by Tony Parsons
We contemplated the body in silence while all over the large office the SOCOs moved in slow motion like scientists examining the aftermath of a biological catastrophe. They were identical in their masks and gloves and white suits, patiently hunting for prints, placing tiny fibres in evidence bags and taking samples of blood from the desk, the carpet and the glass walls. There was a lot of blood to choose from. One SOCO was drawing a sketch. The photographer who had wondered why anyone would want to kill a banker had stopped taking stills and was now filming the room. Small numbered yellow plastic markers were blooming all over the lush carpet as SOCOs harvested footprints for forensics to match against SICAR, the Shoeprint Image Capture and Retrieval database.
Mallory watched them. ‘Most professional hits are very amateur, Wolfe. Is that an irony or a paradox? They’re carried out by thugs hired in the pub. Morons who will kill anyone for some cash in hand. Most professional hits come with a guarantee – they guarantee to do it badly. But not this one. You see how clean that cut is? Most people, cutting someone’s throat, they slash and chop and saw. They make a mess, don’t they? You saw that with your three. About as big a mess as an enraged human being can make to flesh and blood with something sharp. But this looks like just one cut. It almost took his head off, but it’s just one cut. Now who cuts a throat like that?’
‘Someone who knew what they were doing.’ I thought about it. ‘A butcher. A surgeon. A soldier.’
‘You think we’ve got Rambo running around out there?’
‘I don’t know if he’s running around, sir. Maybe he’s sleeping on the streets.’
Mallory nodded beyond the glass walls to the city thirty floors below, spangled with autumn sunshine around the old grey serpent of a river.
‘How many ex-servicemen are sleeping on those streets?’ he asked.
‘Too many,’ I said. I tried to imagine it. ‘He comes in here during the night. To find somewhere warm to sleep. To find something worth stealing. Gets disturbed.’ I couldn’t make it work. ‘But he has to get past security.’
‘Butcher, surgeon, soldier,’ Mallory said. ‘Or perhaps it was someone who had no idea what they were doing. One of Mr Buck’s fellow bankers. One of the cleaning staff. Perhaps it was just beginner’s luck. Or perhaps it was his wife. Apparently she didn’t like him much. Officers were called out to a domestic dispute between Mr and Mrs Buck three nights ago. There was some violence. Did you see the marital bed?’
A mattress was leaning against one of the glass walls, a king-sized bed still wrapped in courier’s cellophane and bearing the purple and orange FedEx markings.
‘That’s their bed?’ I said. ‘His wife sent their bed to his office?’
‘Mrs Buck returned home early from a business trip and discovered Mr Buck with the housekeeper.’ Mallory frowned with embarrassed disapproval. ‘And he wasn’t helping her to unload the dishwasher. So Mrs Buck went for Mr Buck with an oyster knife.’
‘An oyster knife?’
‘Yes, an oyster knife. It has a short, broad blade. These are affluent people. They like oysters. Anyway, she threatened to cut his testicles off and shove them up his back passage. Responding to sounds of a violent struggle, the neighbours call 999. Officers restrain both of them. Mr Buck hasn’t slept at home since.’
We looked at the marital bed in its FedEx wrapping.
‘You think the wife did this, sir?’ I said.
Mallory shrugged. ‘Right now she’s all we’ve got. She’s on record as making a threat to remove her husband’s testicles.’ He looked down at the banker’s mutilated throat. ‘Although nobody’s aim is that bad.’
‘She may have delegated,’ I said. ‘She has the money to hire someone good.’
‘That was my thought,’ Mallory agreed. ‘But then there would be glove prints. And we can’t find any glove prints. And unless she hired someone who didn’t have any idea what they were doing, there should certainly be glove prints in this room. As you know, glove prints can be as distinctive as fingerprints. If the gloves are thin enough, fingerprints can pass through the material. Fingerprints can also be present inside the gloves. Few villains take their gloves home, preferring to ditch them close to the crime scene. So we’re looking for a pair of gloves as well as glove prints.’
‘And what happens if we can’t find glove prints?’
‘Then we have to eliminate every print in the room.’
I looked again at the photograph on the desk. And I could see it now – the boy the man had been. Hugo Buck was standing on the far right of the photograph and one tiny spot from the spray of blood had flecked his image. Twenty years had gone by but the smooth good looks of the future banker were there, buried under a shallow layer of puppy fat. The boys become the men, I thought, and the living become the dead.
‘Did you see his hands?’ Mallory said.
Buck’s hands had fallen by his side but still gripped the vial of pills he had been holding in the last moment of his life. It was another thing I was seeing for the first time.
‘Cadaveric spasm,’ Mallory said. Smiling now, perhaps happy to show me that I hadn’t seen everything yet. That I hadn’t seen anything yet. ‘Instant rigor, caused by shock of sudden death, locking the body in its final second of life. That Pompeii moment. Can you make the pills out?’
I crouched by the corpse and peered at the label, trying to shut out the copper stink of his blood.
‘Zestoretic,’ I read. ‘Take one daily as directed. Prescription only. Made out to Mr Hugo Randolph Buck. Zestoretic?’
‘For hypertension,’ Mallory replied. ‘Blood pressure pills.’
‘He was a bit young to be taking blood pressure pills, wasn’t he?’ I said, standing up. ‘Must be a lot of stress working in banking.’
‘And more stress at home,’ Mallory added.
We stared at the dead man in silence.
‘Why didn’t they just shoot him?’ Mallory asked suddenly.
I looked at him. ‘The banker?’
‘The bomber,’ Mallory said. ‘Your bomber. The chief super panics. The surveillance officer freezes. Nobody’s sure if it’s the man they want. I understand all of that. Nobody wants Jean Charles de Menezes on their CV. Everyone’s jumpy because any fatal shooting has to go before an IPCC inquiry now. You’ve got the Crown Prosecution Service waiting in the wings. The human rights lawyers.’ Mallory smiled shyly, blue eyes twinkling. ‘But you confirmed a positive ID. You overruled the surveillance officer. It was your call. You had seen the man. Watched him. Followed him. Studied him. It was your career on the line. Your liberty. Why didn’t they shoot him?’
‘They can only shoot him in the head, sir,’ I said. ‘New rules of engagement. Everything else is too risky. Can’t shoot him in the torso because he could be wearing a vest. Can’t shoot him in the arms or legs because then he still has a chance to detonate whatever he’s carrying.’ I shrugged. ‘Maybe they didn’t feel confident they could get a clean head shot. Maybe they believed the SO and the chief super and not me. All I can say is, there was a genuine element of doubt. And maybe shooting a man in the head when there was an element of doubt seemed . . . rash.’
Mallory nodded. ‘And maybe we’re becoming afraid to do our job. How do you like this for a robbery?’
‘This wasn’t robbery,’ I said. ‘The Rolex on Mr Buck’s wrist has to be worth fifteen grand.’
‘Unless it was a robbery that was disturbed,’ Mallory said.
I looked beyond the banker’s door to the vast open-plan office.
‘This place must take some cleaning,’ I said.
‘All authorised personnel,’ Mallory said. ‘You can’t take a leak in this building without a laminated card and photo ID. We’re waiting for a translator so we can interview the cleaner who found Mr Buck. He’s fresh from Vilnius.’
‘I thought everyone spoke English now.’
‘He can’t speak it today. Just Lithuanian. Finding the body shook him up. The rest of the cleaning staff are dow
n in the underground car park. We can’t let them go until we’ve had a word. My two DIs are down there – Detective Inspector Gane and Detective Inspector Whitestone. If you can give them a hand . . .’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
At the door of the banker’s office two uniformed officers had established an entry and exit corridor where they logged everyone who came and went from the crime scene. Two PCs, one male and one female, both young, both of them with dark red hair. They could have been brother and sister despite the fact that the woman was small and whippet-thin, and the man tall and gangly. From the state of them they had to be the officers who had answered the call.
The man – a boy, I thought, although he was in his mid-twenties and only a few years younger than me – looked on the verge of passing out. As I approached he leaned against the wall and choked back the urge to be sick. The woman – and she looked like a girl, despite the Metropolitan Police uniform – placed one small hand on her colleague’s shoulder.
She looked up at me as I signed out of the crime scene.
‘His first body, sir,’ she explained, almost apologetic. She hesitated for a moment. ‘Mine, too.’
She was dealing with it better than the boy. But both of their startled faces were wide open and frozen with shock, like children who had just come downstairs and found their pet dead in its cage, or seen through Santa’s disguise, and got their first real glimpse of this wicked world.
‘Breathe,’ I told him. I inhaled deeply through my nose, released it through my mouth with a controlled sigh. Showing him how to do it.
‘Sir,’ he said.
There were six lifts for the office workers and one, much larger and much dirtier, for the help. I took the stairs, thinking I might find gloves. Thirty flights. By the time I was halfway down I was starting to sweat but my breathing was still even.
I stopped at a sound in the stairwell, a hundred metres below.
Looking down, I glimpsed a blur of movement. There was the hint of a shadow and then a distant door slammed shut. I called out but there was no response and I took the final flights more slowly, stopping when I saw something written on the wall.
One word in black.
The shade of black that blood dries to.
P I G
Not taking my eyes from the three letters, I took out my phone and photographed the black word on the filthy wall. Then I went down the rest of the stairs, hearing a babble of voices now, rising up from below ground, the sound getting louder every second.
On the basement floor I shoved open the door and looked out at an underground car park that was full of cleaning staff. They had been invisible from the street. Men and women, young and old, talking in twenty different languages, the unseen people who came every day to clean the floors and the windows and the toilets in the shining glass tower.
And I saw that they were beyond number.
The armies of the poor.
3
WHEN I ARRIVED home that night I knew something was wrong even before I got through the front door.
We lived in a big top-floor loft and the stench filled every corner of it. I knew immediately where the stink came from because the clues were everywhere. A single shoe in the hallway, studded with teeth marks. Wooden floorboards that had been scrubbed clean to conceal evidence. A rubbish bin stuffed with stained kitchen roll. And everywhere there was that smell, meaty and musty and peaty. The smell of animal.
The dog had been bad again.
On the far side of the loft an elderly woman with white hair was sitting at one end of a sofa with a little red dog on her lap. At the other end of the sofa was a fresh wet stain that would now be there for ever.
Mrs Murphy was watching TV with the sound turned off, which was always her custom when my daughter Scout was sleeping.
Without moving his tennis ball-sized head from his front paws, the red dog – Stan was his name – rolled his huge round eyes up to look at me. You could see the whites of his bulging eyes around the blackness, as though the sockets were too small to contain such a pair of headlamps.
He caught my eye and quickly looked away.
‘Mrs Murphy,’ I said, ‘you’ve had so much work again.’
‘Don’t worry none,’ she said, scratching the dog behind his ears, her soft accent sounding as if she had never left County Cork a lifetime ago. ‘Stan’s still little. And the good news is that Scout ate her dinner. Some of it, anyway. She doesn’t eat much, does she? There’s nothing of her.’
I nodded and went off to look in on my daughter.
Scout was five years old and still slept in the baby fashion with her hands held up in loose fists by the side of her head, like a tiny weightlifter. The light was on in her room, although she must have been sleeping for hours.
She had slept with the light on ever since we lost her mother.
I picked up a school sweater from the floor, folded it and placed it on the back of a chair where Mrs Murphy had tomorrow’s school uniform all neatly folded and waiting. I hesitated, wanting to turn off her light. She couldn’t keep it on for ever. But in the end, I didn’t have the nerve.
Mrs Murphy was putting on her coat.
‘It will get better,’ she told me.
I woke before dawn.
I always woke before dawn.
In the dreaming period of sleep, the lightest phase of sleep, REM sleep, I surfaced, waking on my side of the double bed, the left side, chased from my rest by yesterday’s coffee and my dreams of the dead.
I was always right there waiting for the day before the day ever had a chance to begin.
Turning off my alarm before it had the chance to ring, I slipped out of bed without making a sound. I brushed my teeth and went back into the bedroom, got down on my hands and knees and quickly pumped out twenty-five press-ups. Then I sipped the water by my bedside, looking out of the window at the October sky – six in the morning and still black over the nearby dome of St Paul’s Cathedral.
I got down and did twenty-five more press-ups, slower and more deliberate this time, thinking about technique. I gave myself a minute’s break then did twenty-five more, starting to feel it now, my arms shaking with the build-up of lactic acid in the muscles. I stayed on the ground, found my breath and forced out the final twenty-five – an act of will, not strength.
I padded quietly to the kitchen, anxious not to wake daughter or dog, but hearing Stan breathing in the dark, a snorting, snuffling sound coming out of a nose that did not really resemble anything up to the difficult task of breathing. I stood there listening to him, enjoying the sound. He was wiped out after another busy night destroying our home. Then he stirred at my presence, the large ears falling across his face like silky curtains, the soulful eyes blinking open and glittering behind his lavish ears. And then he was awake too, staring at me through the bars of his cage, hopeful of an early release.
I got him out. Held him against my chest. Stan pressing a nose like a squashed prune against my fingers, sniffing them with interest.
Stan had been with us for a month (it felt much longer) – my present to Scout on her fifth birthday. I had found the breeder online, collected Stan on the day he turned eight weeks old, and carried him into the loft with a blanket over his head like a guilty man heading for the high court.
Every time I thought I had made a mistake, that the dog was my pitiful attempt to give Scout a proper family life, I remembered the first time she had seen Stan. Her smile was like the sun coming up. That’s how I knew the dog was not a mistake.
In the kitchen I drank a triple espresso with him on my lap, the only light coming from my laptop as I searched medical sites for information on how to cut a windpipe.
Stan went back to sleep as I learned that either side of the windpipe are the carotid arteries, bringing blood from the heart to the brain, and that severing them is one of the most fatal head injuries known to man.
But no matter how many surgical websites I looked at, and no matter how many times I
typed ‘cut throat’ into the search engine, I could find no weapon that looked remotely capable of doing the job.
In the end the search engine gave up on me, directing me to shaving websites where they sold foam, balm, gel and a variety of old-fashioned straight razors. They were interesting-looking blades, vicious enough to put a smile on Sweeney Todd’s face. But I couldn’t see how any of them could have cut deep enough to remove most of Hugo Buck’s throat.
At seven the sky finally started to lighten. I snapped shut the laptop as Scout appeared, padding into the kitchen still in her pyjamas and puffy with sleep.
Stan struggled down from my lap and flew at her. Our loft was huge. Far too big for a man, child and dog. Our family had grown smaller while the loft seemed to get bigger. Now we rattled around in all that empty space under the exposed wooden beams and brickwork, the dog’s paws skidding on the polished wooden floorboards as he chased towards Scout, sniffing and licking and nuzzling, clambering up her leg, crazy with love.
‘Stan was bad,’ she said, absent-mindedly scratching the top of his small head.
‘I know.’
‘On the sofa.’
‘I saw.’
‘And in the kitchen. And by the door.’ She thought about it. ‘Everywhere really.’
‘Mrs Murphy took care of it.’
‘I helped her.’
‘Thank you for that.’
A pause.
‘Do we have to give him back?’ she said.
I squatted down to be level with her head. Her light brown hair, her dark brown eyes, the sweeping curve of her face – they all came straight from her mother. Even her name was from a character in a book that my wife loved. My wife was gone, but every time I looked at my daughter, I saw her face.
‘This is our dog,’ I said, and found myself quoting Mrs Murphy. ‘It will all get better, OK?’
‘OK.’
We slipped into our breakfast routine. Toast for Scout. Porridge for me. Nature’s Menu dog food for Stan. After carrying her plate to the sink, Scout went off to brush her teeth. That had been one of her mother’s rules – teeth are brushed after the meal, not before, and we really did our best to stick to her rules.