by Tony Parsons
‘Did your brother Peter interact with Mrs Wood?’
‘No,’ he said, then shook his head, as if he was finally anxious to hold nothing back. ‘She held the tray while Peter took a glass of home-made lemonade. He thanked her. She smiled at him.’
I waited.
‘That’s it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did your brother ever mention her?’
‘We never saw her again. He never mentioned her. A woman – some housekeeper – collected the glasses later.’
‘How were you paid?’
‘Cash. In an envelope Mr Wood left for us. All fifties. The housekeeper gave it to me on the last day.’
‘Did you see the child? Bradley Wood?’ I took a photograph from my wallet and showed it to him. A passport-sized photograph of a smiling little boy. Sean Nawkins did not look at it. He stared past my shoulder.
‘I’ve seen it already,’ he said.
‘Look at it again,’ I said. ‘I’m asking politely.’
He looked at it, his mouth twisting.
‘The little boy was with her,’ he said. ‘What can I tell you? That’s it. Just a little boy with his mother as she gave a drink to a gang of men.’
He hung his head.
‘Have a look at this, Max,’ Whitestone said.
The electrical sockets were all off the wall and scattered across the floor. The SST had found something behind one of them. There was a matchbox and a set of keys on the latex-gloved palms of DC Wren. I picked up the matchbox and turned it in my own latex-gloved hand. Red words on a white background.
The Full English Holloway Road, Holloway Road, N7 ‘Good’ food. ‘Healthy’ too.
‘Come over here,’ I told Sean Nawkins, and I held out my hand to him as he crossed the wreck of the caravan.
‘You know this gaff?’ I said. ‘The Full English on the Holloway Road? Where’s that? Around Highbury Corner?’
Nawkins looked as though he was going to throw up.
‘The Full English is at the other end of the Holloway Road,’ he said.
‘Around Archway?’
‘Yes.’
‘You could walk to it from The Garden, then?’
He nodded.
‘And you did,’ I said. It wasn’t a question.
‘We would stop there on our way to the job,’ Nawkins said.
I opened the matchbox. Inside there were four figures scribbled in biro. I showed them to Whitestone and Wren.
1 0 1 0
‘One thousand and ten?’ Wren said.
‘Ten-ten,’ I said.
‘When was Mary Wood’s birthday?’ Whitestone asked.
Wren consulted her phone. Tapped a few keys, waited a few seconds. Then she had it.
‘Tenth October,’ she said. ‘So it’s a birthday.’
‘It’s more than that,’ I said. ‘What do most people choose for a secret code? Their birthday. Get Tactical Support to try the burglar alarm in The Garden. I bet ten-ten still works.’
‘Then this was how he gained entry,’ Whitestone said. ‘He knew the code – guessed it or was told it or most likely saw someone using it – and he had a stolen set of keys.’
I held out my hand and Wren gave me the keys. They weighed almost nothing in my hand. One for the door and one for its deadlock. I looked at them more closely. They were shiny and new. Hardly a scratch on them.
‘He probably borrowed a set for a few hours and duplicated them,’ I said. ‘These don’t look stolen. They look like they’re brand-new copies.’
‘Were the men using the toilet in the house?’ Whitestone said. ‘It’s not uncommon for these big house to have some kind of Portaloo for the workers. But if that wasn’t the case in The Garden …’
We looked up and saw Nawkins slipping out of the caravan. I followed him. A thin blue line of uniformed coppers encircled the outside perimeter of Oak Hill Farm, keeping back a crowd of locals.
Echo Nawkins paraded inside the camp, a pack of dogs barking furiously around her, as she exchanged furious abuse with the locals beyond the fence.
‘I’ve seen this before,’ Nawkins said, more to himself than me. ‘I know what happens next. They always hate us. But then something happens. Some kind of spark that sets it all off. And suddenly people start dying.’
I knew he was thinking of his dead wife, burned alive in a caravan on the other side of the city.
‘You have to get my brother soon,’ he said. ‘If you don’t get him soon, they’re going to torch this place.’
‘Then you better hope we find him,’ I said.
From the middle of the mob beyond the fence, someone chucked a brick. It shattered in the middle of Echo’s pack of dogs and sent them into a frenzy of barking. Echo gave the crowd the finger and screamed a torrent of abuse. Then she picked up what remained of the brick and threw it back. The brick was answered with bottles.
And I watch a shower of broken glass spray across the boots of the young uniformed coppers who stood where they always stand.
Right in the middle.
I stopped at the hospital on my way home.
Even though it was nearly midnight, Gane’s mother was there.
‘Mrs Gane? I’m DC Wolfe. I worked with your son.’
The elderly West Indian lady adjusted her hat and carefully stood up. Then she took my hands and smiled. She had dressed in her best clothes to sit by the side of her son’s bedside in the Homerton. There were screens pulled around his bed. I thought I could hear him breathing behind them.
‘His friend,’ she said, the accent still more Trinidad than London after a lifetime in the country. ‘You were his friend at work. His good friend.’
I smiled and nodded and had no words.
The truth was that DI Gane and I were never really friends.
When I joined Homicide and Serious Crime Command, DI Curtis Gane had looked at me as if I was fresh off the bus. And he was right. Gane had seen things that were still ahead of me. All the same, we were, I believe, on our way to becoming friends. This was true. But now that was all over. Now there was no time left.
‘Would you like to see him, sweetheart?’ Mrs Gane said, and I nodded mutely.
We slipped between the plastic screens and the sight of him made me gasp. His neck was in some kind of collar. A thick tube snaked into his throat. He didn’t look like a man they were attempting to keep alive. He looked like a dead man.
‘He’s broken his first and second cervical vertebrae,’ she said quietly.
I choked down the shock and grief.
‘I don’t know what that means,’ I said.
‘It means his spine and his head are no longer connected.’ She touched his forehead very lightly. ‘But it’s still him, isn’t it? It’s still my Curtis. They are going to stabilise him and then they’re going to see if there’s anything they can do to fix it.’
I had no words. There were no words. And I suddenly saw that Mrs Gane was exhausted.
‘If you need to go home,’ I said, ‘I’ll stay with him for the night.’
She looked doubtful.
‘I don’t want to leave him, but there’s Molly,’ she said. ‘I should see to Molly.’
I nodded. I had no idea who Molly might be.
‘The cat,’ she said, then she laughed. ‘Ridiculous, really. My son has this happen to him and I worry about the cat.’
‘It’s not ridiculous,’ I said.
‘And it’s difficult to wash here.’
‘Go,’ I said. ‘Please, Mrs Gane. I’ll not leave him until you come back. I’ll be here all the time. I promise.’
She left us. I settled in a plastic chair. I felt like praying. I felt like weeping. I found that both were beyond me.
So I watched his face, and I closed my eyes, and the dream-like noises of a hospital at night seeped into my waking dreams.
He spoke at the end of the night, the hospital noises dying at last, and the washed-out grey of a February dawn breaking over the East End rooftops.
He said just four words, and I did not know if they were said to me, or himself, or the life that had been left behind. But those four words gripped my heart and made me fear for what the remains of his life would look like.
Because he was saying that his mother was as wrong as she could possibly be.
‘This is not me,’ said DI Curtis Gane.
20
I left work early the next day so I could go to the Black Museum and stare at the unholy relics of the Slaughter Man, but the rusting cattle gun and faded newspaper clippings said absolutely nothing to me. Instead I found my eyes drawn to a display for police officers who had been killed in the line of duty.
OUR MURDERED COLLEAGUES, it said.
Inside the glass case there were more than a hundred years of faces, all of them official mugshots. Some of the faces were expressionless, and some of them were suppressing a smile.
There were faces from the early part of the twentieth century, the black-and-white grown grey with age, and there were more recent faces, with the haircuts and facial hair out of style but the colours still fresh.
Some of the names were famous, because some of the deaths were so shocking they had made front-page news.
WPC Yvonne Joyce Fletcher. 17 April 1984. Age 25. Shot.
It didn’t say anything about the coward bastard gunman inside the Libyan Embassy.
PC Keith Henry Blakelock. 6 October 1985. Age 40. Stabbed.
It didn’t say anything about the coward bastard mob that tried to decapitate him.
But then it didn’t need to. There was one man I had known and loved. DCI Victor Mallory. And I saw him in the basement room with the screaming woman and the flames and the knife plunging into his neck about one fatal inch above the top of his Kevlar Stealth.
Age 50. Stabbed.
Yet most of the names were unknown. Perhaps they had been a headline for a day. Perhaps not. They had died in many different ways and yet the same causes came round again and again.
Shot. Stabbed. Shot. Stabbed. Run Over. Run over. Rammed by vehicle being pursued. Bludgeoned during an arrest. Bludgeoned during an arrest. Shot. Stabbed.
‘You done?’ asked Sergeant John Caine.
He was closing the Black Museum down for the day and the weak winter sunlight glinted on the knives and swords and firearms that are piled up in Room 101 of New Scotland Yard like a boot sale from hell.
I turned once more to the exhibit for the Slaughter Man. The scratched and rusting cattle gun. The fading newspaper article.
RITUAL SLAUGHTER ON ESSEX FARM
Slaughter Man executes father and sons in midnight killing spree
A killer was jailed for life yesterday for murdering a father and his three grown-up sons with a bolt gun used to slaughter livestock.
Peter Nawkins, 17, had been engaged to the only daughter of Ian Burns of Hawksmoor Farm, Essex. When the engagement was ended, Nawkins broke into Hawksmoor Farm and slaughtered Farmer Burns and his sons Ian Junior, 23, Martin, 20, and Donald, 17, before setting fire to their home. Mrs Doris Burns, 48, and her daughter Carolyn, 16, were present but escaped unharmed by the killer the press have dubbed the Slaughter Man.
And the two photographs.
The Burns family laughing under their Christmas tree. The burly father and his petite wife. The three sons grown big on the farm.
And Peter Nawkins being taken down after being found guilty of murdering the father and his boys, the multiple murderer with the film-star looks and a natty nickname. I had stared at it all for a long time but it gave me no clues.
I found my mind drifting to Curtis Gane in the Homerton Hospital and my gaze to the glass case remembering those who had died in the war we fight every day, the war without end, the war that could never be lost or won.
‘Nothing for the ones who didn’t die,’ I said. ‘The ones who were broken and have to find a way to carry on living.’
‘No, there’s nothing for them,’ Sergeant Caine said with a flash of temper. ‘But do you think that means they’re forgotten?’
I shook my head, feeling a stab of shame. ‘No.’
He began turning off the lights.
‘And you still haven’t got him,’ he said. It wasn’t a question.
‘Where will he run to, John? Dr Joe – our forensic psychologist – said he would run to the place that he’s loved.’
Sergeant Caine snorted.
‘I don’t know about that.’ He thought about it. ‘But it’s true that most villains run to a woman. The woman they love. And what she might think about them usually doesn’t come into it.’
I thought of Mary Wood smiling down on the lonely bed of Peter Nawkins and I saw her lifeless body on a stainless steel table in the Iain West Suite.
‘That’s not going to happen.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because the woman Peter Nawkins loved is dead.’
John Caine snorted impatiently.
‘I’m not talking about Mary Wood. He didn’t love her. He might have been obsessed with her, but he didn’t even know her. I’m talking about the farmer’s daughter.’
‘The farmer’s daughter?’
‘The one he wanted to marry until her dad and brothers decided they would rather cut his nuts off. That’s what started the whole sorry mess, isn’t it? Boy meets girl. Then the girl’s father and brothers think that castration would make a nice engagement present.’
‘John, that’s half a lifetime ago. It was 1980 when Nawkins went down.’
‘So what? What do you reckon he was thinking about for those twenty years inside? The woman he did it for.’
I smiled at him.
‘What an old romantic you are, John. Do you really think a man can love a woman for so long?’
He looked affronted.
‘I think if he loves her for anything less, then whatever it is, it sure as hell ain’t love.’
We looked at the old newspaper article and the girl laughing with her family.
The girl that Peter Nawkins loved.
‘Carolyn Burns, sixteen,’ said John Caine. ‘Whatever happened to her?’
Before going home I stopped off at the Smithfield ABC, knowing that I needed to exhaust myself to make sleep a possibility, happy to put on a pair of fourteen-ounce Lonsdale gloves and bang the heavy bag until my arms were sore.
Swinging from my hips, keeping the rhythm, keeping it neat, not hearing whatever was on the sound system. Not hearing the other sounds of the gym, hearing only the sound of sweat-slick leather striking leather until Fred said, ‘Time.’
Smithfield ABC was filling up. A crowd of men – and they were all men – who had no intention of exercising were taking their place around the empty ring. This was always the way when some serious sparring was coming. The men wandered in off the street like a flock of birds responding to a signal that only they could hear.
‘Do your stretching,’ Fred said. ‘Don’t forget your abductors.’
Rocky strolled to the side of the ring.
He rubbed Vaseline on his face, stuck in his mouthguard, and climbed into the ring. No headguard. His opponent was a much bigger black lad. A bell rang and they began to dance around each other. And I saw now that it wasn’t speed that made him so special. It was timing. Speed beats power. But timing beats speed. Rocky’s opponent was strong and fast, a young pro with an unbeaten record. But he lacked Rocky’s uncanny sense of timing. Rocky would feint a jab, draw the counter and then slip inside, throwing three-, four- and five-punch combinations and then getting out as his opponent swung at thin air. To hit without getting hit in return. It was almost impossible. You had to be dusted with magic. And he was.
Then suddenly Echo Nawkins was by my side.
‘He’s great, isn’t he?’ she said. ‘Rocky.’
‘What are you doing here, Echo?’
Then I saw the way she was looking at Rocky and I understood immediately. She was crazy about him.
‘He didn’t do it,’ she said, not loo
king at me. ‘My Uncle Peter. You’ve got every copper in the country hunting him. But he didn’t kill those people.’
‘What makes you think that, Echo?’
‘Jab, Rocky! Jab! He’s not in your league, sweetheart!’
She still wasn’t looking at me.
‘How can you be so sure?’ I said. ‘You saw the ceiling of his caravan, didn’t you? Don’t be so naïve, just because he’s your uncle.’
‘I just know. I do. Why do you think he did it? Because you found a few pictures?’
‘More than a few! And everybody at Oak Hill Farm has lied to me right from the off. Your father. Your uncle. Your boyfriend up there in the ring. They all led me to believe they had never been anywhere near The Garden. It’s not true, is it?’
‘Rocky’s not my boyfriend,’ she said, blushing furiously. She leaned on the ring, her head resting on her arms, trying to hide her embarrassment. ‘And nobody’s lied to you. They just haven’t told you the whole truth. But why would they? You’re the law and you hate us.’
‘I don’t hate you, Echo. But your uncle is a convicted murderer. He had a thousand pictures of Mary Wood above his bed. And somebody killed Mary Wood and her family with your uncle’s weapon of choice. Doesn’t look good, does it?’
‘I bet a lot of men had pictures of her. I bet a lot of men liked her. Men who didn’t even know her.’
‘It’s not the pictures,’ I said. ‘Or even that he had the alarm code and keys for the house.’
‘What then?’
‘He ran,’ I said. ‘Innocent men don’t run, Echo.’
She shook her head, laughing bitterly.
‘Now who’s being naïve?’ she said. ‘They do if they’re scared enough.’ She gave me a cold glance. ‘If they think they’re being fitted up for something they didn’t do.’
In the ring Rocky had his opponent backed up against the ropes. The other lad dug his elbows into his ribs as Rocky let rip with the body shots. Then Rocky swung a single short upper cut down the middle and the black lad’s head jerked back so fast it made the watching crowd wince with shock.