The Slaughter Man (23 page)

I stood perfectly still.

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide and all that lifeless water making this place look like another planet.

He began walking towards me.

‘Put down your weapon,’ I said.

He didn’t stop. Forty yards.

‘I’m arresting you for the murder of the Wood family,’ I said. ‘Mary. Brad. Marlon. Piper.’

He shook his head, and looked over my shoulder at the blue lights splitting the grey gloom of winter.

Twenty yards.

‘You do not have to say anything,’ I said.

Ten yards.

‘But it may harm your defence—’

He raised the shotgun.

‘
Put the thing down and step away from it now!
’ I told him, my heart pounding, my stab wound throbbing, the blood in my veins pumping as fast as it could. ‘There’s no way out.’

‘Wrong again,’ he said, and turned the shotgun in his hands to fit the barrel in his mouth, his eyes blinking as he eased his right thumb into the trigger and pulled.

There was no separation between the shot and the back of his head exploding. It happened in the same instant. And the sound of the second shot was very different here. It seemed to echo across those ten reservoirs, that vast expanse of water, that sea in the city, and I looked up at the sky as the black flock of birds took flight in alarm.

Nawkins had fallen backwards into the water.

What remained of the back of his head leaked into the still waters.

I looked down at my hands. They were covered in blood.

And my heart began pumping, wild with joy, and I felt the tears of gratitude sting my eyes and choke my throat.

Because it wasn’t my blood.

The woman attacked me from behind.

I was standing by the side of the road, a carton of bad coffee in my hands, boiling hot, far too hot to drink although I drank it anyway, letting it scald my throat, enjoying the way it reminded me that I was still alive, watching the paramedics stitch the gash in Whitestone’s forehead, armed officers and uniforms and blue lights everywhere, when the woman came up behind me, screaming a torrent of filth as her fingernails raked across my face.

She wanted my eyes. She wanted to take them out. She was trying to blind me.

And as I felt the boiling hot coffee splash across my shoes, I thought that she was doing quite a good job.

He nails raked down my forehead and across my eyebrows and into my eye sockets, trying to stay there, attempting to sink into the eyeballs, and then trying again, all the while screaming, screaming, screaming.

I thought it was Carolyn Burns come to punish me.

But as they finally pulled her off, I glimpsed the dog tattoo on the inside of her wrist, the Akita that looked more like a German Shepherd, the image streaked with blood from my clawed face.

It was Echo Nawkins.

Sleeveless shirt. Pink miniskirt. Dressed for start of summer in the middle of winter. She turned to scream at me over her shoulder as a couple of uniformed officers led her away.

‘
Blood on your hands!
’ she screamed. ‘
Blood on your hands! Blood on your hands!
’

‘Shall we do her, sir?’ a sergeant asked me, and I wondered if he was local and if he knew Sergeant Sallis. ‘Book her for assaulting a police officer?’

I shook my head. I didn’t have the heart for it. And I could live without the paperwork. And the truth is that she had shocked me. It was as if Echo knew that Peter Nawkins had not murdered the Wood family. Not
believed
– with the usual sentimental blinkers of the ones who dote on the wicked – but as if she
knew
for a stone-cold fact.

I thought of Sergeant Sallis sitting on the floor of the flat that stank of cannabis and cat, his face frozen with disbelief that he was still breathing, and the hole in the wall where the shotgun had been very deliberately fired.

It was as if she knew
.

Peter Nawkins had not killed anyone for half a lifetime.

It is not easy to hide a dead body.

Two reasons.

Killers are stupid.

And bodies decay.

Twenty-four hours after Peter Nawkins had emptied a twelve-bore shotgun into the roof of his mouth, I stood before the map of London that covered an entire wall in MIR-1 and, as I stepped back to take a better look, I thought – no, it’s not easy to hide a body, not even here.

Not even in this city of ten million souls.

Not even in a metropolis that sprawls for thirty miles either side of a river that is more than two hundred miles long. Not even in London, a special city with countless acres of green and blue, all those parks, woods, commons, gardens and heathland, all those ponds, canals, lakes, rivers and reservoirs.

London, with its sixty thousand streets and all those garages, skips, recycling bins, brand-new patios and old dank basements. And below the floorboards, under the manholes, far beneath the concrete and the earth, deep down in the subterranean network of drains, pipes and sewers that carry away the city’s waste – it still wasn’t easy to get rid of a body. Because killers are stupid and bodies decay.

I stood alone in MIR-1, staring at the map of my city. Behind me, at my workstation, Bradley Wood smiled out from the computer screen, forever four years old and happy, with his Han Solo figurine in his small fist.

I took another step back. It helped me to see better.

Killing someone is the easy bit, I thought. Disposing of a body is the hard part.

Killers are blind with adrenaline, terrified of being caught, sweating with panic. They have no time. Their hands and clothes are covered in enough evidence to put them away for a lifetime. Every fibre of their being is telling them to flee.

The ones who attempt to hide their victims are never thinking clearly. They are unlikely to be reflecting deeply on the immutable facts of death and decay.

Putrefaction, the pathologists call it.

It is the reason you can put me down for cremation.

The process is slowed by cold and quickened by heat, and it is affected by the weight of the corpse, and by the kind of clothes they were wearing at the time of death, and if there is undigested food in the stomach, and wounds, and if the body is in water, and whether the water is warm or cold.

But if a body is not stored in sub-zero temperatures, then the timetable of putrefaction never changes.

I glanced towards the window. It was still bitterly cold but the worst of the winter was over. The snows were melting. The seasons were changing. But even among all that awakening life, the cruel facts of death remained. They are never pretty.

At the moment of death, everything shuts down. The heart doesn’t beat. The blood doesn’t flow. The last breath has gone. There’s a myth that hair and nails continue to grow after death, but it’s not true – skin tissue shrivels at the time of death, so it can appear as if hair and nails have kept growing. But they haven’t. The only thing that hair and nails are going to do from now on is fall out.

After death, the body’s tissues are destroyed by bacteria escaping from the intestinal tract, melting the body down. The internal organs break down in strict order: intestine, liver, kidneys, lungs, brain and finally the prostate or uterus.

After thirty-six hours the head, shoulders and abdomen turn green. Then the gases accumulating in the cavities cause bloating, beginning in the face. The eyes bulge. The tongue protrudes. The head swells. The bloating reaches the stomach and finally the skin, which fills with blisters.

The nose and mouth look as if they are leaking blood, but this is purge fluid, a result of the total destruction of body tissues by bacteria. The body’s blood vessels collapse and this results in an intricate road map known as marbling. By now the body has turned a shade of green so dark that it is almost black.

Then the body splits open like fruit that has been left to rot in the sun and releases its gases.

And all this after just thirty-six hours.

So the murdered dead always sleep uneasy.

They are discovered by dog walkers and drain cleaners and DIY enthusiasts tearing up the floorboards, digging up the garden or knocking through a wall. They are discovered by neighbours who find they are living next door to the unmistakable stench of rotting flesh.

And they are discovered by someone like me who goes into a house of horrors and kicks down the front door.

Although not always. I thought of Winnie Johnson, the mother of Moors Murder victim Keith Bennett. Winnie died after almost fifty years of trying to find out where her murdered twelve-year-old son was buried on Saddleworth Moor, outside Manchester. I thought of Winnie now, and the long years of leaving her flowers and toys and tokens of love on random parts of the moors.

Yes, it happens. Yes, it is easier to hide the body of a child than the body of an adult.

But killers are stupid
.

And bodies decay
.

And if Bradley Wood was dead, I believed with all my heart that we would have found him by now.

My fingertips touched the map of London.

‘He’s still alive,’ I said quietly.

‘Detective Wolfe?’

I jumped back from the map, a breath caught in my throat.

Charlotte Gatling was standing in the doorway.

She bit her lower lip. ‘Why did he do it?’ she said.

I did not know what to say to her. I grasped for some truth that she could understand.

‘I can’t explain madness to you,’ I said as gently as I could. ‘Nawkins was criminally insane. He had some kind of obsession with your sister. If it had not been Mary – and her family – it would have been someone else. He should never have been walking about. After the first murders, all those years ago, he should have been in a high-security psychiatric hospital. He should have done his time in Broadmoor instead of Belmarsh, and they should have let him die there.’ I hesitated. She saw it.

‘Please go on,’ she said.

I was thinking of Wren.

‘A colleague of mine said that Nawkins was a deeply unhappy man who was enraged by the happiness of others. Nawkins saw a happy family and he had to destroy it. My colleague – she’s not a psychologist; she’s not a shrink – she’s just a cop, the same as me. But her theory makes as much sense to me as anything.’

I did not know what else to tell her.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘What will happen to those children? The ones you found in the house on The Bishops Avenue?’

I shook my head.

‘Social services will try to send them home, even though some of them will have been running away from their homes. Most will go into care. I can’t pretend they will have happy endings. I wish I could.’

She thought about it, and nodded.

‘This world is a sewer made by what men want,’ she said.

We stared at each other. She remained in the doorway of MIR-1.

‘What are you doing here?’ I said.

‘I had an interview with the Family Liaison Officer. Looking at CCTV footage. Some pictures taken with an iPhone. Reading reports. I come in once a week. I used to think it was a sign we were making progress. I don’t believe that any more. Pointless, really.’ I could see that a lot of the hope had gone out of her and I hated it. She shook her head. ‘All these ridiculous sightings that lead to nothing,’ she said.

Her face reddened. Perhaps because we both knew the FLO offices were all on the first floor. There was no obvious reason for her to be up here. But she wasn’t lost.

‘I just wanted to thank you,’ she said. ‘And your colleagues, of course. I know you put yourselves in harm’s way to bring Nawkins to justice. But everyone’s gone home.’

It was true. In every sense. It was the end of the working day. And our murder investigation was winding down.

DCI Whitestone and DC Wren were at home with their wounds and their loved ones. Our only suspect was dead by his own hand and, although we would never have publically admitted it, the Met was reluctant to throw endless resources into the search for a four-year-old boy who by now had been missing for two months.

‘I know that my nephew has had a lot of attention,’ Charlotte Gatling said. ‘And I know all the statistics. A child missing every three minutes. One hundred thousand children missing every year. Some new ones disappeared in the time I have been standing here talking to you. And I know not every missing child has the attention you’ve given to Bradley.’ She recovered her poise. ‘That’s why I wanted to thank you.’

‘It’s my job.’

‘But you’re doing far more than just your job, aren’t you?’

She indicated the image of her nephew smiling on my computer screen. I had thought she had not noticed it. I had been wondering how to get across and press
quit
before she saw it. But she had seen it the moment she came to the door.

‘Your job is done,’ she said. ‘You’re a Murder Investigation Team. And now the murders have been solved. And we both know that every day that goes by reduces the chances of Bradley coming home.
But you’re still looking
. Everybody has gone home but you’re still up here, thinking about him, not giving up, still trying. It’s true, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

She took a single step closer to me.

‘Why are you doing it?’

‘Daddy?’

Scout lifted her head at an empty workstation. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and swung back and forth on the swivel chair, her feet not touching the ground. Below her Stan stirred himself at the sound of her voice, yawning and settling into his stretching exercises. Downward-facing dog, upward-facing dog.

Scout slipped off the chair.

‘Toilet,’ she said, heading for the door.

‘You OK with that lock?’ I said.

‘It’s an easy lock,’ Scout said, padding from the room, her dog at her heels.

I looked at Charlotte Gatling.

‘I do it for her,’ I said.

What I didn’t tell Charlotte Gatling was that the information from the public about Bradley had almost dried up. The cranks, and the time-wasters, and the well-meaning citizens had moved on.

Twin girls, five years old, had disappeared from a park in Notting Hill while under the supervision of an Italian nanny who had an obsessive need to Tweet. While the young Italian was attending to her Twitter timeline, the girls vanished. The twins’ parents both worked in the City and the disappearance prompted countless think pieces in red-top and tabloid about parents who work, the balance between parenting and the office, and how we put our children in the care of strangers.