Ten Second Staircase (14 page)

'Artistic adversaries, eh? It could be Turner and Whistler all over again.' Bryant could barely conceal his excitement. 'Well, what are we waiting for?' His impatience overtook him, as did a bus, which nearly ran him down as he stepped into the road.

May helped his partner back onto the kerb. 'I think we'd better use my car, don't you?'

'Don't be ridiculous,' barked Bryant, snatching back his arm. 'It's hardly a ten-minute walk along the Embankment.' So saying, he set off towards the bridge's staircase at a terrific pace, just to prove the point.

'I hate him already,' said Bryant in a voice somewhat louder than a stage whisper, 'eminently slappable.'

McZee, the twenty-three-year-old artist formerly known as Josh Ketchley of Sidcup, Kent, stood before them in ripped jeans, Timberland workboots, and a stained white T-shirt. He was also wearing what appeared to be an elderly lady's dress, black, floral-print, pleated, and baggy. Calvin Burroughs, the gallery owner, had warned them that his young star had a habit of making public protests about age, race, and gender.

'Yeah, we had an argument,' he told them, checking to see if anyone else was within listening distance. 'So what? She was being a hypercritical pain in the arse as usual.' The artist was supervising the crating of his work in the gallery's cavernous delivery bay.

'What time was this?' asked May.

'Just after the conference officially ended, about nine fifty-five A.M. I didn't want to stay around and suck up to the press. She thought we should work the room together, said I was betraying Calvin's trust by not networking and hyping the art. I told her that's not what it's about. She liked to milk the stories about her private life. I said the public doesn't need to know who the artists are shagging to understand their work.'

'Did you touch her when you argued?'

'Actually, I think I pushed her away from me. She does this littlegirl act when she wants something, prodding you in the chest. I wasn't in the mood for it.' McZee sighed wearily. 'I suppose this is about the pictures.'

'What pictures?'

'The pictures of us she put out on the Internet. The private ones taken in the Sanderson Hotel.'

'You don't mean Claridge's, do you?'

'No, mate, that was someone else—"Temptation in Toffs' Toilet." I was "Sex Secrets of Shamed Love Rat."'

Longbright brought tabloids into the unit every day, and several had exploited the scandal of the volatile artist who had discovered her partner was cheating on her.

'We'd been seeing each other nonexclusively for two months when she put those shots out. She filmed us on her digital camera and dropped the footage onto her Web site while I was in the shower. Thought it was funny. So I said "Laugh at this," and finished with her.'

'How do you feel about her installation?'

'The
Destiny
thing? I thought it was a cheap shot, labouring the obvious. I mean, how many new British artists do you know who are pro-life? She had the foetuses manufactured in China. That's how much she cared about human rights.'

'So you have no personal issue with a woman's right to choose.'

McZee gave him a strange look. 'Of course not.'

'Did you know she was pregnant?' He had caught the artist by surprise. 'When did you break up with her?'

'This was, like, over a month ago.' For someone who was happy to share his partner with a number of lovers, McZee looked surprisingly shaken.

'So she might have been carrying your child,' May pressed. He wanted to catch the young man before he had time to absorb the news. 'You don't seem very upset about her death.'

'It hasn't sunk in yet.'

'Tell me more about the argument you had.'

'It got pretty heated.'

'How heated?'

'A shoving match. Handbags at dawn, pretty embarrassing when I think about it. Let's put it this way: It would have given fuel to anyone who thinks artists are a bunch of self-centred wankers.'

'Did anyone else witness this?'

'No, we were in the next room to the press conference, beside my installation. The smoke detector is broken in there. You can have a fag without setting off the alarm.'

'Would you care to show us?' asked May.

McZee led the way to a chamber containing a slender glass box filled with blue smoke and wire filaments. The piece was thirteen feet high. 'Oh, give me strength,' muttered Bryant.

'Hang about, it's not on yet. It has to be turned off every fifteen minutes. There's an overheating problem, but we're working on it.' He flicked a wall switch and the filaments within started to glow. The swirling smoke coalesced about the fine wires, momentarily forming slender moving figures. Soft atonal music played from synchronised speakers.

'Good lord.' Bryant caught his breath, staring with wide blue eyes at the shifting ethereal forms. 'It's absolutely beautiful.'

They left the gallery and headed back to the Embankment. 'He obviously had a real fight with her,' said May as the panorama of the river opened out before them. 'Did you see the scratches on the side of his neck? A pity there were no witnesses. I have to vote him to the top of our suspect list. He could be lying when he says he didn't know about White's pregnancy.'

'I wonder how it works?' asked Bryant dreamily. 'The shaped filaments clearly heat the atmosphere, but how does he get them to dance like that? How can he conjure up something so wonderful from bits of old rubbish?'

'Are you listening, Arthur? We have a suspect. It's what you want.'

'But not
who
I want,' Bryant admitted. 'I've still got my eye on Calvin Burroughs. His star was about to change her much-publicised attitude towards children. If he's the father, he has the motive.'

'He nurtured her and lost her, Arthur.'

'Yes, and the work of dead controversial artists skyrockets in value.'

'You've a point there. Look at Haring and Basquiat.'

'That boy McZee is interested in organic forms, natural beauty, humanity. What could be more natural than a baby? Someone like that could become very passionate about the idea of termination.'

'So he chooses to kill them both? It wouldn't make any sense.'

Bryant was still misty-eyed by the time their taxi reached Tottenham Court Road. 'I'd written myself off as a Rossetti fan,' he told his partner. 'Whoever would have thought modern art could be so extraordinary?'

'Can we concentrate on the matter at hand?' May asked with irritation.

'That's precisely what I'm doing. I was just thinking, perhaps there is an argument against McZee. If an artist can create moving three-dimensional figures from a few lightbulb filaments and some gas, what other illusions could he create? A highwayman on a horse, perhaps? You'd have to admire his ingenuity.'

'You were just as ingenious. I remember some of the scams you had for getting around rationing quotas after the war, raising crows in your attic so you could fry them in vinaigrette sauce, that scheme for creating artificial bacon you nearly had us thrown in jail over.' Bryant made no reply. 'You wanted to change the laws of the land and reinvent the wheel in the process. You really don't see any connection between yourself and the young as they are today?'

'None at all,' said Bryant sadly. 'The more I see talent in others, the more I feel like I'm bumbling off into some obsolete corner, where all the broken washing machines and fridges end up.'

May was determined not to allow any excess of sentiment into the vehicle. 'Shall we keep an eye on Josh Ketchley's movements?' he asked.

'Call him McZee,' Bryant replied. 'The boy has earned it. But put a tag on him, all the same.'

14

PROTECTOR OF THE LAND

The staff of the Mornington Crescent unit would never win awards for office organisation, but on Tuesday morning they were more chaotic than ever.

Whenever a major investigation commenced, boxes were dumped where they could be fallen over, and precipitously stacked files could be guaranteed to cascade like decks of cards. Banbury had removed and bagged a number of items from the crime scene but had lost the key to the evidence room, so they sat at the top of the stairs waiting to break someone's ankle. Crippen the cat had spent most of Monday hiding under May's desk after getting his tail caught in the photocopier, leaving his post only to drop off a surprise in the upturned crash helmet that Meera Mangeshkar had foolishly left on the floor beside her locker. The dead cactus had fallen over, impaling Bryant's Wendigo spirit doll on its spikes and possibly damning him to an afterlife in limbo.

Everywhere she looked, April found evidence of Bryant's surreptitious pipe usage. Even when he wasn't at the unit, it still looked as if he was; there was a piece of toast stuck on the wall above his chair, and several of his fished-out teabags had been impaled on his desk with darts. His carpet slippers, cardigans, and half-eaten sandwiches were strewn over the furniture like votive offerings.

This was only her second day working at the unit, but April had already given up trying to keep the place tidy. As she unzipped her backpack and prepared to offer a hand to anyone who asked her, she wondered what she was doing here at all.

'My grandfather thinks he's helping me,' she told Longbright, 'but I feel like I'm just in the way.' It was true; she had got under everyone's feet the previous day. Sergeant Longbright looked up from her screen and thought for a moment.

'Well, what are you good at?' she asked. 'John says you have a gift for spotting the things other people miss. He says you make fresh connections. That's a very useful talent.'

'I spend a lot of time alone. I guess you become more observant. It's like always being outside, looking in.'

'So you see the bigger picture, that's good. How about helping me collate the remaining interviews? You can go through them and see if there are any common factors we've overlooked. They're already divided into High, Medium, and Low Interest—it's Arthur's system, not mine. He subdivides documents into a lot of ornate and arbitrary levels no-one really understands, including personal philosophy, favourite book, and shoe types, but the basic idea is sound enough. He's got eight potentials listed as suspects, including Saralla White's own mother, her rival artists, the gallery owner, and "The Other Unknown Suitor," although where he got that from is a mystery that he doesn't seem keen on divulging.' Longbright shook her immaculate coiffure in wonder. 'Who uses a word like
suitor,
anyway? You'd think by now I'd have an inkling of how his mind works, but it's a sealed labyrinth.' She slid over a stack of paper. 'Hard copies. I load all the reports electronically, but he prints them out.'

'I know, he's such a Luddite.'

'It's not that, it's the toner. We're on a budget. You know it's his birthday tomorrow? We're taking up a collection. John's buying him a new digital mobile. Guess who'll have to read the manual aloud half a dozen times.'

'Everybody has to do that, Janice. Here, this will cheer you up. Last night's paper.' April unfolded a copy of the
Evening Standard.
'The Highwayman, computer rendition. They latched on to the name pretty quickly.'

Longbright examined the photograph. 'They must have got hold of a copy of the kid's drawing. How the hell did they source it so fast?'

'I don't know, but the article reads pretty much the same as the ones on the Net and the afternoon cable reports—very little new information, no direct attribution. The information's all coming from one source.'

'How can you be sure?' Longbright sat back in her chair.

'The same handful of facts is spread thinly through all the tabloids this morning. They haven't got much more than the witness's description, a photograph of Meera accompanying Luke home, and the usual frank descriptions of White's past lovers, although the
Sun
rates White's sexual partners in terms of performance. I noticed that the
Daily Mail
had got Calvin Burroughs's age wrong, so I checked the other reports and found the error repeated. My guess is it's a single tabloid stringer, someone who's sold nonexclusive rights to the story. The broadsheets aren't trusting any of it until they get more direct sources. It's too bizarre for them; they smell a publicity stunt of some kind.'

'Saralla White is dead, April. That's not a stunt.'

'How do they know that for sure? She reinvented herself, and pulled all kinds of bizarre hoaxes to gain notoriety. She once described herself as a "reality hacker." And she's revealed an incredible amount of detail about her sexual life. I did some Internet research last night. The unofficial Web sites fill in some of the blanks she left; in her early unknown days she wrote a self-published biography called
Macroslut,
but no-one paid any attention. It's already changing hands on eBay now because it's filled with hand-coloured photographs that she later destroyed. There's one particular section Uncle Arthur should find interesting. It turns out Saralla White had a husband, although she always denied the marriage. She took some incredibly nasty photographs of him, naked and aroused, including one where it appears he's been drugged and tied to a toilet cistern. He works somewhere in the city, and he's probably still furious with her.'