The Murder Bag (32 page)

‘It will be,’ I assured him. ‘We can help you. But you have to help us: what happened at that school?’

‘What happened? I’ll tell you what happened. They break you down and then they build you up. That’s what they do at those fine old English schools. That’s what your parents are paying them for. They take you apart bit by bit and they put you together again in their image. They take scared little boys and they turn them into captains of industry, leaders of the land, future Prime Ministers.’

He took a long pull on his cigarette.

‘The first day I met Peregrine Waugh – I was thirteen years old, he was just an English master – he drew a single chalk mark on the wall just above the blackboard. “That is Shakespeare,” he said. And then he drew another chalk mark, at the very top of the blackboard. “That is T. E. Lawrence.” And then he got down on his knees – we were all laughing madly, of course – and drew a third chalk mark just above the floorboards. “And that is you.”’
Salman Khan smiled a crooked smile as he waved his cigarette. ‘And we took it from there.’

It was a busy morning at the Black Museum. A dozen young cadets in uniform were squeezed into Room 101. Sergeant John Caine contemplated them without pleasure or pity.

‘Ground rules,’ he said. ‘You do not touch anything. You do not photograph anything. You do not take a souvenir that you think nobody will miss.
Believe me, I will miss it. Everything here is far older and far more valuable than you are.’

A few guffaws. But Sergeant Caine wasn’t laughing.

‘So show respect,’ he continued. ‘And keep your sticky paws in your pockets at all times.’

He unlocked the door to the Black Museum.

‘Go on. Off you go.’

They set off, excited and laughing, like big kids on a school trip. When the last of them had shuffled into the first room, the one mocked up to look like the original museum in Whitehall, Sergeant Caine turned his attention to me.

‘They’ve come down from Hendon,’ he said. ‘This spotty shower are coming to the end of their course and sending them to me is an attempt to prepare them for the real world. A new initiative.’

‘I’ll wait, if that’s OK.’

He nodded. ‘Best to wait. Join them if you like.’

I followed them through into the Victorian sitting room, nine young men and three young women who were happy to be on a field trip, snickering at the fake fireplace and fake sash window.

They passed under the hangman’s noose and reached the table covered with weapons. Shotguns and rifles, replicas and the real thing, walking sticks that were really swords, umbrellas that were really handguns, and a glass case full of automatic weapons. By the time they went through the doorless opening into the museum proper, their laughter had stopped.

They saw the walking stick that turned into a sword that then turned into a knife – the Cop Killer. There was every kind of gun, every kind of knife – some of them dark with prehistoric blood. They paused longest before the display about the officers of the Metropolitan Police who had been killed in the line of duty.

By the end of their visit – and it doesn’t take very long to see the Black Museum – they were silent and shaken.

‘This place is a learning centre,’ Sergeant Caine told them, leaning against his cluttered desk and holding a mug that said BEST DAD IN THE WORLD. ‘I hope the lesson that you have learned today is that there are many ways to kill a policeman.’

They said nothing.

‘Thank you for visiting the Crime Museum at New Scotland Yard,’ Caine concluded with a formality I had not heard before. ‘Before you graduate from Hendon, I suggest you go to your school’s Simpson Hall where you will find the Metropolitan Police Book of Remembrance. Her Majesty the Queen has signed it and, before your studies come to an end, so should you.’ He looked at their serious young faces and nodded once. ‘Take care of yourself and take care of each other. Thank you, good luck and goodbye.’

When we were alone I opened my kitbag. Inside was a large evidence bag containing the Kevlar Stealth that had been worn by DCI Mallory on the night he died. It was almost new apart from the large stain on the right shoulder from the neck wound that had killed him.

Handling it with great care, I entrusted it to the safe keeping of Sergeant John Caine of the Black Museum, New Scotland Yard.

31

STAN’S FAVOURITE CAFÉ
in Regent’s Park was The Honest Sausage, just off The Broadwalk near London Zoo. We were at an outside table sharing a bacon sandwich, my dog on my lap, when she walked in. Sooner or later, every dog person in central London walks into The Honest Sausage.

‘You again,’ Natasha said.

She didn’t sit down. Susan and Stan did the dog dance, moving in tight, excited circles as they sniffed at each other’s rear end. Then the Pekingese-Chihuahua cross had suddenly had enough and turned and yapped in his face. Stan backed off immediately, tail between his legs, edging closer to me for protection.

‘Fancy bumping into you,’ Natasha said. ‘What’s the lovely old English saying? Accidentally on purpose. Hello, Stan.’

At least she was pleased to see my dog.

‘It’s a good saying,’ I said. ‘I went to your old apartment block but they said you had moved.’

‘Just across the park. Marylebone. I downsized.’

I held out the manila envelope to her. ‘Your videotape. I wanted to return it.’

She took it from me without speaking, her mouth tightening. She still hadn’t sat down. She wasn’t going to now. Not with the videotape of that old rugby match in her hand.

‘I also wanted to say that you were right, and I was wrong. About how your late husband lost his eye. I was rough and rude. And I’m sorry, I really am.’ I shrugged. ‘That’s it.’

‘And what did you think might happen? Did you think you were going to return my VHS tape and say sorry and then I would take you home with me and have wild sex?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘it crossed my mind.’

She shook her head. ‘We missed our moment,’ she said.

I was surprised how sad that made me.

‘Did we really?’

‘Yes. Men and women have a moment and sometimes they just miss it. Bad timing.’

‘Like missing a flight?’

‘Exactly like missing a flight.’

My phone was in front of me on the table. It began to vibrate. WREN CALLING, it said.

Natasha laughed. ‘We don’t even know each other.’

‘I know you,’ I said. ‘You’re one of those party girls with a good heart who wants to settle down but chooses the wrong man and then it all falls to pieces. You can see yourself getting harder and more cynical and you don’t like it because you were expecting a better life. Stop me if I’m getting warm.’

My phone was still vibrating.

‘Story of my life,’ Natasha said. ‘But what kind of man are you? Are you one of those men who stop looking at a woman so he can look at his little phone? The world is full of those men. That’s not what I want.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s not me. I can’t stand guys like that. I’m actually thinking of getting rid of this phone.’ WREN CALLING. ‘But you know what? I do have to take this call.’

‘Of course you do.’

Natasha scooped up her Pekingese-Chihuahua cross and walked away on those long legs. Without turning round, she raised one hand in farewell.

I picked up the phone.

‘Whitestone heard from Salman Khan’s lawyer,’ Wren told me. ‘Khan’s not coming in.’

‘He’s not coming in today?’

I could hear her breathing.

‘Max, Khan’s never coming in.’

Salman Khan’s beautiful home had burned for most of the night and the wealthy street stank of smoke and death. A body had been recovered and taken away before I arrived.

Where the house had stood on the leafy St John’s Wood avenue there was now a blackened husk, sodden and steaming – a five-million-pound monument to ruin. The great pyre had collapsed in on itself at some point, taking the roof with it, and among the wreckage you could just make out what had once been the subterranean swimming pool, now heaped with collapsed brick, bent steel, burned wood.

Fire Officer Mike Truman stood between two fire engines and watched his men carefully picking their way through the ruin. DI Gane and I were with him, Gane taking notes, while beyond the police tape uniformed officers kept back a small crowd wielding camera phones. They seemed to be mostly hired help walking dogs to the park or children to school. You didn’t see the locals walking about round here.

‘There’s evidence of some kind of accelerant,’ Truman said. ‘A petroleum distillate like diesel fuel or gasoline. But we also found a small motorbike – a child’s motorbike, if you can believe that – at the foot of the staircase, so that could explain the traces of accelerant.’

Gane said, ‘That’s the fire’s point of origin?’

Truman nodded. ‘Looks like it.’

‘But how did he die?’ I said.

‘You mean was it the fire or the smoke that killed him?’

Gane was staring at me. ‘No. DC Wolfe’s asking, did someone cut his throat?’

I had never seen a burned corpse before. I had never seen how death by fire seems to coat a body in a black substance that comes from the very centre of the earth. I had never experienced the double shock of seeing what a fire takes away, and what it leaves behind.

Every inch of living flesh on Salman Khan’s body had been replaced by something that resembled a rough black overcoat yet you could clearly see his ribcage, his teeth and the fine bones of his hands, the fingers now long and tapered with all the flesh burned away, like the fingers of a concert pianist.

The fire took away everything but left the shadow of some unimaginable pain. His mouth was open, as if crying out in agony, and his elegant hands were placed over his heart and genitalia, as if protecting himself in the last instant of life.

Whitestone and I were in a viewing room at the Iain West Forensic Suite watching on CCTV as Elsa Olsen examined Khan’s charred remains.

‘Did you ever see pictures of Pompeii?’ Whitestone said, more to herself than to me. ‘They look like they’re screaming, don’t they? They look like they’re going to be screaming for ever.’

‘He was going to come in,’ I said. ‘He was going to make a statement.’

Whitestone looked at me and shook her head. ‘Mr Khan agreed to be interviewed in the presence of his lawyer,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’

‘But how did he die?’

Whitestone gestured angrily at the screen. ‘How do you think he died? He died in the fire.’

Then I was through the door and into the mortuary, and Elsa Olsen was looking up from the burned cadaver on the stainless steel slab before her.

‘Scrubs and hairnets, Wolfe. You know that.’

‘How did he die, Elsa?’

Whitestone was right behind me.

‘How did he die, Elsa?’ I said again. ‘Was it like the rest of them? Did someone cut his throat?’

‘DC Wolfe,’ Whitestone said calmly, ‘get out of here.’

I ignored her.

‘Elsa? You have twenty years of experience. You’re in a million-pound state-of-the-art mortuary. You
must
know how he died.’

Whitestone gripped my shoulder hard enough to turn me around. How could such a slight woman summon up such reserves of physical strength? There was a rage in Whitestone, and she let me glimpse it now.

‘You think someone cut his carotid arteries, don’t you, Max?’ she said. ‘You think someone stuck a commando dagger in his neck and then torched the house. You think our killer is still out there.’

‘That’s exactly what I think.’

Whitestone gestured at the blackened corpse. ‘But why would they bother? I mean, really – look at the state of him. Why would anyone bother cutting the poor bastard’s throat?’

‘Because he wouldn’t commit murder with fire,’ I said. ‘Too unpredictable.’

‘Why is this murder? I saw TDC Wren’s report. I’ve spoken to Gane and Fire Officer Truman. A rich, chain-smoking drunk drops a cigarette butt near a fuel tank. The next thing you know – smoked Salman. Why exactly does that surprise you?’

‘Do you know what oxidation is, Max?’ Elsa said gently. ‘It’s what fire does. It’s what fire
is.
Oxidation is what happens when a fuel substance combines with oxygen to produce light and heat. It’s what makes fire a living, destructive entity.’ She looked at the burned piece of meat on the stainless steel slab. ‘There’s no evidence that someone cut his throat. Because fire destroys everything.’

At the Cromwell Green entrance to the Palace of Westminster, I showed them my warrant card.

I kept it in my hand as I went through the security turnstiles, Big Ben ringing in the sky high above, then past the armed officers in twos and fours cradling their Heckler & Koch assault rifles and finally through the search point just before you enter the great expanse of Westminster Hall.

Under the hammer-beam roof, the thousand-year-old hall teemed with life – guides and tourist groups, journalists and lobbyists, MPs and their constituents. I walked quickly past them all and up the stairs at the far end, where a security guard stopped me under the great medieval window that spilled winter light into the hall. I showed him my warrant card too and told him that I was here to see the MP for Hillingdon North.

‘And is Mr King expecting you, sir?’

‘Probably.’

He hesitated for just a moment.

‘Central Lobby, sir.’

I turned left and walked down to the Central Lobby, where great Prime Ministers get full-sized statues and mediocre Prime Ministers get life-sized busts. I spoke to the doorkeeper and he went off to find the MP for Hillingdon North.

He came back with a cool blonde in glasses and a business suit.

‘DC Wolfe? I’m Siri Voss, Mr King’s PA.’ Just the hint of a Scandinavian accent. She was the woman who had called King in when we spoke out on the terrace. We shook hands. ‘As you can appreciate, this is not a good day.’

And then I saw him. Coming out of the corridors that led to the House of Commons.

Ben King looked at me, white-faced and shaken.

‘Detective Wolfe,’ he said. ‘I thought it was over.’

‘It’s just getting started,’ I said. ‘What did you do twenty years ago?’