The Victoria Vanishes

by Christopher Fowler

  'A lady from the Broadhampton phoned Islington Council to add Tony Pellew to my roster,' she informed them. 'They'd got him a one-bedroom apartment on the De Beauvoir estate. He didn't want to live in South London. His family was originally from around there. Normally we try to return home, don't we? It's only natural. You'll want the address of his flat.'

  'How can we get that?'

  'My filing system's in my head, love.' She took a card from May and wrote on the back of it. 'When did you last see him?'

  'Well, I got him settled in and popped over a couple of times during the first week, but two weeks ago he went missing. He didn't have many belongings, just enough to fill a back-pack, but the wardrobe was emptied out and the bed hadn't been slept in.'

  'How do you know he wasn't staying at a friend's?' asked May.

  'His shoes were all gone. You don't take all your shoes unless you're not coming back, do you? I had to make a report to his probationer.'

  'What was he like?' Bryant wondered, intrigued.

  'Very quiet and sad, needed fattening up. The sort of man an older lady would like to take under her wing, you know? I heard he'd had a difficult upbringing. I'm not trying to excuse what he did, you just want to understand, don't you? Well, it's only human nature, isn't it?'

  'Do you have any idea at all where he went?'

  Mrs Bonner gave a shrug. 'They come and go, these lost souls, can't settle, don't feel comfortable in themselves, do they, just take off one day. London can be so lonely. He can't leave the country because he hasn't got a passport. And I don't think he wants to go far from where his old mum lived, even though she disowned him. He'll turn up in a shelter somewhere, if he hasn't already.'

  Anthony Pellew's apartment had an air of abandonment. Its resident had moved on, taking his clothes and the few personal belongings he possessed. Beneath the smell of dust and damp carpeting was the musk of stillness and solitude. The flat had been used for dozens of short-term residents who had passed their time here, seated forlornly on the corner of the single bed, or propped at the square Ikea kitchen table, staring from the window into an unforgiving future. Discoloured edges on the carpet mapped furniture phantoms. The pale squares on the wall left ghosts of old picture frames. Pellew had not succeeded in leaving his mark in the apartment.

  The first thing to do was check that he had not tried to re-turn to his former home. Bryant pushed back the door of a kitchen cupboard with the tip of his walking stick and peered inside. The few tins he found were the kind of staples stocked by someone with no interest in food. 'He must have left something behind. Everybody who moves out leaves some faint trace. I need to know this man's history. The bloody cheek of the Broadhampton, palming us off with a bit of paper.'

  'It's not their fault,' said May defensively. 'They provide some of the best care in the country. Someone there has been stepped on by the assessment committee. Get April on the phone and have her call the clinic every hour on the half hour until someone gives her the full story.'

  While May made the call, Bryant wandered from room to room, wrinkling his nose in the stale, dead air. They were about to lock the place up and head back to the unit when Bryant saw the newspaper cutting that lay pressed behind a sheet of glass on the kitchen table. Withdrawing his reading glasses, he read through it and called May in.

  'It looks like he was going to frame this, John. It's Pellew's mother.'

  The photograph was of a blond crop-haired woman with a hard, almost perfectly square face. Her son's grainy photo-graph was inset, and showed a boy with a bowed head emerging from court, his features in shadow.

  'She sold her story to our friends at Hard News just a few weeks before her death. "Why My Son Must Never Be Freed," She used the article to envisage what he would do if he was ever to be granted his freedom. Do you think she'd heard he was being assessed for release? My godfathers.' He sat down and peered closely at the page. 'It reads like a blueprint of his activities over the last week. In his state of mind, it's hard not to think that he'd have seen this as some kind of fateful prediction. "Mrs Anita Pellew, the manager of London's famous old Clock House pub in Leather Lane,"'

  Bryant slapped his hand on the glass-covered sheet. 'That's where he's gone.'

  30

  SOLIDARITY

  Janice Longbright was ahead of them. April's search for Pellew's trial coverage had already uncovered his mother's interview. As the information was distributed and digested around the unit, Longbright threw on her jacket and headed for Farringdon before Renfield could try to stop her.

  The Clock House occupied a shaded corner of Leather Lane. As she passed beneath the heraldic red lion and white unicorn over the front door, she wondered how a building with so many windows could remain so gloomy inside, as if the smokers' fug that had obscured the mirrored interior for more than a century was now beyond mere dissipation by a smoking ban. Making her way through a saloon crowded with market traders and local office workers, she introduced herself to a barmaid, another pretty Polish girl, called Zosia.

  'I understand that a woman named Anita Pellew lived here,' said Longbright.

  'I don't know—I'm new here. You should talk to Patrick over there.' Zosia pointed at the old boy collecting glasses.

  'That's right,' said the Irish pot man, thinking. 'She went to the hospital and didn't come back.'

  'Were her rooms above the pub?'

  'Second floor.' He put down his pint mugs to point at the ceiling.

  'Can I get up there?'

  'It's all locked up,' said Zosia.'The new manageress has the keys, and she's gone out.'

  'What about the basement? Does that stay locked?'

  'No, because the bar staff have to get down there to change barrels.'

  'Is that a single staircase behind the bar?' 'No, there's an access door outside as well.' 'Thanks, I'll need to take a look.'

  Zosia raised the bar for her and led the way to the cellar door. 'I can't leave the bar,' she warned Longbright. 'Call me if you need anything.'

  The floor below occupied a far greater area than the bar overhead. At least six rooms opened from the central battleship-grey corridor, their doors pulled shut. The dusty overhead bulb provided barely adequate light. Down here, only the faintest murmurs and footfalls could be heard from the saloon.

  The first two rooms were filled with metal beer barrels and crates. Beyond these, a small office had been set up for the manager to work on the accounts. Had Mrs Pellew once sat here adding up figures while her son played in the bar?

  Longbright groped for the Bakelite light switches, as round and high as pudding bowls, clicking them on as she went. At the far end of the corridor, a door opened onto a narrow stepped passage originally designed for the delivery of coal. Its latch was easy to slip apart. Tony Pellew would have been able to come and go without anyone in the pub seeing him.

  It took a lot to frighten the detective sergeant; she had spent too many years searching London's derelict buildings, climbing through its rubbish-strewn yards and alleyways, chasing panicked men through scraps of waste ground and across windswept car parks. The evidence suggested that Pellew had no intention of causing women pain, even though he had killed them. But to Longbright, that paradox made him all the more disturbing. It left a gap in his genetic makeup, a void that could not be explained away. It made him impossible to read.

  When she opened the door of the darkened end room and saw a green nylon sleeping bag on the floor, she knew she had found him. She stepped inside, drawn by the desire to rummage through the empty white packets beside his bed, and realised they were boxes that had contained clear plastic drug ampoules, diabetic needles so small and fine that nobody would notice them.

  What she failed to notice was that the door had started closing silently behind her.

  A rag of shadow flung itself forward, seizing her in a practised grip. She should have been able to throw him over her head, but he had caught her off balance.

  Stupid, stupid, she thought as she
fell. I didn't consider myself old enough to be a target, but of course I'm exactly the right age.

  The needle must have been tiny, similar to the one on an insulin pen, because instead of sliding in hotly it just plucked at the skin of her arm like an insect. A warm dental numbness flooded her body with astonishing speed.

  His arms extended to catch her as she fell, to ease her to the floor, but she was heavier than he'd expected and slipped through his welcoming embrace. She jarred her hip and the side of her skull as she slammed onto the cement ground.

  Anaesthetists always suggested counting to ten. She tried that now, but struggled beyond the number four. Will I die? she wondered distantly. Have I joined the sisterhood of his victims? Will this be my last conscious thought?

  He wanted to stay with her, but the circumstances were not right. She should have been seated next to him in the warm ochre light of the saloon bar, her thigh lightly touching his, her glass almost full. She should have been watching him with his mother's eyes, listening intently, smiling and nodding as music and laughter surrounded them in soothing sussurance. The time—somewhere between nine o'clock P.M. and the last bell—would have stretched to an eternity. But instead she was lying on the floor of the cellar, dying.

  Knowing it was time to leave, he grabbed his backpack from the floor, ran out into the corridor and headed for the coal steps.

  Longbright had been facedown on the cement for about twenty minutes when John May found her. Her breathing was shallow, her pulse faint but steady. When he saw the emptied ampoule beside her, he immediately searched for the mark on her exposed skin. Her hands and feet were still warm. He could only think that Pellew had underestimated her size, that the amount discharged had been nowhere near enough to kill her.

  The ambulance had trouble reaching the pub because a bendy-bus had become wedged across the turn at Holborn Circus, and the traffic was backed up in every direction. When the medics finally arrived, they took her to University College Hospital.

  'We should have gone with her,' said May, climbing into the driving seat of the BMW.

  'Right now we're more useful going after him,' said Bryant.

  'The ambulance boys say she's going to be all right, and we have to believe them. We'll need someone to meet us there.'

  'Where? You know where he's heading?'

  'He finds sanctuary in pubs, and probably salvation. Before Anthony and his mother lived at the Clock House, they came from south of the river, Greenwich. He grew up in a pub, remember. We think that was most likely the Angerstein Hotel, on Woolwich Road. It's the only other location from the old days he mentioned to nurses.'

  'Do you think it's still there?'

  'I hope so. I'm meant to be playing in their skittles tournament this summer.'

  'There may have been other pubs in between. I thought he and his mother moved around a lot.'

  'Pellew was at the Angerstein from the ages of eight to fourteen, his formative years. And I know the place; it's huge. That makes it the likeliest venue. He clearly feels most comfortable living and even killing inside crowds. Hardly the usual lone wolf.'

  'You can be as alone in a city like London as you can in the secluded countryside, Arthur.'

  'Poor Janice, she shouldn't have gone ahead without us. I'd never forgive myself if anything happened to her. We have to find him today, John. Judging by the number of empty ampoule boxes in his room, he's carrying enough lethal doses to take out a dozen people.'

  Back at the unit in Mornington Crescent, Dan Banbury had looked in on May's granddaughter and found April frowning over her computer screen. He was starting to worry about how much time she was spending at the PCU. The others were used to it; April had only just managed to reconnect with the world, and he couldn't help feeling she had swapped one cage for another. 'You've got that look on your face again,' he warned, seating himself beside her. 'What's the matter?'

  'I've been studying the photograph,' said April. 'Naomi Curtis. Jocelyn Roquesby. Joanne Kellerman. I don't think they just bumped into each other in a pub and had their picture taken together.'

  'Why not?' Dan studied the digitised photograph on her screen.

  'Look at the way they're standing. These women haven't just met. They're too close. I'd only relax like that if I was with a best mate. It doesn't look right.'

  'Maybe they had to squeeze in for the photo.' Banbury squinted at the picture, tilting his head. 'It bothers you?'

  'Enough to make me run some more checks. I finally managed to track down their resumes for date comparisons. It looks like all three changed jobs at the same time, in September 2005.'

  'You mean they were working together?'

  'No, that's just it.' She pulled up the documents and opened their windows beside each other on the screen. 'Curtis was at a place called Sankari Exports, Roquesby was at Legal and General and Kellerman worked for a loss adjustment company called Cooper Baldwin, but they all left in the same month.'

  'Probably just a coincidence.'

  'That's what I thought. So I called Legal and General's HR department, just to get a general idea about why she left. No-one by the name of Jocelyn Roquesby ever worked there. And it gets better. Sankari Exports in High Holborn ceased trading in 1997, and according to Companies House, Cooper Baldwin doesn't even exist.'

  'People exaggerate their resumes.'

  'Come on, Dan. Three impossible jobs, three matching departure dates, three deaths?'

  'What about start dates?'

  'They're all different.'

  'Have you checked the other two victims?'

  'I've ruled out Jazmina Sherwin because she doesn't fit the pattern, and I'm waiting for Carol Wynley's partner to e-mail me back. It should be in any minute.'

  'Then hold off until you've got Wynley as well,' advised Banbury. 'If they did all know each other, it would mean Bryant was right; these women weren't chosen at random.'

  'I don't know where that takes us,' April mused. 'I never go to a pub unless I'm meeting someone. What if Pellew worked with them somehow, perhaps even employed them? He arranges to meet each in turn, which is how they let him get close enough to jab them with a needle.'

  'I don't see how that could happen. He'd been locked up for years.'

  'Do you think he would have had Internet privileges? Could it have been some kind of online deal?'

  Banbury rubbed at his eye, thinking. 'I don't know. How can we tell if Pellew's even the right man? He's not in custody yet.'

  'There's one other thing. Cochrane, the warder at Twelve Elms Cross, sent through Pellew's medical file. There's a photograph of him taken at age eight without the crimson blemish on his face. And another one taken when he was seventeen, still clear-complected.'

  'So if it's not a birthmark, what is it?'

  'A disguise,' said April.

  31

  THE ANGERSTEIN

  I

  t was said that the Angersteins descended from Peter the Great himself, that John Julius Angerstein was the illegitimate son of either Catherine or Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, but the truth was somewhat less salubrious. John Julius, a Lloyd's underwriter, had grown rich from his West Indian slaves, and parlayed their miseries into an art collection that became the envy of kings, and the foundation of the National Gallery.

  The Angersteins made their home in Greenwich, the birth-place of Henry VIII and the home of time itself. Woodlands, their house in Greenwich Park, was built to house his growing collection of Rembrandts and Titians, and a grand Victorian hotel commemorated his name.

  But part of the maritime town had been allowed to die. Away from the splendours of the Royal Naval College, the Royal Observatory, the Queen's House and the Cutty Sark, East Greenwich grew dusty and rotted apart, its community shattered by the roaring motorway flyover that split the quiet streets in half. Here, the great Angerstein Hotel, now just another shabby pub, was situated. Like so many other public houses of its era, it had been repaired with thick layers of paint, blue-grey this time,
and its windows were rainbowed with the lights of gambling machines and posters for karaoke nights.

  John May edged his BMW through the isthmus of the one-way system and parked by the entrance just as Meera Mangeshkar arrived on her Norton, with Bimsley riding pillion. He opened his window and called over to the two young officers.

  'We've spoken to the pub's manager. He was a bit shocked when I explained he might be harbouring a murderer in the building, but he's going to co-operate. He says Pellew's hiding place can only be upstairs, as the basement is pass-code protected.'

  Shielding their eyes from the breaking rain, they looked up at the hotel, as arrogant and imposing as a battleship.

  'Looks like more than twenty rooms, plus a fire escape and a basement exit,' said Bimsley.

  'The second and third floors are accessible by a small side entrance round the corner, but the manager keeps the gate locked. If he's in there, Pellew's only escape route is down through the bar and out the front, or down the rear fire escape.'

  'How do you want to do this?'

  'You two, cover the floors above. Arthur, you're staying on the ground floor. The bar staff are ready to close the main doors once we're inside. I'll get the fire escape.'

  'No-one except the manager sees what we're doing, understood?' said Bryant. 'If Pellew is panicked into running again, he may hurt someone or try to take a hostage. There's no way of getting all the drinkers outside without tipping him off.

  Don't forget that he's armed with the kind of weapon we may not even notice him discharging.' He struggled to unlock his recalcitrant seat belt. 'For heaven's sake get me out of this bloody thing, John.'