The Slaughter Man Read Online Free Page B

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 Café Nero paper napkin. She looked exhausted. We were all exhausted. Our Murder Investigation Team had 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 what’s