The Murder Bag (13 page)

A young woman in muddy combat fatigues got out of the driver’s seat. A Labradoodle got out with her. She placed it back in the van and closed the door.

‘Stan,’ I said, ‘it’s your ride.’

She was a cheerful young Czech called Jana, and Stan welcomed her like an old friend. It was nothing personal. Stan welcomed everyone like an old friend.

Scout was saying goodbye when without further ceremony the dog walker snapped a lead on Stan’s collar and headed for the door.

We returned to the window. A Bichon Frise had somehow squeezed through the van’s half-open window and was sniffing the pavement as the Irish Wolfhound considered it with lofty disdain. Stan and Jana appeared on the street. The dog walker put the runaway Bichon Frise under one arm and Stan under the other and delivered them both to the back of the van. Then they were off. We stood at the window until the tail lights had disappeared.

‘I hope Stan’s all right,’ Scout said.

‘Are you kidding?’ I said. ‘He’ll have the time of his life with the rest of the pack.’

We went down to Smiths of Smithfield for our breakfast. I was just getting the bill when Stan walked past the window, his lead trailing behind him. Scout went outside to collect him as I got Jana on the phone. I could hear furious barking, sounds of terror and fear, human and canine howls of protest.

‘How’s Stan doing?’ I said.

‘Ah,’ Jana said. ‘Ah, yes. Sam is very fine.’

Scout came into SOS with Stan. He was wild-eyed and panting with thirst and exhaustion. A kindly SOS waiter brought him a large silver bowl of water. Scout set him down and he began to lap it up, very loudly.

‘You’re sure Stan’s fine?’ I said.

At the sound of his name, Stan looked up at me, his huge eyes bulging with outrage. Then he went back to his water, Scout’s small hands fussing over him.

‘Ah,’ said Jana. ‘Yes, Sam – lovely little Sam – is very fine. Sam is – ah – enjoying the beautiful park with his friends. There he goes now! Ha ha! Into the trees! Good boy, Sam!’

I looked at Scout and Stan, down on the floor and delighted to see each other, and I knew that from now on we would be walking our own dog.

At the morning briefing in MIR-1, DI Whitestone stood with her back to Mallory’s wall. A blown-up photograph of the seven boy soldiers was visible just behind her. She had a list of names in her hand.

‘Then there were four,’ she said.

She turned to face the wall and carefully drew a red cross over the face of the boy on the extreme left.

‘Adam Jones – deceased.’

She drew another red cross over the face of the boy on the extreme right.

‘Hugo Buck – deceased.’

And finally she drew a red cross over the boy in the dead centre. The one in dark glasses. The one who wasn’t smiling.

‘This is the Honourable James Sutcliffe,’ Whitestone said. ‘Younger son of the Earl of Broughton. Or rather, this
was
the Honourable James Sutcliffe. Two years after this photograph was taken he committed suicide. Walked into the sea off the Amalfi coast where his parents were renting a villa.’

We were all silent.

‘The summer he turned eighteen,’ Whitestone added.

Mallory said, ‘He has a daughter, doesn’t he? The boy’s father, I mean. The Earl of Broughton.’

Whitestone nodded. ‘The Honourable Cressida. She was a bit of a wild young thing in the eighties. Took a pee on the Cenotaph during an anti-capitalism riot.’

‘That’s the one,’ Mallory said.

‘Ran off with some German artist thirty years her senior. Reconciled with her parents now, all forgiven.’

‘When the boy killed himself, did the carabinieri find a suicide note?’ Mallory asked.

‘No, sir,’ Whitestone said. ‘They didn’t even find a body. Just his clothes folded on the beach and a half-finished sketch. He was an artist. Apparently the most brilliant of the bunch.’

‘Why was there an assumption of suicide if no note was found?’

‘James Sutcliffe suffered from clinical depression. He was on quite a cocktail of medication.’ DI Whitestone read from her notes. ‘Prozac. Luvox. Lustral. Cipralex. He had a history of self-harm.’

Gane said, ‘What does a rich kid like that have to be depressed about?’

‘Perhaps we need to ask his friends,’ Mallory said.

There were four of them left alive.

The twins – identical apart from the starburst of facial scarring on one of them.

The tall, dark, whippet-thin, foreign-looking youth.

And the leering fat boy with the stub of his tongue poking out.

The three red crosses did something to the old photograph. Whitestone picked up a sheaf of eight-by-ten photographs. Photographs of the living. She tapped the image of the unscarred twin standing between James Sutcliffe and the dark-skinned boy.

‘Ben King,’ she said. ‘He’s famous.’

She pinned a head-and-shoulders shot to Mallory’s wall. A serious, well-groomed man in a suit and tie smiling for some kind of official photograph. It was recognisably the boy in the picture, twenty years on. His face looked vaguely familiar from late-night news shows glimpsed and turned over.

‘I know him,’ Mallory said. ‘Ben King. He’s a politician, isn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ Whitestone said. ‘His late father was the libel lawyer Quentin King. Ben King is MP for Hillingdon North. Educated at Potter’s Field and Balliol, Oxford. PPE first class. On his party’s fast track.’

Gane said, ‘Which party?’

‘Have a guess.’

Gane guessed the wrong one. I would have got it wrong, too.

‘There’s talk of him as a future Prime Minister,’ Whitestone said.

‘Independently wealthy, privately educated, slick on TV,’ Mallory said. ‘Never employed anyone, never run a business, never done a real job.’ He thought about it for a moment. ‘He’d be perfect. What about his brother? The one with the scars.’

‘Ned King,’ Whitestone replied, pinning a photograph of a soldier to the wall. ‘Serving officer in the British Army. Captain in the Royal Gurkha Rifles. Two tours of Helmand Province. Decorations for valour. He also has a conviction for assault, fifteen years ago.’

The scar tissue on the left side of Ned King’s face looked like the price of the medals on his dress uniform.

Next to him Whitestone put up a photograph of a thin balding man in a tuxedo, his bow tie hanging around his scrawny neck like something that had died. He had lost so much weight since his teenage years that he was almost unrecognisable from the fat boy he had been at school.

‘Guy “Piggy” Philips,’ Whitestone said. ‘Known the King brothers since prep school. Father made a fortune in the property market. Played tennis at a high level – junior Wimbledon semi-finals. Then his knee blew up. Teaches sport at his alma mater – Potter’s Field.’

‘What sports?’ Gane asked.

‘Tennis. Fencing. Cricket. Skiing. Posh sports, Gane, OK? And distance running.’

‘That’s how he dropped the weight,’ Mallory said.

There was one left. Whitestone pinned a portrait of an intense, unsmiling man to Mallory’s wall. He was posing for some kind of company photograph and he considered the camera with eyes that looked black.

‘Salman Khan,’ Whitestone said. ‘From a wealthy Anglo-Indian family. Builders, funnily enough, defying all the racial stereotypes. His father made a pile building estates in the sixties and seventies. Khan has also known the King brothers and Philips since prep school. Works as a human rights lawyer in the London offices of Butterfield, Hunt and West. Considered one of the rising stars of the legal profession. Successfully sued the Ministry of Defence on behalf of disabled servicemen.’

‘You mentioned a conviction of assault for Ned King,’ Mallory said. ‘Anything else on their records?’

‘Adam Jones had multiple convictions for drug offences and vagrancy. Six months after the school picture was taken, he was expelled for selling controlled substances behind the tuck shop. Pills. Dope. And plenty of it.’

‘The upper class are always a greater mix than they are given credit for,’ Mallory noted. ‘What was he doing? Supplementing his personal use with some dealing?’

‘Looks like it, sir. Adam went off the rails early. He was getting into heroin when the others were getting into Oxford, Sandhurst and Goldman Sachs.’

‘DC Wolfe, was Jones expelled from the Royal Academy of Music for dealing?’

‘No, sir,’ I said. ‘Not for dealing. He was smacked out of his brain during an Albinoni concert in Duke Hall. Nodded off during the adagio.’

‘Don’t you hate it when that happens?’ said Gane.

‘Our two victims,’ Mallory said. ‘They were both living dangerously, weren’t they? One had a long-term commitment to opiates. The other was a violent, serial philanderer. Either one of those lifestyles would shorten life expectancy.’

He left the rest unsaid, but it hung in the air: their lifestyle choices did nothing to explain their identically butchered throats.

I looked down at a slim red volume I had before me.
Get Tough! How to Win in Hand-to-Hand Fighting – As Taught to the British Commandos and the U.S. Armed Forces.
The author was Captain W. E. Fairbairn, co-inventor of the commando knife. On its front was a drawing of two grappling soldiers. It looked like some old-fashioned
Boy’s Own
-style comic. But inside was a manifesto for murder. I had placed a yellow Post-it note on the page I wanted, the one where they taught you how to execute the carotid thrust.

Artery #3. Knife in right hand, edges parallel to the ground, seize opponent around the neck from behind with your left arm, pulling his head to the left. Thrust point well in; then cut sideways. See Fig. C.

‘Piggy Philips has three convictions for criminal damage in an eighteen-month period in the late eighties,’ Whitestone continued. ‘As far as I can tell, the boys enjoyed smashing up the odd restaurant. Seems they couldn’t always buy their way out.’

‘Boys will be boys,’ Gane said. ‘Especially when Daddy’s picking up the bill.’ He snorted with contempt. ‘My dog could get five A levels at Potter’s Field. While licking his bollocks.’

‘Piggy Philips seemed happy to always take the rap,’ Whitestone said. ‘According to the local rag, he nearly went down for contempt of court one time. “Disorderly, contemptuous and insolent behaviour towards the magistrate”.’

We stared at the photographs, at the boys they had been, and then at the men they had become.

‘So they were a gang?’ Gane said.

‘It’s more than that, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Most of them had known each other pretty much all their lives. One of them sounds as if he was happy to take the rap for the rest of them. It sounds like they were – I don’t know – almost brothers.’

‘But did that relationship end with their school days or did it endure?’ Mallory said. ‘That’s the next question. And we can start answering it by going to a funeral.’

He stepped closer to the wall.

‘What does it say on their jackets? The Latin just above the crest. I can’t make it out.’

Whitestone closed her notebook. ‘Aut vincere aut mori,’ she said. ‘Their school motto.’

‘Conquer or die,’ Mallory said. ‘Good motto.’

I found my eyes drifting to the boy in the centre. James Sutcliffe. The one without a smile, the one with the hidden eyes. The boy with the marks of self-harm on his arms who folded his clothes neatly and walked into the sea off the Amalfi coast. He was the only one not represented on the wall by a photograph of the man he had become. Dead by his own hand at eighteen. Even more than the pictures of the two murdered men, Sutcliffe’s unsmiling presence made the old school photograph seem heavy with mortality.

These boys are not growing up, I thought. They are rushing to their graves.

The late afternoon light was dying over Highgate Cemetery when the soldier rose from his place on the front row of the crowded chapel, immaculate in the black dress uniform of an officer of the Royal Gurkha Rifles.

Captain Ned King was a big man and he moved slowly to the pulpit, glancing at the large black-and-white photograph of the late Hugo Buck that was placed before his coffin. As Captain King stood in the pulpit, looking at his notes, a bar of the waning light came through the high stained-glass windows and caught him, glinting on the medals he wore on his black jacket and highlighting the white starburst of scar tissue on the left side of his face.

Someone in the packed congregation cleared their throat. Captain King began to speak.

‘Death is nothing at all,’ he said, reading with the clipped, careful delivery of a man accustomed to public speaking. ‘I have only slipped away into the next room. I am I, and you are you.’

My eyes drifted to where he had been sitting. The other three were all there.

Ben King.

Salman Khan.

Guy Philips.

The dead man’s oldest friends, in their places of honour, in the front row with the parents of Hugo Buck and his widow, Natasha, her face hidden by a long black veil. Buck’s parents were in their late sixties but tanned, attractive, looking as though nothing bad had ever happened to them in their lives before now.

Natasha turned her head and stared at me. Behind the veil her face was impassive and showed absolutely no sign of recognition. I had seen her chauffeur when Mallory and I had arrived at the cemetery, sneaking a cigarette out on the street as he waited with the other drivers. Even now he had seemed like her driver rather than her date. I wondered why the hell that even mattered to me.

‘Whatever we were to each other, that we still are,’ Captain King said, his voice rising in the high vaulted chapel. ‘Call me by my old familiar name. Speak to me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference in your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity.’

Mallory leaned his head towards me and his one word was less than a whisper: ‘Look.’

Salman Khan was crying. I could not see his face, but the man’s shoulders were clearly juddering with sobs, and his hands were over his face to hide his grief. I watched as Ben King slowly turned his head, muttered something consoling in Khan’s ear, then turned back to watch his brother. Guy Philips watched the exchange with a kind of cool indifference.