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

by Christopher Fowler

  Rufus Abu was the homeless hacker who had crashed Microsoft’s e-mail system with the infamous TooLarge virus, working from the reconfigured computers of an Internet café in Stoke Newington, into which he had broken one night. He Web-logged May daily, keeping him up to date with the latest technological scams.

  Polly Sharrant ran an SM club in Southwark and a number of pirate music companies from a base in Bermondsey. She knew all of the major players in the city’s fluctuating club scene, and what they were up to, any time of the day or night.

  After careful consideration, May decided that Rufus was the only one who might be able to help.

  These were kids who often risked their lives to provide information, not through any misplaced sense of altruism, but because the unit provided them with a safety net when vendettas became too dangerous on the street. Bryant referred to them as the Haphazards in homage to the Baker Street Irregulars. They were itinerants, thieves, and scammers, the city’s eyes and ears, who kept the detectives in touch with the capital’s unruly behaviour. They were not to be entirely trusted, nor were they to be ignored. Bad boys like Nalin and Rufus looked like a million other youths branded by Nike, Adidas, and Puma, low-slung jeans, grey cotton hoodies, and baseball caps with peaks that had been kept to an exact curve by pushing them into coffee mugs overnight; each teenager was an exercise in operational invisibility, working from his or her own peculiar vantage point within the system.

  John May carefully picked his way through the knots of teenagers who filled the rear of the upstairs bar. Now, below him, a thousand people gyrated through shimmering spheres of luminescence, bloodred, turquoise, and vitreous green. The music was so loud that it had lost any sense of form or content. All that was left was a heavy bass throb that vibrated the material of his jacket as he walked. As he searched each face, May hoped that the boy would remember the favour he had promised to repay.

  The detective had not expected to find himself in an Elephant and Castle nightclub at two A.M., but there was no other way of locating Rufus. The thirteen-year-old computer genius spent his life underground, and could only be lured to the surface with a bait of pirated software. May was confident that the package in his pocket would not appear on the hackers’ black market for days yet, and would be enough to gain an offer of help.

  Meera Mangeshkar had offered to take his place tonight, being nearer to the clubbers’ age group, but the young black boy was wary of strangers. Nobody seemed to know where he came from, where he lived, or who his parents were, if indeed he had any. He spoke with a terrible New York accent and used a cheesy brand of street slang, but was smart enough to assume this as a disguise.

  Rufus had been known to help the police on several occasions in the past, but only if the case suited his sense of the bizarre, and only under conditions of strict anonymity. He had an IQ in excess of 170, but what he saw as attempts at exploitation by adults had led him to a life beyond the law. These days his whereabouts could only be ascertained by following newsgroup rumours and checking recent hacker outrages. His exploits left a luminescent trail through the electronic ether, faintly glowing blips in the virtual darkness.

  As if identification wasn’t hard enough in the club, ducting pipes now jetted clouds of dry ice across the dance floor, filling the air with a searing crimson haze. The dancers were moving in a grey concrete cave the size of an aircraft hangar which remained nightly filled until the sun rose over the river beyond. May narrowed his eyes and peered into the stifling mist, but could see nothing. It was the third place he had tried tonight and definitely the last, although he had to admit he was starting to enjoy the music. He was about to leave when he felt a tugging at his sleeve.

  “Hey, Incoming Blues, is this a raid?” shouted Rufus, glaring up. He turned to a tall blond girl who stood beside him in a tight black rubber dress, and pressed a stack of notes into her hand. “Take a cab, baby. I got business to attend to.”

  Rufus held out his hand and buzzed the detective with an absurdly complex handshake. He was four feet eight inches tall, and in his baggy sweatshirt and baseball cap appeared even younger than his thirteen summers. May wondered how they ever let him in. Behind them the bouncers were frisking clubbers for weapons and drugs.

  “I assume you wanna talk a deal.” The boy jerked his thumb at the door, and they left the main auditorium. Rufus blew on his fingers as a long-legged Chinese girl was being frisked at the door. “Check it.” He turned to May. “I think my libido developed same pace as my brain, but who wants to date a smart dwarf? Hey, how’s your partner, Bryant? You two still a perfect match?”

  “He’s fine, and that’s a terrible joke, Rufus. If you want to go somewhere quieter, I have a car outside.”

  “Excel. There’s a really bad coffee bar a block from here, bad as in bad but at least it’s quiet. How come you always look for me after the good restaurants are closed?”

  “I was looking for you hours ago. You’re a hard man to track down.”

  Rufus hated being referred to as a child. He argued that he had the mind of an adult, although May knew that he found his accelerated brainpower as much a handicap as a blessing.

  They parked and walked to the cheerless plastic all-night snack bar, set back from the main road that led to Waterloo. A few of the other tables were occupied by Covent Garden truck drivers. Rufus settled them away from the window, bringing a tray of coffee and sugary doughnuts.

  “How are you getting along these days?” asked May.

  “Same old,” said Rufus. “As bored as a person can be when he recognises that his resource access is more finite than his development bandwidth.”

  “You haven’t been in touch for a while. We were beginning to worry about you.” May knew that the boy could look after himself in spite of his size and age. He had a very wide-ranging set of friends. Core ‘tacts, Rufus called them.

  “I’ve had the damned welfare people breathing down my neck again,” the boy explained, tearing off a chunk of doughnut and sinking it into his mug. “They’re trying to put me back in care, and you know what happens when they do that.”

  “You disappear.”

  “I’m gone, outta here, high-beta non-linear vaporisation. I can lose social workers faster than you can scream Satanic child abuse. I’m a human flash drive, travel light, plug myself in wherever I’m needed. The system doesn’t recognise that anyone living outside the statistic majority could possibly be happy. They’re talking about therapy and special schools again. I may even have to upstream from London. The case against has that much granularity.”

  “You’re not thinking of leaving before you help us, I hope.”

  “You’re talking about the Highwayman. Well, I been wondering about that, too. What can you tell me beyond the usual randomscatter output?” He meant, what hasn’t made it into the newspapers.

  “This,” said May.

  He handed over the not-for-press details they had logged to date, together with a classified set of internal reports. If the PCU was to continue functioning according to its original intentions, it had to bend the rules regarding access of information. “He’s following a sequence that conforms to no known pattern.”

  “You telling me you have no hard-core suspects?”

  “We have a couple of people we’re looking at, but nothing concrete,” May admitted. “The double deaths have thrown us. Once again the murderer was seen but not apprehended.”

  Rufus scanned the documents. “What makes you think the vics aren’t chosen at random?”

  “The premeditation of the murders suggests someone is aiming for a specific effect, but what it is escapes us.”

  “This feels mathematically arranged, John, kind of a murderer’s Turing code.”

  May assumed he was referring to Alan Turing’s celebrated solution to the wartime Enigma code. The logician had successfully cracked cryptographic messages created on a typewriter attached to a random print-wheel, and had suggested that computers would only be capable of human
thought if a random element, such as a roulette wheel, was introduced. “Why would anyone go to the trouble of doing that?” he asked.

  “Maybe he’s scoping victims according to occult significance. Bet you that’s what Bryant thinks.” He dunked the rest of his doughnut and dropped it, dripping, into his mouth. “I agree about the methodology, though. There’s logic at work. It’s like the victims have been demographically targeted. By what coordinates, though?” May could see ideas spinning through the boy’s brain, each examined and discarded in rapid turn.

  “Four across a single week. No correspondence to a lunar cycle, no mutilation, no mess and no fuss. He’s not getting off on it. The double-header is easy to figure. He’s angry because he thought you’d work it out earlier, so he wants you to get closer, where he can confront you. It’s probably someone you’ve met, because this guy really hates you. He knows you, and it’s personal. Can I keep these?” Rufus folded up the pages.

  “Just so long as you don’t show them around.”

  “I’m only asking out of politeness. I already memorised them.” He looked over at the bulge in May’s jacket pocket. “You got a little something in there for me?”

  “Just some prototype programs I’m taking home with me when I leave,” said May casually. “You haven’t given me any solid leads yet.”

  “I told you, he’s not doing it for himself. He’s doing it to mess with your head. He’s more interested in being seen by the public than by his victims. Why? Because the victims can’t report back.”

  “Rufus, this is serious.”

  “Look, first murder.” The boy withdrew a chewed pencil stub from beneath his shirt and drew numbers on a napkin. “Publicity. Second murder: Feed the flame. You get a week on the front pages, no more, so it all has to be done fast. The third and fourth deaths are a catch-up meant to force you guys out – he wants you to do something stupid and risky, crash and burn in front of him.” Rufus thought for a moment. “Okay, here’s something. I noticed one corresponder.” He tapped the chart with his finger. “And you ain’t gonna like it because it don’t lead nowhere.”

  “At this time of the morning it doesn’t matter if things don’t make sense,” said May with a sigh. “I’m feeling old and tired, and I’m going to be out of a job on Monday morning. Hit me.”

  “Don’t ask me how I know this, ‘cause it’s the kind of crap I just carry around in my head the whole time, okay?”

  “Okay.” May moved forward, listening carefully. The boy had given him strong leads in the past and deserved a hearing, no matter how strange his ideas seemed.

  “The Horse Hospital. It’s a bar in the back of Clerkenwell where local artists drink. Saralla White got herself banned for throwing a punch at a photographer there. Apart from White, it was home to another celebrity drinker when it was still an inn called the Queen’s Head. It was where Dick Turpin stayed before heading north.”

  “Rufus, what on earth am I supposed to do with information like this?” said May, dropping his head into his hands.

  “Don’t you see? He selected his first victim because he’d already decided to behave like a highwayman. She got picked at random. All of the victims are just losers who’ve dropped onto the radar by accident. There’s no motive at all.”

  “Rufus, there has to be a motive. Even serial killers have a motive.”

  But the boy had risen and vanished back into the night before May could ask him anything else.

  ∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧

  39

  Entrapment

  Oskar Kasavian was seething. He slammed through the offices one after the other, searching for a scapegoat or something to hurl, knowing that he could blame no-one but himself, but it was dawn on Saturday morning, and the building was nearly empty. He had not expected the detectives to call his bluff by refusing receipt of the third cadaver, slyly returning the body to its resting place via a couple of taciturn orderlies at University College Hospital. This was going to be trickier than he thought. At least the gloves were off now. His ambition had been made clear, as had their intention to fight back. “Where the hell are they?” he shouted at his secretary in passing. “There’s no answer from the PCU. They can’t all be out on assignment. Don’t they realise this is their last weekend in full employment? What the bloody hell is going on?”

  ♦

  “What else could I do?” asked May. “We’re running out of time.”

  “I don’t need to remind you what happened before,” Longbright warned. She had returned to find a lead on the remaining constable who had registered as a witness on May’s ‘confession’, an e-mail from a colleague who remembered the officer’s married name. But time was running out fast.

  “We were more foolhardy in those days. Besides, this was Janet Ramsey’s idea.”

  “What makes her so sure he’s going to turn up?”

  Before them lay the unfolded Saturday morning edition of Hard News, the last one of the week. Highwayman’s Shock Secret Revealed. “The article states that she alone knows the Highwayman’s identity, and that she’ll give it to the police at six P.M. today. She’s had the article constructed by some psychologist to include provocative phrases that will find resonance with our man. She’s recorded the article, and they’ll be excerpting it on radio and television throughout the day. She’s also making sure that her whereabouts are known on the Internet, just as the others did.”

  “I know she’s doing it to boost circulation, but she’s being very stupid.”

  “We can’t stop her from doing it, so we’ll have to help control the event. Colin and Meera are going to stay with her the whole time. She’s due here any minute for a briefing session with us. I was going to ask you to sit in with me. I might miss something; I haven’t been to bed yet. Did you speak to the publican at the Horse Hospital?”

  “He confirmed the old inn’s claim to fame as Dick Turpin’s rest stop, and he remembers the night White was banned. He doesn’t recall who else was in that night, but he promised to ask around.”

  “Have you seen Arthur?”

  “Is he not answering his mobile?”

  “I tried calling him at home, but Alma hasn’t seen him either. Perhaps it’s best that he’s not around. He doesn’t approve of journalistic entrapment techniques.”

  ♦

  Janet Ramsey looked like a housewife from a faded seventies sitcom, bulky and floral, with hair arranged in stiff red peaks, but her voice betrayed the late Thatcherite steel of determination without conscience. She fixed Longbright with a searching eye before accepting the sergeant’s offer of a seat and coffee, as though suspecting her of a trick. She also refused to say anything of consequence until a male entered the room, a habit Longbright deplored in other women.

  “We think the Highwayman has some kind of link with Clerkenwell, and he certainly knows the area,” May explained. “The apartment we have for you is inside a converted watchmakers’ factory. It’s a monitored site with only one main entrance, right between the school and the estate where the Highwayman was sighted. We’ll block off the rear exit and roof access, and we can cover the windows front and back. If he turns up, he’ll have to use the front hall.”

  Ramsey knew that the unit had never supervised such a sting operation before, and that she was forcing them to maintain a police presence at the site. “You’ve got me for the whole day,” she told him. “If he doesn’t show, I want to record an exclusive interview with you in the afternoon, for a Monday publication.”

  By Monday we may not even be here, thought May. “You know you’ll never get a straight answer from a police officer, Janet. We always hedge our answers to cover all eventualities.”

  “Then I’ll conduct the interview with your partner.” She smiled slyly, knowing that Bryant’s inability to lie had exposed the unit’s plans on a number of occasions.

  “That’s up to him,” May countered. “I’m not striking deals with you. You’re doing this with our knowledge, but without our approval.�
�

  “Let’s face it, you haven’t got very far by yourselves. Besides, I’m helping you to catch the man. I’m performing a public service.”

  “Your altruism is touching,” said Longbright.

  “I make it a policy never to use words my readers wouldn’t understand,” replied Ramsey. “If you’re planning to provide me with protection against this maniac, I’d say you’re involved.”

  “We have a remit to protect the vulnerable and innocent,” Longbright told her, “but we also cover journalists.”

  “This one’s a caution.” Ramsey jerked a thumb back at the sergeant. “Which old movie did you find her in?”

  “We’ll want you to wear a radio mike, in case anything unforeseen happens,” said May.

  “Don’t worry, darling, I’ve done this sort of thing many times before. I used to specialise in ending MPs’ careers by posing as a call girl.”

  “That must have been a stretch for you,” said Longbright. May glared at her, but only for the sake of keeping the peace. “Ah, there you are,” said Bryant, sticking his head around the door. “John, a word?”

  May followed his partner out into the corridor. “I wanted you in the briefing with Ramsey. She’s going into the apartment in an hour’s time. Where have you been?” he asked.

  “The Leicester Square Vampire,” Bryant explained. “The DNA samples from the bodies Kershaw and Finch examined need to be matched up against the evidence we archived in the Paddington lockup. I’ll go there myself and sort it out. Heard anything more from Kasavian?”

  “He’s called several times already this morning, but I’ve instructed everyone to stay away from the phones when his direct line comes up. I wanted you on the Highwayman case, Arthur. We’re out of time. Putting a lid on the Vampire won’t do us any good now.”

  “There are circumstances where I can imagine it would help,” said Bryant mysteriously. “If you need me, I’ll be poking through our bric-a-brac in Paddington.”