“You mean they’re writing a bunch of toss about him.”
“Succinctly put, Mangeshkar. This editor at Hard News, what’s her name?”
“Janet Ramsey,” Longbright pointed out.
“She’s intent on turning the Highwayman into some kind of hero. And to think she started out writing in the New Musical Express. Well, you scratch a liberal and find a conservative. Look at her editorial.” Bryant rattled the magazine angrily. “‘So-called ‘artist’ Saralla White had the morals of a tramp and a string of terminations to her credit. The man who financed her career, the owner of London’s notorious Burroughs gallery, was himself the father of her unborn illegitimate child.’ My God, where are they getting their information?”
“As you said, sir, no shortage of enemies ready to put the boot in.”
“Wait, it goes on: ‘Self-styled ‘Teen Lifestyle Guru’ Danny Martell’s own secret sleazy life involved hookers and drugs. Both died in a manner appropriate to their wasted existence. Can we honestly say that either of them will be missed?’ Longbright, get me a meeting with this woman, would you? What she’s printing is irresponsible and dangerous. We don’t want a repeat of what happened with the Vampire.”
“Why?” asked Meera. “What happened?”
“His victims were accused of bringing their fate upon themselves, just because they were women out alone at night, some postwar notion about unaccompanied females being of loose character. Crime reporters turned the whole thing into a moral issue and a political point-scorer. Janice, where are the Vampire files?”
Longbright caught her breath. She had managed to hide the essential page in the back of her desk. “I think they all burned,” she replied. “Your fault, I’m afraid. I’ll see if there’s anything else left, but don’t expect much.” She rose from her desk and clumped off, returning a few minutes later with the singed cardboard container, denuded of its single incriminating document.
“Is that all we have to show for three decades of sightings?” Bryant settled his spectacles on his nose and peered into the carton, where a handful of damp clippings lay stuck to the bottom.
“We’d have more if you hadn’t blown the place up,” Longbright reminded him, tipping the pitiful contents across his desk. The best form of defence against Bryant, she knew, was distraction.
“Don’t worry, I remember most of the assault details.” May spread the jaundiced newspaper clippings out. “First recorded assault was March twenty-sixth, 1973, in the alleyway connecting Leicester Square to Charing Cross Road. It’s bricked in now as part of the Odeon complex; another smelly, piss-stained piece of old London gone, and good riddance. A nineteen-year-old female on her way home from a nightclub was beaten and bitten around the chin and neck. The same MO occurred six times that summer, enough for us to link the cases and for the press to coin a nickname. The early victims were all women between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three, all on their way home from nights on the town. Two of them were known to us because they’d been arrested on immorality charges. Two were of mixed race. The press weren’t told, but it didn’t stop them from implying that the victims had led their attacker on because they were provocatively dressed in miniskirts, and because they weren’t white. A message there to anyone who thinks the seventies were enlightened.
“The Vampire returned in 1974 after a quiet winter, the attacks continuing intermittently until a boy – Malcolm somebody, his name isn’t here – died of his wounds. He was the first of two fatalities that year. We didn’t have computers to help us find bite marks then, and at first we missed the link, but he was the son of an Austrian diplomat, and suddenly there were funds available to pursue a full investigation. The problem was that, like the alleyways where the Vampire carried out his attacks, every lead turned into a dead end. We ended up with numerous witness reports – ”
“There are a couple of brief descriptions here,” Bryant interrupted. “Tall, athletic, dressed in a black cape, spotted running into a cul-desac, thought to have scaled a sheer wall and escaped somehow. The ‘Vampire’ tag stuck not because of his clothes, but because nearly all of the victims had been bitten, the severity depending on how long the Vampire had been left alone with them. We didn’t know then that biting was so common in sexual assaults. Databases were still difficult to cross-reference in those days. And you have to realise that in 1973 his outfit wasn’t so strange.”
“That’s right.” May took up the story again. “Victorian capes for men had enjoyed a revival. Just the previous year, Christopher Lee had starred in a modern Dracula film which saw him running along the King’s Road in a billowing cape. The image had already been planted in the minds of the young. The press played up the danger, and pretty soon we had drunken vigilante groups roaming the West End as the pubs turned out, searching for this phantom figure who drained his victims’ blood and walked through walls. The whole thing became a ridiculous urban legend. People supposedly sighted him stalking across the rooftops. The Vampire operated in a tight area that, thanks to geographic profiling, we now know wasn’t where he lived. We made mistakes. The unit had been brought in to try and stem the escalating anxiety in the capital. The mythology became self-perpetuating as the Vampire started to act on his own press reports; if they said he’d been seen wearing a top hat, then he wore one the next time he ventured out. If they said he could escape through solid brick, he staged a stunt to suggest that was exactly what he’d done. He played up to his public, and started taking risks. We nearly caught him.”
“What do you mean, nearly?” asked Meera.
An awkward glance passed between the detectives, and they fell uncharacteristically silent. “The operation went wrong,” said Bryant, gathering up the clippings and tidying them away.
“Did the attacks continue?” asked Mangeshkar.
“For a while, yes.”
The room went quiet. The constable shot the detective sergeant a look, as if to say What gives here? but was ignored. Longbright finally broke the stillness.
“Could we get back to the case in hand? Perhaps we should take another look at possible suspects.”
“All right,” May agreed. “Let’s start with the boy, Luke Tripp. We know his testimony is over-imaginative – there’s no way he could have seen a man on a horse in that chamber – so we have to assume that fear made him exaggerate what he saw.”
“Therein lies another paradox,” said Bryant, who loved paradoxes. “The pose Luke drew is exactly the same as the one described by Channing Gifford, the dancer living opposite the Smithfield gym who spotted the Highwayman from her window. It’s the same as the pose struck in the digital shots taken by the estate girls. The head also matches the official logo of the Roland Plumbe Community Estate. But the schoolboy saw the Highwayman up close and in the flesh before anyone else did, therefore he can’t have copied someone else’s description, because he had nothing to base it on. What, then, are we to make of his testimony?”
May rose and strode impatiently to the sunlit crescent window. “We can’t be sure of that. We have to check for further sightings.”
“I circulated the Highwayman’s shot to every motorcycle courier company in Greater London, as you asked,” said Longbright. “I thought someone would be able to tell if his outfit was similar to any of the distinctive leather suits bike messengers wear, but so far no-one has come back with a positive match.”