May broke into a smile, digging a package from the jacket of his smart suit. “I thought you might like to pay it today.” He handed his partner the box. “Happy birthday.”
“It’s my birthday? Are you absolutely sure?” He thought for a minute. “Good heavens, October twenty-fifth, you’re right. I wondered why Alma served my eggs with her earrings on this morning.” He tore open the paper and examined his gift. “This is really most kind of you, John.” He grinned. “What on earth is it?”
“It’s the very latest in mobile technology. You can access the Internet from it and find your position from satellites, and do all sorts of things.”
Bryant was touched. He ran his fingers over the sleek brushed metal of the telephone as if handling a piece of Meissen. “You mean you’re actually trusting me with a gadget?”
May shrugged. “I have to take a leap of faith sometime. It might as well be now.”
♦
Leo Carey was more accustomed to conducting consultations in the calm woody gloom of Claridge’s or the immaculate etherea of the Sanderson Hotel. He glanced up at the moulting distempered walls of the Albany Street nick with the same level of discomfort on his face that film stars showed when posing for police mug shots. His sleek Bond Street-tailored suit and Cambridge tie did little to erase the image presented by photocopies of him tied naked to a toilet that were currently making their way around the police station. Every few minutes one of the Met constables peered in through the meshed glass of the interview room and smirked knowingly.
“Popular opinion is formed by small groups of highly influential people,” Carey told the detectives. “Everyone else is unimportant. It’s my job to ensure that the key opinion-formers attend our events.” The grinning officers at the window were distracting him.
“Take no notice of them,” May advised. “Tell us about Saralla White.”
“I’d been working for British Petroleum as an image consultant,” Carey explained. “I met Sarah at a launch party, while she was still repping graphic artists around town. She told me she was being kicked out of her Bermondsey flat, and had nowhere to stay. I took her for a bite to eat, and she suggested sleeping on my sofa. We’d only known each other for about an hour! I’d never met anyone like her before. She was so angry and passionate. I had just broken up with Olivia, my girlfriend. I had no experience of girls like Sarah before. She was exciting to be around.”
“And before you knew it, you’d become involved,” May prompted.
“She wasn’t easy to be with, mind you, too volatile for comfort, but a lot of fun. Life was never boring. Then I found out why she’d lost her apartment.”
“We know about the drugs. She was dealing cocaine from the premises. We have her arrest details.”
“It was nothing to do with me. And nothing was ever proven. The case got thrown out of court because someone had messed with the evidence. At that point Sarah decided to stop representing artists and become one herself. She came up with an angle, changed her name to Saralla, and asked me to help her get media attention.”
“Are you saying that her artistic status was just a pose, that she didn’t believe in the causes she supported?”
“No, she believed in them, but I taught her how to use her own personality to create controversy. Belief isn’t enough; you have to go out and stir up trouble in the public arena. I taught her everything I knew, and did my job a little too well. She was keeping a Web log of our life together, complete with photographs and filmed footage, and was publishing it behind my back. We fought and I threw her out, but by that time she no longer needed me. Her career had taken off. That should have been the end of it, but she wouldn’t keep her mouth shut. The more the press goaded her, the more she told them. She embellished the truth, then completely reinvented her past. Suddenly I was no longer her mentor, but the man who made her pregnant and forced her to have an abortion. She needed a villain in the story, and had enough photographic evidence to flesh out her fantasy.”
“When did you last see her?”
“I didn’t. I mean, I broke all contact after hearing about the photographs.”
“Why didn’t you take any legal action?”
“Damage limitation. The more you defend yourself, the guiltier you look. My clients started cancelling contracts, so I got out before the company folded on me. I came from an entertainment PR background, and needed to build a client base.”
“So you started low by picking someone with an image problem,” Bryant surmised.
“Martell came with such a bad reputation that nobody else wanted to touch him. I figured if I could make this a success, other offers would come. I thought that after Sarah I could handle anyone, but Martell was a nightmare. Insecurity is a tough trait to deal with. There were rumours about his private life. The tabloids were suspicious, and went fishing for stories about how he spent his evenings, but he was dumb and vain enough to keep taking the bait. This latest escapade has broken within hours of his death, so everyone will think he killed himself. Martell was convinced he’d lose his TV deal. He’d used up all of his friends. He was still popular with the public, but his ratings were starting to slip. He caused offence on ITV1’s breakfast show the week before – he’d been caught on camera making sarcastic comments about his fans – and was getting hate mail as a consequence. If you’re going to start manipulating public opinion, you need a clever game plan, and Martell wasn’t exactly the brightest bulb in the billboard.”
“Tell us about your argument with him,” May suggested.
“Martell rang me at four yesterday afternoon and asked to meet me in the café in Russell Square in an hour’s time. He admitted that he’d gone to a lap-dancing club on Monday night, where he’d met a couple of girls who took him back to the Great Russell Hotel for champagne, drugs, and a little fooling around – the usual tired old story. Except that the girls told him they were Russian fifteen-year-olds who had come here illegally on a vegetable lorry through the Channel Tunnel. You’d think he would have smelled a rat by now, but instead he went with them. So they’re back in the hotel room, and every time the girls break off to take calls on their mobiles, they’re actually shooting digital footage of Martell and sending it over the Internet to Hard News. Turns out they were a couple of twenty-something journalists working for the Blue Dragon herself.”
“Who’s that?” asked Bryant.
“Janet Ramsey is a smart Tory bitch who’s obsessed with illegal immigrants, and happens to be the new editor of Hard News. I couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid. It was the kind of story the red tops fantasise about in bed at night. I was just getting somewhere with him, and he had ruined our deal. Martell had a family audience. I told him I had no magic formula to rehabilitate him in the public’s eyes, especially with the current social panic about paedophilia still raging. Things got pretty heated between us. I was annoyed that his agent hadn’t informed me immediately. It didn’t help that Martell had been drinking. I told him I wasn’t prepared to represent him any longer; he told me I was useless. He tried to hit me, but fell over a chair. Finally he stormed out.”
“What time was this?”
“About a quarter to six. You can check with the staff in the café. They’re bound to remember – we made enough noise.”
“What did you do then?”
“I paid the bill and walked off towards Kingsway, trying to clear my head. I had something to eat at a French place near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, I can’t remember the name, but it would be easy to find. Then I caught a taxi home.”
♦
“Do you believe him?” asked Bryant as the detectives drove back towards Mornington Crescent.
“He had a fight in a public place; he couldn’t lie about that,” said May. “But do I believe him? I think so. He had a reason to take revenge against Sarah White, and Martell was about to ruin his new career, but it’s hardly enough to make you dress up as a highwayman and construct something so insanely baroque – and that’s what we’r
e talking about here, a form of insanity. Carey doesn’t seem mentally troubled. Everyone in business operates on the kind of personal agenda that might look odd to an outsider. It doesn’t make them a killer. If the only suspects we have are perfectly rational men and women, I don’t see how we’ll find someone who’s insane. We can’t employ any kind of deductive reasoning.”
“Then we must apply the science of irrationality,” Bryant replied. “You know what I think we need? Some experts in the field of orchestrated mayhem. I’ll draw up a list. I may be required to meet with – unusual people.”
May knew what that meant; his partner would be phoning everyone from chaos theorists to necromancers. “No, Arthur,” he warned his partner. “I don’t want any of your fringe-dwellers involved, not this time.”
Bryant was shocked. “But I’ve found a new spirit medium who produces electronic ectoplasm that can be charted on a computer – ”
“No, Arthur, not the Camden Town Coven or the Southwark Supernaturals or that creepy biochemist who impersonates his dead wife, or anyone else who could be mistaken for a mental patient. Our every move is being watched, and now is not the time to start behaving strangely. We do this my way or not at all, do you understand?”
Bryant’s pout of disapproval said it all. “You just admitted that we can’t follow the usual routes of deductive reasoning. What are we supposed to do?”
“I don’t know.” May sighed, turning away from the ebbing river. “But we have to think of something fast, before we find ourselves locked out of our own investigation.”
“We can’t do it by ourselves,” Bryant admitted. “We need other talents.”
“Then let’s use the PCU staff. There may not be much budget, but we have access to renegade minds.”
“I like your thinking. That’s Battle of Hastings spirit.”
“We lost the Battle of Hastings, Arthur.”
“So we did.” Bryant bit off the last of his fireman’s hose. “But this time we’ll win.”
The detectives returned to work in a mood of doubtful optimism.
∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧
18
Something of the Night
Raymond Land was utterly exhausted.
The years of chasing after devils and phantoms had taken their toll. He couldn’t believe he was still stranded here at the unit, like a Japanese soldier guarding a forgotten Pacific atoll decades after the war had ended.
Because the war had ended. The kind of crimes the PCU had been set up to investigate no longer existed. If anything, it was easier to recognise the kind of cases the unit didn’t get. They didn’t get ones with identifiable characteristics, criminal associations, reliable witnesses, usual suspects, or even much actual evidence, whether in the form of CCTV footage, DNA, or fingerprints. Those under investigation rarely had previous convictions. The PCU prided itself on tackling original, unrepeatable crimes, but such tragedies were in decline. Despite its recent high-profile successes, the unit was an anachronism. Strong young men and women were needed to combat social disorder and the pervasive influence of drugs across the capital. Scarface-quality cocaine was selling in Florida at thirty-five dollars a gram, and was heading towards London in the form of addictive new compounds. The Met had five areas each the size of a complete force elsewhere in the country, and it still couldn’t cope. Prostitution, murder, burglary, and vandalism were all on the increase – right now, a team of Ukrainian gangsters were running around North London attacking people with blowtorches – and here he was, playing nursemaid to a group of addled academics who read science fiction comics and attended poetry readings in their spare time.
His opposite equals were laughing behind his back. The unit staff ignored him. His superiors could barely remember his name. His wife was in the process of leaving him for a younger man, and was prepared to take their children. His only friend was Sergeant Renfield, the astonishingly unpleasant desk officer at Albany Street nick, and Renfield only bothered calling up to arrange a drink because he knew he could thrash Land at billiards. Stanley Marsden, the former DCS HMCO liaison officer, had been allowed to escape with his pension, so why had he been left behind?
Land had stopped hoping for a transfer or a promotion years ago. All he wanted now was a little appreciation. He would settle for a grudging acknowledgement that he had managed to wrangle his wayward detectives out of lambastings, lawsuits, and lynchings. Surely he deserved the smallest nod of respect? Truth was, nobody liked the facilitators, but they were necessary, like men who unblocked drains.
Strangling his tie into a tiny knot and flattening his straggles of greying hair in the mirror, he set off for the formal meeting with Leslie Faraday in the minister’s Whitehall office. He had been warned not to mention anything to his detectives, who had just arrived and were compiling information in Mornington Crescent’s conference room, oblivious to the ax hanging over their heads. He felt guilty, but something had to be done in order to save his own sanity.
♦
“Before we go any further today, let’s review,” said May, drawing on the whiteboard behind him. “Saralla White and Danny Martell, both low-grade celebrities, both killed in highly unlikely circumstances. And in both cases, we have sightings of this gentleman.” He taped up an artist’s impression of the Highwayman. The morning’s newspapers carried new renderings of their supposed nemesis, one computer-generated from a description provided by a pedestrian on Farringdon Road.
May slapped the board, startling PC Colin Bimsley, who was still recovering from his dog’s birthday party, an excuse to visit the local pub for a lock-in the night before. “No fingerprints at either crime scene, no fibres, nothing except a couple of incomplete bootprints in the gallery. Dan – do the honours on those, would you?”
Banbury rose and pulled up a sheet of paper covered with lifted prints. “Perpetrators always leave footprints at a crime scene; my problem was locating them, and I found none outside the gallery itself. I shot monochrome film to punch up the contrast on the ones raised from inside. These pictures were taken with a diopter lens and oblique lighting, and it’s fairly apparent from the scale bars that this is a rubber-soled motorcycle boot of an unusually large size. I underestimated just how big they were. I’d say we’re looking for someone of around a hundred ninety-eight centimetres height – that’s six feet six inches, sir. Electrostatic lifting got me a couple of flecks of metal in the tread, miniscule traces of aluminium, but they could have been picked up anywhere. Nobody in the gallery was wearing boots, unless somebody changed their footwear, in which case we should have found the original pair. We ran the prints through Shoe-Fit – ”
“I’m sorry, what’s that?” asked Mangeshkar.
“Shoeprint Image Capture and Retrieval software. We now have a confirmed brand, but it’s common and available from just about any motorcycle shop in the country. Moreover, the tread is worn, so it’s no use looking through recent pairs sold. I’m concentrating on Martell now. Giles and I are going to the gym to see if we get anything more in natural light, and I hope to have something to report by the end of the day.”
“Meanwhile,” said May, “in the absence of any other physical evidence, what conclusions can we draw about the circumstances surrounding these two deaths?”
“Don’t worry about speaking out of turn or sounding stupid,” Bryant added. “You know how John and I operate. Nothing you say has to go outside this room. We’re not minuting the session.”
Meera Mangeshkar was the first to raise her hand. “Both victims had enemies they’d never met,” she pointed out.
“How do you know that?”
“It stands to reason. They’d both expressed controversial opinions in the public arena. White was picketed by pro-lifers because of her statements on abortion. Martell was getting hate mail from family groups because of his remarks on TV. They could have attracted a stalker with strong right-wing views.”
“That would fit with the traditional profile,” said Giles Kersh
aw. “White male, mid-twenties to mid-thirties, unemployed, interrupted education, few friends, penniless, embittered. Classic serial killer stuff, in fact.”
“Dear God, let’s not jump to conclusions about a bloody serial killer,” warned May. “The press will be running photos of Anthony Hopkins in seconds – ‘What Serial Killer May Look Like’ – and we’ll end up starting the kind of social panic this unit was originally set up to defuse.”
“Besides,” added Bryant, “I’d say the use of the highwayman costume has a profound resonance that goes beyond the knowledge of most uneducated men.” He sat back, refusing to elaborate.
“Both of the victims had fights just before they were murdered,” Bimsley suggested. “And they both had estranged ex-partners who were upset with them. White’s mentor and the possible father of her child, Calvin Burroughs, and her ex-husband, Leo Carey. And there’s Martell’s ex-wife.”
Emboldened by the others, April half-raised a hand. “Anyone could find out where the victims were,” she offered timidly.
“What do you mean, April?”
“Well, their movements are published on Web sites and in celebrity lifestyle magazines. Their favourite restaurants, even their home addresses are easy to discover. Anyone could have figured out the times of their appearances at the gallery and the gym.”
“Very good point,” said May. “Anything else?”
“The physical impossibility of the murders,” suggested Banbury. “We’ve been over the figures a hundred times. Not a single person unaccounted for in the gallery. Thirty-three adults and fourteen children surrounding the room in which she was killed. No other way in or out except via the electronic turnstiles. The same situation with Martell; no-one else in the gym, which was locked from the inside. White was dropped into a tank over eight feet high, as if she really had been thrown by someone on the back of a horse. Martell had been hit by lightning in a room that has no electrical appliances apart from the recessed neon lighting panels overhead, none of which had been tampered with, by the way.”
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