On the Loose

by Christopher Fowler

  There was a time when Jack Renfield would have been happy to obey the instructions of the Home Office to the letter, but he had recently undergone a change of heart. He had only just gained the trust of the others in the unit. Now he would be risking his new career to please this porcine paper-shuffler. Renfield could be an obstinate man when he chose, and he chose to be so now.

  ‘What if I tell you I’m not prepared to do it?’ he asked, already sensing the answer.

  ‘Then we will have to question your suitability for the PCU, and return you to the Met.’

  ‘You know I can’t go back there. I guess you’re also aware that the CID turned me down.’

  ‘Yes, I heard you rather burned your bridges when you joined the Peculiar Crimes Unit. So I take it you’ll accept this task?’

  ‘You’re not leaving me much choice,’ snapped Renfield, hanging up. But I’ll do it in my own way, he decided, astonished by his new allegiance to the unit.

  1 Ruby Murray=curry.

  15

  VENGEANCE MADE MANIFEST

  He never puts his bloody tools away,’ Clive the chief electrician complained as he rolled up the heavy red plastic cables and kicked them across the floor. He checked his watch: 7:45 p.m. The place had been deserted since one minute past six. They couldn’t have cleared the decks of the Titanic this quickly, he thought. That was the trouble with the lazy sods that management was hiring these days. No pride in their workmanship. It was a bloody disgrace. It was a matter of principle in Clive’s family to work hard and joylessly until the day you dropped dead.

  ‘From Essex, isn’t he, your friend?’ said Constantin, his trainee.

  ‘What’s that got to bloody do with it?’

  ‘They are all cowboys, the ones from Essex.’

  ‘What do you know? You’re from bloody Romania.’

  ‘We are a hardworking people. When you have so little, it makes you work. Your friend has too much, I think.’

  ‘Can you stop calling him my bloody friend?’ The two electricians were clearing up for the night. The central block of the building that would eventually become the shopping mall now had power. Three of the floors were temporarily lit, dimmed at night for the sake of the council flats opposite. Constantin unplugged the extension cords and carefully set them aside. Clive cut the remaining spotlights, and the floor was suddenly darker than the surrounding land, so that they had to be careful reaching the open staircase to the site exit.

  Two hundred and seventy men and women were currently working full-time on the Royal Midland Quadrangle, a retail complex being constructed around a raised concrete platform that would form the centrepiece of the new town to the north of King’s Cross station. Tonight, apart from two security guards, Clive and Constantin were the only workers still left on site.

  When Constantin stepped outside and found himself facing the railway embankment, he was aware of another human presence standing nearby. He could feel someone watching him. He scanned the dug-up fields, the park for the earthmovers, the construction-site cabins, but nothing moved in them.

  When he turned back to the embankment, it seemed that his worst childhood fear had sprung to life. A great half-human creature rose on its spread haunches against the deepening orange skyline. It slowly raised its glinting antlered head until it seemed to be staring directly at him. The electrician let out a groan of fear and backed away.

  ‘Hey, Dinu,’ Clive called, using the diminutive version of Constantin’s name, ‘look where you’re going.’ But it was too late. The Romanian boy was so entranced by the creature standing on the ridge of earth before him that he did not remember the newly dug basement at his back, and fell into darkness.

  Ten thirty-five p.m. Another night, another party.

  Izabella and Piotr had been going out for over three months, and had never slept together. Izabella had no idea what had gone wrong, but they had passed the point where they might have fallen into bed, and had now drifted into a limbo world of friendship. She still fancied him, craved him even, but it was difficult to bring the subject back now that it had gone. She was Polish and smart and thought too much about what boys wanted. He was a dirt-common Russian from the suburbs, weighed down with his father’s new money, and he enjoyed playing the field.

  On that night, they too saw the horned man. He was draped in deerskins and wearing metallic stag antlers that shone in the streetlamps. He stood against the low wall of the bridge across the canal, sometimes moving out of sight when a car pulled up at the traffic lights.

  They were picking their way over the field from Battlebridge Road to York Way, going for a drink before heading for the Keys club, and the stag-man was handing out flyers; several had been tossed aside and were tumbling away toward the embankment. Izabella had thought nothing of it. So many flyers were handed out, usually at the end of the night. She picked one up and tried to read it in the dim light: a horned skull and some kind of poem. The printing was poor and she could only catch the last four lines.

  Long have two springs in dull stagnation slept,

  But taught at length by subtle art to flow,

  They rise; forth from oblivion’s bed they rise;

  And manifest their vengeance to mankind.

  What was it advertising, a Goth pub? There was nothing printed on the back. The stag-man was still there when they left the Keys several hours later, and this time his appearance was more memorable, perhaps because he stood out in stark silhouette against the electric darkness. From the way he was weaving about beside the bridge, he appeared to have been drinking.

  She recalled thinking that the sky was strange, a sickly ochre reflection of the radiant city beneath. The air was cold and gritty, and left a cuprous tang in the mouth, like being near a steelworks or in the proximity of blood. The night was not right. They had argued over something ridiculous—a spilled drink—and left. A lone girl was tottering ahead of them, fawn-thin legs in a too-short dress. She looked awkward, frozen and friendless, as if, leached of life and colour, she might fall over and expire at any moment.

  Izabella was still sniping at Piotr on their way to the night bus stop, a hectoring banter they had evolved when they were feeling frazzled and fractious. She saw the thin girl approaching the bridge from the corner of her eye, saw her long black hair whip up around her dark eyes, and then the stag-man was there as well, towering over her. Backlit by the canal lamps behind the bridge, Izabella saw his antlers glitter and fracture the light. She heard the girl scream or laugh hysterically, but the sound was snatched away by the wind. She watched in shock as he lifted her up, placing her under one arm, and seemed to drop beneath the bridge.

  By the time Izabella reached the spot with Piotr, there was no sign of either of them. No ripple on the petrol-iridescent surface of the canal, only the cold breeze from the tunnel and a fading sigh in the trees, as if the pair had evaporated into the thickening mist like a pair of exorcised ghosts.

  16

  FIRST DAY

  I spent two hours at something called the King’s Cross Police Shop in the early hours of this morning, waiting to be seen, and after I got to make a report they made a phone call and finally sent me to you, only you weren’t open, ‘Izabella told DS Janice Longbright. All I wanted to do was explain what I saw, okay?’ She took a look around the room and wrinkled her nose, trying to make sense of it. ‘This isn’t a police station. What is this place?’

  ‘We’re in the process of moving in,’ said Longbright. ‘We’re a specialist unit.’

  ‘What do you specialise in, pest control? I just saw something in the hall that looked like a rat.’

  Smart mouth, thought Longbright. She’ll make a good witness. ‘Yeah, we have a few of those. Look, I’ve read your statement and I know you’re telling the truth about the man you saw, but are you sure he actually abducted someone?’

  ‘I was with my—’ She stopped herself. ‘A friend. He saw it, too. The dressed-up guy, he was pretty big—’

  ‘How big?’
/>
  ‘I don’t know—he had to reach down to her, he put her under his arm, actually under his arm, she was a skinny little thing, then when I looked back they were gone.’

  ‘You think they went down onto the canal?’

  ‘No idea. The path to the waterside is further back along the road. I’d have seen them if they’d used it, but I suppose they might have ducked into the tunnel. They disappeared so quickly I thought I must have imagined it.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘This girl, she didn’t fight back?’

  ‘I don’t know. I guess so—I mean I saw her hands go up in the air and I think I heard her scream.’

  ‘What do you mean, you think?’

  ‘At first I thought it was a laugh, like maybe she thought he was joking, but it turned into something that sounded like a scream.’

  ‘What did she look like? If I was trying to recognise her in the street, how would you describe her to me?’

  ‘Skinny, very pale, wearing a short pink skirt with little black ruffles, black high heels, dark hair. Maybe there was more colour—you can’t really tell under those yellow streetlights. She was kind of invisible, like everyone else who comes out of a club. I didn’t see her face.’

  Not much to put out a MisPer for, thought Longbright. ‘And no-one apart from you saw what happened?’

  ‘No, it gets really quiet around there before the Keys shuts down. I couldn’t do anything because they were too far away and it happened so fast, but you hear about bad things happening to girls by themselves, and I hate the idea that she might have been abducted without anyone coming forward.’

  ‘You did the right thing. I’m sorry they made it difficult for you. The problem I have is that your description of this girl doesn’t give us much to go on. We can get some leaflets posted around the club, ask around, see if anyone’s failed to check in at home, but we can’t do much more unless she’s reported missing.’

  ‘This guy was handing out flyers, so he’s not trying to hide himself away, is he? I thought he was advertising a club but it was some kind of poem.’ She dug in her pocket and produced a crumpled ball of saffron paper.

  As Izabella left, she passed Constantin waiting in the corridor. His right leg and ankle were heavily bandaged and he was on painkillers that were sending him to sleep, but he still took a great interest in her backside.

  ‘The guy out there saw him too,’ said April, dropping a report on the arrangement of tea chests that served as Longbright’s desk. ‘He was so shocked that he fell down the unlit stairwell behind him and broke his ankle.’

  ‘What was he doing there?’ asked Longbright, digging out a pair of mad rhinestone-winged glasses with which to skim the statement.

  ‘He’s an electrician working on the site’s new mall,’ April explained. ‘There’s a hypermarket going in, and they’re running behind schedule. He was terrified. He could have been killed. Luckily they hadn’t started pouring concrete, so he landed in dirt. This might have started as someone’s idea of a joke, but it’s going beyond that.’

  ‘You don’t need me to re-interview him, do you?’ Longbright asked. ‘Nothing’s working here, and I could really use some time to get straightened out.’

  ‘Well, he has an interesting twist on what he saw.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s Romanian and very superstitious. He insists he saw—Hang on.’ She checked her notes. ‘Veles, the Slavic god of sacred animals. According to this guy, it’s a forest creature that has horns like a ram or a stag, and protects hallowed land from enemies. He’s refusing to go back to work on the site, and he’s told his friends not to go back, either. He insists it’s an indication that something evil has been disturbed. That the land wasn’t meant to be built on.’

  ‘Hm. Is he cute?’

  ‘I’d go to a boxing match with him if he promised to let me touch his chest afterwards.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Longbright. ‘Send him in.’

  ‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’ said May, narrowing his eyes at his old partner. ‘Look at you, sitting there surrounded by dirt and chaos, eating your Licorice Allsorts and reading witness statements about a character from Eastern European mythology. You think you’re back on track. This is not an office, Arthur, it’s a chamber of horrors. We’ve got bare bulbs in the ceiling, no phones, no computer network, no authorisation, no legal existence at all, a broken toilet and hardly any floorboards. By comparison, Mornington Crescent was Silicon Valley. I should never have let you pick a rented property without consulting me.’

  ‘It was cheap,’ said Bryant, happily patting the arms of his new chair, a studded green leather number on broken castors that exuded horsehair stuffing like a disembowelled corpse. ‘Besides, I knew you had your hands full getting the team back together. We’ll manage somehow.’

  May looked up at the blackened ceiling and wrinkled his nose. ‘I’m wondering what was here before; I keep finding joss sticks and pots of strange-smelling incense behind the doors. Poor Raymond nearly had a conniption fit when he saw the place. I think he actually started pining for his old office.’

  ‘Raymond’s only happy when he’s got something to complain about.’

  ‘Chief, how’s your knowledge of local poetry?’ asked Long-bright, sticking her head around the place where the door should have been. ‘Message from the stag-man.’ She threw the balled-up flyer onto the arrangement of crates that constituted a pair of makeshift desks.

  Bryant hooked up his reading glasses and unfurled the page. The silence that followed was broken by a piece of ceiling falling down.

  ‘I know this; it’s part of a long chunk of doggerel written when Battlebridge was still a spa town of royal patronage. It’s always quoted in books about the actress Nell Gwynne. The last line has been altered:… from oblivion’s bed they rise; And manifest their vengeance to mankind. But it’s not supposed to be “vengeance,” it should be “virtues.”’

  ‘Amazing,’ May exclaimed. ‘When I went to pick him up this morning, I had to wait twenty minutes while he remembered where he’d left his shoes, but he can recall a one-word mistake in a two-and-a-half-century-old poem.’

  ‘It’s not a mistake,’ Bryant explained, ‘it’s a threat. Janice, get everyone together, will you? I think we should talk to them in our new briefing room.’

  ‘And where might that be?’ asked Longbright.

  ‘The big black-painted room opposite. They can sit on the floor and take notes.’

  ‘I’m not one to make a fuss, but there are rats.’

  ‘Let Crippen out. He’ll take care of them. I’ll be there in a minute.’ Bryant tore open a cardboard carton and dragged out a stack of books. As May watched, his partner seemed to be reversing the ageing process, becoming visibly younger and happier before his eyes.

  It had taken only one working day for the team to re-create a semblance of their old offices. Now they had time to reacquaint themselves with each other. ‘Hey, Jack.’ Dan Banbury held out his hand to Renfield. ‘How have you been coping for the last month?’

  ‘Just been getting on with it,’ replied the taciturn sergeant.

  ‘Raymond, I thought you were determined to stay retired,’ said May.

  ‘Yes, I thought so too,’ Land admitted despondently.

  ‘Come on, everyone, this is great, we’re all here again, feel the love, group hug,’ said Bimsley. Someone threw a piece of wood at him.

  Giles Kershaw had popped in from the Coroner’s Office in Camley Street to welcome his old friends back and offer them his limited facilities at the morgue. Even Meera accepted a bear hug from Colin Bimsley, telling herself that it would probably never happen again.

  When Bryant entered the room he received a round of applause. ‘All right, you lot,’ he called, ‘settle down, we’re losing time. John, run through the salient points, will you?’

  May stepped forward. ‘In order to make this work we have to be ve
ry organised,’ he told them. ‘I know the place is a dump—we won’t even have a functioning bathroom until Friday at the earliest, so you’ll have to use the one in the pub opposite—but the freedom we have does give us a few advantages.’

  ‘The Home Office won’t be able to find us,’ remarked Bimsley, causing laughter.

  ‘That’s true, we have a few days in hand before the old restrictions kick in. They want this so-called “gang killing” dealt with before word gets out, and we have to work with them. If they’ve covered up our existence, the press won’t know where to look for us, but even so I reckon we only have two or three days’ grace. You’ll have read Janice’s notes on what we have so far, which isn’t much at all—no positive ID on the body, no cause of death, no motive, no suspects.’

  ‘Situation normal, then,’ said Meera. There was more laughter.

  ‘We have an approximate date of demise—a week ago, around last Tuesday—we think our victim was a welder, and he probably wasn’t killed on the site. Islington CID’s only suspect has been released on bail. A gentleman named Rafi Abd al-Qaadir—have I pronounced that right?—who purchased the shop’s lease. Oh, and the original owner of the property has been traced to Nigeria. We’re waiting for the Lagos police to interview him, but you won’t be surprised to hear that they’re being uncooperative and are refusing to tell us when that will be.’

  ‘So we have no leads at all?’ asked Banbury. ‘I don’t know how we’re supposed to work without access to police databases.’

  ‘I found traces of mud that appear to match the construction site up the road,’ said Kershaw, ‘where they’re building the new King’s Cross development. But it’s all over the area, trodden into the pavements and gutters. It’s probably just transferred material.’

  ‘Unfortunately,’ said May, ‘there are more welders and general building workers in King’s Cross than anywhere else in London right now, which is going to make your job much harder. Start with all the site foremen, see if they’re missing anyone. We need to hit all the shops on the Cally Road and find out if anyone saw the door to number seventy-three being forced. Try the tattoo parlours in Camden, see if there’s anything unusual about the ivy-wreath tattoo. And find out whether anyone noticed a van parked outside the shop at night.’