The Slaughter Man

by Tony Parsons

  We were on Kite Hill, looking down at all of London, when my phone rang with a number that I didn’t know.

  ‘It’s Oliver,’ said the new man. ‘We’re at the hospital.’

  The celebrations had already begun.

  Oliver had the look of a man who had been up all night but found a happy ending waiting for him in the morning. He was talking excitedly with an older, affluent-looking couple who could not be anything but his dear old mum and dad. The woman was holding two bouquets of flowers. More were arriving.

  Scout sat quietly at the centre of it all, drawing on her iPad.

  I shook hands all round.

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘Mother and baby doing well?’

  ‘Just a bit early,’ Oliver said, and for the first time something passed between us. I understood exactly how he felt. The mixture of relief, pride and unalloyed joy. It stuck in my heart. Because I remembered it well.

  I held out my hand for Scout.

  Oliver’s parents exchanged anxious looks. Everyone was very friendly but there was no denying that Scout and I were part of the abandoned past. And at that moment I think I understood my ex-wife a little better. It is all so much easier if you can pretend that you never loved before.

  ‘Anne,’ said Oliver’s mother.

  ‘Sleeping,’ Oliver said.

  ‘Exhausted,’ said his father.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, and we were free to make our escape.

  Oliver looked at me and smiled with something that I could not quite read. Perhaps he was truly seeing me for the first time, too.

  I smiled back. There was no reason to prolong their agony. We just wanted to get out of the way of their happiness.

  My daughter’s hand was tiny in mine.

  The Sunday traffic was light and we were soon crossing Blackfriars Bridge for home.

  ‘When she gets out of hospital,’ I said, ‘and when the baby comes home—’

  Scout cut me off. ‘It’s OK, Daddy,’ she said, with a maturity that I had never seen before. She looked out at the river, the streets of Farringdon market, old London closed up for its one day of rest.

  ‘I like it here best,’ Scout said.

  At some point near the end of the night Scout awoke and I stumbled to her room.

  ‘The cool side of the pillow,’ she murmured, her eyes still closed with sleep. ‘Make it the cool side of the pillow.’

  I gently eased her into a sitting position as I turned her pillow over. Then she lay back down and within moments she was sleeping again, her head now resting on what she called the cool side of the pillow.

  12

  In Room 101 of New Scotland Yard, Sergeant John Caine unlocked the door that led to the Black Museum and the police cadets filed inside.

  There were a dozen of them down from the Peel Centre, the Met’s principal training centre that we call simply Hendon. They went inside laughing and happy, like big kids on a field trip, and that lasted until they reached a display case of firearms that had been used to kill a police officer.

  John and I followed them from a distance, me with a triple espresso from Bar Italia and him with half-pint of builder’s tea in his BEST DAD IN THE WORLD mug. The cadets’ next stop was the collection of pots that Dennis Nilsen had used to boil the flesh off the heads, hands and feet of his victims. They were no longer laughing. They were no longer talking. They were starting to understand that any day of their career they could leave home in the morning and never come back.

  ‘How many out there, John?’ I said.

  ‘How many did Nilsen kill?’ he said. ‘He couldn’t remember, could he? They reckon fifteen or sixteen. More than enough to clog up his neighbours’ drains.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean how many are there make a living at it? Not the nut jobs like Nilsen. Not the cowboys and gangsters, the ones who will do anyone for a few grand. And not the crimes of passion committed on the spur of the moment with a kitchen knife because someone saw a text message they were never meant to see. I mean the real pros who treat it as a job. Killing for a career. How many of them are out there?’

  ‘The ones who get away with murder?’

  I nodded.

  ‘We don’t know, do we?’ he said. ‘We can never know. By definition, they’re under our radar. But my guess? There are no brilliant pros or genius hit men. They are all dull little toerags, full of rage, looking for an easy buck. All of them. The ones who do it for money, and the ones who do it because some woman hurt their feelings. The answer to your question, son, is – none.’

  I thought about it.

  The cadets were passing the display of Maisy Dawes, the victim of a Victorian blind, the girl who didn’t do anything but die. They did not even glance at her.

  She didn’t do anything. That was the tragedy. All she did was die.

  ‘I think it’s more, John,’ I said. ‘A little bit more than none.’

  My phone began to vibrate and I went back inside his office to answer it. Edie Wren was calling.

  ‘We found the murder weapon,’ she said.

  It was cold in the catacombs of Highgate’s West Cemetery.

  ‘At the far end, sir,’ a uniformed officer told me at the perimeter. I ducked under the tape. There were black figures at the far end of the catacombs and I began walking towards them. I could hear low voices, the cackle and crack of our radios.

  The catacombs are nearly one hundred yards long with almost a thousand individual recesses, each one just large enough to contain a single coffin. And although the catacombs are above ground, they are cut from a hillside, and the cold of the grave seems to cling to the brick and iron.

  A light came on. Beyond a final tapeline, I saw the suited SOCOs. Whitestone was talking to the Crime Scene Manager. Gane was on his knees, peering into one of the recesses that still held a coffin. Wren took notes as she interviewed a couple of terrified boys, shaking her head at their stupidity, her red hair falling over her face.

  I ducked under the tape.

  ‘These two found it,’ Wren said. ‘Climbed over the wall. Poking about where they shouldn’t be.’ She glared at them. ‘And it’s not even Halloween.’

  ‘We weren’t going to steal anything,’ one said, close to tears.

  ‘Just having a look,’ said the other, dry-eyed. ‘We did good, didn’t we? Found important evidence, like.’

  I knelt by Gane’s side. He shone his torch into the coffin. A skull grinned back at us.

  ‘Apparently the Victorians liked the head at this end,’ he said. ‘So they could have a nice natter with the dead.’

  I couldn’t see a thing. ‘Where’s the weapon?’

  ‘Halfway down. In the ribcage. So these two herberts reckon.’ He nodded at the boys. ‘They pulled the body out and shoved it back inside when they saw what was in there. Told one of their mums and she called it in.’

  ‘If we hadn’t been in here—’ the dry-eyed boy began.

  ‘Just shut your cakehole,’ Wren told him.

  Gane and I stepped back to let the CSI photographer do her work. When she had finished, DCI Whitestone gave me the nod.

  ‘Who’s got the longest arms?’ she said.

  ‘Me,’ Wren said.

  ‘Fish it out, Max,’ Whitestone told me.

  I snapped on blue latex gloves and reached my hand inside the coffin. My fingertips felt the smooth edge of a skull. They ran down the knobbly bumps of the neck and the start of the spine. I leaned forward, shutting my mouth tight, trying not to inhale the dust of the ancient grave. I felt the curve of ribs that were powdery with time. Some of the ribs were sharp and broken. And that was recent.

  I reached inside the dead man’s ribcage and felt the cold of modern steel. My fingers felt the short barrel, the thick body and the three letters of the manufacturer’s name.

  My fist closed around the handgrip.

  Very slowly, I began to pull out a cattle gun.

  ‘How’d they get it in there?’ Wren said.

 
‘Broke the ribcage,’ I said, feeling the sharp edge of the dead man’s ribcage cut through the glove and fleshy part of my thumb. The warm blood oozed down my wrist.

  My knuckles brushed the side of the coffin. The wood was rotten with age. Something slimy slithered away from my presence.

  I pulled the cattle gun from the coffin.

  The Crime Scene Manager was waiting with an evidence bag. As I dropped it inside I saw a single blond hair clinging to the muzzle. The CSI photographer began to take more pictures.

  ‘When I hold it, I can see the attraction,’ I said. ‘Lightweight, Portable. Legal.’

  We watched the cattle gun lit up by the photographer’s flash. It was silver and grey, more like a heavy hand drill or a nail gun than a firearm. But there was a brute force about it. It looked effective and deadly.

  ‘It’s still a strange choice for a murder weapon,’ Wren said. ‘I mean – why would you? It’s a big ask to use that thing to take out an entire family.’

  ‘Not if you fill them full of Rohypnol,’ I said.

  ‘Or if you’re trying to set somebody up,’ said Gane.

  ‘Done,’ said the photographer, and DCI Whitestone took the evidence bag and held it in her hands, feeling the weight of the cattle gun.

  ‘Or if it’s what you know,’ she said.

  Wren and I walked back to The Garden through Highgate Cemetery, wild nature pressing in on all sides, this secret place feeling more like a jungle than a graveyard. Even without their leaves, the great trees crowded in on us and covered us in their shade. I didn’t know what they were but I knew they were the kind where the leaves are sticky when they are green in summer and slimy when they fall in autumn. A city tree, although the city felt light years away in here.

  Then I saw him.

  Moving between the shadows of the trees, disappearing around the corner on one of the rising, winding paths, the hoodie he wore pulled over his eyes.

  ‘This part of the cemetery is closed to the public, right?’ I said.

  Wren nodded. ‘Guided tours only. You told me, remember? The west side is always closed to the public.’

  ‘Then who the hell is he?’

  We found him sitting by an ancient tomb that sat in a wild tangle of undergrowth, his hand resting on the massive statue of a sleeping dog that lay beside it. The tomb itself was plain, but the stone dog was enormous, ten times life size.

  Rocky smiled at us from under his hoodie.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I said.

  ‘Visiting my hero,’ he said, patting the dog’s head. ‘You heard of Tom Sayers? He was a boxer, too. The big star of bare-knuckle boxing in the middle of the nineteenth century. This is where he’s buried. Tom Sayers was the Floyd Mayweather of his day. The Muhammad Ali. The Sugar Ray Leonard. He was little – like me – but he fought much bigger men. No weight divisions, see. Not in those days.’

  Wren narrowed her eyes at Rocky.

  ‘You know this gentleman?’ she asked me.

  ‘From the gym,’ I said. ‘Rocky’s a boxer. How do you know this place, Rocky?’

  ‘Did some work up here. For one of my dad’s mates. On the blackstuff. You know – laying driveways. I told you, didn’t I? I thought I told you.’

  ‘What’s the name of your dad’s mate?’

  ‘Sean Nawkins.’

  Wren and I exchanged a look. And I did not let the jolt of shock show on my face but I thought of the caravans and chalets of Oak Hill Farm out in the wilds of Essex and I thought of the Woods’ beautiful home on London’s highest hill.

  Different worlds, I had thought.

  But I was wrong.

  ‘You ever do any work in The Garden?’ I asked, my voice harder now.

  His eyes were wide with innocence.

  ‘Which garden might that be?’ he said.

  ‘The Garden is the gated community the other side of that wall,’ I said, feeling that he already knew the answer. ‘Six houses.’

  He shook his head. ‘No, this was further out. Hadley Wood. But I heard that Tom Sayers was buried here and I wanted to pay my respects. Do you know how many people went to his funeral? One hundred thousand. They followed his coffin up here from Camden Town. Imagine that …’

  ‘You shouldn’t be in here,’ I said. ‘You know that, right?’

  But Rocky just scratched the giant stone dog behind its ears and gave me his big easy grin, as if all my petty rules did not apply to him and his kind.

  The bell in Mary Wood’s Japanese garden moved with the freezing wind.

  I was standing halfway down The Garden, our team going over the list of workers who had been admitted to the gated community over the last six months, working out who remained to be traced, interviewed and eliminated from our investigation when the toll of the bell made me look up.

  There was a sergeant and a couple of uniformed PCs standing guard outside the Wood house. The POLICE DO NOT CROSS tape was already looking tatty. And I could hear the bell.

  The house was speaking to me.

  Trying to speak to me.

  It was bitterly cold in the growing dark of late afternoon, ice forming on the windscreens of the Range Rovers and Porsches and BMWs that sat on the driveways.

  I took off, running towards the house. I ducked under the tape, hearing the bell quite clearly now, that pure ringing sound from the back of the house where the Woods had been happy.

  ‘Sir?’

  The sergeant was at my side, his breath coming out in steam. But I shook my head, not knowing what I was looking for, not understanding what the house was trying to say.

  I was still standing on the driveway, listening to the bell when Wren reached me.

  ‘What is it, Max?’

  I stared at her. ‘I don’t know.’

  The last weak shards of winter sunlight died as the darkness fell and, as Wren and I stood on the drive, suddenly the ground beneath our feet lit up – two dozen lights built into the driveway, stretching from the road to the front door, either side of the path.

  I crouched down and touched the gravel, looking up at the other driveways with the ice glinting on the windscreens, then I touched the Wood driveway again. It was unbroken black asphalt. But on the other drives I could see wear and tear, marks from rubber and exhaust fumes, the scars of time and the weather.

  But not here. I let my fingertips trace the surface of the smooth gravel.

  ‘This is new,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The driveway. I reckon late summer, early autumn. Not long ago. Not long enough to mark it.’ I remembered Rocky in the gym. ‘Working on the black stuff right now. You know. Laying driveways.’ And at the grave of Tom Sayers. ‘Further out. Hadley Wood.’

  Rocky, I thought. You lying little bastard.

  Who was he trying to protect?

  Sean Nawkins? His father? Himself?

  The Sergeant and his two men watched me as I crouched down, my fingertips touching the smooth black asphalt, our breath steaming. I looked up at Wren.

  ‘The firm who laid this driveway,’ I said. ‘They’re not on the list, are they?’

  Wren looked at me, then at the driveway. She looked at the other driveways, and I knew she could see what I could see.

  Only the driveway of the Wood home was pristine. Only the driveway of the Wood home was new.

  Wren consulted the printout in her hands as the wind stirred the trees beyond the wall and was answered by the bell. She cursed quietly, crumpled the list in her fist and then she was running towards Whitestone and Gane, her red hair flying in the growing dark.

  13

  ‘Laying a driveway like the one outside the Woods’ house is a two-day job,’ Wren said in MIR-1 late the next morning. ‘The contractors turn up with the hot-mix asphalt. It’s a mix of sand, stone and gravel held together by asphalt cement. Pour. Level. Trowel. Forty-eight hours, in and out.’

  ‘The security at the gate should record every entry and exit to The Garden,’ Whitestone said.
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  Wren nodded. ‘But early in the morning – residents off to work and school – the gates are left open. And it seems they didn’t get round to recording whoever put down the black stuff on the Woods’ drive.’

  ‘Paper trail?’ Whitestone said. ‘Invoices? Bills?

  ‘We can’t find anything,’ Wren said. ‘And no digital trail. I looked on the search history of the Woods’ computers.’

  ‘Cash in hand, saves on the paperwork,’ Gane said.

  I stared at the huge map of London on the wall of MIR-1. The Garden was on the west side of Highgate West Cemetery – the highest point in the city. You could approach it north from Finchley, south from Kentish Town, west from Hampstead, east from Holloway. If the contractors came off one of London’s orbitals, the North Circular or the M25, then they would have come from the north.

  ‘Nobody remembers anything?’ Whitestone said. ‘Security? Neighbours?’

  Wren consulted her notebook. ‘The security guard remembers the Woods parked their cars on the road for a few days at the tail end of last summer. Late August, early September, he thinks. And nobody ever parks their cars on the road in The Garden. That must have been due to the hot-mix asphalt. You have to let it set before you can park on it. So we are looking at late last summer.’

  ‘Cameras,’ I said. ‘The cameras might have them.’

  Gane laughed. ‘You know how many CCTV cameras there are within a mile radius of the murder scene?’

  ‘Not the CCTV cameras,’ I said. ‘The ANPR cameras.’

  The public call them speed cameras. But we call them ANPRs – for Automatic Number Plate Recognition. Because it’s not just your speed they clock. That’s just the start. What ANPRs are really interested in is your identity.

  ‘The CCTV cameras are no good because none of them have footage going back that far,’ I said. ‘But it’s different with the fixed cameras. It’s different with ANPRs. They keep data for a lot longer.’

  Wren’s fingers were flying over her keyboard. ‘There’s a fixed camera on the hill outside Highgate Cemetery,’ she said. ‘Another one on The Grove just before you turn into The Garden. Two – no, three – on Spaniards Road if they came from the west.’