Wild Chamber

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘After I broke up with Ritchie he wouldn’t leave me alone,’ said Anzelmo. ‘He was very persistent.’ She shifted uncomfortably on her counter stool. The barista served them decaf soya lattes in dainty floral teacups and two pieces of hemp-seed cake on a plank.

  ‘How long were you going out?’ asked Longbright, taking notes.

  ‘Nearly two years. He wanted us to move in together, settle down and have kids, but I wasn’t ready for that.’

  ‘How did you let him know?’

  ‘We went for a drink and I tried to break it as gently as possible, but he didn’t appear to understand what I was saying. So I had to tell him there wasn’t a future for us. He was more shocked than I expected. I thought I’d finally got through to him, but the next night he turned up at my parents’ flat. My mum really likes him, so she let him in and then told me I should be nice to him.’

  ‘I’m afraid mothers have a habit of doing things like that,’ said Longbright.

  Sofia broke off a piece of cake, but was too agitated to eat. ‘I just couldn’t get him to go away. I blocked his number but it made no difference. He started following me home from work. He was never threatening, he was just always – there, like a clinging shadow. He kept sending me notes and always seemed to turn up in the neighbourhood when I went shopping. I mean, I felt sorry for him but I heard he’d done this before.’

  ‘You said you nearly got a restraining order. You didn’t get one?’

  ‘No, partly because of my mother, who took his side, partly because he’d never threatened or tried to hurt me in any way. His persistence made me feel uncomfortable. I thought I could deal with it myself and go to the police if the problem continued.’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  ‘No, he finally gave up. He couldn’t see what he was doing to me. I felt sorry for him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’d had a bad time at home – his mother had walked out when he was eight or nine; his father was a drunk. He didn’t seem able to keep jobs for very long. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying all this because he deserves a break, but when I heard that he’d been photographing the woman who died … well, his behaviour just seemed’ – she searched for the right word – ‘consistent.’

  ‘So he pestered you. You’re sure there was no threat of physical violence? He never tried to contact you on social network sites?’

  ‘No, nothing like that.’

  ‘If you didn’t think he was a danger, why did you come here?’

  ‘Because of the photographs,’ said Anzelmo. ‘There was a report on the news that Mrs Forester had been photographed just before her death. I know where Ritchie works. That’s how I met him, you see. He took a photo of me in Holland Park. He said I looked like an angel. I said that would make me dead, and he just laughed.’

  She removed a folded piece of paper from her bag and smoothed it out. Anzelmo was in the centre of the shot, seen from the side, fecund greenery forming a lush backdrop behind her. Longbright couldn’t help noticing how remarkably similar it was in construction to the picture Ritchie Jackson had taken of Helen Forester.

  As Leslie Faraday battled his way through the placard holders outside the House of Commons he decided he was sick of do-gooders. The something-for-nothing brigade was on his back again. Shutting the parks had been misconstrued by some to mean that his allies in the civil service were planning to start privatizing them, when nothing could be further from the truth.

  All he wanted was a little piece of the action. He had all the figures in a folder: London was home to the world’s largest urban forest. Some eight million trees existed in the green spaces that took up nearly half the city. In High Barnet there existed a tree that was two thousand years old! In the thirty-three boroughs there were more than thirteen thousand species in three thousand parks, thirty thousand allotments and three million gardens, and what was the one thing you never saw in all this green space? Children! The little buggers were indoors on their PlayStations while all of this beautiful, usable land went to waste.

  London was desperately short of spaces capable of hosting large corporate functions. Chunks of Hyde Park and many of London’s squares were now closed for private hospitality events in the summer, but how many more could play their part in enticing sponsorship? He just needed to push the door open wider, set aside a dedicated area in every park, garden and square for use by businesses and in time the rest would follow. Most green spaces were shut at night, and all that profitable time was lost. By locking the parks the government was reminding the public that usage was a privilege, not a right.

  Faraday knew he would be forced to reopen them after the PCU had gone and the case had passed to the CID, but the new security force was ready to go. They would need to be quartered in the parks, which meant new buildings. He could get prefabricated ones erected in days. From there, it was simply a matter of expanding outward. Utilities, construction, contracts to be awarded … the next few weeks were going to be very busy indeed.

  Locating his limousine, Faraday made for the door and was hit with a barrage of eggs.

  He turned to see who had attacked him and was confronted by a bunch of West Indian church ladies armed with produce and placards reading ‘Nature belongs to God not government!’ He dropped himself into the back seat of the limo just as the rest of the crowd realized who he was and came running towards him.

  ‘Drive over them if you have to!’ he shouted at his driver. Somebody filmed him through the window, lip-read his words and posted the comment online before he made it back to the office.

  It made no difference; Faraday was triumphant. In the folder on his lap lay the remaining permissions he needed to extend the closures to every park in London.

  As he sat back in the purring black Jaguar, he turned back to the list of company directors who he knew would be interested in grabbing a prime piece of London real estate.

  30

  ‘WHERE DO YOU PLACE THE RESPONSIBILITY?’

  As the detectives approached the entrance to the British Library, they might have been forgiven for thinking that Arthur Bryant’s hallucinations had taken corporeal form and burst out into the real world; the foyer was filled with giant red and green mushrooms, and trestle tables were laid out with sandwiches and cakes for a Victorian tea party. They entered just as the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts arrived with Tweedledum and Tweedledee. A jazz band was playing the theme from Frozen.

  ‘Welcome,’ said a young woman dressed as a giant green caterpillar, an effect spoilt only by her Nike trainers. ‘Are you joining us for our Lewis Carroll celebration?’

  ‘No, I am not, madam,’ said Bryant sharply as he unlooped his scarf. ‘We’re here for—’

  ‘Bryant!’ boomed Ray Kirkpatrick, charging over with his arms outstretched and crushing him in such a bear hug that the detective’s boots left the floor. Dropping him, the ursine academic waved a hand over the Wonderlandians. ‘Look at this bloody shambles. It’s exactly what’s wrong with libraries. They’re treating Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as if it’s the only Victorian book anyone can recall. These twerps have modelled themselves on the Disney version, not the original Tenniel drawings. Populism in action – this is what happens when you allow your programming to be dictated by the kind of people who eat crisps at home. No wonder kids don’t read any more, they’re too bloody embarrassed.’

  ‘How would you like to join us for tea?’ asked the Mad Hatter.

  ‘How would you like a knuckle sandwich?’ asked Kirkpatrick, bunching a fist at him. ‘It’s a total pain in the arse having to walk past them every morning. You’re not even allowed to touch their biscuits. I got into a punch-up with the dormouse yesterday. He doesn’t like it when you stamp on his tail. Go on, get back in the sea!’ he shouted at a girl dressed as a walrus.

  ‘It does seem a bit over the top,’ May agreed.

  ‘Over the top? I expect my libraries and churches to be like my ex-wife: unlovely, unforgiving and underheated when you�
��re inside them. I’m assuming you’re here with the details of some gruesome bloody murder? Last time I saw you, you were looking for a killer and asking me about Dickens. What is it this time? Let me guess: you’re after a mad bomber and want to know about Charlotte Brontë.’

  ‘We’re not here for you today, I’m afraid,’ said Bryant. ‘John and I have arranged to meet a chap called Duncan Aston.’

  ‘That’s a pity. I always enjoy hearing about your warped version of policing.’ Kirkpatrick had a scratch around inside his immense beard, pulled something out and flicked it at the Cheshire Cat. ‘Come on, I’ll swipe you in.’ Grabbing both of them by their arms he yanked them through a crowd of schoolchildren. ‘Get out of the way, you damned homunculi! Duncan works in the maps room upstairs, room B230. Is he a suspect? Have we a lunatic in our midst?’

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you,’ said May as they climbed the stairs. ‘We’re conducting interviews. Are you here full time now?’

  ‘Nah, I’m just filling in until Motörhead starts advertising for a new frontman. I’m analysing Elizabethan playscripts on Thursdays and Fridays, gigging with my band on Mondays, fixing websites on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and working as a film extra at the weekends.’

  ‘I think I saw you in The Revenant,’ said Bryant. ‘I loved the bit where you dragged Leonardo DiCaprio around by his spine.’

  ‘Go ahead, mate, have your laugh. I’ve got four jobs that just about keep my head above water. What will you have when the PCU goes?’

  ‘Who said it’s going anywhere?’ asked May, puzzled.

  ‘I guess you’re still not reading the papers.’ Kirkpatrick lifted a confused child aside, setting it down the wrong way around. ‘The Evening Standard reckons you’re being investigated over this business of closing the parks. They say the civil disobedience is all your fault.’

  ‘I must admit I never thought it would get the go-ahead,’ said May.

  ‘There’s going to be a massive protest rally in Westminster tonight. It’s the thin end of the wedge. I imagine the mayor’s office will start charging people to walk along the sodding streets before privatizing the Thames and putting ten-pound entry turnstiles on all park gates. They already charge for the New Year’s Eve celebrations we’ve prepaid in our taxes. At least the congestion charge does what it says on the tin: you pay a tenner to sit in congestion. They’d make us pay for the air if its quality wasn’t so shit. Here you go.’

  He pushed open the door to the antique maps room.

  The detectives found themselves in a windowless municipal office with eyeball-parching light panels. The wide desks held books of old maps that looked impossible to open or even hold flat. In a half-hearted attempt to brighten the environment, the walls were filled with poor quality Monet and Degas reproductions. Duncan Aston glanced up as they approached but didn’t rise. He checked his watch.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, holding out his hand to each of them, ‘which one is which?’

  ‘I’m Mr Bryant, he’s Mr May,’ said Bryant.

  ‘I was going to come down and meet you and got caught up in this. You tend to lose all track of time in here.’ Aston indicated the inked vellum map laid out on his desk. He was bespectacled, thin and sun-starved, with a complexion that suggested he would benefit from being in a room with natural light. In the habit of working in the isolation of deep concentration, he sat in a slouch and averted his eyes as if the mere idea of a conversation made him impatient for it to end.

  Seeing the great map, Bryant was instantly diverted from the task at hand, as May feared he would be. ‘What is this?’ he asked, intrigued.

  ‘New York’s birth certificate,’ Aston explained, glad to be asked. ‘The so-called Duke’s Plan, presented to James, Duke of York, after whom New York was named. As you can see, Manhattan was already in place. That’s the town wall that gave its name to Wall Street, and there’s the canal running up the middle which became Broad Street. It feels very Dutch, unsurprisingly.’

  ‘It’s in good nick.’ Bryant peered at it through his trifocals. ‘Smells funny, though.’

  ‘Vellum is cured goatskin. The map was protected by a curtain before we inherited it as part of the king’s topographical collection in the 1820s.’ Aston daintily peeled off his white cotton gloves. ‘It’s getting a bit of rot now, so we’re treating it. What can I do for you?’

  ‘We’re investigating the deaths of Sharyn Buckland and Helen Forester,’ said May.

  ‘This is about Charlie Forester, isn’t it?’ said Aston. ‘“The little boy with everything to live for.” We may not get out much but we get all of the papers delivered up here.’

  ‘His mother and nanny are both dead,’ said May. ‘Lauren Posner was the young lady who—’

  ‘Please don’t say it.’ Aston raised a hand. ‘Don’t say my girlfriend caused his death. Let’s not bring all that up again. She had to live with the press’s accusations.’

  ‘Can you tell us what happened?’ asked Bryant.

  Aston’s mood clouded. ‘Do I have to? It’s all on record.’

  ‘We’d like to hear about it in your own words.’

  The map restorer gave a shrug. ‘Lauren was bright and fragile. Her parents pushed her hard. When she was young she was given extra tuition every evening and weekend. They wouldn’t let her take time off even in school holidays. Piano, ballet, Spanish, French, the sciences. She studied theatre and wanted to be an actress. My mother had been a classical actress, so I could understand what drove her. But things went wrong for Lauren. At eighteen she suffered a nervous collapse. She was never the same after that.’

  ‘How old was she when you met her?’

  ‘She’d just had her twenty-fourth birthday. We met through a mutual friend at a book launch and hit it off at once. She wasn’t easy to get along with. I was fairly well equipped to deal with her because I’d had my own share of problems in the past.’

  ‘Mainly alcohol issues, I understand,’ said Bryant.

  Aston’s attitude cooled at once. ‘You’ve been checking up on me?’

  ‘Part of the job, I’m afraid. How long were you living together?’

  ‘About three years. Lauren was very sensitive, a practising Catholic, and the accident affected her badly.’

  ‘But it was an accident.’

  ‘So I understand.’ He didn’t sound entirely sure. ‘Lauren had a job in a charity shop in Greenwich. She couldn’t handle any kind of pressure. She’d been talking about moving out of London and living somewhere less crowded, perhaps by the sea, but I didn’t want to commute.’

  ‘Let’s go to the night of the accident,’ said May gently.

  ‘I think it was the first weekend in February, Saturday night. We’d arranged to go to a party in Blackheath. Neither of us liked parties but a friend of Lauren’s was leaving to work in Cape Town and she felt she should say goodbye. I had to be at work the next morning – we often work early on weekends here because you can concentrate without being interrupted – so we said we’d just stay for an hour. We lived in Kilburn, which meant crossing London. When it was time to leave she said she was enjoying herself and didn’t want to go, but I’d had enough and left. She said she’d see me at home.’

  ‘Did you argue about this?’

  ‘No, not really – we were in different moods, that’s all. I got home, watched some TV and went to bed. She got back a couple of hours later. She was in a terrible state. She explained about the accident.’

  ‘What was your reaction?’

  ‘I told her she shouldn’t have left the scene and should have gone with the ambulance. We talked about it for a while, by which time it was late, and she wanted to sleep.’

  ‘So she didn’t know at that point that Charlie Forester had died.’

  ‘No. Even so, I told her she should go to the police the next day, just to give details and explain why she’d left, you know, in case they came looking for her.’

  ‘But she didn’t go.’

  ‘I don’t know wh
at happened but she ended up not going. And the police never called. I thought they would, but they didn’t.’ He looked from one of them to the other. ‘It wasn’t her fault. There was a detour under the station and the truck in front of her suddenly slammed on its brakes, so that she was forced on to the pavement. There was an elderly officer on point duty, due for retirement, a Sergeant Samuel Kemp-Bird. I remembered reading about him because it was such an unusual name. Linguistics is rather our passion up here. Anyway – where was I?’

  ‘It wasn’t her fault,’ reminded May.

  ‘That’s right. Lauren said her car never went anywhere near the boy. It hit a – what do you call those things? A box full of telephone cables. But the wing mirror cracked and a bottle was knocked off the top of the cabinet, and somehow a sliver of glass flew out and hit him.’

  ‘From which, the wing mirror or the bottle?’

  Aston shrugged. ‘I d-don’t know.’ May now understood Aston’s reluctance to talk; his stutter manifested with the effort of recounting the story. ‘The c-coroner’s report was inconclusive. The glass worked its way around the back of the boy’s eye and s-severed the optic nerve, causing a clot, which then entered his brain – something like that. The surgeon found a tiny piece of glass but couldn’t identify its origin.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Bryant. ‘If it came from the wing mirror—’

  ‘We w-weren’t kept informed about it,’ Aston explained. ‘We only knew what we read online. By this time Lauren had returned the car – it was her brother’s – and he had replaced the mirror. She thought that the glass was more likely to have come from the empty wine bottle on the cabinet because, you know, it was m-more breakable. There were homeless people sleeping in the tunnel, and I guess one of them had been drinking. But by that time the detour had been d-dismantled and the road had been washed clean. I suppose it’s irrelevant how the thing got into his eye. When Lauren found out that he’d died she began to blame herself. I couldn’t understand why the police didn’t look for her. Then I read that the traffic officer had got himself into trouble.’