by Tony Parsons
‘The rich take a lot of looking after.’
‘We’re compiling a list of everyone who’s had access to The Gardens over the last six months. It’s not easy with casual workers who like cash in hand.’
‘Saves on the paperwork,’ I said, and we started walking towards the twelve-foot wall that surrounded The Gardens. Beyond it the wood that almost consumed Highgate Cemetery stretched off into the mist. The search teams had gone and stone angels peeked half-hidden from the trees.
‘If he – or they – came in over that wall, he – or they – didn’t go back over it,’ I said. ‘Not carrying a four-year-old child.’
‘Not if the kid was alive,’ Wren said.
‘But if he was dead – why take him?’
A big Lexus pulled into The Gardens. A deeply tanned man and woman of about forty were in the front seats. A teenage girl, her face hiding behind long hippy hair, was slumped in the back, plugged into an iPod. The driver’s window slid down.
‘Miles Compton,’ a tanned fifty-year-old man said. ‘We live next door to the Woods. Heard the news just as we were leaving St Lucia.’ His eyes left me and stared with horror at the tape around the murder scene. ‘Is it really true?’
‘I’m afraid it is, sir,’ Wren said.
Next to him, the woman’s hands were pressed to her mouth.
The man nodded grimly. ‘I always knew he would push his luck too far,’ he said.
‘Who?’ I said.
‘The boy. Marlon Wood. That arrogant little shit.’ He shook his head with real regret. ‘Bloody shame about the rest of them, though. Bloody shame.’
He drove off to the house next door to the Wood property. ‘I’m on my way,’ Wren said, and started walking towards them.
I walked to the wall and followed the perimeter around The Gardens. At the back of the house next door to the Comptons, workmen were taking down some scaffolding.
‘Stop that!’ I called.
They stared at me for a moment and then carried on dismantling the scaffolding.
‘Zatrzymac!’ I shouted, and my Polish was good enough to get them to stop immediately. ‘Policja,’ I said. ‘Let me try something, men. Jing kweer.’
As they conferred in Polish, I climbed up a ladder on the scaffolding and then another to the point where it was above the top of the wall. I walked to the end of the plank. The branch of a tree that grew inside the cemetery hung close to the house, brushing the top of the scaffolding. Some of the branches had been cut back, but it must have been a while ago now. I looked up at the branch above me and then jumped up and gripped it, hanging there for a moment, checking it wasn’t going to break any time soon. It seemed strong enough to hold me so I swung my legs up and caught it. The Polish builders had lit cigarettes and were enjoying the show. Sweating now, I shuffled down the branch, passing over the top of the wall. I kept going until my shoes touched the trunk of the tree. I clambered upright and started edging down the tree. I couldn’t see the Polish builders any more but I could hear them applauding. Coming down was easier, although there was a sheer drop for the final ten feet or so. How could you do it with a child?
With a child that was still alive, I thought.
I dropped into the cemetery.
I hit the ground and caught my breath, staring into the thick wild wood of Highgate Cemetery. There was a stone angel next to me. The features of its face had been worn completely smooth by weather and time. In the distance I could see glimpses of giant crosses and strange memorials. Massive stone animals. A lion. A dog. All curled up with their eyes closed, sleeping for eternity. It was like leaving the world behind and stepping into a dream. The silence was total. It did not feel like the heart of the city. It felt like another planet.
Then suddenly Mary Wood was walking towards me through the mist, watching me every step of the way, just the two of us in that silent place.
I held my breath, flashing back to when I had last seen her on a stainless steel table at the Iain West, and when I had first seen her dead in her marital bed.
And I realised it was not Mary Wood.
It was her sister, Charlotte Gatling. And she was looking at me with the same watchful intensity that I had seen when I was with Scout in Savile Row.
‘Please don’t give up on him,’ she said. ‘Don’t give up on Bradley. My nephew.’
I shook my head.
‘Never,’ I said.
‘I know you think he’s probably dead,’ she said, raising a hand before I could say anything. ‘I know that’s what the statistics all say – you find the child immediately or you never find the child at all. But he’s not dead, Detective. I don’t give a damn about the statistics. I can feel it. That little boy is alive.’
There was something in her hand.
A small toy. A cowboy. One of those eight-inch plastic figures. Boots, waistcoat, white shirt. No, not a cowboy. Han Solo from Star Wars. Of course – the space cowboy. Her nephew’s toy, I thought. Bradley’s favourite toy.
Then there were more people coming out of the trees and the day suddenly felt like a dream. There was her brother and a camera crew. The Media Liaison Officer and the Family Liaison Officer were trailing behind Nils Gatling and the camera crew, flustered and ignored, their high heels unsuitable for Highgate Cemetery in January.
‘What’s happening?’ I said.
‘We’re doing a reconstruction,’ Charlotte Gatling said. ‘For Crimewatch. They want me to be my sister arriving home so we can perhaps jog a few memories.’
‘Did we set this up? The Met?’
‘My brother set it up. It’s good, isn’t it? Exposure is the key. That’s what Nils says.’
‘Exposure can be counter-productive,’ I said, as gently as I could. ‘Because every nut comes out of the woodwork. We can get so many false leads that we miss the real leads. Exposure needs to be carefully managed.’
There was a flash of irritation in her eyes and I remembered her sister staring down the mocking reporter in Lillehammer.
‘But it’s better than just being ignored,’ she said. ‘Like the families of most missing children.’
‘Yes,’ I said quietly. ‘It’s better than that.’
Then I saw something inside her start to crack. ‘So where is he?’ she said, her voice strained with distress, as though her throat wanted to choke down all the terrible questions. ‘What’s happening to him? What are they doing to Bradley?’
Thinking that way did no good, I knew. Thinking that way just paralysed you. But I couldn’t say that to her.
‘I’m going to find Bradley,’ I said. ‘I promise you.’
She stared at me as if she could see into my soul.
‘You really promise me?’
‘Yes.’
Her brother approached us.
‘They’re ready for you, Charlotte.’
‘My brother, Nils Gatling,’ she told me.
I held out my hand.
‘DC Wolfe of West End Central,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry about—’
But Nils Gatling was not interested in any more sympathy from strangers, and he had looked away before we had finished shaking hands, his face set and his eyes cold.
‘Just start doing your job,’ he told me.
‘HOLMES gives us six men who have been convicted of murder with what the law calls a captive bolt pistol over the last thirty years,’ Wren said. ‘It’s a very small club. Three are dead, two are doing time and then there’s the Slaughter Man.’
She hit a button on her laptop.
A good-looking man in his middle years appeared on the big plasma screen on the wall of Major Incident Room One. He wore shabby, threadbare clothes and looked as though he cut his own hair. In his large hands were two plastic supermarket bags. But he was still recognisable as the young man who had been locked up in Belmarsh in 1980. There was more than just a shadow of that seventeen-year-old. Because Peter Nawkins still looked as though he was thinking of absolutely nothing.
‘That’s Peter
Nawkins?’ I said. ‘That’s the Slaughter Man?’
‘Handsome devil,’ Wren said.
The door to MIR-1 opened and a tall man of about sixty came in wheeling a suitcase. He smiled shyly at our applause, running a hand through his snowy white hair.
‘Dr Joe!’ DCI Whitestone said, happily adjusting her glasses. ‘Fresh off the Heathrow Express! Thanks for coming in.’
Dr Joe Stephen, Forensic Psychologist at King’s College, slumped at a workstation, foggy with jet lag. Gane stuck a mug of black coffee in his hand and he nodded gratefully.
‘Four dead and a missing child,’ he said, the California accent smoothed by thirty years in London. ‘I wanted to get started.’
He took a file out of his case and spread it before him. Crime scene shots. Autopsy pictures. The usual blank-faced catalogue of gore.
‘What do you make of it, Dr Joe?’ Whitestone said. ‘The abductors of children don’t spree kill. Mass murderers kill everything that moves but don’t steal kids. We’ve been struggling to make any kind of sense of it.’
Dr Joe seemed very tired. And it wasn’t just because of the night flight from JFK.
‘It feels like the deliberate destruction of happiness,’ he said.
Wren shot me a look. That had been her theory from the start. The Woods had been killed because they were a happy family.
‘What about the missing boy, Dr Joe?’ I said. ‘Do you think there’s a chance he’s still alive?’
Dr Joe ran a hand across his face. ‘Four days into your seven-day window? There’s still a chance, isn’t there? But time’s running out fast now. Have you come up with any leads?’
DCI Whitestone turned to the uniformed officer who was at one of the workstations. Carrot-haired and gawky, he looked like an overgrown kid dressed up as a copper. You would never guess that he had a QPM, the police medal for conspicuous valour.
‘How you doing, Billy?’ she said.
PC Billy Greene held up his hands and I saw the blackened burns on his palms that would probably keep him on desk duties for the rest of his career.
‘Bradley Wood was seen in a department store on Oxford Street in the company of a man and woman,’ Billy said. ‘The child was crying. The man was angry. Bradley was also seen at a service station on the M1 in the company of a man who was buying him a sandwich in a coffee shop. Bradley was also seen on the swings in a park just outside Leeds. He was apparently happy. A young woman was with him. And he was seen in the café at Lego Land.’
‘These sightings, are they all since last night?’ DI Curtis Gane said.
‘No – this is just the last hour,’ Billy said. ‘And it’s going to get a lot worse when this Crimewatch thing goes out tonight.’
‘Can’t the MLO rein in Nils Gatling?’ Gane said. ‘Can’t the Chief Super have a word?’
‘Apparently not,’ Whitestone said. ‘Mr Gatling treats the MLO like a very junior and extremely stupid member of his personal staff.’ She shook her head. ‘You get families who don’t know how to play the media. And you get the ones who do. And that kind never makes our job any easier.’
There was a set of keys on Whitestone’s workstation. She picked them up and held them out to me.
‘The Financial Forensics Unit dug this up – a property Brad Wood owned that we need to check out,’ she said. ‘It’s your neck of the woods, Max. An apartment in the Barbican.’
‘The family owned a flat in the Barbican?’
‘Not the family. Just the father.’
‘FFU traced it through direct debits on Brad Wood’s bank accounts,’ Wren said.
‘Rental property?’
Wren shook her head. ‘As far as we can make out, it was for his own personal use. The utility bills are next to nothing. Doesn’t look as if anybody was living there.’
I thought about that for a while.
‘The apartment’s been processed by forensics, so you can touch what you like,’ Wren said. ‘See if you feel a tremor in The Force.’
I slipped the keys into my pocket.
Whitestone turned to Dr Joe. ‘What do you make of the sexual assault on the mother? Is that significant? Should we be looking at known sexual offenders?’
Dr Joe’s mouth tightened with something that I could not read.
‘I wouldn’t place great emphasis on the rape of Mary Wood,’ he said. ‘Sex and violence are almost always interchangeable in the mind of a psychopath. The choice of weapon is, I would suggest, more significant. The use of a cattle gun to slaughter a family indicates a wish to make the victims less than human.’
‘Any joy with the neighbours in The Gardens?’ Whitestone asked Wren.
‘Mr Compton says his wife and daughter are too distressed to talk to us right now,’ she said. ‘But he’s not shedding any tears over young Marlon Wood. The phrase “degenerate little scumbag” came up, but he wouldn’t be more specific. Closed the door in my face with some force.’
‘Talk to him again,’ Whitestone said. ‘Get him to be more specific, tell him we can do it at his place or at West End Central. But first we need to talk to Peter Nawkins.’
We all looked in silence at the old man on the screen.
‘I know,’ Whitestone said. ‘Nawkins feels like a waste of our time, doesn’t he? But he’s in a category of one – the only living cattle-gun killer who’s not doing time. So the TIE process demands that we talk to him. It’s not optional.’
TIE means trace, interview and eliminate any individual who could have realistically committed the offence under investigation. It is not the same as being suspected of the crime, but we had to cross the Slaughter Man off our list.
‘Where is he?’ Gane said. ‘We have a release address for when he came out of Belmarsh?’
‘Oak Hill Farm. On the border of the East End and Essex.’
‘Oak Hill Farm? The gypsy camp.’
‘The travelling community camp – and it’s more than a camp,’ Whitestone said. ‘It’s the largest concentration of travellers in Europe. There are some permanent settlements there. Not all of them legal.’
‘You don’t really like him for this, do you?’ Gane said. ‘This sad old man with his plastic shopping bags?’
Whitestone shrugged. ‘He’s been out for nearly ten years,’ she said. ‘I bet he has people showing up from time to time. And they might be of interest to us.’
‘You mean journalists?’ I said.
‘I mean fans,’ she said. ‘I mean obsessive nutcases. I never saw a multiple killer yet who didn’t have a sizeable fan club.’
Dr Joe was on his feet, staring at family photograph of the Woods on the whitewall of MIR-1.
‘She was so beautiful, wasn’t she?’ he said. ‘Mary, I mean.’ He saw us watching him and shook his head, embarrassed. ‘I don’t mean because she was conventionally good looking – although there’s that, of course. But there was a radiance to her beauty. The kind of beauty that you so rarely see, inside and outside. She had both.’
‘I guess a lot of us feel as though we knew Mary,’ Whitestone said.
Dr Joe smiled, and behind his glasses I saw that his eyes were shining with tears.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Although she was more complicated than her public image suggests.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘She was in therapy with me for a number of years,’ he said.
We let that sink in.
Whitestone took a step towards him.
‘Recently?’ she asked.
Dr Joe shook his head. ‘I stopped seeing her ten years ago. When her children were small. The first two children, I mean. Marlon and Piper.’ He was still staring at the family photograph.
‘Is there a problem here, Dr Joe?’ Whitestone said. ‘Do we have to worry about therapist-patient privilege?’
‘There’s absolutely no problem, Pat,’ Dr Joe said. ‘Because I’m not going to tell you what we discussed during therapy. It is simply not relevant. And there’s no problem because, if anything, knowing Mary makes me even more
determined that you nail him.’
He could not control the anger in his voice. I had never known this mild-mannered man to sound so angry.
‘Let’s just find rotten bastard that did it,’ he said.
And the first thing next morning Curtis Gane and I drove out to meet the Slaughter Man.
8
Oak Hill Farm was built on the vague border where the end of London meets the start of Essex, a place of fields and warehouses, ancient farms and new houses, concrete and grass, where every colour is either grey or green.
Just beyond Gallows Corner, I turned the BMW X5 off the A127 and we could see it in the distance.
‘What’s the history of this place?’ Gane said.
‘It was an illegal scrapyard for years,’ I said. ‘There was actually a farm – I think there still is – and the farmer sold two plots of land to a pair of travelling families in the Eighties. They built a couple of homes and the council told them to tear them down. They fought it in the courts and won. More travellers came. And they kept on coming. Now there are around a hundred families on ten acres.’
‘Looks like a small town built upon a rubbish dump,’ Gane said.
‘That’s exactly what it is,’ I said. ‘And for about five hundred people – it’s home.’
There were two walls around Oak Hill Farm, and within the second wall the white caravans were parked nose to tail. There was only one way in, under some giant scaffolding with hand-painted signs that said WE WON’T GO and NO ETHNIC CLEANSING surrounded by children’s paintings of brightly coloured caravans.
I drove slowly inside. Eyes watched us all the way.
Dead washing machines, fridges and TVs were scattered between neat little chalets with net curtains. A grubby-looking white horse grazed on a scrap of grass. A dog defecated beside a brand-new Audi. Oak Hill Farm was a strange mix of suburban gentility and unapologetic squalor.
‘I like what they’ve done with it,’ Gane said.
There were no street names so I stopped and Gane opened his window. A woman and a teenage girl were walking by, perhaps a mother and a daughter, holding hands.
‘We’re looking for Mr Nawkins,’ Gane said.
They stared at Gane’s black face for a while and then gestured vaguely to deeper inside the camp where a lone girl was walking with a pack of dogs. She had long straight dark hair and pink hot pants, despite the weather hovering just above freezing. She was around fifteen years old but anxious to be grown-up. High on one cheekbone she had the faded yellows and purples of a fading black eye. Her dogs were a mixed pack of Staffies and mongrels with a magnificent Akita walking by the girl’s side.