Ten Second Staircase

by Christopher Fowler

  'Perhaps it was no accident he picked these sites,' said Bryant.

  'What about the other two?'

  'I thought of that. The Oasis Swimming Pool is very near the site of Seven Dials' notorious rookeries; they sheltered many a famous murderer. Which leaves Burroughs's art gallery on the South Bank as the odd one out. That part of the Thames was hardly more than a rural riverbank until the Festival of Britain in 1951. My theory is that he had no choice in that location, because it's where White's art piece had already been installed.'

  'A bit of a dead end there, then. You must have tons of forensic information to go on, even if you're low on suspects. Surely the bizarre methods of death have left you with something?'

  'Less than you'd think. We're due some more results later today.'

  'So what do you need me for?'

  'I thought you might—oh, I don't know, help me get a synapse jump-started or something.'

  'Well, I can certainly help you with highwaymen. Come with me.' Golifer led the way to a circular iron staircase at the rear of the shop and squeezed his bulk down it. They descended into a mildewy basement filled with overloaded shelves. 'They've always been a popular subject for prints. After all, so many of them became folk heroes. Let me see what we've got.' He slid out a long box from beneath one of the counters and began drawing out envelopes. 'Take a look at these. We've got prints of around thirty highwaymen operating in England, from Captain James Hind to Jack Shrimpton and John Cottington, but of course there were hundreds of infamous highwaymen—and a few women. The trouble is that most of the illustrations are rather similar in styling.' He carefully lifted a sheet of tissue paper covering one of the prints, which bore the caption Mrs Huntingdon is much received of dissatisfaction by robbery and an offer of marriage from Mull-Sack the Murderer.

  'These are all hand-tinted from books published between 1880 and 1925, when the subject came back into vogue. The main features are common to your photographs: flintlock pistol, tricorn hat, greatcoat—usually crimson, occasionally blue—gloves and high riding boots.'

  'What's that?' asked Bryant, pulling out his reading glasses to squint at an object depicted on the bottom of the sheet.

  'Ah, that's a rather more private part of the highwayman's lore,' said Golifer, 'a secret known only to London's criminal fraternity. It's the fabled highwayman's key.'

  Bryant found himself looking at the key left behind in the Burroughs gallery.

  31

  THE ASSONANCE OF MYTHS

  John May pushed his way between the moping trumpet vines draped from the railway embankment as the drainpipe-thin boy passed by no more than six feet away from him.

  He had intended to talk to Luke Tripp as he exited the school, but something had held him back. The detective's age counted against him; the boy would not confide in someone he saw as ancient and alien. He was making his way alone from St Crispin's, and had reached the edge of the Roland Plumbe Community Estate. If the private-school pupils were wary of crossing the estate gang's territory, their caution had not infected Luke, who kept a steady unfaltering pace as he passed into the shadow of the ground-floor columns. Aware that he was the only other figure crossing the bare open space of the estate's grounds, May dropped back.

  Tripp knew exactly where he was going. Not once did he raise his head to check his route, or hesitate before altering direction. His slender form appeared and vanished between the columns as May kept pace. He thought of something Bryant had said: Even if he doesn't know it, the boy holds the key. What had he meant?

  Luke was perhaps a hundred paces from him when he broke into a run. The little devil knows I'm here, thought May, matching his speed. What does he think he's doing? The boy reached the concrete staircase at the end of the corridor and took the steps two, sometimes three at a time. May felt his pulse rise as he tried to keep up. He smelled the acrid stench of urine. As they passed the first-floor corridor he momentarily lost sight of his quarry but heard his shoes thumping on the steps above. Then, as if he had been lifted into the air, they simply stopped.

  May halted, too, listening to the faintly falling rain above the pounding of his heart. He moved cautiously upward, keeping to the dark inner core of the stairs, until he reached the point where the boy should have been. Looking down, he saw where the wet footprints ceased. Although the staircase was open on one side, there was nothing beyond the waist-high concrete barricade but rainy air beneath low cinereous clouds; he was between the first and second floors of the block.

  May's nerve endings tingled with unease. He felt himself in the presence of the Highwayman. Foolishly, he had ventured here alone. To open his radio line now would be to give away his position on the stairs.

  A time switch click-clocked above him, and the stairway was suddenly outlined in dim yellow light. Above a burnt-out sofa and a drift of beer cans, he saw the hand-painted stencils that twined and crowded each other across the concrete. Familiar gang signs of fate and luck: crowns, stars, pitchforks, hearts, horns, dice, pyramids. He peered closer at the recurring stencilled motif of black V's, and realised he was looking at the tricorn hat and collar once again. As a familiar spasm in his back kicked in, he stood upright to ease the pain, and found himself faced with a dozen watchful shadows.

  'We collected a key from the floor of the gallery, beside the installation that contained Saralla White's body,' Bryant explained. 'Made of aluminium, looking exactly like the one in this picture.'

  'Well, you've been left a pun of sorts,' said Oliver Golifer. '"A thieves' key, unlocked for the good of the public," as I believe the city marshal once called it. The key is meant to consist of three main sections: the ring, the pipe—that is, the stem—and the wards, which are the cut sections that interface with the inside of the lock. There are fourteen wards in all. The key and its parts are both literal and figurative.' He unfolded a second print of a highwayman, down the side of which was printed a list of words and phrases with the S's and G's joined. 'The ring is made of gold, signifying the virtuous profession of highwaymen. The pipe is made of silver, and hollow, signifying the secret art of handing out bribes. The wards—well, here you are: First, boldness. Second, neatness. Third, flattery. Fourth, treachery. Fifth, diligence. And so on through obedience, lying, and cruelty—these last few words are water-stained and unreadable, but you get the idea. You'll probably find books that go into great detail about the thieves' key if you're that interested, but it seems a bit arcane. I can't imagine your average murderer would know or care much about them.'

  'He cares enough to dress himself in an exact replica of the clothes in these prints,' Bryant pointed out. 'Who knows how far his interest extends?' He pulled his moulting scarf tighter around his neck. 'Thank you for the information, Oliver. I have absolutely no idea what I shall do with it, but I'm sure I'll think of something. There is another matter to be dealt with; you don't have a file on the Leicester Square Vampire, by any chance?'

  'I haven't heard anything about him in years, but I seem to recall some press shots,' said Golifer. 'Let me have a look.' He led Bryant to a back room filled with locked metal boxes. 'Most of these photographs are in the public domain, but your lot prefer us to keep them away from public gaze because, technically, they involve stillunsolved crimes and could be needed as evidence.'

  'The Met is no longer "my lot," as you put it,' said Bryant, ruffled. 'We report directly to the Home Office now, and I'm not sure which is worse. Why don't they keep the pictures themselves?'

  'No room, apparently. I asked them to pay for some better security down here, but they refused.' He unclipped one of the box lids and drew out a selection of large-bordered monochrome photographs taken in the 1950s. 'These are the earliest ones we have. Didn't you once get a priest involved to exorcise the spot where he appeared? You reckoned he could run through walls like Le Passemuraille. I'm sure I remember a scandal.'

  Bryant sighed. When it came to his investigative technique, everyone remembered the scandals. 'It was a long time ago, Oli
ver. I was desperate for a break in the case. Three deaths, sixteen attacks, I was prepared to try anything at that point. He ran to ground and we never found him.'

  'So why the interest now?'

  Bryant scratched at the grey stubble on his cheek. 'Because I'm sure now it was all trickery, jiggery-pokery designed to make us think he was superhuman. He was motivated less by the need to attack than by the desire to make an impression on the world. That's what we have here. Rampant egotism. The superior being flexing his muscles. And because of that, we never managed to close the case. I don't want history to repeat itself. Do you have any earlier prints of legendary London murderers? Engravings, stuff like that?'

  'The usual plates of Spring-Heeled Jack, Charley Peace, Jack Sheppard, things you'll have seen plenty of times before.'

  'Let me see them. You never know.' They returned to the print files, where Golifer pulled down a vast, mildewy volume of prints.

  'Who are these characters?' asked Bryant, stabbing at a page. The print showed four black-faced men, covered in dirt and ashes, making off with several screaming children.

  'Ah, they're the Flying Dustmen,' Golifer whispered. 'A good example of real-life characters who were absorbed into London's mythical history. Charles Fox was one of a group of bogus refuse collectors known around St Mary, Islington, as the Flying Dustmen. He and his cronies stole baskets of ashes from households. Back in 1812, contractors paid seven hundred fifty pounds a year to the parish and employed several men and their carts to empty the dustbins. They hired women and children to sift cinders, which fetched half the price of coal, and siftings for brickmaking. The regular dustmen feared they would lose their Christmas bonuses from households, and issued written warnings to customers about the rogue collectors. The ringleader was caught and prosecuted, but for many years, parents used the image of the dust-clad thieves to frighten their children into good behaviour.'

  'How one misses the ability to frighten children.' Bryant turned the pages, fascinated.

  'Now, if you're looking for a man with the reputation of vanishing through walls, there's John Williams, who supposedly slaughtered a draper and his own family with a ripping chisel before striking a second time and killing a publican, his wife, and his maid with a crowbar.'

  'You're talking about the infamous Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811.'

  'That's right.' Golifer indicated an etching that showed a curlyheaded sailor stretched out on an inclined platform. 'This is a good example of how the public colluded in manufacturing a legend. Hysteria swept Wapping and the surrounding area because the murderer seemed superhuman, vanishing from the upper rooms where the deaths occurred, and there were over forty false arrests. Finally, a seaman named John Williams was taken in with virtually no evidence against him, and after he hanged himself in suspicious circumstances at Coldbath Fields Prison, he was paraded through the streets with the maul and the chisel inserted into a board beside his head. The High Constable of Middlesex and hundreds of parish officers and constables escorted the cart. Suicides were buried at crossroads in those days, and Williams is interred at the crossroads of Cannon Street and St George's Turnpike. But for years after, the area was infected with a kind of poison. Residents said they heard and saw his vengeful ghost, and even to this day the area has a strange feeling, especially when it's rainy and the wind is high, and everyone else is indoors. Murderers who operate in mysterious—that is to say, unsolved—circumstances, are survived by a peculiar assonance that can last across generations.'

  'Exactly so.' Bryant studied the prints on the crowded walls. 'Wait a minute.' He raised up the copy of the photograph Golifer had shown him, a small blurred shot taken in Leicester Square by a tourist, and narrowed his eyes, comparing it to the lithograph on the wall. The Met had discounted it, but Bryant had long believed that the snap of the Vampire was genuine. This was the evidence no-one else remembered, not even Longbright, who assumed she was official custodian of all remaining documents. He laid the curled photograph on the table. 'Bit of a coincidence, isn't it?' he asked Golifer, pointing to the wall print that showed a strangely outfitted man standing on a rock. 'The clothing of the two figures is almost identical.'

  'I never noticed that before,' Golifer admitted.

  'I think we were misled by the nickname conjured up in the press,' Bryant surmised. 'The cloak, the boots, the jerkin, the high collar; it appears the Leicester Square Vampire wasn't modelled on Dracula at all, but upon someone else entirely. This print you have is familiar from my childhood. You know who this is, of course.'

  'Yes, he's a myth—'

  'Not at all. He was very real. Born in the reign of Henry the Second, with a pedigree ab origine no higher than a shepherd's. He trained as a butcher, and was equally brilliant with a backsword, a quarterstaff, or a bow. He fell in with a bad lot, taking to such a level of violent thievery and murder that travellers lived in terror of him, and would pay him for safe passage through the woodlands. He died in a Yorkshire nunnery at the age of forty-three after a nun bled him and took too much out. Rehabilitated after his death as a righter of wrongs, a working-class champion.' Bryant lifted the print from the wall and set it down. 'We know him today as Robin Hood.'

  May studied the gang before him. He rarely thought about his own frailty; he was usually too concerned with his partner, whose lack of robustness, coupled with a curiously youthful impetuosity, frequently lowered him into the freight-train path of harm. But right now he could see the risk in his own situation. He noted the gender mix and grew warier; the girls could present a shocking ferality that bolstered the boys into more violent acts.

  He waited for them to make a move, but nothing happened.

  They formed an unbroken barrier across the stairway, waiting in silence, unnervingly still. They wore the uniform of the disenfranchised: thin grey hoods over curve-peaked caps, sweatpants or lowslung jeans. The girls had scraped-back hair, gold hoop earrings, pale bare midriffs with tattooed mock-Celtic symbols, the usual fake brands worn in too-small sizes that made them appear thin and feral. May knew that their language would comprise a barrage of shorthand patois, street American, and incomprehensible slang. He felt an equal measure of sorrow and respect for those who had been stranded here by circumstance, but lately his faith in the redemptive power of the nation's youth had been tested to breaking point. He knew that their spectrum also included a percentage of vicious teens trapped between the twin hatreds of innocence and adulthood. The difficulty lay in divining the composition of the group.

  Drawing all the confidence he could muster, he moved forward to the next flight of stairs. Almost imperceptibly, the crowd closed around him, sealing off his exit. A girl popped gum loudly. A boy spoke in murmurs too low to be perceptible. Somebody laughed.

  Knives, thought May. They'll be carrying knives, and I have no way of alerting anyone before they make their move. Did they know who he was? It was absurd to be caught out in such a place, surrounded by families and apartments, without recourse to aid, but he knew that estates like these could be the loneliest places on earth. The Borough of Camden, which had more such estates than most, had the highest suicide rate in London, and all their efforts at treeplanting and traffic-calming were undermined by the desire to continually cram in more housing.

  He felt the shock of contact with a stranger, a boy's fist shoving at his back, then another, and within seconds the entire group was pushing him towards the staircase, others making way in front of him, clearing the path to the concrete steps. His centre of balance shifted as they kicked at his legs, and then he knew that nothing could stop him from plunging headlong down the stairs, because they would not allow him to catch at their arms, only watching in insolent silence as he fell.

  And fall he did, as the shatterproof light on the landing spun overhead, the rough brick wall grazing his hands but affording no purchase.

  He glimpsed the landing below, and braced himself for the bonecracking jolt of the concrete.

  But it never came. Instea
d, broad hands caught him beneath the arms, raising him upright and setting him down on the landing. As he caught his breath, he found himself looking up into the faces of two police constables in yellow traffic jackets. Pushing between them came a stocky sergeant with a familiar, if unpleasant, face.

  'Go on, you lot, piss off before I run you in,' he told the group, waving them away dismissively before turning his attention to the detective. 'I don't know what you think you're doing here, May, apart from trying to get yourself kicked senseless.'

  Sergeant Jack Renfield's father had been Sergeant Leonard Renfield, an old enemy of Bryant's at the Met; like his father, Jack Renfield had been pointedly denied promotion several times, for which he blamed Bryant's damning reports. For once, though, May was pleased to see him.

  'I suppose your grubby little partner is somewhere around here, too,' said Renfield, looking around with suspicion.

  'No, I'm here alone.'

  'Christ, May, I'd have thought you would have more sense. You're lucky my lads didn't knock off early, and were still keeping an eye out.'

  'I owe you one, Jack. What are you doing here, anyway?' asked May, dusting himself down.