Ten Second Staircase

∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧

14

Protector of the Land

The staff of the Mornington Crescent unit would never win awards for office organisation, but on Tuesday morning they were more chaotic than ever.

Whenever a major investigation commenced, boxes were dumped where they could be fallen over, and precipitously stacked files could be guaranteed to cascade like decks of cards. Banbury had removed and bagged a number of items from the crime scene but had lost the key to the evidence room, so they sat at the top of the stairs waiting to break someone’s ankle. Crippen the cat had spent most of Monday hiding under May’s desk after getting his tail caught in the photocopier, leaving his post only to drop off a surprise in the upturned crash helmet that Meera Mangeshkar had foolishly left on the floor beside her locker. The dead cactus had fallen over, impaling Bryant’s Wendigo spirit doll on its spikes and possibly damning him to an afterlife in limbo.

Everywhere she looked, April found evidence of Bryant’s surreptitious pipe usage. Even when he wasn’t at the unit, it still looked as if he was; there was a piece of toast stuck on the wall above his chair, and several of his fished-out teabags had been impaled on his desk with darts. His carpet slippers, cardigans, and half-eaten sandwiches were strewn over the furniture like votive offerings.

This was only her second day working at the unit, but April had already given up trying to keep the place tidy. As she unzipped her backpack and prepared to offer a hand to anyone who asked her, she wondered what she was doing here at all.

“My grandfather thinks he’s helping me,” she told Longbright, “but I feel like I’m just in the way.” It was true; she had got under everyone’s feet the previous day. Sergeant Longbright looked up from her screen and thought for a moment.

“Well, what are you good at?” she asked. “John says you have a gift for spotting the things other people miss. He says you make fresh connections. That’s a very useful talent.”

“I spend a lot of time alone. I guess you become more observant. It’s like always being outside, looking in.”

“So you see the bigger picture, that’s good. How about helping me collate the remaining interviews? You can go through them and see if there are any common factors we’ve overlooked. They’re already divided into High, Medium, and Low Interest – it’s Arthur’s system, not mine. He subdivides documents into a lot of ornate and arbitrary levels no-one really understands, including personal philosophy, favourite book, and shoe types, but the basic idea is sound enough.

He’s got eight potentials listed as suspects, including Saralla White’s own mother, her rival artists, the gallery owner, and ‘The Other Unknown Suitor,’ although where he got that from is a mystery that he doesn’t seem keen on divulging.” Longbright shook her immaculate coiffure in wonder. “Who uses a word like suitor, anyway? You’d think by now I’d have an inkling of how his mind works, but it’s a sealed labyrinth.” She slid over a stack of paper. “Hard copies. I load all the reports electronically, but he prints them out.”

“I know, he’s such a Luddite.”

“It’s not that, it’s the toner. We’re on a budget. You know it’s his birthday tomorrow? We’re taking up a collection. John’s buying him a new digital mobile. Guess who’ll have to read the manual aloud half a dozen times.”

“Everybody has to do that, Janice. Here, this will cheer you up. Last night’s paper.” April unfolded a copy of the Evening Standard. “The Highwayman, computer rendition. They latched on to the name pretty quickly.”

Longbright examined the photograph. “They must have got hold of a copy of the kid’s drawing. How the hell did they source it so fast?”

“I don’t know, but the article reads pretty much the same as the ones on the Net and the afternoon cable reports – very little new information, no direct attribution. The information’s all coming from one source.”

“How can you be sure?” Longbright sat back in her chair. “The same handful of facts is spread thinly through all the tabloids this morning. They haven’t got much more than the witness’s description, a photograph of Meera accompanying Luke home, and the usual frank descriptions of White’s past lovers, although the Sun rates White’s sexual partners in terms of performance. I noticed that the Daily Mail had got Calvin Burroughs’s age wrong, so I checked the other reports and found the error repeated.

My guess is it’s a single tabloid stringer, someone who’s sold non-exclusive rights to the story. The broadsheets aren’t trusting any of it until they get more direct sources. It’s too bizarre for them; they smell a publicity stunt of some kind.”

“Saralla White is dead, April. That’s not a stunt.”

“How do they know that for sure? She reinvented herself, and pulled all kinds of bizarre hoaxes to gain notoriety. She once described herself as a ‘reality hacker.’ And she’s revealed an incredible amount of detail about her sexual life. I did some Internet research last night. The unofficial Web sites fill in some of the blanks she left; in her early unknown days she wrote a self-published biography called Macroslut, but no-one paid any attention. It’s already changing hands on eBay now because it’s filled with hand-coloured photographs that she later destroyed. There’s one particular section Uncle Arthur should find interesting. It turns out Saralla White had a husband, although she always denied the marriage. She took some incredibly nasty photographs of him, naked and aroused, including one where it appears he’s been drugged and tied to a toilet cistern. He works somewhere in the city, and he’s probably still furious with her.”

“How did you find out all this?”

April shrugged. “Tracking sites and podcasts is another thing you do when you can’t go out. Any time a computer is touched it leaves a track. The only way to destroy evidence like that is to unplug the thing, dig a hole in the ground, and cover it with dirt. Besides, I like making connections. Maybe I take after my grandfather after all.”

“Well, it’s a talent we can certainly use around here.” Longbright handed her the rest of the interviews. “Don’t even think about leaving again.”

♦

Dan Banbury placed a magnetic disc on the blurred screen-grab at the top of the board, moving the photograph of McZee down.

“So we’re agreed,” said May. “Until we receive any further information, McZee drops to second place behind this unknown husband.” He squinted at the head shot, trying to make it out. “Is that the best you can get? Can’t you enhance it?”

“What with?” asked Banbury. “We haven’t got the right on-site equipment. I can send it off to WEC, see if they’ll stick it onto one of their jobs.” The unit had been promised its own crime lab, but someone – May suspected Leslie Faraday – had refused to sign off on the new agreed budget.

“Then get some better shots. Her sex life’s been spread all over the Web. You must be able to get something more than a vaguely male shape caught leaving a restaurant with her. Meera, do you want the bad news?”

“Let me guess: I’m doing surveillance on the artist formerly known as Josh Ketchley,” said the young Indian officer without looking up.

“Right, and take Bimsley with you.”

“Can’t, sir. We’ve no spare vehicles, so I’ve been given permission to use my bike.”

“You’re not watching someone from a bicycle,” said May.

“No, sir, a reconditioned thousand-cc Kawasaki. I stripped it down myself. No room for an uncoordinated pillion rider – no offence, Colin.” She flicked a smile at PC Bimsley, whose heart skipped a beat. Something about small, strong women opened his soul to the sky.

“Very well, but stay in the warm somewhere. I’m not having you catch pneumonia.” May sighed. “Did anyone see Arthur leave the building this morning?”

“He said something about following up a lead from one of the teachers you interviewed,” said Kershaw.

“He has no right to go off by himself,” May complained, throwing down his pen. “What does he think he’s doing?”

♦

The Roland Plumbe Community Estate had been built on one of London’s less visible sites, above the brown concrete towers of the Barbican, below the drab grey bricks of Finsbury, sandwiched between Bunhill Fields and St Bartholomew’s Hospital, a negative place where bombs had wiped out history and planners had exercised so little imagination that it could only become the province of the poor.

The apartments had been prefabricated from imperfect concrete slabs containing air pockets that soaked up rain and trapped it in the walls. The triangle of land on which the estate survived had been cleared of wartime rubble and used for asbestos-lined bungalows until 1962, when the great block had risen under new plans for working Londoners enthusiastically approved by Harold Macmillan.

The main building had had seven long balconies and a park at either end, but these greenlands had been lost when two wings were added. The resulting alteration to the original plans left the estate claustrophobic and lightless. Successive councils had tried to alleviate the gloom with bright colours, but in the early 1980^s the first graffiti arrived, and it had never been successfully removed without wrecking the paintwork. The stilts upon which the central block stood proved impossible to light adequately, and provided an ideal home for lurking street gangs.

This is what happens when well-meaning architects decide how the working classes should live, thought Bryant as he tightened his moulting green scarf around his throat and stepped on through tumbling oak leaves. The professional classes should be made to live here for a while before they start pronouncing on the causes of antisocial behaviour. Looking ahead at the bleak grey wind tunnels which daily greeted residents beneath the building, he could not imagine how the human spirit survived intact in such a place.

Fundamental flaws were obvious, even from ground level. The steel lifts opened onto the street side of the building, granting access to anyone looking for a place to inject or relieve themselves. The bedrooms had been intended to overlook parkland, but now overlooked other apartments, which destroyed the tenants’ privacy. The architects weren’t entirely to blame, he supposed. Who could have foreseen how much society would change? Who in wartime could have imagined the end of the traditional urban family unit? He passed a bleak playground consisting of a scarred green roundabout and broken swings, beyond peeling prefabricated garages that had been hastily erected on the only remaining free ground, and headed into the darkness beneath the block’s concrete stilts.

Walking between oily pools of water into the threatening shadows, he reflected that one of the benefits of old age was finding how few things scared him. He had survived a war, seen friends die before his eyes, faced the ebb and flow of various fads and panics that had briefly gripped the country. He had watched politicians pronounce on the end of civilisation, and had listened to grieving, desperate families as they coped with the loss of their loved ones. Dark alleys had no power to harm him now.

“You shouldn’t be here alone, Mr Bryant.” Lorraine Bonner stepped from the shadows to greet him. She was a heavy-beamed black woman in her mid-forties, with a broad face predisposed to smiling. Dressed in a bright red patchwork overcoat, she brought a cheerful touch to the surrounding gloom. “I came to get you ‘cause the main lift is buggered.”

“How did you know me?” asked Bryant, shaking her hand. “I saw you on television. They seem keen to bill you as an English eccentric.” As they walked, she linked her arm in his. Bryant liked the gesture of warmth in such a chill environment. She reminded him of his Antiguan landlady.

“Television is only interested in freaks,” he told her. “I’m afraid that’s probably how they see me. Celebrity is fleeting.”

“Well, you look normal to me, love. We’d better get off the street. The school will be starting sports practise soon. The kids have to pass through here, and their enemies lie in wait for them. It’s not a good idea to get caught in the middle, know what I mean?”

She led the way to a goods lift at the rear of the building and ushered him in. “You’re lucky, this one’s working today. The first time in three weeks.”

Mrs Bonner was the head of the Roland Plumbe Residents’ Association, and liaised with housing officers when she wasn’t working at the Middlesex Hospital. She had called the police to point out that the man she kept seeing on the rolling news had been sighted by residents on the estate. Meanwhile, Bryant had just finished reading his partner’s notes on his meeting with Elliot Mason, and the teacher’s mention of trouble in the area suggested that the call was worth checking out.

“We’ll go to the community office,” she said. “My kids are at home with colds, and I wouldn’t inflict them on you today. They’re hyperactive and can take some getting used to.”

“I’m not good with children,” Bryant understated, entering the glass-walled office. It was typical of so many community rooms housing people in states of emotional distress. No technical innovations here, just Post-it notes, brown folders, papers, Kleenex boxes, children’s drawings, cheap orange plastic chairs, and stained carpet tiles – nothing that could be stolen or used as a weapon. “Everyone comes here with their problems,” Mrs Bonner told him, flicking on the fierce strip lighting. “They can scream and shout, it don’t make any difference to me. I wait for them to calm down, then explain what we can do. It’s probably like your job.”

No, thought Bryant guiltily, my job’s not as tough as this. “You can see the whole estate from up here,” he said aloud.

“Yes, I can keep an eye on the troublemakers. We employed some guardians to patrol and separate the gangs, but we had to get rid of them after they started taking sides. This job has a dangerous habit of getting personal on you. There are two main trouble sectors here, one Anglo-Asian, one African, but they’re not really drawn along ethnic lines; it’s mostly territorial and circumstantial.”

“What do you mean?” asked Bryant, who knew little about everyday urban life.

“It’s circumstantial because they’ve got no money, Mr Bryant, so they’ve got nowhere to go, which means they stand around in groups, and that makes it territorial. Doesn’t help that the rich kids have to cut across their turf three times a week.”

“Who gives them guidance?” Bryant asked. “Are there still such things as youth clubs? We had all sorts of activities available when we were young.”

“No disrespect, Mr Bryant, but youth clubs went out with Teddyboys. These kids should spend less time with their mates and more with their folks. They needed role models, but now they’re beyond the age where they’ll trust any adult to give them guidance. They’ve no shame. They’ll terrorise the older tenants, then lie straight-faced to the police. They know their rights. It’s all ‘Lay a finger on me and I’ll call Claims Direct’.” She checked a large appointments book on her desk. “Don’t get me wrong, we’ve never had gun crime here – that’s for the drug-problem estates – but most of the kids routinely carry knives, and in flashpoint situations they do get used. This is the estate diary. We enter all incidents, no matter how small. The idea is to catch the rising problem, not its aftermath. See here, just this morning a couple of kids told their parents they saw this Highwayman of yours. He was running through The Street – that’s what they call the ground-floor passage under the stilts; it runs the entire length of the three blocks. Nobody uses it unless they have to.”

“Do you have CCTV?”

“Yes, but the camera lenses are so scratched and fogged that they don’t show anything. The council was supposed to replace them last year. Besides, the kids all wear hoodies. We rely on other residents to keep watch.”

“This sighting, do you know if it was before the story broke in today’s papers?”

“I couldn’t say, Mr Bryant. Don’t imagine they read papers.”

“Well, do you have an accurate description of what they saw? They might have noticed some detail we’ve missed.”

“Here, I typed it out for you. Black leather suit, riding boots, eye mask, hat. Looks like a comic book character, they said, tall and broad. They reckon they’ve seen this man on the estate before, dressed exactly the same way each time. He always appears just as it’s getting dark.”

“Always?” asked Bryant, alarmed. “When did they first see him?”

Lorraine crossed to a file cabinet and checked her notes. Bryant noticed that she had the lolloping gait of a woman with hip trouble. “Six months ago, maybe longer. A couple of kids say he’s always been around the estate, as long as they can remember, even when they was little babies.”

“Does he scare them?”

“No, apparently they think of him as a kind of guardian. Sort of a protector of the estate. Because of the badge, see.”

She tapped the Roland Plumbe Community Estate’s logo on the Residents’ Association letterhead, an artisanal fifties symbol that owed its influence to the Festival of Britain’s design ethic. At its centre was the outline of a horseman in a black cape and tricorn hat. The date on the logo was 1954.

My God, thought Bryant. Don’t tell me he’s been around for over fifty years.