Drawing all the confidence he could muster, he moved forward to the next flight of stairs. Almost imperceptibly, the crowd closed around him, sealing off his exit. A girl popped gum loudly. A boy spoke in murmurs too low to be perceptible. Somebody laughed.
Knives, thought May. They’ll be carrying knives, and I have no way of alerting anyone before they make their move. Did they know who he was? It was absurd to be caught out in such a place, surrounded by families and apartments, without recourse to aid, but he knew that estates like these could be the loneliest places on earth. The Borough of Camden, which had more such estates than most, had the highest suicide rate in London, and all their efforts at treeplanting and traffic-calming were undermined by the desire to continually cram in more housing.
He felt the shock of contact with a stranger, a boy’s fist shoving at his back, then another, and within seconds the entire group was pushing him towards the staircase, others making way in front of him, clearing the path to the concrete steps. His centre of balance shifted as they kicked at his legs, and then he knew that nothing could stop him from plunging headlong down the stairs, because they would not allow him to catch at their arms, only watching in insolent silence as he fell.
And fall he did, as the shatterproof light on the landing spun overhead, the rough brick wall grazing his hands but affording no purchase.
He glimpsed the landing below, and braced himself for the bonecracking jolt of the concrete.
But it never came. Instead, broad hands caught him beneath the arms, raising him upright and setting him down on the landing. As he caught his breath, he found himself looking up into the faces of two police constables in yellow traffic jackets. Pushing between them came a stocky sergeant with a familiar, if unpleasant, face.
“Go on, you lot, piss off before I run you in,” he told the group, waving them away dismissively before turning his attention to the detective. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, May, apart from trying to get yourself kicked senseless.”
Sergeant Jack Renfield’s father had been Sergeant Leonard Renfield, an old enemy of Bryant’s at the Met; like his father, Jack Renfield had been pointedly denied promotion several times, for which he blamed Bryant’s damning reports. For once, though, May was pleased to see him.
“I suppose your grubby little partner is somewhere around here, too,” said Renfield, looking around with suspicion.
“No, I’m here alone.”
“Christ, May, I’d have thought you would have more sense. You’re lucky my lads didn’t knock off early, and were still keeping an eye out.”
“I owe you one, Jack. What are you doing here, anyway?” asked May, dusting himself down.
“Chameleon,” replied Renfield somewhat confusingly.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Operation Chameleon. A three-month initiative to disrupt gang organisation on London estates. We’ve got men reporting back from all the major flare-up spots, and I don’t need you disrupting their work. I suppose the PCU’s involved. We all had a good laugh about your Highwayman pictures.”
“Why?” asked May, puzzled.
“Because they weren’t taken here, were they? An idiot can see that. The sightlines don’t match up. These little sods were having you on.”
“You’re wrong. We have witness reports from two girls, one of whom gave Arthur the shots from her mobile.”
“Then they were winding him up, weren’t they?” said Renfield.
“What do you mean?”
“Check the rooftops of these blocks, May – each one has its chimney stacks in different order, and I can tell you there ain’t any like the ones in your pictures. My men should know; they spend enough bloody time up there.”
“Then why the hell didn’t you tell us?” asked May angrily.
“Not our case, is it?” replied Renfield. “We thought you bigbrained desk jockeys had the answers to everything. Let’s not catch you around here again, eh? You’re too old to be out in a place like this on your own, May. You’re not up to it, mate. Next time we might not be able to reach you before you’re kicked to death.”
∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧
32
Hall of Infamy
She had inherited her grandfather’s fondness for organisation. She catalogued her books, arranged her music alphabetically, kept lists, left notes, tidied the mess of her life away into drawers – and somewhere along the line her habits had tipped into compulsions. As much as she tried to create order, little in April’s life made sense to her. There were still too many gaps and unexplained events in the past.
She sat on the floor of her new office, folding each freshly recorded sighting of the Leicester Square Vampire into its own folder, matching the dates and locations against the scrawled notes in Maggie Armitage’s transcripts. The white witch’s handwriting was hopeless, but she was exact on every detail, even though she exhibited a tendency to drift from the subject whenever the mood took her.
April cross-referenced the notes with Arthur Bryant’s accounts of all his cases, histories that dated back to the war. The detective’s diaries ran to over thirty volumes. Luckily, they had been kept at home, and had therefore survived the blaze which had destroyed the unit, although some had been severely damaged by water. As she opened the next volume, tracing the Vampire’s repeated sightings, she was surprised to find that half a dozen pages had been neatly trimmed out with a sharp knife. She checked the dates on either side of the removed sections, and the gravity of unease settled within her. They were the days marking the death of Elizabeth, her mother. April never blamed others for her misfortunes, and had freely admitted her own mistakes, but there were forces at work beyond her control. Some dark and windswept chaos in her family’s past refused her the sustenance of a normal life. Her grandfather could provide answers, but he had always been reluctant to discuss the events surrounding the loss of his only daughter.
April traced the edges of the cut pages, and thought back to ambiguities of her childhood, knowing that they held the key to her troubles. Like a woman wary of visiting the doctor for fear of what she might be told, she decided that the time had come to ask John May for the truth.
♦
“None of this makes any damned sense. It doesn’t follow the accepted psychology of murder.”
May threw the folders back across the table to Longbright. “Attacks take place in an atmosphere of mutual fear. Anger escalates into the impulse of violence. It erupts in the moment. You try to stifle the noise and the fuss your victim is making, and you accidentally kill him. The anger drops like wind leaving a sail, much more quickly than it rose. You just want to damp everything down, but by then it’s too late. It has exploded like a crack in a piece of pressured glass, and there’s nothing you can do to mend it, so you cover your tracks, hide it all away, but you’re not thinking straight. You won’t realise your mistakes until later, when there’s nothing you can do to correct them. A great rock of remorse settles in the head, like the aftermath of guilty sex. Does that sound anything like what we have here? No, because despite my partner’s insistence on the absolute necessity for logic, in this case logic doesn’t apply. There’s some aberration…something we’re missing…something very bad indeed.”