Bryant & May 06 - The Victoria Vanishes

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Would you recognize him again?’

  ‘Possibly. I think he had something wrong with his face, some kind of purple birthmark.’

  ‘Was that what made him appear creepy?’

  ‘No, God, I hope I’m not that shallow. You know the way some people don’t behave how they should in company? He was hunched over his beer, openly staring at other women. We’re used to autistic behaviour but this was different. I’m sorry, it’s not much to go on, is it?’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ said April. It looked as if Curtis’s attacker had hit on her before. Perhaps he had even tried to hurt her, only to have his plans thwarted. All nine members of the PCU were out searching public houses tonight. If any of them turned up a similar description, they would finally have a suspect.

  Dan Banbury found himself wedged against a wall in the claustrophobic Seven Stars pub, which was located behind Lincoln’s Inn Fields and packed to the gills with boisterous, merry legal workers. Normally he would have enjoyed himself in such an environment, but his conversation with the bar staff had been turned into a shouting match by the deafening combination of courtroom rhetoric and cheap beer.

  The barmaid who had served Naomi Curtis on the night of her death could think of no other details, and was too busy to concentrate on the subject for long. Banbury jammed himself further into the corner with his pint and wondered. What kind of man would she have allowed close? In his experience women preferred cocktail bars to pubs, especially ones this intimate and rowdy. He felt sure that she could only have come in here to meet a man. This kind of pub was the choice of a male.

  With difficulty, he unfolded the spreadsheet April had supplied and checked the notes she had printed. The same injected overdose of sedative, giving symptoms that had been mistaken for heat stroke. A quick, virtually painless method of killing, putting someone to sleep so easily and quietly that their death could pass unnoticed in a crowded bar. Naomi Curtis wasn’t rich, had no unusual beneficiaries, no one who might profit excessively from her demise. It seemed unlikely to have been anyone she knew, which meant that she had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  This place was a crime-scene manager’s worst nightmare, trampled flat day in, day out, vacuumed and disinfected, scoured by the scrum of bodies, sloshed with centuries of beer. In a way, the man they were looking for had hit upon the perfect location to commit murder. Every night in every pub there would be petty feuds, heated arguments, friendships forged, sexual liaisons proposed and relationships ended, the threats of tears and laughter. Alcohol heightened the emotions. Providing he did not draw attention to himself, a killer could easily hide inside such a world. Bryant was right: coming here had started to give him a different perspective on the problem. He studied the room again, screening out unlikely candidates. The loudmouths and drunks, the shrieking office girls and their stentorian workmates vanished one by one.

  Banbury found himself left with a handful of introspective loners, any one of whom might be nursing an uncapped syringe in his jacket pocket.

  21

  * * *

  DATING AND DANCING

  Raymond Land indignantly refused to follow his own detective’s orders to return to the Albion in Barnsbury, so Colin Bimsley and Meera Mangeshkar took on a double shift, first travelling to where Jasmina Sherwin had been found dead. After spending half the evening here, they planned to split up and tackle two further public houses.

  For months, Bimsley had fantasized about being in a pub with Meera, a combination of pleasures that made him heartsick with delight. In previous investigations he had been happy enough to spend the night rummaging through suspects’ dustbins with her, searching for pieces of food-stained evidence, but just when his wish had been fulfilled, he found that his changing attitude to the diminutive DC had robbed him of happiness.

  In short, he had gone off her.

  After putting up with her sulks, her tantrums, her cynicism, her sarcasm, her ability to start small bin fires with her pre-menstrual temper, the scales had finally fallen from his eyes, and he fancied he could see her as the woman she had become: bitter, bad-tempered, happy to keep him dangling on the promise of a date which would never be arranged.

  As a consequence, the mood between them was polite but arctic. Seated side by side in the snug of the Albion, they stared into their soft drinks and allowed the silence to stretch between them.

  Finally, Meera spoke. ‘This girl, Sherwin, she was supposed to be young and streetwise. She wouldn’t have let some creep just come up and touch her. We’re not going to find anything here.’

  ‘Well, that’s a positive attitude. You’re just saying that because you don’t believe in Bryant’s methods.’

  ‘Colin, look around you. The place is virtually empty. What are we looking for? The barman who found her isn’t even here any more, so he can’t point out anyone he saw.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I talked to the girl who served me these drinks.’

  ‘Did she say anything else about him?’

  ‘He was sent by the brewery to fill in for someone who hadn’t turned up for work.’

  Bimsley jumped up so quickly that he knocked his orange juice across the table. While obtaining a cloth at the counter he had a word with the barmaid, who wrote him a number on a slip of paper. He waited for an answer on his mobile, turning his back on Meera.

  ‘The brewery never sent anyone,’ he told her, returning. ‘They didn’t get the message in time. If he wasn’t a barman, he could just have ducked behind the bar to serve her. That’s how he got close enough to be sure of his latest choice. There was only one staff member on duty last night instead of two, and if she was in the kitchen or the other bar there would have been no one at all at the front.’

  ‘We need to find someone else other than Raymond who was in the pub, someone observant.’

  ‘This is the sort of place that has regulars. You can spot them a mile off. Those two in the corner, for a start, and that old guy by the fireplace. I’ll do one end of the bar, you do the other. Look for unsteady hands and broken nose veins.’

  Hard drinkers make unreliable witnesses. Several people professed to have seen someone behind the counter, but none of them could agree on a description. He was tall, thin, broad, blond, black, Asian, blotched with a crimson birthmark. Mangeshkar tallied her notes with Bimsley’s, and they headed to their next destinations.

  Speed-dating night was held at the Museum Tavern on the corner of Museum Street, where Jasmina Sherwin had worked and met her boyfriend. The pub retained the seedy bookishness of Bloomsbury, its crimson leather seats filled with half-cut proofreaders poring over drink-dampened manuscripts. Like the Cross Keys in Endell Street or the Bloomsbury Tavern in Shaftesbury Avenue, it remained constant in a sliding world: the distinctive odour of hops, the ebb of background chatter, muted light through stained glass, china tap handles, metal drip trays, mirrored walls, bars of oak and brass. The Victoriana was fake, of course, modelled on obsolete pub ornaments and anachronistically updated with each refurbishment to create an increasingly off-kilter view of the past, but the blurry ambience remained undisturbed.

  The tiny round tables in the rear of the room had been arranged to accommodate the couples who were about to tackle their abridged liaisons. Bimsley was assigned a number by the evening’s hostess, a pleasant-faced, overweight girl who reminded him of a character from a Pieter Bruegel painting. Her name tag proclaimed her to be Andrea from the Two of Hearts Club. She spoke with the sing-song condescension of a suburban Kentish housewife, and probably had a heart of gold until it came to gays and immigrants. ‘First time? Lovely! You’re a nice big fellow, we shouldn’t have too much trouble pairing you up. Pop your badge on and we’ll get you settled in. What’s your name, lovey?’

  ‘Bimsley,’ said Bimsley.

  ‘I think it would be nicer to be on first-name terms with the ladies, don’t you?’

  ‘Colin.’

  ‘Oh, we h
aven’t had one of those for a while. There.’ She patted a sticky yellow square on to his lapel. Bimsley looked around the saloon. There were several presentable, even sexy women, but the quality of the males was abysmal: a couple of boney-faced accountant-types with VDU pallor, a leaker with lank hair stuck to his forehead and sweat rolling down his cheeks, a middle-aged man dressed as a giant toddler in a sleeveless T-shirt and three-quarter-length trousers, an ageing media-type in club gear who was probably not as interesting as his haircut, a very old gentleman cruising for an heir or possibly an enjoyable way of having a heart attack. In Russia there were ten million more women than men, so at least there the males had an excuse for not bothering to look their best.

  His speed dates were allocated just three minutes each, at the end of which he was required to give his women a rating of between one and three points. Bimsley’s decision to ask questions about a murder victim instead of enquiring about hobbies, favourite films or dining out brought him looks of incomprehension, confusion and outright hostility until Andrea took him to one side and gave him some advice.

  ‘I think you need to lighten up, darling,’ she told him. ‘Whatever you’re asking these lovely ladies seems to be having a negative effect on their opinion of you.’

  After achieving a rating score two points lower than the leaker, Bimsley decided to sit out the next batch of rounds and talk to the barmaid instead. This time he found himself on to a winner.

  ‘I worked the same shift as Jasmina most nights,’ said the pixie-faced Polish girl with earnest blue eyes whose name was Izabella, and whose jet hair framed her face like Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box. ‘She was very nice, but I did not like her boyfriend.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Bimsley, succumbing to a pint of lager.

  ‘He was not interested in her. He had other girlfriends.’

  ‘Did she ever come in here and drink on her nights off? Maybe with someone other than her boyfriend?’

  ‘Oh, no. She hated this place.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she had a – what you call it? – a stalker. You get men in every pub who try and talk to you on quiet nights, but this one came in all the time.’

  ‘Did you ever see him? What was he like?’

  ‘Too old for her – probably in his early thirties. Brown hair, tall, with a red mark on his face. I was here one night when he started on her.’

  ‘Can you remember anything he said?’

  Izabella thought carefully. ‘I think he’d been fired from his job. He was a bar manager. North London somewhere. We laughed about him after he left.’

  ‘This is really important,’ said Bimsley. ‘I need you to make a note of everything you remember about this man.’

  ‘Wait until I finish work tonight,’ said Izabella with an impish smile. ‘I will tell you anything you want.’

  Meera Mangeshkar was at the Apple Tree in Mount Pleasant, which Carol Wynley had sometimes visited with her work colleagues, but asking questions of the staff and customers proved difficult because there was a country and western line-dancing night in progress.

  This had been a postmen’s pub for many years due to its proximity to the sorting office, but had now been refurbished for the benefit of tourists visiting from nearby hotels. As Dolly Parton warbled through ‘Heartbreaker’ on the speakers and couples in checked shirts and fringed cowboy jackets stamped their stitched boots on the ancient Axminster carpet, Mangeshkar was forced into stupefied silence on a nearby counter bar stool. The combination of beery British boozer and traditional Texas toetap made her uncomfortable, partly because she was the only Indian girl in the room, and felt as if she might get shot. The well-drilled lines of dancers did not whoop and yell like their more liberated US cousins, but concentrated on their footwork, determined to master exercises more culturally alien to the London mindset than Morris dancing.

  She became annoyed that, once again, she had been given an assignment that would yield nothing useful or practical, and was thinking about calling it a night when one of the men grabbed her hands and pulled her on to the dance floor for ‘My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys’.

  For the next twenty minutes, Meera forgot her frustration and regret about moving to the Peculiar Crimes Unit as, much to her surprise, she discovered the joys of formation dancing to Willie Nelson.

  22

  * * *

  QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

  ‘In the film The Ladykillers, what was the screen name of the old lady Alec Guinness and his cronies were trying to murder? We’re talking about the original British version here, not the remake.’

  May looked around at the hunched shoulders and lowered heads. The room in the Old Dr Butler’s Head, London Wall, where Joanne Kellerman had been found dead, was silent but for the scratching of HB pencils. As he wrote ‘Mrs Wilberforce’ on the sheet before him, he accidentally caught the eye of the woman at the next table. She promptly glanced away, suspecting him of trying to cheat. They want to be back at school, he thought, each vying to be top of the class once more.

  ‘Last question in our film round: give me the name of the ancient kingdom discovered in Passport to Pimlico.’

  May wrote ‘Burgundy’ and turned over his paper, ready for collection. He looked around the room at the assembled players, trying to see if any were alone. We always assume killers operate singly, he caught himself thinking. What if there are two of them, perhaps even a man and a woman? Suddenly the conspiring, whispering pairs in the room appeared more sinister. The women had not told their partners, relatives or friends where they were going. Was that in itself significant? If the attacks were completely random and the killer moved to a fresh venue every time, catching him would be a matter of luck. There are nearly six thousand pubs in London, he thought. What are we expected to do, close them all down? Suppose he switches to another hectic public place – inside the Tube, on rush-hour buses, or simply on crowded city pavements?

  The case had resonance with a number of other, more extraordinary killings that had occurred in London over recent years. A Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov, had been poisoned on Waterloo Bridge with the sharpened tip of an umbrella. Roberto Calvi, the Vatican banker, had been found hanged in a convincingly staged suicide underneath Blackfriars Bridge. And the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko was fatally dosed with radioactive thallium in a busy sushi bar. In all three cases there had been no guns, no knives, just the careful and quiet determination to remove a life.

  It was difficult to shake off a sense of impending failure.

  May was inclined to disagree with his partner, who felt that the attacks were based on opportunity and location as much as on the women themselves, but the fact remained that they had uncovered no common denominators other than the link between their mobile phones. None of the calls had been under surveillance, so there was no way of tracing what had been said.

  And there was another problem: Jasmina Sherwin’s mobile had been found on her body, so the killer wasn’t using a consistent MO. If it can be proved that they all knew each other, he thought, it might be possible to discover the identities of other women in danger. He handed in his quiz form and sipped at his pint, watching the quizmaster at work. That’s who I need to talk to, he decided. He’ll remember everyone who’s ever come here to play. The kind of men who compile quizzes always do . . .

  The Grand Order of London Immortals were, in their own words, primarily interested in London’s most infamous characters: political brigands, celebrity criminals, unapprehended murderers, and anyone else who had been stencilled into the city’s collective memory by doing something notorious and getting away with it.

  Dr Harold Masters knew that the order shared some members with his own Insomnia Squad, and had recommended it to Bryant as a group who might unwittingly shine a light on the path to uncovering a murderer. This month they were meeting in the Yorkshire Grey, Langham Place, a small green-painted Victorian establishment with hanging baskets, exterior tables and memorabilia from
the nearby BBC on their walls. Workers from the garment district frequented the bar, but tonight the Immortals – a grandiose term for what was essentially a band of disgruntled scholars – were loudly holding forth in the rear of the saloon.

  Bryant recognized a number of old friends who had helped him in the past, including Stanhope Beaufort, a bombastic architectural expert who volunteered advice on London’s ancient monuments, and Raymond Kirkpatrick, a verbose English language professor who had been banned from lecturing at Oxford because of his habit of playing deafening heavy-metal music while he researched. The Immortals attracted their own groupies, not as glamorous perhaps as those who lurked backstage at rock concerts, but every bit as tenacious. Among these was Jackie Quinten, the maternal widow who had tried to tempt Bryant back to her kitchen with the offer of a steaming kidney casserole when they had met in the course of the PCU’s investigation into the so-called ‘Water Room’. He had turned her down, not because he disliked her cuisine but because she seemed to view him as potential husband material, which could only lead to tears.

  He had spotted her sitting in a corner reading, and was careful to skirt the edge of the room in order to avoid her. Unfortunately, as he was creeping past with his head drawn down into the folds of his scarf, he caught his foot in her handbag strap and lurched forward, precipitating half a pint of Samuel Smith’s Imperial Stout straight into her lap.

  There was a detonation of yelping chaos followed by a commotion of mopping and sponging, during which time Bryant stood helplessly by, caught between the conflicting desires to apologize profusely and to sprint for the exit.

  ‘Really, Arthur,’ Jackie Quinten cried in exasperation as she wrung out her skirt, which was woollen and perfectly designed for absorption, ‘there must be better ways of announcing yourself.’