Ten Second Staircase

by Christopher Fowler

  'Sometimes I think you're working on the wrong paper,' said Francesca. 'Lately you've been using long words and showing scruples.'

  'Everyone blasts the tabloids; nobody condemns the readers,' replied Ramsey, swinging her white leather chair away. 'I think about the process more than you, that's why I'm in the job you want but will never have. I went to Cambridge and I showed my breasts in the tabloids. These facts aren't mutually exclusive; the stereotypes are formed in the public mind, where I can benefit from them.'

  She flicked at her computer and ran a coral-coloured false nail down the screen, crackling static. 'If this report is to be trusted, the Highwayman killed twice within the same half hour last night. The public won't know what to think, so it's our job to tell them. Either we vilify him, "this depraved monster," et cetera, which leaves our readers with no course of direct action, or we promote him—luckily, he looks bloody sexy in these stills—and they can follow his exploits. They can feel as if they have a share in him. I think our course of action is clear, don't you?' She looked out at the city streets shrouded in autumnal morning vapour. 'They're looking for new gods, and we've got one for them. Vengeful, unforgiving, filled with righteous wrath, roaring down from the sky like a fiery angel. We'll give them what they asked for.'

  'I don't see what you're so angry about,' said Bryant, pulling open each of his desk drawers in turn and rummaging through them. 'Have you seen my special tobacco?'

  'It's not special tobacco, Arthur, it's grass from your mutant marijuana plant, and I've thrown it away—Yes, I know you're going to say it's medicinal, but Janice thinks Raymond Land is searching the offices for incriminating evidence, so it had to go.'

  'I'd appreciate your dropping the sharp tone from your voice,' said Bryant, still rummaging. 'You sound so unnerved.'

  May dropped wearily onto the corner of his desk. 'Is it surprising? I want to find a flesh-and-blood killer, not some mythical creature who slips through the night like a wraith. I'm giving you permission to explore alternative methods of investigation. You should be thrilled. Instead, you're telling me you'd rather use my methods. Why must you always be so perverse?'

  'I'm not, I'm being open-minded, as you requested. And I don't make distinctions between reality and myth. The former often ends up becoming the latter. Look at Atlantis.'

  'What are you talking about?'

  'Men have been looking for Atlantis ever since Plato's dialogues, even though he probably intended the story as an analogy. Despite this, American oceanographers are using up their grant funds in attempts to place the lost continent in locations ranging from Ireland to Cyprus. Fiction affects and alters the truth, you see? If a scientist fell overboard on such a trip and drowned, we could say that he died as the result of belief in a myth.'

  'Four deaths, Arthur! This is not about some ancient myth.' May looked at his bitten nails, wondering how much longer he would last without suffering another heart attack.

  'In a city of eight million people, at least a handful must have strange and potentially harmful belief systems, and we can root them out using standard investigative methodology. Janice and April are searching the victims' backgrounds for common elements, something they've shared in the past that has marked them out from the rest of the population. Because you're right; there are no illogical murders, only irrational ones. A youth bludgeons an old lady for a handful of change. The boy has an addiction, the pensioner is vulnerable. He behaves irrationally but quite logically. One has simply to consider the moral dimension. The boy's need forces him into a situation we consider morally repugnant, but if he failed to act logically, by attacking a stronger victim living further away from the pensioner, we would have no way of locating him. Without logic, our working methods collapse. You're right.'

  'Will you stop saying I'm bloody well right?' May was frustrated and becoming increasingly annoyed. 'How can you use logic here?' he demanded. 'The man is wearing nineteenth-century clothing, for God's sake.'

  'And there is a reason; we simply haven't deduced it yet. The lord chancellor wears a tricorn hat during proclamations in Parliament, did you know that? Perhaps there's a political link.' Something rang a distant bell in his head, but he dismissed it.

  'And what about the timing on Sarne and Paradine? There's nothing logical about the Highwayman being sighted in two places at once.'

  Bryant patted the papers on his desk. '"I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy"—Samuel Butler. The witness reports actually fall within fourteen minutes of each other. The distance between the two sites is too much to cover on foot, but perhaps he really does have a motorcycle. It would partially explain the outfit.'

  'Nothing explains anything in this investigation,' cried May, exasperated. 'I'm expecting Faraday through that door any minute to demand why we haven't locked up a suspect.' He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and dropped into the chair opposite. 'What I'm saying is, I've come around to your way of thinking. We need to try something new. Run me through the combined timeline Banbury and Kershaw came up with.'

  'Let's see.' Bryant adjusted his bifocals and squinted at the page. 'Have you been using my watermarked Basildon Bond? I keep this for special, you know; it's not for scribbling on.'

  'Give it to me. I don't know why you have to get everything printed out; it makes a mockery of the electronic age.' May snatched at the papers impatiently. 'Eight-thirty P.M.—Sarne arrives at the Oasis Swimming Pool for his evening dip. The pool is due to shut at nine P.M. There's supposed to be a guard on duty but he's gone off somewhere; nobody seems to know where. A couple of other swim mers have timed tickets for the previous half hour, but they've gone to change by the time Sarne hits the water. The Highwayman is spotted on the roof above the pool at around eight forty-five P.M. by one of the class instructors, but she doesn't consider the incident unusual enough to report.

  'At exactly the same time, in Clerkenwell, Paradine checks into the empty building in St John Street looking for his recording studio. He goes up to the fourth floor, using the stairs because the lift isn't connected up. You'd think he'd twig that there was something wrong, but presumably he's merely keen to get the job done and leave. His agent has no record of the booking, so we're checking Paradine's phone messages to see if someone rang him direct.

  'On the fourth floor he walks along the corridor, steps onto the faked-up covering, and falls through the unfinished floor. The Highwayman is seen leaving from the site at nine P.M.

  'Meanwhile, Sarne is finishing his laps in the pool. He gets out of the water and heads for the showers. Turning on the hot tap, he gets dowsed in ordinary unleaded engine petrol and set on fire. Banbury traced the exposed section of water pipe into the ceiling and found it sawn through. Fitted over the end was a plastic accordion hand-pump containing petrol residue. The killer simply waited for Sarne to turn on the tap before stamping on the pump and tossing a match down through the grille. Still, it seems an absurdly complex method of death. The pipe must have been cut earlier the same evening, because the shower hadn't been reported out of action.' He tossed the paper back onto his desk. 'The combined reports of the entire unit, and they amount to virtually nothing. Four locations with no link between them, and four victims with no shared attributes beyond a public profile.'

  'You want me to use my methods?' Bryant asked. 'Then we need to find out what inspired this nightmare figure to be conjured to life. How can we protect potential victims if the public believes they somehow brought retribution upon themselves?'

  'We're reviewing the few unlikely suspects we do have. Janice is arranging that for later today.'

  Bryant pulled the collar of his ratty jumper up to his chin, shrinking into his chair with the effort of thought. 'The most common attribute shared by the victims is their increasing level of infamy. As your granddaughter pointed out, their movements are known; it makes them easy targets. Four people have died, and one has been born; the Highwayman has already begun the process of passing into our shared mythology, just as
Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild did before him. He is conjuring himself into existence, aiding his own birth, building the creation of his own myth. How? By dressing outlandishly, by leaving a calling card, by posing for photographs and allowing himself to be seen. He craves a different kind of notoriety to that achieved by his victims. He desires admiration and respect, and that will be the weakness that causes his downfall.'

  Something in Bryant's speech struck a familiar chord. 'You're talking about setting up a potential victim for him.'

  'The thought had crossed my mind.'

  'You know how dangerous that is. Look what happened with the Leicester Square Vampire.'

  'This time we can have total control. You don't even have to be involved, John. The unit will take all the risk. Besides, there's something else for you to do. Look back at the birth of our myth-figure. Who first gave us the image of the Highwayman?'

  'The boy who was drawing in the gallery.'

  'Then return to him. Even if he doesn't know it, the boy holds the key. While you do that, do I have your permission to bring in some alternative expertise?'

  'You have my blessing,' May agreed. 'Just make sure there's nothing to connect us in the event of an internal investigation.'

  30

  SECRET LANDSCAPES

  As he struggled with a recalcitrant length of bookbinding tape, Arthur Bryant thought back to the white witch's comments about London's legendary monsters.

  How many had left their marks behind in ancient streets, to be traced through to the present day? As a tour guide, he had taken tourists around Chelsea, showing them the artists' houses where nervous talk of foreign fiends once filled the drawing rooms, then on to Vauxhall and Rotherhythe, where cutthroats and footpads had operated in the alleyways and under the arches. In London's poor areas the dangers had been more real, and the residents had found little time to fret over the presence of imagined devils, but in wealthy and penurious neighbourhoods alike, the legendary monsters of London had left few physical signs of their presence. All that could be seen were a few untended plaques, a gravestone or two, sometimes a public house where a villain had gathered with his cronies. Monsters lived on in family memories, and were turned into stories to frighten children.

  Bryant patted the binding tape onto his copy of London's Most Notorious Highwaymen and returned it to the shelf behind his desk. So if there were no outward signs of the city's night creatures left, why did their stories survive? Did grandfathers still terrify with tales of Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper, or were these legends now too tame to recount? Denis Neilsen, Fred West, and Dr Harold Shipman were the British bogeymen of the twentieth century, and the infamous catalogue of their victims would lengthen in the twenty-first as the full extent of their crimes was revealed. But they had been identified, analysed, and locked away. For a murderer to become a myth, something more was required, an element of the unfathomable. Could it be that as the lives of murderers were dissected and placed on public display, their power to thrill future generations was diminished?

  Londoners still spoke of the Leicester Square Vampire precisely because he had never been caught. Was that the purpose of the Highwayman, to provide a nemesis for generations to come, to achieve perverse immortality through incompleteness?

  Bryant sat back and untangled his pipe from the scarf he kept wrapped around him in the overheated office. The geographical factor bothered him. Two of the murders had occurred in the area surrounding Smithfield, the former execution site of London's villains for over four hundred years, before it was moved to Tyburn Tree. Once the mob had gathered there to witness death by fire and roasting chair. Was it really coincidence that modern-day scoundrels should suffer similar fates in the vicinity? Bryant kept coming back to Clerkenwell, and its connection with the blood of Christ. All London areas maintained links with the past, no matter how well hidden they were. Even the pubs surrounding Lincoln's Inn Fields had bars named after the Templars. Everything was there for a reason. The past misled and taunted him but tightened its grip as his age advanced.

  And now that he had been given permission to explore the city's history of murderers, he sensed a recurring pattern at work, something that ran all the way from the London Monster to the Leicester Square Vampire and the Highwayman. Certainly similar murderers seemed to have existed under a variety of names. London's bogeymen were part of the folklore that crusted around the city like barnacles on a slow-sailing liner.

  Bryant raised his collapsed trilby from the chair and bashed it back into shape. It was time to consult an expert on the meanings of London's secret landscapes. Creaking up from his seat, he decided to start by paying a visit to his old friend, Oliver Golifer, owner of the Newman Street Picture Library.

  Oliver Golifer's broad, broken nose, badly shaved pate, and ironingboard forehead gave him the appearance of an East End thug sired by Magwitch. Strangers picked Saturday-night fights with him just to prove to their girlfriends that they were hard, which was unfortunate because, although he had the heart of a kitten and the intellect of an Oxford don, he was still happy to knock someone into the floor for their arrogance. He had developed this pugilistic tendency at an early age in response to taunting about his admittedly ridiculous name. This amused Bryant greatly, because while Golifer had the reputation of a bruiser, he could also be as camp as a French operetta. He welcomed the detective with meaty hands the size of Sunday roasts before ushering him through the cramped storefront.

  'Nice to see you looking so well, Arthur,' he whispered. As a child, he had accidentally drunk some bleach his stepfather had saved in an orange squash bottle, and it had corroded his vocal cords, reducing his voice to a sinister sussurance as menacing as his demeanor. 'I see you're all over the news again. I'm assuming that's what you're here about. What's on your mind?'

  'It's a question of motive. You've read about the investigation?'

  'How could I have avoided it? The gentleman you're searching for is a self-publicist. The tabloids have been praying for someone like him to come along for years. I've already opened a picture file on him, although I'm sure they're only variations on the shots you already have.' He led the way through the warren of rooms to racks of yellowing envelopes, filed in a complex system involving dates, locations, and subjects. The proliferation of Internet picture sites meant that Golifer no longer needed to keep the library open, but it appealed to his sense of continuity to do so; Newman Street had housed picture libraries as long as photographs had been taken. Its walls were lined with famous images: Emmeline Pankhurst being carried away by constables, a fascist throwing a Molotov cocktail at a police cordon, Ban the Bomb gatherings in Trafalgar Square, Poll Tax riots, vacant celebrities alighting from limousines into photographers' light storms.

  'I'm interested in his field of operation,' Bryant explained. 'I was waylaid by Clerkenwell's historical connections for a while, but I think that may be a blind. If you connect the murder sites properly, one place seems to exist at the centre. What do you have on Smithfield?'

  'Hm. Bull in a china shop,' replied Golifer enigmatically. He rooted about for a few minutes and finally held up a damaged print of one such enraged bovine creature destroying several hundred Wedgwood vases. 'In the early part of the seventeenth century, drunken herdsmen used to stampede their cattle on the way to the market at Smithfield, just for a laugh. The beasts used to rampage into shops and houses, hence the expression.' He studied Bryant's face thoughtfully. 'You want to go even earlier, don't you? Thinking about the old execution site?'

  'The area's psychogeography is hard to ignore.'

  Golifer dragged over another box and opened it. 'Is your partner still seeing that married woman behind her husband's back?'

  'Monica Greenwood? I'm afraid so.'

  'Dirty old sod, good for him.' Golifer's gurgling laugh sounded like someone unblocking a sink. 'What about you? I heard you were knocking about with some old bird as well.'

  'Mrs Quinten and I have an understanding, that's all,' Bryant bri
dled. 'I enjoy her company. We play skittles together.'

  'Your landlady won't be pleased. Alma always had a soft spot for you.'

  'Can we get back to the subject in hand? I don't ask you about your bedroom arrangements.' Bryant reknotted his scarf, tightening it in some agitation. 'What else do you have on Smithfield?'

  'I know it used to be called "Smoothfield," a flat ten-acre grass field with a horse market on Fridays. Early twelfth century, that was. Farmers added other livestock, punters went to watch tournaments and jousts, then they came for public hangings. It was all considered entertainment. Witches and heretics were roasted alive in cages. In Mary Tudor's reign, over two hundred martyrs were burned. Duels and disorder, death and drunken debauchery, that's Smithfield for you. Now it's all rowdy nightclubs. Goes to show some things hardly change.'