The Slaughter Man (12 page)

‘You can’t imagine what they want.’

‘But I bet I can. Some want cruelty of one kind or another. Some want a bigger party than one-on-one. Some want all the stuff they’ve seen online. Some want underage. And some of the bastards want children.’

She was rattled for the first time.

‘I don’t do any of that stuff,’ she said.

I pushed my card across the table.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘If I thought you did, we would be sitting in an interview room.’

She took my card.

‘I see there’s another little boy gone missing,’ she said.

‘That’s right.’

The waiter came back.

‘If you’re not going to order anything, sir, then we need the table.’

Rather than start throwing my weight about, I ordered a beer I didn’t want. Ginger studied my card. When my beer came I sipped it slowly.

She smiled at me.

‘You don’t have anyone to get back to, do you?’ she said.

‘Not quite true,’ I said. ‘My dog’s in the car.’

‘I’m not sure a dog counts,’ she said.

‘He counts to me.’

‘What happened? You break up with your girlfriend?’

I hesitated. Did I really want to share my secrets with a woman who ran a Social Introduction Agency?

‘Wife,’ I said.

‘Anything else I can help you with?’ she said, playing with me now.

‘You think I need a younger version of my wife?’

‘I think you look lonely, Detective.’

‘Everybody’s lonely,’ I said, standing up to go.

Her face became serious. ‘You know, there’s something far worse than the stuff they see online,’ she said.

‘And what’s that?’ I said.

‘The stuff they see in their head,’ she said.

Sunday morning at Fred’s.

With my hands inside big eighteen-ounce Lonsdale gloves, I threw hooks to the heavy bag. Bam-bam-bam, on and on, the lactic acid building in my arms and making them feel heavy and aching. I was determined to exhaust myself so that I would sleep better tonight.

‘Punch from your shoulders, not your feet,’ Fred was telling the young man in the ring with him. When the buzzer went for the end of my three minutes I stood and watched them. Other people were pausing in their workouts to watch.

The kid was that good.

Fred was taking him on the pads. Calling the shots.

‘Double jab. Double jab. Come on, Rocky! Double jab – right cross – left hook. Good. Don’t worry about power. Worry about speed. Punch from your feet! Get your whole body behind it! And now our seven-punch combination.’ The punches rattled out in a perfect blur. ‘Good, Rocky,’ said Fred, his pirate’s face splitting into a wide grin.

The young man was lean and very fast, with the kind of fitness level that only comes when you are very young and very serious. And you have to be good to call yourself Rocky. I watched his jab pop out and slap hard against the pads, the stinging sound of leather hitting leather. There was something Mediterranean about the way he looked, dark-haired and sallow-skinned, Italian or Spanish maybe, and if he wasn’t a professional boxer already then he was thinking about it.

Fred set down the pads. He put in his mouthguard and pulled on his headguard and fourteen-ounce gloves. Then they sparred for a few rounds, Fred fighting on the back foot, flicking his jab out, staying away from the kid’s big right hand. What shocked me was that only Fred wore a headguard. After three three-minute rounds they climbed out of the ring.

‘You don’t spar in a headguard?’ I asked the kid.

He grinned. ‘Never use them,’ he said. ‘Makes me too willing to get hit.’

‘These travellers like to fight,’ Fred laughed. ‘It’s in their blood.’

So Rocky was a gypsy.

‘You a pro?’ I said.

‘Thinking about it. Might be getting married soon.’ He couldn’t have been more than eighteen. ‘Working on the black stuff right now. You know. Laying driveways.’

I nodded. ‘Good luck with it all.’

‘Thanks, man.’

We touched gloves.

I was back banging the heavy bag when the news on the TV cut to The Garden. Nils and Charlotte Gatling were looking at the flowers that were piled up at the security gates. He had his hands behind his back with all the self-consciousness of visiting royalty. She stood nervously twisted her right hand over her left wrist, as if the gesture gave her comfort, as if she was holding hands with herself. Together brother and sister read the messages, exchanged a few words, watched from a respectful distance by what felt like the entire nation. I waited to see if there was anything about Michael McCarthy of Brixton.

But they cut to the sport’s desk, as if the other boy had already been forgotten.

After training at Fred’s I went home and got clean and caffeinated. Then I drove up to Hampstead Heath, Stan over-excited in the passenger seat, panting with anticipation, knowing exactly where we were going.

The ground was rock hard and glittering with ice, and under the blood-red sky we ran past ponds where fishermen slept in their tents and we walked down lanes where foxes watched us with mild contempt and we crashed through thickets of bare winter trees into unexpected meadows that we would never find again.

We were on Kite Hill, looking down at all of London, when my phone rang with a number that I didn’t know.

‘It’s Oliver,’ said the new man. ‘We’re at the hospital.’

The celebrations had already begun.

Oliver had the look of a man who had been up all night but found a happy ending waiting for him in the morning. He was talking excitedly with an older, affluent-looking couple who could not be anything but his dear old mum and dad. The woman was holding two bouquets of flowers. More were arriving.

Scout sat quietly at the centre of it all, drawing on her iPad.

I shook hands all round.

‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘Mother and baby doing well?’

‘Just a bit early,’ Oliver said, and for the first time something passed between us. I understood exactly how he felt. The mixture of relief, pride and unalloyed joy. It stuck in my heart. Because I remembered it well.

I held out my hand for Scout.

Oliver’s parents exchanged anxious looks. Everyone was very friendly but there was no denying that Scout and I were part of the abandoned past. And at that moment I think I understood my ex-wife a little better. It is all so much easier if you can pretend that you never loved before.

‘Anne,’ said Oliver’s mother.

‘Sleeping,’ Oliver said.

‘Exhausted,’ said his father.

‘Of course,’ I said, and we were free to make our escape.

Oliver looked at me and smiled with something that I could not quite read. Perhaps he was truly seeing me for the first time, too.

I smiled back. There was no reason to prolong their agony. We just wanted to get out of the way of their happiness.

My daughter’s hand was tiny in mine.

The Sunday traffic was light and we were soon crossing Blackfriars Bridge for home.

‘When she gets out of hospital,’ I said, ‘and when the baby comes home—’

Scout cut me off. ‘It’s OK, Daddy,’ she said, with a maturity that I had never seen before. She looked out at the river, the streets of Farringdon market, old London closed up for its one day of rest.

‘I like it here best,’ Scout said.

At some point near the end of the night Scout awoke and I stumbled to her room.

‘The cool side of the pillow,’ she murmured, her eyes still closed with sleep. ‘Make it the cool side of the pillow.’

I gently eased her into a sitting position as I turned her pillow over. Then she lay back down and within moments she was sleeping again, her head now resting on what she called the cool side of the pillow.

In Room 101 of New Scotland Yard, Sergeant John Caine unlocked the door that led to the Black Museum and the police cadets filed inside.

There were a dozen of them down from the Peel Centre, the Met’s principal training centre that we call simply Hendon. They went inside laughing and happy, like big kids on a field trip, and that lasted until they reached a display case of firearms that had been used to kill a police officer.

John and I followed them from a distance, me with a triple espresso from Bar Italia and him with half-pint of builder’s tea in his BEST DAD IN THE WORLD mug. The cadets’ next stop was the collection of pots that Dennis Nilsen had used to boil the flesh off the heads, hands and feet of his victims. They were no longer laughing. They were no longer talking. They were starting to understand that any day of their career they could leave home in the morning and never come back.

‘How many out there, John?’ I said.

‘How many did Nilsen kill?’ he said. ‘He couldn’t remember, could he? They reckon fifteen or sixteen. More than enough to clog up his neighbours’ drains.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean how many are there make a living at it? Not the nut jobs like Nilsen. Not the cowboys and gangsters, the ones who will do anyone for a few grand. And not the crimes of passion committed on the spur of the moment with a kitchen knife because someone saw a text message they were never meant to see. I mean the real pros who treat it as a job. Killing for a career. How many of them are out there?’

‘The ones who get away with murder?’

I nodded.

‘We don’t know, do we?’ he said. ‘We can never know. By definition, they’re under our radar. But my guess? There are no brilliant pros or genius hit men. They are all dull little toerags, full of rage, looking for an easy buck. All of them. The ones who do it for money, and the ones who do it because some woman hurt their feelings. The answer to your question, son, is – none.’

I thought about it.

The cadets were passing the display of Maisy Dawes, the victim of a Victorian blind, the girl who didn’t do anything but die. They did not even glance at her.

She didn’t do anything. That was the tragedy. All she did was die
.

‘I think it’s more, John,’ I said. ‘A little bit more than none.’

My phone began to vibrate and I went back inside his office to answer it. Edie Wren was calling.

‘We found the murder weapon,’ she said.

It was cold in the catacombs of Highgate’s West Cemetery.

‘At the far end, sir,’ a uniformed officer told me at the perimeter. I ducked under the tape. There were black figures at the far end of the catacombs and I began walking towards them. I could hear low voices, the cackle and crack of our radios.

The catacombs are nearly one hundred yards long with almost a thousand individual recesses, each one just large enough to contain a single coffin. And although the catacombs are above ground, they are cut from a hillside, and the cold of the grave seems to cling to the brick and iron.

A light came on. Beyond a final tapeline, I saw the suited SOCOs. Whitestone was talking to the Crime Scene Manager. Gane was on his knees, peering into one of the recesses that still held a coffin. Wren took notes as she interviewed a couple of terrified boys, shaking her head at their stupidity, her red hair falling over her face.

I ducked under the tape.

‘These two found it,’ Wren said. ‘Climbed over the wall. Poking about where they shouldn’t be.’ She glared at them. ‘And it’s not even Halloween.’

‘We weren’t going to steal anything,’ one said, close to tears.

‘Just having a look,’ said the other, dry-eyed. ‘We did good, didn’t we? Found important evidence, like.’

I knelt by Gane’s side. He shone his torch into the coffin. A skull grinned back at us.

‘Apparently the Victorians liked the head at this end,’ he said. ‘So they could have a nice natter with the dead.’

I couldn’t see a thing. ‘Where’s the weapon?’

‘Halfway down. In the ribcage. So these two herberts reckon.’ He nodded at the boys. ‘They pulled the body out and shoved it back inside when they saw what was in there. Told one of their mums and she called it in.’

‘If we hadn’t been in here—’ the dry-eyed boy began.

‘Just shut your cakehole,’ Wren told him.

Gane and I stepped back to let the CSI photographer do her work. When she had finished, DCI Whitestone gave me the nod.

‘Who’s got the longest arms?’ she said.

‘Me,’ Wren said.

‘Fish it out, Max,’ Whitestone told me.

I snapped on blue latex gloves and reached my hand inside the coffin. My fingertips felt the smooth edge of a skull. They ran down the knobbly bumps of the neck and the start of the spine. I leaned forward, shutting my mouth tight, trying not to inhale the dust of the ancient grave. I felt the curve of ribs that were powdery with time. Some of the ribs were sharp and broken. And that was recent.

I reached inside the dead man’s ribcage and felt the cold of modern steel. My fingers felt the short barrel, the thick body and the three letters of the manufacturer’s name.

My fist closed around the handgrip.

Very slowly, I began to pull out a cattle gun.

‘How’d they get it in there?’ Wren said.

‘Broke the ribcage,’ I said, feeling the sharp edge of the dead man’s ribcage cut through the glove and fleshy part of my thumb. The warm blood oozed down my wrist.

My knuckles brushed the side of the coffin. The wood was rotten with age. Something slimy slithered away from my presence.

I pulled the cattle gun from the coffin.

The Crime Scene Manager was waiting with an evidence bag. As I dropped it inside I saw a single blond hair clinging to the muzzle. The CSI photographer began to take more pictures.

‘When I hold it, I can see the attraction,’ I said. ‘Lightweight, Portable. Legal.’

We watched the cattle gun lit up by the photographer’s flash. It was silver and grey, more like a heavy hand drill or a nail gun than a firearm. But there was a brute force about it. It looked effective and deadly.

‘It’s still a strange choice for a murder weapon,’ Wren said. ‘I mean – why would you? It’s a big ask to use that thing to take out an entire family.’

‘Not if you fill them full of Rohypnol,’ I said.

‘Or if you’re trying to set somebody up,’ said Gane.

‘Done,’ said the photographer, and DCI Whitestone took the evidence bag and held it in her hands, feeling the weight of the cattle gun.