‘The idea that all crimes leave a trace only works in controlled environments,’ said Bryant. ‘In a rainy park all bets are off. That’s the other element I’m having trouble with – the crime scenes. At first I thought he picked green spaces because there was no CCTV, but now I believe they simply provide the right setting.’
‘I don’t envy you your task, Mr Bryant,’ said Claxon, perusing the wine list for another assault. ‘In my world all murders have tidy solutions. You have to face the idea that yours may never be solved.’
‘So you’ve never used a park as the setting for a murder?’
‘Certainly, but that’s because of their wildness.’
‘Explain, please.’
Claxon sucked nuts from her teeth. ‘The city is built up and built over. We no longer connect to the earth. We can draw no sense of magic from concrete and steel, so we need parks to remind us of the beasts we once were.’
The search for Jeremy Forester continued into the night. The detectives pulled in favours from the Met’s surveillance teams and the City of London’s electronic fraud department, but no fresh information came in. May called GPS, who ran another check with the Rough Sleepers Community, and Bryant checked with the Haphazards, a loosely knit group of drifters, grifters and petty criminals who acted as the city’s eyes and ears if the money was right.
For good measure Bryant also put in calls to the National Warlocks’ Confederacy, the Dracula Society, the Camden Passage Druids and the Mystic Order of the Mandrill, all of whom were meeting over the weekend in central London pubs. He needed people who were out on the streets, in bars and cafés, on tubes and buses, who might have seen a limping, desperate man with nowhere to go.
An hour later, Bryant noticed a light under the door of Raymond Land’s office and wandered in to find the unit chief leaning out of his window with a cricket bat. ‘I’m trying to get rid of a pest,’ he explained. ‘I did what you asked.’
‘You spoke to Link?’
‘Not exactly. He wasn’t in, so I emailed him.’
‘You cowardly toad,’ said Bryant. ‘Why didn’t you call his mobile?’
‘I thought he might shout at me. It was easier to gather my thoughts in an email.’
‘Thoughts plural, that’s a start. You’d better call him first thing in the morning or he’ll come around here trying to catch us out.’ Bryant unstuck a lemon drop from a paper bag and popped it in his mouth.
Land gave up with the bat but left the window open, shaking raindrops from his sleeve. ‘Have you had any luck with Forester?’
‘Not yet, but we have calls out all over the city. He has no money and nowhere to go. I hope we get to him before Sun Dark does. We picked up the knife-chucking minion and got the “I know nothing” speech.’
‘Do you think Forester’s behind all this?’
Bryant sucked the lemon drop through his false teeth, thinking. The sound, not unreminiscent of vegetable soup being strained into a pot from a great height, was unappealing. ‘I don’t see how he can be. The loss of his son was the start of his downfall. Unless …’
‘Yes, unless?’ Land had a look of desperate hopefulness.
‘Unless his wife was somehow involved in the boy’s death, in which case several possibilities present themselves. Either Sharyn Buckland killed him and blamed the wife, or Helen Forester found some way to engineer the whole thing, and in both cases her husband found out, which makes about as much sense as you attempting to organize this gin dive with the aid of a business manual.’
Land guiltily slid the book into his desk drawer. ‘Isn’t your partner supposed to be helping you?’
‘He’s keeping me focused and providing me with all the data I need. My brain’s not working fast enough. I feel like you must feel all the time. Tomorrow’s our final day, and I can see no sign of a making an arrest unless—’
‘What if it’s just some lone nutter?’ said Land. ‘You know, like what Link was suggesting?’
‘Oh, to have your linguistic dexterity. I do wish you’d attempt to use grammatical English,’ said Bryant testily. ‘Talking to you is like watching a dubbed film.’ He descended into an armchair. ‘You mean in a city of eight and a half million people he just happened to pick three people who all knew each other? It’s as my author Leticia Claxon said: for a murder to be believable there can be no unlikely coincidences.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Land ran his hands over the spot where his hair used to be. ‘Unlikely deaths happen all the bloody time. God knows we’ve had our fair share of them here.’
‘That’s true,’ Bryant agreed. ‘Did you know the ninth-century Earl of Orkney was killed by an enemy he’d beheaded several hours earlier?’
Land knew he shouldn’t be diverted, but took the bait anyway. ‘How is that possible?’
‘He’d tied the man’s head to his horse’s saddle, but while he was riding home one of the skull’s protruding teeth grazed his leg and infected him.’
‘I suppose that was one of your early cases.’ Land sighed. ‘What are we going to do? Link will take the case away, Faraday will start flogging off bits of prime parkland, the unit will take all the blame, Steffi will go back to Cologne and make fun of us and that damned pigeon will keep dropping its guts on my windowsill.’
Bryant placed a sherbet lemon on Land’s desk like a votive offering. ‘I think you’re forgetting the most important thing, mon petit Pétomane. Three people will have died without anyone knowing how or why. But perhaps the killer hasn’t finished. Perhaps he’s not achieved what he set out to do. How can you take the life of someone like Helen Forester and not get caught? She seemed like a successful member of London society, but was actually very isolated. She had no real friends, not the kind you can call in the middle of the night and tell everything to. She was part of a new generation who don’t know who their neighbours are or what to do in an emergency. Loneliness: it’s an urban epidemic that impoverishes us all. At its core is the desperate desire to be reunited with your lost self. And now more victims must be added to that sad roll call because of a situation we caused.’ He stabbed a finger in Land’s direction. ‘Well, let me warn you, if we can’t close the case tomorrow we shouldn’t wait for someone to disband us, we should admit defeat and close the unit down ourselves, because we’re not worthy of the title. “Peculiar Crimes”, it says on that board outside. Remember why? “Crimes peculiar to the City of London”, according to the handbook. These are our people, Raymond, and we’re failing them. So now we have to continue for their sake, until we have nothing left to give.’
Land rested his fists on his hips. ‘Finished? I did enjoy that. The next time you feel like delivering a lecture on the duties of this unit, perhaps you can give Leslie Faraday a PowerPoint presentation instead of attacking me. I will not be your whipping boy any longer!’
‘You’re hardly a boy,’ said Bryant.
‘It’s all very well for you and John – and Janice, come to that – whispering and conspiring together like – like a pair of superannuated schoolboys and their sister—’
‘—and Jack,’ said Bryant, checking his sweet bag.
‘Yes, and Jack—’
‘—and Dan.’
‘Yes, he’s just as bad—’
‘—and Colin.’
‘Yes, yes—’
‘And the rest of us, all except you, Raymond. I can imagine how awful your school years must have been, the first to go down with measles, the last to be picked for the badminton team—’
‘I went to a boys’ school,’ Land pointed out.
‘Whatever, the point is that you’re a natural target because you’re incapable of making up your mind about anything. You’re crippled by indecision because you’re basically nice. You’re English, you’re lukewarm and drippy and reasonable and – nice. You’ve even let a pigeon beat you. A one-legged one.’
‘And how easy it must have been for you,’ Land snapped back, ‘the smart kids who always got the weak ones to
do whatever they wanted, making us run your errands, taking the blame for you, not being given a fag when you all had one, making me pay an extra shilling to park in your bloody bike racks.’
‘Hey, what’s going on in here?’ asked John May, coming in. ‘I could hear you in the street.’
‘Raymond wants a bike rack or something,’ said Bryant. ‘What were you doing in the street?’
‘I went to get a crayfish and rocket sandwich.’
‘Did you get me one? John, reassure Raymondo that we’ll close the case tomorrow or go down trying, will you?’
‘I don’t know, will we?’
‘Yes, we will,’ Bryant replied, gritting his teeth, or rather the teeth he currently owned. ‘We will find the killer and save the day, or I will leave this building tomorrow night and never come back.’
‘You say that like it’s a threat,’ muttered Land, disconsolately blowing his nose. ‘If you leave and don’t come back it’ll only be because you’ve forgotten the address.’
‘Try me,’ warned Bryant. ‘It’s going to be us against them, and this time you have to pick a side.’
40
‘IT’S THE PERFECT SPOT FOR A CONFRONTATION’
It was a bad night for all concerned.
While Jeremy Forester remained at large, hiding in the city’s unvisited corners, a sense of impending doom saturated the unit like a rising river. As Colin Bimsley and Meera Mangeshkar had only managed to assault a Spaniard in Regent’s Park, they stayed late to re-examine all the files they had collated. Infuriated by his inability to pinpoint the origin of the glass sample, Dan Banbury was also still at the unit far past midnight.
The detectives’ office was a mess. John May paced about, frustrated by the wealth of information that led nowhere, but Bryant was worse. Although his eyes burned with a bright intensity, he was leaden-limbed with exhaustion. Unable to settle, he roved between his desk and his bookshelves, searching for something he could not define. His hands hovered over yellowed pages, pawing at dust-covered history books, but for once these esoteric avenues of exploration failed to take him anywhere. Volumes on parks, gardens and squares had been pinned open with pieces of tape and were scattered about the room. It was enough to give a librarian a heart attack.
‘I tried tracing the transport police who were working the night Charlie Forester died,’ said May. ‘Sergeant Kemp-Bird didn’t know it but there were actually two other officers keeping an eye on the traffic. One took early retirement because of an old back injury and now lives in Spain. The other one died of liver failure in May after years of struggling with alcoholism. There was a constable on point duty, but she was away from the tunnel on Borough High Street and didn’t see anything. So there are no other witnesses to any conversation that took place between Lauren Posner and Sharyn Buckland that night.’
‘What about the ambulance crew?’ said Bryant. ‘Did you have any luck with them?’
‘One, the driver. She says Buckland went with the boy but wasn’t allowed to ride in the back of the vehicle because they’d started emergency treatment. She doesn’t remember details, but I pulled the duty log. They’d realized the boy was in trouble but couldn’t isolate the source of the problem. He was given a diluted bronchodilator in the form of a nebulizer to help him breathe. The driver was concentrating on getting them through the traffic in one piece. The EMTs burn out fast. You can’t expect them to remember everything. She said Ritchie Jackson followed them. The boy went straight into surgery and both Jackson and Buckland gave statements to the Admissions Nurse, neither of which we can find because the NHS computer system wasn’t backing up properly. There was a nurse present, but we’re still trying to find her. Both Jackson and Buckland thought that the girl in the red car should be brought in, but the officer didn’t deem it necessary.’
‘Was any effort made to trace her after?’
‘Not initially. Jackson complained a second time, and a fortnight later Sharyn Buckland was interviewed. We don’t have that statement, but it’s understood she didn’t add anything significant to what had already been reported.’
‘I thought I’d find the answer here,’ said Bryant wearily, waving his hand across the volumes spread before him. ‘It had to be someone living or spending a lot of time in the parks, to gain access, to know the secluded corners, to escape easily. Nearly half of this city’s residents were born abroad, five per cent don’t legally exist, fewer and fewer own their own homes. It’s not the city of my youth. I’m having trouble understanding it.’
‘Come on, has it ever really been different?’ asked May. ‘The migrants arrive because their harvests die and they’d rather be penniless in a foreign land than face starvation. It’s human nature to go where you think you’ll survive. And you still know more about this city than anyone.’
Bryant angrily slapped at the covers of his books, barely hearing his partner. ‘The parks are the answer. They’re here as a calming measure, like arboreal speed bumps. The modern world is an equation: time plus people equals productivity. You’re as bad as everyone else. You ask your barber to speed up your haircut, eat at your keyboard and stand in a windowless kitchen squeezing a teabag against the side of a mug because you don’t have time to let it brew.’
‘Arthur, you’re not making sense,’ said May gently. ‘Why don’t you go home? It’s Sunday now, there’s nothing more we can do. Go and put your feet up.’
‘It’s not just that I’m tired, I’m bloody furious. Three women are dead who should be alive. He killed first to survive and then because he grew to like it. Something made him this way, don’t you see? And we will never find out what that thing is because it’s simply not possible to sift through the formative experiences of everyone we’ve interviewed. Remember what I told you at the start of the week about the parks, how they represented the countryside but came to be enclosed? We have to keep them safe or we’ll have nothing left. People are living in tower blocks behind electronic gates, tricking themselves into thinking everything’s fine, but life is slipping out of kilter. And there’s nobody left now to remember how it once was. I wish …’
‘Hey,’ said May, ‘hey, come on.’
‘I wish I could go back. Just reset everything to the 1950s, when we thought we could rebuild the world. I never thought I’d say that, John. I want it back the way it was. I’m worn out. I wish I was young and fresh again. I wish—’
Opening his fist, he set a folded piece of postcard upon his desk.
May rubbed his partner’s back and waited while he wiped his eyes on his sleeve. ‘You don’t want it back, Arthur, not really. Everyone thinks they do but they don’t. When you weigh it all up, now is better. We do progress, even though it doesn’t always seem that way. Do you want to stay here tonight? Tell you what, we’ll go and talk to Ritchie Jackson first thing. We’ll try to get this sorted out.’
Bryant sat up and briskly straightened his jacket. ‘I didn’t mean to get maudlin. The treatment took a lot out of me. I get overwhelmed sometimes.’
‘I’ll make us some tea,’ said May.
‘No, it’s all right, I’ll make it – your tea always makes me think Crippen got caught short near the pot.’
As Bryant headed out to the kitchen, May picked up the postcard and opened it out. The girl was dressed in pale lace, with a makeshift tiara of little white flowers. She was standing by a small tree blooming with saucer-petal flowers, a pearl bush commonly known as the Bride. Head tilted down, she had been coaxed to give a shy smile for the camera. He instinctively knew who she was; it was the only photograph he had ever seen of Nathalie, the woman Arthur would have married. It must have been taken soon after their engagement. Neither of them could have foreseen the coming tragedy.
May placed the photograph back inside his partner’s desk and was about to call Ritchie Jackson when Bimsley swung into the room with more than his usual lack of coordination. ‘We’ve got another one,’ he said breathlessly. ‘St James’s Park, near the lake, Dan’s going t
here right now.’
When John May last took his BMW in for an MOT the mechanic was shocked by the state of his tyres. ‘It looks like you’ve been in a high-speed pursuit,’ he said, chuckling. Recalling that he had actually been in several since his last service, May had said nothing.
‘I don’t know why we can’t have one of those magnetic blue lights they place on the roofs of cars in American films,’ Bryant complained, recovered to his old self. If there was one thing you could always rely on, it was his ability to bounce back. ‘Doesn’t this thing go any faster?’
‘It’s London,’ said May. ‘We’re in a twenty-miles-per-hour zone.’
‘What’s the point of being a cop if you can’t wing the odd dustbin?’
‘The last time you drove to get to a crime scene you didn’t “wing the odd dustbin” as you put it. You drove through a garden fete. We arrived covered in bunting.’
‘Those cakes were dry,’ said Bryant. ‘I’m glad I didn’t have to eat them.’
‘You couldn’t have, seeing as they were all over the windscreen,’ said May. ‘Hang on.’ They cut through the red lights at Shaftesbury Avenue amid the blasting of horns and swung down towards Trafalgar Square.
The view from the Blue Bridge in St James’s Park was one of the most beautiful in London. At one end Buckingham Palace sat framed by trees. At the other, the Horse Guards parade ground was backed by the vaguely Arabian turrets of Whitehall. In the summer deckchairs were set out by the bandstand, but now the trees were bare and brittle in the spiky winter night.
They found Dan Banbury surrounded by tripod lights and a handful of sleepy pelicans who would not be moved from their spot beside the lake.
‘The bird-keeper saw something floating between the nesting sites.’ He led them past the medics, who were removing their body net from the lake edge. ‘Take a look. Eight stab wounds to the throat, thorax and stomach, and a deep, vicious defence slash across his right hand. It’s completely different methodology but – well, it would be pretty weird if it wasn’t connected.’ He pulled open the top of the net and revealed the staring face of Ritchie Jackson.
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