The Slaughter Man (13 page)

‘Or if it’s what you know,’ she said.

Wren and I walked back to The Garden through Highgate Cemetery, wild nature pressing in on all sides, this secret place feeling more like a jungle than a graveyard. Even without their leaves, the great trees crowded in on us and covered us in their shade. I didn’t know what they were but I knew they were the kind where the leaves are sticky when they are green in summer and slimy when they fall in autumn. A city tree, although the city felt light years away in here.

Then I saw him.

Moving between the shadows of the trees, disappearing around the corner on one of the rising, winding paths, the hoodie he wore pulled over his eyes.

‘This part of the cemetery is closed to the public, right?’ I said.

Wren nodded. ‘Guided tours only. You told me, remember? The west side is always closed to the public.’

‘Then who the hell is he?’

We found him sitting by an ancient tomb that sat in a wild tangle of undergrowth, his hand resting on the massive statue of a sleeping dog that lay beside it. The tomb itself was plain, but the stone dog was enormous, ten times life size.

Rocky smiled at us from under his hoodie.

‘What are you doing here?’ I said.

‘Visiting my hero,’ he said, patting the dog’s head. ‘You heard of Tom Sayers? He was a boxer, too. The big star of bare-knuckle boxing in the middle of the nineteenth century. This is where he’s buried. Tom Sayers was the Floyd Mayweather of his day. The Muhammad Ali. The Sugar Ray Leonard. He was little – like me – but he fought much bigger men. No weight divisions, see. Not in those days.’

Wren narrowed her eyes at Rocky.

‘You know this gentleman?’ she asked me.

‘From the gym,’ I said. ‘Rocky’s a boxer. How do you know this place, Rocky?’

‘Did some work up here. For one of my dad’s mates. On the blackstuff. You know – laying driveways. I told you, didn’t I? I thought I told you.’

‘What’s the name of your dad’s mate?’

‘Sean Nawkins.’

Wren and I exchanged a look. And I did not let the jolt of shock show on my face but I thought of the caravans and chalets of Oak Hill Farm out in the wilds of Essex and I thought of the Woods’ beautiful home on London’s highest hill.

Different worlds, I had thought.

But I was wrong.

‘You ever do any work in The Garden?’ I asked, my voice harder now.

His eyes were wide with innocence.

‘Which garden might that be?’ he said.

‘The Garden is the gated community the other side of that wall,’ I said, feeling that he already knew the answer. ‘Six houses.’

He shook his head. ‘No, this was further out. Hadley Wood. But I heard that Tom Sayers was buried here and I wanted to pay my respects. Do you know how many people went to his funeral?
One hundred thousand
. They followed his coffin up here from Camden Town. Imagine that …’

‘You shouldn’t be in here,’ I said. ‘You know that, right?’

But Rocky just scratched the giant stone dog behind its ears and gave me his big easy grin, as if all my petty rules did not apply to him and his kind.

The bell in Mary Wood’s Japanese garden moved with the freezing wind.

I was standing halfway down The Garden, our team going over the list of workers who had been admitted to the gated community over the last six months, working out who remained to be traced, interviewed and eliminated from our investigation when the toll of the bell made me look up.

There was a sergeant and a couple of uniformed PCs standing guard outside the Wood house. The POLICE DO NOT CROSS tape was already looking tatty. And I could hear the bell.

The house was speaking to me.

Trying to speak to me.

It was bitterly cold in the growing dark of late afternoon, ice forming on the windscreens of the Range Rovers and Porsches and BMWs that sat on the driveways.

I took off, running towards the house. I ducked under the tape, hearing the bell quite clearly now, that pure ringing sound from the back of the house where the Woods had been happy.

‘Sir?’

The sergeant was at my side, his breath coming out in steam. But I shook my head, not knowing what I was looking for, not understanding what the house was trying to say.

I was still standing on the driveway, listening to the bell when Wren reached me.

‘What is it, Max?’

I stared at her. ‘I don’t know.’

The last weak shards of winter sunlight died as the darkness fell and, as Wren and I stood on the drive, suddenly the ground beneath our feet lit up – two dozen lights built into the driveway, stretching from the road to the front door, either side of the path.

I crouched down and touched the gravel, looking up at the other driveways with the ice glinting on the windscreens, then I touched the Wood driveway again. It was unbroken black asphalt. But on the other drives I could see wear and tear, marks from rubber and exhaust fumes, the scars of time and the weather.

But not here. I let my fingertips trace the surface of the smooth gravel.

‘This is new,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘The driveway. I reckon late summer, early autumn. Not long ago. Not long enough to mark it.’ I remembered Rocky in the gym. ‘
Working on the black stuff right now. You know. Laying driveways
.’ And at the grave of Tom Sayers. ‘
Further out. Hadley Wood
.’

Rocky, I thought. You lying little bastard.

Who was he trying to protect?

Sean Nawkins? His father? Himself?

The Sergeant and his two men watched me as I crouched down, my fingertips touching the smooth black asphalt, our breath steaming. I looked up at Wren.

‘The firm who laid this driveway,’ I said. ‘They’re not on the list, are they?’

Wren looked at me, then at the driveway. She looked at the other driveways, and I knew she could see what I could see.

Only the driveway of the Wood home was pristine. Only the driveway of the Wood home was new.

Wren consulted the printout in her hands as the wind stirred the trees beyond the wall and was answered by the bell. She cursed quietly, crumpled the list in her fist and then she was running towards Whitestone and Gane, her red hair flying in the growing dark.

‘Laying a driveway like the one outside the Woods’ house is a two-day job,’ Wren said in MIR-1 late the next morning. ‘The contractors turn up with the hot-mix asphalt. It’s a mix of sand, stone and gravel held together by asphalt cement. Pour. Level. Trowel. Forty-eight hours, in and out.’

‘The security at the gate should record every entry and exit to The Garden,’ Whitestone said.

Wren nodded. ‘But early in the morning – residents off to work and school – the gates are left open. And it seems they didn’t get round to recording whoever put down the black stuff on the Woods’ drive.’

‘Paper trail?’ Whitestone said. ‘Invoices? Bills?

‘We can’t find anything,’ Wren said. ‘And no digital trail. I looked on the search history of the Woods’ computers.’

‘Cash in hand, saves on the paperwork,’ Gane said.

I stared at the huge map of London on the wall of MIR-1. The Garden was on the west side of Highgate West Cemetery – the highest point in the city. You could approach it north from Finchley, south from Kentish Town, west from Hampstead, east from Holloway. If the contractors came off one of London’s orbitals, the North Circular or the M25, then they would have come from the north.

‘Nobody remembers anything?’ Whitestone said. ‘Security? Neighbours?’

Wren consulted her notebook. ‘The security guard remembers the Woods parked their cars on the road for a few days at the tail end of last summer. Late August, early September, he thinks. And nobody ever parks their cars on the road in The Garden. That must have been due to the hot-mix asphalt. You have to let it set before you can park on it. So we are looking at late last summer.’

‘Cameras,’ I said. ‘The cameras might have them.’

Gane laughed. ‘You know how many CCTV cameras there are within a mile radius of the murder scene?’

‘Not the CCTV cameras,’ I said. ‘The ANPR cameras.’

The public call them speed cameras. But we call them ANPRs – for Automatic Number Plate Recognition. Because it’s not just your speed they clock. That’s just the start. What ANPRs are really interested in is your identity.

‘The CCTV cameras are no good because none of them have footage going back that far,’ I said. ‘But it’s different with the fixed cameras. It’s different with ANPRs. They keep data for a lot longer.’

Wren’s fingers were flying over her keyboard. ‘There’s a fixed camera on the hill outside Highgate Cemetery,’ she said. ‘Another one on The Grove just before you turn into The Garden. Two – no, three – on Spaniards Road if they came from the west.’

‘They didn’t come from the west,’ I said. ‘They came from the north, off the North Circular or the M25.’

‘How do you figure that?’ Whitestone said.

‘Laying driveways,’ I said. ‘It’s a suburban trade. They’re out-of-towners.’

‘And the ANPRs,’ Whitestone said. ‘How long would the DVLA keep data?’

‘Depends,’ I said. ‘If a car doesn’t have MOT, insurance, vehicle registration. If the car is owned by a person of interest. If it is doing something illegal. The DVLA would pass it on to the enforcing agency but keep it on their own database.’

‘How long?’ Whitestone said, her eyes suddenly fierce behind her glasses. ‘Potentially?’

‘Forever,’ I said.

When we knew we were going to pull an all-nighter we ordered food while we still had the chance. Even Soho shuts eventually. Then we all called home.

Scout was long in her bed and Mrs Murphy told me it was no problem, she would sleep on the couch and see me early in the morning.

I was vaguely aware of the others talking quietly at their workstations. Whitestone Skyping her teenage son. Wren on her phone talking low, I guessed, to her married man. And Gane putting off whoever he was meant to be seeing that night.

Then their voices faded away, and all I was aware of was the soft Irish voice in my ear, telling me about what Scout had drawn at school, MIR-1 fading away while all I heard was the sound of home.

But my eyes drifted back to DCI Whitestone and the face of the thin, tousle-haired teenage boy in glasses on the computer screen before her. The son. And while I could not hear what they were saying, somehow I recognised the fierce bond that exists between a lone parent and their child. I saw – or at least I imagined I saw – something that I knew so well, an unbreakable bond of love and blood, the feeling that there is you two and then there is the rest of the world.

For the very first time, I looked at my boss, that quiet, unassuming woman in glasses with ten years in Homicide and Serious Crime Command and a kid at home, and I believed that I saw myself.

All night long we looked at the black-and-white images of the ANPRs.

We saw no faces. That’s how people swap points, deny they were at the wheel, pretend they were home in bed, allege that the missus was driving, Your Honour.

Because it’s the plate the ANPRs clock.

I sat at Gane’s workstation as he scrolled through the still images of the camera on the hill, of the traffic in the summer sunshine, crawling to the top of London. We worked in silence, my nerves rattling with too many triple espressos from Bar Italia. When I finally spoke the sun was high over the rooftops of Mayfair and my voice was hoarse with the long slog of the night.

‘Stop,’ I said.

A white open-top pickup truck was struggling up the hill.

A distinctive car. A Ford Mustang. You could not see what they were carrying in the back and you could not see the driver. But you could see the words sharp and clear printed in black on the doors.

Premium Blacktop
.

I looked over at Billy Greene.

‘Premium Blacktop, Billy?’ I gave him a car registration and the make.

‘Wouldn’t they have a concrete mixer?’ Gane said. ‘Steamroller? Heavier kit?’

‘You would think so. But the ANPR wouldn’t have kept this image if they were kosher.’

Billy Greene swivelled in his chair.

‘That vehicle had no MOT – that’s why it’s still on the database. Premium Blacktop has no website, no Facebook page, no Twitter account. No digital presence at all, as far as I can see. They’re a firm from Essex registered at Oak Hill Farm. Managing director is a Mr Sean Nawkins.’

Billy hesitated now, choosing his words carefully. We can’t just say what we like these days. It’s not allowed.

‘Travelling people,’ Billy said.

Sixty minutes later I turned the BMW X5 off the A127 at Gallows Corner and there was Oak Hill Farm waiting in the distance, the white caravans parked back to back on the perimeter, making the camp look like a wagon train waiting for the Apache.

‘I’d feel better with the heavy mob,’ DI Gane said.

It was just the four of us in the car. Me at the wheel with Whitestone in the passenger seat, Gane and Wren in the back. Just our MIT.

‘No hats and bats,’ Whitestone said. ‘No ghosties. Not for a chat.’

Hats and bats are officers in helmets with riot sticks. Ghosties are officers with a steel battering ram – the ghostbusters.

We were silent as we approached the camp. Ragged flags flew high above the scaffolding that served for the gateway. NO ETHNIC CLEANSING, said the signs, and WE WON’T GO, and THIS IS OUR HOME.

Then we were inside that place of rural squalor and suburban gentility, the neat little chalets at odds with the fridges and washing machines with the doors pulled off, the busted TVs and ancient computers with their shattered screens.

I slowed the car, careful among the children and dogs that milled around. A fifteen-year-old girl emerged from the pack.

‘Hello, Echo,’ I said. ‘No school on a weekday?’

‘Is it a week day?’ she said.

‘Is your dad home?’

She looked over my shoulder at Gane in the back.

‘He shouldn’t have come back here,’ she said. ‘None of you should have come back.’

With an escort of children and dogs, I slowly drove to where the large chalet and the caravan stood side by side. Sean Nawkins was sitting outside his chalet, and he frowned at us from behind his spectacles. He put down his
Guardian
and stood up, jabbing a finger at Gane as we got out of the car.