The Slaughter Man (21 page)

Sergeant Ross Sallis of Tottenham Police Station had fourteen stone of muscle on him and fifteen years of experience. He was one of those big, hard old onions – onion bhajee, sargie, sergeant – that are the unbreakable backbone of the Metropolitan Police Force.

‘You really think we’re going to have the Slaughter Man in the neighbourhood?’ he said.

He was driving me down Tottenham High Road in the misty morning sunlight, the bright yellow-and-blue Battenberg livery of his motor – a car pool Ford Fiesta, far too small for a man as big as Sergeant Sallis – making us as conspicuous on that long, bleak street as an ice-cream van in the Sahara.

‘I don’t know,’ I said honestly. ‘But it’s enough of a possibility that I have to see Carolyn Burns. She could be in real danger.’

‘It’s all a long time ago.’

‘True. But under certain circumstances, men get fixated about old girlfriends.’

He chuckled. Sergeant Sallis laughed easily and often, and that was probably not a bad policy for a copper who had spent his entire career working Tottenham.

‘And what circumstances might those be?’ he grinned.

‘When they’re desperate.’

Sergeant Sallis was accompanying me because the family were – as we say – known to him.

‘Her boy more than her,’ he explained. ‘Eddie Burns. We had some dealings when Eddie was in his teens. Ten years ago. More. He was hanging around with the wrong sort. Bit of truancy, bit of weed. No major drama. Boys will be boys and all that. But Eddie stuck out around here.’

‘Why’s that, Sergeant Sallis?’

‘Because he’s white.’

Carolyn Burns and her son lived above a greengrocer’s shop on Tottenham High Road, almost in the shadow of White Hart Lane. Sleek new Mercs and Beemers with blacked-out windows purred into the car park of the football ground.

Carolyn Burns lived in a different sort of Tottenham.

There was a metal grille in front of the staircase that led to the flats, and Carolyn Burns had to come down to unlock it for us. She was an unusually small woman, as though she had suddenly stopped growing on the night that Peter Nawkins came for her father and her brothers.

‘Carolyn, this is DC Wolfe of West End Central,’ said Sergeant Sallis.

I showed her my warrant card. She glanced at it for a fraction of a second, chewing her lower lip thoughtfully.

‘DC Wolfe wanted a quiet word, if that’s all right,’ said Sergeant Sallis. ‘Just a courtesy call.’

Everything about the big sergeant was reassuring.

‘You’d better come up,’ she said, and I tried to see the girl she had been all those years ago, the girl that had smiled under the Christmas tree. But that felt as if it was somebody else.

It was a small flat that stank of cat food and cannabis. I couldn’t see a joint and I couldn’t see a cat. The TV was blaring some football match being played in front of what looked like a totally empty stadium. A foreign match, then. Sergeant Sallis smiled at nothing in particular as he walked across the tiny room and turned it off.

He nodded at me to begin.

‘This is a little bit more than a courtesy call,’ I said. ‘Ma’am, I have to inform you that you’re going to be issued with an Osman warning. We believe that there is a real and present danger to you from a man we are seeking to help with our enquiries. The paperwork is being processed right now. If we – the Metropolitan Police – believe that someone is at risk of being killed or seriously injured then we give them an Osman warning. It’s both a warning and an offer of police protection.’

‘I know what an Osman warning is,’ she said. ‘I had one once before from you people. When I was a girl. When it all happened. It was called something else in them days.’

Them days.

I gave her my card. ‘All my contact details are on there,’ I said. ‘If you have any worries—’

‘Peter would never hurt me,’ she said, cutting me off. ‘He didn’t hurt me then, and he’ll not hurt me now.’

A boy appeared in a doorway. No, not a boy – a man in his late twenties but dressed like a boy. One of those new men that seem stuck in time because they never get a job, and they never leave home, and the years drift by as they stare out at the world from under a baseball cap.

‘Hello, Eddie, lad,’ Sergeant Sallis said, apparently delighted to see him. ‘How are you doing? Did you stick with the college course?’

A brief shake of the head.

Eddie Burns probably wasn’t a bad kid. But he had the social skills of a lettuce.

‘Peter would never hurt
us
,’ Carolyn Burns said. ‘So why don’t you go back to—’ She looked at my card and smirked. ‘—
Savile Row
and stop wasting my time?’

‘Peter Nawkins is a convicted killer, ma’am. He served twenty years. He is being sought in connection with four recent murders.’

She laughed. ‘I don’t care. He wouldn’t hurt me. Never. You don’t know him. You don’t know anything about him. What do you think – that I’m going to be grateful to you for coming to my home uninvited? I want to be left alone by you people. You’ve done nothing for me. And you never will.’

‘Has Nawkins attempted to contact you?’

‘No.’

‘When was the last time you saw him?’

‘At his trial. The day he went down.’

‘Nothing since then? You didn’t visit him in prison? You didn’t see him when he got out? You’ve never been to Oak Hill Farm?’

‘What did I just say?’

I looked at Sergeant Sallis. He smiled sympathetically.

But his eyes said that it was time to go.

When we were down on the street Sergeant Sallis said, ‘It’s difficult to help people when they don’t want your help.’

‘That’s true,’ I said, angry at myself for feeling humiliated.

‘She’s a bitter woman,’ Sergeant Sallis said. ‘Life has not been kind to her. And – when you stop and think about it – she’s never actually done anything wrong.’

I nodded. It was all true.

I glanced up at the flat. Eddie Burns was watching us, a fat moggy in his arms.

Sergeant Sallis and I walked back to his car pool Ford. I thought I heard him sigh, as if dreading folding his huge body back into the driver’s seat of that tiny car. He paused with his hand on the door and looked across the roof at me.

‘You really think Peter Nawkins is going to come to see her?’ Sergeant Sallis said. ‘She hasn’t seen him for half a lifetime.’

‘Maybe not,’ I said. ‘But he might come to see his son.’

Sometimes she wept.

Mostly Mrs Gane sat at her son’s bedside and talked – she talked of the kind nurses, and the bad tea in the hospital canteen and she talked of Curtis’s operation and, after the doctors said there would be no operation because the injuries to his spine were far too severe, her conversation drifted to home, to her church and her cat Molly and the changes she saw every day in the Lewisham neighbourhood where she had spent her adult life.

But sometimes she wept.

She was talking about a dispute with her Romanian neighbours that revolved around Molly’s toilet habits when the tears came without warning and stunned us to awkward silence. Wren and I looked helplessly at each other while Whitestone awkwardly put an arm around the old lady’s shoulder.

‘Don’t cry, Ma,’ Curtis pleaded with a cracked grin.

‘Come on,’ Whitestone said gently. ‘Let’s go and see if that tea has improved, shall we?’

Wren went with them. When we were alone, Curtis Gane looked at me and smiled.

‘You got to get me out of here, Max.’

I nodded, smiling along with him. ‘Once you’re well enough for physio—’

He held up a hand that contained some sort of tube feeding into a vein on his wrist. The tape that held it was coming loose.

‘I mean it – you’ve got to get me out of here.’

He wasn’t smiling now. I had been standing in the corner of the little private room and now I sat on his bed. I still did not understand exactly what he was asking.

‘Anything I can do,’ I said.

‘What do you think is going to happen to me?’ he said. ‘I’m not going back to work, am I? I’m never going to walk again, am I? It’s all dead down there. It’s all gone. I am never going to make love to a woman or bring a child into the world or walk down Savile Row.’

I saw him as I had first seen him. The cocky young DI with the sharp suits and the shaven head, his childhood in Lewisham giving him a strange kind of superiority complex. That shaven head was covered with rough stubble now, and I saw the receding hairline that he had contrived to hide.

And my heart fell away as all at once I understood exactly what he was asking.

I stood up and backed away from him.

The neck brace stopped him moving his head. But his dark eyes followed me.

‘I told you,’ he said. ‘This is not me.’

‘Some people live good lives,’ I said, and the words sounded easy and empty to me, although I knew they were true. ‘They come from wars – they survive terrible accidents – they live without arms and legs …’

He was quite calm now.

‘Heroes,’ he said. ‘All of them. And I salute them. The soldiers that carry on with missing limbs. The men and women who adjust to life in a wheelchair.’ He could not move his body enough to shrug. But I saw it on his face. ‘What can I tell you?
I don’t want my mum taking me to the toilet
. That’s it, really. That’s all you need to know. I’m not strong enough for that. I’m a grown man and I can’t go back to being a baby, Max. I can’t do that to her. And I can’t do that to myself.’

I glanced towards the closed door. I could feel the stab wound in my stomach pulsing.

‘It’s impossible,’ I said quietly.

‘It’s actually very easy,’ he said. ‘I’m not asking for a one-way first-class plane ticket to some Swiss clinic. Just a pillow and a few minutes of your time when nobody’s about. You’re a strong man, Max. You put a pillow over my face hard enough to stop me breathing for a few minutes and it’s soon done. You’ll know when it’s done. You would be doing me a real favour. And you would be doing my mother a great kindness.’ Finally there were tears in his eyes. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘There’s nobody else I can ask.’

The door opened and Mrs Gane came in with Whitestone and Wren. They were laughing now.

‘What are you boys talking about?’ asked Mrs Gane, smiling at both of us.

‘Old times, Ma,’ said her son.

I went to pick up Scout. Her friend Mia lived in a townhouse on John Street, the long road that links Smithfield to the Angel, Islington. I stood on the doorstep, my heart still beating wildly from the hospital, and through their window I could see what I could only think of as a normal home.

The father home from a job where nobody suffered injuries they would carry to the grave. The mother calling out to the children. The parents still together. An elderly Golden Retriever lazily climbing onto the sofa and settling down for a nap. It was all so normal that I felt like weeping with envy and admiration.

I could see paintings on the walls, and books, and I could hear voices. Then there was a tall thin man, mid-thirties, taking off his tie as he turned on the news, and then a woman came up beside him and slipped her arm around his waist. They saw me and smiled and waved.

‘Scout’s dad!’ the woman mouthed.

I nodded and grinned, thinking – perhaps Scout and I are normal, too. Just a different kind of normal.

As they let me inside, Scout came bombing down the staircase with Mia, while a kid sister, maybe a couple of years younger, hung back at the top of the stairs.

‘Do we have to go right away?’ Scout said, breathless, by way of a greeting.

‘The girls made some cookies,’ Lissy said. ‘They’re good with coffee.’

I agreed to coffee and homemade cookies and my daughter happily raced back upstairs with her friend. Lissy and Roger took me through to the kitchen. They knew I was a cop. The dad – Roger – did something with money in the City that I didn’t really understand and Lissy was training to be a psychotherapist.

‘Mia loves your dog,’ Roger said. ‘Stan?’ He smiled at his wife. ‘She’s bugging us to get a Cavalier.’

‘Our old mutt doesn’t do much any more,’ Lissy said, passing me a plate of crumpled brown ruins that were possibly meant to be cookies. I took a seat at their kitchen table.

And then their faces fell.

They were looking at my stomach, their eyes wide with horror, and the growing stain on my T-shirt. They had never seen anything like this in their happy, normal home.

‘You’re bleeding,’ Lissy said.

I got up quickly, calling for Scout with my mouth full of cookie, my stab wound pulsing like some living thing and my face burning with shame.

In the morning I was sipping a triple espresso from Bar Italia and wading through the overnight sightings of Bradley Wood when Wren came and sat on my desk.

‘I was looking at the statement you took from the farmer’s daughter,’ she said.

‘Maybe we should stop calling her the farmer’s daughter,’ I said. ‘She hasn’t lived on a farm for thirty years.’

‘Carolyn Burns,’ she said. ‘Formerly the farmer’s daughter. She lied to you.’

She placed a thin green file on my desk.

HMP Belmarsh

Adult Male – Category A

‘Her Majesty’s prisons have been required to keep records of visitors to maximum-security prisons since 1984,’ Wren said. ‘The year the IRA almost blew up the British Government in the Brighton bombing. Don’t ask me why they changed the rules after that – just a general tightening of security in the wake of a major terrorist attack.’

‘It’s always the way,’ I said. ‘Some little bearded loser fails to blow up a plane and suddenly we all have to take our shoes off at airport security.’

‘The Slaughter Man was four years into his stretch in 1984,’ Wren said. ‘So we don’t know about the first four years – but for the rest of his time in HMP Belmarsh, he received only two visitors.’

I picked up the file and looked inside it. The letters were faded with time but mocked me loud and clear.

‘Carolyn Burns looked me in the eye and told me she had not seen him since she was sixteen years old,’ I said. ‘According to prison visiting records, she saw him once a month. For years.’ I shook my head. ‘Peter Nawkins killed her father and her three brothers with a cattle gun. And then she’s going to see him once a month?’