by Tony Parsons
Gane grinned, and I saw that Cho and his techie pals from the PCeU were looking sour.
‘Stick around, boys!’ Gane said. ‘We might be able to show you a few tricks!’
‘Give DI Gane your phone and he’ll fit a GPS tracking device,’ Whitestone told Bush.
‘I don’t want to carry anything bulky,’ the journalist said.
‘It’s either a SIM card or some software,’ Gane said, cutting her off. ‘You’re not going to notice it. The only people who will know it’s even there are us, OK? But it means we know where you are. It means we can pinpoint your movements to within ten metres. If you go beyond a prescribed area, it sends us an alarm.’
Bush gave Gane her phone.
‘The Kevlar Stealth and the tracking device,’ she said. ‘Is that it?’
Whitestone nodded. ‘That’s it. Belt and braces.’
‘What did Bob say to you?’ I said.
I saw the pride in the journalist’s eyes.
‘He said he liked my piece,’ she said. ‘And he said he’d be in touch.’
‘How do you know it was him?’
‘He told me he would post an Oppenheimer quote in the Bob the Butcher timeline. “In sleep – in confusion – in the depths of shame – the good deeds a man has done before defend him.” And then he did.’
There were a dozen copies of her paper scattered across the workstations of MIR-1. In the end she had not goaded Bob the Butcher. There had been no references to sexual preference, childhood trauma or bed-wetting. She had stuck to Dr Stephen’s script. Bob was presented as a mixed-up homicidal maniac who was operating by his own rules (‘Honour, power and control are clearly motivating factors for this most complex of serial killers’) and choosing victims who were something less than totally innocent (‘It seems hardly a coincidence that Bob the Butcher selected as his targets a wealthy investment banker, a drug dealer and an inveterate bully’), and also as a slightly volatile folk hero to the dispossessed (‘These are horrible crimes, certainly – but they are also a cry of rage in a society where the obscene gap between rich and poor is the new apartheid’).
It was more of a press release than journalism. You could see why Bob the Butcher would want to cut it out and stick it in his scrapbook. It made him sound like a psycho Robin Hood.
‘He’s calling my paper’s switchboard some time over the next twenty-four hours,’ Bush said.
‘We’ve got call analytics set up on your switchboard,’ Gane said. ‘The longer you can keep him talking the better. But as soon as he calls we will have the number of whatever disposable or payphone he’s using. A landline or a mobile is too much to hope for. But it will give us more than we have right now. And when he gives you the meet you’re going to lead us to him.’
Mallory was still not happy.
‘I want you to have police protection from this moment on,’ he told Scarlet Bush. ‘I want two officers to escort you back to your office, and to accompany you to the meeting point, where we’ll be waiting.’
‘No chance,’ she said. ‘This is the most important story of my career and I am not going to let you screw it up for me.’
Mallory looked helplessly at Swire, who shrugged.
‘The meet is going to be surrounded with ARVs and SFOs,’ the chief super said. ‘There’s going to be enough Special Firearms Officers to keep her from harm. And I’m all for making sure we don’t frighten Bob away.’
‘Then I want officers in the room an hour before you arrive at the meet,’ Mallory told Bush. ‘And I want roadblocks at fifty metres, five hundred metres and a mile. And make sure you’re wearing the Kevlar.’
‘Bob cuts throats.’ Bush laughed, and for the first time I saw the raw courage in her. ‘What good is a stab-proof vest going to do me?’
Swire chuckled approvingly.
‘And I’ll tell you what I want,’ Bush added. ‘When I get to the meet I want to talk to him before you move in and arrest him.’
‘Five minutes,’ Mallory said.
‘Fuck that!’
Mallory visibly flinched at the profanity.
‘I want at least an hour with him.’
‘We’ll give you five minutes,’ Swire said. ‘But any sign of aggression and he’s coming down.’
Gane returned the reporter’s mobile with the tracking device.
‘What’s in there?’ Mallory said.
‘In the end I went for the handset-based software,’ Gane said. ‘It’s more accurate than a SIM card with an iPhone.’
Mallory still didn’t look happy.
‘Let us know as soon as he makes contact,’ he said. ‘Don’t wait for us to pick it up on your switchboard.’
‘Of course,’ Bush said. She threw her phone into her bag. ‘I’ll tell you where we’re meeting and I’ll see you there.’
She left, escorted by the chief super, and for a moment I thought I was going to hear Mallory curse for the first time. Instead he ran his hand over his polished skull and said angrily, ‘And I want the lot of you in a Kevlar Stealth!’
In the only quiet corner of MIR-1, Dr Stephen was at his laptop. I walked over to him and saw that he was staring at Bob the Butcher’s timeline. The forensic psychologist looked thoughtful. The mushroom cloud was still there.
‘Those people in Hiroshima,’ Dr Stephen said. ‘They had been expecting a massive bombing raid for months. But what they got was the end of all things. What they got was a new world.’
‘So what does it mean?’ I said. ‘The cloud. What’s he trying to tell us?’
He shook his head.
‘I’d be making a guess,’ he said.
‘Go ahead.’
‘The designated target,’ he said. ‘It’s been chosen.’
The internet café was on the Holloway Road. Wren and I sat on opposite sides of the room while half a dozen weary-looking foreign students checked their mail and Skyped home. It seemed a strange location for Scarlet Bush to meet Bob the Butcher.
And when I heard Gane curse in my earpiece, I knew they never would.
Wren heard it too. She looked over at me and I shook my head.
In the back room was a group of armed officers looking like soldiers from the next century. They wore black rubber goggles, Ballistic Kevlar helmets and shiny boots. They carried Heckler & Koch assault rifles, Taser X26 guns and CS gas spray. Their mouths were thin lines of frustrated adrenalin. Mallory and Whitestone were to one side hunched over Gane and his laptop.
‘What’s happening?’ I asked them.
‘We’ve lost Scarlet,’ Mallory said. ‘Not the signal from her phone. Just her.’
‘She gave our officers the slip at her paper,’ Gane said, not looking up from the screen. ‘Went out the fire exit, we think. That easy.’
‘Wanted some quality time on her own with Bob,’ Whitestone said.
‘The tracer on her phone told us she was on her way here,’ Gane said. ‘And now it seems she’s not. The signal hasn’t moved for ten minutes. Look.’
A red dot pulsed steadily in the map’s spider web of streets.
‘Where is it?’ Mallory said. ‘That looks like somewhere near St Paul’s.’
‘East Poultry Avenue, EC1,’ Gane said. ‘It’s the Barbican.’
‘That’s not the Barbican,’ I said. ‘That’s the meat market.’
Mallory shook his head.
‘That stupid girl,’ he said. ‘Oh, that stupid girl.’
The hooks hung around the storage room like stainless steel bunting and our breath made steaming clouds in the freezing fog. Huge slabs of bloody meat hung everywhere in the sub-zero air. I could hear Wren and Whitestone calling her name.
‘Scarlet! Scarlet! Scarlet!’
Mallory pushed aside a great headless carcass of beef.
‘She’s not here, is she?’ he said.
Gane rubbed a hand over the misty screen of his laptop.
‘Well, the phone’s here,’ he said.
And then I saw the pig’s head sitting o
n a marble slab. The pig’s head with its giant, floppy Dumbo ears. Comical and tragic all at once. The albino skin, more white than pink, with just a few delicate smears of blood. The eyes shut as if overwhelmed with exhaustion. And the monstrous snout, squashed flat and rich with blood.
Figures moved in the mist of the cold room, cursing and bumping into each other. Unable to find the thing they sought. They kept calling her name.
My spine throbbed with pain as I reached under the snout and into the pig’s mouth and pulled out a phone, its screen smeared with milky blood.
‘Sir?’ I said.
Mallory took the phone from me. He looked across at Gane, who nodded and closed his laptop.
‘He has her,’ Mallory said.
My own phone began to vibrate. I took it out. SECOND FRONT CALLING it said, and I saw that the blood of the pig’s head was on my hands now, and on my phone, and on my clothes, getting on everything.
‘It’s Cage from the war memorabilia shop,’ a very distant voice said.
‘What happened?’ I said.
‘I sold a knife.’
25
‘THIS BIG GUY walked into my shop,’ Nick Cage said. ‘Well, not big – pumped up. Weights. Maybe steroids. A little man but pumped up, you know?’
We had him in an interview room in West End Central. Mallory and Gane and me. Mallory didn’t like him.
‘I’m trying to help you,’ Cage said, looking at me.
‘I know,’ I said.
‘You sell knives,’ Mallory said. ‘You sell swords. Daggers.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you ever see what a knife can do to someone?’
‘I sell to collectors.’
‘Ever heard of the Offensive Weapons Act?’
Cage’s mouth tightened. ‘Chapter and verse. This country has the most restrictive knife laws in the world. Not that you’d know it from all the kids in A&E with their stab wounds, their guts hanging out. Look, I don’t sell flick knives, sword canes, butterfly knives, throwing stars or gravity knives, OK? I sell to collectors. I’ve got a licence. And I want to keep it. That’s why I got a photocopy of his ID, all right? Now, do you want to talk about him or me?’
We were running the ID Cage had brought us through the Police National Computer. It was a UK driver’s licence for what the PNC database would recognise as an IC1 – a male of white-skinned European appearance. There was a face and a name and a DOB. A young man around thirty with thinning hair. An attempt at a smile that never quite made it past the hint of a sneer. And there was an address. Right at the edge of the city.
‘Do you buy this ID?’ Gane said to Mallory. ‘Bob’s up to his neck in security architecture online but he doesn’t have a fake photo ID? You know how many sites there are flogging fake photo IDs?’
‘Not good ones,’ Cage said. ‘It’s easy to get a bad one. Not so easy to get a good one. That’s the real thing. Or better than anything I’ve ever seen.’
‘Did he know his stuff?’ I said.
‘How do you mean?’ Cage said.
‘Did he know what he was buying?’
‘He was very specific. The men who come in Second Front are collectors. They all know their stuff. He wanted a Fairbairn-Sykes commando dagger. Prepared to pay top dollar. I sourced it for him. Found a nice Second Pattern F-S made by Wilkinson.’
‘And where did you get it from?’ Mallory said.
‘I’m not telling you,’ Cage said, folding his arms.
Gane made a move towards him as Whitestone appeared in the doorway.
‘We’ve got him,’ she said.
The chief super walked into MIR-1, her face tight with tension beneath the helmet of blonde hair. It could have been Mrs Thatcher getting ready to send the Task Force to the South Atlantic, horribly aware that this thing could go either way.
The crowd parted for her and she did not look at any of us until she came to Edie Wren, sitting on her desk at her workstation, a man’s face on the screen behind her, like something she had just caught.
‘What have we got?’ DCS Swire said.
The face on the screen was the same photograph as the one on the driving licence but now it was life-size; now you could see the wary spite in the eyes, the thin scars from ancient acne, the way he had brushed his hair to cover the growing expanse of forehead.
‘Ian Peck,’ Wren said. ‘Multiple convictions. The first one ten years ago for possession of class C drugs – anabolic steroids – and class B – cannabis. Peck was buying in Amsterdam and mailing the stuff to his home address with the name of the previous occupant on the package.’
‘That old trick,’ somebody said.
Wren dropped into her seat.
‘Twelve months suspended,’ she said, scrolling down. She shook her head. ‘Four – no, five convictions for domestic violence against his girlfriend. She has a restraining order. Peck’s a freelance software consultant. After the split with his girlfriend he moved back home with Mum and Dad.’
Wren turned to look at the chief super.
‘And that’s Bob the Butcher,’ she said.
Swire’s mouth twisted with triumph. ‘Well done, everybody. Start making your preparations. We’ll lift him at dawn.’
‘A man who beats women?’ I said. ‘You really think that our perp is a man who beats up women?’
I was looking at Dr Stephen. He had his hands stuffed deep inside his pockets. I believed that he could see it too.
‘The perp doesn’t attack women,’ I said.
Dr Stephen still wasn’t looking at me.
‘What did you say, Dr Stephen? Honour. Power. Control.’ I gestured at the face that stared at us from the screen.
They were all looking at me.
Swire was very calm.
‘Did you ever hear of a copper called George Oldfield?’ she said.
I nodded. Everybody had heard of Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield. He was the head of the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. Letters and a tape claiming ‘I’m Jack’ had Oldfield searching the north-east while Peter Sutcliffe was killing women in other parts of the country.
‘I’m not going to play the part of George Oldfield here,’ Swire said. ‘I’m not letting our killer slip through my hands.’
She brushed past me as MIR-1 burst into activity.
But I stayed where I was, looking at the face on the screen.
Honour. Power. Control.
A man who hits women, I thought. Where’s the honour in that?
In the first light of the new day we gathered on a suburban street of modest terraced houses and all I could hear was the sound of my blood. It sounds like the sea, a red rushing sound, when it’s pumped hard enough. And as we crouched below a little garden wall and fiddled with our kit in those last few seconds – adjusting the straps on Kevlars, the firearms officers checking their safety catches, listening to the subdued murmurs of the Airwave radios – that is what mine sounded like.
It told me what was at stake. A young woman’s life. The jobs of all of us who had let her slip away. And something else, something more personal. Because you never know what is on the other side of that door, and what it will do to you.
The officer with the worn red battering ram slung over his shoulder walked briskly down the garden path.
It didn’t take long.
Two, three steps and he was at the door, hauling the battering ram from his shoulder and swinging it at the lock in one smooth and brutal motion. The door popped open with the rip and splinter of cheap wood and the officer stood to one side as the rest of us charged into the house, screaming as loud as we could – screaming to pour fear into whoever was on the inside, and screaming to hide the fear in our own hearts.
The two armed officers who went in ahead of me suddenly stopped, still shouting behind their Heckler & Koch assault rifles.
Over the shoulders of their body armour I could see a sickly cat at the end of a suburban hall. It arched its back and hissed, full of cancer and contempt.
>
A door opened at the end of the hall.
We were screaming again.
An old woman in house slippers slowly shuffled across the hall, ignoring all orders to halt. She did not even look our way.
I saw an old-fashioned hearing aid tucked behind her ear, as huge and pink as a wad of chewed bubblegum. She disappeared through a door on the other side of the hall, the old cat rubbing against her legs as it followed her.
We followed her down the hall and through the door.
In the living room the old woman sat on a sofa with an old man, a biscuit held halfway to his mouth. He elbowed her, and at last she registered our presence. The pair of them stared slack-jawed at the assault rifles that were aimed at their faces. The cat spat at us.
‘Mr and Mrs Peck?’ I said. ‘Where’s your son? Where’s Ian?’
Still they didn’t talk.
There was a small kitchen on the other side of the hall.
‘Clear,’ said an armed officer, coming out of it.
Boots thundered on the staircase. I could hear them moving around upstairs, screaming as they went through doors, and then the silence of disappointment and relief.
I went into the kitchen. There was a small garden out the back. Beyond the high garden fence I could see more black Kevlar helmets and rubber goggles, mouths tight with tension, the dull gleam of Heckler & Koch assault rifles.
Mallory came out of the garden and into the kitchen. Whitestone and a uniformed officer were with him. When the uniform took off his helmet I saw it was PC Billy Greene, his pale face slick with sweat and fear, but controlling it well. The boxing was doing him some good.
The shouting had stopped.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘Did anyone check the basement?’ Mallory said.
There was a wooden door just outside the kitchen. No lock, paint flaking. I opened it, reached inside and found the switch for the light.
Somewhere deeper down, a bare electric bulb came on.
I went carefully down a short flight of steps, smelling damp and dust, and then I was under the house itself, the ceiling so low that I had to stoop.
Mallory’s voice was right behind me: ‘Anything?’
The basement was more than half full with scrap, smashed chunks of concrete and broken bricks, a ragged pile of rubble that almost reached to the ceiling.
