“I doubt there are sufficient grounds for a warrant, Arthur, and we wouldn’t get one until Monday at the earliest.”
“Then we’ll need to break in. I can get hold of Felix.”
“Oh, no, you promised never to use him again. Not after we paid him to break into Sharon Letts’s house.” Letts, a notorious London thief known as the Queen of Shoplifters, had stolen a fortune in gems from Harrods’s jewellery counter. It was hard to tell how much she had looted, because Felix had stolen back the diamonds for the police, only to hide several of them in a glass of water which he had drunk before anyone could stop him. After the Met boys arrested him, they planned to wait for the stones to pass through Felix’s alimentary canal, but the cat burglar managed to lock the police officers in their own squad car. Felix was later captured and sent to prison, where he discovered that Letts’s family had placed a contract on him. Thinking he would be safer in solitary confinement, he picked a fight with a small ginger Irishman in his wing, only to discover that his victim was a Real IRA terrorist, whose people promptly placed a second contract on the hapless burglar. Since then he had lived in fear of his life, running discreet small-scale operations for anyone who needed his services.
“Lend me your phone. Nobody need ever know we hired him. Besides, he owes me a favour.”
“Give me one good reason why I should agree to this.”
“We’re about to lose the unit. What else is there left to lose?” Bryant fumbled about in his overcoat and produced two scraps of paper. “Look, this is a photocopy of Luke Tripp’s Highwayman drawing.” He unfolded the second piece. “And this I took from the Paddington lockup. It’s the only witness sketch we ever had of the Leicester Square Vampire. Apart from the tricorn hat and the mask, the outfits are almost identical. It looks like Kingsmere stole the idea for some mysterious purpose of his own.”
“This is against my better judgement,” warned May, handing over his mobile. If their superiors discovered that the unit’s most senior members had hired a cat burglar to break into a suspect’s office, they would prosecute the PCU. However, having failed to make his own plan of action work, May had no choice but to trust his partner’s instincts. He had reached a stage where any action was fair if it yielded results.
“Do it,” he told Bryant. “Get him on the phone, and God help us if we get caught.”
∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧
42
Describing Evil
Janet Ramsey checked the temperature of her bath and laid out fresh clothes. She rarely questioned the wisdom of her actions, but the events of the last few days had given her pause for thought. She was editing a tabloid with a shrinking readership and a record number of hits lodged against it with the Press Complaints Commission. She was continuing an affair with a married man despite the fact that Oskar Kasavian was never likely to leave his wife. She had a son she had hardly seen since her ex-husband had unexpectedly been granted custody.
And she wasn’t getting any younger.
Tugging at the creases around her eyes in the bathroom mirror, she wondered how much longer she could maintain the balancing act. The real problem was that she no longer believed the stories she wrote. Once she had been able to convince herself that the public had a right to know about the mistakes made by those whose lives were lived in public. The Fourth Estate’s latest periodicals made hers look positively scrupulous. Everyone had jumped onto the celebrity bandwagon until there was nothing of interest left to report. It was no longer about news but bargaining power, and she doubted her publication would be able to raise the cash for many more exclusives. But Hard News had hitched its reputation to a rising star; the Highwayman could restore their falling circulation.
A fold in the darkness through the glass of the front door caught her eye, and she turned from the mirror. The worst part about living in a ground-floor flat off the Brompton Road was having to place steel trellises across all of the windows and a London Bolt over the main entrance. She had upset plenty of people through the newspaper, but none had ever dared to turn up at her house – the press made too powerful an enemy. She never felt unsafe here, but it was still like being shut in a cage.
The shadow cut reflections from the glass for a moment, and she realised there was definitely someone outside. You don’t go out to look, she told herself. That’s how trouble starts. She calmly walked towards the lounge. Buried far behind her commercial instincts, the small spark that had once fired her desire to investigate, to put matters right, was fanned back to flame, and she approached the lounge window, through which the front door could be seen.
He was standing outside with his back towards the house, his hands clasped together. This time he wore a spectacular dress cape with a triangle of crimson satin lining exposed, as though he had dressed for an audience with her. He was taller than she remembered. He turned and rang the doorbell with the polite apprehension of an Internet date.
He’s desperate to talk, she thought. He needs the air of publicity and wants to grant an exclusive interview. If I’m careful, it could be the scoop of the year. Her hand hovered above the bolt handle.
She thought of calling the police and warning them first. There was a problem with that, though. The local cops hated her after she had approved the publication of an article exposing the sex lives of two female sergeants, both of whom were now being investigated. She thought of calling Toby, her ex-husband, then realised that he was still in Geneva on business.
The Highwayman rang again. If she let him escape, she would lose the greatest journalistic chance of her career. He had never directly attacked a victim before, so he was likely to be unarmed. And he was waiting for her, trusting her.
She withdrew the bolt and opened the door.
Whenever she had commissioned features on the Highwayman, she had asked her writers to exaggerate his height and sinister presence. Now she saw there was no need to do so. The tip of his tricorn hat almost grazed the top of the doorway. He stepped into the hall, his face lost in shadows, took another pace towards her, and froze. There was an unnerving stillness about him, a dead heart of indifference that made him more dangerous than she had ever imagined a human being could be. She knew at once that his masked eyes had seen men die.
She had an idea. Without removing her gaze from him, she slowly reached for her mobile and speed-dialled the number of the Peculiar Crimes Unit. The Highwayman remained motionless, studying her as if watching an alien species.
DS Janice Longbright answered on the third ring, calling her by name; it had come up on her screen.
“He’s standing right in front of me,” Ramsey murmured, daring him to move. She had rarely been granted a chance to describe evil at such close quarters, and was determined to make the most of the opportunity. “He’s taller than I expected, around six two, broadchested and rather sexy. The outfit has been modified from ordinary motorcycle leathers. The buckled knee-boots come from a Goth store called Born in Camden. He’s not wearing his gloves. The back of his left hand is badly stained with your man’s indigo dye. He has dark chin stubble, but it looks like he’s wearing make-up.” She found her old investigative powers returning as she studied him. “Brown eyes, still and rather dead, pointed chin, straight black hair, the kind of pale skin that suggests Eastern European extraction. Wait, I think the hair’s a wig.”
“You must leave while you still can,” said Longbright urgently. “He’s far more dangerous than you realise.”