Authors: Christopher Fowler
‘Nice to meet you, Mr May,’ Toth shouted after him. ‘I don’t want you coming near my house, you hear me? Remember, I know my rights better than anyone. Stay away from me.’
Even as he walked away, May felt sure there was another part of Alexander Toth that remained hidden from view. And until he discovered what it was, he would not be able to put the case to rest.
29
ANCESTRY
I
f London’s Euston Road is the ugliest street in London (it isn’t, quite; City Road can induce such a state of clinical depression that there should be a medical term for it) then the chamber of Camden Council is its Sistine Chapel of human misery. Arthur Bryant was feeling rather buoyant as he approached it, but each step he took into the building drove the sensation from him. He had come to see a town planning officer named Tremble, formerly a solicitor with Horsley, Dagett & Tremble, who now acted as an advisor to the council in matters concerning the compulsory purchases of land.
Bryant wanted to be outside digging up corpses and chasing (as much as his bad leg would allow) unscrupulous but fiendishly brilliant villains through the back alleys of the city. Instead he was meeting a clerk about forgotten bits of paperwork.
And if Camden Council was a boring place to be when there were desperados waiting to be apprehended, Ed Tremble looked like the most boring of council officials, to be ranked beside Leslie Faraday in the great roll call of grim government time-servers. No man ever seemed riper for retirement. Bryant could almost see the weeks, days and hours counting down on his face. Tremble appeared to be having trouble remaining upright. The
solicitor looked like he was covered in dust: baggy grey suit, thin grey face, thinning grey hair. On closer examination he actually
was
covered in dust, having just returned from the basement archive where he had been digging up information for the insistent detective who had called him (on his cell phone, a number he was sure he had never given out) at an unearthly hour on Thursday morning.
Tremble had a secret, however. Underneath his dreary exterior, he was quite interesting. When his penchant for investigating the area’s past was indulged, a light shone in his eyes and he became almost passionate, which was why his wife kept a stack of local history books on her bedside table.
‘I’m not entirely sure that some of this information isn’t classified,’ said Tremble, plonking down a huge stack of filthy green folders and leaving more dust on his jacket in the process. ‘The development of the King’s Cross site has been under public scrutiny for three decades. Nobody wants to make any more mistakes.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Bryant, unwrapping a lemon drop.
‘Well, the building of the Regent’s Canal and the Great Midland Railway turned a thriving area into an industrial wasteland. The river was filled in and the fields were turned into cheap housing for French immigrant workers. Dickens called the site “a suburban Sahara.” So this time the consultation process took in every local group and involved literally hundreds of meetings. Summary reports were produced after every stage. Perhaps you’d rather see those.’
‘No, I want to go right back to the beginning,’ said Bryant. ‘I’m interested in the very first tranche of purchases made by ADAPT.’
‘They weren’t in the picture back then,’ said Tremble. ‘It was
called the King’s Cross Central Development Office in those days. The company became a public-private partnership in the mid-1990s, and finally changed its name to ADAPT in 2003. All the companies have sexier names now. Process, Change, Pulse—I can’t keep up. What are you really looking for, Mr Bryant? I mean, what interest could the police have in old land purchases?’
‘All wars are fought over territory, Mr Tremble. And this is a fascinating piece of ground. How much do you know about King’s Cross?’
‘Far too much for my own good,’ Tremble admitted. ‘What’s most striking is the way it has always switchbacked from rural idyll to urban squalor. One decade you have swans and spa fountains, the next, dustheaps and decay.’
‘What do you know about Xander Toth and the Battlebridge Action Group?’
‘He’s a pain in the rump, but I suppose he has more reason to be than most.’
‘Why is that?’
‘The name, Toth. The area around Euston was once the Manor of Tothele, later Tottenham Court Road. I suspect it derives from a word meaning the sun. Altars on druid sites are called Heal or Hele stones, because the sun rises over them.
Helios
is Greek for sun. Tot-Helios became Tothele, or Sacred Sun Site. The manor was a royal residence of King John in the thirteenth century. He hunted in the surrounding forest. Very popular with the royals, that area. Edward the Fourth, Elizabeth the First and Charles the Second’s mistress Nell Gwynne all lived there. By the 1670s it had become Tottenham Court. So it was a rare example of a sacred site that became a royalist stronghold. Which means that Mr Toth can trace his ancestry back to the
throne of England. That might explain why he feels so strongly about the land.’
‘So it would be a prestigious area for ADAPT to own in its entirety, presuming they could purchase back all the separate properties and reunite it into one site?’
‘Indeed. I think it even comes with its own sovereign laws, rights to hunt and dig, that sort of thing.’
‘That’s very useful, Mr Tremble. You’re wasted here.’
‘Tell me about it,’ said Tremble.
Bryant headed for his next stop.
The elderly detective looked hopelessly out of place in the arctic-white reception area of the ADAPT offices. He was rumpled and tired, and very nearly ready to slide off the vast white leather sofa and fall asleep. He was at the age where he fantasised about having a nap in the afternoon. Indeed, he had done so throughout his fifties, but now he was old enough to be constantly aware of his fragile place in the world, and would not allow himself to miss a moment more of his life.
So there he patiently sat with his brown trilby squashed between his hands, his presence making the place untidy. Bryant’s shabby overcoat was so vast that he appeared to be vanishing inside it. His wispy white tonsure was still fanned up around his ears as if he had just risen from bed. An impossibly slender young woman approached the sofa where he sat, but changed her mind when she saw its occupant. Bryant kept his watery blue eyes locked on the receptionist, daring her to leave him stranded in this snowy wasteland of designer chic for much longer.
After a few minutes, a small boy with a perfect blond
designer haircut and an outfit that made him look like a miniaturised member of a boy band sat down next to him and began hammering a hand-held computer game. Electronic explosions and power chords filled the lobby. The boy punched the air, texted his success to a friend, then grew bored. He turned his attention to Bryant, studying him with vague distaste.
‘Are you more than a hundred years old?’ he demanded, as if interviewing an Egyptian mummy.
‘I feel like it most days,’ Bryant admitted. He did not like children because he had always been an adult.
‘Then how do you stay alive?’
‘I eat small boys.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘You don’t believe me.’
The boy looked disgusted. ‘Duh. Get real.’
Bryant removed his false teeth and nipped the child hard on the arm with them. The boy screamed and burst into tears.
‘Mr Bryant, you can go up now,’ the receptionist called. ‘Miss Waters is ready for you.’
As he passed, she whispered urgently at him, ‘That’s Miss Waters’s son.’
‘Good. Where is she?’
‘Her administrative assistant will meet you on the third floor.’
The closing lift doors snipped off the sound of the wailing child.
Marianne Waters had a corner office with floor-to-ceiling glass overlooking a steam-cleaned courtyard lined with chrome uplighters and silver birches. She was a strong-looking woman, Bryant decided, studying her tight black suit. Hard-bodied and muscular, without a centimetre of body fat. He tried to imagine
her saying silly words like ‘ping-pong’ and ‘hippopotamus,’ but the image wouldn’t spring to life.
‘Do you ever watch television, Mr Bryant?’ she asked, walking to the window. ‘I always enjoy the historical adaptations, all those happy street urchins and ladies in bustle skirts worrying about their suitors. The reality was down there.’ She tapped a nail against the double-glazing. ‘It’s hard to imagine how tough urban life used to be. These buildings were blackened with soot and filled with laundresses who were too old and ill to work by their mid-thirties. A woman of twenty-five looked fifty.’
‘At least you were able to save some of the original buildings,’ said Bryant, dropping onto the nearest seat.
‘These factories were left over from the bad old days. Their staff worked with mercury, lead and arsenic. The dyes rotted their nails, and mercuric vapour burned out their bronchial tubes. They suffered from anaemia, blood poisoning, cardiovascular disease, dermatitis, kidney damage. The employment laws favoured management, of course. The rates of pay were whatever you could get away with. Now the offices are air-conditioned, and have natural light. We’ve improved the environment beyond all imagining.’
‘I agree that our standards are different now, but the gap between rich and poor remains. It’s not your fault. Most of the office workers we interview hate their jobs and are only doing it to pay their bills. They binge-drink and take drugs and go mad with frustration and boredom.’
‘You’re right. It isn’t my job to rebalance the whole of society, Mr Bryant.’ Her mood changed as soon as she realised he would not be easily led. ‘Why are you here?’
‘A rather esoteric subject for an investigation unit, I’m afraid. Land purchases. You made over two hundred and sixty of them
in order to secure this land, and it took thirty years. Any problems there?’
‘What kind of problems?’
‘Well, what do you do about the ones who don’t want to sell?’
‘You mean do we trick property owners into signing away their homes?’
‘Oh, I imagine all the guidelines are carefully followed. At least on paper,’ Bryant replied lightly.
‘More than that. We have government backing every step of the way, at both local and national levels.’
‘So you can’t really fail, can you?’
‘If you’re implying something, Detective, it might be better to just come out and say it.’
‘Well, you must admit you’re having a fairly unusual month. Body parts turning up on your site, some lunatic stalking the workers in fancy dress. At first I thought someone was out to stop you from finishing the project. Silly, of course; an international juggernaut derailed by a worker with a grudge. Then I thought, what if he’s just trying to draw attention to the company and its work practices? You don’t have a high public profile. You get on with your work and keep your heads down. Suppose someone started to shine a spotlight on you? So, first the culprit dresses as a local hero and marauds around your site, making a mockery of your security system. Perhaps he still has friends inside the company who’ll arrange to leave doors unlocked and lights deactivated. And when that has no effect he gets desperate, stepping up his activity until it results in a murder which has to be hidden, which then turns up a second corpse. And he dresses it all up in the myths of local history, just to keep everyone interested. That’s why you need to search through your employment records and see if there’s someone on your books who’s capable of such a thing.’
‘We don’t have time to do that. We have deadlines to meet.’
‘Then we’ll do it for you, starting this afternoon.’
‘This is a privately owned company, but it’s sanctioned by the government,’ Waters warned.
‘It’s publicly accountable. You’d better make sure you have nothing nasty to hide, Miss Waters, because if you do I will find it and I will bring you down to earth.’
‘If we wanted to hide something, Mr Bryant, I can guarantee you’d never find it.’
Bryant left in a fury. No-one was telling the truth. Everyone had something to conceal. And an ordinary, decent man had been killed in impossible circumstances. Another working day was almost over; there was an ever greater danger that the Met would regain control of the investigation, and the truth remained just beyond his grasp.
Worst of all, he could not shake the strange feeling that he was being watched.
30
PREDATOR
B
ryant sat in the Costa coffee shop opposite the station entrance, staring into the falling rain. He was thinking about the Sioux star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.
Chief Long Wolf made it all the way here in 1892
, he thought,
only to die of pneumonia in London’s dreadful weather. That says it all. Look at it
.
He had sounded confident in the meeting with Waters but knew that the case was falling apart around his ears. The first victim was bothering him. At least the head had now been found, and was undergoing tests. Why had it turned up on the same site? If the killer had really wanted to keep his victim’s provenance hidden, he would have taken the head far away, or simply weighted it and thrown it into the fast-flowing tide of the Thames. The invention of the garbage bag had been a boon to murderers everywhere. If the murderer was that much of a professional, it didn’t make sense to bury the head in rubble at the back of the store.
Which meant that their killer was not a hit man at all, but an ordinary fallible human being. No professional would have left the parts where they would be found.
But if there was no hit man, where did this leave the investigation? They had no-one. A face in the crowd. An invisible man. Ordinary people left spoors, and Banbury had turned up nothing,
not a hair, not a thread, not a flake of skin. That in itself was rare enough to suggest they were dealing with someone extraordinary.
The ghosts of Battlebridge obliterated those who would desecrate their land. Veles came storming through the dark green forest to take his revenge. A supernatural killer had risen out of the torn soil, from an age so long gone that civilisation did not even have a trace-memory of it. Time fragmented the past into bright moments, tumbling diurnally until they finally faded from view. The pagan god of all things wild, of woodlands and beasts and storms and rushing rivers, had come back into a world being re-created in concrete, back just in time to restore it to a natural state where faith in the rising sun and the blossoming of plants could reign once more. And he was removing the heads of his victims in rituals of pagan sacrifice.