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

by Christopher Fowler

  “What’s he doing hanging around a block of council flats?” Bryant wondered. “Does this mean he lives there? Was he returning home?”

  “According to the time register on the mobile, the shots were taken several hours after Martell’s murder,” Banbury pointed out. “That means he’s dressing up for the sheer hell of it.”

  “Or he has a purpose we’ve yet to discern.” Bryant rose and walked to the window, looking down into the wet streets of Mornington Crescent. “If it turns out that he lives on the estate and he’s a member of the Saladins, does that mean he has a darker intention, something that connects with the location of the blood of Christ?”

  “I’m sorry, you’ve lost me there,” said Banbury, perplexed.

  “Oh, nothing.” Bryant had decided to keep his more contentious opinions about the case secret, although he had told May of his suspicions. Right now, his partner was heading back to Clerkenwell, to run a different kind of check for him.

  ♦

  John May climbed the steps to the entrance of St Crispin’s School and removed the list of names from his pocket. He felt like interrogating the pupils who had humiliated Bryant, just to put a dent in their confidence, but knew that acts of reciprocation had a way of sticking to the conscience. Instead, he went to visit the relief teacher, Elliot Mason.

  May found him in a sweat-stained tracksuit, bent double in the ground-floor corridor, trying to claw back some breath. Mason was so puny and bookish, it came as a surprise to see him involved in physical education.

  “If you’re here to talk to the kids again, I can’t help you,” the teacher warned him. “Mr Kingsmere is back, so they’re not under my jurisdiction anymore. I’ve just taken the second-years for a sprint, and it nearly killed me. The Head knows how much I hate competitive sport. We’ve got a sports master called Gossage who spends his entire life in the open air and shouts all the time. He looks like a shaved sheep, very red and meaty, you’d think he’d be fit but he’s always off having operations, so I’ve copped his roster. I’m supposed to supervise post-run ablutions, but once you’ve experienced the smell of thirty gym kits in a locker room, you’ll do anything to get out of it. Care to walk very slowly with me?”

  “I don’t want to upset the applecart by getting the boys out of their class again,” said May. “Actually, you can probably help me.”

  “Fire away,” wheezed Mason, who looked like he might collapse at any moment.

  “The Saladins, a gang that hangs around the Roland Plumbe Community Estate. I’ve never heard of them, and we’ve nothing on file under that name. Are they new? Some of the boys here suggested they knew something about the man we’re seeking. I wonder if the gang might even be harbouring him. Some of the kids on the estate reckon that the Highwayman’s identity is common knowledge.”

  “Dear God, don’t start believing children.” Mason sighed. “Let’s go back outside so I can sneak a Rothman’s. There used to be a time when it was the kids who had to hang around the bike sheds smoking, not the teachers.” They returned to the school steps, and Mason guiltily lit up. “Remember Matilda, who told such dreadful lies?”

  “‘It made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes.’’ May recalled the Hilaire Belloc poem. “You’re saying they all lie?”

  “Not intentionally, perhaps, but even the simplest truths can become fabulously distorted. As far as I’m concerned, teenagers are incapable of recounting the simplest fact without embellishment. Their capacity for self-deception is astounding. They seek authorship, they want to be the one who creates the interest; it’s the oddest phenomenon. I don’t remember being like that.”

  “So what is the truth, then?”

  “There’s certainly a gang on the estate, if you can call it that. A loose group united in apathy would be a more accurate description. Two years ago, one of the seniors here was stabbed in the stomach after tangling with them. He made a remarkable recovery, but his parents withdrew him from the school. Big hoo-hah. I’m surprised you don’t remember it.”

  “We’re no longer part of the Met,” May explained. “We don’t have access to the notes on cases that fall under their jurisdiction. Did they make an arrest?”

  “Nothing was ever proven, but the enmity still runs deep. There’s a racial element, too. The boys here are mostly lapsed Church of England or Muslim. Some of the Saladins are committed hard-line Christian. They believe in the fiery sword of God’s vengeance, probably the result of playing too many computer games. The gang’s ringleaders are white skinheads, but they’re not like the ones I remember from my teenage years. The territorial boundaries between teens shift so fast these days, you never know where new allegiances lie.”

  “How do you know so much about them?” asked May.

  “The school’s athletics pitch falls inside their boundary. I see them hanging about all the time. Picking up on their conversation is a teacher’s habit, I’m afraid. Still, I wouldn’t take too much notice of your informants.”

  “Oh, why not?”

  “Kids join gangs because they crave a sense of belonging. They’re looking for respect outside of the parental unit. Your man is a loner, isn’t he? Why would he be hanging around with a bunch of kids?” Mason took a drag on his cigarette while he considered his own question. “Ah, I see, the grim spectre of paedophilia rears its head. You think he’s preying on them.”

  “That would give us an entirely different profile,” said May.

  “Then I’d suggest you dismiss your information as idle gossip. The estate kids have no money, no power, and nowhere to go. Talking is the cheapest thing they can do. I grew up on such an estate myself,” Mason explained. “I spent my entire childhood being mercilessly bullied by the grammar school kids up the road from our flat. Now I’m teaching them. It’s not an irony I care to dwell on.”

  “I wonder if you’d like to add espionage to your skills, and report back to me if you hear this gang mentioned by any of your boys, particularly in connection with the Highwayman?”

  “With pleasure,” Mason agreed. “Sometimes I fantasise about teaching in one of those new glass open-plan schools, being free to concentrate on the intricate beauty of sonnets or the heavenly grace of a Tiepolo in the safety of a controlled, airy environment. Instead, we’re wedged into these dark Victorian corridors, where every room seals its secrets behind a thick oak door. Children are phenomenally susceptible to their surroundings. The gloom breeds odd loyalties in them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Mason paused for a moment, thinking. “If your man is somehow associated with the Saladins, it might be because he’s anxious to gain their approval.”

  “Why would he need the approval of a bunch of disenfranchised children?” asked May.

  “That’s rather the question, isn’t it?” Mason agreed. “Idolatry is a powerful weapon in the right hands.”

  “You’re not suggesting he has a political agenda?”

  “It must have occurred to you. Insurrection requires partisanship. You could ask yourself what this guy is trying to achieve rather than what he’s already done. Every crime requires a motive, doesn’t it? Perhaps the Highwayman is trying to inspire a grassroots revolution against capitalism.”

  “I hardly think he’d pick off B-list celebrities to do so,” said May.

  “The point is that to your average muzzy-headed schoolboy he’s rather an alluring figure.”

  “But he’s a murderer.”

  “There’s a period before teenagers fully develop when they can become very amoral. I look at their blank little eyes and often get a chill. We like to think we can instill them with a value system, but they develop it independently of us. Trust me, the Highwayman appeals to them. Teachers have first-hand experience of the power of charisma. We’re either reviled, tolerated, or worshipped unconditionally, like our illustrious Mr Kingsmere.”

  Mason peered through the window, then suddenly dropped his cigarette and ground it out on the step. “Ah, speaking of whom, it appea
rs you might meet him after all,” he told May. “Here he comes now.”

  ∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧

  22

  Resonant Ground

  The damp autumn winds met around the weather vane on the roof of St Crispin’s School, twisting the protesting copperwork figure of the school’s most celebrated pupil back and forth. On the walkway below, a tall, strong-featured man in his mid-forties ambled towards the detective with a troop of noisy boys in tow.

  “You must be the other one – Mr May, isn’t it?”

  As Mason and May turned, they saw Mr Kingsmere approaching them. He appeared to be too well groomed for someone involved in scholarly pursuits, from his designer stubble to his fashionable shirt and casually expensive shoes. He stopped before them and smiled with practised charm.

  “The school had experience of your partner some weeks ago, not an entirely successful event, I understand. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend. Parfitt, Jezzard, Billings – some of my top pupils. These wretches here tell me there was some misunderstanding between them and your poor old Mr Bryant. Perhaps we can set matters right between us all.” People always stressed Bryant’s maturity when mentioning him, even though there was a difference of only three years in the detectives’ ages.

  “I imagine you’re busy, but perhaps we could talk when you have a moment,” May requested.

  “If you’ve finished with Mr Mason, why not come to my study now? It’ll be quieter away from these gawkers. Jezzard and Parfitt, that means you, too: homeroom, the lot of you.”

  He hovered an avuncular and slightly threatening hand above May’s shoulder. “The brightest two percent in one of the brightest schools in the country, and all it takes to stun them into silence is the presence of someone outside their immediate peer group. Too much time spent in their bedrooms chatting on the Internet to girls they’ll never touch. All that stuff one hears about schoolkids having rampant experimental sex doesn’t apply here. These are a timid lot, but they’re troublesome enough on the surface. That’s why I attempt to teach them how to behave in public, to little effect – you were going to ask about that, weren’t you?”

  “I had heard you were popular with the pupils,” May admitted.

  “There’s no real trick to loyalty, John – may I call you John? You barter with them, that’s all. Teenagers are materialistic little buggers. The ownership of many shiny little items seems to reduce their sense of living under threat. I give them stuff. Of course, the trouble is that this school has a remit to preach traditional Christian values, empirically accepted history, and the English literary canon as if deconstruction and postmodern historical relativism didn’t exist. I expect intelligent children to question the received wisdom of their elders, and make no bones about treating them differently. The kids in my extracurrics have trouble conforming, because they make connections other kids don’t make. They’re quick to see through the illusions of the external world, but it encourages them to acknowledge the legitimacy of value judgements. A good thing in my book; most pupils don’t go deeper than what we term seals and Nazis.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, you know.” Kingsmere flagged his hand at the posters lining the walls. “Received ideas and lazy opinions. Seals are nice; Nazis are evil; everything else falls into one camp or the other.”

  “Surely some truths are constant and universal,” said May. “The earth is round not because we currently think that to be the case, but because scientific absolutes have proven it not to be flat.”

  Kingsmere gave a knowing smile. “The objectivity of science is easily exploded, Mr May. We live in a reflective age which recognises that most personalities, institutions, and beliefs no longer fit into neat logical categories.”

  “But without a certain degree of generalisation and simplification there can be no understanding,” May argued.

  “An understandable attitude from a policeman, but a rather naïve stance, I fear. We need to step beyond the tyrannical pedantry of facts to arrive at a more sophisticated level of theoretical interpretation,” Kingsmere explained, not expecting his guest to understand.

  “I can assure you that if we ran the police force on Derridean deconstructivist ideologies, we’d never arrest anyone, because the degree of guilt would depend on the fluctuation of individual opinion.”

  If Kingsmere was surprised by May’s conclusion, he was careful not to show it. “A good argument for replacing constables with academics,” he said instead. “The school’s top two percent should be allowed to free itself from the straitjacket of a dogmatic education and explore modern liberal relativism. Most private pupils aren’t brighter because their parents had to pay for their education. Actually, they downplay their intelligence because they have a choice of being smart or popular. My job is to single out the smart ones and keep them here long enough to find practical applications. The pressures on them are enormous. Since the dot-com gold rush, private schools have been treated like banks – parents put their kids in when they’re flush, draw them out again when they’re broke. If you think divorcing parents are bad for a child, try removing his peers and dumping him in some budget-strapped state school. Here we are.”

  They were now deep within the venerable building. Kingsmere swiped a card on his study door, which surprised May. The reason quickly became apparent, for the room was a technological revelation: flat-screen computers, underlit glass tables, transparent circuitry and touch panels, the graceful white plastic of Apple Macintosh, the pristine organisation of an operating theatre. “This is where I take my extracurricular classes. The best way to encourage learning is to trick them into doing it for themselves. After twenty minutes surrounded by this equipment, they have to be torn away from it.”

  “A far cry from the book-lined studies of earlier times,” said May, looking around with approval.

  “It’s a modern version, that’s all. The school was left an endowment for technology. Thank God for rich St Crispin’s old boys. Look, I’m sorry if my lads embarrassed your partner. I’ve taught them to question authority, but they can sometimes take things too literally. It wouldn’t have happened if I had been here, I can assure you.”

  “Don’t worry. Mr Bryant prefers a spirited exchange of views. It happens a lot.”

  “Perhaps I should allow you to explain the purpose of your visit now.”

  May felt he was being led through the conversation like a pupil but put it down to the teacher’s habitual manner of dealing with his young charges. “I understand you were off sick this week, so I don’t know whether you’ve heard much about our investigation.”

  “I read about it in the newspapers, of course. The police seem to be going out of their way to avoid the suggestion that London might have a serial killer on the loose.”

  “The term usually denotes someone driven to commit murder by aberrant, uncontrollable passions. That hardly seems appropriate in this case. The victims fall into the common geographic profile – both murders were committed in the same area – but they were not the focus of violent desires. I’ve heard that some of the pupils here have been getting into fights with a gang on the nearby estate.”

  Kingsmere appeared disappointed by the mundanity of the enquiry. “So I understand,” he said. “The seniors, mostly. It’s a territorial matter of little interest. The sixth form use the rear grounds of the estate to reach the rugby pitch and the athletic ground. It’s a very old dispute.”

  “I thought the Saladins were new. We have around thirty-seven registered – that is, official – gangs currently operating in central London, so it can be hard keeping track of them.”

  The teacher cocked his head, intrigued. “How does a gang become official?”

  “It gets registered if one of its members tries to shoot you, Mr Kingsmere.”

  “What I meant was that the territorial dispute goes back a long way before gangs. Our school has been on the same site for centuries, and the estate was built during the postwar slum clearance. Ou
r boys argue, with some justification, that we were here first. Tensions have existed here for many generations. I set a local area research project last year, and we found that as early as the eighteenth century, the poorer residents of the neighbourhood had appointed someone to champion their rights. Hang on, let me see if I can find the document.”

  A new light of enthusiasm fired him as he powered up his laptop and began searching through project files. The white square board above his chair filled with data.

  “This one, in particular, may strike a chord.” He briskly tapped the screen as if drawing the attention of an unruly class. “In 1929, a guy called Albert Whitney led a revolt by the tenants of Three Bells Street against exorbitant rents charged by their landlords, to wit, the owners of this school. Three Bells Street was destroyed during the war, and now lies beneath the rear grounds of the Roland Plumbe Community Estate.” Kingsmere flicked off the light, as if keen to keep any further information to himself. “If ever there was a case to believe in psychogeography, this is it.”

  “Psychogeography is a process based on empirical data,” said May with a certain amount of malicious relish. He had used this argument before with his partner.

  “Data that comprises the temporal value judgements of the superstitious, uneducated masses,” snapped Kingsmere.

  “Either way, it’s the kind of hostile territory that attracts the attention of vigilantes,” May told him. “It will warrant further investigation.”

  As he left the school, a nagging doubt about Kingsmere wedged itself in May’s mind. Connections were slow to form, synapses failing. He felt sure there was something he had forgotten, as though a harmful half-remembered dream was even now fading from his memory.