The Murder Bag (36 page)

‘Another burglar?’

‘No – Jennings was a murderer. And soon the French were at it, nicking a reprobate by the name of Vincenzo Perugia – doesn’t sound very French, does he? – on the basis of a left thumbprint.’

‘What had he done?’

‘He stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. Took the Frogs two years to find him because they only had his right thumbprint on file. I hear you solved your case. DCI Mallory would be very happy.’

I nodded, staring at Harry Jackson’s thumbprint.

‘Twenty years ago, a girl called Anya Bauer was the victim of a gang rape at Potter’s Field,’ I said. ‘The Head Master, Peregrine Waugh, killed her to stop her talking. Bob the Butcher – Ian Peck – cut the throats of the men who had been the boys who attacked Anya. We got two murderers. We got their motives. The pieces all fit. The trouble is, John, when you look at them, those pieces don’t make much sense.’

‘Why not?’

‘Peck is going to get life for Mallory’s murder,’ I said. ‘And his prints were everywhere in his parents’ house.’

‘I heard.’

‘But they were not at the murder scenes of Hugo Buck, Adam Jones and Guy Philips, the other murders he confessed to. No prints there. Not even a partial. Not even a glove print.’

‘Yes,’ said Sergeant Caine. ‘I heard that, too.’

‘But why would he lie?’ I said. ‘Why would Ian Peck confess to murders that he didn’t commit?’

‘Because he’s nobody,’ said the keeper of the Black Museum. ‘And he wants to be somebody. They’re all the same. Serial killers – you think they’re criminal masterminds? They’re not Hannibal Lecter, Max! They’re all just grubby little men. They’re all psychopathic losers. Who are they? Albert DeSalvo, Peter Sutcliffe and Ian Peck. They’re germs, they’re insects. But their crimes make them the Boston Strangler, the Yorkshire Ripper and Bob the Butcher. It wouldn’t surprise me if Bob the Butcher is standing up for murders that he didn’t do. It’s what Albert DeSalvo did. He wasn’t even in jail for killing those thirteen women in Boston. He was in jail for rape. That’s the kind of vicious little woman-hating creep we’re talking about. But then he becomes the Boston Strangler and suddenly you’ve got Tony Curtis playing you in a movie.’

I was still staring at Harry Jackson’s thumbprint.

‘No prints,’ I said. ‘Who has no prints, John?’

Sergeant John Caine of the Black Museum reached out and straightened the frame on his neglected Harry Jackson display.

‘Only a man with no hands, Max,’ he said.

36

MIDNIGHT ON THE
school playing fields, the black silhouette of Potter’s Field behind me, a jumble of towers and spires and architecture from the last five centuries.

Blink your eye and a hundred years go by.

It felt like the world was dead.

I checked my phone one last time – no new calls, although I had left urgent messages for Whitestone, Gane and Wren on my drive out here – and then began across the playing fields.

The wind whistled through the trees in the distant woods and I shuddered, as if the eyes of Anya Bauer were watching me. Soon you will be at rest, I thought. Soon you will be at peace at last.

There were no lights on in the little stone cottage as I felt in my pocket for the Head Master’s keys, the large set that looked like they were from a fairy tale, holding the key to every lock in every door in Potter’s Field.

There were two locks on the front door of the cottage. A standard Yale lock and a flush bolt. Nothing complicated. But I still had to try a dozen keys before the door swung silently open and I stepped inside.

I stood there listening for a moment, my eyes adjusting to the light, slowing my breath, and then I quietly eased the door shut.

On the table there was an empty teacup, a copy of the local newspaper and a .410 shotgun.

It was a small cottage. A servant’s quarters given a quick coat of rural comfort. To the left was the bedroom and the bathroom, both doors shut. To the right the small living area ran into an L-shaped kitchen only large enough for one person at a time.

I stood there, seeing in the darkness now, but not knowing what I was looking for until I glimpsed it under the sink.

I moved quickly to the little kitchen, crouched down and pulled the door all the way open. An ancient leather bag was sitting with the bleach and disinfectant and insecticide. Its dark brown cowhide was worn and cracked, the brass hardware and locks blackened with rust.

But somehow you knew it was still being used.

As something very small scuttled away in the skirting board, I reached in and took out the worn-leather Gladstone bag.

A Murder Bag.

I turned to carry the bag back to the living space and there he was, old Len Zukov, sitting at the table with the .410 shotgun in his arthritic hands.

I held up the bag for his inspection, as if he had asked me to retrieve it.

‘Your bag, Len?’

He sniffed. ‘Of course.’

I set it on the table, saying nothing.

‘You don’t believe me,’ he said, the accent forever caught somewhere between rural England and his Russian homeland. ‘You never believe a word I say, do you?’

I watched his hands on the .410. Despite his condition the shotgun rested easily in his strong arms and those locked, arthritic fists. He was more comfortable than I had ever seen him. And I looked towards the door, wondering if the .410 was even loaded, and how much mobility he needed in his fingers to pull the trigger.

Not much, I thought. The .410 is the lightest shotgun, often used for teaching children how to shoot.

‘Sit down now,’ he said, interrupting my calculations.

‘My colleagues will be here soon,’ I said, hearing the doubt in my voice.

He liked that. ‘Perhaps not soon enough,’ he said. ‘I told you to sit down.’

I remained standing.

‘You didn’t come forward to claim the body,’ I said. ‘Anya’s body, Len. Anya Bauer. We know it was her remains in the grave with the dogs. No doubt about it. We obtained dental records from Germany. What stopped you coming forward and claiming the body? What were you afraid of? You knew her, Len.’

‘Did you ever see what a shotgun does to a man’s face?’ he said.

I joined him at the table. There were only two chairs. He wasn’t one for doing a lot of socialising.

‘Poking around in the night,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘What you looking for?’ He indicated the Gladstone bag that I had placed on the table. ‘That old thing?’

‘Not you,’ I said. ‘I’m not looking for you, Len.’

‘Maybe you should be,’ he said, and he shifted the shotgun in his paralysed hands.

‘Why don’t you put the gun down, Len. Then we can talk.’

He gripped the .410 tighter.

‘You asked me how I came here,’ he said. ‘I came with the soldiers. I rode on the back of a T-34. Do you know the T-34?’

‘It was a tank in the war. The Second World War. The Great Patriotic War, you call it. The T-34 was a Russian tank.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘
The
Russian tank. The T-34 was
the
Russian tank. The tank that bought your freedom. The tank that paid for your democracy. Britain, America. You said once that I was too young for the war. You were right. I was eleven years old, too young for a war of annihilation. The Germans were coming and I was in the fields and I ran away. Then the Red Army took our town and I returned. But the town was not there any more. Because we were sub-humans. To them. You understand? My mother. My father. My grandmother. My sisters. Sub-humans. I never cried so much as at that time. The last days of my childhood passed in this way.’

He was silent, lost in memory, or listening to the night.

‘I went west with our soldiers,’ he said. ‘West, west, west. The First Belorussian. The
frontoviki
– frontline troops. Through a world in ruins. Do you know why they kept me? Because I had almost the same name as their leader. General Georgy Zhukov. What do you call it?’

‘A mascot,’ I said.

‘A mascot. I wanted to live. I wanted to stay alive. But I wanted to see Germany destroyed. I closed my heart to pity.’ He shook his head with wonder. ‘They had so much! The Germans were so rich! The farms, the animals – why did they come to us when they already had so much?’

‘They wanted more, Len,’ I said soothingly. ‘They wanted the world. It was madness.’

But he wasn’t listening to me now.

‘Our soldiers wanted women,’ he said. ‘“
Frau, frau, frau!
” I wanted something else. For my dead family. For my grandparents. For my sisters. For my parents. For my gone family. Our
frontoviki
placed me inside a cellar. One by one, a dozen Waffen-SS men who had destroyed their papers and ripped off their badges were sent inside. I could hear them screaming on the other side of the door. “
Nix SS! Nix SS!
” Our soldiers had showed me what to do. You know? The knife through the neck, then pull, then kick the Nazi down the stairs. A dozen of them. So, you see an old man. But you’re looking at a killer.’

We stared at each other.

‘I think it’s been a while since you killed anyone,’ I said quietly. ‘I think it’s been a lifetime.’

He pointed the .410 at my face.

‘You hate the Germans,’ I said. ‘But Anya Bauer was German, wasn’t she? And you didn’t hate Anya, did you? You loved her.’

‘Anya’s father was German,’ he said. ‘But her mother was Russian. My daughter.’

‘And Anya came to stay with you when she was fifteen years old. Your granddaughter came to stay with you at Potter’s Field. What was that? A summer holiday? Trouble at home? A bit of both? I bet there was some kind of trouble at home, wasn’t there?’

‘Stop talking about her,’ he said.

His voice flat and hard, levelling the .410 at my chest, giving himself a bigger target.

‘And then one day Anya was gone,’ I said. ‘Somewhere between a missing person and a lost contact. And you didn’t know what happened – or maybe you suspected, but you were never sure until you saw what was in Henry’s grave. When it was collapsing. When it was falling to bits. You saw her bones, didn’t you? Human bones in there with the bones of Henry’s dogs. Or maybe you saw them later, when the grave was being renovated. But at some point you saw inside the grave and you knew it had to be Anya.’

‘Shut up now,’ he said, the shotgun moving between my face and my chest.

‘And you put it all together,’ I continued. ‘Anya coming to stay. The boys who were sniffing around. Hugo Buck and his little gang. And then Anya gone – for a night, and then a year, and then for ever. Were there rumours, Len? Did you hear anything about what Peregrine Waugh’s followers had done to some girl? Were they afraid of the truth coming out? There must have been talk after James Sutcliffe killed himself – or pretended to. Somehow you suddenly knew what had happened to her – what they had done. And you drew up a list of the boys who must have been in that room when Waugh broke her neck and they treated your beautiful girl like something to be thrown away. And you wanted revenge. Is that what happened?’

The .410 seemed to seek out my heart, and stay there, steady at last in his paralysed hands.

‘What matters,’ he said, ‘what matters is that I avenged her. Do you believe me at last?’

‘I believe all of it, Len,’ I said. ‘I truly do. Except the last part. I don’t believe that you’ve killed anyone since you were a boy.’

The door opened and Tom Monk came in, an old army jacket slung over jeans, carrying a twelve-bore shotgun and a lifeless brace of rabbits. Behind the terrible burns on his ruined face I saw his eyes widen and grow cold.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I was wondering when you might turn up.’

‘A young policeman I know burned his hands when we collared Bob the Butcher,’ I said. ‘A brave young lad called Billy Greene. He was going to spend his sick leave in Las Vegas. Champagne cocktails by the pool in Caesar’s, chorus girls, all that.’

‘Very nice,’ Monk said.

‘But guess what? They wouldn’t let him in. Sent Billy straight back to Gatwick. Because the Americans fingerprint everyone at the border now. And they couldn’t get any prints off him.’

Monk held up his hands, a mocking gesture of surrender. And for the first time I saw that the reason we could never find any prints at the crime scenes was because the flesh on his hands was as destroyed as the flesh on his face.

‘Remind me to steer clear of Las Vegas,’ he said.

‘So what was in it for you, Tom?’ I said. ‘Keeping your hand in? Spot of vigilante work? Never kicked the killing habit?’

He stopped smiling.

‘Justice,’ he said.

I tried to smile but my mouth merely twisted, and my heart began to hammer in my chest as I realised what was going to happen to me tonight.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s a joke. How can there be justice in a land where they let the bravest and the best sleep on the streets until they work up the nerve to top themselves?’

‘So you cut the throats of Hugo Buck and Adam Jones,’ I said. ‘Botched it with Piggy Philips, didn’t you?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t think he’s going to be taking double games for a while, do you?’

‘But you missed out on Captain King, didn’t you? The Taliban beat you to it.’

Monk’s mask-like face clenched with sudden fury. ‘You’re just another stupid policeman. Captain King was a brave man. A warrior. One more lion led by yet more donkeys. Same story in this country for a hundred years.’ He leaned against the door and shook his head. ‘Captain Ned King was never on my list.’

‘What about Salman Khan?’ I said. ‘Was he still alive when that big house went up in flames? Or did you break in there, open up his throat and then torch the place?’

‘One of his kids had a motorbike,’ Monk said. ‘Have you ever heard of such a thing? A child with his own little motorbike? I served my country for ten years and all I’ve got is a second-hand bicycle.’

‘What outfit were you with in Afghanistan, Tom?’

‘I told you. The Royal Green Jackets.’

‘I don’t think so. You’re too handy with a knife. Too good at creeping around, unarmed combat and covering your tracks. I reckon you were with the Special Forces Support Group. Or maybe the SAS? Or the SBS?’