Ten Second Staircase

by Christopher Fowler

  No, thought Bryant guiltily, my job's not as tough as this. 'You can see the whole estate from up here,' he said aloud.

  'Yes, I can keep an eye on the troublemakers. We employed some guardians to patrol and separate the gangs, but we had to get rid of them after they started taking sides. This job has a dangerous habit of getting personal on you. There are two main trouble sectors here, one Anglo-Asian, one African, but they're not really drawn along ethnic lines; it's mostly territorial and circumstantial.'

  'What do you mean?' asked Bryant, who knew little about everyday urban life.

  'It's circumstantial because they've got no money, Mr Bryant, so they've got nowhere to go, which means they stand around in groups, and that makes it territorial. Doesn't help that the rich kids have to cut across their turf three times a week.'

  'Who gives them guidance?' Bryant asked. 'Are there still such things as youth clubs? We had all sorts of activities available when we were young.'

  'No disrespect, Mr Bryant, but youth clubs went out with Teddyboys. These kids should spend less time with their mates and more with their folks. They needed role models, but now they're beyond the age where they'll trust any adult to give them guidance. They've no shame. They'll terrorise the older tenants, then lie straight-faced to the police. They know their rights. It's all "Lay a finger on me and I'll call Claims Direct." ' She checked a large appointments book on her desk. 'Don't get me wrong, we've never had gun crime here— that's for the drug-problem estates—but most of the kids routinely carry knives, and in flashpoint situations they do get used. This is the estate diary. We enter all incidents, no matter how small. The idea is to catch the rising problem, not its aftermath. See here, just this morning a couple of kids told their parents they saw this Highwayman of yours. He was running through The Street—that's what they call the ground-floor passage under the stilts; it runs the entire length of the three blocks. Nobody uses it unless they have to.'

  'Do you have CCTV?'

  'Yes, but the camera lenses are so scratched and fogged that they don't show anything. The council was supposed to replace them last year. Besides, the kids all wear hoodies. We rely on other residents to keep watch.'

  'This sighting, do you know if it was before the story broke in today's papers?'

  'I couldn't say, Mr Bryant. Don't imagine they read papers.'

  'Well, do you have an accurate description of what they saw? They might have noticed some detail we've missed.'

  'Here, I typed it out for you. Black leather suit, riding boots, eye mask, hat. Looks like a comic book character, they said, tall and broad. They reckon they've seen this man on the estate before, dressed exactly the same way each time. He always appears just as it's getting dark.'

  'Always?' asked Bryant, alarmed. 'When did they first see him?'

  Lorraine crossed to a file cabinet and checked her notes. Bryant noticed that she had the lolloping gait of a woman with hip trouble. 'Six months ago, maybe longer. A couple of kids say he's always been around the estate, as long as they can remember, even when they was little babies.'

  'Does he scare them?'

  'No, apparently they think of him as a kind of guardian. Sort of a protector of the estate. Because of the badge, see.'

  She tapped the Roland Plumbe Community Estate's logo on the Residents' Association letterhead, an artisanal fifties symbol that owed its influence to the Festival of Britain's design ethic. At its centre was the outline of a horseman in a black cape and tricorn hat. The date on the logo was 1954.

  My God, thought Bryant. Don't tell me he's been around for over fifty years.

  15

  WINTER LIGHTNING

  Danny Martell was in trouble. His natural atavism usually left him with nothing worse than a hangover. He jokingly dismissed these lapses of character to friends as Out-of-Pocket Experiences, but the latest occasion had proven altogether more serious.

  Marc Morrison, his agent, had called him this morning with a warning to watch out for the next day's press. The agent did not admonish; what point was there in telling his clients to stay away from hookers and cocaine? In for a penny, in for a pound, the agent figured. Some clients were always going to screw up their careers, so they might as well crash and burn now to leave room for the ones with more self-discipline.

  Morrison had learned the hard way. The agent had once taken on a well-behaved Blue Peter presenter who, out for a drink one evening, had been drawn into a nightclub act by a fire-eater, who had pulled open the boy's shirt and teased his chest with a flaming brand; no big deal, just part of the act. Except that the act was onstage in a club hosting weekly gay nights, and the show had been taped by the management, and the tape had found its way to the News of the World, which ran an outraged feature suggesting that the boy was unfit to be allowed near children. They included a photograph of the bare-chested presenter grimacing as the flame neared him, surrounded by copy that had somehow managed to suggest the club was a haven for paedophiles, heterosexual orgies, gay sex, and Satanism. Nobody in the industry believed the story except the BBC, which fired the presenter, who took a barbiturate overdose and was found dead in his Maida Vale flat, which at least solved his image problem. So it was best not to get Morrison started on the subject of tarnished images.

  But Martell was a bigger challenge. He wasn't likely to kill himself, and he wasn't likely to get another high-profile job after this, either. It wasn't his first slip from grace; this particular romp was the third in an ongoing series of dropped hurdles. Freelance paparazzi spoke disparagingly of his weakness for Brazilian supermodels, so clichéd, so vanilla, but they were happy to exploit it.

  For the past two years, Martell had been hosting Britain's most popular Saturday teenage lifestyle show on ITV1. Now he could see himself having to present lunchtime cookery quizzes on zero-audience channels like ChefTV. He was going through a bad patch; his wife had left him, which would have gained him sympathy except that he had sold his side of the story to Sunday People, and it wasn't very sympathetic, or even feasible.

  No-one understood the pressure he was under. Danny was a perfectionist. He had turned a lousy show into a smash hit; work ate up every hour of his day. How could he hold down a relationship, or have any stability in his life? Who could he trust?

  Even when you're a success, he thought, it becomes a matter of degree. You're not as successful as a hit show on another channel, you're successful in England but not the U.S., you're successful for a season but not on a yearly aggregate. These days even his leisure time was pressurised. Celebrity is about access, he remembered. It's your only weapon: Someone pisses you off, you deny them access. But he could no longer afford to do that.

  One lousy Monday evening in a Clerkenwell lap-dancing bar—a couple of short lines, a few cocktails, and home to bed; he hadn't exactly behaved like Caligula. He hadn't seen anyone he'd recognised, either, hadn't had his picture taken, so where were the shots coming from?

  His agent told him to expect a headline in the national tabloids, and at least four pages of revelations, maybe more, in the Sundays. In just a few hours his career would be downgraded, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  As he pushed open the door to the gym, he wondered if the channel would carry out their threat to terminate his contract. He was due to start a new season of shows but was still in pay negotiations. At the very least, they'd bargain a cut in salary.

  For a second he thought he heard something, a sound he hadn't heard in years—but it disappeared before he could properly register it.

  As he headed for the changing room, he told himself there was no point in stressing about the future. Worrying would only spoil his workout. He insisted on having the entire gym to himself; it had caused a fuss at the time, especially as it meant evicting the women's group that met here on Tuesday evenings, but he had stuck to his guns and asked his agent to strike a deal with the owner, booking out the entire final hour for his exclusive use twice a week. Actually, it hadn't been that tough to
arrange; the gym was badly in need of renovation, and most of its users had moved to a more fashionable fitness centre in High Holborn.

  He had put on twelve pounds in the last few months, and his doctor had warned him about the consequences of neglecting his regime while working in such a high-pressure job. Stepping into the weights room in coordinated blue-and-white Lycra gym gear and rubber sport sandals, he caught sight of his belly in the mirror and felt a twinge of embarrassment. Thank God there are no photographers to get a shot of me like this, he thought.

  He puffed for ten minutes on the rowing machine, watching the rain as fat grey droplets started to spatter the first-floor windows of the renovated Smithfield apartment building opposite. There was a storm coming, and he'd just had the Jaguar washed.

  He wished he'd never made the fitness video; it had been intended as a bit of fun, but now every crew he worked with expected him to give them dietary guidelines. Didn't they realise he had simply been given a script and told where to stand? Didn't they have any idea how many times he'd been swabbed with towels and fresh makeup between takes? Fitness wasn't necessary when you had good lighting.

  Needles of pain flittered between his shoulder blades. Pain is good, he told himself. This is helping. I could shed a stone, lay off the chems, and stop having to pay for sex, really turn my life around.

  On the wall opposite was a luscious poster of an impossibly slender Brazilian girl in a tiny white string bikini, her skin the rich umbrous colour of dates. She was probably eighteen, no more than twenty, high buttocks, flat stomach, large luscious breasts. He pulled at the oars, stretched his legs, felt a warm lolling in his shorts. Girls like that can have anything; the rest of us have to work at it. Sweat was dripping into his eyes, so he slowed his pace and groped about for a towel.

  How many weeks would it take, he wondered, how many hours spent on this damned Californian torture rack, to burn the extravagances of the last few years from his body? The effort of climbing out of the rowing machine nearly sent him reeling back to the changing room.

  I shouldn't feel this bad at forty-eight, he told himself. People forget all the years I worked the clubs before I got a break. Now all they can do is shout at me in the street: 'I won't try that again!' Why did he ever come up with such a stupid catchphrase? He should have known it would shadow him to the grave, probably be carved on his tombstone. He moved to the pectoral press, adjusted the seat, and lowered the weights. Fifteen reps on this, if he was lucky, then some abdominal crunches and off for a shower.

  A low rumble of thunder vibrated the windows. The approaching storm outside made the empty gym a melancholy place. Its brightly painted walls required music and a foreground of pumping athletes to bring the room to life. He was about to raise his hands to the rubber grips and begin his set when he heard the noise again. This time it was clearer, louder, more defined. A horse's galloping hooves, a rush of wind, even a whinny, as tailored and distinct as a BBC sound effect.

  It sounded as if it was in the next room. The gymnasium had been constructed across the first floor of the converted warehouse. There were apartments above, behind, and below—somebody had their television up too loud.

  He began to work out, feeling the now-recognisable streak of pain flash along the line of his buried musculature, and wondered if he had set the weight too high. Beginners always did that, the trainer had warned him. Perhaps it hadn't been such a bright idea, firing her, but it would have been too distracting trying to exercise while catching glimpses of her moist tanned cleavage.

  Forked lightning forms a zigzag; it takes the path of least resistance through the air. He saw it but didn't believe what he was witnessing, because it was here, inside the room with him, a crisp white line tinged blue at the edges, passing before his eyes.

  He felt the arrhythmic pulse deep within the cage of his chest, like soldiers breaking step, or a band squeezing an unfamiliar chord into a well-known song. Something bad was happening. His heart hadn't skipped a beat; it was beating too often, and could not regain its rightful balance.

  Extreme heat in his flesh—the palms of his hands—a searing pain that reached to the insteps of his feet—a plunge into icy bitterness— a hollow forming deep inside, as though something had just jammed and collapsed. A tangle of seared nerves, and a sensation of falling, dropping away.

  He had been pushing the elbow pads of the Nautilus machine forward, but now they whipped back, releasing him. As he fell, he knew that the terrifying silence in his chest was caused by the sudden stopping of his heart.

  He was almost relieved to know that he would not have to suffer the indignity of seeing tomorrow's headlines.

  16

  VOLUPTUOUS HARM

  'I'm sorry to pull you out in such disgusting weather,' Dan Banbury apologised. 'Nobody saw the storm coming in.' The young cockney crime scene manager had been playing squash at Islington's Sobell Centre when he received the summons, and was still sweating so much that he had trouble fitting his disposable gloves. 'I rang your mobile for ages, but there was no answer.'

  The pair were standing outside the first-floor door of the Smithfield Fitter Body Centre. Arthur Bryant undid the buttons of another shapeless raincoat he had purchased from Caledonian Road market. He had taken his partner's advice to treat himself to some more clothes. Unfortunately, the ones he had chosen were every bit as horrible as the items in his existing wardrobe. 'No, it doesn't ring anymore. I only realised someone was calling when I saw it vibrate across the table into my landlady's Ruby Murray. We had a date in Brick Lane with a biryani. I'll be tasting it all evening now.' He picked a piece of curried prawn from his jumper and flicked it over the stairwell.

  'You'll be glad you came, though. I think you're going to like this.' Banbury spoke without a trace of irony. 'Ostensibly, we're looking at a heart attack on an exercise machine. No-one's been into the gymnasium apart from Mr Martell himself.'

  'How can you be sure?' asked Bryant.

  'The owner is a German gentleman who apparently loves Martell's TV show. He cleared the gym at eight-fifteen P.M., ready for Martell to come and do his workout at eight-thirty P.M. There's a bit of resentment from the city boys over the fact that Mr Schneider closes the gym for private sessions several times a week, but his name is on the lease, and there are no bylaws preventing him from doing what he likes with the place. Presumably he gets paid well for the service.'

  Banbury tapped a grey metal box beside the entrance door. 'Standard smart-card system. One swipe gets you in and out. Each card is registered to its member, so the staff know exactly who's in the place at any given time. It's also a security measure—they have a few minor celebrities using the place and don't want photographers grabbing shots of people in the showers. The point is, all the cards are accounted for. Everyone came out, the room, showers, and toilet stalls were all checked, then fifteen minutes later Martell arrived and swiped himself in. He never checked out. The box hasn't been tampered with, so it looks as if he was the only one inside.'

  'Who found his body?'

  'The cleaner came in to turn off the running machines and wipe down the wash basins. She called the owner, who called Clerkenwell nick, who called us. I took a quick look and closed up again, because I wanted you to see exactly what I saw.'

  'Let's cut through some of the mystery, shall we?' Bryant shoved at the door but couldn't open it. Looking around, he lifted the entry card from Banbury and swiped himself inside.

  'Hang on, sir, we haven't—'

  'Don't worry, I'm not going to touch anything.'

  'I was going to say we haven't checked that it's safe.'

  'Why would it need a safety check?' called Bryant, searching for the lights. 'I thought you said he died of a heart attack.'

  'It looks that way,' replied Banbury, moving ahead to where the body still lay. 'There are—anomalies.'

  'You're being cryptic, Banbury. Kindly stop being so.'

  'It's just that we have two witnesses, two old birds in the apartment o
pposite. They called the police. I think you'll be rather interested in what they have to say.'

  Bryant halted and raised a finger. 'Wait, when you say "interested," you mean "irritated and frustrated," don't you. Kershaw's oddly euphemistic speech patterns are starting to rub off on you.'

  Banbury looked sheepish. 'What I mean is, they're a bit of a handful. I think it will be a late night at the unit. The Highwayman's back.'

  Bryant's watery blue eyes widened. 'You're calling him that as well?'

  'Everyone's picking up on the nickname, sir.'

  'Did he leave another calling card?'