The Murder Bag

by Tony Parsons

  ‘He was going to come in,’ I said. ‘He was going to make a statement.’

  Whitestone looked at me and shook her head. ‘Mr Khan agreed to be interviewed in the presence of his lawyer,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘But how did he die?’

  Whitestone gestured angrily at the screen. ‘How do you think he died? He died in the fire.’

  Then I was through the door and into the mortuary, and Elsa Olsen was looking up from the burned cadaver on the stainless steel slab before her.

  ‘Scrubs and hairnets, Wolfe. You know that.’

  ‘How did he die, Elsa?’

  Whitestone was right behind me.

  ‘How did he die, Elsa?’ I said again. ‘Was it like the rest of them? Did someone cut his throat?’

  ‘DC Wolfe,’ Whitestone said calmly, ‘get out of here.’

  I ignored her.

  ‘Elsa? You have twenty years of experience. You’re in a million-pound state-of-the-art mortuary. You must know how he died.’

  Whitestone gripped my shoulder hard enough to turn me around. How could such a slight woman summon up such reserves of physical strength? There was a rage in Whitestone, and she let me glimpse it now.

  ‘You think someone cut his carotid arteries, don’t you, Max?’ she said. ‘You think someone stuck a commando dagger in his neck and then torched the house. You think our killer is still out there.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I think.’

  Whitestone gestured at the blackened corpse. ‘But why would they bother? I mean, really – look at the state of him. Why would anyone bother cutting the poor bastard’s throat?’

  ‘Because he wouldn’t commit murder with fire,’ I said. ‘Too unpredictable.’

  ‘Why is this murder? I saw TDC Wren’s report. I’ve spoken to Gane and Fire Officer Truman. A rich, chain-smoking drunk drops a cigarette butt near a fuel tank. The next thing you know – smoked Salman. Why exactly does that surprise you?’

  ‘Do you know what oxidation is, Max?’ Elsa said gently. ‘It’s what fire does. It’s what fire is. Oxidation is what happens when a fuel substance combines with oxygen to produce light and heat. It’s what makes fire a living, destructive entity.’ She looked at the burned piece of meat on the stainless steel slab. ‘There’s no evidence that someone cut his throat. Because fire destroys everything.’

  At the Cromwell Green entrance to the Palace of Westminster, I showed them my warrant card.

  I kept it in my hand as I went through the security turnstiles, Big Ben ringing in the sky high above, then past the armed officers in twos and fours cradling their Heckler & Koch assault rifles and finally through the search point just before you enter the great expanse of Westminster Hall.

  Under the hammer-beam roof, the thousand-year-old hall teemed with life – guides and tourist groups, journalists and lobbyists, MPs and their constituents. I walked quickly past them all and up the stairs at the far end, where a security guard stopped me under the great medieval window that spilled winter light into the hall. I showed him my warrant card too and told him that I was here to see the MP for Hillingdon North.

  ‘And is Mr King expecting you, sir?’

  ‘Probably.’

  He hesitated for just a moment.

  ‘Central Lobby, sir.’

  I turned left and walked down to the Central Lobby, where great Prime Ministers get full-sized statues and mediocre Prime Ministers get life-sized busts. I spoke to the doorkeeper and he went off to find the MP for Hillingdon North.

  He came back with a cool blonde in glasses and a business suit.

  ‘DC Wolfe? I’m Siri Voss, Mr King’s PA.’ Just the hint of a Scandinavian accent. She was the woman who had called King in when we spoke out on the terrace. We shook hands. ‘As you can appreciate, this is not a good day.’

  And then I saw him. Coming out of the corridors that led to the House of Commons.

  Ben King looked at me, white-faced and shaken.

  ‘Detective Wolfe,’ he said. ‘I thought it was over.’

  ‘It’s just getting started,’ I said. ‘What did you do twenty years ago?’

  He kept walking, trying to shake me off the way he shook off the world. I fell into step beside him. I could feel the light touch of his blonde PA on my arm. People were staring at us. Everyone was staring at us.

  ‘What happened to Anya Bauer?’ I said. ‘What was Salman Khan going to tell me? What happened at that school?’

  He stopped, a powerful man in his prime, accustomed to being in control but suddenly badly rattled by events.

  ‘Can we do this some other time?’ he said.

  ‘How about when your brother comes back?’

  ‘My brother? You want to talk to my brother?’ His eyes blazed with something I could not read. ‘I don’t think that will be possible.’

  Then he was walking away, and I was suddenly aware of Siri Voss standing right in front of me.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Oh, please leave him.’

  And I saw the two coppers she had brought with her, holding their assault rifles and looking at me with embarrassment more than anything else.

  ‘It’s not over!’ I shouted at King’s back. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

  But there was something in the face of Siri Voss that made me let him go.

  I was at home making scrambled omelette for Scout’s tea when DCS Swire called.

  ‘You’re suspended and under investigation by the police Professional Standards Department pending an IPPC inquiry,’ the chief super told me.

  ‘Charges?’ I said, stirring the eggs.

  ‘Neglect or failure in duty. Oppressive conduct or harassment. Whatever sticks. There’s already more than enough.’ A pause. ‘Have you seen the news? You haven’t even seen it, have you? You don’t even know.’ Swire sighed with disbelief. ‘Do yourself a favour, Wolfe, you dumb bastard. Turn on the TV.’

  She hung up.

  I served up Scout’s scrambled omelette then turned on the BBC. It looked like the news looked every night. A bomb in Iraq. A riot in Athens. A meeting in Brussels. A missing child. A flatlining economy. And then came photographs of three soldiers.

  ‘. . . Private Himal Sameer, twenty-two, Corporal Bibek Prabin, twenty-three, and Captain Ned King, thirty-five, of the Royal Gurkha Rifles—’

  ‘Daddy?’

  ‘Wait, wait. Let me watch this, angel.’

  ‘. . . in Helmand when their armoured vehicle was hit by an improvised explosive device. All three died of their injuries in the hospital at Camp Bastion.’

  The two young Gurkhas wore serious expressions in their official portraits, their features rigid with fierce pride and there was Ned King, smiling broadly for the camera, as if he held a secret the world could never share.

  32

  PEREGRINE WAUGH WALKED down Potter’s Field High Street, his tremendous height raising that gaunt bony head above the crowds and almost brushing the bunting and Union Jacks that fluttered above the streets.

  It was just three days since the smiling face of Captain Ned King had appeared on the evening news, and now every boy from the old school was there, gathered in their houses, youngest at the front, but the Head Master said not a word to any of them. He did not need to, for he could make a boy straighten his slovenly tie with just his towering presence; he could kill idle chatter with one fierce look.

  Waugh paused when he reached the boy soldiers of the Combined Cadet Force, four lines of them at the end of the high street, self-consciously rigid with military discipline, and for the first time that day he smiled.

  The school and the town had turned out for the homecoming of Captain Ned King.

  I saw Sergeant Lane, the local copper who had been no help with my enquiry about Anya Bauer’s disappearance, taking his duties more seriously today. He patrolled down the empty street, closed to traffic for the day, and greeted the Head Master with something like a cringing bow.

  I glimpsed faces I knew in the crow
d. On the far side of the high street I saw Mrs Jones, the mother of Adam Jones, the second victim, her face skull-like under her headscarf, almost totally consumed by her cancer now, supported by Rosalita, the Filipina housekeeper, who had a protective arm wrapped around her employer.

  A little further down I saw Len Zukov standing with Sergeant Tom Monk, the burned features of the physio from Barrington Court making him look like some exotic foreign guest among the uniformly white faces of the Potter’s Field townsfolk. Did I see some of them shiver at the sight of the injured soldier? Did I see fathers and mothers lift their staring small children and carry them away to a less disturbing part of the high street? Tom Monk gave no sign that he had noticed. He stared at the empty road, waiting for the homecoming of another soldier.

  And I saw Natasha, standing alone at the end of the street where the crowds thinned out.

  Then all heads turned to watch a lone vehicle coming down the empty high street. Murmurs of resentment. It was a sleek black Mercedes saloon and not a hearse.

  Sergeant Lane stepped forward, barking commands at the uniformed officers who stood watch over the docile crowds, holding up one hand, commanding the Mercedes to stop. When it did, a uniformed chauffeur sprang from the driver’s seat and opened the rear door.

  Ben King got out of the car and the crowd let out an audible gasp at the sight of the MP.

  He was wearing the jacket his brother had worn on the day he died. A British Army desert camouflage jacket in two colours – swirls of sand and stone – stained with a third colour, a deep bloody red that was already turning brown.

  And now I realised that there were cameras for the homecoming. There was TV, press photographers, and journalists. I saw Scarlet Bush stick a sharp elbow in a photographer’s eye as the media broke through the loose police cordon and spilled on to the street, swarming around Ben King.

  ‘Dear Ben,’ said Peregrine Waugh, suddenly right next to me. ‘He always was an exhibitionist.’

  ‘Get them back!’ Sergeant Lane was shouting at his officers, red-faced with fury.

  Ben King walked slowly from the street to the pavement, his face expressionless, his brother’s jacket hanging limply on his shoulders and radiating another world of pure horror.

  Was he wearing the army jacket over a suit and tie? It was impossible to say. All anyone saw was the jacket.

  He stood in front of the Combined Cadet Force. The young soldiers stared straight ahead, trying not to look at him. Cameras capered before them as young police officers tried to restore order.

  ‘Let them see what they have done,’ murmured Waugh. ‘The words of Jacqueline Kennedy when she refused to change out of the pink Chanel suit that was stained with the blood of her assassinated husband. Let them see what they have done! Yes, let them see.’

  A scrum was forming on the pavement. Officers had pushed the press back and King’s PA, Siri Voss, was handing out a press release. Two journalists walked behind us, each with one of the A4 sheets in their hands.

  ‘So it’s a British Army DPM desert camouflage jacket,’ said the first. ‘Does it say what DPM is?’

  ‘Yeah, there, look – disruptive pattern material,’ said the second. ‘There’s the front page tomorrow, mate.’

  ‘He should have worn the full kit. Better shot with the full kit.’

  ‘Siri says there was nothing left of the trousers.’

  They were silent for a moment.

  ‘God.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  There were tears, now. Some emotional dam had broken in the women and the men of the town, and their children took their cue, confused and upset by the unravelling of the adults.

  The boys from Potter’s Field gritted their teeth, set their jaws and held out for longer.

  I looked at Peregrine Waugh. The Head Master was dry-eyed.

  ‘A terrible day for you, sir,’ I said.

  ‘Ned was a soldier,’ he said. ‘I could not wish for a better death for him, only a better war. When did the first British soldier die in that wretched country? 1839? “When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan plains – and the women come out to cut up what remains – just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains – and go to your god like a soldier.”’

  ‘Suicide?’

  He looked at me with disdain. ‘Kipling, actually. But there’s no shame in suicide, detective. It’s only milksop Christianity that clucks with disapproval. The Romans and the Greeks saw suicide largely as a pragmatic act. A graceful and courageous exit when life has become unendurable. Ah – I think Captain King’s coming now.’

  A black hearse was moving slowly down the high street. In the back was a coffin wrapped in the Union Jack.

  ‘Suicide didn’t seem like a pragmatic act for James Sutcliffe,’ I said, watching the first of the flowers being tossed from the pavement. They fell on the windscreen, they fell on the gleaming black hood, and they fell under the slowly turning wheels. ‘For him, suicide seemed like an act of despair. Both times.’

  Waugh sighed, his eyes never leaving the hearse.

  ‘I’m afraid I have no idea what goes on in the mind of every disturbed adolescent,’ he said. ‘But I’m with the Romans and the Greeks – every human body is the property of the gods. Good day, detective.’

  I thought that the Head Master was going to join Ben King in his bloodstained army jacket. Then I thought he might stand with the stiff fierce lines of the Combined Cadet Force. Instead he disappeared into the crowd, and the next time I saw him he was standing beside a small, snivelling Potter’s Field boy. Waugh had placed a large white hand on the shoulder of the boy’s green and purple blazer. I saw the Head Master’s mouth move.

  ‘There, there,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘There, there.’

  The hearse was passing now, the windscreen wipers swishing once, twice, three times to clear the driver’s view of the flowers that threatened to cover the glass. Roses, orchids, lilies – expensive flowers bought and thrown by the people of the town.

  The boys of Potter’s Field brought no flowers for the homecoming of Captain Ned King.

  But later, as I walked through the deserted school grounds, past the chapel and into the small graveyard, I saw that someone had placed a single lily on the tomb of King Henry’s dogs.

  33

  SATURDAY MORNING IN Smithfield ABC.

  I was down on the mat stretching my back. Upward-facing dog – hold it; downward-facing dog – hold it. The pain seemed to release itself. It still hurt but I was not contained in one tight slab. It was looser. It was better. I could feel it.

  This was the quiet time in Fred’s gym. Otis Redding on the sound system and the sound of fourteen-ounce gloves smacking pads.

  There was a young woman banging the heavy bag, an older woman watching the business news as she ran on the treadmill, and, up in the ring, Fred wearing a T-shirt that told you PLAY HARD OR GO HOME as he took some kid in his late teens on the pads. North African, a big toothy grin, either a pro or thinking about it. The kid was fast, slick, hitting the pads very hard without apparently making much of an effort.

  ‘Get that right all the way back to the chin,’ Fred was telling him. ‘Don’t let it fade away. And don’t stand there taking photographs. Get out when you’ve done your work. And throw punches in bunches, punches in bunches.’

  When the bell rang Fred would look down at me, the pads still on his hands, and he would name the part of my body that needed to be stretched.

  ‘Hamstring . . . calves . . . abductors . . . Did you do your abductors? Do your abductors.’

  I laid the front of my left leg on a bench, placed my right foot on the floor and gently eased my shoulders back, feeling the stretch in the muscles at the top of my leg and the bottom of my spine.

  Then Ben King walked in.

  The woman on the heavy bag looked at him, then looked again. It had been a week since he was the lead item on the news, since he was on every front page, since he wore his brother’s bloodstained camouflage
jacket on the rolling news. Satisfied it was really him, the woman looked away and went back to her work on the heavy bag.

  He was dressed for a run.

  ‘I wasn’t party to anything that happened at Potter’s Field,’ he said to me. A beat. ‘But I know who was.’

  I eased myself out of the stretch and sat on the bench.

  ‘You’re coming forward with new information?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why didn’t you come forward before now?’

  King turned his head as a buzzer sounded in the ring.

  ‘Time!’ shouted Fred.

  Ben King looked back at me. ‘Because I loved my brother.’

  ‘Do you know the identity of the man who killed Hugo Buck?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Adam Jones? Guy Philips?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Salman Khan?’

  ‘That was an accident, wasn’t it? A fire.’

  ‘What happened to Anya Bauer?’

  ‘Who’s Anya Bauer?’

  I stood up and took a fistful of his T-shirt near the neck. He didn’t flinch.

  ‘Are you wasting my time?’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘Who was Anya Bauer?’ I said. ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘I don’t know that name. I never knew any name. I never even saw the girl you’re talking about. But I know that . . . questionable acts were done at that school. I know – to my eternal regret – that my brother Ned was a party to them. And, yes, my friends, too. And I know the name of the adult who instigated those questionable acts. Because he was the same man who sexually abused us for years.’

  I still had his T-shirt in my fist. I twisted it until our faces were almost touching.

  ‘Don’t lie to me,’ I said.

  ‘I’m past lying,’ he said. ‘People get lost. My brother Ned got lost. When we were boys, I threw a glass at his face across the breakfast table. Why do you think I threw that glass at his face? Because I loved him. Because of the unspeakable things he was doing. Because of what was happening to him. Because of that man.’

  ‘The Head Master,’ I said. ‘Peregrine Waugh.’