The Murder Bag (7 page)

The uniformed officer had fallen into step beside me. He cleared his throat nervously.

‘It’s PC Greene, sir,’ he said. ‘PC Billy Greene? From that morning at the bank? You told me to breathe. When I came over all funny.’

I looked at him properly and remembered the young officer who was good for nothing after finding the body.

‘PC Greene,’ I said. ‘You don’t call me
sir
just because I’m in plain clothes.’ I was wearing my black Paul Smith wedding suit. Savile Row being still a bit beyond my pay grade. ‘I’m a detective constable – DC Wolfe. Exactly the same rank as you. You can call me Wolfe. You can call me Max. You can call me pretty much whatever you like. But if you call me
sir
then you make both of us look stupid. You do know that a DC has exactly the same powers and authority as a uniformed PC, don’t you?’

He looked embarrassed. ‘Of course, sir— Max, er, DC Wolfe. But anyway, I didn’t thank you. A lot of them were laughing at me for wimping out that day. You helped. It definitely helps. The breathing.’

‘You’re not on the street any more?’

His white face flushed red. ‘They’ve put me on desk duties. Reassigned. A canteen cowboy.’ He laughed miserably. ‘They think I fell to bits.’

I grimaced. ‘That’s a bit hard.’

Greene gestured at the knives, changing the subject. ‘See what you’re looking for?’

‘Not yet.’

I walked between the tables, looking at the knives in their careful lines. Throwing knives. Hunting knives. Bowie knives. Knives so small and thin they could fit into a credit card holder. Samurai swords. Carpet cutters. Gurkha kukris. Rust-dappled Stanley knives. And the height of knife fashion – compact semi-automatic folding knives, with titanium handles and stainless steel blades, knives that whipped out like a gunslinger drawing his Colt 45.

I picked one up and looked at it in my hand.

‘We’re getting a lot of those,’ Greene said. ‘Gang members like them. You think it might be something like that?’

‘I don’t see how it can be,’ I said, replacing the knife. ‘It’s not long enough. I figure what I’m looking for is about twelve inches long. Most of it blade. It has to be a blade that’s long and thin and I guess double-edged. Something that’s made to cut throats.’

He swallowed hard. ‘This is about Bob the Butcher, isn’t it?’

‘Who
is
Bob the Butcher?’

He fetched his laptop and found the page. A newspaper’s website.

BOB THE BUTCHER
STALKS SCARED CITY BOYS

by Scarlet Bush

Crime correspondent

Champagne-swilling City boys are living in mortal terror after a senior detective revealed that the death of investment banker Hugo Buck was a hate crime.

‘Yes, Bob the Butcher murdering that innocent young banker was a hate crime,’ confirmed Detective Constable Max Wolfe. ‘But then all murder is a hate crime.’

In the bars all over the financial district, high-flying young City boys busy blowing their bonuses are now living in abject terror of Bob the Butcher.

‘It’s terrible to think that Bob the Butcher is targeting bankers,’ said Bruno Mancini in fashionable Cheapside watering hole The Lucky Cripple. ‘What’s wrong with being rich? We work hard for our success.’

I cursed under my breath. ‘I didn’t say any of that,’ I said, then glanced at the piece again. ‘Well, maybe just a bit of it.’

There was a small photograph next to the article. It was the young woman outside the flat in Regent’s Park. I wasn’t sure what this meant, but I knew it wasn’t good. The one good thing was that she had not connected the murder of Hugo Buck with the unknown man in the alley. But it was the only good thing.

I carried on walking between the tables, somehow knowing that the knife I was looking for would not be found here.

‘Thanks for your help, Billy. I’m sorry they took you off the street.’

He brightened. ‘It’s actually not so bad. I like the nights. And you get a sense of the history down here. Have you got a minute? Have a look at this.’

Greene opened the door to a storage room. It was as small and cluttered as an attic that had been abandoned around the time the Beatles were playing on a rooftop at the other end of Savile Row.

‘It’s full of stuff that nobody knows what to do with,’ Greene said. ‘It’s not evidence so they can’t bag it. It’s not junk so they can’t chuck it out. And it’s not important enough to be in a museum. I think they’ve all just forgotten about it. Have a look, DC Wolfe.’

We stepped into the dusty room and I looked around in disbelief. There was a stovepipe hat, half eaten away by moths and mould. Cardboard boxes overflowing with old-fashioned rubber truncheons. A collapsed stack of elderly riot shields. Metropolitan Police baseball caps that had never quite caught on. A rack of heavyweight Kevlar jackets, nothing like the wafer-thin stab-proof numbers that we had these days. And there were other bits and pieces of uniform – helmets with the badge gone, jackets with their brass buttons missing, abandoned kit that had to be twenty, fifty, a hundred years old. Police junk that nobody quite had the heart or the energy or the permission to chuck away.

So they stuck it in here.

‘Have you heard of the Black Museum?’ Greene said. ‘It’s in New Scotland Yard. It’s closed to the public. This is just like the Black Museum.’

I smiled. ‘This is a bit more of a mess than the Black Museum. It’s true that the Black Museum has a lot of old kit. Guns. Knives. Walking sticks that turn into swords. Umbrellas that turn into guns. They’ve got a sword that turns into a knife called a Cop Killer. But the Black Museum is not really a museum at all. It’s more of a classroom. A training aid.’

Greene’s eyes were wide. ‘You’ve seen it?’

I nodded. ‘Part of my training. They’ve got a display about Met officers killed in the line of duty. They show you around the Black Museum so that it doesn’t happen to you.’

Greene took a deep breath and let it out slowly as he turned to point at a dusty shelf in the darkest corner of that strange little room.

‘Look,’ he said.

‘I can’t see anything,’ I said, taking a step closer to where he was indicating.

And then I saw it.

It was an ancient leather bag sitting all by itself on a shelf tangled with cobwebs. The dark brown cowhide was worn and cracked. The brass hardware and locks were blackened with rust. Greene lifted it up for my inspection and at the back of the shelf a spider scuttled away as if late for an urgent appointment.

‘It looks like an old doctor’s bag,’ I said.

‘It’s a Gladstone bag,’ Greene said. ‘What makes this one special is that it’s a Murder Bag. I think it’s one of the originals. Did you ever hear of Murder Bags?’

I shook my head.

‘Murder Bags were where modern detective work began,’ he explained. ‘They had two of them in the Yard from 1925. Always packed and ready to go. They contained rubber gloves, magnifying glasses, containers for holding blood, test tubes for fingerprinting, all sorts of gear. The Murder Bags came in when Sir Bernard Spilsbury saw a detective handling a dismembered body with his bare hands. They were the start of modern homicide investigation.’ He looked at me shyly. ‘What you do.’

He gently replaced the ruined old bag as if it was priceless. ‘The history,’ he said. ‘I love all the history.’

‘One thing I don’t understand,’ I said.

Greene looked at me.

‘Your colleague – the woman PC – told me that the dead banker was your first dead body.’

‘PC Wren,’ he said. ‘Edie. Yes.’

‘But that can’t be true,’ I said. ‘How long have you been in uniform, Greene?’

‘Six years.’

‘You must have seen more dead bodies than me,’ I said. ‘You must have averaged a dead person every day. Motorists who went through their windscreens while sending a text. Cyclists who got hit by a bus. Pedestrians who got hit by the cyclists and the motorists.’ I shook my head. ‘I can’t believe that Hugo Buck was your first dead body.’

Greene thought about it.

‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen a lot of dead people. But what Edie— what PC Wren and I found that morning, on the floor of that man’s office, it wasn’t rotten luck or fate or stupidity. It didn’t happen because somebody was drunk or stoned or sending a text message. What happened to that man, that banker, was the most deliberate thing in the world. It felt like a violation of everything. It’s not like the daily slaughter on the roads. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s just
different
, isn’t it?’

I nodded. ‘You’re right. Murder’s different.’

I wake too soon.

It is the sharp point of the night – too late to go back to sleep, too early to get up.

I slip out of bed and go to the window. The lights are blazing in the meat market. I come back and sit on the bed and I still haven’t looked at the alarm clock. It feels like catching the eye of a mad man.

And then I look.

03:50

I walk across to the big cupboard built into the wall and push the double doors. They spring open, and the collection of belts and necklaces hanging on the back of the door jangle softly in the dark.

There are shoes on the left-hand side. All kinds of women’s shoes. Strappy sandals and spike heels. On the right are stacks of drawers. Knitwear. Carefully folded jeans that will never be worn again.

And directly in front of me there are all the hangers with her dresses and skirts and shirts and jackets and tops. Lots of white cotton but splashes of colour too, although you can’t see it in this light. But there are orange silks and blue batik and gauzy things spangled with silver. Soft as a feather, light as a sigh.

I spread my arms wide and sort of gently fall against it, pressing my face into her clothes, her essence, the old life.

I breathe her in.

And then I sleep.

5

THE CHILDREN HAD
painted their families. An entire wall in the classroom was covered with pictures of brightly coloured stick figures. At five they were starting to make sense of the world and their place in it.

The stick-figure mothers had long flowing hair, squiggly lines of black, brown and yellow, and some of them held a sausage-shaped package with a circle for its head – a baby brother or sister. The fathers were mostly bigger stick-insect figures, and nearly all of them carried brown squares and rectangles – briefcases. All of the pictures seemed to be full of life, crowded with parents, siblings, stick figures of assorted shapes and sizes.

Apart from Scout’s.

‘Look, that’s my one,’ she said.

How could I miss it?

In Scout’s picture there was just an unsmiling stick-figure daddy with no briefcase, a little stick-figure girl with huge brown eyes, and at our feet a small red four-legged daub – Stan.

We had left the dog at home that morning, to his high-pitched howls of rage and despair, because once a month the parents were allowed into the classroom to look at the children’s work. It was meant to be a happy time. But I looked at her picture as parents and children jostled around us and I did not know what to say.

Most of the dads were dressed in suits and ties and carrying briefcases, while the mothers were either dressed for the office or for exercise, and some of the ones who were dressed for the gym were carrying babies or shepherding toddlers. So there was definitely a social realism about the pictures.

A young teacher, a blonde New Zealander, Miss Davies, watched us all with a kindly smile.

‘Do you like it?’ Scout said, disturbed by my silence.

‘I love it,’ I said.

The truth was it tore at my heart. The surrounding whiteness in Scout’s picture seemed to overwhelm the three little figures. And I felt it again, as I knew I would feel it for ever. The completeness of other families, and the shattered nature of what was left of ours.

I placed my hand on Scout’s shoulder and she looked up at me with her mother’s eyes.

‘Good work, Scout,’ I said.

‘Miss Davies said just family,’ she said and, suddenly losing interest, wandered off to her desk to prepare for the first lesson.

It was time to go. Mothers and fathers were kissing their children goodbye and exchanging a few smiley words with the teacher.

But I stood there until the bell went, looking up at Scout’s picture of our family, surrounded by all that empty white space.

Stan didn’t like being left at home. He had upended his water dish, torn the puppy pad in his cage to shreds, and for an encore climbed on to the coffee table and contemptuously batted away the mouse of my laptop, so it dangled just above the floorboards like a hanging man.

We stared at each other.

A Cavalier would not have been my first choice for a dog. Or even my fifth or sixth choice. I would have gone for something larger. A Labrador or a Golden Retriever. A German Shepherd. Stan considered me with his bulging eyes, absent-mindedly gnawing on a TV cable as I cleaned up his mess. Something larger and smarter, I thought.

But Scout had done her research and she knew what she wanted. Stan was her dog.

And even if he had burned the place down, I couldn’t be angry with him today. Without Stan in our lives all the white space around us might have swallowed us alive.

It was still early as Stan and I cut through Charterhouse Square on our way home from our walk. Mallory would be alone up in MIR-1, drinking his tea and figuring. Stan and I still had some time together before I put him in the custody of Mrs Murphy and went to work.

He was squatting for his wet when I became aware of the men on a bench. Three of them. Still up from last night. We got a lot of committed drinkers round our way, drawn by the all-night pubs surrounding Smithfield meat market. Two pasty-faced white boys in cheap grey sports gear, and an Asian man, older and larger, wearing a T-shirt despite the early morning chill. A weightlifter. He was the one who made a kissing noise at my dog.