Ten Second Staircase

by Christopher Fowler

  'There are a couple of brief descriptions here,' Bryant interrupted. 'Tall, athletic, dressed in a black cape, spotted running into a cul-desac, thought to have scaled a sheer wall and escaped somehow. The "Vampire" tag stuck not because of his clothes, but because nearly all of the victims had been bitten, the severity depending on how long the Vampire had been left alone with them. We didn't know then that biting was so common in sexual assaults. Databases were still difficult to cross-reference in those days. And you have to realise that in 1973 his outfit wasn't so strange.'

  'That's right.' May took up the story again. 'Victorian capes for men had enjoyed a revival. Just the previous year, Christopher Lee had starred in a modern Dracula film which saw him running along the King's Road in a billowing cape. The image had already been planted in the minds of the young. The press played up the danger, and pretty soon we had drunken vigilante groups roaming the West End as the pubs turned out, searching for this phantom figure who drained his victims' blood and walked through walls. The whole thing became a ridiculous urban legend. People supposedly sighted him stalking across the rooftops. The Vampire operated in a tight area that, thanks to geographic profiling, we now know wasn't where he lived. We made mistakes. The unit had been brought in to try and stem the escalating anxiety in the capital. The mythology became self-perpetuating as the Vampire started to act on his own press reports; if they said he'd been seen wearing a top hat, then he wore one the next time he ventured out. If they said he could escape through solid brick, he staged a stunt to suggest that was exactly what he'd done. He played up to his public, and started taking risks. We nearly caught him.'

  'What do you mean, nearly?' asked Meera.

  An awkward glance passed between the detectives, and they fell uncharacteristically silent. 'The operation went wrong,' said Bryant, gathering up the clippings and tidying them away.

  'Did the attacks continue?' asked Mangeshkar.

  'For a while, yes.'

  The room went quiet. The constable shot the detective sergeant a look, as if to say What gives here? but was ignored. Longbright finally broke the stillness.

  'Could we get back to the case in hand? Perhaps we should take another look at possible suspects.'

  'All right,' May agreed. 'Let's start with the boy, Luke Tripp. We know his testimony is overimaginative—there's no way he could have seen a man on a horse in that chamber—so we have to assume that fear made him exaggerate what he saw.'

  'Therein lies another paradox,' said Bryant, who loved paradoxes. 'The pose Luke drew is exactly the same as the one described by Channing Gifford, the dancer living opposite the Smithfield gym who spotted the Highwayman from her window. It's the same as the pose struck in the digital shots taken by the estate girls. The head also matches the official logo of the Roland Plumbe Community Estate. But the schoolboy saw the Highwayman up close and in the flesh before anyone else did, therefore he can't have copied someone else's description, because he had nothing to base it on. What, then, are we to make of his testimony?'

  May rose and strode impatiently to the sunlit crescent window. 'We can't be sure of that. We have to check for further sightings.'

  'I circulated the Highwayman's shot to every motorcycle courier company in Greater London, as you asked,' said Longbright. 'I thought someone would be able to tell if his outfit was similar to any of the distinctive leather suits bike messengers wear, but so far noone has come back with a positive match.'

  'We'll have to do all the follow-up work ourselves,' said May. 'Faraday won't recommend putting more officers on the street because he's corner-cutting to prove he can meet his end-of-year budget. So long as we're always pulled in after the event, we can't be expected to prevent further tragedies. Not unless we're somehow granted the gift of second sight.'

  'But that's exactly what we need to develop,' said Bryant, 'and I know how to go about it. We need someone who understands why such mythical bogeymen recur in the city. Recognise the cause and you locate the solution.' He tapped his partner on the shoulder. 'Come with me.'

  'Oh, no, I'm not heading down this route,' May warned. 'You heard Raymond, no table-tappers and ghost-watchers, just solid data-gathering.'

  'You're absolutely right, and I'm sticking to my promise. She's just a white witch. I don't suppose you have a problem with that, given this area's rich connections with witchcraft.'

  'You might just as well say the area's connected with carrots because there's a vegetable stall outside the tube station,' said May hotly.

  'Come on, John, have you forgotten the lecture I dragged you to about the "Mother Damnable" of Kentish Town, Jinney the Mother Red-Cap, who frequently lodged the notorious highwaywoman of Oliver Cromwell's days, Moll Cutpurse? She was a fortune-teller, healer, and practitioner of the black arts, and her life was filled with cruelty and insanity. Mother Red-Cap's partner incinerated himself in her oven, and later, when she herself was close to death, crowds saw the devil himself enter her house and take her soul. The witch's hair dropped out in two hours, and the undertaker had to snap her stiff limbs to fit her into a coffin. She, Mother Black Cap, and Mother Shipton, all three notorious witches, all lived within half a mile of one another. Coincidence? I think not.'

  May looked at his partner and his heart sank. It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas. John May knew this, because Bryant had once introduced him to the witches' alarming descendants, who continued to live—and die violently—in the immediate neighbourhood of their ancestors. But now his task was to prevent his partner from favouring the pursuit of his hobbies over practical investigation.

  'I'm not coming with you, Arthur,' he warned.

  'I need to get you out of the office, John. We have to talk about the Leicester Square attacks. Please.'

  Bryant buried himself inside his voluminous threadbare overcoat and looked for somewhere to stick his smouldering pipe. For a moment, with his head all but vanished and smoke coming out of his sleeves, he rather looked like a witch himself, melting after a tossed bucket of water. 'It's early. I'll have you back here in no time.'

  May reluctantly rose but stopped at the unit entrance. 'Can't you see what they're trying to do? They're dissipating our strength, dividing us between two investigations in order to make us fail at both. The Vampire is an irrelevance not worth wasting time and money on. We need to concentrate on the matter at hand. One success is better than none.'

  'We can't ignore this, John,' said Bryant softly. 'Not when you know it involves the death of your daughter.'

  25

  ATTRACTING EVIL

  'How could I have told them the truth, with April in hearing distance?' pleaded May.

  'You'll have to talk to her at some point.' Bryant bundled himself against the cool morning air and set off across wet pavements for the unit car park, a quadrangle of bricks cracked with drain-fed weeds, where horses were once stabled for the gentry of Camden Town. 'You can't leave these things hidden forever. It's not fair on the poor girl.' He produced a bent pickled-onion fork and prised open the broken door lock of Victor, his Mini Cooper.

  'How can I ever broach the subject? She'll hate me for all the years I've lied.'

  'You know my views on that. You should have made a clean breast of it years ago, instead of letting the problem compound itself.'

  'You've always been brutally honest with people because you don't care what they think, but I can't lose April now, just when I'm getting her back.'

  'Get in, for heaven's sake.' Bryant peered at his partner through the rain-stained windscreen, but May had not moved.

  He was remembering the day with terrible clarity.

  The sticky heat rising from London streets at dusk. A cloud of starlings tumbling above the plane trees. Tourists ambling towards the cinemas of Leicester Square, where The Silence of the Lambs and Terminator 2: Judgment Day were
showing. The detectives, tired and fractious, waiting in the shadowed doorway of an amusement arcade. Longbright, radio-linked in a hot patrol car below Leicester Fields, in Panton Street. So much waiting, with nothing to do but argue.

  The press had grown bored with the unsolved assaults. Leicester Square had been redeveloped as a pedestrian zone, and it was assumed that the Vampire had ceased operation in the area, despite the occasional unconfirmed sighting. During the summer of 1991, the brutal murder of a woman in her late twenties in an alley off Cranbourn Street prompted fresh attention, and the case was reopened. This time the victim was a blonde, well-educated and attractive, and therefore more likely to extract outraged cries for justice. The hunt for the killer of young Amanda Wakefield began in earnest.

  Three nights before the detectives' vigil, a fight had broken out in another Leicester Square backstreet, during which a homeless man was half beaten to death by a murderous gang of youths supposedly looking for the Vampire. The police commissioner had been pressured to take action, and the unit had grown too desperate for a break.

  Arthur Bryant had been the first to notice the physical similarity between Amanda Wakefield and May's own daughter, Elizabeth, but it was John who had readily agreed to plant a decoy matching the description of the victim. The pair had been blinded by their need to resolve the investigation.

  Elizabeth offered to help draw the Vampire out into the light.

  Only Detective Sergeant Longbright had felt uneasy as she dressed her up for the part. Elizabeth had been armed with a police radio and pepper spray, in case of trouble, and although she was small in stature, her strength and determination made her a formidable opponent. Everyone was confident. Bryant had employed a psychic to teach her about sending the right signals to her potential attacker, but he had also noted a practical detail that no-one else had remarked upon: All the victims had worn baseball caps. Hardly anything surprising there, of course; the whole of London was wearing caps that summer—but Bryant wondered if the Vampire avoided the bareheaded because they could look up and identify him more easily.

  He spent the afternoon watching Elizabeth as she trod the same route as those who had died. By nine P.M. it seemed unlikely that the Vampire would appear. He had never operated at night. The dusty sun was low behind buildings glowing with soft citrine colours. Shadows stretched and cooled. And Elizabeth decided to depart from her prearranged route, slipping between the narrow walls of Bear Street, picking her way between stacks of restaurant refuse in her search for a killer.

  Her call for help went unanswered. She had not realised that the high buildings would block her radio signal. May was puzzled by the disappearance; she should have been due back at the end of Irving Street by now. Craning his neck to search the gathering crowds, he grew apprehensive. The detectives warned Longbright that they had lost contact with their decoy, and ran into the streets.

  Bear Street had an alley running from it where bars and cafés stored their waste food ready for night collection. It was closed at one end, and presented such a forbidding appearance that no pedestrians used it. Drums of ghee made the ground slick, and there was a sensation of lurking rodent life.

  May was the first on the scene, slowing from a run to a walk as the feeling of something terrible prickled at his throat. The restaurant backs were deep in shadow now, and the noise of the crowd in the square had died away. He studied the filthy brick alleyway, the steel rubbish containers and plastic sacks of leaking leftovers, the cook in a first-floor window smoking a cigarette on his break, the backs of buildings resembling some ancient part of London because they had no need to make themselves attractive. He called up: Did you see a young woman run in here? But the cook spoke no English, and merely stared back.

  As soon as he saw the legs of her jeans on the ground, he knew his daughter was dead. She had been struck down from behind, and lay on an oily patch between a pair of plastic wastebins. Then he saw the bloody knot of hair, the arm twisted beneath her torso with its palm up. Her head pressed up against the base of a drainpipe at an impossible angle.

  He remembered nothing more of that dreadful night.

  A pair of Met officers forced a bottle of brandy on him to numb the shock, not caring that they were breaking the law by doing so. May drank too deeply. He was to blame, he told them, for ignoring the rules, for not trusting his senses. Back at the unit, he insisted on signing a document to that effect, and used the officers as witnesses.

  Nobody had spotted the reemergence of the Vampire from the grey dead-ended alley. An open door led to the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, but the cook insisted that no-one had entered or left. He had, however, seen a tall man in a cloak halfway up the end wall of Bear Street's alley—the idea was preposterous, the details unforthcoming, so that the sighting only made matters worse. But the drainpipes made perfect ladders here, and it was clear that he had climbed them. The phantasm's panicky mythology had hidden obvious truths.

  May had taken a brief leave of absence, returning to work too quickly, assuring them all that he was coping well.

  Elizabeth's daughter was just nine years old when she became motherless. Her father had moved out from the family apartment five years earlier, and had by then remarried in New Zealand. April's worst childhood fear, that she would one day find herself alone, suddenly became true. She found herself unable to talk to the man who had discovered her mother's body, and was sent to live with his sister Gwen. Her problems began soon after.

  May knew he should never have involved his daughter in a hunt for a killer. The detectives had proven too adept at attracting evil. As forensic experts combed the walls and roofs searching for evidence of the Vampire's escape, May damned himself. Bryant, too, cursed his own arrogance, but no amount of blame could bring Elizabeth back.

  And April changed. The girl with smiling eyes was replaced by a sombre, fearful child who found terrors in every building's shadow. In the absence of factual evidence, legends took hold. The Vampire became a bogeyman, an elusive phantom that existed only in tortured dreams.

  Trails grow cold, and need evidence if they are to be revived. Elizabeth's death had marked the Vampire's last appearance. What, wondered May, could now be gained by reopening the wounds of a tragic past?

  26

  SHARED TRAGEDIES

  John May sat up in the passenger seat and looked around. 'Why are we on Prince of Wales Road?' he asked.

  Bryant had stopped the Mini Cooper before a familiar Victorian redbrick building. 'I've been talking to you for the last ten minutes,' he said. 'Weren't you listening?' Whacking a 'disabled' sticker onto his windscreen, he clambered out to tap his walking stick on the wooden sign that had been affixed to the tiny church's gate: Coven of St James the Elder—North London Branch. The crimson neon above the door still read 'Chapel of Hope,' a leftover from the previous tenant.

  'I know you detest the idea, but we need to talk to Maggie Armitage,' Bryant explained. 'The Vampire files may have been destroyed, but she's been keeping diaries for years. If you remember, she acted as my occult consultant throughout the case. I'm hoping she still has records of every sighting.'

  'Yes, but they'll be useless because she's mad.'

  'You say that about every woman over forty who holds strong convictions.'

  'I know all about her convictions, Arthur. I've seen her arrest file.'

  'Our cases don't have traditional signifying elements, so I have to rely on people like Maggie. You never warmed to her, did you?'

  'I know she means well, but when the two of you get together, she

  fills your head with these ridiculous ideas, like the time she convinced you that she could trap the Black Widow of Blackheath inside the Woolwich Odeon by spraying the balcony with luminous paint.'

  'We caught her, didn't we?'

  'Only because you blinded her halfway through South Pacific and she fell down the stairs trying to get to the toilet.'

  'I'll admit it sounds odd when you put it like that. What are you tr
ying to say?'

  'Just that there's no point in looking for things that don't exist.'

  'You think things don't exist just because you can't see them,' Bryant scoffed.

  'Well, yes, strictly speaking, invisibility is a fair indication of nonexistence.'

  'Rubbish. What about gases, subatomic particles, magnetism, religious faith, the unfathomable mysteries of romantic attraction?'

  'Don't drag biology into this. The Leicester Square Vampire and the Highwayman have nothing in common beyond the fact that they've both caught the public imagination. I just don't see how going through some barmy old white witch's rambling diaries is going to help reopen—'