The Slaughter Man

by Tony Parsons

  His legs went – in that sickening way that legs go when something has been turned off in the brain – splaying at awkward angles, collapsing under the weight of a man who had been robbed of his consciousness.

  Fred was climbing into the ring before he hit the deck, waving it off.

  Rocky watched his opponent fall with the detached, dispassionate stare of a man who was born to beat other men into submission.

  They can teach you many things in a boxing gym. But they can’t give you that killer instinct in your heart. Because it’s not natural, I thought.

  Rocky gave me his big wide grin, showing his gumshield as my phone began to vibrate.

  WREN CALLING, it said.

  ‘We’ve seen Nawkins,’ she said.

  21

  You could see the blue lights from miles away.

  They were flashing and swirling on a southbound service station on the M11, the long straight run from London to Cambridge, and in the gloom of the afternoon they lit up fields covered with unbroken snow.

  Around twenty response cars were parked all over the service station, from both the Essex Police Force and the Met. I flashed my warrant card at the perimeter, signed in and ducked under the tape. Whitestone and Wren were inside, with three men who had recently taken a beating. They could have been brothers – three Asians in their twenties who looked like they worked out. Especially on the heavy weights. One of them had a broken arm. Another was dabbing a wad of kitchen towel onto his ruined nose. All of them had faces that were cut and bruised.

  ‘Tell my colleague what you told me,’ Whitestone said.

  The one with the broken arm sighed. Witnesses think they can tell their story once and we will get it. But we like to hear it again and again and again. Just in case it changes.

  ‘A man tried to do a runner late thith morning,’ he said, lisping as if he was still adjusting to a mouth full of broken teeth. ‘We tried to stop him.’

  ‘We’ve got CCTV,’ Wren said.

  On the black-and-white screen Peter Nawkins stood stock still, staring at the pump as he filled the tank.

  ‘I can see the plates,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, we ran the plates,’ Wren confirmed. ‘Nissan Micra was stolen from a supermarket car park in Brentwood this morning. Lady had a full week’s shop in the boot. So he had a car – and all the Pringles he could eat – but he didn’t have cash for gas.’

  On the CCTV Peter Nawkins finished filling his tank and made to slip into the door on the passenger side of the Nissan. The man with the broken arm came into view. In the hand of the arm that was broken, he was holding a hammer. I gave him a look.

  ‘You play rough out here,’ I said.

  ‘We get boy racers from Essex clocking up a ton in their Escorts and Capris,’ he said. ‘We get all the Camden Town cowboys coming out to sell weed to the students in Cambridge. Don’t let the sight of a few cows by the side of the road fool you. This is not The Archers. We have to play rough.’

  In the footage the hammer swung at Peter Nawkins’ head. He caught it on one of his massive arms and fell upon the man, spinning him round and twisting his arm up behind his back until his face writhed with agony as the bone snapped. Then the other two men were on Nawkins, both of them swinging hammers. Nawkins punched the first one to the ground with a single blow that flattened his nose. Then he seized the last man standing by the scruff of the neck and slammed his face into the side of the car until his body was limp and a wing mirror was hanging off. Nawkins slipped into the car and it immediately sped off, leaving the three men motionless on the forecourt.

  Wren pressed stop.

  ‘The lengths some people go to for a free tank of unleaded,’ she said. She indicated the garage workers who had taken a beating. ‘These gentlemen didn’t see inside the car.’

  I stared at them. ‘How could you not see inside the car?’

  They looked sheepish.

  ‘They were too busy getting their hammers,’ Wren said. ‘Not that they did them much good.’

  We stared again at the CCTV screen.

  ‘He got into the passenger side,’ I said. ‘Someone was driving him.’

  Wren nodded. ‘So he’s not alone,’ she said. ‘Where’s he heading?’

  I stared out at the motorway. The M11 is a fast road. But if you are heading south, it only takes you to one place.

  ‘London,’ I said.

  There was a copse in the field next to the service station. Just a thicket of small trees in the middle of nowhere. I walked out to it, the ground as hard as marble beneath my feet, and pushed through the tangle of trees until I found the remains of a campfire in a small clearing.

  The skin and bones of a young rabbit lay next to the fire. I stood staring at it for a while, shuddering with the cold. The winter was harsher out here in the countryside.

  I took out my iPhone and began taking photographs.

  When I got back to the service station Whitestone and Wren were with an elderly white man in muddy waterproofs. He was complaining to them about something.

  ‘I told the local station about the break-in but they say there’s nothing they can do,’ he said. ‘They’re useless. I saw your lights and I thought you might be able to help me. You’re London coppers, right? Not the bloody locals?’

  ‘This gentleman owns the farm down the road,’ Wren said. ‘He had a burglary yesterday.’

  He looked at me as if I might be the answer to his problems.

  ‘What was taken?’ I said.

  ‘I told them that already,’ he said.

  ‘Tell him,’ said Whitestone.

  ‘Clothes, cash, some cutlery,’ he said. ‘And my game gun.’

  I felt myself shiver. It had nothing to do with the cold.

  ‘What kind of game gun?’ I said.

  ‘Twelve-bore shotgun.’ He warmed to his theme. ‘Remington Model 1900 12-gauge. It was my father’s gun, and my grandfather’s gun. Been in my family for over a hundred years. The first hammerless double-barrelled shotgun that Remington ever made. It’s worth a few bob. And what I want to know is – will you get it back?’

  ‘Any shells missing?’

  He looked offended.

  ‘I keep my shells in the safe,’ he said, bristling self-righteously. ‘What kind of a moron do you think I am? No shells missing.’ Then he thought again, looking sheepish. ‘Apart from what was in it, of course,’ he said.

  ‘So it was loaded?’ I said. ‘Both barrels?’

  ‘Not much good if it’s not loaded, is it?’ the farmer said.

  Wren was already on the phone putting out a general alert that Nawkins was armed with a twelve-bore shotgun. And I felt myself shudder with a feeling that had had nothing to do with the cold.

  It was more like feeling footsteps on my grave.

  22

  When the day was winding down, and the rush-hour traffic on Savile Row was finally easing off, Whitestone glanced at her watch, got herself a coffee and took her laptop to a quiet corner of MIR-1, where she Skyped her son.

  I only glimpsed the kid on the screen – mid-teens, that carefully tousled hair they all like now, a sullen and good-looking boy – and I tried not to hear their conversation – mostly Whitestone asking questions about school, and dinner, and domestic arrangements, while her boy – Justin was his name – responded with weary, one-word answers that all sounded like a sigh.

  When she had finished, Whitestone looked over at me at my workstation and adjusted her glasses, as if remembering that I was a single parent too.

  ‘Enough for one day, Max,’ she said. ‘Go home to Scout.’

  ‘No rush,’ I said. ‘Scout has a friend.’

  Scout had one of those friends that you remember fifty years later, the kind of friend where the pair of you spend all your time in helpless laughter at the rest of the world.

  Mia was a fair-haired little girl with a light Australian accent and she was there one day when I got home from work, shrieking with delight as Stan chased her and S
cout around the massive empty space of our loft, and after that she never really went away. I could not imagine that she ever would. I had only spoken to Mia’s parents on the phone, but they were warm, friendly Aussies, with none of the frosty shyness of the English, and Scout was having a sleepover with Mia tonight.

  ‘Scout is staying with her friend,’ I said, and I couldn’t keep the pride out of my voice.

  I felt that Scout and I were more like other families now that she had a special friend. I felt that we were winning.

  ‘I ran the murdered farmer’s daughter through the PNC,’ Wren said, meaning the Police National Computer. ‘Carolyn Burns.’ She tapped on her keyboard and I saw that her face was still white with the shock of violence. ‘I’ve got you two images – same photograph – one from the Passport Office and the other from the DVLA. It took a while because she’s never broken the law.’

  ‘Thanks. Send them across, will you?’

  A face appeared on the screen. A haggard woman who looked far older than her late forties. Wren was staring at the same photographs on her workstation. There was no resemblance to the pretty, smiling sixteen-year-old girl whose father and three big brothers were killed by her boyfriend, Peter Nawkins.

  ‘Wow,’ Wren said. ‘Remind me not to get old.’

  But it was far more than that. There was something of Christine Keeler about Carolyn Burns, she had exactly that kind of exhausted beauty. But it was not the passing of time that had ruined her.

  It was something closer to destiny, or fate, or whatever you want to call the ending that we reach without choosing. The sixteen-year-old girl who smiled under her family’s Christmas tree with her parents and her brothers had never grown old. She had been annihilated along with her father and brothers.

  Some crimes are not over just because someone does time, and the bodies are buried and they fade from the headlines.

  I saw the burn on Whitestone’s neck. The stress on Wren’s pale face. And the empty workstation of DI Curtis Gane.

  Some crimes last a lifetime, I thought.

  When I came out of work Charlotte Gatling was standing under the big blue lamp just outside 27 Savile Row with a dozen photographers coming towards her, all with their cameras and their questions in her face. Her right hand furiously twisted over her left wrist as she looked for a way out.

  ‘Charlotte! Eyes this way, Charlotte!’

  ‘Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte!

  ‘Is Bradley still alive?

  ‘Why did he do it, Charlotte? Why did Peter Nawkins kill them?’

  There should have been some beefy young uniforms around her, and some nice, efficient Media Liaison Officer or Family Liaison Officer. But there was nobody and she was backing up the steps against the wall, her hands in front of her face as if to protect herself.

  ‘Please,’ she said.

  I forced my way to the centre of the little pack, raising my hand to slap away any camera that got in my face, and I took her arm. She looked at me without recognition.

  The X5 was double-parked on the kerb and I got her into the passenger seat. Cameras pressed against the glass as she covered her face with her hands. That’s the shot they’ll use, I thought. She was giving them what they wanted without even trying.

  ‘It’s OK now,’ I said, and I put on the blues and twos, the combined siren and flashing lights which ask the question – what the hell are you doing getting in my way? I turned them off as soon as we were on Regent Street.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘No problem. But—’

  ‘I know,’ she said, raising a hand to stop me. ‘I shouldn’t have been standing out there alone, only your people had new pictures of children – fresh sightings – and they wanted me to see them.’

  I waited.

  ‘They’re not Bradley,’ she said. ‘They’re never Bradley.’

  I nodded.

  ‘People want to help, but they just get in the way,’ I said. ‘The public. Even the press. Mostly decent people. They have children, too. It’s even worse when they don’t care. And that happens too.’

  ‘But they talk as if Bradley is dead. And he’s not. I can feel it.’

  I said nothing, even though I was weary of all these cast-iron certainties. She was certain that her nephew was still alive. Just as Sean Nawkins had been certain that his brother was being stitched up. Just as Echo was certain that her uncle was an innocent man. Everybody was totally certain, right up to the moment that they were proved totally wrong. Not that I blamed Charlotte Gatling for clinging to the hope that her nephew was out there being treated with love and affection. I knew I would have clung to that hope myself.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ she said, reading my mind. ‘If I didn’t believe he was alive – if I didn’t believe that someone, somewhere, is treating him with kindness – I would go insane.’ She stared at the West End without seeing it. ‘Are you going to catch … this man?’ she said.

  ‘I guarantee it,’ I said. ‘Where we heading?’

  ‘Fitzrovia,’ she said. ‘But I can walk.’

  ‘I’ll feel better if I take you to the door.’

  ‘Thank you. Do you know Fitzroy Square?’

  ‘Sure.’ I had always liked Fitzrovia. I liked the area’s history – George Orwell and Karl Marx dreaming their big dreams, and bands like the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and the Pistols playing their small clubs. And I liked all the beautiful houses that I would never live in.

  ‘I thought you lived out of town,’ I said.

  ‘My family live in Lower Slaughter, Gloucestershire. It’s where I grew up. But I never go there.’ She hesitated. ‘My father and I – we’re not close.’ That sounded like classic English understatement. ‘I prefer to live in our town house in Fitzroy Square.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘I think my father prefers it too. We’ve had the house for – I don’t know – fifty years.’

  ‘I bet you’re named after Charlotte Street.’

  She almost smiled. For the first time.

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Just guessing,’ I smiled.

  We were silent for a bit, the traffic crawling north, clogging up around Oxford Circus, and I thought about the options that rich people have, and I pictured Fitzrovia, perhaps the least-known area of central London, quietly sitting between Bloomsbury to the east and Marylebone to the west, and Fitzroy Square, a big leafy square full of discreet old money.

  ‘How’s – your injury?’ she said.

  My stab wound twitched at the name check. ‘Healing,’ I said. ‘And how are you coping?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not sleeping. Not eating. Not working. I keep thinking about my sister. And her children.’

  She didn’t mention her brother-in-law. Maybe that was natural, I thought. And maybe not.

  ‘What work do you do?’

  ‘I write,’ she said. ‘For children.’

  I was impressed.

  ‘Stories for kids? My daughter – Scout – she’s five – she loves stories.’

  ‘No, not stories. I write apps.’

  ‘For the phone, you mean?’

  ‘Phones. Tablets. You can run them on anything. You heard of an app called Human Nature? That’s one of mine. That’s the most famous one. Have you heard of Shazam?’

  ‘It tells you what song you’re listening to,’ I said, happy to prove that I wasn’t a complete idiot.

  ‘Human Nature is the same principal, but it tells you what you’re looking at in the natural world. Trees, flowers, plants …’

  ‘You thought that up?’

  She nodded. ‘I wrote it. This is me.’

  I had pulled up by Fitzroy Square. It is a huge square but you can’t drive in.

  ‘Scout is always asking me the names of trees when we’re out walking our dog,’ I said. ‘And I can never tell her. How would I know the name of a tree?’

  ‘Download the Human Nature app.’

  I looked at her face. I would never get tired o
f looking at her face. Because her beauty was more than some lucky roll of the genetic dice. Charlotte Gatling was decent and brave and smart and it showed in her face.

  ‘Your wife has probably heard of it,’ she said.

  I nodded. ‘Maybe.’

  She pushed her hair from her forehead.

  ‘Thanks for the lift, Detective Wolfe.’

  I watched her walk away.

  And when she had disappeared into a house on the far side of Fitzroy Square, I took out my phone and downloaded Human Nature. It was such a simple, clever idea, that I drove across to Regent’s Park and took a walk in the moonlight, learning the names of all the trees, thinking how happy Scout would be to have a daddy like me when we walked Stan on Hampstead Heath, as I looked through my phone at the cypress, the beech, the elms, the birch and the ash, my head filled with wonder at the Japanese cherry tree and the Indian bean tree and the way that Charlotte Gatling pushed her hair from her forehead.

  23

  Sergeant Ross Sallis of Tottenham Police Station had fourteen stone of muscle on him and fifteen years of experience. He was one of those big, hard old onions – onion bhajee, sargie, sergeant – that are the unbreakable backbone of the Metropolitan Police Force.

  ‘You really think we’re going to have the Slaughter Man in the neighbourhood?’ he said.

  He was driving me down Tottenham High Road in the misty morning sunlight, the bright yellow-and-blue Battenberg livery of his motor – a car pool Ford Fiesta, far too small for a man as big as Sergeant Sallis – making us as conspicuous on that long, bleak street as an ice-cream van in the Sahara.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said honestly. ‘But it’s enough of a possibility that I have to see Carolyn Burns. She could be in real danger.’

  ‘It’s all a long time ago.’

  ‘True. But under certain circumstances, men get fixated about old girlfriends.’

  He chuckled. Sergeant Sallis laughed easily and often, and that was probably not a bad policy for a copper who had spent his entire career working Tottenham.

  ‘And what circumstances might those be?’ he grinned.

  ‘When they’re desperate.’