The Hanged Man Read online

  ‘The doc says three to four days,’ said Dan reluctantly.

  This really pissed her off, as we both knew it would.

  ‘How on earth did the people who killed his wife get to him before us?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s the Kalamans,’ I said. ‘They’ve got good contacts.’

  Sheryl gave me an icy glare. ‘I know that. But this is hugely embarrassing to us. We’re supposed to be the people with the resources and intelligence to track down anyone. We’re the ones everyone comes to for our expertise, and we’re being beaten at our own game by the ones we’re meant to be after. You get the picture, don’t you?’

  We both nodded.

  ‘You’re in charge of the NCA’s Kalaman team, Mr Watts. And Mr Mason here is the man you insisted you needed to help you, even though I had to move heaven and earth to get his suspension lifted. So, between the two of you, do you have any idea who Cem Kalaman might have used for this operation?’

  The NCA’s Kalaman team. It sounded big and important. However, in terms of NCA priorities it had traditionally been neither. Even though the Kalamans had been a criminal enterprise for the best part of half a century they’d been largely ignored by the authorities because they tended to fly under the radar. Up until the last three months, the team had consisted of Dan Watts, another detective (who’d since taken early retirement) and two admin staff. The upshot was that we knew a lot less about their inner workings than we would have liked.

  It didn’t seem like a good time for guesswork or excuses, so in answer to the boss’s question Dan told her that we didn’t.

  Sheryl didn’t exactly roll her eyes but she came close. ‘Then, assuming he’s still alive, we need to find Hugh Manning fast, don’t we?’

  ‘We’ve got an alert out on Bradshaw’s car at the moment, ma’am,’ said Dan. ‘Every ANPR camera in the country’s looking for it. We’ve got alerts on all of Manning’s and Bradshaw’s credit cards too, and the Border Force have been watching out for him for the last week in case he tries to head abroad. We’ll get him eventually.’

  ‘Unless the Kalamans do first.’

  ‘I think we should put out a photo of him,’ I said, joining the conversation for the first time.

  ‘We’ve already had this conversation, Mr Mason,’ Sheryl responded. ‘The evidence against Manning for the Bone Field killings is limited, and he’s a lawyer. He could sue us for defamation of character, and he’d probably win.’

  To me, this was one of the great problems of policing today. The rules got ever more detailed, the penalties for bending them ever more severe, and the rights of suspects ever more paramount. It all made bringing the bad guys to justice that much harder.

  Luckily, I had a simple way round this particular problem. ‘That’s true,’ I said, ‘but we don’t have to mention the Bone Field killings. We can say he’s wanted for the murders of his wife and Max Bradshaw. After all, there was a suicide note in his handwriting next to Mrs Manning’s body, and Manning’s almost certainly driving Bradshaw’s car, because the real killers won’t be. A photo will flush him out. Otherwise he could lie low for a long time, especially if he knows what he’s doing. And the way he’s been avoiding us so far, I’d say he definitely knows what he’s doing.’

  Sheryl thought about it for a few moments, resuming her tapping of the pen nib on the desktop. ‘OK, I’ll run it by legal, and if they give the go-ahead we’ll get a photo out. But that still leaves us with a huge problem. Without Manning, we have nothing. The analysis team have run into a dead end on the trail of the house’s ownership. A search of the computers at Manning’s law firms hasn’t turned up anything useful, and everyone there is expressing complete ignorance of any wrongdoing, and putting any blame firmly on him. So I can tell you how this is going to go if he doesn’t turn up very soon. He’ll take the fall as the owner of that farmhouse in Wales, just as the three men you killed down there, Agent Mason, will take the fall as the Bone Field killers.’

  ‘But that’s bullshit, ma’am,’ said Dan. ‘We know Cem Kalaman’s involved.’

  Sheryl stared at him as if he was mad. ‘Where’s the evidence? There is none. So you’d better find Manning before the bad guys do. And in the meantime, do you have any other leads to go on? Anything that might help us at all?’

  Dan and I looked at each other, then back at her.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I think we do.’

  Six

  One evening when Cem Kalaman was about six years old, he’d seen his father brutally beat a man. Volkan Kalaman wasn’t tall, but he was powerfully built with huge forearms and the hard, rugged face of someone who’d grown up dirt poor on a farm in rural Turkey – and who’d learned that if he wanted something, he had to take it himself, because no one was ever going to give it to him.

  It had been Cem’s bedtime and he’d wanted to say goodnight to his father. His mother had told him no, his father was in a meeting, but Cem had pleaded with her, saying he wouldn’t be able to sleep if he couldn’t and, because he was her favourite, she’d relented and let him run to the office at the back of the house where he knew his father would be. But as he’d rounded the corner, the office door had opened to reveal his father standing over a man on the floor. His father was holding the man in a sitting position by his hair while repeatedly punching him in the head. The man’s face was covered in blood, there was more blood on his suit – which Cem would always remember was a turd-brown colour – and he was making thin whimpering noises like an injured dog.

  There’d been two other men in the room, both associates of his father. One was Cem’s Uncle Faz, who was funny and liked to bounce Cem on one knee whenever he came to family social events. The other, the one who’d opened the door, was Mr Bone. Mr Bone was like a shadow, a thin, expressionless man with small hard eyes who never smiled and who always wore a hat.

  Mr Bone didn’t say anything when he saw Cem witnessing the beating. He just stared at him blankly, almost as if he wasn’t there. It was Uncle Faz who alerted his father to Cem’s presence.

  When his father saw him, he immediately stopped what he was doing and let the man drop to the floor where he lay rolled up in a ball. Mr Bone was already shutting the door but his father motioned for him to stop. He then used a handkerchief to wipe the blood from his knuckles and, after telling his two associates in Turkish to get rid of the man, he came over and crouched down beside Cem.

  ‘Let me tell you something, beautiful son of mine,’ he said, stroking Cem’s hair. ‘Most people are weak and foolish. They are like sheep. Often you can herd them with just words but sometimes, when they turn on you, you have to take a hand to them to bring them back into line. Never be afraid to use that hand.’

  Cem had nodded and said he understood. He worshipped his father and knew whatever the other man had done it had to have been bad for his father to have acted that way.

  In fact, Volkan Kalaman had never wanted his son to go into the family business. He’d wanted him to be a lawyer, or an accountant, reasoning that that way he could steal people’s money legally. Cem might well have followed his father’s wishes too, but then his father had betrayed him in the most heinous way possible, and that had helped send Cem down the long and destructive road to where he was now.

  The ticking of the grandfather clock was loud in the silence of the room as Cem sat facing the other two men. ‘So what progress do we have on the matter of this lawyer, Manning?’ he said. He wasn’t a big man, although he’d inherited his large hands, and he looked younger than his forty-eight years, but his voice carried real authority.

  The man he addressed was Mr Bone. Deep into his sixties, he’d been the organization’s chief assassin for decades now, an otherwise peripheral figure whose existence very few people knew about. It had been he whom Cem had sent to deal with Hugh Manning, which in hindsight Cem realized had been a mistake. Mr Bone was a strange, cold man who gave little away, yet when his father had betrayed him it was Mr Bone who’d become his mentor. Cem knew h
is ruthlessness and loyalty weren’t in any doubt but his age was becoming a problem, and at some point Cem was going to have to replace him.

  Mr Bone met his gaze. ‘Manning has disappeared completely,’ he said. His voice was cold and low, and still retained vestiges of a Turkish accent. ‘We are doing everything we can to track him down. We got to him first last time. There’s no reason to believe we won’t do so again.’

  ‘We were lucky last time,’ said Cem.

  And they had been. Diana Manning had made a basic mistake. She’d called her sister’s landline using a supposedly untraceable number but Cem had the advantage over the police that he wasn’t constrained by the law. He’d already had one of his best security people plant bugs in the sister’s house and they’d picked up the phone conversation. It had only taken a quick call to a contact in BT to find out the number, followed by a further call to a corrupt police contact to run a trace on it. Although the location wasn’t exact because of the limited reception in the area, a search on the Land Registry had thrown up a single property that was owned by exactly the kind of offshore company a tax lawyer like Manning would use, and from there it had all been simple.

  Except it hadn’t been, and the lack of apology from Mr Bone irritated Cem. But there wasn’t much he could do. Mr Bone wasn’t the sort to apologize. As far as he was concerned, he and Cem were equals.

  ‘If the police get to him he’s likely to cooperate,’ Cem continued, ‘and we can’t have that.’

  He then looked at the third man in the room. He’d known Alastair Sheridan since university. They were very different people yet they were close in the way men who share long-standing dark secrets always are.

  Alastair was a big, slightly overweight man with a deceptively cheery manner and an unthreatening public-school accent that made him come across as likeable and harmless. But Cem knew it was just a ruse. Alastair took after his father and, with the exception of Mr Bone, was the most black-hearted man he had ever met. This would have been almost admirable, given the way he was able to fool the outside world, except that his intense sadism had led to mistakes in the past. Not for the first time Cem wondered if he’d be better off without both these men in his life.

  ‘Manning was your friend, Alastair,’ said Cem. ‘You introduced him into our fold. Can you think where he might have gone to?’

  Alastair looked uncomfortable. ‘We were never that close, Cem, and I haven’t seen him socially for more than ten years.’

  ‘Not since that night, eh?’

  ‘No,’ said Alastair, lowering his eyes. ‘Not since that night.’

  ‘You fucked up then.’

  ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘It could come back to haunt us. If Manning talks, and he mentions what happens, then we’re in real trouble.’ Which wasn’t quite true. Alastair would be the one in real trouble. Even so, Cem knew that if this other secret of theirs came out, it would give the hunt for the Bone Field killers a huge push forward.

  ‘He has no evidence,’ said Alastair firmly. ‘It’s his word against mine.’

  Cem knew it would be a lot worse than that but decided to let it go for now. He turned to Mr Bone. ‘The NCA are heavily involved in this case. How far are you along trying to get an insider there?’

  ‘We are almost there. I have identified the perfect candidate, and we’re ready to move on him.’

  ‘And he’ll definitely help us?’

  Mr Bone nodded slowly, his thin, bloodless lips contorting into something vaguely resembling a smile. ‘He’ll do absolutely anything we tell him. I guarantee that.’

  ‘Good,’ Cem said. ‘I want Manning caught. I don’t care what it takes. Then we can relax and hunt again.’

  The hunt. It was what had brought them together all those years ago. It had been Alastair who’d coined the term back in 1988 when they were at Warwick University. At the time, he and Cem had a shared interest in the occult and devil worship, but it went deeper with Alastair. He had a fantasy. He wanted to kidnap a young woman, maybe even a teenager, and sacrifice her to the devil. Cem still remembered how he’d felt when Alastair had told him this. He had sisters. He knew it was wrong. Yet something had stirred in him too. A desire to make someone else pay for the simmering anger that was always there in him; a desire to inflict pain and wield power over others. And it was that which had won through.

  He could have turned back from that path. He’d even thought about it. But he hadn’t.

  Dana Brennan, a thirteen-year-old girl out on her bike on a summer’s afternoon, had been the first victim. An easy one to start with, Alastair had said.

  Since then there had been so many others.

  ‘We have a subject being groomed now,’ said Mr Bone. ‘Untraceable. She’ll be ready very soon.’

  The tiny part of Cem’s brain where the semblance of a conscience had once been had long since disappeared. Now he was simply a hunter, those he hunted nothing more than sustenance to him. He smiled at the prospect of fresh meat, and the conversation moved on to when and where the three of them would devour it.

  Seven

  In July 2005, officers from the National Crime Squad, one of several forerunners to the NCA, raided a council flat in Greenford, west London, that was being rented out to a suspected Albanian people smuggler called Kristo Fisha. Fisha was wanted for the murder of another Albanian in a street brawl, but when the officers broke in they discovered Fisha’s body, along with that of his girlfriend, in the bedroom. They’d both been tortured to death. During the intensive search of the flat that followed one of the investigating officers had pulled up a loose floorboard underneath the sofa in the living room and had discovered a carrier bag containing £12,000 in cash and a DVD.

  It was what was on that DVD that was of interest to us now.

  And, in an extremely rare example of the cogs of justice turning swiftly, less than three hours after getting Sheryl Trinder to request the long-forgotten Kristo Fisha case file from where it was being kept in secure archives at a disused RAF base in Hertfordshire, I was now holding the DVD in my hand.

  It was 8.15 p.m. and Dan and I were alone in one of HQ’s TV viewing rooms, nursing coffees and putting off the inevitable.

  ‘It’s eleven years since I saw what was on here,’ said Dan, who’d been one of the investigating officers at the time, ‘but I still remember it.’

  ‘You don’t have to watch it again.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, sipping his coffee, ‘I do.’

  On the way back in the car from Lincolnshire that afternoon, Dan and I had scoured our brains for other leads to go on, and it was then that I remembered a conversation he and I had had a few months back in which he’d mentioned that DVD. I knew what was on it, which was why I was as reluctant as he was to start watching.

  I looked down at the open case file. A photo of a very dead Kristo Fisha stared back at me. In the shot, he was wearing only a ragged white T-shirt and boxer shorts. His wrists had been bound with cord to each end of an old-fashioned wall radiator, while the same type of cord had been used to secure his neck to the central bar, keeping the top half of his body in place. The shape of a steam iron had been burned into several parts of his face and torso, and he was covered in deep cuts. From the amount of blood, it was clear he’d been tortured for some time before being finished off with a single stab wound to the heart. Next to the photo of Fisha was one of his girlfriend, later identified as nineteen-year-old Bulgarian illegal immigrant Milena Borisov. She was lying naked on the floor in the foetal position with her hands tied behind her back. She’d been shot and stabbed.

  ‘So no one was ever arrested for the killings?’ I said, still holding the DVD as I skimmed through the pages. For a brutal double murder, the file was depressingly short.

  ‘Look at the date of the raid, Ray,’ said Dan. ‘July the twenty-first 2005. It was two weeks after the 7/7 bombings. Three hours after we broke into that flat four other men tried to blow up the Tube all over again, and then went on t
he run. You remember what it was like. Every cop in Greater London was hunting down those guys, and everything else got pushed to one side. Even this. Of course we investigated, but there were no witnesses, and no obvious suspects at the time.’ He sighed. ‘We could have tried a lot harder, I know, but I’ll be honest, Fisha was a suspected murderer himself, and Borisov was a spaced-out druggie, so no one was ever going to go the extra mile for them.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess so,’ I said.

  I think there must have been something in my tone, though, because Dan said, ‘Don’t judge me, Ray.’ His voice was calm – he wasn’t the sort to raise it unnecessarily – but there was no mistaking the anger there. ‘I’ve never shirked any case I’ve worked on.’

  ‘I know you haven’t,’ I said.

  I could understand his reasoning. It was just the way things were when resources were limited. No one liked an unsolved double murder but you could tolerate it far better when the victims were fairly low down the moral pecking order. In hindsight, though, it represented a huge missed opportunity.

  Without saying anything more, I pulled down the blinds to keep out the light from the setting sun, slipped the DVD into the player and sat back down next to Dan.

  It was time to enter someone else’s nightmare.

  For a good minute the screen was blank. Then, just as I was about to get up and move the film forward, it burst into life without warning, revealing a girl of about twenty lying naked and spreadeagled on a bed, her wrists and ankles bound to each corner, a black ball gag in her mouth. The quality of the picture wasn’t brilliant but it was good enough to see the fear in the girl’s eyes as she looked around desperately. The camera filming her was fixed high up in one corner so it could take in the whole room from above. On the wall behind the bed was a large painted sign of a pentacle with a flowing letter ‘M’ in the middle. I recognized both it and the room immediately.