Bryant & May 06; The Victoria Vanishes b&m-6

by Christopher Fowler

  Overhead, neon strip-lights buzzed faintly behind dusty plastic panels. The last of the visitors had gone. Only the night guards and a few members of staff were left, but the museum was larger than a city block, and the handful who remained were hidden somewhere behind sound-deadening walls. The building that acted as a great repository of the past had defied many attempts to make it less oppressive, and only the dimpled glass roof of the new Great Court was truly capable of raising spirits. Elsewhere, in the narrow back channels, morgue-like chambers and suffocating windowless rooms, the weight of history bore down with a melancholy pressure that slowed movement and reduced all conversation to awed whispers.

  Jackie had been feeling unsettled ever since she awoke that morning. She had discovered some days ago that Joanne Kellerman had died, and although it seemed a tragedy there was nothing to be done, for they had hardly been close friends. But in today’s issue of Hard News she found two more names, Naomi Curtis and Carol Wynley, dead within a day of one another. She scoured the newspapers looking for further articles, found one small piece in the Evening Standard, another in a local free sheet, but the rest of the news items were only concerned with a pretty young black girl who had died of unnatural causes in a pub Jackie had never heard of.

  She panicked. She could think of no-one else but Dr Masters to discuss the matter with, but even he had proved elusive. Suddenly, it seemed, the events of the past had returned to disturb her sleep…

  The person she should have called, she realised, was Arthur Bryant. The problem was that she liked him, and enlisting his aid meant revealing the full extent of her complicity.

  The corridor seemed to lead nowhere. Its end wall was entirely blank, the skirting board merely running around it to connect to two opposing doors. A marble bust of a forgotten plunderer of antiquities stood on a discoloured marble plinth. Jackie checked the number on the slip of paper in her hand and counted down the doors. She knocked on 2135 and waited, but there was no answer. The handle turned easily, so she entered.

  The room was lined with plans chests, upon which were piled tagged sections of stone, statues patiently awaiting reassembly. Masters was seated beneath the single cone of light from his green enamel reading lamp, intently writing, his eyes so close to the page that his nose almost touched the paper.

  “Harold?” She took a step further into the darkened room. “I’m sorry, am I disturbing you?”

  “No. I suppose I was half expecting you.” He sounded confused, as if he had just woken up to find himself in a strange place. He sat back in his chair, stretching his spine. “You lose track of time down here. It’s terrible for the posture.” He did not rise to greet her. “How are you, Jackie?”

  “I expected to see you at the Yorkshire Grey this week.”

  “Oh, the Immortals. It completely slipped my mind. I’ve had a lot to worry about lately. I suppose you’ve heard something. It was inevitable that you would.”

  She came forward into the light, setting her handbag on the edge of the swamped desk. “I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything else all day. I don’t know what to think. I tried calling Jocelyn, but I couldn’t get any answer.”

  “She’s also dead.” Masters seemed to lose interest, and returned to his writing.

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Absurd or not, it’s a fact,” he said impatiently. “She died in the Old Bell tavern in Fleet Street. Rather, I should say she was killed, just like the others.”

  “In another pub…it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Oh, I’m afraid it does.” Masters placed a ruler on the page and carefully drew a line in blue ink. “That was the way he worked.”

  “But that just leaves me, Mary and Jennifer. I mean, out of the mothers.”

  “You weren’t real mothers or even surrogate ones; you were little more than day nurses.”

  “We became attached to our charges. How could they have expected us not to?”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have. There’s no room for sentiment where science is concerned. He would have come after the rest of you as well, but the police stopped him. He’s dead.”

  “My God.” Jackie drew out a chair opposite Masters and sat down heavily. “I can’t believe somebody would have done this. Was it really so important that we knew?”

  “Don’t be so naïve; of course it’s important. You can’t compromise in a situation like this.”

  “Then I don’t understand why the press aren’t making more of it. Surely people want the facts?”

  “Really?” He looked up at her now and slowly removed his reading glasses. “Don’t you think it’s in the ministry’s interests not to let it get out?”

  “We still live in a democracy, Harold, no matter how tainted it’s become of late. Things like this can’t – ”

  “Things like this,” he cut across her, “happen all the time in places where the powerful gather. What about Litvinenko? His dinner at the Sheraton Park Lane was poisoned with polonium-two-ten, for God’s sake. A series of government murder plots involving Russian spies, death and a trail of radioactive contamination? It sounds more suited to the plot of a James Bond film, but it happened right here. Nobody cares about a relapsed psychotic putting a few alcoholic middle-aged legal secretaries to sleep. How many times have stories about re-offending ‘care-in-the-community’ patients made the papers for a couple of days before being forgotten?”

  “How do you know so much about it?” she asked, suddenly suspicious. She had once valued Masters’s friendship, had comforted him during his wife’s decline and death, but his defensive attitude was starting to disturb her.

  “The MOD re-hired me on a freelance contract.”

  “I thought you said you would never go back there.”

  “They had an academic problem that I found intriguing. I said I’d help them out.”

  She glanced nervously back at the door, and he caught her looking. “Why would you do that?” she asked. “What happened to you?”

  “You may ask, what is the purpose of an academic? What are we for? I thought it was to make discoveries, to render visible the lines that bind civilisations. Then one day I made a discovery that called into question everything for which I thought I stood. It’s not just the slow accumulation of empirical data, you know; we are granted epiphanies occasionally. We may even pronounce them to the world, but like the Oracle, we are doomed never to be believed.”

  “What did you do for the Ministry of Defence?” she persisted.

  “There’s such a thing as accountability, Jackie. The research teams there couldn’t be seen to – they needed a solution to a thorny ethical problem. You must understand. I didn’t know any of them except you, of course.” He pushed his writing pad back with careful deliberation.

  She spoke in shocked gravity. “What did you do?”

  “Society must abide by the rules it creates, otherwise we descend into moral anarchy.” He spoke with the clarity of a man who had something to hide. “You know how the law works in cases like this. You were sworn to secrecy, and now you’re in breach of your contracts. The documents you signed – you all signed – are still legally binding. And you were paid well. Do you want to betray your country?”

  “It was blood money, and you know it!”

  Masters sighed. “This is all water under the bridge. Everything has been cleared up now. There’s no reason why any of it should ever get out.”

  “It will get out, Harold. Mary and Jennifer are still here. I’m still here,” Jackie persisted. “I’m still alive.”

  “No, I’m afraid you’re not,” said Masters, wearily rising from behind his desk.

  ∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧

  43

  Beneath the Antiquities

  The British Museum was the oldest public museum on the planet.

  It had been built to house the purchases and gifts collected from around the world by Sir Hans Sloane in 1753, items of such antiquity that appreciating the convoluted circumstances of
their history had become a challenge in itself. Almost every exhibit told an extraordinary story, from the graceful Portland Vase, produced before the birth of Christ only to be smashed into two hundred pieces by a drunken sailor in 1845 and then painstakingly reassembled, to the Lindow Man, a two-thousand-year-old peasant preserved in the acids of a Cheshire peat bog.

  It was not a particularly friendly or accessible museum. Artefacts withheld their secrets, and the weight of lost empires hung heavily about the remains. A mere stroll through chambers of glass cabinets taught little, and left no impression; the museum worked best when no more than half a dozen objects were examined at one time.

  Janice Longbright and Jack Renfield had managed to get themselves admitted, but the girl who had opened the side door thought Masters had gone for the night, and went off to look for him in the direction of the Egyptian Hall.

  “I’m not going to wait for her,” said Renfield. “She could be up to something dodgy. He’ll be out of the toilet window before we can grab hold of him.”

  “He’s a senior curator and lecturer at one of the world’s most prestigious institutions,” said Longbright, studying the Grecian statues at the top of the stairs. “He doesn’t leap out of lavatory windows. You have a suspicious mind.”

  “I’m a bloody copper. Come on, let’s have a shufti. You’re going to have trouble keeping up with me in those shoes. I can’t believe they let you get away with breach of uniform regulations like that.”

  “I’ve always worn heels on duty; it’s my look. Mr Bryant says he believes in the foolishness of consistency.” Longbright reluctantly followed her opposite number up the south staircase. Dominating the entire landing was a white marble discus thrower, devoid of its correct setting, out of place and time.

  “You don’t have to get all toffee-nosed about it, Janice. I know where you come from – you’re South London workingclass just like me. Either you want to catch a lawbreaker, in which case you do everything within your power to do so, or you’re happy to let him get away.”

  “We don’t usually do a lot of running about,” she said lamely. Renfield made her realise how sheltered she had been at the PCU. There had been one hundred and eighty murders in the capital over the last year. Two and a half thousand reported rapes. Nearly two hundred thousand instances of violence against the person. And nearly one million men and women in the Met. Perhaps now she would have to go back into the force and deal with the crimes they faced every day of their working lives.

  “Do you know what this bloke looks like, Janice?”

  “I’d recognise him, but you’re going the wrong way. He’ll be in the basement at the back of the building, where the researchers’ offices are.” She hunted about for the correct avenue. “Down here.”

  “This isn’t the way my old squad would have gone about it,” grumbled Renfield. “If she’s with Masters, do we take them both in for questioning? As far as I know, they haven’t broken any law.”

  “We talk to them honestly, Renfield; that’s what the PCU does best. It’s not always about following rules.”

  “Yeah, I figured that much out. This geezer’s not dangerous, is he?” Renfield tried the door opposite, but it was locked. “She’s not at risk? Not that I’m bothered. If we find ‘em and he cuts up rough we’ll be all right, ‘cause you’re big, I’m stocky and he’s just a bookworm. Now which way?”

  “Left here.” Hopping to pull her shoe strap back in place, she led them along a harshly lit passage painted in searing stripes of cadmium yellow.

  “How do you know where to go?”

  “Mr Bryant has a lot of friends who use these offices. Restorers, engravers, historians.” She tried a heavy oak door as they passed, but it failed to open. “He sounded worried, and when he gets like that I know there’s something going on in his head that he hasn’t told us about. I think Masters should be in one of the chambers along here.”

  “You all seem to have so much respect for him, but he doesn’t do a lot, does he, your Mr Bryant?”

  “People either get him or they don’t; he’s old school. He does things quietly, in his own way. Doesn’t like to waste words or expend unnecessary energy. He believes in unfashionable concepts – grace, calm, gentility, tolerance, understatement.”

  “Then he’s out of step with the world, and he’ll get trodden on.”

  “I thought you were going to try to understand.”

  “I’m still biting my tongue sometimes, okay? What are you doing?”

  “I’m calling him.” She pressed an ear hard against her cell phone. “The reception’s terrible down here. Can you hear me? Yes, we’re there now, Masters is supposed to be somewhere nearby. What? We’ll try it, but you need to get here as soon as you can.”

  “What did he say?” asked Renfield as Longbright closed her cell phone.

  “He says we’re to try rooms twenty-one hundred to twenty-one forty.” Longbright pointed to the corridor ahead. “And he thinks Jackie Quinten’s life is in the balance.”

  ∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧

  44

  Accountability

  “Wait, we have to go back,” said Longbright. All the passages had begun to look the same. “We’re too far over.”

  “Do you know where he is, or don’t you?” Renfield looked around. The buzzing overhead panels bathed the halls in seagreen light.

  “The corridors are supposed to be painted differently in this section.” She turned about. “We’ve gone wrong somewhere.”

  “We need to go back to the big marble stairwell, where the bloke with the Frisbee was. You can work it out again from there.”

  Renfield broke into a run, forcing her to keep up. They reached a narrow staff staircase and he took the steps three at a time, as if he had finally come to terms with the idea that Bryant was not playing the fool, and that a murder could only be halted by their intervention. She followed closely behind, almost slamming into him as he stopped dead and listened.

  They both heard the voice, too loud for normal speech in a museum. Renfield continued back along the passageway, putting on an extra spurt of speed when he spotted something she had yet to see.

  He knows something bad is about to happen, she thought. She had seen this instinctive talent, born of experience and an almost supernatural prescience, in just a handful of policemen. It was the last thing she expected to encounter in a man like Renfield. He’s one of us, she realised, surprised to recognise her own ability.

  ♦

  Jackie Quinten made a run for it but wasn’t as young as she thought, and her ankle twisted beneath her weight on the slippery tiled floor. She fell hard.

  Masters didn’t come after her. If anything, he seemed mortified at having to sort out the mess he now found himself in. He was fumbling about in his desk drawer, looking for something.

  “Please,” he called after her. “I just came up with the solution, it was a theoretical conundrum, that’s all. I didn’t want to be involved. I’m not cut out for this sort of thing. My career here is over, did I tell you? The museum is letting me go. Some new people have come in, and they don’t approve of my lecture style. I’m too partisan. It seems you can’t have opinions in public these days; it’s not sensitive enough. I don’t get the audience figures they want. I have to do other things now in order to survive. But this is too much to expect of anyone, let alone me.” He found the object of his search and removed it from the drawer, a long red and green tartan scarf. “I’ve been looking for this everywhere. Please, you mustn’t be frightened. It’ll do neither of us any good.”

  He watched as she climbed to her feet and hobbled to the door, then came around the desk to her, holding up the scarf.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have anything else I can use,” he apologised, wrapping the scarf around her exposed throat and pulling it tight. “I promise you, I’ve never done anything like this before. I don’t want to do it now, but there’s no other way out of the situation. Of course I admit it’s my fault. I didn’
t think the police would close in on Anthony so quickly, and I certainly never imagined he would start leaving them clues. Now I have to clear up the mess he’s created or they’ll deal with me, too. You do understand, don’t you?”

  With the fiery noose of the scarf across her throat, Jackie could only stare helplessly up at her captor. His height gave him an immense advantage; he was able to keep her off balance as he dragged her back into the corridor toward the staircase.

  “When you’re young, you imagine rising to the top of your profession, but of course you never can.” He was almost talking to himself now, paltering in a plea to be understood. “There’s always someone above you, someone behind you, someone to watch out for, someone to answer to. Do you know how far up this chain goes? Further than you’d ever dream. There’s no-one who can help me, no sympathy for what I’ve done, and why should there be? We live in a society that can only function by finding someone to blame, and they will rightly blame me. My solution to their problem was brilliant in its simplicity, but of course things never stay simple. I found them a madman, and now that he has failed I am being forced to finish his work.”

  The more she struggled, the tighter the noose grew. He yanked on the scarf, as one would pull on a dog’s chain to rein it in. She fought to stay upright, knowing that if she fell she would be strangled to death.

  “It’s a matter of accountability. Contract out the work and it seems almost inevitable that the person you’ve entrusted it to will let you down. In the old days it was ‘Never mind, old chap, you did your best.’ Now it’s ‘Fix it yourself or be prepared to take the blame for everything.’ Are you familiar with George Orwell? You remember in 1984, how Winston Smith tells Julia ‘We are the dead’? That’s how I feel now.”

  He yanked hard on the scarf, causing her to gasp in pain. Her heels left ragged black lines along the cream linoleum floor.

  “Once I was a brilliant academic with a soaring future ahead of me. When you agree to do something you know to be wrong, you tell yourself it will just happen once. Then you find yourself doing it just to remain afloat. Finally you become just like them – one of the dead, a walking cadaver obeying orders in order to stay alive.”