The Murder Bag

by Tony Parsons

  ‘What is all this stuff?’ I said.

  ‘Looks like someone dreamed of converting this place into flats,’ Mallory said. ‘They have to fill the basement. Fire regulations. Then the property bubble burst and the dream got cancelled.’ He peered into the darkness. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, easing past. ‘There’s something right at the back.’

  ‘Clear,’ I heard someone call at the top of the house. Then a brief gale of laughter, like a collective sigh of relief. They seemed very far away.

  Mallory moved towards the back wall of the basement. There was a scuttle of something small but living across the rubble and I felt my heart lurch. The tail of a fat rat slithered over the rusted frame of a child’s bicycle.

  ‘There’s a door,’ Mallory said, and he suddenly had his torch in his hand, a sharp white beam in the dull yellow darkness.

  PC Greene was now halfway down the steps, staring at Mallory’s back. We both followed him.

  Mallory was trying the door.

  Locked.

  Then the lights went out. All of them. The mains. A switch had been thrown. I could hear voices protesting far above us.

  Mallory had some sort of blade in his hand and was running it inside the doorjamb. I took his torch and held it on the door as he moved the blade left and right, left and right, lifting the lock tongue from the doorframe socket until he had it.

  The door opened with a crack of wood. Beyond it was a metal grille. And from somewhere beyond that came the screams of a woman.

  Help me help me help me help me help me.

  The rattle of a metal grille in the blackness.

  ‘You hear that?’ Mallory said.

  ‘Yes.’

  We were talking in whispers now. Mallory was reaching through the grille. It was locked from the inside. But a set of keys jangled on a nail; and then he had them and the grille suddenly slid open.

  ‘You smell it?’ Mallory said.

  ‘Yes, sir, I can smell it.’

  The stink of shit and petrol.

  ‘Careful in here,’ he said, stepping inside.

  I followed him and I felt the ground beneath my feet, rough and uneven, and the screaming was louder now and it was recognisably Scarlet Bush, and we moved more quickly because the space suddenly opened up and I was between Mallory and Greene when Mallory seemed to lurch forward and I grabbed a fistful of his jacket and stopped him falling.

  There was a ragged hole beneath us, perhaps two metres deep, and Scarlet Bush at the bottom of it, shielding her eyes from the white light of the torch, naked and wet with petrol.

  A barbecue pit for cooking human flesh.

  A light flared and I saw a man coming round the pit just before it fell – whoooooosh – into the pit, and Billy Greene seemed to fall with it as the flames erupted with a sickening pop, and then Greene was in the pit with Scarlet, beating at the flames with his bare hands.

  The man was small and powerful, long-haired and simian, and when he punched me in the heart I felt the air go out of me as I went backwards, falling, smashing my back hard against some sort of work table that collapsed under my full weight.

  I felt the pain explode in my back, and then the blow on the back of my skull as my head hit the wall.

  I clutched at my heart and felt the rip in my shirt and suddenly I knew that he had not punched me.

  He had stabbed me.

  I touched the dent in the Kevlar Stealth that had saved my life, felt the sting of the bruise beyond.

  I closed my eyes, dizzy and sick from the pain in the back of my head, the rest of it coming in broken fragments.

  Screams from the pit. A man’s screams now. Greene with his jacket in his hands, beating wildly at the fire. Scarlet Bush scrambling out, her eyes wide with the horror. Light in the room from the fire in the hole. A lot of light, but dancing and uneven, making ghosts of us all.

  And the man – Bob the Butcher – punching Mallory in the chest, and in the arm, and in the side of the head. Mallory going down, his John Lennon glasses falling from his face. His face without his glasses no longer as hard as some old Viking, but vulnerable and lost and very easy to hurt.

  Then Bob the Butcher gone. Out of the secret space. Past us all. Getting away with it.

  And Whitestone waiting for him in the basement.

  Bob walking into her forearm smash, the blow turning his head almost 180 degrees, and Whitestone, tiny woman that she was, perched on his back, cuffing him and punctuating his rights by bouncing his face against the ground.

  ‘You are under arrest.’ Smash. ‘You do not have to say anything.’ Smash.

  I remembered a line from training days: a formal arrest will always be accompanied by physically taking control. She was doing that all right.

  ‘But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court.’ Smash. ‘Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

  Smash smash smash.

  Bob the Butcher finally starting to beg.

  And then I heard someone scream Mallory’s name as the lights came on and I blacked out.

  26

  THE PAIN IN my back kicked me awake.

  It started in the lower ribs and worked its way round to the spine, like some new pain meeting up with the pain that was already there. A bright bar of winter sunshine came through the crack in the curtains, telling me I had not been out for more than a few hours.

  I groaned and slowly got out of bed.

  They had me in one of those hospital smocks that reveal your behind to the world. I tore it off and found my clothes in the small room’s wardrobe. I was sitting on the bed struggling to put my socks on when the nurse came in, a large-bosomed bossy matron – the type that expect to be obeyed. This one was Jamaican.

  ‘How’s the boy?’ I said, my skin crawling at the thought of PC Greene alone in the pit, trying to put out the fire with nothing but his bare hands and his jacket. The effort of speaking set off a leaden throb at the back of my skull and I touched my head, expecting bandages or blood. There was nothing. Only the thud of pain.

  ‘You’re getting back in bed right this minute,’ the nurse said.

  I couldn’t get my socks on. My back would not bend forward far enough. So I tossed them away. Slipped my shoes on. Stood up.

  ‘How’s the boy?’ I said.

  Now I had upset her.

  ‘Do you think I’ve got all day for this nonsense? You have possible concussion. We’re keeping you here for observation. Do you want me to get the doctor? Is that what I have to do?’

  I was fully dressed by the time she came back with the doctor. Fully dressed apart from my socks. The doctor was young and Indian. Far too tired and busy to argue with me. Or too experienced. But he clearly thought I was stupid.

  ‘I’m not discharging you,’ he said. ‘Is that quite clear? You’re leaving at your own risk.’

  ‘I get it. Where’s the boy?’

  ‘Intensive Care Unit. Top floor. Let me take you.’

  PC Greene slept the sleep of the heavily drugged. Both his hands were wrapped in bandages. There was an IV drip by his side.

  That was it. Just his hands. But it was probably enough to end his life as a copper.

  ‘He has second-degree burns on both hands,’ the doctor said. ‘That means the burns penetrated the deeper skin but as far as we can tell there’s no damage to muscle and bone. When he’s well enough to be moved, we’ll get him down to the Queen Victoria in West Sussex. It’s the best burns hospital in the south-east of England.’ The doctor turned to leave. ‘He’s a very brave young man,’ he said, almost as an afterthought.

  I thought of the day I met Billy Greene, almost unable to stand after a look at his first body, and the raw shame he had felt when they had made him a canteen cowboy. I wondered if he knew how much good stuff there was inside him. And I wondered how he would make a living for the rest of his life.

  Then I went to work.

  They had Bob the Butcher in an intervie
w room.

  In the observation room you could watch through a one-way mirror or on a CCTV feed. There were lots of people I didn’t know crowding in front of the mirror. I looked up at the screen.

  Whitestone and Gane were sitting across from Bob and his lawyer. She was pretty and prim, dressed in business black.

  The lawyers are getting younger, I thought.

  Bob had a broken nose and the two black eyes that came with it but none of it had wiped the smirk from his face.

  He looked like a cocky little ape.

  ‘Ian Peck,’ Whitestone said, and her voice seemed changed as it came through the speaker. ‘We are charging you with murder.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  ‘But it’s not him,’ I said.

  Some of the crowd standing in front of the mirror turned to look at me. But then they looked away.

  ‘This is bullshit,’ I said.

  There was a big duty sergeant on the door of the interview room.

  ‘You can’t go in there,’ he said as I came towards him.

  I shoved him aside. He didn’t fight back.

  They all looked up as I came in. Whitestone and Gane. Bob and his pretty lawyer. Somebody said my name.

  I reached in my pocket and took out the FS commando dagger I had borrowed from Carol at the Imperial War Museum. It clattered across the table.

  ‘Show me how you did it,’ I said.

  The duty sergeant was in the room now and, after getting the nod from Whitestone, he put his hands on me. I pushed him away. He was a stronger man than me but he held back.

  The lawyer was on her feet, whining about some legal point that I didn’t quite catch. The pain was in my spine, and my skull, and directly behind my eyes.

  The knife was right in front of Bob.

  ‘Come on, tough guy,’ I said. ‘Show me how you cut all those throats. You lying bastard, you fucking fantasist, you pathetic little man.’

  Gane was shouting at me. They were all shouting at me. Apart from Bob. He looked at me, and at the knife, and back at me, as if weighing something in his mind.

  He licked his lips. He stood up.

  The room suddenly fell silent.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, quietly now, and I smiled to give him encouragement. ‘Show me how you did it.’

  Bob – Peck, whatever his name was – picked up the knife.

  They all started shouting again.

  There were hands on me, and my hands were shoving them away, and Bob was looking at me with the knife in his hand. He essayed a slashing movement in slow motion.

  ‘I cut them.’

  I stepped forward.

  ‘You lying piece of shit,’ I said.

  I took his wrist in one fist and punched his bicep with the other. The knife fell to the table.

  ‘Wolfe,’ Whitestone said. ‘Max, please listen to me.’

  ‘He didn’t kill those men,’ I said. ‘Hugo Buck. Adam Jones. Guy Philips. I’m telling you, he doesn’t know how. It’s not him.’

  Then I saw the tears in Whitestone’s eyes.

  ‘We’re arresting him for the murder of DCI Mallory,’ she said. ‘He bled out on the way to the hospital.’

  The duty sergeant was holding me now.

  ‘I’m sorry, Max,’ Whitestone said. ‘The boss didn’t make it.’

  MIR-1 was deserted apart from Wren.

  She looked up as I walked in.

  ‘You have to see this, Wolfe.’

  I walked to the window and stared down at Savile Row.

  I thought of Margaret Mallory and how she had told me that Scout and I were a family when it felt like the entire world wanted to tell us something else, that we were not a real family at all, and the tears came then, blurring the traffic on the street far below and twisting my mouth into a rictus of raw, hopeless grief.

  They would have told her by now, I thought; she would know that her husband was never coming home again by now; she would be alone in the small house in Pimlico with her dog and her photographs and her memories and her smashed heart. The knowledge choked up my throat and clawed at my insides and made my useless tears feel as though they were without end.

  ‘Max?’ Wren said.

  I looked out across the rooftops of Savile Row. I wiped my eyes with the palm of my hands. I didn’t turn around.

  ‘DCI Mallory died,’ I said, and my voice sounded strange to me, as if I was somebody else now. ‘Stab wound in the neck. Dead before they could get him to the hospital.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘He was the kindest man I ever met. And the best copper. But you really need to see this. It’s Bob’s last post online. Before we went in and got him. Are you listening to me?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, I’m not listening to you, Edie. I don’t care. Whatever it is, I really don’t care. I don’t want to see it. I don’t care what he said.’

  ‘You need to, Max. Because the killer is still out there. Because a world full of vicious little creeps is still out there. Will you please look at me?’

  Silence.

  Then Wren was suddenly by my side, dragging me to her workstation.

  ‘Look, will you?’ she said, not gently.

  I looked.

  The final message on Bob the Butcher’s timeline.

  There was no picture of Robert Oppenheimer.

  There was no mushroom cloud.

  In their place was a small black-and-white photograph. At first sight it looked like nothing – an abstract little squiggle of broken planes. But when I looked closer I saw that it was a city. It was an entire city, destroyed in an instant. My eye flicked across the hashtag, like a command to his one million followers.

  #killallpigs

  And then I read the message, and I did not understand, so I read it again, the rhythm of the numbers and words so familiar to me that at first I thought they were not on the screen but only in my head.

  ‘Isn’t that your home address?’ Wren said.

  I was gone.

  They were coming back from school. Scout and Mrs Murphy and Stan. My daughter and Mrs Murphy looking down at the dog and laughing. Stan trotting happily by their side. Something in his mouth. A scrap of bagel. The smiles vanishing when they saw me.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Mrs Murphy said.

  ‘We have to go,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  I got Scout and Stan into the back of the X5, told Scout to put her seat belt on, and then I drove, pushing down hard, just ahead of the evening rush, Mrs Murphy standing on the street in my rear-view mirror, watching us go.

  ‘But where are we going?’ Scout said as we crossed Waterloo Bridge.

  ‘We’re going to see your mother,’ I said.

  She was standing on the lawn of a house on a road in a part of town where you could believe that nothing bad ever happened.

  There was a small toddler crawling at her feet and a baby growing inside her.

  Not my children. From her new man.

  Anne.

  It is such an ordinary, old-fashioned English name and I do not think I will ever be able to hear it without it pulling at my heart.

  Anne, Anne, Anne.

  You might not believe it – I could hardly believe it myself – but there had been a world, not so long ago, when we were as close to each other as we had been to anyone we had ever known in our young lives. When we laughed all the time; when a good life together was before us; when every night we lit a candle in the corner of our bedroom because we were unable to sleep, because it would have meant a kind of parting for a few hours. And now all that was gone; now that is all over, she told me, with one small stroke of the belly that was round with another man’s child.

  Anne, I thought. And looking at her now on the lawn, happy in this new place without me, I was shocked by something that I could not admit was the remains of our love.

  You remember the pain and the anger and the grief of coming apart. You remember the raised voices and worries about money and the tears of a woman who
finds that she is living a different life to the one she was expecting. You remember all of that, and you remember the letter that came two days after she said she had to go to stay with her parents to clear her head.

  Dear Max, I am sorry but I have to go. I never wanted this to happen. But I love him and I am expecting his baby. He has moved so don’t try looking for him . . .

  You remember all of that, but you forget the love. It is a shock to be reminded of it, to admit to yourself that it existed at all, and perhaps still does.

  I was parked across the road from her house on a beautiful street in a leafy south London suburb. Scout and the dog slept on the back seat.

  I did not wake them.

  And when another car pulled into the drive, and another man got out, and Anne smiled and kissed him on the mouth, I knew I was not going to.

  I watched them go back inside the house, the new man with his arm around Anne’s pregnant waist. She looked straight at me as she closed the door. But of course by then it was far too late for anything.

  What about Scout? People sometimes ask me how a mother could leave a child. All I can say is, some people get a new home. And some people get a new family. And some people – mostly they are men, but not always – they make a lifetime of excuses for themselves, and they do what my wife did.

  They get a new life.

  Panic drove me out there. Reality drove me back. But as the night fell black and cold, I still wanted the same thing.

  I wanted my daughter to be safe.

  And as I drove back to Smithfield I saw that the safest place in the world for Scout would always be with me. Because I would kill for her and I would die for her. I would do anything for Scout because Scout was my everything.

  There was a crowd outside our apartment block. Friday night men and women, red faces and white teeth, loud and laughing, bottles and glasses in their hands, making no attempt to move out of the way for a man with a sleeping child in his arms and a dog on a lead beside him.

  I barged my way through them, sharp elbows and dipped shoulders, putting my weight into it, daring them to say something, to do something, to reveal themselves. To let me know they were for me, they had come for me, and now was the time. But there was blood in my eyes, murder in my face, and they said nothing. They got out of my way.