Disturbia

by Christopher Fowler

  Sebastian tipped back his chair and rooted around in his jacket for the Cuban cigar he had been saving. In a little over an hour the power of Prometheus would be fully restored. A gesture would have been made, and its effects felt. In time, there would be other gestures, just as successful as this. He exhaled a plume of blue smoke and permitted himself a small grim smile of satisfaction.

  —

  ‘I’ve got the ninth envelope,’ said Vince, ‘it was Sellotaped behind a pillar at the other end of the church, the real front. Can you hear me? I’m having to shout because the rain’s coming down so hard.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘Hang on a minute.’ He had trouble tearing open the plastic bag inside which the envelope had been sealed, and then managed to rip the foolscap sheet in his haste.

  ‘Oh, great.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Listen to this little lot. You’re going to need a pencil.’ He looked back at the page.

  The Challenge of Decimus Burton

  To keep this baby free from hurt,

  He’s dressed in a cap and Guernsey shirt;

  They’ve got him a nurse and he sits on her knee,

  And she calls him her Tommy

  Bevy

  Descent

  Muster

  Murder

  Obstinacy

  Pod

  Serge

  Smack

  He waited while Masters relayed the list to the others.

  ‘The poem feels like it’s a word short in the last line.’ Maggie rechecked the words she had copied into her notebook. ‘It doesn’t scan properly.’

  ‘For God’s sake, that’s hardly important, is it?’ complained Purbrick.

  ‘Perhaps you’re meant to supply the missing word,’ she replied indignantly. ‘Perhaps that’s the whole point.’

  ‘What does it need in order to scan? I mean, how many syllables?’

  Maggie bounced her fingers over the page. ‘Dum-dah-dah. Three.’

  ‘Chimpanzee,’ said Harold Masters, rising and going to the bookcase behind his chair. ‘Chim-Pan-Zee. Decimus Burton. I mean, I’m guessing but it seems the most likely answer.’

  ‘Forgive us, Harold,’ said Maggie, with more than a trace of sarcasm, ‘we’re not all as well-read as you. Explain please.’

  ‘Decimus Burton planned out the Zoological Society of London, as it was then known in 1826. London Zoo, as it’s now called. There’s a book here somewhere.’

  ‘Conservation in Action?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘To your left, up one shelf.’

  Masters pulled down the photographic volume and opened it at the first chapter.

  ‘Tommy the chimpanzee arrived in 1835,’ he explained. ‘A wonderful novelty in those days. Someone called Theodore Hook was moved to write a poem about him.’

  ‘Vincent’s poem?’

  ‘I can’t imagine there are any others. During the war the keepers packed off most of the animals to stop them from getting shell-shocked, but they ate the contents of the aquarium. This is interesting; someone cut a foot off Alice the elephant’s trunk one bank holiday in 1870. Why would anyone do that?’

  ‘More to the point, why would Sebastian send Vince to London Zoo?’ asked Maggie. ‘Nobody lives there. He doesn’t need to have him appear before surveillance cameras at the monkey house, surely.’

  ‘You’re forgetting one thing. The only way to get to the zoo is by passing some of the most politically sensitive homes in the whole of London, the grace and favour properties of Regent’s Park.’

  They called Vince. Within another three minutes he was on his way north, precisely on time and exactly as Sebastian had planned from the start.

  Chapter 46

  Spine

  Vince crunched two more uppers between his teeth and sat back in the cab, listening to the rain beating on the roof. He tried to force the puzzle through his tired brain. If what Masters had just told him about Sebastian and the creation of evidence from the surveillance cameras was true, what was the point of traipsing onwards to the zoo at all? His role in the game was almost finished. It only remained to be photographed in the last position and captured by the police, so that he could be blamed for whatever atrocity Sebastian had planned for his father’s convention.

  So why bother fitting in with Sebastian’s plans? Wasn’t he safer heading home right now? Except, of course, the League would have considered such an eventuality. It would not be safe to return to his flat. He had no doubt that if the police didn’t get him, Sebastian’s more violent acquaintances would be standing by to finish the job.

  The cab sloshed across the pitted tarmac at Euston Tower and ploughed on through the storm up to Camden Town. It reached the park and entered the first of the gates into Outer Circle. Here the government departments were hidden behind trompe l’oeil mock-Grecian temples, painted a glaring white and set back from the road. Bedecked with posturing statues, they reminded Vince of over-iced wedding cakes, the apotheosis of good taste to some, the ultimate in kitsch to others.

  Smearing a path through the steamed-over window with the back of his hand, he could make out the parade of security cameras mounted on grey steel poles. The curving park road bristled with them. Masters’s theory had to be wrong; how could they record him speeding past through the condensation of a cabbie’s window? Perhaps Sebastian had not allowed for the vagaries of the climate.

  No. He would have thought of everything. Technology had ways of enhancing recorded images. He thought back over the night’s challenges, trying to understand.

  It was then that he remembered that this was the ninth challenge, and the final one was to follow. He ran through each of the journeys he had made and came to the same result. The League’s letter had specifically stated that the challenge started at Victoria, which made the Savoy the first.

  All of which meant that Vince was being sent north on a wild goose chase. He tried to remember how Sebastian’s mind worked. He checked his watch: 6:13 a.m. He felt sure now that this was a ploy to keep him out of the way until the appointed hour, so that he would arrive in the final destination at exactly the right time. Sebastian would want him placed at the scene of the crime, just to make sure. It was the most incriminating piece of evidence he could manufacture, short of putting a smoking gun in his hand. And it was a way of maintaining the balance of the game, to fairly provide each member of the League with a chance to test him.

  Ten members, ten challenges.

  One envelope still to find.

  But where was he supposed to start looking? Inside the monkey house of London Zoo?

  —

  Xavier Stevens stood in the rain outside Sebastian’s Chelsea headquarters, looking up at the dimly lit first-floor windows. He was in a deepening black rage. Not only had he been forced to perform all the dirty work as usual, but Sebastian had refused to authorise additional payment for the extra risks he had taken. He actually had the nerve to complain about the way the last task was handled. Why had the bodies not been taken to the river as he had requested? Where were they, in fact? Did he even think to bring back proof that they had been disposed of? Sebastian conveniently glossed over the fact that he had given Stevens carte blanche to remove any obstacles in his path, and that this had resulted in as many as six probable deaths.

  It was obvious that the leader of the League of Prometheus resented his ability to achieve results, and that the others had only agreed to allow Stevens’s induction into the group because he was prepared to carry out the kind of actions they were too cowardly to handle themselves. That was fine; he had not expected to be liked. He was quite prepared to settle for fear and respect. But Sebastian repeatedly made him appear a fool, and was happy to humiliate him in front of others over what, for him, was a relatively trifling sum of money. He had been sent packing without full payment, and was now determined to have the final say.

  Stevens had overheard enough to understand what they were planning, and re
alised that the best way to hurt Sebastian was to upset the outcome of his scheme. He knew that the events of the night hinged on the League’s scapegoat being set in place, because Sebastian had reluctantly told him why he needed Vincent photographed alone.

  If the scapegoat was permanently removed from the game, the police would have to search out a new suspect. Stevens had an apposite suspect in mind. He checked his watch. If he was still hitting the schedule, Reynolds would be on his way to London Zoo by now. Let them find his body there with Sebastian’s name attached to it, he thought bitterly. Let’s see just how brave and powerful the League could be then.

  Stevens hoisted a black leather pack on his shoulders, climbed back on his motorcycle and headed north.

  —

  ‘They have to be something to do with animals,’ said Stanley Purbrick, pulling at a loose thread in his cardigan. ‘Although I’ve never heard of anything called a Murder or a Bevy. There are animals in Lombard Street, hanging from the signs, gold locusts and frogs and things.’

  Maggie was nearly asleep. Her face was sliding down her arm. Jane set another mug of coffee before her on the table. She took a sip and forced herself to perk up. She stared blearily at the list. ‘They’re collective nouns,’ she exclaimed, surprising even herself. ‘You know, like an “unkindness of ravens”. Where’s the thesaurus?’

  They eventually found the collective nouns catalogued not under ‘Animals’ but ‘Assembly’, an entry which in itself required a certain amount of lateral thinking to locate. In another minute or two, however, Maggie had translated the list back into the animal kingdom:

  Larks, pheasants

  Woodpeckers

  Penguins

  Crows

  Buffalo

  Seals

  Herons

  Jellyfish

  —

  They called Vince and got through just as he was alighting from the taxi a hundred yards or so from the deserted main gate of the zoo.

  ‘You’re going to have to climb over the railings and avoid the night watchmen for this one,’ said Masters. ‘I don’t think you’re meant to head for the monkey house. The chimpanzee poem was just to get you to the zoo. The list contains the pointers. Try the buffaloes. We think they’re on the far side of the gardens.’

  ‘Wait a minute, hold on here.’ Purbrick raised his palm. ‘Why send him after the buffalo? How do you know it’s not, say, the jellyfish?’

  ‘The buffalo is the only four-legged creature on the list,’ said Maggie, rolling her eyes in exaggerated impatience. ‘Have you ever seen a jellyfish with legs? Honestly, Stanley, get a grip.’

  ‘The jellyfish is the only one without a spine,’ sulked Purbrick.

  ‘Trust you to champion the one creature that has no backbone.’ She patted his hand.

  ‘The jellyfish is an oriental delicacy.’ He puffed defensively. ‘You cook it until it has a consistency you can squish through your teeth.’

  ‘That’s a tad more than I need to know,’ said Maggie. ‘Drink your tea and take a nap, dear.’

  —

  The railings were not high, but they were sharpened to an array of severe points. In addition, several cameras were visible through the undergrowth, and what appeared to be a guard post stood inside the low white-framed entrance. Vince decided that it would be best to get nearer to the buffalo enclosure from the outside of the park, rather than risk running through the centre of the gardens accompanied by the hooting of disturbed orangutans. Luckily, a series of useful maps mounted inside the railings pointed him in the right direction. At the nearest possible point to the bison and buffalo enclosure, he painfully shunted himself over the black iron fence.

  He held fond memories of visiting the animals as a child, but a return visit last year had proven a depressing experience. Many of the display cages in the almost-bankrupt zoo had been boarded up, their animals dispersed. Paint peeled from the parrot house, where dejected birds now concealed their once-radiant plumage as if ashamed of their diminished circumstances, and there had been a man selling encyclopedias in the gloomy calm of the aquarium. Indeed, the place seemed torn between a desire to present itself as an ecology centre and the need to make money. In the distance Vince could see a carnival-yellow bouncy castle and fast-food kiosks lining the once-grand central square. The schizophrenic nature of the place had been summed up by the fact that the tiger pelts and alligator handbags confiscated from smugglers and displayed beside cages as examples of callous commercialism had been forced to carry ‘Not for Sale’ tags.

  If there were any buffalo outside tonight, sleeping beneath the dripping trees, he certainly could not see them. The pathways stretching off between the enclosures were rainswept and deserted. He clambered over the low iron fence and walked through the wet straw-strewn pasture. Presumably the animals were kept in on a night like tonight, when the overhead storm might panic them. He reached the holding pens, but there were padlocks fastened on the doors.

  He folded open the mobile phone and punched out Masters’s number, confident that his voice would be concealed by the noise of the rain in the trees. ‘I can’t see anything here for me,’ he told the doctor. ‘There’s nothing in the exterior section of the enclosure, and the rest of the place is locked up tight. Are you sure I’m meant to be heading for the buffaloes?’

  ‘Well, no,’ Masters admitted. ‘But nothing else really strikes us as the odd man out.’

  ‘What about the penguins?’ he offered. ‘They’re the only creatures on the list that are unable to fulfil one of the main functions of their species.’

  ‘Oh, I see what you mean—they can’t fly, can they? But why would that single them out for attention?’

  Vince thought for a moment. He tried to recall his half-drunk conversations with Sebastian in the elegant restaurants they had frequented as friends. All those class-comparison lists they had made together: songs, schools, painters, architects, writers, pastimes—no animals had been mentioned, though he remembered Sebastian’s sharp little denigrations of his heroes (Albert Camus ‘too lefty-liberal’), and the admiration he had expressed for his own idols (Albert Speer ‘a misguided visionary’). But why would he have mentioned Decimus Burton in the clue? Why name an architect? As the answer descended upon him, he could not help but chuckle at the crafty little paradox Sebastian had presented.

  ‘Vince, are you still there?’ asked Masters, alarmed.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I think I detect the hand of the author in this challenge. It’s one of Sebastian’s own. And it’s not about the animals at all. It’s about the zoo.’ He stepped out from the eave of the barn and headed back towards the edge of the enclosure.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Sebastian and I have very different heroes. I expressed an admiration for Berthold Lubetkin, the great social architect who once said “Nothing is too good for ordinary people”. Sebastian violently disagreed with me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t see the connection.’

  ‘Lubetkin designed a masterpiece for the London Zoo. Hang on a second.’ He climbed across the fence and dropped onto the concrete walkway ahead. ‘During the last century this was one of the few private properties open to the public that truly cut across class distinctions. It was where the proletariat came to promenade. Its very name came from a popular music hall song. And in 1936, Lubetkin built a penguin pool for the zoo. Don’t you see? It’s Sebastian’s comment on his perceived failure of such high ideals. A brilliant social designer and humanitarian is now solely remembered for a building that houses flightless birds.’

  The white oval of the sunken pool, dazzling even in rain and darkness, was in sight. He rang off and sprinted along the edges of the path until he was forced out into an open concourse. The pounding rainstorm had at least driven any patrolling security guards back into their offices. Vince ran up to the edge and peered in. A handful of bedraggled penguins stood around the lip of the cobalt pool, sheltering from the downpour. Across the centre, two swee
ping white ramps curled around each other in an elegant descent to water level. On the top one stood a figure dressed in black and white motorcycle leathers, holding a pale envelope.

  He held the envelope high. ‘If you want to capture the last challenge, Mister Reynolds, you’ll have to take it from me.’

  Vince was exhausted. The thought of climbing into the penguin pool and having a fist-fight with a complete stranger was not one which appealed, but he seemed to have no choice in the matter. Setting his duffel bag against the wall, he searched for a way down. He would have to climb onto the same ramp occupied by his challenger, and it looked too fragile to support one man, let alone two.

  As he lowered himself over the wall and his boots connected with the ramp, Stevens came at him.

  Vince saw the knife in his right hand, but there was no way of avoiding it without losing his balance on the narrow walkway. The tip of the blade caught in the wet mesh of his jacket sleeve as Stevens’s body came into contact with his. He could feel the edge of the knife twisting and pushing harder into his arm. But he was above Stevens on the ramp, still standing on a dry section of the white-painted concrete, and was able to gain more leverage.

  Shoving down with all his might, he shifted his attacker back, and in doing so freed Stevens’s arm to slash at him again. This time the blade cut wide above his face, missing by several inches. Seizing the time created by the continuing momentum of the action, he brought his knee up to Stevens’s groin, only to find the move blocked by the other man’s leg. But the assault was enough to shift their balance. He could feel the ramp bouncing dangerously beneath them as they fell, rolling and sliding over each other around the sharp curve. Below, a number of penguins scattered madly into the water.

  In the brief moment that Vince lost sight of the knife it came at him again, this time from above, arcing down and sticking into his left bicep. The jacket prevented it from penetrating deeply, but the sensation snatched his breath away and sent shockwaves through the nerves in his limbs. He rolled over the edge of the ramp and fell, narrowly missing another walkway. He landed in the shallow pool on his back, and the shock of the fish-reeking icy water threw him up on his knees just as Stevens dropped from above.