The Murder Bag

by Tony Parsons

  Sergeant Caine calmly studied half a dozen photographs, copies of the same murder scene and autopsy pictures that were on Mallory’s wall in the Major Incident Room, while I looked around me. The walls were covered with bookshelves and badges from police forces around the world, presumably showing their gratitude for a glimpse inside the Black Museum. I picked up an elderly hardback book from Caine’s desk. There was no dust jacket. Forty Years of Scotland Yard, it said. The Record of a Lifetime’s Service in the Criminal Investigation Department by Frederick Porter Wensley.

  ‘Don’t touch that,’ Sergeant Caine said, not even looking at me.

  I put the book down.

  To Mallory he said, ‘These are the Bob the Butcher killings.’

  ‘We’ve yet to make that connection,’ Mallory said.

  ‘But you’re treating it as a double homicide, sir?’

  Mallory nodded. ‘Same killer, same MO. But I’m not convinced it’s Bob.’

  Sergeant Caine looked at me without warmth or welcome. Mallory had warned me that he was wary of strangers. Although wary didn’t quite cover his cold, gimlet-eyed hostility.

  ‘This is DC Wolfe, the newest member of my MIT.’

  I held out my hand but Caine didn’t seem to see it. Happy to remind me that, as a sergeant, even one in uniform, he outranked me.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Ground rules. No photographs. No touching, unless I say so for the purpose of demonstration. And absolutely nothing I say is for the record. Got it?’

  ‘Got it, sergeant,’ I said.

  ‘Good. Then let’s go.’

  There was a locked door inside Room 101. Sergeant Caine unlocked it and we went inside. It was a living room from the distant past. There was a fireplace, a bay window, gaslights. It took me a moment to register that although these were false, there were weapons everywhere, and these were very real. A glass case full of firearms. A desk covered with what looked like the results of a sword armistice. A hangman’s noose dangled from the ceiling, which I thought was overdoing it a bit.

  ‘What was the name of the detective who founded the museum?’ Mallory asked.

  ‘Inspector Neame, sir,’ Caine said. ‘In 1874. Do you want to have a wander round in here? There are plenty of blades.’

  Mallory was peering at what looked like a pirate’s cutlass. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘You go ahead with DC Wolfe.’

  I followed the curator through a doorway with no door.

  ‘I heard they might open this place up,’ I said, filling the silence.

  He stopped to look at me sharply. ‘Open it up?’

  ‘To the public,’ I said. ‘To raise money.’

  ‘The public?’ he said with some distaste, as if it was the public who were largely responsible for the human misery on display in Room 101. ‘Who wants to open it up to the public?’

  ‘The council,’ I said, wishing I had kept my cakehole shut.

  ‘Over their dead bodies,’ said Sergeant Caine.

  ‘Don’t you mean—’

  ‘I know whose bodies I mean,’ he said. Then he clapped his hands, his mood brightening as he gave me an evil grin. ‘Not one of those queasy types, are you? Let me know if you’re going to bring up your Weetabix.’

  ‘I’ve been here before,’ I said. ‘A Crime Academy visit.’

  ‘Ah, an expert. An old hand. Let’s see how much of an expert you are, sonny.’ He picked up a walking stick. ‘What does this look like?’

  ‘A sword,’ I guessed. ‘A sword disguised as a walking stick.’

  Sergeant Caine smiled. ‘Clever boy.’ He pulled apart the walking stick to reveal twelve inches of gleaming Sheffield steel. Then closed it up again.

  ‘So if I came at you . . .’

  He swung the stick towards my face. I caught it with both hands.

  ‘I would grab it before you had a chance to use it as a sword,’ I said, twisting my grip and pulling the walking stick from his hand.

  I allowed myself a small smile that immediately faded when I saw that he was still holding the handle. It was a handgun.

  ‘Which would leave me with nothing but my firearm,’ he said, pointing it at my face. ‘Bang, bang, you’re dead.’

  ‘Does it work?’ I asked, handing him the walking stick.

  ‘Oh, they all work,’ Caine said. He carefully attached the walking stick to the handle. ‘That’s the point.’

  Mallory came into the room.

  ‘See anything you fancy, sir?’ Caine asked.

  Mallory shook his head.

  ‘Probably here somewhere,’ the curator said cheerfully.

  You would think so. The Black Museum contains every murder weapon you can imagine and plenty more that you can’t. More than a hundred years’ worth of explosives, firearms and poison. And every item in there has seen active service.

  On the counter in front of me was a cutlass used by the Kray brothers. Next door was a rocket launcher used by the IRA. At first I thought Caine had a mini-kitchen in here, but it turned out to be the cooking pot where serial killer Dennis Nilsen boiled the meat off his victims before pouring it down the drains. And there were more knives than I had seen in the basement of West End Central.

  The Black Museum was spread over several large, neat rooms full of glass display cases and exhibits and shelves with the facemasks of men who stole lives. Blank, ordinary, banal-looking men who shot, poisoned, stabbed, chopped up, boiled and ate their victims. All these pathetic little men who had abruptly aborted the happiness of countless lifetimes, all these savage creeps who had built a mountain of human misery.

  Yes, I had been here before.

  But this time was different.

  Now I was not with my peers.

  There was no hiding in a crowd, and no easy laughter to relieve the tension. This did not feel like a school trip. This time the Black Museum confronted me with all its horror, and its collection of human cruelty, and it was just too much for me.

  Or perhaps it was something else. The first time I had been here, on that visit with the Crime Academy, I was a cocky unmarried kid who knew nothing about loss. And now I knew.

  First came the sweat, and then suddenly I was crouching over a wastepaper basket, quietly being sick. Mallory and Sergeant Caine came into the room. If they saw my discomfort then they gave no sign.

  ‘Your weapon could be custom-made,’ Caine was saying. ‘Some kind of knife that’s made to cut a man’s throat – and only that. Something that’s made for that purpose and that purpose alone.’

  Outside, Big Ben was chiming six. Mrs Murphy would have picked up Scout and would be making their dinner while my daughter and our dog chased each other across the great open space of our loft.

  I stood up, looking with embarrassment and disgust at the yellow bile I had brought up. Mallory lightly patted my shoulder.

  I couldn’t look at him just yet.

  ‘Nice cup of tea?’ he said.

  Mallory took me to his home.

  His wife appeared at the door as we pulled up outside a terraced house on a quiet street in Pimlico. A tall, slim, grey-haired woman with an amused twinkle in her eye and carpet slippers on her feet. A West Highland White Terrier stood watch between them as Mr and Mrs Mallory communicated in the shorthand of the long-term married.

  ‘Done for the day then?’ she said, folding her arms.

  ‘Not quite, hen,’ he said, pecking her cheek.

  ‘Going out again then.’

  ‘Spruce up a bit first.’

  ‘Something to eat?’

  ‘Tea would be lovely.’

  She had the same Aberdeen accent as her husband. They could have been born in the same street.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘New man. DC Wolfe.’

  ‘Hello, hen,’ Mrs Mallory said, her face breaking into a broad smile. ‘Come on in.’

  She brought us tea and biscuits, and I began to feel better with sugar and caffeine inside me. Mallory bolted his tea quickly and disappeared, shoving in a gin
ger nut.

  ‘Five minutes,’ he told me.

  The Westie followed him, panting with pleasure.

  Their home was a small, neat maisonette. The photographs on the mantelpiece and bookshelves, their colours fading now, showed the Mallorys’ old life under some tropical sun. The pair of them, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years younger, raising glasses and smiling shyly at some café table. And Mallory, his hair already gone at thirty, grinning in shorts, short-sleeve shirt and a black peaked cap, two Asian men in the same uniform grinning either side of him. And the Mallorys smiling again for the camera with a city built by a harbour behind and far below them.

  ‘Hong Kong,’ Mrs Mallory said. ‘My husband was in the Royal Hong Kong Police Force for fifteen years. “We serve with pride and care”. Maybe he told you.’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  She laughed. ‘You can call me Margaret.’

  ‘DCI Mallory hasn’t told me anything, ma’am – Margaret.’

  ‘We came back in 1997. After the changeover. When it lost the royal bit. The British went home and so did we. Bit of a shock to the system. We miss it. Although of course that old Hong Kong is not there any more.’

  The photographs ran the course of two lifetimes. But I could see no pictures of children.

  ‘And do you have a family?’ Mrs Mallory asked me.

  ‘I have a little girl,’ I said. ‘My parents are long gone. No brothers, no sisters.’ A beat. ‘I lost my wife.’

  She waited for more, but there wasn’t any more.

  ‘I see,’ she said.

  ‘I have my daughter. Scout. She’s five.’ I stirred my tea. ‘But there’s just me and her.’

  Mrs Mallory nodded. ‘Then you have a family,’ she said, and she had me for life.

  We crossed the river as the sun set, the groups of tourists on the bridge taking photographs of the Palace of Westminster, Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, all majestic in the dying light, as the London commuters hurried home, not even noticing the everyday magic of this place.

  ‘And now you’ve met my wife,’ Mallory said. ‘Take the Lambeth Road on the far side of the bridge.’

  ‘Sir.’

  I drove south until two giant cannon reared out of the twilight. They sat before a domed building flying the Union Jack.

  ‘We’re going to the Imperial War Museum?’

  ‘It was once the Bethlem Royal Hospital,’ Mallory said. ‘Bedlam. The lunatic asylum. Did you know that? You can park round the back in St George’s Road. We’re not going through the front door.’

  A security guard emerged as we were coming through the gardens. He stared at us with suspicion until a woman’s voice called out to him: ‘It’s all right, Charlie, they’re with me.’

  The security guard stepped back, and there was a young woman in a wheelchair. She smiled when she saw Mallory.

  ‘Sir,’ she said, and her smile grew bigger as she saluted.

  ‘Hello, Carol,’ he said, leaning forward to kiss her on each cheek.

  He introduced me and we waited while she turned her wheelchair in a tight space. I went to help but she stopped me with a curt, ‘I’ve got it’.

  We followed her down a narrow corridor that led to the main hall. The lights were off. In the darkness Spitfires and Messerschmitts and Hurricanes and V2 flying bombs hung above us, frozen in mid-flight, frozen in time.

  ‘How can I help you, sir?’ Carol said.

  Mallory was opening his briefcase. ‘We’re looking for a murder weapon, Carol.’ He handed her the file.

  She slowly leafed through it.

  ‘Our conjecture is that the weapon was designed for cutting a man’s throat,’ Mallory said.

  ‘Your conjecture is right, sir,’ she said, smiling again. ‘I know just the thing. We should have one in storage. Please follow me.’

  The knife was just under twelve inches long, most of it blade, a blade that was long and thin and double-edged, designed to slip easily into human flesh and then cut through it without fuss. Mallory handed it to me, and I was surprised to find that it weighed next to nothing. The handle had a comforting ring grip, sitting easy in my closed right fist, and the thing conveyed a sense of terrible power.

  ‘The Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife,’ Carol said. ‘Developed by William Ewart Fairbairn and Eric Anthony Sykes when they were policing in Shanghai before the war.’

  ‘The commando knife,’ Mallory said. ‘Of course.’

  I could not get used to how light it felt in my hand. It was so easy to hold. A sharp stabbing point, a good cutting edge. The double-edged blade glinted in the half-light of the storage room.

  ‘This was invented by two policemen?’ I said.

  Carol nodded. ‘W. E. Fairbairn was an expert in close-combat fighting. This was designed to be the perfect fighting knife but it turned out to be the perfect killing knife. Standard-issue sidearm for all World War Two commandos. If the Nazis caught you with one of these, you were shot on the spot as a spy. Most knives are not specifically designed to kill – apart from the Fairbairn-Sykes. It looks easy to use, but it’s not. You have to know which arteries are closest to the surface and unprotected by clothing. Give it here, will you?’

  The young woman in the wheelchair gave us a demonstration. With the fingers on her left hand spread wide she mimed pulling a man’s head to one side. With the knife in her right hand she stabbed the point sideways and then quickly pushed it forward.

  ‘Punch and pull,’ she said. ‘Punch the tip of the knife through the side of the neck and then pull the blade out of the front. You can’t patch that up with a couple of stitches and some Nurofen Plus. Most people who want to cut a throat start on the outside. They hack and saw and chop.’

  She mimed hacking and sawing and chopping.

  ‘That’s all right if you want to hurt their feelings,’ she said. ‘That’s all right if you want to put a crimp in their day. But not if you want to be certain of killing them.’

  ‘The punch and pull,’ Mallory said. ‘It cuts the windpipe and then you have a good chance of cutting the carotid arteries.’

  ‘More than a good chance,’ Carol said. ‘That move is called the carotid thrust. Cutting the carotid arteries is the whole point, sir. If the shock doesn’t immediately kill them, then they die because the carotids have been severed and there’s no blood being pumped from the heart to the brain.’

  ‘How long?’ I asked.

  ‘Brain-dead immediately,’ she said. ‘Unconscious in five seconds and dead in twelve seconds.’

  ‘And when did they stop making these knives?’

  ‘They’ve never stopped making these knives. It’s been evolving for almost a hundred years. There’s a contemporary version used by the Special Forces – the UK-SFK. It’s the greatest combat knife ever invented.’ She looked at Mallory, and I wondered how they knew each other. ‘And now Bob the Butcher’s got one.’

  Mallory smiled. ‘We don’t know if it’s Bob,’ he said. ‘What we do know is that it’s someone with training who has access to specialist weapons.’ He looked at me. ‘Presumably you can get a Fairbairn-Sykes online?’

  ‘You can buy anything online,’ I said.

  ‘Apart from training and knowledge and the expertise you would need to execute the carotid thrust,’ Carol said. ‘That takes years to accumulate. And there’s something else.’

  We watched her feel the weight of the Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife.

  ‘To kill someone with one of these – to stick the stabbing point in the side of their neck and then pull it clean out the front . . .’ She paused and looked up at Mallory from her wheelchair. ‘You would have to really hate their guts, sir.’

  I was in the ring and my legs were gone.

  We were only a minute into the third round of sparring but already I was weak with exhaustion, flat-footed and breathing through my mouth, sagging against the ropes, my elbows pressed protectively against my lower ribcage, my hands raised to protect my head, the black leather of the fou
rteen-ounce Lonsdale gloves slick with sweat against my face.

  The punches kept coming.

  They were being thrown by a small man with long silver hair poking out of his old Everlast headguard. He grinned broadly at my exhaustion, revealing both a mean streak and a blue mouthguard. Hunched behind his tight, high guard, risking nothing, he moved in for the finish.

  With my face buried deep into my gloves, I felt his body shots rip into my side with blinding speed. The small man was both skinny and muscle-packed, and hit very hard. Left ribs, right ribs. Left ribs, right ribs. I dug my elbows in deeper, but I could still feel their whiplash sting.

  We were face to face now. At six feet, I towered above my opponent – Fred was his name – but probably the first thing I had ever learned in a boxing ring is that speed beats power. The bigger you are, the more there is to hit.

  A left hook came through my ragged defence and made me gasp as it struck the lowest rib. I dug my elbows in deeper, really not wanting another one, and the moment I lowered my gloves a few inches Fred smacked me in my poorly guarded head.

  Upstairs downstairs, I thought, cursing my basic mistake – leaving one area undefended while another is being attacked. I rolled against the ropes, willing my legs to work, trying to get back up on the balls of my feet.

  But a left hook cracked against the right side of my headguard, and then a right hook cracked harder against the left side, making my ears ring despite the thick protective leather of my headguard.

  I must have instinctively lifted my gloves a fraction to protect my head because Fred whipped in a wicked left hook, digging me low in the right ribs.

  He was flagging too. Hitting someone non-stop takes it out of you. His combinations were slowing down, but a body shot is the hardest punch to recover from and I felt my dead legs sagging. Everything was telling me to go down. But I didn’t go down. I stayed on my feet, kept up by nothing but the ropes behind me and the will inside.

  Fred grinned at me, revealing that old blue mouthguard. I watched him lift the elbow of his left arm, preparing for a left hook. But such is the beautiful balance of boxing that if your opponent can hit you then you are in a position to hit them back.