Ten Second Staircase

by Christopher Fowler

  April's interest was piqued. Denied access to her cigarettes, her hands fluttered at her sides in weak agitation. 'The government doesn't kill staff members for pursuing unusual hobbies, surely.'

  'I'd like to think not, but he operated under the Official Secrets Act, after all. Somehow, I doubt we'll ever get to the truth on this one, mainly because the Defence Secretary is reluctant to acknowledge that there's a case at all. There are also a couple of outstanding cold cases which act as strikes against the unit. We're no nearer to finding out the truth about the Leicester Square Vampire, and a recent trail belonging to someone the press are calling the Deptford Demon has also gone cold.' May checked his thoughts for a moment. 'You know you'll come up against some extreme morbidity in this job, April.'

  'It doesn't worry me,' said his granddaughter, offering a tentative smile. 'So long as the two of you are nearby to protect me.'

  May smiled back reassuringly. But he knew that their tenure here at the PCU was every bit as unsteady as April's return to the outside world.

  'Uncle Arthur says that ancient evils are always waiting to resurface in London,' said April suddenly. 'Do you believe that?'

  'Yes, I do,' replied May. 'None of us ever knows when we are likely to be tested. All we can be sure of is that it will be when we lower our guard the most.'

  Looking back, he should have added that evil would take the most unlikely of forms.

  4

  THE USEFULNESS OF MEMORY

  After weeks of rain, the city spent one glorious week marooned in the stale sargasso of a warm late summer. The streets became sticky and overheated, the residents made bad-tempered by their return from clean beaches to London dirt. A belated silly season hit the newspapers, whose editors could barely be bothered to outrage their readers with amorous sporting scandals and tales of government waste, and had opted instead for food scares and travel indignations. The great engine of the city slowed. Offices were becalmed. It was as though everyone was waiting for something to happen. London residents were seeking someone new to idolise, someone new to hate.

  In the final week of October, they got their wish.

  On Monday morning, the clear skies occluded, and cataracts of cloud brought soft autumnal drizzle dampening the dusted pavements, misting the arched windows of the offices above Mornington Crescent tube station to give it the appearance of a disreputable sauna. The light level across London dropped until the city appeared to be lit by forty-watt bulbs.

  'Well, I thought my lecture last week went rather well,' said Bryant, poking down the sides of his armchair for his pipe stem.

  'Are you mad? They were ready to hang you.' Longbright was appalled. 'You were pelted with plastic cups. Several of the parents are still threatening to lodge formal complaints.'

  May shook his silver-trimmed mane in wonder. 'I've never understood your ability to enrage total strangers.'

  'It was a pretty spirited debate, I must say,' Bryant told his partner enthusiastically. 'The head teacher was quite overcome with emotion.'

  'Those pupils thought you were having a go at them,' the detective sergeant reminded him. 'I warned you teenagers are sensitive.'

  'I can't imagine why. I never was. I didn't have time to be touchy. Kids don't understand that age and guile will always triumph over youth and enthusiasm. These days the former attributes belong to corporations, the latter to individuals, so of course any attempt at independence is suppressed. And we wonder why children write on walls.'

  'Your cynicism is getting worse.' May agreed with Longbright. 'You should never begin a sentence with the words "these days." '

  'That's it, I'm making tea.' Sometimes the glamorous sergeant stopped behaving like a fifties starlet and became a fifties housewife, making tea whenever she was upset, great steaming brown china pots of it. Now, as she went to check on the kettle, she became annoyed about Bryant's humiliation at the hands of teenagers who were understandably wary of being patronised. He had mentioned the occasion a dozen times in the past week, so the event was clearly preying on his mind. Any intelligent man could appear a fool without clear communication.

  'You might as well say it; I know you're dying to.' Bryant followed her into the kitchen, ready for an argument. 'I'm out of touch with the general public. They think I'm a has-been.'

  Longbright chose her words with care. 'It's not that exactly, but you have to admit that John's right; you've stopped updating your mental software. You know what he always says—"Adapt or perish."'

  'And you think I've perished.' Bryant tightened his ratty green scarf around his neck. 'I'm fully aware of the gap between myself and them. It's not just age. I grew up in Whitechapel and Bethnal Green—they were raised in Edwardian villas beside the Thames, or in houses overlooking Hampstead Vale. My mother cleaned cinemas and was bombed out of her home. They're the progeny of professionals. I can't imagine their lives, Janice. I've never had children of my own. To reach them, I'd have to understand them, and I'm afraid that's utterly beyond me. They're a mystery race, some new form of protoplasmic alkaloid that looks vaguely human but isn't. I see them standing in a group and assume they operate with a single sentience, like Midwich Cuckoos.' Bryant rooted in the cupboard for some ground ginger and added it to his tea mug. 'Actually, I think I'm a little scared of them. Their references are as alien as map coordinates for another solar system. I mean, what is it like to be young these days?'

  'Perhaps you need a refresher course,' offered Longbright, carrying the teas back to the detectives' office. 'This sort of thing doesn't help.' She indicated the hardback books on his cluttered desk; crack-spined copies of The Life of Thomas Chatterton, Great Locomotive Boiler Explosions, The British Catalogue of Victorian Naval Signals, and The Fall of Jonathan Wild, Thief-Taker. 'Your current reading matter. You should be flicking through Heat and Hello! and the News of the World.'

  'Janice is right,' May concurred. 'You need to watch Big Brother and Pop Idol and reality TV—that's how normal people relax.'

  Bryant was disgusted by the idea. 'I would hate to think of myself as normal. What's the point of working your whole life if you end up having to do what other people do?'

  'You don't have to do what they do, Arthur, just try to understand them a bit more. If a television show gets a bigger audience vote than the General Election, you should know about it. It's simply a matter of reconnecting yourself.'

  'What if I don't want to connect myself to things I consider to be puerile rubbish? I want to be more knowledgeable at my age, not less. I plan to go to my grave with a head full of information.' His diluted blue eyes looked up at the pair of them in a bid for sympathy. 'I'm not going to buy a television, if that's what you mean.'

  'It's never too late to change your habits,' said May patiently. 'Come with me to one of the Met's "Meet the Public" sessions. You don't have to get into any arguments, just listen to what some of the street officers and their clients have to say.'

  'Please don't refer to victims of crime as clients. And anyway, if I did that, I'd end up wanting to kill everyone in the room,' Bryant admitted. 'That's what happens when you get older: You become irritated by the views of others for the simple reason that you know better, and they're being ridiculous. If I go to a public debate, some silly man will stand up and start complaining about police brutality until I want to beat him to death with my stick.'

  'You know in your heart that's not true,' replied May, wondering if it was. 'When you conduct your London tours, what's the feeling between you and your audience?'

  'Antipathy bordering on mutual hatred,' said Bryant glumly. 'We usually can't wait to get away from each other.'

  'Then it's time you started learning to empathise more.'

  'You're asking me to give up my carefully nurtured ideals and start reveling in humankind's myriad imperfections.' Bryant took up the Chatterton volume and buffed its cover with his sleeve, scattering dust.

  'If you want to put it like that, yes.'

  'I won't remember the names
of pop stars,' he warned. 'I'd prefer to keep my memory filled with useful data.'

  'But how useful is the data you store?' May tipped back his leather armchair and raised his highly polished Oxfords to the desk. 'You know precisely how many Thames crossings there are between Teddington Weir and the Tower of London—'

  'Of course, twenty-eight, everyone knows that—'

  '—and you told me why there are metal pinecones on top of half of the railings in London—'

  '—the Georgians adopted the pinecone as an architectural motif because it was the Roman symbol of hospitality, that's common knowledge—'

  'But it's not, don't you see? Yesterday you told Janice here that there are eight statues hidden underneath Vauxhall Bridge, and that they can only be seen from a boat, but most of the people we deal with don't give a monkey's fart about such architectural idiosyncrasies. Why should they? Such things have no relevance to their lives.'

  'Rubbish. The details of everyday living enrich us all.'

  'But they're not useful. The majority is more interested in finding aspirational role models amongst celebrities, which makes you the outsider. And if you're an outsider, they'll never take you into their confidence.'

  'Your utilitarian attitude is very taxing,' Bryant complained. 'I don't throw away knowledge just because it ceases to be of immediate use. Crimes are more complex now, so you never know what will come in handy. Remember how it used to be? An emerald robbery in Hatton Garden, a broken window, a clanging alarm, grassing spivs on the Mile End Road, a trip round to a safe house in Southwark, "Can we search the premises?," "It's a fair cop, guv," on with the handcuffs and up before the beak.'

  'I think you're confusing your life with an Ealing caper,' said May drily.

  'Very possibly,' Bryant admitted, 'but that's how things were in my day. Or possibly not.'

  'Your day is still continuing, sir,' Longbright felt duty-bound to point out.

  'Janice is right, old fruit. You remain accountable to the public so long as you're employed, and that means keeping up with them.'

  It's a conspiracy, thought the elderly detective. They're plotting against me. 'All right, what do I have to do?' he asked wearily.

  'Get your coat on, Mr Bryant,' said Dan Banbury, looking around the edge of the door. 'A nasty murder on the Embankment, phoned through a couple of minutes ago, sounds right up our particular culde-sac.'

  5

  ETERNAL DESTINY

  The riverside spot had once been a tumbledown jumble of wharves, timber yards, and stonemasons, twisted ropewalks and moss-green jetties slipping into the brackish brown waters of the Thames. The politicians gathered in the Houses of Parliament opposite had complained about the eyesore in their sight, and down it had all come, to arise in a single splendid building typifying the Edwardian renaissance. The architect's drawings for County Hall showed a great colonnaded crescent finished in Portland stone and red Italian tiles, pallid sculptures, steep sloping roofs, and sun-flecked central courtyards.

  But nothing runs smoothly in the rebuilding of London. In the middle of the clearance and excavation, they had discovered the boat.

  The vessel had been carvel-built of oak, and ran to twenty metres in length. Coins found inside it dated from the reigns of Carausius and Allectus, suggesting that it had been built by Romans late in the third century. A magnificent find, though incomplete; the broken section pulled from the reeking Thames mud had disrupted the construction on the South Bank of the river. The monumental edifice of County Hall eventually housed the wrangling assembly of London, and appropriately enough, took over half a century to complete. It was grimly inevitable that the council should then be abolished and replaced with a more controversial body, which decided to move to a different spot altogether, beside Tower Bridge, in a modern building finished in brown glass and shaped like a giant toe.

  Poor County Hall, ignored when it should have been admired, then reviled for the plan Prime Minister Thatcher unveiled to turn it into a Japanese hotel. When this future also disintegrated it became an aquarium, sleek grey sharks gliding through waters where earnest councillors had once fought to divide the boroughs of London between themselves.

  Here also were housed Salvador Dalí's melting clocks and arid landscapes in permanent exhibition; his great elephant sculpture is placed on the embankment, teetering on attenuated giraffe legs, where it appears to stride over Parliament itself, surely a vision that would once have brought a charge of treason. In the front of the building (for the river faces its back) the former Charles Saatchi collection of modern British art, now the County Hall Gallery, awaits visitors, who balk and complain at the idea of paying to see ideas made flesh, especially when there's nothing traditional on display.

  A home for artistic visions, then (for perhaps we can include its cool blue panoramas of drifting iridescent angelfish), and also a suitable place for a murder, a great wood-panelled beehive of tunnels and passages. Through the shadowed oak corridors, across the sepia parquet blocks, into the main domed chamber like an immense wooden hammam, where half a dozen gargantuan artworks stand in white plaster alcoves, their purpose to stimulate and disturb; an immense angry head, its glaring silver eyes staring down accusingly, office furniture submerged in a water-filled white box, a bizarre steel machine knotted with ropes and leather straps, perhaps designed to torture some alien species, and six foetuses tethered in a twelve-foot tank, their arrangement guaranteed to horrify and infuriate those more used to gentler forms of art.

  But something was wrong here; the liquid in the tank had overflowed, slopping onto the surrounding floor, and the foetuses had been joined by a larger form.

  'It was only unveiled last Monday, now it's buggered.' The young guard was uniformed but uncapped. He absently touched his bristled ginger hair, wondering if he would somehow be made to take the blame. DCs Colin Bimsley and Meera Mangeshkar had cordoned off the area and were taking rudimentary notes, but could do little until the specialists arrived.

  'You're not the regular police, then,' asked the guard, eyeing the slim silver panels on their black padded jackets. 'PCU—what does that stand for?'

  'No, we're not . . . Simon.' Bimsley checked the guard's badge and ignored his question. 'How long have you been on this morning?'

  'Since nine A.M.'

  'Everything was normal at that time. Otherwise you'd have noticed, wouldn't you?' Bimsley stabbed his ballpoint in the direction of the tank. 'Body floating facedown in there, water everywhere, it stands to reason.'

  'Not water, mate. Formaldehyde. You know, to preserve the babies. That's what the smell is.'

  'I read about this artwork. It's been causing quite a fuss.' Mangeshkar approached the tank. 'Isn't the liquid supposed to be clearer than this?'

  Simon the guard turned around to see. 'Something must have gone wrong. It started turning cloudy at the end of last week. The gallery chiefs are supposed to be meeting to discuss the problem.'

  'It's eleven A.M. now. The call was logged in twenty minutes ago—'

  'No, longer ago than that. I rang the police as soon as I saw it.'

  The Met checked it out before passing the case to us, thought Bimsley. 'How many rounds do you make during a day? What times?'

  Simon thought for a moment. 'It's not like a normal gallery with an attendant in each room, because some of the art needs more attention than others. The underwater room, especially—'

  'Which is what?'

  'It's an optical illusion, a huge mirror of mercury that horizontally divides a council chamber in half. You walk inside and it looks like you're wading through water. That one needs a full-time attendant because only one person is allowed to enter the room at a time. The mercury has to stay completely undisturbed, otherwise the illusion is broken, so we keep a careful watch on the visitors. Some of the other stuff doesn't need looking after at all, but there are no rope barriers around the exhibits—they spoil the placement of the art—so I just have to stop kids from leaving their pawprints. I don't h
ave to do that with Eternal Destiny.'

  'That's the title of the piece?' asked Mangeshkar. 'The top of the tank isn't sealed.'

  'No, that would cause condensation, but the glass sides of the tank are seven feet high, so no-one can reach up and put their hands in.'

  'If nobody can even reach the top, how on earth could somebody manage to fall in?' asked Bimsley.

  'I don't think she fell in, Colin, do you?' Mangeshkar shot her partner a dry look. Bimsley looked back at the diminutive Asian officer with unrequited love in his eyes. She was still refusing to go out with him. Was she completely mad?