Ten Second Staircase

by Christopher Fowler

  'I'd be happier if you stayed in the van,' said May.

  'It's okay. I'm wearing a protective vest.' Banbury hopped out of the van and crossed the road, slipping into the entrance hall.

  They waited. Two minutes passed, then three. The crackle of Ramsey's handset made them jump.

  'I heard someone on the stairs,' she whispered. 'Wait, I can see him through the spyhole—he's right outside the door. Where the hell are your men?'

  'They should be on the staircase below you,' May answered. 'They're waiting for him to make a move.'

  'I don't want to be carried out of here in a body bag just because your people were waiting for the right moment,' she snapped back.

  The sound of an electric bell filled the van. 'I don't believe it,' said Ramsey. 'He just rang the doorbell. What do you want me to do?'

  'Don't let him in,' May warned. 'What can you see now?'

  'He's gone—no, wait, he's—'

  There was a burst of static, and the line went dead.

  40

  LOSS AND MEMORY

  A different handset came on-line this time. 'I can see him,' whispered Banbury. 'On the floor above me. He's just standing there outside the door. I'm going to try and get a clear shot at him.'

  'Where's DuCaine?'

  'On the lower landing. He can't get past both of us.'

  May chewed a fingernail, listening and waiting. Banbury had left the line open for him. He heard a sudden tumble of movement, buffeting and scuffling against the built-in microphone.

  'Are you all right?' called May.

  'He winded me.' Banbury checked in. 'Barged past me on the stairs—looks like he was expecting a trap. Yow! He just grabbed the handrail and jumped right over Liberty's head! How did he do that?'

  There was a firecracker pop as Banbury fired his stain pellet.

  'Tell me what's happening,' demanded May.

  'Okay, I fired and caught our man on the back of the left wrist. He's wearing gloves, but the needle should have gone right through. There's ink everywhere. He'll be out of the front door any second now. There's nowhere else for him to go.'

  May shoved open the van's tinted side window and watched. 'Who's in charge of keeping the street clear?' he asked, as he saw the gates of St Crispin's swinging open from the corner of his eye. 'What's going on? I thought Kershaw had both ends of the road sealed off.'

  'He does. It's Saturday—there's nobody in the school—' Pupils were pouring out through the gate, a sea of navy-and-gold blazers moving quickly through the drizzle, filling the street.

  'It's private,' said May, shocked at his own stupidity. 'They hold classes on Saturday as well. We have to get them off the street.'

  May saw the door of the warehouse's entrance hall swing open, and the Highwayman stepped out into the rain.

  'Colin,' called Mangeshkar, 'get around the front. He's on the steps.'

  There were children everywhere now. The Highwayman stood head and shoulders above them all.

  'Christ, where are our men?' cried May, slamming back the van door and alighting. 'Meera, stay with me.'

  Bimsley came sliding around the corner and took a number of schoolboys down like skittles. The black-clad figure was slipping through crests of blue and yellow, moving farther away. May tried to keep him in focus, but the blinding rain reduced his vision.

  'He can't get out without being seen,' called Mangeshkar. She charged into the crowd, slipping between the children, heading towards her target. Moments later she was looking back at him with her hands raised, puzzlement and apprehension flooding her features. Bimsley and DuCaine fought their way through the children towards her as Banbury appeared on the steps clutching his arm. Longbright was there, too, buffeted by the raucous tide of pupils, searching amongst them.

  'He can't have just vanished,' cried May in exasperation. He looked from the dissipating teenagers to the high brick walls of the converted warehouses, then down at the slowly clearing road. He saw only two other adults, a teacher heading for the school's car park, and a single parent who had managed to slip through the cordon.

  'Didn't anyone realise that the school was holding classes?' he asked, exasperated.

  'The Highwayman obviously did,' said Mangeshkar. May knew then that they had lost their quarry.

  'Well, he didn't climb a wall, and he didn't drop into the sewers,' Longbright concluded. 'There was nowhere else he could have run, except onto the estate. Both ends of the street were closed.'

  'Anything show on the CCTV outside the school gates?' asked May, opening the rear door of the van.

  'I've already got an up-link, but I think you need to see it for yourself,' warned Banbury. 'They've a new system that records directly onto a hard drive. The picture resolution is much clearer. Here we go.' He punched in the code and forwarded to the moment when the school gates opened. 'Watch the background.' The sea of uniformed pupils swirled across the lower half of the screen, but the Highwayman could clearly be seen descending the steps of the building. Banbury slowed down the images and tapped the screen with his pen. 'He stopped here for a moment, as if he was remembering an escape route. Now watch.'

  Suddenly, the leather-clad man stepped forward and dropped lower in the picture. For a moment it seemed as though the children were engulfing him. At the point when he reached the bottom of the steps, he continued to descend until he was below the height of the surrounding pupils.

  'It looks as if he's going right into the ground,' said May, amazed.

  'Not possible,' said Banbury. 'I checked. There's nothing there but tarmac.'

  The little group continued staring at the screen in disbelief. The tide of schoolchildren gradually parted and withdrew, leaving nothing behind but blank pavement.

  'That's insane. Where's he gone?' May was mystified. 'Rerun the footage.'

  They watched again, stepping through one frame at a time, but the images yielded no further clues. The Highwayman's movement became too fast and blurred to be fully discerned. He lowered his head and folded down in a tumble of passing figures. The collapsing image disturbed May more each time he watched it, but it took him a few minutes to realise why. The Leicester Square Vampire had supposedly vanished in the same manner, over thirty years earlier.

  Arthur Bryant trudged doggedly through the downpour, checking each litter-cramped alleyway as he passed. He had forgotten to bring the address of the lockup with him, and was now no longer convinced he would recognise the turnoff by sight.

  Lately, certain sections of his memory had started to retreat. The process was peculiarly selective, so that, while he recalled every detail of the trial of Neville Heath, the whip-wielding wartime RAF sadist who suffocated and mutilated his girlfriends, or the investigation surrounding Gordon Cummins, the brutal 'Blackout Ripper' traced by the serial number on his gas mask just as he was about to strangle his fifth victim, Bryant could not remember where he had parked Victor, or when he had last filled it with petrol (the gauge was not to be trusted).

  He felt as though he had been quietly but firmly sidelined from the investigation, given some displacement activity to get on with while the real work was being undertaken by professionals. Nobody trusted Bryant with the contemporary investigation. Instead, somewhat at his own behest, he found himself relegated to rooting about in the detritus of the past. Bryant was a contrary man; in other circumstances this would have been his ideal assignment, but today he felt as if he was missing out on something important. The unit had sailed near the edge of disaster before, but never quite this close.

  He raised his rain-spattered spectacles, peering down a cobbled alley with nasturtiums and vines splitting its dripping brown bridges, and knew he had found the right place. Paddington had always been a contrary, broken-backed area, riven by rail lines and fragmented by landlords, but rendered lively by the economic migrants who perched behind the counters of its late-night shops or cooked in take-aways that filled the air with unfamiliar spices. Now, the smart new basin and rows of expensive executiv
e apartments had supposedly regenerated the area, but as far as Bryant could see, the renovation was merely driving out the people who made the neighbourhood so intriguing.

  He checked the bunch of keys Longbright had released to him, and stood before the creosoted wooden door cut into one of the last bricked-up arches. The evidence archive was one of four kept by the PCU across London to house items from earlier investigations. The catalogued bags and boxes could not be disposed of until all of their cases were concluded, but court appeals and queried verdicts kept many investigations 'live' far beyond the unit's involvement. DNA profiling had meant that many of the items stored here were now active once more, and Bryant was under strict instructions not to handle or remove anything.

  He stepped through the narrow slatted door into the spidery gloom and searched for a light switch, before remembering that the Paddington and King's Cross lockups had no electricity. Hefting May's Valiant into his palm, he shone the cinema torch around the arch. Mildew and moisture had taken their toll; many of the heavy clear plastic sacks were now acting as greenhouses for fungus. Bryant found himself looking at the accumulated details of his career. Here was a painted mask worn by Euridice in a scandalous— not to mention murderous—wartime production of Orpheus in the Underworld. In another box was one of the seventy-seven clocks that had inadvertently caused mayhem among the members of one of London's oldest families in 1973. Shards of education and experience, past mistakes and private moments, triumphs and failures, now eaten by rust and damp and rodents, crushed and crammed together in buckled boxes like scrapbooks of barely recognised memories.

  It took the best part of an hour to locate the file box marked LSV1973, and another ten minutes for his cold-slowed hands to cut open the seals.

  Bryant needed to remove the instruments of death. The Vampire had thrown his knife into the alley after the last attack. The bloodstained handle had been examined and its group noted at the time, but this had been before the era of DNA testing. At least the result could now be matched against the samples taken from the stored bodies.

  As he unwrapped the knife, a wintry draught raised the hairs on his arms. Other hands had gripped this handle, pushing home its blade with terrible force. Two girls and a boy had died, assaulted, stabbed, and bitten almost as an afterthought. Some had lost blood before stumbling terrified into the square, desperate for help. Elizabeth had fallen silently in an alley, her life seeping out into the drain beneath her as the officers had desperately combed the corridors behind Leicester Square. Hundreds of witnesses had been interviewed, but only a handful had been called back for further questioning, and they had surrendered blood samples. The files of these few lay rotting in the bottom of the box.

  When confronted with the hard evidence of violent death, instinct and emotion took hold of him, forcing rationality into retreat. He tried to remember the panicked night patrols, the anxious faces, but saw only the face of Elizabeth, smiling and waving back to John as she turned to walk the path of her murderer. What had happened in the minutes after the attack? How long had it taken for the shock of the event to make itself felt? He had watched over Elizabeth's cooling corpse, taking care to shield it from his partner. John was in shock, and someone had poured him brandy. Bryant's interest in the Vampire's identity had died at that point. Who had he been? What did it matter? Nothing could bring back John's daughter, April's mother. She had joined the ranks of those who had died viciously, needlessly, on the streets of the city.

  Bryant's knees cracked as he lowered himself down to the wet concrete. Normally he would simply have taken what he needed, but as Faraday had forbidden him to remove anything, he was forced to examine the documents by torchlight. He did not expect to find anything new; what little evidence there was had been studied by everyone except the office juniors. Vaguely remembered faces glinted before him, unfortunates photographed in the aftermath of their loss. Pictures of the killer's victims in happier times, backpacking, squinting into sunlight, grinning happily at flashlit nightclub tables, their halted histories stapled to their face shots like casting cards for some melancholy documentary.

  The old detective's bones protested as he changed positions, spreading a sheet of plastic across the floor and laying the files on it. The events of the past had split like thawing pack ice, incidents drifting apart so that it was almost impossible now to see the greater picture. He recognised his own crablike handwriting on the files, adding dense sidebars where none was necessary, noting that the first victim was a member of an occult society, as if that somehow had bearing on the case. His errors of judgement were augmented before him, mocking and misguided, making him ashamed. He had repeatedly avoided obvious lines of questioning to focus on the obscure and the arcane, sidetracking his uncomfortable subjects, repeatedly twisting the interviews to his own ends. Mystical connections, oddball acquaintances; they had assumed an unnatural level of importance, all because he could not bring himself to accept that the real answers might be mundane, that his job might be grimmer and more prosaic than he was prepared to believe.

  And yet there were successful conclusions—how did one account for them? He thumbed through the photographs, wondering what his partner might have seen had he not commandeered the case. Connections—private, public, family, business, social, accidental— that was how May worked. He remained thorough and methodical, endlessly searching and collating. It was how Bryant tried to think now. Keep to human dimensions, he told himself. Make it plain and simple.

  The rain dripped through the cracks in the bricks, drumming onto corrugated iron above his head. He studied the dead victims' backgrounds once more, adding his own notes on those who had survived their attacks. He noted their birthplaces (New Zealand, Nottingham, South Africa, Norway, Wales, Madrid, Chile—not even in the same hemisphere), their lodging addresses (Earl's Court, Marylebone, King's Cross, Acton, Wandsworth, Wembley, Hackney), their jobs (student, student, artist, insurance assessor, secretary, builder), their extracurricular activities (pubs, parties, football, tennis, walking, cinema, night classes), and stopped, rereading his water-stained notes. Comments were scrawled in margins, cramped and indecipherable. Reading by torchlight was hard work; he found himself returning to the typed background files assembled by Longbright, because they strained his eyes less.

  With the files laid out on the damp concrete floor, he tried a process May had taught him. Future stars begin as unknowns in old films, said his partner. When you go back to these early titles now, their names jump out. With cold cases, you return to see if any of the participants have since become notorious.

  A single link had been noted at the time; several of the victims had been taking night classes in the weeks preceding their deaths. The connection had been dismissed, because no two students attended the same college.

  One victim had been heading for a class in economic history on the night she died. No specific venue for the course was listed, but in the contents of the second victim's backpack Bryant found a folded copy of the school curriculum. The class was circled in red Biro, with the name of the lecturer printed beneath it, and a small photograph.

  It would have meant nothing at the time, but now the arrangement assumed momentous significance.

  Alexander Kingsmere, MA, BSc Oxon.

  Brilliant Kingsmere looked so much like his father.

  41

  PSYCHIC TRAIL

  Janet Ramsey turned her key in the lock and admitted herself to her Chelsea apartment. She had been expecting the PCU to prove incompetent—it was what always happened when you placed academics out in the field. Their hopeless mishandling of today's attempt to lure out the Highwayman had achieved the desired effect. She kicked off her shoes and rang Oskar Kasavian's mobile. It made the call traceable but was better than calling him at a government office.

  'You were right, they were even worse than you said they would be,' she told him. 'The Highwayman showed up, just as I expected. He obviously sensed it was a trap and didn't stick around, but he wante
d to use the photo opportunity and made sure my man got plenty of shots. God, a blind man would have sensed the police vehicles scattered around the street. I must admit, though, it hadn't occurred to me that the school would be in session on a Saturday. The unit staged the most extrovert undercover operation imaginable, flatfoots thumping up and down the pavement barking into walkietalkies, huge officers lurking behind tiny garden walls, quite ridiculous.'

  'I want a full report detailing their incompetence,' said Kasavian. 'Your end of the deal.'

  'Don't worry, you'll get it.'

  'What happened to the Highwayman?'

  'He waited outside the apartment, then trotted back downstairs and out the front door, unapprehended. They managed to lose him despite the fact that the entire street had been sealed off.'

  'It doesn't surprise me, but I don't understand how.'

  'They hadn't allowed for two hundred kids suddenly pouring into the street. The sudden confusion allowed him to use an escape route.'

  'Did you get a good look at him?'