The Murder Bag

by Tony Parsons

  We lived opposite the great old meat market of Smithfield. At this time of the morning, the men were ending their long night shift. The butchers and porters were finishing the last of their loading and making their way to cafés and pubs that had opened long before dawn. A few were already outside the early morning pubs with pints of lager in their red fists, big men wilting in the daylight and blurry with exhaustion, white aprons smeared with blood and gore. As we walked through their world, some called out a greeting to Stan, and Scout and I smiled with pride.

  He was a striking dog. In the pale daylight you could see the beauty of his colour – a rich chestnut somewhere between rusty red and old gold. His fur was wavy, and on the tips of those oversized ears there were ringlets of extravagant curls, as though he’d spent the previous evening with a fancy hairdresser rather than urinating on our furniture. Held in check by Scout, who had his leather lead wrapped twice around the wrist of her right hand, Stan trotted happily by her side, his small head up and alert, his tail stiff with anticipation and then whipping like a windscreen wiper in a thunderstorm when something caught his eye.

  And Stan was amazed by everything. He stared with awe at a porter across the street having a cigarette outside the market. A jogger went by and Stan stood stock still, his head tilted to one side, as if witnessing an alien landing. Scout and I laughed. Most of our laughs came from the dog. He looked at a piece of chewing gum, or a discarded cup, or a shard of broken glass, and instantly lurched towards it, dragging Scout with him.

  The sun was up now and making me squint: fresh autumn light can be more crystal clear than summer’s haze. I felt the rawness of the day and the bad sleeper’s burden – the knowledge that every hour would have its own weight and no amount of coffee would ever take the place of lost sleep. Yet I still needed more coffee, immediately.

  There was an all-night stall near the market, serving mostly black cab drivers and meat porters, and I got in line while men with shaved heads and fierce faces fussed over the chestnut-coloured dog at my daughter’s feet. Stan leapt like a salmon, overcome with excitement, and they laughed, all the hard men of the London night, and I was happy then, knowing that our dog had yet to learn fear.

  As we neared the school gates Scout fell into step with another little girl. The girl’s mother turned away to talk to another mother and I waited at the gates with Stan and soothed him as he whimpered to see Scout leave. We waited in case she turned round to wave but she was with her friend now and she had forgotten all about us.

  Before she disappeared into her own world I reflected that her school uniform was too big and it would be too big for a long time.

  Mrs Murphy was right. There was almost nothing of my daughter.

  There was almost nothing of her, and she was my everything.

  Hugo Buck’s home was in a portered apartment overlooking Regent’s Park.

  The porter must have been on his tea break when I got there because the double glass doors were locked. I stood outside, leaning on the bell and watching the dogs in the park. They were all off lead. Big, good-looking dogs, Labradors and Retrievers and Airedales, and some small fry, Beagles and Westies, all of them panting and confident as they sniffed piles of leaves and each other, coming back when their owner called. I could not imagine a time when Stan would come when I called.

  ‘Detective?’

  A young woman and man in their twenties were walking towards me. I had clocked the pair of them when I was parking, taken them for a couple of local rich kids. A pair of good-looking scruffs, carefully unkempt, passing a single cigarette between them as they sat on a low wall by the manicured gardens. Only the children of the wealthy can afford to be that laid back at that age.

  On the driveway there was a chauffeur lounging in a big black Merc, squeezed in tight between a couple of Porsche 911s, and he eyed up the girl as he played with his peaked cap. I saw now the young guy had a camera slung around his neck. Press, then, I thought. It was the girl who did the talking.

  ‘You’re here to speak to Mrs Buck? Is she a suspect? Do you expect to make an arrest soon?’

  I pressed my thumb on the buzzer and left it there.

  ‘Is this a hate crime, detective?’

  I looked at her.

  ‘Every murder is a hate crime,’ I said. ‘Who did you say you write for?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ she said.

  She dug a card out of her bag, and when she gave it to me I saw that there was a tiny digital voice recorder in her other hand. A red light was shining. Scarlet Bush, I read. The Daily Post. Then her mobile phone number, email address and four or five social network accounts. That seemed like a lot to me.

  ‘Scarlet Bush,’ she laughed. ‘Sounds like a porn star, right?’

  When I looked up she nodded at the photographer and, almost lazily, he swung his camera towards me and pulled the trigger. It took photographs like a machine gun.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, raising a hand to protect myself.

  ‘Have you seen what the online community are saying?’ The little voice recorder was in my face. ‘They’re calling Bob the Butcher a hero.’

  I stared at her. ‘Bob the Butcher?’

  ‘He’s all over the social networks. He’s been trending for twenty-four hours.’ Scarlet Bush had a disbelieving little smile on her face. ‘You genuinely weren’t aware of that?’

  The porter was finally opening the door. I pressed my warrant card against the glass and said my name and rank. So she knew my name, too.

  ‘And how does that feel for you, DC Wolfe?’ she asked. ‘When the social networks are calling the murderer a hero and the victim a scumbag?’

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ the porter said, finally opening up.

  I paused in the open doorway.

  ‘Murderers are never heroes,’ I said.

  Scarlet Bush smiled at me, more broadly now, as if we both knew that wasn’t quite true.

  Mrs Natasha Buck, widow of the dead banker, was in dark glasses and wet from the shower. Tall, early thirties, still in her bathrobe.

  The strange combination of robe and shades made her look as though she was on holiday, heading for the pool. Her damp hair was blonde – very blonde, the white-gold you see on black-and-white film stars. She looked like a natural blonde, but maybe not that natural. She had the worked-on thinness that you see with a lot of wealthy women, and the same sense of entitlement.

  Towelling her long blonde hair, she frowned at my warrant card as if it was junk mail from Pepe’s Pizza Parlour.

  ‘I’m very sorry for your loss, Mrs Buck. I know this must be a very distressing time.’

  ‘I already told the police what I know,’ she said. ‘A young black man and an older white woman.’ She had the carefully clipped enunciation of a foreigner who has spent ten years around serious English money.

  ‘DI Gane and DI Whitestone,’ I said. ‘I know.’

  ‘They even swabbed my mouth.’

  ‘They do that for your DNA. To rule you out. We just need to double-check some details, if that’s convenient.’

  ‘Not really.’ She glanced at her watch, shining like a diamond-encrusted bauble on her thin wrist. ‘Actually I’m about to go out.’

  She was strikingly attractive, with the kind of face that you would not look away from until you found yourself staring. And perhaps not even then. But it felt like a lot of men had told her she was beautiful.

  ‘We do have an appointment, Mrs Buck. If it’s inconvenient now we can do it at some later date.’ A pause. ‘At the station.’

  She looked at me properly for the first time. Then she laughed.

  The more money they have, I thought, the less they fear the police.

  ‘Should I call my lawyer?’ she said.

  ‘We’re just talking, Mrs Buck.’

  Her hair fell across her face. She looked at me through the damp veil as she lazily pulled it back.

  ‘Am I a suspect?’

  Her voice had become lower and slower. I liked it mor
e.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said.

  We stared at each other.

  ‘Oh, let’s get it over with,’ she said. ‘Coffee? I’ll have to make it myself. I had to let our housekeeper go when I found her with my late husband’s penis in her mouth.’ She stood up with a sigh. ‘It’s so hard to get good help.’

  It was a lovely apartment. Clean, expensive, uncluttered. Big budget, good taste, no children. I thought of the office with all the blood and tried to feel her husband’s presence in this place. But if his spirit was near, I couldn’t sense him. It felt like the home of a woman who had been living alone for a long time.

  There were two paintings on the wall, clearly by the same artist. City scenes with a kind of Sunday morning stillness about them. One was of deserted railway lines, the other some kind of tunnel, and they were both misty and dream-like, bathed in the soft light of dawn or twilight. There were no people in them and that gave them a strange kind of peace. I felt like I almost recognised these places.

  I leaned in close to the painting of the tunnel, looking for the artist’s name, but there were just two lower-case initials.

  j s

  A miniature dog came into the room while Mrs Buck was making the coffee. Looked like a Pekingese-Chihuahua cross. I let her sniff my hand and then picked her up and placed her on my thigh. She stood there shivering, as weightless as an insect.

  When I tried to stroke her she ambled off to the far end of the sofa and stared at me defiantly as she emptied her bladder.

  Mrs Buck came back into the room with a cafetière on a silver tray.

  ‘Susan, you bad girl,’ she said. ‘You know you’re meant to do that on the carpet.’

  Mrs Buck dropped a silk cushion over the stain, pushed the dog on to the floor and then sat opposite me, leaning back, crossing her long legs, and sighing as her robe slid open. She pulled it shut as an iPhone on the coffee table between us began to vibrate. The dog barked at it, quaking with rage as Mrs Buck picked it up and began reading a message. She made me feel like I wasn’t there at all.

  I cleared my throat.

  ‘Who would want to kill your husband?’ I said.

  Her pretty face was frowning at the iPhone.

  ‘Apart from you,’ I added.

  Now she looked at me.

  ‘Mrs Buck,’ I said. ‘Please try to concentrate on me for the next little while.’

  She took a final look at her phone and turned it off, her face tight with anger.

  ‘Do you really think I wanted my husband dead?’ she said. ‘You stupid little man!’

  I took a breath.

  ‘Officers were called to this address three days before he died.’

  ‘That? A lover’s tiff.’

  ‘You made threats on your husband’s life.’

  ‘What do you expect me to say when I find the help blowing him? You say all sorts of things in the heat of the moment.’

  ‘You FedExed your bed to his office.’

  ‘I wanted to embarrass him. I wanted to humiliate him. I wanted him to know what it feels like.’

  ‘And then someone cut his throat.’

  She exhaled as she poured out coffee.

  ‘I can see it looks bad. Sugar? Milk?’

  ‘Black, please.’

  ‘I didn’t want him to die. I just wanted him to stop. To stop . . . what’s the nice way of saying it? Sleeping around.’

  It was good coffee.

  ‘Did your husband have many friends?’

  ‘You know what the English are like. Or at least that kind of upper-class Englishman. Hugo came from a family where they let their dogs get in their beds and send their children to kennels. He was shipped off to boarding school at the age of seven, made friends there and kept them for ever. He didn’t have much use for the rest of the world. Including his wife.’

  I thought about the photograph on his desk.

  ‘Where did he go to school?’

  ‘Trinity College Cambridge. Prince Charles went there.’

  She was smiling with wistful pride.

  ‘Before that,’ I said.

  ‘Potter’s Field,’ she said. ‘His father went there. And his grandfather. Hugo called it the Eton for athletes, musicians and thugs. He meant it as a compliment.’

  ‘Which one was he?’

  ‘An athlete. My husband was good at games, detective.’

  ‘Did he enjoy his years at Potter’s Field?’

  ‘Sadistic masters. Stodgy food. Cold showers. That constant obsession with sport. Casual bullying. A lot of homosexual sex. He always said they were the best days of his life.’

  ‘Did your husband have lovers?’

  She snorted.

  ‘Apart from your housekeeper,’ I said.

  ‘Plenty.’

  ‘And did the lovers have husbands?’

  ‘Some of them. You think a jealous husband might have killed him? Possible, I suppose. But Hugo was fond of the help. He stayed away from my friends, I’ll give him that. Although I don’t think he did it out of any sense of morality. He just preferred his entertainment below stairs.’

  ‘I’ll need the name and contact details of the housekeeper. You told my colleagues you didn’t have them.’

  The anger flared. ‘Because the bitch caught a plane back to Kiev. I told them. Do I have to say everything twice?’

  ‘Did he fall out with any business partners? Did he receive any threatening phone calls, emails, letters?’

  She shook her head. She had had enough. She took out her phone.

  ‘Where were you between the hours of five and seven a.m. yesterday? I am going to need your credit card records, mobile phone bills, computers and their passwords. Laptops, desktops, tablets, the lot. Are you listening to me, Mrs Buck?’

  She stood up.

  ‘Do you really want to know about my husband?’

  We stared at each other.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then let me tell you about my husband,’ she said.

  With a shrug she let the robe fall from her shoulders and to the floor.

  I saw the bruises on her arms and legs. On her long limbs there were fresh, livid marks and there were old and fading marks. All the signs of systematic and regular beatings that carefully avoided the face.

  ‘This was my husband.’

  ‘Mrs Buck—’

  ‘He was the violent one, not me. When I picked up that little oyster knife he laughed in my face. He laughed at me, detective. But I didn’t want him dead, no matter what I told him.’ The tears finally came and they seemed real enough to me. ‘I wanted him to be kind,’ she continued. ‘I wanted him to stop running around. I wanted him to stop humiliating me with women too poor and too stupid to tell him no. I wanted him to stop.’

  I was on my feet. ‘Please, Mrs Buck—’

  ‘Natasha.’

  I picked up her robe and draped it around her shoulders. She put her arms around my waist. I think she just wanted to be held for a while. I think she was sick of all the questions. I think she was just lonely. Our faces were next to each other. I could feel her breath. And I felt the blood flood into me unbidden.

  Because I was lonely too.

  After a long moment I pulled myself away, cracking my shin against the coffee table and waking up the dog.

  Natasha Buck smiled sadly as she slipped the robe back on and tied the belt around her slim waist.

  ‘Ah, that rare breed,’ she said, nodding towards my left hand. My wedding ring had caught the soft light as I picked up my cup. ‘A married man who loves his wife!’

  ‘Drink your coffee,’ I said.

  The porter was nowhere to be seen when I left. The journalist and the photographer had disappeared. The chauffeur was dozing at the wheel of the Mercedes, his peaked cap pulled over his eyes. The dogs in the park had all gone home and the day was dark far too soon.

  I was walking to the car, kicking through the piles of autumn leaves and thinking of Natasha Buck’s long naked limbs, when DCI
Mallory called.

  ‘It wasn’t beginner’s luck,’ he said. ‘We’ve got another one.’

  4

  A BLACKED-OUT MORTUARY van waited at the mouth of the alley as the swirling blue lights of a dozen response cars lit up the Soho night. Uniformed officers were still unreeling spools of blue and white crime scene tape across Shaftesbury Avenue and shoving back crowds hopeful of glimpsing fresh corpse.

  I ducked under the tape.

  The Airwave digital radios chattered and clacked. The SOCOs were putting on their head-to-toe white body suits while Mallory’s two detective inspectors, Gane and Whitestone, were already ripping off their protective gear. They were excited.

  ‘It’s a good body,’ Gane said to me. He was young and black, his head shaved fashionably clean, and under his protective clothes he was far better dressed than he needed to be.

  I pulled on thin blue latex gloves. ‘A good body?’

  ‘A bad body is one that’s found by the public,’ Whitestone said. ‘Some drunk who needs a pee or a puke. A dog walker clomping through the gore before it’s had a chance to get cold. Destroying evidence, tampering with the scene before we’ve even confirmed death.’ Whitestone was in her middle thirties, a thoughtful-looking blonde woman with black-rimmed glasses. You might not have guessed she had more than ten years on murder investigation teams. ‘A good body is one that’s found by the police when it’s definitely dead. A good body keeps things simple. Saves us work.’

  ‘And this is a good body,’ Gane said. And then, ‘We read about you. You’re famous, Wolfe. What did they call you in court?’

  ‘Officer A,’ I said.

  ‘Officer A. You were in SO15?’

  I nodded. ‘Surveillance officer, Counter Terrorism Command.’

  ‘You were a surveillance officer?’ he said, clearly underwhelmed.

  I could see how a Homicide detective like Gane would think surveillance was life in the slow lane. It’s true there was a lot of hanging around, following people on foot and in cars and watching endless hours of CCTV footage, whereas Homicide and Serious Crime’s work is carried out by Murder Investigation Teams, the Metropolitan Police’s specialised murder squads, and is one of the Met’s elite units, investigating nothing but murder, manslaughter and the threat of murder. But Gane made it sound like I had spent my time asking people if they wanted fries with that shake.