The Murder Bag

by Tony Parsons

  The sign featured the Henry VIII of popular imagination – the portly wife-killer in his middle years, not the athletic young king whose statue adorned the school he had founded five hundred years ago. Some goggle-eyed spaniels frolicked by his silken club-toe shoes. They all looked like Stan’s relatives.

  It was always a shock to see that there was a town beyond the world of the school. Like a lot of small English towns, Potter’s Field hovered somewhere between gentility and poverty. With Wren at the wheel of a pool car, a little unmarked Hyundai, we passed a pretty village green where a group of local youths sat drinking from cans and smoking, their mountain bikes scattered around them.

  ‘DCI Mallory’s wife came in,’ Wren said. ‘After the medal ceremony. Margaret. She was really nice. She wanted to thank everyone. She’s a class act, that lady. She was asking after you.’ A pause. ‘You should go and see her.’

  ‘You want to take the police station or the local newspaper?’ I said.

  Wren stared at me.

  ‘Did you hear me?’

  ‘I heard you. Police station or the local rag?’

  She looked at me for a moment longer, then looked away.

  We were on the high street now. There were quaint little teashops among the chain coffee shops and mobile phone stores and supermarkets. I pulled up outside one of the teashops. A life-sized effigy of Henry VIII and his dogs guarded the offer of afternoon cream tea and a taste of English summer.

  ‘I’ll take the local rag,’ Wren said.

  They were not expecting me. But my warrant card got me into an interview room with the duty sergeant, Sergeant Lane, a big red-faced copper with the hint of a rural accent. He handed me back my warrant card with a smirking mixture of deference and derision. But he shook my hand and gave me a paper cup of scalding black coffee.

  ‘CID are back?’ he said. ‘We haven’t seen you out here since that unfortunate business with the sports master. But the perpetrator went down, didn’t he?’

  ‘This is another matter,’ I said. ‘A missing person.’ I slid the thin file across the table. ‘You’ve always worked in Potter’s Field?’

  ‘Born and bred here,’ he said. ‘The big city never appealed. It’s beautiful out here. Very green. You get out in the fields, it’s like the last few centuries never happened.’

  ‘Do you remember a missing person called Anya Bauer?’

  He was half-heartedly leafing through the file.

  ‘And why would I?’ he said. He closed the file and raised his eyebrows. ‘Not much of a missing person, was she? More of a lost contact.’

  The file slid back towards me.

  ‘So she was reported missing but you never followed it up?’ I said.

  A slow smile. ‘You think we’ve got plenty of time on our hands? The local yokels.’

  I smiled back at him. ‘Not at all. You must get busy. All those spoilt rich kids at Potter’s Field.’

  ‘Oh, they’re no trouble,’ he said, bridling. ‘We have a good relationship with the school. Always have done. If those kids are smashing up restaurants, then they’re doing it in Chelsea and Knightsbridge, not round here.’ He gestured at the file. ‘Foreign girl, was she?’

  I nodded. ‘German. From Munich. Would you have tried a bit harder to find her if she’d been a local?’

  He laughed. ‘Wouldn’t have had a choice, would we?’ Then his face grew serious. ‘Have you got a body? Is that what this is about?’

  ‘We don’t have a body. It’s more of a hunch.’

  I was on my feet, gathering the file with one hand and reaching out to shake his hand with the other. He took it and gripped it for just long enough to demonstrate that despite my age and warrant card and fancy big city ways, he was by far the stronger man.

  ‘Forgive me, but I don’t quite understand why you’re here,’ he said. ‘This is an official inquiry, is it?

  ‘Just some old business we’re trying to clear up,’ I said. ‘I appreciate your time.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ he said.

  Before I was out of the door, he was reaching for the phone.

  The offices of the Potter’s Field Post were located on the high street above an antique shop but Wren had left a text message changing our meet, and directing me to a small thatched cottage on the edge of town where a sprightly woman in her early eighties was tending an immaculate garden.

  ‘She’s inside,’ she called, ‘with my husband. It’s not locked!’

  An old Golden Retriever lumbered up to me as I went into the cottage. It sniffed my hand sleepily and then trailed after me down the hall as I followed the sound of Wren’s excited voice.

  She was on her knees in the living room, peering through a magnifying glass at an old contact sheet of photographs. The floor was entirely covered with contact sheets. In an armchair was a white-haired old man with what looked like a large Scotch in his hand. The dog went over to him and collapsed on his tartan slippers.

  ‘Be good, Fanta,’ said the old man. And to me, ‘Hello, young man. Would you like a wee dram?’

  ‘Single malt,’ Wren said. ‘Twenty years old. It’s very good.’ There was a glass on the table but it didn’t look as though she had touched it.

  The old gentleman started to rise from his chair but I held up my hands, thanking him, but no. Wren pressed the magnifying glass against her eye, and then against the contact sheet in her hand.

  ‘There’s nothing at the paper,’ she said. ‘It’s on its last legs. They don’t even have proper files. They haven’t even digitally converted their old filing system. I found dry rot in their microfiche. Can you believe it?’

  ‘The Potter’s Field Post?’ said the old man. ‘They give it away these days! Give it away! A free sheet, they call it!’

  ‘But they directed me to Mr Cooper here,’ Wren said.

  ‘Monty!’ the old man erupted.

  ‘Monty!’ agreed Wren. ‘Monty was the staff photographer on the paper for forty years.’

  ‘Man and boy,’ he chortled.

  I got the impression that Monty mightily enjoyed Wren’s company, and was happy to produce his stacks of old contact sheets. He didn’t even seem to mind the red felt-tip pen she was waving around for emphasis, and using to circle images of interest.

  I sat down beside her.

  ‘Nightmare at the local rag,’ she said. ‘As far as I can tell, they did nothing on Anya Bauer beyond that one piece when she went missing. They never followed it up.’

  ‘Neither did the law,’ I said.

  ‘But look at this,’ Wren said, and held out the magnifying glass.

  ‘I photographed this town all my working life,’ Monty said, and I could hear an even stronger echo of the old lost countryside that I had heard in Sergeant Lane’s voice. ‘And once a year, on Potter’s Fifth, I photographed the school.’

  I was looking at images of boys in military uniform. It was the uniform worn by the seven boys in the Combined Cadet Force of Potter’s Field. But here there was an entire army of them, and they marched across the decades.

  ‘Potter’s Fifth is the school’s big day,’ Wren explained.

  Monty barked with laughter. Fanta the Golden Retriever sat up sharply and then slowly curled itself back into sleep.

  ‘On the fifth of May every year the school opens its doors to the great unwashed,’ Monty said. ‘And the town opens its heart to the school. Or pretends it does. It’s the Potter’s Field equivalent of the fourth of June at Eton. Of course they’ve got the river at Eton and we don’t have a river.’

  ‘Do you see them?’ Wren said.

  ‘No.’

  She punched my arm. ‘Jesus, Wolfe! Look harder!’

  I saw hundreds of boys in uniform. Marching past the statue of the young King Henry. Saluting the raising of the flag. Eyes snapped right as they marched past the camera. And then I concentrated on one central image on the contact sheet that was circled with red and the mist cleared.

  They were not as I remembered them – co
cky and grinning and unbreakable, as they had been in that first photograph. Now they were serious, upright, stern, in a line of boy soldiers being inspected by Her Majesty the Queen when she and they were twenty years younger.

  Seven of them together in a line that stretched beyond the frame of the camera: Guy Philips, Salman Khan, Ben King, Ned King, James Sutcliffe, Hugo Buck, Adam Jones. And towering by the side of the Queen as Her Majesty frowned at James Sutcliffe, there was Peregrine Waugh, the line of his mouth suggesting that he was about to detonate with pride.

  ‘And this one,’ Wren said.

  There was another contact sheet she had placed by her side. It too had a red circle around one image.

  It was night in the picture. A long shot of some kind of party in a large white tent. Waiters hovered with trays of champagne flutes. Parents and boys and masters and guests stood around grinning and swilling. Another Potter’s Fifth had gone well. And on the far side of the party I could see a boy and a girl half turning away from the camera with a smile.

  ‘It’s Ben King,’ I said.

  ‘It’s Ned King,’ Wren said. ‘Look closer. You can just about see the scars on his face where his brother glassed him over the Coco Pops.’

  ‘And the girl?’

  She was young, blonde, pretty. A ponytail bobbing, the shadow of a secret smile as she turned away. She was in T-shirt and jeans, far too casual for an event like the one in the big white tent, far too casual for Potter’s Fifth.

  Wren smiled and shook her head. ‘I don’t know. It could be just a girl. You talked to Ned King, right? You and Mallory.’

  I remembered the night out at Brize Norton when Captain King and his regiment were about to get on the Hercules for Afghanistan.

  ‘The killings had only just begun,’ I said. ‘Ned King was leaving. Mallory was gentle with him. Impressed by him.’ I stared through the magnifying glass at the image of the boy and girl at a party long ago. ‘We both were.’

  ‘Well, someone has to talk to Captain King again,’ Wren said. ‘When he gets back.’

  ‘Monty,’ I said, ‘would that have been your only reason to go to the school? Potter’s Fifth?’

  He nodded and eased himself out of the chair. ‘Apart from pictures we needed for the files,’ he said. ‘When there was a new Head Master, they would always want a shot of him. And the statue of Henry. The mainstay of our tourist industry.’ He was bent over the coffee table, not risking getting down on his knees. ‘And the grave, of course. The grave of the royal dogs.’ He tapped a ragged cardboard file. ‘There you go.’

  These were not contact sheets. These were glossy eight-by-ten shots. Some of them were of the Head Masters of Potter’s Field, formal portraits. Peregrine Waugh was the most recent but there were also men long retired, long dead. And there were close-up shots of the grave of the royal dogs, taken in all kinds of weather, and all kinds of seasons.

  I held one in each hand. One was black and white, the stone slick with rain, the grass around it untrimmed. The other was in colour, the stone reflecting a white bar of summer sunshine, the grass border neat and cut.

  But that wasn’t the only difference between the two photographs.

  ‘Look at the inscription,’ I said. ‘Look at the epitaph on the grave.’ I held up the black-and-white shot. ‘The words are missing on this one.’

  On the photograph of the grave taken in summer, the epitaph was there. But on the rain-slick shot, it was missing.

  The old photographer smiled, and he didn’t need to look at the words to recite them. ‘“Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware of giving your heart to a dog to tear.” Well, they could hardly put that on the original grave, now could they?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because the grave is nearly five hundred years old,’ he said. ‘But those words were written in the early twentieth century by Rudyard Kipling. By my time the grave was literally falling to bits. Collapsing in on itself.’

  Wren said, ‘Do you have any pictures?’

  He looked doubtful but eventually found one image of a small yellow bulldozer parked next to the cracked tomb. You could clearly make out the name of the company on the side: V. J. Khan & Sons.

  ‘The grave was always unmarked,’ Monty said. ‘Or at least the inscription had worn clean away. I never saw anything on it. It’s five hundred years old, remember. But when they restored it, he added the words from Kipling.’

  ‘Who did?’ Wren said.

  ‘The Head Master,’ he said, sipping his single malt. ‘Mr Waugh said he didn’t want to leave the grave unmarked.’

  29

  I LEFT WREN tucking into cheese on toast with Monty, his wife and their Golden Retriever and drove the pool car to Potter’s Field. The school seemed shut up and silent already but the main gates were open and I left the Hyundai in the staff car park. I could make out a figure moving around in the twilight of the playing fields and I was starting towards him when I heard the sound of the first shot.

  A large-gauge gun, some distance away, the shot seeming to contain its own echo. And then there was silence and I started off again towards the playing fields, the buildings looking so lifeless that you would never guess they contained one thousand souls.

  The old caretaker, Len Zukov, was moving slowly along a rugby pitch with what looked like a lawnmower. It was only when I got closer that I saw he was leaving a long straight white line in his wake as he marked out a touchline.

  I called out a greeting, raising my hand.

  ‘Don’t step on that!’ he replied. ‘Still wet!’

  ‘Remember me? DC Wolfe from West End Central.’

  I was reaching for my warrant card. But he couldn’t have cared less about my warrant card.

  ‘I remember you.’

  ‘I’m just following up a few details of our ongoing investigation.’

  But he wasn’t interested. He was already moving off, his machine drowning my words, the straight white line trailing behind him.

  ‘Don’t step on my lines,’ he shouted over his shoulder, a man accustomed to bawling at generations of boys. ‘Got to get this done before dark.’

  I walked back across the main courtyard, round the side of the college chapel and into the graveyard. There was a flurry of sound and movement. A squirrel skittered across my path and swiftly up a tree. I reached the grave of Henry’s dogs as another shot split the silence. And there was the epitaph.

  Brothers and sisters,

  I bid you beware

  Of giving your heart

  To a dog to tear.

  Weather and time had etched the words in green moss.

  I turned at a shuffling sound behind me and saw Len Zukov coming slowly down the path. Checking up on me.

  ‘What you want?’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t be in here. You should tell someone you’re coming. Get permission.’

  ‘Those words on the grave,’ I said. ‘I never realised until today that they’re only a hundred years old. But the grave is five hundred years old. So they had to be put there within the last century.’

  His mouth moved as if to say and so what?

  ‘I just wondered how I missed it,’ I said, talking to myself as much as him, and looking up at the sound of another gunshot. ‘Noticing things – it’s sort of what I do, Len.’

  He didn’t take his eyes from me.

  ‘What’s that shooting?’ I said. ‘Twelve-bore?’

  ‘Sounds more like a .410,’ he said. ‘Better for close range, thick-cover shooting. Vermin.’ He rubbed his hands on his overalls. They were locked in permanent fists by his arthritis. He saw me looking at his hands and pushed them deep into his pockets. ‘Rats, rabbit and fox,’ he added.

  ‘Where you from, Len?’

  He frowned at me. ‘I told you – I’m from here,’ he said.

  ‘Originally, I mean.’

  ‘Russia.’

  ‘Russia? They didn’t call you Len over there, I bet.’

  ‘Lev,’ he said. ‘Near enough.’ />
  ‘What part of Russia?’

  We both looked up at the sound of another gunshot. Closer now. The long, drawn-out, rolling sound of a large-gauge shotgun fired in open countryside. The noise just went on and on.

  ‘Who’s shooting?’ I said.

  He shrugged, like that was another subject he couldn’t care less about.

  ‘Farmer,’ he suggested.

  ‘So you came over after the Second World War?’

  ‘No,’ he said, not quite smiling. ‘I came over after the Great Patriotic War.’

  I smiled. ‘Same war. Different names.’

  ‘No,’ he said, unsmiling. ‘Very different wars. Very different wars for your people and my people. In Russia there were twenty-five million dead.’

  We both stared at the grave. I wondered what he thought about an English king who built a tomb for his pet spaniels. Not much, probably. Not if he had been in Russia during the war. He had to be somewhere in his seventies, I guessed. That would have made him a boy of eleven or twelve at the end.

  ‘You must have been too young for the war,’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘Nobody in Russia was too young for the war.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I’m away now,’ I said, and offered him my hand to shake.

  It was a mistake. He took his arthritic hands from his overalls and brushed his clenched right fist briefly against my open palm, and we both turned away with our own private shame.

  He made no attempt to follow me this time.

  Perhaps he figured that I wouldn’t be able to poke my nose in where it wasn’t wanted. Certainly everywhere seemed locked up, and despite the falling darkness few lights appeared in any of the ancient windows. I looked up at the room where Mallory and I had stared across the playing fields with Peregrine Waugh but I could see no sign of life even there.

  But I saw Len Zukov again as I walked back to the car park. He was in front of his little stone cottage with another man and it took me a moment to recognise Sergeant Tom Monk, the burns on his face a smooth black mask from so far away.