“You’ll be pleased to know there’s a piece of geographic profiling software available that can calculate this,” said May, risking a biscuit. “We need to place the Highwayman at this home site, and find at least three locations where he’s been known to commit violent acts. For each location we plot out a different likely area in which the offender lives, and see where the areas overlap to form a hot spot. Then we conduct door-to-door interviews. If it turns out that one of our existing suspects lives within the radius, we conduct DNA testing.”
“Very impressive,” Bryant conceded. “Where might this software be?”
“At the moment it’s only leased to the Houston FBI, but we could – ”
“Faraday is holding the purse strings, remember?”
“But when lives may be at stake – ”
“ – we’ll need to fall back on human ingenuity.”
“We could at least ask Raymond Land tomorrow. He wants us both to meet with him first thing, says it’s urgent. That’s what I came to tell you. I tried calling, but your mobile’s not responding.”
“Ah, er – I don’t have it at the moment.”
“The one I bought for you? What do you mean?”
“I’ll explain tomorrow. For now, I’m using my old mobile. At least I would be, but it fell into the hole while I was digging out the toothbrushes.” He pointed to something May had taken for a tinned chocolate sponge on the draining board but now realised was a mud-coated phone. “Let’s go and see Land.” He sighed. “I’m in the mood for a fight.”
♦
The Highwayman poised himself on the apex of the roof, looking down at the city, his black tricorn hat tipping a thin stream of rain over the edge of the building. He felt a dark energy coursing through his nervous system, a sense of power over the residents of the streets below. His boots gripped the slates as he breasted the wind, keeping his balance. He turned to face the rising air currents, his cape lifting in the chill night, a creature conjured from a mythical past, a killer for a harsh new era.
∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧
23
Incrimination
It was six-thirty on Thursday morning, and the lights were on in the all-night taxi office with the canary-coloured plastic fascia that read Mornington Cabs. Above this was the great tiled crescent front window of the PCU, where Raymond Land kept his office. He looked out onto Koko’s, a nightclub housed in the century-old Camden Theatre; three kebab and pizza take-aways; a Sainsbury’s Local hidden behind a fortification of steel delivery trolleys; a makeshift Internet café filled with students; a pockmarked statue of Richard Cobden, the repealer of the Corn Laws in 1846; and a terrace of bricks, where, until just a week ago, a blackened pawnbroker sign had read Old Paintings & Violins Exchanged, this last piece of street furniture having survived above a shop for more than one hundred sixty years until mysteriously vanishing into some property developer’s auction. It was a typical London scene, the old and new wedged untidily together in easy symbiosis.
But this morning, Land wasn’t thinking of the view. He nervously pushed at the strands of grey hair straggling on his head as he seated himself behind the protecting width of his desk. As much as he hated his job, he was far more disturbed by confrontations. He lined up his pens and studied his guests. May, smartly suited, was seated patiently with his hands in his lap. Bryant wiggled a pipe cleaner about in the bowl of his briar, unconcerned; he was used to being in the unit early. Judging by the state of his clothes, he looked as if he had slept there.
“I shouldn’t worry about it if I were you, Raymondo,” said Bryant now, squinting into the pipe stem and blowing bits of burnt tobacco everywhere. “Faraday is merely a mild laxative; he eases things through the system. There’s little he can do about us.” If he was worried, he hid it well.
“I keep telling you, it’s not Faraday,” Land pointed out. “He has a new hatchet man called Oskar Kasavian. That’s who you need to look out for.”
“I don’t understand how you’ve put us in this situation,” said May with some exasperation. “You went to Faraday to complain about us, didn’t you? Surely you must have seen where such an action might lead.”
“I was frustrated and angry,” Land admitted. “You know how I get, John. I thought it might gee you up a bit.”
“It’s going to do more than that. By the sound of it, we have a survival battle on our hands.”
“And it’s all your fault,” added Bryant unnecessarily. “Do I need to remind you how many times we’ve covered up your mistakes? ‘The sinking ship drowns all the rats’ – Confucius.”
“Now look here, Arthur, you can’t deny that the number of cold cases on your files has been creeping up, and there’s little chance of them ever being closed. They must be brought to some sort of resolution, or you’ll be used as an example of outdated detection techniques, and will forfeit your careers. Kasavian has spent this week going through all the records. He’s noticed that the unit has one particularly problematic case to sort out – one that goes back a very long way, and has a number of serious repercussions for the unit.”
“You’re talking about the Leicester Square Vampire,” said Bryant. “You know that’s not solvable.” His longest-running nemesis had been carrying out random attacks on the streets of London for decades. The acts themselves always took the same form, although descriptions of the attacker varied, and there were no links between any of the victims. “A case is cold from the point when its official investigation ends until the day its secrets are finally exposed. Good God, look at Napoleon and the wallpaper.”
“I’m sorry?” said Land, confused.
Bryant sighed as if having to explain to a recalcitrant child. “Historians long suspected that Napoleon was poisoned, so they put a sample of his hair in a nuclear reactor to find out if it was true, irradiating the strands and passing them through a spectrometre. Wallpaper was made with arsenic back in the 1820s. The idea was to prove that he had somehow come into contact with the – ”
“Enough!” Land slapped the table, surprising himself. “You simply don’t appreciate the gravity of the situation, Bryant.” He knew that this particular cold case was the Home Office’s trump card. Kasavian needed a single documented instance of malpractise within the unit, and had picked up on rumours that neither of the detectives would wish to be confirmed. “The outcome of this will affect us all.”
“Oh, come on, Raymond, everyone knows you’re looking to get transferred. You’d be happy guarding a model village on the Isle of Wight, but we’ve still got a future here.”