The Murder Bag Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  October: #Killallpigs

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  November: DreAms of the deAd

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  December: Lost contActs

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Author’s Note

  Copyright

  About the Book

  The gripping first novel in an explosive new crime series by Tony Parsons, bestselling author of Man and Boy. If you like crime-novels by Ian Rankin and Peter James, you will love this.

  Twenty years ago seven rich, privileged students became friends at their exclusive private school, Potter’s Field. Now they have started dying in the most violent way imaginable.

  Detective Max Wolfe has recently arrived in the Homicide division of London’s West End Central, 27 Savile Row.

  Soon he is following the bloody trail from the backstreets and bright lights of the city, to the darkest corners of the internet and all the way to the corridors of power.

  As the bodies pile up, Max finds the killer’s reach getting closer to everything – and everyone – he loves.

  Soon he is fighting not only for justice, but for his own life ...

  About the Author

  Tony Parsons left school at sixteen and was working on the night shift at Gordon’s Gin Distillery in Islington when he was offered his first job in journalism on the New Musical Express.

  Since then he has become an award-winning journalist and bestselling novelist whose books have been translated into more than forty languages, most recently Vietnamese. His semi-autobiographical novel Man and Boy won the Book of the Year prize.

  The Murder Bag is his first crime novel, and features the debut of Detective Max Wolfe of the Homicide and Serious Crime Command. Tony lives in London with his wife, his daughter and their dog.

  The Murder Bag

  Tony Parsons

  For David Morrison, Barry Hoy and Kevin Steel. Somewhere East of Suez.

  Crimes as serious as murder should have strong emotions behind them.

  George Orwell, The Decline of the English Murder

  And nothing in life shall sever

  The chain that is round us now.

  Eton Boating Song

  PROLOGUE

  1988

  WHEN THEY HAD finished with her they left her face down on the mattress and it was as if she was already dead.

  The pack of boys in the basement room, boys with the strength of men and the cruelty of children. They had taken all they wanted, and now it was as if there was nothing left.

  Their voices were no longer in her face, leering above her, pressed hard against her ear. Now they were coming from the long dining table where they smoked and laughed and congratulated each other on what they had done.

  There was her T-shirt. If she could only get her T-shirt. Somehow she found the strength to reach it, pull it on and roll from the mattress. She was not meant to stay in this room. She began to crawl towards the basement stairs.

  The voices at the table fell silent. The pipe, she thought. The pipe makes them slow and stupid and sleepy. God bless the pipe.

  There was blood in her mouth and her face hurt. Everything hurt. The blood was coming from her nose and it caught in her throat and made her choke back the sickness.

  She stopped, gagged, then began to move again.

  The muscles in her legs were heavy slabs of pain. Nothing worked as it should. Nothing felt like it would ever work again.

  Everything was ruined.

  She could have wept with frustration. But she bit back the tears and gritted her teeth and kept edging to the door, an inch at a time, no more than that, feeling the torn skin on her elbows and knees as she dragged them across the basement floor, doing it again and again and again.

  There was evil in this room.

  But she was not meant to die tonight.

  She was not meant to die in this room.

  At first she thought they hadn’t noticed. Because of what the pipe did to them. Because of the way the pipe made them slow and stupid. God bless the pipe. Then she stopped to rest at the foot of the stairs and she heard their laughter.

  And when she looked, she saw they were all watching her, and that they had been watching all along.

  Some of them gave her a round of mocking applause.

  Then the one who had been the worst, the fat one who had talked to her all the time, and called her names, and taken pleasure in hearing her cry out, and left his marks on her from tooth and nail – the worst bastard in that bunch of rotten bastards – he yawned widely, revealing a mouth full of expensive orthodontic work, and said, ‘We can’t just let her go, man.’

  She took a deep breath and placed the palms of her hands on the bottom step.

  There was something wrong with her breathing. Because of her nose.

  A single bead of livid red blood fell on to the back of her hand.

  She ran her fingers across her top lip and with great effort struggled from her hands and knees on to her feet, leaning against the wall, closing her eyes and longing for sleep.

  The pain revived her.

  And the fear.

  And the presence of the boy.

  One of them was standing right next to her, a look of wicked amusement on his face. The one who had spoken to her first, and stopped her with a smile, and pretended to be nice, and brought her to this place.

  Now he took a fistful of her hair and pulled her head to one side. Then, tightening his grip as he turned away, he began to drag her from the stairs and back into the room, that underground room where she was not meant to die.

  Without the prompting of conscious thought, her hands flew to his face and she pressed her thumbs into his eye sockets as hard as she could.

  Deep and deep and deep.

  His turn to feel the pain.

  Rotten bastards. Rotten bastards the lot of them.

  The two of them stood there, locked together in the intimacy of dance partners, his fist still in her hair while she summoned all her remaining strength to push into the mocking blue eyes, her fingers with their nails cracked and bloody and suddenly stinging as she scrabbled for purchase in his thick black hair, gripping his ears, losing the grip, finding it again, pushing the thumbs deeper, then her left hand falling away as he reeled backwards with a rising shriek of agony, lashing out at her, and missing, but her right thumb still there, still pushed into his left eye socket as he tried to shove her away, her thumb pressing against his eyeball for a few more crucial seconds until she suddenly felt it give with a soft wet squelch and sink towards the back of his head.

  He screamed.

  His scream filled the basement, filled her head, filled the night. T
hey were on their feet at the table but paralysed by the screams of the boy who had just lost an eye.

  Then she ran.

  How she ran.

  Flying up the stairs.

  The door locked from the inside but with the key mercifully still in the lock – thank God for the key – fumbling with it, the cries behind her, and then she was out into the air, stunned to find the night had almost gone.

  How long had they kept her there?

  In the distance was the road, on the far side of playing fields with a misty shroud hanging over the great white H-shapes of the rugby posts.

  She began to run across the playing fields, the fog wet on her face, her bare feet sliding on grass slick with the dawn, and the beautiful buildings of the famous old school rising up black and timeless behind her.

  She ran without looking back, expecting to hear their voices at any moment, waiting for the pack to come and run her down and rip her to pieces.

  But they did not come.

  On the far side of the playing fields there was a tiny stone cottage, as unlikely as a woodman’s house in a fairy tale, but its lights were out and she made no attempt to run towards it. Instead she headed for the road. If she could make it to the road then she would not die tonight.

  Halfway to the road, she rested against a rugby goalpost and dared to look back. They had not followed her.

  A leather strap slapped against her side, and she remembered that at some point they had put a dog collar and lead around her neck. She tore them off and threw them aside.

  A solitary car had stopped by the road, headlights on, engine running.

  Someone had seen her.

  She stumbled towards it, waving, calling, crying out for the car to please wait for her, don’t-go-don’t-go, running alongside a wire mesh fence, looking for a gap, the wet grass of the playing fields no longer under her bare feet, asphalt now, then through a hole in the fence and running on the road’s rough tarmac, crying oh please don’t go; and then the passenger door opened and the fat one got out, the one who had been the worst, his face not laughing now, but clenched with absolute murderous fury, and for the first time she knew with total certainty that she would die in this place tonight.

  More of them were getting out of the car.

  The fat one flipped open the boot and the black hole waited for her like an open grave.

  Some part of her mind registered that someone was screaming in the back of the car, screaming about his eye.

  The one she had hurt. The one she had blinded.

  She wished she could have hurt them all. She wished she could have blinded them all. God knows they deserved it.

  But it was too late. She was done now. She felt the weakness and exhaustion flood her body, overwhelming her. They had won.

  Angry hands on her, touching her, squeezing the last juice out of her, and then the hands lifting her off the ground and forcing her into the boot of the car.

  The lid slammed down on her and she was lost in darkness as the car drove slowly back to the grand old school where she would die on the mattress in the basement where she was never meant to die.

  In her last moments she saw the family who would never see her again, and – beyond them, like a road briefly glimpsed but never taken – she saw quite clearly the husband she would never meet, and the children who would never be born, and the good life full of love that had been taken away.

  And as her soul passed over, her last breath was a silent cry of rage and grief for everything they had stolen on the night she died.

  1

  I WAS WAITING for a man who was planning to die.

  I had parked the old BMW X5 just up the road from the entrance to the railway station and I drank a triple espresso as I watched the commuters rushing off to work. I drank quickly.

  He would be here soon.

  I placed three photographs on the dashboard. One of my wife and daughter. The other two of the man who was planning to die. A passport photo from the Home Office and what we called a snatch shot taken from some CCTV footage.

  I slipped the photo of my family inside my wallet and put the wallet inside my leather jacket. Then I taped the two photos of the man who was planning to die to the dashboard.

  And I watched the street.

  I was parked with my back to the station so I could face the busy main road. It was washed in thin autumn sunshine that was like a fading memory of summer days. One hundred metres away there was a young woman who was dressed for the gym looking in the window of the newsagent’s, a large German Shepherd sitting patiently by her side, its lead loose, its intelligent face carefully watching her, the dog totally at ease among the rush hour crowds.

  ‘Now that’s a beautiful dog,’ I said.

  The woman smiled and scratched the back of the dog’s ears in response, and then there was a man’s voice in my ear, although he was not addressing me.

  ‘Reception’s good for Delta 1.’

  Then there were more voices in my ear as they checked transmission for the other radio call signs and all over the surveillance chatter I could hear the studied calm that the police use at moments of extreme tension, like a pilot talking to his passengers when all his engines are on fire. Nothing at all to worry about, folks.

  I scanned the street for the spotter vans and unmarked cars and plainclothes officers on foot. But they were good at their job. All I could see was the woman with the beautiful German Shepherd.

  ‘Delta 1?’ the surveillance officer said to me. ‘We see you and we hear you, Max. You’re running point. We’re waiting on your positive visual ID when Bravo 1 is in the grab zone. Stay in the car.’

  Bravo 1 was the man who was planning to die.

  ‘Copy that,’ I said.

  And then a voice I knew: ‘DC Wolfe, it’s the chief super.’

  Detective Chief Superintendent Elizabeth Swire. My boss.

  ‘Ma’am,’ I said.

  ‘Good luck, Wolfe,’ she said. Then there was a little smile in her voice as she played to the gallery: ‘And you heard the man. Stay in the car. Let the big boys do the heavy lifting.’

  I stared at the street. It would not be long now.

  ‘Ma’am,’ I said, as nice and calm as the German Shepherd.

  If I tilted my rear-view mirror I could look up at the grand Victorian façade of the station hotel. It was like a castle in a fairy story, the turrets and spires rising up to a blue sky full of billowy white clouds. The kind of place where you blink your eye and a hundred years go by. I could not see any of the big boys. But inside the railway station hotel there were enough of them to start a small war.

  Somewhere beyond the net curtains and drapes, SCO19 were waiting, the firearms unit of the Metropolitan Police. Every one of them would be armed with a Heckler & Koch G36 assault rifle and two Glock SLP 9mm pistols. But no matter how hard I stared I still couldn’t see them.

  There would also be bomb disposal squads seconded from the RAF in there. Negotiators. Chemical and biological warfare specialists. And someone to order pizza. We also had maybe twenty people around the station but I could still only see the woman and the dog. The surveillance chatter continued.

  ‘All units report. Echo 1?’

  ‘No sign.’

  ‘Victor 1?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Tango 1?’

  ‘Contact,’ said a woman’s voice.

  For the first time the piece of plastic stuffed in my ear was totally silent.

  ‘I have visual with Bravo 1,’ said the same voice. ‘Contact.’ And then a terrible pause. ‘Possible,’ she said. ‘Repeat – possible contact.’

  ‘Possible,’ the surveillance officer said. ‘Checking. Stand by.’ His voice was winding tighter now.

  And then the woman’s voice again, and all the doubt creeping in: ‘Possible. Red backpack. Just passing the British Library. Proceeding on foot in an easterly direction towards the station. Approaching the grab zone.’

  ‘Delta 1?’

&n
bsp; ‘Copy that,’ I said.

  ‘And I’m off,’ Tango 1 said, meaning she had lost visual contact with the target.

  I glanced quickly at the two photographs taped to my dashboard. I didn’t really need to because I knew exactly what he looked like. But I looked one last time anyway. Then back at the crowds.

  ‘I don’t see him,’ I said.

  Then a more urgent voice in my ear. Another woman. The officer with the dog. It watched her intently as her mouth moved.

  ‘This is Whisky 1, Whisky 1. I have possible visual contact. Bravo 1 coming now. Two hundred metres. Far side of the road. Easterly direction. Red backpack. Possible contact.’

  A babble of voices and a sharp call for silence.

  ‘Possible. Checking. Checking. Stand by, all units. Stand by, Delta 1.’

  Then there was just the silence, crackling with static. Waiting for me now.

  At first I stared straight through him.

  Because he was different.

  I looked quickly at the two photographs on the dashboard and he was nothing like them. The black hair was light brown. The wispy beard had gone. But it was far more than that. His face had changed. It was filled out, puffed up, almost the face of someone else.

  But one thing was the same.

  ‘Delta 1?’

  ‘Contact,’ I said.

  The red backpack was exactly the same as the one in the CCTV snatch shot on the day he bought hydrogen peroxide in a chemist’s wholesale warehouse.

  He was wearing that red backpack when he wheeled out the 440 litres of hair bleach to the cash desk. Wearing it when he counted out the £550 in fifty-pound notes. Wearing it when he unloaded his van at the lock-up garage where we had put our cameras.

  You couldn’t miss that red backpack. It looked like the kind of bag you would use to climb Everest. Big and bright – safety red, they called that colour.

  But his face was not the same. That threw me. It was meant to. The face had been pumped full of something. He was planning to go to his death with the face of another man.

  But I could see it now.

  There was no doubt.