On the Loose

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘I know who his father was. The children of famous parents are nearly always less talented, which is why they make such messes of their lives. From now on, I’ll deal only with you.’

  ‘I don’t know what more you want, Marianne.’ Kasavian regarded her coldly. ‘Your construction crews are all back at work.’

  ‘I wanted Alexander Toth charged, not released. Your special unit let him go.’ Kasavian was shocked at the news. He had specifically asked Faraday to plant a spy at the PCU and get feedback every night.

  ‘Now the press are crawling all over this multiple-murder case. The media’s desperate to suggest that it’s the tip of a corruption scandal and they’re sniffing around us, but so far of course they have no evidence. We can’t be investigated now, not at this crucial juncture. Our investors are nervous enough as it is. One has already pulled out, and the others are keeping a close eye on developments. Nobody wants a spotlight shone on their finances or their internal policies, and they certainly don’t want to attract the attention of the Inland Revenue Services. I’m not saying there are any irregularities, just that any audit would throw us off schedule. I need to know what you’re doing for us, Oskar. I want your press officers to get something out by tomorrow morning at the latest.’

  She knew—everyone knew—about Kasavian’s affair with Janet Ramsey, the editor of Hard News. Strong women were Oskar’s weakness. Marianne Waters was surprised and a little insulted that he hadn’t made a pass at her, not that she would have given him encouragement; she was seeing a twenty-two-year-old Lithuanian barman from the Sanderson Hotel who made up in vigour what he lacked in experience.

  ‘I’m not one of your suppliers, Marianne; I represent the state,’ Kasavian pointed out. ‘You all think you’re above the law, but if we decide to investigate you, we will do so at our convenience and our leisure, without your permission.’

  ‘I have the word of the Secretary of Trade on this,’ warned Marianne. ‘We have put mechanisms in place to ensure that the work is finished on time.’

  ‘And I have the ear of the Prime Minister,’ Kasavian reminded her. ‘You need to remember who you’re talking to. It’s your job to make sure that your investors hold their nerve. Tell them the situation has been resolved.’

  ‘Has it?’

  ‘That’s no concern of yours. The unit handling the investigation is being removed tomorrow evening. Islington and Camden will combine their CID departments and take over, and the whole thing will fall under the jurisdiction of the Commissioner of Police. He’ll make the appropriate reassurances. The work must be completed on schedule.’

  ‘But not at the expense of a financial scandal. I don’t want your people—’

  Kasavian leaned over the table and searched her face. The effect was unnerving. ‘King’s Cross is a dirty area, Marianne. I suggest you go back to your office and make sure everything is thoroughly clean.’

  It was a good time to fish for eels. In the dark they swam nearer to the surface, and the boy did not have a proper fishing rod. He’d owned one when he was smaller, but his father had broken it. His father smashed up everything when he was drunk. Now the boy sat beside the canal beneath the bridge at York Way, dangling the string and waiting for a bite. It was cold and damp here, but better than being at home listening to his parents fight.

  The minutes passed without any movement in the line. He was about to give up when the plastic Christmas tree ornament he had tied to the end of his line shivered and ducked. He pulled on the line. The weight was wrong for an eel, too heavy, too still. He had snagged the hook on something. Pulling harder with his left hand, he shone the flashlight down with his right, peering into the murky green water. Slowly a pale object began to surface.

  At first the boy thought it was a shopping bag. Kneeling on the concrete lip of the basin, he tugged again and leaned closer. He could see the shape rising into view.

  A pair of dark eyes stared back up at him.

  47

  BRIGHTENING DARKNESS

  Oh, something wicked this way comes,’ said Bryant with a shiver. ‘I can feel it in my bones.’ It was still early in the morning, and the trees behind them were rattling in the rising wind. ‘Do you believe that evil can grow inside a man? A brightening darkness, like a torch in reverse?’

  ‘I don’t think you should keep putting the willies up people, Bryant,’ said Raymond Land. ‘It’s bad enough that we’re having to work in some kind of satanic sorting office without you adding to the sinister atmosphere all the time.’

  Land hovered uncomfortably in front of the door to the St Pancras Mortuary. The strange building unsettled him. He thought of heading back to the office, but that place was almost as bad.

  ‘What’s taking Kershaw so long?’ he demanded. When he looked back, Rosa was standing in the open doorway staring up at him. Land recoiled in fright.

  ‘He’s waiting for you downstairs,’ she answered, drifting back into the corridor.

  ‘And she gives me the bloody heebie-jeebies too,’ Land whispered. ‘Creeping up like that. There’s something extremely odd going on around here.’

  ‘So you’re finally allowing the dark history of Battlebridge to get to you,’ said Bryant cheerfully. ‘Good. You need shaking up a bit.’

  ‘Why is it so gloomy in this place?’ Land complained, searching the hall for the light switch. He hated being dragged out of his office, but May was over at the headquarters of ADAPT and Bryant liked having someone to talk to.

  ‘What have you got for us, Giles?’ Bryant asked as they entered the morgue. ‘You have Maddox Cavendish’s head now. That’s all the body parts accounted for.’

  ‘I’ve still got a long day in front of me,’ said Kershaw. ‘I can’t access any information. The system won’t recognise my PCU status. I’m having to use my predecessor’s tutorial notes—it’s very primitive methodology. I feel like a Victorian coroner, operating from old medical textbooks. At least Professor Marshall was thorough when it came to keeping records.’

  ‘Have you got anything fresh for us?’

  ‘Not this head, for a start. The rats have been at it. Let me show you.’

  ‘Do you have to?’

  ‘Perhaps you’d rather start with Mr Standover.’ He crossed to the farthest autopsy table and rolled back the green plastic sheet on it. ‘The puncture wound suggests the same weapon: slender, flexible, long, four-sided. I’d go for a sharpened meat skewer. He stabs behind the base of the ear and punches it hard upwards, penetrating the brain to cause instant—and I mean instant—death.’

  ‘Can you be absolutely sure that it’s the same attacker?’ asked Land.

  ‘Well, I can’t without referral to a national DNA database, can I? Dan is dying to pick up an LCN sweep from the items he removed in Delaney’s apartment, but he can’t do that, either.’ The Low Copy Number project could track DNA from tiny sources, but was expensive, time-consuming and only available through routes that were currently closed to the PCU.

  Kershaw indicated the slashes across the victim’s left palm. ‘He’s got a distinctive sweep from right to left, giving Standover a faint defence cut on his raised left hand. He’s a little shorter than his victims, but his arms are long and strong. It’s the same man all right, but now he’s attacking more violently. This time he’s gone a lot deeper. The earlier hits were nowhere near as deep. But I have to say that even in his anger he’s got a steady, purposeful hand. He’s a danger, this one, attacking in fury but always maintaining control. Very, very angry with himself.’

  ‘Himself?’ said Land in surprise. ‘You mean with the victim.’

  ‘No. Things have gone wrong for him. The first two victims were dismembered and hidden. Even if he hadn’t planned to kill them, he certainly worked at hiding them. But the third and fourth were attacked with no thought of the consequences.’

  ‘So now that his housekeeping has been completed, he can go to ground until something drives him to kill again.’ Bryant was tapping an old pipe stem aga
inst his false teeth, thinking. The noise irritated everyone. ‘That chap in the Midlands, former nightclub bouncer, just got convicted of murdering seventeen girls over a period of twenty years. That’s what worries me.’

  Silence followed as the others tried to figure out what he was talking about.

  ‘Driven by an unstoppable anger, of course, but something else develops over time. An arrogance born of familiarity. This chap knows the area. He hides in plain sight. He’s a lousy burglar, but he’s accidentally become a good killer. He gets away with it; he kills again. He considers himself invulnerable. He thinks he’s wiping away the traces that lead to him, but in doing so he’s creating another path, one that we can follow.’

  ‘You’re a very annoying man, Bryant,’ said Land suddenly. ‘You’re like a Blackpool fortune-teller, handing out bits of information without actually helping.’

  ‘Well, you always have a go at me if I say what I really think.’

  ‘Good God, if you’ve got any clue as to where we find this man, I think now’s the time to tell us!’

  ‘All right. First, I think the first two victims are connected by something more than the methodology. There’s the area, for a start. All of the victims have been found within a tight radius. We’ve established that our killer lives right here, knows these streets, knows when they’re busy and when they’re deserted.’

  ‘If we could access the CCTV cameras around the church and the station we might be able to pick him up,’ suggested Land.

  ‘He knows how to stay outside of their limits. Besides, it would take days to go through all the cameras and the hours of footage. What did we do before we became so reliant on technology? We managed perfectly well before, and we can again. Second point, he severed the heads for a reason, even if it’s a subconscious one. He knows the history of Pentonville, St Pancras, King’s Cross and Battlebridge. It’s too much of a coincidence that he picked the one place in the city where such specific rites were recorded.’

  ‘Please don’t suggest he’s performing human sacrifices,’ groaned Land.

  ‘I didn’t say that. He’s interested merely in saving his own skin, which is why he threw Xander Toth in our path. He knows we’re here.’

  ‘What?’ Land all but exploded. ‘How do you work that one out?’

  ‘Look at the map. Caledonian Road, King’s Cross, York Way, the railway line. Islington Met handle the east side; Camden have control of the west and south. Remember Islington had to give Delaney’s body to Camden because the boundary line runs down the middle of the Caledonian Road? I checked the maps at Camden Town Hall; it doesn’t, not quite. The boundary line stops one road back. The two areas don’t meet up. There’s a small gap in the middle that neither of them covers—the west side of the Caledonian Road isn’t patrolled by anyone. That’s where he chose to leave the body, and that’s exactly where we arrived a couple of weeks later. We’ve been asking around, walking the streets, conducting interviews. The local shopkeepers already know about the PCU moving in. If this is our man’s patch, he’ll know, too. The advantage to us is that others must know him. Beneath the commuter crowds this is still a village, with residents, store owners, street vendors, neighbours who see each other every day. You can’t operate here and not be seen.’

  ‘We’ve been talking to people ever since we arrived,’ Land pointed out.

  ‘We haven’t asked the right questions before,’ Bryant replied. ‘Who is the area’s most vocal resident? Who knows everything that’s going on?’

  ‘Toth,’ said Land.

  ‘Precisely. Toth’s a historian; he runs the local community Web site; he’s made it his business to know about everyone who lives here. We were too busy treating him as a suspect to think of him as a lead. I’m sure Toth knows the identity of the man we’re looking for. And that means our killer knows Toth. And if he’s really planning to clean up all of his loose ends, Toth’s life could also be in danger.’

  ‘We’d better not find this one dead,’ Land warned. ‘We’ll take my car.’

  48

  ELEMENTS OF CHANCE

  You stay here,’ warned Land as they pulled up. The apartment looked miserable and forbidding in the dim rain. ‘There’s no point in you running up all those stairs. I’ll be quicker.’

  ‘You’re no spring chicken yourself,’ Bryant replied with indignation. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘What did I just say? Why must you always do exactly the opposite?’ But Bryant was already out of the car and heading for the nearest staircase.

  They reached the second-floor landing and moved along the balcony to the flat which Toth shared with his girlfriend. Lizzi opened the door at their knock, blinking sleepily at them. ‘You again,’ she complained. ‘You know he’s done nothing wrong. And anyway, he’s not here.’

  ‘Where is he?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘He got a phone call about an hour ago, and went out. I don’t know when he’ll be back.’

  ‘Did he say where he was going? Or who he was going to meet?’

  ‘I think he was seeing Mr Fox.’

  Bryant looked blank. ‘Who is Mr Fox?’

  ‘Oh, you know—thingie.’ She waggled her hand at them.

  ‘From the church. He’s a friend. So I imagine that’s where Xander’s gone.’

  ‘How do you know this Mr Fox is a friend?’

  ‘Xander met him some while ago. He’s always talking to people he doesn’t know. I think Fox is just his nickname, though. He works for the Diocese.’

  ‘Leonid Kareshi,’ snapped Bryant, annoyed with himself. ‘The archivist. Why didn’t I think of him earlier? It has to be someone who knows about the church’s history. He met Toth and Delaney there, and Standover was always connected because of his obsession with the Beatles’ photographic shoot. Call John. ‘Tell him to run a check on Kareshi and meet us at the church.’

  ‘We don’t need him, I can handle this,’ said Land, who was suddenly quite enjoying being back in the field.

  ‘Then I’ll call him,’ said Bryant, giving Land the fish-eye.

  Raymond Land was a careful driver. He had no desire to go racing down alleys, frightening old ladies and knocking over dustbins. It was impossible to do so in London anyway; the traffic was painfully slow, the roads doubled back on themselves, and any kind of vehicle pursuit was unthinkable. Even so, Bryant found his boss unnecessarily cautious. He selfconsciously signalled and braked and waved pedestrians past when Bryant would simply have put down his foot and hoped for the best. Driving like a madman was one of the few perks of the job, as far as Bryant was concerned.

  As they pulled up before the gilded gates of St Pancras Old Church, John May came running out to meet them. ‘You may be right about the archivist, Arthur,’ he said. ‘I’ve just been talking to the vicar. Three years ago, Kareshi was brought up on corruption charges before the FSB, the domestic state security agency of the Russian Federation. There was talk of links to organised crime over the sale of rare artefacts, but the case was dropped after he cut a deal with them. Kareshi has diplomatic immunity now. The Reverend says that he’s been growing worried about the number of dodgy-looking acquaintances Kareshi has been bringing here. He fears they’re up to something.’

  ‘It might have been a good idea if he’d told us that earlier,’ muttered Bryant.

  As they pushed back the vestry door, they found the vicar about to turn out the lights. ‘Our verger just called in sick,’ the Reverend Charles Barton explained. ‘There’s no service today, which is a good thing because someone stole our snuffer, and I have trouble reaching the candles without it. He has gout, can you believe it? I can’t help feeling that it’s an inappropriately excessive illness for a church worker. I think Dr Kareshi is downstairs. The lights are on in the crypt.’

  ‘Is there anyone with him?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. He held a meeting yesterday with three men—pretty unsavoury-looking types.’

  ‘We’ll take over, Reverend,’ May suggested. ‘P
erhaps you’d be so kind as to lock the main doors.’

  ‘There must be no violence here,’ said Barton emphatically.

  ‘Your church is built on a pagan sacrificial temple, for Christ’s sake,’ complained Bryant.

  ‘That was a very long time ago.’ The vicar bridled. ‘And I’ll appreciate it if you don’t blaspheme.’

  ‘Hopefully there won’t be any trouble,’ May assured Barton gently. The detectives headed to the worn stone steps leading into the crypt. Beneath the arc lamps, Kareshi was working alone. He had sifted through what appeared to be a ton of dry grey dust, and had cleaned up more than a dozen small grey stone heads, which were arranged on the floor in groups according to type. The intrusion upon his work was clearly unwelcome.

  ‘Is there something you want?’ he asked them, standing upright and wiping his hands on a cloth.

  ‘Did you receive a visit from a Mr Xander Toth?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘No, I don’t allow visitors. This is like—’ he gestured at the roped-off pit before him ‘—one of your crime scenes. I have an extremely limited time to excavate this site before the Diocese requires it to be refilled, and if the artefacts become contaminated I will not be able to verify their authenticity.’

  ‘How long have you been down here?’

  ‘Since seven. I’ve seen no-one for days except the Reverend and your friend Mr Austin Potterton.’

  ‘Reverend Barton says some men came to see you yesterday.’

  ‘Oh, them,’ Kareshi remembered, showing some awkwardness. ‘Well, I am helping them.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘They are Belarus exiles; their English is poor and they feel isolated here. They are trying to start a club for fellow expatriates, somewhere they can meet and discuss their problems. They want me to help them, but I cannot spare the time. I don’t have much money, but I give them a little whenever I can.’

  The detectives glanced at each other, thinking the same thing. Bryant voiced the thought. ‘It’s someone else.’ Without explanation or apology, they headed out of the crypt.