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

by Christopher Fowler

43

  The Dynasty

  While the staff of the PCU worked on through the rainy Saturday night, Janet Ramsey reached stable condition at the Chelsea Hospital. Her X rays revealed a single wound: a skull fracture caused by a sharp blow to the head.

  Early on Sunday morning, Banbury enlisted Kershaw to take photographs and conduct further analysis at the editor’s apartment.

  “She fell from the top to the bottom,” Banbury told his colleague with certainty, clambering to his feet after examining the attack site. “Seven stairs, enough to increase her weight-mass fatally. She’s lucky to still be alive.”

  “High heels, old chap, hardly surprising she couldn’t keep her balance.” Kershaw checked the screen of his digital camera, playing back shots. “She’s an old-school journo, hasn’t been out of cocktail outfits since her days of attending mayor’s banquets for the provincial press.” He looked around at the pastel cushions, ribbons, and flowers disapprovingly. “Janet Ramsey has a secret – despite what she publishes in Hard News, she’s a born romantic.”

  “Good for me; soft surfaces hold more fibres.” Banbury hated examining hardwood floors because fresh evidence became balled up with older detritus and gathered around the edges of the room. “Let me see the fissure on her forehead again?” Banbury’s partner turned his camera around to reveal the uploaded photographs taken by the admitting doctor. “Can you enlarge the contusion area and lighten it a little?”

  Kershaw worked the camera controls. Together they examined the damage that had placed Ramsey in a coma. “Three leaves,” Kershaw muttered.

  “What are you saying?”

  “You can clearly make out three V-tipped indentations at the hairline of her right temple. She’s got a fleur-de-lis pattern stamped into the front of her head.” He began searching around the base of the staircase.

  “Over here.” Banbury pointed to the antique ironwork railing that stood a few feet beyond the front door. After Kershaw took shots of the area, Banbury sprayed Luminol on the stairway and lifted impressions from the points of the fleur-de-lis. “Looks like she fell headfirst down the steps and banged her forehead against the railing. The force would have been enough to dent her skull. The brain is probably bruised, and there could well be bone splinters in it, so I imagine she’ll be too whacked out to be interrogated just yet.”

  “She was in the bedroom when she phoned the sergeant,” said Kershaw, thinking aloud. “The Highwayman rings her doorbell – the second time he’s done so – and this time she lets him in. She calmly fronts him out, but then he makes a move towards her, as if he’s going to attack, and she jumps back – ”

  “What was he going to hit her with?” asked Banbury. “She said he wasn’t armed.”

  “She said she thought he wasn’t armed. Perhaps he pushes her. Either way, the front door’s still wide open; she goes to leave and falls headlong down the stairs, cracking open her skull. Point is, there’s no way of proving whether it was attempted murder.”

  “Then we have to find a way,” replied Kershaw. “This is the kind of street where the residents will tell you they saw nothing.”

  “We have one reliable witness: Ramsey herself.” Banbury ran a hand over his cropped head. “The phone call. She got closer to him than anyone. And on the transcript, she tells Longbright that the Highwayman is not male.”

  “That’s ridiculous, a woman wouldn’t be strong enough.”

  “You haven’t met my girlfriend,” said Banbury. “She works in a pub and was still changing the barrels two days before giving birth to our nipper.”

  The pair crossed the road and began knocking on doors. An elderly neighbour opposite thought she had seen someone being attacked, but didn’t call the police because she had “no desire to interfere in the affairs of others.” Chelsea was home to much of London’s old money. Phalanxes of pathologically self-centred venture capitalists, wine traders, and art dealers lived behind its triplebolted doors.

  “Did you at least get a full statement?” asked Banbury when Kershaw returned. The crime scene manager was in Janet Ramsey’s hall, lying on his stomach and sliding sheets of sticky acetate across the carpet.

  “I tried to get the witness down to the unit, but she refused to go. Besides, what I got didn’t add up.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The old lady says she looked out of her window and saw Ramsey’s front door open. She knows Ramsey to nod to, nothing more, actually referred to her as ‘that frightful newspaper woman.’ Ramsey came out onto the steps, then dropped, as though she’d lost her footing on the first step, and fell headfirst, glancing against the railing. Witness reckons she was alone. When she landed, she didn’t get up.”

  “And she still did nothing to help?”

  “Carried on repotting her nasturtiums.”

  “As you say, Ramsey was wearing very high heels, so it’s possible she just fell. I need to take a look at the top step.”

  Banbury examined the treads and took a scraping of a single small scuff mark. “I’ll see if this matches her heel,” he told Kershaw, “but it looks pretty straightforward. She was trying to get away from him, and didn’t check where she was going – or he had already gone and she was simply in a state of disorientation.”

  “Or she may have been lying, and he was never there at all,” added Kershaw.

  “Then why would she tell Longbright the Highwayman wasn’t male? No, he was here all right. We’ve got the same ridged bootprints in the hall, and this time they’re the larger of our two sizes, same as the one in the gallery.” He ran his torch along the carpet, highlighting the indented pile. “He walked behind her.”

  “So he could have pushed her,” Kershaw suggested.

  “I don’t think so. The carpet prints are all the same depth. He continued walking and went out the way he came in.” Banbury rocked back on his heels, thinking. “One odd thing, though. Her prints are clearly distinguishable because of the narrow heel. They come up from the lounge, go to the front door and back, then stop altogether. His prints cross hers, so I guess he might have flattened the pile.”

  “But we have an eyewitness report that she tripped and fell,” said Kershaw. “That doesn’t fit with what you’re reading from the carpet.”

  “It’s a recurring MO,” Banbury muttered, lying down with his shoulder against the carpet, examining the skirting boards. “He’s always there, but not, if you see what I mean. He’s seen at the sites, but we have no evidence that he ever touches the victims. That’s a very unusual behavioural pattern, some kind of fundamental disassociation with the victims. Usually I’d expect to find something on the bodies suggesting the identity of an outside party, but there’s been nothing on any of them. It’s as though his mere presence is enough to kill.”

  “Why would he go out of his way not to touch them?”

  “Being careful about forensic evidence, or maybe it’s part of the image. Nemesis, a figure of dread. Remember Wichita’s BTK killer, all those cryptic messages he sent to the police about his crimes thirty years after he had committed them? Same principle here. The desire to inspire fear and be treated as a celebrity monster. Bryant is right; he has the same profile as the Leicester Square Vampire. No wonder he thinks the cases are related.”

  “I take it you don’t,” Kershaw suggested.

  “No, I agree that they are,” said Banbury, “just not in the way anyone has imagined. What do you think this is?” He raised a pair of tweezers in his torch beam and showed its contents to his partner.

  Kershaw peered at the curved white sliver. “Looks like plaster.”

  “There’s nothing made of plaster around here. It’s not from the ceiling. The shape’s too rounded.” It was Bryant who had persuaded Banbury to always carry an old-fashioned magnifying lens. He was glad of it now as he dug it out to examine the splinter. “Appears to have been broken off from the ironwork. Identical fleur-de-lis shape.” He matched it against the design. “Except that there’s nothing missing here, and it’s ma
de of the wrong material.”

  “The Highwayman specialises in the impossible. Therefore, if we assume she didn’t fall, he must have wanted to make it look as if she did.” Kershaw bagged the chip for removal, and thought for a moment. “I think I know what this is. He’s making mistakes now. I hope you didn’t make any arrangements for your day off.”

  “Actually I was planning to attend my sister’s wedding,” Banbury replied. “I’ll stick a note in with the flowers.”

  Loyalty to this unit is going to be the ruin of us all, thought Kershaw sadly.

  ♦

  “Nobody does this kind of thing anymore,” said Felix, lifting away the sticky sheet to reveal a neat square hole in the window. Heavy rain darkened the school, shielding it from the road. The professional burglar set down the pane and proudly brushed back the ends of his grey handlebar mustache. “It’s a lost art. Nobody cares about craftsmanship. The refinement is in the detailing.”

  “You’re breaking and entering, not carving a bentwood chair,” said May tersely.

  “You’re lucky I’m operating on this side of the law,” said Felix.

  “That’s only because we haven’t caught you working on the other side yet. Mr Al Fayed is still hoping to get his diamonds back, despite where they’ve been. We shouldn’t be seen with you. You’re a marked man. I’m surprised you’re still alive.”

  “Ah, you didn’t hear. I faked my own death a couple of times and shook them off.”

  “We still managed to find you easily enough, so watch it.” May looked back at the darkened schoolyard. “I thought there would be a caretaker.”

  “Caretakers cost money. It’s cheaper to install an alarm these days.” Felix slipped his arm through the window and raised the catch. “All you need to shut this system down is a magnet and a needle. It’s pitiful. They go for the cheapest option because only kids break into schools. What would a professional find worth nicking here? They’re too busy reading pin numbers over punters’ shoulders at cash points. My old man would be turning over in his grave.”

  “…if he wasn’t inside,” Bryant pointed out. “Are we likely to find any more alarms?”

  “What are you expecting, laser beams across the floors?” He slid up the window and pulled Bryant inside with some effort. “Would you mind telling me what we’re looking for?”

  “Just get us to the back of the first floor and we’ll do the rest,” said Bryant.

  “It’s a liability having you on the job with me,” Felix complained. “I’m not insured if you break something.”

  They climbed the broad oak staircase and made their way past school portraits dating back more than three hundred years. May tried the door to Kingsmere’s room and found it locked. He turned to Felix. “Over to you, Maestro.”

  Felix pushed May aside and warmed his fingers. “A Hannen cross-flange switch-bolt, a nice little Victorian number; we don’t see many of them nowadays. The screw gauges are different from modern locks.”

  “Can you open it?” asked Bryant.

  Felix unfolded a set of tiny screwdrivers. “Victorian equipment requires Victorian tools. Luckily for you I’m a professional.”

  Within ten minutes, Felix had removed the entire lock from the door and carefully laid it in pieces on the hall floor. “It has to go back in the same way it came out,” Felix explained. They crept into the room and shone torches over Kingsmere’s elegant glass desk.

  “No,” said Bryant, pointing, “start in the cupboards over there.”

  “You know where to look, don’t you?” asked May, amazed. “What have I missed?”

  “The boys told Longbright that he gave them a lesson using artifacts from his family’s history. I think we’ll find what we’re looking for in there.”

  Felix stepped forward and pinged open the tiny lock with a disdainful flick of the finger. Bryant opened the cupboard and checked inside to find cricket pads, footballs, broken pieces of science equipment, a master’s gown, rugby kit, and stacks of schoolbooks. “Funny how school cupboards all smell the same. Give me a hand,” he instructed.

  Together, he and May lifted down a cardboard box and removed the lid. This was May’s abiding image of his partner; nosing into some neglected corner of the city to check out its contents. The box had been taped shut, but Bryant happily slit it open with his Swiss Army knife. It was filled with photographs and newspaper clippings.

  “Take a look at this,” Bryant suggested. “Kingsmere’s family tree. I knew he would keep his mementoes here. This room is very important to him; it’s where he passes on his wisdom. He couldn’t resist a little show-and-tell with his favoured pupils. The St Crispin’s pupils are at war with the boys on the estate, so the Saladins are always looking for ways to bring them down. And recently I think they made a discovery about St Crispin’s favourite teacher. They were annoyed with Kingsmere because he had the nerve to conduct goodcitizen classes at their centre, so they took revenge on him – and by extension, their enemies – by embedding clues about Kingsmere’s culpability in their graffiti, for all to see. How typical of teenagers to take such an unnecessarily complicated route.”

  “You’ve lost me, Arthur,” May admitted.

  “This is where a little reading of London history books comes in useful, John. Kingsmere’s grandfather was a legendary fascist. Nobody is given a forgotten Victorian Christian name like ‘Brilliant’ without a good family reason. The name rang a bell the first time I heard it. There’s a famous photograph of Kingsmere’s ancestor throwing a Molotov cocktail at a police cordon in 1935. I saw it at Oliver’s picture library.”

  Bryant raised a fistful of sepia photographs depicting a thin-faced man shouting on a podium at Hyde Park Corner. “He went to jail for attacking the so-called anarcho-socialists he deemed harmful to the well-being of England. Judging from these photographs, he modelled his appearance on a history of earlier protestors. We tend to adopt the look of those we admire; think of the tree-huggers in the nineties, and how they had modelled their appearance on Californian hippies. Kingsmere could have buried his ancestry, but instead he chose to celebrate it and explain it to his class. That says a lot about his state of mind.”

  May stood back. “I don’t understand. You think some piece of ancient family history makes Kingsmere the Highwayman?”

  “I think he’s been following in his family’s infamous footsteps. This is about their perception of social injustice. Imagine a dynasty of outsiders and anarchists, each generation committing the crimes that it deems necessary to improve society. The grandfather is politically committed and indoctrinates his children, so that eventually Brilliant Kingsmere is encouraged to follow in the family footsteps, and wipe out those he imagines are symptomatic of society’s ills.”

  “You can’t honestly believe that’s enough of a motive to turn Kingsmere into some kind of avenging angel,” said May.

  “I’d seen the grandfather’s picture on the wall of the Newman Street Picture Library; I just didn’t register the central connection. It makes perfect sense. The old man’s radical background obsesses and poisons his son, and his son in turn. Ergo, Kingsmere is the Highwayman, continuing his grandfather’s work.”

  “You’ve come up with some rubbish theories in your time, but this beats them all.” May shoved the photographs back in their box. “You think the grandson’s motive must also be about upsetting the social order? The targeting of celebrities considered to be champions of the masses is a bit of a perverse way of meting out social justice.”

  “I haven’t worked out the finer points yet,” Bryant admitted, looking sheepish.

  May was unconvinced. “This is one of your potty dot-joining exercises. I don’t see any damning evidence here.”

  “You don’t?” Bryant was holding something aloft with a smile creeping across his eerily white false teeth. Dipping into the box once more, he withdrew a black leather eye mask. A moment’s more rummaging brought forth a padded courier’s jerkin, similarly stitched in black leathe
r. “The mask and tunic of the avenger. We’re going to find Kingsmere’s prints all over these. He followed his grandfather’s aberrant ideologies. We’ve found our Highwayman. Let’s bring him in.”

  ♦

  “I know why you’re so out of salts,” said Alma Sorrowbridge, picking up Bryant’s mud-spattered trousers and bundling them for the wash. “You’re working too hard and it’s stressing you out, making you forget things. Worry will play merry hell with the bowels.” The Antiguan landlady tutted and shook her jowls. “Fancy leaving piles of filthy old toothbrushes all over the hall with germs and ungodly crawlies leaping off them, and forgetting the nice packed lunch I made you.”

  “It wasn’t nice, it was covered in lard,” Bryant complained. “You need some fat on your chest with the bad weather coming. And eat some fruit. You’re an old man. You got to eat properly and make your peace with God before it’s too late,” she warned.

  “Thank you very much; that makes me feel a lot better,” said Bryant with heavy sarcasm. “All this emphasis on youth and fitness is unhealthy. Why, only a few weeks ago I was shut inside a London sewer, and suffered no aftereffects.” He searched the mantelpiece for his pipe, but Alma had hidden it again.

  “I had to burn your clothes and fumigate the house,” replied the landlady, releasing a burst of lavender polish into the air and grinding it into her sideboard. “It’s Sunday. Why don’t you come to church with me?”

  “My dear good woman, at some point you must realise that you’re wasting your breath. I am quite beyond redemption. I’ll only come to the church with you if the vicar has been found murdered.”

  “I don’t care for blasphemy, Mr B. Did you take your pills? You know you mustn’t get them muddled up.”

  “Just for once I wish everyone would stop mollycoddling me!” Bryant exploded. “I’m not a six-year-old. I’m in charge of a major murder investigation!”

  He managed to beat her to the phone when it rang. “Ah, John, any luck with our man?”

  “He’s out of contact at the moment, walking in the country according to his girlfriend, and he doesn’t have his mobile with him,” May replied. “He’s due back in two hours’ time. I don’t like the idea of him being on the loose – could we get him picked up?”