Relentless: A Novel Read online

  None of this swayed Mike Bolt. A lot of suicide notes were short. Some were only one line long. Sometimes they weren’t signed either. The thing was, people didn’t tend to be thinking straight when they chose to put an end to their own lives.

  But a job was a job, and to this end Bolt had set the team to work interviewing friends, family and colleagues of the victim, to build up a picture of his private life. The victim had been divorced for more than twenty years, was childless, and his wife now lived in the Cayman Islands. At some point someone would have to talk to her. Not surprisingly, there was no shortage of volunteers among the nine people he had working under him to take on that particular job, but, should it be needed, he’d be the one jetting off over there for a couple of days. He might even try to fit in some game fishing; he’d heard the marlin were good round that neck of the woods. There was no point being the boss unless you got some perks.

  At the moment, though, they were concentrating on the many people who knew him in south-east England. Bolt had already interviewed a judge and a senior politician today, one in central London, the other at his family seat in Hampshire. Now he was waiting for his colleague, DS Mo Khan, to pick him up for their 5.30 interview. When that was done, he was finished for the day. He’d already planned the night ahead. Back to his apartment in Clerkenwell, a good hot shower and a takeaway sea bass in tamarind sauce from the Thai place round the corner, followed by the latest of the Miss Marple remakes on ITV. Tonight it was ‘The Body in the Library’ and, thankfully, he couldn’t remember whodunnit even though he’d read the book twice. People laughed at him for watching Miss Marple, and Poirot, and even bloody Wycliffe. But what they didn’t understand was that he liked to escape from the bleak, cold world of violent crime he inhabited every working day, where murders were cruel events, often committed for the most mundane of reasons. And where escapism was concerned, nothing beat the sofa, a couple of drinks and the late, great Agatha Christie.

  He checked his watch. Five to five. Mo should be here soon. He was currently doing a second interview with the victim’s maid, who lived in Feltham. She’d been in a bit of a state the previous day, so there were a few things they had to go over in more detail, particularly relating to the company the victim kept in his own time. Mo had a theory that he was gay, but Bolt had told him to go easy on this line of questioning with the maid. She was Filipina and a devout Catholic, so might take offence at any aspersions being cast on the honour of her employer.

  He pushed the autopsy report to one side and sat back in his chair, drinking from the mug of coffee he’d made earlier and looking out of the window at the aircraft-hangar-sized warehouse opposite, which was used to store nothing but tens of thousands of gallons of vegetable oil. Bolt often wondered what would happen if that place caught fire. Occasionally, he fantasized about it: this whole bleak estate disappearing in a great ball of foul-smelling flame. It would mean his team being freed to look for some decent premises, preferably closer to the centre of town.

  The open-plan office where Bolt was sitting now was ugly, and cluttered, with too many desks for the available floorspace, and very drably decorated. However, it did have one thing going for it: a frankly magnificent thirty-six-inch plasma TV mounted on one of the faded chipboard walls that had the sharpest picture Bolt had ever seen. At that moment it was being graced by the England football team who were playing an excruciatingly dull friendly on very low volume against a country Bolt hadn’t even heard of. They were halfway through the second half and the score remained anchored at 0–0.

  There was an interesting story about that TV, far more interesting than the one currently being played out on it. It had once belonged to a charming old gentleman by the name of Henry Pugh who’d chopped up his wife, Rita, into six manageable pieces one winter’s night several years earlier before depositing her arms and legs in Highgate cemetery near the spot where Karl Marx resides, her torso in the Regent’s Canal near the junctions of Upper Street and City Road, and, with what you might call a measure of thoughtlessness, her head in a children’s playground in Stoke Newington. When Pugh was arrested, he immediately pleaded guilty and left instructions with his solicitor for all his worldly possessions to be passed to his sister. She then held a macabre bring-and-buy sale that included a set of Japanese kitchen knives with one missing (the murder weapon) and Pugh’s state-of-the-art plasma screen, which he’d bought shortly before the murder and whose purchase had, allegedly, led to the argument that ended in his wife’s death. One of the team, DC Matt Turner, who always had an eye for a bargain, had snapped it up for £200, a snip when you think the knives went for over five hundred, after a bidding war between rival collectors of gruesome memorabilia.

  Bolt’s mobile rang, the first time for almost an hour. He picked up. It was Mo.

  ‘Where are you?’ Bolt asked.

  ‘About ten minutes away.’

  ‘Have you seen the time? Our meeting’s at five-thirty, and I don’t want to give him a chance not to be there. It’s been hard enough getting him pinned down in the first place.’ The victim’s lawyer had been a pain from the start, twice moving interviews due to work commitments, and only fitting them in today when Bolt had threatened to arrest him for obstruction.

  ‘Well, to be honest, boss, there’s not quite the level of urgency there was,’ said Mo.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, Jack Calley won’t be going anywhere. He’s dead. And whoever’s got him that way tried to make it look like suicide.’

  Bolt cursed. This really changed things. So much for his theories.

  ‘Look at it like this, boss,’ said Mo. ‘At least he’ll be there when we turn up.’

  5

  I was taken in the back of the police car to Colindale hospital. The two arresting officers, a young white man and an even younger black man, gave me no further details about who I was meant to have murdered. Nor would they remove the handcuffs, even though I was bleeding, or let me use the mobile to call Kathy. They emptied out my pockets and put the contents in a clear plastic evidence bag that was deposited in the glove compartment.

  ‘I’m trying to find my wife,’ I told them desperately, amazed by their indifference. ‘Her name’s Kathy, Katherine, Meron. That’s why I was at the university. Can you just confirm that she’s all right? Please?’

  ‘We can’t confirm anything at the moment, sir,’ said the white man, who was driving.

  ‘Except that you’re under arrest,’ added his colleague helpfully.

  I tried to reason with them but they told me, politely, to leave it until the interview. The black officer then radioed the station and told the operator he had a suspect in custody for the university killing. He described me as an IC1 male identified by the documents I was carrying as Thomas David Meron, age thirty-five, brown hair, blue eyes, five ten.

  ‘But I haven’t killed anyone,’ I told the driver as his colleague kept talking. ‘I was attacked by a man with a knife in the university library. That’s where these cuts are from. I think he may have attacked my wife. Can you at least tell me if the victim’s a woman or not?’

  ‘We can’t say anything at the moment,’ answered the driver.

  ‘The killer’s still loose,’ I pleaded. ‘You should be looking for him.’

  ‘We’ll be checking every avenue, sir, don’t worry.’

  I replied that of course I was worried. My wife was missing, and I wanted to make sure she wasn’t the victim.

  This time he ignored me.

  I was in the hospital for about twenty minutes. Unlike everyone else in the casualty department, I was whisked straight through to a small, windowless room that smelled of antiseptic where a doctor who was even younger than the two coppers stitched me up. By now, the wounds were really hurting. The one on my jawline throbbed hotly, and I was afraid to see what my face looked like. Like a lot of men, I’m pretty vain. I don’t think I’m God’s gift to women exactly, but I’ve been told I’m pretty good-looking, and I’v
e not done badly with the opposite sex over the years. The idea of being scarred for life scared me – one of quite a few scaring me at that moment.

  The doctor put dressings on the wounds and gave me some painkillers. When he looked at me it was with a mixture of distaste and trepidation. He saw a patient in need, but also a suspected murderer.

  ‘I didn’t do anything wrong,’ I told him. ‘I’m innocent.’

  It was hardly an original line, and I guess, like the cops with me, he’d heard it plenty of times before. He didn’t reply. Instead he turned to the white police officer and told him that I was now fit to be questioned.

  The black police officer reattached the handcuffs, then took me by the arm, his hand scraping against the wound on my forearm. I flinched, and he gave a perfunctory apology. I could tell he didn’t mean it.

  ‘Have you got a mirror?’ I asked the doctor. ‘I need to see what my face looks like.’

  As soon as I said it, I regretted doing so. It looked like I was more interested in my own injuries than what had happened to Kathy, which wasn’t true. I just needed to know. The doctor nodded curtly and found a small round mirror on his desk which he held up in front of my face.

  I flinched again, more noticeably this time. It was bad, very bad. My hair looked like it had been styled by Edward Scissorhands, my face like it had been used to clean a slaughterhouse floor. Smudged and uneven flecks of blood, sweat and dirt covered it. Further dark rivulets of blood, resembling thick spiders’ legs, had solidified on my neck where they’d run down from beneath the gleaming white dressing that covered my jawline. My eyes had become grey and haunted, the pupils little more than retreating pinpricks. I looked exactly like I felt.

  As I was led away, I saw from the clock on the whitewashed wall that it was five o’clock in the afternoon. In the space of two hours, my life – so ordinary, so mundane, so desperately missed – had been torn irreparably apart. Two hours earlier, I’d been a normal working man living a pleasant, easy life. Now, my wife was missing, and very possibly dead; there were people after me for a reason I had no knowledge of; and I was about to be charged with murder.

  What I didn’t know was that this was only the beginning. Things, if you can believe it, were about to get one hell of a lot worse.

  6

  ‘Do we know what happened to Calley?’ Bolt asked Mo as they drove up the M25 in traffic that was surprisingly light for the time of day.

  Mo shook his head. ‘There are very few details at the moment. I called his house just to make sure that he was going to be there when we turned up, and another cop answered it. That was just before five, and then I called you. I explained who I was and why I was phoning, and he told me they’d found Calley’s body in some woods a couple of hundred yards behind his house, hanging from a tree by his belt and looking like he’d had some help getting up there. When I asked what made them think that, he said there were definite signs of a struggle.’

  ‘Less than forty-eight hours after his biggest client dies in mysterious circumstances. Do you think it’s a coincidence?’ Bolt was interested in Mo’s opinion. They’d worked together two years now, and after Bolt himself, Mo was the most experienced officer in his young team.

  ‘There’s no doubt it looks suspicious,’ he answered. ‘Have you found out what work Calley did for our victim yet?’

  ‘That’s one of the things I was hoping to find out today,’ said Bolt. ‘When I asked him on the phone yesterday, he gave me the usual client confidentiality bullshit, but Calley specialized in investments, stuff like that. He was a financial lawyer, so I’m guessing he helped our man hide his money from the Inland Revenue.’

  Mo chuckled. ‘A financial lawyer. Now there’s a job that sounds lucrative.’

  ‘Too right. But it sounds like one that could make you some enemies as well. We’re going to have to dig a little deeper into his business dealings.’ Bolt sighed. ‘You know, I had plans for tonight.’

  ‘It’s Miss Marple, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right. “Body in the Library”.’

  ‘It’s a wild life you lead, boss.’

  ‘You only live once. How about you? Anything happening that’s now going to have to wait?’

  ‘The usual. Breaking-up arguments, nappy changing, midnight feeds.’

  ‘Shit, I bet you’re glad Calley’s dead, aren’t you? Gives you an excuse to stay out.’

  Mo chuckled again. ‘I wouldn’t go that far, boss, but let’s say it’s a very dark cloud with a small silver lining.’

  They came off the M25 at junction 17, Maple Cross, and proceeded through a maze of back roads in the general direction of Ruislip before turning off onto a narrow, tree-lined lane that wound its way through a mixture of woodland and fields dotted with the odd detached cottage and executive home, until finally a loose group of four houses, spaced well apart, appeared on the right-hand side as the road straightened and widened. The houses backed on to a wooded hill and faced a wide, green, undulating field in which a herd of sheep grazed peacefully. It was a lovely rustic English scene, rare this close to London, and one that was only spoiled by the row of police cars and vans parked outside the third house along, and the line of yellow scene-of-crime tape running across the road. An older couple, presumably the neighbours, were standing outside the second house, talking to two note-taking detectives, while several white-overalled scene-of-crime officers milled about beside one of the vans.

  Mo drove past the neighbours and parked up behind one of the police cars. ‘Nice house,’ he said admiringly, looking up at the two-storey whitewashed cottage with the thatched roof and latticed windows that had belonged to Jack Calley. A very swish-looking black BMW 7-Series was parked in a spacious gravel driveway that would have amply accommodated another three of them.

  ‘That’s what you get from being a financial lawyer,’ said Bolt, getting out of the car.

  A uniformed officer who looked about twelve approached them, cap under his arm. Bolt noticed he was already going bald on top, and felt sorry for the poor sod.

  ‘We’re here to talk to the SIO,’ he explained as he and Mo produced their warrant cards and introduced themselves.

  ‘National Crime Squad, eh? Do you reckon it’s gangland?’

  The young officer looked excited and Bolt didn’t have the heart to put a pin in his balloon, so he said that it could be.

  ‘Where’s the body?’ he asked.

  The young uniform pointed behind him, up into the woods. ‘Follow the path and you’ll get to him. The SIO’s up there too.’

  They went to the back of one of the vans, where a SOCO officer gave them the kit of overalls, hoods, gloves and booties, and once they’d put everything on they headed up the path that ran round the side of Calley’s house and into the shadows of the beech trees.

  The two of them made an odd pair. Bolt was a tall, rangy man in his late thirties with the broad shoulders of a rower, closely cropped ash-blond hair that was just beginning to fleck with grey, and a face you wouldn’t choose to argue with. It was long and lean in shape, the features hard and naturally well defined, and clearly belonged to someone who knew how to handle himself. There was a vivid S-shaped scar running almost the length of his chin, and two more scars, like shapeless runes, on his left cheek – relics of a life-changing night three years earlier. Yet the overall result remained somewhere close to handsome. His eyes were his chief selling point. His former wife had called them the most striking she’d ever seen, and although she could probably have been accused of bias, they did draw people, being perfectly oval and a lively cerulean blue, and when he smiled, which was often enough these days, they became surrounded by deep laughter lines.

  Mo, by contrast, was a small, stocky guy with a head that sometimes appeared too big for his body. It was topped by a frizzy mop of curly hair that couldn’t seem to decide whether it was black or silver, and had ended up being an unkempt combination of the two. He was a couple of years younger than Bolt, but could probably h
ave passed for forty. His face was round and jolly and he had big bloodhound eyes under which sat heavy bags, that had become more pronounced in recent years due to the trials and tribulations of his young family. He had three sons under the age of five and a daughter of ten who thought she was a teenager, and it showed in the air of permanent exhaustion that surrounded him. Without cigarettes and copious quantities of coffee, it was doubtful he’d be able to function, and people often asked him why he’d punished himself by waiting so long after his first child before suddenly producing three more. His reply was that he hadn’t planned any of them; they’d just come when they were ready, and rather than being a punishment, to him they were a blessing. Mo loved his kids deeply, and part of the reason he made such a good cop was because, underneath the somewhat cynical exterior, he believed in what he was doing and wanted to create a better society for them to grow up in. Of everyone in the team, he was probably the hardest working, and had never once shied away from overtime, paid for or not, which was the reason Bolt enjoyed working with him.

  The path, which was little more than a dirt track, led up a moderate, fairly straight incline and was muddy in patches from the recent rain, revealing a number of partial and complete footprints, several of which had already been enclosed by phosphorescent-scene-of-crime tape. A line of it stretched up the edge of the path, and they had to keep to its right to avoid contaminating any possible evidence. As they made their way along it, they could see that the prints belonged to at least three sets of shoes. Occasionally, they were scuffed where someone had obviously slipped. It didn’t take much to figure out that Calley had been chased by two people, probably men by the size and style of their shoe markings.