Wild Chamber

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘The old lady, Margo Farrier.’ Longbright checked back through her notes. ‘Steffi, didn’t she say something about Helen Forester having a visitor on Friday night, a well-dressed woman?’

  ‘Mrs Farrier thinks it was Sharyn Buckland,’ said Steffi. ‘She stayed for perhaps one hour, no more.’

  ‘So Buckland calls on Forester, Forester is murdered and her husband is hunted down,’ said Banbury. ‘The chain of events starts with the nanny. Do we have anything on this Asian bloke, Sun Dark?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Renfield. ‘Mr Bryant’s the only one who’s ever heard of him, and he’s not sharing information at the moment.’

  ‘What on earth is wrong with you people?’ Land burst out suddenly. ‘It’s the twenty-first century and we can’t get hold of anyone or find anyone, or persuade them to talk. It’s ridiculous.’

  ‘This is what happens in England, I think,’ said Steffi unhelpfully.

  ‘Good God, they used to have eight posts a day in the 1880s, and telegraph boys running all over London, efficiently delivering messages and supplying sexual favours. Has nothing advanced? I thought Bryant’s tracking device was supposed to remain on him at all times.’

  ‘It seems he attached it to a vehicle that’s now in Aberdeen,’ Longbright admitted.

  ‘Well, start finding these people, can’t you?’ Land pleaded. ‘This knife-chucking Fu Manchu bloke, or this amorous Mary Poppins woman, Sharyn Buckland – and the gardener, get him back in. And while you’re there it would be quite useful to know whether my detectives have decided to abandon the case and go tossing the caber somewhere north of the border. I’ve got Darren Link breathing down my neck to close the investigation now that Faraday’s shutting the parks.’

  ‘When is that due to happen?’ asked Banbury.

  ‘As of this minute,’ Land said disconsolately. ‘He’s using the restriction as an example of our failure, says we couldn’t protect the public so extraordinary measures had to be drafted. We’ve stepped into his trap without realizing what he was up to.’

  ‘Then do we not have to close the investigation at once?’ asked Steffi, looking around. ‘Surely that is not possible?’

  ‘Ask this lot,’ said Land, folding his arms. ‘Two old ladies got machine-gunned in North London this morning. They died under a hail of bullets from a semi-automatic rifle while they were sitting outside the Karma Café in Wood Green having soya lattes, shot by a seventeen-year-old piece of plankton involved in a gang turf war. The Met made their arrest in under half an hour. We get a dog-walker and a junkie strangled to death and after over fifty hours we don’t even have any proper suspects.’

  ‘How did they make an arrest so quickly?’ asked Longbright.

  ‘The gunman shot himself in the foot,’ Banbury explained. ‘They’re always doing it. They copy those gangsta rap videos where you see singers holding their hands up with the first and middle finger of each hand pointing down, not realizing you can’t fire a gun like that, and blow their toes off.’

  ‘That doesn’t change the fact that there are kids running around trying to turn parts of London into Mexico City,’ said Land, ‘and what have we managed to achieve so far?’

  ‘A total shutdown of all London parks, thanks to you,’ said Longbright. ‘This isn’t a gang war, Raymond.’

  ‘Then what is it?’ Land countered.

  ‘You’re the unit head. And you’re the leak, aren’t you? You said, “We’ve stepped into his trap.” It was you.’

  ‘Now look here, I certainly never intended—’ Land began, blustering. ‘You don’t seriously think I would—’

  ‘Perhaps you could help us by not speaking to Faraday any more.’ Longbright shot him a look of deep disappointment and led the way from the briefing room.

  25

  ‘LIKE MIDNIGHT FOXES, WE ADAPT’

  Arthur Bryant had arranged to meet up with the editor of Mephiticus, a periodical of acidic prose and limited appeal that was mailed out to embittered academics and hermetic eccentrics from its premises in Bloomsbury.

  Barney Calman was over fifty and still lived with his mother above his office. His grey-flecked hair revealed the tread of time, and he was not the first to own his clothes. He excelled in all enterprises that were unprofitable, and consequently was not an easy man to deal with. Permanently broke and perpetually complaining, he cadged fags, pints, meals and change, robbing Peter to pay Paul, then robbing Paul again, anything to ensure that another copy of the magazine could be mailed out to his dwindling readership. Even after the announced death of the printed word some fifteen years ago, London was awash with such esoteric tribal magazines.

  ‘Here you go,’ he said, handing a copy of the magazine to Bryant across the pub table, ‘the latest issue, just for you. There’s a piece on the ecstatic nocturnal peregrinations of William Blake that you may find interesting.’

  ‘Cheers,’ said Bryant, preparing to fold it in half to fit inside his overcoat, ready for binning on the way home.

  ‘That’ll be £12.50.’ Calman held out his hand until Bryant dug into his pocket and found the money.

  ‘I haven’t got change of fifteen.’ Bryant held out a tenner and a fiver.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll put it towards the next issue.’ Calman shoved the money into the pocket of a jacket that looked as if it would have gone on to the pre-loved rack of a Dickensian rag shop.

  They were sitting in the snug bar of the Scottish Stores in King’s Cross, formerly a table-dancing dump called the Flying Scotsman that Bryant used to cross the street to avoid, home to desperate women grinding topless for fifty-pence pieces collected in beer glasses. During its rehabilitation a few months ago, sheets of hardboard had been removed to reveal a perfectly preserved Edwardian boozer, a rare example of the past returning.

  ‘God, I think I preferred King’s Cross when it was full of strip joints,’ Calman complained. ‘Anything’s better than clench-arsed hipsters in pirate beards drinking craft ales with stupid names. What did you want to see me about?’

  ‘I’ve been reading up on the history of the city’s parks and open spaces,’ Bryant began, not quite knowing where his sentence would finish, ‘and I wondered if they had any particular association with death.’

  ‘Well, the scythe-bearer is everywhere in London,’ said Calman, noisily slugging the froth from the pint of Affable Alf’s Organic Ale that Bryant had bought him. ‘God, I’d like to knock the brains out of the topknotted twerp who invented craft beer. This is like licking piss off a nettle. The last hanging on Tyburn’s triple tree at the corner of Hyde Park was in 1783, and by then around sixty thousand people had died. The soil under Marble Arch was soaked in their blood. The city was always poorly lit but the parks were darker and full of michers.’

  ‘You mean petty thieves,’ said Bryant, proud to show off his newfound knowledge of arcane slang.

  ‘The dark attracts dark behaviour.’ Calman sniffed, and extracted quite the most disgusting tissue Bryant had ever seen. ‘In old England, forests had a host of symbolic meanings. They were places of sanctuary for Robin Hood and for the banished duke in As You Like It. They represented the realm of magic in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But they’re also associated with wild spirits and sometimes appalling violence. The rape and mutilation of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus takes place in woodland.’

  Unlike his partner, Bryant was entirely at home here, listening to academic theories involving myth and history. He was able to overlay them on any investigation without embarrassment. He regarded anything that helped him to reach a conclusion as a useful and legitimate tool.

  ‘A park may contain a wooded area or copse, and a copse can be a place of death,’ Calman continued. ‘The tale of the Children in the Wood is one of the most ancient of all stories, with parallels in Horace and repetitions in Shakespeare, Drayton and Webster.’ He blew into the tissue, blasting it to bits, then returned to his ale.

  ‘Are we talking about the pantomime Babes in the Wood?’ Bryant ask
ed, watching Calman’s beer sink at an alarming rate.

  ‘That, too,’ said the publisher. ‘There are several versions that tell of a murderer. In one a ship’s chandler kills two children, a boy and a girl, in woodland at the behest of their uncle, and hides their bodies beneath leaves. The tale increased in popularity around the time of Richard the Third, for obvious reasons, but interestingly several wooded areas in London lay claim to the location of the tragedy. In some variations their bodies are covered by robins and turtle doves. There was a popular ballad about it still sung in the eighteenth century:

  ‘No burial this pretty pair

  Of any man receives,

  Till Robin Red-Breast piously

  Did cover them with leaves.

  ‘It was an appealing idea to many.’

  Bryant indicated to the barman that they needed another round. ‘Why would that be?’

  ‘The image of virginal innocence being stolen away in pastoral surroundings is a particularly attractive one,’ Calman explained. ‘Creepy, of course, but so is everything working back from the Victorians. While the ladies sewed pictures of maidens swooning in leafy bowers and knights watching chivalrously over them, their husbands were out rogering servant girls in the nearest patch of long grass they could find.’

  He set aside his empty glass, exchanging it for a full one. ‘London’s parks may have been filled with pretty posies but they were put there to keep the poor away, to guard against their diseased breath and add jolly promenades for landowners. Cultural historians like to describe attractions like the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens as havens of courtly entertainment, but they were really just amusement parks where you could get pissed and laid. So if you’re wondering why this fellow attacks women in parks, and you must be because why else would you bother to get in touch with me when we hardly ever speak, you’re barking up the wrong tree.’

  ‘You think he’s just doing what men have done for centuries: finding the darkest spot in the metropolis and taking advantage of it,’ said Bryant, loosening his scarf.

  ‘Of course. When you take a good look at this city you’ll notice how little it changes. Did you know we still have fifteen hundred gas lamps in operation? But London is losing its disrepute. The old Soho clubs were once the opposite of guilds and masonic lodges. They encouraged disorder, anarchy, drinking, gambling and above all promiscuity, and their inhabitants spilled out into the night and into the parks, looking for someone to slap or shag. What have we got now? Japanese bubble-tea bars.’ Calman stared into his empty glass as if he had just lost an old friend. ‘Children worked in factories on the riverbanks, dying of mercuric poisoning so toxic that their skeletons turned bright green. Now the waterways are home to swans and herons, and you can run their length in Lycra to your fancy new apartment. In search of the real London we avoid the tourist fakery of Camden and head for Dalston, Spitalfields, Whitechapel, because we secretly like a bit of rough. And, like midnight foxes, we adapt, sliding between worlds of darkness and light. If you’re ordering more beers after this I’ll have one of those pork pies to go with it.’

  Bryant reluctantly dug into his pocket. ‘I suppose you think I’m a foolish old man looking for poetic answers when the truth is far more base.’

  ‘You should have been an academic instead of becoming a policeman,’ said Calman. ‘I suppose I’m not the first person to tell you that. I can’t blame you for seeking a higher purpose in our frailties. There is one thing.’

  Bryant had a third pint delivered and watched in amazement as the publisher downed it. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘You know why parks are still here with us in the twenty-first century? Why they haven’t been ripped up by property developers and filled with blocks of flats?’

  ‘Because there would be a national outcry?’

  ‘Yes, but why? I’ll tell you.’ The publisher leaned closer. ‘Because the government knows they stop city workers from going insane. Wooded areas are for reveries and fantasies, for people with crushed spirits to dream in. Dickens believed in the “democracy of dreamers” – the idea that at night in London there’s no difference between rich and poor because we all need to exercise our imaginations. No difference between those at home in pressed linen sheets and night-walkers wandering the darkened alleys like the undead. No difference between those who slumber above and the vast armies of corpses resting below.’

  Bryant came away from the pub thirty pounds lighter and, he thought, none the wiser – until the following week, when he looked back on the meeting and saw that it contained the seeds of a darker truth.

  Meanwhile, taking a leaf from his partner’s book, John May had headed to the low cream-coloured neoclassical building that housed the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Pall Mall, hoping to discover whether something more was motivating their killer. To that end he had arranged to meet Laura Shoemaker, one of the city’s leading behavioural specialists. She was as pink and plump as a pastry chef, but her eyes were sharp and calculating. Dressed in flattering black, she drew forth curiosity in others.

  ‘I’m not sure I’m going to be of much help to you,’ she warned as they headed to a table. Behind them, workers were installing blown-up panels from comic book artists for an upcoming exhibition. Above Shoemaker’s head was a gigantic red and yellow atomic explosion with an immense grawlix followed by the letters ‘ROARRRR!’ plastered across it. ‘You’re looking at two deaths. It’s not a big enough research sample.’

  ‘My partner said that, too,’ May was reminded. ‘He built his reputation by developing a set of intuitive techniques that should be taught in every police training college, but he’s still regarded with suspicion. You know, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle invested his fictional detective with observational skills that were eventually adopted by the Metropolitan Police. Arthur came up with an equally game-changing approach to detection that’s taken a lifetime to refine: he intuits solutions from a dozen or so factors that include time, place, history and personality as well as traditional elements like motive and opportunity. He thinks that if you scratch London’s surface you’ll find a city beneath it that hasn’t changed in a couple of thousand years.’

  ‘He could be right.’ Shoemaker smiled at the thought. ‘A few weeks ago a national poll found that of two thousand randomly selected adults, sixty per cent couldn’t name the current prime minister. That’s about the same as in the late eighteenth century.’

  ‘Arthur has a mental attitude that allows him to see how and why crimes occur,’ May explained. ‘But there’s one thing that bypasses his ability to understand: the madness of passion. To him everything has a logical reason. You make a study of the irrational, which is why I’ve come to you.’

  ‘That’s not strictly speaking what I do.’ Shoemaker gave an order to the gallery’s café owner. ‘It’s more a matter of finding patterns in irrational behaviour. Don’t look so uncomfortable, Mr May. I’m not about to lead you down the path of pseudoscience.’

  ‘I just need to understand what we’re dealing with,’ said May, feeling as if his mind had been read.

  ‘If it’s someone with a violent behavioural pattern, there are certain things to look for,’ Shoemaker agreed. ‘The first murder will be the defining one. Before they cross that line they might not have consciously thought about killing anyone. There could be test runs. The first is the hardest; the rest come easier, but depression usually follows the kill, and gradually the highs are reduced. Killers talk about “crossing over” to a point from which they can never return.’

  ‘What triggers it in the first place?’ May found that their coffees had been delivered in paint-streaked jam jars on an artist’s palette, together with a bill for six pounds.

  ‘A number of elements have to fall into place,’ Shoemaker answered. ‘Stressors – the pressures we face in daily life – can build up, facilitated by stimulant abuse. More than half of all male attackers have had a fight with a female just prior to the trigger moment.’

  ‘So wha
t’s going on in our attacker’s head?’

  ‘He may have entered into a dissociative state where imagination takes over from reality. He often starts trolling for victims without realizing it. A killer may firmly believe he acted on the spur of the moment because he’s blind to the fact that he’s been preparing for months. Sometimes the victim’s age is important, or a certain look. Were the women similar in years and appearance?’

  ‘They were both blonde and slim, about the same build. Is there any significance in the locations chosen?’

  ‘A third of all such killings take place in parks or on open ground. How did they die?’

  ‘They were strangled with ligatures – we haven’t found what he used.’

  ‘That’s unusual.’ Shoemaker took a sip from her jam jar and appraised the matter coolly. ‘If the hands aren’t used, the killer usually improvises with an item of clothing taken from the victim. They weren’t missing anything?’

  ‘We don’t know exactly what they were wearing but no, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Were the ligature marks the same in both cases?’

  ‘Yes, they’re unusual – the material has some kind of ribbing on it, maybe a necklace or a sink chain.’

  ‘He may have fetishized a particular item and chosen it specifically as the method of killing. That suggests a degree of organization. I know this must all sound painfully generic to you …’

  ‘Maybe I can apply it to our list of suspects,’ said May doubtfully. ‘Is there anything unique I should look out for?’

  Shoemaker’s eyes grew even darker. ‘Were these quick kills?’

  ‘Yes, very. But they were in public places, so they had to be.’

  ‘Then you’re not looking for a sexual sadist. There’s no time for him to derive pleasure from seeing someone in pain. Did he take anything away with him?’

  ‘Not that we know of.’

  ‘Could he have considered either of the women “immoral”?’