Dead Time (8 page)

‘Best Christmas present I ever got,’ I said. ‘Go and have fun with your friend, angel.’

From the window of our loft I watched Mrs Murphy cross Charterhouse Street with Scout and Shavon, heading towards the deserted meat market; you could have taken them for a grandmother spending time with her two granddaughters during the holidays.

And I felt the sharp stab of love that is the constant companion of the single parent.

Scout and I were doing fine. I looked forward to seeing her grow over the coming year. But it ripped at my heart that my ex-wife, busy now with her new family and her new life, would see so little of that precious time, all that time that would never come again. Yet there was something important that I was only just beginning to understand.

It was her loss.

My phone began to vibrate for the third time on New Year’s Day.
WHITESTONE CALLING
, it said.

At first there was only silence at the other end of the line. Then I heard urgent voices, shouts, and the sound of my skipper catching her breath after running, or possibly diving for cover.

‘We have a situation,’ Whitestone said. ‘There’s a father holding his family hostage and threatening to kill them. He has a firearm. I’m texting you the address now.’

‘I’m on my way,’ I said.

Whitestone sighed.

‘It’s the pressure that comes with this time of year, Max. Families locked up together. Far too much food and drink. All the old grievances coming out. All the old wounds opened up.’

‘I always quite liked this time of year,’ I said.

‘Not me,’ said DCI Whitestone. ‘It’s dead time, Max.’

Then there was a single shot that seemed to last for a long time followed by furious screams and then the line went dead.

I looked at the address Whitestone had sent me as I walked to the fridge.

There was a postcard stuck to the door.

It was a picture of a brightly lit space in a city that was completely dark outside, a downtown diner, the kind of place that never closes even when the rest of the city sleeps, and the bright yellow light inside the diner revealed three men and a woman.

There was a couple at the bar, a tough-looking hawk-faced man in a sharp suit, tie and hat, sitting with a beautiful red-haired woman in a red dress who was examining her nails, and they were talking to the man in white who worked behind the counter as he crouched down to fix something, and none of them were paying any attention to the solitary diner who sat by himself at the counter, his back turned towards us, a man who would always be alone in the night.

It was Scout’s Christmas present to me, a fifty pence postcard from the gift shop of Tate Britain –
Nighthawks
by Edward Hopper. The best Christmas present I ever got.

I straightened the postcard where it was displayed on the fridge door.

Then I put on my leather jacket and I went down to the street.

The Crime Museum up in Room 101 of New Scotland Yard is at the heart of the Max Wolfe stories.

Sometimes known by its unofficial handle, the Black Museum, this is where DC Max Wolfe goes for clues, guidance and knowledge. Because it contains nothing less than the secret history of London’s fight against crime for the last 140 years.

From the weapons of the Kray twins, to unpublished revelations about Jack the Ripper; from death masks taken at Newgate prison, to the hangmen’s nooses that executed some of the most notorious murderers of all time; from the personal belongings of the Great Train Robbers, to the stained cooking pot of Dennis Nilsen, the Crime Museum is overflowing with grim artefacts that date all the way back to the late nineteenth century. This is the Mecca of the criminal mind.

In
The Murder Bag
, Max visits the Crime Museum in the company of DCI Mallory as they attempt to discover the weapon that Bob the Butcher is using to cut the throats of rich and powerful men. And in
The Slaughter Man
, the hunt for a multiple murderer begins in a dusty corner of the museum devoted to a killer who, thirty years ago, slaughtered his victims with a gun for stunning cattle.

Max Wolfe is a fictional detective, but the Crime Museum is very real, although it has attained mythic status after keeping its doors firmly closed to the general public since the late nineteenth century. Beyond serving police officers and invited guests – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a visitor – very few have ever gazed upon its secrets.

Until now.

In autumn 2015, the Museum of London’s exhibition
The Crime Museum Uncovered
opens the door to the most secret room in the capital.

In every corner of the exhibition, as in every corner of the Crime Museum, there is a story from the blackest annals of crime, from the burglars who roamed the foggy streets of Victorian London to a terrorist’s melted laptop.

The Metropolitan Police began collecting criminal relics with the sole purpose of instruction, and the Crime Museum was conceived as a learning resource for serving police officers. And for 140 years, it has taught officers everything they needed to know about the minds of murderers, terrorists, gangsters, robbers and serial killers – and how the Metropolitan Police have hunted them down.

And what is so striking to anyone who visits – and what will no doubt strike the visitors to
The Crime Museum Uncovered
exhibition – is that while the museum records the deeds of some of the most notorious villains who ever lived, it is also very much about the men and women who have fought against the criminal world for 140 years.

What I remember most about my visit is that I came away with no doubt in my mind that real evil exists in the world. In the presence of countless weapons that have taken lives, the death masks of murderers, and the fading newspaper clippings of robbery, kidnapping, murder and mayhem, you can almost feel evil breathing down the back of your neck. But equally you do not doubt for a second that evil has been fought every step of the way.

After 140 years,
The Crime Museum Uncovered
at the Museum of London finally spills the long-held secrets of Room 101, New Scotland Yard. Nothing will tell you so much about human nature at its very worst – and very best.

The Crime Museum is one of the key locations in the world of Max Wolfe, as central to his life as 27 Savile Row, West End Central, where he works for Homicide and Serious Crime Command. And amongst all the relics of violent death and in the midst of all the chronicles of evil, he finds it a strangely inspirational place.

When you step inside
The Crime Museum Uncovered
, so will you.

The Crime Museum Uncovered runs from 9th October 2015 to 10th April 2016. See
www.museumoflondon.org.uk/crimemuseum
for details.

Tony Parsons

New Year’s Day was big and blue and freezing cold. The single shot from the block of flats ripped the day apart.

I threw myself down behind the nearest car, hitting the ground hard, my palms studding with gravel, my face slick with sweat that had nothing to do with the weather.

Every gunshot is fired in anger. This one was full of murder. It cracked open the cloudless sky and left no space inside me for anything but raw terror. For long moments I lay very still, trying to get my breath back. Then I got up off my knees, pressing my back hard against the bright blue and yellow of an Armed Response Vehicle. My heart was hammering but my breathing was coming back.

I looked around.

SCO19 were already on their feet, staring up at the flats in their PASGT combat helmets, black leather gloves hefting Heckler & Koch assault rifles. Among them there were uniformed officers and plain-clothes detectives like me. All of us keeping our bodies tucked behind the ARVs and the green-and-yellow Rapid Response Vehicles. Glock 9mm pistols were slipped from thigh holsters.

Close by, I heard a woman curse. She was small, blonde, somewhere in her late thirties. Young but not a kid. DCI Pat Whitestone. My boss. She was wearing a sweater with a reindeer on it. A Christmas present. Nobody chooses to own a reindeer jumper. Her son, I thought. The kid’s idea of a joke. She pushed her spectacles further up her nose.

‘Officer down!’ she shouted. ‘Gut wound!’

I looked out from behind the car and I saw the uniformed officer lying on her back in the middle of the street calling for help. Clutching her belly. Crying out to the perfect blue sky.

‘Please God … please Jesus …’

How long since the shot? Thirty seconds? That’s a long time with a bullet in your gut. That’s a lifetime.

There is a reason why most gut-shot wounds are fatal but most gut stab wounds are not. A blade inflicts its damage to one confined area, but a bullet rattles around, destroying everything that gets in its way. If a knife misses an artery and the bowel, and they can get you to an anaesthesiologist and a surgeon fast enough, and if you can avoid infection – even though most villains are not considerate enough to sterilise their knives before they stab you – then you have a good chance of surviving.

But a bullet to the gut is catastrophic for the body. Bullets clatter around in that microsecond annihilating multiple organs. The small intestine, the lower intestine, the liver, the spleen and worst of all, the aorta, the main artery, from which all the other arteries flow. Rip the aorta and you bleed out fast.

Take a knife wound to the gut and, unless you are very unlucky, you will go home to your family. Take a bullet in the gut and you will probably never see them again, no matter what the rest of your luck is like.

A knife wound to the gut and you call for help.

A bullet in the gut and you call for God.

I heard another muttered curse and then Whitestone was up and running towards the officer in the road, a small woman in a reindeer jumper, bent almost double, the tip of an index finger pressed against the bridge of her glasses.

I took in a breath and I went after her, my head down, every muscle in my body steeled for the second shot.

We crouched beside the fallen officer, Whitestone applying direct pressure to the wound, her hands on the officer’s stomach, trying to stem the blood.

My mind scrambled to remember the five critical factors for treating a bullet wound. A, B, C, D, E, they tell you in training. Check Airways, Breathing, Circulation, Disability – meaning damage to the spinal cord or neck – and Exposure – meaning look for the exit wound, and check to see if there are other wounds. But we were already beyond all of that. The blood flowed and stained the officer’s jacket a darker blue. I saw the stain grow black.

‘Stay with us, darling,’ Whitestone said, her voice soft and gentle, like a mother to a child, her hands pressing down hard, already covered with blood.

The officer was very young. One of those idealistic young kids who join the Met to make the world a better place.

Her face was drained white by shock.

Shock from the loss of blood, shock from the trauma of the gunshot. I noticed a small engagement ring on the third finger of her left hand.

She died with an audible gasp and a bubble of blood. I saw Whitestone’s eyes shine with tears and her mouth set in a line of pure fury.

We looked up at the balcony.

And the man was there.

The man who had decided at some point on New Year’s Day that he was going to kill his entire family. That’s what the call to 999 had said. That was his plan. That’s what the neighbour heard him screaming through the wall before the neighbour gathered up his own family and ran for his life.

The man on the balcony was holding his rifle. Some kind of black hunting rifle. There was a laser light on it, a sharp green light for sighting that was the same bright fuzzy colour as Luke Skywalker’s light sabre. It looked like a toy. But it wasn’t a toy. I saw the green light trace across the ground – the grass in front of the flats, the tarmac of the road – and stop when it reached us.

We were not moving. Everything had stopped. The light settled on me, and then on Whitestone. As if it could not decide between us.

‘She’s gone, Pat,’ I said.