Wild Chamber

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘If the ticket stub was hers,’ said May, ‘then Maggie is wrong and there was no third man at Clement Crescent. So how did the ticket end up in Russell Square?’

  The question hung in the air as Raymond Land appeared in the operations room with the morning papers. ‘Look at this. “Experimental Police Unit” – that’s this dump, apparently – “forced illegal closure of London parks”. Faraday’s hung us out to dry. Darren Link’s taking the bloody case away! We have to hand over all our files this weekend so that the CID can start afresh first thing on Monday morning.’

  ‘Then we’ve still got a bit of time,’ said Bryant. ‘If we delay giving them the documentation until Sunday night we could be in with a chance.’

  ‘How would we do that?’ asked May.

  Bryant gave a shrug. ‘I don’t know – tell them our computers are down or something. Surely Dan can help us make up some rubbish about the operating system being upgraded or our passwords being mislaid. He could say we’ve caught an infection.’

  ‘You mean a virus,’ said Land.

  ‘Yes, that’s it, or we could simply barricade the doors.’

  Land studied his most senior detective as if examining an unknown biological specimen. ‘What is it with you? Why don’t you ever give up?’

  ‘For the same reason that you give up so easily; it’s in my nature,’ Bryant countered. ‘“Accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope” – Martin Luther King, Jr.’

  ‘You don’t understand, Raymond,’ said May. ‘Darren Link thinks we’re responsible for getting the parks closed, but it’s Faraday following his own agenda. We need to set the record straight.’

  ‘So you have to help us by keeping Link off our backs,’ Bryant pleaded. ‘He’s not a bad chap, just rule-bound and prone to outbursts of violence. It’s probably best not to tell him the absolute truth. Say the two Daves went through a cable and it’ll take us until Monday morning to get everything running again.’

  ‘I will not be complicit in this!’ Land protested. ‘My pension is on the line. You two don’t have to worry about retirement because you’re going to be carried out of this office feet first, but I have a caravan on the Isle of Wight to pay for. I want my time in the sun, doing what every other retired copper does, reading and drinking until my liver packs up. I’ve earned it.’

  ‘Thank you for that, mon petit crapaud. Your role in this is easy: call Link and lie through your dental crockery. Make him believe we’re contrite and that we’ve already closed up the case all nice and ready for him, the problem being that we can’t access it for forty-eight hours.’

  Land looked as if he was about to have a heart attack. ‘And what if you fail? What happens then?’

  ‘We hand over the files, just as we promised. What could possibly go wrong?’

  ‘I hate it when you say that. What if he wants to come around here?’

  ‘Tell him the two Daves are having the place fumigated because they’re concerned that the coffin in the basement is part of a medieval plague pit and there could be microorganic pathogens harbouring Black Death bacilli.’

  Land’s eyes narrowed. ‘Have you ever lied to me like this?’

  ‘To be honest, I can’t actually recall the last time I told you the truth,’ said Bryant placidly. ‘Except just then.’ He leaned back, studying the operations room whiteboard. Upon it had been drawn every link and interview, arranged in a messy timeline covered in arrows, dotted lines, scribbles, pieces of coloured wool, question marks, photographs, Post-it notes, taped scraps of paper and, for some reason, the lid from a packet of wine gums.

  ‘I don’t know why you keep staring at that,’ said Land, mystified. ‘It looks like an ordnance survey map of the Himalayas.’

  ‘Yes, but somewhere in that mountain lies the answer,’ said Bryant, brushing his fingertips over the connections and dead ends. ‘It’s right here in front of us, waiting to be picked out. The CID sometimes coordinate as many as thirty thousand interviews in their own murder cases. They’ll take maybe three thousand statements and list hundreds of suspects. We make do with a staff of ten and a cat.’

  ‘For God’s sake, be honest and admit for once that you haven’t the faintest idea what you’re looking for,’ said Land, irritated.

  ‘Oh, but I do know what I’m looking for.’ Bryant widened his cornflower-blue eyes. ‘Proof that my instincts are correct. John and I may disagree on the purpose of the deaths but in a way I think we’re both right.’

  ‘I hate it when you talk in riddles,’ Land complained. ‘If I find out you’re withholding information—’

  ‘But I’m not.’ Bryant waved his hand across the anarchy of the whiteboard. ‘It’s all here. The trick is seeing a simple pattern in all this chaos. We don’t have the resources to track five hundred suspects so we have to make something else work in our favour, and you know what that is? A perspective so perversely eccentric that no one in their right mind would think of using it.’

  ‘What?’ Land had the look of a man in a nose-diving plane who’d just realized he hadn’t paid attention to the safety demonstration. ‘That’s your big idea for making an arrest this weekend, is it? Along with sabotaging the computers? Well, heaven help us. I needn’t have worried; it’s obviously all in hand. I’ll go ahead and book my Isle of Wight watercolour course for next week, then.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that just yet,’ cautioned Bryant. ‘I may have to break the law first. I need to see the two Daves about borrowing a pickaxe.’

  37

  ‘HE’S IDEALIZING THE FEMALE FORM’

  ‘And so the mighty machinery of the criminal investigation unit moves into high gear once more,’ said Colin Bimsley, dangling himself over the end of a steel rubbish container. ‘The old man declares we’ll have one final mad dash at the case before losing it, and what do we uncover? The remains of a dinner party, a deflated exercise ball and a dead cat.’

  ‘How come Heidi hasn’t got her hands dirty yet?’ asked Meera, sorting through the reeking yellow Lidl bags that had been stacked beside the bin. ‘“Welcome to London, get some rubber gloves on, you’ll be poking through dirty nappies this weekend.” Why is it always us?’

  ‘We make too good a job of it.’ Colin fished out a perfume bottle and uncorked the top to sniff it. ‘There’s still some left in this. What do you think?’

  Meera was disgusted. ‘I’m not dabbing that on my skin. You don’t know where it’s been.’

  ‘It’s a knock-off, anyway. Chanel only has one N.’ Colin dropped the bottle back in the container. ‘You wouldn’t last long as one of those recyclers who take comestibles past their sell-by dates from bins.’

  ‘Have you ever been to India?’ said Meera.

  ‘No, have you?’

  ‘That’s not the point. My grandparents came from a city they still can’t stop calling Bombay, and once they got here the first thing they did was buy a vacuum cleaner. They spent years trying to get away from mess and dirt. Thank God they can’t see me now. They wouldn’t think we’d progressed very far.’ Rocking back on her heels, she snapped her gloves off. ‘I’m done. We’re not going to find anything useful here.’

  They had searched through detritus from a number of households this week. Last night they’d checked waste bins used by Ritchie Jackson (disinfected, eerily neat) and Sun Dark’s restaurant (tangy, noodle-heavy). This morning the last search on their list smacked of desperation. As Jackson’s former crush, Sofia Anzelmo was only tangentially connected with the case, but they were running out of leads.

  ‘There’s a big stack of magazines that look like they came from her flat,’ said Colin, pulling out some food-sticky copies of OK! magazine and Education Today. ‘She was a primary school teacher for a time, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Yeah, somewhere over Leytonstone way. Now she works in a recruitment agency off Baker Street. Go on then, chuck me half of that pile, we’ll get through it quicker.’ Meera dropped beside Colin on the concrete platform by the bins, rif
fling through magazines. ‘“Most women wear the wrong bra size”. We’re not going to bring this bloke in under forty-eight hours without any fresh leads, are we?’

  Colin checked inside a pizza box, but Meera slapped him. ‘Let’s say, for the sake of argument,’ he said, ‘that Jeremy Forester knocked off his nanny and his wife. He could be using the whole hiding-from-debtors alibi as a double bluff. Most murders are committed by the marital partner. I could see you murdering someone.’

  ‘I wouldn’t murder a husband, I’d make him suffer by never leaving. “How to get buttocks like Kim Kardashian”. God, I could be at home doing laundry instead of this.’ Meera straightened out her legs. ‘I’ve got bacon rind all over my boots. My flat looks like an Ikea storage facility. I’m starting to smell like a bin bag. I’m so rarely at my flat that the council doesn’t even call round to see if I’m dead.’

  ‘You could have got married to that doctor bloke,’ Colin reminded her.

  ‘What, that’s my choice, is it? Someone my mother picked out for me or bin duty with you?’

  Colin Bimsley had never been good at disguising his feelings. Right now he looked like a slapped puppy.

  ‘Sorry, Colin. Being with you isn’t the bad part. I’d rather look at you than look at a bin.’ She set about pulling apart copies of Empire film magazine. ‘What have we here? Cult Cinema Club – isn’t that the place Lauren Posner went to?’ She turned the page. ‘There’s a special offer for an event, underlined – Narratives of Guilt and Conscience. You don’t think she knew Posner, do you? That would be a real lead.’

  ‘Let’s ask her,’ said Colin.

  Bryant found himself in the vast colour-plate restoration room of the British Library, this time with art history lecturer Peregrine Summerfield, the self-styled Ozymandias of Stoke Newington, who had abandoned a promising career as a painter in order to teach. It had not surprised the detective to discover that Summerfield and Kirkpatrick were half-brothers. They might have been twins, but for the fact that Summerfield appeared more benign. He favoured suits and ties (not that much of a tie could be seen beneath his immense ginger beard), and didn’t look as if he wanted to beat people up for making grammatical errors.

  ‘All hail, senex investigator,’ said Peregrine, setting aside some kind of arcane wooden calligraphy tool and pumping Bryant’s hand vigorously. ‘I heard you’d been in. If you’re after our Mr Kirkpatrick, he’s away attending a course on cryptographic semantics. I’m covering for him.’

  ‘Actually it’s you I wanted to see,’ Bryant replied. ‘You may remember we talked in the past about symbolism in paintings. You were most helpful in a couple of our investigations.’

  ‘Yes, you promised to buy me a beer after and never did,’ said Summerfield. ‘Apparently you do that to everyone.’

  ‘Well, I’m about to do it again,’ said Bryant.

  ‘Ask away, why not?’ Summerfield sighed. ‘I’ve nothing better to do. I’ve given up trying to get schoolkids to look at art. What they really want to do is go to M&M World. I’d only take a child there if I hated it enough to want its teeth to fall out. What’s wrong with the National Gallery? Since when did Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors become less enlightening than a dancing chocolate?’

  ‘I forgot, you don’t like the modern world much, do you?’

  Summerfield looked mystified. ‘What’s to like? In my world it’s still 1752, but I have to stick my head out into the rain occasionally to buy a prawn sarnie. I can’t tell a compote from a compost but I know I don’t need three hundred branches of the same coffee shop in one city. Nothing gets better. We’re all treated like babies. We’re told that doors open outward and escalators stop moving at the end. Next they’ll be reminding us to breathe in and out. Strewth, the rich panoply of life from Primark cradle to Co-op grave laid out in all its artery-hardening glory. No wonder the bloody suicide rate has gone up.’

  ‘I take it you don’t get out much these days,’ said Bryant, noting that Summerfield used his desk as a dining table and possibly a bedroom.

  ‘No, and I’m staying where no one who’s interested in baking shows or singing competitions will ever venture. I pray that when we find life on another planet it turns out to be a lot more fun than ours and that they have relaxed immigration laws. I really do prefer 1752. If we’d had the internet back then people would have spent their days looking at Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee, not shots of Justin Bieber’s dick. What can I do you for?’

  ‘It’s about women being strangled in parks.’

  ‘Actually, I did see that in this morning’s Metro. You got all the parks shut. Well done you. What’re you going to do next, get Admiralty Arch turned into a Jamie’s Italian?’

  ‘We’ve been set up, Peregrine.’

  ‘Hey, I read it in a commuter free sheet so it must be true.’

  ‘I need to understand the killer’s motives.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be trying to figure out who it is first?’

  ‘That’s not how it works with me,’ said Bryant. ‘I’m drawing a blank with traditional methods, and thought it might be helpful to look at the lessons we can draw from art.’

  Summerfield had a scratch at his beard. ‘That’s a bit like deciding what crops to plant by checking a bus timetable, but go on.’

  ‘I was thinking about scandals involving nude women in paintings. Strangulation, you see. The victims weren’t disfigured or even – disrespected. I know that’s a bizarre thing to say, considering they were murdered. Their bodies weren’t found as they fell.’

  ‘You mean he arranges them?’

  ‘Not exactly. He tidies them up a little, moving the limbs, and gives them some grace in death.’

  ‘Do their eyes remain open?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘I think I can help you. Come with me.’ Summerfield led the way to an immense metal bookcase in the corner of the floor and pulled down a large volume of art prints. ‘Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of female nude, the virgin and the whore. In the former grouping you get the Nereids, nymphs, goddesses, the Madonna. So without the benefit of clothing to denote class, what distinguishes the latter? The gaze.’ He tapped a colour plate. ‘Goya’s La maja desnuda was commissioned to be hung in a private cabinet filled with nude paintings, the late-eighteenth-century equivalent of a porn stash. It wasn’t her body that caused outrage, but her eyes. She’s looking directly at you without any shame. Goya repainted her with clothing but the effect is still the same, almost more so because she’s in modern attire. Goya was charged with moral depravity but escaped prosecution. The two versions hang side by side at the Prado in Madrid.’ He flipped a page to reveal another nude. ‘The Rokeby Venus by Velázquez features a naked woman with her back to you, but she’s looking directly at the viewer in a hand-mirror. The gaze is pure when downcast, offensive when direct. Women must show guilt, especially if they’re supine and indoors. Move them outside and even the most brazen automatically become virginal. Pastoral surroundings always restore virginity – with one exception.’

  ‘Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe,’ said Bryant.

  ‘Exactly. Two men – Manet’s brother and brother-in-law – enjoy a picnic fully clothed while a naked woman smiles and blatantly stares at the viewer. The woods of Paris were filled with prostitutes but nobody ever mentioned it, and suddenly here was this disgusting painting that confronted the truth and normalized it, exposing the hypocrisy surrounding female sexuality.’

  ‘You think he kills them in parks because it will reveal the truth about them?’

  Summerfield closed the book and replaced it. ‘What are parks but pieces of earthly paradise in the city? He’s not just restoring their purity, he’s preparing them for heaven.’

  ‘So he’s idealizing the female form.’

  Summerfield shrugged. ‘Dunno, mate, you’re the cop.’

  While he was there, Bryant decided to look in on Duncan Aston. He found the map restorer hard at work on an immense d
iagram of Joseph Bazalgette’s great water main for London. ‘I was passing and wondered if I might pick your brains?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘I’m not sure I have any left after staring at this thing all day,’ said Aston, pushing back the sleeves of his sweater.

  Bryant peered at the map with and without various layers of focal lenses. ‘What are you doing to it?’

  Aston rubbed his eyes. ‘It was originally hand-coloured but the inks have faded, which means the finer lines can’t be easily interpreted. The question is how much do we put back before the original becomes debased? Some of the colours can no longer be accurately reproduced.’

  ‘And do you have an answer?’

  ‘We add just enough original pigment to make the diagram readable again, no more.’

  ‘I wish you could do that with London,’ said Bryant sadly. ‘Just put back enough of the buildings we destroyed to restore some of the city’s unique atmosphere.’

  ‘Then you’d have to spray all the buildings black.’ Aston sat back to examine his work. ‘Wars and fires left their marks on every stone. Nothing remains in its pristine state for long. What did you want to ask me about?’

  Bryant’s reverie was broken. ‘Last spring, after the accident in the tunnel, did Lauren Posner say anything else to you about it?’

  Aston was visibly disappointed by the turn in the conversation. ‘In what way?’

  ‘Did she mention the reaction of the boy’s nanny, Sharyn Buckland?’

  ‘Not that I recall. I don’t think either of them reacted strongly at the time because they didn’t realize what had happened. The boy was fine when she left. He died quite unexpectedly in hospital.’

  ‘And only the nanny was with him in the ambulance on the way there?’

  ‘I think the others went directly to the hospital. A lorry driver, and perhaps the traffic officer.’

  ‘When did Ms Posner start to blame herself for what had happened?’

  ‘Right from the moment she heard he’d died, but she quickly got worse. I went to church with her sometimes. I’m also a Catholic. I’ve learned to stop apologizing about my faith.’