Wild Chamber

by Christopher Fowler

  Bryant decided to keep his counsel on that score. ‘Ms Posner attended a cinema club which held discussion groups about various states of neurosis and anxiety.’

  ‘She was drawn to self-examination. I tried to stop her. The films upset her.’

  ‘Did she ever take you?’

  ‘She usually went with a girlfriend.’

  ‘Do you remember her name?’

  ‘No, we never met.’

  ‘Does the name Sofia Anzelmo ring a bell?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Lauren kept her friends separate. She didn’t talk about them much.’

  Bryant studied the Bazalgette diagram once more. The system of pipes and floodgates seemed as complex and confusing as the case map on the PCU’s office wall.

  ‘A man of great foresight,’ he mused. ‘When Bazalgette planned London’s sewage network his calculations allowed a generous level of sewage production for every Londoner. At the last minute he realized he’d only ever do the job once and doubled the figures. If he hadn’t, London’s sewage system would have burst soon after the mass construction of tower blocks in the 1960s. I’d like to think that something I did would be of use 150 years later.’ He tapped his hand on the table in admonition. ‘Forgive me, I’m a foolish old man much given to fancies. I’ll be in touch if I hear anything more.’

  Aston watched as the shambling figure donned his hat and searched for the clearly marked exit door, repeatedly walking right past it. He wondered how such a fellow could have ever ended up in a police unit.

  38

  ‘WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT A SEVEN-YEAR-OLD BOY DEAD?’

  ‘Where is she going?’ Meera asked, trying to see over the heads of the tourists leaving Camden Town tube station.

  ‘Give me your hand,’ said Colin. ‘I’m not trying to touch you – look, just give me your hand.’

  When she realized why Colin was offering, Meera gave in. She was too short for the crowds of Camden, especially in the rain and poor light of late afternoon, when everyone slowed down. The area that had once been the home of hippies and antique dealers now housed seven markets owned by a single corporation. What the borough had gained in tourist currency the residents had lost in every other respect.

  It started to rain harder, and the giant statues of boots, skulls, snakes, jets and playing cards that hung from the low brick buildings were dripping sooty water on to the heads of Chinese coach parties. Camden’s markets were in thrall to images of old Las Vegas, tattoos and disco-era lighting.

  Colin dragged his colleague through a knot of selfie-snapping French students and out into Bayham Street. ‘She’s just ahead,’ he called back. ‘Stay with me.’

  They had arrived outside Sofia Anzelmo’s flat just as she was leaving it, and were not so much following as trying to keep up with her.

  ‘Now I remember why I never come up here any more,’ said Meera, forcing herself through a rat king of drunken neo-punks. ‘Look at all this crap.’ She pointed to a plastic Alice band of fibre-optic LED punk rock hair spikes labelled ‘Crazy! Anarchic!’ and grimaced. ‘Made in China, £14.99. Bloody hell.’

  ‘Hang on, she’s crossing the road,’ warned Bimsley.

  ‘Why don’t we just confront her?’

  ‘Because Janice doesn’t want us to. Anzelmo’s not considered a part of the main investigation. If we’re going to build a case by tomorrow, we have to justify every step.’

  ‘She thinks we’re going to screw up, doesn’t she?’

  ‘She’s just watching out for us, Meera. Darren Link is checking every move the unit makes. She’s heading towards Regent’s Park. Come on.’

  The crowds were thinning. The tourists stayed on the narrow strips of pavement that led to and from the markets.

  Sofia Anzelmo was wearing a leopard-pattern raincoat and carrying several bright red shopping bags that made her stand out. Darting through the stalled, steaming traffic, she slipped into the park as Colin and Meera broke into a run behind her.

  Regent’s Park was the largest of central London’s royal parks. Bordered by Marylebone, Camden and the Grand Union Canal, it was overlooked by the city’s most elite terraces. From its tree-shrouded theatre and Victorian zoological gardens to its Nursemaids’ Tunnel, built to let nannies take their charges to the park without having to cross the road, it retained a sanctified, affluent air. Formally landscaped with fountains and lakes, it was a country park in the heart of the city.

  Sofia Anzelmo left the footbridge over the green canal and turned on to a long diagonal path. ‘She’s cutting across the park,’ said Colin. ‘I think she’s heading for her office in Baker Street.’ He had been playing football here since he was five, and had brought his first date to the boating lake. In the zoological gardens the chimps had stopped having tea parties and the camels no longer gave rides, but occasional roars could be heard from creatures kept far from their natural habitats.

  ‘You can let go of my hand now, Colin.’ Meera’s fingers were going numb.

  ‘Yeah. Right. Sorry. We can catch her.’

  As this part of the park had no gates, Anzelmo was able to pass swiftly and easily through the grasslands. For a moment they lost sight of her beneath the street lamps, but as she reappeared it was clear that someone else was following her. As the figure lurched into the long grass and made to cut her off, Meera ran forward and threw herself on to his back. The pair went over into a mud puddle as Anzelmo screamed.

  ‘Get off me – I was just going to talk to her,’ said the Latin-accented young man.

  ‘Why?’ Meera demanded to know as she helped him to his feet. ‘What were you going to talk to her about?’

  ‘Why?’ He looked at her as if she was insane. ‘Why? She’s a pretty girl. Is that a crime?’

  ‘See, this is why Janice doesn’t like us acting alone,’ said Colin, breaking off from explaining to Sofia why they were there. ‘That’s the second time you’ve done that.’

  ‘You’ve ruined my jeans,’ said the young Spaniard. ‘You can pay to have them cleaned.’

  ‘Piss off before I run you in,’ warned Meera.

  ‘Here you go, mate,’ said Colin, handing him a tenner. The man took it without another word and limped off.

  ‘God, you’re a soft touch.’ She turned to Anzelmo. ‘We’re police officers, Miss Anzelmo. Are you all right?’

  ‘You nearly gave me a heart attack.’ She looked about herself to make sure that she hadn’t dropped anything. ‘Were you following me?’

  Meera felt a fool. ‘It’s part of our ongoing surveillance. We understand you knew Lauren Posner? You attended the cinema club she went to?’

  Anzelmo brushed herself down. ‘No, she told me about one of the films, though. She gave me a flyer for it.’

  ‘Yeah, we found it in your bin.’

  ‘You’ve been going through my rubbish? Wouldn’t it have been simpler to ask me?’

  ‘How did you know her?’

  ‘We had a friend in common, Ritchie Jackson,’ she explained.

  ‘How did he know her?’

  Sofia rolled her eyes. ‘They’d both been involved in the same accident. They talked about it online. I think she found him on Facebook from the name on his truck. The three of us went for a drink together one time. Didn’t Ritchie tell you that? You lot don’t communicate very well, do you?’

  ‘What was Lauren Posner like?’ asked Meera, wiping the mud from her jeans.

  ‘She seemed like she had a lot of problems.’

  ‘What kind of problems?’

  ‘She was very nervous, drinking fast, talking about how terrible her life was. I asked her if she’d ever considered therapy but she said she wouldn’t be able to handle it. I promised to go to the movies with her but then Ritchie started getting serious with me and – well, you don’t stay in touch with everyone when you split up with a partner, do you?’

  ‘Do you remember anything specific about the meeting, anything that could help us?’ Colin asked.

  ‘There was o
ne thing,’ said Anzelmo. ‘Lauren said she could have prevented what happened to that little boy. I thought it was an odd thing to say. I don’t know, she didn’t talk a lot of sense. But she kind of implied that it wasn’t an accident.’

  ‘OK, we’ve turned up samples from the site in London Bridge where the traffic accident occurred,’ said Dan Banbury, turning his laptop so that everyone in the operations room could see. ‘An enterprising member of the EMT snapped them on his phone before the street was cleared, and tried to match them to the glass sliver that was taken from Charlie Forester’s head.’

  He tapped the first shot. ‘This is a splinter from the wine bottle that broke when Posner’s car mounted the kerb. As you can see, it’s green and jagged. The cheaper the glass the more likely it is to fracture, and this burst into many tiny fragments. The second shot shows some of the debris on the ground. There have been a number of accidents at this spot before. We can exclude windscreen glass because it’s laminated to break into smooth-edged globules. This third shot shows a sliver of glass from a wing mirror, which is toughened and hard to shatter. Finally, we have the fragment that was extracted from the back of Charlie Forester’s eye.’

  John May leaned forward, squinting at the screen. ‘But that doesn’t look like any of the pieces you’ve shown us.’

  ‘It’s small, less than half a centimetre, but unfortunately lodged in the corner of the eye where it was able to pass to the back of the socket, into the artery containing the optic nerve and then to the brain. The hospital didn’t keep the piece so we only have this photograph to go by. The sliver doesn’t appear to have come from any of the known sources.’

  ‘Then how did it get into his eye?’ asked May. ‘Could somebody have fired it from a home-made device?’

  ‘That’s a rather fanciful idea,’ said Banbury, although the same thought had briefly crossed his mind. ‘The theory poses more questions than it answers, because the chances of it entering at that exact point and passing into the artery are small. But there are precedents. I found a case of a child losing her eye from a sliver of foil on a chocolate bar wrapper, and another in which a woman passed a breadcrumb from her thumb to her eye. She died of septicaemia after the crumb was introduced into her tear duct. Anyone can die from anything if luck is against them.’

  ‘So where did this piece come from?’ May persisted.

  ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever know the answer to that.’ Banbury shook his head. ‘I went down to the site this morning and found over a dozen different fragments of glass that had missed the mechanical sweepers. Most of them are so small that they would have to be identified at a microscopic level.’

  ‘The traffic cop, Sergeant Samuel Kemp-Bird,’ said Longbright, scanning her tablet, ‘he gave a press interview about the incident and was very clear about where he felt the blame lay. He’d understood there was to be another traffic control officer at the mouth of the tunnel directing pedestrians away from the vehicles, but this position was never assigned. Kemp-Bird saw the boy bend low, then stand and rub his eye.’

  ‘Can we talk to him?’

  ‘Unfortunately Kemp-Bird died of cancer two months ago.’

  ‘I have to say it feels like an accident. There’s no evidence to assume it’s anything but.’ Banbury closed his laptop with an air of finality. ‘That’s where our real problem lies. It’s hard to impose a narrative structure on what was simply a series of bad decisions.’

  ‘So Posner blamed herself for Charlie Forester’s death,’ said May, ‘and Helen Forester was strangled nearly a year after losing her son – why the gap? And if the intention was to kill the nanny as well, why not take care of her first? The mother wasn’t in the tunnel when the accident occurred but she did get to the hospital, along with Ritchie Jackson, who lost his job for showing compassion, and Sharyn Buckland, who also felt responsible. But none of them has a motive. Why would anyone want a seven-year-old boy dead?’

  Before anyone could react to the question, Steffi Vesta appeared in the doorway. ‘Mr Forester has checked himself out of the University College Hospital without his doctor’s permission. He stole another patient’s clothes along with some money and a phone. Nobody knows where he has gone. I have the duty nurse on the line right now.’

  May’s partner had been silent for an inordinately long time. ‘Arthur, do you have any idea where he might go?’ May asked, and then looked around. His partner had disappeared.

  39

  ‘IT’S AN URBAN EPIDEMIC’

  Leticia Claxon had been writing murder mysteries for forty years. Clearly she could not use her family name (which was actually worse, as her middle name was Merriwether, apparently pronounced Midditch, in memory of her titled grandmother) so she went under the pseudonym of Alice Sharp.

  Now so desperate that he was prepared to take theories from a crime writer, Bryant had lured Ms Claxon to the Lighterman pub on Regent’s Canal with the intention of picking her brain. The idea had precedent: Winston Churchill had once hired the supernatural writer Dennis Wheatley to advance theories about how Germany would set about invading England from the shores of France, so why shouldn’t a policeman talk to a novelist?

  Claxon was a writer of considerable ingenuity and surprising intellect. She was, however, no prose stylist. In the literary landscape, her words landed like a series of house bricks upon which unwary readers stubbed their toes. Claxon herself had an air of breeding and distinction so carefully cultivated that no one would guess she had once been a housemaid in a Hampstead mausoleum belonging to a wealthy Chinese family – a house she had since been able to purchase with the profits from A Killer’s Eyes, a novel filmed with two Hollywood stars who possessed such little on-screen chemistry that they had, with grim inevitability, married in real life, their names amalgamating into a single word, much as seaside villas once bore the names of their owners.

  Short and slender and expensively turned out, she brushed at the hem of her floral Dries Van Noten frock, folded herself into a corner chair and waited for her white Rioja to be delivered. She had come to enjoy being waited upon.

  ‘A murder mystery’, she told Bryant as he accepted a cloudy pint of Camden Liver Damage, ‘is an intellectual exercise, a game between reader and writer in which a problem is precisely stated, elaborately described and surprisingly solved. The traditional rules of fair play demand that the criminal must be someone we’ve met. There can be no supernatural elements, no secret passages, no imaginary poisons, no Chinamen, no twins, no mystical intuitive powers, and the detective himself can’t have done it. To them I would add several further moratoria: no more alcoholic policemen with dead wives, no autistic idiot-savant crime scene specialists, no oppressed female detectives derided by sexist colleagues, no overweight computer nerds in dimly lit rooms, no erudite killers arranging corpses in tableaux reminiscent of medieval paintings, no renegade detectives sharing a psychic bond with the killer, no cryptic messages hidden in museums by victims, no opera-loving loners who solve crimes because without them their lives would have no meaning, and absolutely no more reinventions of Sherlock Bloody Holmes.’ She seized her wine gratefully and took a swig.

  ‘Do you think you’d make a good murderer?’ asked Bryant, intrigued.

  ‘Heavens, no, the real thing is far too messy.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Murder hardly ever goes according to plan in real life.’

  ‘But does crime fiction ever inform fact? Are people influenced by what they read and watch?’

  ‘It’s a two-way street.’ Claxon tore open a packet of nuts and necked a fistful. ‘The idea that fatal doses of poison can be built up over time goes back to Charles Bravo and Dr Crippen. Strange gadgets and unusual alibis are found in police manuals as well as novels. Look at Charlie Peace’s collapsible burglary ladder in the Crime Museum if you don’t believe me. A few of Conan Doyle’s observational ideas made it into police procedure – ballistics, toxicology, footprints and so on – but fictional killers are usu
ally more intelligent and organized than their real-life counterparts. However, the two can cross over from time to time, so that murderers emulate characters and vice versa. What you’ve described to me doesn’t sound as if someone copied it from a book. The deaths aren’t gory enough, for a start. There are no decent car chases or violent internal conflicts, and none of the traditional tropes are present – except one.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Bryant cut a Scotch egg in half and smeared it with mustard pickle.

  Claxon brushed nuts from her cleavage. ‘You’ve got your own version of a locked-room mystery, a strangler who appears and vanishes unseen from a private park. Forgive me for sounding callous, but it’s the sort of creaky melodramatic idea that would have seemed old hat in the 1930s.’

  ‘Then I shouldn’t be looking for a clever killer with an elaborate plan,’ said Bryant. ‘I should be forming a much simpler and more obvious conclusion.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s so,’ Claxon agreed. ‘You’ll probably find out that the murderer followed your victim into the park because she didn’t shut the gate properly. It’s a more realistic solution, just not as satisfying. Of course, you’re asking the wrong person about such things. I’m only good at doctored cocktails and electric cables hidden inside bedsprings.’ She shook her pixie cut sadly. ‘When it comes to real-life murder, I simply don’t have the lack of imagination for it.’

  The pair ordered again, surprised to be relaxing in each other’s company. Bryant took a sip of his Hoxton Spleen Cleaver and set it aside at the far edge of the table. ‘We’ve got a couple of obvious suspects. The obsessive gardener, Ritchie Jackson, and the bankrupt husband, Jeremy Forester. The other two, the ambitious wife and the loving nanny, are both dead, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t involved.’

  ‘Can’t you sort out this kind of thing with DNA testing?’