Ten Second Staircase

∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧

25

Attracting Evil

“How could I have told them the truth, with April in hearing distance?” pleaded May.

“You’ll have to talk to her at some point.” Bryant bundled himself against the cool morning air and set off across wet pavements for the unit car park, a quadrangle of bricks cracked with drain-fed weeds, where horses were once stabled for the gentry of Camden Town. “You can’t leave these things hidden forever. It’s not fair on the poor girl.” He produced a bent pickled-onion fork and prised open the broken door lock of Victor, his Mini Cooper.

“How can I ever broach the subject? She’ll hate me for all the years I’ve lied.”

“You know my views on that. You should have made a clean breast of it years ago, instead of letting the problem compound itself.”

“You’ve always been brutally honest with people because you don’t care what they think, but I can’t lose April now, just when I’m getting her back.”

“Get in, for heaven’s sake.” Bryant peered at his partner through the rain-stained windscreen, but May had not moved.

He was remembering the day with terrible clarity.

The sticky heat rising from London streets at dusk. A cloud of starlings tumbling above the plane trees. 'Yourists ambling towards the cinemas of Leicester Square, where The Silence of the Lambs and Terminator 2: Judgment Day were showing. The detectives, tired and fractious, waiting in the shadowed doorway of an amusement arcade. Longbright, radio-linked in a hot patrol car below Leicester Fields, in Panton Street. So much waiting, with nothing to do but argue.

The press had grown bored with the unsolved assaults. Leicester Square had been redeveloped as a pedestrian zone, and it was assumed that the Vampire had ceased operation in the area, despite the occasional unconfirmed sighting. During the summer of 1991, the brutal murder of a woman in her late twenties in an alley off Cranbourn Street prompted fresh attention, and the case was reopened. This time the victim was a blonde, well-educated and attractive, and therefore more likely to extract outraged cries for justice. The hunt for the killer of young Amanda Wakefield began in earnest.

Three nights before the detectives’ vigil, a fight had broken out in another Leicester Square backstreet, during which a homeless man was half beaten to death by a murderous gang of youths supposedly looking for the Vampire. The police commissioner had been pressured to take action, and the unit had grown too desperate for a break.

Arthur Bryant had been the first to notice the physical similarity between Amanda Wakefield and May’s own daughter, Elizabeth, but it was John who had readily agreed to plant a decoy matching the description of the victim. The pair had been blinded by their need to resolve the investigation.

Elizabeth offered to help draw the Vampire out into the light.

Only Detective Sergeant Longbright had felt uneasy as she dressed her up for the part. Elizabeth had been armed with a police radio and pepper spray, in case of trouble, and although she was small in stature, her strength and determination made her a formidable opponent. Everyone was confident. Bryant had employed a psychic to teach her about sending the right signals to her potential attacker, but he had also noted a practical detail that no-one else had remarked upon: All the victims had worn baseball caps. Hardly anything surprising there, of course; the whole of London was wearing caps that summer – but Bryant wondered if the Vampire avoided the bareheaded because they could look up and identify him more easily.

He spent the afternoon watching Elizabeth as she trod the same route as those who had died. By nine P.M. it seemed unlikely that the Vampire would appear. He had never operated at night. The dusty sun was low behind buildings glowing with soft citrine colours. Shadows stretched and cooled. And Elizabeth decided to depart from her prearranged route, slipping between the narrow walls of Bear Street, picking her way between stacks of restaurant refuse in her search for a killer.

Her call for help went unanswered. She had not realised that the high buildings would block her radio signal. May was puzzled by the disappearance; she should have been due back at the end of Irving Street by now. Craning his neck to search the gathering crowds, he grew apprehensive. The detectives warned Longbright that they had lost contact with their decoy, and ran into the streets.

Bear Street had an alley running from it where bars and cafés stored their waste food ready for night collection. It was closed at one end, and presented such a forbidding appearance that no pedestrians used it. Drums of ghee made the ground slick, and there was a sensation of lurking rodent life.

May was the first on the scene, slowing from a run to a walk as the feeling of something terrible prickled at his throat. The restaurant backs were deep in shadow now, and the noise of the crowd in the square had died away. He studied the filthy brick alleyway, the steel rubbish containers and plastic sacks of leaking leftovers, the cook in a first-floor window smoking a cigarette on his break, the backs of buildings resembling some ancient part of London because they had no need to make themselves attractive. He called up: Did you see a young woman run in here? But the cook spoke no English, and merely stared back.

As soon as he saw the legs of her jeans on the ground, he knew his daughter was dead. She had been struck down from behind, and lay on an oily patch between a pair of plastic wastebins. Then he saw the bloody knot of hair, the arm twisted beneath her torso with its palm up. Her head pressed up against the base of a drainpipe at an impossible angle.

He remembered nothing more of that dreadful night.

A pair of Met officers forced a bottle of brandy on him to numb the shock, not caring that they were breaking the law by doing so. May drank too deeply. He was to blame, he told them, for ignoring the rules, for not trusting his senses. Back at the unit, he insisted on signing a document to that effect, and used the officers as witnesses.

Nobody had spotted the reemergence of the Vampire from the grey dead-ended alley. An open door led to the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, but the cook insisted that no-one had entered or left. He had, however, seen a tall man in a cloak halfway up the end wall of Bear Street’s alley – the idea was preposterous, the details unforthcoming, so that the sighting only made matters worse. But the drainpipes made perfect ladders here, and it was clear that he had climbed them. The phantasm’s panicky mythology had hidden obvious truths.

May had taken a brief leave of absence, returning to work too quickly, assuring them all that he was coping well.

Elizabeth’s daughter was just nine years old when she became motherless. Her father had moved out from the family apartment five years earlier, and had by then remarried in New Zealand. April’s worst childhood fear, that she would one day find herself alone, suddenly became true. She found herself unable to talk to the man who had discovered her mother’s body, and was sent to live with his sister Gwen. Her problems began soon after.

May knew he should never have involved his daughter in a hunt for a killer. The detectives had proven too adept at attracting evil. As forensic experts combed the walls and roofs searching for evidence of the Vampire’s escape, May damned himself. Bryant, too, cursed his own arrogance, but no amount of blame could bring Elizabeth back.

And April changed. The girl with smiling eyes was replaced by a sombre, fearful child who found terrors in every building’s shadow. In the absence of factual evidence, legends took hold. The Vampire became a bogeyman, an elusive phantom that existed only in tortured dreams.

Trails grow cold, and need evidence if they are to be revived. Elizabeth’s death had marked the Vampire’s last appearance. What, wondered May, could now be gained by reopening the wounds of a tragic past?