Ten Second Staircase

by Christopher Fowler

  'What about over the back wall?' Bryant asked.

  'You'd have to be about seven feet tall to do that. Don't tell me we're looking for Spring-Heeled Jack.'

  'Then there's only one other answer. The petrol was sent through the pipework itself into the showerhead.'

  'You'd have to saw into the existing pipe and manually pour the stuff in, but gravity would do the trick from that height. Why would anyone go to such effort? It's the kind of deranged thing—'

  '—that the Highwayman would do. Yes, isn't it?' Bryant raised a knowing eyebrow and walked away.

  'You're right, sir, more Highwayman sightings,' said Mangeshkar, grabbing him at the entrance to the changing room. 'Up on the rooftop about ninety minutes ago. Plenty of people in the flats opposite—this time we've got more witnesses than we can wave a stick at. He ran across the flat roof, stopped at the skylight, climbed down the far side, in full regalia: tricorne, cape, black leather bodice, boots. Colin is up there now having a look around.'

  'He wants to be placed at each site,' muttered Bryant. 'It doesn't make sense. Keep a lookout for a calling card—it could be a symbol just a few inches across, scratched into the brickwork.'

  On several occasions, the Leicester Square Vampire had left behind a sign of his presence, probably made while he was waiting in the alley for a victim, although the police had never publicised the fact. Signs and signals in the ancient streets; Maggie Armitage's theory about the capital's mythical attackers leaving their mark.

  'Got anything on the victim yet?' he asked Sergeant Longbright, who was working on her laptop in the changing room. She had bleached her hair a fierce shade of blond and cut it in a style that reminded him of Ruth Ellis, the last British woman to be hanged. What a wonderfully strange creature she is, he thought admiringly, studying her for a moment. So like her mother.

  'His identity's easy. We got that from the wallet he left in his clothes locker. Anthony Sarne, another demicelebrity. Lanechanging politico. There are dozens of Web pages on him—seems he inspired animosity in an awful lot of people.' She turned the screen to face him. 'There's a career synopsis here if you want it; early success as a Labour candidate, disillusionment, a switch of sides to the Liberal Democrats, a court case involving payments to a King's Cross prostitute that seems memorable only for the predictability of the press headlines, wife and children stood by him, blah, blah. Disgrace, eighteen months in jail for lying under oath, reemergence as a hard-line Tory, reinvention on a TV reality show, now a Daily Telegraph columnist. He prided himself on the fact that he never apologised for his actions, but this final determination seems to have driven his wife away, resulting in divorce proceedings and some ugly public mud-slinging. Cue more punning headlines in the tabloids.'

  'Show me,' said Bryant, bending to examine the screen. 'I remember him. Well, at least he remained entertaining in adversity. One of those characters people refer to as "larger than life," when they actually mean he was an opinionated, obnoxious womaniser. He came out with the most frightful spurious rubbish in court, no wonder they sent him down. People with no sense of shame always make good copy. At least we have a clear pattern now.'

  'I don't see one,' said Longbright, flicking through the screen pages.

  'That's because we've been searching for someone with an emotional attachment to the victim, but these are all celebrities, whether we like the idea or not. They live in the public arena, and are expected to pay their dues to the people who made them famous. They're publicly accountable. When they fail themselves, they fail their fans. We're not looking for jilted lovers, betrayed rivals, or deceived wives. It's someone who feels personally let down by the actions of these people. White admits to abortions, Martell wrecks his career, and Sarne upsets just about everyone.'

  'It doesn't exactly narrow down the suspects, sir.'

  'Quite the reverse,' Bryant replied, sighing. 'We'd be harder pushed to find someone who didn't hate him.'

  He stood outside the Oasis with his smouldering pipe, watching the rain-spattered taxis rounding the curve of High Holborn towards St Giles Circus, and considered the predatory tactics of murderers. But instead of the Highwayman, he found himself thinking about the Leicester Square Vampire.

  Although Bram Stoker had set Dracula loose in a northern coastal town, the modern vampire suited an urban setting. Cities attract predators, he thought, and vampires are the most predatory creatures of all. They leech from their hosts, and as the goodhearted grow weaker, the vampires gain strength. To do this, they must first gain a position of intimacy. Physical contact is required, and to gain such proximity requires an element of sexual attraction. Their victims, therefore, are willing to different degrees, and con tinue to remain in sexual thrall until the object of their desire is no longer able to influence them, and the spell is broken.

  Cities attracted lonely people who were vulnerable and ready to believe. Vampires came in all shapes and sizes. Their attraction masked moral and physical decay. Beware the creatures of the night, for they prey on those who trust . . .

  John warned me about this, he thought suddenly. They're dividing our concentration. I won't let them win.

  John May stepped closer to the ragged hole and looked down. 'A hell of a fall,' he remarked. 'Four floors back to ground level, plus the basement. How was the body?'

  'He hit his chin on the way down, leaving most of it behind on the second floor. The impact spun him around, so by the time he passed ground level he was twirling like a Catherine wheel. It did a lot of damage, and that's before the landing broke both his legs and his right arm. It also pushed a rib clear through his heart. It was over quickly, if nothing else.'

  Dan Banbury joined May at the edge. 'This was a very neat trap,' he added with a hint of admiration. 'People can be bloody ingenious when they put their minds to it. Although the killer probably imagined his victim would fall straight down the centre of the hole and break his neck. This is for you.' He passed over a plastic bag containing the dead man's wallet.

  'Alex Paradine,' May read from the ID card inside. 'I would never have recognised him.'

  'You know him?'

  'Only because he's on television. They call him 'Garfy'; a comedian, TV presenter, actor, whatever. He thought he was coming to a recording session.'

  'How do you know that?'

  May had lifted a slip of paper from the wallet by his fingertips. 'He had this address written down. There's an hour booked out on it. Look around. There are at least three sheets of A-four paper directing him to a nonexistent studio.' He pointed at the page still taped at the end of the corridor. 'Someone goes to the trouble of luring him here and preparing an elaborate, not to mention risky, method of death—and then leaves the handwritten signs behind. Why would he do that? Why pull off this kind of remote-control trick successfully, only to leave behind something that helps to reveal the method?' He looked around, thinking. 'He was in a rush and forgot them. But no-one else knew his victim was here, so why hurry?'

  'I think the murderer was on site when it happened,' Banbury pointed out. 'Let me show you.' He led the way to the rear fire stairs, then down to the floor below, keeping his eye on the ragged hole in the ceiling.

  'The building's been empty for nearly two years,' said May. 'The developer hasn't had any luck finding a tenant; there's a banner out front offering reduced rent. I remember passing it at least eighteen months ago. There's probably too much available office space around here. You can tell the holding company ran out of money; half the floors aren't finished. This ceiling was left open so that electricians could get at the wiring, and the panels were never put back.'

  'Maybe our man works on the site and knows about the unfinished floor, or perhaps it was a passing opportunist.' Banbury picked up a cracked sheet of board and showed it to May. 'Either way, he sees the hole and paves it over with a thin sheet of hardboard, then lays carpet tiles taken from the stack left on the floor above.'

  Banbury considered the hardboard for a moment. 'But I'
m guessing that it bowed or just didn't look right. So he searches around for something else, and wedges a pair of wood beams across the gap from the underside, for added strength. He must have shoved them in pretty tight.'

  'Why do you say that?'

  'If you step on something that feels like it might give way, you back off immediately. The floor had to feel strong enough to walk on, otherwise the victim wouldn't have advanced. Even then, if he'd kept going, he might have made it across. Something made him stop, and in that moment he grew too heavy for the floor to support him. This is an exercise in smart carpentry. I wasn't much of an academic when I was a nipper, but I was good at woodwork. It's a very peculiar way to kill a man. Not exactly foolproof. I think that's why he was here, to make sure it worked.'

  'Sir, we've got a witness,' PC Colin Bimsley announced, rushing into the hall so quickly that Banbury had to steer him away from the jagged gap in the floor. May imagined the spatially challenged officer following their victim headfirst into the hole, and wondered how they had ever been landed with such a lumpen constable. 'It's definitely the Highwayman again. Boots, gloves, mask, funny hat. Italian woman who runs the Nero coffee bar across the street saw him leaving the building.'

  'That's impossible,' said May. 'Janice called in a sighting halfway across town just a few minutes ago. They've got a victim fried alive in a shower, for God's sake. He can't have been in two places at once.'

  The distracted crime scene officer was looking at him helplessly, waiting for advice.

  'Banbury,' May said aloud, 'help me out here. Find something normal for me; tell me it was an accidental death, that he just blundered onto an unfinished floor.'

  'Can't do that, sir,' Banbury apologised. 'Nothing remotely normal about this at all. We've got another decent set of boot marks, though. I need to bag the carpet tiles and run some tests, but I can already tell the prints are similar to the ones in the Burroughs gallery. If it's the same attacker, we're getting a pretty unusual profile.' He wiped his hands on his jacket. 'He doesn't like to touch his victims. Always keeps his distance, never gets his hands dirty. No contact means no prints, no DNA, no fibres. The outfit helps, although it seems unnecessarily theatrical.' He doubled down and pulled another carpet tile free. 'There's some kind of gunk on the boot heel. Smells like wood glue. He might have picked it up around here, but it's worth checking.'

  'Look out for a symbol scratched somewhere outside the building. Arthur thinks he always leaves a mark, a pair of V's, one inverted. He stands and watches them die,' said May, realising the truth. 'Or he arranges it so that he's near enough to be sure of their deaths. And there's no emotional response at all, except perhaps a very controlled level of dispassion. If you need me, I'll be over the road.'

  May made his way to the dark bar of the Jerusalem Tavern in Britton Street, sidling along a squeezed, warped corridor to a minuscule back room filled with stuffed animals. The pub's name was another reminder of Clerkenwell's strange connection with the Knights Templars. He ordered a marsh-green bottle of King Cnut ale and sipped it, tasting barley, nettles, and juniper.

  What could I have said? he thought. Maybe I've finally cracked up. Too many years spent dealing with abnormalities, listening to Arthur and his pals explaining why dowsers and sunspots can help catch criminals, instead of following my instincts and using more traditional procedures. I could have become a Met superintendent years ago, a nice safe earner. Instead I spend my time wandering about in the realms of the unnatural, looking for vampires and shape-shifters.

  At such times, May knew, there was only one course of action. His partner operated as the other side of his brain; the two halves needed to be reunited, in order to find some sense in the surreal. If Bryant really thought he could uncover the truth, now was the time for him to use any method necessary to do so.

  29

  DEIFICATION

  In the last two months, Hard News, self-billed as Great Britain's first daily magazine, had become the periodical with the fastestgrowing circulation in the country. Janet Ramsey, former cable newsbabe and Page Three model, was its senior features editor. On Friday morning, she swooped into the Covent Garden office that had once been the headquarters of the British Cabbage Association and searched for somewhere to dump her Starbucks Double-Shot Skinny Latte on the mess of smoked-glass desks. 'Are you the new runner?' she snapped. 'Get me a fresh one of these.'

  'Do you have the money?' asked the lanky young man who had been leaning outside Ramsey's office, waiting for instructions.

  'I don't carry loose cash on me, darling, I'm like the queen. Sub me until I get change of a twenty.'

  'Not on my wages,' the runner told her. 'Cash up front, I'll get change.'

  'I don't know where we find you lads these days,' Ramsey complained, digging in her purse to grudgingly pay him. 'A century earlier we'd have been putting you up chimneys and lowering you into drains with canaries.' She beckoned to Roat, her art director. 'Dump the old shot we had of the Highwayman; the picture quality was horrible. What was it photographed through, a heavy denim veil?'

  'This isn't Vanity Fair,' said Roat. 'It was taken by a barista through a steamed-up coffee bar window.'

  'Can't you find another shot of him, one that isn't so blurred?'

  'He's a murder suspect, not a catwalk model.' The designer sighed. 'We'll retouch the jaw and lips, bring out the tricorne and the mask, make his eyes more sinister.'

  'That's not technically legal,' Ramsey warned.

  'It was good enough for Time magazine and O. J. Simpson,' the designer reminded her. 'It would help if I could reduce the size of the splash.'

  'Then put it on page three and come up with a symbol for the front cover, something we can use to identify the Highwayman whenever he's sighted. Don't go over the top, but make it demonic and sexy.'

  'This just arrived for you, Janet,' said the runner, handing her a brown envelope.

  'You're not entitled to use my first name,' Ramsey warned. 'Actually, you can open it; it might be hate mail.'

  'You've been peed on by a member of Oasis; surely you can withstand a little anthrax,' sniffed the designer, watching as the boy tore open the package.

  'What do we have here?' Ramsey scanned the four photographs. 'Well, well, just in time for this Sunday's edition.' She dropped the photographs on her desk with a smirk that revealed the mouthenhancing limits of her lipstick. 'Someone appears to be on our side. The Highwayman has had some professional pictures taken. Look at them; they're like forties studio shots.' She rattled her Versace charm bracelet at the runner. 'Envelope, envelope. Where did this come from?'

  The runner was examining something he had removed from the lining of his nose. 'Dunno. Post room?'

  'Show some initiative and find out.' She passed the pictures to the designer. 'See if you can do something with them.'

  'Can I spend some money on artwork?'

  'All right, but don't go mad. We'll run a large strap across the

  cover, something like Highwayman Delivers Death Vengeance Twice in One Night. Deliver, you see? Like "Stand and deliver"?'

  'Okay, but "vengeance"? He killed two innocent people.'

  'For God's sake, nobody's innocent anymore. Two very disliked people. All right, I take your point, give me something bland and noncommittal like Masked Man's Double Slaughter Rampage. Get Francesca to work out the details, and shift Pope Admits There Is No Afterlife to the bottom of the page; the story's unsubstantiated.'

  'She's your sub, you tell her,' said Roat, stumping back to his desk.

  'I have to do everything around here.' Ramsey slammed her office door behind her and examined the cuttings on her wall. To date there had been seven amateur snaps taken of the Highwayman, only four of which were verifiable. It would help if they knew where he was going to strike next. According to Simon, the tubby queen who handled the insider's pop page, the Highwayman's face had already made an appearance on stencils and flyers for a club night in the West End. She could take a leaf from the tr
end, ask Roat to tidy up the symbol a bit, get it adopted by the nation's teenagers. Publish some souvenir memorabilia, do a contra-deal with T-shirt printers and knock up some shirts bearing his image, hand them out at gigs and clubs; condemn his actions in print, of course, but run some iconic imagery on mobile phones to whet the public's appetite. It was important for the magazine to own his image. She called Francesca in.

  'Couldn't we get a band to record a song about him?' she asked. 'What would it take to turn him into a cult hero?'

  'A little cash,' said Francesca, who loathed her boss and coveted her job, but was forced to smile and offer help until she could think of a way of derailing her. 'You don't need to shift many downloads for a hit single. We'll be fine so long as he sticks to attacking unloved celebrities, but what if he decides to go after a national hero? Launching a campaign around him could backfire.'

  'Never worry about things that haven't happened yet,' snapped Ramsey. 'The public has a ten-second memory. We're not condoning his actions, Francesca, we're riding on his awareness level. When six million people show an interest in a lousy paperback about finding God, it's your job to understand why they do so; it doesn't mean you have to like it. The English are irrational creatures, and ipso facto, unintentionally hypocritical. We merely reflect their failed ability to appreciate their reduced moral status.'