Ten Second Staircase

by Christopher Fowler

  McZee gave him a strange look. 'Of course not.'

  'Did you know she was pregnant?' He had caught the artist by surprise. 'When did you break up with her?'

  'This was, like, over a month ago.' For someone who was happy to share his partner with a number of lovers, McZee looked surprisingly shaken.

  'So she might have been carrying your child,' May pressed. He wanted to catch the young man before he had time to absorb the news. 'You don't seem very upset about her death.'

  'It hasn't sunk in yet.'

  'Tell me more about the argument you had.'

  'It got pretty heated.'

  'How heated?'

  'A shoving match. Handbags at dawn, pretty embarrassing when I think about it. Let's put it this way: It would have given fuel to anyone who thinks artists are a bunch of self-centred wankers.'

  'Did anyone else witness this?'

  'No, we were in the next room to the press conference, beside my installation. The smoke detector is broken in there. You can have a fag without setting off the alarm.'

  'Would you care to show us?' asked May.

  McZee led the way to a chamber containing a slender glass box filled with blue smoke and wire filaments. The piece was thirteen feet high. 'Oh, give me strength,' muttered Bryant.

  'Hang about, it's not on yet. It has to be turned off every fifteen minutes. There's an overheating problem, but we're working on it.' He flicked a wall switch and the filaments within started to glow. The swirling smoke coalesced about the fine wires, momentarily forming slender moving figures. Soft atonal music played from synchronised speakers.

  'Good lord.' Bryant caught his breath, staring with wide blue eyes at the shifting ethereal forms. 'It's absolutely beautiful.'

  They left the gallery and headed back to the Embankment. 'He obviously had a real fight with her,' said May as the panorama of the river opened out before them. 'Did you see the scratches on the side of his neck? A pity there were no witnesses. I have to vote him to the top of our suspect list. He could be lying when he says he didn't know about White's pregnancy.'

  'I wonder how it works?' asked Bryant dreamily. 'The shaped filaments clearly heat the atmosphere, but how does he get them to dance like that? How can he conjure up something so wonderful from bits of old rubbish?'

  'Are you listening, Arthur? We have a suspect. It's what you want.'

  'But not who I want,' Bryant admitted. 'I've still got my eye on Calvin Burroughs. His star was about to change her much-publicised attitude towards children. If he's the father, he has the motive.'

  'He nurtured her and lost her, Arthur.'

  'Yes, and the work of dead controversial artists skyrockets in value.'

  'You've a point there. Look at Haring and Basquiat.'

  'That boy McZee is interested in organic forms, natural beauty, humanity. What could be more natural than a baby? Someone like that could become very passionate about the idea of termination.'

  'So he chooses to kill them both? It wouldn't make any sense.'

  Bryant was still misty-eyed by the time their taxi reached Tottenham Court Road. 'I'd written myself off as a Rossetti fan,' he told his partner. 'Whoever would have thought modern art could be so extraordinary?'

  'Can we concentrate on the matter at hand?' May asked with irritation.

  'That's precisely what I'm doing. I was just thinking, perhaps there is an argument against McZee. If an artist can create moving three-dimensional figures from a few lightbulb filaments and some gas, what other illusions could he create? A highwayman on a horse, perhaps? You'd have to admire his ingenuity.'

  'You were just as ingenious. I remember some of the scams you had for getting around rationing quotas after the war, raising crows in your attic so you could fry them in vinaigrette sauce, that scheme for creating artificial bacon you nearly had us thrown in jail over.' Bryant made no reply. 'You wanted to change the laws of the land and reinvent the wheel in the process. You really don't see any connection between yourself and the young as they are today?'

  'None at all,' said Bryant sadly. 'The more I see talent in others, the more I feel like I'm bumbling off into some obsolete corner, where all the broken washing machines and fridges end up.'

  May was determined not to allow any excess of sentiment into the vehicle. 'Shall we keep an eye on Josh Ketchley's movements?' he asked.

  'Call him McZee,' Bryant replied. 'The boy has earned it. But put a tag on him, all the same.'

  14

  PROTECTOR OF THE LAND

  The staff of the Mornington Crescent unit would never win awards for office organisation, but on Tuesday morning they were more chaotic than ever.

  Whenever a major investigation commenced, boxes were dumped where they could be fallen over, and precipitously stacked files could be guaranteed to cascade like decks of cards. Banbury had removed and bagged a number of items from the crime scene but had lost the key to the evidence room, so they sat at the top of the stairs waiting to break someone's ankle. Crippen the cat had spent most of Monday hiding under May's desk after getting his tail caught in the photocopier, leaving his post only to drop off a surprise in the upturned crash helmet that Meera Mangeshkar had foolishly left on the floor beside her locker. The dead cactus had fallen over, impaling Bryant's Wendigo spirit doll on its spikes and possibly damning him to an afterlife in limbo.

  Everywhere she looked, April found evidence of Bryant's surreptitious pipe usage. Even when he wasn't at the unit, it still looked as if he was; there was a piece of toast stuck on the wall above his chair, and several of his fished-out teabags had been impaled on his desk with darts. His carpet slippers, cardigans, and half-eaten sandwiches were strewn over the furniture like votive offerings.

  This was only her second day working at the unit, but April had already given up trying to keep the place tidy. As she unzipped her backpack and prepared to offer a hand to anyone who asked her, she wondered what she was doing here at all.

  'My grandfather thinks he's helping me,' she told Longbright, 'but I feel like I'm just in the way.' It was true; she had got under everyone's feet the previous day. Sergeant Longbright looked up from her screen and thought for a moment.

  'Well, what are you good at?' she asked. 'John says you have a gift for spotting the things other people miss. He says you make fresh connections. That's a very useful talent.'

  'I spend a lot of time alone. I guess you become more observant. It's like always being outside, looking in.'

  'So you see the bigger picture, that's good. How about helping me collate the remaining interviews? You can go through them and see if there are any common factors we've overlooked. They're already divided into High, Medium, and Low Interest—it's Arthur's system, not mine. He subdivides documents into a lot of ornate and arbitrary levels no-one really understands, including personal philosophy, favourite book, and shoe types, but the basic idea is sound enough. He's got eight potentials listed as suspects, including Saralla White's own mother, her rival artists, the gallery owner, and "The Other Unknown Suitor," although where he got that from is a mystery that he doesn't seem keen on divulging.' Longbright shook her immaculate coiffure in wonder. 'Who uses a word like suitor, anyway? You'd think by now I'd have an inkling of how his mind works, but it's a sealed labyrinth.' She slid over a stack of paper. 'Hard copies. I load all the reports electronically, but he prints them out.'

  'I know, he's such a Luddite.'

  'It's not that, it's the toner. We're on a budget. You know it's his birthday tomorrow? We're taking up a collection. John's buying him a new digital mobile. Guess who'll have to read the manual aloud half a dozen times.'

  'Everybody has to do that, Janice. Here, this will cheer you up. Last night's paper.' April unfolded a copy of the Evening Standard. 'The Highwayman, computer rendition. They latched on to the name pretty quickly.'

  Longbright examined the photograph. 'They must have got hold of a copy of the kid's drawing. How the hell did they source it so fast?'

  'I don'
t know, but the article reads pretty much the same as the ones on the Net and the afternoon cable reports—very little new information, no direct attribution. The information's all coming from one source.'

  'How can you be sure?' Longbright sat back in her chair.

  'The same handful of facts is spread thinly through all the tabloids this morning. They haven't got much more than the witness's description, a photograph of Meera accompanying Luke home, and the usual frank descriptions of White's past lovers, although the Sun rates White's sexual partners in terms of performance. I noticed that the Daily Mail had got Calvin Burroughs's age wrong, so I checked the other reports and found the error repeated. My guess is it's a single tabloid stringer, someone who's sold nonexclusive rights to the story. The broadsheets aren't trusting any of it until they get more direct sources. It's too bizarre for them; they smell a publicity stunt of some kind.'

  'Saralla White is dead, April. That's not a stunt.'

  'How do they know that for sure? She reinvented herself, and pulled all kinds of bizarre hoaxes to gain notoriety. She once described herself as a "reality hacker." And she's revealed an incredible amount of detail about her sexual life. I did some Internet research last night. The unofficial Web sites fill in some of the blanks she left; in her early unknown days she wrote a self-published biography called Macroslut, but no-one paid any attention. It's already changing hands on eBay now because it's filled with hand-coloured photographs that she later destroyed. There's one particular section Uncle Arthur should find interesting. It turns out Saralla White had a husband, although she always denied the marriage. She took some incredibly nasty photographs of him, naked and aroused, including one where it appears he's been drugged and tied to a toilet cistern. He works somewhere in the city, and he's probably still furious with her.'

  'How did you find out all this?'

  April shrugged. 'Tracking sites and podcasts is another thing you do when you can't go out. Any time a computer is touched it leaves a track. The only way to destroy evidence like that is to unplug the thing, dig a hole in the ground, and cover it with dirt. Besides, I like making connections. Maybe I take after my grandfather after all.'

  'Well, it's a talent we can certainly use around here.' Longbright handed her the rest of the interviews. 'Don't even think about leaving again.'

  Dan Banbury placed a magnetic disc on the blurred screen-grab at the top of the board, moving the photograph of McZee down.

  'So we're agreed,' said May. 'Until we receive any further information, McZee drops to second place behind this unknown husband.' He squinted at the head shot, trying to make it out. 'Is that the best you can get? Can't you enhance it?'

  'What with?' asked Banbury. 'We haven't got the right on-site equipment. I can send it off to WEC, see if they'll stick it onto one of their jobs.' The unit had been promised its own crime lab, but someone— May suspected Leslie Faraday—had refused to sign off on the new agreed budget.

  'Then get some better shots. Her sex life's been spread all over the Web. You must be able to get something more than a vaguely male shape caught leaving a restaurant with her. Meera, do you want the bad news?'

  'Let me guess: I'm doing surveillance on the artist formerly known as Josh Ketchley,' said the young Indian officer without looking up.

  'Right, and take Bimsley with you.'

  'Can't, sir. We've no spare vehicles, so I've been given permission to use my bike.'

  'You're not watching someone from a bicycle,' said May.

  'No, sir, a reconditioned thousand-cc Kawasaki. I stripped it down myself. No room for an uncoordinated pillion rider—no offence, Colin.' She flicked a smile at PC Bimsley, whose heart skipped a beat. Something about small, strong women opened his soul to the sky.

  'Very well, but stay in the warm somewhere. I'm not having you catch pneumonia.' May sighed. 'Did anyone see Arthur leave the building this morning?'

  'He said something about following up a lead from one of the teachers you interviewed,' said Kershaw.

  'He has no right to go off by himself,' May complained, throwing down his pen. 'What does he think he's doing?'

  The Roland Plumbe Community Estate had been built on one of London's less visible sites, above the brown concrete towers of the Barbican, below the drab grey bricks of Finsbury, sandwiched between Bunhill Fields and St Bartholomew's Hospital, a negative place where bombs had wiped out history and planners had exercised so little imagination that it could only become the province of the poor.

  The apartments had been prefabricated from imperfect concrete slabs containing air pockets that soaked up rain and trapped it in the walls. The triangle of land on which the estate survived had been cleared of wartime rubble and used for asbestos-lined bungalows until 1962, when the great block had risen under new plans for working Londoners enthusiastically approved by Harold Macmillan.

  The main building had had seven long balconies and a park at either end, but these greenlands had been lost when two wings were added. The resulting alteration to the original plans left the estate claustrophobic and lightless. Successive councils had tried to alleviate the gloom with bright colours, but in the early 1980s the first graffiti arrived, and it had never been successfully removed without wrecking the paintwork. The stilts upon which the central block stood proved impossible to light adequately, and provided an ideal home for lurking street gangs.

  This is what happens when well-meaning architects decide how the working classes should live, thought Bryant as he tightened his moulting green scarf around his throat and stepped on through tumbling oak leaves. The professional classes should be made to live here for a while before they start pronouncing on the causes of antisocial behaviour. Looking ahead at the bleak grey wind tunnels which daily greeted residents beneath the building, he could not imagine how the human spirit survived intact in such a place.

  Fundamental flaws were obvious, even from ground level. The steel lifts opened onto the street side of the building, granting access to anyone looking for a place to inject or relieve themselves. The bedrooms had been intended to overlook parkland, but now overlooked other apartments, which destroyed the tenants' privacy. The architects weren't entirely to blame, he supposed. Who could have foreseen how much society would change? Who in wartime could have imagined the end of the traditional urban family unit? He passed a bleak playground consisting of a scarred green roundabout and broken swings, beyond peeling prefabricated garages that had been hastily erected on the only remaining free ground, and headed into the darkness beneath the block's concrete stilts.

  Walking between oily pools of water into the threatening shadows, he reflected that one of the benefits of old age was finding how few things scared him. He had survived a war, seen friends die before his eyes, faced the ebb and flow of various fads and panics that had briefly gripped the country. He had watched politicians pronounce on the end of civilisation, and had listened to grieving, desperate families as they coped with the loss of their loved ones. Dark alleys had no power to harm him now.

  'You shouldn't be here alone, Mr Bryant.' Lorraine Bonner stepped from the shadows to greet him. She was a heavy-beamed black woman in her mid-forties, with a broad face predisposed to smiling. Dressed in a bright red patchwork overcoat, she brought a cheerful touch to the surrounding gloom. 'I came to get you 'cause the main lift is buggered.'

  'How did you know me?' asked Bryant, shaking her hand.

  'I saw you on television. They seem keen to bill you as an English eccentric.' As they walked, she linked her arm in his. Bryant liked the gesture of warmth in such a chill environment. She reminded him of his Antiguan landlady.

  'Television is only interested in freaks,' he told her. 'I'm afraid that's probably how they see me. Celebrity is fleeting.'

  'Well, you look normal to me, love. We'd better get off the street. The school will be starting sports practise soon. The kids have to pass through here, and their enemies lie in wait for them. It's not a good idea to get caught in the middle, know
what I mean?'

  She led the way to a goods lift at the rear of the building and ushered him in. 'You're lucky, this one's working today. The first time in three weeks.'

  Mrs Bonner was the head of the Roland Plumbe Residents' Association, and liaised with housing officers when she wasn't working at the Middlesex Hospital. She had called the police to point out that the man she kept seeing on the rolling news had been sighted by residents on the estate. Meanwhile, Bryant had just finished reading his partner's notes on his meeting with Elliot Mason, and the teacher's mention of trouble in the area suggested that the call was worth checking out.

  'We'll go to the community office,' she said. 'My kids are at home with colds, and I wouldn't inflict them on you today. They're hyperactive and can take some getting used to.'

  'I'm not good with children,' Bryant understated, entering the glass-walled office. It was typical of so many community rooms housing people in states of emotional distress. No technical innovations here, just Post-it notes, brown folders, papers, Kleenex boxes, children's drawings, cheap orange plastic chairs, and stained carpet tiles—nothing that could be stolen or used as a weapon. 'Everyone comes here with their problems,' Mrs Bonner told him, flicking on the fierce strip lighting. 'They can scream and shout, it don't make any difference to me. I wait for them to calm down, then explain what we can do. It's probably like your job.'