Wild Chamber

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Was she always alone apart from the dog?’

  ‘She just had Beauchamp. That was its name. You know, one of those upper-class names like Cholmondeley, spelled different to the way it’s pronounced. A white West Highland terrier.’

  ‘How do you know it was spelled differently?’ said May.

  ‘What?’ Ritchie looked confused.

  ‘You must have seen the name written down.’

  ‘Oh, right. Yeah, maybe I saw the collar, or Mrs Farrier told me.’

  ‘Do you ever get homeless people in the garden?’

  ‘No, I told you, they can’t get in. There’s a whole privacy thing about places like Clement Crescent. They have a history – Mrs Farrier would be able to tell you.’

  ‘OK,’ May said finally, turning off his tablet. ‘Off you go. We’ve got your details in case we think of anything else.’

  Ritchie slowly rose, as if he couldn’t believe that was all there was to it, and shook May’s hand with awkward formality.

  ‘Don’t get too excited. You’re not off the hook yet,’ May warned. ‘We’ll have to recall you at some point.’

  ‘But I haven’t done anything wrong,’ insisted Ritchie. ‘OK, I took a photograph when she wasn’t looking. That’s not a crime, is it?’

  ‘No,’ May agreed, ‘but moments later she was dead, which puts you in the picture whether you like it or not.’

  9

  ‘ALL IT TOOK WAS A MURDERER ON THE LOOSE’

  ‘Are you sure you’re up to driving?’ May asked as he clambered into Victor, Bryant’s scabrous yellow Mini. ‘If you think you’re likely to have any more hallucinations, you would say so, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘You worry too much,’ said Bryant cheerfully. ‘My driving’s as good as it’s ever been.’

  ‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’ As May shut the door a large piece of rust dropped off its base.

  The car had a manual choke and always had to clear its throat before starting. ‘The dreams feel very real when they happen, and only occur when I’m in a sort of reflective alpha state,’ Bryant explained, smearing the windscreen with his coat sleeve. ‘My mind starts drifting and things appear to me – sights, sounds, smells, even touch. It feels so real that I have trouble discerning reality from fantasy.’

  ‘So no change there, really,’ said May.

  Bryant lurched away from the kerb and out into the traffic without bothering to look or signal. He’d come to anticipate the chorus of horns greeting his entry into the traffic stream, rather as bugles announced the arrival of Caesar.

  ‘I don’t suppose we know yet if Helen Forester had a lover or anything of that sort?’ May glanced around nervously at the looming proximity of buses.

  ‘She has an older sister,’ answered Bryant. ‘No close friends, though. Her employees reckon she was following a career plan that didn’t make much of an allowance for relationships. I got the feeling they meant that included her husband.’

  ‘That makes it trickier. You’re going the wrong way.’

  ‘No, this is the fastest way to the St Pancras Coroner’s Office,’ said Bryant confidently.

  ‘I mean you’re actually going the wrong way.’ May pointed out of the window at the steady stream of hooting vehicles coming towards them.

  ‘They’re always changing the road layout here,’ said Bryant, unconcerned. ‘It becomes two-way again after the next block.’ He stamped on the accelerator.

  ‘What are you doing?’ May yelled, sliding down in his seat.

  ‘If we get there faster we’ll have less chance of hitting anything.’ Bryant crunched the gears. He suffered from a level of anatopism usually only found in very bad eighteenth-century explorers. ‘I was thinking about what you said, to wit: Why would he attack her inside the park? I can only come up with two reasons. One, because they had an argument and he lost his rag, which would make it unpremeditated; and B, because if he attacked her outside there was a risk of someone coming along the pavement and identifying him, which makes it planned. After all, the street is public, the garden is not. What’s this fellow’s problem?’

  A lorry driver leaned out of his window, swore at the Mini and waved two fingers at it. ‘Get back on yer own side of the road, mate.’

  ‘Lack-linen dumbsquint!’ Bryant shouted. ‘Mid-eighteenth-century, sexual.’ He swung a hard right and they jolted into the Euston Road. ‘Actually, you’re right, there is a faster way than this. I tried to find it once and ended up in Birmingham. Or was it Barking? I don’t know – somewhere ghastly. But if you pick the park, you see, you rather nail your colours to the mast.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ May asked.

  ‘I mean you have to use a key to get in, and that limits the suspect gene pool. Dan tried climbing over the railings and couldn’t even get halfway up. Ruined a new pair of strides apparently.’ He pulled up on a double red line. ‘Open the glove box, there’s a chap. Any of them will do.’

  May did as he was told and extracted several parking passes including ‘Disabled’, ‘Emergency Electrical Repair’ and ‘Bulawayo Consulate Diplomatic Vehicle’.

  ‘So what are we looking for,’ asked Bryant, ‘a spurned lover, a business rival or some total stranger who committed murder on the spur of the moment and could easily do it again?’

  ‘That doesn’t narrow it down much,’ May replied.

  The detectives made their way up the meandering path through the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church. ‘It never ceases to amaze me that a place like this can still exist in central London,’ said Bryant. ‘There was a Roman encampment on this spot, you know.’

  ‘I know, you told me,’ said May. ‘Several times.’

  Bryant would not be dissuaded. ‘Their temple converted to Christian worship in the year 313. The sons of Bach and Benjamin Franklin, John Polidori, Mary Wollstonecraft, Dickens, Hardy, Byron, Shelley and Gilbert Scott, the chap who designed the red telephone boxes – all of them ended up here in this unassuming little side park. Don’t these green spaces fill you with the enrichment of manifold destinies?’

  ‘They give me chilblains.’ May looked at him in amazement. ‘You really are back to your old self, aren’t you? All perked up and raring to go, and all it took was a murderer on the loose.’

  Bryant laughed. ‘My drug of choice. Mind you, this particular vista is starting to lose its Victorian aspect now,’ he said, pointing at the curved blocks of new steel-and-glass apartments that had been built on the other side of the canal. The ‘luxury loft lifestyle studios’, or FutureSlums™ as Bryant disparagingly referred to them, provided the investment opportunities for speculators that had sent London’s property prices to celestial heights.

  Bryant stepped up to the ivy-clamped Gothic arch of the coroner’s door and leaned on the bell for a while.

  Rosa Lysandrou suddenly appeared. ‘One short ring is sufficient,’ she snapped.

  ‘God, it’s you,’ said Bryant, clutching at his raincoat. ‘For a moment I thought Mrs Danvers was back. You almost gave me a heart attack.’

  ‘Almost doesn’t count,’ replied Rosa, not budging from the threshold. The Greek housekeeper had been lavender-polishing the chapel crucifix when the doorbell rang and she hated being interrupted when she was shining Jesus.

  Bryant’s blue eyes narrowed. ‘You’re looking very pale, Rosa. Doesn’t she look pale, John? Working in a mortuary doesn’t agree with everyone. You need a bit of life, get a job in a pub or something. Don’t tell me you haven’t pulled a pint before with those arms. Take up a hobby. You could play poker with that face, or darts. Get some fresh air; go for a walk around the graveyard. On second thoughts, better not, there are old people around. Can Giles come out to play?’

  ‘Mr Kershaw is a very busy man,’ said Rosa, folding her arms. ‘Are you here for a purpose?’

  Bryant rolled his eyes heavenward. ‘What are any of us here for? I often wonder, don’t you? No, of course not, but perhaps it’s not for us to decide. We toil away all our lives,
accumulating the wisdom of the ancients, only to have someone shovel dirt in our faces and leave garage flowers on our headstones.

  ‘Farewell my pleasures past,

  Welcome my present pain,

  I feel my torments so increase

  That life cannot remain …

  ‘Anne Boleyn,’ he finished.

  ‘Death is not the end, Mr Bryant,’ said Rosa, opening the door with slow menace.

  ‘I don’t know – it slows you down a bit.’

  ‘For some of us this earthly life is merely a waiting room.’

  Bryant stepped inside. ‘Not your waiting room, I hope. You’ve still got back issues of Punch and Titbits.’ He sniffed the air. ‘Are you wearing a new perfume or is it just damp in here? Kindly announce us and put the kettle on.’

  ‘You shouldn’t keep teasing her like that,’ said May as Rosa trudged off to warn Giles Kershaw that he had visitors. ‘You know Jack Renfield once went on a date with her.’

  ‘No wonder he used to look so miserable. She probably took him to a horror film.’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re always so mean to her.’

  ‘Sorry, it’s my inbuilt response to the pessimistic mindset.’ Bryant pulled out a log of chocolate nougat and tore open the purple wrapper. ‘Being alive is reason enough to be joyful. Do you want half of my Aztec bar?’

  ‘They haven’t made those for years,’ said May.

  ‘Well, I haven’t worn this coat for a while.’ He looked about. ‘God, it’s depressing in here.’

  ‘What do you want, a pinball table?’

  ‘It would be a start. I wonder if we’ll get tea before it’s time for Rosa to climb back on the church roof and start spouting water again. Ah, Giles.’

  ‘Gentlemen!’ Kershaw strode towards them in his lab coat, blond of hair and pink of cheek, a picture of health and vitality, like some 1950s brochure extolling the benefits of naturism.

  ‘You always look so fresh,’ said Bryant. ‘Do you sleep in cellophane?’

  ‘No, Mr Bryant, I lead a pure and blameless life.’

  ‘I hate you. Have you seen me lately? I look like I won the wrinkle lottery. Have you had a chance to look at Mrs Forester?’

  ‘Yes. Come through. Dan sent me your photographic evidence of the killer. Is there any way of making the shot clearer?’

  ‘Steffi is having a go but she doesn’t think we’ll get much beyond ethnicity, sex and height,’ said May.

  ‘Steffi?’

  ‘Yes, a very attractive young German lady. Kindly stay away from her.’

  ‘Maybe I can get you a cranial type and rough age group.’ Giles opened the door to the mortuary. ‘I need you to see the victim again.’

  ‘What have you got so far?’ asked May, heading towards the covered body.

  ‘You can see the ligature damage quite clearly.’ Giles folded back the material and tapped Helen Forester’s blackened throat with the old telescopic stick he always carried with him. ‘A thin ridged cord of some kind, angled upward to the back of the neck, which suggests he was a different height to her.’

  ‘But not of abnormal height,’ said Bryant, ‘meaning that he didn’t pull himself over the railings to gain entry to the gardens.’

  ‘No, but I think he must be very strong. The cord cut deeply, actually slicing the flesh. Of course people find the strength to do terrible things when they’re het up. It was a vicious act. Strangulation’s usually a spontaneous outburst of temper, but I don’t think this was.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, it’s the only strike point. He choked her first try. No facial bruising. There’s something else.’ He reached down and carefully turned her head to one side. Around the back of her neck a series of dark spots ran in a perfectly neat line, right on the ligature mark. ‘It looks to me like she was wearing a necklace and he grabbed her very hard, pulling her to him and leaving these tiny bruises. Maybe it allowed him to hold her in place until she died. What bothers me is that they aren’t normal.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Bryant, intrigued.

  ‘They just don’t look right. Threaded pearls or beads would break, wouldn’t they? You’d have found them scattered around.’

  ‘Not a very scientific hypothesis, Giles.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s hard to say exactly what’s different – the uniformity of the markings perhaps. You didn’t find anything at all unusual at the site?’

  ‘It was unusual insofar as we didn’t find anything usual.’ Bryant picked up a large china eyeball and peered into it. ‘No signs of a struggle, no ground disturbance, no weapon.’

  ‘What do you know about her?’

  ‘Not much yet,’ admitted May. ‘She was the head of a PR company based in Hammersmith, mostly working on American soft-drink accounts, very well paid. Not really the kind of job where you make enemies. She was a very dedicated worker. Her colleagues never saw her outside of the office. Her divorce was just going through. She’d been setting up an art gallery, but it was being financed by her husband, so the separation put paid to that.’

  ‘Where is the ex-husband? Has anybody spoken to him?’

  ‘We’re trying to get hold of him now but it’s proving trickier than expected. He may not be avoiding us, but it’s starting to look that way. No lovers have surfaced yet. It’s early days. Janice has turned up a couple of acquaintances and a sister, but they haven’t seen her for a while.’

  ‘Could this have been a case of mistaken identity?’ Giles wondered. ‘What do you think, Mr Bryant?’

  ‘Railings,’ said Bryant, setting down the eyeball.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Bryant rarely felt the need to explain his thought processes and usually ignored blank looks from his colleagues, but decided he should make an effort today. ‘Gardens like the one in Clement Crescent once had wooden stakes around them designed to segregate the population. Later they were replaced by permanent railings. Our fair city was segregated. Ladies of gentility weren’t allowed to parade unescorted, so communal gardens provided safe havens, somewhere they could sit and read without being approached by ruffians. People could see there were, quote, “thieves without and nothing to steal within”. Right up until the 1960s there was a sign in Montpelier Square banning all street cries. God forbid we disturbed the gentlefolk inside. The squares all came with locks and keys, and remain under the guardianship of house-owners to this day.’

  ‘Lovely though it is to see you back on form,’ said Giles, ‘I really can’t see how this is relevant.’

  ‘Well, it’s not just about privacy.’ Bryant dug out a tube of Love Hearts and offered them around.

  ‘What do you mean?’ May asked.

  ‘Churchill suggested getting rid of all the railings during the First World War. Campaigns began to have the railings removed.’

  ‘Is this like the wartime initiative to melt down saucepans and make Spitfires?’

  ‘Yes, but there was a bit more behind the idea. It fitted with the socialist ethic of taking away the privilege of privacy and opening London’s land to all, so the subject of removing railings became a political hot potato. The parks’ users argued that without railings the new automobiles could smash into parks and kill children, but the railings were removed to supposedly make armaments in almost every London park and square – except for the ones around Bedford Square, because the Duke of Bedford was a pacifist.’

  ‘Forgive me, Mr Bryant, I still don’t quite see where you’re going with this.’

  ‘I’m trying to show you the bigger picture.’ Bryant checked his Love Heart. It read, ‘CRAZY GUY!’ ‘As soon as the war was over the railings were put back, much to George Orwell’s disgust. He saw their removal as a democratic gesture and longed to get rid of all the keys, so that the poor could enjoy what the rich had kept to themselves. London’s history is filled with squabbles about the removal and replacement of dividing lines, right from the time of the Enclosures. They were the physical separations of class, created by the ide
a that every man’s home is his castle and every scrap of garden attached to it an Eden.’

  ‘Nope,’ said Giles, ‘still not getting it, Mr B.’

  ‘All right, let me make this simpler,’ said Bryant, as if having to explain himself to an inattentive classroom. ‘Those outside represent chaos. Those inside, order. Therefore we have a motive. Helen Forester, wealthy, successful, moves from a six-million-pound house in Primrose Hill to live alone in an expensive rented flat in Holland Park that she plans to buy, and is seen every day in her private garden by someone outside who envies her lifestyle. We may not find our suspect among those who already have keys. Last month local residents persuaded the police to move a cardboard city from the end of Clement Crescent. We need to find out who was evicted. As for the railings, they’re no longer welded in. They’re designed to be removed and returned. You can still gain access to some private spaces by lifting them out.’

  Realization dawned. ‘Has anyone checked to see whether the railing poles can be removed from the outside?’ asked Giles.

  ‘Dan and Jack are on it right now, old sausage,’ Bryant replied, popping the sweet into his mouth.

  10

  ‘SOMETIMES HIS IMAGINATION GETS THE BETTER OF HIM’

  Jack Renfield clambered out of a holly bush with a black plastic bag in his fist. ‘They didn’t take any names,’ he reported.

  ‘What, from the cardboard encampment? Nor should they. Being homeless isn’t against the law.’ Dan Banbury took the bag from him and added it to the small pile of items he’d found in the shrubbery. If they couldn’t identify any of the vagrants who had erected makeshift homes against the railings of Clement Crescent, they could at least sift through the debris that had made its way into the back of the park’s bushes.