The Victoria Vanishes

by Christopher Fowler

  Renfield always felt like arresting someone when he was lonely.

  How, he wondered, had he allowed himself to be manoeuvred into the PCU, where everyone hated him? He felt sure Bryant and May were laughing at him behind his back, ordering him to spend the evening sitting in a pub by himself, in the absurd hope that he might pick up some kind of information about the killer. Why weren't they hammering the fear of the law into relatives and colleagues, chasing down the recent contacts of the deceased and demanding answers? A nutcase wanders around the city's public houses armed with a syringe and nobody sees him—how the hell was that possible? And in-stead of trying to discover his identity, the most obvious way of working, Bryant announces that they must first understand his motive. Crimes that produced no leads in forty-eight hours were virtually dead. No wonder the Home Office tried shutting the unit down every five minutes; the place was an anachronistic embarrassment, a division that fancied itself more at home in the pages of the Strand magazine than on the mean streets of Camden Town.

  And yet...

  He found himself staring at a man who was behaving most strangely. He had taken off his shoes and donned a pair of red plaid carpet slippers, and had sat back to read the top volume of several magazines, just as if he were at home. But he was, in fact, assessing the young women who passed his table, surreptitiously studying their legs, their buttocks, until they had moved from sight.

  The longer he watched the behaviour of strangers in the Old Bell, the more Jack Renfield began to think that there was something to the PCU's methodology after all.

  20

  IRRATIONALITY

  A

  dmit to being afraid,' said a thin ginger-headed man at the podium. 'It's the first step to acknowledging that you have a problem.' He pointed a plastic ruler at the top page of the board behind him, upon which a variety of phobias were spelled out. 'These are the fears of our current and past members. If yours is not listed here, I'd like you to step up here now and add it to the list.'

  April looked for her agoraphobia among more obscure irrationalities. Aichmophobia, the fear of needles; Ailurophobia, fear of cats; Alektorophobia, fear of chickens; Alliumphobia, fear of garlic; Anthrophobia, fear of flowers; Antlophobia, fear of floods—and those were just the A's. Presumably the young man's easel held twenty-six pages of terrors.

  The group was seated upstairs at the Ship & Shovell pub behind the Strand, which Naomi Curtis, the second victim, had visited in an attempt to cure her claustrophobia. It was the only pub in London that existed in two separate halves, each piece a red-painted mirror image of the other, set on either side of a sloping passageway that led down to the Thames.

  'Shovell' was spelled with a double L because it had been the original owner's name.

  For a bunch of people who lived in irrational fear of ordinary things—computers, snow, being touched—they seemed remarkably chatty and cheerful. The ginger man's talk lasted half an hour, after which there were questions, then everyone went to the bar except one woman, who was apparently perturbed by the sight of spilled beer.

  'You're new, aren't you?' asked the speaker. 'I haven't seen you before. You didn't come up to the board.'

  'I was agoraphobic, but it seems to be retreating now,' April explained. 'I've had various other phobias in the past. I was bothered by dirt and untidiness. I have a bit of a neatness fetish.'

  'I suppose your doctor said you were spending too much time indoors, and developed other fears because you were looking to reduce your world still further. It's quite common. I'm Alex, by the way.'

  'April.'

  She held out her hand, but he shook his head. 'Can't do it, I'm afraid. Germs. Sadly, recognising one's phobias doesn't necessarily lead to their cure.'

  'And yet we're in an old pub where there are probably a couple of hundred years' worth of microbes festering in the carpets.'

  'You know as well as I do that a phobia has no respect for reason.' They took their drinks to a corner of the room.

  'I'm here on a mission,' April finally admitted. 'Did you ever meet a woman called Naomi Curtis?'

  'Don't know. Hang on.' Alex fetched a diary from the table by the door and checked it. 'Some only come to the society once or twice. We try to keep a record of names, but it's rather hit or miss. Claustrophobic, wasn't she? She attended a few times. We usually meet outside. It was a little too cramped for her at the bar.'

  'I can understand that. Did she have many friends here?'

  'I think she came with another woman, someone from work. People don't like to visit by themselves. They think they're going to get roped into some kind of sales pitch, but we're just a self-funding help group. Once they understand that, they relax more.'

  'Do you ever cure anyone?'

  'Sometimes. But fears have a habit of mutating. They'll vanish only to reappear in a different form. We've managed to keep the group going for six years now, even though we have to keep changing pubs.'

  'Why's that?'

  'The landlords don't like primal scream therapy. And once I accidentally released ants all over the saloon floor, and we had a tarantula go missing behind the bar. Never did find it. We had a disastrous meeting in the Queen's Head and Artichoke last year, when three old ladies got locked in the lavatory. They went in as autophobics—afraid of being alone—and came out as claustrophobics. Why did you ask about Mrs Curtis, do you know her?'

  'No. I'm helping to investigate her murder.'

  'My God, I had no idea.'

  'She was in a pub.'

  'Not this one?'

  'The Seven Stars in Carey Street, just down the road from here. She probably went there to meet a friend.'

  'And you think it might have been someone she met here?'

  'It's a long shot.' April had already told him more than she'd intended to.

  'Maybe not so long,' said Alex. 'She did meet someone the last time she came, a bloke in his early thirties, funny haircut, black leather overcoat. I remember thinking there was some-thing really creepy about him. It sticks in my mind because they sat in the corner talking intensely for quite a long time, then she left very suddenly, as if they'd had a row. Mind you, she was incredibly drunk.'

  'Would you recognise him again?'

  'Possibly. I think he had something wrong with his face, some kind of purple birthmark.'

  'Do you mean it was the birth defect that made him appear creepy?'

  'No, God, I hope I'm not that shallow. You know the way some people don't behave how they should in company? He was hunched over his beer, openly staring at other women. We're used to autistic behaviour but this was different. I'm sorry, it's not much to go on, is it?'

  'You'd be surprised,' said April. It looked as if Curtis's attacker had hit on her before. Perhaps he had even tried to hurt her, only to have his plans thwarted. All nine members of the PCU were out searching public houses tonight. If any of them turned up a similar description, they would finally have a suspect.

  Dan Banbury found himself wedged against a wall in the claustrophobic Seven Stars pub, which was located behind Lincoln's Inn Fields and packed to the gills with boisterous, merry legal workers. Normally he would have enjoyed himself in such an environment, but his conversation with the bar staff had been turned into a shouting match by the deafening combination of courtroom rhetoric and cheap beer.

  The barmaid who had served Naomi Curtis on the night of her death could think of no other details, and was too busy to concentrate on the subject for long. Banbury jammed himself further into the corner with his pint and wondered. What kind of man would she have allowed close? In his experience women preferred cocktail bars to pubs, especially ones this intimate and rowdy. He felt sure that she could only have come in here to meet a man. This kind of pub was the choice of a male.

  With difficulty, he unfolded the spreadsheet April had sup-plied and checked the notes she had printed. The same injected sedative, giving symptoms that had been mistaken for heatstroke. A swift, virtually painless method o
f killing, putting someone to sleep so easily and quietly that their death could pass unnoticed in a crowded bar. Curtis wasn't rich, had no unusual beneficiaries, no-one who might excessively profit from her demise. It seemed unlikely to be anyone she knew, which meant that she had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  This place was a crime scene manager's worst nightmare, trampled flat day in and out, vacuumed and disinfected, scoured by the scrum of bodies, sloshed with centuries of beer. In a way, the man they were looking for had hit upon the perfect location to commit murder. Every night in every pub there would be petty feuds, heated arguments, friendships forged, sexual liaisons proposed and enemies made, the threats of tears and laughter. Alcohol heightened the emotions. Providing he did not draw attention to himself, a killer could easily hide inside such a world. Bryant was right; coming here had started to give him a different perspective on the problem. He studied the room again, screening out un-likely candidates. The loudmouths and drunks, the shrieking office girls and their stentorian workmates vanished one by one.

  Banbury found himself left with a handful of introspective loners, any one of whom might be nursing an uncapped syringe in his jacket pocket.

  21

  DATING & DANCING

  Raymond Land indignantly refused to follow his own detective's orders to return to the Albion in Barnsbury, so Colin Bimsley and Meera Mangeshkar took on a double shift, first travelling to where Jazmina Sherwin had been found dead. After spending half the evening here, they planned to split up and tackle two further public houses.

  For months, Bimsley had fantasised about being in a pub with Meera, a combination of pleasures that made him heart-sick with delight. In previous investigations he had been happy enough to spend the night rummaging through suspects' dustbins with her, searching for pieces of food-stained evidence, but just when his wish had been fulfilled, he found that his changing attitude to the diminutive DC had robbed him of happiness.

  In short, he had gone off her.

  After putting up with her sulks, her tantrums, her cynicism, her sarcasm, her ability to start small bin fires with her pre-menstrual temper, the scales had finally fallen from his eyes, and he fancied he could see her as the woman she had become; bitter, bad-tempered, happy to keep him dangling on the promise of a date which would never be arranged.

  As a consequence, the mood between them was polite but arctic. Seated side by side in the Albion, they stared into their soft drinks and allowed the silence to stretch between them.

  Finally, Meera spoke. 'This girl, Sherwin, she was supposed to be young and streetwise. She wouldn't have let some creep just come up and touch her. We're not going to find anything here.'

  'Well, that's a positive attitude. You're just saying that be-cause you don't believe in Bryant's methods.'

  'Colin, look around you. The place is virtually empty. What are we looking for? The barman who served her isn't even here, so he can't point out anyone he saw.'

  'How do you know that?'

  'I talked to the girl who served me these drinks.'

  'Well, has anybody else seen him?'

  'He was sent by the brewery to fill in for someone who hadn't turned up for work.'

  Bimsley jumped up so quickly that he knocked his orange juice across the table. While obtaining a cloth at the counter he summoned the barmaid, who wrote him a number on a slip of paper. He waited for an answer on his cell phone, turning his back on Meera.

  'The brewery never sent anyone,' he told her, returning. 'They didn't get the message in time. If he wasn't a barman or a punter, he could just have ducked behind the bar to serve Jazmina. That's how he got close enough to be sure of his latest choice. There was only one staff member on duty last night instead of two, and if she was in the kitchen or the other bar there would have been no-one at all at the front.'

  'We need to find someone else other than Raymond who was in the pub. Someone observant.'

  'This is the sort of place that has regulars. You can spot them a mile off. Those two in the corner, for a start, and that old guy by the fireplace. I'll do one end of the bar, you do the other. Look for unsteady hands and broken nose veins.'

  Hard drinkers make unreliable witnesses. Several people professed to have seen someone behind the counter, but none of them could agree on a description. He was tall, thin, broad, blond, black, Asian, blotched with a crimson birthmark. Mangeshkar tallied her notes with Bimsley's, and they headed to their next destinations.

  Speed-dating Night was held at the Museum Tavern on the corner of Museum Street, where Jazmina Sherwin had worked and met her boyfriend. The pub retained the seedy bookishness of Bloomsbury because its crimson leather seats were filled with half-drunk proofreaders poring over drink-dampened manuscripts. Like the Cross Keys in Endell Street or the Bloomsbury Tavern in Shaftesbury Avenue, it remained constant in a sliding world: the distinctive odour of hops, the ebb of background chatter, muted light through stained glass, china tap handles, metal drip trays, mirrored walls, bars of oak and brass. The Victoriana was fake, of course, modelled on obsolete pub ornaments and anachronistically updated with each refurbishment to create an increasingly off-kilter view of the past, but the blurry ambience remained undisturbed.

  The tiny round tables in the rear of the room had been arranged to accommodate the couples who were about to tackle their abridged liaisons. Bimsley was assigned a number by the evening's hostess, a pleasant-faced, overweight girl who reminded him of a character from a Pieter Brueghel painting. Her name tag proclaimed her to be Andrea from the Two of Hearts Club. She spoke with the singsong condescension of a suburban Kentish housewife, and probably had a heart of gold until it came to gays and immigrants. 'First time? Lovely! You're a nice big fellow, we shouldn't have too much trouble pairing you up. Pop your badge on and we'll get you settled in. What's your name, lovey?' 'Bimsley,' said Bimsley.

  'I think it would be nicer to be on first-name terms with the ladies, don't you?' 'Colin.'

  'Oh, we haven't had one of those for a while. There.' She patted a sticky yellow square onto his lapel. Bimsley looked around the saloon. There were several presentable, even sexy, women but the quality of the males was abysmal: a couple of boney-faced accountant types with VDU pallor, a leaker with lank hair stuck to his forehead and sweat rolling down his cheeks, a middle-aged man dressed as a giant toddler in a sleeveless T-shirt and three-quarter-length trousers, an ageing media type in club gear who was probably not as interesting as his haircut, a very old gentleman cruising for an heir or possibly an enjoyable way of having a heart attack. In Russia there were ten million more women than men, so at least the males had an excuse for not bothering to look their best.

  His speed dates were allocated just three minutes each, at the end of which time he was required to give his women a rating of between one and three points. Bimsley's decision to ask questions about a murder victim instead of enquiring about hobbies, favourite films or dining out brought him looks of in-comprehension, confusion and outright hostility until Andrea took him to one side and gave him some advice.

  'I think you need to lighten up, darling,' she informed him. 'Whatever you're asking these lovely ladies seems to be having a negative effect on their opinion of you.'

  After achieving a rating score two points lower than the leaker, Bimsley decided to sit out the next batch of rounds and talk to the barmaid instead. This time he found himself onto a winner.

  'I worked the same shift as Jazmina most nights,' said the pixie-faced Polish girl with earnest blue eyes, whose name was Izabella, and whose jet hair framed her face like Louise Brooks's in Pandora's Box. 'She was very nice, but I did not like her boyfriend.'

  'Why not?' asked Bimsley, succumbing to a pint of lager.

  'He was not interested in her. He had other girlfriends.'

  'Did she ever come in here and drink on her nights off? Maybe with someone other than her boyfriend?'

  'Oh, no. She hated this place.'

  'Why?'

&nb
sp; 'Because she had a what-you-call-it, a stalker. You get men in every pub who try and talk to you on quiet nights, but this one came in all the time.'

  'Did you ever see him? What was he like?'

  'Too old for her, probably in his early thirties. Brown hair, tall, with a red mark on his face. I was here one night when he started on her.'

  'Can you remember anything he said?'

  Izabella thought carefully. 'I think he'd been fired from his job, he was a bar manager. North London somewhere. We laughed about him after he left.'

  'This is really important,' said Bimsley. 'I need you to make a note of everything you remember about this man.'

  'Wait until I finish work tonight,' said Izabella with an impish smile. 'I will tell you anything you want.'

  Meera Mangeshkar was at The Apple Tree in Mount Pleasant, which Carol Wynley had sometimes visited with her work colleagues, but asking questions of the staff and customers proved difficult because there was a country-and-western line dancing night in progress.

  This had been a postman's pub for many years due to its proximity to the sorting office, but had now been refurbished for the benefit of tourists visiting from nearby hotels. As Dolly Parton warbled through 'Heartbreaker' on the speakers and couples in checked shirts and fringed cowboy jackets stamped their stitched boots on the ancient Axminster carpet, Mangeshkar was forced into stupefied silence on a nearby counter bar stool. The combination of beery British boozer and traditional Texas toe-tap made her uncomfortable, partly because she was the only Indian girl in the room, and felt as if she might get shot. The well-drilled lines of dancers did not whoop and yell like their more liberated U.S. cousins, but concentrated on their footwork, determined to master exercises more culturally alien to the London mind-set than Morris dancing.