Ten Second Staircase

∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧

24

Shadow City

As Meera Mangeshkar arrived for her shift, she heard the detectives arguing in their room opposite. She had become used to the see-saw sound of their bickering, but went over to listen.

“You may as well come in, Mangeshkar; we have no secrets here.” May rolled a chair over to her. “Ever hear of the Leicester Square Vampire?”

“Before my time, sir.”

“Accidents of birth do not excuse your ignorance,” snapped Bryant. “Caligula reigned before you were born, but you’ve heard of him, haven’t you? We were asking ourselves what the Highwayman has in common with the Leicester Square Vampire, and the answer is that they both started social panics. Look at the hysterical press reaction, and remember what Lord Macaulay said: ‘We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.’”

“You mean like the video nasties scare of the eighties?”

“Exactly. Panics occur when individuals feel threatened and mobilise themselves into vigilante groups. Mods and rockers, paedophiles, even UFO sightings have all sparked waves of hysteria. Saralla White and Danny Martell are being tarred and feathered because they represent the failures of a generation. Martell ran a show that was popular with teenagers but hated by their parents, until he lost his remaining audience. White advocated multiple partners, abortion, and drugs, but was a hypocrite. As people age, they form habits and take sides. The Highwayman is a godsend. According to the right-wing press, he’s only doing what people across the country don’t have the guts to do. The general consensus is that his victims had it coming. Journalists are so busy tracking down dubious witnesses that they’ve not stopped to consider the effect of their actions.”

“You mean they’re writing a bunch of toss about him.”

“Succinctly put, Mangeshkar. This editor at Hard News, what’s her name?”

“Janet Ramsey,” Longbright pointed out.

“She’s intent on turning the Highwayman into some kind of hero. And to think she started out writing in the New Musical Express. Well, you scratch a liberal and find a conservative. Look at her editorial.” Bryant rattled the magazine angrily. “‘So-called ‘artist’ Saralla White had the morals of a tramp and a string of terminations to her credit. The man who financed her career, the owner of London’s notorious Burroughs gallery, was himself the father of her unborn illegitimate child.’ My God, where are they getting their information?”

“As you said, sir, no shortage of enemies ready to put the boot in.”

“Wait, it goes on: ‘Self-styled ‘Teen Lifestyle Guru’ Danny Martell’s own secret sleazy life involved hookers and drugs. Both died in a manner appropriate to their wasted existence. Can we honestly say that either of them will be missed?’ Longbright, get me a meeting with this woman, would you? What she’s printing is irresponsible and dangerous. We don’t want a repeat of what happened with the Vampire.”

“Why?” asked Meera. “What happened?”

“His victims were accused of bringing their fate upon themselves, just because they were women out alone at night, some postwar notion about unaccompanied females being of loose character. Crime reporters turned the whole thing into a moral issue and a political point-scorer. Janice, where are the Vampire files?”

Longbright caught her breath. She had managed to hide the essential page in the back of her desk. “I think they all burned,” she replied. “Your fault, I’m afraid. I’ll see if there’s anything else left, but don’t expect much.” She rose from her desk and clumped off, returning a few minutes later with the singed cardboard container, denuded of its single incriminating document.

“Is that all we have to show for three decades of sightings?” Bryant settled his spectacles on his nose and peered into the carton, where a handful of damp clippings lay stuck to the bottom.

“We’d have more if you hadn’t blown the place up,” Longbright reminded him, tipping the pitiful contents across his desk. The best form of defence against Bryant, she knew, was distraction.

“Don’t worry, I remember most of the assault details.” May spread the jaundiced newspaper clippings out. “First recorded assault was March twenty-sixth, 1973, in the alleyway connecting Leicester Square to Charing Cross Road. It’s bricked in now as part of the Odeon complex; another smelly, piss-stained piece of old London gone, and good riddance. A nineteen-year-old female on her way home from a nightclub was beaten and bitten around the chin and neck. The same MO occurred six times that summer, enough for us to link the cases and for the press to coin a nickname. The early victims were all women between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three, all on their way home from nights on the town. Two of them were known to us because they’d been arrested on immorality charges. Two were of mixed race. The press weren’t told, but it didn’t stop them from implying that the victims had led their attacker on because they were provocatively dressed in miniskirts, and because they weren’t white. A message there to anyone who thinks the seventies were enlightened.

“The Vampire returned in 1974 after a quiet winter, the attacks continuing intermittently until a boy – Malcolm somebody, his name isn’t here – died of his wounds. He was the first of two fatalities that year. We didn’t have computers to help us find bite marks then, and at first we missed the link, but he was the son of an Austrian diplomat, and suddenly there were funds available to pursue a full investigation. The problem was that, like the alleyways where the Vampire carried out his attacks, every lead turned into a dead end. We ended up with numerous witness reports – ”

“There are a couple of brief descriptions here,” Bryant interrupted. “Tall, athletic, dressed in a black cape, spotted running into a cul-desac, thought to have scaled a sheer wall and escaped somehow. The ‘Vampire’ tag stuck not because of his clothes, but because nearly all of the victims had been bitten, the severity depending on how long the Vampire had been left alone with them. We didn’t know then that biting was so common in sexual assaults. Databases were still difficult to cross-reference in those days. And you have to realise that in 1973 his outfit wasn’t so strange.”

“That’s right.” May took up the story again. “Victorian capes for men had enjoyed a revival. Just the previous year, Christopher Lee had starred in a modern Dracula film which saw him running along the King’s Road in a billowing cape. The image had already been planted in the minds of the young. The press played up the danger, and pretty soon we had drunken vigilante groups roaming the West End as the pubs turned out, searching for this phantom figure who drained his victims’ blood and walked through walls. The whole thing became a ridiculous urban legend. People supposedly sighted him stalking across the rooftops. The Vampire operated in a tight area that, thanks to geographic profiling, we now know wasn’t where he lived. We made mistakes. The unit had been brought in to try and stem the escalating anxiety in the capital. The mythology became self-perpetuating as the Vampire started to act on his own press reports; if they said he’d been seen wearing a top hat, then he wore one the next time he ventured out. If they said he could escape through solid brick, he staged a stunt to suggest that was exactly what he’d done. He played up to his public, and started taking risks. We nearly caught him.”

“What do you mean, nearly?” asked Meera.

An awkward glance passed between the detectives, and they fell uncharacteristically silent. “The operation went wrong,” said Bryant, gathering up the clippings and tidying them away.

“Did the attacks continue?” asked Mangeshkar.

“For a while, yes.”

The room went quiet. The constable shot the detective sergeant a look, as if to say What gives here? but was ignored. Longbright finally broke the stillness.

“Could we get back to the case in hand? Perhaps we should take another look at possible suspects.”

“All right,” May agreed. “Let’s start with the boy, Luke Tripp. We know his testimony is over-imaginative – there’s no way he could have seen a man on a horse in that chamber – so we have to assume that fear made him exaggerate what he saw.”

“Therein lies another paradox,” said Bryant, who loved paradoxes. “The pose Luke drew is exactly the same as the one described by Channing Gifford, the dancer living opposite the Smithfield gym who spotted the Highwayman from her window. It’s the same as the pose struck in the digital shots taken by the estate girls. The head also matches the official logo of the Roland Plumbe Community Estate. But the schoolboy saw the Highwayman up close and in the flesh before anyone else did, therefore he can’t have copied someone else’s description, because he had nothing to base it on. What, then, are we to make of his testimony?”

May rose and strode impatiently to the sunlit crescent window. “We can’t be sure of that. We have to check for further sightings.”

“I circulated the Highwayman’s shot to every motorcycle courier company in Greater London, as you asked,” said Longbright. “I thought someone would be able to tell if his outfit was similar to any of the distinctive leather suits bike messengers wear, but so far no-one has come back with a positive match.”

“We’ll have to do all the follow-up work ourselves,” said May. “Faraday won’t recommend putting more officers on the street because he’s corner-cutting to prove he can meet his end-of-year budget. So long as we’re always pulled in after the event, we can’t be expected to prevent further tragedies. Not unless we’re somehow granted the gift of second sight.”

“But that’s exactly what we need to develop,” said Bryant, “and I know how to go about it. We need someone who understands why such mythical bogeymen recur in the city. Recognise the cause and you locate the solution.” He tapped his partner on the shoulder. “Come with me.”

“Oh, no, I’m not heading down this route,” May warned. “You heard Raymond, no table-tappers and ghost-watchers, just solid data-gathering.”

“You’re absolutely right, and I’m sticking to my promise. She’s just a white witch. I don’t suppose you have a problem with that, given this area’s rich connections with witchcraft.”

“You might just as well say the area’s connected with carrots because there’s a vegetable stall outside the tube station,” said May hotly.

“Come on, John, have you forgotten the lecture I dragged you to about the ‘Mother Damnable’ of Kentish Town, Jinney the Mother Red-Cap, who frequently lodged the notorious highwaywoman of Oliver Cromwell’s days, Moll Cutpurse? She was a fortune-teller, healer, and practitioner of the black arts, and her life was filled with cruelty and insanity. Mother Red-Cap’s partner incinerated himself in her oven, and later, when she herself was close to death, crowds saw the devil himself enter her house and take her soul. The witch’s hair dropped out in two hours, and the undertaker had to snap her stiff limbs to fit her into a coffin. She, Mother Black Cap, and Mother Shipton, all three notorious witches, all lived within half a mile of one another. Coincidence? I think not.”

May looked at his partner and his heart sank. It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas. John May knew this, because Bryant had once introduced him to the witches’ alarming descendants, who continued to live – and die violently – in the immediate neighbourhood of their ancestors. But now his task was to prevent his partner from favouring the pursuit of his hobbies over practical investigation.

“I’m not coming with you, Arthur,” he warned.

“I need to get you out of the office, John. We have to talk about the Leicester Square attacks. Please.”

Bryant buried himself inside his voluminous threadbare overcoat and looked for somewhere to stick his smouldering pipe. For a moment, with his head all but vanished and smoke coming out of his sleeves, he rather looked like a witch himself, melting after a tossed bucket of water. “It’s early. I’ll have you back here in no time.”

May reluctantly rose but stopped at the unit entrance. “Can’t you see what they’re trying to do? They’re dissipating our strength, dividing us between two investigations in order to make us fail at both. The Vampire is an irrelevance not worth wasting time and money on. We need to concentrate on the matter at hand. One success is better than none.”

“We can’t ignore this, John,” said Bryant softly. “Not when you know it involves the death of your daughter.”