Bryant & May 06 - The Victoria Vanishes

by Christopher Fowler

  Janice Longbright alighted on the Holloway Road and began checking the shop fronts. Mrs Roquesby’s daughter Eleanor lived above a Thai takeaway, in a small flat that bore the marks of serial occupation. Hardly a room was finished; wallpaper ran out, rollered paint-marks fell short of the ceiling, units were missing doors, floorboards appeared beyond remnants of carpet. There was an overwhelming tang of damp in the air.

  ‘You must be Sergeant Longbright. Sorry about the mess. I’m Eleanor Roquesby.’ The ghost-faced girl held out her hand and forced a small smile. ‘I always say mother must have been thinking of Eleanor Rigby – you know, the Beatles song?’

  ‘I’m sorry to intrude upon you at a time like this. You have a lot to be upset about.’

  ‘To be honest, I’m confused more than anything. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to hurt her. Would you like tea?’

  Longbright nodded with a certain amount of resignation. Copious tea-drinking was an occupational hazard because it was a comfort everyone knew how to provide, in the same way that people understood how to mend a plug but not a computer.

  ‘She was such a kind woman,’ Eleanor explained, placing mugs before them. ‘She fostered children, ran playgroups, worked hard all her life, never had a bad word to say about anyone. I’m not her natural daughter, I was given up for adoption when I was two, and she raised me as her own daughter. I want to know how she could end up being murdered in a pub.’ She looked over to the windows, her knuckle against her chin. ‘You know, Jocelyn’s own mother was old-fashioned. She used to tell me that women couldn’t set foot inside a pub by themselves during the war without men thinking they were tarts. So we spent decades fighting for independence and equality, only to get attacked in a place that’s now supposed to be safe.’

  ‘I know it doesn’t seem fair that she died, but we have to stop other women from risking the same fate,’ said Longbright gently. ‘In particular, I need to locate the man who bought her a drink last night. So far we haven’t been able to track down anyone who remembers seeing him.’

  ‘What about CCTV cameras?’

  ‘There were none inside the pub, only outside. You say your mother never drank alone, so we must assume she had arranged to meet a friend who failed to turn up. The barmaid doesn’t think the man who bought her a drink was her intended contact, because he had been at the bar for some time, while your mother was seated at the other end by herself. Do you have any idea who she might have been planning to meet?’

  Eleanor thought for a minute. ‘Not my father, because they don’t keep in contact any more. Perhaps somebody from work?’

  ‘We’re looking into that possibility at the moment. Anyone else? Did she have any local friends who might have agreed to see her in town?’

  ‘Not really. Her female friends around here are mostly married with kids, it’s not the sort of thing they can do.’

  ‘Did she belong to any clubs, societies, groups, see anyone who met regularly outside of the neighbourhood?’

  ‘There was a sort of society she went to occasionally. She didn’t mention it to her family because I think she was faintly embarrassed about it. I don’t really think it had a name, although she called it the Conspirators’ Club. She was interested in conspiracy theories – who killed Kennedy, crop circles, whether the moon landings were faked – just a fun thing really, something to do in the evenings. She read lots of books on the subject, but didn’t take any of it very seriously. She just said it was a good way to make friends. They met in some pub once a month, I forget the name.’

  ‘Could you try and dig it out for me?’

  ‘I have her appointment book – I thought it might be useful to you.’ She passed the sergeant a tiny dog-eared diary filled with what appeared to be the world’s smallest handwriting. Longbright squinted at it. ‘I haven’t got my reading glasses.’

  ‘Hold on. Here you are – upstairs at the Sutton Arms, Carthusian Street, near Smithfield Market, meetings every second and fourth Wednesday.’

  ‘That would mean they’re meeting tonight.’

  ‘I guess so. Do you think this could have something to do with it? That she might have met somebody from the group?’

  ‘There’s one way to find out,’ said Longbright.

  April rubbed her eyes, then returned her stare to the screen, scrolling through the names in the Dead Diary. Based on the three known victims, she now had a set of correlating factors with which to match the Met’s unsolved case histories; she was searching for professional women between the ages of thirty-five and fifty-five who had gone alone to public houses in the central London area. Unfortunately, the files only dated back to when the system was inaugurated, in March 1996, but she hoped that would be far enough to provide a more distinctive pattern.

  She sensed that there had been alcohol issues in the pasts of these three working women, all of whom had held positions of responsibility for some years. Was that why they drank, and perhaps were used to visiting pubs – was it the stress of maintaining their careers? So far as she could see, none had suffered mental-health issues, none had been designated as clinically depressed or suicidal. Many journalists would love to write about innocent victims like these because they fitted the white-middle-class demographic of their newspapers’ readership. If they scented a failure on the part of the police, it wouldn’t take them long to start running articles about how no woman was safe in the capital.

  Her eye ran down the columns of names, matching and discarding until one name jumped out: Joanne Keller-man.

  Her death pre-dated the other three, having occurred four days before Curtis’s, but it fitted the pattern. She had succumbed in a tiny, crowded pub called the Old Dr Butler’s Head, in Mason’s Avenue, by London Wall. Last orders had been rung early, and as the drinkers thinned out, Mrs Kellerman had fallen to the floor in what appeared to be a faint. The barman had been unable to revive her, so he had called an ambulance, but she was pronounced dead on the way to the hospital.

  A cocktail of narcoleptic drugs found in her system suggested that she had taken her own life, although why she had chosen to do it in a crowded pub remained a mystery – hence the coroner’s decision to record an open verdict. There was no history of mental-health problems on record, although she apparently took prescription anti-depressants and sleeping pills. The Met had noted the death and uploaded her file to the Diary, even though they had chosen not to consider the case worthy of further investigation.

  April ran her finger across the screen to the tabulated comments from her next-of-kin, and noted that she had often enjoyed pub quizzes. Did all of the women regularly attend events in London pubs? If so, did their presence bring them to the attention of someone stalking victims in such an environment?

  April’s discovery of the death placed the women in a new running order: Kellerman, Curtis, Wynley, Roquesby. In a city where so many died in unexplained circumstances each day, each event occupied a slender borderline of visibility. Only when compiled together did they form some kind of new and alarming picture. This faint but discernible pattern had begun to coalesce from the mist of empirical data that blurred every death in the city. If no one agency possessed all the facts, there could be no resolution. This, she felt, was why the PCU existed. To transform a killer from smoke and shadows into flesh and bone. To make evil visible.

  April began writing up her report for her bosses.

  16

  * * *

  THE HEART OF LONDON

  He was always watching the women.

  Interesting how they were treated at different times of the day, in different places. In lunchtime city pubs they sat at their counters completely ignored, men reaching around them for beers and change as if they were mere obstacles. In the early evening they were engaged in conversation by men who used a cheerful, chatty manner with older women, as if talking to their mothers. Late at night, when the lights were lower, they became easy targets for leering drunks who felt sure they could never be rebuffed.


  He felt sorry for the women, even when he had to take their lives.

  The cavernous inns of the Strand, the narrow taverns of Holborn, the fake rural hostelries of Chelsea, the brash bars of Soho, each had their own tribes. The lotharios, the jobsworths, the brasses, the bosses, brash drunk kids, braying toffs, swearing workmen, all united by the desperate need for companionship. The single careerists were frightened to go back to their pristine apartments and sit on the ends of their beds, staring into the void of their dead lives. The ones in relationships delayed heading home to warm, sleeping bodies they could barely stand to touch.

  He knew all about the power of pubs, and the invisible customers who kept them alive. The lonely matrons who drank a little too much, the ones with full, sensual bodies and sad old eyes that caught his gaze, holding it a moment too long in bar mirrors. He had been with them all his life.

  He loved the women. As he prepared his poison, he prayed they would escape him.

  ‘A little early in the day to be drinking, isn’t it?’ asked John May. ‘It’s only just gone noon.’ Williamson’s Tavern in Groveland Court was nearly empty, except for a pair of Asian IT managers playing a jittery fruit machine.

  ‘Tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce, crushed celery, beetroot and horseradish sauce, John. No vodka, sadly.’ Bryant held up his glass. ‘Kiskaya Mandeville recommended it to sharpen my brain. She’s prescribed a series of memory tests I must perform every day and put me on a juice diet. Reckons I’ll quickly notice the results. I have to take three different types of fish oil tonight. My poor bowels will be positively peristaltic. This is Dr Harold Masters. Oddly, I don’t think you’ve ever met.’ He gestured at the curator/lecturer from the British Museum. May found himself facing an absurdly tall man with unsuitable tortoiseshell glasses and slightly mad grey hair.

  Masters unleashed a great length of arm and shook May’s hand vigorously. ‘Not sure we’ve ever had the pleasure. But Mr Bryant has consulted me many times in the past.’

  That figures, thought May. He ordered a half of Spitfire bitter. ‘Let’s hope this memory course of yours works,’ he told Bryant. ‘Perhaps you’ll recall what happened to Oswald’s ashes.’ He looked around at the sepia-tinted walls, the framed photographs and dust-gathering knickknacks. ‘What made you pick a pub in an alleyway off another alley? It was a bugger to find.’

  ‘I wanted to make a particular point, and I find that sometimes, if I just talk to you, you sort of tune out.’

  ‘That’s because you have a habit of lecturing me,’ said May.

  ‘I most certainly do not. I try to direct your attention towards topics of interest.’

  ‘Yes, and you used to tap me with a pointing stick until I broke the damned thing in half.’

  ‘That was you, was it? Amongst other things, Dr Masters is an expert on the mythology and etymology of London. He’s been helping me with a few ideas lately, and I thought it would be a good idea for the two of you to meet because he knows an awful lot about English pubs.’

  My God, thought May, studying the academic, we could all do with more women in our lives. This is what happens when men get lonely. They dry out.

  Dr Harold Masters knew far more about the dead than the living. Human beings were too emotional and messy. He had only been able to tolerate Jane, his wife, because she shared his arcane interests, and now she was gone. The awful truth was that her death allowed him to spend more time concentrating on his studies. He missed her, in the distant way that a man misses the regular arrival of dinner and fresh laundry, but relished the extra hours he could now spend among his research documents. Understanding the past was far more interesting than understanding people, especially women.

  ‘Mine is a professional perspective, of course,’ Masters snorted cheerfully. ‘Take a look at this place. It looks quite unremarkable from the outside, doesn’t it? But it was built from the ruins of the Great Fire.’

  ‘Surely not. This bare-wood-and-ironwork-lamps look is 1930s, with a touch of last year chucked in.’

  ‘The present-day building, perhaps, but it’s been a tavern for centuries. In fact, it’s constructed over Roman ruins that survive some five metres down. And it was once the official residence of the Mayor of London. William and Mary liked the place so much that they provided it with the iron gates outside. A gentleman called Robert Williamson turned it into a proper public house in 1739. And it has a ghost.’

  ‘All London pubs say they have a ghost – it gets the tourists in.’

  ‘Ah, but this one has something else,’ Masters enthused. ‘The heart of London. The bar is supposed to contain an ancient stone that marks the dead centre of the old city. The parade of historical characters through here has gone unrecorded and barely remarked upon. Why? Because the pubs of London are taken almost completely for granted by those who drink in them.’ The doctor stabbed a long pale finger at the air. ‘Every single one has a unique and extraordinary history.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Bryant agreed with enthusiasm. ‘Did you know that the basement of the Viaduct Tavern in Holborn contains cells from Newgate Jail? Its walls have absorbed the tortured cries of a thousand poor imprisoned souls. These places survived for reasons of geography. The Tipperary in Fleet Street used to be called the Boar’s Head. It was built in 1605 with stones taken from the Whitefriar’s Monastery, stones that allowed it to survive unharmed in the raging inferno of the Great Fire of London. And the Devereux, where we held Oswald’s wake, is named after Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who was imprisoned in the Bloody Tower and beheaded. The point Harold is trying to make is that these places hold the key to our past, and therefore the present. They’re an unappreciated indication of who we are, and a sign of all we’ve lost and remember fondly, in which bracket I would include nurses’ hats, single railway-carriage compartments, quality umbrellas, the concept of public embarrassment, correct pronunciation and the ability to tell a child off in the street without risking a stab-wound.’

  ‘Pubs are just shops that sell booze, Arthur. What’s more, they’re dying at a rate of sixty-five a year in London because of property developers. You’re over-egging the pudding as usual.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Masters, jumping in eagerly. ‘Walk the streets of London, and the only time you’ll speak to strangers is when you apologize for stepping in their path. Public houses act, as their name implies, as homes for the general populace, where opposites can meet and confront each other without prejudice, on neutral territory. This is why the landlord is referred to as the host, and why rooms in pubs were always used to hold local inquests, to be sure of a fair and impartial verdict.’

  ‘I think you’ll find that the desire for alcohol also plays a part in their popularity,’ said May.

  ‘Obviously, but there’s something more fundamental at the root of it. Walking into a pub alone is for many young people their first act of real independence. Such places have had a profound effect on our society throughout history, acting as every kind of salon and meeting place, from coffee-house pamphleteers to the cruelties of the gin palace. And of course, they reinvent themselves endlessly. Where political and philosophical meetings were once held, there are now karaoke and Jenga evenings, book readings and sexual-fantasy nights. And they come with an amazingly complex set of social codes, of course.’

  ‘True, I suppose,’ May admitted. ‘There’s nothing more embarrassing than finding that your pint-to-toilet cycle has become synchronized with that of a total stranger’s.’

  ‘Why, public houses have even influenced our language. Drinkers used to share the same mug, in which the level of ale was marked with a wooden peg, hence the expression “to take someone down a peg”. The masons who built our churches were housed at inns, hence the Masonic connections of certain pubs, and of course, the Knights Templars had their own inns at Clerkenwell. When the polluted waters of London proved unpotable, everyone drank at ale houses. Pub names provide markers for all the historical events of England. The Red Lion, White Hart, Crown a
nd Anchor, Royal Oak, Coach and Horses – each has its own convoluted meaning. We even find our way around by the location of public houses like the Green Man and the Sun in the Sands.’

  ‘Think about it, John,’ said Bryant. ‘A couple of weeks ago, you and I had a drink at the Anchor, where others had sat drinking half a millennium before us, seeing the same view.’

  ‘Do you realize that in the late-Victorian era there was a pub for every hundred people in the country?’ asked Masters. ‘We talk about the inner-city schools where pupils speak dozens of languages, but what about the melting pots that exist on almost every street corner?’

  ‘And the history they hold, true or false as the case may be,’ mused Bryant, drifting off the point, as he was wont to do. ‘The Sherlock Holmes in Northumberland Avenue, presented as if Holmes was a real detective, and the Old Bank of England, a bar on Fleet Street touted by guides as the site of Sweeney Todd’s shop, if you please. What complete and utter nonsense.’

  ‘Whereas the pub in which I am to be found most evenings, in Smithfields, was once called the Path of Hope, because it stood on the route of condemned prisoners, like the Old King Lud at Ludgate Circus,’ said Masters. ‘Although it was always associated with St Bartholomew’s Fair, the pub sign depicts a pair of stranded sailors. In Victorian times one often finds the idea of hope connected with the sea – hope of finding land or another ship. A popular maritime motto was “We anchor in hope”, but by depicting sailors the sign-maker has misunderstood the meaning of the pub’s name. You see? By decoding the tangled symbols of the past, we get close to the truths that history books miss.’