The Victoria Vanishes

∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧

12

Ecdysiast

“What do you think you’re doing?” asked DC Colin Bimsley. “That belongs to Mr Bryant.”

“It’s a marijuana plant,” said Renfield, dragging the great ceramic pot along the corridor toward the top of the stairs.

“It’s for his rheumatism.”

“And it’s illegal, or did nobody bother to point that out to him?” asked Renfield.

“Give him a break, Jack, he gets pains in his legs.”

“Then he should be retired and relaxing at home. He could be working as a consultant.”

“It’s not your job to decide what he does.”

“It is if he can’t do his job without the aid of psychoactive narcotics.”

“Wait, what else have you got there?” Bimsley pointed to the battered cardboard box Renfield had also dragged out of the office.

“Old books. They’re everywhere, even blocking the fire exits. I’m stacking them by the rubbish. They can go to charity shops.”

“You can’t do that; he’s taken a lifetime to collect them.”

“Land has asked him to take them home dozens of times, but they’re still here, so out they go.”

“But he needs them for research.”

“Really?” Renfield bent down and retrieved a stack of slender volumes. “Let’s see what he’s been researching, shall we? Yoruba Proverbs. The Anatomy of Melancholia. Embalming Under Lenin. Cormorant-Sexing for Beginners. The Apocalypsis Revelata Volume Two. A Complete History of the Trouser-Press. Financial Accounts for the Swedish Mining Board, Years 1745–53. I suppose the next time they bring a gunshot victim in from Pentonville, he’ll be able to use these in his investigation.”

“You’d be surprised,” said Bimsley, “how an intimate knowledge of the workings of the trouser press might aid in the capture of a determined rapist.”

“Are you making fun of me?” asked Renfield suspiciously.

“You’ll never know, will you?” Bimsley stood his ground.

“I say, what are you doing with Mr Bryant’s books?” asked Giles Kershaw, who had found his path blocked upon entering the hall. “He’ll go bananas if he sees you’ve moved them. They’re very useful.”

“Not you as well.” Renfield was starting to wonder if the senior detectives had brainwashed the unit staff. Kershaw raised his long legs in a spidery fashion to climb around the obstruction, and admitted himself into the detectives’ office.

“I’m thinking the bash was incidental,” he began, throwing himself into the guest’s armchair.

“I’m sorry, what are we talking about?” asked May.

“Mrs Wynley. There’s an abnormality in the base of her skull. The bone is extremely thin. It wouldn’t have taken much of a knock to damage it, but even so, I think it occurred as the result of something else.”

“Like what?” asked May.

Kershaw sucked his teeth pensively. “Not entirely sure yet. Gut feeling. People don’t usually keel over like fallen trees, with their arms at their sides. Not very scientific, I know, but there’s something else. Midazolam – it’s a fast-acting benzodiazepine with a short elimination half-life. A pretty potent water-soluble sedative, but the imbiber doesn’t actually lose consciousness unless it’s taken in overdose. I found a tiny trace of it inside her mouth. If you were to inject it between the gums and the inside of the cheek, it could enter the bloodstream immediately. She would have dropped like a log.”

Bryant wrinkled his face, thinking. He looked like a tortoise chewing a nettle. “This is making less sense by the second,” he said. “A woman walks into a pub – which, by the way, hasn’t existed for the best part of a hundred years – gets injected in the face and leaves without complaint. She falls down outside, bashes her head and is left for dead by everyone else who leaves the pub, including the staff. I don’t suppose we have any suspects, either.”

“Her partner was just a couple of miles away, home alone watching TV, no witnesses, says he had several phone calls, but all on his cell phone, none to their flat.”

“So they’re traceable but don’t prove he was there. Then we should bring him in,” said May.

“There’s a problem with that,” April told her grandfather. “He’s in a wheelchair after suffering a stroke some while back, can’t do much for himself at all.”

“A legal PA,” said Bryant, looking up from one of the books Renfield had tried to throw out, Religious Philosophers of the 18^th Century. “At the Swedenborg Society, no less. Swedenborg was a Swedish philosopher famed throughout Europe for his contributions to science, technology and religion. When he got older, he supposedly experienced visions of the spirit world. Reckoned he visited both heaven and hell, where he held conversations with angels and devils. Upon his return, he wrote something called the Apocalypsis Revelata, or Apocalypse Revealed. He claimed he’d been directed by Christ himself to reveal the details of the Second Coming. Understandably, everyone thought he’d gone round the twist. Died in Clerkenwell in 1772. His building in Bloomsbury still houses the Swedenborg Society.”

“Your point being?” May wondered.

“What? Oh, nothing, it’s just odd, that’s all.” Bryant poked about in his jacket and produced the walnut bowl of his pipe. He peered into it wistfully. “I don’t suppose I might be allowed to – ”

“No,” said May and his granddaughter in unison.

“It’s just that the Swedenborg Society lost another of their legal secretaries at the beginning of the month,” Bryant explained, screwing the pieces of his pipe together. “I believe she was found dead in a London pub, the Seven Stars, just behind Lincoln’s Inn Fields.”

“Why on earth would you remember that?” asked May, intrigued.

“Because it reminded me of the nun found unconscious in The Flying Scotsman,” said Bryant, not really managing to answer the question.

“Wait, explain the part about the nun first,” April demanded.

“The Flying Scotsman is one of the most disgustingly awful pubs in London,” replied Bryant, “a grubby little sewer of a King’s Cross strip-joint, crammed for many years with the most unsavoury characters imaginable. But the lady in the wimple who passed out inside it was no ecdysiast, disrobing for a handful of coins collected in a beer mug. When I saw the incident report, I naturally wondered what she was doing in such a place.”

“Ecdysiast?” April raised an eyebrow.

“She wasn’t a stripper,” Bryant explained. “I followed the case and made notes on it. I have them somewhere.”

He withdrew a drawer from his desk, removing a handful of pipe-cleaners, a Chairman Mao alarm clock, a collection of plastic snowstorms and a bottle of absinthe, to finally unearth a small black book.

“Here, in my Letts Schoolboy Diary.” He held open a page filled with tiny drawings of flags. “A full report of the case – well, by the look of it I appear to have written up the salient facts in a code of Edwardian naval signals, but you get the idea. Sister Geraldine Flannery from Our Lady of Eternal Suffering said she was in the pub to collect for charity and was overcome by the pressure of the crowd, but it turned out her robes had been specially constructed to hold wallets and handbags. She wasn’t a nun at all but a dip, and not a very good one, obviously, otherwise she wouldn’t have chosen to pickpocket some of the poorest punters in London. The point is – ” Bryant’s raised index finger wavered in the air. “I’ve forgotten the point.”

“The legal secretary from the Swedenborg Society,” April prompted. The old man really seemed to be losing it. “The Seven Stars.”

“Ah, yes. This time the face on the barroom floor belonged to a respectable middle-aged lady named Naomi Curtis, the daughter of a clergyman. What had she been doing by herself in a pub?” Bryant popped the empty pipe into his mouth. “Most people don’t stray far from their natural habitat, and according to her father, Mrs Curtis was a creature of habit. She liked a tipple, and had been drinking more heavily in the last couple of years, but rarely went to a pub without arranging to meet someone. Suddenly she turns up dead one night in a Holborn boozer. I kept notes on her, too.”

The others looked at him blankly.

“Don’t you see? When something’s out of whack, when people don’t match their locations, a little bell goes off inside my head. There was something else. One of the punters remembered Curtis checking her cell phone at the bar, but by the time the ambulance arrived she had no phone on her. Land wouldn’t allow me to investigate at the time, but he will now. Two women, two public houses and an investigation involving drink, drugs, death and Swedish philosophy.”

“I assume this means you want to handle the case,” said May drily.

“Oh, don’t worry, I will whether I’m allowed to or not. I’m far too old to start obeying the rules now.” Bryant made a hideous draining noise through the pipe stem. “If anyone needs me, I shall be in the pub, conducting a little research.”