The Murder Bag

by Tony Parsons

  I shook my head.

  ‘Murder Bags were where modern detective work began,’ he explained. ‘They had two of them in the Yard from 1925. Always packed and ready to go. They contained rubber gloves, magnifying glasses, containers for holding blood, test tubes for fingerprinting, all sorts of gear. The Murder Bags came in when Sir Bernard Spilsbury saw a detective handling a dismembered body with his bare hands. They were the start of modern homicide investigation.’ He looked at me shyly. ‘What you do.’

  He gently replaced the ruined old bag as if it was priceless. ‘The history,’ he said. ‘I love all the history.’

  ‘One thing I don’t understand,’ I said.

  Greene looked at me.

  ‘Your colleague – the woman PC – told me that the dead banker was your first dead body.’

  ‘PC Wren,’ he said. ‘Edie. Yes.’

  ‘But that can’t be true,’ I said. ‘How long have you been in uniform, Greene?’

  ‘Six years.’

  ‘You must have seen more dead bodies than me,’ I said. ‘You must have averaged a dead person every day. Motorists who went through their windscreens while sending a text. Cyclists who got hit by a bus. Pedestrians who got hit by the cyclists and the motorists.’ I shook my head. ‘I can’t believe that Hugo Buck was your first dead body.’

  Greene thought about it.

  ‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen a lot of dead people. But what Edie— what PC Wren and I found that morning, on the floor of that man’s office, it wasn’t rotten luck or fate or stupidity. It didn’t happen because somebody was drunk or stoned or sending a text message. What happened to that man, that banker, was the most deliberate thing in the world. It felt like a violation of everything. It’s not like the daily slaughter on the roads. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s just different, isn’t it?’

  I nodded. ‘You’re right. Murder’s different.’

  I wake too soon.

  It is the sharp point of the night – too late to go back to sleep, too early to get up.

  I slip out of bed and go to the window. The lights are blazing in the meat market. I come back and sit on the bed and I still haven’t looked at the alarm clock. It feels like catching the eye of a mad man.

  And then I look.

  03:50

  I walk across to the big cupboard built into the wall and push the double doors. They spring open, and the collection of belts and necklaces hanging on the back of the door jangle softly in the dark.

  There are shoes on the left-hand side. All kinds of women’s shoes. Strappy sandals and spike heels. On the right are stacks of drawers. Knitwear. Carefully folded jeans that will never be worn again.

  And directly in front of me there are all the hangers with her dresses and skirts and shirts and jackets and tops. Lots of white cotton but splashes of colour too, although you can’t see it in this light. But there are orange silks and blue batik and gauzy things spangled with silver. Soft as a feather, light as a sigh.

  I spread my arms wide and sort of gently fall against it, pressing my face into her clothes, her essence, the old life.

  I breathe her in.

  And then I sleep.

  5

  THE CHILDREN HAD painted their families. An entire wall in the classroom was covered with pictures of brightly coloured stick figures. At five they were starting to make sense of the world and their place in it.

  The stick-figure mothers had long flowing hair, squiggly lines of black, brown and yellow, and some of them held a sausage-shaped package with a circle for its head – a baby brother or sister. The fathers were mostly bigger stick-insect figures, and nearly all of them carried brown squares and rectangles – briefcases. All of the pictures seemed to be full of life, crowded with parents, siblings, stick figures of assorted shapes and sizes.

  Apart from Scout’s.

  ‘Look, that’s my one,’ she said.

  How could I miss it?

  In Scout’s picture there was just an unsmiling stick-figure daddy with no briefcase, a little stick-figure girl with huge brown eyes, and at our feet a small red four-legged daub – Stan.

  We had left the dog at home that morning, to his high-pitched howls of rage and despair, because once a month the parents were allowed into the classroom to look at the children’s work. It was meant to be a happy time. But I looked at her picture as parents and children jostled around us and I did not know what to say.

  Most of the dads were dressed in suits and ties and carrying briefcases, while the mothers were either dressed for the office or for exercise, and some of the ones who were dressed for the gym were carrying babies or shepherding toddlers. So there was definitely a social realism about the pictures.

  A young teacher, a blonde New Zealander, Miss Davies, watched us all with a kindly smile.

  ‘Do you like it?’ Scout said, disturbed by my silence.

  ‘I love it,’ I said.

  The truth was it tore at my heart. The surrounding whiteness in Scout’s picture seemed to overwhelm the three little figures. And I felt it again, as I knew I would feel it for ever. The completeness of other families, and the shattered nature of what was left of ours.

  I placed my hand on Scout’s shoulder and she looked up at me with her mother’s eyes.

  ‘Good work, Scout,’ I said.

  ‘Miss Davies said just family,’ she said and, suddenly losing interest, wandered off to her desk to prepare for the first lesson.

  It was time to go. Mothers and fathers were kissing their children goodbye and exchanging a few smiley words with the teacher.

  But I stood there until the bell went, looking up at Scout’s picture of our family, surrounded by all that empty white space.

  Stan didn’t like being left at home. He had upended his water dish, torn the puppy pad in his cage to shreds, and for an encore climbed on to the coffee table and contemptuously batted away the mouse of my laptop, so it dangled just above the floorboards like a hanging man.

  We stared at each other.

  A Cavalier would not have been my first choice for a dog. Or even my fifth or sixth choice. I would have gone for something larger. A Labrador or a Golden Retriever. A German Shepherd. Stan considered me with his bulging eyes, absent-mindedly gnawing on a TV cable as I cleaned up his mess. Something larger and smarter, I thought.

  But Scout had done her research and she knew what she wanted. Stan was her dog.

  And even if he had burned the place down, I couldn’t be angry with him today. Without Stan in our lives all the white space around us might have swallowed us alive.

  It was still early as Stan and I cut through Charterhouse Square on our way home from our walk. Mallory would be alone up in MIR-1, drinking his tea and figuring. Stan and I still had some time together before I put him in the custody of Mrs Murphy and went to work.

  He was squatting for his wet when I became aware of the men on a bench. Three of them. Still up from last night. We got a lot of committed drinkers round our way, drawn by the all-night pubs surrounding Smithfield meat market. Two pasty-faced white boys in cheap grey sports gear, and an Asian man, older and larger, wearing a T-shirt despite the early morning chill. A weightlifter. He was the one who made a kissing noise at my dog.

  I smiled.

  The three men stared back.

  It wasn’t a good moment.

  Then Stan was scampering happily towards them, mad with excitement, pulling me, incredulous at the coincidence that they happened to be here at exactly the same time as him.

  I dropped the lead to allow him to greet them.

  And that was my mistake.

  The weightlifter picked Stan up – and picked him up all wrong, with both hands wrapped around the dog’s chest, not supporting his weight with one hand under his butt – and recoiled with disgust when Stan attempted to lick his face.

  As his milky-faced mates laughed, the weightlifter dropped Stan heavily. He twisted as he fell, landing hard and yelping. Stan was whimpering now
, his tail rigid between his legs, ears flattened – all the hallmarks of dog terror.

  He came back to me and I picked him up, one hand around his chest and the other under his bottom, the way you should hold a dog, and I held him to me, feeling the frantic drumbeat of his heart.

  Because now he had learned fear.

  ‘That’s not a dog,’ the weightlifter said, ‘that’s a rat.’

  ‘Man, you freaked it out because you wouldn’t give it a kiss!’ said one of his mates.

  ‘It’s a dog!’ the other said. ‘But it’s a gay dog!’

  They all laughed.

  I put Stan down and he prostrated himself on the ground, his tail tucked up, his ears flattened, big eyes bulging. I placed a reassuring hand on his flank, feeling the fragile ribs under the silky chestnut fur, the small heart still pounding wildly. I held the lead loosely in my hand.

  The three men were still laughing on the bench. Tough guys, I thought. Tough guys who are only having a laugh.

  I tried to walk away as they chuckled and chatted among themselves but Stan stopped for a sniff of a bin. Then he squatted on his hind legs, looking shyly at me as he emptied his bowels. I scooped the three little droppings up in a bag, tied a knot, and placed the bag in the bin. They turned their attention back to my dog, pointing and leering. They had decided that Stan was here for their amusement.

  And that was their big mistake.

  ‘Walk on,’ I said.

  Stan’s melancholy eyes rolled up to look at me. He made no attempt to move.

  The men roared.

  ‘Walk on!’ the weightlifter said. ‘Do you hear him? Walk on, he says! Hey, mate, does he bite? Or does he just suck your cock?’

  I was looking down at Stan. He had never taken his eyes off me, and he seemed to flatten himself even lower now, his tail stiff and quivering between his legs, the paws either side of his head, the giant ears hanging down like shoulder-length hair, his chin pressed against the concrete.

  It had to happen one day.

  He had to learn fear sooner or later.

  We all have to learn fear.

  But it seemed a crying shame that it was today when I felt so grateful to him, genuinely grateful, for joining me and Scout in our family portrait on her classroom wall.

  ‘Walk on,’ I said.

  Still Stan did not move.

  ‘Not very obedient, is he, man?’ the weightlifter said.

  There was a confusion of cities in his accent. London and Los Angeles and Islamabad. And the very worst of all of those places.

  I wrapped the old leather dog lead around an empty bench in a loose knot and turned to the men.

  ‘I wasn’t talking to the dog,’ I said, walking towards them.

  The weightlifter stood up, his smile fading, and he opened his mouth to say something just as I punched him in the heart.

  One punch.

  Right hand.

  Full force.

  They don’t do it in the movies. But the heart is the very worst place to be hit hard. You really don’t want to get hit in the heart.

  It was a punch that began in the pivoting sole of my left boot and travelled up the muscles in my left leg, gaining full momentum with my twisting torso and then racing down my right arm into the first two knuckles on my right fist.

  Less than a second after it had begun its journey, the punch slammed with enormous force against the man’s sternum, right on the flat bone at the front of the chest where the upper ribs are attached by cartilage just in front of the heart.

  I can never understand why nobody ever punches the heart. Drunks in a bar fight would not think of punching their opponent’s heart. Street fighters at closing time would never dream of hitting a man in his heart. The average yob, like these three very average yobs in Charterhouse Square, know nothing about a blow to the heart.

  But I knew.

  The heart is everything.

  The weightlifter staggered backwards, his hands on his heart, reeling from the trauma of chest compression. He sat back down on the bench, between his dumb friends, the fight all out of him. The punch had collapsed his sternum maybe an inch, no more, but it was devastating enough to shock the heart.

  I looked at the other two, their faces already frozen. They didn’t know what to do now. I didn’t expect them to. And I looked at the weightlifter, clutching his chest, pawing at his collapsed sternum, and I could see that he lacked the will to get back up.

  It was more than just the shock of being punched in the heart. The punch had induced tachycardia – an abrupt and terrifying increase in the heart rate.

  He felt like his heart was about to explode.

  He felt like he was dying.

  I walked back to my dog and rubbed his neck.

  ‘This is Stan,’ I told them. ‘Stan is a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. Cavs are the most peace-loving dogs in the world. They are famous for being mild-mannered and polite. Great with children. They were the favourite dog of the Tudor and Stuart kings because of their gentle nature – the gentle nature that you can still see with Stan.’

  ‘We don’t want any trouble, man,’ one of them said.

  I looked at him sharply. ‘Can you see Stan’s gentle nature or not?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  I needed coffee immediately. A triple espresso that you could stand your spoon up in. Stan gazed at me with bashful love. He would sit on my lap outside the café and I would drink the short black coffee while I fed him Nature’s Menu chicken treats until it was time to go to work.

  I nodded at the men, glad that they understood at last.

  ‘He’s not the one who bites,’ I said.

  ‘Let’s visit the dead,’ Mallory said at the morning briefing.

  If you cut across St James’s Park it is a brisk ten-minute walk from 27 Savile Row to the Westminster Public Mortuary on Horseferry Road, and the Iain West Forensic Suite.

  ‘Iain West was the Elvis of forensic pathologists,’ Mallory told me as Gane, Whitestone and I struggled to keep pace with him. ‘A genius who changed everything. Proved WPC Yvonne Fletcher was shot from the Libyan Embassy. Located exactly where the Brighton bomb was placed in the Grand Hotel by interpreting the injuries of the victims. Examined the victims of the IRA atrocities at Harrods and Hyde Park. Single-handedly improved rail safety with his autopsies of the King’s Cross fire. And taught us all an invaluable lesson before dying while he was still a young man.’

  ‘What’s that, sir?’

  ‘The dead can’t lie.’

  Deep inside the Iain West Forensic Suite we waited patiently in our blue scrubs and hairnets as Elsa Olsen, forensic pathologist, smiled and spoke with all the polite good grace of a hostess of a dinner party who was about to make the introductions.

  Elsa had a lovely smile, I thought, as she turned her friendly gaze from our faces to the two naked corpses on the stainless steel tables before us.

  ‘Our mystery man,’ she said, indicating the drug-withered body of the homeless man. ‘Adam Jones. Born New Year’s Day, 1973. Died tenth of October 2008.’ She indicated his neighbour, the over-fed body of the banker. ‘And Hugo Buck, who I think you know already. Born on the seventh of January 1973, died ninth of October 2008.’

  Elsa let the dates sink in. Mallory and I stared hard at the bodies. Born within seven days of each other. And died within twenty-four hours of each other. But what else connected them? Apart from the livid wounds that had opened up their throats, now gaping black slits, they looked as though they were from different planets.

  Even in death, Hugo Buck’s body looked like that of a good amateur sportsman who was only just starting to run to expense-account fat. It was the body of a man who had serious gym sessions a few times a week, probably a personal trainer screaming at him for fifty quid an hour, no matter how busy he got at work; but the years were passing and there were plenty of meals at good restaurants during the working day, and a steady social drinking habit.

  You wife-beating bastard.
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br />   In comparison, the shell of Adam Jones looked totally depleted, a pathetic sack of bones blotted with bad tattoos and veins scarred by damaged tissue – the squalid souvenirs of a thousand needles. He already looked on the cusp of old age, as if he had shot not just opiates into his veins but all his future years.

  I shuddered.

  The temperature was kept just above zero in here. Beyond an impatience to get started, I felt nothing when I looked at the bodies. Their spirits had flown. Now there were just the living in this freezing room, and two brutalised empty husks.

  ‘The four questions of death,’ Elsa Olsen continued. ‘Cause? Mechanism? Manner? Time?’ She smiled pleasantly. ‘Death’s fifth and final question – who? – I leave to you gentlemen.’ A smile for DI Whitestone. ‘And lady.’

  Elsa stepped between the two steel tables.

  ‘Cause of death for both men was suffocation,’ she said.

  Mallory said, ‘They didn’t bleed to death?’

  Elsa shook her head. ‘The single wound to the neck caused a massive haemorrhage. Death would have been quick, quiet and messy. An initial spray, perhaps several, as the artery was cut and then massive bleeding. As you noted, DCI Mallory, the trachea was severed, so screaming was a physical impossibility – there was nothing left to scream with. But it wasn’t just the trachea that was cut. The carotid artery was also severed along with the internal jugular vein. Death would have been almost immediate, but neither man had the chance to bleed to death. They suffocated before they had the chance to bleed out.’

  Elsa spoke the effortlessly perfect English of the Scandinavian abroad. She was fortyish, Norwegian, tall and slim and dark, one of those black-haired, blue-eyed Norwegians who defied the Nordic stereotype. Mallory had told me that she was his favourite pathologist because she talked about the dead as if they had once been among the living. He said they did not all do that.

  ‘We don’t have a weapon,’ Mallory said. ‘We don’t even have an idea of a weapon. What kind of blade can cut a throat like that, Elsa?’

  ‘The mechanism would need to be long and thin and razor-sharp,’ Elsa answered. She peered at the gaping black letterbox in Hugo Buck’s neck which extended from ear to ear. ‘The assailant was standing behind the victim, as we can see from the classic long sweep of the wound. The mechanism would be something like a short double-edged sword, a long scalpel, something similar. Something with a sharp stabbing point and good cutting edges. These are remarkably clean cuts. A torn artery tends to contract and stem the bleeding. But a cleanly cut artery starts bleeding and it doesn’t stop.’ And then, almost as an afterthought, she said, ‘Manner of death was murder.’