The Victoria Vanishes

by Christopher Fowler

  41

  THE PATH OF HOPE

  H

  e told me himself where he spends his evenings.' Bryant hurried his partner through the fine soaking rain toward the car. 'He's a creature of habit, and he doesn't know we're looking for him.'

  May's immaculate BMW wound its way down through the fading light toward Smithfields, and the welcoming lights of the Hope tavern in Cowcross Street. The roads around them were deserted. They would not come to life until the clubs started up later in the evening.

  'The pub usually opens early for the market's meat porters, and apparently derived its name from the Path of Hope,' Bryant told him, 'a section of the route taken by condemned prisoners from Newgate on their way to execution. The market didn't appear until around 1855, but the pub's curved-glass bay windows date it from an earlier time. Look at the etched windows, mythical birds surrounding twined Ts and Hs.' 'This is no time for one of your guided tours, Arthur.' 'Many years ago I took it upon myself to educate you, and I have not yet given up hope. Don't feel bad; it's been a reciprocal process. You showed me how to use my cell phone correctly. Those calls I was accidentally making to Kuala Lumpur were costing me a fortune. Why have you got a tennis ball in your glove compartment?'

  'Leave that alone,' warned May. 'It's there in case I lose my keys again.'

  'I don't understand.'

  'Something Renfield taught me. You make a small hole in the ball, stick it over the lock and punch it. The air pressure pops the lock open.'

  'That man has a touch of the tea leaf about him,' said Bryant with a look of disapproval.

  'What do you expect? He was dealing with thieves on the street all day before he came to us. Anyway, you could learn a bit from him.' Like other members of the unit, May had begun to grudgingly reassess the sergeant.

  As they locked the vehicle and alighted, Bryant started examining the pub's woodwork until May pulled him inside.

  'I think Jackie Quinten did discover that some of her colleagues were dead, and at that point she must have realised what connected them all,' Bryant declared, heading straight for the bar. 'She needed to confide in someone, to visit a person in a position of trust. The Official Secrets Act remains in place after you leave a government establishment. She couldn't unburden herself to an outsider. It had to be someone she had known through the company she had worked for.'

  'And you think she came here?'

  'I'm convinced of it. I tried a couple of Kiskaya Mandeville's memory techniques and remembered something Masters said to me when I went to see him about Christ's blood going missing in Clerkenwell.'

  'Christ's blood?' repeated May, more confused than ever.

  Bryant irritably waved the thought aside. 'He said something very odd, but I didn't think anything of it at the time. Masters thinks aloud; it's not always easy to follow what he's on about. With people like that, you let a certain amount of what they say slip by you. He said, "I lecture on mythology these days, I'm not in haematology anymore, unless you count the Athenian." I knew he studied medicine, of course, he's a doctor, but I had no idea of the branch he specialised in. Haematology, the study of blood, blood-producing tissues and more importantly in this case, sanguinary diseases. So why would he mention the Athenian? Well, to a lecturer in mythology there can only be one Athenian: the greatest king of Athens, Theseus. I think he was referring to the Theseus Research group euphemistically, one of those bright little remarks he can expect to toss out and have ignored by his acolytes.'

  'Except that you didn't miss it,' said May, pleased. 'Let's search the place. You can explain the rest later.'

  Alas, it's unlikely I'll be able to do that. We need to find Mrs Quinten before we get any further answers.'

  Asking the bar staff if any of them had noticed a tall, grey-haired academic in the saloon during the last few days merely started an argument between them about height, weight and hair colour, at which point the detectives realised they would not get any easy answers.

  'She needed to seek him out,' said Bryant, 'but there's no record of her calling him from her house phone or her cell, so she must have known where to go.'

  'Either that, or she's somewhere else entirely.'

  'I can't allow myself to think that, John. I need to be right about this. We've nothing else left.'

  Colin Bimsley was too big for Jackie Quinten's home. Owing to his difficulties with space and balance, he had grown up in a house where the only ornaments were unbreakable and usually cemented down. Now he edged his way through rooms cluttered with pottery jugs, dainty china bowls, display glassware, antique violins, rare maps and fragile Edwardian dolls' furniture. 'I don't know where to begin looking with all this crap about,' he complained.

  'She's a collector,' said Meera.'I've already been here once today; I didn't need you to come back with me.'

  'Maybe you missed something.'

  Meera shot him a look that could have peeled wallpaper. 'Go and do the kitchen. I'll check the bedrooms. I don't trust you on the stairs. Wait.'

  Bimsley's eyes widened in alarm.'What?'

  'That girl who dropped you off—have you seen her again?'

  'Izabella? Not yet. I was going to give her a ring tonight, see if she was up for a beer and a curry, but now it looks like we'll be working late. At least we'll be together, eh?' Meera seemed to be immune to his smile, but he tried one hopefully.

  'Yeah, great.' It was hard to tell if she was being sarcastic.

  With a sigh, Bimsley headed for the kitchen and went through all the drawers, even looking inside the microwave. There was nothing here that he would not have expected to find. He leaned back on the draining board, looking around the tiny galley, and knocked a cup into the sink. He was trying to fit the handle back on when he noticed the empty cardboard boxes in the small backyard.

  The brand-new leaf incinerator seemed an odd thing to own, as there were no trees overhanging the property. Outside, he removed the steel lid and peered in at the charred remains of paperwork. He knew that burned pages could sometimes be deciphered if they were layered between sheets of cotton and sent to forensic-document experts, but the rain had worked its way into the metal container and had soaked the remains. Reaching in, he dug his shovel-like hands into the soggy mess. The downpour had put the fire out, and only the top sheets had been burnt. Underneath, entire folders were wet but intact. He began to lift them out. 'Meera,' he called ‘give me a hand.'

  Together they managed to bag half a dozen barely scorched folders of paper. 'Let's get this inside and read it,' he suggested. 'We should take it back.'

  'No time for that, and no place to take it back to, remember? If there's something here that can tell us where Quinten went, we need to know right now.'

  They started to sort through the documents. You chase thieves and murderers through the city streets, thought Bimsley with a sigh, but somehow you always end up doing paperwork. That's how they caught Al Capone. That's what always gets the convictions in the end.

  42

  BLOOD MONEY

  Jackie Quinten had all but given up hope of finding Dr Harold Masters.

  She had tried his darkened house in Spitalfields before heading back to the lecture hall in the British Museum, where an assistant had traced him to a rear section of the basement. Jackie was presented with instructions for finding Room 2135, but the building was a labyrinth of identical corridors and office doors. This was the backstage area of the British Museum that the public never saw: institutional, drab, unchanged in decades.

  Overhead, neon strip-lights buzzed faintly behind dusty plastic panels. The last of the visitors had gone. Only the night guards and a few members of staff were left, but the museum was larger than a city block, and the handful who remained were hidden somewhere behind sound-deadening walls. The building that acted as a great repository of the past had defied many attempts to make it less oppressive, and only the dim-pled glass roof of the new Great Court was truly capable of raising spirits. Elsewhere, in the narrow back channe
ls, morguelike chambers and suffocating windowless rooms, the weight of history bore down with a melancholy pressure that slowed movement and reduced all conversation to awed whispers.

  Jackie had been feeling unsettled ever since she awoke that morning. She had discovered some days ago that Joanne Kellerman had died, and although it seemed a tragedy there was nothing to be done, for they had hardly been close friends. But in today's issue of Hard News she found two more names, Naomi Curtis and Carol Wynley, dead within a day of one another. She scoured the newspapers looking for further articles, found one small piece in the Evening Standard, another in a local free sheet, but the rest of the news items were only concerned with a pretty young black girl who had died of unnatural causes in a pub Jackie had never heard of.

  She panicked. She could think of no-one else but Dr Masters to discuss the matter with, but even he had proved elusive. Suddenly, it seemed, the events of the past had returned to disturb her sleep

  The person she should have called, she realised, was Arthur Bryant. The problem was that she liked him, and enlisting his aid meant revealing the full extent of her complicity.

  The corridor seemed to lead nowhere. Its end wall was entirely blank, the skirting board merely running around it to connect to two opposing doors. A marble bust of a forgotten plunderer of antiquities stood on a discoloured marble plinth. Jackie checked the number on the slip of paper in her hand and counted down the doors. She knocked on 2135 and waited, but there was no answer. The handle turned easily, so she entered.

  The room was lined with plans chests, upon which were piled tagged sections of stone, statues patiently awaiting reassembly. Masters was seated beneath the single cone of light from his green enamel reading lamp, intently writing, his eyes so close to the page that his nose almost touched the paper.

  'Harold?' She took a step further into the darkened room. 'I'm sorry, am I disturbing you?'

  'No. I suppose I was half expecting you.' He sounded confused, as if he had just woken up to find himself in a strange place. He sat back in his chair, stretching his spine. 'You lose track of time down here. It's terrible for the posture.' He did not rise to greet her. 'How are you, Jackie?'

  'I expected to see you at the Yorkshire Grey this week.'

  'Oh, the Immortals. It completely slipped my mind. I've had a lot to worry about lately. I suppose you've heard something. It was inevitable that you would.'

  She came forward into the light, setting her handbag on the edge of the swamped desk. 'I haven't been able to concentrate on anything else all day. I don't know what to think. I tried calling Jocelyn, but I couldn't get any answer.'

  'She's also dead.' Masters seemed to lose interest, and re-turned to his writing.

  'That's absurd.'

  'Absurd or not, it's a fact,' he said impatiently. 'She died in the Old Bell tavern in Fleet Street. Rather, I should say she was killed, just like the others.'

  'In another pub...it doesn't make sense.'

  'Oh, I'm afraid it does.' Masters placed a ruler on the page and carefully drew a line in blue ink. 'That was the way he worked.'

  'But that just leaves me, Mary and Jennifer. I mean, out of the mothers.'

  'You weren't real mothers or even surrogate ones; you were little more than day nurses.'

  'We became attached to our charges. How could they have expected us not to?'

  'Well, you shouldn't have. There's no room for sentiment where science is concerned. He would have come after the rest of you as well, but the police stopped him. He's dead.'

  'My God.' Jackie drew out a chair opposite Masters and sat down heavily. 'I can't believe somebody would have done this. Was it really so important that we knew?'

  'Don't be so naive; of course it's important. You can't compromise in a situation like this.'

  'Then I don't understand why the press aren't making more of it. Surely people want the facts?'

  'Really?' He looked up at her now and slowly removed his reading glasses. 'Don't you think it's in the ministry's interests not to let it get out?'

  'We still live in a democracy, Harold, no matter how tainted it's become of late. Things like this can't—'

  'Things like this,' he cut across her, 'happen all the time in places where the powerful gather. What about Litvinenko? His dinner at the Sheraton Park Lane was poisoned with polonium-two-ten, for God's sake. A series of government murder plots involving Russian spies, death and a trail of radioactive contamination? It sounds more suited to the plot of a James Bond film, but it happened right here. Nobody cares about a relapsed psychotic putting a few alcoholic middle-aged legal secretaries to sleep. How many times have stories about re-offending "care-in-the-community" patients made the papers for a couple of days before being forgotten?'

  'How do you know so much about it?' she asked, suddenly suspicious. She had once valued Masters's friendship, had comforted him during his wife's decline and death, but his defensive attitude was starting to disturb her.

  'The MOD re-hired me on a freelance contract.'

  'I thought you said you would never go back there.'

  'They had an academic problem that I found intriguing. I said I'd help them out.'

  She glanced nervously back at the door, and he caught her looking. 'Why would you do that?' she asked. 'What happened to you?'

  'You may ask, what is the purpose of an academic? What are we for? I thought it was to make discoveries, to render visible the lines that bind civilisations. Then one day I made a discovery that called into question everything for which I thought I stood. It's not just the slow accumulation of empirical data, you know; we are granted epiphanies occasionally. We may even pronounce them to the world, but like the Oracle, we are doomed never to be believed.'

  'What did you do for the Ministry of Defence?' she persisted.

  'There's such a thing as accountability, Jackie. The research teams there couldn't be seen to—they needed a solution to a thorny ethical problem. You must understand. I didn't know any of them except you, of course.' He pushed his writing pad back with careful deliberation.

  She spoke in shocked gravity. 'What did you do?'

  'Society must abide by the rules it creates, otherwise we descend into moral anarchy.' He spoke with the clarity of a man who had something to hide. 'You know how the law works in cases like this. You were sworn to secrecy, and now you're in breach of your contracts. The documents you signed—you all signed—are still legally binding. And you were paid well. Do you want to betray your country?'

  'It was blood money, and you know it!'

  Masters sighed. 'This is all water under the bridge.

  Everything has been cleared up now. There's no reason why any of it should ever get out.'

  'It will get out, Harold. Mary and Jennifer are still here. I'm still here, 'Jackie persisted. 'I'm still alive.'

  'No, I'm afraid you're not,' said Masters, wearily rising from behind his desk.

  43

  BENEATH THE ANTIQUITIES

  T

  he British Museum was the oldest public museum on the planet.

  It had been built to house the purchases and gifts collected from around the world by Sir Hans Sloane in 1753, items of such antiquity that appreciating the convoluted circumstances of their history had become a challenge in itself. Almost every exhibit told an extraordinary story, from the graceful Portland Vase, produced before the birth of Christ only to be smashed into two hundred pieces by a drunken sailor in 1845 and then painstakingly reassembled, to the Lindow Man, a two-thousand-year-old peasant preserved in the acids of a Cheshire peat bog.

  It was not a particularly friendly or accessible museum. Artefacts withheld their secrets, and the weight of lost empires hung heavily about the remains. A mere stroll through chambers of glass cabinets taught little, and left no impression; the museum worked best when no more than half a dozen objects were examined at one time.

  Janice Longbright and Jack Renfield had managed to get themselves admitted, but the girl who had open
ed the side door thought Masters had gone for the night, and went off to look for him in the direction of the Egyptian Hall.

  'I'm not going to wait for her,' said Renfield. 'She could be up to something dodgy. He'll be out of the toilet window before we can grab hold of him.'

  'He's a senior curator and lecturer at one of the world's most prestigious institutions,' said Longbright, studying the Grecian statues at the top of the stairs. 'He doesn't leap out of lavatory windows. You have a suspicious mind.'

  'I'm a bloody copper. Come on, let's have a shufti. You're go-ing to have trouble keeping up with me in those shoes. I can't believe they let you get away with breach of uniform regulations like that.'

  'I've always worn heels on duty; it's my look. Mr Bryant says he believes in the foolishness of consistency.' Longbright reluctantly followed her opposite number up the south staircase. Dominating the entire landing was a white marble discus thrower, devoid of its correct setting, out of place and time.

  'You don't have to get all toffee-nosed about it, Janice. I know where you come from—you're South London working-class just like me. Either you want to catch a lawbreaker, in which case you do everything within your power to do so, or you're happy to let him get away.'

  'We don't usually do a lot of running about,' she said lamely. Renfield made her realise how sheltered she had been at the PCU. There had been one hundred and eighty murders in the capital over the last year. Two and a half thousand reported rapes. Nearly two hundred thousand instances of violence against the person. And nearly one million men and women in the Met. Perhaps now she would have to go back into the force and deal with the crimes they faced every day of their working lives.