Ten Second Staircase

by Christopher Fowler

  'So they were spread throughout the gallery in different rooms? How could you watch over them?'

  'They're easier to keep an eye on when they're engrossed in an activity.'

  'You spend the same amount of time with each group?'

  'I try to, but you inevitably spend more with some than others.'

  'I'm told one of the boys saw something.'

  'Yes—Luke Tripp, over there. He was one of four or five kids in the main chamber. They were actually sketching the giant head, but he'd gone across to the tank and had started drawing that instead.'

  'Do you mind if I talk to the group?'

  'No, but try not to upset them. I could lose my job.'

  'Don't worry, Mr Mason, I'm not going to provide them with any more information than I have to.' Longbright walked over and introduced herself to the row of boys dressed in blue-and-gold blazers. 'I'm Detective Sergeant Longbright, but call me Janice. What are your names?'

  A thin, moody-looking sixteen-year-old raised a tentative hand. 'I'm Nicholas Gosling.'

  'Daniel Parfitt,' said the small-boned boy with the bad complexion next to him. 'What happened? Somebody's died, haven't they?'

  'Who are you two?' she asked the pair seated beside them, one slim and dark, with deep-set eyes, the other red-blotched and still carrying puppy fat.

  'Jezzard and Billings, miss.'

  'When did you first know something unusual was going on?'

  'We heard a splash and got up to see.' They would have had to come around the corner to view the tank clearly.

  'So all of you were in the alcove drawing the giant head?'

  'Yes, miss. Except Luke, who was drawing the tank.' Jezzard pointed down at one she had missed. Janice knelt beside the youngest boy, bringing herself into his sight line. 'Hey, there.' She checked Bimsley's notes. 'Luke Tripp, that's you?'

  The child nodded faintly. He was small for his age, a pale bulbous head balanced on a pipe-thin neck, eyes staring intently at the drawing in his lap. Longbright turned the page around and examined it.

  'That's pretty good. Do you like art?'

  Another mute nod.

  'How come you decided to draw the big green tank instead of the giant head?'

  'The babies looked easier to draw.' His voice was barely more than a whisper.

  'It's a pretty big tank. Hard to get it all into one picture. I used to like drawing, but if something moved I could never catch it on paper. While you were drawing, did something move?'

  Luke looked up at her with an innocence that would have been termed theatrical in anyone older. 'The lady came and talked to me,' he explained. 'She asked me what I thought of the babies. She said she designed them.'

  'You mean she was the artist?'

  'She got someone else to build them, but it was her idea. Conceptual artists never build their own installations; everyone knows that.'

  'Oh.' Longbright felt as though she had just been put in her place. 'Then what happened?'

  'She said people were annoyed with her because they didn't understand what she was trying to say. Then the man came up to her.'

  'Which man?'

  'I don't know.' The boy closed his drawing pad, but continued to stare at it.

  'Luke, I need to get this right so I can picture it in my head. The other boys were on the far side of the chamber—you couldn't see them from where you were?'

  'No, the tank is around the corner.'

  'We were over there, miss,' said Gosling, indicating the space below the giant head.

  'Okay. You were drawing alone, Luke. The lady came up and talked to you—did the man come in with her?'

  'No, he came in afterwards, from behind the tank.'

  'What did he look like?'

  Luke smoothed the cover of the drawing pad. 'He was very big, like a painting. He lifted up the lady very gently and put her in the tank.'

  That's ridiculous, thought Longbright. He would have to have been eight feet tall.

  'You mean he just lifted her off the ground and lowered her in?'

  'Yes.'

  'Did she make a splash? Did she try to get out?' Longbright knew that the liquid in the tank had only spilled on two sides, suggesting the victim had barely struggled.

  'No.'

  'Which direction did the man come from?'

  'The door, I suppose.'

  Longbright glanced back. Anyone coming in through the door would have been spotted by everyone in the chamber, if they'd been facing the right way. But the boys had been lying on the floor, concentrating on their drawings, on the far side of the large sculpture.

  'Do you think you could sketch this man for me? Exactly as you saw him?'

  'I already did, miss.'

  'Can I see?'

  Luke Tripp raised the cover of his pad and twisted the portrait towards her.

  He had drawn a cape-clad highwayman in a tricorn hat, crimson ruff-collar, leather tunic, and thigh boots, riding a great black stallion.

  7

  THE PRICE OF NOTORIETY

  'Whenever the English build something enormous, the first thing they always do is have dinner inside it,' said Arthur Bryant. 'Throughout history, our councillors have dined in unlikely places like Constitution Arch and the Thames Tunnel, even inside the mastodon at the Crystal Palace prehistoric park, so you can imagine how many celebratory meals they must have had in here. I fancy it still smells of institutional cooking.' He sniffed disapprovingly. 'There's definitely an undertone of cabbage.'

  Standing beside one another in the cool shadowed corridors of County Hall, silhouetted by the tall, dusty courtyard windows, the detectives could have been mistaken for elderly councillors themselves, stopping to confer about arcane LCC rulings. Few would have taken them for policemen, but from their earliest years they had dedicated their lives to the rebalancing of inequalities.

  Their official biographer (for there would eventually be a biography) felt that Arthur Bryant was driven by a sense of distilled outrage, perhaps over the loss of his wife during the war, and by the possession of a temperament that prevented him from ever finding peace with anyone else. Cherchez la femme had been the biographer's maxim, but in this case nothing was quite that simple.

  Bryant was an anomaly; a working-class academic who had positioned himself on the outside of humanity, beyond a moral view point. The fact that he studied people as if they were insects or igneous rocks was cited as a fault, but it was also his secret strength. While the men and women of the Metropolitan Police mopped spilt blood and wiped away tears, comforted and calmed the fearful, and locked up those who were a danger to themselves, Bryant never truly became involved; he lacked the basic emotional mechanism to do so. But he was no mere machine; distrusting scientific proof, he preferred to follow humankind's more overgrown paths, those instinctual routes he felt had been buried by modern reliance on technology. Criminals and victims were linked to the land, to history, and to their own irrepressible natures; it was an unfashionable view, particularly in a country that was fast becoming disconnected from its past, but it suited the government to employ such a believer, and proved ideal for the work of the Peculiar Crimes Unit.

  John May, on the other hand, had successfully remained in contact with both his feelings and the tumbling mess of humanity surrounding him. In a sense, he was his partner's only link with the outside world. In return, Bryant gave him something he never had: a sense of his place in the invisible world that lay beyond facts and statistics, a connection to the vanishing past.

  'What do you think about this business?' John May asked quietly. 'The case is clearly within our jurisdiction. If the public start thinking they're not safe in museums and art exhibitions, the damage to other public institutions could be immeasurable.'

  'Saralla White was hardly an ordinary member of the public, John. It will be important to stress that she was an employee of the gallery, and, from what I've heard, somewhat under the control of her ringmaster, Mr Burroughs. There's no question that we should take i
t on. This is either murder or the most public suicide I've ever come across. One is apt to suspect that drugs will be present in her system. How else could she die so calmly? We can certainly rule out an accident, unless she had decided to hang from the light fittings in order to change a bulb.'

  'We can't afford another unsolved case at this point, Arthur. Any way you look at it, the scenario seems wildly unfeasible.'

  'You always say that, but everything becomes unlikely when you analyse it. It's unlikely the planet still survives without having blown itself to bits. It's unlikely that society will reach a balance without murdering itself first, or that any of us will get through our lives without going mad. Open any newspaper on any day and you're confronted with unlikely crimes. What about the seventeen Chinese cockle pickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay? Or that fellow in Norfolk who suffocated his workmates in chicken slurry? What about that doctor who managed to kill over two thousand patients undetected, how likely is that?'

  'All right, point taken,' agreed May, if only to head his partner off from a lengthy diatribe about the world's ills.

  'A tenner a ticket, that's what the public are paying to be shocked at this exhibition, and now they've got something to be shocked about,' said Bryant. 'We need to wrap this up quickly, before any details slip out. I want Oswald Finch to get the body opened as soon as possible. What do you know about any of these artists?'

  'Just what I gleaned from the TV documentary and the article in the Guardian. Calvin Burroughs seems to be more than just their mentor. He has complete control over his protégés, because he's invested a lot of time and money in his big three. They were all unknowns before he began grooming them for this new venture. His first discovery was also the oldest, Sharinda Van Souten. She's half American, born in India, probably the most traditional member of the group. She built the giant entwined ceramic bodies at the far end of the gallery. She's been re-creating classical Indian statuary in the context of modern Indian society for some years now. It was Burroughs who encouraged her to place her figures in updated sexual poses, something that has brought censure from the present Indian government. They're pretty strong stuff for the uninitiated; the art pupils were allowed to see the figures but not to make sketches. Apparently the teacher was less worried about upsetting his kids than getting complaints from their parents. Van Souten also produced the Burning Bride statue that drew attention to attacks on Indian women by their husbands. She's fighting for new legislation dealing with the problem.'

  They turned and began to head off along the twisting corridor, moving deeper inside the great wooden honeycomb. 'Burroughs's second find was McZee,' May continued, 'a former Glaswegian hiphop artist who switched to multimedia art after studying psychologically repressive regimes. He couldn't get any more financial support in his native Scotland—some kind of long-running feud with his funding body—and came south. He's exploring the links between fear and power in the torture of political prisoners. Good stuff, solid and committed to human rights, but shocking all the same, and the right-wing press don't like some of the links he makes with members of the British cabinet. He also created a piece modelled on Picasso's Guernica, about trial without representation, and entitled it Guantánamo, which has upset the American ambassador.

  'Saralla White has the highest profile; since she started sculpting, she's been living out her private life in the public eye, using various elements in her art: boyfriends, miscarriages, sexual traumas. She's a mouthy East Ender with a couple of drug busts behind her, turned up drunk on TV, that sort of thing. Apparently, her mother was an illegal abortionist who was incarcerated in Holloway for a time in the sixties. The babies in the tank are intended to represent six abortions undergone by her friends, other artists whose lives would have been altered if they had become mothers. Saralla White is a liberal and naturally proabortion, which opens her to attacks by the religious right and pro-family hardliners.'

  'You're a mine of information; I'm glad you were paying attention,' Bryant said with a smile. 'I tend to fall asleep within minutes of Alma putting her TV on. Think it was murder?'

  'The fact that the PCU got the call suggests that somebody thought it was. Still, they delayed passing it over. It should have come through within minutes of the general emergency code going out, instead of sitting on a desk while the plods checked its validity.' The detectives made their way back along the passageways towards the main chamber. 'But I also think we might be looking at some crazed form of suicide. Anyone who purchases illegal abortions and places them inside an art installation might be considered unstable.'

  Bryant's wry smile caught him by surprise. 'I don't think Saralla White was unstable. She's been a very clever young woman. She manipulated this controversy about the artwork herself.'

  'You only saw the top half of the documentary, Arthur. How could you assume that?'

  'Simple. The foetuses aren't real. They're painted plastic facsimiles, convincing enough but definitely sculpted. Anyone taking a few minutes to study the contents of the tank should be able to see that the same creases and folds of the limbs are repeated in several of the babies. They were all struck from the same basic mould. White was feeding the press a story they wanted to believe so badly that they rushed it into print without any detailed fact-checking. They're making sure that their readers are more interested in the lives of the artists than the artwork. No doubt Burroughs colluded by controlling access to photographic material. The only other time most reviewers would have seen the piece is at the press show.'

  'Suppose she went out of her way to find identical babies?'

  'They're fake, John. I think she painted over polyurethane, which would require a petroleum-based coating. Chemistry caught her out. She hadn't counted on the reaction of the formalin compound on their painted surfaces. That's why the tank has turned cloudy. Burroughs might be a patron of the arts, but he's also an opportunist. I'm betting he's in on her story. He'd already called a meeting with her to deal with the tank's contents. It's the price she had to pay for notoriety, a compromising deal with her patron.'

  May stopped before the chamber and placed a restraining hand on his partner's shoulder. 'We don't know that yet. Let's talk to him again, and find these other two artists. Perhaps there was some professional jealousy between them. With someone like Saralla White, how do you separate her personal and public lives? Or her enemies?'

  'It wouldn't be the first time someone had killed for the sake of art. What about the Water Room murders? Look how deeply artis tic passions ran there.' Bryant checked his watch. 'How much longer can we keep everyone here for?'

  'The children will need to be released soon. The rest should be good for another hour or so, if we get Janice to be nice to them. I'm sure you must be very excited. On a purely investigative level this one's right up your street. Impossible death, single point of entry, no motive, no suspects, and a single witness who reckons the culprit was a man on a horse.'

  'Oh, I don't get enthused about such things anymore,' said Bryant, barely able to suppress the gleam of excitement from his eye. 'Locked-room mysteries are the inventions of dreadful novelists, more's the pity. Besides, there'll be a motive. You know how many homicides there were last year?'

  'Eight hundred seventy-two,' May replied without hesitation.

  If Bryant was impressed, he didn't show it. 'Home Office figures show that sixty-three percent of female victims and forty percent of male victims knew the main suspect in the case. Furthermore, around sixty percent of those women and twelve percent of the men were killed by a lover, partner, or ex-partner, which proves how much more vulnerable women are to assault by a male attacker. We'll find a former lover with a grudge against White, and we'll be interviewing him in the next twenty-four hours, you wait and see.'

  'I read the same Home Office document,' May countered. 'Those figures still leave a hefty percentage of motiveless murders. And stranger-homicides tend to get column inches only if the victim is a pretty girl, which leaves a lot of cases
unnoticed and unsolved.'

  'Come on, John, you know that stranger-crime is usually the result of coincidence. All it takes is a tiny fluctuation in the laws of chance, a decision to take one route home rather than another, and you get a random murder. How can we be expected to solve those?'

  'Scotland Yard is always banging on about its ninety-percent murder-detection rate, but that means a lot of killers who might strike again are still wandering the city streets.'