by Tony Parsons
I touched her hand and her eyes met mine.
‘Scout,’ I said, ‘it’s just you and me now. But we’re all right, aren’t we?’
She looked at her drawing and then back at me.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We’re all right.’
I breathed again.
‘Scout?’
‘What?’
‘I’m very, very proud that you’re my daughter.’
She got up and gave me an awkward embrace, her arm around my waist as I kissed her on top of her head. Then she broke off and went off to her bedroom, Stan trailing behind her, his tail up like a periscope.
I turned to the TV as Ben King came out of Number Ten and began walking towards the camera. Siri Voss was beside him, hugging her papers, but as they reached the camera she stepped aside with a smile, waiting for him just out of shot.
Ben King smiled. Then he cocked his head at the camera, and looked into it the way he had so often looked at me – a penetrating, lopsided look, disarmed and disarming, as if he saw something in you the rest of the world had yet to see.
Something glinted for a moment but I couldn’t tell if the fragment of light was on the TV screen or just inside my head.
And then I realised that Ben King had a glass eye.
And I saw that what James Sutcliffe had claimed was true. Someone had lost an eye in that room twenty years ago – a small forfeit for a young girl’s life. But it wasn’t Hugo Buck.
How had I missed it?
You, I thought, as Ben King smiled for the cameras in Downing Street. You.
And I saw a vision of two boys at a breakfast table, twin brothers, arguing with a fury that neither of them had known before, identical in every way apart from their hearts, and one of the brothers threw a glass with full force at the other’s face. And I knew it wasn’t Ned who was in that basement room the night they stole Anya Bauer’s life.
It was his brother, Ben.
‘Daddy?’ Scout said.
She was holding the junior boxing gloves I had bought her – one of those unsuccessful presents that parents so often buy for their children, when they still hold on to the vain hope that their mutual interests might possibly coincide; one of those presents that are admired for the sake of politeness and then tossed into a drawer, never to be seen again.
‘I want to know how,’ she said. ‘Show me.’
I helped her to put on the gloves. They were the smallest size available and they were still comically enormous on her. But we did not smile. I held up my palms.
‘When you throw a punch,’ I said, ‘it should be like catching a fly. You ever catch a fly?’
She shivered. ‘I saw Stan catch a wasp once.’
‘Well, think of that. The hand should snap back as fast as it snaps forward.’
I demonstrated, and then held up my palms again.
‘You try.’
Scout frowned.
‘I can’t hit very hard,’ she said.
I touched her shoulder.
‘Angel,’ I said. ‘It’s got nothing to do with how hard you can hit.’
Scout started punching.
Then suddenly there were just a few days to Christmas and there was the promise of snow in the grey city skies.
I sat in a dark school hall and I watched angels in bed sheets with sellotaped paper wings, five-year-old wise men with wonky cotton-wool beards, stuffed toys standing in for the animals in the manger in Bethlehem and, at the centre of it all, a grumpy sheep waving her small fist at the heavens.
‘It’s all right for the angels!’ the grumpy sheep said bitterly. ‘The angels can fly to the manger! But I must walk!’
The grumpy sheep – Scout under an old white rug superglued to an even older rucksack, her nose blackened with make-up – narrowed her eyes at the heavens.
‘Why must I walk to the manger? It means nothing to me! I don’t even want to see this baby they call Jesus.’
She regretted it in the end. On her knees in the centre of the stage, shaking her head as the wise men and angels milled around in the background.
‘Oh why was I so grumpy! Why did I complain? I see clearly now! At last, I see it all.’ She raised her head and stared out into the darkness. ‘This is a special child!’
Mrs Mallory – Margaret – was sitting next to me and she reached across and squeezed my hand as I sat there in the darkness with all the other parents, choking down wild laughter, and the hot tears streaming down my face.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The first grown-up piece of journalism I ever wrote – the first article that did not involve staying up all night with rock stars – was out of 27 Savile Row, London W1 – West End Central.
The young men and women I met there were among the finest people I have ever met. They are real, but this book, which roams freely about their place of work, is a work of fiction.
I have taken the liberty of using real life to give The Murder Bag some grit – for example, the Black Museum really is at Room 101, New Scotland Yard, and the ‘From Hell’ letter by someone claiming to be Jack the Ripper is quoted accurately from contemporary photographs.
The letter itself is said to be lost, and its location in this book is a product of the author’s imagination.
Tony Parsons
September 2013
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Epub ISBN: 9781448185726
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Published by Century 2014
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Copyright © Tony Parsons 2014
Tony Parsons has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Century
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ISBN 9781780892337
