The Murder Bag

by Tony Parsons

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘The Russian tank. The T-34 was the Russian tank. The tank that bought your freedom. The tank that paid for your democracy. Britain, America. You said once that I was too young for the war. You were right. I was eleven years old, too young for a war of annihilation. The Germans were coming and I was in the fields and I ran away. Then the Red Army took our town and I returned. But the town was not there any more. Because we were sub-humans. To them. You understand? My mother. My father. My grandmother. My sisters. Sub-humans. I never cried so much as at that time. The last days of my childhood passed in this way.’

  He was silent, lost in memory, or listening to the night.

  ‘I went west with our soldiers,’ he said. ‘West, west, west. The First Belorussian. The frontoviki – frontline troops. Through a world in ruins. Do you know why they kept me? Because I had almost the same name as their leader. General Georgy Zhukov. What do you call it?’

  ‘A mascot,’ I said.

  ‘A mascot. I wanted to live. I wanted to stay alive. But I wanted to see Germany destroyed. I closed my heart to pity.’ He shook his head with wonder. ‘They had so much! The Germans were so rich! The farms, the animals – why did they come to us when they already had so much?’

  ‘They wanted more, Len,’ I said soothingly. ‘They wanted the world. It was madness.’

  But he wasn’t listening to me now.

  ‘Our soldiers wanted women,’ he said. ‘“Frau, frau, frau!” I wanted something else. For my dead family. For my grandparents. For my sisters. For my parents. For my gone family. Our frontoviki placed me inside a cellar. One by one, a dozen Waffen-SS men who had destroyed their papers and ripped off their badges were sent inside. I could hear them screaming on the other side of the door. “Nix SS! Nix SS!” Our soldiers had showed me what to do. You know? The knife through the neck, then pull, then kick the Nazi down the stairs. A dozen of them. So, you see an old man. But you’re looking at a killer.’

  We stared at each other.

  ‘I think it’s been a while since you killed anyone,’ I said quietly. ‘I think it’s been a lifetime.’

  He pointed the .410 at my face.

  ‘You hate the Germans,’ I said. ‘But Anya Bauer was German, wasn’t she? And you didn’t hate Anya, did you? You loved her.’

  ‘Anya’s father was German,’ he said. ‘But her mother was Russian. My daughter.’

  ‘And Anya came to stay with you when she was fifteen years old. Your granddaughter came to stay with you at Potter’s Field. What was that? A summer holiday? Trouble at home? A bit of both? I bet there was some kind of trouble at home, wasn’t there?’

  ‘Stop talking about her,’ he said.

  His voice flat and hard, levelling the .410 at my chest, giving himself a bigger target.

  ‘And then one day Anya was gone,’ I said. ‘Somewhere between a missing person and a lost contact. And you didn’t know what happened – or maybe you suspected, but you were never sure until you saw what was in Henry’s grave. When it was collapsing. When it was falling to bits. You saw her bones, didn’t you? Human bones in there with the bones of Henry’s dogs. Or maybe you saw them later, when the grave was being renovated. But at some point you saw inside the grave and you knew it had to be Anya.’

  ‘Shut up now,’ he said, the shotgun moving between my face and my chest.

  ‘And you put it all together,’ I continued. ‘Anya coming to stay. The boys who were sniffing around. Hugo Buck and his little gang. And then Anya gone – for a night, and then a year, and then for ever. Were there rumours, Len? Did you hear anything about what Peregrine Waugh’s followers had done to some girl? Were they afraid of the truth coming out? There must have been talk after James Sutcliffe killed himself – or pretended to. Somehow you suddenly knew what had happened to her – what they had done. And you drew up a list of the boys who must have been in that room when Waugh broke her neck and they treated your beautiful girl like something to be thrown away. And you wanted revenge. Is that what happened?’

  The .410 seemed to seek out my heart, and stay there, steady at last in his paralysed hands.

  ‘What matters,’ he said, ‘what matters is that I avenged her. Do you believe me at last?’

  ‘I believe all of it, Len,’ I said. ‘I truly do. Except the last part. I don’t believe that you’ve killed anyone since you were a boy.’

  The door opened and Tom Monk came in, an old army jacket slung over jeans, carrying a twelve-bore shotgun and a lifeless brace of rabbits. Behind the terrible burns on his ruined face I saw his eyes widen and grow cold.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I was wondering when you might turn up.’

  ‘A young policeman I know burned his hands when we collared Bob the Butcher,’ I said. ‘A brave young lad called Billy Greene. He was going to spend his sick leave in Las Vegas. Champagne cocktails by the pool in Caesar’s, chorus girls, all that.’

  ‘Very nice,’ Monk said.

  ‘But guess what? They wouldn’t let him in. Sent Billy straight back to Gatwick. Because the Americans fingerprint everyone at the border now. And they couldn’t get any prints off him.’

  Monk held up his hands, a mocking gesture of surrender. And for the first time I saw that the reason we could never find any prints at the crime scenes was because the flesh on his hands was as destroyed as the flesh on his face.

  ‘Remind me to steer clear of Las Vegas,’ he said.

  ‘So what was in it for you, Tom?’ I said. ‘Keeping your hand in? Spot of vigilante work? Never kicked the killing habit?’

  He stopped smiling.

  ‘Justice,’ he said.

  I tried to smile but my mouth merely twisted, and my heart began to hammer in my chest as I realised what was going to happen to me tonight.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s a joke. How can there be justice in a land where they let the bravest and the best sleep on the streets until they work up the nerve to top themselves?’

  ‘So you cut the throats of Hugo Buck and Adam Jones,’ I said. ‘Botched it with Piggy Philips, didn’t you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t think he’s going to be taking double games for a while, do you?’

  ‘But you missed out on Captain King, didn’t you? The Taliban beat you to it.’

  Monk’s mask-like face clenched with sudden fury. ‘You’re just another stupid policeman. Captain King was a brave man. A warrior. One more lion led by yet more donkeys. Same story in this country for a hundred years.’ He leaned against the door and shook his head. ‘Captain Ned King was never on my list.’

  ‘What about Salman Khan?’ I said. ‘Was he still alive when that big house went up in flames? Or did you break in there, open up his throat and then torch the place?’

  ‘One of his kids had a motorbike,’ Monk said. ‘Have you ever heard of such a thing? A child with his own little motorbike? I served my country for ten years and all I’ve got is a second-hand bicycle.’

  ‘What outfit were you with in Afghanistan, Tom?’

  ‘I told you. The Royal Green Jackets.’

  ‘I don’t think so. You’re too handy with a knife. Too good at creeping around, unarmed combat and covering your tracks. I reckon you were with the Special Forces Support Group. Or maybe the SAS? Or the SBS?’

  ‘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.

  An
d 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 m
other. 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.