Authors: Christopher Fowler
‘All right, I can see I’m going to have to explain why I’m so interested in our antlered abductor. Come to my office.’
‘You haven’t got an office. None of us has.’
‘Don’t be pedantic. Come back to the space which I plan to turn into our centre of operations.’
They walked together into a dingy, cobwebbed front room overlooking the Caledonian Road. ‘Pull up a crate,’ said Bryant magnanimously. He seated himself in his cracked leather chair and lifted a yellowed scroll of paper from the floor, wiping dust from it. ‘Right, this is King’s Cross during Mesolithic times.’
‘Dear Lord, do we have to go back that far?’ asked May, fearing the meeting would be a long one. He knew that the disturbing myths and mysteries of old London were Bryant’s obsession. Besides, it was getting toward lunchtime and he’d had no breakfast.
‘Now, we know there was a Mesolithic settlement just up the road from here, on Hampstead Heath, but most pre-Christian tribal activity was in the district we now call King’s Cross, near the Battlebridge Basin. The area was still unspoilt countryside a couple of centuries ago, filled with meadows, streams and wells. Water drained from Hampstead Heath down to King’s Cross, which was then the Bagnigge Wells, then to Sadler’s Wells and Clerkenwell—all wells, you see, and very healthful because they contained so much sodium, iron and magnesium sulphate, although they can’t have tasted very nice.’
‘I get the idea. You’ve told me all this before.’
‘Just checking that you were paying attention.’ He threw open a filthy, dog-eared book and stabbed at a lithograph. ‘In the Middle Ages, the area of St Pancras was part of the great forest of Middlesex. The last remaining piece of that is Caenwood—what we now call Kenwood—in Hampstead. Where you get water, you get villages, crops—and fertility rites. Now, around
1550 a fable resurfaced about the Pindar of Wakefield. The pindar warns that no-one may trespass upon his land, is challenged, and acquits himself by winning a sword fight. He appears in folk songs and his story forms the basis for part of the Robin Hood legend, where he becomes a man named George-a-Green, and his challenger is Little John.’
‘I really don’t see what on earth this has to do with a bloke abducting girls outside a nightclub.’ May was exasperated. ‘What is a pindar, anyway?’
‘He’s a man who keeps the village’s stray cattle in a pen, or pinfold. The pindar’s story goes back much further, all the way to Paleolithic times, because he’s based on a pagan British god, the lord of the forest beasts, the stag-headed “Horned One.” This character reappears throughout our history as Herne the Hunter, and represents the fertile male power of nature. In prehistoric times he would be portrayed by a shaman dressed in deerskins and a headpiece decorated with stag horns, a man undergoing transformation into a god.’
‘You think we’ve got someone who knows his history.’
‘Or his pubs. After catching our pub killer, you’ll agree that I know an awful lot about houses of refreshment. Now until recent times, the inns in Highgate still practiced Swearing on the Horns, a debased fertility rite for visiting strangers who were required to worship the god and kiss a maiden. The Pindar of Wakefield pub nearby in Gray’s Inn Road only changed its historic name in 1986, to The Water Rats. But here’s a strange thing. In 1517 when it was built, the landlord’s name was George Green. The whole area is associated with the most ancient pagan god in British folklore. There was even a pub called The Horns right on the site where this stag-man has been spotted.’
‘What on earth can he want?’
‘Well, there’s a sinister side to all of this.’ Bryant’s blue eyes glittered as he found another lithograph. ‘ George-a-Green, or Herne the Horned One, is also Jack in the Green or the Green Man, the spirit of vegetation. The Green Man is a story that predates Christ. Uniquely, it has its roots in both pagan and Christian history. The legend tells how the dead Adam had the seeds of the tree of knowledge planted in his mouth. From this mix of fertility and soil grew a sinister god, the Oak King, the Holly King, the Green Man—the symbol of death in life. The Green Man is found in a great many English churches. I understand that there are over sixty Green Men in Exeter Cathedral alone. He appears both in church carvings and at May Day celebrations, as a sort of primeval trickster, a symbol of spiritual rebirth, but also as a vengeful rapist and bloodsucker. Look at this.’ Another etching, this more disturbing than the last. ‘The Green Man is a forest creature with the power to wipe out cities and return them to nature. He destroys men by unleashing natural forces upon them, and reappears when the earth is threatened. He can be benign and healing, but there’s a wildness about him, a dangerous cruelty—and a terrible madness.’
May studied the pictures. He opened his mouth and shut it again. ‘No,’ he said firmly, ‘I’m not going to buy into this, Arthur. You always do this to me, you sidetrack me from the business at hand. The sighting and the killing are not connected. We’re after someone who has been punished for flogging dodgy drugs or black-market fruit machines, not some—vengeful god.’
Bryant wasn’t listening. His face was transformed with youthful excitement. ‘Don’t you see? The stag-man is being perfectly clear about his intentions. It’s all in the flyer he’s been handing out. The rivers will rise forth from oblivion’s bed and manifest their vengeance to mankind. He wants to reclaim the ancient woodlands.’
‘But it hasn’t been woodland for two hundred years.’
‘Hasn’t it? Take a look at the area between St Pancras Old Church and the new rail link. Apart from the odd warehouse and a few streets that were knocked down during the war, there’s nothing there.’ He thrust his hand in the direction of the window. ‘The land behind King’s Cross is finally about to be concreted over and densely populated. For the first time in two and a half million years—humankind’s entire time on earth—the forest will become a town. Someone is trying to stop that. And they’re prepared to kill in order to do so.’
18
THE WATCHER
I
t was safe to say that things had not gone according to plan. Standing beside the green park bench beneath the rustling beech trees, Mr Fox tried to understand how it had gone so badly wrong. He had painstakingly followed his own rules. He should have been prepared for anything. Instead, his anger had resurfaced at the wrong time, unfolding like a malignant bloom, spreading poison and panic across the situation. No matter how hard he tried to behave like a machine, the dark devil inside him returned to make him human.
In a way, Mr Fox had got his wish. He had moved up, because there was no going back. He had been suddenly thrust into the big league. Now that he was a murderer, the word defined who he had become, and who he would always be. It was the ultimate description of a human being, how the rest of the world would see him if they ever found out. The term overrode any other that could be applied. What he needed to do was stay calm and find a way to turn the situation to his advantage.
Murderer
. He actually felt different. The word freed him. He had nothing more to lose. If he could guarantee that no trace of his path was left behind, the way ahead was clear. He could kill again, and again. His new life required no great change in the patterns of his behaviour. It was merely an adjustment. He had
always known how to make himself invisible. His unique skill had always been to absorb the talents and knowledge of others, use what he needed and discard the rest. He never allowed anyone to get too close. He kept the world at arm’s length in order to look down on it.
Checking across the road he saw three women standing beside their prams in the forecourt of a block of flats. Jasmine Wincott, whose husband had left her for a girl half his age; Paula Trainer, whose teenage son was now mainlining heroin; and Sylvia Crane, whose oldest boy had been stabbed to death in a territorial fight between two gangs that had been disbanded by the time the case went to trial. In the road, working on his van, was Casey Potter, who’d done time for B&E, and was now studying chemistry at UCL. Mr Fox looked at the rows of boxy windows above them and knew who stood in every room. He had made it his business to know.
He watched as the shabby old detective marched past on the other side of the road, his walking stick held jauntily at his shoulder. That was Arthur St John Bryant; the middle name was not pronounced
‘sinjon’
in the traditional way. He had been given the name because his mother had been delivered to hospital in a St John’s ambulance. Not even his partner knew of this, but Mr Fox had been determined to find out as much as possible. Bryant was formerly of Bow Street, Savile Row, and the North London Serious Crimes Division. Although he had been born in the East End, the old man had lived in Hampstead and Battersea, and was now residing in Chalk Farm. His parents came from Bethnal Green, and his brother had died after suffering an accident on a Thames barge. He had never remarried after his wife’s death. He was a rebel and a nuisance, but not someone to be dismissed lightly.
Mr Fox made it his business to know everything about
everyone. The price of freedom was eternal vigilance. This was his area. He had learned the history of the Bagnigge Wells, with its lake of swans, peacocks and seashell grottos. He had been to the British Library and studied an on-line copy of the Domesday Book in order to learn about the four ancient prebendal manors in his parish—Pancras, Cantlowes, Tothill and Ruggemure. He knew how the bucolic village of Battle Bridge had become the sprawling chaos of King’s Cross, how the vast piles of ashes from Harrison’s Brickworks that had accumulated in Battle Bridge Field were eventually sold to the Russians, to help rebuild Moscow after Napoleon’s invasion.
He had discovered that the name King’s Cross came from the unpopular octagonal monument to George IV that once stood at the junction of four roads, less than half a kilometre from where he now stood. The building had been used as a police station and then a tavern before being torn down. Every time he walked through the station, he was aware that he was walking upon the site of a smallpox hospital, and that the Centre for Tropical Diseases still stood nearby. So much had been demolished around here in the last three years, so many road names changed, that it was already becoming hard to recall the streets of his childhood. He had watched the old buildings fall. Only the Coal and Fish Offices and the Granary had been spared the rapacious bulldozers. The Grade II-listed Stanley Buildings had been torn down, and all but one of the famous gasholders had been dismantled. But he knew that no matter how hard you tried to change a place, it would find a way of reverting to its historical character.
The only way he could stay here was by recording people and events even more carefully than the CCTV lenses that covered the stations.
I am the future
, he thought.
One day all people will be
like me. Not because they want to, but because it will be the only way they can prove they are still free
.
And I will be free
, thought Mr Fox as he watched the elderly detective head off in the distance.
No matter how many I have to kill to remain so
.
19
UNBURIED
I
’m only coming along to make sure you don’t say anything inflammatory,’ warned John May as he and Arthur Bryant picked their way across the torn landscape of the building site. Around them, Caterpillar trucks burrowed and strained beneath a mean-spirited sky. ‘But it’s as far as I’m prepared to go on your stag-man. After this I’ll be helping the others, so you’ll be on your own. Okay, what are we looking at?’
‘This is the head office of the Albert Dock Architectural Partnership Trust,’ Bryant explained, checking the brochure April had given him. ‘ADAPT is in charge of planning the entire area. The contract was awarded to a single company so that the new town would “observe a single cohesive vision of design,” it says here. I imagine they want to avoid any more ghastly balls-ups like the Paddington Basin.’ Paddington, another derelict area bordered by canals and railways, had been filled with a mixture of offices, retail outlets and community housing, but the resulting confusion of styles had ended up satisfying no-one.
Bryant leaned back and looked up, holding onto his hat. ‘Nice building,’ he said. ‘It’s a pity they pulled down all the others like this.’
They had reached the doors of a huge two-floor warehouse restored in reclaimed yellow brick. The former jam factory was
one of the few surviving industrial units left in an area that had once been filled with foundries, flour and timber mills, varnishers, laundries, hat manufacturers and beer-bottle washing plants. Cobbled courtyards had been sandblasted, interior walls removed, roofs renovated and steel walkways added to create a modern version of Victorian architecture, lighter and airier than anything imagined by their ancestral counterparts.
‘Who are we seeing?’ May asked.
‘A woman called Marianne Waters. She’s one of the senior partners, certainly the one with the highest visibility. She made a fortune in the city during the eighties, set up this company, the ADAPT Group, with her two former bosses, and became one of the biggest property developers in the city. She’s leading the way toward more ecologically responsible building, and has the ear of the environment minister. Their children go to the same school. She wrote a self-help book about running companies while being a single mother.’
‘Now give me the bad stuff.’
‘Well, ecologically sound architecture comes at a price, and Marianne Waters has a habit of running behind on her projects. This one is no different. They’ve been slipping back their deadlines; the new shopping mall in the centre of the development was supposed to be finished by now. Before she saw the green light Waters was a great pal of Maggie Thatcher’s, and unfortunately, London’s arch-villainess, Lady Porter. There are stories about her that she doesn’t enjoy seeing repeated in print. They mostly involve persistent rumours about her involvement in the “Building Stable Communities” scheme.’