The Slaughter Man by Tony Parsons Read Free Book Online Page B

effect was hypnotic.
    ‘Scout,’ Mrs Murphy said from the back of the black cab. ‘Come, little darling.’
    I crouched down to ease Scout safely into the back of the cab. When I straightened up, Charlotte Gatling was staring at me through the crowd with an unnerving intensity.
    As if she had never seen a father carrying his daughter before.

6
    ‘The cattle gun,’ said Sergeant John Caine of the Black Museum. ‘Also known as the captive bolt pistol and the stunbolt gun. Farmers call them stunners, as though they are very attractive young ladies. Primary use is stunning cattle prior to slaughter. Also quite effective on goats, sheep, horses and of course human beings.’ He took a sip of tea from a mug that said BEST DAD IN THE WORLD. ‘You ever see that movie,
No Country for Old Men
?’
    ‘Tommy Lee Jones was the cop,’ I said. ‘He was good.’
    ‘And Javier Bardem was even better,’ John said. ‘He was the villain with the cattle gun, remember?
Anton Chigurh
. Having a bad hair day. Remember his cattle gun?’
    ‘He used it to open doors. Blew the lock out. He killed a man with it once but mostly he used his shotgun. The cattle gun was on this big carbon-dioxide canister. Looked like an oxygen tank.’
    ‘Cattle guns don’t look like that any more,’ John said. ‘What old Anton Chigurh had, that’s the Model T-Ford of cattle guns. I don’t know what the filmmakers were thinking. The modern cattle gun looks more like a hand drill.’
    ‘Do you have one I could see, John?’
    He laughed. ‘We’ve got the lot in the Black Museum. You know that, Max. Shall I put the kettle on?’
    ‘No, I better get cracking.’
    He took out his key and unlocked the door to the Black Museum. I followed him into a Victorian drawing room that was stuffed full of deadly weapons.
    The Black Museum in New Scotland Yard looks like a boot sale for psychopaths. Weapons everywhere. Most of these weapons have either killed or wounded policemen or civilians. But I could not see what I was looking for.
    ‘At the far end,’ he said. ‘I’ve only got the one.’
    He led me to a distant corner of the Black Museum that I had never noticed before.
    The cattle gun sat on a small card table. John Caine was right. It looked like a hand drill. Or maybe some kind of sophisticated nail gun. It was scarred and rusting, as though it had seen a lot of service. Above it there was a yellowing newspaper article in a dusty glass case.
    ‘That’s him,’ I said. ‘The Slaughter Man.’
    RITUAL SLAUGHTER ON ESSEX FARM
    Slaughter Man executes father and sons in midnight killing spree
    A killer was jailed for life yesterday for murdering a father and his three grown-up sons with a bolt gun used to slaughter livestock.
    Peter Nawkins, 17, had been engaged to the only daughter of Ian Burns of Hawksmoor Farm, Essex. When the engagement was ended, Nawkins broke into Hawksmoor Farm and slaughtered Farmer Burns and his sons Ian Junior, 23, Martin, 20, and Donald, 17, before setting fire to their home. Mrs Doris Burns, 48, and her daughter Carolyn, 16, were present but escaped unharmed by the killer the press have dubbed the Slaughter Man.
    There was more but I was looking at the article’s two photographs. One showed a man who looked like a large, overgrown boy being led away in handcuffs by a uniformed officer, the boy-man’s face smooth and unlined and totally empty, as if he was thinking of nothing at all. He was strikingly handsome, in a way that seemed from another time. The mass of black curls pushed back from a Roman profile, like the head on a coin, the picture somehow not marred by a nose that had been bent by man or nature.
    The other picture showed a family laughing under a Christmas tree. The father dark and beefy, his three boys the same, and his wife and daughter both slim and fair.
    ‘Why do they give them these names?’ John said, the anger suddenly bubbling up. ‘
The Slaughter Man!
As though he’s some kind of superhero? Who put