Ten Second Staircase (36 page)

'There's one other,' said May. 'Elliot Mason. The relief teacher once taught Paradine's son.'

"I hate to make matters worse,' Banbury interrupted, 'but I got the results of the footprints back this morning. It seems we have two radically different sizes of the same boot. The first print, taken from the floor of the Burroughs gallery, is a size eleven. The second, lifted from the roof of the Oasis pool, is a size eight. We know from the height of the gallery tank that he would have to be abnormally tall—and extraordinarily strong—to lift White over the edge. However, we should be able to get another height estimate from the picture taken by the girls on the Roland Plumbe Community Estate.'

'According to Jack Renfield, the picture wasn't taken there at all,' said May.

'Doesn't have an effect on the result,' said Banbury, tapping open the photograph on May's computer. He expanded the background brickwork behind the blurred shot of the Highwayman. 'These are half-bond yellow brick balustrades, so by factoring in the standard sizes of brickwork we can calculate their distance from the foreground figure, and work out his approximate height. Either he's bending his knees, or he's become shorter.'

'Don't be ridiculous. You're telling me our Highwayman is capable of changing size.'

'I think he possibly wears something in his shoes to give him added height on certain occasions.'

'Why would he do that?'

'Perhaps he has something wrong with his legs. I suppose it could be some kind of a brace. The gallery prints are deeper and heavier than the rest, as if he was burdened with extra weight.'

'I hate to say it,' said Bryant, 'but this supports my hypothesis.'

'I didn't know you had one.'

'I'm wondering if the Highwayman doesn't exist.'

He glanced up at the stunned faces of his team.

'I asked myself, was the London Monster a real flesh-and-blood

character, or something created for self-publicity? He abused, assaulted, and cut fifty-nine Mayfair ladies in the buttocks until they started sticking frying pans down their knickers. Epidemic hysteria produces symptoms of so-called conversion reactions wherein illogical, aberrant behaviour spreads through the populace. The Monster ceased to operate, and perhaps some other member of the public, taken with the idea, copied the example he had set. He received fan mail from women across the capital. In early twentiethcentury Paris, someone pricked women with hat pins. In 1956 in Taipei, there was an epidemic of razor slashings. In Illinois in 1944, a mad gasser sprayed women with paralysing "nerve gas" that proved to be nothing of the sort. The Leicester Square Vampire was also a manufactured monster. With this in mind, the witness statements from the time could be viewed with suspicion.'

'You're suggesting he was someone we interviewed?'

'The complicity of the public in creating the myth suggests so, yes. The originator stays around to help fan the fire of notoriety.'

'But we no longer have the statements, and there's no way of tracing the people we questioned.' May thought for a second. 'You think the same is true of the Highwayman? That it's someone we've placed at the crime scenes?'

'You've been on the estate where this picture was meant to have been taken,' said Bryant. 'You've seen the signs and symbols the Saladins scrawl on the walls like talismans.'

'You think a bunch of disenfranchised kids could bring a killer to life and direct him to murder whomever he pleases?'

'History shows us that the poor have to claim back what they should rightfully be able to share,' said Bryant.

'So they conjure up a supernatural hit man from bones and hair and magic tokens.'

Aware of the silence, May looked around to see that everyone was watching them. He had resolved never to argue with his partner in front of the unit, and had broken his promise. Furious with his lack of self-control, he left the room.

'Well, that was a load of bollocks,' said Mangeshkar finally. 'Anyone care for a mutiny?' The blank looks provoked her. 'You're a bunch of cowards. Maybe Kasavian has the right idea; shut this place down and save the taxpayer some money.' She, too, stormed out. The remaining staff members could hardly blame her.

With dissent and confusion collapsing the unit, John May took positive action, and borrowed the staff car to track down Lorraine Bonner. When he found her, he tried to find out who Luke Tripp was meeting in the estate's community centre.

'We keep a room-hire roster.' Lorraine took him to her office and consulted the bulletin board behind her. 'I heard about your trouble on the staircase. Sorry we couldn't be there, but I did warn your partner. Let's see, we had addiction counselling from two to three, followed by a meeting of the garden committee.'

'This would have been just after four o'clock. Anyone take it out between four and five?'

'That's a session handled by a teacher from St Crispin's,' she explained. 'He's a former Crown prosecutor who helps out with some community work on the estates, in collaboration with our anti-gang initiative. Last night was his directional guidance and confidencebuilding task force, a fancy title for improving low self-esteem among disadvantaged children who join gangs to provide themselves with alternative families. Whenever trouble flares up, the usual things are blamed—hip-hop, pop videos, horror films, gaming, violent Web sites—but the kids around here are media-literate, and little of what they see enters their real lives. They don't believe much of what they see.' She gave a wry smile. 'Well, except all those commercials that show the kind of beautiful life you should be having instead of sitting around here smoking dope. They want the things they'll never have in a straight job, so they set out jacking other kids right on the street.'

'There's nothing sadder than the poor stealing from the poor,' May agreed.

'Are you a Christian?' asked Lorraine.

'I share certain fundamental Christian beliefs,' May admitted.

'Let me tell you what
I
believe, Mr May. The passage from youth to age? It's a staircase we climb throughout our lives, from one step to the next. We learn something new with each step, and keep changing our behaviour. That staircase is as old as the human race itself, but now some part of it has ruptured, so that it's harder for us all to make our way across the gap. We need to repair the passage to responsibility and adulthood. Either we find the next step or we stay where we are, endlessly repeating our mistakes.'

'So you set about making your own repairs with community classes.'

'Three years ago we had a problem with methamphetaminebased drugs on the estate that led to several tragic deaths, so the parents got together and paid for a volunteer to come and take a community class.'

'What's his name, the teacher taking this class?'

'Kingsmere, Brilliant Kingsmere.'

'You're telling me his name is Brilliant?'

'It was a very popular name once. Way back in Victorian times. And he's a pretty cool guy. The kids look up to him.'

That was why Luke Tripp had visited the estate. He was in Kingsmere's exclusive extracurricular set. 'Why did the parents pick a teacher from a private school?' asked May.

'There's been bad feeling between the school and the estate—we heard tell that a few of the private boys were beaten up, some stupid argument about right-of-way to their playing fields. The parents thought it would be a good way to heal the old wounds.'

'Are his groups successful?'

'How can you tell?' Lorraine sighed. 'Kids sense when they're being preached to, no matter how smartly you sweeten the pill.'

'Do you have an attendance list for Kingsmere's meetings?'

'Don't need to, Mr May. They're open to anyone. There's another meeting tonight. Why don't you go along?'

Kingsmere
. It was odd how many times the teacher's name had appeared in the investigation. In the absence of any other course of action, May decided it was time to check him out.

35

BRANDALISM

'Your chairs are horribly uncomfortable,' complained Arthur Bryant. 'I crossed my legs and fell off.'

'They're Philippe Starck,' said Julio Stamos. 'They're intended as a style statement.'

'If you're going to keep people waiting for twenty minutes, you could perhaps try making a comfort statement. Treat yourself to some cushions; it wouldn't compromise your ideals too much.' Bryant brushed himself down irritably.

Stamos usually knew what to expect when the police came calling, but this rumpled old man wrapped in an absurdly large overcoat and a lint-covered green scarf had thrown him. There was a peculiar miasma of herbal tobacco in the air, or perhaps smouldering straw, and he felt sure it was emanating from his visitor.

'You are from the police?' he asked by way of confirming that some moulting tramp hadn't simply wandered into the offices of
GRAF
magazine by mistake.

'You spoke to my sergeant,' Bryant confirmed. 'I require fifteen minutes of your time, no more.'

Stamos led the way to a graceful white box with free-floating backlit walls and chocolate leather sofas. 'Perhaps you'll find this a little more comfortable.' He indicated a seat partially occupied by Lazarus, his snuffling Vietnamese potbellied pig, a retro-eighties pet accoutrement currently favoured by style gurus all over Hoxton.

'My sergeant tells me you're the country's leading expert on graffiti.'

'Street art is a movement with its roots in folklore. It protests against the system and creates beauty from dereliction.'

'It's also illegal.' Bryant hefted the glossy fat copy of
GRAF,
flicking past the slick ads for Land Rover, Nike, and Nokia. 'I can't believe this retails at twenty quid a copy.'

Stamos decided he was dealing with an idiot. 'It's bought by art directors, fashion photographers, music video producers—they're not buying it with their own money.'

'The examples of art in here are very beautiful,' admitted Bryant.

'They fetch high prices, too. Many artists have become highly collectible.'

'But their work is not what I see on the street.'

'No, ninety percent of that is admittedly bad. Tagging, piecing, and bombing over each other on trains and scratching on windows, that's not the real stuff. Graffiti is about possession and ownership, making a name for yourself.'

'You said this was art from the street, but your magazine shows work in galleries and is full of ads placed by corporations. You're encouraging kids without training to make the environment even more polluted, threatening, and ugly.'

'Who's to decide what's ugly?' said Stamos hotly. 'Those seethrough posters for underwear that cover the backs of busses? That's just corporate crap. Is graffiti any more of an urban blight than advertising? Public spaces are tightly controlled by capitalist interests. Unless you're rich, access to public walls is blocked, and if you do get into a public space, chances are you have to be selling something. The average London resident is subjected to hundreds of ads every day, and at least ten percent of them are illegally sited. Graffiti is social communication from the heart. It creates folklore because every act of tagging has its own dramatic story of why and how it was sprayed.'

'Yes, I saw what kids did to the Olton Hall,' said Bryant. Graffiti artists had spray-painted several carriages of the elegant old Scarborough-to-York steam train, wrecking it and earning the outraged hatred of the public.

'Yeah, you can't buy publicity like that.'

'Perhaps not, but your advertisers can discreetly sponsor it in your magazine.'

Stamos sighed. 'No-one's denying that the media is complicit. They see it as shorthand for cool. I presume you didn't come here to give me a lecture on morality, Mr Bryant.'

'If I gave you a lecture, it would be on hypocrisy, Mr Stamos. Can you identify particular kinds of graffiti?' Bryant opened his scarred leather briefcase and pulled out the photographs Banbury had taken at the Roland Plumbe Community Estate. 'I need to understand what these mean.'

'
Graffiti
means "little scratches," from the Italian
graffiare,
but it's also from the Greek word
graphein
, meaning "to write,"' said Stamos, surveying the pictures. 'Examples have been uncovered in Pompeii. Much of it was political, related to specific social events, and usually appeared under authoritarian governments. The state removes such graffiti in order to depoliticise the marginalised. After this, you get personalised graffiti, racial and sexual slurs from men, very little from females. Gang graffiti hit-ups convey identity and territorial supremacy. What you have here is the most common kind of graffiti, tagging, which began at the end of the sixties and is largely associated with hip-hop culture. The idea is to get up in as many places as possible to establish territorial rights. This is from central London, north side of the river, right?' Stamos examined each shot carefully. 'Police try to create links between taggers and organised crime, carjacking, drug use, but in truth there are rarely any at all. You've got tagging and piecing here.'