Ten Second Staircase (20 page)

'We know he's tall, about six six, broad-chested, black-haired—'

'The hair sounds like a part of the disguise.'

Longbright tapped at her notepad. 'The witness reports suggest he might have five o'clock shadow, which makes him dark-complected. No fingerprints, because he's wearing leather gloves that appear to be part of the outfit.'

'We can't go to Land with this,' said May, shoving back his chair. 'None of it hangs together.'

'That's what bothers me most,' Bryant admitted, tipping back his chair dangerously. 'He leaves an elaborate calling card at the first crime scene, then leaves a very different one at the second. He dresses conspicuously and chooses to attack in public places, but nobody sees him in the act of taking lives. And—' Bryant's watery blue eyes dilated, refocussing across the room at a point halfway up the wall, like a cat. Everybody waited.

'And what?' prompted May.

But Bryant was thinking of the symbolic head on the logo of the Roland Plumbe Community Estate, and had decided not to speak.

He looked at the anxious faces surrounding him, and found himself unable to elucidate his half-formed thoughts. Kershaw had placed the Highwayman's age between twenty-five and thirty-five, the statistical range for a serial killer, but Bryant was sure these were no crimes of passion; they were calculated for some other purpose entirely. He wanted to explain that they were not looking for a stalker or a madman, but for a very moral human being, someone filled with a righteous sensitivity and the invisibility of ordinariness. In the eyes of the killer the victims were immoral, and in the hearts of the public, they deserved to suffer. It was why the Highwayman wanted to be seen. He desired acknowledgement, recognition for his services, perhaps even hero worship. The choice of clothes, grand and elegant; the deliberate appearances in crowded spaces.

Bryant wanted to say all this but something stopped him, because he felt he would lead them all to a strange and dangerous place. It would confirm Faraday's worst suspicions and jeopardise the unit's existence.
There is another, far more sinister force at work here,
he thought,
and I daren't trust myself to voice my darkest feelings.

The Right Honourable Leslie Faraday MP was seated behind the most imposing desk Raymond Land had ever seen, an acre of green glass that made him appear to be sitting upright in a stagnant pond. The pudgy, wide-eyed young man with slicked sandy hair whom the detectives had first met in the 1970s was now a bloated, bald, and bad-tempered time server who had never managed to shake off his image as the government's most pedantic minister.

In a long and almost entirely unmeritable career he had been shunted all over Whitehall. When civil servants are bad at their jobs, they are never cast out and prevented from pursuing their chosen career; they are merely moved elsewhere until they find a department that will have them. As Minister of State for the Arts, Faraday's remark about Andy Warhol's work consisting of 'boring old photos painted in the kind of colours black people like' had resulted in the outraged cancellation of a major exhibition. As minister for Rural Affairs and Local Environmental Quality, he had managed to bring the nation's low-waged road-gritters out on strike during the worst blizzard in a century after calling them 'a bunch of work-shy Irish layabouts.' As Minister of State for Sport, he had sparked off a race riot by inviting a white South African paramilitary leader to a Brixton Jail cricket match. After spending two years as a Minister Without Portfolio (where, by definition, he was unable to find anyone to offend) he was rehabilitated in the Home Office with a new brief: to make specialised police units pay, or shut them down.

Incompetent men exist in every profession, but they are easily dealt with. Faraday remained in Whitehall because of his single great talent, also his curse, which was that he never forgot anything.

'Mr Land,' he announced. 'We met on August seven, 1971, did we not? It rained all afternoon. Then I met you with Mr Bryant, and again with Mr May two years later, under more clement circumstances. How are you?'

Shaking his hand, thought Land, was like dipping your fingers into warm Swarfega: clammy and clinging. As Faraday reseated himself, his brown suit constricted his stomach and his shirt collar throttled his throat seemingly to the point of asphyxiation. He tapped at an old-fashioned intercom. 'Diedre, could we have two teas? Brooke Bond, very weak for me. And see if we have any of those ginger biscuits, the oblong ones with the little bits of peel in.' When he suddenly tipped his chair back, Land thought for a moment that he had submerged, but he bounced up again in a move that had been practised across an eternity of dull Whitehall afternoons. 'I must confess I'm at a bit of a loss to know what to do about your two detectives,' Faraday admitted. 'I mean, they've been at the unit a jolly long time, so they must be doing something right.'

'I was hoping you'd give me some advice, sir,' said Land. He waited for a response. A clock ticked distantly. Dust settled.

Faraday sighed like a leaking, tired balloon. 'From your memorandum, it's clear that you'd like to transfer to a more—professional—unit. I've given the problem some thought, and have decided that, because I know Mr Bryant and Mr May personally, I'm probably not the right chap for the job, so I'm going to hand the matter over to my new assistant. He has the kind of specialist knowledge that might be required for a more covert operation.' Faraday pressed a buzzer on his desk. 'Diedre, would you send in Mr Kasavian?'

Land had only met Faraday a handful of times, but their wives had once been crown green bowling together, and he thought he had the mark of the man. Now, though, he sensed that he might be getting out of his depth.

As Oskar Kasavian entered, the sun passed behind a cloud outside Faraday's office, and the room was plunged into shadow. Kasavian looked as if he was used to the recurrence of this effect. Tall, dark, and—well,
saturnine
was really the only word; there was more than a touch of Mephistopheles about him, and he would probably have enjoyed the comparison. His slicked-back hair and jet-black suit lent him the air of an Edwardian funeral director.

'I'll take over now, sir,' Kasavian warned Faraday, effectively dismissing him from the conversation. He towered darkly between them, folding his hands behind his back with an unsettling crack of the knuckles.

'I read your memo with interest, Mr Land, and found that it suits our current need to cut spending by a third across the specialised units. The simple fact is that murder is becoming far too expensive. As I'm sure you know, the cost of a single investigation can take up a tenth of an area's annual budget. The Serious Organised Crime Agency is planning to use the National Intelligence model to coordi nate cross-agency operations for now, but their long-term plan is to consolidate all specialist units with the minimum of disruption. I hardly need outline the benefits; an end to so-called blue on blue clashes, and a huge financial saving for the government. It is imperative, therefore, that we arrange for the PCU to be closed down. And to do that, we must remove its senior detectives. The problem is that they command a certain amount of respect amongst older law enforcement officials, so they must be quickly discredited.'

'Mr Bryant and Mr May are entirely decent men,' said Land. 'Their intentions are honest, if a little misguided.'

'Come on, Mr Land, you can't have it both ways.' When Oskar Kasavian hooded his eyes at the subject of his attention, it was as though steel shutters had slammed down, screening off the weaknesses of the human heart. 'You described specific instances of their incompetence to Mr Faraday
in writing
. I've begun checking into Home Office records on our dealings with your unit, and there seem to be an astonishing number of irregularities, including—if we can lay our hands on the original documents—some of an extremely serious nature involving a number of illegal immigrants. Clearly, we've only uncovered the tip of the iceberg. If these detectives have been allowed to twist the system to their own ends, there will be others who are just as guilty. All those who support and admire them must be made to see the truth. Who knows how deeply this corruption runs through the unit? For all
I
know, even
you
may be involved.' Mr Kasavian's black eyes glittered with malice. 'Later today I have a meeting with representatives of the Fraud Squad to begin auditing your casework. You may consider this the start of the PCU's first internal investigation, and hopefully their last. I suggest that if you personally wish to remain untainted, you had better make sure that your own dealings are in order.'

Now that he was finally getting what he had wished for, Raymond Land started to have doubts. If Kasavian could so quickly agree to dismissing two senior members of the force, he would easily turn his attention to others. But it was too late; the wheels of Whitehall were slow to grind forward, but once started would not be stopped.

19

ARRHYTHMIA

It was cold enough to condense breath in the converted school gymnasium, and that was how Oswald Finch liked it. Some nights he worked until his fingers and nose turned blue. The lower half of the room was below the level of the street, and remained cool until the two sticky months of the English summer, when everything, including Oswald, started to smell bad. Where climbing frames had once stood against the tall, narrow windows, there were now six body lockers. The sprung wooden basketball floor had been covered with carpet tiles that retained the acrid reek of spray bleach.

'Are you still here?' asked Bryant, leaning in the doorway. 'I thought you'd have gone by now.'

'How can I, when you keep sending me bodies?' Finch complained. 'Raymond Land refuses to accept my resignation, says it will have to wait for a few weeks while he's sorting something out. It's unfair, keeping me at my post like this. Do you have any idea how long it takes me to get up in the morning? If I'd known it would get so difficult to tie my laces, I'd have bulk-bought elastic-sided shoes back in the fifties.'

'Come on, I know there's nothing you'd rather be doing than opening up a cadaver. It's unnatural, but nothing to be ashamed of. I see you've got Danny Martell on the slab. What have you found for me?'

'Someone should run statistics on how many television comedians suffer untimely deaths.' Finch prised open a fatty yellow flap of chest flesh and peered inside, wrinkling his long nose. 'They seem to peg out at an earlier age than the rest of us, and in more unusual ways.'

'Not strictly true,' said Bryant. 'Look at Bruce Forsyth. He'll live forever, or at least his wig will. For most celebrities, the trick is surviving the scrutiny of the gutter press.'

'If you make a deal with the devil you must expect to be damned,' said Finch gloomily. 'This man Martell—his body was not in good shape. Take a look.' He unfurled another section of the black micromesh Mylar sheet from his dissection tray and revealed the bloated corpse of the entertainer in full. 'This is what years of fast food, high stress, and sitting in cars shouting at the traffic does to you. That's not a liver, it's low-grade foie gras. To be honest, I only opened him up out of nosiness; a first-week intern could look at his face and say what caused his death.' Finch tapped the chest with the car antenna he used as an indicator. 'Dicky pump. His valves are leaky, his pipes are furred, his blood's virtually all fat. He's suffering from arteriosclerosis, so I'm looking at ventricular fibrillation that went into a fatal heart attack. But then I have to add the witness reports about this so-called lightning flash. Did they really see some kind of electrical pulse strike Martell?'

'I wondered if it might have been the reflection of a distant lightning strike on the window of the apartment,' said Bryant. 'That would have been an easy mistake to make. The storm looked close but had no accompanying thunderclap, because the real distance was greater.'

'But if it
was
an electrocution, that gives us a cause for the VF. An electric shock will cause the heart's ventricles to twitch—it will applied to any of the body's muscles—but the electrical cycle is so fast and erratic that it can interfere with the normal contractions of the heart. The muscles quiver without pumping, and a fatal arrhythmia occurs. It happens with low-voltage appliances like hair dryers and toasters. The current needs a single point of entry.' He turned over Martell's hands and pointed to a pair of faint red blotches on his palms. 'We've got something more dependable here: marks indicating that a shock passed from one limb to the other, right across the chest, deregulating the heart.'

'We considered that,' said Bryant, 'but Banbury failed to find anything on his initial examination of the room. None of the equipment is operated electrically. Nautilus weight-lifting equipment is based on mechanical leverage. There are a couple of wall plugs for vacuum cleaners, but they have safety caps that haven't been touched in a couple of days.'

'I can only tell you what killed him, Arthur, not how it was done.' Finch folded the fatty flaps of Martell's chest shut like the curtains of a toy theatre. 'It wouldn't take a very powerful electrical device, just one with an alternating current. You can survive a low DC; it's AC you have to watch out for.'