The Victoria Vanishes

by Christopher Fowler

  'I wanted to make a particular point, and I find that sometimes, if I just talk to you, you sort of tune out.'

  'That's because you have a habit of lecturing me,' said May.

  'I most certainly do not. I try to direct your attention toward topics of interest.'

  'Yes, and you used to tap me with a pointing stick until I broke the damned thing in half.'

  'That was you, was it? Amongst other things, Dr Masters here is an expert on the mythology and etymology of London. He's been helping me with a few ideas lately, and I thought it would be a good idea for the two of you to meet because he knows an awful lot about English pubs.'

  My God, thought May, studying the academic, we could all do with more women in our lives. This is what happens when men get lonely. They dry out.

  Dr Harold Masters knew far more about the dead than the living. Human beings were too emotional and messy. He had only been able to tolerate Jane, his wife, because she shared his arcane interests, and now she was gone. The awful truth was that her death allowed him to spend more time concentrating on his studies. He missed her, in the distant way that a man misses the regular arrival of dinner and fresh laundry, but relished the extra time he now had to spend among his research documents. Understanding the past was far more interesting than understanding people, especially women.

  'Mine is a professional perspective, of course,' Masters snorted cheerfully. 'Take a look at this place. It looks quite unremarkable from the outside, yes? But it was built from the ruins of the Great Fire.'

  'Surely not. This bare-wood-and-ironwork-lamps look is 1930s, with a touch of last year chucked in.'

  'The present-day building, perhaps, but it's been a tavern for centuries. In fact, it's constructed over Roman ruins that still survive some five metres below us. And it was once the official residence of the Mayor of London. William and Mary liked the place so much that they provided it with the iron gates outside. A gentleman called Robert Williamson turned it into a proper public house in 1739. And it has a ghost.'

  All London pubs say they have a ghost—it gets the tourists in.'

  'Ah, but this one has something else,' Masters enthused. 'The heart of London. The bar is supposed to contain an ancient stone that marks the dead centre of the old City. The parade of historical characters through here has gone unrecorded and barely remarked upon. Why? Because the pubs of London are taken almost completely for granted by those who drink in them.' The doctor stabbed a long pale finger at the air. 'Every single one has a unique and extraordinary history.'

  'That's true,' Bryant agreed with enthusiasm. 'Did you know that the basement of the Viaduct Tavern in Holborn contains cells from Newgate Gaol? Its walls have absorbed the tortured cries of a thousand poor imprisoned souls. These places survived because of geography. The Tipperary in Fleet Street used to be called The Boar's Head. It was built in 1605 with stones taken from the Whitefriars Monastery, stones that allowed it to survive unharmed in the raging inferno of the Great Fire of London. And the Devereux, where we held Oswald's wake, is named after Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who was imprisoned in the Bloody Tower and beheaded. The point Harold is trying to make is that these places hold the key to our past, and therefore the present. They're an unappreciated indication of who we are, and a sign of all we've lost and remember fondly, in which bracket I would include nurses' hats, single railway carriage compartments, quality umbrellas, the concept of public embarrassment, correct pronunciation and the ability to tell a child off in the street without risking a stab-wound.'

  'Pubs are just shops that sell booze, Arthur. What's more, they're dying at a rate of sixty-five a year in London because of property developers. You're over-egging the pudding as usual.'

  'Not at all,' said Masters, jumping in eagerly. 'Walk the streets of London, and the only time you'll speak to strangers is when you apologise for stepping in their path. Public houses act, as their name implies, as homes for the general populace where opposites can meet and confront each other without prejudice, on neutral territory. This is why the landlord is referred to as the host, and why rooms in pubs were always used to hold local inquests, so that the deceased could be sure of a fair and impartial verdict on his death.'

  'I think you'll find that the desire for alcohol also plays a part in their popularity,' said May.

  'Obviously, but there's something more fundamental at the root of it. Walking into a pub alone is for many young people their first act of real independence. Such places have had a profound effect on our society throughout history, acting as every kind of salon and meeting place, from coffeehouse pamphleteers to the cruelties of the gin palace. And of course, they reinvent themselves endlessly. Once, where political and philosophical meetings were held, there are now karaoke and Jenga evenings, book readings and sexual-fantasy nights. And they come with an amazingly complex set of social codes, of course.'

  'True, I suppose,' May admitted. 'There's nothing more embarrassing than finding that your pint-to-toilet cycle has become synchronised with that of a total stranger.'

  'Why, public houses have even influenced our language. Drinkers used to share the same mug, in which the level of ale was marked with a wooden peg, hence the expression "to take someone down a peg." The masons who built our churches were housed at inns, hence the Masonic connections of certain pubs, and of course, the Knights Templar had their own inns at Clerkenwell. When the polluted waters of London proved unpotable, everyone drank at alehouses. Pub names provide markers for all the historical events of England. Red Lion, White Hart, Crown and Anchor, Royal Oak, Coach and Horses, each has its own convoluted meaning. We even find our way around by the location of public houses like the Green Man and the Sun in the Sands.'

  'Think about it, John,' said Bryant. A couple of weeks ago, you and I had a drink at The Anchor, where others had sat drinking before us for half a millennium, seeing the same view.'

  'Do you realise that in the late Victorian era there was a pub for every hundred people in the country?' asked the academic. 'We talk about the inner-city schools where pupils speak dozens of languages, but what about the melting pots that ex-ist on almost every street corner?'

  'And the history they hold, true or false as the case may be,' mused Bryant, drifting off the point, as he was wont to do. 'The Sherlock Holmes in Northumberland Avenue, presented as if Holmes was a real detective, and The Old Bank of England, a bar on Fleet Street, touted by guides as the site of Sweeney Todd's shop, if you please. What complete and utter nonsense.'

  'Whereas the pub in which I am usually to be found most evenings, in Smithfield, was once called the Path of Hope, because it stood on the route of condemned prisoners, like the Old King Lud at Ludgate Circus,' said Masters. 'Although it was always associated with St Bartholemew's Fair, the pub sign depicts a pair of stranded sailors. In Victorian times one often finds the idea of hope attached to the sea, hope of finding land or another ship. A popular maritime motto was "We anchor in hope," but by depicting sailors the sign-maker has misunderstood the meaning of the pub's name. You see? By decoding the tangled symbols of the past, we get close to the truths that history books miss.'

  'What we're trying to say is that perhaps these places,' Bryant gestured around the bar, 'are as germane to the solution of a case like this as the identity of the victims. What if these unfortunate women met their deaths not just because of who they were, but where they were?'

  'That's ridiculous,' said May hotly. 'It would mean they were selected from the population at random, and we have too many correlating factors to believe that.'

  'Then imagine a man who, for reasons we cannot yet fathom, strikes only in public houses, and does so because of what they represent. By killing these women he is unstringing the very fabric of England.'

  'It's true,' exclaimed Masters. 'If you wished to undermine everything we stand for as a people, you could do no better than damage the institution of the pub. You'd be striking at the heart of the city.'

  17

 
; ASLEEP IN THE TREES

  Sergeant Renfield was looming behind her, trying to read over her shoulder

  'Anything I can help you with, Jack?' asked Longbright pointedly.

  All a bit mundane, isn't it?' said Renfield with a disdaining sniff. 'People die in or outside pubs all the time, it just never gets reported. A little beneath you, this sort of thing. I thought the PCU was about tracking down lunatics in highwayman outfits and solving murders committed in ridiculous places.'

  'When deaths occur outside pubs, the victims are never middle-aged career women who've been drinking alone,' Longbright replied.'They're teenaged and in groups, drunk or stoned, and have been in fights with their peers over girls and loyalty and the mysteriously coded world of respect and humiliation. Come on, Jack, you know that.'

  'I ask because I'm trying to understand how this place works. You've got that girl April, who has no qualifications, trawling through cold cases looking for links to these dead women, and that's not logical. Procedure requires—'

  'This unit doesn't operate according to the laws of logic,' said Longbright.'Colin and Meera are searching for witnesses and conducting interviews as procedure requires, leaving us free to detect larger trends.'

  'You mean there's no proper system at work here. It's like you've forgotten that you're working against the clock. Lives are at stake. Don't your bosses understand that others will die if they don't stop fannying around?'

  'The system doesn't work within the normal structure of criminal investigation departments.'

  'So what happens when a case comes in?'

  'Raymond Land has to approve our involvement, but he gets overruled by Mr Bryant, who chooses the cases he thinks we're best suited to. John usually backs him up. Then Land has to go cap in hand to the Home Office.'

  'So what interests Bryant?'

  'He's concerned with deaths that occur in circumstances too troubling for the Met to deal with. The detectives write up their notes—more themes and ideas, really. Then we spend the next few days hiding what we've discovered from anyone who might stop us.' Longbright was enjoying the look of creeping unease on Renfield's face.

  'And where is everybody else this morning? I ask because I have to keep notes on you lot.'

  'John and Mr Bryant are in a pub somewhere in Holborn consulting an expert in London mythology. April is calling the surviving relatives of Joanne Kellerman, and after work I'm getting my roots touched up before attending a society for conspiracy theorists. Raymond Land is probably in the Nun and Broken Compass playing darts with former officers from Bow Street station and slagging you off something rotten. Giles Kershaw will be running more tests on Jocelyn Roquesby, and Dan Banbury is probably going over the crime scenes of the earlier victims. Happy?'

  And out of this farrago you expect to find a murderer?' Renfield was staggered. He had expected an element of disorganisation, but nothing on this scale. It would have been easier to predict the movement of cats.

  'I don't know about that,' Longbright told him. 'Things have to get stranger first, or else Mr Bryant will lose interest.'

  'And when do you suppose that might happen?' asked Renfield, fighting to keep his natural temperament under control.

  'Oh, right around now,' replied Longbright with a malignant smile. 'Come on, Jack, lighten up on us a bit. Our clearance rate is more than double that of any other specialist unit. Find something positive to say.'

  Renfield eyed her thoughtfully.'You've got some lovely legs on you, Janice,' he said at last.

  Jazmina Sherwin checked her watch again. She had been waiting for her so-called boyfriend to turn up for nearly half an hour, but his cell phone was turned off. She pulled her sheep-skin coat more tightly around her, and looked out at the empty roadway. It was already starting to get dark. The trunks of the plane trees opposite were lost in shadows. Their uppermost leaves stood out black against the dying sky. Nobody else was sitting on the benches in the front garden of the Albion, but Jazmina hated overheated rooms, and the saloon bar was un-bearably warm.

  The Barnsbury pub appeared to have been dropped down in the heart of the English countryside. Graceful Edwardian houses filled the backstreets between Liverpool Road and the Caledonia Road. It was hard to imagine that the chaos of King's Cross was just a fifteen-minute walk from this spot.

  A pair of crows sniped in the branches above her. A breeze rose, the shiver rippling along the street in a wave that caused the tops of the branches to gossip.

  She knew she should never have agreed to meet him again, not after he had let her down the week before. What, she wondered, was the attraction of careless men? A car drifted past al-most in silence, the driver insolently staring at her.

  She looked over her shoulder, through the window of the pub. The barman had gone somewhere. The bar appeared to be deserted now, except for a small group of noisy fat men playing darts in the rear saloon, but she was sure someone had been standing close by her when she ordered her orange juice. She had seen him from the corner of her eye, just a dark shape really, but she'd had the sense of a heavy overcoat, a pale eye turned in her direction. Normally she was entirely at ease in pubs, but this one didn't feel as if it was even in the city.

  Shiny dark birds cawing in the trees, the evening so quiet you could hear the greenery. Something was not right. Something...

  He made her start, moving in to sit beside her without disturbing the air, so that she was sure he had not been there the moment before. She was strong, but he had the element of surprise. His grip was practised and complete. She felt the hot lance of the needle enter her neck, and knew at once that the time for escape had already passed. The freezing numbness flooded her body, like dental anaesthetic but much faster, more totally invasive, and she felt herself falling down into his awaiting arms.

  She heard his voice from far above, even though he could only be speaking in a whisper. 'Stay with me,' he told her. She tried to remain awake, sensing that if consciousness failed it would not return. She was young and mistrustful of men, so how could this be happening?

  So unfair, she thought, so stupid. In that brief moment she felt as if all the evils in the world were there to be understood. Men were starving wolves who searched for weaknesses, and she had dropped her guard for the first—and only—time in her short life.

  The Nun & Broken Compass had been shut for refurbishment, so Raymond Land's pals from the Met had suggested going a little further afield today, seeing as they were on short shifts, and Land could basically do as he pleased now that the Home Office called the shots for his unit. Land was still laughing at the superintendent's disgusting joke as they pocketed their dart sets and left the Albion. He didn't like Barnsbury, too many stuck-up North London politicians living here, but the Albion was a bit of a find, bucolic and becalmed, hidden behind an artful undergrowth.

  While they were discussing what would be the quickest way back, the superintendent noticed the girl. She was seated upright on the bench, her head hanging over her drink, and Land had been about to make a remark about birds not being able to hold their booze when one of the others realised that something was wrong with her.

  In the deepening shadows beneath the leaves of mulberry trees, a young black girl had fallen asleep so soundly that she had died, her soul departing on respectful tiptoe, as quietly as the fading breeze.

  18

  PUB CRAWL

  Thursday morning at the PCU dawned in a tangle of disbelief and recriminations.

  'You were actually on the premises,' May accused his superior, pacing the latter's threadbare office carpet. 'How could you not have seen what happened to this young woman?'

  'Do you know the Albion?' asked Land angrily. 'It's a series of rooms, and we were out at the back having a game of arrows. How was I to know she'd been attacked?'

  'Didn't you hear or see anything unusual at all?'

  'No, I was playing for money and concentrating on my form. I don't think I saw another person in the pub apart from the barman, and he h
ardly speaks any English. This girl had apparently been stood up by her boyfriend—who is in the clear, by the way, because he was actually at a job interview in the Finchley Road Mercedes showroom and had forgotten he was meeting her. Besides, she had been sitting outside the whole time, so how was I supposed to see her?'

  'Has Giles had a chance to conduct a full examination of the body yet?'

  'No, he had to wait for the family to come in and ID her last night, but he says there's a piercing on the side of her neck consistent with the MO on the first two—or rather four, if we count the uninvestigated cases.'

  'Our perpetrator is becoming angrier.' Giles Kershaw was unfurled in Land's doorway. 'Very nearly snapped the needle off in her neck, left a circular bruise where he pushed the syringe base right up against the skin, and it looks like such a high dosage that I imagine she died in seconds. I'm heading back to Bayham Street. Jazmina Sherwin's father is probably going berserk.'

  Kershaw flicked back his blond hair in the habitual gesture he had acquired from bending his tall frame over tissue samples.'Something's out of whack. This one is different—the age, the ethnicity, the social background. I'd have said it was an entirely separate incident except that she was found in a pub and killed in the same fashion. Premeditation, obviously. But a fundamental paradox: The killer wants them to die so quietly that no-one notices, and yet he chooses to kill them in public, often crowded, places. It goes against all of our received wisdom.'

  'Why has he switched to a young black girl after singling out middle-aged white women?' asked Land.

  'His lacunae—the calm gaps between his acts of violence— are closing. It's only a few hours since he last took a life. Perhaps the need has now become so urgent that in this case it drove him into the nearest pub, and Sherwin was unlucky enough to be the only female there. The rest of the locations are grouped in roughly the same area. Does anyone mind if I take Renfield with me?'