Snap_‘The best crime novel I’ve read in a very long time’ Val McDermid

by Belinda Bauer

But this knife was not blurred by plastic – and it was a thing of utter beauty …

  The abalone was a turbulent storm cloud, captured and tamed by the smooth, warm handle that fitted his palm like magic. He touched his thumb to the diamond stud and the knife seemed to open itself! Seemed to know that he wanted it open, and obliged before he’d exerted any noticeable pressure. No hesitation. No notches. No friction. The blade sprang open like a living thing, alert to his every wish. Serrated on one edge, curved on the other to a cruel point.

  It was the same.

  And it was … magical.

  Marvel was almost embarrassed by how magical it felt. He felt so connected to it! And he wanted to use it. Wanted to see what it could do. Wanted to cut and to stab and to slice. To carve his name in something.

  Anything!

  He gingerly touched his thumb to the blade. It kissed a thin line of blood there that made him shiver.

  ‘Sir!’ said Rice, and broke the spell.

  Marvel breathed again.

  ‘You’ve cut yourself, sir.’

  Marvel nodded. He held his bloody thumb away from the handle so as not to sully the shell. His regretful forefinger decreed that the knife must close, and the blade obeyed and bowed down into its pearly sheath without a murmur.

  He cleared his throat and handed the knife back to While. ‘I see why they’re so expensive. Where did you get it?’

  ‘It was a gift from my father.’

  ‘I hear they’re thousands of pounds. That’s some gift.’

  ‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘But it was for my twenty-first.’

  ‘Where did he get it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, did he get it in a shop?’

  While frowned at the knife, then wiped it clean of Marvel’s touch on the tail of his untucked shirt, and slid it back into his pocket. ‘I don’t know, to be honest.’

  ‘Or direct from the maker?’

  He shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘But he’d remember, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Unfortunately, he’s dead.’

  ‘Oh that is sad,’ said Marvel without sounding at all sad. ‘When did he die?’

  ‘Last year,’ said While. ‘Cancer.’

  ‘The big C,’ said Marvel.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘There are worse ways to go,’ he mused.

  ‘I suppose so,’ said While.

  ‘No suppose about it,’ said Marvel. ‘Some of the things you see in this job …’

  He didn’t finish the thought. Just stared at Adam While until even Rice looked nervous.

  Then he said, ‘Well, thank you for your time, Mr While.’

  ‘He’s lying,’ said Marvel as they drove away from the house.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Then how do you know he’s lying, sir?’ said Rice.

  ‘A biiiiiiig hunch,’ said Marvel. ‘Tell me,’ he went on, ‘if two homicide cops turned up on your doorstep and asked to see your knife, wouldn’t you want to know why?’

  ‘I would,’ she said.

  ‘Me too,’ said Marvel. ‘But he didn’t. Even though the news of the murder weapon being found was never released to the public. So he should have no idea why his knife would be of any interest to anyone investigating the death of Eileen Bright.’

  Rice nodded. ‘Unless he knows his knife matches the murder weapon.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Rice sighed. ‘But it’s not the murder weapon, is it?’ she said.

  Marvel nodded and his jaw set in frustration. ‘The one thing that links Adam While to the crime is the one thing that exonerates him.’

  They drove the rest of the way back to the police station in silence.

  THERE WAS A website.

  VC KNIVES: THE POINT IS PERFECTION

  The site was ugly and text-heavy, with a lot of it in bold caps of red and blue, punctuated by exclamation marks, underlined sections and bizarre, angry headlines like TEN REASONS NOT TO BUY A VC KNIFE! and DON’T ASK ME WHEN YOUR VC KNIFE WILL BE READY BECAUSE I! DON’T!! KNOW!!!!!

  Reasons not to buy a VC knife included SHOWING OFF!, CRIME! and OPENING LETTERS!

  IF YOU DON’T HAVE A GOOD REASON TO OWN A VC KNIFE, the page raged at potential customers, DON’T BUY A VC KNIFE! And to customers who were even thinking of enquiring as to the progress of their custom-made knives, VC had a very special message indeed:

  Every time I have to reply to a query about the status of your knife, you stop me working and risk delay or even damage to a knife – possibly YOURS!!!

  Marvel was not, by nature, a friendly, easygoing man. But even he felt the tone of the VC Knives page was a bit … brisk. The point of the site seemed to be to put people off buying a VC knife.

  He whistled low through his teeth. ‘What a nut.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Reynolds. ‘No crime! What does he think people are going to do with a four-thousand-pound hunting knife? Peel fruit?’

  Now and then there was a photograph of a knife. And, while the maker of the website – whom Marvel strongly suspected to be VC himself – had lavished no expense on its construction, the photos of knives had been taken with an obsessiveness that was almost pornographic. Lights were perfectly positioned, angles carefully arranged, accessories lovingly displayed. Each knife was laid out against an appropriate backdrop – a survival knife reclined on a camouflage net beside a snared rabbit; a combat dagger was clipped to a carefully mud-spattered paratrooper’s boot; and a black carbon-fibre stiletto lay in a puddle of candlelight on a Victorian desk beside a chalice of wine and – in the shadows – a human skull. Fantasy tableaux of the powers that might magically be bestowed upon the owner of a VC knife – if only they could survive the obstacle course of purchase.

  And on that last point, there were no clues as to price. Apparently VC operated on the basis of If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.

  Finally Reynolds found the only contact information. Right at the bottom of the last page – in tiny type, sandwiched between ‘Est:1988’ and a stern notice about photographic copyright (‘THEY’RE MINE!!!!’) – was a mobile phone number.

  ‘That’s a UK number,’ said Reynolds. ‘At least we know he’s in this country.’

  Marvel rang the number twice. Both times it went directly to voicemail, where there was no message – only a fifteen-second silence and then a beep.

  He didn’t leave a message.

  Instead he called Taunton and got them to run a reverse directory search on the mobile number.

  Then he and Rice and Parrott stood and watched Reynolds scroll aimlessly through the website, desperately looking for clues in the photographs, in the small print, in the syntax, that might shed light on VC’s identity or whereabouts.

  ‘Hold on,’ said Marvel suddenly. ‘What date was VC established?’

  ‘Nineteen eighty-eight, sir,’ said Reynolds, double checking.

  Marvel flicked through the Eileen Bright file that Stourbridge had copied for him.

  ‘Three years ago, in nineteen ninety-eight when While was picked up at the murder scene, he was thirty-five years old.’

  They all looked at him.

  He went on, his intensity growing slowly as he worked things out, ‘An hour ago, Adam While told us that his father gave him the knife for his twenty-first birthday.’

  He turned to Rice, who nodded her agreement.

  ‘But he must have turned twenty-one in nineteen eighty-four. According to this site, that’s four years before VC Knives started trading.’

  ‘But what does that mean?’ asked Parrott.

  ‘It means his father didn’t give him the knife,’ said Rice.

  ‘Does it matter who gave him the knife?’ asked Reynolds.

  ‘No, but it matters that he lied about it,’ said Marvel. ‘Why would he lie about anything if he had nothing to hide? I knew he was lying!’

  Rice’s face broke into a broad grin. ‘Sometimes feeli
ngs are facts!’

  Reynolds arched his eyebrows. ‘Sir, I do think this rather smacks of the no-smoke-without-fire school of policing.’

  ‘Too right,’ said Marvel. ‘When I like someone for murder, I’m usually right.’

  Reynolds closed his eyes briefly and realized there was nothing else he could say right now to convince Marvel otherwise.

  ‘What about the boy, sir?’ he said. ‘We really need to charge him or let him go.’

  Before Marvel could say anything, Taunton rang back, and he snorted as he wrote the address on a yellow Post-it note.

  Then he got up with a great scrape of his chair.

  ‘Get the kid,’ he said. ‘We’re going to London.’

  IT WASN’T REALLY London; it was Bromley. But it was close enough to London to make Marvel start dropping his aitches.

  In the back seat, Jack Bright looked around him with interest as the buildings grew taller, the cars newer and the people more colourful.

  As they crawled along the busy streets, Marvel got a wave of nostalgia for kebabs and diesel fumes and pavements spotted with chewing gum. Not far from here, his final case in the Met had ended in failure so abject that he’d known his time there was over.

  A child lost, a child dead, a child found.

  One out of three ain’t good enough.

  He hadn’t said goodbye to anybody and nobody had said goodbye to him.

  But he’d go back tomorrow if things could be the way they were before …

  ‘How do you want to do this?’ said Reynolds.

  They hadn’t discussed it on the way. That had been three hours of silence, punctuated by blunt directions and grunted decisions about where to pee.

  At Membury Services, Marvel had bought a bargain bucket of KFC because it was the food of the gods, but the kid said he wasn’t hungry.

  Reynolds had had a hummus wrap and bottled water. The man was averse to living.

  ‘How do you want to do this?’ said Reynolds again.

  Marvel would love to have told him they were going to kick the front door down and pin VC to the floor with his own knives until he admitted he’d sold the murder weapon to Adam While.

  ‘Dead straight, for starters,’ he said instead. ‘You never know when you’re going to get lucky.’

  They drove out of the town centre and into the residential areas – more green and with a mix of grand old homes, flats and ugly 1960s boxes, a legacy of wartime bombing.

  VC’s house on Cumberland Road was one of those brick boxes, with an overgrown front garden.

  Reynolds swung the car around the corner and took ages to parallel park in a small space behind a lorry.

  ‘You wait here,’ said Marvel, and Jack nodded.

  ‘You sure that’s a good idea, sir?’ said Reynolds warily.

  Marvel knew Jack Bright wasn’t going anywhere. He wanted to catch his mother’s killer more than any of them. If they failed to do that, then he’d worry about the kid doing a runner to avoid charges in the Goldilocks case. But until then, Marvel was confident Jack Bright would stay put.

  He didn’t bother reassuring Reynolds on this point. He went to university. Let him work it out for himself.

  ‘Can I listen to the radio?’ said Jack.

  ‘No,’ said Reynolds, and looked defensively at Marvel. ‘I’m not leaving him the keys, sir!’

  Even Marvel agreed that that would be tempting fate, and they left Jack sitting in the car as they walked back around the corner and turned into the short driveway.

  ‘I’m uncomfortable bringing the boy, sir,’ said Reynolds. ‘He’s been questioned without a legal guardian, locked up without charge and now he’s here with us and I’m not sure why …’

  Marvel shrugged. ‘He might come in useful.’

  ‘Useful how?’ said Reynolds.

  ‘Everybody has their uses, Reynolds. It’s all about context. If it turns out he isn’t useful, we’ll take him back down the M5, charge him with the Goldilocks crimes and no harm done.’

  ‘He hasn’t even seen a solicitor yet, sir.’

  ‘Well, we haven’t formally interviewed him.’

  ‘It’s almost twenty-four hours! We need to charge him or let him go.’

  ‘Calm down, Reynolds,’ said Marvel. ‘Don’t forget he came to us. He insisted on talking even when we told him not to. Wanted to make a deal. And, thanks to your joke arrest, he wasn’t even in legal custody for most of it.’

  Reynolds pressed his lips together and said no more as they turned into the property.

  The ragged lawn was home to a brightly painted gnome pointing a camera at them. Marvel glanced up and saw the black CCTV under the eaves. A TO LET sign leaned against the inside of the haywire hedge.

  Reynolds knocked and they both got out their ID. Through the obscured-glass door a figure approached and Marvel braced himself.

  But the door was opened by a small, frumpy woman in her late fifties. She had thick spectacles, a mumsy grey bob, and a cat chasing a ball of wool across her jumper.

  ‘Hello?’ she said warily.

  ‘Hello,’ said Marvel. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Marvel and Detective Sergeant Reynolds.’ Marvel held his ID up for her to see and she peered at it. ‘We’re here about VC Knives.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the woman. ‘It’s my son you want. He’s not here.’

  ‘And what’s your son’s name, ma’am?’ said Reynolds.

  ‘Christopher.’

  ‘Surname?’

  ‘Creed,’ she said. ‘Christopher Creed.’

  Marvel frowned. ‘We assumed VC were the initials of the knife-maker.’

  ‘I think it’s for Victoria Cross,’ she said. ‘Like the medal. But you can ask him when he gets home.’

  ‘Great,’ said Marvel. ‘When will that be?’

  ‘Tuesday,’ she said. ‘He’s gone to Lanzarote.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Marvel. It was Friday.

  Reynolds smiled smoothly. ‘Could we call him?’

  ‘Call Christopher?’ said Mrs Creed, looking surprised. ‘I wouldn’t know how to!’

  ‘Doesn’t he have a mobile phone?’

  She looked unsure for a moment, then said, ‘Well, he has one, but I don’t know whether he’d have it with him on holiday.’

  Probably the phone they’d already called, thought Marvel. ‘Do you know which hotel he’s at?’

  ‘No,’ she said regretfully. ‘He didn’t say which hotel. But Lanzarote’s very small, isn’t it? You can hardly see it on the map! Couldn’t you just phone the island and ask where he’s staying?’

  Old people, thought Marvel. No fucking clue.

  He shook his head and blew out a lungful of air in frustration. Here in this house – or in some shed out the back – one of the world’s finest knife-makers apparently plied his trade to the wealthy and – more likely than not – the criminal. He was intrigued to meet him, if only to fix in his head an accurate mental image of Christopher Creed. Was he a square-jawed ex-marine, milling titanium with battle-scarred fingers and the zeal of the righteous? Or some fat, lazy man-child, eating crisps in his underpants, whose metalwork skills had started with a Lord of the Rings obsession, and been honed to perfection only because he never left his bedroom?

  It could be either, or neither, or anything in between.

  They’d come all this way! He didn’t want to leave empty-handed.

  ‘Could we come in for a moment, Mrs Creed?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I don’t often get visitors! Would you like some tea?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Mrs Creed showed Marvel and Reynolds into the front room and went to make tea.

  The house smelled funny. Metallic? Acidic? Marvel didn’t know about the processes of knife-making but maybe that was part of it.

  There was a fading photograph of a boy on the mantelpiece – Christopher, he assumed – but it gave no real clues as to the adult.

  Other than that, the room was all about cats.

 
China cats, wooden cats, knitted cats, felt cats, cat door stop, cat air freshener, cat-shaped vases, cat lampshades, cat curtains, cat couch, cats, cats, cats.

  Mrs Creed brought in tea on a tray. She poured it from a china pot, and covered it with a cat cosy, then put the cat cups down on cat coasters.

  ‘You like cats?’ said Marvel.

  ‘Oh I love cats!’ she cried, and fixed him with a magnified stare that was both eager and strangely off-putting. ‘Do you?’

  ‘I do,’ said Marvel.

  He hated cats. Couldn’t bear the hoity-toity little fuckers. But he was a whore for information.

  She beamed at him. ‘They’re like little furry children,’ she nodded dreamily.

  ‘Talking of children, you must be very proud of Christopher,’ said Reynolds. ‘I understand he has quite a reputation in his field.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ sighed Mrs Creed. ‘And I know he’s very good at what he does, but I do wish it wasn’t knives. They’re so …’ she searched long and hard for the perfect word, and finally settled on ‘sharp’.

  Marvel nodded sagely and agreed, ‘Yes. Knives are sharp.’

  ‘I always worry he’ll cut himself, you see?’ said Mrs Creed.

  ‘I’m sure he takes every precaution,’ said Reynolds reassuringly. ‘He’s a professional, after all.’

  Mrs Creed gave him a very small smile. ‘I hope you’re right, Mr Reynolds. Would you like a biscuit?’

  Marvel took a bourbon, Reynolds a custard cream. Old-people biscuits.

  ‘Maybe you can help us,’ Marvel said, although he doubted it.

  Mrs Creed sipped her tea, then put the cup back on its saucer and said, ‘Of course, if I can.’

  ‘It’s a simple thing,’ said Marvel. ‘We just need to find out whether Christopher ever sold a knife to a particular customer. If you could show us his records, I’m sure we’d be able to find it in a moment.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Creed. ‘I can’t get into Christopher’s room when he’s away. He locks it, you see?’

  ‘You don’t have a spare key to the door?’ asked Marvel.

  ‘Oh no!’ Mrs Creed shook her head. ‘Even if I did, I think he’d be very annoyed with me if I went in there without him. You know how boys are about their things.’

  Marvel itched with frustration. A flimsy bedroom door was all that stood between him and the information he wanted. He could probably knock it clear off its hinges – or get Reynolds to do it. Now he’d have to go away and come back! And even then he would need a warrant. He didn’t have probable cause to search the house without one, and unearthing probable cause could take weeks.