The Murder Bag (11 page)

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It was one of your days to pick me up. Not one of Mrs Murphy’s days. One of your days.’

‘I’ll work it out better,’ I said. ‘Maybe Mrs Murphy can do more days. But I’ll never be late again.’

She wasn’t looking at me any more.

‘Scout?’

‘What?’

‘Forgive me?’

She looked back at the street.

‘I always forgive you,’ she said.

And I thought about that all the way home.

Scout rolled on the floor with the dog.

‘He cries in the night sometimes,’ she said. ‘Stan does. I hear him.’

I nodded. ‘I hear him too,’ I said.

‘I think he misses his old home.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘He misses his mother’s heartbeat. But there’s a trick for young dogs that miss their mothers. I’ll show you.’

I found an old alarm clock and slipped it under the blanket in the dog’s basket.

‘He’ll think it’s his old mum dog,’ I said. ‘He’ll hear the tick-tock of the clock and he’ll think it’s her heartbeat.’

Scout looked so doubtful that the idea suddenly seemed ridiculous to me.

But it worked.

That night I lay awake until just before dawn, turning my pillow over until the meat market fell silent and the light in the room was milky grey. Stan did not whimper once.

8

THE BLACK MUSEUM
of Scotland Yard is not a museum at all. It is not open to the public and its contents are guarded behind heavily locked doors. Officially, it is not even called the Black Museum. After complaints from officers working in areas with large ethnic minorities, it was renamed the Metropolitan Police Crime Museum, an enforced change that ensured we would always and forever call it the Black Museum.

As I had told PC Greene, the Black Museum is a teaching aide. That was why it was established in the Victorian era, that was why it still existed – to save the lives of policemen by educating them in the criminal’s tools of the trade.

And that was why DCI Mallory and I went to the Black Museum. I had spent a full day on HOLMES2, slogging through just one item on the MLOE checklist – identifying modus operandi suspects, murderers who killed by cutting throats and who were neither dead nor in prison. It was a long, frustrating day of too many dead ends and too much caffeine.

So when the day’s light was fading, we went looking for a murder weapon.

DCI Mallory and I stood outside Room 101 in New Scotland Yard. He was grinning broadly.

‘Room 101,’ he chuckled. ‘It’s almost too perfect, isn’t it?’

I must have looked baffled.

‘Room 101,’ he repeated, frowning with mild disappointment. ‘The torture chamber in the Ministry of Love. George Orwell?
1984
?’

My brain scrambled to catch up. I had read
1984
when I was a kid. Somebody made me. ‘Where the rats are,’ I said. ‘The rats in the cage that get strapped to Winston’s face.’

‘Room 101 is the place of your worst nightmare,’ Mallory said. ‘It’s the room that contains the worst thing in the world. O’Brien tells Winston that we all know what is waiting for us inside.’

Mallory knocked on the door and a voice told us to come in.

Even for a detective chief inspector in Homicide and Serious Crime, visits to the Black Museum were meant to be by appointment only. But the curator in Room 101 – a Sergeant John Caine with thirty years’ service on his face and not a gram of flab on his body – greeted Mallory like an old friend.

‘What can we do you for, sir?’ the keeper of the Black Museum said as they shook hands.

‘We’re looking for a knife, John,’ Mallory said. ‘Or at least some kind of double-edged blade.’ He was opening his briefcase. ‘I figure it has to be less than a sword but more than a knife.’ He removed a file containing a sheaf of photographs and spread them on the curator’s desk. ‘Something that could have done this.’

Sergeant Caine calmly studied half a dozen photographs, copies of the same murder scene and autopsy pictures that were on Mallory’s wall in the Major Incident Room, while I looked around me. The walls were covered with bookshelves and badges from police forces around the world, presumably showing their gratitude for a glimpse inside the Black Museum. I picked up an elderly hardback book from Caine’s desk. There was no dust jacket.
Forty Years of Scotland Yard
, it said.
The Record of a Lifetime’s Service in the Criminal Investigation Department
by Frederick Porter Wensley.

‘Don’t touch that,’ Sergeant Caine said, not even looking at me.

I put the book down.

To Mallory he said, ‘These are the Bob the Butcher killings.’

‘We’ve yet to make that connection,’ Mallory said.

‘But you’re treating it as a double homicide, sir?’

Mallory nodded. ‘Same killer, same MO. But I’m not convinced it’s Bob.’

Sergeant Caine looked at me without warmth or welcome. Mallory had warned me that he was wary of strangers. Although wary didn’t quite cover his cold, gimlet-eyed hostility.

‘This is DC Wolfe, the newest member of my MIT.’

I held out my hand but Caine didn’t seem to see it. Happy to remind me that, as a sergeant, even one in uniform, he outranked me.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Ground rules. No photographs. No touching, unless I say so for the purpose of demonstration. And absolutely nothing I say is for the record. Got it?’

‘Got it, sergeant,’ I said.

‘Good. Then let’s go.’

There was a locked door inside Room 101. Sergeant Caine unlocked it and we went inside. It was a living room from the distant past. There was a fireplace, a bay window, gaslights. It took me a moment to register that although these were false, there were weapons everywhere, and these were very real. A glass case full of firearms. A desk covered with what looked like the results of a sword armistice. A hangman’s noose dangled from the ceiling, which I thought was overdoing it a bit.

‘What was the name of the detective who founded the museum?’ Mallory asked.

‘Inspector Neame, sir,’ Caine said. ‘In 1874. Do you want to have a wander round in here? There are plenty of blades.’

Mallory was peering at what looked like a pirate’s cutlass. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘You go ahead with DC Wolfe.’

I followed the curator through a doorway with no door.

‘I heard they might open this place up,’ I said, filling the silence.

He stopped to look at me sharply. ‘Open it up?’

‘To the public,’ I said. ‘To raise money.’

‘The public?’ he said with some distaste, as if it was the public who were largely responsible for the human misery on display in Room 101. ‘Who wants to open it up to the public?’

‘The council,’ I said, wishing I had kept my cakehole shut.

‘Over their dead bodies,’ said Sergeant Caine.

‘Don’t you mean—’

‘I know whose bodies I mean,’ he said. Then he clapped his hands, his mood brightening as he gave me an evil grin. ‘Not one of those queasy types, are you? Let me know if you’re going to bring up your Weetabix.’

‘I’ve been here before,’ I said. ‘A Crime Academy visit.’

‘Ah, an expert. An old hand. Let’s see how much of an expert you are, sonny.’ He picked up a walking stick. ‘What does this look like?’

‘A sword,’ I guessed. ‘A sword disguised as a walking stick.’

Sergeant Caine smiled. ‘Clever boy.’ He pulled apart the walking stick to reveal twelve inches of gleaming Sheffield steel. Then closed it up again.

‘So if I came at you . . .’

He swung the stick towards my face. I caught it with both hands.

‘I would grab it before you had a chance to use it as a sword,’ I said, twisting my grip and pulling the walking stick from his hand.

I allowed myself a small smile that immediately faded when I saw that he was still holding the handle. It was a handgun.

‘Which would leave me with nothing but my firearm,’ he said, pointing it at my face. ‘Bang, bang, you’re dead.’

‘Does it work?’ I asked, handing him the walking stick.

‘Oh, they all work,’ Caine said. He carefully attached the walking stick to the handle. ‘That’s the point.’

Mallory came into the room.

‘See anything you fancy, sir?’ Caine asked.

Mallory shook his head.

‘Probably here somewhere,’ the curator said cheerfully.

You would think so. The Black Museum contains every murder weapon you can imagine and plenty more that you can’t. More than a hundred years’ worth of explosives, firearms and poison. And every item in there has seen active service.

On the counter in front of me was a cutlass used by the Kray brothers. Next door was a rocket launcher used by the IRA. At first I thought Caine had a mini-kitchen in here, but it turned out to be the cooking pot where serial killer Dennis Nilsen boiled the meat off his victims before pouring it down the drains. And there were more knives than I had seen in the basement of West End Central.

The Black Museum was spread over several large, neat rooms full of glass display cases and exhibits and shelves with the facemasks of men who stole lives. Blank, ordinary, banal-looking men who shot, poisoned, stabbed, chopped up, boiled and ate their victims. All these pathetic little men who had abruptly aborted the happiness of countless lifetimes, all these savage creeps who had built a mountain of human misery.

Yes, I had been here before.

But this time was different.

Now I was not with my peers.

There was no hiding in a crowd, and no easy laughter to relieve the tension. This did not feel like a school trip. This time the Black Museum confronted me with all its horror, and its collection of human cruelty, and it was just too much for me.

Or perhaps it was something else. The first time I had been here, on that visit with the Crime Academy, I was a cocky unmarried kid who knew nothing about loss. And now I knew.

First came the sweat, and then suddenly I was crouching over a wastepaper basket, quietly being sick. Mallory and Sergeant Caine came into the room. If they saw my discomfort then they gave no sign.

‘Your weapon could be custom-made,’ Caine was saying. ‘Some kind of knife that’s made to cut a man’s throat – and only that. Something that’s made for that purpose and that purpose alone.’

Outside, Big Ben was chiming six. Mrs Murphy would have picked up Scout and would be making their dinner while my daughter and our dog chased each other across the great open space of our loft.

I stood up, looking with embarrassment and disgust at the yellow bile I had brought up. Mallory lightly patted my shoulder.

I couldn’t look at him just yet.

‘Nice cup of tea?’ he said.

Mallory took me to his home.

His wife appeared at the door as we pulled up outside a terraced house on a quiet street in Pimlico. A tall, slim, grey-haired woman with an amused twinkle in her eye and carpet slippers on her feet. A West Highland White Terrier stood watch between them as Mr and Mrs Mallory communicated in the shorthand of the long-term married.

‘Done for the day then?’ she said, folding her arms.

‘Not quite, hen,’ he said, pecking her cheek.

‘Going out again then.’

‘Spruce up a bit first.’

‘Something to eat?’

‘Tea would be lovely.’

She had the same Aberdeen accent as her husband. They could have been born in the same street.

‘Who’s this?’

‘New man. DC Wolfe.’

‘Hello, hen,’ Mrs Mallory said, her face breaking into a broad smile. ‘Come on in.’

She brought us tea and biscuits, and I began to feel better with sugar and caffeine inside me. Mallory bolted his tea quickly and disappeared, shoving in a ginger nut.

‘Five minutes,’ he told me.

The Westie followed him, panting with pleasure.

Their home was a small, neat maisonette. The photographs on the mantelpiece and bookshelves, their colours fading now, showed the Mallorys’ old life under some tropical sun. The pair of them, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years younger, raising glasses and smiling shyly at some café table. And Mallory, his hair already gone at thirty, grinning in shorts, short-sleeve shirt and a black peaked cap, two Asian men in the same uniform grinning either side of him. And the Mallorys smiling again for the camera with a city built by a harbour behind and far below them.

‘Hong Kong,’ Mrs Mallory said. ‘My husband was in the Royal Hong Kong Police Force for fifteen years. “We serve with pride and care”. Maybe he told you.’

‘No, ma’am.’

She laughed. ‘You can call me Margaret.’

‘DCI Mallory hasn’t told me anything, ma’am – Margaret.’

‘We came back in 1997. After the changeover. When it lost the royal bit. The British went home and so did we. Bit of a shock to the system. We miss it. Although of course that old Hong Kong is not there any more.’

The photographs ran the course of two lifetimes. But I could see no pictures of children.

‘And do you have a family?’ Mrs Mallory asked me.

‘I have a little girl,’ I said. ‘My parents are long gone. No brothers, no sisters.’ A beat. ‘I lost my wife.’

She waited for more, but there wasn’t any more.

‘I see,’ she said.

‘I have my daughter. Scout. She’s five.’ I stirred my tea. ‘But there’s just me and her.’

Mrs Mallory nodded. ‘Then you have a family,’ she said, and she had me for life.

We crossed the river as the sun set, the groups of tourists on the bridge taking photographs of the Palace of Westminster, Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, all majestic in the dying light, as the London commuters hurried home, not even noticing the everyday magic of this place.

‘And now you’ve met my wife,’ Mallory said. ‘Take the Lambeth Road on the far side of the bridge.’

‘Sir.’

I drove south until two giant cannon reared out of the twilight. They sat before a domed building flying the Union Jack.

‘We’re going to the Imperial War Museum?’

‘It was once the Bethlem Royal Hospital,’ Mallory said. ‘Bedlam. The lunatic asylum. Did you know that? You can park round the back in St George’s Road. We’re not going through the front door.’

A security guard emerged as we were coming through the gardens. He stared at us with suspicion until a woman’s voice called out to him: ‘It’s all right, Charlie, they’re with me.’