The Murder Bag (35 page)

There was a red Lexus parked outside the main building. King’s PA, Siri Voss, sat in the driver’s seat tapping away on a phone. She got out when she saw me, wearing jeans and leather jacket, off duty now, her quick smile changing to a frown of concern.

‘You all right?’

‘Sorry,’ I said, confused. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m Mr King’s ride back into town,’ she said. ‘He called me. He doesn’t want to waste your time, or police resources.’ Her hand was on my arm. ‘Can I get you anything?’

‘I have to go,’ I said. ‘Upstairs.’

‘Of course.’ She hesitated. ‘When you have a chance – when things are better – when this ghastly business is over – I would love to talk to you. Mr King wants to start a charity in the name of your late colleague, DCI Mallory. A fund for the families of policemen killed in the line of duty. Is that something you would be interested in?’

Her hand was on my arm again. It was a strange touch. It stayed there a little too long, yet somehow not long enough.

‘How’s Mrs Mallory coping?’ she tried. ‘How’s Margaret?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, and felt a stab of real shame.

She smiled and fell in behind me as I climbed the stairs and made my way to the Head Master’s rooms. Ben King was sitting at Waugh’s desk, his head in his hands, and when he looked up I saw the tears on his face.

‘I knew that boy,’ he said. ‘The boy outside. I knew that boy. Because he was me. And he was Ned. And he was all of us.’

Siri flew to his side.

‘Where is he?’ I said, but King was good for nothing now, the pretty PA rocking him like a child as he wept.

I moved quickly through the rooms, a feeling of dread rising in my stomach.

And then I saw the water coming from under the bathroom door.

It was locked from inside so I slammed my shoulder into it – nothing. And again. Nothing.

The water was through my shoes and soaking my feet. I felt an icy calm descend on me as I remembered how to open a locked door quickly. I took a step back to give myself room and kicked the lock as hard as I could. The door flew open with a crack of metal and wood and I saw one of Waugh’s long white arms hanging over the side of the bath, fresh blood pouring from the open veins on his wrists, staining the side of the bathtub and the white tiles of the floor with long crimson streaks.

There were soft white towels on heated rails and in little piles stacked neatly under the sink. I snatched them up and, sliding on the sopping floor, pressed them against his open wrists, and tied them tight around his limp white arms, and then threw them aside and started all over again when, in what seemed like seconds, his blood soaked through.

I was screaming and cursing and calling for help as I pressed the towels against the open veins of Peregrine Waugh. It was only when I ran out of towels that I saw the lifeblood had drained from his body, that his eyes were staring at the ceiling without seeing. I stood there with no breath and no strength to move until I finally remembered to turn off the hot and cold running water.

In the sudden silence the only sound was the boys down on the playing fields and, from the room behind me, the subdued sobbing of a grown man.

‘Open it up,’ DCI Whitestone said.

By now the December night was cold and black but the lamps of the SOCOs encircled the tomb and drenched it in blazing light. A bitter wind whipped through the graveyard, rustling dead leaves and the poppies that someone had swept from the grave.

A forklift truck was slightly tilted on the slope of the old graveyard, and it seemed to rock dangerously as its long metal fork eased beneath the grey stone of Henry’s tomb.

The Murder Investigation Team from West End Central stood just behind the SOCOs, their mufti evidence of their interrupted weekends. Whitestone was in a parka thrown over jeans and T-shirt, as if she had come straight from home. Gane was in a tracksuit, as if he had come straight from the gym. And Edie Wren was in a short dress and killer heels and complicated hair, as if she had come straight from seeing her married man, or maybe trying to forget about him.

I saw the chief super exchanging words with Sergeant Lane of Potter’s Field, their faces ghost-like in the fierce artificial light.

And then I looked back at the tomb as the wheels of the bulldozer fought for purchase in the soft soil. All at once the great slab of stone came away with the crack of torn granite. It rose in the air, clumps of dirt and cement falling away, and the grave was suddenly open.

A dozen officers in protective clothing moved quickly forward, and there were shouts and groans and protests as they heaved the lid of the tomb on its side and eased it up against an ancient oak. The white-suited SOCOs and the uniformed officers edged forward, but the grave was pitch black, buried in the darkness.

Somebody adjusted a light.

And there in the earth were the small bones of perhaps a dozen spaniels, their legs as thin as fish bones, their skulls the size of tennis balls, locked for eternity in the embrace of what were unmistakably human remains.

34

NATASHA CAME DOWN
The Broadwalk in Regent’s Park, her perfect face impassive behind dark glasses, long of hair and arms and legs, the little Pekingese-Chihuahua cross trotting by her side with a stick in its mouth, and she looked like the one for me.

It was sixty hours since we’d found the lonely bones of Anya Bauer. I had not slept and I had not eaten since we’d opened the grave, but after taking Scout to school on the third morning I knew that I desperately needed to do both. You can go without food and sleep for three nights and then you begin to fall apart. A single parent can’t afford to fall apart.

Then I saw Natasha coming towards me as I was finishing my second bacon sandwich at a table outside The Honest Sausage, and I saw that I needed her even more.

‘My stalker,’ she said.

‘The merry widow,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

‘No daughter? No dog?’

I looked under the table. ‘I knew I’d forgotten something.’

‘Too bad,’ she said. ‘I like your dog and daughter.’

Susan had abandoned her stick and was snuffling at my hand.

‘They like you,’ I said, wondering if it was too much. ‘My daughter and my dog.’

‘I can’t think why.’

‘Me neither.’

She indicated the little Pekingese-Chihuahua cross who was eating out of my empty hand.

‘I didn’t know Susan cared for you.’

‘Nothing to do with me. Everything to do with my bacon sandwich.’

Natasha took off her dark glasses. She seemed younger than I remembered, and not quite as tough as she wanted to be.

‘Listen,’ she said.

Later, as we lay side by side, and I knew her for the first time, my hands moved across those long limbs and skin that was as white and unbroken as snow. And I remembered that I had seen her naked body once before, long ago, the first time we met.

She kissed my mouth and read my thoughts, and the traffic down on Marylebone High Street seemed to be coming from some other world. She held my hands and made me feel her, made me know her properly, made me understand what had changed.

The bruises were gone.

‘I healed,’ Natasha said.

We loved and slept the day away.

I had not slept by someone’s side for a long time. It was a delicious feeling, a private world of warmth and safety and longing. But then, too soon, it was time for me to go.

I slipped out of the sheets, and the dog at the foot of the bed stirred with annoyance and then went back to sleep.

Natasha was half awake, and I sat by her side and smoothed her hair and very softly ran my hands over the smooth warmth of her skin and all of that seemed to make her more sleepy and smiley.

‘Oh, come back to bed,’ she said. ‘Don’t make me call the cops.’

I kissed her arm.

‘I have to pick up my daughter.’

‘Then come back tonight. Both of you. I’m not a cook but there are some great restaurants round here. What does Scout like?’

‘We have to do something tonight. Family stuff.’

She hugged me.

‘OK,’ she said, waking up a bit now, the real world creeping into this secret room. ‘I know you’re a father. I know a dad has to do what a dad has to do, right?’

I kissed her cheek, her neck, her mouth.

‘Right,’ I said.

‘But we’ll work it out,’ she said, and I believed her.

I parked the X5 outside a terraced house on a quiet street in Pimlico.

Scout was in the passenger seat, holding Stan and a bouquet of white flowers that was almost as big as her – lilies and roses and flowers that neither of us knew the name of.

Bringing flowers always felt like an imposition to me. A vase had to be found. Stems cut, water added, topped up at regular intervals, and one week later the dead flowers had to be thrown out, the stinking green water poured away, the vase washed clean.

It felt like you were asking a lot of someone when you gave them flowers.

Then Scout grinned at me as we got out of the car – a new smile, a gappy smile, because she had lost two teeth at the bottom, the first of her milk teeth to go – and I knew the flowers didn’t matter a damn. What mattered was her, and us, and knowing that coming here was the right thing to do.

Scout rang the bell. Stan barked once, then again, his feathery tail revolving with excitement. From beyond the door’s frosted glass I heard the excited yap of a West Highland Terrier.

Then I saw the shape of Mrs Margaret Mallory coming down the hall, and the outline of her face through the frosted glass, and the start of her smile.

35

SOHO WAS OUR
canteen.

It meant that odd, unexpected couples were sometimes seen sharing a meal together in the backstreet restaurants.

PC Billy Greene and Dr Stephen were in a corner table of the Siam Café on Frith Street. Greene’s hands were no longer bandaged. He was in uniform. I was about to join them when I realised that this was not a chance encounter. This was therapy.

‘Please,’ Dr Stephen said. ‘Our fifty minutes are just about up. So you’re no longer suspended, Max?’

I shook my head. ‘One day you’re the cock of the walk and the next you’re a feather duster,’ I said. ‘Or is it the other way round?’

I joined them.

‘You found the missing girl,’ Dr Stephen said.

I nodded. ‘We just got the results of the forensic autopsy from Elsa Olsen. Identified her body from dental records sent over from Germany. Cause of death was a broken neck. Peregrine Waugh snapped Anya Bauer’s neck like she was some kind of wounded animal.’

‘And twenty years later,’ Greene said, ‘he opens up his veins.’

‘And gets off too lightly,’ I said. ‘I wanted to see him in court. I wanted to see him in a cell.’

We were silent until I nodded at Greene’s hands.

‘How are you doing, Billy?’

‘Doing good,’ he said. ‘The pain is easing off. The physio is coming along. My fingers are working better, although the right hand is still a bit stiff. The more exercises I do, the better I feel.’

The waitress brought a plate of fruit. I saw that Greene’s hands were stained black with burns, and that he held a fork with difficulty.

‘Stick with it, Billy,’ I said. ‘Stick with all of it.’

But he didn’t want my pity.

When a piece of mango slipped from his fork and slid across the table, he stabbed at it repeatedly until he finally speared it. He popped the mango in his mouth and laughed.

‘Lunch takes a bit longer,’ he said.

Dr Stephen stared at his plate and then back at Greene.

‘Funny thing is, they gave me sick leave,’ Greene said. ‘After the night we got Bob. And I went to Vegas – because I always fancied Vegas. So I flew to Vegas.’ He paused dramatically. ‘But they wouldn’t let me in!’

Dr Stephen had obviously heard the anecdote before. I had the impression that Greene had told the story many times, and that his fellow uniformed policemen had enjoyed the punchline. It was the kind of punchline that coppers would find amusing.‘T
hey wouldn’t let you in?’ I said. ‘You mean, into the country? When you landed?’

He nodded, still looking cheery, still seeing the funny side and assuming that I would see it too.

‘The Americans fingerprint everyone when they pass through immigration – part of the tightened security after 9/11, right?’

I shrugged. ‘OK.’

Greene held up his hands like it was a conjuring trick. ‘And guess who doesn’t have fingerprints any more! They put me on the first flight home!’

I stared at Billy Greene’s blackened hands and I kept on staring until he placed them on his lap, below the table, where I could no longer see them.

‘Harry Jackson,’ said Sergeant John Caine. ‘People tend to walk right past old Harry Jackson.’

It was true.

The Black Museum was so full of gory artefacts, from the endless variety of firearms and blades that had claimed policemen’s lives to the pots and pans in which serial killers had cooked the flesh of their victims, that it was easy to walk past the small, unassuming display devoted to Harry Jackson.

There wasn’t much. A glass frame containing a short newspaper clipping, yellow with age. Two typewritten paragraphs of explanation.

And the whorls of a dead man’s thumbprint.

‘Harry Jackson was the first man to be convicted in England because of fingerprint evidence,’ Sergeant Caine said. ‘Harry was a burglar. In the summer of 1902 he climbed through a window in Denmark Hill, stole some billiard balls and left his thumbprint in wet paint on the windowsill.’ Sergeant Caine chuckled. ‘Silly bugger. He got seven years.’

I peered closer at the newspaper clipping. It was a letter to
The Times
, signed by someone calling himself A Disgusted Magistrate.

Sir, Scotland Yard, once known as the world’s finest police organisation, will be the laughing stock of Europe if it insists on trying to trace criminals by the odd ridges on their skins.

‘Eight years later, the rest of the world was catching up,’ said Caine. ‘Thomas Jennings of Chicago became the first person in America to be convicted by fingerprint evidence.’