Ten Second Staircase

by Christopher Fowler

  'Very impressive,' Bryant conceded. 'Where might this software be?'

  'At the moment it's only leased to the Houston FBI, but we could—'

  'Faraday is holding the purse strings, remember?'

  'But when lives may be at stake—'

  '—we'll need to fall back on human ingenuity.'

  'We could at least ask Raymond Land tomorrow. He wants us both to meet with him first thing, says it's urgent. That's what I came to tell you. I tried calling, but your mobile's not responding.'

  'Ah, er—I don't have it at the moment.'

  'The one I bought for you? What do you mean?'

  'I'll explain tomorrow. For now, I'm using my old mobile. At least I would be, but it fell into the hole while I was digging out the toothbrushes.' He pointed to something May had taken for a tinned chocolate sponge on the draining board but now realised was a

  mud-coated phone. 'Let's go and see Land.' He sighed. 'I'm in the mood for a fight.'

  The Highwayman poised himself on the apex of the roof, looking down at the city, his black tricorn hat tipping a thin stream of rain over the edge of the building. He felt a dark energy coursing through his nervous system, a sense of power over the residents of the streets below. His boots gripped the slates as he breasted the wind, keeping his balance. He turned to face the rising air currents, his cape lifting in the chill night, a creature conjured from a mythical past, a killer for a harsh new era.

  23

  INCRIMINATION

  It was six-thirty on Thursday morning, and the lights were on in the all-night taxi office with the canary-coloured plastic fascia that read Mornington Cabs. Above this was the great tiled crescent front window of the PCU, where Raymond Land kept his office. He looked out onto Koko's, a nightclub housed in the century-old Camden Theatre; three kebab and pizza take-aways; a Sainsbury's Local hidden behind a fortification of steel delivery trolleys; a makeshift Internet café filled with students; a pockmarked statue of Richard Cobden, the repealer of the Corn Laws in 1846; and a terrace of bricks, where, until just a week ago, a blackened pawnbroker sign had read Old Paintings & Violins Exchanged, this last piece of street furniture having survived above a shop for more than one hundred sixty years until mysteriously vanishing into some property developer's auction. It was a typical London scene, the old and new wedged untidily together in easy symbiosis.

  But this morning, Land wasn't thinking of the view. He nervously pushed at the strands of grey hair straggling on his head as he seated himself behind the protecting width of his desk. As much as he hated his job, he was far more disturbed by confrontations. He lined up his pens and studied his guests. May, smartly suited, was seated patiently with his hands in his lap. Bryant wiggled a pipe cleaner about in the bowl of his briar, unconcerned; he was used to being in the unit early. Judging by the state of his clothes, he looked as if he had slept there.

  'I shouldn't worry about it if I were you, Raymondo,' said Bryant now, squinting into the pipe stem and blowing bits of burnt tobacco everywhere. 'Faraday is merely a mild laxative; he eases things through the system. There's little he can do about us.' If he was worried, he hid it well.

  'I keep telling you, it's not Faraday,' Land pointed out. 'He has a new hatchet man called Oskar Kasavian. That's who you need to look out for.'

  'I don't understand how you've put us in this situation,' said May with some exasperation. 'You went to Faraday to complain about us, didn't you? Surely you must have seen where such an action might lead.'

  'I was frustrated and angry,' Land admitted. 'You know how I get, John. I thought it might gee you up a bit.'

  'It's going to do more than that. By the sound of it, we have a survival battle on our hands.'

  'And it's all your fault,' added Bryant unnecessarily. 'Do I need to remind you how many times we've covered up your mistakes? "The sinking ship drowns all the rats"—Confucius.'

  'Now look here, Arthur, you can't deny that the number of cold cases on your files has been creeping up, and there's little chance of them ever being closed. They must be brought to some sort of resolution, or you'll be used as an example of outdated detection techniques, and will forfeit your careers. Kasavian has spent this week going through all the records. He's noticed that the unit has one particularly problematic case to sort out—one that goes back a very long way, and has a number of serious repercussions for the unit.'

  'You're talking about the Leicester Square Vampire,' said Bryant. 'You know that's not solvable.' His longest-running nemesis had been carrying out random attacks on the streets of London for decades. The acts themselves always took the same form, although descriptions of the attacker varied, and there were no links between any of the victims. 'A case is cold from the point when its official investigation ends until the day its secrets are finally exposed. Good God, look at Napoleon and the wallpaper.'

  'I'm sorry?' said Land, confused.

  Bryant sighed as if having to explain to a recalcitrant child. 'Historians long suspected that Napoleon was poisoned, so they put a sample of his hair in a nuclear reactor to find out if it was true, irradiating the strands and passing them through a spectrometre. Wallpaper was made with arsenic back in the 1820s. The idea was to prove that he had somehow come into contact with the—'

  'Enough!' Land slapped the table, surprising himself. 'You simply don't appreciate the gravity of the situation, Bryant.' He knew that this particular cold case was the Home Office's trump card. Kasavian needed a single documented instance of malpractise within the unit, and had picked up on rumours that neither of the detectives would wish to be confirmed. 'The outcome of this will affect us all.'

  'Oh, come on, Raymond, everyone knows you're looking to get transferred. You'd be happy guarding a model village on the Isle of Wight, but we've still got a future here.'

  'A future?' Land was incandescent. 'What are you talking about? What future? All you have left is a past, and look at the trouble that always causes. Look at the trouble your screwups will cause now, at the worst possible time for all of us.'

  'I say, there's no need to be rude.' Bryant felt affronted. He glanced uncomfortably at his partner. This was the last thing either of them needed. 'Do we have to go into the Leicester Square business?' he asked sheepishly.

  'It's too late; the investigation is already in motion. It's all going to come out into the open. You need to put your house in order fast.'

  'We're making progress with the Highwayman,' pleaded Bryant. 'Don't force us to defend our position on a case that's been rumbling on for over thirty years.'

  'The debunking of phantoms and bogeymen is what you do best,' said Land. 'You had a clear remit; to stop the general public from panicking, to protect the vulnerable, to remove danger from the streets. Admit it, you lost sight of your duties.'

  'We had to look at the greater picture. Our job is to help keep the city in equilibrium between myth and reality.'

  'I don't hold with all that spiritual holy-water-sprinkling demonsummoning nonsense, Bryant. You're a policeman; you can't afford to hold eccentric views. Some kind of closure must be reached over the Leicester Square Vampire. I'm not prepared to leave this job under a cloud. Take a fresh look at the case. A nutter in a costume attacking total strangers—he might have more in common with the Highwayman than you realise. Who knows, perhaps one case will help inform the other.'

  Bryant examined the idea. A pensive pout crippled his face, shifting his ears and popping his eyes into pockets of wrinkled flesh. It wasn't an attractive sight. 'You know, Raymond, sometimes you actually come up with a useful suggestion,' he told the supervisor, brightening. 'Admittedly it's not very often, and usually accidental when it does happen, but on behalf of the unit I accept your challenge.'

  May felt like dropping his head in his hands. If there was one thing more dangerous than seeing his partner demoralised, it was seeing him fired with enthusiasm.

  DS Janice Longbright found she could hear everything that was going on in Raymond Land's office simp
ly by listening at the grate. The Edwardian offices were still fitted with fireplaces, although the chimneys had long ago been bricked up, and Land's pleading wheedle droned down through the iron bars of the draught trap beneath the chimney breast, revealing his most secret plans to her.

  She remembered hearing how her mother had also eavesdropped on her superiors, although in wartime the task had proven a little easier as the wall between their offices had been blown down. Still, it paid to take heed of the prevailing mood in the PCU, especially when the detectives were facing fresh censure.

  Now, as she sat reapplying Jungle Fever Glamour Stick to her lips (one of several cosmetic lines favoured by Longbright despite being discontinued in the UK in 1968 but mercifully still on sale in Botswana owing to their exotic brand names), she could hear the Acting Head's voice rise to a tremulous quaver as he sought to pass the blame for his actions.

  There had been plenty of scares before, but she knew this time was serious, not just because the Leicester Square Vampire had never been caught, but because Bryant's overconfidence had led to the most damaging moment of his career—one which had almost wrecked his friendship with John May.

  Kneeling beside the fireplace, she recognised the gravity of the threats which Bryant so lightly dismissed, and knew that the Vampire case was a Pandora's box of trouble just waiting to be opened. They were all bound to be implicated in the blaming process. After all, it was she who had recently destroyed the original documentation, burning the incriminating paper trail in the very grate where she now sat hunched in horror, listening to Bryant's enthusiastic offer to bury himself.

  Her mind flashed back to the moment she had helped to hide the evidence—was there anything she had missed? With any luck, all remaining files had been reduced to embers in the unit's fire.

  But what if something still survived? What if it had already fallen into Kasavian's hands? The damage could only be undone if the detectives acknowledged the problem. And they would never do that, because at the very least it involved destroying John May's tentatively renewed friendship with his granddaughter.

  Longbright had warned them about mixing their personal lives with business. This time, she felt sure, the habit would ruin them all. She retreated to the evidence room at the rear of the building and quietly unlocked the door.

  The only box that had survived the unit's fire contained a single damning document about the case dating from 1992. Standing on a chair and rummaging on top of a cupboard, she pulled a manila folder free and slipped the loose page inside her jacket. Raymond Land had never seen the sheet, because it contained a drunken confession from the one person qualified to know the truth of the mat ter: John May himself. It had not been destroyed because there were two additional signatures at the bottom of the page belonging to the officers who had witnessed its writing. A subpoena would draw the truth from them, and unless they could be traced and coerced into refuting its contents, there was nothing to be gained by obliterating the original. May had clearly forgotten his admittance of guilt in the shadow of a greater tragedy that had unfolded that night, and Bryant's memory was notoriously unreliable.

  Longbright had never faced a situation like this; her loyalties were suddenly divided between performing her duty and honouring her mentors. Her mother had raised her to believe that no-one was above the law, especially not those who administered it. But who could vouch for the mitigating circumstances that had resulted in the escape of a murderer, and the tragic death of an innocent civilian?

  The detective sergeant locked the door and returned to her office, made miserable by the dilemma that called her own personal morality into question.

  24

  SHADOW CITY

  As Meera Mangeshkar arrived for her shift, she heard the detectives arguing in their room opposite. She had become used to the seesaw sound of their bickering, but went over to listen.

  'You may as well come in, Mangeshkar; we have no secrets here.' May rolled a chair over to her. 'Ever hear of the Leicester Square Vampire?'

  'Before my time, sir.'

  'Accidents of birth do not excuse your ignorance,' snapped Bryant. 'Caligula reigned before you were born, but you've heard of him, haven't you? We were asking ourselves what the Highwayman has in common with the Leicester Square Vampire, and the answer is that they both started social panics. Look at the hysterical press reaction, and remember what Lord Macaulay said: "We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality."'

  'You mean like the video nasties scare of the eighties?'

  'Exactly. Panics occur when individuals feel threatened and mobilise themselves into vigilante groups. Mods and rockers, paedophiles, even UFO sightings have all sparked waves of hysteria. Saralla White and Danny Martell are being tarred and feathered because they represent the failures of a generation. Martell ran a show that was popular with teenagers but hated by their parents, until he lost his remaining audience. White advocated multiple partners, abortion, and drugs, but was a hypocrite. As people age, they form habits and take sides. The Highwayman is a godsend. According to the right-wing press, he's only doing what people across the country don't have the guts to do. The general consensus is that his victims had it coming. Journalists are so busy tracking down dubious witnesses that they've not stopped to consider the effect of their actions.'

  'You mean they're writing a bunch of toss about him.'

  'Succinctly put, Mangeshkar. This editor at Hard News, what's her name?'

  'Janet Ramsey,' Longbright pointed out.

  'She's intent on turning the Highwayman into some kind of hero. And to think she started out writing in the New Musical Express. Well, you scratch a liberal and find a conservative. Look at her editorial.' Bryant rattled the magazine angrily. '"So-called 'artist' Saralla White had the morals of a tramp and a string of terminations to her credit. The man who financed her career, the owner of London's notorious Burroughs gallery, was himself the father of her unborn illegitimate child." My God, where are they getting their information?'

  'As you said, sir, no shortage of enemies ready to put the boot in.'

  'Wait, it goes on: "Self-styled 'Teen Lifestyle Guru' Danny Martell's own secret sleazy life involved hookers and drugs. Both died in a manner appropriate to their wasted existence. Can we honestly say that either of them will be missed?" Longbright, get me a meeting with this woman, would you? What she's printing is irresponsible and dangerous. We don't want a repeat of what happened with the Vampire.'

  'Why?' asked Meera. 'What happened?'

  'His victims were accused of bringing their fate upon themselves, just because they were women out alone at night, some postwar notion about unaccompanied females being of loose character. Crime reporters turned the whole thing into a moral issue and a political point-scorer. Janice, where are the Vampire files?'

  Longbright caught her breath. She had managed to hide the essential page in the back of her desk. 'I think they all burned,' she replied. 'Your fault, I'm afraid. I'll see if there's anything else left, but don't expect much.' She rose from her desk and clumped off, returning a few minutes later with the singed cardboard container, denuded of its single incriminating document.

  'Is that all we have to show for three decades of sightings?' Bryant settled his spectacles on his nose and peered into the carton, where a handful of damp clippings lay stuck to the bottom.

  'We'd have more if you hadn't blown the place up,' Longbright reminded him, tipping the pitiful contents across his desk. The best form of defence against Bryant, she knew, was distraction.

  'Don't worry, I remember most of the assault details.' May spread the jaundiced newspaper clippings out. 'First recorded assault was March twenty-sixth, 1973, in the alleyway connecting Leicester Square to Charing Cross Road. It's bricked in now as part of the Odeon complex; another smelly, piss-stained piece of old London gone, and good riddance. A nineteen-year-old female on her way home from a nightclub was beaten and bitten around the chin and neck
. The same MO occurred six times that summer, enough for us to link the cases and for the press to coin a nickname. The early victims were all women between the ages of seventeen and twentythree, all on their way home from nights on the town. Two of them were known to us because they'd been arrested on immorality charges. Two were of mixed race. The press weren't told, but it didn't stop them from implying that the victims had led their attacker on because they were provocatively dressed in miniskirts, and because they weren't white. A message there to anyone who thinks the seventies were enlightened.

  'The Vampire returned in 1974 after a quiet winter, the attacks continuing intermittently until a boy—Malcolm somebody, his name isn't here—died of his wounds. He was the first of two fatalities that year. We didn't have computers to help us find bite marks then, and at first we missed the link, but he was the son of an Austrian diplomat, and suddenly there were funds available to pursue a full investigation. The problem was that, like the alleyways where the Vampire carried out his attacks, every lead turned into a dead end. We ended up with numerous witness reports—'