The Murder Bag by Tony Parsons

blood money. Matthew 27:3–8. “And the chief priests took the silver pieces and said; It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood. And they took counsel and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in. Wherefore that field was called – The Field of Blood. Unto this day.”’
    She smiled modestly.
    ‘Sunday school?’ Gane said.
    ‘Google,’ Whitestone replied.
    ‘They’re more of a mixed bunch than I thought they would be,’ I said. ‘Hugo Buck comes from an old banking family. Adam Jones was at Potter’s Field on a music scholarship. They didn’t just die in different worlds. They came from different worlds.’
    Mallory nodded. ‘Old money. New money. And no money. But who hates them?’
    We stared at the photograph of the Potter’s Field Combined Cadet Force, class of 1988. The only sound was the traffic crawling along Savile Row five floors below. And I saw how Mallory used the silence, how it created a space for the truth to seep in.
    ‘Maybe they hate each other,’ I said.
    I was late. Horribly late.
    Scout had an extra class after school. Fashion illustration, whatever that was. Something for kids who loved to draw and whose parents were stuck in an office. But I was still late.
    Scout was waiting with her teacher, Miss Davies, just inside the school gates. Everyone else had gone home long ago. The pair of them were chatting happily – or Scout was talking and the blonde young New Zealander was listening, smiling and nodding and unable to get a word in edgeways. Scout really loved Miss Davies.
    I parked the car as close as I could get to the school gates and ran to them.
    ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘The traffic.’
    Miss Davies was all smiles and Kiwi cool and very understanding. Scout was poker-faced, revealing nothing.
    In the car on the way home I looked at her in my rear-view mirror, watching her watching the street.
    ‘Scout,’ I said.
    She looked at my eyes in the mirror. ‘Yes?’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘It was one of your days to pick me up. Not one of Mrs Murphy’s days. One of your days.’
    ‘I’ll work it out better,’ I said. ‘Maybe Mrs Murphy can do more days. But I’ll never be late again.’
    She wasn’t looking at me any more.
    ‘Scout?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Forgive me?’
    She looked back at the street.
    ‘I always forgive you,’ she said.
    And I thought about that all the way home.
    Scout rolled on the floor with the dog.
    ‘He cries in the night sometimes,’ she said. ‘Stan does. I hear him.’
    I nodded. ‘I hear him too,’ I said.
    ‘I think he misses his old home.’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘He misses his mother’s heartbeat. But there’s a trick for young dogs that miss their mothers. I’ll show you.’
    I found an old alarm clock and slipped it under the blanket in the dog’s basket.
    ‘He’ll think it’s his old mum dog,’ I said. ‘He’ll hear the tick-tock of the clock and he’ll think it’s her heartbeat.’
    Scout looked so doubtful that the idea suddenly seemed ridiculous to me.
    But it worked.
    That night I lay awake until just before dawn, turning my pillow over until the meat market fell silent and the light in the room was milky grey. Stan did not whimper once.

8
    THE BLACK MUSEUM of Scotland Yard is not a museum at all. It is not open to the public and its contents are guarded behind heavily locked doors. Officially, it is not even called the Black Museum. After complaints from officers working in areas with large ethnic minorities, it was renamed the Metropolitan Police Crime Museum, an enforced change that ensured we would always and forever call it the Black Museum.
    As I had told PC Greene, the Black Museum is a teaching aide. That was why it was established in the Victorian era, that was why it still existed – to save the lives of policemen by educating them in the criminal’s tools of the trade.
    And that was why DCI Mallory and I went to the Black Museum. I had spent a full day