Wild Chamber

by Christopher Fowler

  Bryant gave his partner a look that said, See, you’ve set her off now.

  ‘You’re not going to tell me about druids,’ said May, pleadingly.

  ‘Not at all.’ Maggie waved the thought aside. ‘We know nothing about real druids. They left behind not a single artefact or image. But there is one thing that connects them to your victims – the idea of sacrifice. Pliny the Elder described a ritual in which druids cut down mistletoe growing on a sacred oak, killed two white bulls and created a potion to cure infertility. There were rituals to suit every occasion. Sacrificial points were constructed in elevated spots where sunrise could be observed – and every single one was in a park.’

  ‘So you think he’s carrying out sacrifices?’ asked Bryant. ‘He uses the same method each time, so it’s not simply about the disposal of some perceived enemy. He’s following a ritual.’

  ‘Wait, I’m not sure I believe that,’ said May uncertainly.

  ‘Many repeat kills have ritualized elements.’ Bryant drained his pint. ‘His happens to involve women and trees.’

  ‘Trees have great symbolic value,’ said the white witch. ‘They’re rooted in the earth with their heads in the air, but they need water and sun to grow, so all four elements are represented. They offer protection and are symbols of eternal life. The Vedic school of thought is that trees are a sacred, primal form of humanity that has accumulated great wisdom.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ protested May, ‘this is getting a bit too Lord of the Rings for me.’

  Maggie would not be swayed. ‘Individual trees have different meanings,’ she explained. ‘The ash tree symbolizes sacrifice, the oak means power, the fig and willow suggest perception and dreaming, the lime and magnolia, intimacy. Do you know which trees your victims fell beside?’

  May’s patience was wearing thin. ‘I haven’t a clue, Maggie. And somehow I don’t think it’s likely to have any relevance to our case.’

  ‘Then I suggest you study the locations more carefully.’ The white witch took a sip of her bilious-looking concoction. ‘Places have the power to haunt and disturb. Killers return to crime scenes in order to relive their experiences. He may be doing it because he has to, but he’s choosing parks because he needs to feel something very specific.’

  Bryant took the plastic bag from his pocket and removed the torn cinema ticket, pressing it into Maggie’s hand. ‘Tell me what you feel,’ he instructed. He wanted the white witch to prove her relevance to his sceptical partner.

  ‘You’ve just contaminated our only piece of evidence,’ said May, appalled.

  She stayed still with her eyes closed, slowly rubbing her palms in a circular motion. ‘He likes the trees,’ she said softly. ‘They make him feel safe. They prepare his victims.’

  ‘How do they do that?’ asked May.

  Maggie suddenly opened her eyes. ‘By absolving their sins,’ she said, ‘and preparing them for death. You should be looking for someone who idolizes women in their most natural and pure surroundings. Or one woman, perhaps. A defining experience that left its mark.’

  May was determined not to let his partner admit pseudoscience into the case. ‘Then here’s my problem,’ he said. ‘The suspects we’re looking at don’t have the kind of mindset you’re describing. One’s a gardener; the other’s a businessman. They have problems but they also have friends and lovers and jobs. They’re not lonely weirdos.’

  Maggie answered with the simple logic of a child. ‘Then they weren’t the only two people in the garden with Mrs Forester that morning. The owner of this cinema ticket was there. You need to start looking for the third person.’

  35

  ‘MISERY MAKES MONEY’

  They drank until ten p.m., after which Maggie Armitage wandered off on the arm of a complete stranger, a wild-haired creative consultant from Norway whom she decided had a healthy enough aura to conduct her to the tube station. More important, he had an umbrella, and it was bucketing down outside.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t share a taxi with you,’ said May. ‘I’m heading over the river.’

  ‘Not a problem, got a brolly.’ Bryant tapped his furled Smith & Sons on the tiled floor. ‘You be off. I may have a pipe before I head back. Alma’s banned me from smoking in the flat.’

  He dug out his tobacco pouch and watched as May hailed a taxi. Stuffing his pipe with Dick Deadeye Old Salt Marine Tobacco and tamping it down, he slipped into the alleyway beneath the pub awning and lit up.

  Bryant raised his nose and sniffed the air. Instead of smelling the sweet reek of seasoned tobacco leaf he picked up a different scent: aniseed and cloves, Parma violets and horse manure, old flavours recalled from childhood.

  ‘I saw a man stealing dogs here,’ said a low, lugubrious voice. ‘Short, reddish whiskers. Had a sack full of ’em kept at the alley. Long ago, of course. Always wondered what he did with ’em.’

  Bryant turned to see a tall, heavy figure calve itself from the shadows and loom towards him. Greying mutton-chop whiskers extended from a hatless head, almost to the start of a fulsome double chin. The eyes were surprisingly small but bright with life and curiosity, although his whole demeanour could easily be turned to wrath.

  ‘Are you waiting for the curtain?’ Bryant asked, awed.

  ‘Me? No, no.’ William Schwenck Gilbert tipped back his great square head and jetted cigar smoke into the rainy night. ‘My days for that have passed. I could hardly stand it inside the Savoy tonight, listening to them rustling their librettos like leaves in an autumn forest. The band is two violins short and of a very indifferent quality. They need to engage better string players. And the ladies are banging their fairy wands all over the stage, so that the diamonds in the heads keep dropping out. It’s less a revival, I feel, than a resuscitation.’

  Bryant looked back at the speaker’s grey sagging features and understood. His smoking companion was one half of British theatre’s most celebrated duo, but late in his life, and world-weary. Gilbert and Sullivan had fallen from fashion. Sadder still, Gilbert was now alone. Iolanthe had first been performed at the Savoy in 1882, but had been revived after Arthur Sullivan’s death. The great theatre was in its dying days. The impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte had quickly followed Sullivan to his grave, and his wife was overseeing the final few productions.

  Times were changing. From out in the Strand the hoot of automobile horns mingled with the clop of horses’ hooves. Gilbert had learned to drive, and had already been in an accident.

  ‘Yes, I spoilt a parson,’ Gilbert said, reading his mind, for he was but a figment of it. ‘He came off his bicycle. I went over the dashboard and my wife was pitched very comfortably into a hedge, where she looked like a large and quite unaccountable bird’s nest.’ He barked out a laugh.

  ‘May I just say that Iolanthe is one of my—’ Bryant began, but Gilbert raised his hand.

  ‘Please don’t tell me how you thought the music superior to the libretto. I sometimes think the audiences only came to see the new electric light.’ Gilbert drew on his cigar, making it glow and crackle. ‘I do miss him, you know. Nothing was ever as good again. People think Sullivan and I could no longer speak, but we were about to be reunited when he had the confounded temerity to die. He passed on the day of St Cecilia – the patroness of music. No topsy-turvydom there, just plain propriety. I suppose they let him into Paradise because he wrote “Onward, Christian Soldiers”. How typically Sullivan! Of course, I took the blame for our falling-out. How everybody loved Sullivan, so kind, so patient, so melodious. They saw me as a bitter, selfish creature. It was because I cared about the words. Was that so terrible? Genius exacts its price. Is it wrong to be demanding when one’s livelihood is at stake? You’re a detective, would you settle for less than best?’

  ‘You know me?’ Bryant’s blue eyes widened.

  ‘Well, I’m dead and you’re imagining me, so I should know you.’ Gilbert tapped the ash from his cigar over the alley grate. ‘I assume I’ve been returned for a purpose, so ask away
and let’s get it over with. What don’t you know about me? I kept lemurs in my garden. I’ve been to the cinema. I watched Crippen’s trial. I purchased the axe and block from The Yeomen of the Guard. I am six foot four inches tall. You know all this. Come then, ask away.’

  ‘Women,’ said Bryant.

  ‘Ah. And there you have me.’

  ‘Is it true that after dinner you used to send the men off and stay with the ladies?’

  ‘Not always, but often. The younger ones, anyway. My wife, my kitten, paid no heed. When everything you do and say is based upon the idea of paradox, you may behave as you wish.’

  ‘You drowned saving a young woman’s life.’

  ‘Yes, well. Folly was my foe and wit my weapon. Unfortunately pond water was my downfall.’

  Bryant knew all about his hero’s ingenious paradoxes, his balancing of warmth, comedy and darkness, an application that existed as much in his private life as on the page. ‘The older women,’ he said. ‘Katisha in The Mikado, Ruth in The Pirates of Penzance, Lady Jane in Patience. Why did you always make fun of them?’

  ‘Oh, that. I needed contraltos to balance my comic baritones,’ replied Gilbert. ‘And they weren’t so hard done by. I always married them off. Is that all you wanted to ask?’

  ‘Your relationship to women—’

  ‘Your impertinence is second only to your perseverance, sir, so let me answer thus. I made fun of them because I loved them; does that seem strange to you? Men are made by women, so we are right to question them. But we know women are superior, despite their tendency to be overabsorbed by their ideals, so we listen and learn from them. We place them on pedestals, set them in pastoral surroundings and idolize them, but when we have finished learning and they cease to be novel we allow our love to turn to dust. And that, my dear fellow, is the paradox of man.’

  ‘It won’t help me catch a murderer,’ groused Bryant.

  ‘I’m a librettist, not a consulting detective,’ said Gilbert tartly. ‘Might I suggest you employ the principle of paradox in your investigation? Why are you at odds with your partner? Surely you may both be right about these terrible acts, committed with both passion and purpose. What if the killer attacked with reason and discovered pleasure?’

  ‘That hadn’t occurred to me,’ Bryant admitted, puffing his pipe.

  ‘Then before I leave you I’ll trade you a question,’ said Gilbert, putting out his hand to see if the rain had ceased. ‘My theory of topsy-turvydom dictates that in British society no political measures can endure because one party will assuredly undo all that the other party has done. No social reforms will be attempted if there is no capital to be made. And while grouse can be shot and foxes worried to death, the legislative action of the country will remain at a standstill. In short, if you empty the buildings and fill the jails there will be general and unexampled prosperity. Misery makes money. Has all that come to pass?’

  ‘That and more,’ said Bryant. ‘The only difference is that we are powerless to do anything about it.’

  ‘Then I’m glad I had a voice and used it,’ Gilbert replied, withdrawing something shiny from his pocket. ‘This is a new invention. It’s called a reservoir pen. I was presented with it during the run of The Mikado. I have no use for it any more.’

  He handed the silver and tortoiseshell fountain pen to Bryant, then stepped out into the alley’s chill air. Turning in the direction of the Savoy Theatre, he released a baritone sigh. ‘We were as much an institution as Westminster Abbey,’ he said. ‘I am unmoored without him. There is no Gilbert without a Sullivan. Treasure your partnership with Mr May, and remember how lost he will feel when you are turned to dust.’

  ‘I’m only three years older than him!’ cried Bryant indignantly. ‘Bloody cheek. He might go first – he’s like you, he’s got a dodgy ticker!’ Gilbert was striding slowly away into the misted street. ‘You should never have argued over a bit of bloody carpet!’ he called. ‘And your last two operas were rubbish!’ No reply came from the empty swirl of mist.

  Bryant pocketed the fountain pen anyway.

  THE SIXTH DAY

  36

  ‘WE’VE COME FULL CIRCLE’

  Saturday morning saw the appearance of what Janice Longbright’s mother used to call ‘a continental sun’, as fierce blue skies sharpened the city’s bristling skyline.

  The headmaster of the Royal Order of St John in Blackheath answered Longbright’s call. ‘Nathan Buff, you say? I’m afraid we don’t allow the film club to be held here at the school any more.’ There was a cool edge to his voice. ‘Some of the audiences were rather too outré for us. Let me put you in touch with Fergus Carrington. He’s the art teacher who ran the cinema club here until I discovered the sort of things they were showing and asked him to find an alternative venue.’

  Longbright tried another number. On her fourth try she struck lucky. As it was Saturday, Carrington could be found at the National Film Theatre, so she headed for the South Bank.

  It felt appropriate that a nation whose film industry had passed from being on permanent life support to a state of assisted death should have its pantheon shoved beneath a railway bridge. The National Film Theatre was a building designed to punish people for enjoying movies, and proved there was such a thing as feng shui, if only because you knew when it wasn’t there.

  It was fair to say that Fergus Carrington was in touch with his inner film freak. On a freezing winter morning he was wearing an XXL Matrix Revolutions T-shirt advertising one of the least loved SF movies of the past fifty years, and smelled as if he’d been lifting bricks on a hot day. The Gandalf-bearded art master gazed upon Longbright as if she was being delivered to him gift-wrapped on a conveyor belt, a look that crossed the line from inappropriate to creepy in a matter of seconds.

  ‘What have I done to attract the attentions of such a lovely WPC?’ he asked, seating himself a little too far within the circumference of Longbright’s personal space in the NFT’s depressing coffee shop.

  ‘We don’t say WPC any more,’ said Longbright briskly, accepting the membership list she had requested from him.

  ‘These were all I could find,’ he explained. ‘Members are allowed to bring one guest, and we don’t keep records of those names.’

  Unfolding the page listing members from the Pictures in the Park subscription list, she compared the two. Four names fell into both groups. ‘Do you know any of these people?’ she asked.

  ‘Not personally but they may be on our website.’ He pecked at his phone and squinted. ‘Yes, they’re all paid-up members.’

  ‘And they’re all still active in your club?’

  ‘I only have their names, not their attendance details.’

  ‘What kind of films do you show?’

  Carrington looked suddenly wary. ‘We operate under club conditions, so we’re not governed by general exhibition certificates.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means we have a special licence to show films that have not been passed by the BBFC.’

  ‘You’re talking about pornography?’

  Carrington looked at her pityingly. ‘There’s no such thing, my love. We show countercultural art films, experimental shorts and cult rarities. Sometimes the members contribute works they’ve made themselves.’

  ‘A man called Nathan Buff told us that your club has some unusual guests and members.’

  ‘Oh, Nathan. That’s what you get for talking to someone in the pay of Hollywood. It’s true that we’ve hosted artists from the American adult film scene and have covered a number of transgressive subjects. But what our members watch and what they do in their private lives are entirely separate. It’s an academic forum.’

  ‘I appreciate that, Mr Carrington, but we’re looking for a man who follows women into public parks and chokes them to death.’

  Carrington shifted uncomfortably.

  ‘So it’s possible that he may be interested in watching others perform similar acts, even if it’s only make-b
elieve. Is there anyone on that shortlist who you think is capable of causing harm?’

  Carrington hesitated, and then appeared to reach an uncomfortable decision. ‘There’s one, but the name isn’t here.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Longbright.

  ‘We had someone who did rather bother me. There was a season back in the spring – films and documentaries about aberrant psychopathy, sadism, masochism, victim status and so on. Such events are intended to encourage legitimate dialogue around taboo subjects. Many of the people who come along have a professional interest in the issue under discussion. But I must admit I’ve wondered about some of the attendees.’

  ‘Can you recall any particular instances?’

  ‘There was one after-film conversation that especially disturbed me, partly because I remembered what happened later. We’d shown an uncertificated documentary called Narratives of Guilt and Conscience by a renowned American neuroscientist.’

  Someone dropped a tray of cups behind them. Longbright flinched, her concentration momentarily lost. ‘What was the film about?’

  ‘It used explicit documentary footage to explore the idea that the brain imposes a narrative on harmful events, which the individual must then decide whether or not to act upon. This person became very agitated and disrupted the discussion group so much that we had to call a halt to it.’

  ‘Do you remember his name?’

  ‘Yes, but – well, rather unusually, it was a woman. And she wasn’t interested in killing. She wanted to die. Her name was Lauren Posner.’

  ‘Posner,’ said Longbright. ‘She saw half a dozen films about victims, self-harmers and masochists, mostly academic documentaries, and subsequently took her own life.’

  ‘So we’ve come full circle,’ said Bryant. ‘All this time we’ve been following the wrong case. It didn’t begin with Helen Forester’s death, it started with her son’s killer. Hell’s teeth, I should have seen this.’