Free The Slaughter Man by Tony Parsons

member of his personal staff.’ She shook her head. ‘You get families who don’t know how to play the media. And you get the ones who do. And that kind never makes our job any easier.’
    There was a set of keys on Whitestone’s workstation. She picked them up and held them out to me.
    ‘The Financial Forensics Unit dug this up – a property Brad Wood owned that we need to check out,’ she said. ‘It’s your neck of the woods, Max. An apartment in the Barbican.’
    ‘The family owned a flat in the Barbican?’
    ‘Not the family. Just the father.’
    ‘FFU traced it through direct debits on Brad Wood’s bank accounts,’ Wren said.
    ‘Rental property?’
    Wren shook her head. ‘As far as we can make out, it was for his own personal use. The utility bills are next to nothing. Doesn’t look as if anybody was living there.’
    I thought about that for a while.
    ‘The apartment’s been processed by forensics, so you can touch what you like,’ Wren said. ‘See if you feel a tremor in The Force.’
    I slipped the keys into my pocket.
    Whitestone turned to Dr Joe. ‘What do you make of the sexual assault on the mother? Is that significant? Should we be looking at known sexual offenders?’
    Dr Joe’s mouth tightened with something that I could not read.
    ‘I wouldn’t place great emphasis on the rape of Mary Wood,’ he said. ‘Sex and violence are almost always interchangeable in the mind of a psychopath. The choice of weapon is, I would suggest, more significant. The use of a cattle gun to slaughter a family indicates a wish to make the victims less than human.’
    ‘Any joy with the neighbours in The Gardens?’ Whitestone asked Wren.
    ‘Mr Compton says his wife and daughter are too distressed to talk to us right now,’ she said. ‘But he’s not shedding any tears over young Marlon Wood. The phrase “degenerate little scumbag” came up, but he wouldn’t be more specific. Closed the door in my face with some force.’
    ‘Talk to him again,’ Whitestone said. ‘Get him to be more specific, tell him we can do it at his place or at West End Central. But first we need to talk to Peter Nawkins.’
    We all looked in silence at the old man on the screen.
    ‘I know,’ Whitestone said. ‘Nawkins feels like a waste of our time, doesn’t he? But he’s in a category of one – the only living cattle-gun killer who’s not doing time. So the TIE process demands that we talk to him. It’s not optional.’
    TIE means trace, interview and eliminate any individual who could have realistically committed the offence under investigation. It is not the same as being suspected of the crime, but we had to cross the Slaughter Man off our list.
    ‘Where is he?’ Gane said. ‘We have a release address for when he came out of Belmarsh?’
    ‘Oak Hill Farm. On the border of the East End and Essex.’
    ‘Oak Hill Farm? The gypsy camp.’
    ‘The travelling community camp – and it’s more than a camp,’ Whitestone said. ‘It’s the largest concentration of travellers in Europe. There are some permanent settlements there. Not all of them legal.’
    ‘You don’t really like him for this, do you?’ Gane said. ‘This sad old man with his plastic shopping bags?’
    Whitestone shrugged. ‘He’s been out for nearly ten years,’ she said. ‘I bet he has people showing up from time to time. And they might be of interest to us.’
    ‘You mean journalists?’ I said.
    ‘I mean fans,’ she said. ‘I mean obsessive nutcases. I never saw a multiple killer yet who didn’t have a sizeable fan club.’
    Dr Joe was on his feet, staring at family photograph of the Woods on the whitewall of MIR-1.
    ‘She was so beautiful, wasn’t she?’ he said. ‘Mary, I mean.’ He saw us watching him and shook his head, embarrassed. ‘I don’t mean because she was conventionally good looking – although there’s that, of course. But there was a radiance to her beauty. The kind of beauty that you so rarely see, inside and