The Murder Bag

by Tony Parsons

  ‘Oy!’ Fred called. He was talking to me. I still had a fistful of Ben King’s T-shirt in my hand. ‘Take it in the ring or take it outside.’

  I let go of King’s T-shirt. He was smiling.

  ‘I haven’t boxed since school,’ he said.

  ‘You boxed at school?’ I said.

  ‘Of course! All good schools teach their boys to box. May I borrow these?’

  He was pointing at a pair of yellow fourteen-ounce Cleto Reyes gloves.

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ I said.

  His mouth twisted with amusement. ‘I’m sure you’re right.’

  I stared at him for a moment.

  ‘Find a headguard,’ I said.

  He was a boxer not a fighter. He kept his distance, up on the balls of his feet, dancing sideways as I advanced, and for a moment I thought he had lost his nerve and did not want to fight.

  Then I stuck out a left jab that fell short and he came back with a stiff counter that went straight through my guard and smacked hard against my nose. By the time I had angrily swung back, he had skipped away.

  We repeated our little dance. He would wait for me to strike, then slip, block or move out of range, and come back with a fast, straight counter.

  The sweat was pouring under my headguard. I had not sparred for weeks and I could feel my ring rust, that tiny loss of pace you get when you haven’t boxed for a while. I was one second too slow in everything I did, and nothing is more draining than being hit without having the chance to hit back.

  A buzzer sounded. One minute gone and his confidence was growing. And that was good because I jabbed, he countered with a jab, and stayed close to smack me with a right cross. It caught me high on the headguard but not hard enough to stop me slipping inside and burying a left hook into his bottom rib.

  King went down on one knee, one glove pressed against his ribs, and his face contorted with pain. A body shot sticks around in a way a head shot never does, and when he got to his feet he was less cocky, keeping his distance, happy to get in the odd counter, happy to stay away from another dig in the ribs.

  The buzzer counted down from ten and it was over. We had sparred for three minutes and were both totally spent.

  ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘That’s harder than squash.’

  Fred was smiling at us.

  ‘Nice spar,’ he said. And to Ben King, ‘Keep those elbows tucked in. Going to do another couple of rounds?’

  ‘Perhaps some other time,’ King said, still breathing hard.

  Fred laughed and went off to collect the towels that were strewn around the gym. King and I sat there saying nothing, drenched in sweat, locked in the strange intimacy of two men who have just shared a boxing ring.

  ‘What do you want, Max?’ he said.

  ‘I want justice,’ I said. ‘And I want the truth. And I want it to be over.’

  He fixed me with his politician’s look – that look that suddenly saw you, the look that endlessly flattered you, the look that saw you in your true light for the first time.

  ‘And I want what you want,’ he said.

  ‘The abuse started as soon as we arrived,’ King said. ‘Mental abuse before the sexual abuse. “Shakespeare is here, T. E. Lawrence is here, and you are here because you are nothing, you are specks of dirt on my shoes”. And then the building up – feeling you were special, almost acolytes – by this God-like and punitive father figure who knew everything there was to know about history, art, literature, war and the ways of the flesh. We were thirteen years old! There was, shall we say, a disparity of power. We wanted to please him. My God – we wanted that more than anything in the world.’

  The grey ribbon of motorway hummed and unfurled ahead of me, eating up the miles. I let him talk.

  ‘And he gave us all what we were looking for. The insecure – Adam, Salman – were made to feel as if they belonged, as if they were part of a family, a country, a secret world. The strong – Hugo, Ned, Guy – were made to feel they were clever. The exceptional – James, of course – were made to feel that they were touched by God. And he told us we were special, and he taught us to sneer at the rest of the world, and he talked of beauty and truth as he put us in his mouth.’

  He was silent for miles.

  ‘I bailed out,’ King said eventually. ‘I don’t know why it was possible for me and not the others. Some basic survival instinct I had and they lacked. They were all exceptional boys, in their own way. James – James was brilliant, truly gifted. Adam was a child prodigy. Hugo was the school’s athlete. Guy – Piggy – was a force of nature. And Salman – Salman was so touching, trying so hard to fit in, so determined, so much more English than the rest of us. And everyone loved Ned. Ned was good.’

  ‘Why did you throw the glass at his face?’

  ‘They were getting older. It was no longer enough to perform sexual acts on the Head Master in his study and then sit down for a chapter of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. They were curious, they were growing boys. Hugo and Guy had been caught in town with a couple of local girls. Women – grown women – went wild at the sight of James.’ He laughed. ‘And Piggy was masturbating himself into a coma every night.’ He chewed his bottom lip. ‘It was a world without women. So he told them that he would find them one. A woman. A girl. And let them see how little they were missing.’

  ‘What did your brother tell you about the girl?’

  ‘He told me she was being given as a special treat.’ A pause. ‘Which was the exact moment I threw the glass at Ned’s face. And after that, he told me nothing.’

  I turned off the motorway. In the distance, across the empty fields, you could already see the black towers of Potter’s Field.

  The boy was small for his age and he wore a Potter’s Field school blazer over his fencing whites. He sat on the steps of the main building, pushing back his mop of dark hair as he stared at the paperback in his hands.

  ‘Any good?’ Ben King said.

  The boy looked up, startled. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Book any good?’

  King held out his hand and the boy passed him the paperback, standing up as he did so, self-consciously smoothing his green and purple blazer.

  ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence,’ King said. He opened it up and read, as if to himself. ‘“But at last Dahoum drew me: ‘Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all,’ and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past.” I read this one when I was your age. How you getting on with it?’

  ‘Just started it, sir. Pretty good stuff, sir.’

  King nodded at him. ‘Waiting to see the Master?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Private lesson today?’

  A red flush flooded the boy’s pale face. ‘Yes, sir. Every Saturday morning this half. Immediately after fencing club.’

  King handed the boy his book. ‘Lesson’s cancelled.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Go back to your house. Practise your lunge and parry. Do your prep. Write to your mother.’

  The boy looked doubtful.

  King clapped his hands once. ‘Go on then!’

  The boy went, and we climbed the stairs to the Head Master’s rooms.

  Peregrine Waugh answered the door in a plain white kimono. His bliss-heavy eyes took a moment to focus. A smile leapt to his face at the sight of Ben King and died when he saw me.

  ‘Ah,’ he said.

  We followed him inside. Heavy brocade curtains, pulled shut at noon. A thick fug of smoke from whatever had been in the water pipe that sat unlit on an oak desk. Piles of books everywhere.

  ‘To what do I owe—’

  ‘Actually we’ve come here for the truth, Perry,’ King told him. ‘Finally.’

  I couldn’t breathe in this place. I pulled back the curtains, opened the windows as wide as they would go. On the playing fields, there was the Firs
t XV playing rugby against another school watched by a scattering of pupils and two sports masters, and more boys in bright training bibs carrying cones and five-a-side nets to the football pitch. Their shouts and laughter drifted up to me.

  ‘The truth? You wouldn’t dare! Think of your career, Benjamin. The Right Honourable Member for . . . what’s the name of that dreary little suburb you represent? It’s slipped my mind.’

  ‘Hillingdon North,’ King said.

  Waugh dropped backwards on to a red velvet sofa, pulling primly at his kimono as one hairy leg with the dimensions of a small tree popped into view. And then, again, the savagery of the despot who has no experience of being challenged: ‘You would not dare.’

  ‘The world is changing, Perry,’ King said calmly.

  ‘Really?’ Waugh said. ‘How unfortunate.’

  ‘It is for you, Perry. Because we’re finally learning not to despise the victims of abuse.’ He let it sink in. ‘You broke a bond of trust. You abused the children in your care.’

  ‘Genius makes its own rules.’

  King shook his head. ‘If you have a genius, Perry, then it is for destroying the lives of children. How many would you say? Over the years.’

  ‘Ratting me out, are you, Benjamin? You little snitch. You little shit. You grass. Is that the correct term? Everybody hates a tell-tale, King.’

  ‘Hundreds?’

  ‘Oh, more. Thousands. An MP.’ Waugh laughed. ‘A politician. And I wanted greatness for you! Remember?’ Measuring the air with a languid hand. ‘The good old days. “Shakespeare is here. T. E. Lawrence is here. And you boys are here.”’

  ‘Oh, Perry,’ King said. ‘Then where does that leave you?’

  I picked up the pipe and breathed in, inhaling something that stank like a curry made of gasoline and flowers. A heavy, musky, strangely beautiful smell. I had never smelled it before. I had only heard tales.

  ‘Opium?’ I said.

  Waugh sniffed. ‘The honey of the gods,’ he said, smiling to reveal a jumble of crumbling teeth, like the mouth of an elderly weasel. ‘The keys of paradise. The gardens of gold. “Boy – as you love me – I charge you to fold – pipe over pipe into gardens of gold”. Did you ever read Aleister Crowley, detective? No? Not your thing?’

  I crossed the room.

  ‘What happened to the girl?’ I said.

  The Head Master looked genuinely perplexed. ‘I thought we were talking about the boys. I thought that’s what you were going to arrest me for. The boys. I thought that’s why I was being thrown to the baying mob. The thousands of boys. What bloody girl?’

  The open palm of my hand cracked against his cheek.

  ‘Ouch,’ he said, recoiling as if I had hurt feelings more than flesh. ‘That was very painful.’

  ‘Anya Bauer,’ I said. ‘German. Blonde. Pretty. Around fifteen years old when she passed through your hands some twenty years ago.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That girl.’ His eyes darted across the floor. Then he closed them. ‘She rests. She sleeps. Perchance to dream.’

  ‘Where?’ I said.

  He was looking at Ben King.

  ‘What do you expect me to do, Benjamin? Beg for forgiveness? Seek counselling? Repent my sins?’

  ‘What would the Romans have recommended, Perry?’ King said. ‘Or the Greeks? Or T. E. Lawrence?’

  ‘I don’t know. A cup of tea and a nice lie down?’

  I slapped him again. Harder this time, leaving my red mark livid on his skull-like head.

  ‘Where?’ I said.

  ‘With the dogs,’ he said. ‘With the bloody dogs.’

  ‘The dogs?’

  ‘You’ve hurt me now,’ he said, edging away from me, gathering his kimono in his long bony fingers. ‘Truly. I’m very upset. Police brutality.’ And then he began to snivel with self-pity. He turned to King, pleading. ‘May I change? Before we leave? Ben?’

  ‘Look at me,’ I said quietly.

  Waugh looked at me.

  ‘What did you do to her?’ I said.

  He gathered the neck of his kimono. ‘I never touched the little tart!’ he said. ‘Not until it was time to put her down. Nobody else had the stomach for it.’

  King was looking at me, struggling to breathe.

  ‘My God,’ he said, white-faced with shock. ‘My God.’

  ‘Your keys,’ I said to Waugh. ‘I need all the keys to this place. Move!’

  He moved stiffly across to his desk, rummaged for a while in a drawer then gave me two sets of keys. One was a little domestic set for Waugh’s front door and car. The other could have been a gaoler’s keys from a fairy tale, perhaps two dozen of every shape and age on a rust-flecked metal hoop – apparently the means of access to every door in Potter’s Field.

  When I had double-locked them inside Waugh’s rooms I stuffed both sets of keys in my pockets and went quickly down to the chapel and round the back to the old graveyard.

  I saw now, and for the first time, that there were many gravestones so old that time and weather had erased every word of their epitaphs. Their blank faces stared back at me. My pace slowed and faltered when I saw what someone had done to the tomb of Henry’s dogs.

  I could see it through the ancient trees and the rusting iron railings that guarded the grander tombs; I could see it quite clearly waiting for me on the far side of the leaning headstones and the forest of crosses and the cracked grey vaults. Watched by the sightless eyes of stone angels, I walked towards a great splash of red and black.

  Poppies.

  Someone had completely covered the tomb of King Henry VIII’s dogs with poppies.

  There were poppies in the shape of a cross, and poppies in round wreaths of every size, the wreaths of old soldiers and young children, all of them coming apart after spending long winter weeks out in the elements resting against monuments to the glorious dead.

  And there were single poppies that had come astray from the wreaths, or perhaps been worn for that week of remembrance in November and then discarded.

  Where had they all come from? Some must have been collected from the war memorial at Potter’s Field, but others must have come from war memorials in the town itself, and in surrounding towns.

  My vision filled with the red and black of the poppies, and even as my mind raced to understand, their message was clear.

  You are never forgotten.

  Fighting back an overwhelming urge to turn and run away, I pulled out my phone and called Elsa Olsen, reaching her voicemail.

  ‘Elsa,’ I said. ‘It’s me, Wolfe. Sorry – Saturday, and all that.’ I knelt by the tomb, touched the stone beneath the poppies, so suddenly and unexpectedly cold that it made my blood shiver. ‘And I’ll clear this with Whitestone and Swire as soon as I hang up, but I wanted you to be the first to know.’ I picked up a single poppy and held it in my hand. ‘I need an exhumation certificate.’

  There was a red Lexus parked outside the main building. King’s PA, Siri Voss, sat in the driver’s seat tapping away on a phone. She got out when she saw me, wearing jeans and leather jacket, off duty now, her quick smile changing to a frown of concern.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, confused. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m Mr King’s ride back into town,’ she said. ‘He called me. He doesn’t want to waste your time, or police resources.’ Her hand was on my arm. ‘Can I get you anything?’

  ‘I have to go,’ I said. ‘Upstairs.’

  ‘Of course.’ She hesitated. ‘When you have a chance – when things are better – when this ghastly business is over – I would love to talk to you. Mr King wants to start a charity in the name of your late colleague, DCI Mallory. A fund for the families of policemen killed in the line of duty. Is that something you would be interested in?’

  Her hand was on my arm again. It was a strange touch. It stayed there a little too long, yet somehow not long enough.

  ‘How’s Mrs Mallory coping?’ she tried. ‘How’s Margare
t?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, and felt a stab of real shame.

  She smiled and fell in behind me as I climbed the stairs and made my way to the Head Master’s rooms. Ben King was sitting at Waugh’s desk, his head in his hands, and when he looked up I saw the tears on his face.

  ‘I knew that boy,’ he said. ‘The boy outside. I knew that boy. Because he was me. And he was Ned. And he was all of us.’

  Siri flew to his side.

  ‘Where is he?’ I said, but King was good for nothing now, the pretty PA rocking him like a child as he wept.

  I moved quickly through the rooms, a feeling of dread rising in my stomach.

  And then I saw the water coming from under the bathroom door.

  It was locked from inside so I slammed my shoulder into it – nothing. And again. Nothing.

  The water was through my shoes and soaking my feet. I felt an icy calm descend on me as I remembered how to open a locked door quickly. I took a step back to give myself room and kicked the lock as hard as I could. The door flew open with a crack of metal and wood and I saw one of Waugh’s long white arms hanging over the side of the bath, fresh blood pouring from the open veins on his wrists, staining the side of the bathtub and the white tiles of the floor with long crimson streaks.

  There were soft white towels on heated rails and in little piles stacked neatly under the sink. I snatched them up and, sliding on the sopping floor, pressed them against his open wrists, and tied them tight around his limp white arms, and then threw them aside and started all over again when, in what seemed like seconds, his blood soaked through.

  I was screaming and cursing and calling for help as I pressed the towels against the open veins of Peregrine Waugh. It was only when I ran out of towels that I saw the lifeblood had drained from his body, that his eyes were staring at the ceiling without seeing. I stood there with no breath and no strength to move until I finally remembered to turn off the hot and cold running water.

  In the sudden silence the only sound was the boys down on the playing fields and, from the room behind me, the subdued sobbing of a grown man.

  ‘Open it up,’ DCI Whitestone said.

  By now the December night was cold and black but the lamps of the SOCOs encircled the tomb and drenched it in blazing light. A bitter wind whipped through the graveyard, rustling dead leaves and the poppies that someone had swept from the grave.