The Victoria Vanishes (15 page)

Shiny dark birds cawing in the trees, the evening so quiet you could hear the greenery. Something was not right. Something
...

He made her start, moving i
n to sit beside her without dis
turbing the air, so that she was sure he had not been there the moment before. She was strong, but he had the element of surprise. His grip was practised and complete. She felt the hot lance of the needle enter her neck, and knew at once that the time for escape had already passed. The freezing numbness flooded her body, like dental anaesthetic but much faster, more totally invasive, and she felt hers
elf falling down into his await
ing arms.

She heard his voice from far above, even though he could only be speaking in a whisper.
'Stay with me,' he told her. She tried to remain awake, sensing that if consciousness failed it would not return. She was young and mistrustful of men, so how could this be happening?

So unfair,
she thought,
so stupid.
In that brief moment she felt as if all the evils in the world were there to be understood. Men were starving wolves who searched for weaknesses, and she had dropped her guard for the first—and only—time in her short life.

The Nun & Broken Comp
ass had been shut for refurbish
ment, so Raymond Land's pals from the Met had suggested going a little further afield today, seeing as they were on short shifts, and Land could basically do as he pleased now that the Home Office called the shots for his unit. Land was still laughing at the superintendent
's disgusting joke as they pock
eted their dart sets and left the Albion. He didn't like Barnsbury, too many stuck-
up North London politicians liv
ing here, but the Albion was
a bit of a find, bucolic and be
calmed, hidden behind an artful undergrowth.

While they were discussing what would be the quickest way back, the superintendent noticed the girl. She was seated upright on the bench, her head hanging over her drink, and Land had been about to make a remark about birds not being able to hold their booze when one of the others realised that something was wrong with her.

In the deepening shadows beneath the leaves of mulberry trees, a young black girl had fallen asleep so soundly that she had died, her soul departing on respectful tiptoe, as quietly as the fading breeze.

18

PUB CRAWL

T
hursday morning at the PCU dawned in a tangle of disbelief and recriminations.

'You were actually on the
premises,' May accused his supe
rior, pacing the latter's threadbare office carpet. 'How could you not have seen what happened to this young woman?'

'Do you know the Albion?' asked Land angrily. 'It's a series of rooms, and we were out
at the back having a game of ar
rows. How was I to know she'd been attacked?'

'Didn't you hear or see anything unusual at all?'

'No, I was playing for money and concentrating on my form. I don't think I saw another person in the pub apart from the barman, and he hardly speaks any English. This girl had apparently been stood up by her boyfriend—who is in the clear, by the way, because he was actually at a job interview in the Finchley Road Mercedes showroom and had forgotten he was meeting her. Besides, she had been sitting outside the whole time, so how was I supposed to see her?'

'Has Giles had a chance to conduct a full examination of the body yet?'

'No, he had to wait for the family to come in and ID her last night, but he says there's a piercing on the side of her neck consistent with the MO on the first two—or rather four, if we count the uninvestigated cases.'

'Our perpetrator is becoming angrier.' Giles Kershaw was unfurled in Land's doorway. 'Very nearly snapped the needle off in her neck, left a circula
r bruise where he pushed the sy
ringe base right up against the skin, and it looks like such a high dosage that I imagine she died in seconds. I'm heading back to Bayham Street. Jazmina Sherwin's father is probably going berserk.'

Kershaw flicked back his blond hair in the habitual gesture he had acquired from bending
his tall frame over tissue sam
ples.'Something's out of whack. This one is different—the age, the ethnicity, the social backgro
und. I'd have said it was an en
tirely separate incident except that she was found in a pub and killed in the same fashion. Premeditation, obviously. But a fundamental paradox: The killer wants them to die so quietly that no-one notices, and yet he chooses to kill them in public, often crowded, places. It goes
against all of our received wis
dom.'

'Why has he switched to a young black girl after singling out middle-aged white women?' asked Land.

'His lacunae—the calm gaps between his acts of
violence— are closing. It's only a few hours since he last took a life. Perhaps the need has now become so urgent that in this case it drove him into the nearest pub, and Sherwin was unlucky enough to be the only female there. The rest of the locations are grouped in roughly the same area. Does anyone mind if I take Renfield with me?'

'What for?' asked May.

Kershaw looked embarrassed. 'I think Mr Sherwin might come back and try to thump someone, probably me as I'm the weediest. We've never had a
nyone at the unit who could han
dle trouble, and I've heard Renfield is pretty good in difficult situations.'

'He gets very stroppy and shouty, if that's what you mean,' said May.

'It may be what's needed in thi
s case,' said Kershaw. 'I'll re
turn him, don't worry.'

'So what happens now?' asked Land, for whom events were clearly moving too fast.

'The press is making sure that this story will be all over London like a cheap suit. It's the fault of that woman from
Hard News
whose life we saved, Janet Ramsey.' The journalist had nearly come a cropper in her pursuit of a story, luring a killer to her apartment, only to be bailed out by the PCU.
'She agreed to get off our backs for a
while but clearly has no grati
tude, because she's already rung me about reports of a young girl's death in a London pub, says she's going to run something tonight.'

'It's the scorpion and the frog,' said Land despondently. 'Janet Ramsey can't resist stinging because it's in her nature. The last thing we need ri
ght now is more negative public
ity. What are you going to do about it?'

'What happened to
we?'
asked May in surprise. 'I thought you were on our side.'

'I've had enough crap fall on me in the last few months to drown a cow,' answered Land. 'I'm going to make sure I stay dry and sweet-smelling this time.'

'Oh, I see,' said May, 'when the going gets tough, the tough run for cover.'

'I never said I was tough,' answered Land.
All I ever wanted was a quiet life.'

'Well, you'll get it if this goes wrong, won't you? Renfield will take great joy in filing a report to Faraday and Kasavian. In addition to pointing out that we
were sitting on cold files con
nected to an
on-going
investigation which he thinks we can't crack, he'll probably mention that Arthur's memory is so bad he managed to lose the ashes of his coroner on the same night he somehow hallucinated himself back into Victorian times. So you'll finally get your wish, to sit out your remaining working years in a police station the size of a cabdrivers' hut in a depopulated village on the Orkney Islands that's so quiet you'll be able to hear a duck fart four miles away.'

'I don't know why you have to be so incredibly rude,' said Land indignantly.

'Because you might have saved a young woman's life if you'd been concentrating on your bloody job instead of drinking with your cronies. If you're so keen to have Renfield write out reports, tell him to put that detail in them.'

'We are going to get a lead in this case today, and we will stop anyone else from dying,' Bryant announced as he strolled into the office and tossed his walking stick into its stand, a sooty old chimney pot he had rescued from the demolition of the York Way Jam Factory in 1982.

'Did I miss a meeting?' asked May. 'I love the way you just decide to announce these things. How are w
e going to accom
plish this feat? We're still trying to sort out links between the victims.'

'We'll get the break. It may
not seem to you like we're clos
ing in, but we are. Perhaps it's someone who worked with them all.'

'Unlikely. Only Curtis an
d Wynley were at the Swedenborg
Society. And we have no proof that they really knew each other—only that one woman was friendly enough with the next to put her number into her cell phone.'

'Then perhaps you're approaching the investigation from the wrong end. Ask yourself, what do we know about the killer?' Bryant dropped into his chair and swung it around.
'He feels at home in pubs, to th
e point where he can commit mur
der in them with total confidence. Unfortunately, due to high staff turnover, the barmaids and barmen rarely take note of regular customers. Also, his field of operation is in an area of the city which doesn't have local custom, and that allows him to slip unseen among strangers. Perhaps he's visited these pubs many times when he has not been moved to kill. Perhaps these women mean something special to him, have some magic that can only be captured by taking a life.'

'You know I'm going to say I don't agree with you,' warned May.

'Yes, and therefore to prove a point, to
night the PCU is go
ing on a pub crawl. I've worked the whole thing out. There have been five deaths in all, but there are only four public houses involved, as the fifth appears to have vanished some decades ago. However, all five women have connections with other pubs, so we need to check those as well, which in my book makes a total of nine places to visit, and means we need to put every member of the PCU to work undercover this evening. Here's the roster.'

Bryant flipped open a neat black leather Mont Blanc notepad, the one gift from his landlady Alma that he had managed not to lose. 'Longbright is going to head for the Conspirators' Club at the Sutton Arms, where Jocelyn Roquesby was a regular, and Renfield will stake out the Old Bell tavern, where she died.

'Meera will visit The Apple Tree in Clerkenwell, where Carol Wynley used to socialise after work. Colin has requested to join the speed-dating night at the Museum Tavern, Bloomsbury, where our most recent victim, Jazmina Sherwin, worked as a barmaid.

'John, you'll be going to the quiz night at the Betsey Trotwood in Farringdon, which Joanne Kellerman had been known to frequent. Giles Kershaw has offered to spend the evening in The Old Dr Butler's Head, where she was found murdered.

April will attend the Phobia Society upstairs at the Ship and Shovell off the Strand, w
hich Naomi Curtis told her part
ner she visited because she suffered from claustrophobia, while Dan Banbury will check out the Seven Stars, Carey Street, where she was killed.

'Raymond Land can go back to the Albion, Barnsbury, to see if he can find out anything more about Jazmina Sherwin's death. And I shall be joining a historical society, the Grand Order of London Immort
als, which Dr Masters has recom
mended to me on previous occasions, because they know all there is to know about sociopathic behaviour in urban society. They've moved to the back bar of the Yorkshire Grey in Langham Place because their old haunt, The Plough in Museum Street, installed a plasma screen for the World Cup, an act for which they have never been forgiven.'

'And what good do you think all this is going to do?' asked May.

'As I believe I mentioned, I have an idea that the murderer is motivated as much by the locations as the victims. If that's the case, we need to spend more time in the kind of places he finds comfortable enough to commit acts of violence in. I want everyone to be sensitive to their surroundings, and to make copious notes. Talk to people, be honest about what you're looking for. We meet back here after closing time and pool any information we consider relevant, or possibly irrelevant.'

'You think Renfield's going to go along with something like this?'

'We have Raymond's backing, so I don't see how he can stop us. Besides, we're covering all the official routes of enquiry. This is extra-curricular. It's going to be a long night, so no drinking alcohol. I don't want
Renfield trying to throw out ev
idence because our intelligence sources were one over the limit.'

'That includes you,' said May.