The Victoria Vanishes

by Christopher Fowler

  'Show me those names.' The archivist held out a meaty fist. 'It would help if I knew what you expected to find.'

  'If I knew that I wouldn't need your help, would I? Something to do with pub histories and how they got their names. I can't help thinking the murderer might somehow have left us some pointers.'

  'Why the hell would he do that?'

  'Because he wants to be caught.'

  'That makes no bleeding sense at all but I suppose you know what you're doing,' said Golifer. All right, here, first one up, the Seven Stars, back of the law courts. A nice little boozer; I've been there a few times myself.'

  'It's where the second victim, Naomi Curtis, died. Does it say how the pub got its name?'

  Golifer turned the photograph over and read the typed caption that ran across the back.'"Penderel's Oak is the name of the oak tree which Charles the Second hid inside after the Battle of Worcester, which is why so many public houses are named the 'Royal Oak.'"'

  'No, Oliver, that's the wrong caption.'

  'Bugger, they've been transposed. I had an assistant here for a while but had to fire him. Hang on.' They searched for the photograph of the Penderel's Oak pub, and checked its description. 'Right, here's the Seven Stars. "Built 1602, this public house was originally named The League of Seven Stars, the sign representing the seven provinces of Holland." Is that any help?'

  'I don't know.' Bryant screwed up one eye in thought. 'The number seven, a Dutch connection, could be anything. Go back to the first pub, The Old Dr Butler's Head in Mason's Avenue.'

  Golifer riffled through the folds of photographs, but came up empty-handed. 'No pictures, but I know about that one. It's named after some nutter, Dr Butler, who claimed he was a neurologist, but his treatment consisted of chucking his patients down a trapdoor into the Thames from London Bridge to scare the merde out of them. Apparently James the First thought it was a worthwhile pastime because he appointed him Court Physician, but then James was obsessed with the idea that witchcraft would destroy the fabric of England. He wrote a barking-mad treatise on demonology that resulted in hundreds of Scottish people being put to death and buried under the streets of Edinburgh. Old Butler developed a brand of ale with so-called medicinal properties, and set up a string of taverns to sell it in, and that—The Old Dr Butler's Head— is the last surviving pub. Try me on another.'

  'You're a mine of fantastically useless information, Ollie. How about this, the Old Bell tavern, Fleet Street, scene of the fourth victim's death. Anything on that?'

  After a few minutes of diligent searching, the archivist pulled out a dog-eared Victorian photograph. He flipped it before Bryant.

  'The frontage is right, but that's the wrong name.' He tapped the picture. A sign hanging above the entrance depicted seven golden bells.

  'Maybe it used to be called the Seven Bells. Doesn't mean anything.' Bryant consulted his list. 'All right, how about The Victoria Cross, Bloomsbury, which Carol Wynley died out-side?'

  They dragged out several mouldy cardboard boxes from beneath the counters and emptied their contents across the planked floor. 'You're a pain in the arse, Arthur,' Golifer complained.'Do I get anything out of this disruption and chaos?'

  'The sense of inner calm that arises from knowing you've helped London's finest in the course of their duty,' said Bryant promptly. 'This place is a fire risk. Have you got insurance?'

  'Don't you threaten me, mate. Here we go, look at that.' He slipped a creased sepia photograph from its protective sleeve and held it up for Bryant to examine. Two straw-hatted publicans stood proudly in front of the pub window. Above them

  part of the signage could be read: Ales — Stouts — Porter

  Established 1845 — The Vict—.

  'That's the sign I saw. What exactly is porter?' Bryant wondered.

  'The name of the drink changed. It used to be called Three Threads, because it was made up of stale old ale mixed with good young beer to freshen it, plus a third stronger beer called Twopenny. The threads refer to the taps on the casks. The resulting mixture was dirt cheap, so it became the chosen tipple of the Covent Garden porters, and the name "porter" stuck.'

  'How could I have seen a pub called The Victoria Cross eighty years after it was demolished?'

  'You couldn't, old chum.' Oliver chucked down the picture. 'There wasn't such a place.'

  'What are you talking about?'

  'The Victoria Cross wasn't awarded until 1857. When this pub was built, the medal didn't yet exist. The name must have been changed after that date. Old pubs sometimes dumped their original names if they got bad reputations.' Golifer pulled out a photographers' magnifier and examined the lettering above the window. 'Judging by the width of this frontage I reckon the first name was shorter, probably The Victoria.'

  'But I specifically remember the date, 1845. I remember the painted sign depicting the medal.'

  'There's a simple explanation,' said Golifer. 'They changed the sign but not the etched detailing on the glass.'

  'No. All of the other building details match the pub I saw,' Bryant insisted. 'It's some kind of deliberate anachronism, put there to trick me.'

  'Do you realise how bloody paranoid that sounds?' Golifer handed him the photograph. 'Go on, take it, at least I'll be able to bill you.'

  'I agree, it's utter madness,' Bryant said miserably, 'but how am I supposed to rationalise what I saw? Try one more for me, the Exmouth Arms, Exmouth Street. It's where three of the victims were photographed together.'

  Golifer sighed and began searching the alphabetised racks again. This time he found a more recent photograph, colour, taken in the 1970s, featuring hipsters with tiresome haircuts forcing a pose outside the pub, surrounded by black plastic rubbish sacks left in one of the many refuse collectors' disputes of the time.

  'Okay, a case in point, the sign carved into the wall of the saloon says 1915, see?' Golifer held the picture so close that Bryant had to back away to examine it clearly. 'But the back of the photo has 1816 as the pub's foundation date. Says here it was originally named the Viscount Exmouth, presumably after the first Viscount Exmouth, as his dates were something like 1757 to 1833. He was a British naval officer, actually a vice-admiral, who turned up in the Horatio Hornblower stories. He was the hero of the bombardment of Algiers in 1816 that ended Christian slavery. And according to this, he was also the father of one Pownoll Bastard Exmouth. Bloody extraordinary choice of name for his son, I must say. So, as the pub was there before the rest of the street, it must have lent its name to Exmouth Market. Anything of use so far?' 'Not that I can think of.'

  'Exmouth's family motto: Deo Non Fortuna—Through God Not By Chance. Nice family crest, silver argent, red chevron, three silver mascles. Natty painting of the admiral on the pub's sign.'

  'What was the viscount's actual name?' 'Edward Pellew.'

  Bryant's eyes widened. 'Holy jumping Moses, I think my memory suddenly improved.' 'Why do you say that?'

  'I remember that name. Let me think. I need a cup of char, strong, Indian, lots of it.'

  Golifer had been hoping to get some work done, but now resigned himself to acting as a butler to his old friend. 'It was back in 1994,' Bryant told him once they were seated in Golifer's cramped kitchen behind the store. 'We had a case of suspected kidnap come in. A teenaged girl had been missing for over forty-eight hours, and it seemed clear to us that her boyfriend was somehow involved in the disappearance. At first he refused to speak to anyone, but John and I tricked him into admitting that he had been with her on the night of her disappearance. During the subsequent interview, we discovered that he had rendered her unconscious and imprisoned her in the basement of his mother's pub. Luckily, we found her and were able to effect her release. The odd thing was that he really seemed to care for the girl, and simply couldn't help himself. It was a very unusual case.' 'What happened to him?'

  'He was judged to be in possession of his faculties at the time of the kidnap, but a subsequent court of appeal found him mentally incompeten
t to stand trial. He was committed to the secure wing of an NHS mental hospital called Twelve Elms Cross, somewhere in East Kent. I distinctly remember the case because John went down to see him soon after his admission, when he was undergoing therapy. He was very interested in the boy. I think we both thought there was a benefit in understanding what drove him to act the way he did.'

  'I don't see what this has to do with Viscount Exmouth,' said Golifer, mystified.

  Bryant raised a knowing eyebrow. 'The lad's name. It was Anthony Pellew.'

  27

  LAST ORDERS

  D

  on't you see?' said Bryant. 'He's leaving clues in the histories of the pubs, knowing we'd track him down. The Seven Stars—seven victims, perhaps some kind of Dutch connection. The Victoria Cross—an anachronism, an impossibility I was meant to pick up on. It's true that there are some pubs I haven't worked out how to fit into the picture yet, but then there's the Exmouth Arms, chosen because it bears his own surname. How desperately he wants to be caught! We must oblige him immediately.'

  'Really, Arthur, this insatiable desire of yours to tie every-thing into neat parcels is infuriating.'

  'Then prove me wrong. Contact Twelve Elms Cross and find out if Tony Pellew was released before the first murder occurred.'

  May made the call while Bryant impatiently slammed about among his books, but it took the best part of an hour for staff to collate the information they needed. With the receiver crooked under his ear, he gave his partner an update.

  'Looks like you're right. Pellew was transferred to the Broadhampton Clinic two years ago, then released back into the community three weeks before the death of Mrs Kellerman, the first victim.'

  Bryant's face crumpled in puzzlement. 'The Broadhampton's not a secure hospital, at least not in the same way as Twelve Elms Cross. Pellew was dangerous; you of all people know that. Why would they have transferred him at all?'

  'The head nurse sounds uncomfortable. She says it's a matter of some delicacy. I don't think she'll give us anything else over the phone.'

  'Then we must go and see her at once. Tell her we'll come today.'

  The train from Victoria was almost empty. 'I wasn't planning to leave London again for a while,' said Bryant, heaving himself into a seat after gingerly removing sandwich wrappers and a Coke can from it. 'Not after our trek into the snowdrifts of Dartmoor. That little escapade played havoc with my chilblains.'

  'Nobody has chilblains anymore,' said May. 'This is the twenty-first century. Global warming has knocked them on the head.'

  A glance at my plates of meat would reveal a different story.'

  May sighed. 'Come on then, get it all out—bunions, chilblains, Pakamacs, cap bombs, Jamboree Bags, MacFisheries, bombsites, Shirley Abicair and her zither, real coal fires, smog, gabardine, milk stout, rag-and-bone men—let's hear about all the weird old English stuff you miss from the past,' he cried in exasperation. 'It's amazing how you never remember the dreadful things like TB and whooping cough and only two channels on the telly. I wish you could hear yourself sometimes.'

  Bryant gave a disdainful sniff. 'You can still get milk stout, actually. Trains have lost the odd smell they had when the carriages were separate, have you noticed? There was an odour of iron filings, mica and dust. Now we all have to be communal and watch each other eating while staring from windows savaged by graffiti. Did you see the youths on the platform back there? When I was a kid we had to go to the circus if we wanted to see the fat lady and the tattooed man. Now they're all over the place.'

  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 to-day 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 t
hawed 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 precis. 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.'