“He cares enough to dress himself in an exact replica of the clothes in these prints,” Bryant pointed out. “Who knows how far his interest extends?” He pulled his moulting scarf tighter around his neck. “Thank you for the information, Oliver. I have absolutely no idea what I shall do with it, but I’m sure I’ll think of something. There is another matter to be dealt with; you don’t have a file on the Leicester Square Vampire, by any chance?”
“I haven’t heard anything about him in years, but I seem to recall some press shots,” said Golifer. “Let me have a look.” He led Bryant to a back room filled with locked metal boxes. “Most of these photographs are in the public domain, but your lot prefer us to keep them away from public gaze because, technically, they involve stillunsolved crimes and could be needed as evidence.”
“The Met is no longer ‘my lot,’ as you put it,” said Bryant, ruffled. “We report directly to the Home Office now, and I’m not sure which is worse. Why don’t they keep the pictures themselves?”
“No room, apparently. I asked them to pay for some better security down here, but they refused.” He unclipped one of the box lids and drew out a selection of large-bordered monochrome photographs taken in the 1950s. “These are the earliest ones we have. Didn’t you once get a priest involved to exorcise the spot where he appeared? You reckoned he could run through walls like Le Passemuraille. I’m sure I remember a scandal.”
Bryant sighed. When it came to his investigative technique, everyone remembered the scandals. “It was a long time ago, Oliver. I was desperate for a break in the case. Three deaths, sixteen attacks, I was prepared to try anything at that point. He ran to ground and we never found him.”
“So why the interest now?”
Bryant scratched at the grey stubble on his cheek. “Because I’m sure now it was all trickery, jiggery-pokery designed to make us think he was superhuman. He was motivated less by the need to attack than by the desire to make an impression on the world. That’s what we have here. Rampant egotism. The superior being flexing his muscles. And because of that, we never managed to close the case. I don’t want history to repeat itself. Do you have any earlier prints of legendary London murderers? Engravings, stuff like that?”
“The usual plates of Spring-Heeled Jack, Charley Peace, Jack Sheppard, things you’ll have seen plenty of times before.”
“Let me see them. You never know.” They returned to the print files, where Golifer pulled down a vast, mildewy volume of prints. “Who are these characters?” asked Bryant, stabbing at a page. The print showed four black-faced men, covered in dirt and ashes, making off with several screaming children.
“Ah, they’re the Flying Dustmen,” Golifer whispered. “A good example of real-life characters who were absorbed into London’s mythical history. Charles Fox was one of a group of bogus refuse collectors known around St Mary, Islington, as the Flying Dustmen.
He and his cronies stole baskets of ashes from households. Back in 1812, contractors paid seven hundred fifty pounds a year to the parish and employed several men and their carts to empty the dustbins. They hired women and children to sift cinders, which fetched half the price of coal, and siftings for brickmaking. The regular dustmen feared they would lose their Christmas bonuses from households, and issued written warnings to customers about the rogue collectors. The ringleader was caught and prosecuted, but for many years, parents used the image of the dust-clad thieves to frighten their children into good behaviour.”
“How one misses the ability to frighten children.” Bryant turned the pages, fascinated.
“Now, if you’re looking for a man with the reputation of vanishing through walls, there’s John Williams, who supposedly slaughtered a draper and his own family with a ripping chisel before striking a second time and killing a publican, his wife, and his maid with a crowbar.”
“You’re talking about the infamous Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811.”
“That’s right.” Golifer indicated an etching that showed a curlyheaded sailor stretched out on an inclined platform. “This is a good example of how the public colluded in manufacturing a legend.
Hysteria swept Wapping and the surrounding area because the murderer seemed superhuman, vanishing from the upper rooms where the deaths occurred, and there were over forty false arrests. Finally, a seaman named John Williams was taken in with virtually no evidence against him, and after he hanged himself in suspicious circumstances at Coldbath Fields Prison, he was paraded through the streets with the maul and the chisel inserted into a board beside his head. The High Constable of Middlesex and hundreds of parish officers and constables escorted the cart. Suicides were buried at crossroads in those days, and Williams is interred at the crossroads of Cannon Street and St George’s Turnpike. But for years after, the area was infected with a kind of poison. Residents said they heard and saw his vengeful ghost, and even to this day the area has a strange feeling, especially when it’s rainy and the wind is high, and everyone else is indoors. Murderers who operate in mysterious – that is to say, unsolved – circumstances, are survived by a peculiar assonance that can last across generations.”
“Exactly so.” Bryant studied the prints on the crowded walls. “Wait a minute.” He raised up the copy of the photograph Golifer had shown him, a small blurred shot taken in Leicester Square by a tourist, and narrowed his eyes, comparing it to the lithograph on the wall. The Met had discounted it, but Bryant had long believed that the snap of the Vampire was genuine. This was the evidence no-one else remembered, not even Longbright, who assumed she was official custodian of all remaining documents. He laid the curled photograph on the table. “Bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?” he asked Golifer, pointing to the wall print that showed a strangely outfitted man standing on a rock. “The clothing of the two figures is almost identical.”
“I never noticed that before,” Golifer admitted.
“I think we were misled by the nickname conjured up in the press,” Bryant surmised. “The cloak, the boots, the jerkin, the high collar; it appears the Leicester Square Vampire wasn’t modelled on Dracula at all, but upon someone else entirely. This print you have is familiar from my childhood. You know who this is, of course.”
“Yes, he’s a myth – ”
“Not at all. He was very real. Born in the reign of Henry the Second, with a pedigree ab origine no higher than a shepherd’s. He trained as a butcher, and was equally brilliant with a backsword, a quarterstaff, or a bow. He fell in with a bad lot, taking to such a level of violent thievery and murder that travellers lived in terror of him, and would pay him for safe passage through the woodlands.
He died in a Yorkshire nunnery at the age of forty-three after a nun bled him and took too much out. Rehabilitated after his death as a righter of wrongs, a working-class champion.” Bryant lifted the print from the wall and set it down. “We know him today as Robin Hood.”
♦
May studied the gang before him. He rarely thought about his own frailty; he was usually too concerned with his partner, whose lack of robustness, coupled with a curiously youthful impetuosity, frequently lowered him into the freight-train path of harm. But right now he could see the risk in his own situation. He noted the gentler mix and grew warier; the girls could present a shocking ferality that bolstered the boys into more violent acts.
He waited for them to make a move, but nothing happened. They formed an unbroken barrier across the stairway, waiting in silence, unnervingly still. They wore the uniform of the disenfranchised: thin grey hoods over curve-peaked caps, sweatpants or lowslung jeans. The girls had scraped-back hair, gold hoop earrings, pale bare midriffs with tattooed mock-Celtic symbols, the usual fake brands worn in too-small sizes that made them appear thin and feral. May knew that their language would comprise a barrage of shorthand patois, street American, and incomprehensible slang. He felt an equal measure of sorrow and respect for those who had been stranded here by circumstance, but lately his faith in the redemptive power of the nation’s youth had been tested to breaking point. He knew that their spectrum also included a percentage of vicious teens trapped between the twin hatreds of innocence and adulthood. The difficulty lay in divining the composition of the group.