Bryant & May 06 - The Victoria Vanishes

by Christopher Fowler

  Bryant read the card:

  Kiskaya Mandeville

  Herbal Remedies – Organic Therapies –

  Hypnotism – Sofas Repaired

  ‘She sounds like my kind of woman,’ he said, brightening up and reaching for the phone.

  14

  * * *

  DISPOSAL

  Just after ten o’clock on Tuesday evening, a chill drenching rain began to fall on Fleet Street. Once, the pavements would still have been crowded with couriers, journalists, printers, picture editors, typesetters, artists and accountants, and the lights of the buildings would have formed unbroken ribbons of luminescence from the Strand to St Paul’s, but now the thoroughfare was almost deserted. The great rolls of paper that had been brought by barge up to the presses of Tudor Street had been moved to the eastern hinterland of the city.

  Jocelyn Roquesby tilted the address she had printed out and tried to read it without her glasses. By doing so, she walked straight past her destination, and was forced to back up before the black-framed windows of the little Georgian house that housed the Old Bell Tavern. The pub’s rear door opened out into the courtyard of St Bride’s Church. The cramped corners and angled nooks of its interior had barely changed in centuries. Mrs Roquesby’s fingers itched to punch out a number on her mobile, at least to tell her daughter where she was going, but she had promised not to call anyone.

  She scanned the front bar, then moved to the rear of the pub, wondering if she had somehow managed to miss her contact. She had been surprised to receive the text message, and would normally have suggested a morning coffee in the local Starbucks, especially now that she was trying to give up alcohol. However, a tone of anxiety in its phrasing had struck a chord, and she had replied with an agreement to meet in one of their former haunts.

  She looked around the pub with a growing sense of disappointment. This place used to be packed, she thought. Now there were just a few lone drinkers at the bar, a couple of elderly tourists studying maps, a pair of snogging teenagers. She was a few minutes early, so she pulled up a bar stool in the corner and ordered herself a vodka and tonic.

  Arthur Bryant stood on the corner of Whidbourne Street and studied the supermarket opposite, kicking at the kerb with a scuffed Oxford toecap. The Victoria Cross had stood here for the best part of a hundred years, casting its welcoming saffron light on to the paving stones, its revellers wavering home to their wives at eleven – fewer women, and certainly no single ones of decent repute, would have been out drinking in the early years – or perhaps there had been a lock-in, with the heavy velvet drapes drawn tight to eliminate all light on the street. There the drinkers would have remained – so easy to forget the world outside – until the landlord decided they’d all had enough. ‘Ain’t you got no ’omes to go to?’ he would have called jocularly. ‘You’re going to cop a right earful from your missus when you fall through the front door, Alf.’

  Bryant remembered having to pull his father out of virtually every pub in the East End, Bow, Whitechapel, Wapping and Canning Town. It had surprised no one when he died young. Probably a blessing, his mother had said when the old man passed on. Your father was never a happy man. But she had stood by him, despite the pleas from her side of the family to leave and take her son away. Parents rode out the most hellish storms for the sake of their children in those days.

  He looked back at the corner, and the mental image of the public house faded to reveal the blank bright windows of the Pricecutter Food & Wine Store, its Indian proprietor staring dully at the sports pages of the Sun. Rain pattered against the glass, plastered with faded advertisements for Nivea moisturizing cream, Ernst and Julio Gallo wine, Thomson Holidays, Zippo’s Circus. The past had realigned itself into the present, and nothing was in its rightful place.

  The girl behind the bar had just called last orders. Mrs Roquesby sat back against the wall and listened to the song that was softly playing on the pub’s CD deck. The Everly Brothers, wasn’t it? ‘All I Have To Do Is Dream’.

  She wanted to sleep, but not dream. Dreams too easily turned into nightmares. Tired, she rested her head against the wall and listened to the lyrics. She had been stood up, but had at least found herself a drinking companion, although now he seemed to have disappeared, and she just wanted to let the night slide away into warm, wood-dark oblivion. A bee-sting, she thought, scratching at the back of her neck, or an insect bite. Odd that they should be around so early in the year . . .

  When Mrs Roquesby began to slide majestically from her stool, Lenska, the barmaid, thought she would snap awake, but she kept going all the way to the carpet, landing hard on her knees. Running around from behind the counter, Lenska pulled at the lady, but was unable to wake her. Mrs Roquesby’s head fell back and her wig slid off, revealing the sparse, wispy grey hair of a head that had undergone cancer therapy.

  Lenska loosened the collar of her blouse and tried to find a heart beat. She looked around for help, but the bar had cleared since she had rung last orders. A thick yellow froth was leaking from the mouth of the woman in her arms. Lenska knew a little about first aid, but this was beyond her, so she laid the woman down and went to call for an ambulance.

  Dan Banbury saw the world from a different perspective, usually starting at floor level. Gravity required everything to fall. Dust and skin flakes, hairs and sweat drops, everything sifted down through the atmosphere to land on the ground. Any movement stirred up the air, shifting molecules in swirls and eddies that resembled hurricane patterns on weather charts, and tumbling particles cascaded from one resting place to the next. You could track them if you were able to define the direction of the air current. Sometimes particle movement would lead you back towards the source of a disturbance; it was like hunting in reverse.

  Banbury’s long-suffering wife was all too aware of his enthusiasm for exploring the detritus of death, as it took the form of ruined trousers and jacket sleeves, and since he hated buying new clothes, she was forever racing to the dry cleaner’s in her lunch break. Even now he was lying on the carpet of the Old Bell public house, pushing strips of sticky tape along the underside of the counter, which appeared not to have been cleaned since Boswell propped up the bar.

  ‘I’m glad you managed to keep Bryant away for once,’ he muttered through clenched teeth, for he was holding a pencil torch in his mouth. ‘It’s a mystery how he always manages to make a mess of any crime scene.’

  ‘He’s gone to see someone about improving his memory,’ John May explained. ‘He forgot the urn containing Finch’s ashes, and now he’s feeling guilty. He got a crack on the noggin and lost the plot a while back. I’m wondering if he’s suffered some kind of a relapse. Are you getting anything down there?’

  ‘Far too much, that’s the problem. It’ll take chromatography to sort out the tangle of dead cells that have drifted down here. Forensically speaking, this sort of place is my worst nightmare. Dog hairs, crisps, meat pies, beer, mud flecks, skin, mites, a few mouse droppings, it’s like Piccadilly Circus.’

  ‘You’re sure she was alone?’ May asked the barmaid.

  ‘She ordered a drink and sat in the corner,’ said Lenska. ‘I can show you the till receipt.’

  ‘So she was here by herself for about forty minutes. Look like she was waiting for someone, did she?’

  ‘Maybe, I don’t know. I think I saw her check her watch a couple of times.’

  ‘And she didn’t speak to anyone else?’

  ‘She was reading a copy of the Metro – actually, there was someone else. Some guy talked to her. He ordered two drinks, so I guess he bought her one.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘I wasn’t really paying attention. Early thirties, maybe, I didn’t really take him in.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be able to recognize him again?’

  ‘God, no. I didn’t register his face at all – he was just one of those blokes you always get in a pub like this, sort of invisible.’

  ‘You didn’t see him leave?’

/>   ‘No. I had to go downstairs to change barrels. When I came back up he’d gone, and she was alone. Right after that she fell off her stool. I thought she was drunk.’

  ‘If it’s the same MO, Kershaw reckons he’ll find traces of benzodiazepine again,’ said May to Banbury. ‘She had a red mark at the base of her skull like a sting, possibly from a needle. Whoever did this has found an effective method of disposal, and is probably planning to stick with it.’

  ‘Interesting choice of phrase there,’ said Banbury. ‘Disposal. That’s what it feels like, doesn’t it? He can’t be getting sexual gratification, and presumably he’s not gaining anything financially from his victims, so why is he doing it? Plus, he’s picked the worst possible place to get away with murder, acting inside a roomful of strangers. I’m no psychologist, but you don’t think that’s it, do you?’

  ‘An act of exhibitionism, taking a risk in front of the punters? Possible, I suppose. Murder is an intensely revealing act, best performed in privacy. Seems a bit perverse to stage it as some kind of public performance. Besides, do people pay much attention to each other in pubs? You tend to concentrate on the friends you’ve come out with. I’m sure if Bryant was here he’d regale us with a potted history of public murder. She’s roughly the same age as the other two. Is he looking to take revenge on a mother substitute? What were they doing drinking alone?’

  ‘You always get one or two by themselves in London pubs. That’s the difference between a pub and a bar,’ Banbury explained. ‘Pubs are about conviviality and community, meeting mates. Bars are for being alone in, or for meeting a stranger. So why would he pick his victims in the former? It doesn’t add up.’

  ‘Perhaps the killer has a mother or an older sister who was a drunk,’ Kershaw suggested. ‘If he’s in his early thirties, she’d probably be in her fifties. Are the victims all similar physical types?’

  ‘Not at all. Jocelyn Roquesby was fifty-six, a former copy typist and human resources officer, divorced, one daughter, no current partner, lived alone in a flat in Holloway. She had just finished a bout of treatment for breast cancer. According to the daughter she liked a drink, but never went into a pub alone unless she was meeting someone. Also, the chemotherapy made her sick if she drank. So who was she there to meet?’

  Meanwhile, April had gone to the Devereux on the mission of locating Oswald Finch’s remains.

  ‘You were working behind the bar on the night of Mr Finch’s wake, weren’t you?’ she reminded the barmaid in the upper bar. ‘If you cashed up the till, you must have also cleared the counter, so you’d remember if there was something as odd as a funeral urn left behind on it.’

  ‘I told your boss, there was nothing left behind,’ said the girl, who regarded all men over thirty with narrow eyes and a cold heart. ‘People leave their briefcases, umbrellas and handbags here all the time, but it stands to reason I’d have remembered an urn.’

  ‘So someone took it with them.’

  ‘And it had to be one of your lot, because you had the room to yourselves for most of the evening. Your Peculiar Crimes Unit have a reputation for being a bunch of practical jokers, you know. The manageress warned me. They’ve had parties here before. Somebody left an inflatable sheep in the ladies’ toilet last time, frightened the life out of the cleaner.’

  ‘Not much of a practical joke, is it,’ said April, ‘swiping the ashes of a dead colleague?’

  ‘Depends on what they’re going to do with them,’ said the barmaid, with a disapproving sniff.

  15

  * * *

  VISIBLE EVIL

  Raymond Land tipped his armchair forward, cleared a steamed-up arc of glass and looked down into the street. Was there anything in the world more miserable, he wondered, than a wet Wednesday morning in Mornington Crescent? Especially when you felt you were no longer the captain of your destiny, more a third mate dragged in the undertow of someone else’s foundering vessel?

  ‘You and your partner like to work in a pincer movement, don’t you?’ he complained. ‘First John creeps up on me with dire warnings, and now you. Three dead, at the very least! If the Home Office get wind that the proles think it’s not safe to venture into a public house without risking death, our entire national fabric will collapse. The idea of a Britain without anyone in the boozers is unimaginable.’

  Bryant lounged back on Land’s sofa and felt about in his pocket. ‘There’s no doubt about it now, cheeky chops. Three murders in London pubs, all within a mile of each other. And this new woman, Roquesby, pushes the affair much further into the public arena because her former husband was security-cleared for some kind of government work. I think there’s something really big going on here. Don’t tell me we can’t get the case prioritized now.’

  ‘That’s not an issue.’ Land continued searching the street below, as if expecting to find the rest of his thought there. ‘I just worry.’

  ‘Good Lord, I know articulacy has never been your forte, Raymondo, but at least take a stab at piecing together an entire sentence.’

  ‘I’m not sure the unit is up to handling something like this. It’s a potential minefield.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Bryant dug a little silver box from his pocket and flicked it open. ‘Don’t worry, I haven’t taken up cocaine. I thought I’d try snuff, seeing as nobody will allow me to light my pipe.’

  ‘Well, suppose you fail to stop this lunatic, and in the process undermine national confidence in the security of public places?’

  ‘You think you’ll be given the order of the boot, don’t you?’ Bryant sniffed and sneezed abundantly. ‘This is no time to start worrying about your frankly moribund career, old sausage, there are greater issues at stake. Suppose your wife was to walk into a public house by herself for a quiet drink and a gander at the papers?’

  ‘Leanne would never do such a thing,’ said Land indignantly.

  ‘Far from what I’ve heard, but we’ll let that pass. Imagine how much you’d worry for her safety, then magnify that a million times across the country – you see my point? When nobody feels protected, the economy simply starts to unravel. Look at the terrible side effects of past bombing campaigns against civilians. The public house is virtually the country’s last unassailable place, now that so many churches lock their doors. For hundreds of years it has occupied a unique position in our culture. What’s the one thing every pub is supposed to have?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Land scratched his chin. ‘At least two brands of bad lager?’

  ‘A welcoming hearth created by centuries of tradition. Wasn’t it Hilaire Belloc who once said, “When you have lost your inns drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England”?’

  Land looked back blankly and shrugged.

  ‘Pubs tend to stay constant because they’re rebuilt on the same plot of land. The extraordinary thing is that brewers don’t keep historical information on their own properties, so histories often only exist in the form of handed-down anecdotes. That’s why pubs are different to any other type of building around us. The public houses of London are its keystones. Good Lord, the Romans brought them here two thousand years ago and put vine leaves outside to advertise their wares, no wonder they occupy such an important—’

  ‘Look here, Bryant, don’t give me one of your historical lectures on the subject of beer. I’m interested in catching a criminal, nothing else.’

  ‘But that’s my point, vieux haricot, you can’t catch the criminal if you don’t understand his milieu.’

  ‘Yes, you can,’ said Land, irritated. ‘You can catch him by bringing in the victims’ relatives and shouting at them in a windowless room for a few hours. And don’t throw words like “milieu” at me. Renfield’s going to be a breath of fresh air in this place. He won’t stand for any of this nonsense, I can tell you. He’s out there right now, tracking down contacts and conducting doorstep interviews. He grills people, makes the innocent feel miserable and uncomfortable until they provide him with acci
dental information.’

  ‘General Pinochet did that, it’s called torture and has nothing to do with police duties.’

  ‘Listen, I know foot-slogging has become unfashionable, I know it’s all computers and DNA matches now, but sometimes a bit of shoe leather and the odd threat of a slap is needed, and this is one of those times.’

  ‘After all these years, you still don’t understand how we operate, do you?’ said Bryant. ‘It’s a complete mystery to you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well no, not exactly,’ stalled Land. ‘I know you use various undesirables to give you information and that you wander off the beaten track a lot, that you won’t stick to established procedures and once threw a sheep carcass out of the window of your old office at Bow Street to measure skull fractures. I know your methods are obscure, unsavoury and probably illegal, but somehow you seem to get the job done. But I don’t know . . .’ Land looked up and realized he was talking to himself. ‘Where are you going?’

  Bryant was attempting to pull a gabardine raincoat over a broad-stitched fisherman’s sweater. ‘To Mrs Mandeville’s memory-improvement class,’ he explained. ‘I’d forgotten all about it. Later, I shall be employing a detection process photographers refer to as Methodical Anticipation. In this case it means catching the killer before he strikes again. I wrote a pamphlet on the subject in 1968. A casual browse through it may enlighten you.’

  ‘Arthur, please.’ Land felt uncomfortable using Bryant’s first name, but was desperate. ‘If you have anything at all that might constitute a lead, tell me. Whitehall is breathing down my neck. They’re going to hang me out to dry.’

  ‘All right. Ask yourself why all three victims were found without their mobile phones. We’re waiting on their call records, but I think we’ll find the killer has a rather novel method of contacting his victims, using each phone’s address book to send a text message to the next victim in a sort of round-robin. Which means, of course, that all the victims knew each other. And the fact that Jocelyn Roquesby was found without her mobile suggests that he’s going to do it again. Cheerio.’