The Murder Bag (3 page)

I put the car into reverse, ready to go again.

But there was no need to go again.

Zero.

I slowly got out of the car.

People were screaming. Some of them were commuters. Some of them were the voices in my head. A dog, getting closer every second, was barking wildly.

One voice in my ear was shouting about gross misconduct and manslaughter. Another was shouting about murder.

‘
Wolfe!
’

Swire.

I tore out the earpiece and threw it away.

The man with the red backpack was sitting up against the brick wall, staring straight at me with a baffled expression on his ruined face. One hand still twitched with the surprise of sudden death. Both of his hands were empty.

I was not expecting his hands to be empty.

Suddenly there were armed men in balaclavas. Guns were trained on the dead man. Glock SLP 9mm pistols. Heckler & Koch submachine guns. Then I saw that some of them were pointing at me.

‘He was the target,’ I said.

Armed officers from SCO19 were everywhere. Commuters were running and crawling for cover. A lot of people were screaming and crying because these men with guns did not look remotely like police officers. They wore Kevlar body armour. They had metal carabiners on their shoulders so they could more easily be dragged away if they were down. The black balaclavas they wore had the eyes and mouths cut out. They looked like paramilitary bank robbers.

People thought it was to protect their identity but I knew it was to spread terror.

And it worked.

They were shouting into the radios attached just above their hearts. The masked faces were bawling at me to get down and stay down and lie on my face.

Now. Now. Now. Do it now!

Slowly I took my warrant card out of my jeans, showed it, and tossed it at them. Then I held up my hands. But I wasn’t getting on my knees for them. I wasn’t getting down on my face. I kept walking towards the man on the ground.

Because I had to know if I was right.

Last chance! Do it now!

Crouching above the dead man on the ground, I saw that the impact had not cracked the back of his skull. It had removed it.

A huge slick of fresh blood was already spreading across the pavement.

All around there were the screams of terror and fury. The dog was so close now that I could smell it, so close now that I could feel its breath.

I could see the strange flat-nosed Glocks in the corner of my vision, aimed at the dead man on the ground and also at my face. The safety catches were released.

But this was our boy, wasn’t it?

I looked at my hands with wonder.

They were covered in the dead man’s blood.

But they were not shaking as I tore open the red backpack and looked inside.

2

‘SORRY,’ I SAID,
my body clenched tight inside the suit I had not worn since my wedding day.

The office was crowded with the full cast of a murder investigation. A SOCO was standing directly in front of me, trying to get past, all in white apart from the blue facemask that covered everything but the irritation in her eyes. I was in a big corner room near the top of a shining glass tower, but I flashed briefly on the many school playgrounds of my childhood, and how you can feel both invisible and in the way just because you are new.

And then there was a spark of recognition in the SOCO’s eyes.

‘I know you,’ she said.

‘I’m the new man,’ I said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re the hero. At the railway station. When did you start working Homicide?’

‘Today.’

Now she was smiling behind her blue facemask.

‘Cool. What did they call you in court?’

‘Officer A.’

‘You kill anybody this week, Officer A?’

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘But it’s only Monday morning.’

She laughed and left me standing by the dead man’s desk. There wasn’t much on it. Just fresh blood and an old photograph.

In the photograph, seven young men in military uniform smiled for the camera as if they were looking at their unbreakable future. Blood had splattered across one corner of the glass. But it did nothing to hide their cocky faces.

It was a strange photograph to have on an office desk. No wife, no kids, no dog. Just seven young soldiers, defaced now with a bright spurt of blood.

Travel blood. Fresh from an artery.

I looked closer and saw the photograph was taken in the eighties, judging by the washed-out colours and the mullet haircuts of the cocky lads. Their hair was from another decade and their uniforms were from another century. They looked like Duran Duran at Waterloo.

And I saw that they were not men. These were boys who would be boys for perhaps one more summer. And despite the military uniforms, they were not real soldiers. Just students dressed as soldiers. Two of them looked like twins. One of them was the dead man on the far side of the desk. He had grown up to be a banker. He had grown up to be murdered.

I stood aside as a forensic photographer started taking pictures of the desk’s bloody mess.

‘Who would want to kill a banker?’ the photographer said.

It got a laugh. Mostly among the SOCOs, chuckling away behind their facemasks. Spend your life collecting microscopic samples of blood, semen and dirt and you are grateful for any laugh you can get. But the senior detective standing on the far side of the desk did not smile, although I could not tell if he had not heard the remark, or if he was preoccupied with the corpse before him, or if he disapproved of levity in the presence of death.

He was waiting patiently while a small man with a briefcase – the divisional surgeon, here to pronounce death – knelt over the body.

The detective’s large head was shaved so clean it shined, and despite his extravagantly broken nose – and it had been broken so often that it looked like a wonky ski run – he had enough vanity to keep his pale goatee beard neatly trimmed.

He turned his piercing blue eyes on me and I thought that he looked like a Viking. I could imagine that pale, fierce face coming up the beach for a spot of pillaging and monk bothering. But Vikings didn’t wear glasses and the detective’s were round and rimless, John Lennon Imagine specs; they softened his ferocious appearance and gave his hard face a kindly, slightly perplexed expression.

My new boss.

‘DC Wolfe, sir,’ I said.

‘Ah, our new man,’ he said, the quiet voice precise and clipped with the vowels of the distant north, Aberdeen or beyond, the kind of Highlands accent that sounds as if every word is carved from granite. ‘I’m DCI Mallory.’

I already knew his name. I had never met him before but I had heard of him enough. Detective Chief Inspector Victor Mallory was one of the reasons I wanted the transfer to Homicide and Serious Crime Command.

We were both wearing thin blue gloves and made no attempt to reach across the desk and shake hands. But we smiled, and took a second to size each other up.

DCI Mallory looked very fit, not just for a man in his early fifties but for a man of any age, and it looked like the kind of fitness that comes from natural athleticism rather than hours in the gym. He watched me with his blue eyes as the divisional surgeon fussed briskly over the corpse.

‘You’re just in time,’ Mallory said. ‘We’re about to begin. Welcome to Homicide.’

Friendly, but skipping all small talk.

The divisional surgeon was standing up.

‘He’s dead all right,’ he said, snapping his bag shut.

Mallory thanked him and gave me the nod. I stepped forward. ‘Come and have a look at our body, Wolfe,’ he said, ‘and tell me if you’ve ever seen anything like it.’

I joined DCI Mallory on the far side of the desk and we stood above the dead man. At first all I saw was the blood. Lavish arterial sprays with a man in a shirt and tie somewhere beneath it all.

‘The deceased is Hugo Buck,’ Mallory said. ‘Thirty-five years old. Investment banker with ChinaCorps. Body discovered by cleaning staff at six a.m. He gets in early. Works with the Asian markets. While he was having his first coffee, somebody cut his throat.’ Mallory looked at me keenly. ‘Ever seen one of these?’

I did not know how to respond.

The banker’s throat had been more than cut. It had been ripped wide open. The front half of his neck was cleaved away, sliced out with clean precision. He was flat on his back but it felt like only a bit of bony gristle was keeping his head attached to his body. The blood had erupted from his neck in great spurts; his shirt and tie looked like some monstrous red bib. I could smell it now, the copper stink of freshly spilt blood. I shut my mind to it.

Hugo Buck’s jacket was still on the back of his chair. Somehow the fountains of blood had not touched it.

I looked quickly at Mallory and then back at the dead man.

‘I’ve seen three cut throats, sir,’ I said.

I hesitated and he nodded once, telling me to carry on.

‘First week in uniform, there was a husband who saw a text message on his wife’s phone from his best friend and reached for a carving knife. Maybe a year later I attended a robbery in a jewellery shop where a gun failed to discharge and the thief produced an axe and went for the man who pushed the security button. And then there was a wedding reception where the father of the bride objected to the best man’s speech and shoved a champagne flute into his neck. Three cut throats.’

‘Did any of them look anything like this?’

‘No, sir.’

‘This is almost a decapitation,’ Mallory said.

I looked around.

‘Somebody must have heard something,’ I said.

‘Nobody heard a thing,’ Mallory said. ‘There are people around in a building like this even at that time of day. But nobody hears a thing when a man almost gets his head chopped off.’

He considered me with his pale blue eyes. But I didn’t get it.

‘Because the victim’s windpipe was cut,’ he said. ‘The trachea. There was no air. And you need air to scream. Nobody heard anything because there was nothing to hear.’

We contemplated the body in silence while all over the large office the SOCOs moved in slow motion like scientists examining the aftermath of a biological catastrophe. They were identical in their masks and gloves and white suits, patiently hunting for prints, placing tiny fibres in evidence bags and taking samples of blood from the desk, the carpet and the glass walls. There was a lot of blood to choose from. One SOCO was drawing a sketch. The photographer who had wondered why anyone would want to kill a banker had stopped taking stills and was now filming the room. Small numbered yellow plastic markers were blooming all over the lush carpet as SOCOs harvested footprints for forensics to match against SICAR, the Shoeprint Image Capture and Retrieval database.

Mallory watched them. ‘Most professional hits are very amateur, Wolfe. Is that an irony or a paradox? They’re carried out by thugs hired in the pub. Morons who will kill anyone for some cash in hand. Most professional hits come with a guarantee – they guarantee to do it badly. But not this one. You see how clean that cut is? Most people, cutting someone’s throat, they slash and chop and saw. They make a mess, don’t they? You saw that with your three. About as big a mess as an enraged human being can make to flesh and blood with something sharp. But this looks like just one cut. It almost took his head off, but it’s just one cut. Now who cuts a throat like that?’

‘Someone who knew what they were doing.’ I thought about it. ‘A butcher. A surgeon. A soldier.’

‘You think we’ve got Rambo running around out there?’

‘I don’t know if he’s running around, sir. Maybe he’s sleeping on the streets.’

Mallory nodded beyond the glass walls to the city thirty floors below, spangled with autumn sunshine around the old grey serpent of a river.

‘How many ex-servicemen are sleeping on those streets?’ he asked.

‘Too many,’ I said. I tried to imagine it. ‘He comes in here during the night. To find somewhere warm to sleep. To find something worth stealing. Gets disturbed.’ I couldn’t make it work. ‘But he has to get past security.’

‘Butcher, surgeon, soldier,’ Mallory said. ‘Or perhaps it was someone who had no idea what they were doing. One of Mr Buck’s fellow bankers. One of the cleaning staff. Perhaps it was just beginner’s luck. Or perhaps it was his wife. Apparently she didn’t like him much. Officers were called out to a domestic dispute between Mr and Mrs Buck three nights ago. There was some violence. Did you see the marital bed?’

A mattress was leaning against one of the glass walls, a king-sized bed still wrapped in courier’s cellophane and bearing the purple and orange FedEx markings.

‘That’s their bed?’ I said. ‘His wife sent their bed to his office?’

‘Mrs Buck returned home early from a business trip and discovered Mr Buck with the housekeeper.’ Mallory frowned with embarrassed disapproval. ‘And he wasn’t helping her to unload the dishwasher. So Mrs Buck went for Mr Buck with an oyster knife.’

‘An oyster knife?’

‘Yes, an oyster knife. It has a short, broad blade. These are affluent people. They like oysters. Anyway, she threatened to cut his testicles off and shove them up his back passage. Responding to sounds of a violent struggle, the neighbours call 999. Officers restrain both of them. Mr Buck hasn’t slept at home since.’

We looked at the marital bed in its FedEx wrapping.

‘You think the wife did this, sir?’ I said.

Mallory shrugged. ‘Right now she’s all we’ve got. She’s on record as making a threat to remove her husband’s testicles.’ He looked down at the banker’s mutilated throat. ‘Although nobody’s aim is that bad.’

‘She may have delegated,’ I said. ‘She has the money to hire someone good.’

‘That was my thought,’ Mallory agreed. ‘But then there would be glove prints. And we can’t find any glove prints. And unless she hired someone who didn’t have any idea what they were doing, there should certainly be glove prints in this room. As you know, glove prints can be as distinctive as fingerprints. If the gloves are thin enough, fingerprints can pass through the material. Fingerprints can also be present inside the gloves. Few villains take their gloves home, preferring to ditch them close to the crime scene. So we’re looking for a pair of gloves as well as glove prints.’