The Slaughter Man Read Online Free Page A

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 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 were 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.

3
    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 it 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