The Murder Bag (12 page)

The security guard stepped back, and there was a young woman in a wheelchair. She smiled when she saw Mallory.

‘Sir,’ she said, and her smile grew bigger as she saluted.

‘Hello, Carol,’ he said, leaning forward to kiss her on each cheek.

He introduced me and we waited while she turned her wheelchair in a tight space. I went to help but she stopped me with a curt, ‘I’ve got it’.

We followed her down a narrow corridor that led to the main hall. The lights were off. In the darkness Spitfires and Messerschmitts and Hurricanes and V2 flying bombs hung above us, frozen in mid-flight, frozen in time.

‘How can I help you, sir?’ Carol said.

Mallory was opening his briefcase. ‘We’re looking for a murder weapon, Carol.’ He handed her the file.

She slowly leafed through it.

‘Our conjecture is that the weapon was designed for cutting a man’s throat,’ Mallory said.

‘Your conjecture is right, sir,’ she said, smiling again. ‘I know just the thing. We should have one in storage. Please follow me.’

The knife was just under twelve inches long, most of it blade, a blade that was long and thin and double-edged, designed to slip easily into human flesh and then cut through it without fuss. Mallory handed it to me, and I was surprised to find that it weighed next to nothing. The handle had a comforting ring grip, sitting easy in my closed right fist, and the thing conveyed a sense of terrible power.

‘The Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife,’ Carol said. ‘Developed by William Ewart Fairbairn and Eric Anthony Sykes when they were policing in Shanghai before the war.’

‘The commando knife,’ Mallory said. ‘Of course.’

I could not get used to how light it felt in my hand. It was so easy to hold. A sharp stabbing point, a good cutting edge. The double-edged blade glinted in the half-light of the storage room.

‘This was invented by two policemen?’ I said.

Carol nodded. ‘W. E. Fairbairn was an expert in close-combat fighting. This was designed to be the perfect fighting knife but it turned out to be the perfect killing knife. Standard-issue sidearm for all World War Two commandos. If the Nazis caught you with one of these, you were shot on the spot as a spy. Most knives are not specifically designed to kill – apart from the Fairbairn-Sykes. It looks easy to use, but it’s not. You have to know which arteries are closest to the surface and unprotected by clothing. Give it here, will you?’

The young woman in the wheelchair gave us a demonstration. With the fingers on her left hand spread wide she mimed pulling a man’s head to one side. With the knife in her right hand she stabbed the point sideways and then quickly pushed it forward.

‘Punch and pull,’ she said. ‘Punch the tip of the knife through the side of the neck and then pull the blade out of the front. You can’t patch that up with a couple of stitches and some Nurofen Plus. Most people who want to cut a throat start on the outside. They hack and saw and chop.’

She mimed hacking and sawing and chopping.

‘That’s all right if you want to hurt their feelings,’ she said. ‘That’s all right if you want to put a crimp in their day. But not if you want to be certain of killing them.’

‘The punch and pull,’ Mallory said. ‘It cuts the windpipe and then you have a good chance of cutting the carotid arteries.’

‘More than a good chance,’ Carol said. ‘That move is called the carotid thrust. Cutting the carotid arteries is the whole point, sir. If the shock doesn’t immediately kill them, then they die because the carotids have been severed and there’s no blood being pumped from the heart to the brain.’

‘How long?’ I asked.

‘Brain-dead immediately,’ she said. ‘Unconscious in five seconds and dead in twelve seconds.’

‘And when did they stop making these knives?’

‘They’ve never stopped making these knives. It’s been evolving for almost a hundred years. There’s a contemporary version used by the Special Forces – the UK-SFK. It’s the greatest combat knife ever invented.’ She looked at Mallory, and I wondered how they knew each other. ‘And now Bob the Butcher’s got one.’

Mallory smiled. ‘We don’t know if it’s Bob,’ he said. ‘What we do know is that it’s someone with training who has access to specialist weapons.’ He looked at me. ‘Presumably you can get a Fairbairn-Sykes online?’

‘You can buy anything online,’ I said.

‘Apart from training and knowledge and the expertise you would need to execute the carotid thrust,’ Carol said. ‘That takes years to accumulate. And there’s something else.’

We watched her feel the weight of the Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife.

‘To kill someone with one of these – to stick the stabbing point in the side of their neck and then pull it clean out the front . . .’ She paused and looked up at Mallory from her wheelchair. ‘You would have to really hate their guts, sir.’

I was in the ring and my legs were gone.

We were only a minute into the third round of sparring but already I was weak with exhaustion, flat-footed and breathing through my mouth, sagging against the ropes, my elbows pressed protectively against my lower ribcage, my hands raised to protect my head, the black leather of the fourteen-ounce Lonsdale gloves slick with sweat against my face.

The punches kept coming.

They were being thrown by a small man with long silver hair poking out of his old Everlast headguard. He grinned broadly at my exhaustion, revealing both a mean streak and a blue mouthguard. Hunched behind his tight, high guard, risking nothing, he moved in for the finish.

With my face buried deep into my gloves, I felt his body shots rip into my side with blinding speed. The small man was both skinny and muscle-packed, and hit very hard. Left ribs, right ribs. Left ribs, right ribs. I dug my elbows in deeper, but I could still feel their whiplash sting.

We were face to face now. At six feet, I towered above my opponent – Fred was his name – but probably the first thing I had ever learned in a boxing ring is that speed beats power. The bigger you are, the more there is to hit.

A left hook came through my ragged defence and made me gasp as it struck the lowest rib. I dug my elbows in deeper, really not wanting another one, and the moment I lowered my gloves a few inches Fred smacked me in my poorly guarded head.

Upstairs downstairs, I thought, cursing my basic mistake – leaving one area undefended while another is being attacked. I rolled against the ropes, willing my legs to work, trying to get back up on the balls of my feet.

But a left hook cracked against the right side of my headguard, and then a right hook cracked harder against the left side, making my ears ring despite the thick protective leather of my headguard.

I must have instinctively lifted my gloves a fraction to protect my head because Fred whipped in a wicked left hook, digging me low in the right ribs.

He was flagging too. Hitting someone non-stop takes it out of you. His combinations were slowing down, but a body shot is the hardest punch to recover from and I felt my dead legs sagging. Everything was telling me to go down. But I didn’t go down. I stayed on my feet, kept up by nothing but the ropes behind me and the will inside.

Fred grinned at me, revealing that old blue mouthguard. I watched him lift the elbow of his left arm, preparing for a left hook. But such is the beautiful balance of boxing that if your opponent can hit you then you are in a position to hit them back.

I saw my chance and took it.

Before Fred could slam a short hard left hook into my aching body, or my ringing head, I whipped a short left uppercut on to the point of his chin, jerking back his head just as the buzzer went to end the third and final round.

We fell into each other’s arms, totally spent, both laughing.

When we broke from the embrace, I stood there bent double, fighting for breath. I could hear the sound of skipping ropes, the business news on the TV by the treadmills, and a trainer chanting yoga instructions. When I looked up, Fred was taking off his battered headguard and his long silver hair was tumbling down – the hair of a veteran pirate. He pulled out his mouthguard.

‘You’re so lucky to be training,’ he said.

He lifted a glove in salute and I touched it with my own glove.

‘Good,’ he told me. ‘But keep those elbows tucked in and don’t be a statue. When you’ve thrown your punches, get out of there. Don’t stand around taking pictures. Even when you’re knackered. Especially when you’re knackered.’

My breath was slowly returning. ‘It’s hard,’ I managed.

Fred laughed. ‘It’s supposed to be hard. If it was easy, then everyone would do it.’ He patted my back. ‘Warm down with thirty minutes on the bike and don’t forget your stretching.’

Fred climbed out of the ring. He wandered over to the sound system and put on The Jam. This was Smithfield Amateur Boxing Club, and Fred ran the place, so he got to choose the music. ‘Going Underground’ began to belt out.

I was feeling better already. My ribs might be sore in the morning but the ringing in my head had already calmed down and nothing else had sustained serious damage. It was not the pain itself that wore you out so much as the shock of being hit. Yet I was always surprised how little being punched in the face actually hurt. It was those body shots that killed you.

Then I was aware of someone watching me.

He was by the free weights, and had gloves on, those fingerless gloves for lifting weights, and his meaty shoulders looked as though he had lifted a lot of them. You don’t see many Asians that heavily into their weights. But I guess you see more than you used to.

He held my gaze for a long moment, then removed his gloves and walked to the cupboards where Fred stored the boxing kit. He took out a black headguard and a pair of bright yellow gloves. Then he walked back across the gym and climbed into the ring. And by now I knew him. Just poking out of the top of his training vest I could see the bruise where I had punched him in the heart because he’d laughed at my dog.

‘I’ll fight you,’ he said, pulling on the gloves.

‘We call it sparring,’ I said, ‘not fighting.’

‘But it’s full contact, right?’ he said. ‘You’re trying to punch each other’s lights out, right?’

I shrugged. ‘Of course.’

I saw no point explaining that there was an etiquette involved in sparring, an unwritten and unspoken code of honour, and a deep degree of trust. He didn’t look as though he would be very interested in any of that stuff. I had been sparring with Fred for five years, but neither of us had ever been hit with a low blow, neither of us had ever left the ring feeling angry. Our friendship had been forged in the rough intimacy of sparring. But it was true what the weightlifter said: when we sparred, we didn’t hold anything back.

‘You sucker-punched me,’ the weightlifter said, the anger flaring.

‘You were rude to my dog.’

‘I wasn’t ready then. But I’m ready now.’

‘I just did three rounds,’ I said.

‘I want to see how tough you really are,’ he said. ‘Unless you’re chicken.’

I was looking at his yellow gloves – a pair of ten-ounce Cleto Reyes gloves, the best boxing gloves in the world, handmade in Mexico, but far too light for hard sparring. But that wasn’t what bothered me.

‘I’m not sparring with you,’ I said, taking my gloves off.

When I moved to get out of the ring, he blocked my path.

‘Why not?’

‘Because you don’t have a mouthguard.’

‘I don’t need a mouthguard.’

‘Yes you do,’ I said. ‘Everybody needs a mouthguard. Because I could catch you with my elbow. Or I could bang you with my forehead. And there’s even an outside chance that I might actually punch you in the mouth.’

Then Fred was there. He took the weightlifter by the elbow and easily turned the far bigger man around. Fred had worked the doors at some point.

‘See that sign?’

On the walls of Smithfield ABC gym there were framed photographs of boxers. They were a certain kind of boxer – natural-born fighters, all grit and glory, the kind of boxers Fred loved. Jack Dempsey. Jake La Motta. Joe Frazier. Marvin Hagler. The hard men of the sport. And there were other framed photographs – pictures of kids boxing in Cuba, a dozen of them in the ring at a time, shirtless and skinny and sparring with gloves that looked as though they had just been dug up. And above them all there was a sign.

NO SPARRING WITHOUT PERMISSION

‘You don’t have permission,’ Fred said.

Fred was the smallest man in the gym. But in that place of assorted hard nuts – where policemen came to keep fit, and rough boys from sink estates came to learn the sweet science of bruising, and young women came to learn self-defence, and white-collar City types came to push themselves to the limit – nobody argued with him.

The weightlifter got out of the ring.

‘There are many bad things about steroid abuse,’ observed Fred, who was the kind of boxer who is also a philosopher. ‘Shrunken balls. Acne. Hair loss. But the worst thing is that it wipes out the part of the brain that inhibits aggression. In the end they want to kill someone.’

There was a heavy bag near the exit door. Just before the weightlifter walked out of Smithfield ABC, he hit the bag as hard as he could.

Fred laughed with contempt.

‘It’s not about how hard you can hit,’ he said.

9

STAN KNEW SOMETHING
was up.

The dog was the only member of the family who had eaten breakfast, but Scout was standing at the window with her palms pressed against the glass, watching the street, occasionally flinching with anticipation at the sight of a car pulling up, while I kept checking the clock, my watch, my mobile.

She should have been here by now.

Stan lay Sphinx-like in the middle of the loft, his front paws demurely crossed, his huge round eyes watching us with suspicion.

Something you want to tell me?

‘Oh – oh – oh!’ Scout said, and when I went to the window I saw a white van that was stuffed full of dogs.

An Irish Wolfhound occupied the passenger seat, staring with interest at a white-coated porter emerging from the meat market, arms stained red up to the elbow. A pair of Pugs pressed their flat faces against the rear windows, while behind them a forest of tails were erect and wagging as small faces sniffed large bottoms and large faces sniffed small bottoms.