The Murder Bag

by Tony Parsons

  ‘Time of death?’ Whitestone said.

  ‘Hugo Buck had an algor mortis or temperature of death of ninety-seven degrees Fahrenheit,’ Elsa said. ‘Not far below normal body temperature of 98.6. Adam Jones was ninety-five degrees. But Mr Jones died on the street and Mr Buck died in a climate-controlled office.’

  ‘And bodies lose temperature more quickly in the open air,’ Whitestone said, looking at Gane.

  ‘Adam Jones was found just after seven p.m.,’ Elsa said. ‘I would estimate the time of death was between five and seven p.m. Hugo Buck was found at six a.m. and I would estimate time of death between four a.m. and six.’

  Mallory smiled. ‘Two-hour windows, Elsa? Not taking many chances, are you?’ He looked at his detectives. ‘I think we just missed them – both of them. I think they both died just before we got there.’

  The pathologist raised her hands – the perfect hostess trying to avoid an unpleasant scene. ‘Time of death is only ever a best guess,’ she said. ‘You know that as well as I do.’

  ‘We have to cut Elsa some slack,’ Mallory said, still smiling. ‘Time of death can eliminate subjects or damn them. So time of death is where our forensic colleagues are at their most cagey, and least willing to speculate.’

  ‘And where the investigating detectives are most desperate for accuracy,’ Elsa added.

  ‘Defensive wounds?’ Gane said. ‘I can’t see anything obvious.’

  ‘Nothing,’ the pathologist said. ‘Neither of them had the will or the chance to put up a fight. There are no defensive wounds on the hands, arms, wrists, legs or feet.’ She peered at the body of Adam Jones. ‘Although on the body of Mr Jones I did discover some old cuts, bruises and abrasions from minor, earlier incidents.’

  ‘Life on the streets,’ I said. ‘Takes its toll. No sign of recent substance abuse? He wasn’t using at the time of death?’

  Elsa shook her head. ‘Surprisingly not.’ There was a note of pity in her voice. ‘Mr Jones was drug free. He was trying to change his ways, despite what you can see.’

  What we could see were the exhausted veins on the man’s arms – track marks, the miniature railway lines of heroin abuse. They were fading now.

  ‘I think he was trying to kick the habit,’ Elsa continued. ‘I think he had tried more than once.’ She smiled apologetically. ‘Do stop me if I start doing your job.’

  Mallory said, ‘Star sign?’

  Elsa stared at him. ‘Taurus,’ she said. ‘The oboe you mention in your notes gave it away. Taureans are lovers of music and song.’ Then she smiled. ‘Oh bugger off, Mallory!’

  We all laughed.

  I leaned close to the dead men, looking at the neck of first Adam Jones and then Hugo Buck. In length, depth and darkness, the wounds were absolutely identical.

  ‘One cut,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Just one cut in the right place.’

  ‘Sometimes one cut is all it takes,’ Mallory said. ‘The assassination squad stabbed Julius Caesar twenty-three times. But the Roman physician who examined him concluded that Caesar would have survived the assault if not for the wound to his heart.’

  Elsa pointed at the wounds where she had cut open, examined and then closed up their stomachs.

  ‘As you noted from his locked fists, Mr Buck had a cadaveric spasm in the moment of his death – instant rigor,’ she said. ‘What you like to call that Pompeii moment, Mallory. But Mr Jones is different. There was rigor in his legs but only in the legs. As you know, rigor mortis usually takes two hours to kick in unless there’s a cadaveric spasm – as in the case of Mr Buck – or a loss of energy in a part of the body. That causes a chemical reaction, a loss of adenosine triphosphate – ATP – that makes the muscles stiffen and contract. So rigor in the legs means one thing: there was strenuous muscular activity in the legs prior to death.’

  We considered the corpse of Adam Jones.

  ‘So Jones was running,’ Mallory said.

  ‘He was being chased,’ I said.

  Elsa Olsen smiled at me, like a teacher looking at her star student. She held out her hand, as if I had won a prize.

  ‘And this belonged to Mr Buck,’ she said, and dropped something into my palm.

  A small blue thing, round and hard and staring at me from beyond the grave.

  ‘Hugo Buck had a glass eye,’ she announced.

  6

  IT WAS LATE afternoon with the day’s light already fading when I parked outside the block of flats in Regent’s Park. The trees in the park were at their most beautiful now, a riot of red and gold leaves that had not yet become serious about falling. But it wouldn’t be long, I thought as I walked to the glass doors, wishing I had a coat. You could feel the world turning.

  The porter let me in. Natasha Buck opened her door in her robe again. I couldn’t decide if it was a bit early to be in a robe, or very late. But this time her hair wasn’t wet. And this time she wasn’t alone.

  A man moved across the living room, glaring at me, with a frosted champagne flute in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I recognised the chauffeur who had been lounging in the big black Merc. I recognised him even in his underpants. It must have been all my training.

  ‘You’re too late,’ Mrs Buck said.

  ‘This will only take a minute,’ I said.

  The chauffeur came to the door, sipping his drink. He had come up in the world.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ he said.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Would you like one?’

  ‘I’ll be in the other room,’ he said.

  Smart chauffeur.

  He went away and took his iced champagne flute with him.

  ‘Tell me about your husband’s eye,’ I said. ‘The one he lost.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘How it happened.’

  ‘At school,’ she said. ‘At Potter’s Field. He told me he was kicked in the eye when scoring a try. Hugo was a natural athlete.’ She sounded proud of him. ‘All those sports the English invented. Rugby. Cricket. Tennis. Football. They came easy to him.’

  ‘So it’s something that happened when he was a boy?’

  Natasha Buck nodded. ‘He was very good at games.’

  The next morning I left West End Central after our morning briefing and one hour later I was parking the X5 on a sweeping gravel drive and looking up at a large detached house. It felt like the countryside.

  Adam Jones had fallen a long way, I thought, as a Filipina housekeeper let me in. She left me in the hall and I stared through glass doors at the back garden while I waited for the dead man’s mother.

  There was a neglected swimming pool out there, the surface coated with dead leaves, and the huge garden was wild and overgrown. A fox dozed undisturbed on the far side of the pool, as if he knew that no gardener was coming round any time soon. The house felt abandoned. But there had been money here once. Maybe the money was still here. Maybe it wasn’t the money that had run out.

  There was one painting on the wall. A shaft of dying sunlight striking the side of a skyscraper. It was a city street but the people had all gone home. It was clearly by the same artist as the one on the wall in Hugo Buck’s apartment. And there in the corner I found the same two lower-case initials:

  j s

  ‘Thank you so much for coming,’ Mrs Jones said, coming down the stairs with her hands outstretched as if I was paying a social call.

  I tried not to look shocked but I recognised the function of the colourful scarf she had tied around her head, and the pale, puffy look that comes with long months of intensive chemotherapy.

  This lady was dying.

  And yet there was an undeniable youthful beauty about her appearance. Under the headscarf, beyond the cancer and the chemo, there was an unlined face, preserved in time like some enchanted creature from a magic land.

  ‘Mrs Jones,’ I said. ‘I’m DC Wolfe. We spoke briefly on the phone.’ I offered my warrant card and she smiled at it politely. ‘Mrs Jones, I’m so sorry for the loss of you
r son.’

  She flexed her mouth with a spasm of pain, nodded once and composed herself. She was a proud woman and determined not to show her heart to a man she would probably never see again.

  ‘Please,’ she said, gesturing towards the living room.

  I followed her. She moved with the careful deliberation of someone whose body has betrayed them. I waited until she had sunk into an armchair, and then took my place on the sofa opposite. An ancient black Labrador padded silently into the room, sniffed the hand that I offered and then ambled over to settle on its owner’s feet.

  The Filipina housekeeper appeared.

  ‘Tea, please, Rosalita,’ said Mrs Jones. Then she looked at me with her shining eyes, bright blue behind her spectacles, intelligent eyes that were still shocked with grief. ‘I do appreciate you coming,’ she said. ‘And how are your enquiries progressing? Have you arrested anyone yet?’

  ‘No, ma’am,’ I said. ‘But if you could answer some questions, that would be an enormous help to our investigation.’

  She nodded, her hand absent-mindedly stroking the back of the black Lab’s neck. The dog grunted with contentment.

  ‘Your son,’ I said, ‘Adam. It would be helpful if you could tell me about Adam.’ I hesitated. ‘He had no fixed abode at the time of his death?’

  His mother smiled, remembering an earlier time.

  ‘He was a very gifted boy,’ she said. ‘Enormously talented. Sensitive. A wonderful musician. Wonderful!’

  She looked around the room, and now I saw that it was a shrine to her dead son. On the bookshelves were trophies, prizes, and small white busts of men having bad hair days. Beethoven and the boys. Between the shelves the walls were covered with framed certificates. And massed on top of a small piano was an array of silver-framed photographs.

  ‘My son was at the Royal Academy of Music,’ Mrs Jones told me. ‘For one term. Before they asked him to leave.’

  Rosalita brought our tea. Mrs Jones lifted a hand and the housekeeper understood that we would serve ourselves. I waited until she had left the room.

  ‘Why did they ask Adam to leave?’

  Mrs Jones ruffled the dog between the ears, her face clenched with tension, and I saw that she was in what must have been constant pain.

  ‘Because,’ she said, ‘there was a darkness in him.’ She smiled with an old sadness. ‘I don’t know how else to explain it. There was a darkness in my son, and that led him to the drugs. And then the drugs took away everything.’

  ‘I think he was trying to stop,’ I said. ‘The autopsy showed there were no drugs in Adam’s body at the time of his death.’

  ‘Yes, he was trying to stop. He was trying very hard.’ She looked at me. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  I wasn’t sure what she was thanking me for, and I didn’t know how to respond.

  Mrs Jones poured our tea. I looked out of the windows. The fox had gone.

  ‘When was the last time you saw your son?’

  ‘A month ago. He came to borrow some money.’ She laughed. ‘Borrow – that’s a good one! His father died two years ago and it was easier for my son to come home and ask for money – to borrow money – after that. When his father was alive, it was difficult. Arguments. Refusals. Raised voices. Tearful promises to change his ways. You can imagine. And things disappeared. A watch left by a bedside. Money in a wallet. That made relations with his father very difficult. But he never stole from me. Not from me. And some do, I know. Some heroin addicts – and my son was certainly a heroin addict – do steal from the people who love them most.’

  I sipped my tea. Already Adam Jones had become more than a homeless junkie found dead in an alley, more than a naked corpse on a freezing bed of stainless steel. He had become somebody’s son.

  ‘And I saw him last night,’ Mrs Jones said. ‘My son. Adam. In my dreams. Or in my sleep. But it didn’t feel like a dream. He was very sad. Have you ever heard of such a thing?’ She laughed again. The dog sat up, and then settled. ‘Am I going dotty in my old age?’

  ‘I think it happens all the time,’ I said. ‘A loved one appearing in a dream. Especially at the start. Especially when you have just lost them. I think it takes a while before the dead rest easy.’

  She looked at me. ‘I get so tired,’ she said. She gestured impatiently at her headscarf. ‘All this business.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Perhaps you’re not eating as you should, Mrs Jones,’ I said. I hesitated for a moment. ‘Chemotherapy makes food taste awful.’

  ‘Yes, it does,’ she said. ‘They tell you about the hair loss and the nausea. Everyone knows about that. But they don’t warn you about what it does to your sense of taste.’ She looked at me levelly. ‘You seem to know something about the subject.’

  ‘Not really. My grandmother went through the same thing. But it was a long time ago.’

  ‘You must have been close to your grandmother.’

  ‘She brought me up,’ I said. ‘She raised me. After my parents died. She was more like my mother.’

  ‘I see. Your grandmother sounds like a wonderful woman.’

  ‘She was the kindest person I’ve ever met,’ I said.

  ‘And then she died.’

  ‘Yes. Please tell me some more about Adam. Did he have enemies?’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Somebody killed him. Somebody did that to him. But he was a gentle boy. Everyone loved him. Everyone who ever met him. As far as I know.’

  ‘Mrs Jones, most murder victims know their killer. Can you think of anyone who would want to harm Adam? When he came home, did he talk about his money problems? Money that he owed? Outstanding debts?’

  ‘Money problems were a way of life for my son,’ she replied. ‘But there was no malice in him. He was one of those people who make the world a better place. Then he lost his way and he never found his way back. And it didn’t do any good – however much we loved him, however much it hurt us, however much we wanted him to be well. However much he wanted it for himself. None of it mattered. But under it all he was a good boy. A happy boy. There wasn’t always that sadness in him. There wasn’t always that darkness.’

  She suddenly seemed very tired. She nodded towards the piano and the silver-framed photographs. ‘Look for yourself. Look at my son. Go on.’ It was more than an invitation. ‘Look,’ she said.

  I went across to the piano where there were dozens of photographs. But they were all of a baby and a boy. It was as if Adam Jones had never made it beyond his middle teens. There were shots of a bonny baby, in his cot and in the arms of Mrs Jones, when she was young and pretty and healthy, in love with life and her newborn son, laughing with delight at the miracle of this baby; and then Adam as a chubby-legged toddler, holding hands with his father, both of them smiling on some sunny English beach; and Adam a bit older, six or seven, long-haired and grinning to reveal the gaps in his front teeth, holding a child’s violin. The boy grew before my eyes. But he did not grow to manhood. Not in these photographs.

  I looked across at Mrs Jones. Her eyes were closed. The dog had seized the opportunity to climb on to the sofa and snuggle up to her. Her head was dropping forward.

  ‘I get so very tired,’ she said, looking up at me sharply. ‘Did your grandmother experience that tiredness?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  I picked up a photograph of Adam at the age of about ten, on stage in an evening suit standing before an audience of adults and children who were on their feet and clapping. He held a child-sized oboe in his hands.

  I put it back down.

  ‘Chemotherapy makes you exhausted,’ I said.

  I looked at her, and she was sleeping. I turned back to the piano, my eyes ranging over the photographs, waiting for them to tell me something. No brothers, no sisters. Adam as a little boy in his Superman pyjamas. A posed picture of a youth orchestra. And another, a year or two later. And sitting in front of his mother on a carousel, both of them grinning and waving as their horse rode past the camera.


  Goodbye, Daddy, goodbye.

  I was holding the photograph in my hands before I knew it. The silver frame was flecked with the first signs of age. And I held it for a long moment before I realised that the Filipina housekeeper, Rosalita, was standing in the doorway, watching me. She came into the room and began to clear away the tea things. I looked back at the photograph in my hands.

  Soldiers, I saw.

  Young men in uniform, I saw.

  This was the same photograph I had seen in the shining tower, sitting all alone on the desk of Hugo Buck, splashed with his fresh blood. The same seven with the same unbreakable smiles.

  And again I saw that it was only at first glance that it looked like a photograph of soldiers. Despite the old-fashioned military uniforms, these were boys, not men. Schoolboys dressed as warriors. No, not men, but boys who would not be boys for much longer.

  One of them was the young unspoilt Adam Jones and the other, on the far side of the photograph, was the teenage Hugo Buck.

  I had only known them a couple of decades later, as dead men, murder victims, drowned in their own blood. I had only ever seen them as corpses on stainless steel slabs in the cold room of the Iain West Forensic Suite.

  But when you looked, when you really looked, they were both unmistakable.

  ‘I must have nodded off,’ Mrs Jones said, suddenly standing next to me, and so close and so unexpected that I almost gasped out loud.

  She took the frame from me, looked at the photograph as if she had not seen it for a while, then replaced it exactly where it had been, in its little groove of dust on the black lacquer of the piano.