The Slaughter Man (17 page)

Because she loved Scout, too.

My mouth twisted into what was meant to be a reassuring smile.

‘You should see the other guy,’ I said, and that got a nervous laugh from Little Mikey and Big Mikey, although Mrs Murphy and Siobhan didn’t smile.

They all watched me as I gasped with a sudden jolt of pain. Mrs Murphy placed a hand on Scout’s shoulder and my daughter looked up at her.

My side hurt about as much as flesh always will hurt when a piece of sharpened steel is stuck into it. It was a heavy, throbbing pain than spread out from the small wound into the rest of my torso, making it feel as if it was made of some material so dense and heavy that I felt I would never be able to walk properly again.

But I knew I had been lucky.

If you have to get stabbed, then the stomach is one of the better places to get stabbed.

Because blood loss and organ failure are what kill stab victims. If your attacker doesn’t slice an artery, and if there is no internal bleeding, and if you don’t bleed out – and if the shock doesn’t kill you with heart attack or stroke – then you just have to sit around eating grapes for a day or so while they monitor your blood pressure and core body temperature, sucking up the pain as you count your blessings. There are worse things that can happen to a copper than getting stabbed in the stomach. I considered myself lucky that Fat Roy didn’t know enough to stick his knife in my heart or my neck or my lungs or my eye – in one of the places where if the haemorrhage doesn’t kill you, then the shock will.

‘How’s Stan?’ I said. It was strange how much of our conversation revolved around that small red dog.

‘He’s in my van!’ Big Mikey said, stunned at this unexpected turn of events.

‘I love Stan,’ little Paul said.

‘He’s a good boy,’ said Mrs Murphy.

‘But he’s started jumping on other dogs all the time,’ Scout said, laughing and frowning with concern at the same time. ‘
I’m Stan! Who are you? I’m Stan! Who are you?
’

We all laughed. That’s exactly what he was like.

‘I think he’s reaching sexual maturity,’ Scout said, and the Murphys all immediately stopped laughing and didn’t know where to look. She leaned in to me again.

‘Listen,’ she whispered.

‘I’m listening,’ I whispered.

‘I want to help you with your work.’

‘Listen. You do help, Scout. By being a good girl for Mrs Murphy and by keeping an eye on Stan and our home. By trying hard at school. And I’ll be out of here tomorrow.’

She shook me with all the ferocity of a five-year-old who demands to be understood.

‘I want to be with you always,’ Scout said.

‘And you always are,’ I told her, tapping my heart. ‘In here.’

She copied me, tapping the badge of her school blazer.

‘Don’t forget our deal,’ she said. ‘OK, Daddy?’

‘Come here, you.’

I held out my hands and Scout came to me and I hugged her as hard as I dared.

My beautiful, smart, deal-making daughter at five years old.

There was almost nothing of her and she was my world.

The real pain came in the night and it felt exactly like the thing that had made the pain. The real pain was like a few inches of good steel cutting through that exact amount of fragile human meat. The real pain was a blade that cut through flesh and veins and muscle and then spread out through the rest of my body and into my head and into my dreams.

The sleeping pills they had dosed me with were not nearly enough to stop me waking with a gasp. Edie Wren was sitting in the little room’s only chair.

‘It’s a mess,’ she said. ‘A bloody shambles.’

I could not tell if she was talking to me or herself. The sleeping pills were a thick fog in my brain.

But I remembered when we were at Oak Hill Farm. I remembered the pictures of Mary Wood, young and beautiful and dead, above the bed in the caravan. I remembered the fists and the boots and the fury of the mob. I remembered Peter Nawkins being arrested, and getting away.

‘Did we get him yet?’

She shook her head.

‘Not yet. But every copper in the country is looking for him. The big lump can’t run for long.’

And as a wave of nausea swept over me and the fog in my head seemed to clear, I remembered the house on The Bishops Avenue, Wren being knocked out with one punch, the hiss of acid burning Whitestone’s clothes and flesh and the way Gane had looked after falling two storeys.

I remembered holding the hand of the dead child.

I swallowed the sickness that made me feel like gagging and I blinked, trying to understand what was happening as Wren, as if in sympathy, retched noisily into the wastepaper basket. Nothing came up.

‘Sorry,’ she said, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me. You get hit in the head hard enough and you feel like someone pressed the pause button on time.’

‘You feel really sick, don’t you?’

‘Do you think that might be a really stupid question?’

‘Seeing little black stars?’

She nodded.

‘You shouldn’t be walking about alone,’ I said. ‘It’s
concussion
, Edie.’

She cursed me in the darkness and I saw that her eyes were wet with tears.

‘You shouldn’t be going home alone,’ I insisted. ‘We can get you a ride …’

‘I’ve got a ride,’ she said, and I now saw the man beyond the doorway, waiting for her.

He was a good-looking man in a suit and tie, like a politician on the campaign trail, but a lot older than I had expected, maybe the far side of forty. With his shock of black hair, neatly trimmed, and the fitness of the college athlete who stayed in shape for the next twenty years, he was undoubtedly a handsome man, and he knew it. He’s no stranger to a jumbo-sized bottle of male moisturiser, I thought. When he looked at his watch, I saw his wedding ring glint in the strip lighting of the hospital corridor and I wondered what lies he had told to his wife back at home tonight.

Edie Wren’s married man.

She was staring at me defiantly.

‘How’s the boss?’ I said.

‘Lucky. If you can call getting battery acid on the back of your neck lucky. DCI Whitestone is tough. She’ll have a scar for life, of course. But the collar of her coat took most of it. She’s going to need a new coat.’

I swallowed hard.

‘And Gane’s dead, isn’t he?’

‘No. Fat Roy was DOA – but not Curtis.’

‘But … I saw him fall.’

‘He’s alive.’

We were silent in the darkness. The hospital made no sound but not far away I could hear the heavy traffic around Archway.

‘Gane broke his spinal cord,’ Wren said. ‘But he’s not dead.’

I could hear her trying to sort out her breathing.

‘It’s a bit worse than that,’ she said.

Daylight.

The prettiest girl I had ever seen was standing by my bed. Not a girl – a woman. But a woman who had all of her life ahead of her. A blonde in a red coat. For the rest of my life I knew I would always look twice whenever I saw a blonde in a red coat.

‘Who was he?’ Charlotte Gatling asked quietly, her right hand nervously twisting over her left wrist, that strange gesture, as if she was holding hands with herself.

The fog was still in my head but I knew who she was talking about. I closed my eyes and I could see him. I knew that I would always see him now.

‘His name was Michael McCarthy,’ I said. ‘He was four years old. He lived with his mum in South London. Brixton.’ I opened my eyes and looked at her. ‘He was a little boy who never stood a chance.’

She sat on the bed.

‘You thought they had my nephew,’ she said. ‘You were looking for Bradley.’

I nodded. I felt like I had failed everyone. Especially Michael McCarthy and Bradley Wood.

‘The man on the news,’ she said. ‘The man they are hunting – Peter Nawkins. Is he the one who killed my sister?’

‘We found evidence that connected him to her.’

‘What evidence?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

A flash of impatience in the blue eyes.

‘Believe me, Detective Wolfe – I want to know.’

‘Peter Nawkins was obsessed with your sister. We discovered pictures of her – I don’t know, hundreds of images, maybe thousands – above his bed. And then he ran. He’s running still. The innocent don’t run.’

‘Will you catch him?’

‘Catching him is an absolute certainty.’

‘Anything – any sign – my nephew …’

Her eyes were pleading with me and I knew she wanted me to tell her something reassuring.

‘We’ll keep searching for Bradley,’ I said. ‘And we will never stop until it’s over.’

She nodded, satisfied. And then something inside her seemed to collapse and she covered her face with her hands. I watched her sobbing with her face hidden.

‘That poor child,’ she said. ‘Poor little Michael. What he must have suffered …’

She wasn’t crying for her nephew. She was crying for a child she had never known and that stirred some feeling inside me that I thought had gone forever.

I touched her arm lightly.

She composed herself.

‘The nurse said you had a knife wound,’ she said. ‘Are you in pain?’

‘The pain’s getting better,’ I said.

‘Have you been stabbed before?’

‘This is a first. And also a last, I hope.’

‘The men you found – the ones that did this to you – they’re nothing to do with what happened to my sister and her family?’

I shook my head.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You were looking for Bradley. You were risking your life to find him. You were putting your life on the line when I know you have a family of your own. And I can tell you – he’s not dead.
Bradley’s not dead
. Do you believe me?’

‘Sure.’

She squeezed my hand.

In her perfect Grace Kelly face I could see the ghost of her sister and I could understand how Peter Nawkins would look up from his labours and fall in love with that face.

Just one look. That is sometimes all it takes.

I could imagine Nawkins looking up outside her home and being poleaxed by all that smiling blue-eyed perfection. I could see it so easily, and understand how that lonely, simple-minded man could look at Mary Wood’s face in the dying light of the summer and believe that she was the best thing he had ever seen in his life. What I could not understand was why he would want to destroy something he loved so much.

I placed my free hand on top of Charlotte’s hand.

I realised I had stopped breathing.

‘Let me hold you for a moment,’ she said, and looked at me for some response, but I could not come up with anything, I was completely out of responses.

So she wrapped her arms around me and held me in an awkward embrace. I could smell her perfume and, beyond that, the beautiful fact of her existence. Her head was close to mine and when I turned to look at her she pulled away.

I watched her smooth her red coat and do up a button that had somehow come undone.

‘My brother’s waiting for me,’ she said.

I saw her again when I went back to work. I looked up from my workstation in MIR-1 and there she was on the big flat-screen TV, her face pale and impassive, and one hundred cameras clicking like crazy every time she raised her head.

It was late afternoon and they were having for a press conference down on the second floor of West End Central. Charlotte Gatling settled herself at a long table next to her brother Nils with Detective Chief Superintendent Swire next to him, the Chief Super’s hand covering the microphone in front of her as a Media Liaison Officer leaned in for a few last words.

‘Thank you for coming, everyone,’ the MLO said. ‘DCS Swire will be making a statement about recent events. We will not be taking any questions. Thank you.’

Charlotte turned to look at the MLO as she stepped away and the battery of cameras clicked in a furious attempt to capture the moment.

‘Grief and beauty,’ Wren said to herself. ‘They love it, don’t they?’

The door of MIR-1 opened and Dr Joe Stephen walked in, and when I saw how the forensic psychologist looked at us – a mixture of shock and pity – I knew our MIT had taken a real beating.

Wren was still muttering to herself, displaying all the classic symptoms of concussion, and the million nerve cells in her brain that were never coming back. I looked all right but the bandages that covered my stab wound were wet with the slow warm ooze of fresh blood, leaving a growing stain on my shirt. And on one side of her neck, Whitestone had a livid pink acid burn.

I suddenly wondered if she had had the same kind of conversation with her son that I had with Scout. Did the boy dream of protecting his mother? Did he want her to quit her job? Was he afraid of what would become of him if his mother were gone? And was she? I wanted to talk to Whitestone about all of these things, but I did not know where to start.

Dr Joe touched the back of the empty chair at DI Gane’s workstation.

‘Did we pick up Nawkins?’ he said.

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Where will he run to, Dr Joe?’

He thought about it.

‘Where is he loved?’

Wren laughed bitterly.

‘Nowhere,’ I said.

‘Then he’ll just run,’ said Dr Joe.

‘They’re starting,’ Whitestone said.

‘First of all, our condolences to the family of Michael McCarthy,’ DCS Swire began. ‘I can confirm that last night’s operation on The Bishops Avenue was not – as we first believed – related to the investigation into the murder of the Wood family and the abduction of Bradley Wood.’ She paused, making eye contact with the room. She was a fine public speaker, moving at exactly her own pace. ‘Arrests have been made. Charges will follow.’ A glance down at her notes. ‘Fifteen children, ranging in age from nine to fifteen, have been taken into the care and custody of social services.’ Another pause. ‘We remain totally committed to finding those responsible for the murders of Brad Wood – Mary Wood – Marlon Wood – Piper Wood – and the abduction of Bradley Wood.’ Her mouth set in hard lines. ‘We are confident that Peter Nawkins can assist us with our enquiries and would ask anyone with knowledge of his current whereabouts to contact the number behind me. Do not approach this man. He is a convicted killer and quite capable of killing again. Thank you.’