♦
Sarne tried to rise, but petrol was flooding across the floor of the booth, and his bare legs were slipping as the reeking liquid pooled about him. He realised he was sitting on the drain, preventing it from emptying, but was unable to raise himself. The fumes unfocussed his brain even as they made him nauseous. The most important thing, he knew, was to climb to a standing position, but it seemed so difficult to negotiate a way clear from the path of the spattering spirit.
Pushing hard against the tiles at his back, he woozily shoved himself upright and lurched to a freestanding position, concentrating on stepping out of the poisonous cascade. He was about to throw himself forward, when he glanced up and saw the tiny descending light in the gloom of the cubicle. There was just enough time for him to register the dropping match before its flame combusted.
♦
It seemed impossible, but the floor was bowing beneath Paradine’s feet. He began moving forward, but the shifting of his weight caused the pale green tiles to sag still further, until he realised that he was actually dropping through the corridor floor.
For a moment, nothing more happened – he fought to maintain his balance while absurdly sinking into the ground. The motorcyclist remained motionless, watching impassively, as though he had been expecting this to happen all the while. The carpet tiles were parting fast, splinters of wood beneath them piercing his trousers and striating his legs. Then, sickeningly, there was nothing below him but dead dark air.
♦
The shower was transformed into a tiled oven as it filled with molten fire. Flame bellowed and belched, ceramic cracked, and above the noise rose Sarne’s scream. The fire formed a scorching red whirlwind around him. He saw the flesh of his bare arms blackening, and over the roiling blaze in the booth, the mask and tricorne and the implacably reptilian eyes peering down at him from their safe vantage point above the inferno.
♦
Paradine plunged down into darkness. The fall seemed to last forever. It occurred to him that this acceleration towards a painful and abrupt oblivion was merely the last stage of an effect that had been occurring for some time now. The final unforgiving rupture of flesh into concrete, when it came, offered agonised purification.
♦
Two men dead, blackened and shattered, one figure watching before striding away in black leather boots and a crackling cape – a new London legend on the rise to everlasting infamy.
∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧
28
Dual Impossibilities
“We’ll need a burns man, old fruit.”
Giles Kershaw dropped like a collapsing deck chair and crouched at the base of the shattered shower booth. He shone a slender torch beam across the black body, its flesh crusted like barbecued chicken skin. Over an hour had passed since the fire had burned out, but the atmosphere in the changing room was thickened with an acridity that still stung the eyes.
“We don’t have a burns specialist,” snapped Bryant. “You’re supposed to have covered this sort of trauma in your training.”
“I have, Mr Bryant. I’ve just not come across anything like this in the field before.” Kershaw viewed the twisted corpse with illdisguised incredulity.
“I’m sorry the unit can’t provide you with more traditional methods of death, Mr Kershaw.” Bryant studied the charred mess of limbs and broken tiles, and softened a little. “Just take a few deep breaths and do the best you can. How was your sister’s hen night, by the way?”
Kershaw was pulled up short. If there was one thing everyone knew about Arthur Bryant, it was that he never showed the slightest interest in the personal lives of his employees. His concern was neither natural nor appropriately timed – when it came to handling pleasantries, he had the air of a hotel guest picking the wrong moment to tip a porter – but he was clearly making an effort to be sociable, and Kershaw accepted the gesture in good grace.
“Very good, sir, thank you.” He examined the shower stall. “Well, this isn’t a job for FIT, because the fire was deliberate, not accidental.” The Fire Investigation Team was a specialist service intended to aid a police investigation by mapping the source, growth, and decay of fires. “The triangle stayed intact long enough to kill him. There are three points on the triangle after ignition: heat, fuel, and oxygen. Fires have to stay alive by moving, and they do that by conduction, convection, or radiation, but there were no pipes or other objects in the cubicle to aid the transfer of heat, and the ceiling above is too high for it to have spread easily.”
“There’s a faint V pattern of scorching on the rear wall,” Bryant pointed out. “What’s that?”
“It means combustion started low, and a pool burned here on the floor, see?” He indicated a dark halo shape on the cracked tiles. “An accelerant, petrol obviously.” Kershaw lifted some scraps of burned matter and dropped them into a nylon sack. “Chromatography can break down the chemical structure of the vapour in the bag. God, it smells like a burger bar in here. My tummy’s rumbling.” He stepped back from the cubicle and took some air.
“Can you tell whether he was dead or alive when the fire started?” asked Bryant.
Kershaw swallowed gamely and concentrated. “That’s straightforward enough. A positive reaction for carbon monoxide in his blood will prove he was still breathing, and we’ll check for soot in the air passages. Hyperaemia – inflammation caused by the healing process of leucocytes, the white blood cells – will be present around blisters. Look at this.” Kershaw indicated what appeared to be knife marks across the top of Sarne’s skull. “Heat ruptures caused by the splitting of soft tissues where bone is closest to the skin.”
He rose once more and stretched, pushing blond hair from his eyes with his wrist. “Usually it’s not a very practical way to kill someone, but he was standing in a narrow glazed box and basted with petrol – he might as well have stepped into an Aga. We know he was showering when he went up. That’s burned bare flesh, no fibres that I can see, apart from the remains of his trunks. A polyamide of some kind, they melted onto him. It’s telling that the shoulders are the most heavily burned part.”
“Oh, why?” Bryant leaned closer to examine the roasted body with a handkerchief attached to his nose.
Kershaw unwittingly pulled Bryant’s old trick of not answering the question. “I was thinking perhaps he’d struck some kind of flame like a lighter, but why would anyone smoke in a shower? And besides, that would have left him with his arms bent, at about midheight, and the scarring’s not right. We know this was petrol, not a gas explosion, and there are several odd things about that. First, the boiler is down in the basement, so it couldn’t be faulty pipework; too many metres away to cause an explosion up here. If the petroleum was thrown into the shower unit, it would have to be lit pretty damned quickly before the victim could jump out of the booth. And there are no splash burns on the surrounding floor tiles in front, which you’d have had if someone was tossing the contents of a can. The deeply charred upper body suggests it was tipped from above, except that our perpetrator didn’t climb up from the adjoining booth, because the walls are still wet from a previous shower, and there are no scuff marks breaking the water patterns.”
“What about over the back wall?” Bryant asked.
“You’d have to be about seven feet tall to do that. Don’t tell me we’re looking for Spring-Heeled Jack.”
“Then there’s only one other answer. The petrol was sent through the pipework itself into the showerhead.”
“You’d have to saw into the existing pipe and manually pour the stuff in, but gravity would do the trick from that height. Why would anyone go to such effort? It’s the kind of deranged thing – ”
“ – that the Highwayman would do. Yes, isn’t it?” Bryant raised a knowing eyebrow and walked away.
“You’re right, sir, more Highwayman sightings,” said Mangeshkar, grabbing him at the entrance to the changing room. “Up on the rooftop about ninety minutes ago. Plenty of people in the flats opposit
e – this time we’ve got more witnesses than we can wave a stick at. He ran across the flat roof, stopped at the skylight, climbed down the far side, in full regalia: tricorne, cape, black leather bodice, boots. Colin is up there now having a look around.”
“He wants to be placed at each site,” muttered Bryant. “It doesn’t make sense. Keep a lookout for a calling card – it could be a symbol just a few inches across, scratched into the brickwork.”
On several occasions, the Leicester Square Vampire had left behind a sign of his presence, probably made while he was waiting in the alley for a victim, although the police had never publicised the fact. Signs and signals in the ancient streets; Maggie Armitage’s theory about the capital’s mythical attackers leaving their mark.
“Got anything on the victim yet?” he asked Sergeant Longbright, who was working on her laptop in the changing room. She had bleached her hair a fierce shade of blond and cut it in a style that reminded him of Ruth Ellis, the last British woman to be hanged. What a wonderfully strange creature she is, he thought admiringly, studying her for a moment. So like her mother.
“His identity’s easy. We got that from the wallet he left in his clothes locker. Anthony Sarne, another demicelebrity. Lanechanging politico. There are dozens of Web pages on him – seems he inspired animosity in an awful lot of people.” She turned the screen to face him. “There’s a career synopsis here if you want it; early success as a Labour candidate, disillusionment, a switch of sides to the Liberal Democrats, a court case involving payments to a King’s Cross prostitute that seems memorable only for the predictability of the press headlines, wife and children stood by him, blah, blah. Disgrace, eighteen months in jail for lying under oath, reemergence as a hard-line Tory, reinvention on a TV reality show, now a Daily Telegraph columnist. He prided himself on the fact that he never apologised for his actions, but this final determination seems to have driven his wife away, resulting in divorce proceedings and some ugly public mud-slinging. Cue more punning headlines in the tabloids.”
“Show me,” said Bryant, bending to examine the screen. “I remember him. Well, at least he remained entertaining in adversity. One of those characters people refer to as ‘larger than life,’ when they actually mean he was an opinionated, obnoxious womaniser. He came out with the most frightful spurious rubbish in court, no wonder they sent him down. People with no sense of shame always make good copy. At least we have a clear pattern now.”
“I don’t see one,” said Longbright, flicking through the screen pages.
“That’s because we’ve been searching for someone with an emotional attachment to the victim, but these are all celebrities, whether we like the idea or not. They live in the public arena, and are expected to pay their dues to the people who made them famous. They’re publicly accountable. When they fail themselves, they fail their fans. We’re not looking for jilted lovers, betrayed rivals, or deceived wives. It’s someone who feels personally let down by the actions of these people. White admits to abortions, Martell wrecks his career, and Sarne upsets just about everyone.”
“It doesn’t exactly narrow down the suspects, sir.”
“Quite the reverse,” Bryant replied, sighing. “We’d be harder pushed to find someone who didn’t hate him.”
He stood outside the Oasis with his smouldering pipe, watching the rain-spattered taxis rounding the curve of High Holborn towards St Giles Circus, and considered the predatory tactics of murderers. But instead of the Highwayman, he found himself thinking about the Leicester Square Vampire.
Although Bram Stoker had set Dracula loose in a northern coastal town, the modern vampire suited an urban setting. Cities attract predators, he thought, and vampires are the most predatory creatures of all. They leech from their hosts, and as the goodhearted grow weaker, the vampires gain strength. To do this, they must first gain a position of intimacy. Physical contact is required, and to gain such proximity requires an element of sexual attraction. Their victims, therefore, are willing to different degrees, and continue to remain in sexual thrall until the object of their desire is no longer able to influence them, and the spell is broken.
Cities attracted lonely people who were vulnerable and ready to believe. Vampires came in all shapes and sizes. Their attraction masked moral and physical decay. Beware the creatures of the night, for they prey on those who trust…John warned me about this, he thought suddenly. They’re dividing our concentration. I won’t let them win.
♦
John May stepped closer to the ragged hole and looked down. “A hell of a fall,” he remarked. “Four floors back to ground level, plus the basement. How was the body?”
“He hit his chin on the way down, leaving most of it behind on the second floor. The impact spun him around, so by the time he passed ground level he was twirling like a Catherine wheel. It did a lot of damage, and that’s before the landing broke both his legs and his right arm. It also pushed a rib clear through his heart. It was over quickly, if nothing else.”
Dan Banbury joined May at the edge. “This was a very neat trap,” he added with a hint of admiration. “People can be bloody ingenious when they put their minds to it. Although the killer probably imagined his victim would fall straight down the centre of the hole and break his neck. This is for you.” He passed over a plastic bag containing the dead man’s wallet.
“Alex Paradine,” May read from the ID card inside. “I would never have recognised him.”
“You know him?”
“Only because he’s on television. They call him ‘Garfy’; a comedian, TV presenter, actor, whatever. He thought he was coming to a recording session.”
“How do you know that?”
May had lifted a slip of paper from the wallet by his fingertips. “He had this address written down. There’s an hour booked out on it. Look around. There are at least three sheets of A-four paper directing him to a non-existent studio.” He pointed at the page still taped at the end of the corridor. “Someone goes to the trouble of luring him here and preparing an elaborate, not to mention risky, method of death – and then leaves the handwritten signs behind. Why would he do that? Why pull off this kind of remote-control trick successfully, only to leave behind something that helps to reveal the method?” He looked around, thinking. “He was in a rush and forgot them. But no-one else knew his victim was here, so why hurry?”
“I think the murderer was on site when it happened,” Banbury pointed out. “Let me show you.” He led the way to the rear fire stairs, then down to the floor below, keeping his eye on the ragged hole in the ceiling.
“The building’s been empty for nearly two years,” said May. “The developer hasn’t had any luck finding a tenant; there’s a banner out front offering reduced rent. I remember passing it at least eighteen months ago. There’s probably too much available office space around here. You can tell the holding company ran out of money; half the floors aren’t finished. This ceiling was left open so that electricians could get at the wiring, and the panels were never put back.”
“Maybe our man works on the site and knows about the unfinished floor, or perhaps it was a passing opportunist.” Banbury picked up a cracked sheet of board and showed it to May. “Either way, he sees the hole and paves it over with a thin sheet of hardboard, then lays carpet tiles taken from the stack left on the floor above.”
Banbury considered the hardboard for a moment. “But I’m guessing that it bowed or just didn’t look right. So he searches around for something else, and wedges a pair of wood beams across the gap from the underside, for added strength. He must have shoved them in pretty tight.”
“Why do you say that?”
“If you step on something that feels like it might give way, you back off immediately. The floor had to feel strong enough to walk on, otherwise the victim wouldn’t have advanced. Even then, if he’d kept going, he might have made it across. Something made him stop, and in that moment he grew too heavy for the floor to support him. This is an exercise in smart carpe
ntry. I wasn’t much of an academic when I was a nipper, but I was good at woodwork. It’s a very peculiar way to kill a man. Not exactly foolproof. I think that’s why he was here, to make sure it worked.”
“Sir, we’ve got a witness,” PC Colin Bimsley announced, rushing into the hall so quickly that Banbury had to steer him away from the jagged gap in the floor. May imagined the spatially challenged officer following their victim headfirst into the hole, and wondered how they had ever been landed with such a lumpen constable. “It’s definitely the Highwayman again. Boots, gloves, mask, funny hat. Italian woman who runs the Nero coffee bar across the street saw him leaving the building.”
“That’s impossible,” said May. “Janice called in a sighting halfway across town just a few minutes ago. They’ve got a victim fried alive in a shower, for God’s sake. He can’t have been in two places at once.”
The distracted crime scene officer was looking at him helplessly, waiting for advice.
“Banbury,” May said aloud, “help me out here. Find something normal for me; tell me it was an accidental death, that he just blundered onto an unfinished floor.”
“Can’t do that, sir,” Banbury apologised. “Nothing remotely normal about this at all. We’ve got another decent set of boot marks, though. I need to bag the carpet tiles and run some tests, but I can already tell the prints are similar to the ones in the Burroughs gallery. If it’s the same attacker, we’re getting a pretty unusual profile.” He wiped his hands on his jacket. “He doesn’t like to touch his victims. Always keeps his distance, never gets his hands dirty. No contact means no prints, no DNA, no fibres. The outfit helps, although it seems unnecessarily theatrical.” He doubled down and pulled another carpet tile free. “There’s some kind of gunk on the boot heel. Smells like wood glue. He might have picked it up around here, but it’s worth checking.”
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