The Murder Bag

by Tony Parsons

  ‘I heard that it would never have detonated,’ he said with a grin. ‘Because the bomber ruined the cook.’

  ‘I heard that too,’ I said, flexing my fingers inside the latex gloves. ‘In court the tech guy said the perp didn’t distil the hydrogen peroxide to the correct concentration. Simmered when he should have stirred. Forgot to whisk his egg white. Maybe it’s true. Maybe they’re just trying to cheer us up. Anyone who makes a bomb in their old mum’s kitchen can’t be that bright, can they?’

  ‘And what did they give you?’ Gane asked.

  ‘The Queen’s Police Medal.’

  He almost whistled. ‘A QPM? Was it for exceptional courage, skill, exhibiting conspicuous devotion to duty, or all three?’ He laughed. ‘Lucky he had a bomb in his bag. Or they would have given you twenty years to life.’

  ‘It’s good to have you, Wolfe,’ Whitestone told me, ending the chat. ‘The boss is waiting for you.’

  SOCOs were putting up arc lights at the end of the alley where Mallory stood next to a black shape lying on the ground by giant recycling bins, his long lean figure stock still in the blazing white glare as the scene was carefully prepared, looking like an actor waiting for his cue to step on stage. The filthy alley felt like it was light years away from the shining tower where we had found Hugo Buck.

  ‘I thought we had another one,’ I said.

  ‘We do,’ Mallory said.

  There’s a look that you see in all boxers and in certain breeds of dog – German Shepherds have it. It is a look that reveals knowledge of how serious the world is. Mallory had that look now.

  ‘Different postcode, same killer,’ he said. ‘Look.’

  The dead man wore the sad rags of homelessness. And someone had cut his throat out.

  All of it.

  The fierce white lights revealed a neck that had been ripped open, torn out, the front half of the victim’s neck cleaved clean away. Again. It felt like only the spine was keeping the head attached to the body. Again. Mallory was right. The homeless man in the stinking alley was a world away from the banker in his glass tower.

  But he was another one.

  Even under the arc lights the alley was cold, and through the thin rubber gloves I could feel the sweat tingle on my palms.

  I turned on my torch to look beyond the reach of the lights’ glare, and let the thin beam trace slowly across the great spurts of arterial blood covering the walls and the recycling bins. I turned the torch off as I looked at the blood that soaked and stained the top half of the body.

  The blood stank with that distinctive metallic odour that is also sickeningly human, and the smell mixed with the fuel and food and alcohol scents of the West End.

  I tried to look beyond the blood and the horror. I tried to look at what had once been a man.

  His hair was long and matted, the clothes rags, blackened by the grinding toll of living on the streets. It was hard to estimate his age because he looked all used up, as though he had lived an entire lifetime long before this brutal death.

  ‘There will be needle marks on his arms,’ I said, ‘and perhaps on the legs, and even between the toes.’

  Mallory said, ‘But why kill a man who was so busy killing himself?’

  There were a few pitiful belongings by the dead man’s side. A black rubbish bag secured by an elastic band holding his worldly goods. A woollen cap still full of coins. And a musical instrument. A thin piece of black wood with a complicated tangle of silver metal buttons and keys.

  ‘A clarinet?’ I said.

  ‘Not a clarinet,’ Mallory said. ‘Too small. An oboe.’

  ‘Nobody’s busking is that bad,’ said one of the SOCOs.

  Nobody laughed.

  Mallory’s gaze took in the bloodied body, the untouched money, and the musical instrument. He shook his head with what looked like real sadness.

  ‘Looks like he was on the streets for a while,’ I said. ‘Plenty of addicts and former addicts around Soho. But the homeless don’t often kill each other.’

  ‘No,’ Mallory agreed. ‘It’s the people with homes to go to who are the problem.’

  I looked back at the street. The SOCOs moved in slow motion now, plodding white ghosts, falling into their routine of photographing footprints, gathering cigarette butts, collecting fibres, prints, and samples of blood. One of them was drawing a sketch. The photographer stopped taking stills and started filming the scene. The usual crop of small numbered yellow markers were blooming on the ragged ground and the SOCOs trod carefully between them, like scientists tiptoeing through the aftermath of nuclear Armageddon. Beyond them, in the festive swirl of the blue lights of our cars, uniformed officers were pushing back the crowds recording the drama on their phones.

  ‘They think we’re putting on Les Misérables down here,’ Mallory sighed. ‘This is a strange space, isn’t it?’

  I lifted my head. Mallory was right. It was not really an alley at all, more of a crevice between two of the grand old theatres of Shaftesbury Avenue. At the end of the alley, above the heads of the gawping crowd, I could see the bright lights of the very heart of the city. The white neon of the theatre marquees, the reds and golds of Chinatown.

  ‘And nobody heard a thing,’ Mallory said, reading my mind.

  ‘Because his trachea had been cut,’ I said. ‘No windpipe, no scream.’

  As the crowds were moved to the far side of the street their voices rose in protest. They craned their necks for a better view and held their little phones even higher above their heads.

  ‘God spare us from stupid people with smartphones,’ Mallory muttered.

  The SOCOs began to erect a tent over the dead man to shield the scene from the public and to protect the thousand tiny scraps of evidence from the weather. Mallory’s gaze settled on the beanie cap full of coins, then moved on to the musical instrument.

  ‘What kind of heroin addict busks with an oboe?’ he said.

  I thought about it. ‘One who comes from money. One who had all the chances. One who comes from privilege. The music teacher coming round once a week to practise the oboe. The lessons going on for years. Money never a problem.’

  Mallory ran the palm of one large hand over his bald head and then pushed his John Lennon glasses a bit further up his broken nose. ‘Or maybe he just stole it.’ A beat. ‘But I don’t think so. I think you’re right. I think there was all kind of care lavished on him. A long time ago now.’

  The flash from a SOCO’s camera lit up a part of the alley wall that the arc lights had not reached. Among the fresh spurts of travel blood there was a tangle of graffiti I had missed. One word shouted at me and I stepped closer to see, although I already knew what it said.

  P I G

  On the far side of the street I could see perhaps a hundred mobile phones, held above the shoulders of the uniformed officers who stood on the far side of the POLICE DO NOT CROSS tape. The crowds had been pushed right back now but the numbers were growing, stretching our officers, and as their excitement mounted the white lights on their phones glowed like the eyes of wolves in winter.

  A SOCO came down the alley, carrying a laptop in one hand and pulling off her facemask with the other.

  ‘Good body, sir,’ she said to Mallory.

  ‘No witness, no weapon, no CCTV, no ID and no glove prints,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen better.’

  In the morning I took care of my daughter and my dog and then I drove to work – 27 Savile Row, London W1. The Met call it West End Central.

  27 Savile Row is a modern block of offices with one of those ancient blue police lamps outside – the kind of blue lamp that makes you think of Sherlock Holmes hunting Jack the Ripper through the London fog. But although Savile Row is famous for two things, West End Central isn’t one of them.

  For hundreds of years Savile Row has been home to the most exclusive men’s tailors in the world. The short Mayfair street is also where, on the rooftop high above number 3, the Beatles played their final gig, attracting the attention of
the local police. The attending officers from West End Central let the Beatles finish their last ever set because they were all music fans. That’s what they tell you in West End Central.

  Carrying the triple espresso I had bought at Bar Italia in Soho, I went up to the Major Incident Room, MIR-1, on the top floor. MIR-1 would be the centre of Homicide’s murder investigation. It was a large suite of connecting rooms with a computer station at every desk and it was now completely empty apart from DCI Mallory, who stood cradling a carton of takeaway tea as he stared at a blank whiteboard.

  ‘You’re early,’ he said. ‘Morning briefing’s not for an hour.’

  ‘I thought I’d be the first to arrive, sir,’ I said. ‘Look keen and all that.’

  He laughed. ‘I like to spend a bit of time figuring before I start opening my mouth,’ he said. ‘What could possibly connect a wealthy investment banker and a homeless heroin addict?’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I have no idea. And I need to know. At least I need to have a theory.’ He sipped his tea. ‘Have you heard of the Golden Hour principle?’

  I nodded. ‘It means early action can secure material that would otherwise be lost. Witnesses remember things more clearly. Offenders can still be nearby. CCTV footage hasn’t been deleted. The longer we leave it, the harder it all gets.’

  ‘I believe in the Golden Hour principle as much as the next man,’ Mallory said. ‘But I also believe in what the old SIOs call “creating slow time”. Meaning you need to put your foot on the ball and have a figure; meaning you have to leave time for figuring as well as action.’

  He was such a soft-spoken man that it took me a moment to realise that by coming in early I had intruded upon his private time – his figuring time. He must have seen the alarm on my face.

  ‘Why don’t you go down to the basement?’ he suggested kindly. ‘See if you can find our weapon.’ He held out an A4 file. ‘Take this with you.’

  ‘Sir.’

  I bolted my coffee and went down to the basement. The lift doors opened on to a low-ceilinged room where row upon row of canteen dining tables were covered with knives.

  A young uniformed officer was filming them and making notes on a clipboard. He looked like a tourist in some exotic marketplace.

  ‘Help you, sir?’ he said.

  ‘I’m looking for a knife,’ I said.

  ‘What kind of knife, sir?’

  ‘A knife that can do this.’

  There were four photographs inside the file. Two of Hugo Buck’s corpse and the other two of the homeless man. They were all graphic close-ups of the fatal wounds. I held them up for the constable and saw the blood drain from his face.

  ‘Go ahead, sir,’ he said. ‘We’ve got all sorts here.’

  It was true. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of knives glinting under the harsh strip lighting. Knives that had been seized, found, dumped, bagged as evidence or surrendered during an amnesty. So many knives that I didn’t see how I could fail to find a suitable candidate for the one that had cut the throats of the banker and the unknown man.

  The uniformed officer had fallen into step beside me. He cleared his throat nervously.

  ‘It’s PC Greene, sir,’ he said. ‘PC Billy Greene? From that morning at the bank? You told me to breathe. When I came over all funny.’

  I looked at him properly and remembered the young officer who was good for nothing after finding the body.

  ‘PC Greene,’ I said. ‘You don’t call me sir just because I’m in plain clothes.’ I was wearing my black Paul Smith wedding suit. Savile Row being still a bit beyond my pay grade. ‘I’m a detective constable – DC Wolfe. Exactly the same rank as you. You can call me Wolfe. You can call me Max. You can call me pretty much whatever you like. But if you call me sir then you make both of us look stupid. You do know that a DC has exactly the same powers and authority as a uniformed PC, don’t you?’

  He looked embarrassed. ‘Of course, sir— Max, er, DC Wolfe. But anyway, I didn’t thank you. A lot of them were laughing at me for wimping out that day. You helped. It definitely helps. The breathing.’

  ‘You’re not on the street any more?’

  His white face flushed red. ‘They’ve put me on desk duties. Reassigned. A canteen cowboy.’ He laughed miserably. ‘They think I fell to bits.’

  I grimaced. ‘That’s a bit hard.’

  Greene gestured at the knives, changing the subject. ‘See what you’re looking for?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  I walked between the tables, looking at the knives in their careful lines. Throwing knives. Hunting knives. Bowie knives. Knives so small and thin they could fit into a credit card holder. Samurai swords. Carpet cutters. Gurkha kukris. Rust-dappled Stanley knives. And the height of knife fashion – compact semi-automatic folding knives, with titanium handles and stainless steel blades, knives that whipped out like a gunslinger drawing his Colt 45.

  I picked one up and looked at it in my hand.

  ‘We’re getting a lot of those,’ Greene said. ‘Gang members like them. You think it might be something like that?’

  ‘I don’t see how it can be,’ I said, replacing the knife. ‘It’s not long enough. I figure what I’m looking for is about twelve inches long. Most of it blade. It has to be a blade that’s long and thin and I guess double-edged. Something that’s made to cut throats.’

  He swallowed hard. ‘This is about Bob the Butcher, isn’t it?’

  ‘Who is Bob the Butcher?’

  He fetched his laptop and found the page. A newspaper’s website.

  BOB THE BUTCHER STALKS SCARED CITY BOYS

  by Scarlet Bush

  Crime correspondent

  Champagne-swilling City boys are living in mortal terror after a senior detective revealed that the death of investment banker Hugo Buck was a hate crime.

  ‘Yes, Bob the Butcher murdering that innocent young banker was a hate crime,’ confirmed Detective Constable Max Wolfe. ‘But then all murder is a hate crime.’

  In the bars all over the financial district, high-flying young City boys busy blowing their bonuses are now living in abject terror of Bob the Butcher.

  ‘It’s terrible to think that Bob the Butcher is targeting bankers,’ said Bruno Mancini in fashionable Cheapside watering hole The Lucky Cripple. ‘What’s wrong with being rich? We work hard for our success.’

  I cursed under my breath. ‘I didn’t say any of that,’ I said, then glanced at the piece again. ‘Well, maybe just a bit of it.’

  There was a small photograph next to the article. It was the young woman outside the flat in Regent’s Park. I wasn’t sure what this meant, but I knew it wasn’t good. The one good thing was that she had not connected the murder of Hugo Buck with the unknown man in the alley. But it was the only good thing.

  I carried on walking between the tables, somehow knowing that the knife I was looking for would not be found here.

  ‘Thanks for your help, Billy. I’m sorry they took you off the street.’

  He brightened. ‘It’s actually not so bad. I like the nights. And you get a sense of the history down here. Have you got a minute? Have a look at this.’

  Greene opened the door to a storage room. It was as small and cluttered as an attic that had been abandoned around the time the Beatles were playing on a rooftop at the other end of Savile Row.

  ‘It’s full of stuff that nobody knows what to do with,’ Greene said. ‘It’s not evidence so they can’t bag it. It’s not junk so they can’t chuck it out. And it’s not important enough to be in a museum. I think they’ve all just forgotten about it. Have a look, DC Wolfe.’

  We stepped into the dusty room and I looked around in disbelief. There was a stovepipe hat, half eaten away by moths and mould. Cardboard boxes overflowing with old-fashioned rubber truncheons. A collapsed stack of elderly riot shields. Metropolitan Police baseball caps that had never quite caught on. A rack of heavyweight Kevlar jackets, nothing like the wafer-thin stab-proof numbers that we had these days. And
there were other bits and pieces of uniform – helmets with the badge gone, jackets with their brass buttons missing, abandoned kit that had to be twenty, fifty, a hundred years old. Police junk that nobody quite had the heart or the energy or the permission to chuck away.

  So they stuck it in here.

  ‘Have you heard of the Black Museum?’ Greene said. ‘It’s in New Scotland Yard. It’s closed to the public. This is just like the Black Museum.’

  I smiled. ‘This is a bit more of a mess than the Black Museum. It’s true that the Black Museum has a lot of old kit. Guns. Knives. Walking sticks that turn into swords. Umbrellas that turn into guns. They’ve got a sword that turns into a knife called a Cop Killer. But the Black Museum is not really a museum at all. It’s more of a classroom. A training aid.’

  Greene’s eyes were wide. ‘You’ve seen it?’

  I nodded. ‘Part of my training. They’ve got a display about Met officers killed in the line of duty. They show you around the Black Museum so that it doesn’t happen to you.’

  Greene took a deep breath and let it out slowly as he turned to point at a dusty shelf in the darkest corner of that strange little room.

  ‘Look,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t see anything,’ I said, taking a step closer to where he was indicating.

  And then I saw it.

  It was an ancient leather bag sitting all by itself on a shelf tangled with cobwebs. The dark brown cowhide was worn and cracked. The brass hardware and locks were blackened with rust. Greene lifted it up for my inspection and at the back of the shelf a spider scuttled away as if late for an urgent appointment.

  ‘It looks like an old doctor’s bag,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a Gladstone bag,’ Greene said. ‘What makes this one special is that it’s a Murder Bag. I think it’s one of the originals. Did you ever hear of Murder Bags?’