Dead Time (2 page)

‘You should have waited, Wolfe,’ he told me. ‘If you’d have waited for back-up, we would have nicked them.’

‘I’ve thought about that a lot, sir,’ I said. ‘But a man’s life was in danger.’

DCI Flashman was unimpressed. ‘And you were never going to save him,’ he said. ‘I read your statement, Wolfe. It’s a bit thin.’

‘A bit thin, sir?’

‘You can’t identify the men who took the victim from the van.’

‘They were wearing ski masks.’

‘And you can’t identify the man you claim was impersonating a police officer.’

I took a breath.

‘I’m not
claiming
it,’ I said. ‘Sir. That’s what happened. He had the kit on – or enough of it to fool me in the split second I looked at him. Apart from the truncheon. It was like some old wooden Victorian number rather than a modern baton.’

DCI Flashman sighed. A big man sighing with immense disappointment. It felt like it lasted quite a while.

‘And that didn’t give you a clue that he might be less than the real thing?’

‘It did. But I didn’t have much time for reflection before he smacked me.’

‘How’s the head?’

‘No stitches. No black stars.’

‘You cocked it up for us, Wolfe.’

‘I called it in, sir. Then I tried to stop a murder. They were going to run the vic through that mincing machine. They were going to disappear him.’

He shook his head.

‘You want another Queen’s Police Medal for that?’ he said, and nodded at my look of surprise. ‘Yes, I know who you are, Wolfe. I know you’re not the local Neighbourhood Watch. I know you’re part of the MIT from West End Central who took down Bob the Butcher. You lost your skipper, right?’

I nodded. ‘DCI Mallory,’ I said, hearing my voice shake with a grief that was still raw.

But I didn’t want to talk about any of that.

‘Did you run the plates, sir?’ I said.

‘A stolen rental,’ he said, dismissing it. ‘Found it burned out in White City.’

‘What about the victim? Did you ID him yet? Dental records? Prints?’

‘I don’t have to ID the victim, because I
recognise
him.’ DCI Flashman raised his eyebrows, almost smiling. ‘Didn’t you, Detective Wolfe?’

I shook my head.

‘That was Lenny Lane,’ said DCI Flashman. ‘White male. Forty years old. Or he would have been in January if someone hadn’t cut his head off.’

‘Lenny Lane…’

‘Drug dealer. Big time. Ecstasy, mostly. That’s what his business was built on. MDMA. X. Whatever you want to call it. Methylenedioxy-methamphetamine. Ebeneezer Goode and all that. XTC. Coke more recently, before he did five years in Belmarsh for distribution. But he only diversified into cocaine when his core business started going wrong. The Lenny Lane empire started with an E.’

‘The Man Who Made Ibiza Dance,’ I remembered.

‘That’s him,’ Flashman said. ‘The Man Who Made Ibiza Dance. Which makes him sound like a DJ. But Lenny Lane effectively invented the drug industry in this country. Started out dealing from a toilet in a pub called Faces on the Goldhawk Road. Ended up buying the place. More than anyone, dead or alive, Lenny Lane turned recreational drugs into big business. Before Lenny it was just students, musicians and middle-class bohemians who took drugs. And after Lenny Lane, it was everybody.’

‘Who wanted him dead?’ I asked.

DCI Flashman shrugged. ‘Some other little scumbag drug dealer, is my guess.’

‘This looks like a gangland hit to you?’

‘Why not?’

‘The weapon. The MO. The fact that there were at least three of them and they had planned to turn him into sausage meat. I don’t know what it is, but it doesn’t look like a gangland hit. Where’s the body gone? The Iain West Forensic Suite?’

DCI Flashman narrowed his blue eyes. He had seemed deeply irritated with me from the moment we met. But for the first time he seemed angry.

‘What? You upset because you got a little knock on the head?’ he said. ‘It’s Boxing Day. Go home. Have a mince pie. Get out the Wii. This is not your investigation, detective.’

Scout was returning from the toilet. Stan got up to meet her, padding across the floor of Smiths of Smithfield, his feathery tail wagging at the sight of her.

‘It’s not my investigation, sir,’ I said. ‘But it’s my neighbourhood.’

Scout and I entered Mrs Murphy’s home as wide-eyed as waifs in a Dickens story.

After our quiet Christmas, happily rattling around in our huge loft, settling down after opening our presents to endless hours of drawing (Scout), reading and listening to music (me), sleeping (Stan) and eating (all of us), the Murphys’ crowded flat felt like what the season was really all about.

Big Mikey, Mrs Murphy’s husband – who wasn’t very big at all – was asleep in the corner, a red and white Santa hat on his head. Their son Little Mikey – predictably large – was playing Just Dance on the Wii with his daughter Shavon, who was a year younger than Scout. Little Mikey’s wife Siobhan was nursing Baby Mikey – the latest arrival – while Damon, their middle child, chased a bandy-legged mongrel pup around the flat.

Mrs Murphy was in the kitchen, next to the remains of what must have been a gigantic turkey. The Christmas tree’s white lights flashed on and off, glittering on decorations of red and green and gold. Shining wrapping paper and already broken and discarded toys were strewn all over the carpet. The little flat was full of a kind of exhausted happiness.

‘You’ll have a sandwich before you go,’ Mrs Murphy told me.

Mrs Murphy was our housekeeper, although that’s a bit like calling Jesus a carpenter. Mrs Murphy held our life together. When my marriage fell apart, and I found myself bringing up Scout alone, it was Mrs Murphy who was always there, always on our side and willing us to make it, happy to help in any way she could. She was the kindest woman I had ever met.

‘I’ve got to go,’ I said, as Scout shyly approached Shavon, standing quietly by her side as she stomped through the Village People’s ‘YMCA’ with her dad. ‘But thanks for letting Scout hang out.’

Mrs Murphy shook her head impatiently. She hated me thanking her for her kindness.

‘Did they catch that fella yet?’ Little Mikey shouted, glancing over his shoulder as he did the ‘YMCA’ hand movements. ‘I heard another fella had his head chopped clean off.’

‘You’ll remember there are children present,’ Mrs Murphy scolded her son.

‘That’s what I’m working on,’ I told Little Mikey. ‘So long, Scout.’

‘Come back in a thousand years from today!’ she told me, and Scout and Shavon had a good laugh at that.

Mrs Murphy walked me to the door.

‘And how does she like her new bike?’ she said. ‘Red Arrow?’

‘It’s a bit big for her at the moment.’

‘Ah, she’ll grow into it.’

When I felt overwhelmed by my parental duties, Mrs Murphy always made me feel that there was no problem that could not be solved. ‘And how did you like
your
lovely present?’ she smiled. ‘The one that Scout bought you?’

‘
Nighthawks
by Edward Hopper? I love it. Thanks for helping her buy it.’

Mrs Murphy’s face grew serious as we reached the front door. At first I thought it was because of the murder that had happened right outside our homes. But it was something else.

‘And when do you get
your
break?’ she asked me.

‘As soon as this is sorted,’ I said.

It should not have taken me an hour to get from Smithfield to the Westminster Public Mortuary on Horseferry Road but the crowds were out in force on Oxford Street, spilling into the street as they surrendered themselves to the hysteria of the sales and the promise of all that useless luxury.

At the mortuary I quickly changed into blue scrubs and hairnet. Elsa Olsen, my favourite forensic pathologist, was waiting for me down in the chilly depths of the Iain West Forensic Suite. She was a tall, good-looking Norwegian, and if she had been called to work from some celebration, she gave no sign of irritation.

‘Max,’ she said. ‘Now this is an interesting one.’

She opened the freezer, slid out a stainless steel tray and pulled back a white sheet. I shuddered. They kept the temperature just a shade above freezing in here, but it wasn’t the cold that made my flesh crawl. There was Lenny Lane, a few inches of nothingness between his body and his severed head.

Elsa picked up Lenny’s severed head, stared at it thoughtfully and handed it to me. The weight felt strange in my hands. All wrong somehow. I had never held a head before.

‘It’s heavier than I expected,’ I said.

‘Ten or eleven pounds,’ Elsa said. ‘Mostly bone and fluid. The brain is just a few pounds. But what’s really interesting is the cut. Look.’

I lifted the head and looked at what remained of Lenny Lane’s neck.

‘One would expect the margins of excision to be a mixed pattern of cuts with areas of abrasion and notching,’ Elsa said.

‘In English, Elsa.’

‘It’s very clean. It was a single cut. Most beheadings – the kind that terrorists carry out – are really throat cutting, and they keep hacking away until the head is severed from the body. But this is actually more what you would expect from a decapitation in a road accident.’

I looked into Lenny Lane’s lifeless eyes.

‘So they cut his head off with one blow,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ Elsa said. ‘May I?’

I gave her the head. She squinted at the severed neck and then placed the head carefully next to the body. Some forensic pathologists treated the dead as if they had never lived. Elsa Olsen was not like that.

‘The four questions of death,’ she said. ‘
Cause
?
Mechanism
?
Manner
?
Time
? Cause was the severing of all of the vital structures of the neck. Spinal cord, trachea, carotid arteries. The neck connects the brain to the body and death would have been almost immediate.’

‘Hold on. Death would have been
almost
immediate?’

She nodded.

‘Decapitation causes a quick death, but not an
instantaneous
death. Unconsciousness takes approximately two to ten seconds because of the circulation of oxygenated blood in the brain.’

‘My God, Elsa…’

‘There’s some anecdotal evidence that consciousness can persist for longer than ten seconds. Many contemporary reports of the guillotine, for example, report of limbs and eyes moving after decapitation. But most doctors – and indeed pathologists – will tell you that’s impossible due to the rapid fall of intracranial blood. Reflexive twitching is not a credible sign of life. The only living creature that can survive decapitation is the cockroach. And the decapitated cockroach quickly starves to death. But a cleanly decapitated human does not die instantly.’

‘So they cut Lenny Lane’s head off and he was actually alive for those final few moments…’

‘That’s right, Max. Shall we move on? Mechanism must have been something incredibly sharp, delivered with enormous force. Manner was homicide.’ A wry smile. ‘Very few suicides by beheading, and even fewer beheadings from natural causes. As I said, this is what a decapitation in a car crash looks like. Time was between one and two a.m. on the twenty-sixth of December. There is no great mystery here. Apart from the fifth question of death.’

‘Who?’ I said.

Elsa Olsen slid the steel tray holding Lenny Lane back into the freezer.

‘But I leave that to you, Max,’ Elsa said. ‘And to them.’

Beyond the large observation window of the Iain West Suite, I could see DCI Flashman of New Scotland Yard and his MIT putting on their blue scrubs and hairnets.

I got out of there without them seeing me.

As I walked the short distance from the Westminster Public Mortuary to the Black Museum at Scotland Yard, all I could think of were those final few seconds when Lenny Lane had stared into the faces of the men who had cut off his head.

The Black Museum is in Room 101 in New Scotland Yard and it is where the Metropolitan Police remembers its bloody history.

The Black Museum looks like a car boot sale of deadly weapons. Many of the weapons on display were used to kill members of the public or the police. There are firearms of every description, from derringers hidden in Victorian walking sticks to submachine guns. But today I was interested in something that could remove a man’s head with one blow.

Sergeant John Caine, the keeper of Room 101, considered the file of 8 × 10 photographs I had brought from the Iain West Suite.

‘What can do that, John?’ I asked him.

‘Lots of things,’ he said, taking a sip of tea from a mug that said
THE BEST DAD IN THE WORLD
. ‘Most of human history has been spent making weapons that can do that to a man.’

‘You ever cross paths with Lenny Lane?’

He shook his head.

‘I heard of him, of course. Drug dealer. The first and the biggest. Ecstasy by the lorry-load. By the container-load. Started out in a toilet on the Goldhawk Road, didn’t he?’

I nodded. ‘A pub called Faces. Ended up buying it.’

‘And still worked the door.’

‘He was a bouncer at a pub he owned?’

‘Lenny fancied himself as a bit of a hard man before he got put away. A martial artist – in his imagination. The Bruce Lee of Shepherd’s Bush. Married a very pretty girl, as I recall.’ Sergeant John Caine shook his head at the grisly photographs. ‘Former actress. Or at least she did a few commercials. They spent a lot of that drug money on a big house in Chelsea. And now Lenny Lane’s come to a sticky end. Wow – what were the odds of that happening?’

John showed me an eighteenth-century cavalry sword taken from a gang of twenty-first-century Somalians. And then a short, thick Chinese sword decorated with Buddhist emblems confiscated from Triads in Chinatown. And then a cutlass that had once done service for Ronnie and Reggie Kray.

‘There’s too much,’ I said.

‘We haven’t even had a look at the axes yet,’ John laughed. ‘Want to have a look at some axes?’

I shook my head.

‘What about truncheons?’ I said. ‘You got any of those old-fashioned wooden truncheons?’

‘Should have a few,’ he said. ‘For most of the Met’s history, we used wooden truncheons rather than a baton.’