Die Alone

the house in Wales, which made their killer or killers some of the worst in British criminal history. Bolt was realistic enough to know that, because only one of the women had been positively identified, and she was a working-class woman in her early twenties, the case hadn’t captured the public’s imagination in the way it might otherwise have done, and so, as time had passed, the clamour for results had died down. But there were still plenty of unanswered questions. The ownership of the farmhouse had been traced back through numerous shell companies to Hugh Manning, the lawyer who’d done a lot of work for Alastair Sheridan’s hedge fund, and he’d handed himself in with Tina Boyd a year earlier, on the same night Ray Mason had been arrested for murder. But Manning had then been assassinated less than a week later while in a secret location under police protection, presumably to stop him naming other people who’d been involved in the Bone Field murders. Only a handful of people would have known his whereabouts, yet somehow the killers had got to him, suggesting they were people on the inside with powerful connections.

Under ordinary circumstances, Bolt might have thought Tina mistaken in thinking that Alastair Sheridan was a serial killer. She was a good detective, but prone to letting emotion get the better of her. Yet the fact that the NCA investigation into the Bone Field murders now had only a handful of people on it, none of whom had turned up anything new in months, was now bothering him.

The problem was that the two people who did have an idea of what was going on weren’t helping him. It was too risky to talk to Tina off the record. And Mason had disappeared into thin air. Except, as Bolt knew from years as a detective, no one disappears into thin air. Tina had been helping Mason, he was convinced of that, but there had to be other people involved for him to evade detection.

So Bolt was going back in time, looking for likely helpers. According to the prison records, Mason had only had one visitor in his whole time behind bars, and that was his lawyer, Edward Kleinman, who at sixty-three, with an unblemished record, was unlikely to be caught up in anything illegal.

Mason’s phone records for the six months up to and including the day of his arrest were spread out on the desk in front of him. He started from the most recent statement, crossing out the calls he wasn’t interested in with a red pen. There were at least two a day to Tina, sometimes more, and Bolt felt a twinge of jealousy that irritated him as he crossed those out too. In the weeks leading up to his arrest, Mason had been one of the main investigators on the Bone Field case and there were plenty of calls between him and his fellow investigator, DS Dan Watts, who’d died in mysterious circumstances on the night of Mason’s arrest. There were also ones to and from Sheryl Trinder, who’d been Mason’s boss at the time, but Bolt wasn’t interested in any of these. He was interested in people they didn’t know about and, after he’d gone through all the statements with the red pen, there weren’t that many numbers left.

One number did catch his eye. It turned up eight times in the three months running up to Mason’s arrest, including four times in the space of a week. It was a landline belonging to a Steve and Karen Brennan.

Bolt rubbed his eyes and took a sip from the glass of Pinot Noir he had on the desk next to him. The names sounded familiar.

Then he remembered. They were the parents of Dana Brennan, the thirteen-year-old girl who’d gone missing in Hampshire decades before, and whose remains had been found in school grounds in Buckinghamshire the previous year, alongside those of a young woman in her twenties called Katherine Sinn, who herself had gone missing the year after Dana. Bolt recalled now that Mason had been investigating those cases too, not for the NCA, but for one of the Met’s Murder Investigation Teams. The murders of Dana Brennan and Katherine Sinn had never been officially linked to the Bone Field murders, although Bolt remembered that Sinn had been Alastair Sheridan’s cousin.

The series of four calls had been made between Mason and the Brennans in the week after the discovery of Dana’s body, which stood to reason as he’d been investigating their daughter’s murder. Bolt’s team had produced a detailed dossier on Mason, which Bolt had read and re-read a dozen times since his escape. It was how he knew immediately that Mason had been suspended from the investigating team before he’d made the fourth call to the Brennans. It was possible, of course, that Mason had just been telling them that he’d been removed from the case. But he’d still been under suspension when he’d made the fifth call two weeks later. According to the records, they’d talked for eleven minutes. And there were two more – one by Mason, one by the Brennans – over the next six weeks, each one lasting close to fifteen minutes, before Mason made a final one, a few minutes before his arrest, lasting eight minutes.

The thing was, there was no reason for Mason to be talking to the Brennans in any of those last four calls. He wasn’t on the case, and the couple would already have been assigned a specialist liaison officer to keep them informed of any progress on the reopened inquiry into the murder of their daughter. But Mason had still been talking to them. Why? There was only one reason Bolt could think of: he’d become emotionally involved in the case. It would also explain his actions since being broken out of prison. Rather than make a run for it like any ordinary escaped prisoner, he’d gunned down Cem Kalaman, a man Tina Boyd had