Ten Second Staircase (32 page)

Something in Bryant's speech struck a familiar chord. 'You're talking about setting up a potential victim for him.'

'The thought had crossed my mind.'

'You know how dangerous that is. Look what happened with the Leicester Square Vampire.'

'This time we can have total control. You don't even have to be involved, John. The unit will take all the risk. Besides, there's something else for you to do. Look back at the birth of our myth-figure. Who first gave us the image of the Highwayman?'

'The boy who was drawing in the gallery.'

'Then return to him. Even if he doesn't know it, the boy holds the key. While you do that, do I have your permission to bring in some alternative expertise?'

'You have my blessing,' May agreed. 'Just make sure there's nothing to connect us in the event of an internal investigation.'

30

SECRET LANDSCAPES

As he struggled with a recalcitrant length of bookbinding tape, Arthur Bryant thought back to the white witch's comments about London's legendary monsters.

How many had left their marks behind in ancient streets, to be traced through to the present day? As a tour guide, he had taken tourists around Chelsea, showing them the artists' houses where nervous talk of foreign fiends once filled the drawing rooms, then on to Vauxhall and Rotherhythe, where cutthroats and footpads had operated in the alleyways and under the arches. In London's poor areas the dangers had been more real, and the residents had found little time to fret over the presence of imagined devils, but in wealthy and penurious neighbourhoods alike, the legendary monsters of London had left few physical signs of their presence. All that could be seen were a few untended plaques, a gravestone or two, sometimes a public house where a villain had gathered with his cronies. Monsters lived on in family memories, and were turned into stories to frighten children.

Bryant patted the binding tape onto his copy of
London's Most Notorious Highwaymen
and returned it to the shelf behind his desk. So if there were no outward signs of the city's night creatures left, why did their stories survive? Did grandfathers still terrify with tales of Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper, or were these legends now too tame to recount? Denis Neilsen, Fred West, and Dr Harold Shipman were the British bogeymen of the twentieth century, and the infamous catalogue of their victims would lengthen in the twenty-first as the full extent of their crimes was revealed. But they had been identified, analysed, and locked away. For a murderer to become a myth, something more was required, an element of the unfathomable. Could it be that as the lives of murderers were dissected and placed on public display, their power to thrill future generations was diminished?

Londoners still spoke of the Leicester Square Vampire precisely because he had never been caught. Was that the purpose of the Highwayman, to provide a nemesis for generations to come, to achieve perverse immortality through incompleteness?

Bryant sat back and untangled his pipe from the scarf he kept wrapped around him in the overheated office. The geographical factor bothered him. Two of the murders had occurred in the area surrounding Smithfield, the former execution site of London's villains for over four hundred years, before it was moved to Tyburn Tree. Once the mob had gathered there to witness death by fire and roasting chair. Was it really coincidence that modern-day scoundrels should suffer similar fates in the vicinity? Bryant kept coming back to Clerkenwell, and its connection with the blood of Christ. All London areas maintained links with the past, no matter how well hidden they were. Even the pubs surrounding Lincoln's Inn Fields had bars named after the Templars. Everything was there for a reason. The past misled and taunted him but tightened its grip as his age advanced.

And now that he had been given permission to explore the city's history of murderers, he sensed a recurring pattern at work, something that ran all the way from the London Monster to the Leicester Square Vampire and the Highwayman. Certainly similar murderers seemed to have existed under a variety of names. London's bogeymen were part of the folklore that crusted around the city like barnacles on a slow-sailing liner.

Bryant raised his collapsed trilby from the chair and bashed it back into shape. It was time to consult an expert on the meanings of London's secret landscapes. Creaking up from his seat, he decided to start by paying a visit to his old friend, Oliver Golifer, owner of the Newman Street Picture Library.

Oliver Golifer's broad, broken nose, badly shaved pate, and ironingboard forehead gave him the appearance of an East End thug sired by Magwitch. Strangers picked Saturday-night fights with him just to prove to their girlfriends that they were hard, which was unfortunate because, although he had the heart of a kitten and the intellect of an Oxford don, he was still happy to knock someone into the floor for their arrogance. He had developed this pugilistic tendency at an early age in response to taunting about his admittedly ridiculous name. This amused Bryant greatly, because while Golifer had the reputation of a bruiser, he could also be as camp as a French operetta. He welcomed the detective with meaty hands the size of Sunday roasts before ushering him through the cramped storefront.

'Nice to see you looking so well, Arthur,' he whispered. As a child, he had accidentally drunk some bleach his stepfather had saved in an orange squash bottle, and it had corroded his vocal cords, reducing his voice to a sinister sussurance as menacing as his demeanor. 'I see you're all over the news again. I'm assuming that's what you're here about. What's on your mind?'

'It's a question of motive. You've read about the investigation?'

'How could I have avoided it? The gentleman you're searching for is a self-publicist. The tabloids have been praying for someone like him to come along for years. I've already opened a picture file on him, although I'm sure they're only variations on the shots you already have.' He led the way through the warren of rooms to racks of yellowing envelopes, filed in a complex system involving dates, locations, and subjects. The proliferation of Internet picture sites meant that Golifer no longer needed to keep the library open, but it appealed to his sense of continuity to do so; Newman Street had housed picture libraries as long as photographs had been taken. Its walls were lined with famous images: Emmeline Pankhurst being carried away by constables, a fascist throwing a Molotov cocktail at a police cordon, Ban the Bomb gatherings in Trafalgar Square, Poll Tax riots, vacant celebrities alighting from limousines into photographers' light storms.

'I'm interested in his field of operation,' Bryant explained. 'I was waylaid by Clerkenwell's historical connections for a while, but I think that may be a blind. If you connect the murder sites properly, one place seems to exist at the centre. What do you have on Smithfield?'

'Hm. Bull in a china shop,' replied Golifer enigmatically. He rooted about for a few minutes and finally held up a damaged print of one such enraged bovine creature destroying several hundred Wedgwood vases. 'In the early part of the seventeenth century, drunken herdsmen used to stampede their cattle on the way to the market at Smithfield, just for a laugh. The beasts used to rampage into shops and houses, hence the expression.' He studied Bryant's face thoughtfully. 'You want to go even earlier, don't you? Thinking about the old execution site?'

'The area's psychogeography is hard to ignore.'

Golifer dragged over another box and opened it. 'Is your partner still seeing that married woman behind her husband's back?'

'Monica Greenwood? I'm afraid so.'

'Dirty old sod, good for him.' Golifer's gurgling laugh sounded like someone unblocking a sink. 'What about you? I heard you were knocking about with some old bird as well.'

'Mrs Quinten and I have an understanding, that's all,' Bryant bridled. 'I enjoy her company. We play skittles together.'

'Your landlady won't be pleased. Alma always had a soft spot for you.'

'Can we get back to the subject in hand? I don't ask you about your bedroom arrangements.' Bryant reknotted his scarf, tightening it in some agitation. 'What else do you have on Smithfield?'

'I know it used to be called "Smoothfield," a flat ten-acre grass field with a horse market on Fridays. Early twelfth century, that was. Farmers added other livestock, punters went to watch tournaments and jousts, then they came for public hangings. It was all considered entertainment. Witches and heretics were roasted alive in cages. In Mary Tudor's reign, over two hundred martyrs were burned. Duels and disorder, death and drunken debauchery, that's Smithfield for you. Now it's all rowdy nightclubs. Goes to show some things hardly change.'

'Perhaps it was no accident he picked these sites,' said Bryant.

'What about the other two?'

'I thought of that. The Oasis Swimming Pool is very near the site of Seven Dials' notorious rookeries; they sheltered many a famous murderer. Which leaves Burroughs's art gallery on the South Bank as the odd one out. That part of the Thames was hardly more than a rural riverbank until the Festival of Britain in 1951. My theory is that he had no choice in that location, because it's where White's art piece had already been installed.'

'A bit of a dead end there, then. You must have tons of forensic information to go on, even if you're low on suspects. Surely the bizarre methods of death have left you with something?'

'Less than you'd think. We're due some more results later today.'

'So what do you need me for?'

'I thought you might—oh, I don't know, help me get a synapse jump-started or something.'

'Well, I can certainly help you with highwaymen. Come with me.' Golifer led the way to a circular iron staircase at the rear of the shop and squeezed his bulk down it. They descended into a mildewy basement filled with overloaded shelves. 'They've always been a popular subject for prints. After all, so many of them became folk heroes. Let me see what we've got.' He slid out a long box from beneath one of the counters and began drawing out envelopes. 'Take a look at these. We've got prints of around thirty highwaymen operating in England, from Captain James Hind to Jack Shrimpton and John Cottington, but of course there were hundreds of infamous highwaymen—and a few women. The trouble is that most of the illustrations are rather similar in styling.' He carefully lifted a sheet of tissue paper covering one of the prints, which bore the caption
Mrs Huntingdon is much received of dissatisfaction by robbery and an offer of marriage from Mull-Sack the Murderer.

'These are all hand-tinted from books published between 1880 and 1925, when the subject came back into vogue. The main features are common to your photographs: flintlock pistol, tricorn hat, greatcoat—usually crimson, occasionally blue—gloves and high riding boots.'

'What's that?' asked Bryant, pulling out his reading glasses to squint at an object depicted on the bottom of the sheet.

'Ah, that's a rather more private part of the highwayman's lore,' said Golifer, 'a secret known only to London's criminal fraternity. It's the fabled highwayman's key.'

Bryant found himself looking at the key left behind in the Burroughs gallery.

31

THE ASSONANCE OF MYTHS

John May pushed his way between the moping trumpet vines draped from the railway embankment as the drainpipe-thin boy passed by no more than six feet away from him.

He had intended to talk to Luke Tripp as he exited the school, but something had held him back. The detective's age counted against him; the boy would not confide in someone he saw as ancient and alien. He was making his way alone from St Crispin's, and had reached the edge of the Roland Plumbe Community Estate. If the private-school pupils were wary of crossing the estate gang's territory, their caution had not infected Luke, who kept a steady unfaltering pace as he passed into the shadow of the ground-floor columns. Aware that he was the only other figure crossing the bare open space of the estate's grounds, May dropped back.

Tripp knew exactly where he was going. Not once did he raise his head to check his route, or hesitate before altering direction. His slender form appeared and vanished between the columns as May kept pace. He thought of something Bryant had said:
Even if he doesn't know it, the boy holds the key.
What had he meant?