by Tony Parsons
All three were closed. Two bedrooms and a bathroom.
Carolyn Burns and her son were looking at me.
‘Boss,’ I said. ‘We should do this at West End Central. Now.’
Carolyn Burns stood up, her arms stiff with tension by her side. She seemed to be having trouble breathing too. There was suddenly less air in the little flat.
‘Mum?’ her son said.
I heard a sound in one of the rooms and then the door opened and Peter Nawkins came out with a twelve-bore shotgun in his hands.
Somebody screamed and Wren was on her feet but Whitestone did not have time to get out of the chair and if I moved I wasn’t aware of it as Nawkins pulled the stock tight against his shoulder and pointed the shotgun at the head of Sergeant Sallis and pulled the trigger.
It was like a bomb exploded in the tiny room, the sound so loud that when it was over I heard nothing at all, just the aftershock of that single shot ringing somewhere behind my eardrums.
Sergeant Sallis was on the ground.
I looked down at him, fully expecting to see half of his head a smashed and bloody pulp, brains and hair and bone sprayed all over the cheap wallpaper behind him.
But Sergeant Sallis was staring at me with his mouth open. Blinking with confusion. Alive.
Behind him there was a hole in the wall the size of a fist.
Nawkins had missed. But how had he missed?
Sound came back. But not my hearing. Not fully. The deafening shot in that confined space made everything sound as though it was coming from underwater.
Mouths were moving. People were screaming. I staggered forward, my balance gone with my hearing. With a stricken look on his face. Peter Nawkins was staring at the uniformed policemen sitting on the floor.
The shotgun was still pressed hard against his shoulder.
Only seconds had passed.
I looked at Sergeant Sallis again, struggling to understand how he was alive, then I took a step towards Nawkins on legs made of water.
He turned towards me, as if noticing me for the first time and I watched him as he aimed the double-barrelled shotgun at my chest, a good place to aim because there was less chance of missing the target.
Everything froze.
I stopped, staring at the business end of the shotgun, aware of a boy cursing, the noise somehow penetrating the deafness. Wren and Whitestone were on their feet, staring at Sergeant Sallis sitting on the ground, dumbfounded that he had survived being shot at point-blank range. Nothing made any sense.
My legs moved. My fists clenched. A short left hook, I thought. Break his jaw. One chance. Don’t miss.
But I stopped as Nawkins took half a step back, lifting the stock of the shotgun to his shoulder again, the barrel levelled at my eyes now, as if he couldn’t decide the best place to shoot me.
We stared at each other. Nothing was moving. Everybody was screaming. My ears hurt. Then he jerked the shotgun away with his right hand and swung it at my face, the old wooden stock connecting high on my left cheekbone.
It was like being hit with a hammer.
I went down and stayed down, dizzy and sick, waiting for the sound of the second shot.
I lay there waiting and still it never came.
All I heard were screams and tears and cries for help.
All I heard was a front door crash open.
All I heard was the sound of a man running when there was nowhere left to run.
26
I got up off my knees, slowed down by sickness more than pain, that deep and debilitating nausea that comes from being struck in the face, very hard.
I wanted to sleep, or at least to slip into the blackness, but I leaned against a chair, staring down at Sergeant Sallis.
He was still sitting on the floor, his face paralysed with shock. There was still a black hole the size of a fist in the wall behind him. And he still wasn’t dead.
‘You’re OK,’ I told him, as I struggled to stop myself from falling.
He blinked at me. ‘I can’t hear you,’ he said. ‘I see your mouth move, but – nothing.’
I got down on my knees and placed my hands on his arms. Everywhere there should have been the stink of blood and ruin. It felt like a miracle that he was suffering from nothing worse than shock. But I knew that there were no miracles.
‘What happened?’ Sergeant Sallis said.
‘He missed,’ I said.
‘What? Missed? How could he miss?’
‘Because he had no reason to kill you.’
I got back up. Getting up was easier this time.
Carolyn Burns and Eddie were standing inches away from me, pointing at the hole in the wall and screaming at each other. My hearing was coming back but I could not register one word of it.
I looked around the small room. There was nobody else here. Then I heard Whitestone and Wren shouting down on the street. I patted Sergeant Sallis on the back of his head, just to let him know he was still breathing, and I stumbled from the flat.
Through the metal grille of the open gate I saw Whitestone and Wren inexplicably getting into the back of a response car, as if it had been waiting for them. But then I saw the two young uniforms in the front, both women, eyes wide with alarm, and I knew they must have flagged it down.
It pulled away with a shriek of burning rubber, the back door still open, Whitestone shouting instructions as the blues and twos came on, the lights and sirens swirling and screaming.
I stood on the pavement cursing. I could feel my cheekbone swelling to the size of a boiled egg.
Then I saw Peter Nawkins.
He was jogging down the pavement, maybe one hundred yards away, heading south towards Tottenham Hale, nothing but gridlocked traffic between him and the response car, looking back at the sound of the sirens.
I could not see the weapon.
Then suddenly it was in his hands.
There were motorbikes and cyclists edging their way through the stalled traffic and Nawkins stepped into the middle of them and pointed the shotgun at a motorbike messenger.
The biker bumped onto the pavement and tore away, his bike flying up onto the back wheel. Nawkins tried again.
Still standing among the traffic, terrified faces at the windows, pointing his shotgun at the next biker. And this time the biker raised his hands and fell backwards from his bike. Nawkins got on the bike, glanced back once and took off, turning into the one-way system that feeds in and out of Tottenham. I heard the horns and curses and I knew that he was going the opposite way to everyone else.
The stagnant traffic on the High Road was getting out of the way of the response vehicle, pulling onto the pavement, crashing into each other with the soft crunch of metal, and I saw Edie Wren leaning out the window, trying to get a fix on Nawkins.
She ducked back inside and they picked up speed as they went after him, following the bike into the one-way system, against the tide of the traffic.
And I began to run.
They soon lost me.
And the traffic that parted for the blues and twos had continued on its journey by the time I ran into the Tottenham Hale Gyratory. I ran between the oncoming cars, the curses and horns and faces twisted with rage, the traffic always faster here, the drivers swerving to get out of my way, the palm of my hand touching the cold metal as I ran on, my body tensed, waiting the crunch of steel and glass and rubber into flesh and blood and bone.
It didn’t happen. Not to me.
Instead I stopped when I came upon the crashed response vehicle, its front crumpled against the metal pole of a speed camera, the pole bent at a sickening angle and resting across the smashed glass of the windscreen.
Whitestone was still in the back seat, holding her forehead. Wren was standing by the wrecked car, apparently unharmed but dazed, her phone in her hands. And beyond the inflated air bags in the front of the vehicle I could see the bruised and scuffed faces of the two young uniforms.
‘Max!’ Wren shouted. ‘He’s heading for the reser
voir!’
I went off after him.
Nawkins had had his own crash. The stolen motorbike was bent and mangled under the front wheels of a large lorry. Nawkins had not done a lot of damage to the lorry but the driver was standing on the road, bent double as he vomited.
The traffic had ground to a halt here, other vehicles concertinaed into each other, drivers getting out, voices shouting, fingers pointing, and I saw the great expanse of the Walthamstow reservoir system off to my left, ten interlinked reservoirs that go on for miles.
I climbed the fence and dropped inside. The reservoirs looked like a sea, dead calm, and the city seemed to slip away. It was curiously still and silent in here, the roar of Tottenham’s chaos coming from another planet.
Then I saw two men running towards me, awkward in their Wellington boots. Two fishermen, their rods abandoned by a pair of green tents.
‘Over there!’ they said, pointing towards a rough clump of bushes fifty yards away. ‘He’s got a fucking shotgun!’
They didn’t stop running.
I heard sirens. More sirens. And when I looked back there were response vehicles everywhere. I wondered if CO19 were here yet, Scotland Yard’s specialist firearms unit, and then I saw them – the big BMW X5s, the Armed Response Vehicles of CO19, and the black gleam of the weapons, the HK G3ks of the snipers and the MP5 sub-machine guns. There are around 550 Specialist Firearms Officers in CO19 and it looked like every last one of them was here.
I hesitated, looking back at them as they took up their positions, wondering how far these reservoirs stretched and if CO19 had all the exits covered, and most of all wondering if I should keep after Nawkins or bail out now. And then there was no choice to make because Peter Nawkins came out the bushes, still holding his shotgun.
I stood perfectly still.
Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide and all that lifeless water making this place look like another planet.
He began walking towards me.
‘Put down your weapon,’ I said.
He didn’t stop. Forty yards.
‘I’m arresting you for the murder of the Wood family,’ I said. ‘Mary. Brad. Marlon. Piper.’
He shook his head, and looked over my shoulder at the blue lights splitting the grey gloom of winter.
Twenty yards.
‘You do not have to say anything,’ I said.
Ten yards.
‘But it may harm your defence—’
He raised the shotgun.
‘Put the thing down and step away from it now!’ I told him, my heart pounding, my stab wound throbbing, the blood in my veins pumping as fast as it could. ‘There’s no way out.’
‘Wrong again,’ he said, and turned the shotgun in his hands to fit the barrel in his mouth, his eyes blinking as he eased his right thumb into the trigger and pulled.
There was no separation between the shot and the back of his head exploding. It happened in the same instant. And the sound of the second shot was very different here. It seemed to echo across those ten reservoirs, that vast expanse of water, that sea in the city, and I looked up at the sky as the black flock of birds took flight in alarm.
Nawkins had fallen backwards into the water.
What remained of the back of his head leaked into the still waters.
I looked down at my hands. They were covered in blood.
And my heart began pumping, wild with joy, and I felt the tears of gratitude sting my eyes and choke my throat.
Because it wasn’t my blood.
The woman attacked me from behind.
I was standing by the side of the road, a carton of bad coffee in my hands, boiling hot, far too hot to drink although I drank it anyway, letting it scald my throat, enjoying the way it reminded me that I was still alive, watching the paramedics stitch the gash in Whitestone’s forehead, armed officers and uniforms and blue lights everywhere, when the woman came up behind me, screaming a torrent of filth as her fingernails raked across my face.
She wanted my eyes. She wanted to take them out. She was trying to blind me.
And as I felt the boiling hot coffee splash across my shoes, I thought that she was doing quite a good job.
He nails raked down my forehead and across my eyebrows and into my eye sockets, trying to stay there, attempting to sink into the eyeballs, and then trying again, all the while screaming, screaming, screaming.
I thought it was Carolyn Burns come to punish me.
But as they finally pulled her off, I glimpsed the dog tattoo on the inside of her wrist, the Akita that looked more like a German Shepherd, the image streaked with blood from my clawed face.
It was Echo Nawkins.
Sleeveless shirt. Pink miniskirt. Dressed for start of summer in the middle of winter. She turned to scream at me over her shoulder as a couple of uniformed officers led her away.
‘Blood on your hands!’ she screamed. ‘Blood on your hands! Blood on your hands!’
‘Shall we do her, sir?’ a sergeant asked me, and I wondered if he was local and if he knew Sergeant Sallis. ‘Book her for assaulting a police officer?’
I shook my head. I didn’t have the heart for it. And I could live without the paperwork. And the truth is that she had shocked me. It was as if Echo knew that Peter Nawkins had not murdered the Wood family. Not believed – with the usual sentimental blinkers of the ones who dote on the wicked – but as if she knew for a stone-cold fact.
I thought of Sergeant Sallis sitting on the floor of the flat that stank of cannabis and cat, his face frozen with disbelief that he was still breathing, and the hole in the wall where the shotgun had been very deliberately fired.
It was as if she knew.
Peter Nawkins had not killed anyone for half a lifetime.
MARCH
MortAl remAins
27
It is not easy to hide a dead body.
Two reasons.
Killers are stupid.
And bodies decay.
Twenty-four hours after Peter Nawkins had emptied a twelve-bore shotgun into the roof of his mouth, I stood before the map of London that covered an entire wall in MIR-1 and, as I stepped back to take a better look, I thought – no, it’s not easy to hide a body, not even here.
Not even in this city of ten million souls.
Not even in a metropolis that sprawls for thirty miles either side of a river that is more than two hundred miles long. Not even in London, a special city with countless acres of green and blue, all those parks, woods, commons, gardens and heathland, all those ponds, canals, lakes, rivers and reservoirs.
London, with its sixty thousand streets and all those garages, skips, recycling bins, brand-new patios and old dank basements. And below the floorboards, under the manholes, far beneath the concrete and the earth, deep down in the subterranean network of drains, pipes and sewers that carry away the city’s waste – it still wasn’t easy to get rid of a body. Because killers are stupid and bodies decay.
I stood alone in MIR-1, staring at the map of my city. Behind me, at my workstation, Bradley Wood smiled out from the computer screen, forever four years old and happy, with his Han Solo figurine in his small fist.
I took another step back. It helped me to see better.
Killing someone is the easy bit, I thought. Disposing of a body is the hard part.
Killers are blind with adrenaline, terrified of being caught, sweating with panic. They have no time. Their hands and clothes are covered in enough evidence to put them away for a lifetime. Every fibre of their being is telling them to flee.
The ones who attempt to hide their victims are never thinking clearly. They are unlikely to be reflecting deeply on the immutable facts of death and decay.
Putrefaction, the pathologists call it.
It is the reason you can put me down for cremation.
The process is slowed by cold and quickened by heat, and it is affected by the weight of the corpse, and by the kind of clothes they were wearing at the time of death, and if there is und
igested food in the stomach, and wounds, and if the body is in water, and whether the water is warm or cold.
But if a body is not stored in sub-zero temperatures, then the timetable of putrefaction never changes.
I glanced towards the window. It was still bitterly cold but the worst of the winter was over. The snows were melting. The seasons were changing. But even among all that awakening life, the cruel facts of death remained. They are never pretty.
At the moment of death, everything shuts down. The heart doesn’t beat. The blood doesn’t flow. The last breath has gone. There’s a myth that hair and nails continue to grow after death, but it’s not true – skin tissue shrivels at the time of death, so it can appear as if hair and nails have kept growing. But they haven’t. The only thing that hair and nails are going to do from now on is fall out.
After death, the body’s tissues are destroyed by bacteria escaping from the intestinal tract, melting the body down. The internal organs break down in strict order: intestine, liver, kidneys, lungs, brain and finally the prostate or uterus.
After thirty-six hours the head, shoulders and abdomen turn green. Then the gases accumulating in the cavities cause bloating, beginning in the face. The eyes bulge. The tongue protrudes. The head swells. The bloating reaches the stomach and finally the skin, which fills with blisters.
The nose and mouth look as if they are leaking blood, but this is purge fluid, a result of the total destruction of body tissues by bacteria. The body’s blood vessels collapse and this results in an intricate road map known as marbling. By now the body has turned a shade of green so dark that it is almost black.
Then the body splits open like fruit that has been left to rot in the sun and releases its gases.
And all this after just thirty-six hours.
So the murdered dead always sleep uneasy.
They are discovered by dog walkers and drain cleaners and DIY enthusiasts tearing up the floorboards, digging up the garden or knocking through a wall. They are discovered by neighbours who find they are living next door to the unmistakable stench of rotting flesh.
And they are discovered by someone like me who goes into a house of horrors and kicks down the front door.