Ten Second Staircase

∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧

10

Vulnerability

He stood above London and surveyed his rain-swept domain.

The black cape cracked about his boots, and the wind tried to tear the tricorne from his head. The brief heat spell had quickly broken, and the city had begun a slow slide into winter. Flat-bottomed clouds the colour of charcoal scraped the peaks of the city’s financial towers. Great planes of shadow darkened the postwar concrete of the office blocks behind Smithfield, endless grey buildings medievally arranged. The city was silvery, parchment and teal, oddly homogenous in the face of indifferent planning, as though its spirit was deliberately seeking to impose order on chaos.

He stood astride the parapet but could not yet be seen, for he did not exist.

♦

Janice Longbright knelt on the wood flooring and swept broken glass into a dustpan. Someone had kicked in the front door, popping the latch from the strike-plate, splintering the jamb from the brickwork. The lounge was trashed, the television receiver and CD player were now just dusty dented boxes spilling bare wires. They had urinated in the bedroom, and split a sofa with a bread knife; pointless, random acts reeking of bitterness. A neighbour – young, single, nursing a sick daughter – had seen them, but had been too frightened to respond. The cheery constable sent over by Haringey nick had joked with his print man as if enjoying a beer with him. The occasion was too ordinary to care about. Nurses were the same, chattering around terminal patients.

Longbright was sanguine about such thefts. No matter how many times the mayor told residents that crime was his priority, she knew that it was the real price of living in London, paid by almost everyone during their tenure here. Insurance would cover the loss, but it could not replace the torn-up photographs of Gladys, her mother. When she spotted them in pieces on the floor, then, and only then, did she allow a brief tear to fall.

♦

“I say, do we have any money?” asked Giles Kershaw, flicking a flop of blond hair out of his eyes as he peered around the door.

“I wish you’d go to a barber. You look like a footballer. What do you want money for?” asked Bryant, crinkling his eyes suspiciously.

“I want to run some more thorough tests on the aluminium key, which will necessitate an omnibus trip to the delightful borough of Peckham and an exorbitant invoice for the use of their equipment.”

“Give it here. I’ll show you how we used to do it in the old days.” Bryant pulled his antelope-horn magnifying glass from a drawer and twisted an anglepoise lamp into position.

“Really, Mr Bryant, I hardly think – ”

“I know; that’s your problem, old sock, coupled with an overreliance on technology. What is it you’re looking for?”

“That’s precisely the point, Mr Bryant. I don’t have to go in with a prepared agenda; electronic examination will tell me what there is to see.” Kershaw snatched back the bag. “A magnifying glass might have been good enough in the olden days, but it’s not now. All I need you to do is sign the evidence out and wait until I deliver my report.”

There was a time when Bryant would have argued the point until dusk, but the humiliating circumstances of his recent lecture continued to crimp his confidence. Perhaps Kershaw was right. May had long insisted on the importance of modern technology in criminal investigations. What point was there in clinging to past habits? “Fine.” He sighed. “Run it through your spectromolo-thingie, you’ll probably find out a lot more than I would. Just remember to fill out your documentation.”

Kershaw seemed taken aback, disappointed almost. “Oh,” he said, non-plussed. “Thanks.”

He took off quickly, before Bryant could change his mind, squeezing past John May in the hall.

“What’s the matter, Arthur?” asked his partner. “You look like you’ve lost a shilling and found sixpence.”

“Will you show me how to work the computer properly?” Bryant nodded curtly at his new laptop.

“Of course not. In between asking lots of fantastically annoying questions, you’d find a way to destroy the unit’s intranet, and I’d end up killing you.” Bryant’s talent for spreading malignant plagues through the most benign technical equipment had made him an object of terror amongst IT technicians. “Besides, you don’t need to know. You’ve got me to do it for you.”

Bryant fingered the frayed edge of his corduroy waistcoat, purchased at the Gamages summer sale of 1948. “I thought perhaps you could show me Web sites, you know, about music and celebrities – the sort of things young people like.” Young people was in italics, like a tropical disease or a new species of fern.

“So that’s what this is about.” May could not resist an inward smile. “You have a team who are paid to research that sort of thing, so that you can stick to what you’re good at.” Bryant was usually convinced he was right in the face of unshakeable odds. This new doubting demeanor was unsettling. “Delegation,” May concluded feebly. “Let someone else do it for a change. You’ve devoted your life to this place. You’ve paid your dues.” But he could tell that Bryant thought he was being put out to pasture, and had no way to convince him otherwise.

“Cool gaff,” said Colin Bimsley, admiring the redbrick exterior of the double-fronted house while they awaited an answer. “She’s got a bob or two. When I get promotion, I’m going to get on the property ladder.”

Meera Mangeshkar snorted derisively. “Yeah, right. From a rented bedsit in Stoke Newington to a two-million-pound town house in Holland Park.”

“Sneer all you like, mate. You’ll be sorry you turned me down one day. I’m not going to be slapping the sidewalk in a padded parka for the rest of my life.”

“No, you’ll be sitting at a cheap desk filing reports and dropping bits of burger into the keyboard of a seven-year-old computer, before going down the local for eight pints of bitter and a curry with the lads.”

Colin subjected his colleague to intense scrutiny. “I don’t know what makes you so sarcastic, but it’s incredibly unattractive.”

Mangeshkar sniffed. “So now I’m ugly.”

“What do you care what I think? You’ve already told me I’m not good enough for you.”

“I never said that.”

“So will you go on a date with me?” Colin asked, sensing a gap in her defence.

Before Meera could answer, the front door opened.

♦

“I don’t know where she got this new identity from,” said Eleanor White. “Certainly not from us.”

“What do you mean, new identity?” asked Meera, setting aside her notepad.

Mrs White fell silent, distracted by something fluttering past in the garden. The lawn was an absurd shade of countryside emerald that could still be seen in expensive parts of the city. “This working-class thing,” she said finally, sniffing drily and turning from the windows. “Her name was Sarah, you know. Perhaps she thought ‘Saralla’ sounded more exotic. She dropped out of Oxford. She was training to be a biochemist. We didn’t hear from her for two years. Can you imagine how that made us feel?”

Meera was in danger of sinking inside the immense floral sofa. She felt suffocated by the arrangements of dried flowers, the emetic purples and greens, the gathered flounces of material around the tables and curtains. A woman like Mrs White cut little ice with her, even if she had just lost a daughter. She belonged to a breed of county women who dwelt in bay-windowed Edwardian villas and never showed emotion to those they perceived as social inferiors. Meera had grown up in a battery of pebbledashed Peckham council flats where the sound of police sirens nightly bounced off the balcony walls.

“She reappeared when she had run out of money, of course.” Eleanor White tapped out a cigarette and lit it. “Living in an East End squat with some other so-called artists, including the one who made her pregnant. Casually announced that she was a sculptor, if you please, not that she’d had any formal training. Didn’t look like she’d had a bath or a hot meal in months. My husband, Patrick, refused to give her a penny, but I couldn’t let her leave the house without something. She was our only child. The next time we saw her was on the television, drunk, swearing at a man who had once interviewed Nixon. Then that disgusting magazine photo spread, her sex life revealed, the abortion, and the rest I don’t even want to think about. Patrick won’t have the subject mentioned in the house. Soon afterwards we started hearing that her – installations, is that what you call them? – were fetching record prices with private collectors.”

“You must have taken some pride,” Meera wondered, “at least in her success.”

“Pride?” Mrs White was horrified by the idea. “To have our name dragged through the mud? To see such muck being sold to the public? There are plenty of other ways to be successful. An animal can be seen rutting in a farmyard, but that doesn’t make it talented. She became famous for exposing details about her private life that no decent wife would share with her husband; it was nothing to do with having artistic talent. We were deeply ashamed of her.”

And you’re more ashamed than ever now, thought Meera. She died before you could find a way to call a truce. “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to harm her? A former boyfriend? Someone who hated her work? Perhaps even someone who felt jealous of her fame?”

“There were plenty of boyfriends. The artist, and her supposed mentor. She left the first one when she started to make sales.”

“Do you remember his name?”

“Oh, it was something strange and made up, the way they do.” Mrs White stopped. “Don’t give me that disapproving look, young lady. You think I’m just one of those undemonstrative Englishwomen who never showed her daughter love. But it wasn’t like that. We only ever wanted her to be happy. Of course we hoped she would share our values, even if she considered them old-fashioned. We believe in dignity, honesty, and Christian kindness – there’s nothing so unusual in that, is there? Some emotions require privacy. Why would she want to throw it all up in our faces? I don’t understand.” Her fingers traced the outline of a photograph on the side table. “I still can’t believe our sweet little girl changed into such a monstrous person. This is a terribly poisonous time to be young.”

Meera realised she was ashamed to be seen crying, and watched with a softening heart. “We’ll talk to everyone who knew her,” she promised. “We have every hope that her killer will be found. We’ll try to give you back your little girl.”

But she wondered if such comforting words were true. It was the lonely who left themselves open to attack. Eleanor White’s daughter had been insulated by a public life and a large circle of friends. It made her death all the more unlikely, and the chance of discovering its cause almost impossible. They left Eleanor White sitting in her floral lounge, bewildered and diminished, surrounded by the silver-framed memories of a daughter she now realised she had never tried to understand.