Free The Murder Bag by Tony Parsons Page B

of heroin abuse. They were fading now.
    ‘I think he was trying to kick the habit,’ Elsa continued. ‘I think he had tried more than once.’ She smiled apologetically. ‘Do stop me if I start doing your job.’
    Mallory said, ‘Star sign?’
    Elsa stared at him. ‘Taurus,’ she said. ‘The oboe you mention in your notes gave it away. Taureans are lovers of music and song.’ Then she smiled. ‘Oh bugger off, Mallory!’
    We all laughed.
    I leaned close to the dead men, looking at the neck of first Adam Jones and then Hugo Buck. In length, depth and darkness, the wounds were absolutely identical.
    ‘One cut,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Just one cut in the right place.’
    ‘Sometimes one cut is all it takes,’ Mallory said. ‘The assassination squad stabbed Julius Caesar twenty-three times. But the Roman physician who examined him concluded that Caesar would have survived the assault if not for the wound to his heart.’
    Elsa pointed at the wounds where she had cut open, examined and then closed up their stomachs.
    ‘As you noted from his locked fists, Mr Buck had a cadaveric spasm in the moment of his death – instant rigor,’ she said. ‘What you like to call that Pompeii moment, Mallory. But Mr Jones is different. There was rigor in his legs but only in the legs. As you know, rigor mortis usually takes two hours to kick in unless there’s a cadaveric spasm – as in the case of Mr Buck – or a loss of energy in a part of the body. That causes a chemical reaction, a loss of adenosine triphosphate – ATP – that makes the muscles stiffen and contract. So rigor in the legs means one thing: there was strenuous muscular activity in the legs prior to death.’
    We considered the corpse of Adam Jones.
    ‘So Jones was running,’ Mallory said.
    ‘He was being chased,’ I said.
    Elsa Olsen smiled at me, like a teacher looking at her star student. She held out her hand, as if I had won a prize.
    ‘And this belonged to Mr Buck,’ she said, and dropped something into my palm.
    A small blue thing, round and hard and staring at me from beyond the grave.
    ‘Hugo Buck had a glass eye,’ she announced.

6
    IT WAS LATE afternoon with the day’s light already fading when I parked outside the block of flats in Regent’s Park. The trees in the park were at their most beautiful now, a riot of red and gold leaves that had not yet become serious about falling. But it wouldn’t be long, I thought as I walked to the glass doors, wishing I had a coat. You could feel the world turning.
    The porter let me in. Natasha Buck opened her door in her robe again. I couldn’t decide if it was a bit early to be in a robe, or very late. But this time her hair wasn’t wet. And this time she wasn’t alone.
    A man moved across the living room, glaring at me, with a frosted champagne flute in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I recognised the chauffeur who had been lounging in the big black Merc. I recognised him even in his underpants. It must have been all my training.
    ‘You’re too late,’ Mrs Buck said.
    ‘This will only take a minute,’ I said.
    The chauffeur came to the door, sipping his drink. He had come up in the world.
    ‘Is there a problem?’ he said.
    ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Would you like one?’
    ‘I’ll be in the other room,’ he said.
    Smart chauffeur.
    He went away and took his iced champagne flute with him.
    ‘Tell me about your husband’s eye,’ I said. ‘The one he lost.’
    ‘What do you want to know?’
    ‘How it happened.’
    ‘At school,’ she said. ‘At Potter’s Field. He told me he was kicked in the eye when scoring a try. Hugo was a natural athlete.’ She sounded proud of him. ‘All those sports the English invented. Rugby. Cricket. Tennis. Football. They came easy to him.’
    ‘So it’s something that happened when he was a boy?’
    Natasha Buck nodded. ‘He was very good at games.’
    The next morning I left West End Central after our morning briefing and one hour