On the Loose

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘What were they arguing about?’

  ‘I imagine they were both going after the same memorabilia, but Standover also lives with Jesson’s sister.’

  ‘Did Jesson ever talk to you about his collection?’

  ‘He hardly ever talked about anything else,’ said the old man wearily. ‘He has a storage unit in King’s Cross right next to St Pancras station where he keeps everything.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘He owns the first hundred issues of Spider-Man in mint condition, every single Bob Dylan track ever released, stuff like that. He specialises in original artwork from album sleeves, but he lives in a really run-down council flat. No furniture, nothing. I had to deliver some books to him once.’

  Longbright wondered why Jesson had chosen to live in squalor when his collection was worth good money.

  The man behind the desk seemed to read her mind. ‘Blokes like him never sell their treasures,’ he explained. ‘They’re not interested in investment value. They’d rather live like starving students, because they can never let go. It’s the mark of a true collector. It becomes an unhealthy obsession.’

  There were only a handful of storage places left in the King’s Cross area, and it did not take long to track down the one used by Adrian Jesson. Longbright arrived to find rain sluicing from the brick arches of the undercroft beneath St Pancras station. The vaults had been constructed for storing beer, and were tailored precisely to fit the barrels. Once the area had been defined by these Victorian tunnels, which were eventually converted into everything from car washes to showrooms for antiques. One of the last surviving businesses was behind a pair of curved wooden doors marked Rental Space Available At Cheap Rates.

  The manager was just about to leave for the day. Longbright explained why she needed him to open Jesson’s storage unit. For the next hour she dug through boxes filled with sealed and dated plastic bags of comics, albums, paperbacks and merchandising ephemera from old movies, including screening tickets, invitations, drink coasters and VIP party tags. Without an expert, it was impossible to tell how much the collection was worth or which parts of it were valuable.

  ‘When was the last time you saw him?’ she asked the manager.

  ‘About a week ago. He’s got his own keys and can come by whenever he wants, but I happened to be on-site. He complained that the arch had a leak and was damaging his boxes. I said I’d try to get it fixed, and he told me he was going to come by the next morning to move his stuff out of the way, but he never showed up.’

  ‘You remember the exact day?’

  ‘It must have been Thursday.’

  ‘Are you absolutely sure?’

  ‘Positive. I only do a half-day on Thursday, and when he didn’t show by lunchtime, I went home.’

  ‘Did he ever come here with anyone else?’

  ‘You’re joking. He was far too scared of getting robbed.’

  ‘Is this stuff valuable?’

  ‘You could sell it piecemeal on eBay, but it’s worth more in sets.’

  Longbright called the unit and spoke to May. ‘Jesson definitely died after Delaney. He was last seen alive on the Wednesday, two days after Delaney was killed.’

  ‘We mustn’t get misled by the timing of the deaths, Janice, that’s just muddying the waters. Jesson was a collector. Delaney had a habit of helping strangers. I can’t help wondering if they had something valuable in their possession that had to be taken from them whether they were dead or alive.’

  ‘What could they have had in common, John? They seem to have been complete opposites. Different backgrounds, different classes, different interests. The only thing they share—’

  ‘—is the same location.’ May completed her thought. ‘What if Arthur is right and it’s not who they were but where they lived?’

  The arguments went back and forth, but nothing further was achieved that night. The rain continued to fall, the skies darkened, and King’s Cross once more became a place of transience, somewhere to hurry through before reaching safe shelter.

  The lights in the PCU’s warehouse shone long after the bars had closed down and the streets had cleared. At night, the edges of the smart gentrified area frayed to reveal older incarnations; flyers for call girls and sex clubs filled the wet gutters, drunks and the homeless reappeared in the shadows. All would vanish with the coming of another dawn, but the central mystery refused to be dissolved.

  33

  DECAPITATION

  Joseph was a devoutly religious man who had chosen to work in a cathedral of commerce. As the cleaner released his vacuum hose and guided the nozzle between the desks, he once more felt a sense of awe. The desk units were arranged like pews on either side of a central aisle, at the head of which was the boxed-off chancel where the Director of Operations received his clients.

  It was not yet light outside, but here in the great nave of the open-plan office everything was sharp and bright from six a.m. onwards. Two walls of bare brick, two of glass, twenty desks, a conference area and the sacristy of the refreshment station, all intended to be maintained in immaculate condition throughout the day. Except that the workers here accumulated so much rubbish in their work spaces that Joseph could discern their individual personalities, forcing their way through like grass growing in concrete cracks. Each night they left something of themselves behind, as if anxious to leave evidence that they existed. When someone resigned from the company and was replaced, the space was cleared and inevitably filled again. To Joseph, even the photographs of families were interchangeable. He never met the people who sat on the chairs and hunched over these desks. For him, they existed only through their belongings, a draped cardigan, a gym bag, a sunlit photograph of smiling children.

  However, this morning was different, because there was someone here. Joseph could see the shiny black shoes sticking out from the edge of the desk partition. As he walked forward, towing the vacuum cleaner behind him, he knew something was seriously wrong. The office cubicle was in chaos. The garbage pail had been overturned and a swivel chair lay on its side. Papers lay in sacrilegious disarray across the carpet tiles. Then he saw the dark, sticky patches gleaming in the light from the overhead panels.

  Joseph took a step forward, and the victim was revealed to him.

  The name on his cubicle wall was Maddox Cavendish, and he was one of the project’s main architects, but Joseph had heard that he was Marianne Waters’s hatchet man, and that presumably meant he fired people, and that meant there were a lot of people who really hated him.

  Which probably explained why Maddox Cavendish had no head.

  ‘Oh, God. Oh, Lord. Oh, Jesus.’ Raymond Land sat shaking his head in his hands as Arthur Bryant looked on with interest.

  ‘Isn’t it funny how the most atheistic people start summoning gods when they’re in a state of panic?’ he mused. ‘You could probably trace the birth of many religious cults to such moments of self-induced anxiety.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Bryant. You’re no help at all. What are we going to do? The chief architect of the ADAPT Group’s expansion plans, rendered headless in an office with a secure entry system. Murdered within a few hundred yards of two other men, one a builder, the other an assistant manager of a sodding coffee shop! And you’re telling me our only suspect is the clueless young leader of a local protest group. It’s not going to stick. I can’t go back to Faraday and tell him this. I can’t contain it now. The story will be out and all over the networks by lunchtime. We can’t have people fearful of going to work. Can you imagine the chaos? They’ll be suing their employers. The publicity’s going to backfire on everyone. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lied to Leslie Faraday this week. I keep telling him we’re getting close to an arrest but he doesn’t seem to believe me. He’s not getting information from anywhere else, is he?’

  ‘I can’t imagine why you did that, old fruit. You should have told the truth and said that there’s a mad killer roaming our streets and we have absolutely no clue about
who he might be or what his motives are.’

  ‘That’s what you would have done, isn’t it? Because you don’t care what you say to your superiors; you never have. I remember the Brixton Prison breakout, when you called Faraday a time-wasting dung-beetle.’

  ‘If I remember correctly, which is fairly unlikely, I accused him of behaving like Cardinal Richelieu or a rabid weasel, depending on whether he preferred to take his comparisons from history or the animal kingdom.’

  ‘All very amusing, Bryant, but Faraday was a junior official then and he’s your boss now, and that’s exactly why we’re in this fix. If you’re mean to them on the way up, they’ll knife you once they reach the top. We’re all going to be thrown out on the streets any minute now.’

  ‘Drink your tea, Raymondo, you’ll feel better. It’s got whisky in it.’

  ‘It’s half past eleven in the morning. I can’t drink alcohol this early.’

  ‘I only added a drop to buck you up. We’re doing everything we can. Apparently the room was covered from every angle by cameras and very well lit, but the killer took the precaution of smashing up the CCTV’s hard drive. There was a separate system in operation outside which he couldn’t get at. April and Meera are going through the footage right now.’

  ‘What about everyone else?’

  ‘Renfield is with Kershaw at the morgue, John has gone with Janice and Dan Banbury to the ADAPT offices, Bimsley and DuCaine are getting interviews and I’m ploughing my lonely furrow here. In fact, you’re the only one not doing anything useful.’

  ‘Then tell me what I can do,’ Land pleaded.

  ‘Go over Faraday’s head. Talk to Oskar Kasavian and tell him the truth. If you don’t, I will.’

  ‘I don’t see what good it will do—’

  ‘I want him to understand one thing,’ said Bryant. ‘He must realise that whether he likes it or not, we’re his only hope. Tell him that we’ll clear up the case. We need everyone on our side for this. And I think we can do it.’

  ‘Do you really believe that?’ Land asked.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ said Bryant. ‘But if I told you why, you’d probably have a heart attack.’

  ‘We know that he was here until nearly ten p.m. because he called home from work to check his messages,’ said John May. ‘Where have you gone, Dan?’

  Banbury appeared from behind the desk units. ‘I’m trying to get the carpet tiles up,’ he explained. ‘There’s an awful lot of blood underneath them.’ The area surrounding Cavendish’s desk had been taped off and photographed, and the floor closed to all members of staff, who periodically peered in through the glass with impassive faces. Occasionally one of them would discreetly record some footage onto a mobile phone.

  ‘If the courtyard hadn’t been closed outside, we might have had witnesses walking past. How the hell did the killer get in?’

  ‘No forced entry. It must have been someone Cavendish knew.’

  Longbright bagged the dead man’s appointment book. ‘I’ll do the remaining co-workers,’ she suggested. ‘His suppliers and clients will take longer to sift through.’

  ‘What happened, Dan?’ asked May. ‘You must have some idea.’

  ‘This is only in the early stages, John. But I can tell you our man is starting to panic. The victim was killed here. The cuts are the same as before, but nastier, more ragged and careless. Once the bone was severed he tore through the remaining section of skin. There are bits of it all over the place. Looks like he’s taken the head away. Hang on, here’s something…’ He raised a white rubber glove above the desk to show May. Between Banbury’s thumb and forefinger was a tangle of brownish black hair. ‘It’s from a dead animal. The collar of a jacket?’

  ‘No,’ said May grimly. ‘Too coarse. Looks to me like it’s from a deer or a stag. Mr Toth has every reason to panic. I think we’ve got him this time. Okay, Janice, let’s bring him in.’

  34

  EXORCISM

  Liberty DuCaine had been the fastest runner in his school, but he had bulked up since then, and knew that the extra weight would slow him down. He had misjudged the height of the railing and was stuck halfway across it. The iron spearheads were digging into his upper thigh, and his quarry was getting away.

  Xander Toth had decided to make a run for it.

  DuCaine had been forced to kick in the front door but Toth had barricaded himself into the living room. Now there were crashes and slams coming from within the second-floor flat, so with Mangeshkar on guard at the front, DuCaine had run around the entire block to the courtyard at the rear. The morning light was unusually low, and although it had stopped raining the air was furred with damp. There were no lights on in the building. It sounded as if Toth had gained access to the apartment next door. Suddenly he appeared half out of the bathroom window. Toth was muscular and agile. A moment later he had jumped. His sneakers skittered on the wet roof tiles, then he was pelting along the slope toward the end of the roof.

  DuCaine ran up the concrete steps to the half-landing but knew he would not be able to reach his quarry from here. Toth was in navy tracksuit bottoms and a white t-shirt; it was almost as if he had been expecting to have to run. DuCaine tried to see which way he would move, but moments later Toth had passed the crest of the roof and leapt from sight.

  Liberty pelted back down the stairs, wondering why Meera had not come down, then caught sight of Toth running across the dewy grass bank, heading toward the road. DuCaine raised the pace, pumping up the same slope, closing the distance, but Toth darted behind a row of parked vans. Toth was heading toward St Pancras Old Church. If he got inside the gates, DuCaine knew he would be able to reach the canalside and lose himself in the empty buildings awaiting demolition.

  The silver coils of newly risen mist wreathed the churchyard like sheets of fragile silk. The effect was absurdly theatrical, something from a Hammer horror film, but Toth vanished into them as if passing through layers of years into the past. The grounds were deserted except for some crazy-looking old hippie in a pin-striped suit who was shouting out at Toth, warning him away. Toth ignored the commands and powered forward across the grassy graves, aiming for the far side of the churchyard. He had not got far when something tripped him and he fell. A green nylon tarpaulin closed about his legs and he vanished from view, into an open grave site that had been covered to protect it from the rain. The grave digger leaned on his shovel and watched from a safe distance, neither alarmed nor concerned.

  ‘Bloody vandals!’ Austin Potterton shouted at DuCaine. ‘This is a site of archaeological importance and he’s damaging it. Honestly, young people have no bloody respect for the past.’

  John May looked at the watch Arthur Bryant had bought him. The second hand had never worked properly. Bryant’s ability to infect every electronic device he touched had apparently spread to mechanical objects as well.

  May wondered where his partner had disappeared to this time. It felt like the pair of them hardly ever worked in tandem anymore. Bryant was off sorting through arcane publications in an attempt to prove that London’s criminals were influenced by myths from past centuries, while he was trying to cope with the exigencies of a modern metropolis.

  Right, he decided, I’m putting my foot down. It’s time he learned that criminals aren’t fingered by recourse to thousand-year-old ghosts. If the PCU is to have a future, I have to make Arthur understand how a modern police team works.

  But as he walked to the interview room a few minutes later, he thought, Fat chance.

  ‘You can’t hold me,’ said Toth, sprawled out across a straight-back chair. ‘You’ve got nothing.’

  ‘Why did you run?’ DuCaine asked.

  ‘I don’t want to talk to you. I’ll talk to him, no-one else.’ He pointed at John May.

  ‘I’ll be happy to offer you advice after you’ve answered a few of Mr DuCaine’s questions,’ said May.

  ‘Then I have nothing to say. I’ve done no wrong. I’m not obliged to explain anything to anyone.’

&
nbsp; ‘I think he might want to talk about this,’ said Meera, carrying in a black plastic garbage bag. Dropping it on the floor, she pulled out the stag-man’s furry jacket and a handful of knife blades. Behind her, a nervous pregnant girl stepped forward into the room.

  ‘Lizzi, what are you doing here?’

  ‘I had to tell them, Xander. I know where you go at night. I saw you putting on that stupid outfit. I want to find out exactly how many lies you’ve told me.’

  Toth pulled himself upright, and sat in stupefied silence. He was trying to come up with a fresh game plan, but realised there was no escape from the truth. ‘Where do you want me to start?’ he asked.

  ‘Why don’t you let me do it for you?’ said Bryant, sauntering into the already overcrowded interview room. ‘Can I have a chair? I’m knackered and it’s only one o’clock. Is anyone on tea duty? Meera, would you ask April to fill up that huge teapot I saw in the hall? Make sure Crippen’s not been near it first. Thank you so much.’

  DuCaine dragged in a battered armchair and everyone waited while Bryant squirmed into it. ‘The land, the land,’ mused Bryant. ‘You studied land rights when you worked at ADAPT, didn’t you?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘And the more you found out about the practice of co-opting properties, the less you liked what they were asking you to do. Is offering someone money to leave their home a bribe? I’m sure ADAPT’s lawyers would argue that no illegal acts were ever committed. But you saw the rules being bent, the meetings with councillors and property developers, and finally decided to complain. I found a pretty hefty file on you in Camden Council’s department of planning.’

  ‘I tried the official channels but nobody would listen to me,’ said Toth. ‘So I switched to unofficial ones.’

  ‘But all you could find were a few disgruntled householders who eventually caved in and sold out. After all, everyone wanted to see King’s Cross restored to being a decent neighbourhood. That’s why the ADAPT Group was offered so many sweeteners to start undoing the damage that the railway had done, clearing uninhabitable slums and unrentable factories. They’re doing London a huge favour and making millions in the process. Marianne Waters will probably get an O.B.E.’