The Victoria Vanishes

by Christopher Fowler

  'I'm not going mad,' said Bryant anxiously. 'I saw her go into the saloon bar and get served by the barman.'

  'Wait, you sure it was the saloon? Arthur, pubs haven't been divided into public and saloon bars for years.'

  'Oh, you know what I mean. It was old-world, not messed about with. No beeping fruit machines.'

  'Can't you give me more descriptive detail than that?'

  'Yes—no, I mean, perhaps I was a little drunk.' He rubbed his forehead, trying to recall the exact sequence of events. 'I don't remember as clearly as I thought. I'll have to sit and think.'

  'Did it smell different, this alternative space-time continuum you ventured into?' 'Why should it smell different?'

  'You know, Victorian smells. Horse dung, tobacco, sewage, hops.'

  'I don't know, I can't remember. I don't suppose Victorian London smelled any worse than the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street does during the present day.'

  May didn't mention it, but he was reminded that hallucinations could often be accompanied by sharp changes in one's sense of smell. Savoury odours of leather and burning were common. Are you still taking your medication?'

  'You mean have drink and drugs addled my brain, causing it to slip into the febrile desuetude of Alzheimer's? No, they have not and it has not, thank you so much.'

  'Then let's go back to the unit and see what else we can un-cover.'

  At the PCU, John May's granddaughter came in and set several pages before them. 'There are eight public houses named after Queen Victoria in London,' she explained, 'plus The Victoria Park in Hackney, the Victoria & Albert in Marylebone and the Victoria Stakes in Muswell Hill. The nearest Victoria to Bloomsbury is just over the road, off Mornington Crescent. Actually, I think I've been there with you.'

  'There you are, you see? You've muddled the memory of another pub with the one you passed,' said May soothingly.

  'I did not muddle them!' Bryant all but shouted. 'Good God, do you think I can't tell the difference between Mornington Crescent and Bloomsbury? She went into the pub on that corner, and then left and died or was killed on the street outside.'

  'We could settle this if you knew the exact time you passed each other,' said May. 'We know she was alive when you saw her, so if Kershaw can pinpoint the time of death we'll be able to see if there's a discrepancy.'

  'I want an artist,' said Bryant stubbornly. 'I need someone who can draw what I saw.'

  'I can draw,' April volunteered. It had been one of the many talents she had perfected during the flare-up of her agoraphobia, during which time she had rarely left her shuttered apartment in Stoke Newington.

  'There are sketch pads and some pens in the evidence room,' said May. 'You'll have to get Renfield to unlock it for you. What else have we got on Carol Wynley's movements last night?'

  'I was about to give you this,' said April. 'I've put together a timeline from statements volunteered by her partner and work colleagues. Wynley worked at the Swedenborg Society in Bloomsbury, but was meeting up with friends from a former workplace, a charity organisation working with Medecins Sans Frontieres. They had drinks in a pub called The Queen's Larder—'

  Bryant perked up.'I know that watering hole. It was named after Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George the Third. He was being treated for insanity at a doctor's house in Queen Square. The queen leased the cellar beneath the pub to keep the king's special foods there.'

  'Wynley left The Queen's Larder sometime after ten— no-one's been able to pinpoint the exact time—and made her way up to Euston Road, but then she doubled back into Bloomsbury, which suggests a deviation from simply returning home.'

  'I told you so,' insisted Bryant. 'She had another destination in mind.'

  'Then perhaps you made a mistake about the name of the pub,' May suggested.

  'We'll soon see.' Bryant climbed the small stool behind his desk and reached up among his books, pulling down a green linen volume with untrimmed pages. 'Here we are, The Secret History of London's Public Houses,'

  'Wait, when was that printed?'

  Bryant checked the publisher's page. '1954. Not one of my more recent acquisitions.' He flicked to the index. 'Here you are. Going mad, am I? Look at this.' He turned the book around and held it up with the pages open.

  The others found themselves looking at a photograph of a public house built on the corner of Whidbourne Street, Bloomsbury, but they did not seem pleased.

  'What's the matter?' asked Bryant. 'I was right after all, wasn't I? We just overlooked it. Let's go back and—'

  Arthur, this can't be the place,' said May. 'This picture was taken two years before the pub was demolished, in 1925. It's been gone for over three quarters of a century.'

  12

  ECDYSIAST

  W

  hat do you think you're doing?' asked DC Colin Bimsley.'That belongs to Mr Bryant.' 'It's a marijuana plant,' said Renfield, dragging the great ceramic pot along the corridor toward the top of the stairs. 'It's for his rheumatism.'

  'And it's illegal, or did nobody bother to point that out to him?' asked Renfield.

  'Give him a break, Jack, he gets pains in his legs.'

  'Then he should be retired and relaxing at home. He could be working as a consultant.'

  'It's not your job to decide what he does.'

  'It is if he can't do his job without the aid of psychoactive narcotics.'

  'Wait, what else have you got there?' Bimsley pointed to the battered cardboard box Renfield had also dragged out of the office.

  'Old books. They're everywhere, even blocking the fire exits. I'm stacking them by the rubbish. They can go to charity shops.'

  'You can't do that; he's taken a lifetime to collect them.' 'Land has asked him to take them home dozens of times, but they're still here, so out they go.' 'But he needs them for research.'

  'Really?' Renfield bent down and retrieved a stack of slender volumes.'Let's see what he's been researching, shall we? Yoruba Proverbs. The Anatomy of Melancholia. Embalming Under Lenin. Cormorant-Sexing for Beginners. The Apocalypsis Revelata Volume Two. A Complete History of the Trouser-Press. Financial Accounts for the Swedish Mining Board, Years 1745-53. I suppose the next time they bring a gunshot victim in from Pentonville, he'll be able to use these in his investigation.'

  'You'd be surprised,' said Bimsley, 'how an intimate knowledge of the workings of the trouser press might aid in the capture of a determined rapist.'

  Are you making fun of me?' asked Renfield suspiciously.

  'You'll never know, will you?' Bimsley stood his ground.

  'I say, what are you doing with Mr Bryant's books?' asked Giles Kershaw, who had found his path blocked upon entering the hall. 'He'll go bananas if he sees you've moved them. They're very useful.'

  'Not you as well.' Renfield was starting to wonder if the senior detectives had brainwashed the unit staff. Kershaw raised his long legs in a spidery fashion to climb around the obstruction, and admitted himself into the detectives' office.

  'I'm thinking the bash was incidental,' he began, throwing himself into the guest's armchair.

  'I'm sorry, what are we talking about?' asked May.

  'Mrs Wynley. There's an abnormality in the base of her skull. The bone is extremely thin. It wouldn't have taken much of a knock to damage it, but even so, I think it occurred as the result of something else.'

  'Like what?' asked May.

  Kershaw sucked his teeth pensively. 'Not entirely sure yet. Gut feeling. People don't usually keel over like fallen trees, with their arms at their sides. Not very scientific, I know, but there's something else. Midazolam—it's a fast-acting benzodiazepine with a short elimination half-life. A pretty potent water-soluble sedative, but the imbiber doesn't actually lose consciousness unless it's taken in overdose. I found a tiny trace of it inside her mouth. If you were to inject it between the gums and the inside of the cheek, it could enter the blood-stream immediately. She would have dropped like a log.'

  Bryant wrinkled his f
ace, thinking. He looked like a tortoise chewing a nettle. 'This is making less sense by the second,' he said. A woman walks into a pub—which, by the way, hasn't existed for the best part of a hundred years—gets injected in the face and leaves without complaint. She falls down outside, bashes her head and is left for dead by everyone else who leaves the pub, including the staff. I don't suppose we have any suspects, either.'

  'Her partner was just a couple of miles away, home alone watching TV, no witnesses, says he had several phone calls, but all on his cell phone, none to their flat.'

  'So they're traceable but don't prove he was there. Then we should bring him in,' said May.

  'There's a problem with that,' April told her grandfather. 'He's in a wheelchair after suffering a stroke some while back, can't do much for himself at all.'

  'A legal PA,' said Bryant, looking up from one of the books Renfield had tried to throw out, Religious Philosophers of the 18th Century. At the Swedenborg Society, no less. Swedenborg was a Swedish philosopher famed throughout Europe for his contributions to science, technology and religion. When he got older, he supposedly experienced visions of the spirit world. Reckoned he visited both heaven and hell, where he held conversations with angels and devils. Upon his return, he wrote something called the Apocalypsis Revelata, or Apocalypse Revealed. He claimed he'd been directed by Christ himself to reveal the details of the Second Coming. Understandably, everyone thought he'd gone round the twist. Died in Clerkenwell in 1772. His building in Bloomsbury still houses the Swedenborg Society.'

  'Your point being?' May wondered.

  'What? Oh, nothing, it's just odd, that's all.' Bryant poked about in his jacket and produced the walnut bowl of his pipe. He peered into it wistfully. 'I don't suppose I might be allowed to—'

  'No,' said May and his granddaughter in unison.

  'It's just that the Swedenborg Society lost another of their legal secretaries at the beginning of the month,' Bryant explained, screwing the pieces of his pipe together. 'I believe she was found dead in a London pub, the Seven Stars, just behind Lincoln's Inn Fields.'

  'Why on earth would you remember that?' asked May, intrigued.

  'Because it reminded me of the nun found unconscious in The Flying Scotsman,' said Bryant, not really managing to answer the question.

  'Wait, explain the part about the nun first, 'April demanded.

  'The Flying Scotsman is one of the most disgustingly awful pubs in London,' replied Bryant, 'a grubby little sewer of a King's Cross strip-joint, crammed for many years with the most unsavoury characters imaginable. But the lady in the wimple who passed out inside it was no ecdysiast, disrobing for a handful of coins collected in a beer mug. When I saw the incident report, I naturally wondered what she was doing in such a place.'

  'Ecdysiast?' April raised an eyebrow.

  'She wasn't a stripper,' Bryant explained. 'I followed the case and made notes on it. I have them somewhere.'

  He withdrew a drawer from his desk, removing a handful of pipe-cleaners, a Chairman Mao alarm clock, a collection of plastic snowstorms and a bottle of absinthe, to finally unearth a small black book.

  'Here, in my Letts Schoolboy Diary.' He held open a page filled with tiny drawings of flags. A full report of the case— well, by the look of it I appear to have written up the salient facts in a code of Edwardian naval signals, but you get the idea. Sister Geraldine Flannery from Our Lady of Eternal Suffering said she was in the pub to collect for charity and was overcome by the pressure of the crowd, but it turned out her robes had been specially constructed to hold wallets and handbags. She wasn't a nun at all but a dip, and not a very good one, obviously, otherwise she wouldn't have chosen to pick-pocket some of the poorest punters in London. The point is—' Bryant's raised index finger wavered in the air.'I've forgotten the point.'

  'The legal secretary from the Swedenborg Society,' April prompted. The old man really seemed to be losing it. 'The Seven Stars.'

  Ah, yes. This time the face on the barroom floor belonged to a respectable middle-aged lady named Naomi Curtis, the daughter of a clergyman. What had she been doing by herself in a pub?' Bryant popped the empty pipe into his mouth. 'Most people don't stray far from their natural habitat, and according to her father, Mrs Curtis was a creature of habit. She liked a tipple, and had been drinking more heavily in the last couple of years, but rarely went to a pub without arranging to meet someone. Suddenly she turns up dead one night in a Holborn boozer. I kept notes on her, too.' The others looked at him blankly.

  'Don't you see? When something's out of whack, when people don't match their locations, a little bell goes off inside my head. There was something else. One of the punters remembered Curtis checking her cell phone at the bar, but by the time the ambulance arrived she had no phone on her. Land wouldn't allow me to investigate at the time, but he will now. Two women, two public houses and an investigation involving drink, drugs, death and Swedish philosophy.'

  'I assume this means you want to handle the case,' said May drily.

  'Oh, don't worry, I will whether I'm allowed to or not. I'm far too old to start obeying the rules now.' Bryant made a hideous draining noise through the pipe stem.'If anyone needs me, I shall be in the pub, conducting a little research.'

  13

  FORGETTING

  W

  e can't take it on,' decreed Raymond Land. A case doesn't just come under PCU jurisdiction because you two have a funny feeling about it.'

  'Giles and Dan agree with us,' said May. 'They think there's enough circumstantial evidence to link the two cases. The Naomi Curtis death was given an open verdict, although the coroner told relatives that she probably suffered heart failure following heat-stroke.'

  'I don't know,' said Land, wiggling a finger in his ear, then examining it. 'All you've got is the fact that they both worked for the same organisation as legal secretaries.'

  'Which meant that they probably knew each other. And they also died in a similar manner, in or near public houses,' May added.

  'But they didn't, did they?' Land pointed out. 'This Wynley woman wasn't in a pub, unless Bryant somehow managed to cause a rift in the bloody space-time continuum and plunge himself back to Victorian England. He's gone to Bloomsbury for another look, hasn't he? It's not like him to miss coming in here and having a go at me.'

  'He doesn't believe he could have made such a mistake.'

  'Look, it was late, he was a bit plastered, the road was dark and knowing Bryant, he was probably thinking about the history of the area. He'd read about the pub or seen a picture of it in one of his weird old books, and superimposed it over the scene. This wouldn't be the first time he's been wrong. He's not infallible, you know.'

  May had an image of the retirement letter in Land's pocket. He would have transferred it to his desk by now, perhaps even left it at home. He suddenly saw a way to protect his partner. If they were given the case, Bryant would be presented with an opportunity to come up with a solution. It was the type of investigation at which he excelled. His confidence would be re-stored, the letter would be withdrawn and Land would be satisfied that his senior detectives were still on the ball. 'There's the issue of undermining safety in public areas,' he added.

  'What are you talking about?'

  'If we imagine for a moment that there really is someone out there who has struck at two innocent women in crowded public places without anyone else even noticing their deaths, we have a real problem on our hands.' May knew that one of the less-frequently invoked remits of the PCU was to 'ensure the maintenance of public comfort and confidence in the free and open areas of the city.' In other words, if someone dangerous was running loose in any building or public space to which the residents of London enjoyed open access, it could undermine their faith in the police, and ultimately, the state, creating scenes of public disorder. It had happened many times before in London's past.

  'You think the Home Office would come down on us?' asked Land, suddenly uncomfortable.

  'Like a ton o
f bricks,' confirmed May. 'Leslie Faraday and his sinister boss Kasavian are still angry about us leaping their last hurdle.' The HO had booked a royal visit to the unit, hoping that the detectives would make fools of themselves by incurring the disapproval of a member of the monarchy. Instead, the detectives had seen off their common enemy and resoundingly silenced their critics.

  'I'll make the recommendation.' Land sighed. 'You'd better brief the others so we can hit the ground running.'

  'Whatever you think best, sir.' May left the room with an inward smile, thankful that Land had failed to effect a transfer from the unit.

  'What do you mean, it's not here?' said Bryant with indignation. 'Where's it gone?'

  'It was on the bar all evening, but I don't remember seeing it when we closed up,' said the barmaid of the Devereux.

  'Good God, woman, it contained the poor man's corporeal remnants. It was a cremation urn.'

  'Oh. We thought you'd won it at bingo. Well, one of your lot must have taken it.'

  'You opened the bar to the general public at ten, didn't you? It could have been anyone.'

  A roomful of police officers,' the barmaid sniffed. 'Not much of an advert, is it? Rather calls your observational skills into question.'

  'Don't you start.' He threw her a card. 'You'd better call me if you hear anything.'

  Back on the streets of Holborn, he reread his notes on Naomi Curtis and wondered if there was really much likelihood of the two cases being connected. The only reason he had filed a note on Curtis was because she had died in the wrong place. It was inconceivable to imagine what had brought her from a vicarage in Sevenoaks to a smoky Holborn pub at the age of fifty-four, unless she was in some kind of trouble and had arranged to meet someone inside.