The Murder Bag
NEW YEAR’S DAY was big and blue and freezing cold. The single shot from the block of flats ripped the day apart.
I threw myself down behind the nearest car, hitting the ground hard, my palms studding with gravel, my face slick with sweat that had nothing to do with the weather.
Every gunshot is fired in anger. This one was full of murder. It cracked open the cloudless sky and left no space inside me for anything but raw terror. For long moments I lay very still, trying to get my breath back. Then I got up off my knees, pressing my back hard against the bright blue and yellow of an Armed Response Vehicle. My heart was hammering but my breathing was coming back.
I looked around.
SCO19 were already on their feet, staring up at the flats in their PASGT combat helmets, black leather gloves hefting Heckler & Koch assault rifles. Among them there were uniformed officers and plain-clothes detectives like me. All of us keeping our bodies tucked behind the ARVs and the green-and-yellow Rapid Response Vehicles. Glock 9mm pistols were slipped from thigh holsters.
Close by, I heard a woman curse. She was small, blonde, somewhere in her late thirties. Young but not a kid. DCI Pat Whitestone. My boss. She was wearing a sweater with a reindeer on it. A Christmas present. Nobody chooses to own a reindeer jumper. Her son, I thought. The kid’s idea of a joke. She pushed her spectacles further up her nose.
‘Officer down!’ she shouted. ‘Gut wound!’
I looked out from behind the car and I saw the uniformed officer lying on her back in the middle of the street, calling for help. Clutching her belly. Crying out to the perfect blue sky.
‘Please God … please Jesus …’
How long since the shot? Thirty seconds? That’s a long time with a bullet in your gut. That’s a lifetime.
There is a reason why most gut-shot wounds are fatal but most gut-stab wounds are not. A blade inflicts its damage to one confined area, but a bullet rattles around, destroying everything that gets in its way. If a knife misses an artery and the bowel, and they can get you to an anaesthesiologist and a surgeon fast enough, and if you can avoid infection – even though most villains are not considerate enough to sterilise their knives before they stab you – then you have a good chance of surviving.
But a bullet to the gut is catastrophic for the body. Bullets clatter around in that microsecond, annihilating multiple organs. The small intestine, the lower intestine, the liver, the spleen and, worst of all, the aorta, the main artery, from which all the other arteries flow. Rip the aorta and you bleed out fast.
Take a knife wound to the gut and, unless you are very unlucky, you will go home to your family. Take a bullet in the gut and you will probably never see them again, no matter what the rest of your luck is like.
A knife wound to the gut and you call for help.
A bullet in the gut and you call for God.
I heard another muttered curse and then Whitestone was up and running towards the officer in the road, a small woman in a reindeer jumper, bent almost double, the tip of an index finger pressed against the bridge of her glasses.
I took in a breath and I went after her, my head down, every muscle in my body steeled for the second shot.
We crouched beside the fallen officer, Whitestone applying direct pressure to the wound, her hands on the officer’s stomach, trying to stem the blood.
My mind scrambled to remember the five critical factors for treating a bullet wound. A, B, C, D, E, they tell you in training. Check Airways, Breathing, Circulation, Disability – meaning damage to the spinal cord or neck – and Exposure – meaning look for the exit wound, and check to see if there are other wounds. But we were already beyond all of that. The blood flowed and stained the officer’s jacket a darker blue. I saw the stain grow black.
‘Stay with us, darling,’ Whitestone said, her voice soft and gentle, like a mother to a child, her hands pressing down hard, already covered with blood.
The officer was very young. One of those idealistic young kids who join the Met to make the world a better place.
Her face was drained white by shock.
Shock from the loss of blood, shock from the trauma of the gunshot. I noticed a small engagement ring on the third finger of her left hand.
She died with an audible gasp and a bubble of blood. I saw Whitestone’s eyes shine with tears and her mouth set in a line of pure fury.
We looked up at the balcony.
And the man was there.
The man who had decided at some point on New Year’s Day that he was going to kill his entire family. That’s what the call to 999 had said. That was his plan. That’s what the neighbour heard him screaming through the wall before the neighbour gathered up his own family and ran for his life.
The man on the balcony was holding his rifle. Some kind of black hunting rifle. There was a laser light on it, a sharp green light for sighting that was the same bright fuzzy colour as Luke Skywalker’s light sabre. It looked like a toy. But it wasn’t a toy. I saw the green light trace across the ground – the grass in front of the flats, the tarmac of the road – and stop when it reached us.
We were not moving. Everything had stopped. The light settled on me, and then on Whitestone. As if it could not decide between us.
‘She’s gone, Pat,’ I said.
‘I know,’ Whitestone said.
She looked back at the vehicles with their bright markings, the blocks of blue and yellow of the ARVs and the green and yellow of the RRVs. Between them I could see the dull metallic sheen on Glocks and Heckler & Kochs, the medieval curve of the combat helmets, the faces drawn tight with adrenaline.
Whitestone was shouting something at them. The green laser sight on the black hunting rifle played across the reindeer on her sweater and settled there.
‘Put him down!’ she said.
Then I heard their voices.
‘I have the trigger!’ somebody said.
But there was no shot.
And I thought of the palaver that came with every discharged firearm. The automatic suspension and then every shot endlessly analysed, pored over, suspected. The prospect of jail and the dole queue. No wonder they were scared to shoot.
But this was not the reason for holding fire.
When I looked back at the balcony I saw that the man was no longer alone. A woman was with him. She was wearing some kind of headscarf, although from this distance I could not tell if it was faith or fashion.
He was calling her names. He was calling her all the names that kind of man always call women. Then he seemed to shove her back and pick up something from the ground. Holding it by the scruff of the neck. Shaking it.
A child. A toddler of two or less. From where we were kneeling with the dead officer I could see the chubby look that they all get at that age. The kid squirmed like a tortured animal as the man held it over the edge of the balcony.
Four floors up.
Nothing but concrete below.
The man was shouting something. The woman was weeping by his side and without looking at her he struck her in the face with the butt of the black hunting rifle. She stumbled backwards.
Then the child was suddenly falling.
The woman screamed.
‘Take the shot!’ someone shouted.
There was a single crack that sounded very close to the back of my head and immediately a spurt of blood came from a hole in the neck of the man on the balcony. He did not fall. He staggered backwards and smashed though the glass window behind the balcony, and as he disappeared from view I thought how fragile we all are, how very easy to break, how always so close to ruin.
And then I was running, my shoes slipping on grass slick with ice, the call for God’s help coming unbidden from my lips, holding out my arms for the falling child.
But the distance between us was too great, and there was never enough time, and the child was always falling.
THE MEAT MARKET of Smithfield was silent.
I walked under the market’s great arch, shivering in the early death of New Year’s Day, past the line of old red telephone boxes and the plaque marking the spot where they killed William Wallace. Not yet four in the afternoon, and the sun was already going down behind the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral.
There was a strip of shops on the far side of the square. They were all closed for the holiday but in the flat above one of them, music was playing. Fiddles and flutes and drums played at a mad pace. A song about a girl called Sally MacLennane. Irish music. Happy music. Probably The Pogues, I thought. On the front of the darkened store the painted words were worn by time.
MURPHY & SON
Domestic and Commercial Plumbing and Heating
‘Trustworthy’ and ‘Reliable’
I went round the back of the shop and up a flight of stairs to the flats. A few of the residents had already thrown out their Christmas tree, but they were still celebrating at the Murphys. It took them a while to hear me ringing the bell, what with Shane MacGowan singing about his Sally MacLennane and the shouts of the adults and children inside.
My daughter Scout answered the door. Five years old and breathless. Rosy cheeked. Having the time of her life. There was a little red-haired girl with her, Shavon, maybe a year younger, and the girl’s kid brother, Damon, plus a ruby-coloured Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, panting with excitement. Our dog Stan, who had a bandy-legged black mongrel pup I hadn’t seen before shyly sniffing behind him.
‘We don’t have to go yet, do we?’ Scout said by way of a greeting.
‘And who’s this?’ I said, looking at the mongrel, by way of a response.
‘This is Biscuit,’ said Shavon.
‘You’ll have a sausage roll,’ Mrs Murphy predicated, appearing behind her.
Scout dashed off with her friend, trailing kid brother and dogs behind them. Mrs Murphy took me inside where I was greeted enthusiastically by her husband, Big Mikey – a thin, dapper man with silver hair and a neat moustache, not very big at all – and their son, Little Mikey – a black-haired giant of a lad around thirty, nothing little about him. Little Mikey’s wife Siobhan was nursing a new baby boy in blue. Baby Mikey.
The Christmas tree twinkled and shone. Kirsty MacColl and Shane MacGowan were telling their fairytale of New York. I was given a plate of sausage rolls and a beer. I stared at the bottle of beer as if I had never seen one before.
‘Too late in the day for coffee,’ Mrs Murphy said. ‘You’ll need your sleep.’
I nodded and mumbled my thanks to the Murphys for looking after Scout and as one they raised their voices in protest, telling me that she was no trouble, she was a joy and company for the kids. They were the kindest people I had ever met.
I suppose they were a small family. Defying all the Irish Catholic stereotypes, Little Mikey was an only child. But the three generations of Mikeys seemed like a mighty tribe compared to me, Scout and Stan.
The Murphys were a family of self-employed plumbers and I saw that, even today, they weren’t really on holiday. Big Mikey was consulting his iPad to see when they could fit in a woman from Barnet with a burst pipe, while Little Mikey talked to a man in Camden with a broken boiler. And when my phone began to vibrate I knew that my own working day was not yet over.
I looked at the message and it was bad. A muscle by my left eye began to pulse. I placed my hand over it to hide it from the Murphys.
Big Mikey and Little Mikey were looking at me with sympathy.
‘The holidays,’ Mrs Murphy said. ‘Busy time.’
The big house stood in a gated community in Highgate.
The Garden, it said on the gate.
This was London’s highest point, the far north of London’s money belt, and up here the air was fresh and clean and sweet. I stood outside the electronic gates with my warrant card in my hand and inhaled a draught of air that was almost Alpine.
A uniformed officer signed me in on the perimeter pad. The electronic gates began to open. DC Edie Wren was walking towards me on high heels. Her red hair was up, and she looked like she had been on her way to a dinner date when she got the call.
I took another look at the gated community. ‘Are these houses all lock-up-and-leave-thems?’
Now that London had more billionaires than any city in the world, we were seeing a lot of high-end property that was bought and then left empty, as its value increased by millions.
The rich always had somewhere else to go.
‘Some of them are lock-up-and-leaves, but not our one,’ Wren said. ‘It’s a family, Max.’ She hesitated for a moment, as if she could not quite believe it. ‘Parents. Two teenage children. It’s very slick. Looks like they’ve been executed.’
The gates closed behind us.
There were six large houses in the complex. Our tape was up outside one of them and beyond it the SOCOs were pulling on their white protective suits and uniformed officers stamped their feet for warmth. The winter darkness was really closing in now and the blue lights of our cars pierced the gloom.
Beyond the high walls of the gated community I could see what appeared to be a wild green forest stretching off into the distance. But among the trees and the mad tangle of undergrowth there were huge crosses and stone angels and glimpses of ancient vaults. It was a graveyard that had been claimed by nature.
Highgate Cemetery.
Uniformed officers were knocking on the doors of the other houses where Christmas lights twinkled in the windows. In the middle of a road clogged by our cars a private security guard was being interviewed by a young black detective: DI Curtis Gane. He saw me and nodded and placed a hand on the guard’s shoulder. The man was slack-jawed with shock. He was wearing no shoes.
‘The guard called it in,’ Wren said. ‘He was doing his rounds when he saw the front door was open and he went inside.’
‘And walked all the way through the house,’ I said.
‘Nothing we can do about that,’ she said. ‘Forensics have got his size tens and it’s easy enough to eliminate.’ She indicated the electronic gates. ‘He reckons nobody comes in without him knowing.’
‘Then they came from the back,’ I said. ‘On the far side of the wall is Highgate West Cemetery.’
‘Where Karl Marx is, right?’
‘Marx is in the Highgate East Cemetery. The other side of Swain’s Lane, the part that’s open to the public. The far side of this wall is the West Cemetery and it’s closed to the public. They only open it up for the odd guided tour and funerals.’
Wren looked doubtfully at the graveyard in a forest. In the twilight all you could see were the stone angels bowing their heads in the darkness.
‘They’re still burying people in there?’
I nodded. ‘That’s the way I would come,’ I said, snapping on a pair of protective gloves.
We showed our warrant cards at the tape and I signed in again. It was very early in our initial response and the SOCOs had not yet gone inside. They were ready to work, white-coated and blue-gloved in their bunny suits, but they had to wait for the Senior Investigating Officer to view the scene and for the Crime Scene Photographer to record it – untouched, pristine, as horribly messed up as we first found it. Because once we all went inside, it would never look that way again.
There was the blurred electronic chatter of the digital radios, and in the distance the sound of more Rapid Response Vehicles rushing to the scene, their sirens splitting the air and their spinners turning the night blue. They would all have to wait for DCI Pat Whitestone to take that crucial first look.
Just before we reached the open front door where two uniformed officers were waiting, Wren stopped.
‘Look,’ she said.
A wooden pole had been shoved deep into some bushes. It was maybe ten feet long, made out of bamboo with an S-shaped piece of silver metal at one end. A butcher’s hook. It resembled a primitive fishing rod. And that’s what we called this popular form of breaking and entering.
‘Fishing,’ Wren said. ‘Must be how he gained access.’ She turned to call to one of the SOCOs. ‘Can we get this grabbed and bagged, please?’
The bamboo pole must have been slipped through the letterbox and the butcher’s hook had helped itself to a set of front-door keys that had been casually tossed by the door.
‘Everybody thinks they’re safe,’ I said, shaking my head.
Inside, the smell of petrol was overwhelming.
White spotlights lit a long white hallway leading to a massive, two-storey atrium, a great open space with a wall of glass at the back. Someone had tried to set it on fire. Two senior fire officers were inspecting a blackened patch that totally covered one high wall and half the floor of a kitchen and dining area. There was a dinner table with places for twelve people. Beyond the glass wall there was only blackness.
DCI Whitestone was standing above a half-naked body. The corpse was a teenage boy with a single entry wound in the centre of his forehead. His legs splayed at awkward angles and his eyes were still open.
‘Max,’ Whitestone said quietly, taking off her glasses and rubbing her eyes. It had been a hard day and I saw the strain of it in her face. But she sounded calm, professional, ready to go to work. ‘What do you think did that?’ she asked me. ‘Nine millimetre?’
The boy looked as though he had been shot at point-blank range.
‘Looks like it,’ I said. The floor was polished hard wood and I was expecting to see a telltale gold cylinder of a cartridge casing.
‘I don’t see any casings,’ I said.
‘There are no casings,’ Whitestone said, and she was silent as we thought about that.
Taking the time to collect the casings was impressive.
‘What happened to his legs?’ Gane said. ‘Looks like somebody hit him with a sledgehammer.’
‘Or a car,’ said Edie Wren, peering closer at the boy. ‘I think he could have been outside. Looks like gravel on his arms and hands.’
There was a dog basket in one corner. It was for a big dog and on the back of it was stitched, MY NAME IS BUDDY.
‘What happened to the dog?’ I said.
Gane erupted.
‘The dog?’ he said. ‘You’re worried about the dog? Up to our knees in a Charles Manson bloodbath and you’re worried about the dog?’
I couldn’t explain it to Gane. The dog was part of this family too.
‘Anybody check on the goldfish?’ Gane said. ‘How’s the hamster doing? Get Hammy’s pulse, will you, Wolfe? And somebody check the budgie.’
‘All right,’ Whitestone said, silencing him. ‘Let’s go upstairs and see the rest of it.’
The giant glass wall suddenly burst into light.
The SOCOs had turned on their arc lights out the back.
Outside was a stone garden, swirls of pebbles around rocks, like a lake made of gravel. A Japanese garden. There was a temple bell in the centre of it all, a green bell stained with the weather of centuries, and it tolled as it moved with the breeze.
I did not move for a moment, stilled by the presence of all that unexpected beauty. There was a dog, a Golden Retriever, in one corner of the garden. He looked as though he was sleeping. But I knew he wasn’t.
When I turned away Whitestone, Gane and Wren had already gone upstairs.
As I followed them I saw that there were photographs all over the wall of the staircase. Tasteful black-and-white photos mounted inside slim black frames. They were photographs of the family that had lived in this beautiful house.
And I saw that they had been the perfect family.
I felt I could tell their story from the photographs. The mother and father looked as though they had married young and been fit and happy and in love for all their lives.
The man was big, athletic, with a look of mild amusement. A youthful mid-forties. The woman, perhaps ten years younger, was stunning, and vaguely familiar. She looked like Grace Kelly – she had exactly the kind of beauty that looks like a freak of nature.
If they had problems, then they were beyond my imagination. They had health, money and each other. And they had two children, a boy and a girl, and I watched them grow as I ascended the staircase.
They were good-looking, sporty kids. There was a shot of the girl on a hockey field aged maybe twelve, her gumshield showing orange in her serious face. And the boy, her brother, joyously holding up a cup with his football team. It was hard to equate that smiling child with the corpse downstairs.
Near the top of the stairs the boy and the girl were in their middle teens, almost a young man and a young woman, and I saw that the boy was slightly older than the girl but not by much more than a year. There was a photograph of the family together under a Christmas tree. Another photograph at a restaurant on a beach. In the later pictures there was a Golden Retriever who looked like he was laughing at his good fortune to find himself with this perfect family. The dog who now lay in the Japanese garden. And in the final photograph the woman who looked like Grace Kelly was holding a child.
A boy. About four. I guessed that his arrival had been unexpected. Their lives were full. The photograph wall was full. You could imagine that they did not think they would have any more children. Then the boy had come along and put a seal on all their happiness. Yes, he looked about four.
A year younger than Scout, I thought.
The Crime Scene Photographer came down the stairs.
I touched his arm.
‘You absolutely sure there’s nobody left alive?’ I said.
‘The Divisional Surgeon hasn’t arrived yet so death hasn’t been officially pronounced. But I’ve been up there. And all we’ve got in here is bodies, sir. Sorry.’
Something rose inside me and I choked it back down.
An entire family.
Gane was right. A Charles Manson bloodbath.
There was another body on the landing. The girl, all dressed up for New Year’s Eve, lying on her side. I could not see an entry wound but around her throat there was what looked like a necklace made of blood. I heard voices at the far end of the hall, coming from the master bedroom. I moved towards it, steeling myself for what was inside.
The woman who looked like Grace Kelly was in bed, a veil of blonde hair over her face. The pillow she lay on was stained but I could not see an entry wound. Like her daughter, she appeared to have been killed with a single shot to the back of the head.
‘Looks like it was the father they came for,’ Whitestone said.
The man’s naked body was propped up against a dresser. He had been shot twice, once in each eye, at point-blank range and he stared at us with empty sockets. I inhaled deeply, forcing myself to look at the holes of ruined pulp. A halo of blood and brains was splashed over the white dressing table.
‘Looks like it,’ Gane said. ‘They came for the father then decided to take out the family. The woman. The girl. The boy. They’ve been executed. But the father – that was personal.’
The four of us stood there like mourners.
‘What about the little boy?’ I said.
The silence grew like something that could kill you.
‘What little boy?’ Whitestone said.
The Specialist Search Team were there in fifteen minutes.
They are part of SO20, the Counter Terrorism Protective Security Command. They collect evidence after a terrorist attack and they clear an area before a state visit or major ceremonial event. They also work with Homicide.
While we were waiting for them to arrive we searched in every corner of that house for a small broken body. Then the SST methodically tore it apart.
They pulled up carpets, ripped up floorboards and punched holes in walls. They looked in the attic and in the recycling bins and in the drains. They looked in the oven and in the microwave and in the washing machine. And when they had done all of that and found nothing, they went out to the Japanese garden and searched under the neat grey stones. Then they went over the wall and into Highgate Cemetery.
The sun did not rise until just before eight a.m. And when it did, the men and women of the Specialist Search Team were still on their hands and knees, crawling inch by inch across the green hills of Highgate Cemetery. Hours before then DCI Whitestone had sent out the alert that a child was missing.
But as the sun came up our people still crawled across the graveyard, their fingers reaching in ancient tangles of ivy, their torches shining inside dusty crypts, watched from the wild by the angels with empty faces.
THE MISSING BOY smiled shyly down at us from the wall of Major Incident Room Two.
Missing children always smile in their pictures. That is what rips up your heart, those childish smiles of joy captured on some beach holiday or birthday party, with nobody ever dreaming what is waiting down the line.
‘You all know how it works,’ DCI Whitestone said. ‘We find him quickly …’
She left the rest of it unsaid because we knew it by heart.
Or we never find him at all.
This cruel fact had been hammered into us since our training days. All the statistics said that a child is found quickly or it’s likely that they will never be found alive. If we didn’t find the boy within twenty-four hours – seven days at the outside – then if we ever found him at all his body would probably be stuffed into an abandoned suitcase or tossed on a skip or at the bottom of a river or buried in a shallow grave. When a child has been missing for over a week, happy endings are hard to find.
We had come straight into 27 Savile Row from spending the night at the house on the hill.
And the smiling little boy had a name now.
Bradley Wood.
Bradley was four years old and he had a wonky, lopsided smile. At some point in the night, the Divisional Surgeon had officially pronounced that his mother and his father and his sister and his brother were all dead. And as I looked at Bradley Wood’s smiling face I wondered what kind of life we would be bringing him back to with his family gone.
I bolted another triple espresso and pushed the thought aside.
Find him first.
He held a favourite toy in his small fist. An eight-inch plastic figure of a little man with a white shirt, black waistcoat and high boots. I looked closer and recognised Han Solo, the cocky captain of the Millennium Falcon.
‘Where are we with the victims?’ DCI Whitestone said, taking off her glasses and giving them a brief polish with a crumpled Caffè Nero paper napkin. She looked exhausted. We were all exhausted. Our Murder Investigation Team had spent the night at the crime scene and then come straight into 27 Savile Row – West End Central – at dawn, working through the morning on identifying the dead. Now it was early afternoon and the pale winter sun was already sinking over the rooftops of Mayfair.
‘This is the Wood family,’ I said, hitting a key on my laptop. ‘The victims.’
There was a huge HD TV screen on the wall of MIR-2 and it was suddenly filled with one of the family photographs that I had first seen on the staircase of the Wood family home.
They smiled at us. The good-looking woman and man. Their two teenage children. Wealthy, athletic, beautiful. In the photograph they were all huddled up and laughing at some ski resort with baby Bradley at their centre.
‘The father, Brad, was a sports agent. The mother, Mary, she was a housewife. The boy is Marlon, fifteen, and the girl is Piper, fourteen. They were both at private schools in Hampstead. And then there’s Bradley.’
Whitestone shook her head. ‘Why do I feel like I know them?’ she said.
‘You recognise the mother,’ I said. ‘Mary Wood was once Mary Gatling and she was briefly very famous.’
Whitestone blinked with surprise behind her glasses. ‘The Mary Gatling of the 1994 Winter Olympics?’
I nodded. ‘At Lillehammer in Norway. The Ice Virgin, they called her.’
‘Mary Wood was the Ice Virgin?’ Whitestone said. ‘The girl who said she wasn’t going to have sex until she got married?’
‘That’s her. She was part of the UK’s team. A downhill skier. She didn’t get a medal but she got a lot of headlines. Announced that she was going to save herself until she got married. It was big news for about five minutes.’
‘She met her husband at the games in Lillehammer, right?’
‘Yes – Brad Wood. American. From a blue-collar family in Chicago. He was in Lillehammer for the biathlon. Cross-country skiing and shooting. Nearly won a medal. Met Mary in the Olympic Village.’
‘That’s the Ice Virgin,’ Whitestone said, shaking her head with wonder. ‘Mary Gatling. She didn’t lose her looks, did she?’
‘Gatling?’ DC Edie Wren said. ‘Like Gatling Homes? The property developers?’
‘Exactly like Gatling Homes,’ I said. ‘Mary was the eldest of Victor Gatling’s daughters. She came from serious money. The old man started out as a runner for slum landlords in the Sixties. Then he bought a one-bedroom flat in Tottenham – did it up – sold it. And took it from there. The company has been upmarket for the last twenty years. Victor Gatling has to be seventy now at least. A lot of the new developments in prime London real estate are Gatling Homes: Kensington, Chelsea, Mayfair, Hampstead, Knightsbridge. They say Victor Gatling made two fortunes. Building homes for poor immigrants in the last century and building homes for rich immigrants in this century. They call him the man who built London. His son Nils has been running the show since the old man semi-retired.’
‘And Mary’s husband has been a sports agent for the last twenty years?’ Whitestone said.
‘Not so long,’ I said. ‘After Brad married Mary he worked for the father-in-law for a few years. Apparently that didn’t work out.’
There were shouts and screams from down in the street and we all turned to look at the window. Four floors below MIR-2, the fury of the traffic was one unbroken howl. Savile Row is a narrow, canyon-like street, a place of bespoke tailors and hard-core Beatles fans looking for the scene of the band’s final gig. And from Conduit Street in the north to Burlington Gardens in the south, right now it was clogged with the world’s media. Banks of paparazzi, large vans with transmitting dishes, milling hordes of reporters were all waiting under the blue lamp of 27 Savile Row.
‘The MLO called again, boss,’ Wren said.
The MLO was our Media Liaison Officer.
‘Yes?’ Whitestone said.
‘She wants to know when you’re going to brief the press,’ Wren said. ‘That photo of little Bradley is going to be on every front page tomorrow morning. It’s going to be all over the evening news tonight. And it’s on every social network right now. And nothing’s moving down there.’
‘Tell the MLO I’ll brief the press when the next of kin have formally identified the bodies,’ Whitestone said impatiently.
Wren hesitated. ‘And I had a call from the Chief Super’s office.’
‘What did they want?’
‘They also want to know when you’re going to brief the press.’
Whitestone nodded grimly. ‘You can tell DCS Swire’s office exactly the same thing: I’m not talking to journalists until the family has seen the bodies.’
‘That’s happening now,’ Wren said. ‘Mary Wood’s next of kin has arrived at the Iain West.’
The Iain West Forensic Suite was the Westminster mortuary, named after the country’s legendary forensic pathologist.
‘Who’s over there?’
‘Mary Wood’s sister, accompanied by the FLO.’
The FLO was the Family Liaison Officer. Every police station in the world is acronym central.
Whitestone nodded, and turned to look at a map of London that reached from floor to ceiling.
‘How are we doing with the search, Curtis?
‘The major problem for the search teams is that our crime scene is in the greenest part of London,’ DI Curtis Gane said. ‘Lots of undergrowth, ditches, trees. Highgate Cemetery. Waterlow Park. Highgate Woods. Hampstead Heath. A couple of golf courses. It’s like looking for a body in a forest.’
‘And there’s a lot of water,’ Whitestone said. ‘The ponds in Highgate and Hampstead. Three reservoirs within – what? – a twenty-minute drive?’
‘Yes, boss,’ Gane said. ‘Brent Reservoir to the west. Manor House and Tottenham Hale to the east. We’ve called in Underwater Search and the Dive Team are working their way out. It’s hard-going for the search teams, but they’ve got the full kit. Not just sniffer dogs – EVRDs.’
Enhanced victim recovery dogs are trained to detect human remains.
We stared at the photograph of the Wood family in silence.
‘It doesn’t make sense, does it?’ Whitestone said. ‘Spree killers don’t hit gated communities with a private security guard outside. And contract killers don’t abduct children.’ She paused, pushing her glasses up her nose, struggling to understand. ‘Who kills four people and then steals a child? Why does anyone steal a child?’
‘Extortion,’ Gane said. ‘That might fit. Demanding a ransom for the return of the child. These are seriously wealthy people.’
‘Trafficking,’ Wren said. ‘Abduction with the intent of sexual abuse, illegal adoption or organ farming.’
‘And murder,’ I said.
‘Get Dr Joe in here,’ Whitestone said. ‘Let’s have a psychological profile of the kind of creep who can kill a family and then abduct their child.’
Wren reached for her phone and hit the speed dial for Dr Joe Stephen, a forensic psychologist based at King’s College London.
‘No weapon?’ Whitestone said.
Gane shook his head. ‘Not yet.’
‘No prints? No partials?’
‘We heard from forensics,’ I said. ‘The house has been wiped down by a pro. But that fits with the lack of nine-millimetre casings. If he’s going to pick up his shells, he’s going to wipe the place down.’
‘He?’ Wren said. ‘Subduing an entire family is a big job for just one man. What makes you think—’
There was a roar down in the street.
I went to the window.
‘Someone’s talking to the press,’ I said.
Whitestone scowled, roughly pushing her glasses up her nose. ‘What?’
We leaned from the window but all we could see was the massed crush of reporters. So we turned on the TV and watched it on the rolling news.
Directly under the old blue lamp, a man and a woman were standing on the steps of 27 Savile Row. The woman was a slightly younger version of Mary Wood with the same cool blonde beauty. Like a girl from a Hitchcock film. The man was older, with thinning blond hair. Beside them I could see the FLO and the MLO, two young women in business suits, both looking pained.
‘Ah – ladies and gentlemen, your attention, please,’ said the MLO. ‘Can we stop pushing forward? Please! Ah, I am joined by Mr Nils Gatling and Ms Charlotte Gatling, the brother and sister of the deceased, Mary Gatling-Wood.’
The pack surged forward. Uniformed officers frowned under their helmets and attempted to keep the cameras and the microphones and the bodies off the steps outside West End Central.
Whitestone cursed. ‘Please don’t tell me they’re actually going to give a statement,’ she said.
‘Isn’t that going to get the public to help us?’ Wren said.
‘We don’t want their help,’ Gane said.
‘We rely on the public for help,’ Whitestone said. ‘But you can get too much help, Edie, and you can get all the wrong kind.’
‘We don’t want volunteers tramping through Highgate Woods,’ Gane said. ‘We don’t want telephone calls every time someone spots a fair-haired kid of four. We don’t want the cranks and nutters and fruitcakes. We don’t want a gang of squirrel-brained loonies giving us a helping hand. Because none of that helps us. All it does is get in the way of us doing our job.’
‘Too late now,’ Whitestone said.
The man – Nils Gatling – had begun to speak, his voice ragged with shock and pain.
‘My sister and I have just seen the body of our beloved sister and her beautiful family,’ he said, to an explosion of cameras. A forest of microphones was shoved towards him. ‘It is still difficult to comprehend that this tragedy has actually happened,’ he said. ‘Our sister’s family has been destroyed and our hearts have been broken. My family and I will of course cooperate in any way we can to bring those who did this to justice. Our thoughts now are with my sister’s youngest child …’ He looked up. ‘Bradley.’
‘Please,’ his sister said, her voice as soft as a prayer, and the camera swung towards her. ‘Please don’t hurt my nephew.’
She did not cry. Yet her grief was so palpable that I found I could not breathe.
‘Bradley is a beautiful little boy who never hurt anyone,’ she said. ‘Don’t hurt him. Please, please. Just bring him home – bring him home to the only family he has left. Bring Bradley back.’
The camera held her.
The camera loved her.
‘That’s their headline tomorrow,’ Gane said. ‘Bring Bradley back.’
‘She looks like God’s second attempt at – what’s the name of that old actress?’ said Wren. ‘Oh, yeah. Michelle Pfeiffer.’
And still the camera could not pull itself away from that hypnotic combination of beauty and grief.
Her brother Nils said a few more words, and then there was some meaningless soft-spoken waffle from the MLO about respecting privacy.
But still the camera lingered on Charlotte Gatling.
The TV cameras could not get enough of her. The photographers gazed up at her, desperately capturing her face as it was on those moments under the blue lamp of 27 Savile Row on a cold day in January.
And I found that, just like all those cameras, I could not look away from her face.
I heard Whitestone sigh.
‘We’re going to need a bigger room,’ she said.
I awoke with a start in the dead of the night.
4.10 a.m., warned the clock by my bed.
Too early to get up. Too late to go back to sleep.
What had woken me?
I quickly went into Scout’s bedroom. But she was sleeping peacefully, her school clothes for the morning waiting on an old-fashioned wooden stand, carefully placed there by Mrs Murphy.
I watched Scout’s sleeping face, marvelling that I had somehow helped to produce the most beautiful little kid in the world. I know that every parent feels that way. What was different about my daughter was that she really was the most beautiful little kid in the world.
I padded to the kitchen, hearing Stan snoring in the darkness, the old-man wheeze of the short-nosed dog. I made myself coffee and looked at my phone. Edie Wren had left me a message fifteen minutes ago:
I know why they died.
As I called her number, I walked to the window of our loft and looked down at the blazing lights of Smithfield meat market.
Four in the morning and the men were in the middle of their work. It made me feel better, like less of a freak for being awake at this hour. Wren answered immediately, and I sensed that she had not slept at all.
‘They had a strong digital presence,’ Wren said. ‘The Woods. Try Googling them, Max.’ I was already turning on my MacBook Air in the kitchen. ‘You get seven million results in just under half a second.’
‘Because of Lillehammer,’ I said. ‘Because she was the Ice Virgin, half a lifetime ago. You’re not just famous for fifteen minutes now. It all stays out there forever.’
‘Not just that,’ Wren said. ‘Not just the Winter Olympics and Mary the Ice Virgin. I mean now. This family – they put films online. You know – happy family stuff: Here’s us having fun at Val d’Isère. Here’s us celebrating one of our birthdays. Here’s us on a boat in Barbados. Oh, and here’s us looking gorgeous.’
There were so many results for the Woods that I didn’t know where to start.
‘What are you talking about?’ I said. ‘Sharing their happiness or showing off?’
‘Is there a difference?’
By now I was on YouTube looking at the Woods on their Easter holiday in Geilo, Norway. They looked like a family in an advertisement for something you realise that you desperately need. And under their beautiful smiling faces, I scrolled down the comments section, and I flinched at the spite, the malice and the abuse. Their happiness enraged the great anonymous public.
‘I want to turn these comments off, Edie,’ I said. ‘It’s like swimming in a sewer.’
‘You can’t turn them off, Max. You can never turn them off.’
‘So what’s your theory?’
‘It’s not a theory,’ she said. ‘I felt like saying it in MIR-2 but I didn’t have the nerve. Because it sounds stupid.’
‘Say it, Edie.’
‘Look at those comments, Max. Look at all that filth. Look at how much the world hates the beautiful people, the rich ones, the lucky ones with all the money and love. Look how the world hates the happy ones. Can’t you see it, Max? Somebody killed the Wood family because they were happy.’
WE GOT UP early to see the Queen’s horses.
It was still freezing dark when Stan, Scout and I took our places on the corner of Charterhouse Street and Farringdon Road. As usual, our conversation revolved mostly around our dog.
‘Stan doesn’t have one of those happy dog faces, does he?’ Scout said.
I knew what she meant. He was a beautiful dog but he didn’t have one of those upturned, grinning, ain’t-life-grand? mouths that dogs sometimes have, with tongue lolling and eyes twinkling, the kind of dog face that you see in commercials for pet food. Stan would never wear a rakish smirk. He had the mournful downturn of the spaniel’s mouth. But his windscreen-wiper tail told me he was happy to be out on an early morning adventure with all of our little family, and his ruby-coloured coat was like molten silk, and he gazed up at Scout as if she was the absolute centre of the universe.
‘He’s laughing inside,’ I said. ‘Here they come.’
Two dozen horses came slowly down the road, all of them pitch black. The heat of their bodies sent up clouds of steam in the freezing air. The Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment on their watering order – exercise for the horses who would not be participating at Horse Guards later that day. In some ways, I thought this was more magnificent. No gilt and gold and swords and plumes, just mounted soldiers in khaki fleeces, but the sight of them on these city streets seemed to touch the day with magic.
Stan pulled at his lead in an attempt to go with them. When Scout restrained him he looked up at her with eyes as huge as black marbles in his little head.
Oh, come on, he seemed to say.
When the horses had passed by, clomping down to Victoria Embankment on their way back to the stables of the Queen’s Life Guard, we went for breakfast in Smiths of Smithfield.
Stan greeted familiar faces. Our dog was very people-orientated. When the first wild dogs were tentatively approaching the campfires of man ten thousand years ago, the start of the greatest alliance between two species in nature, man’s food and shelter fair exchange for the affection and protection of the dogs, there’s no doubt that Stan’s ancestors were right at the front of the queue, licking hands and wagging tails and rolling their huge eyes.
Through the massive windows we could see the meat porters of Smithfield finishing their long night shifts.
‘Did they find Bradley yet?’ Scout said.
‘What?’
‘Did they find Bradley yet? Did they bring him back?’
‘How do you know about Bradley, angel?’
‘I saw him on the news. The lady was talking.’
‘Angel, you know you’re not meant to watch the news.’ It had been one of her mother’s rules. And we tried our best to stick by all the old rules. ‘There are things on the news that are not suitable for children your age.’
‘I know. I was watching kids’ TV and then the news came on. And Mrs Murphy turned it over quick to the cookery show. But Bradley was the first thing on the news. And I wondered if they got him back yet …’
‘Not yet. But we will. We’re going to find him and we are going to bring him home.’
‘How can you be so sure?’