The Slaughter Man (8 page)

Wren shot me a look. That had been her theory from the start. The Woods had been killed because they were a happy family.

‘What about the missing boy, Dr Joe?’ I said. ‘Do you think there’s a chance he’s still alive?’

Dr Joe ran a hand across his face. ‘Four days into your seven-day window? There’s still a chance, isn’t there? But time’s running out fast now. Have you come up with any leads?’

DCI Whitestone turned to the uniformed officer who was at one of the workstations. Carrot-haired and gawky, he looked like an overgrown kid dressed up as a copper. You would never guess that he had a QPM, the police medal for conspicuous valour.

‘How you doing, Billy?’ she said.

PC Billy Greene held up his hands and I saw the blackened burns on his palms that would probably keep him on desk duties for the rest of his career.

‘Bradley Wood was seen in a department store on Oxford Street in the company of a man and woman,’ Billy said. ‘The child was crying. The man was angry. Bradley was also seen at a service station on the M1 in the company of a man who was buying him a sandwich in a coffee shop. Bradley was also seen on the swings in a park just outside Leeds. He was apparently happy. A young woman was with him. And he was seen in the café at Lego Land.’

‘These sightings, are they all since last night?’ DI Curtis Gane said.

‘No – this is just the last hour,’ Billy said. ‘And it’s going to get a lot worse when this
Crimewatch
thing goes out tonight.’

‘Can’t the MLO rein in Nils Gatling?’ Gane said. ‘Can’t the Chief Super have a word?’

‘Apparently not,’ Whitestone said. ‘Mr Gatling treats the MLO like a very junior and extremely stupid member of his personal staff.’ She shook her head. ‘You get families who don’t know how to play the media. And you get the ones who do. And that kind never makes our job any easier.’

There was a set of keys on Whitestone’s workstation. She picked them up and held them out to me.

‘The Financial Forensics Unit dug this up – a property Brad Wood owned that we need to check out,’ she said. ‘It’s your neck of the woods, Max. An apartment in the Barbican.’

‘The family owned a flat in the Barbican?’

‘Not the family. Just the father.’

‘FFU traced it through direct debits on Brad Wood’s bank accounts,’ Wren said.

‘Rental property?’

Wren shook her head. ‘As far as we can make out, it was for his own personal use. The utility bills are next to nothing. Doesn’t look as if anybody was living there.’

I thought about that for a while.

‘The apartment’s been processed by forensics, so you can touch what you like,’ Wren said. ‘See if you feel a tremor in The Force.’

I slipped the keys into my pocket.

Whitestone turned to Dr Joe. ‘What do you make of the sexual assault on the mother? Is that significant? Should we be looking at known sexual offenders?’

Dr Joe’s mouth tightened with something that I could not read.

‘I wouldn’t place great emphasis on the rape of Mary Wood,’ he said. ‘Sex and violence are almost always interchangeable in the mind of a psychopath. The choice of weapon is, I would suggest, more significant. The use of a cattle gun to slaughter a family indicates a wish to make the victims less than human.’

‘Any joy with the neighbours in The Gardens?’ Whitestone asked Wren.

‘Mr Compton says his wife and daughter are too distressed to talk to us right now,’ she said. ‘But he’s not shedding any tears over young Marlon Wood. The phrase “degenerate little scumbag” came up, but he wouldn’t be more specific. Closed the door in my face with some force.’

‘Talk to him again,’ Whitestone said. ‘Get him to be more specific, tell him we can do it at his place or at West End Central. But first we need to talk to Peter Nawkins.’

We all looked in silence at the old man on the screen.

‘I know,’ Whitestone said. ‘Nawkins feels like a waste of our time, doesn’t he? But he’s in a category of one – the only living cattle-gun killer who’s not doing time. So the TIE process demands that we talk to him. It’s not optional.’

TIE means trace, interview and eliminate any individual who could have realistically committed the offence under investigation. It is not the same as being suspected of the crime, but we had to cross the Slaughter Man off our list.

‘Where is he?’ Gane said. ‘We have a release address for when he came out of Belmarsh?’

‘Oak Hill Farm. On the border of the East End and Essex.’

‘Oak Hill Farm? The gypsy camp.’

‘The travelling community camp – and it’s more than a camp,’ Whitestone said. ‘It’s the largest concentration of travellers in Europe. There are some permanent settlements there. Not all of them legal.’

‘You don’t really like him for this, do you?’ Gane said. ‘This sad old man with his plastic shopping bags?’

Whitestone shrugged. ‘He’s been out for nearly ten years,’ she said. ‘I bet he has people showing up from time to time. And they might be of interest to us.’

‘You mean journalists?’ I said.

‘I mean fans,’ she said. ‘I mean obsessive nutcases. I never saw a multiple killer yet who didn’t have a sizeable fan club.’

Dr Joe was on his feet, staring at family photograph of the Woods on the whitewall of MIR-1.

‘She was so beautiful, wasn’t she?’ he said. ‘Mary, I mean.’ He saw us watching him and shook his head, embarrassed. ‘I don’t mean because she was conventionally good looking – although there’s that, of course. But there was a radiance to her beauty. The kind of beauty that you so rarely see, inside and outside. She had both.’

‘I guess a lot of us feel as though we knew Mary,’ Whitestone said.

Dr Joe smiled, and behind his glasses I saw that his eyes were shining with tears.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Although she was more complicated than her public image suggests.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘She was in therapy with me for a number of years,’ he said.

We let that sink in.

Whitestone took a step towards him.

‘Recently?’ she asked.

Dr Joe shook his head. ‘I stopped seeing her ten years ago. When her children were small. The first two children, I mean. Marlon and Piper.’ He was still staring at the family photograph.

‘Is there a problem here, Dr Joe?’ Whitestone said. ‘Do we have to worry about therapist-patient privilege?’

‘There’s absolutely no problem, Pat,’ Dr Joe said. ‘Because I’m not going to tell you what we discussed during therapy. It is simply not relevant. And there’s no problem because, if anything, knowing Mary makes me even more determined that you nail him.’

He could not control the anger in his voice. I had never known this mild-mannered man to sound so angry.

‘Let’s just find rotten bastard that did it,’ he said.

And the first thing next morning Curtis Gane and I drove out to meet the Slaughter Man.

Oak Hill Farm was built on the vague border where the end of London meets the start of Essex, a place of fields and warehouses, ancient farms and new houses, concrete and grass, where every colour is either grey or green.

Just beyond Gallows Corner, I turned the BMW X5 off the A127 and we could see it in the distance.

‘What’s the history of this place?’ Gane said.

‘It was an illegal scrapyard for years,’ I said. ‘There was actually a farm – I think there still is – and the farmer sold two plots of land to a pair of travelling families in the Eighties. They built a couple of homes and the council told them to tear them down. They fought it in the courts and won. More travellers came. And they kept on coming. Now there are around a hundred families on ten acres.’

‘Looks like a small town built upon a rubbish dump,’ Gane said.

‘That’s exactly what it is,’ I said. ‘And for about five hundred people – it’s home.’

There were two walls around Oak Hill Farm, and within the second wall the white caravans were parked nose to tail. There was only one way in, under some giant scaffolding with hand-painted signs that said WE WON’T GO and NO ETHNIC CLEANSING surrounded by children’s paintings of brightly coloured caravans.

I drove slowly inside. Eyes watched us all the way.

Dead washing machines, fridges and TVs were scattered between neat little chalets with net curtains. A grubby-looking white horse grazed on a scrap of grass. A dog defecated beside a brand-new Audi. Oak Hill Farm was a strange mix of suburban gentility and unapologetic squalor.

‘I like what they’ve done with it,’ Gane said.

There were no street names so I stopped and Gane opened his window. A woman and a teenage girl were walking by, perhaps a mother and a daughter, holding hands.

‘We’re looking for Mr Nawkins,’ Gane said.

They stared at Gane’s black face for a while and then gestured vaguely to deeper inside the camp where a lone girl was walking with a pack of dogs. She had long straight dark hair and pink hot pants, despite the weather hovering just above freezing. She was around fifteen years old but anxious to be grown-up. High on one cheekbone she had the faded yellows and purples of a fading black eye. Her dogs were a mixed pack of Staffies and mongrels with a magnificent Akita walking by the girl’s side.

The dog paused to lick his testicles.

‘I wish I could do that,’ Gane said.

‘Maybe you should buy him dinner first,’ I said.

The Akita was the pack leader and he considered me with his pale blue eyes as I got out of the car. I stood there and did not move while he tasted the air.

‘Lots of people,’ the girl said, ‘they hold out the back of their hand so the dog can smell it.’

I laughed. ‘But there’s no need, is there?’ I said. ‘He can smell me all right.’

‘That’s right. You don’t need to hold out your hand. He already knows what you had for breakfast.’

‘He’s magnificent. What’s his name?’

‘Smokey,’ she said, and when she ran her fingers through her hair I saw the tattoo of a dog on her inner wrist. It looked like a German Shepherd, although it might have been an Akita. Maybe the body artist couldn’t do an Akita.

‘Do you know Mr Nawkins?’ I said.

‘My dad,’ she said. ‘I’m Echo Nawkins. I’ll show you where we live.’ Then she looked at us doubtfully, as if she couldn’t decide what we were. Gane was in one of his Savile Row suits.

‘You the lawyers or the council?’ she said.

‘We’re the law,’ Gane said.

She nodded, suddenly cooler.

‘And you’re a traveller,’ I said, trying to restore relations. It didn’t work.

‘Our Lord was a traveller,’ she said, as if I had attempted to insult her.

I got back in the car and we followed Echo Nawkins and her pack of dogs.

‘Do you think people would like them a bit more if they cleared up their trash instead of chucking it out the window?’ Gane said.

‘This is it,’ I said.

She had led us to a caravan and a chalet, both twice the size of anything else in the camp. There was a skip on the drive, overflowing with junk, and the acrid black smoke of burning plastic was rising from it. On the patch of grass in front of the chalet, a man sat reading the
Guardian
and drinking tea at a small table where breakfast was set for one. He was tall, lean, fifty and rimless spectacles gave him a studious air. He poured milk from a bottle that said Oak Hill Farm Dairy into a cereal bowl. Gane and I looked at the burning skip and then at each other. They were clearly not big on recycling in these parts. We got out of the car.

‘I’m Sean Nawkins,’ the man said. ‘Who are you?’

Our warrant cards came out.

‘DI Gane and DC Wolfe,’ Curtis said. ‘I believe we want the other Mr Nawkins. Peter Nawkins.’

‘My brother,’ Sean Nawkins said, shaking his head and looking at us as if he wanted to rip our throats out. ‘You’ll never leave him alone, will you? You’ll never let him get on with his life. He did his time. A lot of time. The best years of his life. What do you want with him? This London murder, is it?’

‘A few routine questions,’ Gane said easily. ‘Where is he?’

But Sean Nawkins was building up a head of steam.

‘Can’t you let him die in peace?’ he said.

We let that settle for a while.

‘What’s wrong with your brother?’ I said.

‘Pancreatic cancer.’

‘Terminal?’

‘He has months rather than years.’

‘Is he having chemotherapy?’

Gane gave me a look. As if we were not actually here to discuss anyone’s medical problems.

‘Peter doesn’t want chemo,’ Sean Nawkins said. ‘He saw what chemo did to both of our parents. He just wants to enjoy whatever time he has left.’ He softened. ‘Please – can’t you let him be? Can’t you just get off his back?’

‘Yeah,’ came a voice from somewhere behind and above us. ‘Get off his back.’

We turned to look at a man on a large white horse. The man was dark and bearded, and the horse looked like the one we had seen grazing on the scrap of grass. But I was no expert. It might have been a completely different horse.

‘Tell the bastards about your wife, Sean,’ the man said.

‘They don’t care about my wife,’ Nawkins said.

‘What happened to your wife, sir?’ I said.

‘Do you really want to know how she died?’ he said.

‘Dad,’ the girl said.

‘Shut up, Echo,’ he said, not looking at her. ‘Townies set fire to our caravan. Ten years ago. Gunnersbury Park. Remember that riot?’

‘There was an illegal traveller settlement in Gunnersbury Park,’ Gane said. ‘Some of the locals took matters into their own hands.’

‘That’s the one,’ Sean Nawkins said. ‘Why did you never catch
them
? Why is it always
us
who get the strong arm of the law?’

I turned at the sound of a large amount of animal moving towards me. The man and horse were edging forward, sideways on, although I couldn’t quite work out how he was doing it. He had no saddle or reins. It was as if he was moving the horse through some act of will.

I turned back to look at Sean Nawkins.

‘This really doesn’t have to be difficult, sir,’ I said. ‘We just need to ask your brother a few questions.’

‘Or stitch him up.’ The bearded man was off his horse and staring at Gane. ‘Look at you,’ he said. ‘Walking on your hind legs and everything. Got many coloured chaps in your line of work?’