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

by Christopher Fowler

  Now, as she sat reapplying Jungle Fever Glamour Stick to her lips (one of several cosmetic lines favoured by Longbright despite being discontinued in the UK in 1968 but mercifully still on sale in Botswana owing to their exotic brand names), she could hear the Acting Head’s voice rise to a tremulous quaver as he sought to pass the blame for his actions.

  There had been plenty of scares before, but she knew this time was serious, not just because the Leicester Square Vampire had never been caught, but because Bryant’s overconfidence had led to the most damaging moment of his career – one which had almost wrecked his friendship with John May.

  Kneeling beside the fireplace, she recognised the gravity of the threats which Bryant so lightly dismissed, and knew that the Vampire case was a Pandora’s box of trouble just waiting to be opened. They were all bound to be implicated in the blaming process. After all, it was she who had recently destroyed the original documentation, burning the incriminating paper trail in the very grate where she now sat hunched in horror, listening to Bryant’s enthusiastic offer to bury himself.

  Her mind flashed back to the moment she had helped to hide the evidence – was there anything she had missed? With any luck, all remaining files had been reduced to embers in the unit’s fire.

  But what if something still survived? What if it had already fallen into Kasavian’s hands? The damage could only be undone if the detectives acknowledged the problem. And they would never do that, because at the very least it involved destroying John May’s tentatively renewed friendship with his granddaughter.

  Longbright had warned them about mixing their personal lives with business. This time, she felt sure, the habit would ruin them all. She retreated to the evidence room at the rear of the building and quietly unlocked the door.

  The only box that had survived the unit’s fire contained a single damning document about the case dating from 1992. Standing on a chair and rummaging on top of a cupboard, she pulled a manila folder free and slipped the loose page inside her jacket. Raymond Land had never seen the sheet, because it contained a drunken confession from the one person qualified to know the truth of the matter: John May himself. It had not been destroyed because there were two additional signatures at the bottom of the page belonging to the officers who had witnessed its writing. A subpoena would draw the truth from them, and unless they could be traced and coerced into refuting its contents, there was nothing to be gained by obliterating the original. May had clearly forgotten his admittance of guilt in the shadow of a greater tragedy that had unfolded that night, and Bryant’s memory was notoriously unreliable.

  Longbright had never faced a situation like this; her loyalties were suddenly divided between performing her duty and honouring her mentors. Her mother had raised her to believe that no-one was above the law, especially not those who administered it. But who could vouch for the mitigating circumstances that had resulted in the escape of a murderer, and the tragic death of an innocent civilian?

  The detective sergeant locked the door and returned to her office, made miserable by the dilemma that called her own personal morality into question.

  ∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧

  24

  Shadow City

  As Meera Mangeshkar arrived for her shift, she heard the detectives arguing in their room opposite. She had become used to the see-saw sound of their bickering, but went over to listen.

  “You may as well come in, Mangeshkar; we have no secrets here.” May rolled a chair over to her. “Ever hear of the Leicester Square Vampire?”

  “Before my time, sir.”

  “Accidents of birth do not excuse your ignorance,” snapped Bryant. “Caligula reigned before you were born, but you’ve heard of him, haven’t you? We were asking ourselves what the Highwayman has in common with the Leicester Square Vampire, and the answer is that they both started social panics. Look at the hysterical press reaction, and remember what Lord Macaulay said: ‘We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.’”

  “You mean like the video nasties scare of the eighties?”

  “Exactly. Panics occur when individuals feel threatened and mobilise themselves into vigilante groups. Mods and rockers, paedophiles, even UFO sightings have all sparked waves of hysteria. Saralla White and Danny Martell are being tarred and feathered because they represent the failures of a generation. Martell ran a show that was popular with teenagers but hated by their parents, until he lost his remaining audience. White advocated multiple partners, abortion, and drugs, but was a hypocrite. As people age, they form habits and take sides. The Highwayman is a godsend. According to the right-wing press, he’s only doing what people across the country don’t have the guts to do. The general consensus is that his victims had it coming. Journalists are so busy tracking down dubious witnesses that they’ve not stopped to consider the effect of their actions.”

  “You mean they’re writing a bunch of toss about him.”

  “Succinctly put, Mangeshkar. This editor at Hard News, what’s her name?”

  “Janet Ramsey,” Longbright pointed out.

  “She’s intent on turning the Highwayman into some kind of hero. And to think she started out writing in the New Musical Express. Well, you scratch a liberal and find a conservative. Look at her editorial.” Bryant rattled the magazine angrily. “‘So-called ‘artist’ Saralla White had the morals of a tramp and a string of terminations to her credit. The man who financed her career, the owner of London’s notorious Burroughs gallery, was himself the father of her unborn illegitimate child.’ My God, where are they getting their information?”

  “As you said, sir, no shortage of enemies ready to put the boot in.”

  “Wait, it goes on: ‘Self-styled ‘Teen Lifestyle Guru’ Danny Martell’s own secret sleazy life involved hookers and drugs. Both died in a manner appropriate to their wasted existence. Can we honestly say that either of them will be missed?’ Longbright, get me a meeting with this woman, would you? What she’s printing is irresponsible and dangerous. We don’t want a repeat of what happened with the Vampire.”

  “Why?” asked Meera. “What happened?”

  “His victims were accused of bringing their fate upon themselves, just because they were women out alone at night, some postwar notion about unaccompanied females being of loose character. Crime reporters turned the whole thing into a moral issue and a political point-scorer. Janice, where are the Vampire files?”

  Longbright caught her breath. She had managed to hide the essential page in the back of her desk. “I think they all burned,” she replied. “Your fault, I’m afraid. I’ll see if there’s anything else left, but don’t expect much.” She rose from her desk and clumped off, returning a few minutes later with the singed cardboard container, denuded of its single incriminating document.

  “Is that all we have to show for three decades of sightings?” Bryant settled his spectacles on his nose and peered into the carton, where a handful of damp clippings lay stuck to the bottom.

  “We’d have more if you hadn’t blown the place up,” Longbright reminded him, tipping the pitiful contents across his desk. The best form of defence against Bryant, she knew, was distraction.

  “Don’t worry, I remember most of the assault details.” May spread the jaundiced newspaper clippings out. “First recorded assault was March twenty-sixth, 1973, in the alleyway connecting Leicester Square to Charing Cross Road. It’s bricked in now as part of the Odeon complex; another smelly, piss-stained piece of old London gone, and good riddance. A nineteen-year-old female on her way home from a nightclub was beaten and bitten around the chin and neck. The same MO occurred six times that summer, enough for us to link the cases and for the press to coin a nickname. The early victims were all women between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three, all on their way home from nights on the town. Two of them were known to us because they’d been arrested on immorality charges. Two were of mixed race. The press weren’t told, but it didn’t stop
them from implying that the victims had led their attacker on because they were provocatively dressed in miniskirts, and because they weren’t white. A message there to anyone who thinks the seventies were enlightened.

  “The Vampire returned in 1974 after a quiet winter, the attacks continuing intermittently until a boy – Malcolm somebody, his name isn’t here – died of his wounds. He was the first of two fatalities that year. We didn’t have computers to help us find bite marks then, and at first we missed the link, but he was the son of an Austrian diplomat, and suddenly there were funds available to pursue a full investigation. The problem was that, like the alleyways where the Vampire carried out his attacks, every lead turned into a dead end. We ended up with numerous witness reports – ”

  “There are a couple of brief descriptions here,” Bryant interrupted. “Tall, athletic, dressed in a black cape, spotted running into a cul-desac, thought to have scaled a sheer wall and escaped somehow. The ‘Vampire’ tag stuck not because of his clothes, but because nearly all of the victims had been bitten, the severity depending on how long the Vampire had been left alone with them. We didn’t know then that biting was so common in sexual assaults. Databases were still difficult to cross-reference in those days. And you have to realise that in 1973 his outfit wasn’t so strange.”

  “That’s right.” May took up the story again. “Victorian capes for men had enjoyed a revival. Just the previous year, Christopher Lee had starred in a modern Dracula film which saw him running along the King’s Road in a billowing cape. The image had already been planted in the minds of the young. The press played up the danger, and pretty soon we had drunken vigilante groups roaming the West End as the pubs turned out, searching for this phantom figure who drained his victims’ blood and walked through walls. The whole thing became a ridiculous urban legend. People supposedly sighted him stalking across the rooftops. The Vampire operated in a tight area that, thanks to geographic profiling, we now know wasn’t where he lived. We made mistakes. The unit had been brought in to try and stem the escalating anxiety in the capital. The mythology became self-perpetuating as the Vampire started to act on his own press reports; if they said he’d been seen wearing a top hat, then he wore one the next time he ventured out. If they said he could escape through solid brick, he staged a stunt to suggest that was exactly what he’d done. He played up to his public, and started taking risks. We nearly caught him.”

  “What do you mean, nearly?” asked Meera.

  An awkward glance passed between the detectives, and they fell uncharacteristically silent. “The operation went wrong,” said Bryant, gathering up the clippings and tidying them away.

  “Did the attacks continue?” asked Mangeshkar.

  “For a while, yes.”

  The room went quiet. The constable shot the detective sergeant a look, as if to say What gives here? but was ignored. Longbright finally broke the stillness.

  “Could we get back to the case in hand? Perhaps we should take another look at possible suspects.”

  “All right,” May agreed. “Let’s start with the boy, Luke Tripp. We know his testimony is over-imaginative – there’s no way he could have seen a man on a horse in that chamber – so we have to assume that fear made him exaggerate what he saw.”

  “Therein lies another paradox,” said Bryant, who loved paradoxes. “The pose Luke drew is exactly the same as the one described by Channing Gifford, the dancer living opposite the Smithfield gym who spotted the Highwayman from her window. It’s the same as the pose struck in the digital shots taken by the estate girls. The head also matches the official logo of the Roland Plumbe Community Estate. But the schoolboy saw the Highwayman up close and in the flesh before anyone else did, therefore he can’t have copied someone else’s description, because he had nothing to base it on. What, then, are we to make of his testimony?”

  May rose and strode impatiently to the sunlit crescent window. “We can’t be sure of that. We have to check for further sightings.”

  “I circulated the Highwayman’s shot to every motorcycle courier company in Greater London, as you asked,” said Longbright. “I thought someone would be able to tell if his outfit was similar to any of the distinctive leather suits bike messengers wear, but so far no-one has come back with a positive match.”

  “We’ll have to do all the follow-up work ourselves,” said May. “Faraday won’t recommend putting more officers on the street because he’s corner-cutting to prove he can meet his end-of-year budget. So long as we’re always pulled in after the event, we can’t be expected to prevent further tragedies. Not unless we’re somehow granted the gift of second sight.”

  “But that’s exactly what we need to develop,” said Bryant, “and I know how to go about it. We need someone who understands why such mythical bogeymen recur in the city. Recognise the cause and you locate the solution.” He tapped his partner on the shoulder. “Come with me.”

  “Oh, no, I’m not heading down this route,” May warned. “You heard Raymond, no table-tappers and ghost-watchers, just solid data-gathering.”

  “You’re absolutely right, and I’m sticking to my promise. She’s just a white witch. I don’t suppose you have a problem with that, given this area’s rich connections with witchcraft.”

  “You might just as well say the area’s connected with carrots because there’s a vegetable stall outside the tube station,” said May hotly.

  “Come on, John, have you forgotten the lecture I dragged you to about the ‘Mother Damnable’ of Kentish Town, Jinney the Mother Red-Cap, who frequently lodged the notorious highwaywoman of Oliver Cromwell’s days, Moll Cutpurse? She was a fortune-teller, healer, and practitioner of the black arts, and her life was filled with cruelty and insanity. Mother Red-Cap’s partner incinerated himself in her oven, and later, when she herself was close to death, crowds saw the devil himself enter her house and take her soul. The witch’s hair dropped out in two hours, and the undertaker had to snap her stiff limbs to fit her into a coffin. She, Mother Black Cap, and Mother Shipton, all three notorious witches, all lived within half a mile of one another. Coincidence? I think not.”

  May looked at his partner and his heart sank. It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas. John May knew this, because Bryant had once introduced him to the witches’ alarming descendants, who continued to live – and die violently – in the immediate neighbourhood of their ancestors. But now his task was to prevent his partner from favouring the pursuit of his hobbies over practical investigation.

  “I’m not coming with you, Arthur,” he warned.

  “I need to get you out of the office, John. We have to talk about the Leicester Square attacks. Please.”

  Bryant buried himself inside his voluminous threadbare overcoat and looked for somewhere to stick his smouldering pipe. For a moment, with his head all but vanished and smoke coming out of his sleeves, he rather looked like a witch himself, melting after a tossed bucket of water. “It’s early. I’ll have you back here in no time.”

  May reluctantly rose but stopped at the unit entrance. “Can’t you see what they’re trying to do? They’re dissipating our strength, dividing us between two investigations in order to make us fail at both. The Vampire is an irrelevance not worth wasting time and money on. We need to concentrate on the matter at hand. One success is better than none.”

  “We can’t ignore this, John,” said Bryant softly. “Not when you know it involves the death of your daughter.”

  ∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧

  25

  Attracting Evil

  “How could I have told them the truth, with April in hearing distance?” pleaded May.

  “You’ll have to talk to her at some point.” Bryant bundled himself against the cool morning air and set off across wet pavements for the unit car park, a quadrangle of bricks cracked with drain-fed w
eeds, where horses were once stabled for the gentry of Camden Town. “You can’t leave these things hidden forever. It’s not fair on the poor girl.” He produced a bent pickled-onion fork and prised open the broken door lock of Victor, his Mini Cooper.

  “How can I ever broach the subject? She’ll hate me for all the years I’ve lied.”

  “You know my views on that. You should have made a clean breast of it years ago, instead of letting the problem compound itself.”

  “You’ve always been brutally honest with people because you don’t care what they think, but I can’t lose April now, just when I’m getting her back.”

  “Get in, for heaven’s sake.” Bryant peered at his partner through the rain-stained windscreen, but May had not moved.

  He was remembering the day with terrible clarity.

  The sticky heat rising from London streets at dusk. A cloud of starlings tumbling above the plane trees. 'Yourists ambling towards the cinemas of Leicester Square, where The Silence of the Lambs and Terminator 2: Judgment Day were showing. The detectives, tired and fractious, waiting in the shadowed doorway of an amusement arcade. Longbright, radio-linked in a hot patrol car below Leicester Fields, in Panton Street. So much waiting, with nothing to do but argue.

  The press had grown bored with the unsolved assaults. Leicester Square had been redeveloped as a pedestrian zone, and it was assumed that the Vampire had ceased operation in the area, despite the occasional unconfirmed sighting. During the summer of 1991, the brutal murder of a woman in her late twenties in an alley off Cranbourn Street prompted fresh attention, and the case was reopened. This time the victim was a blonde, well-educated and attractive, and therefore more likely to extract outraged cries for justice. The hunt for the killer of young Amanda Wakefield began in earnest.

  Three nights before the detectives’ vigil, a fight had broken out in another Leicester Square backstreet, during which a homeless man was half beaten to death by a murderous gang of youths supposedly looking for the Vampire. The police commissioner had been pressured to take action, and the unit had grown too desperate for a break.