Bryant & May 04; Ten Second Staircase b&m-4

by Christopher Fowler

  “Perspiration stains,” Giles Kershaw indicated, walking around the exercise equipment. “Looks like there are plenty of them on the machine Martell was using.”

  “A man of that size should have been leaving pools of sweat,” said Banbury. “Never see the point of exercise myself. The patches must have dried fast, but we can still get a residue match. Maybe it wasn’t all his.”

  “Don’t get into the glands, old sausage, they’re too unreliable.” Sweat contained amino acids, fats, chlorides, urea, and sugar in varying amounts, but its construction varied in the body from one day to the next. “I take it you’re assuming his attacker managed to slip under the door with his portable lightning conductor, then leave the same way.”

  “I don’t know; maybe he killed Martell by remote control.”

  “Perverse but possible, I suppose.”

  Banbury dropped to his knees, then shimmied under the seat of the exercise machine, examining its base. “He certainly didn’t come in through the main door.”

  “You can’t be sure of that.”

  “Martell left pristine prints on both inner and outer handles. You can’t open a door without touching the handle. The prints should be smudged, otherwise we must assume no-one else came in via the entrance. Forget the windows, they’re barred and dead-bolted.” Banbury wriggled back out and rose to inspect the grip bars. “There’s no other access, so there has to be something here you’ve missed.”

  “Something I’ve missed? You’re the crime scene manager, lovey. I don’t know why you’re examining those; Martell never touched bare metal. Both the grips have rubber slipcovers.”

  Banbury pulled at the foot-long grips, but they fitted tightly over the steel arms of the machine. “You’re right, he shouldn’t have come into contact with metal. There’s no way to get these off. Give me a hand.” Between them, they managed to move the machine out and check beneath it. “If you were going to electrocute someone here, you’d have to assume your victim would be wearing rubber-soled trainers, so I guess the current would need to pass through his hands. Martell wasn’t wearing workout gloves.”

  They tore up four carpet tiles and exposed a red rubberised layer coating the concrete floor. Banbury climbed behind the machine and examined the white ceramic wall tiles. “Hang on a minute, take a look at this.” He shone a penlight into a centimetre-wide hole between the tiles.

  “Clutching at straws,” said Kershaw, disappointed. “It’s just an air bubble in the grout. What’s behind there?”

  “A private apartment; I don’t know who it belongs to. The hole looks like it might go all the way, though.”

  “Not big enough to pass anything through.”

  “Yes, it is. Let’s get the keys.”

  They found the caretaker and had themselves admitted to a narrow flat, thickly perfumed and decorated in claustrophobic seventies’ paisley patterns of green, yellow, and brown.

  “Madame Briquet divides her time between here and her villa in Menton,” explained the caretaker. “She wouldn’t like me letting strange men into her flat.”

  “We’re not strange,” said Kershaw. “We’re from the Peculiar Crimes Unit.”

  “All right.” The caretaker regarded him uncertainly. “Just don’t disturb anything.”

  “That depends on what we find, mate.” Banbury bridled. “We might have to tear the place to bits.”

  Kershaw silenced his partner with a look. “We’ll be terribly careful,” he promised. “This will only take a moment.”

  They located the connecting wall to the gymnasium. Banbury tapped on it experimentally. “Kitchen,” he said. “Look at the cooker. Interesting.”

  Kershaw couldn’t see what was interesting about an ancient upright electric Canon but held his tongue. Banbury knelt and felt around in the gloom. “Blimey, there’s some muck behind here,” he complained.

  After a few minutes, he heaved himself to his feet dragging a coil of fine copper wire from behind the stove. “He’s a clever sod, but we’ve got him.” He waved the roll in a chubby fist. “Did you ever have a home physics kit when you were a kid?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “So what did you do for fun?”

  “I went shooting on the estate.”

  “Yeah, there were a few shootings on our estate, too. Better warn the caretaker this apartment’s part of a crime scene now. His tenant’s going to have a fit.” Banbury scratched himself thoughtfully while studying the wire. “I won’t get prints off this, but I might be able to lift a palm heel from the cooker front. He had to push it back into place.” He produced a Zephyr brush from his kit and twirled it experimentally. “You know, the Met have put more technology on the street than any other force in Europe. They’re outside my flat monitoring radio waves from fake ice cream vans, and still couldn’t stop my car from being nicked. They’d be useless at something like this. This is the kind of crime I joined the unit for. It requires belief in the absurd. Even in death, you can be given proof of the desperate ingenuity of human nature.”

  “I’m pleased you approve of the killers we attract,” said Kershaw, non-plussed. “Go and get the rest of your kit. It’s time we scored one for the unit.”

  ♦

  Arthur Bryant found himself back at The Street, the dingy, litterstrewn concrete corridor running beneath the central block of the Roland Plumbe Community Estate. His route took him through a flooded concrete stairwell where a smouldering mattress slumped beside stacks of broken Argos kitchen furniture. He shook his head in wonder, unable to imagine why anyone would deliberately despoil their home territory.

  Bryant’s parents had conformed to the wartime London cliché about East End pride and poverty. In Bethnal Green, it was common for a wife to embarrass her old man by taking his Sunday lunch down to the pub. His mother aired the family’s bed linen but never her emotions. Whenever she was angry she cleaned the house, and the house was always spotless. Women of whom she didn’t approve were accused of keeping a dirty home. He wondered what she would make of the estate.

  Lorraine Bonner, the leader of the Residents’ Association, was waiting for him. She had called the unit an hour earlier to tell him that the Highwayman had been sighted again. “Mr Bryant, this is getting to be a habit,” she smiled, passing him a plastic cup. Word of Bryant’s heroin-like addiction to strong tea had obviously got about. “The girls are over here.”

  She led the way beneath an arch to a mesh-glassed stairwell door. Inside, two teenagers sat on the steps. Bryant recognised the look they shared: pale scraped-back hair tied into a short ponytail in a style derogatively referred to as a Croydon facelift, hoop earrings, Puffa jackets, studded jeans, charm bracelets, baby-pink shoes over white socks. One was smoking, both were chewing gum. They appeared to be soured, sullen, and battle-hardened at thirteen, and perhaps they were, but Bryant wondered how far he had to scratch beneath the brittle surface before discovering girls with ordinary hopes and insecurities. Such youngsters had been referred to as chavs for decades, but this mysterious term had only recently passed into universal use.

  “Danielle, Sheree, this is Mr Bryant. I want you to tell him what you told me.”

  “I’m not a policeman, strictly speaking,” he quickly explained. “I’m trying to find out if the man you saw is – ”

  “We seen him on the telly,” said Danielle suddenly. “The Highwayman. It’s the same bloke. We all know who he is ‘cause he’s in like a gang and that. We seen you and all. What you going to give us if we tell you?”

  Bryant had been hoping they had not seen him before. The testimony of his witnesses would now be tainted by previous exposure. “Where did you see the Highwayman?” he asked.

  “Third-floor bridge.” Danielle looked at her friend for confirmation.

  “You mean the balcony that runs along the front of the block?” asked Bryant.

  “The bridges connect the two newer wings to the central block,” Lorraine explained. “There’s one on the third floor, and one on
the sixth.”

  “He was standing there like come on then come and get me like he was disrespecting and fronting out being so hard,” said Sheree in a sudden rush.

  “Can you describe him to me?”

  “He was wearing these raw leathers, you know, like a biker, only a black mask over his eyes and this cap thing and boots and whatever.”

  Bryant knew it would be a struggle getting the girls to articulate clearly enough for a witness statement; they had rarely been challenged to describe anything in detail. How much of what they saw was culled from artists’ impressions on TV and in newspapers? Perhaps they simply wanted attention, and had invented the sighting.

  Sheree launched another assault on the English language. “St C is blatantly taxin’ us saying it’s someone on this estate just ‘cause we got the Saladins and they’re Yahs and they diss us and saying we’re slack and that, so when they come here sharkin’ us we’re gonna bust ‘em up.”

  “I’m not at all sure I understand.” Bryant turned to Lorraine for help. His recent reading had taught him that most London teen slang was Jamaican, but that it changed from one borough to the next. He tried to imagine how it would be to grow up in a permanent atmosphere of threat.

  “The Saladins are a gang of boys who hang around here causing trouble,” the community officer explained. “A couple of them have ASBOs, so we’ve been able to curfew them, but they still turn up on the estate after dark.”

  “Is there anything else?” Bryant asked the girls doubtfully.

  Danielle pulled her mobile from her jacket and flicked it open. “I took a picture,” she said, turning the image to him. “He was there for ages, so I zoomed in and got some really cool close-ups. Sell it to ya.”

  Bryant accepted the mobile in amazement. It was like being handed a photograph of the Loch Ness monster, except that these children were unlikely to have tampered with the image. More important, it was their first piece of real proof that the Highwayman really existed.

  “I’ll need to borrow the phone,” he told the girls.

  “That is like so no chance on that!” squealed Danielle, with her friend in support.

  “I’m afraid you don’t have a choice. This is police evidence.”

  “You ain’t having it.” Danielle thrust out a defiant chin.

  They could erase the shot if you handle this badly, he suddenly thought. Learn from your mistakes at St Crispin’s.

  “Tell you what, I’ll trade you this.” He removed the beautiful chrome-trimmed state-of-the-art mobile May had bought him for his birthday and flicked it open.

  Danielle examined it carefully, then turned over her phone.

  John’s going to kill me, thought Bryant as he walked away with the evidence in his pocket, but another thought excited him more. The Roland Plumbe Estate gang, the Saladins. He could scarcely believe they existed.

  The area of Clerkenwell, and specifically the Gothic arch of St John’s Gate, was the dwelling place of London’s most venerable traditions and legends, the home of old religions and ancient mysteries. For half a millennium, the Knights Hospitallers had flourished in Clerkenwell. The charitable hospital of St John of Jerusalem had been filled with wounded Crusaders, and its priory church was inextricably bound with the Knights Templars. In 1187, when Saladin retook Jerusalem, he had allowed the Hospitallers to flourish. On the third of October, 1247, the Knights Templars presented King Henry III with a thick crystalline vase containing the blood of Christ. The authenticity of the relic had been attested to by the seals of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and by all the prelates of the Holy Land. The fateful secret of Christ’s blood supposedly lay lost in the ruins of Clerkenwell.

  And the Saladins still survived.

  Lorraine had shown him the gang markings of the Saladins painted along the walls of The Street, a red-and-white cross-hilt, the symbol of the knights themselves. The wiping of a Crusader’s sword represented an undefiled life. He had seen other gang markings: a spray-painted chevron between three combs, the arms of Prior Botyler, the design taken from the original priory window of St John’s. The prior of St John had ranked as the first baron of England. In the eight-hundred-fifty-year-old diagonally buttressed crypt, caskets had been stood upright and ghosts had supposedly shuffled through the silent nights.

  Bryant wondered now if Clerkenwell, the home and heart of the Crusades, an area forever linked to the city of Jerusalem and to the blood of Christ himself, had spawned new acolytes every bit as dangerous as their Christian ancestors.

  ∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧

  21

  Loyalties

  At the end of Wednesday afternoon, Dan Banbury flicked on his desk lamp and ushered Bryant into his office at the PCU. He tried not to appear excited, but this was his first time to shine before his superior, and his mask of calm rationality was slipping.

  He opened his computer file on Danny Martell’s murder before the unit’s most senior partner, tapping up a scaled photograph of the copper coil. “I think we’ve an extremely demented individual on our hands,” he said, pointing to the image. “I asked myself: Why didn’t he kill White and Martell in unprotected private spots? Why wait until it was virtually impossible to get at them?”

  “Because the impossibility is what makes it appealing,” said Bryant.

  “Exactly. Martell kept to a regular schedule, so first of all, our perpetrator needed to make a floor plan of the building, and he found what he needed next door, in an apartment kept empty for half the year. This was a lot easier to gain access to than the gym. Of course, the idea was to make us think he’d been in the gym when Martell was killed, a little bit of magician’s misdirection there. Giles and I talked to the caretaker, who has no idea how many keys his tenant kept to her apartment. Great security on the gym, lousy system for the flats. We’re trying to find the tenant to see if she had direct contact with the Highwayman, but I think we’ll pull a negative to that.”

  He opened another screen, the floor plan of the apartment. “Inside, the kitchen gives him what he needs, a party wall to the gym. Next, he requires something with an alternating current, and finds an added bonus; there’s an old-fashioned, freestanding electric cooker. He drills a tiny hole through the wall. This is the weakest part of his plan, as he could damage the wall on the other side and give himself away. If he’d known it was tiled rather than painted, he’d probably have rethought the move, but he’s lucky. The drill bit exits through the grout.

  “Now, he unplugs the cooker and swaps the thirty-amp plug for a pair of insulated copper wires, which he feeds into the hole. He gains access to the gym a day or two before Martell comes for his workout, and pulls the ends of the wires through. This last bit is tricky, as he needs to use a needle and thread to sew the uninsulated ends of the wires through the rubber grips on the pectoral fly machine. I tried it myself; it took a good five minutes, but I did it without having to remove the handle-cover. He threads them in a single line that can’t be seen against the black rubber. When Martell arrives for his workout, the killer lets himself into the apartment and switches on the current. Martell’s hands and chest are covered in sweat, making him the perfect conductor. The circuit is completed, and the current interrupts the rhythm of the victim’s heart. At which point, our Highwayman pulls firmly on the wire coil, unthreading it from the grips and reeling it back through the hole. I tried this as well, and it was dead easy to do.”

  “There’s one thing wrong with your theory,” said Bryant. “He’d have to be mad as a bag of snakes to go to so much trouble.”

  “Maybe he was excited by the sheer absurdity of the act,” Banbury suggested, unconvincingly in Bryant’s opinion.

  “You’re forgetting that he doesn’t even get to see it. Arsonists usually stick around to witness the results of their work. Due to the spontaneity of their actions, murderers are generally present during the act itself. Where is the pleasure in this glorified piece of Blue Peter tomfoolery? Where is the profit? The pleasure?”

&n
bsp; “As you said, maybe he’s barking. I’m just telling you how it was done.” Banbury was disappointed with the effect of his news.

  “For which I thank you, but it gets us nowhere. How are you getting on with the photos on the mobile?”

  “It’s a cheap Nokia. The picture quality’s not great, but she took several shots, so I was able to replace the blurred sections from one frame with sharper pixels from another, creating a composite. The resolution is a little clunky, but take a look.” He opened the graphics file and expanded the reworked image.

  “So now we have our man,” said Bryant, adjusting his bifocals and craning forward. “There’s something very familiar about this picture.”

  The photograph showed a broad-chested figure in black leggings and a leather jacket, standing on the bridge of the Roland Plumbe apartment block looking down into the quadrangle, his hands on his hips in an ironically heroic pose. He wore a slender black mask that covered the area around his eyes. A lock of thick black hair protruded from his cap, a smaller version of the traditional highwayman’s tricorne.

  “What’s that at his waist?” asked Bryant, thumping the screen with a wrinkled finger.

  “I can enlarge the image and lighten it a little, but we’ll lose some sharpness.” Banbury went to the graphics menu and blew up a square section. He tried a second time, but the detail was lost.

  “That’s all right. I can see what it is,” said Bryant, satisfied. “He’s wearing a flintlock pistol. He really is a highwayman. Janice, how did you get on with the historical societies?”

  Longbright checked her notes. “Plenty of English Civil War buffs, mostly Cavalier and Roundhead uniforms, although someone usually comes along dressed as Cromwell. A few Crimean War fans, crimson outfits with epaulets and gold buttons, hardly our man’s cup of tea. And some First World War nuts, but I’m reliably informed that it’s only the German and Prussian officers’ uniforms that attract a certain type of obsessive. Nobody wants to be a British Tommy. Nothing about highwaymen, though. I tried the theatrical costumiers in Shaftesbury Avenue. They have one highwayman outfit made for a film called, let me see, Plunkett and McLaine, for film and television use only, and it’s not been rented out in months.”