“Very good, sir, thank you.” He examined the shower stall. “Well, this isn’t a job for FIT, because the fire was deliberate, not accidental.” The Fire Investigation Team was a specialist service intended to aid a police investigation by mapping the source, growth, and decay of fires. “The triangle stayed intact long enough to kill him. There are three points on the triangle after ignition: heat, fuel, and oxygen. Fires have to stay alive by moving, and they do that by conduction, convection, or radiation, but there were no pipes or other objects in the cubicle to aid the transfer of heat, and the ceiling above is too high for it to have spread easily.”
“There’s a faint V pattern of scorching on the rear wall,” Bryant pointed out. “What’s that?”
“It means combustion started low, and a pool burned here on the floor, see?” He indicated a dark halo shape on the cracked tiles. “An accelerant, petrol obviously.” Kershaw lifted some scraps of burned matter and dropped them into a nylon sack. “Chromatography can break down the chemical structure of the vapour in the bag. God, it smells like a burger bar in here. My tummy’s rumbling.” He stepped back from the cubicle and took some air.
“Can you tell whether he was dead or alive when the fire started?” asked Bryant.
Kershaw swallowed gamely and concentrated. “That’s straightforward enough. A positive reaction for carbon monoxide in his blood will prove he was still breathing, and we’ll check for soot in the air passages. Hyperaemia – inflammation caused by the healing process of leucocytes, the white blood cells – will be present around blisters. Look at this.” Kershaw indicated what appeared to be knife marks across the top of Sarne’s skull. “Heat ruptures caused by the splitting of soft tissues where bone is closest to the skin.”
He rose once more and stretched, pushing blond hair from his eyes with his wrist. “Usually it’s not a very practical way to kill someone, but he was standing in a narrow glazed box and basted with petrol – he might as well have stepped into an Aga. We know he was showering when he went up. That’s burned bare flesh, no fibres that I can see, apart from the remains of his trunks. A polyamide of some kind, they melted onto him. It’s telling that the shoulders are the most heavily burned part.”
“Oh, why?” Bryant leaned closer to examine the roasted body with a handkerchief attached to his nose.
Kershaw unwittingly pulled Bryant’s old trick of not answering the question. “I was thinking perhaps he’d struck some kind of flame like a lighter, but why would anyone smoke in a shower? And besides, that would have left him with his arms bent, at about midheight, and the scarring’s not right. We know this was petrol, not a gas explosion, and there are several odd things about that. First, the boiler is down in the basement, so it couldn’t be faulty pipework; too many metres away to cause an explosion up here. If the petroleum was thrown into the shower unit, it would have to be lit pretty damned quickly before the victim could jump out of the booth. And there are no splash burns on the surrounding floor tiles in front, which you’d have had if someone was tossing the contents of a can. The deeply charred upper body suggests it was tipped from above, except that our perpetrator didn’t climb up from the adjoining booth, because the walls are still wet from a previous shower, and there are no scuff marks breaking the water patterns.”
“What about over the back wall?” Bryant asked.
“You’d have to be about seven feet tall to do that. Don’t tell me we’re looking for Spring-Heeled Jack.”
“Then there’s only one other answer. The petrol was sent through the pipework itself into the showerhead.”
“You’d have to saw into the existing pipe and manually pour the stuff in, but gravity would do the trick from that height. Why would anyone go to such effort? It’s the kind of deranged thing – ”
“ – that the Highwayman would do. Yes, isn’t it?” Bryant raised a knowing eyebrow and walked away.
“You’re right, sir, more Highwayman sightings,” said Mangeshkar, grabbing him at the entrance to the changing room. “Up on the rooftop about ninety minutes ago. Plenty of people in the flats opposite – this time we’ve got more witnesses than we can wave a stick at. He ran across the flat roof, stopped at the skylight, climbed down the far side, in full regalia: tricorne, cape, black leather bodice, boots. Colin is up there now having a look around.”
“He wants to be placed at each site,” muttered Bryant. “It doesn’t make sense. Keep a lookout for a calling card – it could be a symbol just a few inches across, scratched into the brickwork.”
On several occasions, the Leicester Square Vampire had left behind a sign of his presence, probably made while he was waiting in the alley for a victim, although the police had never publicised the fact. Signs and signals in the ancient streets; Maggie Armitage’s theory about the capital’s mythical attackers leaving their mark.
“Got anything on the victim yet?” he asked Sergeant Longbright, who was working on her laptop in the changing room. She had bleached her hair a fierce shade of blond and cut it in a style that reminded him of Ruth Ellis, the last British woman to be hanged. What a wonderfully strange creature she is, he thought admiringly, studying her for a moment. So like her mother.
“His identity’s easy. We got that from the wallet he left in his clothes locker. Anthony Sarne, another demicelebrity. Lanechanging politico. There are dozens of Web pages on him – seems he inspired animosity in an awful lot of people.” She turned the screen to face him. “There’s a career synopsis here if you want it; early success as a Labour candidate, disillusionment, a switch of sides to the Liberal Democrats, a court case involving payments to a King’s Cross prostitute that seems memorable only for the predictability of the press headlines, wife and children stood by him, blah, blah. Disgrace, eighteen months in jail for lying under oath, reemergence as a hard-line Tory, reinvention on a TV reality show, now a Daily Telegraph columnist. He prided himself on the fact that he never apologised for his actions, but this final determination seems to have driven his wife away, resulting in divorce proceedings and some ugly public mud-slinging. Cue more punning headlines in the tabloids.”
“Show me,” said Bryant, bending to examine the screen. “I remember him. Well, at least he remained entertaining in adversity. One of those characters people refer to as ‘larger than life,’ when they actually mean he was an opinionated, obnoxious womaniser. He came out with the most frightful spurious rubbish in court, no wonder they sent him down. People with no sense of shame always make good copy. At least we have a clear pattern now.”
“I don’t see one,” said Longbright, flicking through the screen pages.
“That’s because we’ve been searching for someone with an emotional attachment to the victim, but these are all celebrities, whether we like the idea or not. They live in the public arena, and are expected to pay their dues to the people who made them famous. They’re publicly accountable. When they fail themselves, they fail their fans. We’re not looking for jilted lovers, betrayed rivals, or deceived wives. It’s someone who feels personally let down by the actions of these people. White admits to abortions, Martell wrecks his career, and Sarne upsets just about everyone.”
“It doesn’t exactly narrow down the suspects, sir.”
“Quite the reverse,” Bryant replied, sighing. “We’d be harder pushed to find someone who didn’t hate him.”
He stood outside the Oasis with his smouldering pipe, watching the rain-spattered taxis rounding the curve of High Holborn towards St Giles Circus, and considered the predatory tactics of murderers. But instead of the Highwayman, he found himself thinking about the Leicester Square Vampire.