The Victoria Vanishes

by Christopher Fowler

  'That's right,' Bryant agreed. All Pellew had to do was specify where and when he was prepared to commit the acts he had fantasised about for so long.'

  'And he wanted to perform his little psychodramas in pubs,' said Kershaw.

  'Of course; they were the only places in which he would operate. It was why he had kidnapped his girlfriend in the past, what had led to his original conviction. Masters would have known that.'

  'Stranger things have happened,' said May. 'It could have been the perfect cover-up. With the deaths traceable only as far as a reoffending mental patient, there could be no sign of Theseus's involvement. The entire matter would have been sealed, and the plan couldn't be traced back. But no-one considered the idea that their killer might want to be caught. He started leaving behind clues.'

  'Funny how you only ever really find out what people are capable of when their plans go wrong,' said Longbright, thinking about the increasingly panicked Masters.

  'I hate to say I told you so.' Bryant gleamed.'Pellew knew he was being manipulated and hated it, so he set out to be caught. I can't imagine the mental turmoil he must have been going through. No wonder he ended up running into the traffic be-fore he could be brought to justice. But his death left others who could still go public.'

  'Masters had already gone to extraordinary lengths to comply with whatever Pellew said he needed to carry out Theseus's cover-up,' said April, 'and because he insisted on catching Carol Wynley on her way home, they were forced to fake up the front of a public house to lure her in—'

  'I told you I hadn't imagined it,' Bryant interrupted. 'You all thought I was going barmy. Once Pellew had started, he couldn't be stopped without giving the game away. By this time, Theseus must have been so desperate for the rest of Masters's plan to work that they were prepared to hire a designer and a couple of scenery-shifters to knock up a simple trompe l'oeil, a false pub front that would lead into the dressed and emptied shop. They bribed the owner to close down for the evening, then put everything back in place afterwards. But they messed up. They used a couple of conflicting photographic references for the building, and constructed a pub that could not possibly exist. The Victoria had been built in 1845 but the cross wasn't awarded until 1857. They compounded the error by including the clock just as it had appeared in my photograph. Wonderful news to Pellew, of course, who continued to sabotage their plans by leaving us clues in the pubs he picked. "Doctor," "seven belles," "conspiracy," things that weren't as they seemed, even his own name. It was Pellew who left the photograph in the Exmouth Arms for us to find. Unfortunately, in keeping with the strange workings of his mind, these pointers proved so obscure that—'

  '—that no-one but you could have found him, Arthur,' said May, sipping his bitter.

  'I must admit, I do find myself intrigued by the strange pairing of Pellew and Masters. Pellew's profile pegged him as an egotist unable to empathise with others. True to type, he appears to have been selfish, withdrawn, incapable of normal social interaction. How surprised must he have been by his sudden release? He was aware of the appalling nature of his actions—why else would he try to guarantee his own capture? But Masters's behaviour, supposedly acting for the greater good, must have puzzled him. And Pellew was on a roll. Part of him was addicted to the thrill of the hunt, part of him was abominably ashamed. Still, the aberrant behaviour patterns that had been re-awoken in him were enough to drive him to attack a woman who wasn't on the list, purely out of desire.'

  'Jazmina Sherwin, the girl who was assaulted in the Albion, Barnsbury,' said Bimsley, grasping the bigger picture.

  'So, what happens now?' asked Longbright.

  'We have to go after Theseus,' said Bryant, without pausing to think.

  'We've got no status, no office, no dosh,' said Meera disconsolately. And we're working out of a pub.'

  'Besides, Theseus is a government outsource,' May re-minded him. 'How far do you honestly think you'll get?'

  'When a democratic government is no longer accountable for its actions, it becomes a dictatorship. Besides, who says they even know what's been going on? The Ministry of Defence is a law unto itself. I wouldn't be surprised if they've hung Theseus out to dry.'

  Behind them, the door banged open and Raymond Land burst in wearing a plastic mackintosh, spraying water around like a retriever emerging from a pond. Ah, here you all are. I've been looking for you everywhere.' He shook his umbrella violently, searching for somewhere to leave it.

  'Get you a drink?' asked Renfield.

  'No, no, can't stop unfortunately, the wife will give me hell. Purely a business call.' He turned to his detectives and saw the paperwork spread on the table. 'Should you be examining evidence in a pub?'

  'They're only copies,' April explained. 'Obviously the originals are safely stowed away.'

  'Quite. Understood. You should know that Leslie Faraday has promised to try and find you new accommodation as soon as possible. This won't be forever, you know. You can't operate out of a pub.'

  'Come off it, Raymondo,' said Bryant. 'You know as well as I do that they've finally got us where they want us. What's the likelihood of them rehousing the unit somewhere else?'

  'I do see your point, but I'm not here to discuss that. It's rather more serious, I'm afraid.' He drew a fortifying breath. 'To me has fallen the unpleasant task of placing you and Mr May under arrest.'

  'What on earth for?' asked May, startled.

  'Breach of the Official Secrets Act, I'm afraid.'

  'But we don't operate under its jurisdiction.'

  'Since the Peculiar Crimes Unit is answerable to the Home Office, you are government employees. You have knowingly disseminated information from protected Ministry of Defence sources.'

  'I forwarded Jocelyn Roquesby's computer files to the office terminal,' April admitted. 'It never occurred to me that it was already in someone else's hands—'

  'So you'll both have to come with me to West End Central and face charges.' Land's determination faded into sheepishness.

  'We'd love to help you, vieux haricot, but I'm afraid it's quite impossible,' said Bryant with a smirk. 'You see, you're in Ye Olde Mitre tavern.'

  'What has that got to do with anything?' asked Land.

  'Well, due to a mix-up with certain clauses in the Land Registry Act several centuries ago, Ye Olde Mitre is not, technically speaking, part of London, but in ancient Cambridgeshire. The City of London police have no jurisdiction in here.'

  'You're having a laugh, aren't you?' Land turned to the barman, dumbfounded. 'He's having a laugh, isn't he? Is this true?'

  'I'm afraid so, mate,' said the barman. 'No-one can be ar-rested within the pub or in the immediate environs of Ely Court. This isn't London, it's Cambridge. Don't look at me, I'm Australian. You lot are the ones with the bloody silly laws.'

  Bryant coaxed his distraught boss to a stool and helped him from his mackintosh. And as we're not going to be leaving here until well after the last bell has sounded,' he said, 'you might as well get another round in for all of us.'

  46

  Guerrilla Tactics

  We unwittingly opposed a government project,' whispered May, waiting while the nurse finished attending to Mrs Quinten. 'What did you expect to happen?'

  'I expected a desire to trace culpability,' snapped his partner, looking around at the sleeping hospital ward.

  After a boozy night with his emphatic detectives, Land had agreed to try and have the charges against them temporarily suspended on cognisance of their exemplary records, and their willingness to abide by instructions issued from HO Internal Security. It was nothing more than they expected and demanded, but while they were cooling their heels at home for the remainder of the night, scouring Internet reports for any news of the case, they discovered that the managing director of Theseus Research had already been assigned to another post, this time in Atlanta, Georgia.

  'There are others who know, you may be assured of that,' said Bryant, burying himself inside his tweed coat. 'Conta
inment on this scale never works. I've no doubt both the birth mothers and the remaining fosterers would have their credibility destroyed should any choose to come forward, but there are others who must have seen what they saw.'

  'Inadmissible hearsay, not empirical data. How thoroughly has all the proof been destroyed? Our one hope now is that Jackie—ah, Mrs Quinten.' May sat forward in his chair and studied her sleepy eyes. 'Not in too much pain, I hope?'

  'Some bruising, a few scratches, nothing a child couldn't handle,' the nurse told them. 'But she'll have a very sore throat for a while. You two shouldn't be here, you know. The other patients aren't awake yet.' She adjusted the curtains around them and left.

  'I've been wondering about Harold Masters,' said Jackie Quinten softly. 'I thought I understood him. I can't imagine why any man would have done what he did. He wasn't interested in making money.'

  'It was less about money than pride,' said Bryant.'The museum had reduced his workload and was in the process of let-ting him go. He'd worked for the MOD before, and knew how far Theseus would go to cover up a mistake, because at the end of the day that's all it was. Remember those British volunteers who participated in the anti-inflammatory drugs trial conducted by the German pharmaceutical company TeGenero AG? Their heads swelled up and they nearly died. The drug was designed to treat rheumatoid arthritis, leukaemia and multiple sclerosis. The Theseus drug trial was conducted for an even more altruistic reason: to prevent innocents from dying on the streets of London.'

  'They showed us the paperwork,' said Jackie Quinten. All of the babies had been signed over to the state by their mothers. One was an orphan whose parents had died travelling to Britain from Ethiopia. Another was abandoned in a McDonald's bag by heroin addicts. Everyone I spoke to at Theseus was committed to helping the children. They told us it would just be one safe short-term drug trial. I saw them every day. Harold Masters saw me with the little Ethiopian boy and said, "You could always adopt him when he leaves here." But I couldn't, you see. I'd been turned down before, after some trouble with my stepson. And Jocelyn had faced problems with alcoholism. None of us thought we could truly adopt, not for a minute, but we grabbed at the opportunity to look after the babies during the day, and were paid a little extra.

  'It was Carol's baby that got sick first. He started crying and couldn't stop, until he could barely draw breath. It all happened so quickly, on the third and fourth days of the test. One after the other they went blue—cyanosis, the doctor said— and their little hearts just stopped. They held a single funeral on the Friday, just hours after the last autopsy. A terrible afternoon. It didn't stop raining, and the graves couldn't be filled in because of flooding. We were never told what had gone wrong. We were paid our bonuses, reminded of our loyalties to the company, and that was that.

  'But I couldn't stop thinking about my little boy. I had to talk to someone, and so I called Jocelyn. One time we persuaded Carol and Joanne to join us, and shortly after that we began holding regular meetings in different pubs.'

  'It got back to Theseus that you had re-formed your group of friends,' said May. 'It looks like Masters sold you out for a contract to fix the security leak.'

  'But we wouldn't have gone to the press,' said Jackie miser-ably. 'We just needed the comfort of conversation, some assurance that we weren't responsible for what had happened. What I don't understand is, how could they take such drastic action against us?'

  'Well, I'm afraid even we can't tell you that,' said Bryant, rising to leave. 'I'll call on you again.'

  'I'll be going home in a while,' said Jackie. 'If you like, I can cook you a meal and help you answer any other questions you might have.'

  'Thank you, no.' Bryant smiled sadly. 'Our work is not quite finished.'

  'She doesn't understand how anyone can conceive of killing witnesses to what amounted to a humanitarian defence project,' said May as they left University College Hospital, 'because she doesn't know who commissioned it. Masters said it went all the way to the top. I can guess whose signature was on the order to test the anti-toxin. Did you know Theseus is an Anglo-American operation? There's a chap called Senator Nathan Maddock who fits the bill very nicely. A hard-line right-winger with the ear of both the President and the Prime Minister, the man who tells British Defence what to do. But I don't think even he would have agreed to act without Masters's assurance that the remedy was completely untraceable.'

  'What level of panic would induce a company used to handling state defence contracts to hire the services of a mental patient?' Bryant wondered as they walked through falling rain toward May's car. 'Didn't they stop to consider how many things could go wrong in that scenario?'

  'You can look at it this way,' said May. 'Theseus survives.'

  'Only because we'll never be allowed to go public with the story. We don't even have a unit anymore.'

  'And we can't go public, Arthur, because nobody there will ever acknowledge what happened, even if any one person had possession of all the facts.'

  'They know, John. And we could let them know that we know. We could get in there.'

  'No, no, no.' May shook his head in vehemence. 'We have nothing left, Arthur. As of this minute, we have no official status. What are you going to do, kick the door down and blast everyone with a shotgun?'

  'You just said we have no official status. We're off the radar.' Bryant was forced to shout in order to compete with the traffic on Euston Road. 'This may require guerrilla tactics.'

  'Don't you think you're a little too old to be thinking about bringing down the government?' asked May.

  'I've been thinking about it all my life,' said Bryant with a twinkle in his eye. 'Might as well go out with a bang.'

  47

  PANDORA'S BOX

  Arthur Bryant passed two six-foot butterflies and a red rubber nurse tottering on platform heels before he started to wonder if he really was hallucinating this time.

  On Sunday morning at eight o'clock, the only people on the streets of King's Cross were backpackers leaving their hostels and thematically dressed denizens of a large nightclub, all of whom looked very much the worse for wear.

  The courtyard door leading to the refurbished office complex behind York Way had been left discreetly ajar by the overqualified Polish cleaners who nightly restored workspaces to their functional glory. Slipping inside, Bryant crossed the new cobblestones and once more found himself before the gates of Theseus Research.

  What an arrogant name, he thought, peering through the bars at the brushed-steel logo adorning the sea of darkened glass before him. Theseus was both mortal and divine. His father, Poseidon, was the god of the ocean. Appropriate, considering that Dr Peter Jukes had been washed up on shore, a victim of its turbulent currents.

  Bryant had studied the tidal charts and suspected that, as much as he wanted to blame Theseus, suicide could not be ruled out. He supposed no-one would ever get to the absolute truth surrounding Jukes's death. Such is the path of vigilance, he thought. Each single mystery precipitates a dozen more. Then again, Theseus was thrown off a cliff after losing his popularity, so perhaps the company directors might find it best not to behave too much like gods.

  Mandume, the Namibian guard, was in his usual place. Providing twenty-four-hour security for Theseus Research required three men, but Bryant had calculated the shifts correctly. His obvious respect for the security officer and his performance of general doddery politeness stood him in good stead. Mandume saw him and smiled, happy to approach. He even opened the gate slightly to chat.

  'Hi there. Any luck with your walking club?'

  'We've decided to reroute our tour through another part of town, but thank you for asking. I missed you yesterday, when I came to visit my grandson.'

  'My day off,' the guard told him. 'I went to visit my little boy. He lives with his mother.'

  'It's difficult to know where to take the kids sometimes, isn't it?' said Bryant, as if he had any clue at all about children and divorced parents.

  'He li
kes dinosaurs, so we went to the Natural History Museum. You know that place?'

  'Certainly, I've been there many times. I daresay they shall put me there when I retire. A joke.' The guard had looked blank, but now smiled. 'Why don't you bring your boy here to see where his father works? I'm sure he'd be interested.'

  Mandume's smile vanished.'No, no, not here.'

  He's heard something, thought Bryant. Secrets have a way of escaping. 'When I came here yesterday I stupidly forgot to leave my grandson's christening gift. His wife gave birth to a baby boy. I wonder, could I go and leave it on his desk? It would only take a moment.'

  'Where is your grandson today? Could you not give it to him yourself?'

  'No, he has to visit his wife in hospital, and they're not al-lowed to use cell phones inside, so I can't call him.' The lies, he thought, they trip from the tongue so easily I'm almost ashamed of myself.

  'Or if I can't leave it on his desk, perhaps you could. I'd be very grateful. No child's birth should go uncelebrated in the eyes of Our Lord, don't you agree?' For a fleeting moment, Bryant wondered if he was overdoing it.

  Mandume looked so uncomfortable that Bryant felt bad about pushing him. 'I could leave it behind reception, in the janitor's room '

  'But he may not get it then. He goes straight up to his desk from the car park. You know how things can go missing in a building this size.' Time to show that you've got more front than Selfridge's, thought Bryant. 'Look, I know you're not allowed to go to the laboratories. They are underground, aren't they, and require security passes. But I'm also a government employee, and I'll be happy to sign responsibility for the package myself.' He gave Mandume a fleeting glimpse of his police pass. 'You see, I'm actually a policeman. So surely you could go up to the second-floor reception desk and leave it there.'

  The guard glanced back at the building nervously. Bryant knew it was bristling with cameras. 'Sure, I am allowed up there. I can go wherever I want.'