Ten Second Staircase

∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧

26

Shared Tragedies

John May sat up in the passenger seat and looked around. “Why are we on Prince of Wales Road?” he asked.

Bryant had stopped the Mini Cooper before a familiar Victorian redbrick building. “I’ve been talking to you for the last ten minutes,” he said. “Weren’t you listening?” Whacking a ‘disabled’ sticker onto his windscreen, he clambered out to tap his walking stick on the wooden sign that had been affixed to the tiny church’s gate: Coven of St James the Elder – North London Branch. The crimson neon above the door still read ‘Chapel of Hope’, a leftover from the previous tenant.

“I know you detest the idea, but we need to talk to Maggie Armitage,” Bryant explained. “The Vampire files may have been destroyed, but she’s been keeping diaries for years. If you remember, she acted as my occult consultant throughout the case. I’m hoping she still has records of every sighting.”

“Yes, but they’ll be useless because she’s mad.”

“You say that about every woman over forty who holds strong convictions.”

“I know all about her convictions, Arthur. I’ve seen her arrest file.”

“Our cases don’t have traditional signifying elements, so I have to rely on people like Maggie. You never warmed to her, did you?”

“I know she means well, but when the two of you get together, she fills your head with these ridiculous ideas, like the time she convinced you that she could trap the Black Widow of Blackheath inside the Woolwich Odeon by spraying the balcony with luminous paint.”

“We caught her, didn’t we?”

“Only because you blinded her halfway through South Pacific and she fell down the stairs trying to get to the toilet.”

“I’ll admit it sounds odd when you put it like that. What are you trying to say?”

“Just that there’s no point in looking for things that don’t exist.”

“You think things don’t exist just because you can’t see them,” Bryant scoffed.

“Well, yes, strictly speaking, invisibility is a fair indication of non-existence.”

“Rubbish. What about gases, subatomic particles, magnetism, religious faith, the unfathomable mysteries of romantic attraction?”

“Don’t drag biology into this. The Leicester Square Vampire and the Highwayman have nothing in common beyond the fact that they’ve both caught the public imagination. I just don’t see how going through some barmy old white witch’s rambling diaries is going to help reopen – ”

The woman standing in the doorway listening to him was small, plump, and resplendent with sparkling appendages. Shells, amulets, chains, bracelets, semi-precious gemstones, and what appeared to be pieces of broken china tied in string dangled from her unnerving bosom. Chiming and jangling, she threw her arms wide to hug Bryant, leaving him smothered in cat hairs and cake crumbs. “Darling, monstrous man!” she laughed. “You only ever call when you want something, but do come in.”

“You look very well,” said Bryant cheerfully. “You seem to be ageing backwards.”

“Yes, I probably am,” said Maggie casually. “We conducted Day of the Dead celebrations in Miccailhuitontli last month, and the high priest traded me some Mexican rejuvenation paste for my Vodafone battery. It does wonders for the epidermis, although it did take the glaze off my mixing bowl. And Mr May, my favourite non-believer, we’ll make a disciple of you yet, come in. Your granddaughter is here, so pretty and vulnerable that one fears for her. But so clever – she’s one to watch.”

“I don’t understand,” said May. “What’s April doing here?”

“Oh, we’re friends of old, although I’ve yet to dispel the darkness from her soul, something I suspect only you can do. Do come through.”

She led the way through pools of gloom into the hall of the deconsecrated chapel, past oaken pews, across the perished parquet floor treacherous with loose blocks, through a miasmic aura of lavender, ginger, and sandalwood. The late afternoon sunlight illuminated two grim stained-glass windows illustrating the suffering of Christ, and threw bloody patches across the ragged walls.

“Sorry about the Christian symbols,” Maggie apologised. “We’ve been meaning to replace them with something more inclusive. If I have to look at the beatific Virgin Mary every time I cross the nave, I think we should at least have a representation of Ormazd, the Persian principal of goodness, as well. Maureen’s been up Columbia Road on the lookout for a nice Buddha, but they’re an arm and a leg. She found one in a salvage yard but had no way of getting it back because she had her Lambretta stolen while she was meditating.”

May shot his partner a weary look. “Arthur says we need to talk to you about the bogeymen of London,” he said, trying to sound benevolently indulgent. “I suppose you know we have one on our hands.”

“I’ve read about it; who hasn’t? Quite catching the public imagination.”

“Arthur also wants to go back to the Leicester Square Vampire.”

“And you wish to expose my diaries to the light. Very well, but in return, you must help me put up our Christmas tree; we’re short of strong lads.” She pointed to a bedraggled pine propped in the corner.

“Don’t tell me you’ve forsaken your usual pagan iconology and have become infected with the pernicious spirit of Christmas,” said Bryant in surprise. “Aren’t you a few months premature?”

“We’re equal opportunity worshippers,” Maggie pointed out. “Anyway, Christmas is incorrectly placed in the calendar, so we’ve moved it forward by way of recompense. The celebration is rooted in the belief that during the winter solstice, the door between our world and the one containing evil spirits is left open. When dark entities attempt to step across the gap in search of human souls, we ward them off with talismans; hence all the ornaments. And that’s not a Christmas pine, it’s a representation of the great snake Ydragsil.”

“It wasn’t last year, when you stuck a fairy on top of it,” Bryant reminded her. He still recalled the deformed angel she had constructed from dead pigeon wings, crepe paper, and a cat skull that owed less to the spirit of St Nicholas and more to that of Ed Gein.

“I hope you won’t try to weasel out of our canticle service again this year,” said Maggie. “Maureen dropped beetroot salad inside the harmonium, so it sounds like it’s being played by Hornblas, the patron devil of musical discord, but that’s what happens when you eat snack lunches from a Jiffy bag. Come into the office.” She led the way to a small room stacked with books and newspapers, in the midst of which an ancient computer screen stuttered and rolled. April sat in one corner, almost buried behind the white witch’s notebooks.

“Your handwriting is awful, Maggie,” she complained. “Half of it looks back to front.”

“That’s because it is, darling. Mirror-writing. Arthur taught me years ago. I’m left-handed, you see; it makes less mess to go right to left on right-hand pages. Arthur is here with your grandfather.”

“I think we’ve got what you asked for, Arthur,” said April, tapping her notebook.

“You’ve already briefed her?” asked May, surprised.

“You’d be proud of me, Grandad – I got on a tube train this morning.” She raised a small amulet shaped like a miniature astrolabe. “Maggie gave it to me for my agoraphobia.”

“Chased silver,” said Maggie proudly. “A colony of druids on the Orkney Islands nearly blinded themselves making it.”

“Wait a minute, how long have you two known each other?” asked May, waggling a finger between them.

April smiled conspiratorially. “Get in the game, John. Uncle Arthur introduced me to Maggie years ago. We don’t all have to stay in touch through you, you know.”

“I don’t want you filling her head with strange ideas,” May admonished. “She has quite enough to worry about.”

“Rubbish, the child is old enough to make up her own mind about the world.”

“I’ve been assisting Maggie on-line for a while now,” April explained. “When I couldn’t go out, Maggie found me incantations that could help.”

“There was nothing magical about them, it was just good psychology,” Maggie assured him. The white witch stood beside April, examining the books. “Would you care to hear what we’ve found?” Maggie hauled up her spectacle chain and squinted at a sheet of paper containing April’s notes. “The first publicly recorded attack of the Leicester Square Vampire was, as you rightly mention, in 1973, but the first time you mentioned such an incident to me was just after the war.”

“Are you sure?” asked Bryant, rubbing his watery cobalt eyes. “I don’t remember that.”

“Because your predator had no name at that point,” Maggie reminded him. “It was an isolated incident. He sucked blood from a Wren.”

“Show me.”

She turned the diary to him. “Two days after that, he attacked a nineteen-year-old typist from Dagenham, bit her on throat and wrist, cracked two ribs, multiple bruising.”

Bryant read the entry. “Didn’t I follow this up? John, do you remember?”

“Only vaguely,” May admitted. “I recall that the girl was badly shaken. We had no leads, and there were more important things to worry about. We were trying to find a murderer stalking the cast of Orpheus in the Palace Theatre.”

“You may not have realised it, but the Leicester Square attacks continued with a fair amount of regularity,” said Maggie. “We only found it because of the Panic Site. It’s a Web site set up by Dr Harold Masters.”

“That strange academic who runs the Insomnia Squad?” asked Bryant. Masters’s group of intellectual misfits regularly stayed up all night arguing about everything from Arthurian fellowships and Islamic mythology to the semantics of old Superman comics. It was a wonder they were still able to hold down regular jobs.

“Lately he’s been cataloguing social panics and outbreaks of mass hysteria. He noted activities consistent with mob violence around the square and traced them to dozens of attacks over a period of over forty years.”

“That’s rather a long time for someone to operate in such a small area without getting caught, don’t you think?” said May.

Maggie ignored him. “You wanted to know how he picked his victims, Arthur, when and where he decided to strike, so I rang an old psychic friend of mine.”

It was on the tip of May’s tongue to ask if the psychic had answered the phone before it rang, but he thought better of it.

“Unfortunately, Madame Lilith’s information proved to be incorrect.”

“There’s a surprise,” May said without meaning to.

Maggie fixed him with an eye that could have drawn the past from a paperweight. She returned to April’s notes. “The various witness descriptions are remarkably constant.”

“I checked news files on the Web and found myself going back even further,” said April. “His first appearance may well have been in the 1740^s.”

“You mean we’re looking for some kind of ageless, mythical monster?” asked Bryant with excited incredulity.

That was enough for May. He threw his hands up in protest. “Has everyone gone mad? We are not looking for him or any other kind of monster, thank you, we’re after someone completely different, someone who has been operating for barely a fortnight.”

“Are you, though?” asked Maggie. “Across the centuries there have been many attackers who have gained mythical status. They seek to leave behind a permanent mark on the city.”

“It’s true,” Bryant agreed. “London has a secret all-but-forgotten history of crimes and criminals that have caught the public imagination. James Whitney, William Hawke, the Earl of Pembroke, Dr Thomas Cream, Charley Peace, Thomas Savage, the Hammersmith Ghost, the Lollards, the Kennington Maniac, the Stockwell Strangler, the London Monster, Jack the Ripper. Few were ever caught, but all excited interest and grew to legendary status. The Highwayman is merely the latest in a long line of seemingly superhuman English villains.”

“How does this knowledge connect us to the present, exactly?” asked May. “You’re not going to try and convince me that they’re all linked.”

“But they are, John, via the children on the Roland Plumbe Community Estate. There has been trouble on the site for generations, owing to arguments over land access. In every village, town, and city, champions are found, victims are chosen, villains emerge, and gradually the most memorable ones enter the realm of legend. These cases are rooted in fact but acquire supernatural status because of the hysterical reaction of the public. If their deeds passed unnoticed, they would never find a place in history. ‘Hue and cry’ was a procedure developed under which a robbery victim could insist upon passersby giving chase to catch the criminal. It encouraged mob hysteria. Look at the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811, and how the public hammered a stake through the heart of the killer’s corpse before burying him under a pavement. Panic swept the capital. Families began locking their doors for the first time, and Parliament recommended the creation of a police force. Or take the case of the London Monster. April, do you have my original notes on him?”

“Here. Do you want me to read them back?”

May was about to protest but decided against it. His granddaughter was clearly interested in helping with the case, and perhaps it was better to hear her out.

April began to read aloud. “‘Between 1788 and 1790, women in Mayfair were terrorised by ‘The Monster’, who would creep up to them, mutter indecencies, and then stab their buttocks with a thin, sharp instrument.

“‘The Bow Street runners failed to catch him, so a wealthy Lloyds insurance broker called John Julius Angertstein offered a reward of fifty pounds for his capture. The money encouraged false accusations and vigilante attacks as passersby hysterically screamed ‘The Monster!’ at anyone they didn’t like the look of.

“‘Such a sense of panic settled over the capital that the lives of innocent men were endangered. Fashionable women were encouraged to wear copper-plated petticoats to protect themselves from attack. After over fifty females had been assaulted, a young artificial-flower maker called Rhynwick Williams was arrested when one of the more unstable victims pointed him out to a vigilante. He was convicted after a couple of ridiculous show trials, despite the fact that he had a cast-iron alibi for one of the worst outrages.

“‘The London Monster wasn’t alone; the Hammersmith Monster also scratched lonely women, and despite being caught and committed for trial, he seems to have reappeared eight years later for further attacks. By now, though, he had been branded a ‘ghost’, appearing in a large white dress with long claws.

“‘This version has an interesting coda: One hundred years later, in 1955, he acquired a retroactive history via the West London Observer, which stated that he appeared every fifty years in St Paul’s churchyard when the moon was full. He walked between the tombstones with blazing eyes, wrapped in a white winding sheet. At the date of his next visitation, four hundred ghost-hunters turned up in the churchyard. The police were forced to seal off the area until midnight, when the ghost was due to walk, but nothing happened. Then someone remembered that British Summer Time had made the visitation an hour late, so the crowd stayed on, and were rewarded with the sight of a ghostly floating creature in brilliant white, with no legs, rising on a strange wind and drifting from the church porch into one of the tombs. The legend was now complete.’” She slammed the diary shut. “In fact, he’s due to walk again this very month.”

“So you’re saying that these London myths are created by fearful populations rather than the villains themselves?” asked May, trying to understand.

“Obviously there has to be a defining action at the start,” said Maggie, “but remember what happened when the News of the World released information concerning convicted paedophiles to their readers: rioting, hysteria, mob violence. It’s not just an English phenomenon. Look at Nancy Reagan and the ‘Just Say No’ campaign that had parents submitting their children to drug tests. In Lagos, Nigerians started believing that they could be killed by answering specifically numbered calls on mobiles after midnight. And the London Ambulance Service recently fell for the old story about gang members driving without car headlights, believing that if they flashed the oncoming cars to warn them, they would be shot dead as part of an initiation ceremony. Scaremongering panics like these surface regularly, only to be debunked as nonsense before rising again.”

“But the Highwayman has actually killed two people.”

“Look at his victims: objects of hatred, misunderstanding, and public ridicule by the middle-aged middle classes. Think of vilified TV comics whose careers nose-dive after scandals. The public reaction: ‘No smoke without fire.’ Worst fears are confirmed: ‘I always felt there was something odd about him.’ But if the public figure is admired, the public is prepared to overlook faults. The politicians and actors we know to be gay will be accepted if they show themselves to be honest people. Politicians with murky histories and an inability to speak plainly – one thinks of Michael Howard, Mark Thatcher, Jeffrey Archer, and that ghastly ex-politician with the publicity-mad wife – are subject to confirmed suspicions and receive no aid. Those who remove objects of public suspicion are therefore in a position to become celebrities.”

“Good God, does this mean we have to start protecting every disliked celebrity and parliamentary member in the city?” asked May. “We’d never be able to do it.”

“Exactly. The Highwayman has found himself a perfect modus operandi. He’s impervious to anticipation. And no doubt he’s relying on the fact that we will never be able to follow his game plan, assuming he has one.”

“So you don’t think he’s randomly picking victims according to his own temperamental outbursts?”

“No. The acts are far too premeditated to make me believe he has no plan. He craves popular support. He won’t attack anyone the public truly admires.”

“That still doesn’t help us.”

“Perhaps not, but it helps to build a profile of the person we’re searching for. The case histories of the past always shed light on the present.”

“But we’re not talking about hysterical outbreaks in Mayfair – these are perverse, clever cruelties.”

“I agree that the attacks differ in one crucial aspect,” said Bryant. “They’re not designed to frighten the public but to reassure them; to prove that someone is on their side, acting on their behalf. The Leicester Square Vampire fits the former category. He inspired fear, clearing the streets at night by reminding everyone that they were vulnerable. His acts were unfathomable, possibly politically driven, but it’s likely that the Vampire himself had no explanation for his actions. Our Highwayman is of a different psychological make-up. He’s unemotional, an insider, a calculator of odds, above average intelligence, multifaceted, perhaps even a split personality. But he wants to be seen as a champion. And we haven’t seen the last of him.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“There are always more than two items on any plotted agenda.”

“So the Leicester Square Vampire had no agenda?”

“Hard to tell, but he appears to have been operating over an unusually long time scale. April, are you serious about sightings dating back to the middle of the eighteenth century?”

“There are listings with descriptions here, but you know what the Internet is like; UFO sightings are given the same weight as accepted historical truths. It’s as much a source of rumour as it is of factual reference.”

“We still have to close his case before Faraday and Kasavian can use it to shut us down,” said Bryant. “I suppose we could reexamine the physical evidence, open the bodies of his victims, and arrange for Longbright to visit his survivors – although I should think their memories will prove unhelpful after all this time.”

For once, May gleaned a practical purpose in talking to the white witch. He began to see how Bryant connected people and events, across decades and districts, through history and hardship, applying their shared tragedies to the present problem. “Fair enough,” he agreed. “We’ll divide the unit staff into two groups. You lead the cold case, I’ll take over on the Highwayman. We share the information, and if either team hits an impasse, we agree to swap investigations. Meanwhile, we stay out of Faraday’s way as much as possible. And if anything goes wrong, you do what I tell you.”

“It’s a deal,” said Bryant, eagerly shaking his partner’s hand.

“I still can’t believe you gave away my birthday present,” said May, shaking his head in wonderment.