The Murder Bag (10 page)

She took the frame from me, looked at the photograph as if she had not seen it for a while, then replaced it exactly where it had been, in its little groove of dust on the black lacquer of the piano.

She’d wanted me to see, and she’d wanted me to understand, but I saw now that this courteous, kind and dying woman would really prefer it if I did not actually touch her photographs.

‘Did you ever meet Hugo Buck, Mrs Jones?’

‘Hugo? I haven’t seen him for, what, must be nearly twenty years. He went into the City. I understand he’s doing very well.’

‘And your son knew Hugo Buck,’ I said. ‘They were friends, weren’t they?’

She nodded. ‘At Potter’s Field. They were at school together.’

7

I DROVE BACK
to 27 Savile Row and for the rest of that day and for most of the next our team never left Major Incident Room One.

The discovery of the second photograph changed everything. It gave us our MLOE – main line of enquiry – and focused all of the double homicide investigation on seven schoolboys in military uniform, grinning at a camera twenty years ago.

‘Work out from the photograph applying the ABC principle at all times,’ DCI Mallory warned us, moving between the workstations where we hunted, our phones on permanent charge and HOLMES2 – the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, the mainframe police computer – flickering on the screens in front of us. ‘Assume nothing. Believe nothing. Challenge and check everything.’

The sky was flat and white above the rooftops of Mayfair when Mallory faced us for his afternoon briefing. He ran a hand across his scalp and took a joyless gulp of cold takeaway tea.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘What are we looking at?’

We were looking at the large flat plasma screen on the wall of MIR-1, and on the screen was the photograph that had been in the home of Adam Jones’s mother, and also on Hugo Buck’s desk.

DI Whitestone, the MIT’s deputy SIO, cleared her throat and said, ‘Sir, this photograph was taken at Potter’s Field College in the spring of 1988. Potter’s Field College is a boarding school for boys aged thirteen to eighteen on the border of Berkshire and Buckinghamshire. The seven boys in the photograph are all wearing the uniform of the school’s Combined Cadet Force. On the far left of the picture is Adam Jones. And on the far right is Hugo Buck.’

Next to the screen was Mallory’s wall – a massive whiteboard with the physical photograph of the seven smiling boys, eight inches by ten inches out of its frame, looking tiny tacked up there, and next to it a selection of pictures of Jones and Buck taken at the scenes of their murder and again at their autopsy at the Iain West.

‘The Combined Cadet Force is the Potter’s Field version of the Officer Training Corps,’ Whitestone continued, ‘which they still go in for at a lot of these old public schools.’

‘And Potter’s Field is one of the oldest,’ Mallory said. ‘Five hundred years old? It has to be as old as Harrow, St Paul’s, Westminster, Winchester, Rugby and Marlborough. And of course Slough Comprehensive.’ He glanced at our blank faces. ‘Eton,’ he explained. ‘They call themselves Slough Comprehensive. It’s their little joke. What’s our source for the photograph?’

I said, ‘Sir, this is the copy I obtained from the mother of Adam Jones.’

‘And we’re absolutely certain it’s the same one that was on the desk of Hugo Buck?’

DI Gane looked up from his laptop. ‘The one at the bank had some superficial damage, sir. There was a blood trace that had seeped under the glass. But it’s the same photograph all right.’

‘And were Jones and Buck in contact after leaving school?’ Mallory asked.

‘Looks like they went their separate ways, sir,’ I replied. ‘Jones’s mother hadn’t seen Hugo Buck in nearly twenty years. She wasn’t aware of his death.’

Gane said, ‘Doesn’t she read the papers?’

‘She’s in the last stage of terminal cancer,’ I said. ‘I think she has other things on her mind.’

‘Because the mother wasn’t aware of contact doesn’t mean there wasn’t any,’ Gane reasoned.

‘Natasha Buck, Hugo Buck’s widow, has no recollection of ever meeting Adam Jones,’ I said. ‘She would have remembered a homeless heroin addict turning up at their door or their wedding.’

‘Jones tried to make contact with Buck at his office,’ Whitestone said. ‘I spoke to the PA at ChinaCorps and she can remember a man claiming to be an old friend of Buck’s turning up at the office wanting to see him. This is two or three years back. She described the man as looking like a tramp. Sounds like Jones. But Buck wouldn’t see him and security had to escort the unknown visitor from the building. Apparently it was an ugly little scene.’

‘The junkie tapping his rich mate for money and getting a knockback,’ Gane said.

‘That’s a reasonable assumption,’ Mallory said.

‘So we’re definitely treating this as a double homicide, sir?’ Gane asked. ‘We’re working on the theory that it’s the same perp? Even without contact since – what’s the school? – Potter’s Field?’

‘Yes,’ Mallory confirmed. ‘The killer’s MO. The manner of death. The school connection. It’s enough. It’s more than enough. How are we doing with prints?’

‘We’ve identified and eliminated all the prints found in the ChinaCorps office,’ Gane said. ‘The alley where Jones was found is a forensic nightmare. Full of prints that we can’t identify and never will.’

‘Glove prints?’ Mallory said.

‘No, boss. Sorry, boss.’

Mallory shook his bald head. ‘There should be glove prints.’ He stared up at the photograph. ‘Who are the other five boys?’

‘We’re chasing that down, sir,’ Whitestone said. ‘Should have names by the end of play today. DC Wolfe’s going to talk to Adam Jones’s mother again and I’ve sounded out the school. The Head Master’s calling me.’

‘And I want the photographer, please,’ Mallory said. ‘Find out who took the photograph, will you, DI Whitestone? And give us a close-up, would you, DI Gane?’

Gane tapped some keys and the camera seemed to move in for a better look. Seven faces swam out of the past and into vivid close-up.

We looked at them in silence.

The boys had all looked the same to me at first. Seven smiling sons of privilege, cocky and smug in their military uniforms and their mullet haircuts, certain that tomorrow belonged to them. But now they were starting to look like individuals.

Adam Jones on the left – a skinny kid with an open, guileless face, looking far younger than the rest. The only one who still looked like a child.

Hugo Buck on the right – dark and mannish, already looking like he needed to shave every day, confident in his looks and his strength and his place in the world.

I was looking harder at the photo, really seeing it for the first time. They were not all the same.

They were not even all smiling.

In the middle of the group was a serious, delicate-looking boy in dark glasses, his fringe swept back off a high forehead.

He was flanked by the twins – identical, I could now see. Tall, good-looking and cold. One of them had a jumble of jagged scars running down one side of his face.

Next to the twin with the scars, between him and Adam Jones, there was a chubby, leering adolescent, the tip of his tongue exploring a corner of his mouth.

And on the other side, next to Buck, there was a grinning dark-skinned youth, possibly Indian, far taller than the rest.

Only their uniforms were the same.

‘So what exactly is this Combined Cadet Force?’ Gane said. ‘Posh rich kids playing soldiers?’

‘They take it seriously,’ Mallory said. ‘A significant number of boys take up commissions in these schools. I bet the British Army is still the biggest employer of Old Potter’s Field Boys. Even now. They say that Old Etonians go into the army, politics and acting while Old Potters go into the army, banking and jail.’

I wondered how Mallory knew so much about it.

‘But what’s the point of them?’ Gane persisted. ‘The Officer Training Corps. The Combined Cadet Force. Why do a bunch of public schoolboys need to dress up as soldiers?’

Whitestone looked at her notes. ‘It’s been around for quite a while. The Potter’s Field Combined Cadet Force was founded in 1805 as the Potter’s Field Rifles.’

Mallory smiled with affection at Gane, his round John Lennon glasses glinting in the overhead lights. ‘That year ring any bells, DI Gane? No? The country thought that Napoleon was about to invade. He had an army of two hundred thousand men on the coast of France. These grand old schools were preparing a home guard. A youth movement to repel the invaders.’

‘And did Napoleon bottle it, sir?’ Gane asked. ‘Excuse my ignorance.’

‘Yes, Gane, Napoleon seriously bottled it.’ Mallory looked at the screen. ‘But whether they called them an Officer Training Corps or a Combined Cadet Force or something else, the public schools all kept their Rifles.’

‘They join at fifteen,’ Whitestone said, ‘around the age of the boys in the photograph. And they’re taught by regular serving army officers. Leadership skills, signals. And how to shoot. They have a range weekend where they use live ammunition.’

‘Any other business?’ Mallory said.

‘Bob the Butcher, sir,’ Gane said.

And then he turned on me.

‘You don’t talk to the press, OK? You just never do it. We have people to do that for us. The media liaison officers – leave it to them, all right? Because as soon as you start talking to journalists, as soon as you start mouthing off with your little theories, then every mummy’s boy with an iMac and a grudge against society starts crawling out of the woodwork, boasting on all the social network sites about how antisocial they’ve been. And once they do – once they start claiming to be Bob the Butcher – then we have to follow it up, chase down their IP addresses, go round to their house and tell them they’ve been very, very naughty. So we don’t talk to the press, the MLOs do. OK?’

‘Fair enough,’ I said.

He saw that I wasn’t going to argue with him, and he softened.

‘Especially to this Scarlet Bush,’ he continued. ‘She’s poison. They say she’s got a tabloid brain and a broadsheet mouth. Or is it the other way round?’

I hesitated. ‘But you’re taking Bob the Butcher seriously?’

‘We have no choice,’ Gane said. ‘If someone claims to have committed murder, then we have to take them seriously. And run them down. It’s sort of our job.’

Mallory said, ‘You’ve got the IP address for this Bob the Butcher?’

‘Not yet, sir,’ Gane replied. ‘He’s running his messages through some kind of anonymiser or anonymous proxy. Probably Tor or 12P. It’s an intermediary that’s meant to act as a wall between the user and the rest of the digital world. Most of the child pornography online is run through anonymisers. It’s the deep web, designed to bury an IP address. Bob’s been in touch again, if anybody’s interested.’

Gane hit a couple of keys. On the big TV screen a social network site replaced the photograph of the seven boys. A black-and-white photograph the size of a postage stamp featuring a thin-faced man in a suit, tie and hat, an insolent cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth. A face from history.

Mallory read the message aloud: ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Behold the dark angel of the people, righteous avenger of the dispossessed. Bob the Butcher is coming. Kill all bankers. Kill all pigs. #killallpigs.’

Gane laughed. ‘Now there’s someone who has played one too many computer games.’

Mallory wasn’t laughing. ‘The first part is from Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb,’ he said. ‘“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.
The photograph is of Oppenheimer. He was quoting a Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. He said it after they tested the first nuclear weapon. After the world changed for ever.’

‘I’ll find him,’ Gane said, stabbing some keys.

The photograph of the seven boys returned to the screen.

‘The school is the key,’ Mallory said. ‘Potter’s Field.’

‘Potter’s Field,’ Whitestone said. ‘The school was founded by King Henry VIII in 1509, the first year of his reign. The name is taken from the Bible. A potter’s field is a piece of land that’s good for nothing but burial. The priests bought the potter’s field with Judas’s blood money. Matthew 27:3–8. “And the chief priests took the silver pieces and said; It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood. And they took counsel and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in. Wherefore that field was called – The Field of Blood. Unto this day.”’

She smiled modestly.

‘Sunday school?’ Gane said.

‘Google,’ Whitestone replied.

‘They’re more of a mixed bunch than I thought they would be,’ I said. ‘Hugo Buck comes from an old banking family. Adam Jones was at Potter’s Field on a music scholarship. They didn’t just die in different worlds. They came from different worlds.’

Mallory nodded. ‘Old money. New money. And no money. But who hates them?’

We stared at the photograph of the Potter’s Field Combined Cadet Force, class of 1988. The only sound was the traffic crawling along Savile Row five floors below. And I saw how Mallory used the silence, how it created a space for the truth to seep in.

‘Maybe they hate each other,’ I said.

I was late. Horribly late.

Scout had an extra class after school. Fashion illustration, whatever that was. Something for kids who loved to draw and whose parents were stuck in an office. But I was still late.

Scout was waiting with her teacher, Miss Davies, just inside the school gates. Everyone else had gone home long ago. The pair of them were chatting happily – or Scout was talking and the blonde young New Zealander was listening, smiling and nodding and unable to get a word in edgeways. Scout really loved Miss Davies.

I parked the car as close as I could get to the school gates and ran to them.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘The traffic.’

Miss Davies was all smiles and Kiwi cool and very understanding. Scout was poker-faced, revealing nothing.

In the car on the way home I looked at her in my rear-view mirror, watching her watching the street.

‘Scout,’ I said.

She looked at my eyes in the mirror. ‘Yes?’