Ten Second Staircase

by Christopher Fowler

  'Chameleon,' replied Renfield somewhat confusingly.

  'I beg your pardon?'

  'Operation Chameleon. A three-month initiative to disrupt gang organisation on London estates. We've got men reporting back from all the major flare-up spots, and I don't need you disrupting their work. I suppose the PCU's involved. We all had a good laugh about your Highwayman pictures.'

  'Why?' asked May, puzzled.

  'Because they weren't taken here, were they? An idiot can see that. The sightlines don't match up. These little sods were having you on.'

  'You're wrong. We have witness reports from two girls, one of whom gave Arthur the shots from her mobile.'

  'Then they were winding him up, weren't they?' said Renfield.

  'What do you mean?'

  'Check the rooftops of these blocks, May—each one has its chimney stacks in different order, and I can tell you there ain't any like the ones in your pictures. My men should know; they spend enough bloody time up there.'

  'Then why the hell didn't you tell us?' asked May angrily.

  'Not our case, is it?' replied Renfield. 'We thought you bigbrained desk jockeys had the answers to everything. Let's not catch you around here again, eh? You're too old to be out in a place like this on your own, May. You're not up to it, mate. Next time we might not be able to reach you before you're kicked to death.'

  32

  HALL OF INFAMY

  She had inherited her grandfather's fondness for organisation. She catalogued her books, arranged her music alphabetically, kept lists, left notes, tidied the mess of her life away into drawers—and somewhere along the line her habits had tipped into compulsions. As much as she tried to create order, little in April's life made sense to her. There were still too many gaps and unexplained events in the past.

  She sat on the floor of her new office, folding each freshly recorded sighting of the Leicester Square Vampire into its own folder, matching the dates and locations against the scrawled notes in Maggie Armitage's transcripts. The white witch's handwriting was hopeless, but she was exact on every detail, even though she exhibited a tendency to drift from the subject whenever the mood took her.

  April cross-referenced the notes with Arthur Bryant's accounts of all his cases, histories that dated back to the war. The detective's diaries ran to over thirty volumes. Luckily, they had been kept at home, and had therefore survived the blaze which had destroyed the unit, although some had been severely damaged by water. As she opened the next volume, tracing the Vampire's repeated sightings, she was surprised to find that half a dozen pages had been neatly trimmed out with a sharp knife. She checked the dates on either side of the removed sections, and the gravity of unease settled within her.

  They were the days marking the death of Elizabeth, her mother.

  April never blamed others for her misfortunes, and had freely admitted her own mistakes, but there were forces at work beyond her control. Some dark and windswept chaos in her family's past refused her the sustenance of a normal life. Her grandfather could provide answers, but he had always been reluctant to discuss the events surrounding the loss of his only daughter.

  April traced the edges of the cut pages, and thought back to ambiguities of her childhood, knowing that they held the key to her troubles. Like a woman wary of visiting the doctor for fear of what she might be told, she decided that the time had come to ask John May for the truth.

  'None of this makes any damned sense. It doesn't follow the accepted psychology of murder.'

  May threw the folders back across the table to Longbright. 'Attacks take place in an atmosphere of mutual fear. Anger escalates into the impulse of violence. It erupts in the moment. You try to stifle the noise and the fuss your victim is making, and you accidentally kill him. The anger drops like wind leaving a sail, much more quickly than it rose. You just want to damp everything down, but by then it's too late. It has exploded like a crack in a piece of pressured glass, and there's nothing you can do to mend it, so you cover your tracks, hide it all away, but you're not thinking straight. You won't realise your mistakes until later, when there's nothing you can do to correct them. A great rock of remorse settles in the head, like the aftermath of guilty sex. Does that sound anything like what we have here? No, because despite my partner's insistence on the absolute necessity for logic, in this case logic doesn't apply. There's some aberration . . . something we're missing . . . something very bad indeed.'

  He watched the glistening traffic from the window, rubbing his sore arm. 'This isn't a whodunit; pick the likeliest from a list of connected suspects and accuse him. The killer is a stranger, so strange to us that we can have no idea who he might be, because it isn't about anger; it's about the lack of it, an absence of any emotional core that might provide a motive. And I don't know how to deal with that.'

  'Then you have to find a new way of shuffling the deck, John. You're good at that. You've always been an early adapter. Arthur's too set to change his ways, but this time I think it's down to you.'

  Longbright had long been used to assembling information and leaving it before her superiors without comment; she rarely talked to either of the detectives in this manner, but now she sensed May's need for support. He doubted himself. Perhaps he felt he could no longer rely on his partner. Arthur Bryant was venturing further into the arcane than was healthy for the unit; nobody said anything, but it was clear how the rest of them felt.

  'You're the only one who keeps us focussed on hard fact, John. Facts are all that Faraday's interested in. We're all relying on you to provide them.' She saw the tension rumpling his forehead. 'What happened on the estate? Why were you there?'

  'Luke Tripp was visiting someone. You should have seen him—he knew exactly where he was going. What was so important that he would walk through a no-go area in semidarkness? Do me a favour: Call the residents' liaison officer Arthur met with, and find out who uses the community centre. Get me a list of everyone who's been there this week. Where is Arthur?'

  Longbright was almost embarrassed to tell him. 'He went to see someone about some rare library books. He said it was to do with the case.' The page containing May's drunken implication in the Vampire investigation was weighing heavily on Longbright's mind. So far, she'd had no luck tracing the two officers who had co-signed it. One had left the Met, but the other was female and had married someone in the force. It meant she was operating under her married name, and would be harder to find.

  'Are you free for a moment?' Dan Banbury put his head around the door. 'There's something I think you should be aware of.'

  May followed Banbury to his office and looked for a place to sit down, but found only a clear plastic inflatable ball. 'Where's your chair?' he asked.

  'That's it. Good for your posture; you soon get used to it. I bought one for Mr Bryant after he complained about his back, but he deliberately and maliciously punctured it.' Banbury rolled the ball over, and May lowered himself tentatively. 'Take a look at this. I was waiting for the lab results on the boot prints to come back and ran a couple of search engines on the Highwayman.'

  'My God, tell me that figure is wrong.' May found himself looking at a projection of over 12,500 separate Web sites.

  'These are sites dedicated to the Highwayman in the UK alone, John. He has a motion-graphic symbol that's been posted on some kind of shareware and distributed to everyone who's asked for the download. There's souvenir memorabilia up on a couple of auction sites, patently fake but selling for a fortune, and the prices are rocketing. There are several bands, the biggest of which, Stand and Deliver, is clearly being sponsored by some corporation chasing the teen demographic. Plenty of merchandise: boots, decals, T-shirts, sweatshirts, masks, jackets, gloves, heavy metal songs about vengeance and justice—most of the material originating right here in the Camden area. The speed with which this stuff has appeared is absolutely unprecedented, and it's getting a political spin; it's all good old-fashioned right-wing propaganda about law and order. The Highwayman is no longer j
ust a source of prurient interest. He's on his way to becoming a cult hero.'

  'I don't understand. He's killed popular national celebrities; he should be despised. Look at the public outrage over the murder of Jill Dando,' said May, remembering the much-loved TV presenter who was shot on her own doorstep.

  'Highwayman's achieving fantastic popularity among teenage girls,' Banbury pointed out. 'Check this.' He opened another site. '"Why I want the Highwayman to be the father of my unborn baby." The girl who wrote this is fifteen years old. "Why the Highwayman may be good for us all. Rough Justice: Hard News is the first national newspaper to openly support the Highwayman." There's much darker stuff turning up on the fan sites, pornographic stories and homemade movies about him. We're going to have imitators on our hands.'

  May threw his hands up in disgust. 'What is wrong with these people?'

  'I suppose you could cite underdog heroes like Bonnie and Clyde—'

  'They were grassroots thieves, robbing banks that were universally hated by the disenfranchised for foreclosing land,' said May. 'The Highwayman is just a killer.'

  'Think about it, though. The last decade saw the rise of celebrity culture, personality replacing altruistic ideals. This could be the start of the backlash.'

  'So he replaces such ideals with romanticised images of himself?' asked May. 'How does that work?'

  'I guess in some twisted way he thinks he can become the anticelebrity celebrity. And it looks like he's right. He's committing the kind of crimes people love to read about or see at the movies, the sort of murders that hardly ever occur in real life. He's pandering to his public.'

  'That's what Arthur said. He wants us to set a trap.' He glanced back at the Hard News headline. 'I think we've found someone who can help us.'

  33

  CRIMINAL LANGUAGE

  'Where's Dorothy Huxley?' Bryant demanded of no-one in particular, sauntering into the dingy southeast Greenwich Library that smelled of fish glue, lavender polish, fungus, and cats, with just a hint of warm tramp.

  He glanced at the depleted shelves and stood some books upright, checking their covers—The Papal Outrages of Boniface VIII; Lost Zoroastrian Architecture, Vol. VI: Iran; A Treatise on Catastrophe Theory Concerning Saturn and the Number Eight; The Cult of Belphegor; and Biggles and Algy: Homoerotic Subtext in Childhood Literature. No wonder nobody ever browsed here, he thought. Hard-core readers only.

  Jebediah Huxley's literary bequest appeared even more run-down than it had been on Bryant's previous visits. Lurking in the grim shade of the rain-sodden bypass, awaiting the wrecking ball of cashkeen councillors, it remained a defiant bastion of the abstruse, the erudite, and the esoteric. The crack-spined volumes were flaking with neglect; Dorothy and her gloomy unpaid assistant Frank were unable to save more than a few books a week with their meagre resources. That they continued to do so at all was a miracle. As he peered into the shadowed shelves, Frank's face materialised between two volumes of the Incunabulum like an unpopular Dickensian ghost.

  'You nearly gave me a heart attack,' said Bryant, theatrically palpitating his waistcoat. 'You haven't got the sort of face you should be creeping about with. Kindly don't do it.'

  'I was expecting you earlier, Mr Bryant,' Frank gloomed. 'You missed her.'

  'Well, when will Dorothy be back?'

  'A good question. It depends on how soon we can arrange for the medium to visit.'

  'What on earth are you talking about?' Bryant had little patience with the prematurely aged assistant librarian.

  'He can't come round for a few days because he was cat-sitting for a sick aunt, but her Persian swallowed a hair ball and coughed itself to death, so he had to find an identical replacement, and the trouble is that the new one has one green eye and one yellow, so he's waiting to hear back from the vet about whether they can put a contact lens in.'

  'I'm sorry, Frank; you seem to be speaking some alien language designed for people who care about your problems. Back to me. Where is Dorothy?'

  Frank glumly pointed a long forefinger to the floor. 'She's dead.'

  'Dead? I was picking her brains on Etruscan pottery a fortnight ago; how can she be dead?'

  'Stroke. We buried her on Tuesday. I tried calling your mobile, but there was no answer.'

  'There wouldn't have been. I traded one, and dropped the other in a hole I was digging. This is awful news. Poor old Dorothy, what a terrible shame. I suppose she had a good run, though. Give me the name of her nearest relative and I'll send some pears.'

  'She had no relatives left alive, Mr Bryant. I was the closest to her. Er, pears?'

  'Golden Delicious. She loved them, and they can plant the pips.' A horrible thought struck the detective. 'What's going to happen to the Huxley collection now?'

  'It's in safe hands,' Frank assured him. 'She passed the building over to me on the condition that its purpose as a library remained unaltered.'

  'Could she do that? I mean, you're not her next of kin.'

  'Actually, I am.' Frank stroked the side of his long nose thoughtfully. 'She legally adopted me four years ago.'

  'Dorothy never told me that.'

  'That's because you only ever came to see her when you wanted information.'

  Bryant wasn't used to someone answering back, and was momentarily stumped for a reply.

  'She did it so that Greenwich Council wouldn't be able to touch the building. They've been sniffing around, sensing a real estate killing to be made, but we've foiled them.'

  'Good for her. She was always a crafty old bird.'

  'I always wanted to ask you—did you go out with her once?' asked Frank. 'I heard she was a bit of a goer in her time.'

  'That's none of your business, even if you are her son.' Bryant bridled. 'Really, this prurience is most distasteful. I'm sure she would have wanted us to continue as normal, so I'm here to avail myself of your utilities.'

  'You mean you're looking for a book.'

  'Precisely so.' He looked around, smacking his lips, uncertain. 'Dorothy always knew where everything was . . . '

  'And so do I, Mr Bryant. It's hard to share a room with someone for twenty years without learning everything they know. What are you after?'

  'A canting dictionary. You know, an English code of thieves and cutthroats. I understand that highwaymen and outlaws used their own language to leave messages for each other, in much the same way that burglars still mark houses today. I wondered if they had ever committed their code to print.'

  'Such a book would, by its very nature, have been illegally published, but I'll see what I can find in our Private Reference section.'

  Thunder rolled lazily across the roof of the library, rustling the

  damp pages of forgotten periodicals and sharpening the air with static. 'I'll need to get a light,' Frank explained. 'The electrics don't work back here.'

  Bryant extracted a long metal usherette's torch from the voluminous folds of his overcoat. 'Don't worry, I have my partner's Valiant.'

  They made their way between stacks of books, like divers negotiating coral reefs, until they reached a row of rusting cabinets. True to his word, Frank knew exactly where to look. He lifted down a heavy leather volume with mouse-chewed corners and laid it on the table. After consulting the index beneath Bryant's beam, he tapped the page meaningfully. 'Do you know about the Thieves' Key?'

  'Yes, done that; what else is there?' asked Bryant with characteristic rudeness.

  'Well, there's the Thieves' Exercise. It goes hand in hand with the key.'

  'What is it?'

  'Hm.' Frank read in silence for a few minutes. 'Appears to be a series of lessons passed on from lawbreakers to their pupils, full of slang. Listen to this: Dinging the Cull upon the Poll—that is, bashing someone over the head if he offers resistance. Mill the Gig with a Betty—to open a door with a crowbar; Fagger and Storm—to break into a house and tie up its residents. Gamon, Bowman, Angling Stick, Squeezing Chates, Pike on the Bene, Main Buntings, Nubbing Chit—there are hu
ndreds of phrases here.'

  'Can I take this away with me?'

  'No, but I can make you some photocopies.'

  'That will have to do.' Bryant flipped the pages. 'It says that attackers chewed licorice to make them more long-winded during foot escapes. Sensible advice. There are cases here that go back to Charles the Second.'

  'This might be of use,' said Frank, wiping a thin green layer of mildew from the cover of a small tome. 'The Grammatical Dictionary of Thieves and Murderers.'

  'Show me.' Bryant flicked his fingers at the librarian. On the front of the book was an embossed drawing of a highwayman. In his right hand he held playing cards: a four of clubs, known as 'the devil's bedposts,' and two pair, aces and eights, the so-called dead man's hand.

  He read the frontispiece. '"Being a Collection of Words, Terms, Proverbs, and Phrases Used in the Modern Language of the Thieves, Cutthroats, etc., Useful for All Sorts of People (Especially Travellers) to Secure Their Money and Preserve Their Lives." Oh, this is interesting. Backt, meaning "dead," deriving from the backing up of a coffin onto six men's shoulders. Cloud, "tobacco," as in "to raise a Cloud." Sneaking Budge, one that robs alone. Jolly good stuff; not much use to me though.' He slammed the book shut.