Relentless (14 page)

from the highest echelons of Scotland Yard while they looked
into it. It was one of the liaison officers who'd called, and the
reason John was agitated was because the man on the other end
of the phone had told him that as a result of their enquiries they
weren't going to be pursuing the matter any further. They'd also
told him not to talk about it with anyone, as by doing so he
could be in breach of the Official Secrets Act. Naturally he was
upset, and he apologized for not having told me anything earlier,
which was typical of him. Even though I'd accused him unjustly
of having an affair, he ended up being the one saying sorry.'
She took a drag on the cigarette and blew the smoke in the
direction of a picture on the wall that showed a group of dogs
playing pool. There was a deep sense of regret in her expression
as she raked over the coals of her recent past, and Bolt felt for
her. For a moment, he thought she might break down, but then
her expression became neutral again. She drank some more wine
before continuing.
'He didn't want to tell me about it, even then. Not because he
was scared that he might get prosecuted - that sort of threat
wouldn't have worried him - but because he was so bloody
honest. He'd been told not to say anything, so he wasn't going
to. He obviously wasn't in a good mood, but when we got back
to his place we broke open a bottle of wine, and by the time
we'd polished it off he was ready to talk.'
She took a last drag on the cigarette and stubbed it out in the
ashtray. ?
'What he had to say ... frankly, I found it difficult to believe
at the time.' For the first time, she made the effort to look
them both in the eye. Hers were dark and bleak, the pain
they were reflecting almost tangible. 'I almost wish he'd never
told me.'

There was silence at the table for a few seconds. From the
bar came the sound of gravelly laughter. Although only a few
yards away, it felt distant. Bolt knew instinctively that what was
coming was both relevant to their inquiry, and bad. Neither he
nor Mo prompted Tina. They simply waited.
'He told me that a man - someone I have a feeling he must
have known, but who he never identified - had given him a
dossier he'd compiled on a paedophile ring that had been active
in south-east England in the late 1990s, and which involved
several men who were high up in the establishment. This group
of men had apparently murdered a young girl in 1998 and
dumped her body in a lake in Dorset soon afterwards. People
attached to them were also thought to be responsible for a
number of murders in London late last year when they were
trying to cover up the death of this girl, including the stabbing of
my partner at the time, DCI Simon Barron.'
It was for this reason that Tina Boyd had got her nickname,
the Black Widow. People around her had a habit of dying.
'You were working a case with DCI Barron at the time of
his murder, though. Didn't you find out anything about this
paedophile ring?' Bolt asked her.
'No. DCI Barron's death was, and is, officially unsolved, and
there was never any evidence of a group of people matching this
description. But the dossier John had named names, several of
whom died in mysterious circumstances last year. They included
your suicide victim, Tristram Parnham-Jones.'
Bolt was shocked. He looked at Mo, who was clearly feeling
the same way. 'You're talking about the Parnham-Jones, the
Lord Chief Justice?' Bolt knew she was, but felt he had to ask. It
was that sort of revelation.
'Yes,' she said frostily, as if she felt her intelligence was being

questioned. 'Your suicide victim. He was apparently involved in
the murder of the girl in 1998.'
'Was there any hard evidence implicating Parnham-Jones?'
asked Mo.
'The dossier contained the exact resting place of the young
girl's body, and her identity. The name matched that of a girl
who'd gone missing at about the right time, but the liaison
officer told John that a search of the lake in question hadn't
revealed any remains.'
Bolt leaned forward in his seat. 'So, it's possible - and believe
me, I'm not saying it is - but it's possible that this dossier could
have been some sort of elaborate hoax?'
'At the time I thought that was possible, of course I did. It was
a pretty outlandish accusation. It was also obvious from what
John told me that Scotland Yard had looked at it, and had
probably even acted on parts of it, like searching the lake,
but weren't going to devote any more resources to proving or
disproving the contents. So I suppose they thought it was a hoax
too. But John was convinced of its truth, and he was no fool, I
can promise you that.'
'I know a little bit about his background,' said Bolt, 'so I'm
aware that he knew what he was doing.'
She forced a smile, but her face remained as bleak as ever. 'He
did.'
'Did you ever see the dossier?' asked Mo.
She shook her head. 'I asked t o see it, but he didn't want me
to. He said there was nothing that could be done so there was no
point. I think it hurt him that Scotland Yard had decided against
continuing to look into it. I think he also believed that they were
covering things up because Parnham-Jones was such a high
profile figure.'

Bolt exhaled. 'He was certainly that. Did John make any
further enquiries of his own, do you know?'
'I'm not sure. He certainly brooded over it, and he couldn't
seem to let it go, but I don't know what else he did, or could
have done, for that matter. I know one thing, though: it damaged
our relationship, and we saw each other a lot less in February than we had done previously. I didn't like to think that events
involving the top judge in our country could have ended up
being connected to the murder of a young child, or of one of my
colleagues, and I didn't want my boyfriend obsessing about it
either. I'm a realist. I know my limitations. I don't like to see
bad people get away with crimes they've committed. But at the
same time I don't like to damn them when the evidence is flimsy.
And in this case it was near enough non-existent.' She paused.
'But now, looking back on it, I should have done something.'
'But what could you have done?' asked Bolt, feeling the need
to reassure her, the pain in her expression affecting him more
than he would have liked.
'I don't know, but I know this: a month after he took that call
in the restaurant, John was dead.'
'He committed suicide, didn't he?'
'That was the verdict, yes.'
'But you don't believe it?'
'John wasn't suicidal, Mike. He had a teenage daughter he
doted on. He would never have left her behind. He had too
much of a sense of responsibility for that. He wasn't the type
either. And before you say that the people left behind always
say that, I was a copper long enough to know the type. I would
have seen the signs.'
'You said he was brooding, though,' put in Mo. 'Could it be
possible that you...' He thought about what he was going to say

for a moment. Mo was always a diplomat when it mattered.
'That you saw the signs but didn't realize the seriousness of
them?'
'He wasn't acting suicidal. He was acting as if he was obsessed
with this particular case, and was frustrated by the fact that his
hands were tied. But he would never have killed himself over it.
I'm absolutely sure of that.'
She took another mouthful of wine, and Bolt noticed that her
hand was shaking. A thought struck him.
'What was the actual cause of death?'
'An overdose of sleeping pills,' she answered. 'And that's
another thing: he never took sleeping pills.'
Mo and Bolt exchanged glances. Tina picked up on this and
immediately asked how Parnham-Jones had died.
Bolt sighed. 'Off the record, and it's very much off the record'
- Tina nodded to show she understood - 'it was sleeping pills.
Dilantin, to be precise.'
She took a deep breath. 'Snap.'
'You're saying John overdosed on dilantin?'
'Yes,' she said. 'That's exactly what I'm saying.'
Another thought struck Bolt. 'Did he leave a note?'
For the first time, he saw doubt cross her face.
'He did. A short two-liner.'
'Typed or handwritten?'
'Typed.'
'Signed?'
She nodded. Parnham-Jones's letter hadn't been, and Bolt felt
his initial excitement fading a little.
'Was the signature a forgery?'
'No,' she said reluctantly, 'I saw it. It looked like his handwriting.
But there was something wrong with the letter. It was

the words. They just weren't. . .' She worked hard to come up
with the right phrase. 'They just weren't him. He would never
have said something like "I'm sorry but I just can't take the pain
of living". And he would have written a lot more. He would have
explained his actions, and he would definitely have made some
reference to Rachel, his daughter, or he would have left her a
note of her own.' She stopped speaking suddenly and looked at
them both intensely. 'What is it?' she asked. 'Why are you
looking at me like that?'
The excitement had returned and was racing through Bolt
with a vengeance. 'Can you remember the exact words of the
suicide note?' he asked, his tone as even as he could manage.
Tina lit another cigarette and looked down at the table, clearly
trying to compose herself. 'I read it plenty of times,' she said
eventually, 'so, yes, I remember the contents. As I told you, it
wasn't very long. It went: "This letter is to all of those I care and
have cared about. I'm sorry but I just can't take the pain of
living. The world's problems can sometimes be too much to
bear. Love" - and then he signed it with his formal signature,
which again wasn't like him. He always signed his notes "John".'
Bolt heard Mo exhale. He exhaled himself. The wording was
identical to that which Parnham-Jones had typed on the headed
paper he'd left on the bedside table beside him as he died.

21

I stared intensely at Daniels, trying without any great success to
fathom him out. We were stopped at traffic lights and it was
raining hard.
'Why the hell should I help you find my wife?' I demanded.
'Because,' he said, turning in his seat and fixing me with a
pretty intense stare of his own, 'at the moment I'm the only
person who actually does believe you know nothing about
what's going on. The whole world is after you. You need all the
help you can get, and at the moment I'm it.'
I sighed and took a long drag on my cigarette as the lights
went green and we pulled away. It was beginning to taste better
than it had done at the beginning, but still not good enough to
justify why I'd bothered getting through twenty-five of them a
day during my formative years. Outside the window, the wet
night streets of an unfamiliar stretch of London swept past us,
the whole journey seeming nightmarishly surreal.
'Who is Lench?' I asked. 'And why would he think a man
like me, a fucking software salesman, for Christ's sake, could
possibly have something he wanted?'

'Lench is a hitman, a killer. We've got him down for about four
murders and two disappearances, and that's just the stuff we're
sure about. He could be involved in as many as twenty deaths.'

'Jesus. How come he hasn't been arrested?'
Daniels' lips formed into a thin smile. 'You've got a touching
faith in the powers of the police, haven't you?'
'What? And you haven't? Great.' Today, it seemed, was definitely
a day for bursting the bubbles of my preconceptions.
'We know all this,' he continued, ignoring my sarcasm, 'but
the problem is Lench is careful. He doesn't leave loose ends,
often there aren't even any corpses, and the only people he uses
are those he trusts absolutely, and who are involved so much
themselves that there's no way they'll ever testify against him in
a court of law. In fact, even now we still don't know his true
identity. So, you have to get someone in on the inside and gather
the evidence against him that way.'
'You say he's a hitman. Who does he do his hits for?'
'He works for a very rich businessman who's involved in all
kinds of projects, mainly legitimate these days. I can't tell you
his name because he's someone you may have heard of, but he
started out in cocaine and heroin smuggling, and rather than
pissing up his profits against the wall like a lot of these guys do,
he invested his money in property and built up a major portfolio.
Then it was a matter of expanding into construction - so that he
was building the properties rather than just buying them up and
other related businesses. He's been enormously successful,
and one of the main reasons for that is the fact that he's kept to
the same methods he used in his drug-smuggling days. Whenever
he hits any opposition to his plans, he either bribes them or, if
that fails, he gets Lench and his people to make the problem go away. We've been after this individual for years but he keeps so

far away from the action we reckoned the only way we were
going to get him was to secure the evidence needed to bring
down Lench, and then use him to testify that our main target
was the man pulling the strings. And now, suddenly, it's all
fucked up.'
This information didn't make my situation any clearer. 'So,
what were you told about me? How come I suddenly became a
target?'
'I've been on the periphery of Lench's outfit for about six
months now, doing fairly minor things. A few threats to debtors,
or people who haven't been playing ball, but not really on the
inside. There's only a handful of people - three or four - who
are on the inside. Mantani's one of them, and I've been working
mainly for him. Lately, they've been letting me in further - I've
met Lench a couple of times, and he seems to approve of me but
I'm still considered a bit of an outsider. At least I was until
this morning. Then Mantani and me get called in to see Lench
and it's obvious something's up. He says we've got an emergency
on, and that we're to stand by and wait by the phone for orders.
On no account are either of us to be non-contactable, even to
take a piss. He keeps Mantani back to tell him a few other things
he doesn't want to tell me, but later on Mantani lets slip that the
orders are coming from Lench's boss and that it's him who's in
trouble. He needs to find something. I have no idea what it is,
and neither does Mantani, but we both know that it's been
hidden by someone, and that it absolutely has to be found,
whatever the cost.'
'And that's what they're after me for? They think I've got it?'
'We got our orders at six o'clock. We had to track you down
and get you over to a secure place where Lench could find out
what jjpu knew. So, yeah, to answer your question, Lench and