Bryant & May 06; The Victoria Vanishes b&m-6

by Christopher Fowler

  May fell wearily back into the seat and snapped open his newspaper. The annoying thing was that he knew Bryant was playing with him. He caught the twinkle of his partner’s eye over the top of his page and decided to let the old man blow off steam. During the journey, he was treated to a detailed description of the usefulness of the Adlestrop Railway Atlas, a diatribe on the unoriginality of the modern criminal mind, a complaint about the discontinuation of Fry’s Five Fruit Chocolate, and sundry reminiscences concerning London’s burglars, thieves and confidence tricksters of the late 1950s. Bryant’s monologues were rarely less than entertaining, but today May wasn’t in the mood. He was quite relieved when the train finally pulled into Otford railway station.

  “You’re very quiet today,” Bryant observed as they alighted. “I hope you’re not having a mid-life crisis.” He hastily threw up his hands. “I jest, I jest!”

  Twelve Elms Cross was a melancholy yellow-brick mansion built on the gentle slopes of royal parkland three miles beyond the station. Since 1902 it had provided a secure home for some of the country’s most disturbed mental patients, but now the listed interiors were proving unsuitable for modern health care, and the building was in the process of being decommissioned.

  The chief warden, Abigail Cochrane, was also its curator. She led the detectives from her office to the patients’ quarters via a corridor reserved for visitors. It spared them the discomfort of seeing the inmates, and vice versa.

  “Why do they always have to line these places with horrible daubs?” whispered Bryant, referring to the patients’ paintings that hung on the passage walls. “Being nuts doesn’t make them more creative, it just shows they have time on their hands.”

  “Once in a while,” May whispered back, exasperated, “it wouldn’t hurt you to be a little more politically correct, would it?”

  “The hospital was designed to incarcerate rather than rehabilitate,” Nurse Cochrane explained. “The grounds are pleasant enough, but the day-rooms are pitifully inadequate, and the personal quarters are too small. The Edwardians had rather fixed ideas about the amount of private space that should be allocated to offenders. I tend to think they treated the institution as if it were some kind of human zoo.”

  She pushed back a door leading to a wide corridor with a floor of polished linoleum and institutional green-and-cream walls. The faint scents of cabbage and disinfectant hung in the undisturbed air. “As I’m sure you’ll remember, Mr May, Tony was of above-average intelligence. Under different circumstances he could really have made something of himself. He was rather a favourite of ours, even though I felt he was likely to be a repeat offender.”

  “Why was he transferred to a low-security clinic?”

  Nurse Cochrane withdrew a large, old-fashioned key and unlocked the iron door they had stopped before. “Because of this,” she told them, gesturing about the room. “We never got around to clearing it.”

  The cell was ten feet by twelve, little more than a space for a bed and desk, without separate bathroom facilities. A single barred window faced out to the pasture where the twelve elms must once have existed. The cell walls were cream-painted brick, but had been obscured by dozens of taped photographs and reproductions of paintings. Most of the art was from the late nineteenth century, and showed groups of men sociably smoking, drinking, bantering. A few featured pugilists posing in pleasure gardens.

  The photographs were all of one person, a blowsy middle-aged woman in heavy makeup. Her features showed the signs of poor diet and too much drink. “Tony was distraught when his mother died. He worshipped her, even though she never once bothered to visit him. Tragic, really. We contacted her so many times over the years, whenever he was ill or particularly hard to settle, but she only ever responded once. There.” Cochrane pointed to a taped postcard with the words ‘Tony wishing you better love Anita’ scrawled across the back. “I think she only wrote to get him off her back for a while. When he found out she had died from cirrhosis of the liver, the fight went out of him.”

  “Are you saying there was something more than a normal mother-son relationship going on?” asked May.

  “I’m not able to comment on that.”

  He sensed that a shutter had closed between them, and knew she would cite patient confidentiality if he tried to press her.

  “This is an ongoing murder investigation, Miss Cochrane. We’ll sequester his hospital notes if we have to, and remove any files we feel might pertain to his case if it means we can prevent him from harming anyone else.”

  Cochrane’s cold manner thawed a little. She had simply not realised the gravity of her charge’s situation. “I’m sorry, sometimes it is necessary to protect our patients from the eagerness of the public to condemn and demonise. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Then perhaps you could help us to understand him more fully,” Bryant suggested. “Did he ever talk about the girl he kidnapped?”

  “There are extensive therapists’ notes in his case history, but I can probably save you a lot of time with a précis. Tony’s story is sad, but hardly uncommon. Pellew’s family was originally from Zandvoort, in Holland. His father had been in and out of jail all his life. He was a violent alcoholic whose first two sons had been taken into care. He met Tony’s mother in the pub where she worked, and their relationship was a familiar cycle of alcohol misuse and physical abuse. She left him, taking Tony with her, and worked in City of London pubs, usually in bars that had live-in premises above them. Although we have only anecdotal evidence, it seems likely that she supplemented her income through bouts of prostitution. Oddly, I think Tony was at his happiest during that period. He would have been about eleven then.”

  “Camus suggested that we spend our adult lives seeking to restore childhood’s brief moments of happiness,” said Bryant.

  “Tony told me he felt safest during those evenings he spent waiting for his mother to finish behind the bar, or waiting for her to return after seeing a punter. She always left him in the pub. He tried to strangle his first girlfriend, did you know? It didn’t take long for a pattern to emerge. He would latch onto girls he met in his mother’s pub, come on too strong and scare them off by trying too hard to keep them with him.”

  “The serial killer Denis Nielsen murdered because he wanted companionship,” May reminded them. “He was not only lonely but incredibly boring. The only way he could make his victims stay around was by rendering them unconscious.”

  “Tony told us something similar,” said Cochrane. “He had all sorts of scenarios worked out to keep women by his side. He didn’t need to kill them to re-create his happiest hours, merely make them immobile. It seems he experimented for a number of years without getting caught, although there were a few close calls. He felt at home in pubs, and dreaded the sound of the last bell, knowing that the place would empty out and leave him alone.”

  “The girl he kidnapped was anxious to point out that she was never hurt by him in any way,” said May. “And yet it seems he decided to start killing them.”

  “You say he changed after his mother died. How did that change manifest itself?”

  “He’d always been boisterous, eager to join in and organise meetings. He enjoyed a good argument with the others, although he could be very attention-deficit and tended toward over-excitement. After her funeral he withdrew from everyone, wouldn’t talk or think for himself, exhibited the classic signs of depression, became morbidly introspective, lost weight, spent too much time asleep.”

  “If he was unwell, why was he transferred?”

  “This building has been sold, Mr Bryant. It is about to become luxury apartments. The pressure is on for us to place all of our patients elsewhere as soon as possible. Tony Pellew was apparently no longer considered to be a threat to himself or anyone else. It was decided that the Broadhampton was better equipped for his needs.”

  “Are you aware that he’s no longer at the Broadhampton, either?” asked May.

  “I knew the board decided to release him rec
ently, because they contacted me in order to obtain my personal files,” Cochrane explained.

  “Don’t you think their decision was rather odd?”

  “Not so much these days. You’d be amazed if you knew about some of the people who get sent back out onto the streets.”

  “You must have made your own judgement as to whether he was in any fit state to be released.”

  Cochrane regarded Bryant with a cool detachment that suggested she had an opinion but wasn’t keen on sharing it. “I’m afraid you’ll have to take that up with the staff at the Broadhampton,” she replied.

  As the echoing rooms of Twelve Elms Cross were emptied and barred, it seemed as if their past melancholies would fade and die with them, to be replaced by the bright, light cubicles of a luxurious new prison.

  ∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧

  28

  Maternity

  Bryant was unusually quiet on the journey back. He stared from the scarred windows with his chin resting on a liverspotted knuckle, lost in thought, impervious to conversation. May was confident that it would be only a matter of hours before they would find Pellew, and his partner’s silence perplexed him.

  “All right, out with it,” he said finally. “What’s wrong?”

  Bryant turned to fix him with translucent blue eyes that were, for once, unreadable. “You would say that we understand each other to an unusual degree, wouldn’t you?” he asked. “I mean, over so many years, the extraordinary way in which we’ve been involved in each other’s lives?”

  “Indeed. I never know exactly what you’re thinking, but I usually have a pretty good idea. I can’t imagine anyone knows you better.”

  “And that’s how I feel about you. I know you leave the TV on all the time, and love buying those hideously vulgar new suits. I know you’ve got a sister in Brighton. I know you lost the wallet I bought you for your birthday, and purchased an identical one so I wouldn’t find out. I know you hate beetroot and suffer from hay fever. I know you still blame yourself for the death of your daughter, even though there was nothing more you could have done for her. I wonder, therefore, if you’ve been entirely honest with me.”

  “What do you mean? What about?”

  “The past, John. The past. There were, of course, a few periods when we weren’t working together, and I know I didn’t see enough of you during the time you were married. That’s understandable; you were in love, and were having to deal with the onset of Jane’s mental problems; I was wrapped up in troubles of my own. I suppose I always realised there were – omissions – in your life. I forgot about them for a while, but I started wondering again during Oswald Finch’s wake.”

  May furrowed his brow, but decided to say nothing. It was better to let Bryant clear his head without interruption. Perhaps it was time for the conversation he had so long avoided.

  “I got to thinking. Instead of floral tributes, Oswald asked for contributions to be left in the care of a ward at the Broadhampton Hospital. When I asked you about it, you refused to catch my eye. In fact, considering the number of times we’ve had cause to check with the Broadhampton’s patients in other investigations, you’ve always seemed uncomfortable with the subject. I think it’s time you told me the truth.”

  “What about?” May played for time. He had not lied so much as omitted details, but after all this time he knew that the inconsistency felt like something more deceptive.

  “Jane, your wife. Surely you couldn’t have lied to me about her?”

  Any answer May could have made dried in his mouth. He stared helplessly back.

  “On more than one occasion you told me she was dead, or at least you suggested as much, but it was the way you said it, as if you meant dead to me, as if you had simply cut her out of your life after the divorce. That was how I phrased it when I was writing our memoirs. Of course, you’d been apart for quite a while by then, and I thought well, if that’s how he’s dealing with it, it’s his affair. Then out of the blue, you told me you’d take me to meet her, and I could only assume you were making some kind of off-colour joke. You really had led me to believe she was gone, hadn’t you?”

  “I wasn’t deliberately trying to mislead you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I knew she’d had a breakdown. I assumed she’d died in the Broadhampton, and that Oswald knew about it, which is why he wanted contributions sent there.”

  “No,” said May, shaking his head. “No, she didn’t die, Arthur. She’s still there.”

  “Then it’s true. My God. I don’t understand. Why would you keep such a thing from me?”

  May felt the shame of a betrayer. “It was less a lie than an omission. You don’t know what I went through with Jane.”

  “You could have told me; I might have been able to help.”

  “Arthur, you have no patience with people. This was a private problem, something I couldn’t find a way to share with you. I had to find a way of getting through to Jane on my own. Mental illness is so terribly misunderstood and I wanted to see if I could help her.”

  “Even you can’t undo the past, John,” said Bryant sadly. “How is she now?”

  “She has her black dog days. The death of our daughter will always stand between us, but the trouble began long before she died.” May had good reason for sometimes thinking that his family had been cursed. First, Jane’s illness and their subsequent divorce, then the death of Elizabeth. Alex, her brother, had left for Canada and would still not talk to his father. “I kept thinking that if I had understood Jane better in the early days of her illness, I might have been able to keep us all together.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “About four months ago. Oswald used to come with me to visit her. That’s why he wanted to leave money to the hospital.”

  “Does she recognise you?”

  “Certainly. But it’s difficult to hold a conversation with her. Sometimes you think she’s perfectly fine, but she’s very good at pretending that nothing is wrong. She’s in her seventies, hardly the age it once was, of course, but she hasn’t been right for such a long time that I can hardly recall a time when she was ever truly well. I’ve lost track of the number of times she’s tried to kill herself. Elizabeth’s death removed her reason for living.”

  “But what about April? Does she know about this?”

  “No, and I agreed with Jane that we’re not going to tell her. That girl’s been through enough without finding out that her grandmother is still alive. What is the point in opening up old wounds? Jane is in no fit state to see her granddaughter, and April has only just made her own recovery. I don’t hold with all this guff about closure and moving on. Sometimes I think it just causes more damage.”

  “Perhaps she needs to decide that for herself,” said Bryant carefully.

  “Don’t you see, once the subject is reopened it can’t be closed up again. April is not strong enough. I have to protect her.”

  “Nor is she a child, John. What happened to Jane?”

  May sighed. “It was a long time ago, in a very sixties marriage. You must remember what Jane was like, how wild she could be. It’s a miracle we stayed together as long as we did. After the separation, I told you she went off with someone who was a bad influence on her, some kind of TV producer, so he said. I expected him to tell her lies, but not to give her drugs. Anyone with an ounce of sense could see she was not the sort of person…well, I was looking after the children, you were off in France sorting out troubles of your own with Nathalie’s family, we weren’t working together much, you and I – I meant to tell you what had happened, but the time never seemed to be right.”

  “You told me a little about the accident, but not much.”

  “Jane was driving the Volkswagen when it mounted the sidewalk right in the middle of Tottenham Court Road. Her boyfriend was killed instantly. She had no licence. They found LSD, cocaine and alcohol in her system. She was too fragile to deal with police and doctors. She suffered a mental co
llapse and was deemed unfit to stand trial. She wouldn’t see me, or anyone else for that matter, and although her physician thought she would eventually recover, she seemed to slip away from us to some private place inside her head. She became a danger to herself and was admitted as a patient to the Broadhampton. I had to sign her papers. It was the worst day of my life. She showed little improvement, and seemed desperate to take up long-term residency. She wanted no responsibility for her own life. When you returned, I told myself I would talk to you when the time was right, but I kept putting it off. I visit her every once in a while, but she doesn’t really know who I am.” May looked from the window as if searching for answers. “It seems I can help every family except my own. My son thinks I dumped his mother in a clinic and encouraged his sister to join the police. To think that I could have lost April as well…”

  “But you didn’t, John, you brought her back,” said Bryant gently. “You should be proud of that. You know we have to go to the Broadhampton next, don’t you? Would you let me visit Jane?”

  “Wouldn’t you rather remember her as she once was?” asked May, as the train passed across the glittering grey Thames on its approach to Victoria Station.

  “Yes, but I’d still like to see her once more.”

  “Then I should call ahead.” May took out his phone.

  “No, don’t do that. We need to find out why Pellew was released early, so let’s catch them on the hop. I don’t want any prepared answers.”

  May tried to read the look on his partner’s face, but for once, failed to do so.

  ♦

  The Broadhampton Clinic in Lavender Hill, South London, was an orange brick Edwardian building with central columns of white stucco, pedimented wings and a small bell tower. It possessed the aura of paternal authority common to civic buildings of the era, and made one feel protected just by approaching it.