The Victoria Vanishes

by Christopher Fowler

  Meanwhile, April had gone to the Devereux on the mission of locating Oswald Finch's remains.

  'You were working behind the bar on the night of Mr Finch's wake, weren't you?' she reminded the barmaid in the upper bar. 'If you cashed up the till, you must have also cleared the counter, so you'd remember if there was something as odd as a funeral urn left behind on it.'

  'I told your boss, there was nothing left behind,' declared the girl, who regarded all men over thirty with narrow eyes and a cold heart. 'People leave their briefcases, umbrellas and hand-bags here all the time, but I'd have remembered an urn.'

  'So someone took it with them.'

  And it had to be one of your lot, because you had the room to yourselves for most of the evening. Your Peculiar Crimes Unit have a reputation for being a bunch of practical jokers, you know. The manageress warned me. Your unit has had parties here before. Somebody left an inflatable sheep in the ladies' toilet last time, frightened the life out of the cleaner.'

  'Not much of a practical joke, is it?' said April. 'Swiping the ashes of a dead colleague.'

  'Depends on what they're going to do with them,' said the barmaid, with a disapproving sniff.

  15

  VISIBLE EVIL

  R

  aymond Land tipped his armchair forward, cleared a steamed-up arc of glass and peered down into the street. Was there anything in the world more miserable, he wondered, than a wet Wednesday morning in Mornington Crescent? Especially when you felt you were no longer the captain of your destiny, more a third mate dragged in the under-tow of someone else's foundering vessel?

  'You and your partner like to work in a pincer movement, don't you?' he complained. 'First John creeps up on me with dire warnings, and now you. Three dead, at the very least! If the Home Office get wind that the proles think it's not safe to venture into a public house without risking death, our entire national fabric will collapse. The idea of a Britain without any-one in the boozers is unimaginable.'

  Bryant lounged back in Land's sofa and felt about in his pocket. 'There's no doubt about it now, cheeky chops. Three murders in London pubs, all within a mile of each other, and this new woman, Roquesby, pushes the affair much further into the public arena because her former husband was security-cleared for some kind of government work. I think there's something really big going on here. Don't tell me we can't get the case prioritised now.'

  'That's not an issue.' Land continued searching the street below, as if expecting to find the rest of his thought there. 'I just worry.'

  'Good Lord, I know articulacy has never been your forte, Raymond, but at least take a stab at piecing together an entire sentence.'

  'I'm not sure the unit is up to handling something like this. It's a potential minefield.'

  'What are you talking about?' Bryant dug the little silver box from his pocket and flicked it open. 'Don't worry, I haven't taken up cocaine, I'd thought I'd try snuff, seeing as nobody will allow me to light my pipe.'

  'Well, suppose you fail to stop this lunatic, and in the process undermine national confidence in the security of public places?'

  'You think you'll be given the order of the boot, don't you?' Bryant sniffed, then sneezed abundantly. 'This is no time to start worrying about your frankly moribund career, old sausage; there are greater issues at stake. Suppose your wife was to walk into a public house by herself for a quiet drink and a gander at the papers?'

  'Leanne would never do such a thing,' said Land indignantly.

  'Far from what I've heard, but we'll let that pass. Imagine how much you'd worry for her safety, then magnify that a million times across the country, you see my point? When nobody feels protected, the economy simply starts to unravel. Look at the terrible side effects of bombing campaigns against civilians. The public house is virtually the country's last unassail-able place, now that so many churches lock their doors. For hundreds of years it has occupied a unique position in our culture. What's the one thing every pub is supposed to have?'

  'I don't know.' Land scratched at his chin. 'At least two brands of bad lager?'

  'A welcoming hearth created by centuries of tradition. Wasn't it Hilaire Belloc who once said "When you have lost your inns drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England"?'

  Land looked back blankly and shrugged.

  'Pubs tend to stay constant because they're rebuilt on the same plot of land. The extraordinary thing is that brewers don't keep historical information on their own properties, so histories often only exist in the form of handed-down anecdotes. That's why they're different from any other type of building around us. The public houses of London are its key-stones. Good Lord, the Romans brought them here two thou-sand years ago and put vine leaves outside to advertise their wares; no wonder they occupy such an important—'

  'Look here, Bryant, don't give me one of your historical lectures on the subject of beer, I'm interested in catching a criminal, nothing else.'

  'But that's my point, vieux haricot, you can't catch the criminal if you don't understand his milieu.

  'Yes, you can,' snapped Land, irritated. 'You can catch him by bringing in the victims' relatives and shouting at them in a windowless room for a few hours. And don't throw words like milieu at me. Renfield's going to be a breath of fresh air in this place. He won't stand for any of this nonsense, I can tell you. He's out there right now, tracking down contacts and conducting doorstep interviews. He grills people, makes the innocent feel miserable and uncomfortable until they provide him with accidental information.'

  'General Pinochet did that; it's called torture and has nothing to do with police duties.'

  'Listen, I know footslogging has become unfashionable, I know it's all computers and DNA matches now, but some-times a bit of shoe-leather and the odd threat of a slap is needed, and this is one of those times.'

  'After all these years, you still don't understand how we operate, do you?' said Bryant. 'It's a complete mystery to you, isn't it?'

  'Well, no, not exactly,' stalled Land. 'I know you use various undesirables to give you information and that you wander off the beaten track a lot, that you won't stick to established procedures and that you once threw a sheep carcass out the window of your old office at Bow Street to measure skull fractures. I know your methods are obscure, unsavoury and probably illegal, but somehow you seem to get the job done, but I don't know...'Land looked up and realised he was talking to himself. 'Where are you going?'

  Bryant was attempting to pull a gabardine raincoat over a broad-stitched fisherman's sweater. 'To Mrs Mandeville's memory improvement class,' he explained. 'I'd forgotten all about it. Later, I shall be employing a detection process photographers refer to as Methodical Anticipation. In this case it means catching the killer before he strikes again. I wrote a pamphlet on the subject in 1968. A casual browse through it may enlighten you.'

  Arthur, please.' Land felt uncomfortable using Bryant's first name, but was desperate. 'If you have anything at all that might constitute a lead, tell me. Whitehall is breathing down my neck. They're going to hang me out to dry.'

  'All right. Ask yourself why all three victims were found without their cell phones. We're waiting on their call records, but I think we'll find he has a rather novel method of contacting his victims, using each phone's address book to send a text message to the next victim in a sort of round-robin. Which means, of course, that all the victims knew each other. And the fact that Jocelyn Roquesby was found without her cell phone suggests that he's going to do it again. Cheerio.'

  Sergeant Janice Longbright alighted on the Holloway Road and began checking the shop fronts. Mrs Roquesby's daughter lived above a science fiction bookshop in a small flat that bore the marks of serial occupation. Hardly a room was finished; rollered paint-marks fell short of ceilings, wallpaper ran out, units were missing doors, floorboards appeared beyond remnants of carpet. There was an overwhelming tang of damp in the air.

  'You must be Sergeant Longbright. Sorry about the mess, I'm
Eleanor Roquesby.' The ghost-faced girl held out her hand and forced a small smile. 'I always say Mother must have been thinking of Eleanor Rigby, you know, the Beatles song?'

  'I'm sorry to intrude upon you at a time like this. You have a lot to be upset about.'

  'To be honest, I'm confused more than anything. I can't imagine why anyone would want to hurt her. Would you like tea?'

  Longbright nodded with a certain amount of resignation. Copious tea-drinking was a hazard of British police work because it was a comfort everyone knew how to provide, in the same way that people understood how to mend a plug but not a computer.

  'She was such a kind woman,' Eleanor explained, placing mugs before them. 'She fostered children, ran play groups, worked hard all her life, never had a bad word to say about anyone. I'm not her natural daughter; I was given up for adoption when I was two, and she raised me as her own daughter. I want to know how she could end up being murdered in a pub.' She looked over to the windows, her knuckle against her chin. 'You know, Jocelyn's own mother was old-fashioned. She used to tell me that women couldn't set foot inside a pub by them-selves during the war without men thinking they were tarts. So we spend decades fighting for independence and equality, only to get attacked in a place that's now supposed to be safe.'

  'I know it doesn't seem fair that she died, but we have to stop other women from risking the same fate,' said Longbright gently. 'In particular, I need to locate the man who bought her a drink last night. So far we haven't been able to track down anyone who remembers seeing him.'

  'What about CCTV cameras?'

  'There were none inside the pub, only outside. You say your mother never drank alone, so we must assume she arranged to meet a friend who failed to turn up. The barmaid doesn't think the man who bought her a drink was her intended contact, be-cause he had been at the bar for some time, while your mother was seated at the other end by herself. Do you have any idea who she might have been planning to meet?'

  Eleanor thought for a minute. 'Not my father, because they don't keep in contact anymore. Perhaps somebody from work?'

  'We're looking into that possibility. Anyone else? Did she have any local friends who might have agreed to see her in town?'

  'Not really. Her female friends around here are mostly mar-ried with kids;it's not the sort of thing they can do.'

  'Did she belong to any clubs, societies, groups? See anyone regularly outside of the neighbourhood?'

  'There was a sort of society she went to occasionally. She didn't mention it much because I think she was faintly embarrassed about it. I don't really think it had a name, although she called it the Conspirators' Club. She was interested in conspiracy theories—who killed Kennedy, crop circles, whether the moon landings were faked—just a fun thing really, something to do in the evenings. She read lots of books on the subject, but didn't take any of it very seriously. She just said it was a good way to make friends. The club met in some pub once a month, I forget the name.'

  'Could you try and dig it out for me?'

  'I have her appointment book—I thought it might be useful to you.' She passed the sergeant a tiny dog-eared diary filled with what appeared to be the world's smallest handwriting. Longbright squinted at it. 'I haven't got my reading glasses.'

  'Hold on. Here you are, upstairs at the Sutton Arms, Carthusian Street, near Smithfield Market, meetings every fourth Wednesday.'

  'That would mean they're meeting tonight.'

  'I guess so. Do you think this could have something to do with it? That she might have met somebody from the group?'

  'There's one way to find out,' said Longbright.

  April rubbed her eyes, then returned her stare to the screen, scrolling through the names in the Dead Diary. Based on the three known victims, she now had a set of correlating factors with which to match the Met's unsolved case histories; she was searching for professional women between the ages of thirty-five and fifty who had gone alone to public houses in the Central London area. Unfortunately, the files only dated back to when the system was inaugurated, in March of 1996, but she hoped that would be far enough to provide a more distinctive pattern.

  She sensed that there had been alcohol issues in the pasts of these three working mothers, all of whom had held positions of responsibility for some years. Was that why they drank, and perhaps were used to visiting pubs; was it the stress of maintaining their careers? So far as she could see, none had suffered mental health issues, none had been designated as clinically depressed or suicidal. Journalists loved innocent vic-tims like these because they fit the white middle-class demo-graphic of their newspapers' readership. If they scented a failure on the part of the police, it wouldn't take them long to start running articles about how no woman was safe in the capital.

  Her eye ran down the columns of names, matching and discarding until one name jumped out: Joanne Kellerman.

  Her death predated the other three, having occurred four days before Curtis's, but it fit the pattern. Joanne Kellerman had succumbed in a tiny, crowded pub called The Old Dr Butler's Head, in Mason's Avenue, by London Wall. Last orders had been rung early, and as the drinkers thinned out, Mrs Kellerman had fallen to the floor in what appeared to be a faint. The barman had been unable to revive her, so he had called an ambulance, but she was pronounced dead on the way to the hospital.

  A cocktail of narcoleptic drugs found in her system suggested that she had taken her own life, although why she had chosen to do it in a crowded pub remained a mystery—hence the coroner's decision to record an open verdict. There was no history of mental health problems on record, although she apparently took prescription anti-depressants and sleeping pills. The Met had noted the death and uploaded her file to the diary, even though they had chosen not to consider the case worthy of further investigation.

  April ran her finger across the screen to the tabulated comments from her next of kin, and noted that the dead woman had often enjoyed pub quizzes. Did all of the women regularly attend events in London pubs? If so, did their presence bring them to the attention of someone stalking victims in such an environment?

  April's discovery of the death placed the women in a new running order: Kellerman, Curtis, Wynley, Roquesby. In a city where so many died in unexplained circumstances each day, each event occupied a slender borderline of visibility. Only when compiled together did their collective information form some kind of new and alarming explanation. This faint but discernable pattern had begun to coalesce from the mist of empirical data that blurred every death in the city. If no one agency possessed all the facts, there could be no resolution. This, April felt, was why the PCU existed. The unit was transforming a killer from smoke and shadows into flesh and bone. It was making evil visible.

  April began writing up her report for her bosses.

  16

  THE HEART OF LONDON

  H

  e was always watching the women. Interesting how they were treated at different times of day, in different places. In lunchtime city pubs they sat at their counters completely ignored, men reaching around them for beers and change as if they were mere obstacles. At early evening they were engaged in conversation by men who used a cheerful, chatty manner with older women, as if talking to their mothers. Late at night, when the lights were lower, they became easy targets for leering drunks who felt sure they could never be rebuffed.

  He felt sorry for these women, even when he had to take their lives.

  The cavernous inns of the Strand, the narrow taverns of Holborn, the fake rural hostelries of Chelsea, the brash bars of Soho—each had their own tribes. The lotharios, the jobsworths, the brasses, the bosses, brash drunk kids, braying toffs, swearing workmen, all united by the desperate need for companionship. The single careerists were frightened to go back to their pristine apartments and sit on the ends of their beds, staring into the void of their dead lives. The ones in relationships delayed heading home to warm sleeping bodies they could barely stand to touch.

  He knew all about the po
wer of pubs, and the invisible customers who kept them alive. The lonely matrons who drank a little too much, the ones with full, sensual bodies and sad old eyes that caught his gaze, holding it a moment too long in bar mirrors. He had been with them all his life.

  He loved these women. As he prepared his poison, he prayed they would escape him.

  A little early in the day to be drinking, isn't it?' asked John May. 'It's only just gone noon.' Williamson's Tavern in Groveland Court was nearly empty, except for a pair of Asian IT man-agers playing a jittery fruit machine.

  'Tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce, crushed celery, beet-root and horseradish sauce, John. No vodka, sadly.' Bryant held up his glass. 'Kiskaya Mandeville recommended it to sharpen my brain. She's prescribed a series of memory tests I must per-form every day and put me on a juice diet, reckons I'll quickly notice the results. I have to drink three different types of fish oil tonight. My poor bowels will be positively peristaltic. This is Dr Harold Masters. Oddly, I don't think you've ever met.' He gestured at the curator/lecturer from the British Museum. May found himself facing an absurdly tall man with unsuitable tortoiseshell glasses and slightly mad grey hair.

  Masters unleashed a great length of arm and shook May's hand vigorously. 'Not sure we've ever had the pleasure. But Mr Bryant has consulted me many times in the past.'

  That figures, thought May. He ordered a half of Spitfire bit-ter. 'Let's hope this memory course of yours works,' he told Bryant. 'Perhaps you'll recall what happened to Oswald's ashes.' He looked around at the sepia-tinted walls, the framed photographs and dust-gathering knickknacks. 'What made you pick a pub in an alleyway off another alley? It was a bugger to find.'