Bear Street had an alley running from it where bars and cafés stored their waste food ready for night collection. It was closed at one end, and presented such a forbidding appearance that no pedestrians used it. Drums of ghee made the ground slick, and there was a sensation of lurking rodent life.
May was the first on the scene, slowing from a run to a walk as the feeling of something terrible prickled at his throat. The restaurant backs were deep in shadow now, and the noise of the crowd in the square had died away. He studied the filthy brick alleyway, the steel rubbish containers and plastic sacks of leaking leftovers, the cook in a first-floor window smoking a cigarette on his break, the backs of buildings resembling some ancient part of London because they had no need to make themselves attractive. He called up: Did you see a young woman run in here? But the cook spoke no English, and merely stared back.
As soon as he saw the legs of her jeans on the ground, he knew his daughter was dead. She had been struck down from behind, and lay on an oily patch between a pair of plastic wastebins. Then he saw the bloody knot of hair, the arm twisted beneath her torso with its palm up. Her head pressed up against the base of a drainpipe at an impossible angle.
He remembered nothing more of that dreadful night.
A pair of Met officers forced a bottle of brandy on him to numb the shock, not caring that they were breaking the law by doing so. May drank too deeply. He was to blame, he told them, for ignoring the rules, for not trusting his senses. Back at the unit, he insisted on signing a document to that effect, and used the officers as witnesses.
Nobody had spotted the reemergence of the Vampire from the grey dead-ended alley. An open door led to the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, but the cook insisted that no-one had entered or left. He had, however, seen a tall man in a cloak halfway up the end wall of Bear Street’s alley – the idea was preposterous, the details unforthcoming, so that the sighting only made matters worse. But the drainpipes made perfect ladders here, and it was clear that he had climbed them. The phantasm’s panicky mythology had hidden obvious truths.
May had taken a brief leave of absence, returning to work too quickly, assuring them all that he was coping well.
Elizabeth’s daughter was just nine years old when she became motherless. Her father had moved out from the family apartment five years earlier, and had by then remarried in New Zealand. April’s worst childhood fear, that she would one day find herself alone, suddenly became true. She found herself unable to talk to the man who had discovered her mother’s body, and was sent to live with his sister Gwen. Her problems began soon after.
May knew he should never have involved his daughter in a hunt for a killer. The detectives had proven too adept at attracting evil. As forensic experts combed the walls and roofs searching for evidence of the Vampire’s escape, May damned himself. Bryant, too, cursed his own arrogance, but no amount of blame could bring Elizabeth back.
And April changed. The girl with smiling eyes was replaced by a sombre, fearful child who found terrors in every building’s shadow. In the absence of factual evidence, legends took hold. The Vampire became a bogeyman, an elusive phantom that existed only in tortured dreams.
Trails grow cold, and need evidence if they are to be revived. Elizabeth’s death had marked the Vampire’s last appearance. What, wondered May, could now be gained by reopening the wounds of a tragic past?
∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧
26
Shared Tragedies
John May sat up in the passenger seat and looked around. “Why are we on Prince of Wales Road?” he asked.
Bryant had stopped the Mini Cooper before a familiar Victorian redbrick building. “I’ve been talking to you for the last ten minutes,” he said. “Weren’t you listening?” Whacking a ‘disabled’ sticker onto his windscreen, he clambered out to tap his walking stick on the wooden sign that had been affixed to the tiny church’s gate: Coven of St James the Elder – North London Branch. The crimson neon above the door still read ‘Chapel of Hope’, a leftover from the previous tenant.
“I know you detest the idea, but we need to talk to Maggie Armitage,” Bryant explained. “The Vampire files may have been destroyed, but she’s been keeping diaries for years. If you remember, she acted as my occult consultant throughout the case. I’m hoping she still has records of every sighting.”
“Yes, but they’ll be useless because she’s mad.”
“You say that about every woman over forty who holds strong convictions.”
“I know all about her convictions, Arthur. I’ve seen her arrest file.”
“Our cases don’t have traditional signifying elements, so I have to rely on people like Maggie. You never warmed to her, did you?”
“I know she means well, but when the two of you get together, she fills your head with these ridiculous ideas, like the time she convinced you that she could trap the Black Widow of Blackheath inside the Woolwich Odeon by spraying the balcony with luminous paint.”
“We caught her, didn’t we?”
“Only because you blinded her halfway through South Pacific and she fell down the stairs trying to get to the toilet.”
“I’ll admit it sounds odd when you put it like that. What are you trying to say?”
“Just that there’s no point in looking for things that don’t exist.”
“You think things don’t exist just because you can’t see them,” Bryant scoffed.
“Well, yes, strictly speaking, invisibility is a fair indication of non-existence.”
“Rubbish. What about gases, subatomic particles, magnetism, religious faith, the unfathomable mysteries of romantic attraction?”
“Don’t drag biology into this. The Leicester Square Vampire and the Highwayman have nothing in common beyond the fact that they’ve both caught the public imagination. I just don’t see how going through some barmy old white witch’s rambling diaries is going to help reopen – ”
The woman standing in the doorway listening to him was small, plump, and resplendent with sparkling appendages. Shells, amulets, chains, bracelets, semi-precious gemstones, and what appeared to be pieces of broken china tied in string dangled from her unnerving bosom. Chiming and jangling, she threw her arms wide to hug Bryant, leaving him smothered in cat hairs and cake crumbs. “Darling, monstrous man!” she laughed. “You only ever call when you want something, but do come in.”
“You look very well,” said Bryant cheerfully. “You seem to be ageing backwards.”
“Yes, I probably am,” said Maggie casually. “We conducted Day of the Dead celebrations in Miccailhuitontli last month, and the high priest traded me some Mexican rejuvenation paste for my Vodafone battery. It does wonders for the epidermis, although it did take the glaze off my mixing bowl. And Mr May, my favourite non-believer, we’ll make a disciple of you yet, come in. Your granddaughter is here, so pretty and vulnerable that one fears for her. But so clever – she’s one to watch.”
“I don’t understand,” said May. “What’s April doing here?”
“Oh, we’re friends of old, although I’ve yet to dispel the darkness from her soul, something I suspect only you can do. Do come through.”
She led the way through pools of gloom into the hall of the deconsecrated chapel, past oaken pews, across the perished parquet floor treacherous with loose blocks, through a miasmic aura of lavender, ginger, and sandalwood. The late afternoon sunlight illuminated two grim stained-glass windows illustrating the suffering of Christ, and threw bloody patches across the ragged walls.