The Slaughter Man (3 page)

There was the blurred electronic chatter of the digital radios, and in the distance the sound of more Instant Response Vehicles rushing to the scene, their sirens splitting the air and their spinners turning the night blue. They would all have to wait for DCI Pat Whitestone to take that crucial first look.

Just before we reached the open front door where two uniformed officers were waiting, Wren stopped.

‘Look,’ she said.

A wooden pole had been shoved deep into some bushes. It was maybe ten feet long, made out of bamboo with an S-shaped piece of silver metal at one end. A butcher’s hook. It resembled a primitive fishing rod. And that’s what we called this popular form of breaking and entering.

‘Fishing,’ Wren said. ‘Must be how he gained access.’ She turned to call to one of the SOCOs. ‘Can we get this grabbed and bagged, please?’

The bamboo pole must have been slipped through the letterbox and the butcher’s hook had helped itself to a set of front-door keys that had been casually tossed by the door.

‘Everybody thinks they’re safe,’ I said, shaking my head.

Inside, the smell of petrol was overwhelming.

White spotlights lit a long white hallway leading to a massive, two-storey atrium, a great open space with a wall of glass at the back. Someone had tried to set it on fire. Two senior fire officers were inspecting a blackened patch that totally covered one high wall and half the floor of a kitchen and dining area. There was a dinner table with places for twelve people. Beyond the glass wall there was only blackness.

DCI Whitestone was standing above a half-naked body. The corpse was a teenage boy with a single entry wound in the centre of his forehead. His legs splayed at awkward angles and his eyes were still open.

‘Max,’ Whitestone said quietly, taking off her glasses and rubbing her eyes. It had been a hard day and I saw the strain of it in her face. But she sounded calm, professional, ready to go to work. ‘What do you think did that?’ she asked me. ‘Nine millimetre?’

The boy looked as though he had been shot at point-blank range.

‘Looks like it,’ I said. The floor was polished hard wood and I was expecting to see a telltale gold cylinder of a cartridge casing.

‘I don’t see any casings,’ I said.

‘There are no casings,’ Whitestone said, and she was silent as we thought about that.

Taking the time to collect the casings was impressive.

‘What happened to his legs?’ Gane said. ‘Looks like somebody hit him with a sledgehammer.’

‘Or a car,’ said Edie Wren, peering closer at the boy. ‘I think he could have been outside. Looks like gravel on his arms and hands.’

There was a dog basket in one corner. It was for a big dog and on the back of it was stitched, MY NAME IS BUDDY.

‘What happened to the dog?’ I said.

Gane erupted.

‘The dog?’ he said. ‘You’re worried about the dog? Up to our knees in a Charles Manson bloodbath and you’re worried about
the dog
?’

I couldn’t explain it to Gane. The dog was part of this family too.

‘Anybody check on the goldfish?’ Gane said. ‘How’s the hamster doing? Get Hammy’s pulse, will you, Wolfe? And somebody check the budgie.’

‘All right,’ Whitestone said, silencing him. ‘Let’s go upstairs and see the rest of it.’

The giant glass wall suddenly burst into light.

The SOCOs had turned on their arc lights out the back.

Outside was a stone garden, swirls of pebbles around rocks, like a lake made of gravel. A Japanese garden. There was a temple bell in the centre of it all, a green bell stained with the weather of centuries, and it tolled as it moved with the breeze.

I did not move for a moment, stilled by the presence of all that unexpected beauty. There was a dog, a Golden Retriever, in one corner of the garden. He looked as though he was sleeping. But I knew he wasn’t sleeping.

When I turned away Whitestone, Gane and Wren had already gone upstairs.

As I followed them I saw that there were photographs all over the wall of the staircase. Tasteful black-and-white photos mounted inside slim black frames. They were photographs of the family that had lived in this beautiful house.

And I saw that they had been the perfect family.

I felt I could tell their story from the photographs. The mother and father looked as though they had married young and been fit and happy and in love for all their lives.

The man was big, athletic with a look of mild amusement. A youthful mid-forties. The woman, perhaps ten years younger, was stunning, and vaguely familiar. She looked like Grace Kelly – she had exactly the kind of beauty that looks like a freak of nature.

If they had problems, then they were beyond my imagination. They had health, money and each other. And they had two children, a boy and a girl, and I watched them grow as I ascended the staircase.

They were good-looking, sporty kids. There was a shot of the girl on a hockey field aged maybe twelve, her gumshield showing orange in her serious face. And the boy, her brother, joyously holding up a cup with his football team. It was hard to equate that smiling child with the corpse downstairs.

Near the top of the stairs the boy and the girl were in their middle teens, almost a young man and a young woman, and I saw that the boy was slightly older than the girl but not by much more than a year. There was a photograph of the family together under a Christmas tree. Another photograph at a restaurant on a beach. In the later pictures there was a Golden Retriever who looked like he was laughing at his good fortune to find himself with this perfect family. The dog who now lay in the Japanese garden. And in the final photograph the woman who looked like Grace Kelly was holding a child.

A boy. About four. I guessed that his arrival had been unexpected. Their lives were full. The photograph wall was full. You could imagine that they did not think they would have any more children. Then the boy had come along and put a seal on all their happiness. Yes, he looked about four.

A year younger than Scout, I thought.

The Crime Scene Photographer came down the stairs.

I touched his arm.

‘You absolutely sure there’s nobody left alive?’ I said.

‘The Divisional Surgeon hasn’t arrived yet so death hasn’t been officially pronounced. But I’ve been up there. And all we’ve got in here is bodies, sir. Sorry.’

Something rose inside me and I choked it back down.

An entire family
.

Gane was right. A Charles Manson bloodbath.

There was another body on the landing. The girl, all dressed up for New Year’s Eve, lying on her side. I could not see an entry wound but around her throat there was what looked like a necklace made of blood. I heard voices at the far end of the hall, coming from the master bedroom. I moved towards it, steeling myself for what was inside.

The woman who looked Grace Kelly was in bed, a veil of blonde hair over her face. The pillow she lay on was stained but I could not see an entry wound. Like her daughter, she appeared to have been killed with a single shot to the back of the head.

‘Looks like it was the father they came for,’ Whitestone said.

The man’s naked body was propped up against a dresser. He had been shot twice, once in each eye, at point-blank range and he stared at us with empty sockets. I inhaled deeply, forcing myself to look at the holes of ruined pulp. A halo of blood and brains were splashed over the white dressing table.

‘Looks like it,’ Gane said. ‘They came for the father then decided to take out the family. The woman. The girl. The boy. They’ve been executed. But the father – that was personal.’

The four of us stood there like mourners.

‘What about the little boy?’ I said.

The silence grew like something that could kill you.

‘What little boy?’ Whitestone said.

The Specialist Search Team were there in fifteen minutes.

They are part of SO20, the Counter Terrorism Protective Security Command. They collect evidence after a terrorist attack and they clear an area before a state visit or major ceremonial event. They also work with Homicide.

While we were waiting for them to arrive we searched in every corner of that house for a small broken body. Then the SST methodically tore it apart.

They pulled up carpets, ripped up floorboards, and punched holes in walls. They looked in the attic and in the recycling bins and in the drains. They looked in the oven and in the microwave and in the washing machine. And when they had done all of that and found nothing, they went out to the Japanese garden and searched under the neat grey stones. Then they went over the wall and into Highgate Cemetery.

The sun did not rise until just before eight a.m. And when it did, the men and women of the Specialist Search Team were still on their hands and knees, crawling inch by inch across the green hills of Highgate Cemetery. Hours before then DCI Whitestone had sent out the alert that a child was missing.

But as the sun came up our people still crawled across the graveyard, their fingers reaching in ancient tangles of ivy, their torches shining inside dusty crypts, watched from the wild by the angels with empty faces.

The missing boy smiled shyly down at us from the wall of Major Incident Room Two.

Missing children always smile in their pictures. That is what rips up your heart, those childish smiles of joy captured on some beach holiday or birthday party, with nobody ever dreaming what is waiting down the line.

‘You all know how it works,’ DCI Whitestone said. ‘We find him quickly …’

She left the rest of it unsaid because we knew it by heart.

Or we never find him at all
.

This cruel fact had been hammered into us since our training days. All the statistics said that a child is found quickly or it’s likely that they will never be found alive. If we didn’t find the boy within twenty-four hours – seven days at the outside – then if we ever found him at all it would probably be stuffed into an abandoned suitcase or tossed on a skip or at the bottom of a river or buried in a shallow grave. When a child has been missing for over a week, happy endings are hard to find.

We had come straight into 27 Savile Row from spending the night at the house on the hill.

And the smiling little boy had a name now.

Bradley Wood.

Bradley was four years old and he had a wonky, lopsided smile. At some point in the night, the Divisional Surgeon had officially pronounced that his mother and his father and his sister and his brother were all dead. And as I looked at Bradley Wood’s smiling face I wondered what kind of life we would be bringing him back to with his family gone.

I bolted another triple espresso and pushed the thought aside.

Find him first.

He held a favourite toy in his small fist. An eight-inch plastic figure of a little man with a white shirt, black waistcoat and high boots. I looked closer and recognised Han Solo, the cocky captain of the
Millennium Falcon
.

‘Where are we with the victims?’ DCI Whitestone said, taking off her glasses and giving them a brief polish with a crumpled Café Nero paper napkin. She looked exhausted. We were all exhausted. Our Murder Investigation Team had had spent the night at the crime scene and then come straight into 27 Savile Row – West End Central – at dawn, working through the morning on identifying the dead. Now it was early afternoon and the pale winter sun was already sinking over the rooftops of Mayfair.

‘This is the Wood family,’ I said, hitting a key on my laptop. ‘The victims.’

There was a huge HD TV screen on the wall of MIR-2 and it was suddenly filled with one of the family photographs that I had first seen on the staircase of the Wood family home.

They smiled at us. The good-looking woman and man. Their two teenage children. Wealthy, athletic, beautiful. In the photograph they were all huddled up and laughing at some ski resort with baby Bradley at their centre.

‘The father, Brad, was a sports agent. The mother, Mary, she was a housewife. The boy is Marlon, fifteen, and the girl is Piper, fourteen. They were both at private schools in Hampstead. And then there’s Bradley.’

Whitestone shook her head. ‘Why do I feel like I know them?’ she said.

‘You recognise the mother,’ I said. ‘Mary Wood was once Mary Gatling and she was briefly very famous.’

Whitestone blinked with surprise behind her glasses. ‘The Mary Gatling of the 1994 Winter Olympics?’

I nodded. ‘At Lillehammer in Norway. The Ice Virgin, they called her.’

‘Mary Wood was the Ice Virgin?’ Whitestone said. ‘The girl who said she wasn’t going to have sex until she got married?’

‘That’s her. She was part of the UK’s team. A downhill skier. She didn’t get a medal but she got a lot of headlines. Announced that she was going to save herself until she got married. It was big news for about five minutes.’

‘She met her husband at the games in Lillehammer, right?’

‘Yes – Brad Wood. American. From a blue-collar family in Chicago. He was in Lillehammer for the biathlon. Cross-country skiing and shooting. Nearly won a medal. Met Mary in the Olympic Village.’

‘That’s the Ice Virgin,’ Whitestone said, shaking her head with wonder. ‘Mary Gatling. She didn’t lose her looks, did she?’

‘Gatling?’ DC Edie Wren said. ‘Like Gatling Homes? The property developers?’

‘Exactly like Gatling Homes,’ I said. ‘Mary was the eldest of Victor Gatling’s daughters. ‘She came from serious money. The old man started out as a runner for slum landlords in the Sixties. Then he bought a one-bedroom flat in Tottenham – did it up – sold it. And took it from there. The company has been upmarket for the last twenty years. Victor Gatling has to be seventy now at least. A lot of the new developments in prime London real estate are Gatling Homes: Kensington, Chelsea, Mayfair, Hampstead, Knightsbridge. They say Victor Gatling made two fortunes. Building homes for poor immigrants in the last century and building homes for rich immigrants in this century. They call him the man who built London. His son Nils has been running the show since the old man semi-retired.’

‘And what’s Mary’s husband Brad been doing for the last twenty years or so?’ Whitestone said.