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

by Christopher Fowler

  “Exactly so.” Bryant studied the prints on the crowded walls. “Wait a minute.” He raised up the copy of the photograph Golifer had shown him, a small blurred shot taken in Leicester Square by a tourist, and narrowed his eyes, comparing it to the lithograph on the wall. The Met had discounted it, but Bryant had long believed that the snap of the Vampire was genuine. This was the evidence no-one else remembered, not even Longbright, who assumed she was official custodian of all remaining documents. He laid the curled photograph on the table. “Bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?” he asked Golifer, pointing to the wall print that showed a strangely outfitted man standing on a rock. “The clothing of the two figures is almost identical.”

  “I never noticed that before,” Golifer admitted.

  “I think we were misled by the nickname conjured up in the press,” Bryant surmised. “The cloak, the boots, the jerkin, the high collar; it appears the Leicester Square Vampire wasn’t modelled on Dracula at all, but upon someone else entirely. This print you have is familiar from my childhood. You know who this is, of course.”

  “Yes, he’s a myth – ”

  “Not at all. He was very real. Born in the reign of Henry the Second, with a pedigree ab origine no higher than a shepherd’s. He trained as a butcher, and was equally brilliant with a backsword, a quarterstaff, or a bow. He fell in with a bad lot, taking to such a level of violent thievery and murder that travellers lived in terror of him, and would pay him for safe passage through the woodlands.

  He died in a Yorkshire nunnery at the age of forty-three after a nun bled him and took too much out. Rehabilitated after his death as a righter of wrongs, a working-class champion.” Bryant lifted the print from the wall and set it down. “We know him today as Robin Hood.”

  ♦

  May studied the gang before him. He rarely thought about his own frailty; he was usually too concerned with his partner, whose lack of robustness, coupled with a curiously youthful impetuosity, frequently lowered him into the freight-train path of harm. But right now he could see the risk in his own situation. He noted the gentler mix and grew warier; the girls could present a shocking ferality that bolstered the boys into more violent acts.

  He waited for them to make a move, but nothing happened. They formed an unbroken barrier across the stairway, waiting in silence, unnervingly still. They wore the uniform of the disenfranchised: thin grey hoods over curve-peaked caps, sweatpants or lowslung jeans. The girls had scraped-back hair, gold hoop earrings, pale bare midriffs with tattooed mock-Celtic symbols, the usual fake brands worn in too-small sizes that made them appear thin and feral. May knew that their language would comprise a barrage of shorthand patois, street American, and incomprehensible slang. He felt an equal measure of sorrow and respect for those who had been stranded here by circumstance, but lately his faith in the redemptive power of the nation’s youth had been tested to breaking point. He knew that their spectrum also included a percentage of vicious teens trapped between the twin hatreds of innocence and adulthood. The difficulty lay in divining the composition of the group.

  Drawing all the confidence he could muster, he moved forward to the next flight of stairs. Almost imperceptibly, the crowd closed around him, sealing off his exit. A girl popped gum loudly. A boy spoke in murmurs too low to be perceptible. Somebody laughed.

  Knives, thought May. They’ll be carrying knives, and I have no way of alerting anyone before they make their move. Did they know who he was? It was absurd to be caught out in such a place, surrounded by families and apartments, without recourse to aid, but he knew that estates like these could be the loneliest places on earth. The Borough of Camden, which had more such estates than most, had the highest suicide rate in London, and all their efforts at treeplanting and traffic-calming were undermined by the desire to continually cram in more housing.

  He felt the shock of contact with a stranger, a boy’s fist shoving at his back, then another, and within seconds the entire group was pushing him towards the staircase, others making way in front of him, clearing the path to the concrete steps. His centre of balance shifted as they kicked at his legs, and then he knew that nothing could stop him from plunging headlong down the stairs, because they would not allow him to catch at their arms, only watching in insolent silence as he fell.

  And fall he did, as the shatterproof light on the landing spun overhead, the rough brick wall grazing his hands but affording no purchase.

  He glimpsed the landing below, and braced himself for the bonecracking jolt of the concrete.

  But it never came. Instead, broad hands caught him beneath the arms, raising him upright and setting him down on the landing. As he caught his breath, he found himself looking up into the faces of two police constables in yellow traffic jackets. Pushing between them came a stocky sergeant with a familiar, if unpleasant, face.

  “Go on, you lot, piss off before I run you in,” he told the group, waving them away dismissively before turning his attention to the detective. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, May, apart from trying to get yourself kicked senseless.”

  Sergeant Jack Renfield’s father had been Sergeant Leonard Renfield, an old enemy of Bryant’s at the Met; like his father, Jack Renfield had been pointedly denied promotion several times, for which he blamed Bryant’s damning reports. For once, though, May was pleased to see him.

  “I suppose your grubby little partner is somewhere around here, too,” said Renfield, looking around with suspicion.

  “No, I’m here alone.”

  “Christ, May, I’d have thought you would have more sense. You’re lucky my lads didn’t knock off early, and were still keeping an eye out.”

  “I owe you one, Jack. What are you doing here, anyway?” asked May, dusting himself down.

  “Chameleon,” replied Renfield somewhat confusingly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Operation Chameleon. A three-month initiative to disrupt gang organisation on London estates. We’ve got men reporting back from all the major flare-up spots, and I don’t need you disrupting their work. I suppose the PCU’s involved. We all had a good laugh about your Highwayman pictures.”

  “Why?” asked May, puzzled.

  “Because they weren’t taken here, were they? An idiot can see that. The sightlines don’t match up. These little sods were having you on.”

  “You’re wrong. We have witness reports from two girls, one of whom gave Arthur the shots from her mobile.”

  “Then they were winding him up, weren’t they?” said Renfield.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Check the rooftops of these blocks, May – each one has its chimney stacks in different order, and I can tell you there ain’t any like the ones in your pictures. My men should know; they spend enough bloody time up there.”

  “Then why the hell didn’t you tell us?” asked May angrily.

  “Not our case, is it?” replied Renfield. “We thought you bigbrained desk jockeys had the answers to everything. Let’s not catch you around here again, eh? You’re too old to be out in a place like this on your own, May. You’re not up to it, mate. Next time we might not be able to reach you before you’re kicked to death.”

  ∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧

  32

  Hall of Infamy

  She had inherited her grandfather’s fondness for organisation. She catalogued her books, arranged her music alphabetically, kept lists, left notes, tidied the mess of her life away into drawers – and somewhere along the line her habits had tipped into compulsions. As much as she tried to create order, little in April’s life made sense to her. There were still too many gaps and unexplained events in the past.

  She sat on the floor of her new office, folding each freshly recorded sighting of the Leicester Square Vampire into its own folder, matching the dates and locations against the scrawled notes in Maggie Armitage’s transcripts. The white witch’s handwriting was hopeless, but she was exact on every detail, even though she exhibited a tendenc
y to drift from the subject whenever the mood took her.

  April cross-referenced the notes with Arthur Bryant’s accounts of all his cases, histories that dated back to the war. The detective’s diaries ran to over thirty volumes. Luckily, they had been kept at home, and had therefore survived the blaze which had destroyed the unit, although some had been severely damaged by water. As she opened the next volume, tracing the Vampire’s repeated sightings, she was surprised to find that half a dozen pages had been neatly trimmed out with a sharp knife. She checked the dates on either side of the removed sections, and the gravity of unease settled within her. They were the days marking the death of Elizabeth, her mother. April never blamed others for her misfortunes, and had freely admitted her own mistakes, but there were forces at work beyond her control. Some dark and windswept chaos in her family’s past refused her the sustenance of a normal life. Her grandfather could provide answers, but he had always been reluctant to discuss the events surrounding the loss of his only daughter.

  April traced the edges of the cut pages, and thought back to ambiguities of her childhood, knowing that they held the key to her troubles. Like a woman wary of visiting the doctor for fear of what she might be told, she decided that the time had come to ask John May for the truth.

  ♦

  “None of this makes any damned sense. It doesn’t follow the accepted psychology of murder.”

  May threw the folders back across the table to Longbright. “Attacks take place in an atmosphere of mutual fear. Anger escalates into the impulse of violence. It erupts in the moment. You try to stifle the noise and the fuss your victim is making, and you accidentally kill him. The anger drops like wind leaving a sail, much more quickly than it rose. You just want to damp everything down, but by then it’s too late. It has exploded like a crack in a piece of pressured glass, and there’s nothing you can do to mend it, so you cover your tracks, hide it all away, but you’re not thinking straight. You won’t realise your mistakes until later, when there’s nothing you can do to correct them. A great rock of remorse settles in the head, like the aftermath of guilty sex. Does that sound anything like what we have here? No, because despite my partner’s insistence on the absolute necessity for logic, in this case logic doesn’t apply. There’s some aberration…something we’re missing…something very bad indeed.”

  He watched the glistening traffic from the window, rubbing his sore arm. “This isn’t a whodunit; pick the likeliest from a list of connected suspects and accuse him. The killer is a stranger, so strange to us that we can have no idea who he might be, because it isn’t about anger; it’s about the lack of it, an absence of any emotional core that might provide a motive. And I don’t know how to deal with that.”

  “Then you have to find a new way of shuffling the deck, John. You’re good at that. You’ve always been an early adapter. Arthur’s too set to change his ways, but this time I think it’s down to you.”

  Longbright had long been used to assembling information and leaving it before her superiors without comment; she rarely talked to either of the detectives in this manner, but now she sensed May’s need for support. He doubted himself. Perhaps he felt he could no longer rely on his partner. Arthur Bryant was venturing further into the arcane than was healthy for the unit; nobody said anything, but it was clear how the rest of them felt.

  “You’re the only one who keeps us focussed on hard fact, John. Facts are all that Faraday’s interested in. We’re all relying on you to provide them.” She saw the tension rumpling his forehead. “What happened on the estate? Why were you there?”

  “Luke Tripp was visiting someone. You should have seen him – he knew exactly where he was going. What was so important that he would walk through a no-go area in semi-darkness? Do me a favour: Call the residents’ liaison officer Arthur met with, and find out who uses the community centre. Get me a list of everyone who’s been there this week. Where is Arthur?”

  Longbright was almost embarrassed to tell him. “He went to see someone about some rare library books. He said it was to do with the case.” The page containing May’s drunken implication in the Vampire investigation was weighing heavily on Longbright’s mind. So far, she’d had no luck tracing the two officers who had co-signed it. One had left the Met, but the other was female and had married someone in the force. It meant she was operating under her married name, and would be harder to find.

  “Are you free for a moment?” Dan Banbury put his head around the door. “There’s something I think you should be aware of.”

  May followed Banbury to his office and looked for a place to sit down, but found only a clear plastic inflatable ball. “Where’s your chair?” he asked.

  “That’s it. Good for your posture; you soon get used to it. I bought one for Mr Bryant after he complained about his back, but he deliberately and maliciously punctured it.” Banbury rolled the ball over, and May lowered himself tentatively. “Take a look at this. I was waiting for the lab results on the boot prints to come back and ran a couple of search engines on the Highwayman.”

  “My God, tell me that figure is wrong.” May found himself looking at a projection of over 12,500 separate Web sites.

  “These are sites dedicated to the Highwayman in the UK alone, John. He has a motion-graphic symbol that’s been posted on some kind of shareware and distributed to everyone who’s asked for the download. There’s souvenir memorabilia up on a couple of auction sites, patently fake but selling for a fortune, and the prices are rocketing. There are several bands, the biggest of which, Stand and Deliver, is clearly being sponsored by some corporation chasing the teen demographic. Plenty of merchandise: boots, decals, T-shirts, sweatshirts, masks, jackets, gloves, heavy metal songs about vengeance and justice – most of the material originating right here in the Camden area. The speed with which this stuff has appeared is absolutely unprecedented, and it’s getting a political spin; it’s all good old-fashioned right-wing propaganda about law and order. The Highwayman is no longer just a source of prurient interest. He’s on his way to becoming a cult hero.”

  “I don’t understand. He’s killed popular national celebrities; he should be despised. Look at the public outrage over the murder of Jill Dando,” said May, remembering the much-loved TV presenter who was shot on her own doorstep.

  “Highwayman’s achieving fantastic popularity among teenage girls,” Banbury pointed out. “Check this.” He opened another site. “‘Why I want the Highwayman to be the father of my unborn baby.’ The girl who wrote this is fifteen years old. ‘Why the Highwayman may be good for us all. Rough Justice: Hard News is the first national newspaper to openly support the Highwayman.’ There’s much darker stuff turning up on the fan sites, pornographic stories and homemade movies about him. We’re going to have imitators on our hands.”

  May threw his hands up in disgust. “What is wrong with these people?”

  “I suppose you could cite underdog heroes like Bonnie and Clyde – ”

  “They were grassroots thieves, robbing banks that were universally hated by the disenfranchised for foreclosing land,” said May. “The Highwayman is just a killer.”

  “Think about it, though. The last decade saw the rise of celebrity culture, personality replacing altruistic ideals. This could be the start of the backlash.”

  “So he replaces such ideals with romanticised images of himself?” asked May. “How does that work?”

  “I guess in some twisted way he thinks he can become the anticelebrity celebrity. And it looks like he’s right. He’s committing the kind of crimes people love to read about or see at the movies, the sort of murders that hardly ever occur in real life. He’s pandering to his public.”

  “That’s what Arthur said. He wants us to set a trap.” He glanced back at the Hard News headline. “I think we’ve found someone who can help us.”

  ∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧

  33

  Criminal Language

  “Where’s Dorothy Huxley?” Bryant demanded of no-
one in particular, sauntering into the dingy southeast Greenwich Library that smelled of fish glue, lavender polish, fungus, and cats, with just a hint of warm tramp.

  He glanced at the depleted shelves and stood some books upright, checking their covers – The Papal Outrages of Boniface VIII; Lost Zoroastrian Architecture, Vol. VI: Iran; A Treatise on Catastrophe Theory Concerning Saturn and the Number Eight; The Cult of Belphegor; and Biggles and Algy: Homoerotic Subtext in Childhood Literature. No wonder nobody ever browsed here, he thought. Hard-core readers only.

  Jebediah Huxley’s literary bequest appeared even more run-down than it had been on Bryant’s previous visits. Lurking in the grim shade of the rain-sodden bypass, awaiting the wrecking ball of cashkeen councillors, it remained a defiant bastion of the abstruse, the erudite, and the esoteric. The crack-spined volumes were flaking with neglect; Dorothy and her gloomy unpaid assistant Frank were unable to save more than a few books a week with their meagre resources. That they continued to do so at all was a miracle. As he peered into the shadowed shelves, Frank’s face materialised between two volumes of the Incunabulum like an unpopular Dickensian ghost.

  “You nearly gave me a heart attack,” said Bryant, theatrically palpitating his waistcoat. “You haven’t got the sort of face you should be creeping about with. Kindly don’t do it.”

  “I was expecting you earlier, Mr Bryant,” Frank gloomed. “You missed her.”

  “Well, when will Dorothy be back?”

  “A good question. It depends on how soon we can arrange for the medium to visit.”