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

by Christopher Fowler

  “Look out for a symbol scratched somewhere outside the building. Arthur thinks he always leaves a mark, a pair of V’s, one inverted. He stands and watches them die,” said May, realising the truth. “Or he arranges it so that he’s near enough to be sure of their deaths. And there’s no emotional response at all, except perhaps a very controlled level of dispassion. If you need me, I’ll be over the road.”

  May made his way to the dark bar of the Jerusalem Tavern in Britton Street, sidling along a squeezed, warped corridor to a minuscule back room filled with stuffed animals. The pub’s name was another reminder of Clerkenwell’s strange connection with the Knights Templars. He ordered a marsh-green bottle of King Cnut ale and sipped it, tasting barley, nettles, and juniper.

  What could I have said? he thought. Maybe I’ve finally cracked up. Too many years spent dealing with abnormalities, listening to Arthur and his pals explaining why dowsers and sunspots can help catch criminals, instead of following my instincts and using more traditional procedures. I could have become a Met superintendent years ago, a nice safe earner. Instead I spend my time wandering about in the realms of the unnatural, looking for vampires and shape-shifters.

  At such times, May knew, there was only one course of action. His partner operated as the other side of his brain; the two halves needed to be reunited, in order to find some sense in the surreal. If Bryant really thought he could uncover the truth, now was the time for him to use any method necessary to do so.

  ∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧

  29

  Deification

  In the last two months, Hard News, self-billed as Great Britain’s first daily magazine, had become the periodical with the fastestgrowing circulation in the country. Janet Ramsey, former cable newsbabe and Page Three model, was its senior features editor. On Friday morning, she swooped into the Covent Garden office that had once been the headquarters of the British Cabbage Association and searched for somewhere to dump her Starbucks Double-Shot Skinny Latte on the mess of smoked-glass desks. “Are you the new runner?” she snapped. “Get me a fresh one of these.”

  “Do you have the money?” asked the lanky young man who had been leaning outside Ramsey’s office, waiting for instructions.

  “I don’t carry loose cash on me, darling, I’m like the queen. Sub me until I get change of a twenty.”

  “Not on my wages,” the runner told her. “Cash up front, I’ll get change.”

  “I don’t know where we find you lads these days,” Ramsey complained, digging in her purse to grudgingly pay him. “A century earlier we’d have been putting you up chimneys and lowering you into drains with canaries.” She beckoned to Roat, her art director. “Dump the old shot we had of the Highwayman; the picture quality was horrible. What was it photographed through, a heavy denim veil?”

  “This isn’t Vanity Fair,” said Roat. “It was taken by a barista through a steamed-up coffee bar window.”

  “Can’t you find another shot of him, one that isn’t so blurred?”

  “He’s a murder suspect, not a catwalk model.” The designer sighed. “We’ll retouch the jaw and lips, bring out the tricorne and the mask, make his eyes more sinister.”

  “That’s not technically legal,” Ramsey warned.

  “It was good enough for Time magazine and O.J. Simpson,” the designer reminded her. “It would help if I could reduce the size of the splash.”

  “Then put it on page three and come up with a symbol for the front cover, something we can use to identify the Highwayman whenever he’s sighted. Don’t go over the top, but make it demonic and sexy.”

  “This just arrived for you, Janet,” said the runner, handing her a brown envelope.

  “You’re not entitled to use my first name,” Ramsey warned. “Actually, you can open it; it might be hate mail.”

  “You’ve been peed on by a member of Oasis; surely you can withstand a little anthrax,” sniffed the designer, watching as the boy tore open the package.

  “What do we have here?” Ramsey scanned the four photographs. “Well, well, just in time for this Sunday’s edition.” She dropped the photographs on her desk with a smirk that revealed the mouthenhancing limits of her lipstick. “Someone appears to be on our side. The Highwayman has had some professional pictures taken. Look at them; they’re like forties studio shots.” She rattled her Versace charm bracelet at the runner. “Envelope, envelope. Where did this come from?”

  The runner was examining something he had removed from the lining of his nose. “Dunno. Post room?”

  “Show some initiative and find out.” She passed the pictures to the designer. “See if you can do something with them.”

  “Can I spend some money on artwork?”

  “All right, but don’t go mad. We’ll run a large strap across the cover, something like Highwayman Delivers Death Vengeance Twice in One Night. Deliver, you see? Like ‘Stand and deliver’?”

  “Okay, but ‘vengeance’? He killed two innocent people.”

  “For God’s sake, nobody’s innocent anymore. Two very disliked people. All right, I take your point, give me something bland and non-committal like Masked Man’s Double Slaughter Rampage. Get Francesca to work out the details, and shift Pope Admits There Is No Afterlife to the bottom of the page; the story’s unsubstantiated.”

  “She’s your sub, you tell her,” said Roat, stumping back to his desk.

  “I have to do everything around here.” Ramsey slammed her office door behind her and examined the cuttings on her wall. To date there had been seven amateur snaps taken of the Highwayman, only four of which were verifiable. It would help if they knew where he was going to strike next. According to Simon, the tubby queen who handled the insider’s pop page, the Highwayman’s face had already made an appearance on stencils and flyers for a club night in the West End. She could take a leaf from the trend, ask Roat to tidy up the symbol a bit, get it adopted by the nation’s teenagers. Publish some souvenir memorabilia, do a contra-deal with T-shirt printers and knock up some shirts bearing his image, hand them out at gigs and clubs; condemn his actions in print, of course, but run some iconic imagery on mobile phones to whet the public’s appetite. It was important for the magazine to own his image. She called Francesca in.

  “Couldn’t we get a band to record a song about him?” she asked. “What would it take to turn him into a cult hero?”

  “A little cash,” said Francesca, who loathed her boss and coveted her job, but was forced to smile and offer help until she could think of a way of derailing her. “You don’t need to shift many downloads for a hit single. We’ll be fine so long as he sticks to attacking unloved celebrities, but what if he decides to go after a national hero? Launching a campaign around him could backfire.”

  “Never worry about things that haven’t happened yet,” snapped Ramsey. “The public has a ten-second memory. We’re not condoning his actions, Francesca, we’re riding on his awareness level. When six million people show an interest in a lousy paperback about finding God, it’s your job to understand why they do so; it doesn’t mean you have to like it. The English are irrational creatures, and ipso facto, unintentionally hypocritical. We merely reflect their failed ability to appreciate their reduced moral status.”

  “Sometimes I think you’re working on the wrong paper,” said Francesca. “Lately you’ve been using long words and showing scruples.”

  “Everyone blasts the tabloids; nobody condemns the readers,” replied Ramsey, swinging her white leather chair away. “I think about the process more than you, that’s why I’m in the job you want but will never have. I went to Cambridge and I showed my breasts in the tabloids. These facts aren’t mutually exclusive; the stereotypes are formed in the public mind, where I can benefit from them.”

  She flicked at her computer and ran a coral-coloured false nail down the screen, crackling static. “If this report is to be trusted, the Highwayman killed twice within the same half hour last night. The public won’t know what to think, so it�
��s our job to tell them. Either we vilify him, ‘this depraved monster,’ et cetera, which leaves our readers with no course of direct action, or we promote him – luckily, he looks bloody sexy in these stills – and they can follow his exploits. They can feel as if they have a share in him. I think our course of action is clear, don’t you?” She looked out at the city streets shrouded in autumnal morning vapour. “They’re looking for new gods, and we’ve got one for them. Vengeful, unforgiving, filled with righteous wrath, roaring down from the sky like a fiery angel. We’ll give them what they asked for.”

  ♦

  “I don’t see what you’re so angry about,” said Bryant, pulling open each of his desk drawers in turn and rummaging through them. “Have you seen my special tobacco?”

  “It’s not special tobacco, Arthur, it’s grass from your mutant marijuana plant, and I’ve thrown it away – Yes, I know you’re going to say it’s medicinal, but Janice thinks Raymond Land is searching the offices for incriminating evidence, so it had to go.”

  “I’d appreciate your dropping the sharp tone from your voice,” said Bryant, still rummaging. “You sound so unnerved.”

  May dropped wearily onto the corner of his desk. “Is it surprising? I want to find a flesh-and-blood killer, not some mythical creature who slips through the night like a wraith. I’m giving you permission to explore alternative methods of investigation. You should be thrilled. Instead, you’re telling me you’d rather use my methods. Why must you always be so perverse?”

  “I’m not, I’m being open-minded, as you requested. And I don’t make distinctions between reality and myth. The former often ends up becoming the latter. Look at Atlantis.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Men have been looking for Atlantis ever since Plato’s dialogues, even though he probably intended the story as an analogy. Despite this, American oceanographers are using up their grant funds in attempts to place the lost continent in locations ranging from Ireland to Cyprus. Fiction affects and alters the truth, you see? If a scientist fell overboard on such a trip and drowned, we could say that he died as the result of belief in a myth.”

  “Four deaths, Arthur! This is not about some ancient myth.” May looked at his bitten nails, wondering how much longer he would last without suffering another heart attack.

  “In a city of eight million people, at least a handful must have strange and potentially harmful belief systems, and we can root them out using standard investigative methodology. Janice and April are searching the victims’ backgrounds for common elements, something they’ve shared in the past that has marked them out from the rest of the population. Because you’re right; there are no illogical murders, only irrational ones. A youth bludgeons an old lady for a handful of change. The boy has an addiction, the pensioner is vulnerable. He behaves irrationally but quite logically. One has simply to consider the moral dimension. The boy’s need forces him into a situation we consider morally repugnant, but if he failed to act logically, by attacking a stronger victim living further away from the pensioner, we would have no way of locating him. Without logic, our working methods collapse. You’re right.”

  “Will you stop saying I’m bloody well right?” May was frustrated and becoming increasingly annoyed. “How can you use logic here?” he demanded. “The man is wearing nineteenth-century clothing, for God’s sake.”

  “And there is a reason; we simply haven’t deduced it yet. The lord chancellor wears a tricorn hat during proclamations in Parliament, did you know that? Perhaps there’s a political link.” Something rang a distant bell in his head, but he dismissed it.

  “And what about the timing on Sarne and Paradine? There’s nothing logical about the Highwayman being sighted in two places at once.”

  Bryant patted the papers on his desk. “‘I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy’ – Samuel Butler. The witness reports actually fall within fourteen minutes of each other. The distance between the two sites is too much to cover on foot, but perhaps he really does have a motorcycle. It would partially explain the outfit.”

  “Nothing explains anything in this investigation,” cried May, exasperated. “I’m expecting Faraday through that door any minute to demand why we haven’t locked up a suspect.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and dropped into the chair opposite. “What I’m saying is, I’ve come around to your way of thinking. We need to try something new. Run me through the combined timeline Banbury and Kershaw came up with.”

  “Let’s see.” Bryant adjusted his bifocals and squinted at the page. “Have you been using my watermarked Basildon Bond? I keep this for special, you know; it’s not for scribbling on.”

  “Give it to me. I don’t know why you have to get everything printed out; it makes a mockery of the electronic age.” May snatched at the papers impatiently. “Eight-thirty P.M. – Sarne arrives at the Oasis Swimming Pool for his evening dip. The pool is due to shut at nine P.M. There’s supposed to be a guard on duty but he’s gone off somewhere; nobody seems to know where. A couple of other swimmers have timed tickets for the previous half hour, but they’ve gone to change by the time Sarne hits the water. The Highwayman is spotted on the roof above the pool at around eight forty-five P.M. by one of the class instructors, but she doesn’t consider the incident unusual enough to report.

  “At exactly the same time, in Clerkenwell, Paradine checks into the empty building in St John Street looking for his recording studio. He goes up to the fourth floor, using the stairs because the lift isn’t connected up. You’d think he’d twig that there was something wrong, but presumably he’s merely keen to get the job done and leave. His agent has no record of the booking, so we’re checking Paradine’s phone messages to see if someone rang him direct.

  “On the fourth floor he walks along the corridor, steps onto the faked-up covering, and falls through the unfinished floor. The Highwayman is seen leaving from the site at nine P.M.

  “Meanwhile, Sarne is finishing his laps in the pool. He gets out of the water and heads for the showers. Turning on the hot tap, he gets dowsed in ordinary unleaded engine petrol and set on fire. Banbury traced the exposed section of water pipe into the ceiling and found it sawn through. Fitted over the end was a plastic accordion hand-pump containing petrol residue. The killer simply waited for Sarne to turn on the tap before stamping on the pump and tossing a match down through the grille. Still, it seems an absurdly complex method of death. The pipe must have been cut earlier the same evening, because the shower hadn’t been reported out of action.” He tossed the paper back onto his desk. “The combined reports of the entire unit, and they amount to virtually nothing. Four locations with no link between them, and four victims with no shared attributes beyond a public profile.”

  “You want me to use my methods?” Bryant asked. “Then we need to find out what inspired this nightmare figure to be conjured to life. How can we protect potential victims if the public believes they somehow brought retribution upon themselves?”

  “We’re reviewing the few unlikely suspects we do have. Janice is arranging that for later today.”

  Bryant pulled the collar of his ratty jumper up to his chin, shrinking into his chair with the effort of thought. “The most common attribute shared by the victims is their increasing level of infamy. As your granddaughter pointed out, their movements are known; it makes them easy targets. Four people have died, and one has been born; the Highwayman has already begun the process of passing into our shared mythology, just as Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild did before him. He is conjuring himself into existence, aiding his own birth, building the creation of his own myth. How? By dressing outlandishly, by leaving a calling card, by posing for photographs and allowing himself to be seen. He craves a different kind of notoriety to that achieved by his victims. He desires admiration and respect, and that will be the weakness that causes his downfall.”

  Something in Bryant’s speech struck a familiar chord. “You’re talking about setting up a potential vic
tim for him.”

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  “You know how dangerous that is. Look what happened with the Leicester Square Vampire.”

  “This time we can have total control. You don’t even have to be involved, John. The unit will take all the risk. Besides, there’s something else for you to do. Look back at the birth of our myth-figure. Who first gave us the image of the Highwayman?”

  “The boy who was drawing in the gallery.”

  “Then return to him. Even if he doesn’t know it, the boy holds the key. While you do that, do I have your permission to bring in some alternative expertise?”

  “You have my blessing,” May agreed. “Just make sure there’s nothing to connect us in the event of an internal investigation.”

  ∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧

  30

  Secret Landscapes

  As he struggled with a recalcitrant length of bookbinding tape, Arthur Bryant thought back to the white witch’s comments about London’s legendary monsters.

  How many had left their marks behind in ancient streets, to be traced through to the present day? As a tour guide, he had taken tourists around Chelsea, showing them the artists’ houses where nervous talk of foreign fiends once filled the drawing rooms, then on to Vauxhall and Rotherhythe, where cutthroats and footpads had operated in the alleyways and under the arches. In London’s poor areas the dangers had been more real, and the residents had found little time to fret over the presence of imagined devils, but in wealthy and penurious neighbourhoods alike, the legendary monsters of London had left few physical signs of their presence. All that could be seen were a few untended plaques, a gravestone or two, sometimes a public house where a villain had gathered with his cronies. Monsters lived on in family memories, and were turned into stories to frighten children.

  Bryant patted the binding tape onto his copy of London’s Most Notorious Highwaymen and returned it to the shelf behind his desk. So if there were no outward signs of the city’s night creatures left, why did their stories survive? Did grandfathers still terrify with tales of Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper, or were these legends now too tame to recount? Denis Neilsen, Fred West, and Dr Harold Shipman were the British bogeymen of the twentieth century, and the infamous catalogue of their victims would lengthen in the twenty-first as the full extent of their crimes was revealed. But they had been identified, analysed, and locked away. For a murderer to become a myth, something more was required, an element of the unfathomable. Could it be that as the lives of murderers were dissected and placed on public display, their power to thrill future generations was diminished?