Wild Chamber

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘The poor devil,’ said May. ‘He was a nice bloke.’

  ‘His attacker’s going to be covered in blood right now,’ said Bryant. ‘Someone’s bound to notice him. I assume you’ve put out the call, Dan?’

  ‘Before I got here,’ said Banbury. ‘Jackson’s last phone call came from a blocked number at ten sixteen p.m. It suggests to me that he was meeting someone because the call pinged at the Birdcage Walk telecom tower, so it was made locally. Adding the time he took to walk here from Charing Cross Station, where his travel card flagged, I’d estimate he died between eleven and eleven fifteen p.m. What I don’t understand is why he took the chance of coming alone. He could have armed himself, but there’s nothing on his body except his phone, wallet and flat keys, so we’ll have to dredge the lake. Unfortunately, to do that we need to get permission from the landlady.’

  ‘The landlady?’ asked May.

  ‘Her Majesty is in residence at the moment,’ said Dan, pointing in the direction of Buckingham Palace, ‘and it’s her lake. This whole park functions as her front garden. She’s already had an intruder sit on the end of her bed in the middle of the night. I’d rather it didn’t get out that someone was murdered in her flowerbeds and chucked into her duck pond.’

  ‘Do you know exactly where he was attacked?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘I’ve a pretty clear idea. He certainly wasn’t drowned. There’s some mud and disturbed gravel on the path, just over here.’

  Banbury walked them to a taped-off patch of track leading to the lakeside. May knelt and ran a torch over the bloody striations. ‘No air-rifle pellets this time. Whoever did this will need to change his clothes fast.’

  ‘What if someone close to one of the victims knew that Jackson was the killer and decided to take matters into their own hands?’

  Dan rubbed his nose, unhappy at the idea. ‘It would explain the different method and the aggression of the assault, Mr B., but it offends my sense of order to think we might have two murderers on our hands.’

  May called Sofia Anzelmo and asked if she’d heard from Jackson. She sounded sleepy, and explained that she was in Birmingham helping to prepare for a company convention on Monday morning.

  Bryant stood at the edge of the lake looking down into the ice-green water. ‘What would have made him risk coming here?’ A fat white pelican lazily raised its head and eyed him suspiciously. ‘It’s the perfect spot for a confrontation: poorly lit, underpopulated, unenclosed. One of the only parks that haven’t been sealed.’

  ‘People feel safe because of where we’re situated, Arthur. Maybe there was a witness.’

  May looked towards the illuminated windows of Buckingham Palace.

  41

  ‘NOT THE MOST SALUBRIOUS AREA’

  As soon as Ritchie Jackson’s death was registered and his body headed to the St Pancras Mortuary, the detectives went home to grab a few hours’ sleep; there was nothing to be gained by returning to the unit until daylight. If anyone was picked up with blood on his clothes the PCU would be called at once.

  Arthur Bryant decided to make the short walk from Euston Road to Harrison Street as it saved his partner having to go out of his way. He stopped on the corner of the pavement and sniffed the air: coffee, burned wood, varnish.

  Warning signs. He picked up the pace, reaching the gates of his building.

  The scene before him tipped slightly and righted itself. He closed his eyes for a moment, saw something jewel-like shimmering, lost track of time, closed and opened them wide once more.

  Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth II, dressed in the black velvet robes and white silk ribbons of her famous Annigoni portrait, sat before him in the cluttered front parlour of his mother’s old house in Bethnal Green, perched on the edge of a floral settee.

  ‘You must forgive us,’ said Her Majesty, looking at the sideboard lined with silver-framed pictures of royalty purchased down Petticoat Lane. ‘One is more used to going to a friend’s home and finding photographs of their family rather than of one’s own.’

  ‘My mother was a great royalist,’ Bryant explained. ‘She collected the set. The Duke of Bedford’s eyes tend to follow you around the room.’

  ‘As indeed they did in life.’ The queen sniffed faintly. ‘I fancy we came here to open a homeopathic centre, which of course one now regrets. Have you lived here long?’

  ‘This is my mum’s old gaff,’ said Bryant. ‘I’d offer you a port and lemon but it’s been in the sideboard a long time and is probably past its zenith. The women used to drink while their husbands were away at sea.’

  ‘So you could say there was a port in every wife.’ Her Majesty’s eyes betrayed a sense of mischief.

  ‘Indeed, Your Majesty,’ said Bryant, moving the best china between them and pouring tea. ‘This house must seem very cramped to you.’

  ‘Not really. We have 775 rooms but live in about six of them. As you can imagine, the Throne Room doesn’t get much use. It’s terribly inefficient to heat. Thanks to Balmoral, we have quite a lot of blankets. Are these Bourbons?’

  ‘Please feel free to load up, Your Majesty. Stick one behind your ear for later, I won’t be offended.’

  ‘It was you who summoned me, was it not?’ said Queen Elizabeth, dunking her Bourbon in builder’s tea. ‘Time is rather pressing.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, ma’am,’ Bryant apologized. ‘I wondered if you saw anything untoward occurring in your front garden last night.’

  ‘One so rarely looks from the front windows,’ sighed the queen. ‘It doesn’t do to be seen peering around the curtains, and there are always so many people waiting outside to catch a glimpse. One doesn’t dare put one’s own milk bottles out.’

  ‘There aren’t many milkmen left now, ma’am.’

  A look of surprise crossed Her Majesty’s delicately powdered features. ‘Are there not? What a shame. Next you’ll be telling us the telephone boxes have gone.’

  ‘So you didn’t clock anything odd earlier tonight?’

  ‘Actually, we did have a small peek but saw nothing untoward. You should ask Philip, he often gets out his binoculars and has a good shufti.’

  ‘If I need to get in touch with you—’ Bryant began.

  ‘We imagine you know the address,’ said Queen Elizabeth. ‘We’re in Victoria, near the station. Not the most salubrious area, but there’s a bit of a garden.’

  ‘Could you have one last really hard think for me, Your Majesty?’ He tipped some custard creams on to the plate by way of enticement, seeing as she had wolfed the Bourbons. ‘Did you really not see anything happening in the park?’

  Queen Elizabeth’s intelligent eyes narrowed as she tried to recall the landscaped gardens beneath the cold night moon. ‘Well, there were the usual young men strolling about – one tends to get that a lot when you’ve a household full of male servants with too much time on their hands – but we do remember seeing a chap by the lake greeting a friend.’

  ‘How do you know it was a friend?’ asked Bryant, leaning forward to make sure he heard the answer clearly.

  ‘I’m putting a bacon butty on your nightstand,’ said the queen. ‘Don’t get brown sauce all over the duvet this time.’

  Her Majesty dissolved into Alma Sorrowbridge, who was standing beside his bed with an immense pork-filled doorstop and a mug of tea. He was tucked up to his nose in his brass bedstead at number 17, Albion House, Harrison Street, and it was morning.

  ‘You stupid woman, you woke me up just as Her Majesty was about to tell me something important,’ said Bryant, sitting up and reaching for his spectacles.

  ‘Your knighthood still hasn’t come through, if that’s what you were wondering.’ Alma sniffed, heading out. ‘The thanks I get.’

  He tried to imagine where their conversation had been going, but the dream had become spider threads dissolving in watery sunlight. Then he remembered: Queen Elizabeth knew that Jackson had thought he was meeting a friend because he was walking towards him with his right hand outstr
etched. Unable to contain his anger a moment longer, the ‘friend’ had slashed at the outstretched hand with a knife. Defence cuts were usually on both hands and forearms. Jackson’s was on the right only.

  His defences were lowered because he knew and trusted his killer.

  THE SEVENTH DAY

  42

  ‘YOU KNOW THE WHOLE THING’S A BLUFF’

  Leslie Faraday had a wife who had promised to stand by him in sickness and in health but not on the witness stand, and when the Home Office liaison officer was caught lying in the most recent civil service expenses scandal, he had a terrible time persuading her to support his story.

  Sandra Faraday decided to testify against her husband, but he escaped censure after his lawyer spotted a loophole in the reams of legal semantics that forced the Crown to drop the case. Once a respectable period of time had elapsed, his wife filed for divorce and departed to set up a company that designed cheap electronic equipment for African schoolchildren. Faraday told his colleagues he harboured no ill will towards her, then used a private security firm to find health and safety infringements on her company premises which got her shut down long enough to wreck most of her contracts.

  Leslie Faraday saw nothing wrong in this. His lack of moral discernment meant that he recognized no difference between altruism and profiteering. Money was money. Civil servants were required to possess objectivity and impartiality, unencumbered by political affiliations or alliances. They could, however, be bastards.

  All of which is a rather roundabout way of illustrating that as he made his case for the closure of the PCU, Faraday did so entirely without malice. Bryant and May were an untidy obstacle more than anything else, like a stack of obsolete magazines that had piled up in a corner and needed to be thrown out.

  The park privatization scheme was coming along nicely. When the PCU’s investigation failed it would be handed over to the CID, and it would take them a while to get up to speed, and the longer everything took the longer the parks could remain shut, and the more people would get used to the idea of not taking them for granted. Even the protests had started to die down, although many kept lonely vigils by the railings.

  The only thing Faraday had going against him was his own ineptitude. He had recently sent Darren Link a screen grab from his computer showing protestors outside the locked gates of Battersea Park, but had forgotten to erase his NSFW browsing history, which appeared in a bar above the photograph. What a field day the press had enjoyed with that!

  So when he picked up intelligence about another corpse being found in a park, and this time virtually on Her Majesty’s front lawn, he knew he had finally sealed the unit’s fate. There was no way that they could conclude their investigation by the end of Sunday.

  When Darren Link called to inform him of the latest development in the case, Faraday was at home in Chipping Norton, getting ready for the day’s golf game. Link considered Faraday to be a pusillanimous little weasel with the morals of a maggot, especially since the situation with the parks had created antipathy towards the police, but he recognized his usefulness as a snitch.

  FARADAY: A corpse bearing multiple stab wounds, dragged out of the St James’s Park lake in full view of Buckingham Palace? I’m surprised they didn’t think to mention it.

  LINK: Raymond Land just fed me some cock-and-bull story about their computer system being down. I’ve run a check from here and it seems to be working perfectly. He says he can’t access any of their case records until tomorrow morning at the earliest.

  FARADAY: I know how he feels, I’m hopeless with email. [Aside] Just set it down there, Deirdre, and see if there are any Garibaldis. Or wafers, but not the pink ones. [To Link] It’s Sunday, there won’t be much happening there today, surely.

  LINK: Why is your secretary at home with you?

  FARADAY: She’s polishing my clubs. So you think they’re all at their King’s Cross headquarters, up to something?

  LINK: Of course I bloody do! They’re busy clearing out files, getting ready to cart them off-premises and bury every sign of their incompetence.

  FARADAY: Then why don’t you send your men around to stop them?

  LINK: Because Bryant and May will feed them a load of nonsense and pack them off until they’ve finished. My men aren’t devious enough to keep up. You could distract most of them by waving a piece of coloured cloth.

  FARADAY: Then you should go round.

  LINK: Land warned me not to come over because the workmen are having the place fumigated today. They reckon the coffin they found in the basement could be part of a medieval plague pit.

  FARADAY: And they’re all still inside?

  LINK: I know they’re up to something. I rang a few of them from different numbers and all of their phones are on voicemail.

  FARADAY: Then that’s your answer. You think they’re planning to move the hard evidence off-site? Give them exactly what they’d like you to believe they want. Go with the idea that the building is a contamination zone. Check that everyone’s inside, cordon it off and lock it down until tomorrow morning. Under the quarantine laws put in place by the Francis Crick Institute they’ll have to remain isolated. They daren’t take the risk of destroying electronic police files without obstructing the case, and they won’t be able to smuggle hard copies out. Seal them up and reopen the building after the deadline has passed. I can push the order through right this minute.

  LINK: You can do that?

  FARADAY: With one phone call. You know the whole thing’s a bluff.

  LINK: Is it, though? The CoL really did find plague victims in Houndsditch a few weeks ago when they were excavating the lower floors of a new office block. And the unit officially reported finding something in their own basement during the renovations.

  FARADAY: For Christ’s sake – they’re using you, Mr Link, so play along. Shut them today and I’ll make sure they stay shut for good.

  Link was amazed. As much as he disliked Faraday, he had to admit that the weasel had finally come up with a foolproof method of destroying the PCU’s credibility once and for all.

  The problem was, he suddenly felt uncomfortable with the plan.

  43

  ‘THIS IS NOT NORMAL PROCEDURE, I THINK?’

  Rosa Lysandrou peered through the mullioned window of the St Pancras Coroner’s Office and saw the pudgy scarf-cocooned face of her nemesis peering in. With a heavy sigh she unlatched the front door.

  ‘Ah, you are there, I’ve been ringing the bell for ages,’ said Bryant, stepping inside. ‘I suppose it takes you a while to get up from the cellar.’

  ‘We don’t have a cellar,’ retorted Rosa, her eyes hooded, her face immobile. ‘Wipe your feet.’

  Bryant stamped his wet boots on the mat. ‘Really? I thought you slept here. I’m sure Giles said something about having to fix a new lid on your bed.’

  ‘I don’t listen to you, Mr Bryant. There is no room for levity here.’

  ‘Oh, come now. I know Christian doctrine wants us to believe that life is simply a vallis lacrimarum, but you must think there’s more to it than a vale of tears.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rosa, ‘there is heaven for those who meet the conditions.’

  ‘That’s me out, then,’ rejoined Bryant cheerfully. ‘You should meet my landlady; she imagines paradise as a sort of golden nightclub with bouncers. You two would get on like a church on fire. Don’t bother to announce me, I’m going in.’

  He found Kershaw bent over the body of the late Ritchie Jackson. ‘I thought I heard you,’ said Giles, rising and removing his gloves. ‘I was thinking about what you told me on the phone, and you could be right. Here, hold out your right hand as if to shake mine.’

  Bryant did as he was told. Gripping his telescopic indicator like a knife, Kershaw slid it across the detective’s palm, then continued the movement, ending it at the point where the indicator touched Bryant’s stomach.

  ‘Jackson strides towards his attacker, anxious to see him, his arm extended, and is caught by
surprise. After the stomach wound he bends over so that his body lowers, which is why the next penetrations are in the thorax and finally, as he falls, in the throat. He lands face down on the path as the killer steps back – I found some specks of gravel stuck to the front of his jacket – and is hauled by his collar into the lake, which is no more than a couple of metres away. All over in a moment.’

  ‘So as Jackson approached all he saw was someone standing looking out over the lake,’ said Bryant.

  ‘It appears that way.’

  ‘Someone he knew and trusted.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Kershaw replied. ‘You do know that St James’s Park once had a reputation as a cruising ground?’

  ‘Not any more, though, surely? It wasn’t an assignation, he was summoned there by a phone call.’

  ‘Just working through all of the possibilities, Mr B. There’s something else, a bruise across his face, a thin stripe, like a braided whip.’

  ‘You mean like the ligatures on the other victims. Any ideas about the knife?’

  ‘It’s smooth-edged, not serrated, with a two-and-a-half-inch blade, very sharp. Nothing like the ones your knife-thrower used.’

  ‘Jackson owned a Swiss army knife, a Victorinox Pioneer. We gave it back to him. He could have had it at the meeting for protection.’

  ‘In which case Jackson holds out his hand with the knife in it, is lashed on the face, drops the blade and is then stabbed with it.’

  ‘Now, that makes more sense. And he was killed because he was the last one there at the scene of Charlie Forester’s accident. I like my loose ends neatly tied.’ Bryant unwrapped a tube of Army & Navy lozenges, adding liquorice to the room’s chemical odour.

  ‘I’ve a feeling you’re not going to get them tied this time.’