The Murder Bag

by Tony Parsons

  Fred walked in. He went over to the music system and fiddled about with it until he found some early Clash. The gym was filled with the crashing guitar chords of Mick Jones and Joe Strummer’s machine-gun bark. Fred picked up a towel that somebody had dropped on the floor and went off to put it in the laundry. When he came back I was leaning against the ropes and staring at the square that we call a ring. My back was stiff with pain, and I reflected on the fact that the things that hurt me the most were a source of entertainment for others.

  Fred and I leaned on the ropes, the sweet stink of a boxing gym all around us, The Clash at full volume, and the silence between us was not awkward.

  And then he spoke.

  ‘It’s not about how hard you can hit,’ he said. ‘It’s about how hard you can get hit and then keep going – for just long enough to hit the bastards back.’

  17

  ‘LET HIM GO!’

  On the far side of a field that glittered with early morning frost, Scout released the dog and he began tearing towards me.

  Hampstead Heath, early Sunday morning. The forest at the top of London. We were in a meadow high on the Heath and my daughter and my dog seemed giddy with all the sunlight, fresh air and freedom. All around us were trees that still clung to the last of the red and gold leaves of autumn. Beyond them you could see the city from Canary Wharf to the BT Tower. It felt like it all belonged to us.

  We should do this more often, I thought. We should do this all the time.

  The field we were in looked perfectly flat until Stan began racing across it. With him in top gear I suddenly became aware of all the dips and bumps and rabbit holes. As he came to one sudden drop in the ground he extended his front legs before him and his hind legs behind to dramatically bound across. He looked like he was flying.

  Scout shouted with delight. ‘Superdog!’

  Stan raced towards me, his large ears streaming behind him, bright eyes shining and mouth open, panting, going flat out. It was his first time off lead and he was almost hysterical with excitement. And so were we.

  I got down on my knees, my back moaning in protest, and held my arms wide to greet him.

  Then he was on me, breathing hard and snuffling for the chicken treats I held in my fists. I fed him the treats, his nose a wet button in my palm, and I kept hold of his harness until Scout gave me the signal.

  And he flew back to her side.

  Hampstead Heath was dog heaven. Dogs of all sizes passed through this meadow on their walks, some of them coming over to give Stan an investigative sniff, others lost in their own world of smells, uninterested in the little red squirt off lead for the first time.

  Dogs paced along the perimeter of the meadow where the trees began, noses pressed to the ground on the trail of some long-gone rabbit or fox. But Scout and I stayed on the meadow with Stan running between us, until he was gasping with exhaustion and our bags of chicken treats were almost empty.

  We were both grinning with happy relief. Stan had gone off lead and he hadn’t been lost. I took out his dog lead. It was time to go home.

  And then he saw the birds.

  Two fat crows, pecking the ground just beyond the tree line, and they took flight as Stan hurtled towards them. Scout and I chased after him, calling his name, but the birds had touched some ancient nerve and suddenly he was not interested in chicken treats or us.

  The elm trees were old and huge on that part of the Heath, and their spreading boughs formed a thick canopy that made it impossible for the birds to take to the sky. So they flew low, flapping wildly, unable to break free.

  And Stan went after them.

  Within seconds we had lost sight of him. We staggered among the trees, calling his name, and within minutes we too had completely lost our bearings. The Heath was dense and wild up here, although we could hear the distant buzz of traffic on Hampstead Lane and could easily imagine our dog under their wheels. Scout began to cry. Silently, hopelessly. I put my arm around her and called Stan’s name again, though it felt useless. The traffic was closer now. There was a tight knot of fear and grief in my stomach.

  And then we saw them.

  The woman coming through the trees with a little red dog in her arms and another dog scampering off lead by her side. A Pekingese-Chihuahua cross. I recognised the dog before I recognised Natasha Buck in her flat cap, green Hunter boots and black waterproofs, a city girl dressed for the country.

  Scout and I choked out our thanks for Stan’s safe return.

  ‘Don’t thank me,’ she said. She pointed at the Pekingese-Chihuahua cross daintily snacking on rabbit droppings by her boots. ‘Thank Susan.’

  We thanked Susan.

  I clipped on Stan’s lead and we walked back to the meadow, while Natasha told us how they had been walking back from Kenwood House when they came across a young Cavalier King Charles Spaniel shivering alone under the elms. Then she asked us if we wanted a cup of hot chocolate.

  I looked at Scout, and Scout looked at me.

  ‘Yes, please,’ we said.

  We walked back to our cars with our dogs on their leads, and I thought that we looked like one of the families who take their dogs on the Heath at the weekend, one of those lucky families. Not perfect, but intact.

  At first I thought she was moving out. There were boxes in the hallway of Natasha’s flat, some of them sealed and some of them open, piled high with clothes and sports equipment, and shoeboxes overflowing with old photos. But she was only shipping out her husband’s things.

  She brought us our hot chocolate.

  ‘First time off lead?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Scout said. ‘I don’t like it. Off lead is scary. I don’t like it when he can just run away.’

  Natasha laughed. It was the first time I had seen her laugh properly, without anything behind it.

  ‘But you have to let him go,’ she said. ‘You have to give him that freedom. He’s a dog.’

  ‘I know he’s a dog,’ Scout said. ‘But I don’t like it.’

  Stan roamed the perimeter of the flat, sniffing the skirting board. Susan followed him, sniffing his backside. Natasha and Scout followed the pair of them, laughing together.

  Some people who don’t have children themselves try too hard. But Natasha wasn’t like that. She was easy and friendly, and I thought I saw her for the first time. This wild girl who wanted to settle down but picked the wrong man. She looked back at me and smiled. They paused at the window, looking across Regent’s Park. Natasha slipped her arm around Scout’s shoulder. My daughter lifted her face to say something.

  I sipped my hot chocolate. Hugo Buck had owned a lot of stuff, I thought, looking at the boxes. The two paintings of the empty city were no longer on the wall. I could see them sitting alone in an old champagne box.

  I went over and picked one of them up. The style was very familiar to me now. The secret corners of the city, empty of people, changed by twilight. I’d seen it here, I had seen it on the wall of the Jones family home, and I had seen it again in Salman Khan’s office. The abandoned city in soft half-light; London – I took it to be London – as a place of loneliness and shadows and sadness, full of the Sunday morning stillness that James Sutcliffe saw in the world.

  The one I’d picked up featured the deserted railway lines. I looked in the corner for his initials.

  But they were not there.

  Instead there was a name I did not recognise.

  Edward Duncan

  I stared at the unknown signature, and then I picked up the other painting, the tunnel in the soft light of dawn or twilight.

  j s

  James Sutcliffe. Then who was Edward Duncan?

  I placed the paintings side by side. And I saw what I had not seen before. The style was similar – so alike that it was easy to assume they were by the same artist. But the painting by Edward Duncan was different. It was different from the painting that had ‘j s’ in the corner, it was different from the painting on the wall of the Jones family home, and it was
different from the painting on the wall of Khan’s office. It was something to do with the artist’s use of light.

  Natasha was saying something to me. The dogs were at my feet and Scout tugged at my sleeve. But I could not tear my eyes from the painting.

  Edward Duncan’s world was darker than the one James Sutcliffe knew. The light was not fading in his painting of an abandoned city.

  It was dying.

  18

  FIRST THING MONDAY morning I found TDC Edie Wren alone in MIR-1 reading a new post from Bob the Butcher on her laptop.

  ‘“If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of The Mighty One. #killallpigs.” A shy, unassuming fellow, isn’t he? You seen how many followers he’s got now?’

  Wren had her laptop plugged into a workstation and on the desk screen I could see that she was logged into HOLMES. Every scrap of evidence produced during the investigation – Operation Fat Boy, they were calling it, after the attack on Guy ‘Piggy’ Philips – had been entered into HOLMES: witness statements, forensic reports, crime scene photographs, autopsy records, every bit of it tagged with a number, a security level and a priority status. Wren had HOLMES open at the Action Management page, a yellow document that would allocate the day’s work schedule for our team. But it was the social network site on her laptop that she was focused on.

  ‘Just sending Bob a message telling him how much I love him,’ she said. ‘Not much chance of getting a response, I know. But if he replies I can find his IP address in sixty seconds.’

  I watched her sending Bob the Butcher some fan mail.

  ‘You’re good at this stuff,’ I said. ‘The whole digital thing.’

  She shrugged with false modesty. ‘Good enough.’

  ‘Do you think we’ve done all we can to find him?’ I said.

  ‘Bob or the perp?’

  ‘I was thinking of Bob.’

  ‘Everyone in here talks as if they’re one and the same. But you don’t think so.’

  I shrugged. ‘It comes down to this. If Jack the Ripper was around today, would he Tweet? Would the Boston Strangler be updating his single status on Facebook? I don’t think so.’

  Wren laughed. ‘You’re dead wrong. I think that’s exactly what they’d be doing. Are you kidding? Jack the Ripper would have loved social media. The Boston Strangler, the Yorkshire Ripper – they would have got a big bang out of the digital community. Taunting the law, puffing out their little chests, revelling in the horror, the horror. The digital world is made for sociopaths. As long as you don’t get caught.’

  ‘Then you don’t think we’ve done enough to find Bob.’

  She pushed a strand of red hair from her face. ‘Clearly not, because we haven’t found him, have we? But it’s not necessarily DI Gane’s fault, and I’m not being diplomatic. Bob’s hiding behind multiple firewalls, and IDS – intrusion detection systems, like a burglar alarm for computers – and Tor, the onion router, where every message is encrypted and re-encrypted multiple times through countless servers. So it will probably take more than a love letter to flush him out.’

  Wren pushed back her chair and picked up what looked like a thick exercise book – the Action Book, which logs the tasks that have been done and the tasks that are yet to be done, and who should do them. It was the real-world equivalent of the Action Management page on HOLMES. Mallory still liked to have a paper record of everything.

  ‘I see you’re going back to Potter’s Field today with a Specialist Search Unit, and taking more statements from the boys who were out running with Philips,’ Wren observed.

  I nodded.

  As well as monitoring the Action Book, Wren was responsible for all the statements coming in, logging them into HOLMES, and for maintaining the integrity of the chain of evidence, the paper trail leading from the crime scenes to MIR-1 and all the way to court.

  It was a big job, and I could see that it bored the hell out of her.

  I indicated the laptop.

  ‘Is it true what they say?’ I asked. ‘Does everyone leave a digital footprint?’

  ‘Now I wouldn’t go that far,’ she said. ‘Everybody leaves a digital shadow. We all live two lives – our physical life, and our digital life. All of us. And the finest minds of my generation are currently working out how to sell you stuff you’ve already bought. So there’s pixel tracking, page tagging, tracking codes – it’s why all these ads seem to follow you around, to magically know it’s you.’ She laughed. ‘At its hollow heart, the internet doesn’t really want anyone to be anonymous. Because it wants to sell you stuff.’

  ‘So everyone leaves a shadow.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Because there’s someone I want you to find.’

  ‘Bob the Butcher,’ she said. ‘Because he broke your back. Because he made you the laughing stock of millions. And because he could have killed you if he wanted to.’

  ‘Not Bob,’ I said. ‘I don’t think Bob has anything to do with these murders. But the man I want to find just might. He would be somewhere in his mid thirties. Name of Edward Duncan.’

  She found herself a pen. ‘Edward Duncan,’ she said as she wrote. ‘Do we have a date of birth?’

  ‘I can get you a possible one but I don’t want you to treat it like gospel.’

  ‘OK. What does he do, this Edward Duncan?’

  ‘He paints.’

  ‘Houses?’

  ‘Cities.’

  ‘Should I put it in the Action Book?’

  I smiled at her. She wasn’t bored now.

  ‘This one’s off the book,’ I said.

  As the afternoon grew colder and darker I stood on the edge of the ploughed field, watching twelve uniformed officers from the Specialist Search Unit inching across it on their hands and knees, fingertip-searching for evidence, the manual labour of police work.

  A photographer was standing in the middle of the field staring at something on the ground. I walked over to him and we both looked at a dip in the field containing a single perfect footprint. On one side of it the photographer had placed a yellow marker with the number 1, and on the other side a plastic ruler. He hummed to himself, as cheerful as a wedding photographer, as he began setting up his tripod, lights and ladder.

  ‘Not you, is it?’ he grinned, nodding at the footprint.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ he said, adjusting his tripod. ‘Maybe it’s the farmer’s wife. And maybe it’s our man. You never know your luck, do you?’

  I agreed that you never knew your luck and headed towards the woods, my back aching in protest at being forced to cross a ploughed field.

  The SSU van was parked just beyond the tree line and another dozen officers were sitting around it gulping down tea and bars of chocolate, their clothes filthy from the fingertip search, their exhausted faces as black with sweat-streaked dirt as coal miners’.

  I came out of the trees and on to the playing fields of Potter’s Field. In the distance the wind whipped the flag of St George that flew above the main building. I’d just started towards it when I was caught by the smell of burning leaves. Smoke was drifting up from behind a tiny stone cottage at the edge of the rugby pitch. I walked round the back of it and found an old man unloading a wheelbarrow piled with dead leaves on to a small bonfire.

  ‘Excuse me, sir?’

  I showed him my warrant card. He peered at it and nodded. Then carried on with what he was doing. Whatever you do, get their name and address, they tell you at Hendon. It’s the very first thing they tell you.

  ‘May I ask your name, sir?’

  ‘I’m nobody. I’m just the groundsman.’

  A strange accent that contained both Eastern Europe and the West Country. I watched him unload the wheelbarrow. There was something wrong with his hands. He glanced at me and saw that I was still waiting for an answer.

  ‘Len Zukov,’ he said.

  ‘Where you from, Len?’
r />   He gave me a sharp look. ‘I’m from here. How about you? Where you from?’

  The accent was Russian, maybe.

  ‘I’m from here, too,’ I said.

  ‘Then we’re both from here.’

  ‘Worked here long, Len?’

  He was silent for a moment, as if adding it up.

  ‘Thirty years,’ he said.

  ‘Do you remember these boys?’

  I was holding out a photograph of the seven boys in their Combined Cadet Force uniforms.

  He shook his head. Too quickly?

  ‘Many boys come and go,’ he said.

  ‘This was taken in 1988. In your time. You don’t remember them? Have a closer look. The King twins? You don’t remember identical twins?’

  ‘No.’

  The worst thing about being a policeman? People lie to you. They lie all the time. They lie because they are afraid of getting into trouble, they lie because they are afraid of getting into deeper trouble, and most of all they lie so that you will go away.

  But maybe he was telling the truth. It was a long time ago, and boys had come and gone in their thousands.

  ‘But you know Mr Philips,’ I said. ‘The sports master. And you know that someone tried to kill him.’

  The old man looked at me as if I was some kind of idiot.

  ‘Everybody knows,’ he said.

  I watched him load more leaves on the fire and then saw what was wrong with his hands. The fingers did not open. He was building his fire with two fists closed by what looked like the advanced stages of rheumatoid arthritis.

  ‘It was in the woods,’ he said. ‘Far from here.’

  When the last of the leaves were on the fire he brushed his closed fists on his trousers and we walked to the front of the cottage. There was a figure standing in the doorway – the physiotherapist Mallory and I had seen on the playing fields with the disabled men. Now I saw that he was not wearing a mask. Most of his face had been lost to burns.

  I held out my hand.

  ‘Sergeant Tom Monk,’ he said. ‘Formerly of the Royal Green Jackets.’

  His shockingly burned face split with a wide white grin. He looked like a member of some lost race; I could not believe there would be a time when his face would not shock me. He clicked the heels of his Asics trainers, and Zukov smiled for the first time. He seemed much more relaxed in the presence of Monk.