by Tony Parsons
My boss got out of the black car. Detective Chief Superintendent Elizabeth Swire – the Chief Super. She stared coldly at the press and then smiled at Scout.
‘Hello, young lady,’ DCS Swire said. ‘Are you helping your father today?’
‘No,’ Scout said. ‘I’m only five.’
‘Excellent,’ DCS Swire said and turned back to the car. Nils Gatling got out, buttoning his suit jacket and ignoring the questions shouted at him by the press pack. He was clean-shaven but his eyes looked as though he had not slept since yesterday.
‘I’ll talk to them later,’ he told DCS Swire.
His sister got out of the car and the mob charged forward, screaming her name. Charlotte Gatling had a face that was as near to perfect as I had ever seen. Yet grief and shock were etched deep on that face, and the effect was hypnotic.
‘Scout,’ Mrs Murphy said from the back of the black cab. ‘Come, little darling.’
I crouched down to ease Scout safely into the back of the cab. When I straightened up, Charlotte Gatling was staring at me through the crowd with an unnerving intensity.
As if she had never seen a father carrying his daughter before.
6
‘The cattle gun,’ said Sergeant John Caine of the Black Museum. ‘Also known as the captive bolt pistol and the stunbolt gun. Farmers call them stunners, as though they are very attractive young ladies. Primary use is stunning cattle prior to slaughter. Also quite effective on goats, sheep, horses and of course human beings.’ He took a sip of tea from a mug that said BEST DAD IN THE WORLD. ‘You ever see that movie, No Country for Old Men?’
‘Tommy Lee Jones was the cop,’ I said. ‘He was good.’
‘And Javier Bardem was even better,’ John said. ‘He was the villain with the cattle gun, remember? Anton Chigurh. Having a bad hair day. Remember his cattle gun?’
‘He used it to open doors. Blew the lock out. He killed a man with it once but mostly he used his shotgun. The cattle gun was on this big carbon-dioxide canister. Looked like an oxygen tank.’
‘Cattle guns don’t look like that any more,’ John said. ‘What old Anton Chigurh had, that’s the Model T-Ford of cattle guns. I don’t know what the filmmakers were thinking. The modern cattle gun looks more like a hand drill.’
‘Do you have one I could see, John?’
He laughed. ‘We’ve got the lot in the Black Museum. You know that, Max. Shall I put the kettle on?’
‘No, I better get cracking.’
He took out his key and unlocked the door to the Black Museum. I followed him into a Victorian drawing room that was stuffed full of deadly weapons.
The Black Museum in New Scotland Yard looks like a boot sale for psychopaths. Weapons everywhere. Most of these weapons have either killed or wounded policemen or civilians. But I could not see what I was looking for.
‘At the far end,’ he said. ‘I’ve only got the one.’
He led me to a distant corner of the Black Museum that I had never noticed before.
The cattle gun sat on a small card table. John Caine was right. It looked like a hand drill. Or maybe some kind of sophisticated nail gun. It was scarred and rusting, as though it had seen a lot of service. Above it there was a yellowing newspaper article in a dusty glass case.
‘That’s him,’ I said. ‘The Slaughter Man.’
RITUAL SLAUGHTER ON ESSEX FARM
Slaughter Man executes father and sons in midnight killing spree
A killer was jailed for life yesterday for murdering a father and his three grown-up sons with a bolt gun used to slaughter livestock.
Peter Nawkins, 17, had been engaged to the only daughter of Ian Burns of Hawksmoor Farm, Essex. When the engagement was ended, Nawkins broke into Hawksmoor Farm and slaughtered Farmer Burns and his sons Ian Junior, 23, Martin, 20, and Donald, 17, before setting fire to their home. Mrs Doris Burns, 48, and her daughter Carolyn, 16, were present but escaped unharmed by the killer the press have dubbed the Slaughter Man.
There was more but I was looking at the article’s two photographs. One showed a man who looked like a large, overgrown boy being led away in handcuffs by a uniformed officer, the boy-man’s face smooth and unlined and totally empty, as if he was thinking of nothing at all. He was strikingly handsome, in a way that seemed from another time. The mass of black curls pushed back from a Roman profile, like the head on a coin, the picture somehow not marred by a nose that had been bent by man or nature.
The other picture showed a family laughing under a Christmas tree. The father dark and beefy, his three boys the same, and his wife and daughter both slim and fair.
‘Why do they give them these names?’ John said, the anger suddenly bubbling up. ‘The Slaughter Man! As though he’s some kind of superhero? Who put the idea about that these little men are anything special? This one – old Slaughter Man – was illiterate, as I recall. Couldn’t even read and write.’
I was still studying the clipping.
‘Nawkins got a life sentence with a minimum tariff of twenty years before parole could be considered,’ I said. ‘Is that all? Seems a bit of a slap on the wrist for four murders.’
‘Mitigating factors, weren’t there?’ John said. ‘Nawkins’ IQ level was lower than his shoe size. Possibly not his fault. He never had much formal education – him being a Romany and all. He was seventeen years old – just about. Over eighteen, they would have hit him a hell of a lot harder. And he didn’t bring the weapon with him. The murders were not premeditated – at least, that’s what his brief got the judge to believe. He was a young simpleton who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Until he killed four men.’
‘So Nawkins was a gypsy …’
‘Came from a long line of colourful travelling folk.’
‘Sentenced to a minimum tariff of twenty years in 1980. Is he out? Is he still alive?’
‘No idea. You’ll have to ask HOLMES. You don’t like him for this Highgate turnout, do you?’
I shrugged. ‘Same MO.’
‘But Nawkins didn’t steal a child, did he?
‘No, he didn’t.’
‘And the killings he did – they were personal. Farmer Burns didn’t like his only daughter going out with a gypsy. Made her break it off. I mean, Nawkins was a murdering scumbag, no doubt about it. But he was a murdering scumbag with a genuine grievance.’
‘We’re just looking for leads. I know murders happen with cattle guns, but not often enough for us to discount someone like Nawkins. Was this the weapon he used?’
John nodded. He picked it up.
‘It’s a cordless, gas-powered captive bolt tool. You get a thousand stuns out of one gas canister, so it gives you plenty of firepower. Primary use is on-farm culling.’
He handed the cattle gun to me. It felt strange in my hand. Somewhere between a tool and a weapon.
‘How does it work?’
‘It’s not complicated. A pointed bolt is fired into the skull by pressurised air. It destroys the animal’s brain but keeps its heart beating. This is the older, meaner type – the penetrating stunner. These days they use a non-penetrating stunner with a mushroom-shaped tip. Causes concussion rather than brain damage. Less effective, but brain matter doesn’t enter the bloodstream the way it does with this type here, so there’s less risk of contamination with mad cow disease. What did they use in Highgate?’
‘No idea. But they made a mess. How easy is it to use?’
‘Easier to kill a man than stun a cow. And you need contact pressure to activate the thing. You can’t shoot anything with it unless you’ve got it pressed right in there. So – if you’re stunning a cow or topping your girlfriend’s dear old dad – you have to stick it right against the flesh and bone, or it doesn’t fire. You’re meant to shoot down at a 45-degree angle to penetrate the brain with enough concussive impact to produce instant unconsciousness. But that’s with pigs and cattle. I imagine you don’t have to be quite so fussy when you’re killing human beings.’
‘Why kill anyone with a
cattle gun? Why not just stab them? Or shoot them?’
He shrugged. ‘As a general rule, the amateur kills with whatever’s handy.’
I was looking at the face of Peter Nawkins. Seventeen in 1980. He would be a middle-aged man now, if he was still alive. He was a big, good-looking lad before he went inside. I wondered what twenty years of hard time had done to his looks.
I took a step back, still hefting the cattle gun in my hand, struggling to believe that it could be used to wipe out a family. I was in a corner of the Black Museum that I had never noticed before. Apart from the Slaughter Man, most of the exhibits in the dusty corner seemed to date from the founding of the Black Museum in 1875.
There was a display of Victorian mugshots, brown with age, the faces of these long-dead villains seen facing forward and also in profile, just like today, except their profiles were all reflections in a mirror when they were facing the camera. They all posed with their hands resting on their chest and their expressions looked like villains throughout the ages. Resigned. Defiant. Some of them trying to look amused. Some of them trying to look hard. Many of them bearing the scuffs and bruises that come with resisting arrest. There were women on display, plenty of them, but for the most part they looked as cold and hard as the men.
Apart from one.
She was young, plain and among that wall of Victorian mugshots, she was the only one who looked as if she had been crying.
‘Maisy Dawes,’ I read. ‘What did Maisy Dawes do?’
‘Maisy Dawes wasn’t a villain,’ John said. ‘She was a blind.’
‘A blind?’
‘A blind was a false trail left to deceive the law. An unwitting decoy. A distraction. Some poor sucker who is used to mislead the police. Maisy Dawes was an innocent young woman who was used by villains to send investigating officers off on a false trail. See the date on her picture?’
‘1875. The year the Black Museum opened.’
‘Maisy was a maid in Belgravia back then. Scrubbing toilets for some Lord and Lady in Eaton Square. Then one night there was a burglary. Those Victorian burglars called themselves the Dancing Schools of London. They would go on the rob at dinnertime because that was when the entire house was eating their dinner, upstairs and downstairs. What they would do is slip into one of the higher floors – dancing inside, they called it – and lift the jewels at the top of the house. But before they danced out again they often left a souvenir under the mattress of some poor little cow like Maisy Dawes.’
‘So when detectives searched the premises they found the jewel under Maisy’s mattress. And they stopped looking for the real thieves.’
‘Exactly. And Maisy Dawes did hard time. Ten years for lifting some lady’s bauble. Maisy came out, went on the game and died of smallpox in some East End gutter.’
‘How do you know so much about her?’
‘Because they found the real jewel thieves after Maisy died and she became famous. And because Maisy Dawes fascinates me, young man. In this temple of human cruelty, what they did to Maisy Dawes takes some beating.’
I looked around the room, the cattle gun feeling suddenly heavy in my hand.
‘You think we might be following a blind now?’ I said. ‘That someone might be setting up the Slaughter Man?’
‘No idea, son,’ John Caine sighed. ‘But I leave Maisy Dawes up there so that the boys and girls from Hendon will learn to distrust their first impressions.’ He took the cattle gun from me and put it back on its little display table, carefully adjusting it so it was exactly where it was before.
‘In answer to your question – Maisy Dawes didn’t do anything,’ he said. ‘That was her tragedy, son. All she did was die.’
7
‘It’s really not a big deal,’ Mary Gatling said, twenty years old in 1994, a beautiful young woman in a Team GB tracksuit, her face flushed with embarrassment, serious exercise and all that mountain air. Then she smiled awkwardly at a press conference full of camera crews and journalists who were about to make her virginity the biggest deal in the world.
The camera briefly cut to the reporters, all wrapped up warm enough for Norway in the middle of winter, and you could see some smirks that registered – what? Disbelief? Cynicism? Envy? All of the above, I thought, as that long-lost girl squirmed before a forest of microphones, her blonde hair falling in front of her face.
I hit the pause button and stood up, stretching.
It was after midnight and I had been looking at these clips on YouTube for two hours. I still hadn’t learned a thing.
Out in the street I could hear the quiet roar that Smithfield meat market makes through the night. Stan stirred in his basket and stared at me with bleary eyes, checking to see if I might be planning to give him some food. He settled back into his snoring slumber as I went to look in on Scout. She was sleeping peacefully but had kicked all her bedclothes off. I pulled the duvet back over her and quietly slipped out. I knew I should turn in and try to sleep, but I felt that I was missing something that was just out of reach.
I came back into the main space of the loft and stared at Mary’s face on my screen. She looked like a daughter of privilege, one of those rich English kids who grow up on ski slopes.
I hit play.
Mary sat before a poster that said LILLEHAMMER ’94, a flurry of white lines on a blue background, and it took me a moment to understand that they were meant to represent the Northern Lights. There was a man with her on stage, same kind of coach, middle-aged, also wearing a Team GB tracksuit. He covered the microphone with his hand and whispered to Mary. She nodded, composed herself and spoke.
‘Look – when I gave that interview to Ski Monthly I thought that we were talking about my fantastically slim chances of a medal. Right at the end of the interview, the journalist asked me if I had a boyfriend and I answered honestly – I don’t have a boyfriend and I don’t want one until I meet … someone special.’
‘The love of your life, Mary?’ a woman shouted, the question laced with mocking laughter.
Mary looked at her coldly, her white teeth bared in a thin smile, and I saw the fighting spirit in her.
‘The love of my life? Why not? It would be nothing less than what I deserve. And now – well. All this.’
Then there was a CNN reporter on screen.
‘But Mary Gatling, the Ice Virgin of Lillehammer, may have found love in the snow of Lillehammer.’
There was some footage of Mary coming a spectacular cropper on the slopes, and then CNN cut to the Olympic village, where Mary was being pushed in a wheelchair by a grinning young man – although Brad Wood was not as young as her. He was ten years older than Mary and looked it. The presenter on CNN could hardly contain her excitement.
‘After withdrawing from the downhill event following a nasty fall, the young Brit was consoled by American biathlete, Brad Wood – who was just out of the medals in the biathlon but has perhaps been luckier in love.’
The film cut to the closing ceremony. There were athletes everywhere. The Olympic flag was being passed from the mayor of Lillehammer to the mayor of Nagano. And Mary was out of her wheelchair now but walking with a cane in one hand and Brad’s meaty paw in the other.
‘It looks like the Ice Virgin of Lillehammer has finally found her Prince Charming.’
The film stopped with a close-up of Mary and Brad looking up at the fireworks of the closing ceremony, his arms wrapped around her tight. Wrapped up warm like a couple of kids at a bonfire. The clip had over a million hits. And there was more, much more. Mary Gatling 1994 Olympics. Mary Gatling 1994. Mary Gatling Ice Virgin. Mary Gatling Brad Wood 1994. Ice Virgin XVII Olympic Winter Games.
But I kept staring at the frozen frame before me. Brad Wood with his large hands placed protectively on Mary’s stomach. And they had that look I remembered. The delighted surprise of a man and a woman who can’t believe their luck in finding each other.
It might have been all the gear they had on.
Because I could have sworn that
the Ice Virgin looked as if she was already pregnant.
An early morning mist hung over The Gardens.
At the far end of the gated community two uniformed officers stood either side of the crime scene tape that still surrounded the Wood house. Our people were knocking on doors of the other five houses. I watched one door opened up by a Filipina maid who we had already talked to.
Edie Wren cursed. ‘The door-to-door is a total washout,’ she said. ‘All we’ve had are housekeepers and cooks who were all off on New Year’s Eve.’
‘Good time to kill someone,’ I said.
‘Six houses and five of the owners are away on New Year’s Eve? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘They’re rich,’ I said. ‘Seriously rich. And the seriously rich have always got other places to be. Only the poor stay home.’
But it felt like the holidays were over. The gates of The Gardens were open and there was a steady flow of vehicles arriving. A pool guy. White vans. Live-out housekeepers and cleaners walking from the bus stop on the other side of Waterlow Park.
‘The security guard was quite certain the gates were closed on New Year’s Eve,’ I said.
‘Why would he lie?’ Wren asked.
‘The same reason they always lie,’ I said. ‘Because he was scared. Maybe he was asleep. Maybe he had slipped off to see in the New Year with his family. Maybe he was in on it, if only to open the gates. But if the gates weren’t open, then they came over the wall.’
‘There’s a lot of traffic now,’ Wren said. ‘Maids. Cleaners. Gardeners. Builders.’
