FINDINGS OF THE POST MORTEM
Item 24: A wound at the throat, sliced with an extremely sharp serrated blade, is so deep that the girl’s head is almost completely severed.

Amelia

The man stalked her as she limped awkwardly to the phone box, and watched as she dialled the first number. She appeared surprised when the call was answered. Her head jerked up and she spoke urgently, briefly. He couldn’t hear what she was saying – the glass muffled her words. Then she sat in the bottom of the box and waited. The box had a light inside and was by a main road. He couldn’t touch her there. He would have to wait.

Not long after, a taxi pulled up and a youngish man got out. He was dressed in black denim and had spiky light brown hair, or maybe blond. He opened the door of the phone box and she fell onto him, crying. He held her at arms length.
‘Why are you being so dramatic? he asked. ‘Don’t you know by now I couldn’t stand your hysterics?’
She calmed down a little – enough to speak clearly. ‘I’m not crying because you were at Rebecca’s when I called. I couldn’t care less about that. I’m crying because I think I was almost killed just now and I needed you to come here and save me. Now I’m crying because I realise how stupid that was. You can go. I’ll call Caroline.’
‘I can WHAT?’ he exploded, backing dangerously close to where the man crouched, watching. ‘You drag me out here in the middle of the fucking night and now I can just GO? Four pounds-sixty it cost me to get here! I’ll never get another taxi in this godforsaken place. Is this because of the pregnancy? Are you threatening me? Are you going to tell Rebecca about it?’
The smallness of the things he worried about was so absurd that she couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Crazy bitch,’ he said. He turned and left, striding away from her toward the road with his arm out hopefully.

The man took a few steps forward but the girl returned to the phone box and inserted another coin. He couldn’t have her scream, or worse: say his name out loud, while she was on an open line to god-only-knew-whom. He stepped back into the gloom of the wood.
That was why the Marić boy had died. He had been enjoying himself in the VIP area of his half-brother’s club, shabby though it was by the standards of Rome or Monte Carlo or even London, but he didn’t want to hurt Barry’s feelings. He had sat there with a too-fizzy beer and a cheap brandy and chatted with all the eager tarts that Barry beckoned past the velvet rope. He had been drinking, laughing, talking, drinking some more, beginning to enjoy himself, when he noticed that he was being stared at from across the reverberating dance-floor. He had looked up, looked away, looked up again, and the pleasant haze had cleared from his mind as the threat was processed and understood. He wasn’t simply being watched, envied for his VIP status, or unknowlingly fondling the knee of some poor loser’s girlfriend, he had been recognised.
He had risen to his feet, and the other man, the skinny, Eastern European-looking one, had started to cross the floor. He had something in his hand. A piece of paper perhaps? No. A photograph.
Attack, in order to defend, his adoptive father had taught him. Never take chances.

The man couldn’t hear what Amelia was saying inside the box but this conversation was evidently longer. It ended. She hung up, her head bowed in disappointment. She walked away from the phone box toward the road, and he thought she must be looking for her boyfriend, but perhaps he had found a taxi after all, because she slumped down on the kerb, hugging her knees, her head resting on her forearms – defeated.
She stayed like that for what seemed like an age, until he was tempted to take the risk of just overpowering her and pulling her back toward the trees. There weren’t many cars going by at that time of night but then she moved, looked up, and at first he thought someone else might be coming for her – that her teenage senses had detected a sound he hadn’t – but all she did was to shift her position so that her hands were placed behind her and she dropped her head back, staring up into the heavens. Perhaps she thought she was safe. Perhaps was past caring. She had made herself vulnerable, and that was when he took her.
He crept forward. He picked his moment carefully, straining his eyes in both directions for the glint of oncoming headlights – there were none. He grabbed. Something metallic clattered to the ground but he heard the roar of a motorbike engine coming up behind him and he didn’t stop to look for what had fallen.

Max, less than half a mile away, walking back towards town, thought he heard a muffled cry and turned back in the direction he had come. He didn’t run. He walked, cautiously toward the sound of voices.
‘I don’t understand,’ he heard Amelia say. ‘Barry said it would be okay. What do you want from me?’
‘If you can’t give me my sim card, and you haven’t got Stefan’s file, then there is nothing I want from you,’ the man said. ‘I don’t suppose Barry will ever stop trying to reform me. He ought to know by now that it’s far too late for that.’
‘But you’re brothers,’ she says, wondering how they could be so different.
‘Half-brothers, yes. Mother’s shameful little secret, that’s me, farmed off to a barren sister in the poorest little one-horse town in the whole of Spain. Raised by an alcoholic whore and an old soldier, who still thought he was fighting the civil war. That’s why I let Barry launder the proceeds of my business dealings through his crappy little club – he owes me.’
‘Your business dealings?’ she asked. ‘Stefan believed it was your cousin…’
‘There is no cousin, you silly girl. Antonio Garcia was my father – not the man who impregnated our mother – my real father, the only one I’ve ever known. He died when I was twelve, but I’ve lived my life by the lessons he taught me. I even took his name.’
‘You killed Hassima,’ she said, already certain of the answer.
‘Stefan killed Hassima,’ he replied. ‘Stefan concocted his little dossier and came looking for me, wanting her back in exchange for his silence. I would have let her go in a few more months, if he hadn’t forced my hand.’
‘How did he find you?’
‘That, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t see how he could have tracked me to the club, even if he had somehow linked me to Leicester. He could perhaps have followed the money, or maybe he actually found one of my… clients… and got them to talk. I doubt it. I think they are all sufficiently afraid of me to keep their mouths shut once they get where they want to be. Unless I find his dossier, I will never know. He carried me photograph with him though.’
‘He didn’t have a photograph. No one did.’
‘Oh yes he did. Barry made sure it was taken from his pocket before the ambulance arrived – he isn’t completely useless, my brother. Heaven knows where he found it. It was of poor quality and badly out of focus, but he carried it everywhere with him. He looked for me everywhere he went, I think. The poor man was obsessed.’
‘What can I do?’ she asked. ‘I swear on my life I’ll never tell anyone. You can leave, and I won’t say a word.’
‘You won’t,’ he said, and she saw the blade flash.

Fifty yards off, Max Taylor saw it too, and ran.


THE INVESTIGATION
Chapter 30, 08:01

At 08:01, on the morning of Thursday 31st November 1995, just over twenty-four hours after Amelia’s body was discovered at Burbage Common, Leicester and Rutland CID are called to the Muay-Thai kickboxing club, where they find the bloated corpse of Darren Gadd. His neck had been broken, cleanly and with no evidence of a struggle. Doctor Hussain estimates that he had been dead for roughly seven hours, putting the time of death somewhere between midnight and two o’clock in the morning.
He had died at about the time the police were escorting the Ana Marić and her family to the hospital to be treated for smoke inhalation. At about the time Milan Marić had been standing in his ruined home, asking himself when his family would ever begin to feel safe. At about the time the standby unit had arrived from Birmingham, and probably while both Max Taylor and Barry Gadd had been in police custody at the station.
The area around the building seemed to be a CCTV blackout zone, with cameras getting smashed as fast as they could be put up. There were no houses nearby and no one was coming forward as a witness, despite numerous pleas for help in the media.
Max Taylor and Barry Gadd were both questioned, but each had a plausible alibi for where they had been immediately before being picked up by the police. They even questioned Caroline Hatchell and Milan Marić, albeit very gently, as they were the only other people the police could think of, who might have any motive at all for the killing. They came up with nothing. Caroline had been heard by her parents, struggling to get her key in the door – stomping about drunkenly, trying to be quiet – and then snoring loudly in her room, until Detective Sergeant Wright had woken them all up shortly after five a.m. by hammering on their front door. Milan Marić had been inside a guarded house, with a surveillance car parked outside.
No one had seen Milan slip out of the smoke-blackened back door. No one knew that he had read the entire Garcia dossier, and understood a great deal more of it than Amelia. No one knew that he had contacted Bernadette LaCroix himself, and been sent a copy of the same photo that Stefan had. No one considered the military training he must have received, growing up in a country that still had compulsory National Service. And no one else knew how determined Milan Marić had been, that his family would never be hurt again.