Ten Second Staircase

by Christopher Fowler

  'I imagine you're busy, but perhaps we could talk when you have a moment,' May requested.

  'If you've finished with Mr Mason, why not come to my study now? It'll be quieter away from these gawkers. Jezzard and Parfitt, that means you, too: homeroom, the lot of you.'

  He hovered an avuncular and slightly threatening hand above May's shoulder. 'The brightest two percent in one of the brightest schools in the country, and all it takes to stun them into silence is the presence of someone outside their immediate peer group. Too much time spent in their bedrooms chatting on the Internet to girls they'll never touch. All that stuff one hears about schoolkids having rampant experimental sex doesn't apply here. These are a timid lot, but they're troublesome enough on the surface. That's why I attempt to teach them how to behave in public, to little effect—you were going to ask about that, weren't you?'

  'I had heard you were popular with the pupils,' May admitted.

  'There's no real trick to loyalty, John—may I call you John? You barter with them, that's all. Teenagers are materialistic little buggers. The ownership of many shiny little items seems to reduce their sense of living under threat. I give them stuff. Of course, the trouble is that this school has a remit to preach traditional Christian values, empirically accepted history, and the English literary canon as if deconstruction and postmodern historical relativism didn't exist. I expect intelligent children to question the received wisdom of their elders, and make no bones about treating them differently. The kids in my extracurrics have trouble conforming, because they make connections other kids don't make. They're quick to see through the illusions of the external world, but it encourages them to acknowledge the legitimacy of value judgements. A good thing in my book; most pupils don't go deeper than what we term seals and Nazis.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Oh, you know.' Kingsmere flagged his hand at the posters lining the walls. 'Received ideas and lazy opinions. Seals are nice; Nazis are evil; everything else falls into one camp or the other.'

  'Surely some truths are constant and universal,' said May. 'The earth is round not because we currently think that to be the case, but because scientific absolutes have proven it not to be flat.'

  Kingsmere gave a knowing smile. 'The objectivity of science is easily exploded, Mr May. We live in a reflective age which recognises that most personalities, institutions, and beliefs no longer fit into neat logical categories.'

  'But without a certain degree of generalisation and simplification there can be no understanding,' May argued.

  'An understandable attitude from a policeman, but a rather naïve stance, I fear. We need to step beyond the tyrannical pedantry of facts to arrive at a more sophisticated level of theoretical interpretation,' Kingsmere explained, not expecting his guest to understand.

  'I can assure you that if we ran the police force on Derridean deconstructivist ideologies, we'd never arrest anyone, because the degree of guilt would depend on the fluctuation of individual opinion.'

  If Kingsmere was surprised by May's conclusion, he was careful not to show it. 'A good argument for replacing constables with academics,' he said instead. 'The school's top two percent should be allowed to free itself from the straitjacket of a dogmatic education and explore modern liberal relativism. Most private pupils aren't brighter because their parents had to pay for their education. Actually, they downplay their intelligence because they have a choice of being smart or popular. My job is to single out the smart ones and keep them here long enough to find practical applications. The pressures on them are enormous. Since the dot-com gold rush, private schools have been treated like banks—parents put their kids in when they're flush, draw them out again when they're broke. If you think divorcing parents are bad for a child, try removing his peers and dumping him in some budget-strapped state school. Here we are.'

  They were now deep within the venerable building. Kingsmere swiped a card on his study door, which surprised May. The reason quickly became apparent, for the room was a technological revelation: flat-screen computers, underlit glass tables, transparent circuitry and touch panels, the graceful white plastic of Apple Macintosh, the pristine organisation of an operating theatre. 'This is where I take my extracurricular classes. The best way to encourage learning is to trick them into doing it for themselves. After twenty minutes surrounded by this equipment, they have to be torn away from it.'

  'A far cry from the book-lined studies of earlier times,' said May, looking around with approval.

  'It's a modern version, that's all. The school was left an endowment for technology. Thank God for rich St Crispin's old boys. Look, I'm sorry if my lads embarrassed your partner. I've taught them to question authority, but they can sometimes take things too literally. It wouldn't have happened if I had been here, I can assure you.'

  'Don't worry. Mr Bryant prefers a spirited exchange of views. It happens a lot.'

  'Perhaps I should allow you to explain the purpose of your visit now.'

  May felt he was being led through the conversation like a pupil but put it down to the teacher's habitual manner of dealing with his young charges. 'I understand you were off sick this week, so I don't know whether you've heard much about our investigation.'

  'I read about it in the newspapers, of course. The police seem to be going out of their way to avoid the suggestion that London might have a serial killer on the loose.'

  'The term usually denotes someone driven to commit murder by aberrant, uncontrollable passions. That hardly seems appropriate in this case. The victims fall into the common geographic profile— both murders were committed in the same area—but they were not the focus of violent desires. I've heard that some of the pupils here have been getting into fights with a gang on the nearby estate.'

  Kingsmere appeared disappointed by the mundanity of the enquiry. 'So I understand,' he said. 'The seniors, mostly. It's a territorial matter of little interest. The sixth form use the rear grounds of the estate to reach the rugby pitch and the athletic ground. It's a very old dispute.'

  'I thought the Saladins were new. We have around thirty-seven registered—that is, official—gangs currently operating in central London, so it can be hard keeping track of them.'

  The teacher cocked his head, intrigued. 'How does a gang become official?'

  'It gets registered if one of its members tries to shoot you, Mr Kingsmere.'

  'What I meant was that the territorial dispute goes back a long way before gangs. Our school has been on the same site for centuries, and the estate was built during the postwar slum clearance. Our boys argue, with some justification, that we were here first. Tensions have existed here for many generations. I set a local area research project last year, and we found that as early as the eighteenth century, the poorer residents of the neighbourhood had appointed someone to champion their rights. Hang on, let me see if I can find the document.'

  A new light of enthusiasm fired him as he powered up his laptop and began searching through project files. The white square board above his chair filled with data.

  'This one, in particular, may strike a chord.' He briskly tapped the screen as if drawing the attention of an unruly class. 'In 1929, a guy called Albert Whitney led a revolt by the tenants of Three Bells Street against exorbitant rents charged by their landlords, to wit, the owners of this school. Three Bells Street was destroyed during the war, and now lies beneath the rear grounds of the Roland Plumbe Community Estate.' Kingsmere flicked off the light, as if keen to keep any further information to himself. 'If ever there was a case to believe in psychogeography, this is it.'

  'Psychogeography is a process based on empirical data,' said May with a certain amount of malicious relish. He had used this argument before with his partner.

  'Data that comprises the temporal value judgements of the superstitious, uneducated masses,' snapped Kingsmere.

  'Either way, it's the kind of hostile territory that attracts the attention of vigilantes,' May told him. 'It will warrant further investigatio
n.'

  As he left the school, a nagging doubt about Kingsmere wedged itself in May's mind. Connections were slow to form, synapses failing. He felt sure there was something he had forgotten, as though a harmful half-remembered dream was even now fading from his memory.

  'I'm over here,' said the hole, as a fistful of toothbrushes came flying out of it.

  John May walked to the earth mound surrounding the edge and looked down. His partner was on all fours in the muddy pit, scrabbling at sheaves of half-buried Bakelite handles. What on earth did he think he was doing?

  'I told you it was a toothbrush factory,' Bryant panted. 'The estate agent insisted it was dentures.'

  'I'm sorry?'

  'My new apartment, it's converted from the only remaining part of a toothbrush factory that survived the wartime bombing. This whole area was riddled with small workshops.'

  'After all this time I still don't understand you,' complained May, giving him a hand out of the quagmire. 'You go missing from the unit without telling anyone where you're heading, and now I find you at home? And why do you have to know the history of the ground you live on? Why can't you just leave things alone?'

  'Well, yes, that would be the easiest thing to do,' Bryant admitted, 'but so many questions would remain unanswered. Did you not wonder how I managed to buy this place so cheaply?' Bryant had made his new home on the unfashionable side of Chalk Farm, which bordered the fashionable, expensive, celebrity-riddled Primrose Hill.

  'Let me guess. It was cheap because it has a peculiar shape, uneven floors, damp patches, a leaky flat roof that appears to be made of tin, and is built on a triangular piece of overgrown waste ground barely ten yards from a heavily used railway line?'

  'It has character.'

  'It has mice.'

  'And it has no foundations. That's why it was cheap.' Bryant stamped mud from his Wellingtons and entered the yellow brick apartment through an old-fashioned green stable door divided across the middle.

  'So it's liable to fall down as well. You know it was never designed to be lived in. I wouldn't be surprised if it was illegal to do so. Poor Alma, how she must miss her cosy apartment in Battersea. Have you got any heating?'

  'Not as such,' Bryant admitted. 'Now that you mention it, Alma has been covetously glancing at brochures on Antigua lately. The toothbrush-making machinery probably kept the whole place warm in winter. Never mind, there's a stack of broken trestle tables at the end of the garden. I could burn them if it gets really cold.'

  'Look, I'll bring you a portable radiator. And throw out all those filthy toothbrushes.' May's St John's Wood flat was as clean and bare as an operating theatre. Even April had warned her grandfather that he was exhibiting signs of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. May reacted to the chaos of the world around him by creating a hygienic haven where he could work and think far into the night. Bryant, on the other hand, seemed to be living with the ants.

  'I rather thought I'd create an artwork with the toothbrushes, although I'm not sure how easy it is to carve Bakelite. I suppose my fleeting interests are a bit of a curse. To whom will I pass on all my arcane knowledge? I do admire your ability to draw a line underneath the past and leave it alone.'

  'It's the best thing to do,' said May, searching for somewhere clean to sit. He was worried by the fact that his partner was digging in the garden at a time when he should have been concentrating on the case. Every few months, fresh fears assailed him about Bryant's advancing age affecting his abilities. Everyone had doubts as they grew older, but when wrong decisions were made in the course of crime detection, lives were at stake. He hoped he would once again be proven wrong but could not shake the feeling that they were now living on borrowed time.

  'Exactly, you see. England has the most contemporary spiritual landscape in Europe. Why not make the most of it? Continuity has been fractured, leaving a spiritual vacuum. The meaningful aesthetics of family and religion have fallen by the wayside. We have tribalisms, but no belief system against which we can measure ourselves. And just when we're free to reinvent ourselves on this wonderful blank canvas, to finally prove responsible for our own destinies, international corporations are busy trying to fill the void. What could be more grotesque than companies behaving like vengeful deities by copyrighting the genetic code, or stopping seeds from reproducing? So someone must remain behind to remember the past, and I've appointed myself for the task. Do you want tea?'

  'I'll make it,' May insisted. 'You get cleaned up.'

  Bryant's landlady had been hard at work in the jumble of cavernous, damp rooms that now constituted their home. Touched by her decision to give up her Battersea apartment for him, Bryant had placed the new property in her name, in order that she could continue to call herself his landlady. In return, she had transformed the inhospitable chambers, dividing areas off for dining and relaxing, but making sure not to touch the room designated as Bryant's study.

  Here were stored the surviving texts and artifacts that shaped and informed his life: Beethoven sonatas and Socratic dialogues; Greek mythologies; treatises on the Essex witches and the dinner parties of Attila the Hun; accounts of Walpole, Cibber, Keats, and Pepys; the poems of Philip Larkin and the concerts of Sir Malcolm Sargent; eyewitness accounts of the Conquistadors entering Mexico City; the discovery of Virginia and the great Knightsbridge safe-deposit raid of 1987; the kings of England and fights historical ('from Marathon to Waterloo in order categorical'); books on insects, dowsers, the art of skittles, great sea disasters, sand dancers, Japanese ferns, sausagemaking, code-breaking, the films of Launder and Gilliat, underground rivers, bus routes of the 1920s, the lost lion statues of London, the whereabouts of Lord Lucan and the private diary of Laurence Shirley, the only British earl to be hanged for murder; folders filled with clippings of forgotten crimes, photographs of dead admirals and the interior decoration of Victorian brothels. On top of this nightmarish mélange was a brand-new stack of youthoriented lifestyle magazines. May was touched by the thought that his partner was at least trying to adjust to the modern world, although he had no doubt that the attempt was doomed.

  'You recall we were having a conversation about the English concept of home,' called May, searching for cups. 'You said the convoluted shapes of London streets trapped residents in coils from which they never truly escaped.'

  'You only have to look at the figures, dear chap. We're bombarded by adverts for faraway places, but many of us barely manage to stray more than a few miles from where we started.'

  'Something came up this afternoon. I went to see the teacher of the pupils who barracked you. He's a postmodern relativist with a chip on his shoulder about elite education, but he managed to suggest something interesting about the Highwayman. According to him, the area on which the estate is built has always had a champion, a kind of vigilante. What do you know about distance decay?'

  Bryant thoughtfully poured out some sepia tea and passed over a tray of misshapen biscuits. 'Oh, I read an article about this. People subconsciously make an energy analysis before they go anywhere. Consequently they make lots of short trips but few long ones.'

  'That's right. Criminals carry out mundane crimes close to home, and travel further afield to commit violent acts. They keep a buffer zone around their immediate area of residence in order to avoid recognition. Villains escape to the safety of home, but still often return to their crimes. Are these raisins?' May pointed to something in a lumpen biscuit of dubious provenance.

  'I don't know. Alma's eyesight isn't what it was, so they could be dried peas.' Bryant scrunched his features as a biscuit fought back against his dentures. 'Ever hear of Governor Joseph Wall? He had a man flogged to death in Gorée, an island off the coast of the Gambia, in 1782. After guiltily hiding out in France and Italy, he returned to England and wrote to the Secretary of State offering to meet the charges against him. Twenty years had passed, and he didn't realise that the matter had been completely forgotten. Naturally, we thanked him for returning, then executed him. My point b
eing,' Bryant paused for breath as he brought out fresh biscuits and, more mysteriously, a plate of Brazil nuts, 'that the man felt he was unable to go home without giving himself up, and chose to take that risk, which suggests that the territorial instinct maintains a very powerful hold on us. Now, if that territory consistently attracts a certain class or type, they'll always return. So if we assume that our Highwayman's possible home base is on the estate, it would explain why he has travelled within a certain radius to commit his attacks. He might be choosing his victims not by their celebrity status but by the fact that they venture into his field of operation.'

  'You'll be pleased to know there's a piece of geographic profiling software available that can calculate this,' said May, risking a biscuit. 'We need to place the Highwayman at this home site, and find at least three locations where he's been known to commit violent acts. For each location we plot out a different likely area in which the offender lives, and see where the areas overlap to form a hot spot. Then we conduct door-to-door interviews. If it turns out that one of our existing suspects lives within the radius, we conduct DNA testing.'