The Slaughter Man (9 page)

Gane let it go. You would be amazed how much of this stuff we have to let go. Every day of our lives we let stuff go. And it is worse for the guys like Gane. I looked at the horseman and then I looked at Sean Nawkins.

‘As I say, this really doesn’t have to be difficult,’ I said. ‘But it can be – it can be as difficult as you want to make it – but it doesn’t have to be. We just need to eliminate your brother from our enquiries.’

‘Fitting him up!’ said the bearded man. ‘Those London murders! That family! Pinning it on him, they are! Because they always have to nick someone for the big ones!’

‘Dan,’ Sean Nawkins said quietly. ‘Get my brother, will you?’

The bearded man snorted, but went away.

‘Doesn’t look like you do a lot of travelling,’ Gane said. ‘Considering you’re travelling folk, I mean.’ He gazed around, nodding at the dozens of new chalets. ‘You look quite settled.’

Sean Nawkins folded his copy of the
Guardian
and spoke to DI Gane as if addressing a simple child.

‘Our people never travelled all year round,’ Nawkins said. ‘Not in this country. In our family the year began with potato planting and ended with hop picking. And in the winter months we were off the road. Do you know what they did to him?’

‘Your brother?’ I said.

He laughed with genuine pleasure. ‘Yes. Peter. My brother. Do you know what they wanted to do to him? The farmer he killed? His sons?
They were going to nut him
. The way you nut a horse. That’s what they tried to do.’

‘You mean – they tried to castrate him?’ I said.

‘That’s exactly what I mean, Detective. For touching the girl. For getting her in the family way. No way that old farmer was going to tolerate a posh-rat in his family. Know what a posh-rat is, do you? It means half-blood. People think a posh-rat is a gypsy who lives in a house. But it means that our mother was not a traveller. They hated him so much and he is not even a full-blooded traveller. They picked up Peter when the girl was away with her mother. Took him down some lane. Had his trousers off.
Going to cut his fucking balls off, they were
. But he fought them off. Big, hard lad, he was. Then he went back. And he made sure they would never do it again. Now you tell me, detectives – what the hell has any of that got to do with those murders in London?’

We were silent for a moment.

‘Does your brother ever have visitors?’ Gane said.

‘You mean outsiders who are obsessed with what he did? Fans, obsessives, stalkers, the like?’

Gane nodded. ‘Like that.’

Sean Nawkins shook his head. ‘Not any more. It’s all a long time ago. You still think of him as the Slaughter Man, don’t you? To me he was a boy with learning difficulties who made a mistake after some dreadful, terrifying provocation. To you – he’s just some old lag. To me – he’s my brother.’ He was looking over our shoulders and his voice dropped low. ‘He did the crime and he did the time and he has earned the right to die in peace.’

Then he was suddenly there.

Peter Nawkins.

The Slaughter Man.

I tried to see the violence in him. I tried to see the dark shadow of the past. But he did not look like a man who had taken the lives of four other men. He was large, much larger than the bearded horseman who walked beside him, and Peter Nawkins’ face was still a fading photocopy of the matinee-idol looks he’d had as a young man. But he seemed far older than his years. That was prison, I thought, and that was cancer. And as he wiped dirt from his hands onto his tracksuit, I believed that I could tell he was dying.

‘Been working on your allotment?’ his brother said gently.

‘Lots to plant in January,’ Peter Nawkins said, looking at Gane and me. ‘Aubergines. Leeks. Cauliflowers, of course.’

‘Peter Nawkins?’ Gane said, and we produced our warrant cards and made the introductions again.

Peter Nawkins looked at his brother.

‘I didn’t do anything, Sean.’

‘It’s all right, Peter. They just want to ask you a couple of questions and then they’ll go back to their holes in London and you can get back to the garden.’

We were drawing a crowd. They gathered between us and the car and I wondered how much of a problem this might be.

‘Where were you on New Year’s Eve, Mr Nawkins?’ Gane said.

Peter Nawkins looked at his brother.

‘Just tell them,’ Sean Nawkins said, with a hint of irritation.

‘I don’t know,’ Peter Nawkins said.

We let that sink in.

‘You don’t know where you were on New Year’s Eve?’ Gane said.

‘He was in camp,’ Sean Nawkins said. ‘I can get witnesses.’

‘Yeah, I bet you can get five hundred witnesses,’ Gane said.

The bearded horseman had acquired a little rat-faced friend.

‘Don’t get smart, black boy,’ rat-face said to the back of Gane’s head.

I smiled at him but he kept looking at the back of DI Gane’s shaven head, muttering to himself and the horseman, working himself up into a frenzy. That’s what people who were not drunk or stoned had to do – they had to work themselves up to the violence. More bystanders arrived to gawp, gossip and give advice. A woman with a baby in her arms spat on the ground behind Gane’s muddy Italian shoes.

‘I pay your wages,’ she said.

‘Were you here on New Year’s Eve?’ I said.

Peter Nawkins nodded. ‘I guess. When was that? That was last week, right?

‘Have you ever met any member of the Wood family, Mr Nawkins?’ Gane said.

‘He’s never met any member of the Wood family,’ Sean Nawkins said.

‘Please, sir, I would rather talk to your brother,’ Gane said.

The rat-faced man said, ‘And he’d rather talk to the organ grinder instead of the monkey.’

It got a laugh and I knew they did not fear us.

‘No,’ Peter Nawkins said. ‘No to all of the questions. I wasn’t there and I don’t know them and I didn’t do anything wrong.’ His breathing was becoming more shallow. He was old and he was sick but he was big enough to be a handful if he lost it. ‘
And I’m not going back to prison
.’

Gane and I looked at each other.

Something passed between us and we knew it was time to go.

By now the crowd had got bigger and there were more of them between us and the car. If anything was going to happen, it would happen over the next sixty seconds. We thanked Peter and Sean Nawkins for their time. We turned away. And then it happened.

‘You black—’

It was rat-face.

And before he had finished, Gane had picked him up by the collar of his shell suit and slammed him with maximum force against Sean Nawkins’ caravan.

I don’t think he was aiming for the window. But there was an explosion of glass as rat-face’s head went clean through the caravan’s window. I picked up the milk bottle from the table and in one smooth move I brought it down on the ground and then offered its broken end to the men who were coming for us.

‘Now it has to be difficult,’ I said.

They stopped. Rat-face was on his knees, blood all over his verminous features.

We paused, giving them their chance to make their move. But nobody stepped up, so we walked slowly to the car. The bearded horseman thought about it more than the rest. I dropped the broken milk bottle into an overflowing rubbish bin.

‘Catch you later,’ I told him.

We took our time getting in the car.

But we didn’t take our time getting away.

‘Hit it,’ Gane said.

I hit it.

For several minutes the green fields of Essex flashed past.

‘Pull over,’ Gane said.

I pulled over.

He was still shaking with adrenaline.

‘That went well,’ I said.

‘I wasn’t aiming his head at the window, Max.’

‘I figured.’

‘Sometimes they go too far.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I get it. People think the police are racist. But we just hate the people who give us the most trouble. That doesn’t make us racist,’ I said. ‘It makes us human.’

We sat in silence for a bit. The heavy traffic to London roaring by, the tension draining away.

‘What do you make of him?’ Gane said. ‘Peter Nawkins. The Slaughter Man.’

‘If he killed anyone, I reckon it would have to be personal.’

‘It was personal, wasn’t it? They tried to cut his balls off.’

I closed my eyes and steadied my breathing. It had been a busy morning.

‘That’s quite personal,’ I agreed.

‘They tried to castrate him because he fell in love with some girl he shouldn’t have fallen in love with. You can see how that would make you reach for the cattle gun. The poor simple bastard. He’s not a hitman. He never was a hitman.’

‘And it’s probably too late to start now,’ I said, sticking the X5 into drive. ‘He’s too busy dying.’

It was a beautiful apartment.

A seventh-floor penthouse in the Barbican. Light, airy, modern. Lots of white walls, not much furniture. A table for two, a white leather sofa, music system, elliptical trainer. The bare necessities, but all very tasteful. I opened doors. Just one bedroom. It was a bolthole, but a very luxurious bolthole. Brad Wood wouldn’t have got much change out of a million. Wren said there was no mortgage.

There were a couple of paintings of the wall of the living room and they were the only real splash of colour. I peered at the signature. Patrick Caulfield, they both said. They were paintings of cool modern rooms that looked a lot like this one. There was a desk where a computer had been, but forensics had taken it away.

I stepped out onto the south-facing balcony. There was a courtyard with a small lake and private gardens seven floors below and above the rooftops there was the dome of St Paul’s, looking very close, and on the far side of the river, the Tate Modern and London Eye. It was late afternoon and the sun was setting in a cloudless and freezing cold sky, the brilliant blue streaked with rivers of red.

I couldn’t see it from here but Smithfield meat market and our loft was almost next door, just the other side of Aldersgate. We were practically neighbours.

The doorbell rang. I answered it. It was young woman in her mid-twenties, pretty and short and a shade too blonde to be believed, slowly smiling as if we shared an innocent secret.

‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘May I come in?’

Her English was pretty good, but not so good that it wasn’t charming. I stood aside and she walked in, taking her time, not sure which way to turn. So it was her first time here too. She was wearing shiny black heels, very high, and they were the kind with the red soles. Christian Louboutin. My wife had liked those shoes, too. Ex-wife, I mean.

‘This is such a cool area,’ she said.

‘It used to be Cripplegate,’ I said. ‘One of the oldest parts of London.’

She looked surprised. ‘Cripplegate? That’s a funny name.’

‘From Roman times,’ I said. ‘It was a gate in the city wall. Then in the war, the Germans bombed it flat.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘I’m sure it wasn’t you personally.’

‘Could have been my grandfather. Perhaps both my grandfathers. Have you lived in the area long?’

I thought about it. I had been single and married and divorced in this area. I had been childless and a father here. I’d had a dog and I’d had no dog.

‘For years,’ I said, but by then she had wandered off.

She was making herself at home. I heard water running in the bathroom. I went back out to the balcony. If you get up high enough, I thought, then London has the greatest sunsets in the world.

‘Sir?’ she said behind me.

She was still wearing her Christian Louboutin shoes but that was all. She had a dancer’s body – small-breasted, not tall although the heels gave her some height, but with strong quad muscles in her thighs and what looked like a very hard abdomen, the kind of stomach you can’t get without ten thousand sit-ups.

As I wondered what kind of dancer she had been she held her hands up, palms facing me, as if we had to decide something very soon.

‘And should I keep my shoes on, Mr Wood?’ she asked me.

My new friend – Claudia – was on the edge of tears from the Barbican all the way to Gerrard Street in Chinatown. I parked the X5 in the big multi-storey behind the fire station and looked at her over the bonnet. She suddenly seemed very young.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Claudia.’ She stared at me, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. ‘You haven’t done anything wrong,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to be scared of me.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s not you I’m scared of.’

We walked through the great gate at the start of Gerrard Street. Chinese New Year was coming soon and thousands of red lanterns filled the evening sky. The smell of roast duck reached us and made me feel giddy with hunger.

‘So you were a dancer?’ I said.

‘How did you know?’

‘Wild guess. What kind of a dancer were you?’

She almost laughed. ‘I’ve been every kind of dancer there is,’ she said. ‘This is the place.’

We were halfway down Gerrard Street, between a restaurant where Cantonese in their late teens and twenties were queuing for a table and a Chinese medicine shop where two middle-aged women in white lab coats were playing mah-jong. There was a code box by the door and a buzzer. Claudia went to press the buzzer. I stopped her.

‘You know the code?’ I said.

She thought about lying and decided against it. ‘Yes.’

‘Then use the code,’ I said.

She tapped in four numbers and the door opened. We went up a narrow flight of stairs. A young black man was leaning against the wall on the landing, fiddling with his phone. He looked at me with disbelief as he got out of his seat.

‘Claudia,’ he said. ‘What’s he doing here?’ He placed a hand on my chest. ‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘Looking for trouble, are you?’

I smiled pleasantly. ‘I am the trouble,’ I said.

He was smart enough to let me pass.

I opened the only door on the landing and stepped into a small white room where a woman of about thirty was sitting behind a desk, staring at the biggest iMac I had ever seen. She wasn’t Chinese but she looked as if she had some Asian blood and she was peering at me from behind black-rimmed spectacles. The room was perfumed by a scented candle, probably in an effort to disguise the smell of roasting duck that drifted up from downstairs.