The Murder Bag

by Tony Parsons

  Salman Khan hung his head and wept. Ben King kept his eyes on the shattered face of his brother as Captain King’s words filled the ancient chapel.

  ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’

  Captain King’s delivery was matter of fact, yet the words carried real meaning. He was composed and yet replete with emotion. He was good at that. But then he had had a lot of practice.

  Captain King returned to the front row, touching Khan once on the shoulder before taking his place next to his brother. Their wives sat behind them – pretty women, sleek and sexy even in their mourning clothes – shepherding well-behaved children with braces on their teeth. The ladies’ fat jewels glistened. There was plenty of money and time for their children’s bodies, minds and orthodontics.

  The King brothers and Khan all had families. And I guessed that they loved those families.

  But the real bonds, the unbreakable bonds, the bonds of a lifetime, they were different.

  Because they were with each other.

  After the memorial service I walked across the playing fields, skirting the rugby pitch where a games lesson was taking place. The boys all wore black armbands for their murdered sports master.

  The sounds of flesh crashing into flesh, stud on to bone, cries and laughter faded behind me as I headed towards the stone cottage where Len Zukov lived. I knocked on the door. There was no answer. I walked round the back of the cottage, turning up my collar against the bitter wind. I stopped when I saw the fox.

  It lay on top of the compost heap, a ragged sack of fur and bone, waiting for the fire.

  Its neck had been neatly broken.

  I got back to town at five in the afternoon, the November day already as dark as midnight and London’s 180-minute rush hour starting to get mad. I sent Wren a text when I was on Piccadilly and she was waiting for me outside 27 Savile Row when I arrived. She got into the X5 with a triumphant smile.

  ‘If it wasn’t for me,’ she said, ‘you’d still be dicking about on Google. I’d go through Regent’s Park, if I were you. The traffic is always surprisingly light around the park.’

  I took the park route and within fifteen minutes we were on the Finchley Road, the traffic heavy but moving steadily; and then it was thinning and the road was rising steeply towards the end of Heath Street as we climbed to the highest point of the city.

  I realised that we were close to the meadow where Scout and I had let Stan off his lead and lost him. I had never noticed all the art galleries before. You drive out of Hampstead and they are the last thing you see, a cluster of them, all shapes and sizes, just before you are surrounded by the wild green expanse of the Heath.

  As the car crawled higher, I saw that some of these galleries were high end, great lavish spaces with large, expensively lit canvases displayed in the window; other places were far more modest, local artists selling their work to a local clientele. The one we were looking for was little more than a darkened hole in the wall.

  ‘This is it,’ Wren said.

  NEREUS

  Fine Art

  I slowed as we drove past and caught a glimpse of a tiny space behind wrought-iron railings glinting under the streetlights. A recycling bin was overturned, its contents spilled over the narrow pavement. Wren was already unclipping her seat belt as I crested the hill. I found a parking space behind Jack Straw’s Castle.

  But when we walked back to the gallery we found that Nereus Fine Art was closed. Two small landscapes were displayed in the window. A wave of junk mail was washed up inside the glass door. BACK SOON lied a sign.

  I stood back. It was a three-storey building: the small gallery had a basement flat below and a flat above. I leaned over the wrought-iron railings, looking down and then up. Both of the flats were in darkness. Broken glass crunched beneath my feet and the recycling bin looked as though it had been rifled through by a fox that had come down from the Heath. He had been out of luck. It was just beer bottles and empty pizza boxes.

  I looked up and down the street. We were on the edge of Hampstead affluence. Businesses were either booming or going bust. Apart from the galleries, there were a few restaurants and clothes stores, but over half of them had closed down. The buildings all had exactly the same wrought-iron railings as Nereus. The blue and red lights of burglar alarms blinked on even the most modest buildings.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘I’ve got another call to make. Where should I drop you?’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  I looked at her. How old was she? Twenty-five? Younger?

  ‘Don’t you have a life to go to?’ I said.

  ‘I can’t see my boyfriend tonight.’ A beat. ‘He has to have dinner with his wife.’ Another beat. ‘It’s her birthday.’

  She toed the broken beer bottles, then pushed aside an empty pizza box with fossilised cheese on its side.

  ‘A man lives here,’ she said.

  ‘How do you know it’s a man?’

  ‘Only men live like this. Men and pigs.’

  Holloway was a few miles and several light years away from Hampstead.

  Wren and I stood before a large dusty shop window where pride of place was given to a showroom dummy dressed as a German soldier from World War Two.

  ‘How’d you know about this place?’ Wren said.

  ‘I dicked about on Google,’ I said.

  Under its coalscuttle helmet the mannequin had the gently pouting features of a young male model. But the clothes he wore were heavy and harsh and made for invading Russia. A thick wool greatcoat was draped over a rough tunic, both far too large for the delicate, snake-hipped dummy, and baggy trousers were tucked into leather boots. It all looked impossibly old and fragile, as if it would disintegrate with one touch.

  ‘Is any of this stuff real?’ I wondered.

  ‘Those boots aren’t,’ Wren said. ‘Everything else might be. But the boots – never. The Krauts wore their boots out. On the Eastern Front the Germans used to saw the legs off dead Russian soldiers and defrost them in some lucky peasant’s oven, just to get at the boots.’

  I stared at her.

  ‘My dad,’ she said. ‘He liked World War Two. Is that the expression? Liking it? He was interested, let’s say. The World at War boxed set and all that.’

  The rest of the window was full of lovingly presented junk. Buttons. Posters. Faded scraps of metal and cloth and card and leather, all of it displayed like holy relics. SECOND FRONT, it said above the store. COLLECTIBLE MILITARIA.

  The lights were going out inside.

  I cop-knocked on the door. A long-haired man, not young, stuck his head around the door.

  ‘I’m just closing up,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t let us stop you.’

  He stood to one side at the sight of our warrant cards and we went in.

  ‘DC Wolfe and TDC Wren,’ I said.

  ‘Nick Cage,’ he said, reluctantly.

  I saw rags in glass cases, rusty medals in presentation cases, framed photographs of smiling men who had died screaming a lifetime ago.

  ‘Nice place,’ Wren said. ‘My old man would love it. Is that a real Luger P08?’

  She was indicating a handgun in a dark stained-glass box.

  ‘Replica,’ he replied, looking at me. ‘It doesn’t fire.’

  I opened my bag and removed a file. Inside it was a collection of eight-by-ten photographs. I spread them on top of a glass cabinet and felt a pulse of pain freeze my lower back. The photographs were all of a knife that was designed to cut a man’s throat. I leaned forward, my palms on the glass case, easing my tailbone and my breath out at the same time. It wasn’t a proper dog stretch, but it made me feel better.

  ‘I know you,’ Cage said. ‘Where was it?’ He clicked his fingers. ‘The Laughing Policeman film on YouTube.’

  ‘He’s dead famous,’ Wren said, flicking through a rack of ragged army jackets as if she was in Miss Selfridge. ‘He went viral.’

  I looked at C
age. ‘You don’t know me, OK?’ I said.

  ‘OK,’ he said.

  ‘Do you know what these are?’

  He looked at the photos one by one.

  ‘It’s a Fairbairn-Sykes commando dagger. They’re all Fairbairn-Sykes commando daggers. These are all different generations of the same weapon. I could be more specific if I could see the knives. This one with the green handle is marked PPCLI. That’s Canadian – Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. This one with the French writing – LE COMMANDO INOX, see that? – was used by French Special Forces in Algeria between 1954 and 1962. Laymen think that the Fairbairn-Sykes was only used in World War Two. But Wilkinson’s kept producing them after the war and sold them to Special Forces all over the world. This is about Bob the Butcher, isn’t it?’

  ‘Did you ever sell one of these knives?’

  He shook his head. ‘The only place I ever saw one was in a museum.’

  ‘The Imperial War Museum?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What kind of clients do you get in here?’

  He was watching Wren browsing the store.

  ‘Collectors,’ he said.

  The sound of muffled laughter. Wren had put on a gas mask.

  ‘My dad would love this,’ she said. ‘Christmas is coming.’

  ‘It’s six hundred quid,’ Cage said. ‘You break it, you bought it.’

  Wren removed the gas mask. ‘Maybe I’ll stick to socks and aftershave.’

  ‘What’s the appeal?’ I said.

  Cage looked at me as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  ‘The Second World War was the greatest conflagration in human history,’ he said. ‘It killed millions of people. It reshaped Europe and the world. We live with its legacy today. We will live with its legacy for ever. The men who come here – and they are all men – think they would have been improved by war. They believe they missed something by being born too late. And they’re right. They did miss something. They missed everything. They missed the great test of the twentieth century – perhaps of all time.’

  ‘But let me ask you this,’ Wren said. ‘Why is so much of this stuff about the Nazis? They lost, didn’t they? Yet so much of the war memorabilia industry is about them. It’s like wanting the replica shirt of the side that lost the cup final.’

  ‘I think the general consensus is that they had the strongest sense of aesthetics.’

  ‘They had the best kit?’ Wren smiled.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If only it were that simple,’ she said, not smiling at him now. ‘If only it were that innocent.’

  I smoothed the photographs on the glass case.

  ‘Do you recall ever being asked about one of these knives?’ I said.

  ‘Well, of course,’ Cage said. ‘This is one of the great collector’s items of World War Two.’ A flicker of pleasure in his eyes. ‘And the enquiries have been on the rise lately. What with all the publicity.’

  ‘Can you give me a list of people who wanted to buy one?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Client confidentiality.’

  Wren and I grinned at each other.

  ‘You have to take the Hippocratic oath just to flog a bit of Nazi memorabilia?’ I said.

  He licked his lips and said nothing.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’m not interested in busting you.’

  He bridled at that. ‘What could you bust me for?’

  I didn’t know where to start. ‘Offensive weapons. Knives. Bayonets. These firearms. Incitement to racial hatred.’

  ‘The idea that all my clients are Nazi fetishists is simply not true!’

  ‘Not all of them. But some of them, I bet. And I bet there’s some stuff in the back room or under the counter that you wouldn’t necessarily put on display in the shop window. Am I right? Look, I don’t want to stop you doing your job—’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Unless you stop me from doing mine.’

  I left him my card and a few simple instructions. The shop went dark as Wren and I got into the car across the street. The Wehrmacht dummy stared out into the Holloway night.

  ‘You don’t really think that Bob bought a knife here, do you?’ Wren said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But I think he might.’

  I dropped off Wren at her car in Savile Row and drove south of the river to where two hundred-ton cannons sat in a little green garden. I parked round the back of the museum and rang the buzzer at the service entrance. An elderly security guard who looked as though he had been roused from his slumbers answered the door. Beyond him I could see Carol negotiating her wheelchair down the tight corridor.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘He’s with me.’

  She looked as if she had been expecting me.

  22

  WE WENT BACK to Nereus Fine Art the next evening and this time it was open. It did not look so different from when it was closed. But a woman with short fair hair stood stock still in the gallery, staring out at the empty Hampstead street. She had not sold either of the two small landscapes.

  ‘I don’t mind you coming in,’ I told Wren as I parked behind Jack Straw’s Castle.

  ‘Big of you,’ she said.

  ‘But let me ask the questions.’

  ‘And what do I do?’ she said.

  ‘You tell me if I’m missing something.’

  ‘Mr Duncan doesn’t produce much work,’ the gallery woman said. She was a slight blonde in black-rimmed glasses, attractive in a brittle sort of way, and with just as much charm as was necessary she was getting rid of me. ‘He’s a bit of a recluse, I’m afraid. He doesn’t exhibit, he doesn’t talk to the press. He doesn’t need to. All his work is sold to private collectors. Very little of it comes on the market. But if you would like to leave me your card, I’ll put your details on file.’

  ‘Because I love his work,’ I said, not for the first time.

  And it was true. I had never seen anyone paint like that. It was a city that I recognised, if only from dreams.

  But she didn’t care what I loved.

  ‘Please leave your details,’ she said, with the warmth turned down a notch.

  Wren was looking at the canvases on the walls. There was a lot of lush green countryside. I guessed there was a big market for that stuff.

  ‘How does he survive?’ Wren said.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘How does he make a living? If he doesn’t paint much, and if he doesn’t sell much, and if he doesn’t make much of an effort, how does he pay the rent?’

  ‘Pay the rent?’

  The gallery woman stared at Wren. Wren stared right back.

  ‘I understand there’s some family money,’ the woman said.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘We have some other interesting contemporary work,’ she said to me, handing me her card.

  ‘Do you own the gallery?’ Wren said.

  ‘Nereus is owned by my mother.’

  Wren thought about it.

  ‘So if your father is an earl, then what does that make your mother? A lady, right?’

  The woman had stopped smiling. ‘You’re not collectors, you’re fucking journalists. Get out. Get out now or I’ll call the police.’

  I was looking at the card.

  HON. KRIS HUETLIN

  Nereus Fine Art

  And I saw what Wren had seen: that the Kris was short for Cressida and the Huetlin came from the German artist she had married at nineteen and divorced five years later. It was the ‘Hon.’ that she couldn’t resist that gave her away.

  The Honourable Cressida Sutcliffe, only daughter of the Earl of Broughton, sister of the late James Sutcliffe.

  Then I was out on the street, gripping the wrought-iron railings, looking up. Wren had followed me outside and was watching me crouch in the broken glass from the recycling bin. The smashed glass was all from beer bottles.

  Peroni. Italian beer.

  ‘We’re missing something,’
I said, the sound of broken glass beneath our feet. ‘Upstairs,’ I said. ‘A dead man lives there.’

  Up a narrow flight of stairs.

  The door was unlocked.

  Behind me I could hear the Hon. Kris Huetlin arguing with Wren, then falling silent when she produced her warrant card. And then arguing some more.

  I went into a room full of canvases, all of them turned to face the wall. I could smell fresh paint. A man was standing in the centre of the small room, next to a canvas on an easel.

  The canvas before him was blank.

  ‘Hello, James,’ I said.

  James Sutcliffe was heavy, bearded, with the weight of the long-term committed drinker. I could see no trace of the delicate boy in dark glasses who would not smile for the camera when he posed in his Combined Cadet Force uniform at Potter’s Field. The hair that had been thick and black and slicked back straight off his forehead was now long and grey and thinning. It fell around his shoulders, and over the baggy smock he wore.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  ‘I’m DC Wolfe,’ I said, hearing footsteps on the stairs and then stopping behind me. ‘This is TDC Edie Wren. Can we talk?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His sister was right behind Wren.

  ‘Even lower than I thought,’ she said. ‘Not hacks. Pigs.’

  I looked at her, remembering her radical past. Then I turned back to her brother.

  ‘I love your paintings,’ I said. ‘I love the early ones. And I love the later ones, where the city gets darker.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Do you know why I’m here?’

  He looked over my shoulder at his sister.

  ‘Someone’s killing your friends,’ I said. ‘Hugo Buck. Adam Jones. Guy Philips. They’re all dead. Did you know that?’

  A small shake of his head that could have meant anything.

  ‘I’m going to find the killer,’ I said. ‘Don’t you want to help me catch the bastard who’s murdering your friends?’

  He focused on me again.

  ‘They’re not my friends,’ he said.