Wild Chamber

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘The doorman says Machin was always dressed the same summer and winter, in jeans and a cheap blue Puffa jacket. That was what he noticed most about her, apart from her ability to bounce back from the nastiest brush-offs. So why was she found in a designer overcoat worth £2,250?’

  ‘Well, I guess she stole it.’

  ‘She was a junkie, John. She wouldn’t have been able to get into any high-end venues looking the way she did. It’s too cold to take a coat off outside, and something like that doesn’t get left on the back of a pub seat. So where did she get it?’

  ‘Maybe it’s a knock-off, a Chinese fake.’

  ‘I had Giles send a shot of it to Janice. She says the coat is the real thing, and it certainly didn’t belong to Machin because it’s two sizes too big. I wouldn’t argue with Janice when it comes to fashion.’

  ‘There are always anomalies—’ May began, his breath condensing in the chill night air.

  ‘And they contain the truths we fail to see,’ said Bryant. ‘“What is essential is invisible to the eye” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. What’s the news on Jeremy Forester?’

  ‘He’s still unconscious.’

  ‘That’s tiresome. Can’t we slap him awake? Did you speak to the head nurse?’

  ‘Yes, and it’s the same one you upset the last time you went to the University College Hospital,’ May pointed out, ‘when you went to interview Shoulders O’Keefe about the Hatton Garden job.’

  ‘I have no recollection of that,’ said Bryant.

  ‘You sat on his drip. You must remember. He passed out.’

  ‘He tried to bribe me.’

  ‘He offered you money to go away. There’s a difference.’

  Bryant walked back to where the body had been found. ‘It’s the same MO, isn’t it, Dan?’

  ‘Looks like it,’ said the crime scene manager, pointing to a street lamp bristling with raindrops. ‘He was standing under the trees over there. I’ve lifted some trainer prints. Adidas ZX Flux Originals, worn on the right side, the same as in Clement Crescent.’

  ‘Then it can’t be Forester. He’s out cold in a hospital bed,’ said May.

  ‘His wife was taken by surprise,’ Bryant reminded them, ‘and so was this street-smart, feral girl who wouldn’t let anyone creep up on her.’

  ‘She was walking dead, Arthur, skin and bone, easy to take down, a natural victim.’

  ‘But why?’ Bryant insisted. ‘Why on earth would he do a thing like that?’ Bryant had no idea how to respond to the notion of someone who might kill for pleasure. It was his blind spot and his greatest weakness.

  ‘If it turns out that we’re looking for a man who enjoys the sexual thrill of murder,’ May said carefully, ‘I think you have to stand down from the investigation.’

  ‘Wait, you can’t just—’ Bryant started to protest.

  ‘Hear me out,’ said May. ‘You always say you have to find the logic behind the case before you can crack it, and you admit that you have no understanding or appreciation of psychosis. If he’s attacking at random, driven by impulse, you have no hope of finding him.’

  ‘He kills without damaging them, John. He doesn’t commit any kind of sexual assault.’

  ‘Maybe it’s as you said, killing them in parkland is enough.’

  Bryant ground the tip of his walking stick into the gravel. ‘He’s acting for a solid reason.’

  ‘You’re saying that because you don’t want to give up the investigation. I think you’re wrong.’

  ‘You always think I’m wrong.’

  ‘Only when you are wrong.’

  ‘But I’m normally right.’

  ‘You go through a lot of wrongs to reach a right.’

  ‘But the rights make up for the wrongs.’

  ‘Can you two stop arguing about who’s right or wrong for a few minutes?’ called Banbury, exasperated. ‘You’re like a couple of bloody five-year-olds.’

  ‘Then for heaven’s sake find us something to work with,’ snapped Bryant. ‘We have to keep this out of the press for as long as we can.’

  ‘I’ve got some scuff marks where he lifted her off her feet,’ said Banbury, ‘and something else. Some little metal pellets, the sort you get in air rifles.’

  ‘Let me see.’

  ‘No, I’m bagging them for forensic study first.’

  ‘I don’t need forensic evidence to know that he killed them both,’ Bryant managed before Banbury shot him a filthy look. He turned to his partner. ‘Remember I told you that the parks were once referred to as London’s wild chambers? They provide the opportune locations; they’re free zones where anything can happen. But the heart also has chambers. He has a personal motive.’

  ‘You’re frightened that if he doesn’t, you won’t ever be able to understand what drives him,’ said May, looking over to where Dan was marking off patches of gravel. ‘We should have been able to prevent this. You always look for logic, Arthur. This time there may not be any. There are a lot of crazy people out there.’

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Bryant slammed his walking stick into the path. ‘Two deaths in two days, both in parks, both with the same MO? There’s obviously a connection.’

  ‘Then why can’t either of us see it?’ May asked.

  ‘Because it’s like this place.’ Bryant peered into the darkness beneath the trees. ‘Reason needs order. In here, the shadows move. “Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear!”’

  THE THIRD DAY

  22

  ‘EVERYBODY HAS TO PAY SOMEONE’

  Wednesday’s dawn sky was striated with bands of black and yellow, a reminder, if any was needed at this time of the year, that England’s location in the northern hemisphere had more in common with that of Norway and Iceland than with that of Spain or Italy, despite what the habitués of London’s cafés chose to believe.

  Renfield and Longbright followed the footpath into the Torrington, watched from the upper terraces by hooded teenagers. The estate had been built in 1967 and comprised four shabby grey blocks built around a quadrangle of threadbare grass. At one end stood the rehab centre. A rusty broken shovel propped against a wall was a cruel reminder that a gardener had once been employed to tend the green.

  As they negotiated the maze of waterlogged tunnels and dimly lit staircases connecting the buildings, a hammering grime track leaked from a shattered upstairs window. It was hard to imagine that the place had ever felt safe. When the Torrington gained a reputation for trouble the government cut off its cash and looked away. Half a century later it was so badly run down that most of the residents had moved out, and the last few families awaited relocation. The gangs had taken over, running postcode wars at night. They were no longer visible on the street but shifted in the shadows, forming incomprehensible alliances and loyalties. The council had moved the residents block by block, providing them with new homes somewhere in London’s hinterlands.

  ‘Didn’t they give this place a makeover a couple of years ago?’ asked Renfield, looking about.

  ‘A few concrete flower boxes and a lick of paint,’ said Longbright. ‘They’re planning to get everyone out by next summer. I can’t wait to see how they turn this into luxury apartments. Look out for number 140.’

  They headed up on to the first-floor walkway, where half the light panels were broken, the other half flickering and buzzing. The thought of having to inform Paula Machin’s family about the circumstances of their daughter’s death filled Longbright with foreboding, but instead the door was opened by a young bespectacled Chinese student.

  ‘She stayed here sometimes,’ he confirmed. ‘I pay the rent.’

  ‘So she sublet from you?’ asked Renfield.

  ‘Not sublet, no. I sublet from the Cypriots.’

  ‘Who are the Cypriots?’

  ‘Some guys who live in the next street – I don’t know. Two brothers called Stanisopolis. I pay them on time. Around here everybody has to pay someone.’

  A familiar story emerge
d. The original families had moved out and a brokered sublet had evolved with the council’s tacit consent so that coffers could continue to be filled until the wreckers arrived.

  ‘I asked her to leave,’ said the student.

  ‘When was this?’ Longbright asked.

  ‘Two nights ago.’

  ‘Why, what was the problem?’

  ‘She was doing this.’ He tapped the crook of his arm.

  Janice showed him a photograph of the red coat. ‘Ever see her wearing that?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. I never saw her in warm clothes.’

  ‘Anyone ever call for her? Any family?’

  ‘No, no family, no friends, nobody ever.’ He thought for a moment. ‘She stole from everyone. She was not a good person. But it wasn’t her. It was this thing.’ He tapped his arm again.

  ‘Why would he strangle a junkie in a busy park used as a shortcut?’ asked Renfield as they left.

  Janice slapped her gloves together, trying to warm her hands. ‘Maybe he felt the need and had to act on it at once.’

  ‘Which means there may have been dry runs first,’ said Renfield. ‘Where was Ritchie Jackson while all this was happening?’

  ‘I already checked,’ said Longbright. ‘He says he was home alone in front of the TV and can’t remember what he watched, and somebody was definitely in. His electricity records back him up.’

  ‘Then let’s start with him and move on to Forester the second he wakes up.’

  ‘You know what’s really odd about this whole thing?’ said Longbright. ‘It should have been the simplest case in the world. A dead wife and a missing husband involved in a nasty divorce. Why can’t the most obvious answer be the right one?’

  ‘Because life is never convenient,’ said Renfield. ‘Forester couldn’t have killed Machin.’

  ‘Then whatever we’re missing is buried deeper.’

  ‘Or it’s right in front of us,’ said Renfield. Crossing the Caledonian Road against rain and traffic, they headed back towards the unit.

  Steffi Vesta had been walking around the PCU, passing from one chaotic room to the next, trying to understand what she had been drafted into.

  The building struck her as a microcosm of London: not one job had been satisfactorily finished, no single rule applied anywhere, everything was off-kilter, nothing quite made sense. She made extensive notes, attempting a comprehensive study that could be submitted to her senior officers in Cologne. Instead she received answers to questions she hadn’t asked and was given extraneous information that led nowhere. And old! To her young eyes the detectives seemed positively primordial. Raymond Land talked very loudly and slowly to her, as if she was a Martian. At least John May was helpful and possessed an air of modernity, but Mr Bryant smelled of peppermints and marijuana and barely registered her presence, not bothering to look up from his books when spoken to, throwing arcane words around like ‘dolly-mop’ and ‘scobolotcher’, wandering outside in the middle of a sentence and returning only to ask her if she knew anything about hedgehogs. And she never knew if he was joking; when he asked her if ‘bandwidth’ had something to do with fat musicians, she knew he had to be pulling her leg. Surely everybody knew what bandwidth was? Nobody else seemed to find this odd. Clearly they had all been working together for such a long time that nothing struck them as unusual.

  In the morning’s first meeting she raised her hand.

  ‘Miss Vesta, now what’s the matter?’ asked Raymond Land, who was already growing tired of the permanently confused look on her face.

  ‘The man who attacked Paula Machin used the same operational method, yes?’ she said.

  ‘Well, obviously,’ said Land rather rudely. ‘We’ve already established that.’

  ‘But this coat looks as if it would belong to Helen Forester, do you not think? It is very similar to the one she was wearing when she died.’

  ‘You mean he only goes after women in red coats?’

  ‘I don’t know, but is it not worth talking to Forester’s sister to see if she had such a coat?’ She cast a hopeful glance at Longbright, who seemed to be her ally.

  ‘Worth a try,’ said Janice. ‘We’ll get on it.’

  But before the lead could be followed up, the week’s events took a disastrous turn.

  23

  ‘THEY’RE CLOSING THE PARKS TONIGHT’

  Raymond Land tipped back his chair and folded his business manual open to another chapter, entitled ‘Removing Dissent in the Workplace’. The volume had been sent to him by Leslie Faraday, who suggested it might help him run the PCU more efficiently.

  Land studied the manual in minute detail, making copious notes. As a result, he felt that he knew more about the efficient running of the unit than he ever had in the past, and was ready to apply his learning. He was confident that he alone had the power to turn their fortunes around.

  Unfortunately, what he didn’t know was this: in 1944, the forerunner of America’s CIA, the Office of Strategic Services, issued a business manual aimed at sabotaging foreign industries. It was intended to be dispensed to citizens who were sympathetic to the Allies but living in Axis nations. Through an accident of fate too unbelievable to be detailed even in these memoirs, the manual’s contents somehow made it into a training course entitled Better British Business Management, and the repackaged volume, filled with advice that actually meant the reverse, had ended up on Raymond Land’s desk with a note from Faraday, who had taken it at face value. Land had perused it and cherry-picked the ideas that appealed to him, including the following:

  All work should be passed through the proper channels. Never permit shortcuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions. Whenever possible refer all matters to committees of at least six people for further consideration. Always refer back to the precise wording of resolutions decided upon at the last meeting and reopen the question of the advisability of that decision. Urge your colleagues to avoid haste. Insist on perfect work and after careful consideration, reject all flawed plans. Advocate caution and responsibility at all times.

  It seemed like eminently sensible advice to him, even if he couldn’t quite grasp how it would make others respect him more. There was something else that Land did not know: in his eternal quest to have the PCU closed down, Faraday had spotted what he felt was its greatest weakness – Land himself.

  When the phone rang on his Whitehall desk that morning, Faraday was in the middle of lowering a McVitie’s chocolate biscuit into his tea with the precision of a crane driver setting down an RSJ, and the lapse in concentration caused it to break in half.

  ‘What do you want?’ he snapped irritably, trying to fish out the soggy biscuit with a pair of nail clippers.

  ‘You asked me to keep you updated on the investigation,’ said Land.

  Faraday cursed as he dropped the clippers in his tea.

  ‘The woman killed in the park. There’s been another one, and we’re sure the cases are linked.’

  ‘Oh, dear. The same park?’ He folded some sheets of toilet paper in half and began dredging the remains of his biscuit out on to them.

  ‘No, this time it’s a much more heavily used spot. The gardens at Russell Square, in Bloomsbury.’

  ‘How close are you to making an arrest?’

  Even Land could see the expediency in being economical with the truth. ‘We have a couple of suspects under scrutiny …’ he began.

  ‘And in the meantime the parks are open, leaving the public at risk. I see.’ Feeling a surge of elation Faraday pushed his tea aside and returned to the plan on his notepad. On it he had written:

  City of London – Approved

  Westminster – Approved

  Kensington & Chelsea – Approved

  Camden – Approved

  Southwark – Pending

  Tower Hamlets – Pending

  ‘Yes, but of course you couldn’t close the parks,’ said Land, almost as if he was reading over his shoulder. ‘For a start, we’d get the blame.’


  ‘On the contrary,’ objected Faraday, nettled. ‘We have to get them closed as quickly as possible. People are in danger. I think we can get the gates locked by tonight.’

  ‘But if you do that there’ll be riots.’ Land began to get an inkling of what he had started. ‘Perhaps we should have a committee meeting. This isn’t a decision to be undertaken lightly. We’d need to discuss it with at least six people.’

  ‘No, I want all of them closed at once. Except for St James’s and Hyde Park, obviously. The royals – you don’t want to have to handle their PR departments, quite the most highhanded bunch I’ve ever had the misfortune to—’

  ‘Not the main parks,’ said Land, attempting to dam the flow of disaster heading his way. ‘Perhaps just the small ones.’

  ‘You say women are at risk, yes? There could be more than one attacker. Have you been reading the papers lately? Bombs going off all over Europe. And Turkey. Or is Turkey in Europe? I can never remember. We could be dealing with a terrorist group.’

  Land suddenly saw that he’d been played for a fool. Faraday had built his reputation by driving through dubious initiatives and buttressing them with acolytes who saw him lighting a path to promotion.

  ‘I already have the plans drawn up,’ he said, closing his ear to Land’s burbling prevarications. ‘I’ll get on it straight away. Keep me informed of any further developments.’ Replacing his phone, he set about making the calls that would seal off the city’s parks by nightfall and close the PCU’s doors by the weekend.

  ‘Have you seen this?’ asked Longbright, entering the detectives’ office and reaching past John May to tap at his keyboard. ‘Breaking news. It hit the Hard News website first, which probably means it came from Leslie Faraday.’ It was well known that Faraday had the site’s editor in his pocket. ‘Police to close Central London parks from sunset tonight. Just the very thing we wanted to avoid.’

  ‘This isn’t about public safety,’ said May. ‘He has an agenda. But while he’s trying to drive the initiative through, he won’t be watching us. What do you think, Arthur?’