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

by Christopher Fowler

  He hauled her to the edge of the balustrade and kicked her legs out from under her, easily holding her squirming body against the stonework. Jackie felt her centre of gravity shifting as he pulled her over the edge. They were only two floors up, but he was tipping her upside down to cause the maximum impact. She felt her stomach flop, as though she was boarding a funfair ride.

  Her greying auburn hair fell over her face, obscuring her sight. His hand slipped between her thighs, sliding over her tights, so that he was holding her almost vertically. She knew that the fall would kill her. She could only fear that it would not be instant.

  ♦

  They were above Masters, Longbright saw that now. They had passed along the passage at the very top of the building, aligned with the roof of the Great Court, to emerge in the service area at the top of the stairwell. The academic was diagonally below them, trying to unhook Mrs Quinten’s legs from the balustrade, but now her right hand had gained purchase on the rail, so he was pummelling at her back and stomach in a desperate attempt to make her release her grip.

  The impossibility of the situation was enough to paralyse Longbright. If they made their presence known to Masters he would either release Mrs Quinten, allowing her to fall under her own weight, or attack her with greater violence.

  She was still trying to reach a decision when Renfield threw his broad frame straight down the stairs in a foolhardy but spectacular airborne rugby tackle that slammed Masters to the steps so hard that it cracked his ribs and punched the air from his lungs.

  Renfield climbed to his feet, unfazed, and reached over the balcony just as Mrs Quinten’s grip failed, dragging her back across the balustrade like a sack of flour. He fell onto the stairs beside Masters, with Mrs Quinten lying on top of him. It was undignified, but seemed to have done the trick.

  “You make one sudden move, sunshine,” he told the inert doctor, “and I’ll tear your bleeding head off.” But with the scarf loosened from her throat, Mrs Quinten suddenly started to scream and thrash about in shock, and in the brief moments it took Renfield to quell the tangle of limbs, Masters had risen and run into the gallery straight ahead of them.

  Renfield abandoned his charge and was following now, but Longbright had the lead. She closed in behind Masters as he blundered past the Cetole, the only surviving English musical instrument of the Middle Ages, resplendent in its glass case.

  He was limping, clutching at his cracked rib cage, and she caught up with him in the clock room, by Congreve’s rollingball timepiece of 1810. He flung out his right arm with such suddenness that she was taken by surprise. The blow to her face knocked her head back, sending her to the floor, but she was up on her feet even before Renfield appeared in the doorway.

  “No, Jack,” she told the sergeant. “He’s mine.”

  Masters was more shocked than anyone when Longbright slammed into him, pressing down on the fractured ribs in his chest. Masters yelped painfully and fell back, hitting the case behind with his full weight. Inside, the bulbous black-and-white vase tilted onto its rim.

  Longbright stepped back in horror. “Oh no,” she said quietly. “The Portland Vase. Not again.” The priceless antiquity had survived two millennia only to be shattered once before. In one of the greatest restoration feats ever attempted in modern times, it had been made whole once more. She watched the vase in horror as it rolled around on the edge of its base, teetering on its plinth.

  The vase had passed its point of equilibrium, and tipped over.

  The glass case was not wide enough to allow it to properly fall, and the vase was held at a forty-five-degree angle, settling safely as the wounded academic slid down to the floor and began to cry for his own shattered life.

  ∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧

  45

  The Method

  “It’s all in here,” said April, tapping the rescued folders. “And it’s all about babies. Or rather, mothers and babies.”

  Ye Olde Mitre tavern in Ely Court, Hatton Garden, was a godsend to the nine drenched, exhausted men and women who found themselves together on a miserably wet Saturday night. The members of the PCU had nowhere else to go. Alma Sorrowbridge had banned them from Bryant’s house because Colin Bimsley had tracked something nasty onto the carpet before knocking over a jug less unique, but with more sentimental value, than the Portland Vase.

  April, Meera and Colin might have uncovered the documentation needed to resolve the investigation, but Renfield was nonplussed to find himself the hero of the hour. Uncomfortable with the attention, he spent most of his time at the bar, returning with fresh drinks whenever he spotted an empty glass on the table. He had already bought Longbright three pints of Guinness. He liked a woman who could drink pints.

  “We’re still piecing together a timeline of events,” April warned, spreading the printouts and typed pages across the beer-stained table. The detective constables had elected her to translate their elements into something resembling a narrative. “As far as we can tell, it begins with Dr Peter Jukes, chief scientist for chemical and biological defence at the MOD’s Porton Down laboratory.”

  “Jukes?” repeated Kershaw. “What has he got to do with all this?”

  “If you recall, Giles, we knew he was a colleague of Jocelyn Roquesby, and that he had drowned while he was still employed as a consultant for the Ministry of Defence. It made sense that she met Jukes at work. She might even have had an affair with him. He was single, and looks pretty fit in his photographs.”

  “But she wasn’t at MOD – ”

  “No, like the others, Mrs Roquesby worked for Theseus Research in King’s Cross, one of the companies to whom the ministry outsourced contracts. The women were legal secretaries, nothing more than that. Jackie Quinten was formerly employed there. She’d retired, but had agreed to be pressed back into service on a part-time basis. Her security rating was still intact, after all, but what brought her back? Well, they were seven middle-aged women who all appeared to share something in common. None of them were able to have children of their own.”

  “Wait,” said Banbury, “doesn’t Mrs Roquesby have a daughter?”

  “Eleanor Roquesby is adopted,” April corrected.

  “And Jackie Quinten’s child is her stepson,” Bryant pointed out.

  “One of the MOD’s chief remits was – and no doubt still is – to prevent a chemical terrorist attack from occurring in London and the other major cities of Great Britain,” April continued. “You remember the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult in Japan? In 1995, they attempted to hasten the apocalypse by carrying out five sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo Metro, killing twelve and injuring a thousand. It would appear from Mrs Quinten’s unburned notes that Theseus had indeed developed a new vaccine. It had been tried on animals with a high level of success, but they needed to test it on humans, and in the light of increasing terrorist warnings that culminated in the 7/7 attacks, they had to act quickly.

  “So, in the course of their experiments, Jukes discreetly asked around for volunteers to take part in an experiment. He needed to carry out an unethical expediency. His brief was to administer a preventative vaccine to live subjects, humans less than eighteen months old. None of the infants is identified in Mrs Quinten’s notes, but it seems at least two had been abandoned in Eastern European orphanages. To Joanne Kellerman and the others, it lessened the moral burden if they were assured that the babies had been given up for adoption in the direst of circumstances. It also seems clear the women were told that their charges faced absolutely no risk of infection. They agreed to foster them, taking care of the infants during their working hours at Theseus, helping to monitor their wellbeing throughout the day. The babies were to be allowed medication for ten weeks, but at the end of this period they unexpectedly became sick, and one by one they died. All this we have from Mrs Quinten’s notes.”

  “What went wrong?” asked Kershaw.

  “Jukes’s drug proved to have unforeseen side effects. Perhaps the infants would have lived had they been
older or healthier – but who would allow their children to undergo such testing, even given assurances that no possible harm could come to them? So the mortified women were paid off and sworn to secrecy. They left their jobs with good severance money – we have Mrs Quinten’s old pay slips – and were reminded of their allegiance to the Official Secrets Act.

  “What nobody counted on was the fact that Joanne Kellerman and the others felt increasingly uncomfortable with their own consciences, and were eventually unable to process the guilt surrounding their unwitting complicity. They agreed to meet up in a pub. Perhaps just two of them met at first, but the meetings clearly grew to involve five out of the seven women. They liked a drink and they were on safe neutral ground, away from loved ones. Their security was not seen to be compromised. They could talk freely without being watched. London is full of secrets, and they were dealing with theirs in the best way they knew how, by quietly and privately discussing it.”

  “But secrets have a way of escaping.”

  “Exactly. It was Jackie Quinten who remembered her colleague Masters, and went to him for advice. He didn’t know the others and probably only knew Mrs Quinten slightly, but she trusted him.”

  “No doubt she appealed to him as a humanitarian,” said Bryant. “But he betrayed her. He told Theseus about the possible information leak. They, in return, hired him to come up with a foolproof way of containing the damage. Imagine the scandal if the matter got out to the press. It was an appealingly bizarre conjectural problem. And his solution was suitably peculiar to it.”

  “That’s right,” said April. “Masters was intrigued by the proposition. He decided that in order to commit the perfect crime an agent was needed, a fall guy. So he contacted various clinics and hospitals to ask them about the psychological profiles of their patients.”

  “And he found someone made for the job,” Bryant explained. “A man who would harm if carefully directed and provided with the correct means. It was Masters who placed the request to have Pellew released, with the weight of the MOD behind him. And armed with Pellew’s confidential patient records, it was Masters who gave him the syringes. Under those circumstances, how hard was it to get Pellew to fall back into his old habits, do you think? I mean, by pushing the right psychological buttons and supplying the method?”

  “So Theseus got the poor, deranged Pellew released through Masters, who offered him easy victims?” asked Longbright.

  “That’s right,” Bryant agreed. “All Pellew had to do was specify where and when he was prepared to commit the acts he had fantasised about for so long.”

  “And he wanted to perform his little psychodramas in pubs,” said Kershaw.

  “Of course; they were the only places in which he would operate. It was why he had kidnapped his girlfriend in the past, what had led to his original conviction. Masters would have known that.”

  “Stranger things have happened,” said May. “It could have been the perfect cover-up. With the deaths traceable only as far as a reoffending mental patient, there could be no sign of Theseus’s involvement. The entire matter would have been sealed, and the plan couldn’t be traced back. But no-one considered the idea that their killer might want to be caught. He started leaving behind clues.”

  “Funny how you only ever really find out what people are capable of when their plans go wrong,” said Longbright, thinking about the increasingly panicked Masters.

  “I hate to say I told you so.” Bryant gleamed. “Pellew knew he was being manipulated and hated it, so he set out to be caught. I can’t imagine the mental turmoil he must have been going through. No wonder he ended up running into the traffic before he could be brought to justice. But his death left others who could still go public.”

  “Masters had already gone to extraordinary lengths to comply with whatever Pellew said he needed to carry out Theseus’s cover-up,” said April, “and because he insisted on catching Carol Wynley on her way home, they were forced to fake up the front of a public house to lure her in – ”

  “I told you I hadn’t imagined it,” Bryant interrupted. “You all thought I was going barmy. Once Pellew had started, he couldn’t be stopped without giving the game away. By this time, Theseus must have been so desperate for the rest of Masters’s plan to work that they were prepared to hire a designer and a couple of scenery-shifters to knock up a simple trompe l’oeil, a false pub front that would lead into the dressed and emptied shop. They bribed the owner to close down for the evening, then put everything back in place afterwards. But they messed up. They used a couple of conflicting photographic references for the building, and constructed a pub that could not possibly exist. The Victoria had been built in 1845 but the cross wasn’t awarded until 1857. They compounded the error by including the clock just as it had appeared in my photograph. Wonderful news to Pellew, of course, who continued to sabotage their plans by leaving us clues in the pubs he picked. ‘Doctor,’ ‘seven belles,’ ‘conspiracy,’ things that weren’t as they seemed, even his own name. It was Pellew who left the photograph in the Exmouth Arms for us to find. Unfortunately, in keeping with the strange workings of his mind, these pointers proved so obscure that – ”

  “ – that no-one but you could have found him, Arthur,” said May, sipping his bitter.

  “I must admit, I do find myself intrigued by the strange pairing of Pellew and Masters. Pellew’s profile pegged him as an egotist unable to empathise with others. True to type, he appears to have been selfish, withdrawn, incapable of normal social interaction. How surprised must he have been by his sudden release? He was aware of the appalling nature of his actions – why else would he try to guarantee his own capture? But Masters’s behaviour, supposedly acting for the greater good, must have puzzled him. And Pellew was on a roll. Part of him was addicted to the thrill of the hunt, part of him was abominably ashamed. Still, the aberrant behaviour patterns that had been reawoken in him were enough to drive him to attack a woman who wasn’t on the list, purely out of desire.”

  “Jazmina Sherwin, the girl who was assaulted in the Albion, Barnsbury,” said Bimsley, grasping the bigger picture.

  “So, what happens now?” asked Longbright.

  “We have to go after Theseus,” said Bryant, without pausing to think.

  “We’ve got no status, no office, no dosh,” said Meera disconsolately. “And we’re working out of a pub.”

  “Besides, Theseus is a government outsource,” May reminded him. “How far do you honestly think you’ll get?”

  “When a democratic government is no longer accountable for its actions, it becomes a dictatorship. Besides, who says they even know what’s been going on? The Ministry of Defence is a law unto itself. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve hung Theseus out to dry.”

  Behind them, the door banged open and Raymond Land burst in wearing a plastic mackintosh, spraying water around like a retriever emerging from a pond. “Ah, here you all are. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.” He shook his umbrella violently, searching for somewhere to leave it.

  “Get you a drink?” asked Renfield.

  “No, no, can’t stop unfortunately, the wife will give me hell. Purely a business call.” He turned to his detectives and saw the paperwork spread on the table. “Should you be examining evidence in a pub?”

  “They’re only copies,” April explained. “Obviously the originals are safely stowed away.”

  “Quite. Understood. You should know that Leslie Faraday has promised to try and find you new accommodation as soon as possible. This won’t be forever, you know. You can’t operate out of a pub.”

  “Come off it, Raymondo,” said Bryant. “You know as well as I do that they’ve finally got us where they want us. What’s the likelihood of them rehousing the unit somewhere else?”

  “I do see your point, but I’m not here to discuss that. It’s rather more serious, I’m afraid.” He drew a fortifying breath. “To me has fallen the unpleasant task of placing you and Mr May under arrest.”

  �
��What on earth for?” asked May, startled.

  “Breach of the Official Secrets Act, I’m afraid.”

  “But we don’t operate under its jurisdiction.”

  “Since the Peculiar Crimes Unit is answerable to the Home Office, you are government employees. You have knowingly disseminated information from protected Ministry of Defence sources.”

  “I forwarded Jocelyn Roquesby’s computer files to the office terminal,” April admitted. “It never occurred to me that it was already in someone else’s hands – ”

  “So you’ll both have to come with me to West End Central and face charges.” Land’s determination faded into sheepishness.

  “We’d love to help you, vieux haricot, but I’m afraid it’s quite impossible,” said Bryant with a smirk. “You see, you’re in Ye Olde Mitre tavern.”

  “What has that got to do with anything?” asked Land.

  “Well, due to a mix-up with certain clauses in the Land Registry Act several centuries ago, Ye Olde Mitre is not, technically speaking, part of London, but in ancient Cambridgeshire. The City of London police have no jurisdiction in here.”

  “You’re having a laugh, aren’t you?” Land turned to the barman, dumbfounded. “He’s having a laugh, isn’t he? Is this true?”

  “I’m afraid so, mate,” said the barman. “No-one can be arrested within the pub or in the immediate environs of Ely Court. This isn’t London, it’s Cambridge. Don’t look at me, I’m Australian. You lot are the ones with the bloody silly laws.”

  Bryant coaxed his distraught boss to a stool and helped him from his mackintosh. “And as we’re not going to be leaving here until well after the last bell has sounded,” he said, “you might as well get another round in for all of us.”

  ∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧