The Slaughter Man

by Tony Parsons

  ‘He’s more than that,’ I said. ‘Sean Nawkins is a murderer. And now he’s going down.’

  Rocky nodded, attempting a grin that failed miserably, and I found myself hoping that it was his child she was carrying. Suddenly an awkward silence came between us. He didn’t feel he could ask me who had given me a beating, and I could not talk to him about Echo’s baby.

  ‘I can’t believe you two are still here,’ I said. Echo’s black eye looked fresh. ‘So close to your father,’ I said.

  ‘That’s ending,’ Rocky said. ‘Got my first pro fight on Friday. York Hall. A six-rounder against a Serbian who’s 6 and O.’

  Rocky had the kind of fitness that glows. Fighting fit, they call it. I had no doubt the he was ready for his life to begin.

  ‘Good luck with that,’ I said, and indicated the pair of them. ‘Good luck with everything.’

  Rocky looked at Echo proudly.

  ‘Get a few wins under my belt and then we’re moving out of here,’ he said. ‘It’s no life for a fighter. Not knowing when you’re getting moved on. You need stability. You need routine. Get a little flat in Billericay. Somewhere with a bit of green for the kid but that’s handy for the London trains.’

  I nodded. It seemed like a good plan.

  Then I stood up, shrugging my shoulders, feeling where it hurt. I did not have any injuries that would stop me doing what I needed to do. Better get on with it, I thought.

  ‘I need you to do one more thing,’ I told him. ‘I’m going to give you a direct number for DCI Patricia Whitestone at West End Central. I want you to call her right now and tell her that I have arrested Sean Nawkins for the murders of Mary Wood, Brad Wood, Marlon Wood and Piper Wood. Can you remember that?’

  They were silent.

  Rocky looked at Echo.

  ‘I can remember it,’ she said.

  I gave her the number.

  Then I nodded at the pair of them and stepped outside their little caravan. I was still wearing the hoody he had put me in. It said KRONK GYM – DETROIT on the front. I zipped it up as far as it would go.

  I was close to the front gate of Oak Hill Farm, a part of the camp where there were smaller caravans. The crowds beyond the wire seemed to have increased. I looked for the reassuring sight of blue uniforms but all I saw was the young woman I had watched from the caravan and her colleague, a young man who was at the main gate, talking into the radio on his shoulder. He looked scared.

  They had parked their car inside the gates. That was a mistake. You park where you inform the public that they are going no further. Parking inside the gates was lousy tactics.

  From somewhere close by I heard the sound of breaking glass, followed by ironic cheers. Then more breaking glass.

  I walked faster. I wanted this done.

  I saw the smoke before I saw Sean Nawkins. Thick black smoke rising from the skip behind his bungalow.

  Screams. I turned to look at the wire. The young copper was in the middle of the crowd. Now the woman was talking urgently into her radio, calling for backup. I listened for sirens. Nothing. I stared at them for a moment, knowing they needed my help.

  But I kept walking.

  More breaking glass. And a much louder cheer this time, as a small burst of fire exploded on the scrappy patch of grass where I had seen the horses on that first day. I stopped again, waiting to see if they were going to throw more petrol bombs. But when a couple of beer bottles came over, shattering harmlessly against the roof of a caravan, I kept going.

  The front door to Sean Nawkins’ bungalow was open. I walked round the side of the building to where the skip was burning. Nawkins was emptying petrol from a plastic jerrycan onto perhaps a dozen black bin bags that he had tossed into the skip. I wondered what was in the bin bags apart from the clothes he had worn last night.

  I wondered if Zina was in them.

  ‘I’m arresting you for murder,’ I said, and he looked up at me as if he was staring at a dead man, taking a terrified half-step backwards, his jaw suddenly slack with terror.

  ‘No,’ he said, denying my existence more than his crimes. ‘Not you.’

  ‘You do not have to say anything,’ I said, moving towards him as a bottle smashed against the side of the skip, and then another bounced off the roof of his bungalow without breaking.

  He clutched the jerrycan to his chest, as if defending himself from a ghost, and all at once a burning bottle hit his shoulder and there was a soft pop of air – whap! – and Sean Nawkins erupted into a ball of flames.

  He staggered towards me, his head a corona of flame and his flesh already melting, his hair on fire, his eyebrows and hair the first to burn, his mouth twisted and screaming, one hand holding the side of the skip, his body stooped by the all-consuming agony, his face blackening as his features burned away.

  Then a bottle must have struck me because I was momentarily stunned, dizzy and sick, a searing pain in the back of my skull and broken glass glistening on the front of Rocky’s tracksuit top.

  Sean Nawkins was lying at my feet.

  Flat on his face, the flames subsiding, most of his clothes gone revealing that every inch of his flesh was the colour and the texture and the stink of badly burned meat.

  I backed away, one hand on the back of my head, another over my mouth, and I stumbled round the side of the bungalow and into a full-scale riot.

  The locals had entered the camp.

  The residents of Oak Hill Farm were pouring out of their caravans and bungalows to meet them. There were men with lead pipes, women with baseball bats, dogs barking and children screaming. Just inside the main gates the two sides clashed like medieval armies, coming together in a sickening collision of metal and flesh, broken glass and blood.

  The two uniformed officers were nowhere to be seen but their car had been commandeered by the locals. Two large men in polo shirts, all clinical obesity and bad tattoos, not young, bellowing from the windows, were driving the squad car across the neat little flower beds, weaving across the lawns.

  I saw Rocky and Echo in the doorway of their tiny caravan. She was calling a name.

  ‘Smokey! Smokey! Smokey!’

  Her dog.

  I saw the Akita, maddened with terror, standing on a lawn next to a child’s swing, barking wildly. Then Rocky was running towards the Akita, and the men in the stolen squad car had seen him too, and began driving towards him.

  Rocky got to the dog first. Clapping his hands, shouting instructions. For a moment the great Akita was oblivious but then he responded, and Rocky was turning back, the Akita at his heels, the squad car with the two screaming men getting closer to them with every second.

  The car not swerving now.

  The car aimed at man and dog like a heat-seeking missile.

  Echo was in the doorway.

  Her dog was much faster than Rocky and it bounded ahead of him, disappearing inside the caravan, its tail already wagging with happiness, and Rocky was almost there, almost there when he stumbled and fell and lay unmoving and spreadeagled on the scrappy grass of Oak Hill Farm.

  The squad car ran over his arms just above the elbows.

  I saw his face contort with agony as he screamed at the heavens.

  The car swerved away, the two men laughing wildly.

  Then I heard the sirens and I turned towards the gates of Oak Hill Farm, and began running towards them.

  35

  I put on the blues and twos and we drove west as night came closing in, the heavy traffic on the motorway to Heathrow melting away before us, the tail lights pulling over to the hard shoulder at the approach of the BMW X5.

  ‘Mary talked,’ DCI Whitestone said beside me. She was leafing through a thin green file that looked as if it was twenty years old but had never been touched. ‘When Mary was sixteen years old, she went to the local police and made a formal statement about her brother’s abuse.’ She closed the file. ‘Nobody believed her. Nobody was listening.’

  ‘They would have believed her this time,�
� I said. ‘The world has changed.’

  ‘They didn’t even bother to lose the file,’ Wren said. ‘Did the father lean on the law back in the day?’

  ‘The sad thing is that he probably didn’t even have to,’ Whitestone said. ‘The big man’s name would have been enough.’

  ‘But why take out the family?’ Wren said. ‘Nils Gatling wanted to shut his sister up. Why kill the husband and the children? Why abduct the little boy?’

  ‘Making it look like a spree kill was part of the blind,’ I said. ‘And so was the cattle gun. What kind of nutter uses a cattle gun for mass murder? Somebody who’s done it before.’ I thought of what John Caine had told me in the Black Museum. ‘You kill with what you know. And it was a good blind – the Slaughter Man looked perfect for this – especially after Mary Wood gave him a glass of lemonade and a smile and he started collecting her pictures.’

  ‘So Nils Gatling and Sean Nawkins had known each other for years?’ Whitestone said.

  I nodded. ‘Gatling owned property all over London, and Nawkins had a limitless supply of cheap labour. And once Nils realised that Mary had decided there were things she intended to tell the police, she was as good as dead. All he needed was someone to spill the blood. And Sean Nawkins had his own reasons for setting up his brother, the Slaughter Man.’

  ‘But why was Mary so determined to talk now?’ Wren said. ‘After all these years? Because she wanted justice? Because she wanted to save her marriage? Because she wanted to stay sane? Because men should not get away with this stuff – no matter how long ago it was?’

  ‘All of the above,’ I said.

  I thought of Charlotte in my arms. I remembered how she had looked when she told me not to get too carried away. This is difficult for me, she had said, and I knew that was why Mary had decided to finally go to the police. Because her life could never be what it should be while the cruel and bitter past dragged her down, and held her heart, and stopped her from loving, trusting and holding someone the way she should. This is difficult for me, Charlotte had said, and I knew she spoke of the victim’s terrible burden, and it was exactly why Mary was ready to tell the world what her brother had done to her.

  ‘Nils Gatling wanted to silence his sister and Sean Nawkins wanted to punish his brother,’ Whitestone said. ‘But are we really certain that Peter Nawkins had an affair with Sean’s wife and daughter?’

  I shrugged. ‘I know that Echo spent New Year’s Eve with her Uncle Peter and I know that her mother visited him in Belmarsh for years. That’s it. I don’t know for certain what either of them did with him. Nights of passion? A cup of tea and a cuddle? No idea, in all honesty. There’s no question that Peter Nawkins was an extremely violent man – when Burns and his sons tried to castrate him he came back to their farmhouse and fired a cattle gun into their brains. But if the world left Peter Nawkins alone, he was happy to leave the world alone. He didn’t shoot Sergeant Sallis when he had the chance. If you caught Peter Nawkins on a good day, or even if you just treated him like a human being, I suspect he could be gentle and kind. But Sean Nawkins was a psychopath.’

  ‘Sean’s wife and daughter couldn’t stand to be around him,’ Whitestone said. ‘He was a vicious, woman-beating bastard. A woman like that – and a girl like that – they’re going to look for a way out.’

  ‘And sometimes they don’t look very far,’ Wren said. ‘In this case, the caravan next door.’

  I looked in my rear-view mirror. The cars that pulled onto the hard shoulder stayed there to let the rest of our convoy through. There were two CO19 ARVs, response cars, patrol cars, and a few motorbike outriders who couldn’t keep up with me. Somewhere in there was a Child Abuse Investigation Team.

  ‘We’ve got to lose the circus before we go in,’ I said. ‘They have to wait for our call. I don’t want to frighten that little boy.’

  I felt rather than saw Whitestone and Wren exchange a glance. But they said nothing, as the city and the suburbs made way for green rolling hills and houses made of honey-coloured stone.

  And I drove to Lower Slaughter.

  In the walled garden of a manor house, a small boy was playing by himself.

  Bradley Wood looked older and darker than any photograph I had ever seen of him, but then that is true of almost all missing children. At a garden table, an elderly Filipina housekeeper was dozing with her head on her arms, an iPad on the table in front of her. We didn’t disturb her.

  ‘Bradley?’ I said, crouching down so that our eyes were level. ‘I think this belongs to you.’

  I held out a plastic eight-inch figurine of a space cowboy.

  ‘Han Solo,’ he said, taking it from me. ‘I’ve been looking for him.’ He looked beyond me at Wren and Whitestone, as if expecting to see his mother, and I felt a wave of raw grief surge through me. The things men do, I thought. The things men do for those few spasms of pleasure, and the things they do to hide it away.

  ‘Bradley?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did anyone hurt you, son?’

  He thought about it. Then shook his head.

  ‘Would you tell me if someone hurt you?’ I said.

  A short nod.

  I believed him.

  ‘Can I go home now?’ Bradley said. ‘Uncle Nils keeps telling me – soon, soon.’

  ‘You can go home right now,’ I said. ‘And you don’t even need to say goodbye, OK? You go with these ladies. They’ve got the Millennium Falcon parked outside.’

  He gave me a slow, shy smile, and in his face I saw his mother, his brother, his sister, the entire star-crossed family.

  Most of all I saw his aunt.

  Wren was holding out her hand. ‘I’m Edie,’ she said. ‘And the Metropolitan Police Force is always with me.’

  Bradley laughed uncertainly, but he took her hand.

  I looked back at the house. A man with a shaven head was standing in the doorway. He had arms built up on weights that bulged from his short-sleeve white shirt and a gut built up on lager that hung over his black trousers. The kind of bodyguard that had been turning up all over London. Apparently they were even out in the countryside. He disappeared back into the house, talking on his mobile.

  Whitestone and I watched Wren leading the boy round the side of the house.

  ‘Max?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I have to ask you – did Charlotte Gatling know the boy was here?’

  ‘No,’ I said with total certainty. ‘She never came to this place. It wasn’t home to her. It was more like a torture chamber. And it tore her heart out that Bradley was missing.’

  ‘You know that the CAIT people – the child protection unit – are going to have to turn him over to social services?’

  ‘That can’t happen. Not to him. Hasn’t he lost enough already?’

  ‘Max, they’re not going to release him to someone from this messed-up family.’

  ‘Then just take him to her in London,’ I said. ‘You and Edie. Get the kid to someone who loves him. Charlotte can argue about it later. She’s smart. She’s rich. She wants him. He needs her. They need each other. She can hire the best lawyers in London. Please. Bradley can’t go into care.’

  Whitestone thought about it. But not for long.

  ‘What’s the address?’

  I gave her the address in Fitzroy Square.

  And then we went into the house.

  There were screams coming from the first floor.

  ‘What have I told you?’ a woman with a West Country accent was shouting. ‘What have I told you about doing your bloody business in the bed?’

  Screams. Slaps. The sound of tears.

  We entered an enormous room.

  An old man lay on a four-poster bed.

  He was wearing nothing but a gigantic nappy.

  It was Victor Gatling.

  And Victor Gatling was crying.

  Bitter, heartbroken tears. He looked into my eyes and, although I was no expert, I estimated that his dementia was at least ten y
ears old. There was a red mark on his cheek.

  A man and a woman were either side of the bed. They were both grotesquely overweight, and the tattoos that covered the flopping blubber of their bare meaty arms looked out of place amid all this rural splendour.

  The fat man lifted his hand to strike Victor Gatling again, but he saw the muscles tighten around my mouth and that was enough to stop him. The fat woman was less wary. She took a fistful of the old man’s thinning white hair and shook it hard.

  Then she stared at Whitestone defiantly.

  ‘What the fuck do you want, you four-eyed bitch?’ the woman said, a fleck of spit flying from her mouth.

  Whitestone took out an Airwave radio and said that she wanted social services and some uniformed officers in here immediately. Then she started towards the bed.

  ‘Madam,’ she told the fat woman. ‘That’s DCI Bitch to you.’

  There were a lot of bathrooms.

  I found Nils Gatling in the master bedroom’s en-suite bathroom at the very top of the house. He was wearing a cashmere sweater and his underpants. His legs were thin and hairy and the sight of him half-dressed made my flesh crawl. I was hoping that the sight of me risen from that shallow grave in Highgate Cemetery might kill him. But he looked at me with that old familiar contempt.

  ‘Step back, pig,’ he said. Between the thumb and index finger of his right hand he held an old-fashioned razor blade. He pressed the razor blade against his wrist. He did not break the skin.

  I laughed at him.

  ‘Go ahead,’ I said. ‘Don’t stop on my account.’

  I glanced over my shoulder. Nobody else was coming. They were all happy to leave him to me.

  ‘But slashing your wrists is a slow way to die,’ I said. I nodded at the bathtub. ‘You need to speed up the blood flow or it’s going to be more pain than you can handle, pal. Trust me. Hot water is good. A bath is great. But you need to cut something serious – an artery or a vein – so push down really hard, OK? And don’t slash across – that’s just in the movies, and a common mistake – you have to slash down, towards your wrist from about two-thirds of the way to your elbow. Otherwise you’re going to cut a tendon and you will not be able to do both sides. What would be good is if you were really hydrated – you need to drink as much water as you can to enlarge your veins and make the blood flow good and fast. Get a few litres of water inside you. Sparkling or still – it doesn’t matter. Whatever you fancy. But make it a long cut. How sharp is that razor? It doesn’t look that sharp to me. You should use a brand-new blade. And – this is important, so pay attention – you have to do it quick or you’ll back out. And what’s really perfect is if you can do both wrists. So you cut one wrist and then immediately put the razor in the other hand and do the same again. But you should do the weaker side first. You’re right-handed? So cut your right wrist with your left hand and then change sides. There’s just one problem …’