Wild Chamber
Page 16
His memory was unfathomably selective. He remembered every case that had involved the unit, but was unable to retain the name of a single cabinet member below the level of prime minister. His knowledge of the city’s past was as phenomenal as ever; he knew what had happened to Lord Byron’s remains and which Westminster house had been occupied by Oliver Cromwell. He assumed it was common knowledge that London had once boasted a Turkish hammam in Jermyn Street and a museum of geology in Piccadilly. The city’s secret history was there for all to find, but these days only a handful of specialists could be bothered to look. London’s lost characters were to him close companions, from the body-snatchers of Blenheim Street to the running footman of Mayfair and the rat man of Tottenham Court Road. He saw Queen Elizabeth I dancing alone on rainy days in Whitehall Palace and female barbers shaving beards in Seven Dials, but he could barely recall his mother’s face.
Bryant’s nature was now so far removed from that of any normal person in the street that when he turned on a television he had absolutely no idea what he was seeing. He clung to one incontrovertible truth: that human nature never changed. Those neon TV shows filled with prancing, screaming ninnies were merely seventeenth-century puppet plays transposed, their presenters an updated version of the fops and mountebanks from centuries past. If you knew people, he told himself, you could solve any mystery. A city’s character lay in its people.
The gardens of Mecklenburgh Square were closed to all except keyholders, but now that Dan Banbury had obtained a set of all-purpose keys for him, he intended to use them on every locked door in the city. He was going to nip inside and have a quick nose around, just out of curiosity, when the gardens suddenly transformed themselves into a park.
He had been expecting the return of the lucid hallucinations Dr Letheeto had warned him about, but had not suffered one in a couple of weeks and had been lulled into thinking they might not recur. As he approached the entrance the trees spread wider and wider before him, the railings toppled and vanished, and fairy-lit avenues flickered into sight, seductively snaking to the interior, drawing him forward.
Music played in an unseen bandstand, the sound made harsh by a hurdy-gurdy and fiddles. A wavering orange light shone between the trees. Bryant held out his right hand and turned it over, marvelling. The air felt suddenly warm. Pushing the iron gates apart, he stepped from the street on to the gravel path and began making his way towards the music.
He stopped in the middle of the footpath and stared. A lady of some eminence was promenading with her escort. He wore a deep blue tricorne hat and a startling pink suit with a cream brocade waistcoat. She was the epitome of grace, dressed in a sky-blue centre-parted dress with a bodice covered in tiny sewn flowers. Around the 1660s, then, Bryant decided, as wigs for women were not yet back in fashion, although the lady wore yellow ribbons in her curled locks. The couple were heading towards a circle of red and yellow lanterns where musicians played.
It was the time of tea palaces, spas and skittles, the era of the pleasure garden, but where was he meant to be? Not at Ranelagh, for that had a rotunda and an artificial boating lake, nor at the Cremorne in Chelsea, which sported ruins, cascades and triumphal arches. Flambeaux and lanterns lit the way. He could only step forward and marvel at the sight.
Why am I seeing this? he wondered, trying to make sense of this latest glimpse into London’s past. At least he could now cope with the visions, which he knew had a chemical cause. They were patched together from the historical knowledge he had absorbed and sprinkled with scraps of dreams, but it didn’t make them any less extraordinary.
‘Is it not amusing to see how a feast unites everybody? Appetite is the great leveller.’
Bryant turned to find someone his own height, but young, in his late twenties, full-lipped, long-nosed and rather bug-eyed, his bone-pale face half buried beneath a dry-looking wig of brown ringlets. In one hand he carried a pair of beribboned grey leather gloves.
Bryant experienced a shudder of excitement. He had read that Samuel Pepys was fond of spending his evenings in the capital’s pleasure gardens. He was standing shoulder to shoulder with a man familiar from countless paintings and sketches. His mouth dried at the prospect of a conversation with London’s greatest witness to history.
‘I came to gather some pinks from the Jardin Printemps, but rather wish I had gone to the Fox-Hall now.’ Pepys sighed. His face was unexpectedly kind. ‘Here the young bucks are too fondly making nuisances of themselves. Look how they scale the supper boxes to petition their wenches! There is a place for such sport, la, but we gentlemen of quality must abstain. One should never try to separate a maiden from her mutton.’ He released a squeak of a laugh.
‘Mr Pepys – you are Mr Pepys, I take it?’ Bryant asked. ‘Why do Londoners love the parks so much?’
Pepys looked as if he had never considered the question. Bryant was reminded of the often disingenuous entries in his diaries, the remarks of an ordinary man, albeit one with the king’s ear, caught up in a lifetime of extraordinary events. ‘I would have thought the answer obvious,’ said Pepys. ‘It is the pastoral in the urban which brings out the beast in man.’
‘Then perhaps we should all move to the countryside,’ said Bryant, enjoying himself now.
‘Lud, no! London is my domain. A fish kept in a glass of water will live for ever.’ Pepys unfolded a handkerchief and passed it beneath his nose. ‘These counterfeit pleasures will not last. Already they are becoming spoilt by nature.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why, all of this.’ Pepys’s forefinger jabbed at the flickering scene before them. ‘The dandies strutting like forcemeat laced into corsets, using the bushes as jeroboams, these fubsy mother-midnights pretending to be maidens.’ Before them passed a pockmarked old woman got up in the mauve gown of a much younger girl. She held a silvered mask before her, and leaned on an escort half her age. ‘That’s it, milady,’ Pepys yelled delightedly, ‘keep your vizard high to hide the worst and show the better face!’
Some linkboys with torches danced past, their lights splitting the shadows. Taking Bryant’s arm, Pepys led the detective on to the sheep-shorn grass. ‘The refinement of the gardens is giving way to base urges,’ he warned. ‘They always reassert themselves. Have you not seen?’ He pointed off to one side. Bryant followed the line of his finger. Each grass hillock was occupied by unbuttoned couples in the throes of delirious carphology. Many of the women were in advanced states of undress, their clothes splayed about on the bushes, their pale breasts jouncing.
‘To see the line of loose-boxes outside the gardens one would think there was a sale of common goods on offer, not a concert of Jenkins’s gavottes,’ said Pepys. ‘The shrubberies are filled with assignations. What an age this is, and what a world! The designers of these Arcadian delights encourage such sport. Did you know there are fountains that piddle upon you as you pass, making the ladies shriek with delight? La, there you have it.’ He sniffed hard and replaced his handkerchief. ‘I am not a prude, of course, I love my ladies and must find them, especially when my wife has her month upon her. Even so there is a time and a place, and it is not at a public entertainment. Have you had chocolate? It’s rather good.’
Bryant wanted to know more of the man behind the diaries, to see the paradoxical humanity of him, a man unfaithful yet jealous, domineering yet needful, intelligent in learning yet banal in observations. It was not possible, of course, because he could not see more than he already knew. When he turned to look all he saw was a fleshy pleasant-faced young man in a suit of brown satin.
The warm summer breeze lifted the leaves, the torches blustered and ladies laughed as they pressed down their skirts. Bryant whirled about and Pepys was gone, puffed away in a gust.
Time was warping again, moving forward fast.
From the dark walkway to his right a lady emerged in a dress that appeared to have been stitched from green and purple handkerchiefs. In her powdered periwig was a miniature galleon. He heard the scro
op of silk, the twitter of false laughter, the yap of a miniature spaniel. Two men wore black leather masks and were dressed as harlequins. The perfume of roses filled the air, artificial and smothering. Torches flickered out and relit themselves. What now? Bryant thought.
Other pairs materialized on the path. Judging by the escorted ladies who were approaching, sporting the fashion of wide skirts arranged in frilled layers, it was now the late eighteenth century, probably around 1770. The layout of lanterns and trees had changed, so that the rectangular promenade of avenues and paths ran around a great ellipse.
A masquerade was taking place within the darkened grove ahead. Bryant could smell roasting pullets and spitted lamb. Walking into the brilliantly lit clearing, he found himself before a number of garish yellow and crimson buildings constructed in different styles: Gothic, Chinese and Greek. They were flimsy and flat-looking, like theatre sets that might fall down at any moment. An elaborate curving white colonnade contained supper boxes, where diners could see and be seen. The music was faster and more raucous.
Bryant was hot now. Tearing at his striped woollen scarf, he removed it together with his overcoat and hung them on a convenient branch, then unbuttoned his cardigan.
The next enclosure was guarded by a ticket-seller. A pair of ragged children tried to duck inside, and the ticket man threw a stone at them from the grouch bag at his waist.
The detective could only watch and marvel. He recognized where he was – in the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, at a time long past the height of their fame. Someone was singing a much later music hall song, ‘One Half of the World Don’t Know How t’Other Lives’, accompanied on an accordion. And there in front of him was the most astounding sight yet, a great rococo edifice of white fretwork, set about with scalloped balconies and covered in chandeliers. There were musicians’ stands in one part, and in another ices were being sold. In a cleared part of the grass lolled a scarlet hot-air balloon. On the other side a pair of pugilists waited for a crowd to gather. But as he watched, one wall crumbled and faded, to be replaced with a reeking meat stand and a dog pit.
Bryant knew that the fortunes of the gardens had fallen in time, that they had become the haunt of bawds, thugs and pickpockets, and now were in their dying stages, but what was he supposed to learn from such sights? What was it all meant to mean?
As he continued to watch, a fight broke out between two ruffians in mud-stained calico shirts while a young woman looked on. She gave a sudden scream of laughter, but the rough and tumble was now in deadly earnest and blood-spattered, the shock of scarlet blossoming on white linen. One pugilist spat a tooth, and the fight began again, this time involving the woman, who clung to her lover’s opponent and was kicked aside. She clumsily rose, and moments later the boxer had his hands around her neck, throttling the life from her. It was quite clear that the ruffian had learned to enjoy the punishment of women.
I’m seeing this for a reason, thought Bryant. It’s something I know which can’t yet surface – it’s speaking to me through these visions.
As the young woman fell to her knees in front of him, her hands clawing at her throat, he thought: There will be another murder.
20
‘A HUMAN BEING IS NOT A TURKEY’
‘He came home without his topcoat or his scarf, Mr May,’ said Alma Sorrowbridge, ‘just in his shirtsleeves and cardie. It can’t be more than five or six degrees out there tonight. Where’s he been? Where are his clothes? And he’s been playing that awful noise all evening. Perhaps you can talk to him. I’ve given up.’
Bryant sat shivering in front of Alma’s horrendous mock-flame-effect electric fireplace while Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore played on the stereo.
‘What happened tonight, Arthur?’ May asked gently, pulling a chair alongside him. ‘You left early but it took you an hour and a half to get here. Where did you go?’
Bryant heard his old friend speak, but struggled to pull his attention back into the present. ‘I was in Mecklenburgh Square,’ he said finally, ‘although I don’t remember much about how I got back here. I was warned there would be side effects from my treatment.’
‘The hallucinations? I thought you said you could control them.’
Bryant pulled his dressing gown tighter. ‘I can, at least to a point – but what if they get out of control?’
‘Do you think they might?’
‘I’m not sure. I saw another girl killed in a park tonight. I mean I imagined it. It’s not second sight, I’m not seeing something that hasn’t happened yet, but that’s what it feels like.’
May was puzzled. ‘Then how do you account for it?’
‘Over the years I’ve read a lot about London parks, and of course I’ve read the Pepys diaries – the shorter version, at least – but what I see is somehow more than the sum total of my memories.’
‘It’s your subconscious,’ May told him. ‘Think of all the knowledge you’ve accumulated in your years. You always joke that you’ve forgotten more than anyone remembers. What if your medication is drawing out that knowledge?’
‘I can’t simply stop taking it,’ said Bryant. ‘I’ll have to learn to live with the effects and harness them somehow. The hallucinations are iatrogenic. They’re caused by the treatment itself.’
‘You don’t believe the investigation is over. Jeremy Forester didn’t kill his wife because she denied him his passport.’
‘No, that’s merely the reason why he was present in Clement Crescent yesterday.’
‘And you don’t think the gardener had anything to do with it?’
‘You’ve met him, John. Jackson doesn’t move in their circles. You couldn’t call him anything more than a general suspect.’ There were five categories for persons of police interest, and Jackson was only on the second rung by dint of his presence in the gardens. ‘The problem for me is his testimony. If he saw Mrs Forester both before and after the attack, why didn’t he see the actual murder take place? Why didn’t he spot anyone else in the garden? And then there’s the viciousness of the act. Dan says it was sudden, close and overwhelming. It suggests an opportunistic assault. Am I trying to impose order on the behaviour of a madman?’
‘You know it can’t be,’ May countered. ‘It must have been planned because the killer needed a key, and we’re no closer to understanding how he gained entry.’
‘Oh, I know how he did that.’ Bryant waved the question aside.
‘You do? Were you planning to tell me?’
‘Yes, I just forgot. Here.’ He rose from his armchair and headed over to the Victorian writing desk that he had made Alma lug into the sitting room. Shaking out one of the drawers, he removed a paper sachet and a candle, then drew down a leather-bound volume from the shelf behind him. May watched in puzzlement as he riffled the pages.
‘The lock on the gate to the gardens,’ Bryant said. ‘It’s called a Belfry and it’s quite old. Belfry mostly made padlocks for British Army vehicles in the 1950s, but quite a few were fitted to gates after the war. The one on the gate at Clement Crescent takes a pipe key – that is, one with a hole in the end of the shaft into which a pin inside the lock fits. I had two hypotheses. First, that the key was removed from one of the residents, copied and replaced before they knew it had gone. I immediately thought of old missus busybody, what’s her name, Farrier. But it turns out she was worried about losing it so she kept it tied to the zip of her purse, which means it was never out of her sight. I checked with the only key cutter in the neighbourhood. He said that it’s a specialist item and he would have to order in a copy, but no one had requested such a key. Which brought me to the second idea. I spoke to Coatsleeve Charlie.’
‘Good Lord, is he still around?’ May exclaimed. ‘I thought he was put away after the Belgravia blackmailings.’ Charlie had sent plaster busts of Churchill and Shakespeare to various lords and civil servants in Belgravia, none of whom knew that the busts had microphones planted inside them. Even the judge had commended him on his ingenuity.
‘And you think he did all that?’ asked May.
‘Have you got a better idea?’
Alma came in with a tray of rock cakes and looked around suspiciously. ‘Are you burning things in here again?’
Bryant looked at her wide-eyed. ‘No,’ he lied, quickly snuffing the candle’s wick with his fingers.
‘You know what happens with you and fire. There’s a dirty great hole in my bedsheets from your pipe.’
‘Inferior cotton, madam. If you didn’t go to second-rate stores for your linens they wouldn’t prove so incendiary. This place is a death trap.’
‘Mr May,’ Alma implored, ‘can’t you do something? Last week he poisoned my aspidistra and got carbolic acid all over my whatnot stand.’
‘I was trying to re-create a rare toxin,’ Bryant explained.
Alma was unconvinced. ‘The smell was something chronic. We had the gas board round looking for a leak. I was going to cook a nice bit of halibut at the weekend and found him in the kitchen bashing it flat with a poker. He says he’s experimenting, but what kind of experiment involves flattening a fish?’
‘It has the texture of human flesh,’ said Bryant. He turned to May for support. ‘At the University of Pennsylvania scientists tried to work out the minimal stimulus required to sexually excite a male turkey, and found they could remove all of the female’s body parts without the male losing interest, until they were left with just a head on a stick. If you recall, they found a severed head in the canal last month. Parts of the body had been chewed by fish—’