Ten Second Staircase

∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧

44

Lockdown

“What’s the problem?” asked Meera Mangeshkar, drawing alongside and pulling off her motorcycle helmet. It was seven-thirty A.M. on Monday, October 31. Unit staff usually arrived early at Mornington Crescent for a group meeting that decided the week’s schedule, but this morning they were all stranded outside the building.

“The front door’s stuck,” said Longbright, fiddling with the key to the PCU’s main door. She stepped back and looked up at the unlit windows beneath the crimson-tiled arches.

“Let me take a look.” Mangeshkar peered through the keyhole, then tested the latch. “The lock’s been changed. The old one’s been drilled out.”

“That’s impossible, I was the last to leave yesterday evening.” Longbright threw her considerable shoulder against the door, but it would not budge. She dug out her mobile and snapped it open. “I’m going to call Faraday. This is his doing.”

“I’m afraid you won’t get in by bashing the door down.” Leslie Faraday’s tone was regretful when she managed to track him down, apologetic even. “I fear my hands are tied.”

“But I don’t understand,” said Longbright, shielding her mobile from the spattering rain. Bimsley and Mangeshkar were huddled in the unit’s doorway, waiting for her to finish the call.

“Mr Kasavian,” said Faraday. His speakerphone made him sound as if he was in a public toilet. “He’s terribly exercised about the bungled attempt to catch the Highwayman on Saturday. And then the attack on Mrs Ramsey was the last straw, you should have seen him, utterly distraught – ”

“He’s not taking the case away from us?” asked Longbright.

“No,” replied Faraday. “He’s closed your unit down for good.”

The detective sergeant was outraged. “He can’t do that.”

“I’m afraid it’s entirely within his remit to do so. I was hoping to tell you myself, but things are rather hectic here, what with London’s tourism-development seminar occupying all my time at the moment. I have a lot of functions to attend, and frankly, the closure of a small unproductive department is all in a day’s work.”

Longbright decided it might be for the best not to lose her temper. “What happens to the investigation now? All our details are inside the unit.”

“Mr Kasavian has handed this case back to the Metropolitan Police,” explained Faraday. “They’ll take charge of all the contents.”

John May’s confession was still lying in Longbright’s unlocked desk. She needed access to the building right now.

“Sergeant Renfield is on his way over to remove all your files from the building. I do hope you’re not going to be awkward about this, Longbright.”

If Renfield can get in, she thought, that means we can, too.

♦

April watched the falling rain from the window of her Holloway Road apartment and wondered if it was about to become her prison again.

DS Longbright had called her a few minutes ago with news of the unit’s closure, warning her not to come in, but without the offices at Mornington Crescent to visit every morning, she knew she might easily slip back into her old ways and become a recluse once more. How could her grandfather have allowed such a thing to happen? Clearly, the detectives had been so used to getting their own way that they had failed to notice how badly matters had slipped from their control.

She blamed herself for not warning them that Janet Ramsey was conducting an affair with Oskar Kasavian. She had made the connection two days earlier, while compiling Internet information about the editor. There had been no direct references to their relationship, but April was adept at reading between the lines, and noticed a matching pattern in the duo’s published schedules. Ramsey was divorced, but Kasavian was reported to be happily married. Civil servants were expected to behave with impartiality, and Ramsey’s paper, for all its sexual salaciousness, was harshly and actively conservative. Law and order had been a political issue since the time of Dick Turpin, to be used as ammunition by the opposing party, but Kasavian clearly considered himself above such rules.

She knew that he had taken his vendetta to a personal level, and as he was the most senior official in charge of the unit, there was no higher court of appeal. The PCU would remain closed, and its longest-serving detectives would finally be forced into retirement without honour or the satisfaction of finishing the task at hand. It would be the end of Bryant, if not her grandfather. John had hobbies and friends, but Arthur lived for his work.

It was too late to save the unit, but she wondered if there was a way of rescuing the partners from their predicament. Seating herself back at her computer, she followed a line of thought that she suspected might prove beneficial to them. Arthur had taught her always to trust her instincts above the facts, an attitude that irritated her grandfather. Bryant solved the most tangled cases by tracing barely visible psychic paths hidden under the weight of empirical data. For him, it was like following emergency lights through dense fog. This time, though, she was sure that the opposite was needed. The basic elements of logic in the case had been ignored, and it was time to reinstate them. April had a head for connecting simple facts.

She had sent her office notes to her home computer, in order to work at her apartment over the weekend. Now she looked through them, beginning with the first interview of the investigation, and its most fundamental paradox: the testimony of Luke Tripp.

She wanted a cigarette. She wanted to rearrange her desk so that all the pencils were in perfect alignment. Instead, April forced her mind towards the bare facts. Do it for them, she told herself.

Luke Tripp had gone on record stating that he had seen the horseman ride into the gallery and raise Saralla White up to the tank. Despite the absurdity of the claim, Banbury had been required to check it out. Where was the summary of his notes? She trawled through the hundreds of pages they had already amassed on the Highwayman and found his conclusion, an obvious point, but one that had been consistently sidelined: that it would have been quite impossible for a horse and rider to enter the building and secrete themselves within it.

Luke had been the first to describe the Highwayman, but that didn’t mean he was not lying. His testimony had been accepted for two reasons: The Highwayman logo on the Roland Plumbe Community Estate letterhead matched his description, and the pose in the sketch was similar to earlier reports of the Leicester Square Vampire and even, according to Bryant, Robin Hood. Assuming this latter point was merely coincidental, how to deal with the former? She realised that Tripp would have seen the estate logo when he visited its community hall.

So why would he have insisted he was telling the truth, even surrounded by police officers?

Because failure to do so was a more frightening prospect than admitting the lie to the authorities. He was covering up for someone who threatened him. She found Tripp’s mobile number at the foot of the report and called him.

♦

Kershaw and Banbury were able to set up their makeshift work station in the Rio Café, Inverness Street, because its owner had catered Banbury’s sister’s wedding. He spared them a table beside the window and all the coffee they could drink.

“This is embarrassing, being shut out of our own unit,” Kershaw complained. “The Met boys must be killing themselves.”

“I’m not stopping now,” Banbury told him. “We’re so close. The plaster chip we found in Ramsey’s flat is definitely part of the ironwork pattern at the base of her staircase. I thought perhaps it had been used to fill a crack or replace a missing piece – except there was nothing missing. Yet it matches the indentation in Ramsey’s head.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Impossible crime,” Banbury explained, without explaining. “Let me get this right – she was hit with a fleur-de-lis from the staircase to make it look like she fell?”

“Exactly. I’ve thought of a simple way he could have pulled it off. Suppose our man broke into the flat earlier and took a mould of the pattern from the ironwork. Then all he would have to do is make a positive cast in plaster, setting it over the head of a hammer. When he hit her, it left behind an impression.”

“Which is why the witness saw her fall straight to the ground. She didn’t see the blow from the hammer.”

“But he hadn’t reckoned on the plaster cracking and leaving behind a clue.”

Kershaw flicked his hair from his eyes. “Oh, that’s rather good. Who needs the unit anyway? We could work here from now on. The coffee’s better. There’s still something very strange here, though. It feels so elaborate, don’t you think? I keep asking myself why. What kind of person would go to so much trouble?”

♦

They made a sadly bedraggled little group, huddled together in the rain as Mornington Crescent’s morning traffic sloshed past them.

“What do you mean, we’ve been locked out?” demanded Arthur Bryant, thumping his walking stick on the puddled pavement. Rain sluiced from the brim of his shapeless brown trilby. “It’s coming down stair-rods and I can’t afford to get my vest wet at my age. Open this door at once.” He rapped on it with the head of the stick.

“That’s the point,” said Bimsley. “We can’t, sir. They’ve changed the bloody locks.”

“Sergeant Renfield is coming around to take away all our files,” Longbright added.

Bryant brightened up. “Wait, that means he has keys.”

“Just what I was thinking.”

“He’s your opposite number, Janice. He’s always fancied you. This calls for subterfuge. And lipstick. And unbutton the top of your shirt.”

Longbright was appalled. “I will do no such thing. It’s pouring.”

“That’s sexism, Mr Bryant,” complained Meera.

“Rubbish, it’s using your feminine wiles. I would if I was a woman. I’d have no qualms about being an utter strumpet if the situation called for it.”

“Here he comes now,” warned May. “I don’t think I’ll be able to bear his gloating.”

Renfield squeezed his unset bulk from the rear of the squad car and waddled over to them. “What a miserable bunch,” he said, barely suppressing a smirk. “I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye in the past, but you can’t say we didn’t warn you. Home Office can only allow things to go wrong so many times before they step in to pick up the pieces.”

“You have no jurisdiction here, Renfield,” said Bryant. “I’ve been meaning to ask you: Did your mother read Bram Stoker when she was pregnant?”

“What do you mean?” The sergeant fixed him with a glassy eye.

“Renfield was the obsequious fly-eating sidekick to the prince of darkness,” Bryant explained. “How is Mr Kasavian? I do find there’s something of the night about him, don’t you?”

“Are you trying to be offensive, Mr Bryant?” Renfield hissed, sounding unpleasantly nocturnal. He pushed between them and brandished a bunch of keys. “None of you is allowed inside, so don’t think you’ll get around me.” He spread himself fatly in front of the unit’s entrance.

“Don’t worry, I couldn’t spare the time to circumnavigate you,” said Bryant. “I’d lose an hour passing the international date line at the back of your belt.”

Renfield wasn’t able to follow the complexity of the insult about his weight, and soldiered on. “There’s no point in standing around out here like a bunch of wet dogs,” he told them. “You’re not coming in.”

“You need an independent monitor with you,” warned Longbright. “It’s in the regulations.”

“Well, you’re hardly independent, are you?”

“It can’t be one of your own men, Renfield, and there’s no-one else here. Mr Bryant has no filing system, but I know where everything is. It’ll take you hours to collate all the material otherwise. You’ll be here all day. Watch me all you want; I won’t try to remove anything.”

“All right,” said Renfield reluctantly. “But I’m not taking my eyes off you.”

Longbright winked back at her bosses as she followed Renfield inside.

“It’s up to her now,” said Bryant. “If she doesn’t sabotage him, it’s all over for us.” He pulled the Mini Cooper’s keys from his raincoat. “Come on, John, you and I have to get to Kingsmere first. If the Met get their paws on him, we’ll never discover what’s really happening.” He paused to lean against a wall, furrowing his already wrinkled brow still further.

“Are you all right?” asked May.

“I feel a bit dizzy, that’s all. I think I forgot to take my pills.” He dug into his overcoat pocket and slapped two more red night tablets into his mouth. “Let’s get over to Clerkenwell and finish this.”

“But the unit’s been shut down. We have no power of jurisdiction.”

“We won’t need it,” Bryant replied. “We’re going to get a confession.”