The Murder Bag (31 page)

On the photograph of the grave taken in summer, the epitaph was there. But on the rain-slick shot, it was missing.

The old photographer smiled, and he didn’t need to look at the words to recite them. ‘“Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware of giving your heart to a dog to tear.”
Well, they could hardly put that on the original grave, now could they?’

‘Why not?’

‘Because the grave is nearly five hundred years old,’ he said. ‘But those words were written in the early twentieth century by Rudyard Kipling. By my time the grave was literally falling to bits. Collapsing in on itself.’

Wren said, ‘Do you have any pictures?’

He looked doubtful but eventually found one image of a small yellow bulldozer parked next to the cracked tomb. You could clearly make out the name of the company on the side: V. J. Khan & Sons.

‘The grave was always unmarked,’ Monty said. ‘Or at least the inscription had worn clean away. I never saw anything on it. It’s five hundred years old, remember. But when they restored it, he added the words from Kipling.’

‘Who did?’ Wren said.

‘The Head Master,’ he said, sipping his single malt. ‘Mr Waugh said he didn’t want to leave the grave unmarked.’

29

I LEFT WREN
tucking into cheese on toast with Monty, his wife and their Golden Retriever and drove the pool car to Potter’s Field. The school seemed shut up and silent already but the main gates were open and I left the Hyundai in the staff car park. I could make out a figure moving around in the twilight of the playing fields and I was starting towards him when I heard the sound of the first shot.

A large-gauge gun, some distance away, the shot seeming to contain its own echo. And then there was silence and I started off again towards the playing fields, the buildings looking so lifeless that you would never guess they contained one thousand souls.

The old caretaker, Len Zukov, was moving slowly along a rugby pitch with what looked like a lawnmower. It was only when I got closer that I saw he was leaving a long straight white line in his wake as he marked out a touchline.

I called out a greeting, raising my hand.

‘Don’t step on that!’ he replied. ‘Still wet!’

‘Remember me? DC Wolfe from West End Central.’

I was reaching for my warrant card. But he couldn’t have cared less about my warrant card.

‘I remember you.’

‘I’m just following up a few details of our ongoing investigation.’

But he wasn’t interested. He was already moving off, his machine drowning my words, the straight white line trailing behind him.

‘Don’t step on my lines,’ he shouted over his shoulder, a man accustomed to bawling at generations of boys. ‘Got to get this done before dark.’

I walked back across the main courtyard, round the side of the college chapel and into the graveyard. There was a flurry of sound and movement. A squirrel skittered across my path and swiftly up a tree. I reached the grave of Henry’s dogs as another shot split the silence. And there was the epitaph.

Brothers and sisters,

I bid you beware

Of giving your heart

To a dog to tear.

Weather and time had etched the words in green moss.

I turned at a shuffling sound behind me and saw Len Zukov coming slowly down the path. Checking up on me.

‘What you want?’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t be in here. You should tell someone you’re coming. Get permission.’

‘Those words on the grave,’ I said. ‘I never realised until today that they’re only a hundred years old. But the grave is five hundred years old. So they had to be put there within the last century.’

His mouth moved as if to say
and so what?

‘I just wondered how I missed it,’ I said, talking to myself as much as him, and looking up at the sound of another gunshot. ‘Noticing things – it’s sort of what I do, Len.’

He didn’t take his eyes from me.

‘What’s that shooting?’ I said. ‘Twelve-bore?’

‘Sounds more like a .410,’ he said. ‘Better for close range, thick-cover shooting. Vermin.’ He rubbed his hands on his overalls. They were locked in permanent fists by his arthritis. He saw me looking at his hands and pushed them deep into his pockets. ‘Rats, rabbit and fox,’ he added.

‘Where you from, Len?’

He frowned at me. ‘I told you – I’m from here,’ he said.

‘Originally, I mean.’

‘Russia.’

‘Russia? They didn’t call you Len over there, I bet.’

‘Lev,’ he said. ‘Near enough.’

‘What part of Russia?’

We both looked up at the sound of another gunshot. Closer now. The long, drawn-out, rolling sound of a large-gauge shotgun fired in open countryside. The noise just went on and on.

‘Who’s shooting?’ I said.

He shrugged, like that was another subject he couldn’t care less about.

‘Farmer,’ he suggested.

‘So you came over after the Second World War?’

‘No,’ he said, not quite smiling. ‘I came over after the Great Patriotic War.’

I smiled. ‘Same war. Different names.’

‘No,’ he said, unsmiling. ‘Very different wars. Very different wars for your people and my people. In Russia there were twenty-five million dead.’

We both stared at the grave. I wondered what he thought about an English king who built a tomb for his pet spaniels. Not much, probably. Not if he had been in Russia during the war. He had to be somewhere in his seventies, I guessed. That would have made him a boy of eleven or twelve at the end.

‘You must have been too young for the war,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘Nobody in Russia was too young for the war.’

I nodded.

‘I’m away now,’ I said, and offered him my hand to shake.

It was a mistake. He took his arthritic hands from his overalls and brushed his clenched right fist briefly against my open palm, and we both turned away with our own private shame.

He made no attempt to follow me this time.

Perhaps he figured that I wouldn’t be able to poke my nose in where it wasn’t wanted. Certainly everywhere seemed locked up, and despite the falling darkness few lights appeared in any of the ancient windows. I looked up at the room where Mallory and I had stared across the playing fields with Peregrine Waugh but I could see no sign of life even there.

But I saw Len Zukov again as I walked back to the car park. He was in front of his little stone cottage with another man and it took me a moment to recognise Sergeant Tom Monk, the burns on his face a smooth black mask from so far away.

As the old caretaker watched, a cigarette clutched in one balled-up fist, Monk raked a pile of newly mown grass, shovelled it into a wheelbarrow and carried the load round the side of the cottage to where the smoke from a small bonfire was rising. Easing the old man’s burden.

I raised my hand in farewell but they did not appear to see me.

Then there was another gunshot as I reached the car, much closer now, coming from somewhere just beyond the tree line. The stuttering shot tore through leaves and took its time to crack the sky. Len was wrong. Whatever they were killing, they were not using a .410 to do it. I know what a twelve-bore shotgun sounds like.

That’s big vermin someone’s hunting, I thought, happy to get back into the car.

There was something wrong with the silence.

It jolted me from my shallow sleep, and before I was even awake I was sitting by the side of the bed, staring straight into the eye of the madman who sat on my bedside table.

12:05, he told me. Five minutes after midnight?

Outside I could hear the hum and roar of the meat market as it began its night. The clamour of the trolleys, the shouts of the men, still laughing with the long hours of the night ahead of them.

What had woken me?

I pulled on my pants and a pair of lightweight knuckle-dusters that sat in the drawer by the bed. They weighed nothing but would crack open a skull like a boiled egg if you could get close enough. I stepped out of my bedroom, resisting the urge to call Scout’s name. Inside his cage, Stan stirred in his sleep.

Our front door was shut. Our windows were unbroken. There was no fresh air coming from somewhere it shouldn’t be.

I looked at Stan’s cage. It was not a sound that had broken my sleep. It was the absence of a sound.

I knelt beside Stan, felt under him and beneath the blanket that covered his basket and pulled out the alarm clock we had put there to stand in place of his mother’s heartbeat. The battery had died some time ago. I smiled at him in the darkness and touched his soft red coat. Then I walked into the kitchen and dropped the old alarm clock into the bin.

Stan didn’t need it any more. He was home.

But under the door to my daughter’s bedroom, I could see that Scout still slept with all the lights on.

30

SALMAN KHAN OPENED
his front door unshaven and squinting in the pale morning sunlight, a baseball bat in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He held them both loosely, as if either might slip from his hand in a strong wind. He was in a dress shirt, open to his waist, with a black bow tie hanging around his neck like fresh roadkill. He looked like he had been wearing black tie to bed for a week.

‘Mr Khan,’ Wren said. ‘DCI Whitestone received a complaint—’

‘Because they’re not here any more!’ Khan gestured with his baseball bat. ‘The officers who were protecting me! The ones who were here after the – what is it? The Osman Warning!’

Wren smiled sympathetically. ‘Because the threat to your life is over,’ she said, all professional calm. ‘The perpetrator has been convicted.’

He laughed viciously.

We just stared at him, letting the laughter fade and then the silence grow.

Khan looked over our shoulders. There was a young Nepalese security guard on the drive. You were starting to see them all across London’s money-belt – private policemen hired to watch over just one wealthy street. The rich were getting scared.

But nobody was more scared than Salman Khan.

‘Thank you, Padam,’ Khan said.

The Gurkha saluted. ‘Sir.’

We followed Khan inside his house. A midget motorbike was resting against a double-sided winding staircase. Through glass panels in the marble floor you could see down into the basement area and the impossible blue world of an indoor swimming pool. You could feel its heat, taste the chlorine. Wren looked at me and I knew she felt it too.

These people have so much.

‘Your family are away?’ I said.

‘They can’t stay here! It’s too dangerous! If anything should happen to them . . .’

This was meant to be routine, one of the last jobs on the Action Book in the winding up of Operation Fat Boy. But Salman Khan could still smell murder in the air.

‘What are you afraid of, Mr Khan?’ I asked.

‘Are you serious? Some of my closest friends have died.’

He stubbed out his cigarette and immediately lit another one.

‘Mr Khan,’ I said. ‘Look at me.’

He looked at me, looked away, and threw his baseball bat aside with a scream. ‘Fuck!’

‘How’s your father’s business doing? A building firm, isn’t it?’

It took him a moment to recover.

‘My father died ten years ago. The company was sold at the time of his death. Why do you ask?’

Wren said, ‘Who was Anya Bauer?’

The name seemed to mean nothing to him. He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re supposed to be—’

‘What happened at that school?’ I said.

‘How long are you going to keep asking that question?’

‘Until I get the truth.’

‘What happened? Nothing. High jinks. Nothing more. I can’t deny that we did things. Irresponsible things.’

‘Like what?’ Wren said.

‘God, I don’t know! Smashed some glass. Made some noise. Bought some charlie.’

‘That’s it?’ Wren said. ‘Petty vandalism and recreational drugs? Come on.’

Khan shot her a wary look. ‘But none of it was at our instigation. And all of it was done in a spirit of experimentation and adventure.’ He seemed to stop himself, then clenched his teeth. ‘We fell under his spell, you see.’

‘You mean Peregrine Waugh? He was your House Master twenty years ago, wasn’t he?’

Khan shook his head. ‘I mean the Master’s favourite.’ He laughed. ‘I mean Peregrine’s representative on earth.’

And I suddenly saw who had the most to lose.

‘You’re talking about Ben King, aren’t you? Was he the Master’s favourite?’

He couldn’t look at me. ‘I didn’t say that,’ he said. ‘I didn’t give you any names.’ He gripped a fistful of his hair. ‘You’re meant to be here to
help
me!’

‘Would you like to make a statement?’ I said.

Khan’s mouth twisted into a grotesque parody of coquettishness. ‘Would you like me to, detective?’

‘I think you’re ready to talk to us, Mr Khan,’ I said. ‘I think you know that it’s really the only option you have left.’ I looked around at all the useless luxury. ‘This is no life, is it?’

He sucked hungrily on his cigarette.

‘I need to talk to a few people. I need to talk to my wife, my beautiful—’ He choked up. Hung his head. Then gathered himself. ‘And my lawyer. And my children, God help me. After that, I’ll come to your station.’ He was starting to compose himself now. ‘I believe there’s a possibility that I can help you with your enquiries.’

‘And when will that be?’ Wren asked.

‘When I am fucking ready, young lady.’

I shook my head. ‘Not good enough, sir,’ I said. ‘And watch your mouth when you’re addressing my colleague. We have reason to believe that a serious crime was committed during the period when you were a student at Potter’s Field. I could take you in now if I wanted to.’

He laughed. ‘Really? And by this time next year you would be waiting outside in your new security guard’s uniform, watching over my children as they unload their mountain bikes from my wife’s Porsche Cayenne. Wouldn’t you?’ He paused, took a breath. ‘Tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘Afternoon at the latest. I promise. I want it to be over.’