Ten Second Staircase

by Christopher Fowler

  'It's a deal,' said Bryant, eagerly shaking his partner's hand.

  'I still can't believe you gave away my birthday present,' said May, shaking his head in wonderment.

  27

  ENGLISH CRUELTIES

  His real name was Alexander Garfield Paradine, and he was related to the Earl of Devonshire, but everyone called him Garfy, and thought he was the son of a taxi driver who had been discovered in a Skegness talent competition.

  You needed the common touch to succeed on television; it levelled the playing field between you and the viewer. While his fans imagined that he drank at his local and ate in chip shops, he had been dining at the Groucho Club and hooking slices at Sunningdale. It was part of the pact to allow them their dreams, that they too might one day become like him.

  He'd been lucky in the early years, becoming an alternative comedian without having to haul a one-man show around Edinburgh for several festivals. He'd become popular on the university circuit, garnering a strong student following, but he longed for a wider audience, and as his career shifted from late-night cult shows to Saturday evening clip-fests like You're on Camera, the pact with his youthful fan base had become strained. His privacy was repeatedly invaded by viewers who felt they owned him. They clambered over the wall of his house in Henley-on-Thames, and followed his wife back from Waitrose, photographing her on their mobiles.

  To reduce the pressure, he reinvented himself, but by the time he was cutting his teeth on dramatic soaps like Manchester Emergency, his fans had turned on him. No-one, neither critics nor audiences, was prepared to accept him as a serious actor. Taking a role in the BBC's prestigious two-parter Dombey and Son, his mannered performance was disastrously received. His Christmas single proved popular with mums and dads, but he was derided in the West End musical Don Juan, so he began missing performances, pleading laryngitis. As a consequence, the 2.5-million-pound show ran for just seventeen performances, making enemies of his backers.

  He caught sight of his profile in the glass doors, and didn't like what he saw. At thirty-seven, his boyish looks were going; he had to face the fact that he was starting to look too used-up for romantic leads. His eyes had bagged; his jowls had sagged. He looked tired all the time. He made the tactical error of appearing in a Conservative party broadcast advocating the rights of fox hunters, and lost his remaining student fans overnight. Then came the drunk-driving ban, and the unsuccessful spell in rehab. He gained a reputation as the tabloids' favourite drunk.

  Now he hated his former fan base, never more than when they shouted 'Oi, Garfy!' across busy streets, or bellowed his catchphrases as he alighted from cabs. With the grim predictability of a star on the downslope, he punched a photographer outside Stringfellow's, and was filmed intoxicated and crying in the Met Bar. Knowing that it was a small step from here to playing villains in seaside pantomimes, he reinvented himself again. He became a bornagain Christian, went to Capetown for a face-lift, and hosted a morning cable show that picked up a surprisingly loyal following. His ghostwritten book Loving Someone Other Than Yourself became a top-ten best-seller at the expense of using up his savings. But his fickle TV fans had moved on. The younger generation, whose attention he sought and craved, now loathed him as the representative of everything their parents respected.

  As he pressed the entry buzzer beside the glassed doorway in St John Street, Clerkenwell, he considered the thought of another makeover. He needed to choose a charity, one with a high profile, preferably involving children. His agent could do all the sourcing. He'd agree to sign over a percentage of royalties, attend some photoops, perhaps even adopt a Romanian orphan so that teenagers could see he was sincere. They were the audience that counted; they had the buying power that excited sponsors. Hell, at least it was a game plan.

  At his back, the swollen pale green sky prepared to release expectorations of rain. He cupped his hands over the glass and tried to see inside, then checked the address on his printout. The offer of the radio voice-over had come to him directly at his home computer, bypassing his agent, the message merely specifying the time and place. He would have binned the request, but it was for a teen magazine and he couldn't afford to pass up the chance.

  He cupped his hands again—no-one in the foyer, all lights out; it felt like the wrong address, except that the number was stencilled above the door in chrome. He tried the handle, and was surprised to find the door unlocked. As he entered, hard neon fuzzed on overhead. He noted the sign pinned on the deserted steel reception desk—Sound Studio 4th Floor—and summoned the elevator.

  Anthony Sarne swam with the same languor he possessed out of the water, his tanned arms lifting and falling through the warm blue shadows. He was most contented like this, on his own in the calm evening gloom. Rolling onto his back, he studied the glass roof as he lazily drifted beneath it. He had swum thirty lengths of the tiled Victorian pool; now he could relax in the last few minutes before dressing and going to dinner.

  The tight-fitting plastic goggles dyed his cool green world. Chlorine affected his vision adversely. More than ever he found himself wearing shaded lenses of some kind; his eyes were increasingly sensitive to light. He was forty-eight and in good shape, happy with his body, vain about his ability to maintain a flat stomach. He still had his pick of the girls, and his current mistress, an astonishingly athletic nineteen-year-old from Korea, watched him with a possessiveness that made his enemies hate him even more. His wife pretended everything was fine, of course, and rarely came up to town anymore.

  At this time of the night there were usually a few lane-ploughing high-flyers left at the Oasis Swimming Pool in Holborn, but tonight they had showered and dressed, to disperse from the city, where they could hone their aggressive business techniques on their loved ones. One other swimmer remained, a boy with cropped black hair and defined musculature, seated motionless on the edge of the deep end. He leaned back, staring into the sharp mesh of light that filtered from an arabesque of glass bricks set in the side wall. Above the diving board, buttresses of bright light from the overhead neon splintered the refracting depths.

  Sarne's feet reached down and touched the sloping floor of the pool. Standing very still, he allowed the water to settle. The boy rose from the poolside and padded away to the changing rooms.

  Now there was nothing to keep him in the water. Lately, to his consternation, he had begun swimming almost every other evening. It had taken him a few months to understand that he was not drawn here by the determination to get fit, but by the thought of boys in their swimming trunks. This sea change in his sexuality was unexpected and unwelcome. He was revolted by the surfacing of this secret objective, but found himself helplessly returning to the baths.

  The boy had gone. The water stilled and fell silent. It was time for him to exit the pool and dress. The sense of excitement he had briefly shared with his swimming companion faded away as he rose from the chlorinated water.

  The shower was capricious. He had learned by now to hammer the temperature dial with the heel of his hand. The baths had individual booths, but only low tiled walls separated them. He had covetously watched young men soaping themselves from here, prepared to take the risk of someone spotting his sidelong glances. Ashamed by his desires, he knew he deserved to be caught. He thumped the dial and water began to flow. Overhead, rain started to course down the glass panels of the roof. The nearby laser lights in Oxford Street designed to fanfare London's Olympic bid traced Möbius patterns across low yellow clouds. The sensuality of warm shower water unlaced his thoughts, and his mind drifted.

  It snapped back into focus when he saw a cloaked figure in a tricorn hat outlined against the roof glass, illuminated by the reflecting water.

  Paradine alighted at the fourth floor and found himself in a nondescript corridor, dimly lit and decorated in the grey gloss paint and smoked-pink pastels of buildings constructed in the late eighties. He wondered if the whiskies he had consumed half an hour earlier would reveal themselves in his voice. Following t
he hand-printed signs to the studio, he struggled to imagine who would use such a place—a local radio station, perhaps? Columns of mortar-crusted bricks leaned against the wall to his right. Bare wires hung down from a pair of missing ceiling panels like the roots of forced plants. As he followed the paper arrows, Paradine grew more suspicious.

  His suspicion turned to amazement when he saw the leather-clad figure—was he a motorcycle courier?—leaning in shadows against the end of the corridor, motionlessly watching him.

  Absurd. He had to be imagining things. Could his alcoholism have advanced to the stage of hallucination so quickly? Before Anthony Sarne had a chance to think through the answer, the cloak above swept open to reveal a blood-scarlet lining, and a steel-shod boot heel stamped on the glass above the swimming pool, sending sharpness through the still air. Some kind of ridiculous film stunt, he thought vaguely, wondering if hidden cameras were capturing the event. Or a reveller in fancy dress, a drunken fugitive from an office party about to make the kind of mistake that would get him arrested. But the figure was already pounding away across the skylight, and the shower water was turning cold—colder still and reeking—and he glanced up at the battered steel nozzle to be blinded by something that seared his eyes, and he recognised the smell even as its greasy viscosity caused him to slip and land on the tiled floor of the shower stall with a bony crack.

  It seemed as absurd as the vision overhead, but the shower nozzle was spraying him with petrol.

  The courier raised a gloved hand and beckoned as Alex Paradine kept walking forward. The caped figure was almost a welcome sight, an indication that someone else here was prepared to risk making a fool of himself. A smile showed beneath his eye mask: a Mardi Gras carnival character, got up as a night rider, but for what purpose? His beckoning right hand slowed and raised itself, so that the black palm showed—the universal symbol to halt—and Paradine found himself responding. Now the index finger alone was raised, and the rider twisted his fist, pointing down to the floor. He followed the courier's indication with his eyes, and felt the carpet tiles shift ominously beneath his feet.

  Sarne tried to rise, but petrol was flooding across the floor of the booth, and his bare legs were slipping as the reeking liquid pooled about him. He realised he was sitting on the drain, preventing it from emptying, but was unable to raise himself. The fumes unfocussed his brain even as they made him nauseous. The most important thing, he knew, was to climb to a standing position, but it seemed so difficult to negotiate a way clear from the path of the spattering spirit.

  Pushing hard against the tiles at his back, he woozily shoved himself upright and lurched to a freestanding position, concentrating on stepping out of the poisonous cascade. He was about to throw himself forward, when he glanced up and saw the tiny descending light in the gloom of the cubicle. There was just enough time for him to register the dropping match before its flame combusted.

  It seemed impossible, but the floor was bowing beneath Paradine's feet. He began moving forward, but the shifting of his weight caused the pale green tiles to sag still further, until he realised that he was actually dropping through the corridor floor.

  For a moment, nothing more happened—he fought to maintain his balance while absurdly sinking into the ground. The motorcyclist remained motionless, watching impassively, as though he had been expecting this to happen all the while. The carpet tiles were parting fast, splinters of wood beneath them piercing his trousers and striating his legs. Then, sickeningly, there was nothing below him but dead dark air.

  The shower was transformed into a tiled oven as it filled with molten fire. Flame bellowed and belched, ceramic cracked, and above the noise rose Sarne's scream. The fire formed a scorching red whirlwind around him. He saw the flesh of his bare arms blackening, and over the roiling blaze in the booth, the mask and tricorne and the implacably reptilian eyes peering down at him from their safe vantage point above the inferno.

  Paradine plunged down into darkness. The fall seemed to last forever. It occurred to him that this acceleration towards a painful and abrupt oblivion was merely the last stage of an effect that had been occurring for some time now. The final unforgiving rupture of flesh into concrete, when it came, offered agonised purification.

  Two men dead, blackened and shattered, one figure watching before striding away in black leather boots and a crackling cape—a new London legend on the rise to everlasting infamy.

  28

  DUAL IMPOSSIBILITIES

  'We'll need a burns man, old fruit.'

  Giles Kershaw dropped like a collapsing deck chair and crouched at the base of the shattered shower booth. He shone a slender torch beam across the black body, its flesh crusted like barbecued chicken skin. Over an hour had passed since the fire had burned out, but the atmosphere in the changing room was thickened with an acridity that still stung the eyes.

  'We don't have a burns specialist,' snapped Bryant. 'You're supposed to have covered this sort of trauma in your training.'

  'I have, Mr Bryant. I've just not come across anything like this in the field before.' Kershaw viewed the twisted corpse with illdisguised incredulity.

  'I'm sorry the unit can't provide you with more traditional methods of death, Mr Kershaw.' Bryant studied the charred mess of limbs and broken tiles, and softened a little. 'Just take a few deep breaths and do the best you can. How was your sister's hen night, by the way?'

  Kershaw was pulled up short. If there was one thing everyone knew about Arthur Bryant, it was that he never showed the slightest interest in the personal lives of his employees. His concern was neither natural nor appropriately timed—when it came to handling pleasantries, he had the air of a hotel guest picking the wrong mo ment to tip a porter—but he was clearly making an effort to be sociable, and Kershaw accepted the gesture in good grace.

  'Very good, sir, thank you.' He examined the shower stall. 'Well, this isn't a job for FIT, because the fire was deliberate, not accidental.' The Fire Investigation Team was a specialist service intended to aid a police investigation by mapping the source, growth, and decay of fires. 'The triangle stayed intact long enough to kill him. There are three points on the triangle after ignition: heat, fuel, and oxygen. Fires have to stay alive by moving, and they do that by conduction, convection, or radiation, but there were no pipes or other objects in the cubicle to aid the transfer of heat, and the ceiling above is too high for it to have spread easily.'

  'There's a faint V pattern of scorching on the rear wall,' Bryant pointed out. 'What's that?'

  'It means combustion started low, and a pool burned here on the floor, see?' He indicated a dark halo shape on the cracked tiles. 'An accelerant, petrol obviously.' Kershaw lifted some scraps of burned matter and dropped them into a nylon sack. 'Chromatography can break down the chemical structure of the vapour in the bag. God, it smells like a burger bar in here. My tummy's rumbling.' He stepped back from the cubicle and took some air.

  'Can you tell whether he was dead or alive when the fire started?' asked Bryant.

  Kershaw swallowed gamely and concentrated. 'That's straightforward enough. A positive reaction for carbon monoxide in his blood will prove he was still breathing, and we'll check for soot in the air passages. Hyperaemia—inflammation caused by the healing process of leucocytes, the white blood cells—will be present around blisters. Look at this.' Kershaw indicated what appeared to be knife marks across the top of Sarne's skull. 'Heat ruptures caused by the splitting of soft tissues where bone is closest to the skin.'

  He rose once more and stretched, pushing blond hair from his eyes with his wrist. 'Usually it's not a very practical way to kill someone, but he was standing in a narrow glazed box and basted with petrol—he might as well have stepped into an Aga. We know he was showering when he went up. That's burned bare flesh, no fibres that I can see, apart from the remains of his trunks. A polyamide of some kind, they melted onto him. It's telling that the shoulders are the most heavily burned part.'

  'Oh, why?' Bryant leaned
closer to examine the roasted body with a handkerchief attached to his nose.

  Kershaw unwittingly pulled Bryant's old trick of not answering the question. 'I was thinking perhaps he'd struck some kind of flame like a lighter, but why would anyone smoke in a shower? And besides, that would have left him with his arms bent, at about midheight, and the scarring's not right. We know this was petrol, not a gas explosion, and there are several odd things about that. First, the boiler is down in the basement, so it couldn't be faulty pipework; too many metres away to cause an explosion up here. If the petroleum was thrown into the shower unit, it would have to be lit pretty damned quickly before the victim could jump out of the booth. And there are no splash burns on the surrounding floor tiles in front, which you'd have had if someone was tossing the contents of a can. The deeply charred upper body suggests it was tipped from above, except that our perpetrator didn't climb up from the adjoining booth, because the walls are still wet from a previous shower, and there are no scuff marks breaking the water patterns.'