The Murder Bag (17 page)

‘This must be a very traumatic time for you,’ I said, ‘losing two close friends in a short space of time.’

He smiled sadly. ‘We lost Adam many years ago.’

There was a pause as the coffee was placed before us.

‘I had been dreading that phone call for years – the one telling me he had gone. But Hugo – that was a blow, yes.’

‘So you were not in contact with Adam Jones?’

‘A few years ago he approached me for money – or rather my office. I didn’t see him.’

‘And you didn’t give him any money?’

‘I would have given him money for rehabilitation. I would have given him money for treatment. I wasn’t giving him money for heroin. I think he approached a number of old friends. Guy saw him.’

‘He told me,’ I said, and the thought rushed in –
but you knew that already.
‘It’s a tragedy that he couldn’t get help. What a waste.’

Ben King looked at me. And I saw that he had a way of looking at someone as if he was suddenly seeing them clearly for the first time. He cocked his head to one side, as if readjusting his gaze, as if I had just said something unique, or momentous, or true. As if I were suddenly a man of substance in his eyes, coming out with things that had never been said before. He looked at me as if I were the last man left alive. That was the way he looked at me. But perhaps all politicians do that.

‘That’s three of your old school friends who have died before their time,’ I pointed out.

He thought about it for a moment.

‘You mean James? That was a tragedy. As I get older, I find myself thinking of James constantly.’ For the first time he seemed genuinely moved, the eighteen-year-old suicide somehow a wound that was more raw than the two recent murders. ‘Hugo and Adam,’ he said. ‘Are their deaths connected?’

‘That’s our conjecture,’ I said, echoing Mallory. ‘We’re going to be visiting Potter’s Field in due course.’

He sipped his coffee before speaking again. ‘But why would you go to our old school?’ His voice was calm and quiet.

‘It’s just one of the leads we’re pursuing. As far as we know there’s only one thing that links Mr Buck and Mr Jones – the past. Did anything happen during your school days that—’

‘Might make someone want to kill them?’ King said. The practised smile drew some of the sting from his words. He was trying not to laugh at me. ‘You’re talking as if their murders were somehow justified, detective.’

‘I didn’t mean to give that impression.’

‘I’m sure you didn’t,’ he said, forgiving me. He let his eyes drift away, as if remembering. ‘We were just ordinary boys,’ he said. And then back at me. ‘But if anything occurs, then of course I will immediately get in touch. I want what you want. Could I possibly have your card?’

I gave it to him, and realised that I was being very politely dismissed. And that there was someone else being brought in to see him. A dishevelled, overweight man blinking with awe behind his greasy specs, some kind of journalist, there for an interview, looking like a tourist. All hot and flustered, as if it had not been easy to find the unmarked door of a gentlemen’s club on St James’s Street. And then I was standing up and shaking Ben King’s hand and thanking him for his time and the coffee.

I collected my coat from the smirking porters and I was back on St James’s Street before it sank in that the MP for Hillingdon North had scheduled a meeting for every course of his lunch.

I was dessert.

‘That little gang,’ I said back at the incident room. ‘It was all about the King brothers, Ben and Ned. They were the alpha males. Ben looks like the pack leader.’

‘Why do you think that?’ Mallory said.

‘The mess he made of his brother’s face. Guy Philips was their pit bull. Salman Khan was their poodle. Hugo Buck was their jock, their star athlete. Adam Jones – I think he just tagged along. Let them run wild at his house when his parents were away. Adam was their mascot. Their lapdog.’

‘And what about the one who killed himself? James Sutcliffe.’

‘They all seem to love him,’ I said. ‘Died young. Good-looking corpse and all that. I doubt if it was so different when he was alive. And he was the one genuine aristocrat among them. The Honourable James Sutcliffe, younger son of the Earl of Broughton. These boys – these men – they all come from money. Even Adam, with his music scholarship, grew up with money. But Sutcliffe was the only true toff, the only one of them that came from a family where the money had been there for generations. He was their hero.’

We looked up at the photograph of the seven soldiers, and at the boy dead centre, dark glasses, unsmiling, hair swept back off that high forehead. I pictured him folding his clothes on the beach at Amalfi and walking into the sea.

‘If they don’t hate each other,’ I said, ‘then who does?’

Mallory said, ‘Oh, everyone hates them.’

‘Sir?’

‘It’s that very British hatred with class resentment at its core. We pity the small boys packed off to their boarding schools where they wet the beds and cry for their mothers but we end up wanting to be them, because they have something that the rest of us will never have.’

Mallory considered the big screen and the grinning boys in their uniforms.

‘It’s more than confidence,’ he continued. ‘It’s more than the sense of entitlement. It’s the total and unequivocal certainty that tomorrow belongs to them.’ He smiled at me. ‘Who wouldn’t want to feel like that?’

The next day I drove us to Potter’s Field.

13

‘
NOW GET DOWN
on the ground,’ Guy Philips said.

Fifty boys, shivering in their running shorts and vests, stared at their sports master. They grinned foolishly at each other, still hoping that he might be joking. A bitter wind whipped across the school playing fields. Three in the afternoon and it already seemed to be getting dark.

‘
Now!
’ he screamed.

And they saw he wasn’t joking.

Slowly they got down on all fours. The rugby pitch had been churned to mud by ten thousand studmarks and their hands and knees made squelching sounds as they tested the ground. Philips walked between them in his pristine white tracksuit, a grin spreading across his red face. He was enjoying himself.

‘Not doggy style, toads. On your bellies. On your backs. Roll around in it. That’s good. Now on your back, Knowles. Give it a good old wriggle, Jenkins. Come on, Patel, you big girl, rub it a bit harder than that!’

Soon their running gear – white shorts and vests trimmed with the purple and green of Potter’s Field – was rank with mud and damp. But Philips left them down there as he strode across to where we were watching.

‘A five-miler through the woods and I’ll be with you after a shower,’ he said to Mallory. ‘Should be an hour plus another thirty minutes or so for the retards. That all right?’

Mallory nodded, and Philips jogged back to his boys. The sports master was in a good mood.

‘Get up, get up!’ he barked, as if it had been their idea to roll around in the mud. ‘Now you don’t have to worry about getting your knees dirty, do you?’

‘Sir, no, sir,’ they chorused.

‘Then let’s get cracking. Across the fields, through the woods to the Old Mill and back in time for evensong.’

They took off across the playing fields, Philips pristine in his tracksuit among the small muddy figures. By the time they reached the woods he was flanked only by the fastest runners while the bespectacled, the fat and the surly trailed behind.

We started back to the school.

Potter’s Field was mostly a great jumble of redbrick Victorian buildings but there were also more modern blocks that were clearly residential, and some more ancient buildings, black and crumbling, that looked like something from the Middle Ages. You blinked your eye and a hundred years went by.

Flocks of boys drifted past. They wore straw boaters – the hats on the older boys threadbare and falling to pieces – green blazers trimmed with purple and light grey trousers. All of them lugged books or sports gear or both.

‘It hasn’t changed since Hugo Buck and Adam Jones were here in the eighties,’ Mallory said. ‘A thousand pupils. All boys. All boarding. Three resident staff in every boarding house – House Master, house tutor and matron.’

We paused to look at the statue of the school’s founder in the courtyard of the main building. Not Henry VIII as a fat, bearded king, but as a long-haired scholar and athlete, a lean young man clutching a book, two stone spaniels at his feet – the King Henry VIII who wouldn’t hurt a fly.

‘And it probably hasn’t changed very much since he founded the place,’ Mallory added. ‘Did you know he buried his greatest love here in the school grounds?’

‘What wife was that, sir?’

‘Not a wife. His dogs.’ Mallory indicated the spaniels. ‘Henry buried his favourite dogs at Potter’s Field. We should have a look at their grave. I wouldn’t want to miss it.’

Five hundred years. I couldn’t imagine anything lasting for five hundred years. I was always happy to make it to the weekend.

There was a small graveyard behind the church chapel. Crumbling tombstones, many of the inscriptions wiped clean by time and weather. But the grave of the dogs was easy to find. It was a large square tomb in the very centre of the graveyard with a short epitaph.

Brothers and sisters,

I bid you beware

Of giving your heart

To a dog to tear.

As we walked back to the main buildings a coach was unloading visitors from a local state school’s rugby team. The state school kids grinned with bewildered amusement at the boys from Potter’s Field in their boaters and their green and purple blazers. But the Potter’s Field boys gave no indication that they had noticed, which made the smiles on the faces of the state school kids look like some kind of defensive wound.

A towering man in a gown moved among the visitors, nodding and smiling at nobody in particular with his hands behind his back, like royalty inspecting Third World troops. I had seen him before – the impossibly tall man at the funeral of Hugo Buck.

‘That’s the Head Master,’ Mallory said. ‘He’s expecting us.’

Peregrine Waugh, Head Master of Potter’s Field College, stood at the window of his study and stared across the playing fields.

‘Three Prime Ministers, twelve Victoria Crosses and four Nobel Prizes,’ he said. ‘Two in physiology and two in physics. Fifteen Olympic medallists, forty-four Members of Parliament and six BAFTAs. Our drama department has always been very active. The boys were treading the boards, as it were, long before the first Old Etonian was admitted to RADA.’

‘And two murders,’ I said.

He stared at me over his rimless glasses.

‘What’s that?’ he barked.

‘Hugo Buck and Adam Jones,’ Mallory said. ‘They were Potter’s Field old boys too.’

‘Yes, yes. A terrible tragedy. Both of them. Did you arrest anyone yet?’

‘Not yet,’ Mallory said.

Waugh returned to his desk with a release of breath that might have been a sigh.

‘Although Jones left the school under a cloud,’ he said. ‘And they are not the first old boys to be murdered, sadly. Persian chap in the seventies. Filthy rich. Oil money. Mistress clobbered him with an empty bottle of Bollinger on The Bishops Avenue.’ He offered us a thin smile. ‘Privilege is no guarantee of a happy life, or even a long one. And we do know we’re privileged at Potter’s Field, gentlemen. But we give something back, you know – it’s part of the Potter’s Field tradition. Part of our ethos. Always has been. Remembrance Day service. A carol concert for the people of the town. We pay for a street cleaner. Potter’s Field Lawn Tennis Club uses our courts. And the school’s facilities – the playing fields, the swimming pool – are used extensively by local schools and various charities.’

He rose from his chair and returned to the window.

‘In fact, I think – ah yes.’ He looked at us with a delighted smile. ‘Look.’

We joined him at the window, the great green playing fields of Potter’s Field spread out before us. They were deserted apart from three figures who hovered by the touchline of the nearest rugby field. There was a man in a wheelchair, another with a walking stick, and a third, their physiotherapist, was demonstrating a stretching exercise. They all wore T-shirts. The physio’s face looked somehow unnatural, as if he were wearing some kind of mask.

The man in the wheelchair had no legs. Where his legs should have been there was simply nothing. What looked like two white bowls were attached just below his waist. One of his arms was a far lighter colour than his black skin and it was only the weak sun glinting on a curved piece of metal where a hand had once been that made me understand he was wearing a prosthesis.

The man with a walking stick had also lost his legs. Or most of his legs. Two thin black poles stuck out of his long baggy blue shorts. What remained of his right leg had some kind of white bandage around the knee area. He appeared to need the stick to stand up but his upper body was incredibly muscular.

They were all laughing.

‘The British Army is still the biggest employer of Potter’s Field old boys,’ Waugh said. ‘Despite what the general public may think, not all the old boys go into investment banking in the City and the RSC in Stratford. We never forget our debt to our country.’

We watched the three men perform a few gentle exercises, the man in the wheelchair and the one with the stick taking their directions from the physio, the man who looked as though he was wearing a mask.

‘Splendid, splendid,’ Waugh said, turning away when he decided we had seen enough.

‘You knew them,’ Mallory said. It wasn’t a question. ‘You knew Hugo Buck and Adam Jones. When they were at Potter’s Field. You were here too, were you not? Twenty years ago. In fact, you were their House Master.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Waugh said. ‘Did I not mention that?’

Mallory let him fill the silence.

‘Buck and Jones were both in The Abbey. It’s the oldest and smallest house at Potter’s Field. Not the most obvious of friendships – the athlete and the musician. But sharing a house throws boys together.’