The Murder Bag (27 page)

We had him in an interview room in West End Central. Mallory and Gane and me. Mallory didn’t like him.

‘I’m trying to help you,’ Cage said, looking at me.

‘I know,’ I said.

‘You sell knives,’ Mallory said. ‘You sell swords. Daggers.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you ever see what a knife can do to someone?’

‘I sell to collectors.’

‘Ever heard of the Offensive Weapons Act?’

Cage’s mouth tightened. ‘Chapter and verse. This country has the most restrictive knife laws in the world. Not that you’d know it from all the kids in A&E with their stab wounds, their guts hanging out. Look, I don’t sell flick knives, sword canes, butterfly knives, throwing stars or gravity knives, OK? I sell to
collectors
. I’ve got a
licence
. And I want to keep it. That’s why I got a photocopy of his ID, all right? Now, do you want to talk about him or me?’

We were running the ID Cage had brought us through the Police National Computer. It was a UK driver’s licence for what the PNC database would recognise as an IC1 – a male of white-skinned European appearance. There was a face and a name and a DOB. A young man around thirty with thinning hair. An attempt at a smile that never quite made it past the hint of a sneer. And there was an address. Right at the edge of the city.

‘Do you buy this ID?’ Gane said to Mallory. ‘Bob’s up to his neck in security architecture online but he doesn’t have a fake photo ID? You know how many sites there are flogging fake photo IDs?’

‘Not good ones,’ Cage said. ‘It’s easy to get a bad one. Not so easy to get a good one. That’s the real thing. Or better than anything I’ve ever seen.’

‘Did he know his stuff?’ I said.

‘How do you mean?’ Cage said.

‘Did he know what he was buying?’

‘He was very specific. The men who come in Second Front are collectors. They
all
know their stuff. He wanted a Fairbairn-Sykes commando dagger. Prepared to pay top dollar. I sourced it for him. Found a nice Second Pattern F-S made by Wilkinson.’

‘And where did you get it from?’ Mallory said.

‘I’m not telling you,’ Cage said, folding his arms.

Gane made a move towards him as Whitestone appeared in the doorway.

‘We’ve got him,’ she said.

The chief super walked into MIR-1, her face tight with tension beneath the helmet of blonde hair. It could have been Mrs Thatcher getting ready to send the Task Force to the South Atlantic, horribly aware that this thing could go either way.

The crowd parted for her and she did not look at any of us until she came to Edie Wren, sitting on her desk at her workstation, a man’s face on the screen behind her, like something she had just caught.

‘What have we got?’ DCS Swire said.

The face on the screen was the same photograph as the one on the driving licence but now it was life-size; now you could see the wary spite in the eyes, the thin scars from ancient acne, the way he had brushed his hair to cover the growing expanse of forehead.

‘Ian Peck,’ Wren said. ‘Multiple convictions. The first one ten years ago for possession of class C drugs – anabolic steroids – and class B – cannabis. Peck was buying in Amsterdam and mailing the stuff to his home address with the name of the previous occupant on the package.’

‘That old trick,’ somebody said.

Wren dropped into her seat.

‘Twelve months suspended,’ she said, scrolling down. She shook her head. ‘Four – no, five convictions for domestic violence against his girlfriend. She has a restraining order. Peck’s a freelance software consultant. After the split with his girlfriend he moved back home with Mum and Dad.’

Wren turned to look at the chief super.

‘And that’s Bob the Butcher,’ she said.

Swire’s mouth twisted with triumph. ‘Well done, everybody. Start making your preparations. We’ll lift him at dawn.’

‘A man who beats women?’ I said. ‘You really think that our perp is a man who beats up women?’

I was looking at Dr Stephen. He had his hands stuffed deep inside his pockets. I believed that he could see it too.

‘The perp doesn’t attack women,’ I said.

Dr Stephen still wasn’t looking at me.

‘What did you say, Dr Stephen? Honour. Power. Control.’
I gestured at the face that stared at us from the screen.

They were all looking at me.

Swire was very calm.

‘Did you ever hear of a copper called George Oldfield?’ she said.

I nodded. Everybody had heard of Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield. He was the head of the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. Letters and a tape claiming ‘I’m Jack’ had Oldfield searching the north-east while Peter Sutcliffe was killing women in other parts of the country.

‘I’m not going to play the part of George Oldfield here,’ Swire said. ‘I’m not letting our killer slip through my hands.’

She brushed past me as MIR-1 burst into activity.

But I stayed where I was, looking at the face on the screen.

Honour. Power. Control.

A man who hits women, I thought. Where’s the honour in that?

In the first light of the new day we gathered on a suburban street of modest terraced houses and all I could hear was the sound of my blood. It sounds like the sea, a red rushing sound, when it’s pumped hard enough. And as we crouched below a little garden wall and fiddled with our kit in those last few seconds – adjusting the straps on Kevlars, the firearms officers checking their safety catches, listening to the subdued murmurs of the Airwave radios – that is what mine sounded like.

It told me what was at stake. A young woman’s life. The jobs of all of us who had let her slip away. And something else, something more personal. Because you never know what is on the other side of that door, and what it will do to you.

The officer with the worn red battering ram slung over his shoulder walked briskly down the garden path.

It didn’t take long.

Two, three steps and he was at the door, hauling the battering ram from his shoulder and swinging it at the lock in one smooth and brutal motion. The door popped open with the rip and splinter of cheap wood and the officer stood to one side as the rest of us charged into the house, screaming as loud as we could – screaming to pour fear into whoever was on the inside, and screaming to hide the fear in our own hearts.

The two armed officers who went in ahead of me suddenly stopped, still shouting behind their Heckler & Koch assault rifles.

Over the shoulders of their body armour I could see a sickly cat at the end of a suburban hall. It arched its back and hissed, full of cancer and contempt.

A door opened at the end of the hall.

We were screaming again.

An old woman in house slippers slowly shuffled across the hall, ignoring all orders to halt. She did not even look our way.

I saw an old-fashioned hearing aid tucked behind her ear, as huge and pink as a wad of chewed bubblegum. She disappeared through a door on the other side of the hall, the old cat rubbing against her legs as it followed her.

We followed her down the hall and through the door.

In the living room the old woman sat on a sofa with an old man, a biscuit held halfway to his mouth. He elbowed her, and at last she registered our presence. The pair of them stared slack-jawed at the assault rifles that were aimed at their faces. The cat spat at us.

‘Mr and Mrs Peck?’ I said. ‘Where’s your son? Where’s Ian?’

Still they didn’t talk.

There was a small kitchen on the other side of the hall.

‘Clear,’ said an armed officer, coming out of it.

Boots thundered on the staircase. I could hear them moving around upstairs, screaming as they went through doors, and then the silence of disappointment and relief.

I went into the kitchen. There was a small garden out the back. Beyond the high garden fence I could see more black Kevlar helmets and rubber goggles, mouths tight with tension, the dull gleam of Heckler & Koch assault rifles.

Mallory came out of the garden and into the kitchen. Whitestone and a uniformed officer were with him. When the uniform took off his helmet I saw it was PC Billy Greene, his pale face slick with sweat and fear, but controlling it well. The boxing was doing him some good.

The shouting had stopped.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘Did anyone check the basement?’ Mallory said.

There was a wooden door just outside the kitchen. No lock, paint flaking. I opened it, reached inside and found the switch for the light.

Somewhere deeper down, a bare electric bulb came on.

I went carefully down a short flight of steps, smelling damp and dust, and then I was under the house itself, the ceiling so low that I had to stoop.

Mallory’s voice was right behind me: ‘Anything?’

The basement was more than half full with scrap, smashed chunks of concrete and broken bricks, a ragged pile of rubble that almost reached to the ceiling.

‘What is all this stuff?’ I said.

‘Looks like someone dreamed of converting this place into flats,’ Mallory said. ‘They have to fill the basement. Fire regulations. Then the property bubble burst and the dream got cancelled.’ He peered into the darkness. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, easing past. ‘There’s something right at the back.’

‘Clear,’ I heard someone call at the top of the house. Then a brief gale of laughter, like a collective sigh of relief. They seemed very far away.

Mallory moved towards the back wall of the basement. There was a scuttle of something small but living across the rubble and I felt my heart lurch. The tail of a fat rat slithered over the rusted frame of a child’s bicycle.

‘There’s a door,’ Mallory said, and he suddenly had his torch in his hand, a sharp white beam in the dull yellow darkness.

PC Greene was now halfway down the steps, staring at Mallory’s back. We both followed him.

Mallory was trying the door.

Locked.

Then the lights went out. All of them. The mains. A switch had been thrown. I could hear voices protesting far above us.

Mallory had some sort of blade in his hand and was running it inside the doorjamb. I took his torch and held it on the door as he moved the blade left and right, left and right, lifting the lock tongue from the doorframe socket until he had it.

The door opened with a crack of wood. Beyond it was a metal grille. And from somewhere beyond that came the screams of a woman.

Help me help me help me help me help me.

The rattle of a metal grille in the blackness.

‘You hear that?’ Mallory said.

‘Yes.’

We were talking in whispers now. Mallory was reaching through the grille. It was locked from the inside. But a set of keys jangled on a nail; and then he had them and the grille suddenly slid open.

‘You smell it?’ Mallory said.

‘Yes, sir, I can smell it.’

The stink of shit and petrol.

‘Careful in here,’ he said, stepping inside.

I followed him and I felt the ground beneath my feet, rough and uneven, and the screaming was louder now and it was recognisably Scarlet Bush, and we moved more quickly because the space suddenly opened up and I was between Mallory and Greene when Mallory seemed to lurch forward and I grabbed a fistful of his jacket and stopped him falling.

There was a ragged hole beneath us, perhaps two metres deep, and Scarlet Bush at the bottom of it, shielding her eyes from the white light of the torch, naked and wet with petrol.

A barbecue pit for cooking human flesh.

A light flared and I saw a man coming round the pit just before it fell –
whoooooosh
– into the pit, and Billy Greene seemed to fall with it as the flames erupted with a sickening pop, and then Greene was in the pit with Scarlet, beating at the flames with his bare hands.

The man was small and powerful, long-haired and simian, and when he punched me in the heart I felt the air go out of me as I went backwards, falling, smashing my back hard against some sort of work table that collapsed under my full weight.

I felt the pain explode in my back, and then the blow on the back of my skull as my head hit the wall.

I clutched at my heart and felt the rip in my shirt and suddenly I knew that he had not punched me.

He had stabbed me.

I touched the dent in the Kevlar Stealth that had saved my life, felt the sting of the bruise beyond.

I closed my eyes, dizzy and sick from the pain in the back of my head, the rest of it coming in broken fragments.

Screams from the pit. A man’s screams now. Greene with his jacket in his hands, beating wildly at the fire. Scarlet Bush scrambling out, her eyes wide with the horror. Light in the room from the fire in the hole. A lot of light, but dancing and uneven, making ghosts of us all.

And the man – Bob the Butcher – punching Mallory in the chest, and in the arm, and in the side of the head. Mallory going down, his John Lennon glasses falling from his face. His face without his glasses no longer as hard as some old Viking, but vulnerable and lost and very easy to hurt.

Then Bob the Butcher gone. Out of the secret space. Past us all. Getting away with it.

And Whitestone waiting for him in the basement.

Bob walking into her forearm smash, the blow turning his head almost 180 degrees, and Whitestone, tiny woman that she was, perched on his back, cuffing him and punctuating his rights by bouncing his face against the ground.

‘You are under arrest.’ Smash. ‘You do not have to say anything.’ Smash.

I remembered a line from training days: a formal arrest will always be accompanied by physically taking control.
She was doing that all right.

‘But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court.’ Smash. ‘Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

Smash smash smash.

Bob the Butcher finally starting to beg.

And then I heard someone scream Mallory’s name as the lights came on and I blacked out.

26

THE PAIN IN
my back kicked me awake.

It started in the lower ribs and worked its way round to the spine, like some new pain meeting up with the pain that was already there. A bright bar of winter sunshine came through the crack in the curtains, telling me I had not been out for more than a few hours.