Authors: Tony Parsons
Dead Time
Contents
One am, Boxing Day. Snow falls, the city sleeps.
Not DC Max Wolfe. He is looking out of his loft apartment at the deserted streets below.
A van has just drawn up. Two men get out. Dressed in black and wearing ski-masks, they are dragging something.
It’s a man. Half-naked. Half-dead. But still alive.
Not for much longer.
Soon Max Wolfe is hunting a gang of killers who decapitate their victims And this time it’s personal …
Tony Parsons
left school at sixteen and was working on the night shift at Gordon’s Gin Distillery in Islington when he was offered his first job in journalism on the
New Musical Express
.
Since then he has become an award-winning journalist and bestselling novelist whose books have been translated into more than forty languages, most recently Vietnamese. His semi-autobiographical novel
Man and Boy
won the Book of the Year prize.
The Murder Bag
Babe of the Blessed Trinity,
Shall smile their steeds to see:
Herod and Pilate riding by,
And Judas, one of three.
Walter de la Mare, ‘A Ballad of Christmas’
There was something wrong with the night.
I slid from my bed, suddenly awake, and stood shivering in the darkness, trying to understand what had changed. But there was only the silence. I went into my daughter’s bedroom.
Scout, my five-year-old, had kicked the duvet to the floor and our dog, a red spaniel called Stan, was curled up against the back of her legs. I pulled the duvet over the pair of them. Stan opened his huge round eyes and checked me out. Scout didn’t stir. I quietly closed the door behind me.
Then I walked to the window and I saw what was different about the night. Snow had started to fall.
The sleeping city was already covered in a thick white blanket. Ahead of me, high above our loft, a billion snowflakes swirled around the great white dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, sparkling in the moonlight. It was beautiful.
I glanced at the clock and smiled. One a.m. on 26 December. London had missed a White Christmas by about sixty minutes.
I turned away from the window and stopped dead, suddenly understanding that it was not the snow that had forced me from sleep.
Directly below me was the great London meat market of Smithfield and it should have been deserted. But there was a black Transit van parked directly in front of the main entrance, its engine running, clouds of diesel fumes billowing behind it.
I watched the van, hoping that it would drive away. But it didn’t. The back doors opened and a man climbed out.
He was bundled up against the cold, his face covered by some kind of ski mask. And then somebody else got out. His face was also covered by a black ski mask, and I could not tell if it was to protect him from the cold or to protect his identity.
The dark figures began dragging something from the van. It took both of them to move the thing. It slowly emerged from the back of the vehicle.
White meat, streaked with red, the ribs clearly visible.
A side of beef.
They placed it on the snow-covered pavement outside the meat market.
No, not a side of beef.
A man. Naked. Half-dead. But still alive.
I could see his mouth opening and closing as they picked him up and carried him down Poultry Avenue, one of the three small roads that cross the meat market.
I quickly pulled on my jeans, my boots and my leather jacket and was halfway down the stairs before I stopped and went back up to triple lock our front door.
Then I went down to the street.
The snow was falling harder.
I took out my phone and called CCC – Central Communications Command, also known as Metcall, the largest Operation Command Unit at London’s Metropolitan Police Service – my eyes never leaving the black van on the other side of Charterhouse Street. The engine was still running but there was nobody at the wheel.
‘Immediate response detail required,’ I told the First Contact Operator at CCC. ‘Suspected murder in progress. Multiple assailants. Smithfield Market, Charterhouse Street, EC1. Over.’
A beat.
And then the voice of the First Contact Operator, alert and calm.
‘
I grade,
’ she said, meaning the highest level of emergency. ‘
Response detail en route. Despatch Op gives me an ETA of six minutes.
’
That was fast. The target response of I grade emergencies is fifteen minutes.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Merry Christmas.’
I zipped up my leather jacket as I crossed the street, the fresh snow crunching beneath my boots, suddenly aware that Christmas was over.
My phone was still in my hand and I took a photo of the front registration plates, checking out the cab – empty – and then the rear registration plates as I checked out the back – also empty, although there was a thick streak of blood on the floor of the van, shining black in the half-light.
I looked up at our loft, thinking that if I saw Scout now then I would go back inside and wait for help to arrive. But my daughter did not appear at the window. So I waited, the flurries of snow falling on my face, thinking that if I heard the sirens coming now then I would wait for help to arrive. But all I heard was the silence.
I ran my hand over my face and walked inside the meat market. Everywhere seemed to be locked up for the holidays but I could hear voices inside – low, business-like, working out how to get this thing done. And then I heard the man – whimpering, pleading, moaning – the sound of terror. A man begging for his life.
There were sudden footsteps behind me.
I whirled around and saw a uniformed police officer.
He was walking towards me, his flat cap pulled low over his eyes and his Met winter fleece dusted with snow. I held up my hand and he stopped. I pointed inside. We could both hear the voices, very clear, more excited now. They were talking in a language I did not recognise while the man begged for his life in English.
I gestured for the young copper to follow me. He nodded and I saw him reach for the baton on his duty belt. At least, it should have been some kind of baton – rigid, side-handled, extendable, telescopic. Whatever kind of baton they were carrying this year. But definitely a baton.
Instead he produced an old-fashioned wooden truncheon. Strange, I thought, turning to work out how the men had got inside the meat market.
And that is when he hit me.
The blow exploded on the side of my neck, somewhere between my left ear and my shoulder blade; I went down on my hands and knees, the breath knocked out of me, too shocked to register any pain.
‘Not me, you thick bastard,’ I said. ‘Them.’
He was banging on the door of the meat market. The door opened and they let him inside. I heard that unknown language again, voices raised, and then a scream. I was still on my hands and knees when the three of them came back out. They stood around me, and then two of them moved off, leaving only the legs of the young copper, or whatever he was, in front of me.
Van doors opened and closed. The engine gunned. But the legs were still there. He was wondering what to do with me. While he was thinking about it, I saw a broken beer bottle glinting in the gutter.
I picked it up by the neck and rammed the broken end into the copper’s legs, although by now I had stopped thinking of him as a colleague.
He screamed.
‘Bah kwai!’
he shouted.
He started to beat me with his truncheon. I think he meant to kill me but his friends called to him in their language and he left me there on my knees.
I heard the sirens as the van pulled away.
I got up. My head hurt but there was no blood. Nobody had ever taught him how to use that truncheon.
I stumbled inside the meat market. There were dozens of individual stalls, all locked up for the holidays. Apart from one. I went inside and for a long moment I could not understand what I was looking at on the floor. It was a head. Just a head.
The mouth half-open and the eyes half-closed. No longer quite human. The body was on the other side of a large piece of machinery.
The machine was made of stainless steel and it was the size of a small car. It had a large, heavy-duty, 500-litre steel bowl that fed into a barrel that led to a giant ejector chute. There were controls for different speeds, gears and cycles, and various options for cutting, deboning and the removal of gristle.
The sirens were directly outside now. Blue lights shone on the stainless steel of this monstrous machine.
The sight of it choked my throat and suddenly I was overwhelmed by the smell of a thousand years of town-killed meat.
Because they had not brought the man here merely to kill him, but also to mince him.
‘Do you have to help them, Daddy?’ Scout said.
We were having a late breakfast in Smiths of Smithfield, sitting in one of the window seats, Scout focusing on her drawing while I let my porridge get cold as I watched the action across the street.
Smithfield meat market was the scene of a murder investigation.
The mortuary van had come and gone before first light but now the gang was all here. Where there were usually giant freezer trucks and white vans there were a dozen Rapid Response Vehicles, a couple of Specialist Search Team vans and the unmarked cars of detectives from Homicide and Serious Crime Command.
White-suited SOCOs wearing blue latex gloves moved in and out of the tent that had been erected in front of the main entrance. Uniformed officers stamped their feet to keep warm as they patrolled the taped
DO NOT CROSS
perimeter that ran right down the middle of Charterhouse Street, up Grand Avenue, round Smithfield Long Lane at the back and looped down East Poultry. It had stopped snowing before dawn and Boxing Day was bright and cold, the memory of that unbroken white blanket in the early hours already fading like a dream.
And at the heart of it all were four detectives – a Murder Investigation Team out of New Scotland Yard. One of them, a young DI, had interviewed me before I rushed up the stairs to our loft to find that Scout and Stan had slept through it all.
I could feel my blood boiling that this had happened outside our home.
‘Daddy?’
‘Sorry, angel,’ I said. ‘I think they might need my help.’
I admired Scout’s drawing of a German Shepherd. On either side of the taped perimeter there were handler teams from the DSU – Dog Support Unit – and my daughter had drawn one of their beautiful dogs.
The nice Australian waitress brought me another triple espresso. There was a brand new red bicycle propped up against the window and the waitress nodded at it.
‘Is that what Father Christmas brought you?’ she asked Scout.
A brief shake of the head. ‘No, my daddy bought it online.’
‘And do you like riding it?’
‘I like looking at it.’
Scout and I smiled at each other. To both of us her new bike – Red Arrow – seemed like a giant leap forward from the little blue kids’ bike she had wobbled about on for the last few years.
‘And what did you buy your daddy?’ the waitress asked.
‘I bought him
Nighthawks
by Edward Hopper,’ Scout said. ‘That’s his favourite painting.’
‘Wow,’ said the nice Australian waitress, dead impressed.
A large man with a mop of white-blond hair emerged from the SOCO tent wearing plastic baggies on his shoes, latex gloves on his hands, and a white face mask. He pulled the mask up on his forehead and conferred with the DI who had interviewed me. Then he started across Charterhouse Street towards Smiths. When one of the uniformed officers lifted the tape for him to pass under, I knew he had to be the Senior Investigating Officer. This was his investigation. He came into the cafe and made straight for our table. Stan stirred at Scout’s feet.
‘Hello, young lady,’ the detective said to Scout. ‘Is this your dog?’
‘Mmmm.’
‘Doesn’t he have lovely big eyes?’
‘Bulbous eyes are a typical feature of the breed,’ Scout told him, standing up. ‘Toilet,’ she told me.
‘Are you all right with that lock?’ I said.
‘It’s an easy lock,’ she reassured me, and headed upstairs.
‘DC Wolfe?’ the detective said. ‘DCI Flashman of New Scotland Yard.’
‘Sir,’ I said, standing up to shake his hand and then having to wait until he took off the blue latex gloves he was still wearing. He took his time. He was young for an SIO, early thirties, with the lazy cockiness that came with men who are both very large and very fit.
