The Murder Bag

by Tony Parsons

  You try it.

  But I knew if I got down on the floor I would need the fire brigade to get me up. So I stood with my forearms resting on the bed and pushed back with my tailbone, feeling the stretch in my lower back. Then I rocked forward, and there it was in my hamstrings – that sweet feeling of muscles that had been sleeping suddenly waking up.

  I kept doing it – rocking back, rocking forward, a modest approximation of my dog’s stretches – until I was sweating and breathless but finally loose enough to sit on the bed and pull on my socks.

  Stan watched me.

  Yeah, he seemed to say. You got it.

  Scarlet Bush was right – three deaths and we were no longer hunting a murderer. We were hunting a serial killer.

  But we were not there yet.

  Piggy Philips was lying in a hospital bed, breathing through a ventilator because of the puncture wound in his windpipe, uniformed officers outside his door twenty-four hours a day as he stubbornly clung to life.

  15

  THERE IS A canteen in 27 Savile Row, but just the other side of Regent Street all of Soho is waiting for you with every kind of food in the world. So if you work out of West End Central, the backstreets of Soho are your real canteen.

  I found Elsa Olsen in a Korean restaurant at the top of Glasshouse Street. The forensic pathologist was just polishing off a bowl of dak bulgogi and steamed rice.

  ‘You look like death warmed up, Max.’

  I eased myself into the chair opposite her.

  ‘Coming from someone in your job, Elsa, I’m going to consider that a compliment.’

  She waved her chopsticks. ‘You want something to eat?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘If you don’t want lunch then you’re here to ask me about a man with a knife wound in his windpipe,’ she said.

  I smiled at her. ‘You know me so well.’

  ‘You want to know if he’s going to live.’

  ‘It had crossed my mind.’

  ‘That depends entirely on the severity of the penetrating trauma.’

  ‘It’s a puncture wound, Elsa. A knife was stuck in Guy Philips’ throat but his throat was not cut open. I’m giving you the edited highlights, you understand.’

  ‘I understand. But you have to understand that there are puncture wounds and there are puncture wounds, Max. Tracheal perforation ranges from a small wound to complete avulsion. He’s survived for, what, forty-eight hours?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I would think he has every chance. But not even his doctors will know for certain. If you don’t like dak bulgogi, you’d be far better off talking to them.’

  ‘There’s something more, Elsa.’

  She placed her chopsticks across her rice bowl and waited.

  I leaned forward. My back throbbed in protest.

  ‘Would he have lost consciousness?’ I said. ‘He had a knife stuck in his throat – the assailant was disturbed, we don’t know why – and the victim somehow stemmed the blood for long enough to save his life, long enough to get up and get away. Was he awake through all of that? I got a couple of taps on the head and there were whole seconds when I was out for the count. This man had his throat cut. Would he have blacked out?’

  She thought about it.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Please, Elsa. Have a guess.’

  ‘I doubt it. Because if he had blacked out then he would have bled to death. But, like you, there may have been moments when he was not fully conscious.’

  ‘What’s the timetable?’

  ‘There is no timetable! There are only a series of approximations.’

  ‘But we know that Hugo Buck and Adam Jones died almost instantly.’

  ‘Yes, because if you cut the carotid artery then loss of consciousness is within five seconds. But even that’s an approximation. And the killer didn’t get the chance to cut the carotid artery this time, did he?’

  ‘Because he was disturbed. Or he panicked. There were fifty kids in those woods. Or maybe he was spooked by a bird. Whatever happened, he didn’t finish the job. So did Guy Philips lose consciousness?’

  ‘What I’m telling you is that severing any artery will eventually result in loss of consciousness. Eventually. Suicides who cut their radial arteries – slash their wrists, in plain English – have approximately thirty seconds to regret it before they black out and then another two minutes before they die. But it is entirely dependent on the severity of the trauma. Or, more specifically, the loss of blood plasma.’

  ‘So how about a punctured windpipe, Elsa? My guess is that the victim was awake all the time. Even with an open wound in his windpipe. He was always awake. That’s what I think. What do you think, Elsa?’

  ‘I know exactly what you’re asking, Max, and I’m not going to give you an answer. Because I just don’t know! And there’s no way I could possibly know for certain.’

  A waiter brought a bowl of kim chi and placed it in front of Elsa. She did not look at the waiter, the kim chi or me. She stared out at Glasshouse Street, which is really little more than a glorified alley that runs parallel to Regent Street, and she sighed, shaking her head.

  I did what I had seen Mallory do. I let the silence between us grow and waited for her to fill it. And eventually she did.

  ‘A body only has to lose approximately a fifth of its normal blood volume to produce hypovolemic shock. Lose that amount of blood and the heart stops pumping. Veins dilate, blood pressure drops, and eventually—’

  ‘You flake out.’

  ‘Yes. If we’re going to use the medical term, you flake out.’

  ‘But that didn’t happen to Piggy because he didn’t lose enough blood. He lost a lot of blood – a hell of a lot of blood – but not enough to put him out.’

  ‘That’s a reasonable supposition.’

  ‘So the killer sticks the blade in his neck, cuts through the windpipe, but doesn’t finish the job – something spooks him – and he lets the man slide from his arms. But Philips doesn’t black out. Just so we’re clear, he doesn’t black out, right?’

  Elsa reluctantly nodded.

  And then finally she gave me what I had come to Soho to find.

  ‘I know what you are asking, and the answer is yes,’ she said. She picked up her chopsticks and selected a slice of kim chi. The chilli soaking the napa cabbage was as bright as fresh blood. ‘There’s a good chance Guy Philips saw his assailant’s face.’

  A uniformed sergeant was outside the main entrance to the hospital, red-faced and stamping his boots.

  ‘He’s still alive,’ I said.

  It wasn’t a question.

  The PS gave me a grin, indicating the deserted street outside the private hospital. ‘You’ll know soon enough when he’s snuffed it,’ he said. ‘They’ll all come running.’

  I nodded. The death of Guy Philips would swamp the street with cameras and microphones because then we would have a serial killer.

  There was another uniformed officer outside the lifts. I didn’t recognise him and I had my warrant card in my hand before I reached him.

  ‘All quiet?’ I said.

  ‘These nurses keep bothering me, sir,’ he said. ‘They love a man in uniform.’

  I stepped into the lift. ‘You’ll just have to try to be strong,’ I said, thinking that they should teach mindless banter at Hendon, the Training School of the Metropolitan Police.

  The gangly figure of PC Billy Greene was waiting outside the Intensive Care Unit. He looked half asleep but snapped to attention when he saw me coming.

  ‘Back on the beat,’ I said.

  He grinned. ‘Yes, DC Wolfe.’

  ‘Visitors?’

  ‘The same gentleman,’ Greene said. ‘His friend. The politician. Mr King. It’s still restricted visitors but Mr King must have had a word.’

  The door to the ICU opened and a doctor emerged.

  ‘Doctor,’ I said, ‘DC Wolfe. When can I talk to your patient?’

  ‘Detective,’
he said. ‘Mr Philips has a severe tracheal rupture. Someone, as you know, stuck a knife through his windpipe. Thirty per cent of patients with tracheal tears die, most of them within one hour.’

  ‘I get it,’ I said. ‘I understand the severity of the injury.’

  ‘I’m not convinced you do. Mr Philips is currently sedated and breathing through a ventilator. If he survives, he will need extensive surgery to repair the severed windpipe. If he has surgery, even surgery that is successful, he will have breathing difficulties for the rest of his life, due to a narrowing of the airways in his throat.’ He looked up from his notes. ‘And you’re seriously asking me when you can talk to him?’

  ‘Because we believe he may have seen his assailant’s face,’ I said. ‘He wouldn’t have to speak. He could write something down.’

  The doctor looked at me with open hostility. ‘He’s not well enough for visitors,’ he said. ‘And I’ll let you know when you can talk to him.’

  He walked off.

  I gave Greene my card.

  ‘If he wakes, you call me. If his condition changes, you call me. And if there are any problems, what do you do?’

  ‘I call you.’

  ‘Good.’

  Then I entered the Intensive Care Unit. PC Greene followed me inside, concern flitting across his face as he watched me scrub my hands in one of those big deep sinks you only find in ICUs.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘I’m not going to operate on him. And I’ll be quick.’

  I went inside Philips’ room. In the gloom I could see a figure propped up in bed. I could not recognise him as the man I had last seen emerging from the woods at Potter’s Field with blood pouring through hands around his neck. Guy Philips looked like the sole survivor of some catastrophic disaster. He looked like someone I had never met.

  Three tubes, two fat and corrugated and one thin and smooth, snaked over the side of the bed like tentacles, and were connected to another tube, which in turn was connected to his nose and throat. The doctor had told me that the puncture in his trachea meant that he could only breathe through a ventilator. And the doctor was right – I didn’t really understand what that meant until I saw him and heard him. The ventilator made every single breath Piggy took sound like a small war.

  His neck was swathed in bandages which made him look like a relic from an Egyptian tomb, or as if someone had tried to decapitate him. There was no blood.

  ‘Detective Wolfe,’ a voice said, and only now did I see Ben King sitting on the far side of the room, hunched up in the solitary chair. ‘I want to thank you for saving Guy’s life.’

  His voice was very soft, and although there was no chance of us waking the man in the bed, I responded in the same hushed tones.

  ‘I don’t deserve any credit for that,’ I said. ‘Thank DCI Mallory. He stopped him bleeding to death.’

  ‘Of course. And I will thank him personally. Have you any leads?’

  ‘No.’ I hesitated for a moment. ‘But we think he saw a face. We think he can identify whoever attacked him. And we believe he will. When he wakes.’

  ‘When he wakes,’ Ben King said. ‘Then let’s hope he wakes soon.’

  He stood up in the darkness and I thought he was leaving. But he just wanted to shake my hand. There were tears in his eyes as he held my gaze.

  ‘This has to end,’ he said. ‘These senseless murders. This unspeakable violence.’

  ‘I want to end it,’ I said.

  His eyes blazed at me in the twilight of the hospital room, and that was when I felt the full force of his personality, and I understood exactly why he had climbed so far so fast.

  ‘And I want what you want,’ he told me.

  16

  I RECOGNISED HER as soon as I walked into MIR-1 the next morning.

  She was alone in the room, having arrived even before Mallory, sitting on a desk, looking at a laptop that was open on a PDF of the Murder Investigation Manual.

  She turned to look at me with the cool, steady gaze that I remembered from my first day in Homicide, up at the bank, Hugo Buck on the shag carpet with his throat opened up. It was the rebellious red hair that really gave her away. Everything else seemed different, because this time she was not in uniform.

  ‘DC Wolfe?’ she said. ‘I don’t know if you remember me. From the one-oh-one at ChinaCorps. TDC Edie Wren?’

  ‘I remember. You’re a trainee detective constable now? How did that happen?’

  ‘The usual way. I passed my National Investigations Exam. I’m working towards my PIP Level 2 Portfolio. You know – demonstrating competence, all of that?’

  ‘What you doing here?’

  ‘I’m the bagman on the double homicide.’

  ‘Our bagman? The bagman’s usually a detective sergeant or detective constable.’

  ‘Cuts,’ she said.

  The bagman was the lowest rank of the investigation, answering directly to the senior investigating officer, DCI Mallory, and giving assistance wherever it was needed. I remembered how calm Wren had been on the day she and Greene found Buck’s body and I had no doubt she could do the job.

  ‘So this is where it all happens,’ she said.

  ‘This is where some of it happens,’ I said. ‘There’s plenty of legwork outside. I’ve learned that murder is labour intensive. In the Yorkshire Ripper case, the law checked over five million car registration numbers.’

  ‘Yes, and they still cocked it up,’ she said. ‘Did you see the new Bob the Butcher post?’

  She stabbed a few buttons on her laptop. The social network site came up. It was nothing I hadn’t seen before. The later photograph of Robert Oppenheimer. The same apocalyptic boasting: ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Kill the protectors of the rich. Kill all pigs.’

  ‘Seen it,’ I said.

  ‘But did you see the link?’ Wren said. ‘That’s new. And you’re in it.’

  She clicked on the link. And there I was on my hands and knees, a thin trickle of blood running down the side of my face from a wound in my temple. Another sliding down the side of my neck. My mouth was open and my eyes were fixed on nothing.

  And I was crawling.

  There was only a few seconds of footage, but it kept repeating, and looping back on itself, so it looked like I was crawling forward, and then reversing, as if doing some comic jig. In one corner of the screen the pig edged towards me, its eyes bulging with terror. Our faces would almost touch and then we would back away from each other. And then the mad dance would begin again.

  There was music, I realised. Not really music at all. Just mad laughter, on and on, hysterical screams of laughter over an oompah-oompah beat as the pig and I crawled towards each other and then backed away. And did it again. Laughter in the dark, laughter from the grave.

  ‘Who filmed you out there?’ Wren said.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did he film you, the killer? Did Bob make this film?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘Not his style.’

  ‘I would have thought it was exactly his style,’ Wren said. ‘I Shazamed it. That song. It’s some old music-hall number. “The Laughing Policeman” by Charles Jolly.’

  As if on cue, Charles Jolly stopped laughing and started singing.

  He said, ‘I must arrest you.’

  He didn’t know what for.

  And then he started laughing

  Until he cracked his jaw!

  Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

  ‘It’s gone viral,’ Wren said. ‘You see how many hits you’ve got?’

  My phone went.

  It was the chief super.

  I pictured her in one of those top-floor offices at New Scotland Yard where they either have a view of the river or a view of the park. And I knew from the ice-cold ferocity in her voice that she was looking at neither. Detective Chief Superintendent Swire was looking at my little film. I was no longer flavour of the month. I was a flavour that had been discontinued.

  ‘I t
hink you’ve been promoted beyond your ability and experience,’ she said. ‘That day at the railway station – you were right and I was wrong. You got your medal and your pay rise and your transfer to Mallory’s outfit. But here’s the thing: I think nothing could have stopped you running that man down. I think that is who you are, Wolfe. I think you would have run him down if he’d had a bag full of onion bhajis. I think because of your personal history – don’t be surprised, it’s all in your file – you are completely out of control. Do you know why we don’t have guns, detective?’

  I knew the answers off by heart.

  ‘Because we don’t need them, ma’am. Because we have trained firearms officers. Because the public do not want their police to be armed. And because if every officer had a firearm, then standards would slip from their current high level.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘The real reason we don’t have guns is because of reckless bastards like you. In a war of smart bombs, you’re an unexploded device. You’re not even a loose cannon, Wolfe.’

  She hung up, and I saw that Mallory was standing in the doorway of MIR-1, holding his takeaway tea and staring at me.

  I couldn’t look at him.

  Not because the world was laughing at me.

  Please. I have a daughter.

  But because the world had seen me crawl.

  I did not feel like going to the gym. But I knew I needed to. I knew I had to. I knew I must exhaust my body tonight, that muscle and blood and bone must be so weary by the time I got into bed that a few hours of sleep was at least a possibility. And I had to fill my head with something other than my humiliating new career as an internet sensation.

  There was a sign in Fred’s, and as the gym emptied near closing time I stood looking up at it. It was placed between a posed black-and-white photograph of Sonny Liston and a picture of a dozen Cuban kids sparring in a ring with ropes like snapped elastic.

  PAIN IS JUST WEAKNESS LEAVING THE BODY

  It was a good message, and there had been times when I’d believed in it, and it had helped me. But not today. Today I did not feel that the thick burning knot of pain in my lower back was just weakness leaving the body.

  Today, pain was just pain.