Slowly, carefully, I forced myself to my feet, taking hold of the pistol, preparing to finish him off.
But he was already gone. It was over. The Bone Field killers were all finally dead. I’d won and, amid the pain, I felt a small but palpable sense of satisfaction.
I fired a single round into his head, just to make sure, then threw away the gun, before staggering through to the kitchen where I used two handtowels tied together to form a tourniquet for my wound. I felt faint and sick, but still very much alive.
With a sigh, I made my way back down the hallway, stopping by Marco’s body to take the car keys out of his pocket, before opening the front door and walking unsteadily out into the silent, peaceful night, leaving my enemies dead behind me.
Epilogue
Eight months later
Tina Boyd lay back in the hammock and stared up at the perfect azure sky, thinking about all that had happened these past few months.
Alastair Sheridan’s death in an isolated mansion in Bosnia was initially treated as a national tragedy in the UK. Here was a charismatic family man and self-made entrepreneur who, for a short time, had been seen by many as the possible saviour of the dysfunctional British political system, and as a result the words of praise bestowed on him by the great and the good were effusive and plentiful.
But then, just as had happened with the fallen icon Jimmy Savile, the rumours started to surface. The house his body had been found in was owned by a company with potential links to organized crime, and the fact that there were three other bodies in the house, all those of men linked to a local criminal gang, raised more questions. As the rumours proliferated, a picture began to emerge of a man with a very dark side.
And then, when the remains of a Hungarian hiker, missing since the previous summer, were found buried in the grounds of the house, the truth finally came out: Alastair Sheridan, like Cem Kalaman, was one of the infamous Bone Field killers.
The news had a cataclysmic effect on the nation’s psyche, and trust in politicians, already at a low ebb, sank even further. Sheridan’s wife and child went into hiding. His hedge fund collapsed. Even those who’d been close to him, like his parliamentary colleague George Bannister, were forced to resign, so great was the taint of Sheridan.
And what of the man suspected of killing him? On the night Sheridan was believed to have died, Ray Mason was captured on CCTV receiving treatment for a gunshot injury at the Bosanes Hospital in Sarajevo. As was procedure with gunshot injuries, the police were informed, but by the time they arrived at the hospital, Mason was gone, and he hadn’t been seen since, despite a huge international manhunt.
And here was the thing. The Alastair Sheridan story had everything, and the public’s appetite for all the grisly details was insatiable, which was why the media were so keen to talk to Tina Boyd. Tina had been a part of the story and, although she never ended up facing any charges in relation to Ray Mason’s escape, the rumours that she’d played a role refused to die away, so the big-money offers for her story came flooding in.
Usually, Tina would have turned them down flat. She was a private person who gained no joy from having her name splashed all over the news. But this time she didn’t. With her business suffering, and because she had a hankering to do something different, she’d sold her story for £100,000, and given a series of interviews on the Bone Field case, and her part in it, as well as her life with the fugitive killer Ray Mason. The media were also especially interested in the part played by the assassin, The Wraith, who’d tortured Tina in a futile effort to find out her former lover’s whereabouts.
In the end, Tina had become something of a hero. Brave, loyal and resilient. But being a hero didn’t sit so easily with her either. She just wanted to be left alone, so, after a couple of operations on the damaged tendons in her left hand, she’d rented out her cottage and had gone travelling overseas.
She’d been gone two months now, crisscrossing first Europe, then Asia, and now the South Pacific where, for the past week, she’d been relaxing on a beach in the Cook Islands, thousands of miles from civilization. It was another gloriously sunny afternoon, with a gentle breeze coming in from a perfectly blue sea, as she got up from the hammock in front of her beach hut and strolled along the wet sand in the direction of the headland half a mile away.
In the distance, a tiny figure walked towards her, the only other person on the whole beach, and as he drew closer and lifted an arm in greeting, she smiled in recognition and waved back, thinking that however dark things became, it was still a beautiful world out there.
You just had to make the decision to leave the crap behind and go and find it.
THIS IS JUST
THE BEGINNING
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