by Tony Parsons
‘We realise this is a traumatic time, Mr Khan,’ Mallory said.
‘You shouldn’t be talking to me,’ Khan said, placing the cigarette in its silver coffin. ‘You should be out there finding the killer.’
‘Why do you think someone wanted to kill Hugo Buck and Adam Jones, Mr Khan?’
‘Because they were addicts,’ Khan said. ‘One of them was a sex addict and the other was a drug addict. Hugo was a dear friend. Adam – I hadn’t seen Adam since leaving school. But they were both, in their own way, hopeless addicts. And that’s what killed them.’
It was a credible theory on the surface. One man was a sexual adventurer and the other was a junkie. They were the victims of random murders, acts as senseless and irrational as most murders. Very sad and all that, but they were living dangerously and they died because they had it coming.
But the theory did not explain Khan’s naked terror.
‘You knew both men for many years,’ Mallory prompted. ‘Since you were at school.’
‘I remember the first time I met Adam,’ Khan said, shaking his head. ‘Thirteen years old. We were coming in from the playing fields. All of us. The six of us. Ben and Ned. Piggy Philips and Jimmy Sutcliffe. Hugo and me. The First Fifteen rugby trials. Covered in mud and blood. And there was Adam in his nice new uniform carrying his bloody oboe in its case. Waiting for some music tutorial. And somebody – probably the Pig – said, come on, give us a tune, new boy. Give us a tune, will you? Making fun of him, of course. But Adam took his instrument out of its case and he gave us the sweetest smile – and he played Bach. “Sheep May Safely Graze”. And it was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.’
There were photographs on the walls of Khan’s office. I stood up to get a closer look. It is always worth studying a man’s shrine to himself.
Khan smiling in a dinner jacket receiving an award from another man in a dinner jacket.
Khan making a speech at a podium that bore the words ‘Aut vincere aut mori’ – the Potter’s Field school motto: Conquer or die.
The teenage Khan on a cricket field flanked by the King brothers, and Piggy Philips grinning behind them, all of them in immaculate whites, Philips resting his bat on his shoulder like a caveman with his club.
I did not see the photograph of the seven boys in their Combined Cadet Force uniforms.
‘Can I help you?’ Khan said sharply.
‘Do you get back to your old school much, sir?’ I said, smiling at him.
He was immune to my charms. ‘I speak to the boys. There are various events. I still have friends at the school. Among the masters, I mean. There are various military charities the school helps this firm support. Look, what’s your point?’
‘Best days of your life, eh, sir?’
‘Indeed.’
There was one lone painting on the wall. A hidden corner of the city, a canyon of office blocks glazed with a shining haze, like a city seen in a dream, or remembered far from home. There were no people. I already knew what the initials would be in the right-hand corner.
j s
‘James Sutcliffe,’ I said. ‘James Sutcliffe painted this picture.’
‘James was a genius,’ Khan said. ‘He could have achieved more than any of us.’
‘Why did he kill himself?’
‘James was troubled. His parents thought that having those Harley Street doctors stuff him with happy pills would make everything all right. But it pushed him over the edge.’
‘You made some close friends at Potter’s Field,’ Mallory said.
Khan picked up an unlit cigarette, put it into his mouth, then took it out. He shivered with undisguised contempt.
‘That’s what school’s for,’ he said.
For a moment I thought he was going to ask us where we had gone, but he decided against it. He knew we hadn’t gone anywhere. And suddenly he was furious.
‘Resentment killed them,’ he said. ‘Jealousy – this country reeks of it now.’ He put the unlit cigarette back between his lips. ‘Isn’t it bloody obvious? Envy killed them.’
The Officers’ Mess at RAF Brize Norton overlooks the airfield, and from the window I could see a huge fat-bellied aircraft waiting on the runway, its four turboprop engines idle as all around its great bulk men in sleeveless yellow tabards made the last of their checks.
A wide ramp was open under the tail of the aircraft – a Lockheed C-130 Hercules – but the troops in their camouflage fatigues stood patiently on the tarmac, as though waiting was one of the things they were trained for, and good at. The Royal Gurkha Rifles were shipping out tonight.
I watched the faces of the men, all those small golden-faced warriors who somehow looked both gentle and fierce, and far off in the darkness I could see the distant lights of Oxford glinting and glittering in the night. It had only taken us ninety minutes to drive from Savile Row to Brize Norton after the afternoon briefing, but London felt far away.
I turned at the sound of a man’s harsh laughter.
Captain Ned King and DCI Mallory sat facing each other on red leather sofas in the red-carpeted room. Mallory was leaning forward, his face impassive, unsmiling, letting the other man fill the silence. Like the men on the runway, Captain King was dressed in camouflage fatigues.
‘Forgive me,’ he said, grinning broadly, ‘but there’s no great mystery here. Adam, who I hadn’t seen in many years, was a drug addict. And Hugo was a sex addict. These are high-risk hobbies, detective.’
‘But who would want to kill them?’ Mallory said.
‘Off the top of my head? Try Adam’s fellow drug addicts. Try Hugo’s Russian wife – or possibly some of her Russian friends.’
Mallory nodded, as if giving the matter some thought.
‘You really think Hugo Buck’s wife is capable of killing someone?’ I said.
King turned his scarred face towards me. He was not smiling now.
‘I think that anyone in the world is capable of killing someone else,’ he said.
‘But your friends died in exactly the same way,’ I said. ‘All the evidence suggests the same killer. Do you really think that’s just coincidence?’
Captain King shrugged. ‘What I think is that death is random. That’s what I think. And that’s what I know.’
From the back of the mess came the sound of snooker balls kissing. Two officers were laughing easily together.
‘Helmand is the only place I’ve ever seen a man eat his lunch and defecate his breakfast at the same time,’ one of them was saying.
‘Yes, they’re four hours and thirty minutes ahead of us,’ said the other. ‘And a thousand years behind.’
Outside on the runway, the engines of the Hercules air transport started up. King suddenly had to raise his voice.
‘I would very much like all those men out there to come back,’ he said. ‘I don’t want them crippled. I don’t want them killed. I don’t want to see them repatriated – in the hideous modern parlance.’ His broken face twisted with disgust, as if the word physically sickened him. ‘I don’t want those good brave men brought back to face the pity of the Darrens and the Sharons who stand outside Tesco.’ He smiled without mirth. ‘“You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye who cheer when soldier lads march by—”’
‘“Sneak home and pray you’ll never know,”’ Mallory said, ‘“the hell where youth and laughter go.”’
King chuckled. ‘Very good, detective. Where did you go?’
‘Where did I go?’
‘Your school.’
Mallory smiled. ‘I didn’t go anywhere. I went to a state school in Banff. In the Highlands. Get to Aberdeen and keep going. But we liked our First World War poets.’
‘Siegfried Sassoon, of course,’ King said. ‘Lived to a ripe old age. Died in 1967. But his great friend Wilfred Owen was killed just one week before the Armistice. The fate of our two greatest war poets perfectly illustrates the random nature of death. I want all those men out there to come home. That will not happen. We arrive i
n Afghanistan at night so they can’t kill us immediately. But they always get around to it eventually. The really unlucky ones will be wounded and live. Single amputees, double amputees, triple amputees and – full house – both arms and both legs gone. Or no balls, no cock, no face. Phallic reconstruction is a growth industry, I’m told. And no cheering crowds for those lads. There will be roadside bombs. There will be friendly fire from our American chums and our Afghan allies. There will be the local policeman who decides that his god wants him to blow up as many of my men as possible. My men will be killed by IEDs. They will step on bombs left behind by the Russians as well as the Taliban. Some of those men out there will come home in wheelchairs, and some will come home in a coffin. Death is the price we pay for life, gentlemen, and sometimes the bill arrives early. And it will not be fair. It will not be rational. You both know that as policemen. Death doesn’t play the game, does it?’
He stood up. Outside, the soldiers were preparing to board the plane.
‘We arrive on Sunday, and Sundays are the most dangerous. They pray on Friday, plan on Saturday and attack on Sunday. Holy Shit Sundays, we call them. But, you know, people are polite there. People are decent. There is no litter at Camp Bastion. Now, if you will excuse me, gentlemen.’
‘Thank you for your time, Captain King,’ Mallory said.
We followed him to the door of the mess.
As King stepped outside into the chill of the October night, every one of his men turned to look at him. Some of them smiled shyly, and I was struck by their youth, the jumble of equipment they all carried, and their obvious love for their commanding officer.
‘Why did James Sutcliffe kill himself?’
King winced at Mallory’s question.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘That was all a long time ago.’
‘But you must have some thoughts.’
‘Why does anyone kill himself? Because he was weak.’
‘I thought he was your friend.’
‘James Sutcliffe was more than my friend. Far more. And I think about him every day of my life. But James was weak.’
Mallory nodded thoughtfully. ‘My apologies for detaining you, Captain King.’
He shook our hands. ‘I wish I could have been more helpful.’
‘Just one final thing,’ Mallory said.
King waited.
‘What happened to your face?’
King laughed out loud.
‘Ben did it,’ he said. ‘When we were boys. Threw a glass at my head at the breakfast table. Must have said something that annoyed him. Nobody ever asks me that,’ he added cheerfully, his spirits rising now that he was joining his men. ‘They all assume I copped it in the line of duty.’
Mallory shook his head. ‘No, those marks are too old. I know what scars look like.’
11
SCOUT WAS SILENT over breakfast.
I knew there was a time coming, maybe not that long from now, when she would be able to hide her feelings from me. But at five years old we were not there yet.
I sat down opposite her, moved aside a cereal packet with grinning monkeys on the side, and looked into her eyes.
‘Something’s wrong, Scout,’ I said. ‘What’s wrong, angel?’
Scout glanced down at the milky brown gloop in her bowl, then back at me.
‘You have to make me a costume,’ she said.
I leaned back in my chair, trying to take it in.
‘Why do I have to do that?’
‘A costume for our play. Our Christmas play.’
‘A Nativity play?’
She nodded. ‘The mummies all have to make the costumes for the children.’ A moment of doubt. ‘And the daddies. Miss Davies said so.’
If Miss Davies said something then it was burned into tablets of stone and carried down from the mountain in the trembling hands of Moses.
‘What’s the play?’
‘The Grumpy Sheep. It’s about the sheep that doesn’t want to go to see the baby Jesus getting born in the manger. Everybody goes to see the baby Jesus. The wise men, and the angels, and all the other sheep. But he doesn’t want to go, the grumpy sheep. Do you know that story?’
‘No.’
‘He’s grumpy, the sheep. Then he’s sad. Then he’s sorry. He’s very, very sorry in the end. He sees the mistake he made.’
A costume, I thought. How do you make a costume? What stuff do you need?
‘What part do you play, Scout?’
‘The grumpy sheep.’
I was impressed. ‘You’ve got the lead – the big part?’
A flicker of pride. ‘Miss Davies chose me for the grumpy sheep,’ she confirmed.
‘That’s a good part, Scout. That’s the best.’
She refused to be distracted by flattery.
‘I need my costume,’ she said. ‘You’re going to have to make it.’
‘I will,’ I promised, not knowing how to do it, not even knowing where to start.
Instead of going to the morning briefing I drove off the edge of the A to Z, the BMW X5 alone on the road north as massed ranks of commuter traffic crawled into town in the other direction. It felt like nobody in the world was going where I was going.
It felt the same way when I sat in the back row of the crematorium waiting for the crowd to come.
And they never did.
Finally a handful of lost souls wandered slowly in. Tattooed faces, missing teeth and the pallid flesh of addiction. So few of them that everybody had their own row. They sat well back, avoiding close proximity to the simple coffin awaiting the flames.
When Guy Philips arrived, ruddy-faced from double games or a hard night on the tiles, he sat across the aisle from me in the other back row. I got up and sat next to him.
‘Morning, Piggy.’
He reared back in his seat.
‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You were at Hugo’s funeral. The two plods. Spot you a mile off. Big feet, small dicks.’
‘Have you been drinking, sir?’
‘Not nearly enough.’
‘And I saw you. You were a bit rough with the girl, Piggy. I think you hurt her.’
He smirked. ‘Natasha? She was tired and emotional, that’s all. Took her in hand. For the best.’ He took a better look at me. ‘You were up at Pak’s office, weren’t you?’
‘Pak?’
‘Paki Khan.’
‘I understood Mr Khan was Anglo-Indian.’
‘I don’t want to split hairs, constable, but that’s a kind of Paki, isn’t it? Not that I’m racist. It’s just an old school name. An affectionate nickname. I adore Indians.’ He surveyed his fellow mourners and sighed. ‘Christ, this place looks like a convention of Big Issue sellers.’ And then to himself, shaking his large red head: ‘What happened to you, Adam?’
‘Why aren’t the others here? The old gang.’
‘Well, Ned must be in Helmand by now. Ben’s a public figure, of course. Might not look good in the Daily Mail hanging out at the AGM of Junkies Anonymous. And I believe the Pak’s in court, probably defending some gyppo’s human rights.’
‘Excuses, excuses.’
‘I know. Dreadful, isn’t it? But as you can see from his new chums, Adam was always a bit different.’
‘Because he was a heroin addict? Cut him off, did you, Piggy?’
Philips chuckled. ‘Do you think we care about that? Some of the best families have drug issues. Dreadful word. No, Adam was always an outsider. Adam was always different. Even more than Paki Khan – who was, lest we forget, a Paki. Thing about old Pak – bloody good cricketer, the Pak. Bloody good. Opened the first eleven’s batting three years in a row. Hitting sixes gets you accepted, see. But Adam was a different creature entirely. Not because of the drugs. Because he was a scholarship boy. The rest of us, our parents paid for us to be there. Poor little Adam had to get there on merit. Strumming his banjo. Blowing his flute. Oh, I’ve offended you now. You think I’m a snob.’
‘When did you last see him, Piggy?’
<
br /> ‘Could you please stop calling me that? It was mildly amusing the first three or four times. But it’s what we call unearned intimacy, constable.’
‘Detective.’
‘Of course. Sorry, constable.’
‘Piggy is just an old school name,’ I said. ‘An affectionate nickname.’
‘I don’t remember you at school,’ he said. ‘Were you cleaning the lavatories?’
‘Come on, Piggy. When did you last see Adam Jones?’
‘Not for years. He came to me, begging for money. Boo hoo hoo. Poor little me. Look what a mess I’ve made of my veins. Don’t know where my next fix is coming from. All of that. I gave him what I had. And he went away.’
‘It didn’t concern you that he would spend the money on heroin?’
‘Not really. I wasn’t expecting him to spend it on low fat yoghurt.’
‘But why would anyone want to kill him? Hugo Buck I can understand. The woman-beating bastard.’
Philips gave me a sly look. ‘Not soft on our Natasha, are you? Bit rich for your blood, I reckon. Out of your pay grade.’
I gently touched his arm. ‘I’ll ask you again. Very politely. Why would anyone want to kill a homeless heroin addict, Piggy?’
He shot me a furious look. ‘Look, you’ve not earned the right to call me that name. It’s a stupid name. A childish name. Give me your name. Give me your warrant card number. What exactly are you doing here?’
‘I’m trying to understand. You must have some thoughts. And don’t give me the line about Hugo Buck banging the help. Don’t tell me that Adam Jones had it coming. Your friend Captain King told us that the deaths are unrelated. Mr Khan told us the same thing. But I don’t think they believe it. And I don’t think you do, Piggy.’
But he wasn’t listening to me. Mrs Jones had entered the crematorium with Rosalita. They sat down in the front row directly in front of the coffin. I thought that Philips was shocked by the sight of Adam’s mother. I had seen her far more recently and she shocked me. Her face was swollen with chemotherapy and twisted with grief. The coffin she stood before could have been her own.
