The Murder Bag (37 page)

‘You calling me a liar?’

I nodded.

‘You going to cut my throat, Tom?’ I said, knowing that was exactly what he was going to do.

‘Should have done it when I had the chance the first time.’

I looked at the old man opposite me. ‘You should have gone to the police, Len. If you wanted justice for your granddaughter. You should have come to us. Not waited for Rambo here to turn up.’

Monk laughed. ‘Who was going to get justice for Anya? Or for Len here? The police? The courts? You? You with your soft judges and weak laws and tricky lawyers selling rich man’s justice? You with your bad back!’

‘Enough,’ Len said.

And I turned my head just in time to see the old man shoot me in the chest.

The roar of the .410 split the air.

I was blown backwards and over and flat on my back with my head in the open fireplace, the deafening sound of the .410 fired in a tiny space still ringing somewhere deep inside my eardrums, and I was calling for Jesus and God to help me as my fingers scrabbled at my heart.

The excruciating pain of two cracked ribs beneath massive bruising told me that I was not yet dead.

The .410 shell had ripped a hole in my leather jacket and my T-shirt but had not passed through the lightweight CV1 body armour.

I kept calling for Jesus and God.

‘You’re better off shooting him in the head,’ Monk said. ‘I need to go home now.’

‘Yes,’ Len said. ‘Go to them now. Go to your family. It is time. Your work here is done. Thank you, my beloved friend. Thank you, my brother.’

I struggled to sit up but the pain in the top half of my body held me down. I could not move.

Oh God . . . oh Jesus . . .

I realised that the chair I had been sitting on was underneath me, smashed to pieces.

I saw Zukov kiss Tom Monk hard on the mouth and I saw Monk leave the cottage without looking back.

Len shuffled off to his bedroom, and when he came back he had a box of shells with him. I saw him break the .410, laboriously push in a three-inch red shell, then snap it shut.

Oh God . . . oh Jesus . . .

He shuffled across to where I was lying and pointed the shotgun at my face.

Oh God . . . oh Jesus . . .

‘No!’

Edie Wren was in the doorway.

Len Zukov swung the shotgun at her and paused.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘What do you want? Talk to me. Please talk to me, sir.’

He looked at her face for a moment and then, as if in answer, he placed the shotgun on the floor and, half crouching, set the barrel under his chin.

I heard Edie scream and I heard the shotgun roar but then the darkness overwhelmed me and the night was black.

37

WE DROVE BACK
to the city. DCI Whitestone at the wheel of my X5. DI Gane beside her in the passenger seat. Edie Wren and me in the back. Every time I was drifting off, thinking I might steal some sleep, the road rushing under our wheels and the white-hot pain in my cracked ribs shoved me awake.

‘Sergeant Tom Monk came back from Afghanistan and he never went home,’ Whitestone said, her eyes not leaving the road ahead. ‘I spoke to the people at Barrington Court. Monk returned from Helmand with a Conspicuous Gallantry Cross and third-degree burns on his face and hands. He spent a few months in an ICU and then went to Barrington Court for his final rehab. Treatment for his burns. Extensive physio. Therapy sessions with a psychoanalyst. The usual routine for a veteran with his injuries. When he had recovered, he stayed on helping out at Barrington Court. And they were glad for an extra pair of hands. Nobody seems to know what happened. But just before he was due to leave Barrington Court, Monk put on his dress uniform and had his photo taken at a small studio in Potter’s Field High Street. Then he mailed the photo to his fiancée back in Stratford.’

Whitestone fell silent. I thought of the face that had been burned beyond recognition, and I thought of his girl back home, seeing a posed photograph of the damage for the first time.

The road kept slipping past, lit by nothing but the high winter moon.

‘Nobody knows if she ever wrote back. Or sent him a text, email or message on Facebook. Monk never talked about it. Maybe she told him that it was over. Maybe she never contacted him again and that told him all he needed to know. Who knows? But Monk never left Barrington Court. He stayed on – unpaid, unofficial, helping out with the rehab of other badly injured veterans. Taking the men to Potter’s Field for exercise.’

‘Where he met another old soldier,’ I said. ‘Len Zukov. The start of a beautiful friendship.’

‘I understand why Len Zukov wanted payback for what they did to his granddaughter,’ Wren said. ‘And I get why his friend would want to help him. But – did Monk want to kill evil bastards? Or did he just want to kill somebody?’

Whitestone glanced at me in the rear-view mirror. I had no answers. All I knew was that the state had trained Monk to be a killer and in the end that was all he had left, and all he could do, all he could offer, even when the state wanted him to stop.

‘Edie,’ Whitestone said. ‘Some stuff we never get to know.’

You could see the piercing blue lights of our cars cutting up the night from a mile away. They illuminated the sleek, futuristic buildings of the Olympic Park and the urban wasteland that surrounded them.

‘Now Monk’s returned to the place you go when you’ve run out of places to go,’ Whitestone said. ‘He’s finally come home.’

In the shadow of Olympic Park, a dozen armed response vehicles surrounded a shabby block of flats that managed to be both modern and derelict. They were out of place in a neighbourhood where the buildings were either neat little flats and small houses that promised a nice life in the new East End, or they had been wiped from the face of the Earth. It looked like the surface of the moon after a few years of serious gentrification.

We lowered the windows of the X5 and dug out our warrant cards. Beyond the police tape you could hear the digital cackle of the Airwave radios, the occasional bark from one of the police dogs, and the shouts of officers who were pulled tight by nerves.

Armed officers waited between the ARVs, their Heckler & Koch assault rifles held at their favourite forty-five-degree angle, butt high and business end pointing down, sweating hard in all that kit despite the chill of the December night. They looked like the future.

Tom Monk was standing alone on a scrappy patch of grass outside the block of flats, looking up, his gaze unswerving. And I saw now that there were half a dozen Glock 17 pistols pointing at the back of his head.

They had evacuated most of the residents from the flats. In almost every window the only signs of life were the fairy lights of Christmas, twinkling, white and red and green.

A young woman appeared briefly in one window, a toddler under her arm, and then she was gone. But Monk kept looking up at her window, even after the light in the room had gone out.

‘That’s her,’ said Edie Wren, and the tears on her face shone bright in the riot of flashing blue lights. ‘That’s Monk’s family. That poor girl. That poor man.’

‘No,’ DCI Whitestone said. ‘That’s our killer. Let’s nick the bastard.’

The armed officers stood aside as the K9 unit came forward with their German Shepherds. The handlers knelt by the flanks of their dogs, fingers scratching the back of those noble heads, whispering their final words of encouragement.

Monk turned at the sound of the dogs. His old army coat swung open and I saw his weapon sticking out of the lining, stuffed inside what looked like one of those big secret pockets that shoplifters use – the 12-bore shotgun that he had carried all the way from Potter’s Field.

Then voices were shouting all around and someone screamed ‘I have the shot!’ and Whitestone said ‘Take the shot!’ and the crack of gunfire tore the night, ripped it wide open, shockingly loud, one single shot that was so stretched-out and jagged it made your heart leap, and Tom Monk was falling backwards, his head twisting sideways as if suddenly and savagely punched, the top of it flying away in a clump of blood and hair and skin and bone and brain, and then he was lying very still on the scrappy piece of grass looking like what he was now – a fallen British soldier.

I moved towards the lifeless body, any hatred I had felt for him suddenly turned to a sour kind of sadness; but I felt Whitestone’s hand on my arm, making me wait, taking no more chances.

‘Enough for one night, Max,’ she said. ‘It’s almost Christmas.’

She gave the command and they let loose the dogs.

38

SUNDAY MORNING.

Scout sat at the window, waiting for her mother. Across the street the great meat market of Smithfield was closed for the weekend, the crowds all gone, and the white dome of St Paul’s Cathedral rose above a scene of perfect stillness.

On TV, the MP for Hillingdon North was entering 10 Downing Street, Siri Voss one pace behind, cradling a thick file of papers. Ben King smiled shyly at the journalists who called out to him.

‘Congratulations on the promotion! A few words, Minister?’

‘The youngest Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury in history – how does that feel?’

‘What kind of Chief Whip are you going to be, Mr King? Are you going to put it about a bit? Are you going to give them some stick?’

There was a policeman on the door. King murmured good morning to him. The policeman touched his helmet in salute. Ben King and Siri Voss disappeared inside as a spasm of pain racked my lower back.

Stan was sleeping at Scout’s feet. But as I flinched the dog stirred and stretched – downward-facing dog, then upward-facing dog – all the while watching me with those massive round eyes, as if to say
you must do the stretching every day of your life, don’t you even know that?

Or maybe he just wanted some food.

In the pocket of my jeans, my phone began to vibrate. Then it was still. And then it began to vibrate again. I took it out and read the message from Anne, and I thought, there is no greater stranger than someone we used to love.

‘Angel,’ I said to Scout, with a lightness that I did not feel. ‘Your mother’s not coming today. Something came up. I’m sorry.’

Scout watched me with impassive eyes.

‘She’s very busy,’ my daughter said.

I nodded, and I could not tear my eyes from her as she went to the table and took out her box of pens and opened her drawing book. I walked over to her and watched her work for a bit. She was drawing Stan’s head, and she had captured him very well. The bulging beauty of the eyes, the extravagant ears flowing like the hair of a girl in an old-fashioned painting, the nose like a squashed prune, the feathered glory of his tail.

I touched her hand and her eyes met mine.

‘Scout,’ I said, ‘it’s just you and me now. But we’re all right, aren’t we?’

She looked at her drawing and then back at me.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We’re all right.’

I breathed again.

‘Scout?’

‘What?’

‘I’m very, very proud that you’re my daughter.’

She got up and gave me an awkward embrace, her arm around my waist as I kissed her on top of her head. Then she broke off and went off to her bedroom, Stan trailing behind her, his tail up like a periscope.

I turned to the TV as Ben King came out of Number Ten and began walking towards the camera. Siri Voss was beside him, hugging her papers, but as they reached the camera she stepped aside with a smile, waiting for him just out of shot.

Ben King smiled. Then he cocked his head at the camera, and looked into it the way he had so often looked at me – a penetrating, lopsided look, disarmed and disarming, as if he saw something in you the rest of the world had yet to see.

Something glinted for a moment but I couldn’t tell if the fragment of light was on the TV screen or just inside my head.

And then I realised that Ben King had a glass eye.

And I saw that what James Sutcliffe had claimed was true. Someone had lost an eye in that room twenty years ago – a small forfeit for a young girl’s life. But it wasn’t Hugo Buck.

How had I missed it?

You
, I thought, as Ben King smiled for the cameras in Downing Street.
You.

And I saw a vision of two boys at a breakfast table, twin brothers, arguing with a fury that neither of them had known before, identical in every way apart from their hearts, and one of the brothers threw a glass with full force at the other’s face. And I knew it wasn’t Ned who was in that basement room the night they stole Anya Bauer’s life.

It was his brother, Ben.

‘Daddy?’ Scout said.

She was holding the junior boxing gloves I had bought her – one of those unsuccessful presents that parents so often buy for their children, when they still hold on to the vain hope that their mutual interests might possibly coincide; one of those presents that are admired for the sake of politeness and then tossed into a drawer, never to be seen again.

‘I want to know how,’ she said. ‘Show me.’

I helped her to put on the gloves. They were the smallest size available and they were still comically enormous on her. But we did not smile. I held up my palms.

‘When you throw a punch,’ I said, ‘it should be like catching a fly. You ever catch a fly?’

She shivered. ‘I saw Stan catch a wasp once.’

‘Well, think of that. The hand should snap back as fast as it snaps forward.’

I demonstrated, and then held up my palms again.

‘You try.’

Scout frowned.

‘I can’t hit very hard,’ she said.

I touched her shoulder.

‘Angel,’ I said. ‘It’s got nothing to do with how hard you can hit.’

Scout started punching.

Then suddenly there were just a few days to Christmas and there was the promise of snow in the grey city skies.

I sat in a dark school hall and I watched angels in bed sheets with sellotaped paper wings, five-year-old wise men with wonky cotton-wool beards, stuffed toys standing in for the animals in the manger in Bethlehem and, at the centre of it all, a grumpy sheep waving her small fist at the heavens.