Wild Chamber

by Christopher Fowler

  Bryant raised a pint of bitter so cloudy that it appeared to be deliberately hiding something. ‘I tried a substitution code,’ he explained, ‘but I didn’t get anywhere.’

  August took a chewed yellow pencil stub from behind his ear. ‘There are other ways to break cyphers. Assuming the paper was his, why did he throw it away?’

  ‘He could have dropped it, or simply finished with it.’

  ‘Which means that these pairs of numbers – 26, 28, 29, 2, 4, 8, 10, 11 – are probably dates, because it’s the eleventh today. And where you get dates you get locations. So if they’re places we have several recurring consonants, P, G and C.’ He made some calculations on the back of a receipt.

  ‘The death occurred in Clement Crescent,’ said Bryant. ‘An old lady scolded my partner for calling the site a park. She said it’s a garden, which is different. P and G – park and garden?’

  ‘What do you know about the man who left this?’

  ‘Very little,’ Bryant admitted. ‘He wears bright trainers that look like sponge bags with laces.’

  ‘If he was sleeping rough in parks, it could be a list of the other places where he’s been hiding out. Can you get the internet on your phone?’ August made it sound like a fabulous but barely feasible idea.

  Bryant cracked his knuckles in preparation. ‘It’s a bit touch and go, Dante. I tend to have an electromagnetic effect on gadgetry. Last week my bottom phoned someone in Taiwan.’

  ‘Oh, that happens to everyone, Arthur. I keep ordering pizzas every time I bend over. Try finding London Gardens Online for me and type in FHG.’

  It took Bryant several goes, but he got there. ‘Fenton House Garden. It’s in Hampstead.’

  ‘And FP?’

  ‘Finsbury Park.’

  After putting their heads together and trawling through the rest of the initials, a picture emerged. Their target had plotted a course around London, visiting Culpeper Community Garden, Camley Street Natural Park, Abney Park Cemetery, Gunnersbury Triangle Nature Reserve and something called Emslie Horniman’s Pleasance, a pleasance being a French term for a secluded garden.

  ‘So he keeps on the move to avoid detection,’ said Bryant, tasting his pint. ‘The first thing to do is find out if there have been any attacks in those parks. The progression’s wrong, though. If he deliberately set out to visit Clement Crescent, the last one should read CC. He’s gone off-piste. Why?’

  August smashed a bag of salt and vinegar crisps flat with his fist, tore it open, rolled a pickled egg in the crumbs and handed it to Bryant. As an accompaniment to a decent pint it was hardly delicate but shockingly delicious. ‘I’m afraid that’s rather more your area than mine. I can help you with his environment, though.’

  ‘Be my guest,’ said Bryant, nibbling his crunchy pickled egg.

  ‘London’s greenery is complicated. Parks are not gardens and gardens are not squares. They cover forty per cent of the city and form the so-called lungs of London. There are over 250 officially designated parks alone.’ August ticked off his fingers. ‘Then you’ve got burial grounds, woodlands, ancient forests, secret gardens, informal community parks, tended meadows, play areas, crescents, allotments, polygons, circuses, heaths and commons, each with a different character, and many are still separated by our old friend the English class system.’

  ‘Of course they are,’ said Bryant, whose childhood in the backstreets of Bethnal Green had been marked by a moment when the local children had all stopped playing to watch in awed silence as a gentleman passed by in a grey silk waistcoat and watch chain. The detective had been an outsider then, and still was now.

  ‘Gardens were for communal use,’ August explained, clenching his eyes and releasing them in what proved to be a disturbing physical tic, ‘but squares kept out the rabble and provided bosky dells where like could meet like, so that the social classes wouldn’t have to mix. There are still hundreds of them all across the city and most go unnoticed. Some parks, like Hyde Park, are as old as London itself – both Hyde and Green Park have ancient tree circles. They remain for the general use of all, while others, like Victoria Park in the East End, were constructed to keep out “diseased miasmas”. It was believed that pestilence travelled through ill humours, and the parks could provide a germ barrier between the sick poor and the healthy rich.’

  ‘But some of the places on this list aren’t used by the rich,’ said Bryant. ‘I’ve been to Abney Park Cemetery many times and I know it can be a pretty rough, wild corner of London.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ August agreed. ‘There are all kinds of liminal spaces. At the bottom of the list you had the pleasure gardens, which were more like disreputable funfairs, with concert halls, skating rinks, cafés and beer halls that turned rowdy after dark. In such areas base human nature was quick to surface, and the lands were used for liaisons.’

  ‘That wasn’t just limited to the working-class parks, surely.’ Bryant licked his forefinger and dusted it around his crisp crumbs.

  ‘No, of course not.’ August’s great eyes rolled. ‘Russell Square was rife with sexual goings-on after dark, and in Samuel Pepys’s time Green Park was littered with copulating couples. As for Cremorne Gardens near Battersea, James Whistler might have painted his Nocturne in Black and Gold there but it was little more than a meat market. Look at photos of Soho Square between the wars – they show a wild, uncultivated spot. Green Park still had grazing rights for sheep. Nobody rented out chunks for corporate events and film shows, as they do now. The royal parks were charged to “improve” their users, which is why there are still concerts of popular classics at lunchtimes. The squares were seen as extensions of the typical London house; they were overly pruned and domesticated, like the Ladbroke Estate in Kensington, which was designed so that children could be dropped into them like goldfish into a bowl. We’re so used to seeing these places and assuming they’re safe that we barely notice they’re there.’

  ‘So if our killer moves from one secluded green space to the next, why does he need the piece of paper to guide him?’ Bryant asked. ‘Why not just head to the quietest spot and wait for a victim?’

  ‘Parks are not fungible,’ replied August. ‘Each has its own character. Perhaps he has done this before and plans to do it again, and matches each park to the nature of his victim.’

  ‘Do me a favour, Dante, don’t try to be a detective.’ Bryant looked into the fire’s dancing flames. ‘Maybe he just sleeps in the parks. They’re sheltered and separated from the street by hedges, and if he gets in and out at the right time he wouldn’t be disturbed. But why keep a shorthand list? Dante, is there such a thing as a homeless person’s code? Could this be a recommendation list of which places are safe, and on what dates?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ replied the academic, ‘although I’ve never heard of such a thing. Tribal groups appear and vanish with such speed in this city that it’s impossible to catalogue them all. I do try, though. While I was assembling the exhibition for the museum, many of the street groups I was planning to feature broke up or re-formed under new identities. Online social networks have made street life much more fluid. The classes have become more permeable.’

  ‘I have to get back,’ said Bryant, draining his pint. ‘I’d like to say you’ve been a great help. If you think of anything useful, let me know. He’s going to do it again.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ August asked.

  ‘Because he thinks he got away with it,’ said Bryant, gathering his hat and scarf.

  Kings Place on York Way was one of the few new buildings of which John May wholeheartedly approved. It housed a national newspaper, two concert halls, an art gallery and a restaurant, and its airy atrium led to the sky-reflecting canal basin, where the winter air was filled with sweet woodsmoke from houseboats and barges. As he walked across the pale marble tiles May could hear the raw brass of a modernist piece by Michael Nyman being rehearsed on the floor below.

  Charles Haywood Frost met May in the atrium’s coffee bar. He so resem
bled a music lover’s ideal representation of an orchestra conductor, tall and elegantly slender, with an alarming mass of curled black hair designed to flop forward during bows, that it was hard to tell which came first, the image or the man. Either way, he seemed very young to be commanding an orchestra.

  ‘This is the first break I’ve had today,’ he complained, settling with a cardboard coffee cup on the other side of the table. Beyond them, excited schoolchildren disembarked from a barge on the basin. ‘We’re rehearsing Tavener’s The Protecting Veil. Critics always underestimate just how punishing minimalist works are on members of the orchestra.’

  ‘They’re pretty hard on my ears, too,’ May replied.

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised,’ said Frost. ‘We get a lot of unlikely converts. It’s an exacting musical form, but it’s fascinating to watch in live performance. A piece can really come alive in this space.’

  May studied the smiling young man sitting opposite him, restlessly jiggling his left leg. ‘You do appreciate that this is a murder investigation?’ he asked.

  Frost’s face froze. ‘Yes, of course, how stupid of me. You must think me utterly inconsiderate. I didn’t know Helen for very long.’

  ‘But you were lovers.’

  ‘We weren’t partners in the conventional sense. My work is more important to me than anything right now, and Helen didn’t want a formal relationship. I understand she was changed by the loss of her son. She blamed herself for not being there when he needed her. She told me Charlie’s death altered the course of her life.’

  ‘How did you meet?’ asked May, moving his coat to allow a pair of violinists to seat themselves and their instruments.

  ‘She came to a Vaughan Williams concert and I remember noticing her after, sitting in the front row in tears. The Lark Ascending is a pastoral piece; it doesn’t usually make people break down, so I talked to her. Her husband had bought the tickets for their wedding anniversary but they were divorcing, and she had come alone. I consoled her and I suppose that’s what I became, a source of consolation.’

  ‘Do you know if she had any enemies at work? If she was getting trouble from her husband?’

  ‘She told me nothing about her working life.’ Frost rested long fingers along the arms of his chair. ‘Obviously I never met the husband, although I know he had very strong feelings about her.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘They fought a lot after their son died. I think he had an affair with his assistant. Nothing serious, a one-night stand. He confessed to Helen but I imagine his timing couldn’t have been much worse.’

  ‘What else do you know about him?’

  ‘He made his money from a company that developed shopping malls in South East Asia, but ran it into the ground, then worked for some property firm in the City. From what I understand the nanny also had a soft spot for Mr Forester. She blamed Helen for being a bad mother and so on. Look, I was on the outside of it all and that suited me fine.’

  ‘You two seem to have had little in common. What was the attraction?’

  Frost seemed genuinely at a loss. ‘Helen liked music. She was lonely. She was easy to be with. We weren’t involved in each other’s lives, which made being together simpler – if that makes any sense.’

  May understood perfectly. London was full of uncommitted men and women who kept their personal and public lives separate. ‘Mr Frost, I need to build up a mental picture of Helen Forester. In these cases we tend to come in after it’s too late to fully understand someone, so we have to work backward through the people who knew them. Anything you can tell me would be helpful.’

  Frost chose his words with care. ‘She kept people at arm’s length. I imagine she was very different before she lost her son.’

  ‘The boy’s nanny,’ said May, checking his notepad. ‘Did Mrs Forester tell you anything else about her?’

  ‘We went to dinner with her and her boyfriend. It was an uncomfortable evening. I couldn’t understand why we were even there.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Helen talked about work. The nanny talked about children. They didn’t have anything in common.’

  ‘They were linked by Mrs Forester’s son, Mr Frost.’

  The conductor looked as if the thought had never crossed his mind. ‘I suppose they were. Something odd happened to the husband.’ He looked away to the barges drifting past beyond the glass. ‘He was kicked out of his company and they hushed it up.’

  ‘His boss is unwilling to talk to us,’ said May, although he had written ‘Forester Asst’ on his pad.

  ‘Apparently he had trouble telling his wife what had happened, and carried on going to work as if nothing was wrong. When she found out, it caused the final split between them.’ He looked at May uncomfortably. ‘Why would anyone do something like this? It wasn’t a sexual assault, was it?’

  ‘No, but she may have known her attacker,’ May admitted.

  From the bottom of the stairs a bell rang, making Frost start. ‘I’m afraid that’s my rehearsal cue.’

  May watched Frost leave. The conductor had a commanding presence. It was not difficult to imagine him walking into a hotel with Mrs Forester, greeting the staff with natural self-assurance. May had run a check on Frost’s background before the meeting: Harrow and Cambridge, then the Conservatoire de Paris and a smooth step into conducting his own company, the Orchestra of New Minimalism. He was thirty-one years old and heading for international fame. His liaison with Helen Forester had already been forgotten.

  As he walked back to the unit, May thought about the Foresters: a high-flying couple committed to their careers, their only child being cared for by a nanny, and the sudden terrible loss that had made them re-evaluate their lives. Bryant was an academic, not a psychologist. May sensed that his partner was struggling with the case. Perhaps it was up to him to find out what exactly had happened to Helen Forester in a small London park, and why.

  He made one more stop before meeting up with his partner, to see Melissa Byrne, Forester’s assistant. He met her in a fake-artisanal chain coffee shop across the street from her office. Byrne was in her mid-twenties, slender, dark and attractive enough to worry any wife. She had come out without a coat, and sat hugging her arms on the chair opposite, anxious to leave.

  ‘Jeremy was released for violating financial regulations,’ she explained. ‘That’s all I know. He was marched out of the building, so it had to be serious.’

  ‘How did you get on with him?’

  ‘Let’s just say I wasn’t being paid enough to share his passion for making the company money. He had kept me working late a lot. He refused to believe I was actually working at home on Fridays and never once asked me how I was, even when I’d been in hospital.’

  ‘But you were shocked when he was dismissed.’

  ‘Of course – anyone would be. I called him to see if he was OK but he never answered his mobile. Eventually I got up the courage to call the house phone, and his wife picked up. She didn’t know where he’d gone. After he was fired nobody could get hold of him.’

  ‘Why were you trying?’ May asked.

  ‘Well, we worked together, I was worried …’ She knew her reply sounded lame.

  ‘Was it during a business trip that the two of you slept together?’ Byrne’s eyes hardened. She was still deciding how to answer when May continued. ‘Melissa, you said it took courage to call the house phone. I know he told his wife about it. Do you think if he hadn’t, it would have turned into something more between you two?’

  ‘God no, that was a mistake! Our flight was cancelled because of a French air traffic control strike. We were stranded overnight in the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. We were both kind of angry and got drunk.’

  ‘What were you angry about?’

  ‘I’d just been dumped by the guy I was seeing and he’d had a fight with his wife over the funding of an art gallery. Why would he have told Helen? I mean, what was the point?’

  ‘I guess he loved her,’ said M
ay.

  ‘Well, she’s dead now, and he’s lost everything,’ said Byrne bitterly, ‘so who cares what happened once in a hotel room?’

  13

  ‘IF A FISH MURDERED A LADY FISH’

  The mature trees and unruly grasslands of Green Park separated it from other open spaces in central London.

  The meadows behind Piccadilly had once contained wilder prey than the surrounding raucous streets; highwaymen, hunters and duellists took the lives of animals and citizens alike. The fields had contained lodges and libraries, an ice-house and the two vast temples of Peace and Concord, both of which were accidentally exploded in fireworks festivals. This licence for wildness had been tamed by the arrival of two grand houses on the park’s borders: Buckingham Palace and the Ritz Hotel. Yet there remained something undomesticated about the place. Unlike most other parks, Green Park had never been closed to the public at night.

  Tonight two figures could be glimpsed between the trees, climbing towards Constitution Hill. Passing joggers might have imagined that these gentlemen of mature status were spirits strolling through the grand golden gates on the way to their club for an evening snifter, followed perhaps by a partridge pie, but if they had stopped they would have overheard a conversation about death and darkness that was all too real.

  ‘The blade that was buried under the rose bush has an ornate red and blue enamelled handle,’ said John May. ‘Dan says it’s handcrafted and unusually well balanced, probably an illegal import.’

  Bryant batted his stick at a pile of leaves. ‘Is it valuable?’

  ‘We can’t find a match on any database, so it’s not a stolen antique. It looks modern but seems to have been specially prepared for its owner. It’s been sharpened by a professional. We have a list of specialists but it only covers London.’

  ‘You checked that it wasn’t Ritchie Jackson’s, I assume? He wasn’t using it to trim plant stalks or something?’