The Murder Bag Read Online Free

– and it had been broken so often that it looked like a wonky ski run – he had enough vanity to keep his pale goatee beard neatly trimmed.
    He turned his piercing blue eyes on me and I thought that he looked like a Viking. I could imagine that pale, fierce face coming up the beach for a spot of pillaging and monk bothering. But Vikings didn’t wear glasses and the detective’s were round and rimless, John Lennon Imagine specs; they softened his ferocious appearance and gave his hard face a kindly, slightly perplexed expression.
    My new boss.
    ‘DC Wolfe, sir,’ I said.
    ‘Ah, our new man,’ he said, the quiet voice precise and clipped with the vowels of the distant north, Aberdeen or beyond, the kind of Highlands accent that sounds as if every word is carved from granite. ‘I’m DCI Mallory.’
    I already knew his name. I had never met him before but I had heard of him enough. Detective Chief Inspector Victor Mallory was one of the reasons I wanted the transfer to Homicide and Serious Crime Command.
    We were both wearing thin blue gloves and made no attempt to reach across the desk and shake hands. But we smiled, and took a second to size each other up.
    DCI Mallory looked very fit, not just for a man in his early fifties but for a man of any age, and it looked like the kind of fitness that comes from natural athleticism rather than hours in the gym. He watched me with his blue eyes as the divisional surgeon fussed briskly over the corpse.
    ‘You’re just in time,’ Mallory said. ‘We’re about to begin. Welcome to Homicide.’
    Friendly, but skipping all small talk.
    The divisional surgeon was standing up.
    ‘He’s dead all right,’ he said, snapping his bag shut.
    Mallory thanked him and gave me the nod. I stepped forward. ‘Come and have a look at our body, Wolfe,’ he said, ‘and tell me if you’ve ever seen anything like it.’
    I joined DCI Mallory on the far side of the desk and we stood above the dead man. At first all I saw was the blood. Lavish arterial sprays with a man in a shirt and tie somewhere beneath it all.
    ‘The deceased is Hugo Buck,’ Mallory said. ‘Thirty-five years old. Investment banker with ChinaCorps. Body discovered by cleaning staff at six a.m. He gets in early. Works with the Asian markets. While he was having his first coffee, somebody cut his throat.’ Mallory looked at me keenly. ‘Ever seen one of these?’
    I did not know how to respond.
    The banker’s throat had been more than cut. It had been ripped wide open. The front half of his neck was cleaved away, sliced out with clean precision. He was flat on his back but it felt like only a bit of bony gristle was keeping his head attached to his body. The blood had erupted from his neck in great spurts; his shirt and tie looked like some monstrous red bib. I could smell it now, the copper stink of freshly spilt blood. I shut my mind to it.
    Hugo Buck’s jacket was still on the back of his chair. Somehow the fountains of blood had not touched it.
    I looked quickly at Mallory and then back at the dead man.
    ‘I’ve seen three cut throats, sir,’ I said.
    I hesitated and he nodded once, telling me to carry on.
    ‘First week in uniform, there was a husband who saw a text message on his wife’s phone from his best friend and reached for a carving knife. Maybe a year later I attended a robbery in a jewellery shop where a gun failed to discharge and the thief produced an axe and went for the man who pushed the security button. And then there was a wedding reception where the father of the bride objected to the best man’s speech and shoved a champagne flute into his neck. Three cut throats.’
    ‘Did any of them look anything like this?’
    ‘No, sir.’
    ‘This is almost a decapitation,’ Mallory said.
    I looked around.
    ‘Somebody must have heard something,’ I said.
    ‘Nobody heard a thing,’ Mallory said. ‘There are people around in a building like this even at that time of day. But nobody hears a