Ten Second Staircase

by Christopher Fowler

  Bryant accepted the mobile in amazement. It was like being handed a photograph of the Loch Ness monster, except that these children were unlikely to have tampered with the image. More important, it was their first piece of real proof that the Highwayman really existed.

  'I'll need to borrow the phone,' he told the girls.

  'That is like so no chance on that!' squealed Danielle, with her friend in support.

  'I'm afraid you don't have a choice. This is police evidence.'

  'You ain't having it.' Danielle thrust out a defiant chin.

  They could erase the shot if you handle this badly, he suddenly thought. Learn from your mistakes at St Crispin's.

  'Tell you what, I'll trade you this.' He removed the beautiful chrome-trimmed state-of-the-art mobile May had bought him for his birthday and flicked it open.

  Danielle examined it carefully, then turned over her phone.

  John's going to kill me, thought Bryant as he walked away with

  the evidence in his pocket, but another thought excited him more. The Roland Plumbe Estate gang, the Saladins. He could scarcely believe they existed.

  The area of Clerkenwell, and specifically the Gothic arch of St John's Gate, was the dwelling place of London's most venerable traditions and legends, the home of old religions and ancient mysteries. For half a millennium, the Knights Hospitallers had flourished in Clerkenwell. The charitable hospital of St John of Jerusalem had been filled with wounded Crusaders, and its priory church was inextricably bound with the Knights Templars. In 1187, when Saladin retook Jerusalem, he had allowed the Hospitallers to flourish. On the third of October, 1247, the Knights Templars presented King Henry III with a thick crystalline vase containing the blood of Christ. The authenticity of the relic had been attested to by the seals of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and by all the prelates of the Holy Land. The fateful secret of Christ's blood supposedly lay lost in the ruins of Clerkenwell.

  And the Saladins still survived.

  Lorraine had shown him the gang markings of the Saladins painted along the walls of The Street, a red-and-white cross-hilt, the symbol of the knights themselves. The wiping of a Crusader's sword represented an undefiled life. He had seen other gang markings: a spray-painted chevron between three combs, the arms of Prior Botyler, the design taken from the original priory window of St John's. The prior of St John had ranked as the first baron of England. In the eight-hundred-fifty-year-old diagonally buttressed crypt, caskets had been stood upright and ghosts had supposedly shuffled through the silent nights.

  Bryant wondered now if Clerkenwell, the home and heart of the Crusades, an area forever linked to the city of Jerusalem and to the blood of Christ himself, had spawned new acolytes every bit as dangerous as their Christian ancestors.

  21

  LOYALTIES

  At the end of Wednesday afternoon, Dan Banbury flicked on his desk lamp and ushered Bryant into his office at the PCU. He tried not to appear excited, but this was his first time to shine before his superior, and his mask of calm rationality was slipping.

  He opened his computer file on Danny Martell's murder before the unit's most senior partner, tapping up a scaled photograph of the copper coil. 'I think we've an extremely demented individual on our hands,' he said, pointing to the image. 'I asked myself: Why didn't he kill White and Martell in unprotected private spots? Why wait until it was virtually impossible to get at them?'

  'Because the impossibility is what makes it appealing,' said Bryant.

  'Exactly. Martell kept to a regular schedule, so first of all, our perpetrator needed to make a floor plan of the building, and he found what he needed next door, in an apartment kept empty for half the year. This was a lot easier to gain access to than the gym. Of course, the idea was to make us think he'd been in the gym when Martell was killed, a little bit of magician's misdirection there. Giles and I talked to the caretaker, who has no idea how many keys his tenant kept to her apartment. Great security on the gym, lousy system for the flats. We're trying to find the tenant to see if she had direct contact with the Highwayman, but I think we'll pull a negative to that.'

  He opened another screen, the floor plan of the apartment. 'In

  side, the kitchen gives him what he needs, a party wall to the gym. Next, he requires something with an alternating current, and finds an added bonus; there's an old-fashioned, freestanding electric cooker. He drills a tiny hole through the wall. This is the weakest part of his plan, as he could damage the wall on the other side and give himself away. If he'd known it was tiled rather than painted, he'd probably have rethought the move, but he's lucky. The drill bit exits through the grout.

  'Now, he unplugs the cooker and swaps the thirty-amp plug for a pair of insulated copper wires, which he feeds into the hole. He gains access to the gym a day or two before Martell comes for his workout, and pulls the ends of the wires through. This last bit is tricky, as he needs to use a needle and thread to sew the uninsulated ends of the wires through the rubber grips on the pectoral fly machine. I tried it myself; it took a good five minutes, but I did it without having to remove the handle-cover. He threads them in a single line that can't be seen against the black rubber. When Martell arrives for his workout, the killer lets himself into the apartment and switches on the current. Martell's hands and chest are covered in sweat, making him the perfect conductor. The circuit is completed, and the current interrupts the rhythm of the victim's heart. At which point, our Highwayman pulls firmly on the wire coil, unthreading it from the grips and reeling it back through the hole. I tried this as well, and it was dead easy to do.'

  'There's one thing wrong with your theory,' said Bryant. 'He'd have to be mad as a bag of snakes to go to so much trouble.'

  'Maybe he was excited by the sheer absurdity of the act,' Banbury suggested, unconvincingly in Bryant's opinion.

  'You're forgetting that he doesn't even get to see it. Arsonists usually stick around to witness the results of their work. Due to the spontaneity of their actions, murderers are generally present during the act itself. Where is the pleasure in this glorified piece of Blue Peter tomfoolery? Where is the profit? The pleasure?'

  'As you said, maybe he's barking. I'm just telling you how it was done.' Banbury was disappointed with the effect of his news.

  'For which I thank you, but it gets us nowhere. How are you getting on with the photos on the mobile?'

  'It's a cheap Nokia. The picture quality's not great, but she took several shots, so I was able to replace the blurred sections from one frame with sharper pixels from another, creating a composite. The resolution is a little clunky, but take a look.' He opened the graphics file and expanded the reworked image.

  'So now we have our man,' said Bryant, adjusting his bifocals and craning forward. 'There's something very familiar about this picture.'

  The photograph showed a broad-chested figure in black leggings and a leather jacket, standing on the bridge of the Roland Plumbe apartment block looking down into the quadrangle, his hands on his hips in an ironically heroic pose. He wore a slender black mask that covered the area around his eyes. A lock of thick black hair protruded from his cap, a smaller version of the traditional highwayman's tricorne.

  'What's that at his waist?' asked Bryant, thumping the screen with a wrinkled finger.

  'I can enlarge the image and lighten it a little, but we'll lose some sharpness.' Banbury went to the graphics menu and blew up a square section. He tried a second time, but the detail was lost.

  'That's all right. I can see what it is,' said Bryant, satisfied. 'He's wearing a flintlock pistol. He really is a highwayman. Janice, how did you get on with the historical societies?'

  Longbright checked her notes. 'Plenty of English Civil War buffs, mostly Cavalier and Roundhead uniforms, although someone usually comes along dressed as Cromwell. A few Crimean War fans, crimson outfits with epaulets and gold buttons, hardly our man's cup of tea. And some First World War nuts, but I'm reliably informed that it's only the German and Prussia
n officers' uniforms that attract a certain type of obsessive. Nobody wants to be a British Tommy. Nothing about highwaymen, though. I tried the theatrical costumiers in Shaftesbury Avenue. They have one highwayman outfit made for a film called, let me see, Plunkett and McLaine, for film and television use only, and it's not been rented out in months.'

  'What's he doing hanging around a block of council flats?' Bryant wondered. 'Does this mean he lives there? Was he returning home?'

  'According to the time register on the mobile, the shots were taken several hours after Martell's murder,' Banbury pointed out. 'That means he's dressing up for the sheer hell of it.'

  'Or he has a purpose we've yet to discern.' Bryant rose and walked to the window, looking down into the wet streets of Mornington Crescent. 'If it turns out that he lives on the estate and he's a member of the Saladins, does that mean he has a darker intention, something that connects with the location of the blood of Christ?'

  'I'm sorry, you've lost me there,' said Banbury, perplexed.

  'Oh, nothing.' Bryant had decided to keep his more contentious opinions about the case secret, although he had told May of his suspicions. Right now, his partner was heading back to Clerkenwell, to run a different kind of check for him.

  John May climbed the steps to the entrance of St Crispin's School and removed the list of names from his pocket. He felt like interrogating the pupils who had humiliated Bryant, just to put a dent in their confidence, but knew that acts of reciprocation had a way of sticking to the conscience. Instead, he went to visit the relief teacher, Elliot Mason.

  May found him in a sweat-stained tracksuit, bent double in the ground-floor corridor, trying to claw back some breath. Mason was so puny and bookish, it came as a surprise to see him involved in physical education.

  'If you're here to talk to the kids again, I can't help you,' the teacher warned him. 'Mr Kingsmere is back, so they're not under my jurisdiction anymore. I've just taken the second-years for a sprint, and it nearly killed me. The Head knows how much I hate competitive sport. We've got a sports master called Gossage who spends his entire life in the open air and shouts all the time. He looks like a shaved sheep, very red and meaty, you'd think he'd be fit but he's always off having operations, so I've copped his roster. I'm supposed to supervise post-run ablutions, but once you've experienced the smell of thirty gym kits in a locker room, you'll do anything to get out of it. Care to walk very slowly with me?'

  'I don't want to upset the applecart by getting the boys out of their class again,' said May. 'Actually, you can probably help me.'

  'Fire away,' wheezed Mason, who looked like he might collapse at any moment.

  'The Saladins, a gang that hangs around the Roland Plumbe Community Estate. I've never heard of them, and we've nothing on file under that name. Are they new? Some of the boys here suggested they knew something about the man we're seeking. I wonder if the gang might even be harbouring him. Some of the kids on the estate reckon that the Highwayman's identity is common knowledge.'

  'Dear God, don't start believing children.' Mason sighed. 'Let's go back outside so I can sneak a Rothman's. There used to be a time when it was the kids who had to hang around the bike sheds smoking, not the teachers.' They returned to the school steps, and Mason guiltily lit up. 'Remember Matilda, who told such dreadful lies?'

  '"It made one gasp and stretch one's eyes."' May recalled the Hilaire Belloc poem. 'You're saying they all lie?'

  'Not intentionally, perhaps, but even the simplest truths can become fabulously distorted. As far as I'm concerned, teenagers are incapable of recounting the simplest fact without embellishment. Their capacity for self-deception is astounding. They seek authorship, they want to be the one who creates the interest; it's the oddest phenomenon. I don't remember being like that.'

  'So what is the truth, then?'

  'There's certainly a gang on the estate, if you can call it that. A loose group united in apathy would be a more accurate description. Two years ago, one of the seniors here was stabbed in the stomach after tangling with them. He made a remarkable recovery, but his parents withdrew him from the school. Big hoo-hah. I'm surprised you don't remember it.'

  'We're no longer part of the Met,' May explained. 'We don't have access to the notes on cases that fall under their jurisdiction. Did they make an arrest?'

  'Nothing was ever proven, but the enmity still runs deep. There's a racial element, too. The boys here are mostly lapsed Church of England or Muslim. Some of the Saladins are committed hard-line Christian. They believe in the fiery sword of God's vengeance, probably the result of playing too many computer games. The gang's ringleaders are white skinheads, but they're not like the ones I remember from my teenage years. The territorial boundaries between teens shift so fast these days, you never know where new allegiances lie.'

  'How do you know so much about them?' asked May.

  'The school's athletics pitch falls inside their boundary. I see them hanging about all the time. Picking up on their conversation is a teacher's habit, I'm afraid. Still, I wouldn't take too much notice of your informants.'

  'Oh, why not?'

  'Kids join gangs because they crave a sense of belonging. They're looking for respect outside of the parental unit. Your man is a loner, isn't he? Why would he be hanging around with a bunch of kids?' Mason took a drag on his cigarette while he considered his own question. 'Ah, I see, the grim spectre of paedophilia rears its head. You think he's preying on them.'

  'That would give us an entirely different profile,' said May.

  'Then I'd suggest you dismiss your information as idle gossip. The estate kids have no money, no power, and nowhere to go. Talking is the cheapest thing they can do. I grew up on such an estate myself,' Mason explained. 'I spent my entire childhood being mercilessly bullied by the grammar school kids up the road from our flat. Now I'm teaching them. It's not an irony I care to dwell on.'

  'I wonder if you'd like to add espionage to your skills, and report back to me if you hear this gang mentioned by any of your boys, particularly in connection with the Highwayman?'

  'With pleasure,' Mason agreed. 'Sometimes I fantasise about teaching in one of those new glass open-plan schools, being free to concentrate on the intricate beauty of sonnets or the heavenly grace of a Tiepolo in the safety of a controlled, airy environment. Instead, we're wedged into these dark Victorian corridors, where every room seals its secrets behind a thick oak door. Children are phenomenally susceptible to their surroundings. The gloom breeds odd loyalties in them.'

  'What do you mean?'

  Mason paused for a moment, thinking. 'If your man is somehow associated with the Saladins, it might be because he's anxious to gain their approval.'

  'Why would he need the approval of a bunch of disenfranchised children?' asked May.

  'That's rather the question, isn't it?' Mason agreed. 'Idolatry is a powerful weapon in the right hands.'

  'You're not suggesting he has a political agenda?'

  'It must have occurred to you. Insurrection requires partisanship. You could ask yourself what this guy is trying to achieve rather than what he's already done. Every crime requires a motive, doesn't it? Perhaps the Highwayman is trying to inspire a grassroots revolution against capitalism.'

  'I hardly think he'd pick off B-list celebrities to do so,' said May.

  'The point is that to your average muzzy-headed schoolboy he's rather an alluring figure.'

  'But he's a murderer.'

  'There's a period before teenagers fully develop when they can become very amoral. I look at their blank little eyes and often get a chill. We like to think we can instill them with a value system, but they develop it independently of us. Trust me, the Highwayman appeals to them. Teachers have firsthand experience of the power of charisma. We're either reviled, tolerated, or worshipped unconditionally, like our illustrious Mr Kingsmere.'

  Mason peered through the window, then suddenly dropped his cigarette and ground it out on the step. 'Ah, speaking of whom, it
appears you might meet him after all,' he told May. 'Here he comes now.'

  22

  RESONANT GROUND

  The damp autumn winds met around the weather vane on the roof of St Crispin's School, twisting the protesting copperwork figure of the school's most celebrated pupil back and forth. On the walkway below, a tall, strong-featured man in his mid-forties ambled towards the detective with a troop of noisy boys in tow.

  'You must be the other one—Mr May, isn't it?'

  As Mason and May turned, they saw Mr Kingsmere approaching them. He appeared to be too well groomed for someone involved in scholarly pursuits, from his designer stubble to his fashionable shirt and casually expensive shoes. He stopped before them and smiled with practised charm.

  'The school had experience of your partner some weeks ago, not an entirely successful event, I understand. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend. Parfitt, Jezzard, Billings—some of my top pupils. These wretches here tell me there was some misunderstanding between them and your poor old Mr Bryant. Perhaps we can set matters right between us all.' People always stressed Bryant's maturity when mentioning him, even though there was a difference of only three years in the detectives' ages.