A Secret Worth Killing For

It was past 3 a.m. Small groups were setting off to join the Festival Hall throng, beckoning her to come with them. She realized that all she wanted was to be rid of them, to find silence to take in what had happened to her. She waved happily, leaning the side of her face against joined hands to indicate sleep. While other newly elected MPs and defeated candidates retired to their homes with loving wives, husbands, boyfriends and girlfriends, she left the arena alone.

Melting into the night air and walking briskly to expel the fustiness of the crowd and the clamour, she cut through the side streets of low Victorian terraces towards the river, stopping occasionally to listen for pursuing steps. The further she walked, the more the sense of unreality took hold.

Within half an hour she was entering her apartment block, one of five modernist buildings its architect called ‘pavilions’ overhanging the Thames – just one element in the massive new city within a city housing fifty thousand people. A new embassy row. A new haven for rich oligarchs when the going back home got rough. Thousands of pods of secluded anonymity. Her shield.

She took the lift to the eleventh floor and entered the flat she had reserved two years before. Then, she had analysed the model in the sales suite and lined up the view she wanted. Now that imagined outlook lay before her in spectacular reality. It never ceased to take her breath away.

She flicked on the television. Nearly 4 a.m. Counting had stopped for the night but her party was certain of an overall majority.

She undressed, scrubbed her face and teeth, and changed into the comfort of her pyjamas. She walked to the swathe of glass revealing London and the river. To the right the Millennium Wheel was still alight and revolving on this long election night, catching its celebrating stragglers. Sweeping left came the tower of the House of Lords, the ugliness of Millbank, then, peeping through a tiny gap in the forest of concrete and brick, the face of Big Ben.

She stared at these icons of the British state, the alien fortress she would soon inhabit. Below, apart from one lonely tug crawling slowly upstream, water gleamed emptily. A few cars flowed along the Embankment opposite, then an ambulance flashing its light. Their motion was silent and ghostly, deadened by the thickly insulated glass. She looked down on the river below and then right as the towpath resumed its curl towards Vauxhall.

There she saw the figure.

Stooping, long coat, dark brimmer hat concealing his forehead and upper face. He – it was a man for sure – lifted a cigarette pinched between thumb and forefinger to his lips, puffed, and exhaled smoke that streaked into the night. He turned his head up and towards the window she was watching from. She caught a glimmer of chin and lip. There seemed something familiar about their contours. She felt she saw him start, as if he had seen an apparition. He threw the cigarette onto the path, turned on his heel, and shuffled away. It was his back view as he left, the brimmer raked at a hint of an angle over his neck, strands of hair falling beneath that made her shudder. A wraith dissolving into the blackness.

The moment passed and she told herself to snap out of it. The transformative events of the past hours must have dislocated her. She repeated her calculation: any man with any interest in tracking her down these many years on was dead or disappeared.

Cold logic dictated imaginings of coincidences.

CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_b13e963d-77c2-54a3-adb5-634b2dbd4ae3)

Post-election, Saturday, 6 May

The rutted lane snaked up the hillside and emerged into a broad flank of heather-dotted fields forming a shallow ascent to a flat summit. Grey drizzle cast a familiar gloom over Irish border country, a sullen response to the excitement at Westminster.

Peering through the monotonous beat of his windscreen wipers, Detective Chief Inspector Jon Carne felt he was disappearing into a primordial soup. Finally he could make out the working party a couple of fields away. He turned right through a gate and pulled up beside a four-by-four in the gaudy gold of the province’s Police Service, its roof light flashing like an irrelevant lighthouse in a deserted sea of washed-out green.

Stakes were being driven into the ground and a wire fence assembled. He watched the mallet head swish down like an executioner’s blade. The point of wood below broke smoothly into the soft squelch of earth. Inside the fence a temporary tarpaulin was being erected over the excavation site.

A sergeant stood guard. ‘SOCO’s inside, sir,’ he said.

Carne crossed the fence boundary and approached the area where the tarpaulin was rising.

‘Morning, sir,’ said the scene-of-crime officer.

‘Morning,’ replied Carne. ‘So how and why?’

‘We got a call on the confidential line last night. Couldn’t do anything till first light.’

‘Credentials?’

‘He gave a password. It was a genuine one, operating in the early ’90s.’

‘When did they stop using it?’

‘1995, sir.’

‘Go on.’

‘His coordinates are spot on. The description of the field and where to dig, too. We found a few remains on the surface. Animal disturbance. We’ve done a preliminary dig. Skull’s well preserved. Fair bit of clothing.’

‘He didn’t say who or exactly when.’

‘Just you’ll find an unlucky young man. That was it, sir.’

Carne looked down at the muddled remnants so far revealed. Fragments of what may have been dark-blue jeans, the rubber soles of shoes, the jacket oddly intact, the macabre shape of head. He imagined the different endgames. A simple execution of a known enemy – or an assassination – just a bullet in the head. More likely, the last hours of a tout. Kicks and punches, cigarette burns, electrodes, hammers on kneecaps, scalpels on skin, two bullets in the head.

What must it be like to be the parent of whoever who had become this set of bones and rotted clothes? An offspring who disappeared, never to return. Would they have had any idea – or suspicions? Were they ever told? ‘We’re sorry to have to inform you, Mr and Mrs . . .’ Carne tried to imagine the platitudes of a ghastly conversation. If he and Alice had been able to have children, they would have come into this world at the time this young man was leaving it. They would now be the age his short life was extinguished. What might they have become? But no child had arrived. And as the years passed, her memory receded into a different, long-gone life whose future had died along with her.

‘Pathologist’s on the way, sir.’ The scene-of-crime officer shook him from his distraction.

‘Who’s on call?

‘Riordan, sir.’

‘Good.’ He looked again at the skull. ‘I don’t care how long he’s been there. Any tiny trace, we want it.’ Carne’s bleakness conveyed little optimism. ‘And no talking. No media, no publicity. You tell this lot, make sure they get it. I’ll instruct the press office. I don’t want anyone out there scurrying for cover.’ He retreated from the covering canvas into the drizzle still driving across the rolling fields. A few mournful sheep, huddled against stone walls, munched disconsolately, occasionally raising their heads at the unfamiliar activity. This was a place where nothing ever happened.

A battered-looking Ford Fiesta splashed through the gate, halting with a skid of the front wheels. Out of it jumped a chubby woman with bouncing blonde hair, a pert snub nose and hint of double chin, accompanied by a male colleague. For the first time that morning a galvanizing beam illuminated Carne’s face. He removed his cap, transforming the policeman’s dourness to reveal a handsome, dark-haired man belying his forty-seven years. Working with Amy Riordan, in his eyes the single argument for the state pathology service, was guaranteed to cheer him up. He briskly greeted her.

‘OK, make my life easy. Tell me who did it, why, when, and how.’

‘Sure. I thought you wanted something difficult.’

She gave him an amiable punch in the ribs, headed up to the grave, laid out her evidence bags and carefully pulled on inner nitrile gloves and latex covers. She knelt beside the remains, spreading her weight to avoid disturbing the mud walls, and gingerly stretched down one hand. One by one, she removed shreds of clothing, passing them to her assistant to place in individual bags and mark. The work tensed her, beads of sweat forming around her mouth. After ten minutes of concentrated foraging, she came up for air and stood gazing at the skull.

‘So, early 1990s,’ said Riordan.

‘Yes, the password he used dates him.’

‘That fits. Twenty, twenty-five years.’ She shrugged. ‘Give or take a few. Looks like he had a bashing around the face. Signs of bullet damage in the skull. Doesn’t seem much on the other bones that are bared.’

‘Will we get anything?’ asked Carne.

‘Possibly,’ she replied. ‘The jacket’s synthetic, so it’s pretty intact. Might be something on it, or inside it. Jeans were denim, natural fibre, so not much left. But you never know. I don’t want to poke around the shirt fibres yet. He had a plastic belt. It’s slipped down his thighs. That’s probably the result of the corpse swelling, forcing his lower clothing down below the waist.’

‘Is that common?’

‘Reasonably, though it’s not widely studied. It can sometimes be interpreted as an indicator of sexual interaction with the victim. But actually, during decomposition this kind of abdominal bloating is frequent. Then, as the flesh and organs continue to decompose, it leaves this curious-looking position of the belt.’

As so often when watching and listening to Amy, Carne felt goose pimples of pride both at her manual dexterity and expert knowledge.

‘Mind you,’ she continued, ‘I might get something on sex. Saliva, semen, DNA. Maybe what type too if you’re dead lucky. Gay or straight, mouth or tongue.’

‘Let’s turn it into a musical,’ Carne chimed in.

‘Sure, you write the tunes, I’ll do the words.’ She gave him her full-on, inquisitorial stare. ‘Now you tell me something, Jonny Carne. What in the name of God, the Devil and all creatures in between is this young man doing lying in this grave in this field in this desolate part of this island of poets, artists and balladeers with bullet holes in his head?’