Ten Second Staircase

∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧

13

Smoke and Light

The stones of the city still held autumn’s dying warmth, but as the detectives reached the centre of Waterloo Bridge, the biting freshness of river winds numbed their fingers and reddened their ears. The Thames was high, dark, and wide, the crepuscular evening pin-pricked with the crimson lights of police boats. The skyline seemed to be daily updating itself. Blade-edged blocks of black glass and rows of orange fountains shone from Tooley Street to the waterside. The concrete sides of London Bridge had been illuminated a friendly red. New apartment buildings sported strips of azure neon. The metropolis had finally shaken off decades of dirt and darkness imposed on it by the war.

“Pray don’t talk to me about impossible crimes,” warned Bryant, rattling his walking stick along the balusters of the bridge like a truanting schoolboy. The musty odour of mildew and estuary mud was discernable in his nostrils. It was the time of year he liked best, when the tourists left and the city grew more intimate. “I’ve seen them all. We had a gassing in a locked room in a Deptford boardinghouse in 1957. All the doors and windows were sealed with tape. The killer had used a duplicate key and sucked the tape into place with a vacuum cleaner nozzle. There was that schoolmistress from Putney in 1964, stabbed in her own bedroom, no murder weapon, the door locked from inside, a roaring fire in the hearth, do you remember? Her husband had murdered her, taken the knife and climbed up the chimney, dropping petrol and matches into the grate from above. What about the KGB? They were masters of the impossible. We had an air rifle wired into a piano, a dagger dropped from a nightclub balcony during a shower of confetti, a poisoned umbrella, and a trained monkey armed with a hypodermic syringe. I don’t see why this is presenting such a problem.”

“Times have changed,” said May. “Those sort of crimes disappeared in the twentieth century. These days it’s about drugs and territory and grudges and saving face.”

“Then why does Saralla White’s death have all the hallmarks of a John Dickson Carr novel?” wondered Bryant. “A populated gallery, a noisy, messy murder that nobody sees or hears, a killer who appears and vanishes at will, an artist killed by her own work, and an animated poem in riding boots and a tricorn hat who comes galloping through a building before leaving a calling card – doesn’t it sound to you like someone’s been reading old detective stories?”

“When you say it like that, it sounds ridiculous,” May admitted, “but put it another way. Think of a pregnant pro-abortionist found dead in a public place, and ask yourself who we’re looking for.”

“A paradox.” Bryant nodded. “She’s in the middle of going public with a powerful pro-abortion statement when she finds she’s carrying a child. Suppose she wants to keep it? Where does that leave her beliefs? We must find the father.”

“White’s so-called boyfriends are proving a letdown so far. Both have alibis and neither have seen her for weeks. Calvin Burroughs is a more interesting case because he admits to having been obsessed with her, but seems vague about when the affair ended. I’ve warned him we’ll run DNA tests to sort out the paternity if we have to. Perhaps the answer lies in an area we haven’t considered. Our killer is anxious to draw attention to himself. Murderers don’t normally go to such extreme lengths as this. One of the boys I met at St Crispin’s said that the act feels like a piece of performance art, and he’s absolutely right, but in that case why not have more witnesses? Why rely on a child to describe what he saw?”

“It’s the calling card that bothers me, John. It carries the suggestion that he’ll do it again. If there are no leads among her lovers or her immediate family, where are we supposed to start looking – in the artistic community, among anti-abortionists? This could be a random, unique act of violence. It takes two events to make a pattern.”

“There’s probably a simple explanation. We’ll find out what that is when we talk to our chief suspect.”

“I’m sorry, did I miss something? Suspect?”

“That’s right. We’re seeing McZee tonight. There were two other artists at the press conference, remember? We can rule out Sharinda Van Souten – she was accompanied by her agent the whole morning, and had only met White once before. McZee is on record saying he hates White and everything she stands for. He was arrested for assaulting a police officer in Manchester two years ago.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“He was fingerprinted. The partials on White’s silver buttons aren’t finished, but Banbury reckons they contain an oil residue on the thumb: linseed. That suggested a painter, so we ran a match against every artist who had exhibited in the gallery, and AFIS came up with a short list with his name on it. The spread-out configuration of both hands is consistent with someone pushing on her chest.”

“Artistic adversaries, eh? It could be Turner and Whistler all over again.” Bryant could barely conceal his excitement. “Well, what are we waiting for?” His impatience overtook him, as did a bus, which nearly ran him down as he stepped into the road.

May helped his partner back onto the kerb. “I think we’d better use my car, don’t you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” barked Bryant, snatching back his arm. “It’s hardly a ten-minute walk along the Embankment.” So saying, he set off towards the bridge’s staircase at a terrific pace, just to prove the point.

♦

“I hate him already,” said Bryant in a voice somewhat louder than a stage whisper, “eminently slappable.”

McZee, the twenty-three-year-old artist formerly known as Josh Ketchley of Sidcup, Kent, stood before them in ripped jeans, Timberland workboots, and a stained white T-shirt. He was also wearing what appeared to be an elderly lady’s dress, black, floral-print, pleated, and baggy. Calvin Burroughs, the gallery owner, had warned them that his young star had a habit of making public protests about age, race, and gentler.

“Yeah, we had an argument,” he told them, checking to see if anyone else was within listening distance. “So what? She was being a hypercritical pain in the arse as usual.” The artist was supervising the crating of his work in the gallery’s cavernous delivery bay.

“What time was this?” asked May.

“Just after the conference officially ended, about nine fifty-five A.M. I didn’t want to stay around and suck up to the press. She thought we should work the room together, said I was betraying Calvin’s trust by not networking and hyping the art. I told her that’s not what it’s about. She liked to milk the stories about her private life. I said the public doesn’t need to know who the artists are shagging to understand their work.”

“Did you touch her when you argued?”

“Actually, I think I pushed her away from me. She does this little-girl act when she wants something, prodding you in the chest. I wasn’t in the mood for it.” McZee sighed wearily. “I suppose this is about the pictures.”

“What pictures?”

“The pictures of us she put out on the Internet. The private ones taken in the Sanderson Hotel.”

“You don’t mean Claridge’s, do you?”

“No, mate, that was someone else – ‘Temptation in Toffs’ Toilet.’ I was ‘Sex Secrets of Shamed Love Rat.’”

Longbright brought tabloids into the unit every day, and several had exploited the scandal of the volatile artist who had discovered her partner was cheating on her.

“We’d been seeing each other non-exclusively for two months when she put those shots out. She filmed us on her digital camera and dropped the footage onto her Web site while I was in the shower. Thought it was funny. So I said ‘Laugh at this,’ and finished with her.”

“How do you feel about her installation?”

“The Destiny thing? I thought it was a cheap shot, labouring the obvious. I mean, how many new British artists do you know who are pro-life? She had the foetuses manufactured in China. That’s how much she cared about human rights.”

“So you have no personal issue with a woman’s right to choose.”

McZee gave him a strange look. “Of course not.”

“Did you know she was pregnant?” He had caught the artist by surprise. “When did you break up with her?”

“This was, like, over a month ago.” For someone who was happy to share his partner with a number of lovers, McZee looked surprisingly shaken.

“So she might have been carrying your child,” May pressed. He wanted to catch the young man before he had time to absorb the news. “You don’t seem very upset about her death.”

“It hasn’t sunk in yet.”

“Tell me more about the argument you had.”

“It got pretty heated.”

“How heated?”

“A shoving match. Handbags at dawn, pretty embarrassing when I think about it. Let’s put it this way: It would have given fuel to anyone who thinks artists are a bunch of self-centred wankers.”

“Did anyone else witness this?”

“No, we were in the next room to the press conference, beside my installation. The smoke detector is broken in there. You can have a fag without setting off the alarm.”

“Would you care to show us?” asked May.

McZee led the way to a chamber containing a slender glass box filled with blue smoke and wire filaments. The piece was thirteen feet high. “Oh, give me strength,” muttered Bryant.

“Hang about, it’s not on yet. It has to be turned off every fifteen minutes. There’s an overheating problem, but we’re working on it.” He flicked a wall switch and the filaments within started to glow. The swirling smoke coalesced about the fine wires, momentarily forming slender moving figures. Soft atonal music played from synchronised speakers.

“Good lord.” Bryant caught his breath, staring with wide blue eyes at the shifting ethereal forms. “It’s absolutely beautiful.”

♦

They left the gallery and headed back to the Embankment. “He obviously had a real fight with her,” said May as the panorama of the river opened out before them. “Did you see the scratches on the side of his neck? A pity there were no witnesses. I have to vote him to the top of our suspect list. He could be lying when he says he didn’t know about White’s pregnancy.”

“I wonder how it works?” asked Bryant dreamily. “The shaped filaments clearly heat the atmosphere, but how does he get them to dance like that? How can he conjure up something so wonderful from bits of old rubbish?”

“Are you listening, Arthur? We have a suspect. It’s what you want.”

“But not who I want,” Bryant admitted. “I’ve still got my eye on Calvin Burroughs. His star was about to change her much-publicised attitude towards children. If he’s the father, he has the motive.”

“He nurtured her and lost her, Arthur.”

“Yes, and the work of dead controversial artists skyrockets in value.”

“You’ve a point there. Look at Haring and Basquiat.”

“That boy McZee is interested in organic forms, natural beauty, humanity. What could be more natural than a baby? Someone like that could become very passionate about the idea of termination.”

“So he chooses to kill them both? It wouldn’t make any sense.”

Bryant was still misty-eyed by the time their taxi reached Tottenham Court Road. “I’d written myself off as a Rossetti fan,” he told his partner. “Whoever would have thought modern art could be so extraordinary?”

“Can we concentrate on the matter at hand?” May asked with irritation.

“That’s precisely what I’m doing. I was just thinking, perhaps there is an argument against McZee. If an artist can create moving three-dimensional figures from a few lightbulb filaments and some gas, what other illusions could he create? A highwayman on a horse, perhaps? You’d have to admire his ingenuity.”

“You were just as ingenious. I remember some of the scams you had for getting around rationing quotas after the war, raising crows in your attic so you could fry them in vinaigrette sauce, that scheme for creating artificial bacon you nearly had us thrown in jail over.” Bryant made no reply. “You wanted to change the laws of the land and reinvent the wheel in the process. You really don’t see any connection between yourself and the young as they are today?”

“None at all,” said Bryant sadly. “The more I see talent in others, the more I feel like I’m bumbling off into some obsolete corner, where all the broken washing machines and fridges end up.”

May was determined not to allow any excess of sentiment into the vehicle. “Shall we keep an eye on Josh Ketchley’s movements?” he asked.

“Call him McZee,” Bryant replied. “The boy has earned it. But put a tag on him, all the same.”