“We’ll have to do all the follow-up work ourselves,” said May. “Faraday won’t recommend putting more officers on the street because he’s corner-cutting to prove he can meet his end-of-year budget. So long as we’re always pulled in after the event, we can’t be expected to prevent further tragedies. Not unless we’re somehow granted the gift of second sight.”
“But that’s exactly what we need to develop,” said Bryant, “and I know how to go about it. We need someone who understands why such mythical bogeymen recur in the city. Recognise the cause and you locate the solution.” He tapped his partner on the shoulder. “Come with me.”
“Oh, no, I’m not heading down this route,” May warned. “You heard Raymond, no table-tappers and ghost-watchers, just solid data-gathering.”
“You’re absolutely right, and I’m sticking to my promise. She’s just a white witch. I don’t suppose you have a problem with that, given this area’s rich connections with witchcraft.”
“You might just as well say the area’s connected with carrots because there’s a vegetable stall outside the tube station,” said May hotly.
“Come on, John, have you forgotten the lecture I dragged you to about the ‘Mother Damnable’ of Kentish Town, Jinney the Mother Red-Cap, who frequently lodged the notorious highwaywoman of Oliver Cromwell’s days, Moll Cutpurse? She was a fortune-teller, healer, and practitioner of the black arts, and her life was filled with cruelty and insanity. Mother Red-Cap’s partner incinerated himself in her oven, and later, when she herself was close to death, crowds saw the devil himself enter her house and take her soul. The witch’s hair dropped out in two hours, and the undertaker had to snap her stiff limbs to fit her into a coffin. She, Mother Black Cap, and Mother Shipton, all three notorious witches, all lived within half a mile of one another. Coincidence? I think not.”
May looked at his partner and his heart sank. It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas. John May knew this, because Bryant had once introduced him to the witches’ alarming descendants, who continued to live – and die violently – in the immediate neighbourhood of their ancestors. But now his task was to prevent his partner from favouring the pursuit of his hobbies over practical investigation.
“I’m not coming with you, Arthur,” he warned.
“I need to get you out of the office, John. We have to talk about the Leicester Square attacks. Please.”
Bryant buried himself inside his voluminous threadbare overcoat and looked for somewhere to stick his smouldering pipe. For a moment, with his head all but vanished and smoke coming out of his sleeves, he rather looked like a witch himself, melting after a tossed bucket of water. “It’s early. I’ll have you back here in no time.”
May reluctantly rose but stopped at the unit entrance. “Can’t you see what they’re trying to do? They’re dissipating our strength, dividing us between two investigations in order to make us fail at both. The Vampire is an irrelevance not worth wasting time and money on. We need to concentrate on the matter at hand. One success is better than none.”
“We can’t ignore this, John,” said Bryant softly. “Not when you know it involves the death of your daughter.”
∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧
25
Attracting Evil
“How could I have told them the truth, with April in hearing distance?” pleaded May.
“You’ll have to talk to her at some point.” Bryant bundled himself against the cool morning air and set off across wet pavements for the unit car park, a quadrangle of bricks cracked with drain-fed weeds, where horses were once stabled for the gentry of Camden Town. “You can’t leave these things hidden forever. It’s not fair on the poor girl.” He produced a bent pickled-onion fork and prised open the broken door lock of Victor, his Mini Cooper.
“How can I ever broach the subject? She’ll hate me for all the years I’ve lied.”
“You know my views on that. You should have made a clean breast of it years ago, instead of letting the problem compound itself.”
“You’ve always been brutally honest with people because you don’t care what they think, but I can’t lose April now, just when I’m getting her back.”
“Get in, for heaven’s sake.” Bryant peered at his partner through the rain-stained windscreen, but May had not moved.
He was remembering the day with terrible clarity.
The sticky heat rising from London streets at dusk. A cloud of starlings tumbling above the plane trees. 'Yourists ambling towards the cinemas of Leicester Square, where The Silence of the Lambs and Terminator 2: Judgment Day were showing. The detectives, tired and fractious, waiting in the shadowed doorway of an amusement arcade. Longbright, radio-linked in a hot patrol car below Leicester Fields, in Panton Street. So much waiting, with nothing to do but argue.
The press had grown bored with the unsolved assaults. Leicester Square had been redeveloped as a pedestrian zone, and it was assumed that the Vampire had ceased operation in the area, despite the occasional unconfirmed sighting. During the summer of 1991, the brutal murder of a woman in her late twenties in an alley off Cranbourn Street prompted fresh attention, and the case was reopened. This time the victim was a blonde, well-educated and attractive, and therefore more likely to extract outraged cries for justice. The hunt for the killer of young Amanda Wakefield began in earnest.
Three nights before the detectives’ vigil, a fight had broken out in another Leicester Square backstreet, during which a homeless man was half beaten to death by a murderous gang of youths supposedly looking for the Vampire. The police commissioner had been pressured to take action, and the unit had grown too desperate for a break.
Arthur Bryant had been the first to notice the physical similarity between Amanda Wakefield and May’s own daughter, Elizabeth, but it was John who had readily agreed to plant a decoy matching the description of the victim. The pair had been blinded by their need to resolve the investigation.
Elizabeth offered to help draw the Vampire out into the light.
Only Detective Sergeant Longbright had felt uneasy as she dressed her up for the part. Elizabeth had been armed with a police radio and pepper spray, in case of trouble, and although she was small in stature, her strength and determination made her a formidable opponent. Everyone was confident. Bryant had employed a psychic to teach her about sending the right signals to her potential attacker, but he had also noted a practical detail that no-one else had remarked upon: All the victims had worn baseball caps. Hardly anything surprising there, of course; the whole of London was wearing caps that summer – but Bryant wondered if the Vampire avoided the bareheaded because they could look up and identify him more easily.
He spent the afternoon watching Elizabeth as she trod the same route as those who had died. By nine P.M. it seemed unlikely that the Vampire would appear. He had never operated at night. The dusty sun was low behind buildings glowing with soft citrine colours. Shadows stretched and cooled. And Elizabeth decided to depart from her prearranged route, slipping between the narrow walls of Bear Street, picking her way between stacks of restaurant refuse in her search for a killer.
Her call for help went unanswered. She had not realised that the high buildings would block her radio signal. May was puzzled by the disappearance; she should have been due back at the end of Irving Street by now. Craning his neck to search the gathering crowds, he grew apprehensive. The detectives warned Longbright that they had lost contact with their decoy, and ran into the streets.