The Victoria Vanishes

by Christopher Fowler

  'Do you know what this bloke looks like, Janice?'

  'I'd recognise him, but you're going the wrong way. He'll be in the basement at the back of the building, where the researchers' offices are.' She hunted about for the correct avenue. 'Down here.'

  'This isn't the way my old squad would have gone about it,' grumbled Renfield. 'If she's with Masters, do we take them both in for questioning? As far as I know, they haven't broken any law.'

  'We talk to them honestly, Renfield; that's what the PCU does best. It's not always about following rules.'

  'Yeah, I figured that much out. This geezer's not dangerous, is he?' Renfield tried the door opposite, but it was locked. 'She's not at risk? Not that I'm bothered. If we find 'em and he cuts up rough we'll be all right, 'cause you're big, I'm stocky and he's just a bookworm. Now which way?'

  'Left here.' Hopping to pull her shoe strap back in place, she led them along a harshly lit passage painted in searing stripes of cadmium yellow.

  'How do you know where to go?'

  'Mr Bryant has a lot of friends who use these offices. Restorers, engravers, historians.' She tried a heavy oak door as they passed, but it failed to open. 'He sounded worried, and when he gets like that I know there's something going on in his head that he hasn't told us about. I think Masters should be in one of the chambers along here.'

  'You all seem to have so much respect for him, but he doesn't do a lot, does he, your Mr Bryant?'

  'People either get him or they don't; he's old school. He does things quietly, in his own way. Doesn't like to waste words or expend unnecessary energy. He believes in unfashionable concepts—grace, calm, gentility, tolerance, understatement.'

  'Then he's out of step with the world, and he'll get trodden on.'

  'I thought you were going to try to understand.' 'I'm still biting my tongue sometimes, okay? What are you doing?'

  'I'm calling him.' She pressed an ear hard against her cell phone. 'The reception's terrible down here. Can you hear me? Yes, we're there now, Masters is supposed to be somewhere nearby. What? We'll try it, but you need to get here as soon as you can.'

  'What did he say?' asked Renfield as Longbright closed her cell phone.

  'He says we're to try rooms twenty-one hundred to twenty-one forty.' Longbright pointed to the corridor ahead. And he thinks Jackie Quinten's life is in the balance.'

  44

  ACCOUNTABILITY

  W

  ait, we have to go back,' said Longbright. All the passages had begun to look the same. 'We're too far over.'

  'Do you know where he is, or don't you?' Renfield looked around. The buzzing overhead panels bathed the halls in sea-green light.

  'The corridors are supposed to be painted differently in this section.' She turned about. 'We've gone wrong somewhere.'

  'We need to go back to the big marble stairwell, where the bloke with the Frisbee was. You can work it out again from there.'

  Renfield broke into a run, forcing her to keep up. They reached a narrow staff staircase and he took the steps three at a time, as if he had finally come to terms with the idea that Bryant was not playing the fool, and that a murder could only be halted by their intervention. She followed closely behind, almost slamming into him as he stopped dead and listened.

  They both heard the voice, too loud for normal speech in a museum. Renfield continued back along the passageway, putting on an extra spurt of speed when he spotted something she had yet to see.

  He knows something bad is about to happen, she thought. She had seen this instinctive talent, born of experience and an al-most supernatural prescience, in just a handful of policemen. It was the last thing she expected to encounter in a man like Renfield. He's one of us, she realised, surprised to recognise her own ability.

  Jackie Quinten made a run for it but wasn't as young as she thought, and her ankle twisted beneath her weight on the slippery tiled floor. She fell hard.

  Masters didn't come after her. If anything, he seemed mortified at having to sort out the mess he now found himself in. He was fumbling about in his desk drawer, looking for some-thing.

  'Please,' he called after her. 'I just came up with the solution, it was a theoretical conundrum, that's all. I didn't want to be involved. I'm not cut out for this sort of thing. My career here is over, did I tell you? The museum is letting me go. Some new people have come in, and they don't approve of my lecture style. I'm too partisan. It seems you can't have opinions in public these days; it's not sensitive enough. I don't get the audience figures they want. I have to do other things now in order to survive. But this is too much to expect of anyone, let alone me.' He found the object of his search and removed it from the drawer, a long red and green tartan scarf. 'I've been looking for this everywhere. Please, you mustn't be frightened. It'll do neither of us any good.'

  He watched as she climbed to her feet and hobbled to the door, then came around the desk to her, holding up the scarf.

  'I'm afraid I don't have anything else I can use,' he apologised, wrapping the scarf around her exposed throat and pulling it tight. 'I promise you, I've never done anything like this before. I don't want to do it now, but there's no other way out of the situation. Of course I admit it's my fault. I didn't think the police would close in on Anthony so quickly, and I certainly never imagined he would start leaving them clues. Now I have to clear up the mess he's created or they'll deal with me, too. You do understand, don't you?'

  With the fiery noose of the scarf across her throat, Jackie could only stare helplessly up at her captor. His height gave him an immense advantage; he was able to keep her off balance as he dragged her back into the corridor toward the stair-case.

  'When you're young, you imagine rising to the top of your profession, but of course you never can.' He was almost talking to himself now, paltering in a plea to be understood. 'There's always someone above you, someone behind you, someone to watch out for, someone to answer to. Do you know how far up this chain goes? Further than you'd ever dream. There's no-one who can help me, no sympathy for what I've done, and why should there be? We live in a society that can only function by finding someone to blame, and they will rightly blame me. My solution to their problem was brilliant in its simplicity, but of course things never stay simple. I found them a madman, and now that he has failed I am being forced to finish his work.'

  The more she struggled, the tighter the noose grew. He yanked on the scarf, as one would pull on a dog's chain to rein it in. She fought to stay upright, knowing that if she fell she would be strangled to death.

  'It's a matter of accountability. Contract out the work and it seems almost inevitable that the person you've entrusted it to will let you down. In the old days it was "Never mind, old chap, you did your best." Now it's "Fix it yourself or be prepared to take the blame for everything." Are you familiar with George Orwell? You remember in 1984, how Winston Smith tells Julia "We are the dead"? That's how I feel now.'

  He yanked hard on the scarf, causing her to gasp in pain. Her heels left ragged black lines along the cream linoleum floor.

  'Once I was a brilliant academic with a soaring future ahead of me. When you agree to do something you know to be wrong, you tell yourself it will just happen once. Then you find yourself doing it just to remain afloat. Finally you become just like them—one of the dead, a walking cadaver obeying orders in order to stay alive.'

  He hauled her to the edge of the balustrade and kicked her legs out from under her, easily holding her squirming body against the stonework. Jackie felt her centre of gravity shifting as he pulled her over the edge. They were only two floors up, but he was tipping her upside down to cause the maximum impact. She felt her stomach flop, as though she was boarding a funfair ride.

  Her greying auburn hair fell over her face, obscuring her sight. His hand slipped between her thighs, sliding over her tights, so that he was holding her almost vertically. She knew that the fall would kill her. She could only fear that it would not be instant.

  The
y were above Masters, Longbright saw that now. They had passed along the passage at the very top of the building, aligned with the roof of the Great Court, to emerge in the service area at the top of the stairwell. The academic was diagonally below them, trying to unhook Mrs Quinten's legs from the balustrade, but now her right hand had gained purchase on the rail, so he was pummelling at her back and stomach in a desperate attempt to make her release her grip.

  The impossibility of the situation was enough to paralyse Longbright. If they made their presence known to Masters he would either release Mrs Quinten, allowing her to fall under her own weight, or attack her with greater violence.

  She was still trying to reach a decision when Renfield threw his broad frame straight down the stairs in a foolhardy but spectacular airborne rugby tackle that slammed Masters to the steps so hard that it cracked his ribs and punched the air from his lungs.

  Renfield climbed to his feet, unfazed, and reached over the balcony just as Mrs Quinten's grip failed, dragging her back across the balustrade like a sack of flour. He fell onto the stairs beside Masters, with Mrs Quinten lying on top of him. It was undignified, but seemed to have done the trick.

  'You make one sudden move, sunshine,' he told the inert doctor, 'and I'll tear your bleeding head off.' But with the scarf loosened from her throat, Mrs Quinten suddenly started to scream and thrash about in shock, and in the brief moments it took Renfield to quell the tangle of limbs, Masters had risen and run into the gallery straight ahead of them.

  Renfield abandoned his charge and was following now, but Longbright had the lead. She closed in behind Masters as he blundered past the Cetole, the only surviving English musical instrument of the Middle Ages, resplendent in its glass case.

  He was limping, clutching at his cracked rib cage, and she caught up with him in the clock room, by Congreve's rolling-ball timepiece of 1810. He flung out his right arm with such suddenness that she was taken by surprise. The blow to her face knocked her head back, sending her to the floor, but she was up on her feet even before Renfield appeared in the door-way.

  'No, Jack,' she told the sergeant. 'He's mine.'

  Masters was more shocked than anyone when Longbright slammed into him, pressing down on the fractured ribs in his chest. Masters yelped painfully and fell back, hitting the case behind with his full weight. Inside, the bulbous black-and-white vase tilted onto its rim.

  Longbright stepped back in horror. 'Oh no,' she said quietly. 'The Portland Vase. Not again.' The priceless antiquity had survived two millennia only to be shattered once before. In one of the greatest restoration feats ever attempted in modern times, it had been made whole once more. She watched the vase in horror as it rolled around on the edge of its base, teetering on its plinth.

  The vase had passed its point of equilibrium, and tipped over.

  The glass case was not wide enough to allow it to properly fall, and the vase was held at a forty-five-degree angle, settling safely as the wounded academic slid down to the floor and began to cry for his own shattered life.

  45

  THE METHOD

  It's all in here,' said April, tapping the rescued folders. And it's all about babies. Or rather, mothers and babies.' Ye Olde Mitre tavern in Ely Court, Hatton Garden, was a godsend to the nine drenched, exhausted men and women who found themselves together on a miserably wet Saturday night. The members of the PCU had nowhere else to go. Alma Sorrowbridge had banned them from Bryant's house because Colin Bimsley had tracked something nasty onto the carpet before knocking over a jug less unique, but with more sentimental value, than the Portland Vase.

  April, Meera and Colin might have uncovered the documentation needed to resolve the investigation, but Renfield was nonplussed to find himself the hero of the hour. Uncomfortable with the attention, he spent most of his time at the bar, returning with fresh drinks whenever he spotted an empty glass on the table. He had already bought Longbright three pints of Guinness. He liked a woman who could drink pints.

  'We're still piecing together a timeline of events,' April warned, spreading the printouts and typed pages across the beer-stained table. The detective constables had elected her to translate their elements into something resembling a narrative. As far as we can tell, it begins with Dr Peter Jukes, chief scientist for chemical and biological defence at the MOD's Porton Down laboratory.'

  'Jukes?' repeated Kershaw. 'What has he got to do with all this?'

  'If you recall, Giles, we knew he was a colleague of Jocelyn Roquesby, and that he had drowned while he was still employed as a consultant for the Ministry of Defence. It made sense that she met Jukes at work. She might even have had an affair with him. He was single, and looks pretty fit in his photographs.'

  'But she wasn't at MOD—'

  'No, like the others, Mrs Roquesby worked for Theseus Research in King's Cross, one of the companies to whom the ministry outsourced contracts. The women were legal secretaries, nothing more than that. Jackie Quinten was formerly employed there. She'd retired, but had agreed to be pressed back into service on a part-time basis. Her security rating was still intact, after all, but what brought her back? Well, they were seven middle-aged women who all appeared to share something in common. None of them were able to have children of their own.'

  'Wait,' said Banbury, 'doesn't Mrs Roquesby have a daughter?'

  'Eleanor Roquesby is adopted,' April corrected. 'And Jackie Quinten's child is her stepson,' Bryant pointed out.

  'One of the MOD's chief remits was—and no doubt still is—to prevent a chemical terrorist attack from occurring in London and the other major cities of Great Britain,'April continued. 'You remember the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult in Japan? In 1995, they attempted to hasten the apocalypse by carrying out five sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo Metro, killing twelve and injuring a thousand. It would appear from Mrs Quinten's unburned notes that Theseus had indeed developed a new vaccine. It had been tried on animals with a high level of success, but they needed to test it on humans, and in the light of increasing terrorist warnings that culminated in the 7/7 attacks, they had to act quickly.

  'So, in the course of their experiments, Jukes discreetly asked around for volunteers to take part in an experiment. He needed to carry out an unethical expediency. His brief was to administer a preventative vaccine to live subjects, humans less than eighteen months old. None of the infants is identified in Mrs Quinten's notes, but it seems at least two had been abandoned in Eastern European orphanages. To Joanne Kellerman and the others, it lessened the moral burden if they were assured that the babies had been given up for adoption in the direst of circumstances. It also seems clear the women were told that their charges faced absolutely no risk of infection. They agreed to foster them, taking care of the infants during their working hours at Theseus, helping to monitor their well-being throughout the day. The babies were to be allowed medication for ten weeks, but at the end of this period they unexpectedly became sick, and one by one they died. All this we have from Mrs Quinten's notes.'

  'What went wrong?' asked Kershaw.

  'Jukes's drug proved to have unforeseen side effects. Perhaps the infants would have lived had they been older or healthier—but who would allow their children to undergo such testing, even given assurances that no possible harm could come to them? So the mortified women were paid off and sworn to secrecy. They left their jobs with good severance money—we have Mrs Quinten's old pay slips—and were reminded of their allegiance to the Official Secrets Act.

  'What nobody counted on was the fact that Joanne Kellerman and the others felt increasingly uncomfortable with their own consciences, and were eventually unable to process the guilt surrounding their unwitting complicity. They agreed to meet up in a pub. Perhaps just two of them met at first, but the meetings clearly grew to involve five out of the seven women. They liked a drink and they were on safe neutral ground, away from loved ones. Their security was not seen to be compromised. They could talk freely without being watched. London is full of secrets, and they wer
e dealing with theirs in the best way they knew how, by quietly and privately discussing it.'

  'But secrets have a way of escaping.'

  'Exactly. It was Jackie Quinten who remembered her colleague Masters, and went to him for advice. He didn't know the others and probably only knew Mrs Quinten slightly, but she trusted him.'

  'No doubt she appealed to him as a humanitarian,' said Bryant. 'But he betrayed her. He told Theseus about the possible information leak. They, in return, hired him to come up with a foolproof way of containing the damage. Imagine the scandal if the matter got out to the press. It was an appealingly bizarre conjectural problem. And his solution was suitably peculiar to it.'

  'That's right,' said April. 'Masters was intrigued by the proposition. He decided that in order to commit the perfect crime an agent was needed, a fall guy. So he contacted various clinics and hospitals to ask them about the psychological profiles of their patients.'

  'And he found someone made for the job,' Bryant explained.

  'A man who would harm if carefully directed and provided with the correct means. It was Masters who placed the request to have Pellew released, with the weight of the MOD behind him. And armed with Pellew's confidential patient records, it was Masters who gave him the syringes. Under those circumstances, how hard was it to get Pellew to fall back into his old habits, do you think? I mean, by pushing the right psychological buttons and supplying the method?'

  'So Theseus got the poor, deranged Pellew released through Masters, who offered him easy victims?' asked Longbright.