The Victoria Vanishes

∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧

14

Disposal

Just after ten o’clock on Tuesday evening, a chill drenching rain began to fall on Fleet Street. Once, the pavements would still have been crowded with couriers, journalists, printers, picture editors, typesetters, artists and accountants, and the lights of the buildings would have formed unbroken ribbons of luminescence from the Strand to St Paul’s, but now the thoroughfare was almost deserted. The great rolls of paper that had been brought by barge up to the presses of Tudor Street had been moved to the eastern hinterland of the city.

Mrs Jocelyn Roquesby tilted the address she had printed out and tried to read it without her glasses. By doing so, she walked straight past her destination, and was forced to back up before the black-framed windows of the little Georgian house that housed the Old Bell tavern. The pub’s rear door opened out into the courtyard of St Bride’s Church. The cramped corners and angled nooks of its interior had barely changed in centuries. Mrs Roquesby’s fingers itched to punch out a number on her cell phone, at least to tell her daughter where she was going, but she had promised not to call anyone.

She scanned the front bar, then moved to the rear of the pub, wondering if she had somehow managed to miss her contact. She had been surprised to receive the text message, and would normally have suggested a morning coffee in the local Starbucks, especially now that she was trying to give up alcohol. However, a tone of anxiety in its phrasing had struck a chord, and she had replied with an agreement to meet in one of their former haunts.

She looked around the pub with a growing sense of disappointment. This place used to be packed, she thought. Now there were just a few lone drinkers at the bar, a couple of elderly tourists studying maps, a pair of snogging teenagers. She was a few minutes early, so she pulled up a bar stool in the corner and without thinking, ordered herself a vodka and tonic.

♦

Arthur Bryant stood on the corner of Whidbourne Street and studied the supermarket opposite, kicking at the kerb with a scuffed Oxford toe cap. The Victoria Cross had stood here for the best part of a hundred years, casting its welcoming saffron light onto the paving stones, its revellers wavering home to their wives at eleven – fewer women, and certainly no single ones of decent repute, would have been out drinking in the early years – or perhaps there had been a lock-in, with the heavy velvet drapes drawn tight to eliminate all light on the street. There the drinkers would have remained – so easy to forget the world outside – until the landlord decided they’d all had enough. “Ain’t you got no ‘omes to go to?” he would call jocularly. “You’re going to cop a right earful from your missus when you fall through the front door, Alf.”

Bryant remembered having to pull his father out of virtually every pub in the East End, Bow, Whitechapel, Wapping and Canning Town. It had surprised no-one when he died young. Probably a blessing, his mother had said when the old man passed on, your father was never a happy man. But she had stood by him, despite the pleas from her side of the family to leave and take her son away. Parents rode out the most hellish storms for the sake of their children in those days.

He looked back at the corner, and the image of the public house shimmered into points of light that faded to reveal the blank bright windows of the Pricecutter Food & Wine Store, its Indian proprietor staring dully at the sports pages of The Sun. Rain pattered against the glass, plastered with faded advertisements for Nivea moisturising cream, Ernest & Julio Gallo wine, Thomson Holidays, Zippo’s Circus. The past had realigned itself into the present, and nothing was in its rightful place.

♦

The girl behind the bar had just called last orders. Mrs Roquesby leaned back and listened to the song that was softly playing on the pub’s CD deck. The Everly Brothers, wasn’t it? “All I Have to Do Is Dream.”

She wanted to sleep, but not dream. Dreams too easily turned into nightmares. Tired, she rested her head against the wall and listened to the lyrics. She had been stood up, but had at least found herself a drinking companion, although now he seemed to have disappeared, and she just wanted to let the night slide away into warm, wood-dark oblivion. A bee-sting, she thought, scratching at the back of her neck, or an insect bite, odd that they should be around so early in the year…

When Mrs Roquesby began to slide majestically from her stool, Lenska, the barmaid, thought she would snap awake, but she kept going all the way to the carpet, landing hard on her knees. Running around from behind the counter, Lenska pulled at the lady, but was unable to wake her. Mrs Roquesby’s head fell back and her wig slid off, revealing the sparse, wispy grey hair of a head that had undergone cancer therapy.

Lenska loosened the collar of her blouse and tried to find a heartbeat. She looked around for help, but the bar had cleared since she had rung last orders. A thick yellow froth was leaking from the mouth of the woman in her arms. Lenska knew a little about first aid, but this was beyond her, so she laid the woman down and ran to call for an ambulance.

♦

Dan Banbury saw the world from a different perspective, usually starting at floor level. Gravity required everything to fall. Dust and skin flakes, hairs and sweat drops, everything sifted down through the atmosphere to land on the ground. Any movement stirred up the air, shifting molecules in swirls and eddies that resembled hurricane patterns on weather charts, and tumbling particles cascaded from one resting place to the next. You could track them if you were able to define the direction of the air current. Sometimes particle movement would lead you back towards the source of a disturbance; it was like hunting in reverse.

Banbury’s long-suffering wife was all too aware of his enthusiasm for exploring the detritus of death, as it took the form of ruined trousers and jacket sleeves, and since her husband hated buying new clothes, she was forever racing to the dry cleaners during her lunch break. At that very moment, he was sprawled on the carpet of the Old Bell public house, pushing strips of sticky tape along the underside of the counter, which appeared not to have been cleaned since Boswell propped up the bar.

“I’m glad you managed to keep Bryant away for once,” he muttered through clenched teeth, for he was holding a pencil torch in his mouth. “It’s a mystery how he always manages to make a mess of any crime scene.”

“He’s gone to see someone about improving his memory,” John May explained. “He forgot the urn containing Finch’s ashes, and now he’s feeling guilty. He got a crack on the noggin and lost his memory a while back. I’m wondering if he’s suffered some kind of a relapse. Are you getting anything down there?”

“Far too much, that’s the problem. It’ll take chromatography to sort out the tangle of dead cells that have drifted down here. Forensically speaking, this sort of place is my worst nightmare. Dog hairs, crisps, meat pies, beer, mud flecks, skin, mites, a few mouse droppings, it’s like Piccadilly Circus.”

“You’re sure she was alone?” May asked the barmaid.

“She ordered a drink and sat in the corner,” said Lenska. “I can show you the receipt.”

“So she was here by herself for about forty minutes. Look like she was waiting for someone, did she?”

“Maybe, I don’t know. I think I saw her check her watch a couple of times.”

“And she didn’t speak to anyone else.”

“She was reading a copy of the Metro – actually, there was someone else. Some guy talked to her. He ordered two drinks, so I guess he bought her one.”

“What was he like?”

“I wasn’t really paying attention, early thirties maybe, I didn’t really pay attention.”

“You wouldn’t be able to recognise him again?”

“God, no. I didn’t register his face at all – he was just one of those blokes you always get in a pub like this, sort of invisible.”

“You didn’t see him leave?”

“No. I had to go downstairs to change barrels. When I came back up he’d gone, and she was alone. Right after that she fell off her stool. I thought she was drunk.”

“If it’s the same MO, Kershaw reckons he’ll find traces of benzodiazepine again,” said May. “She had a red mark at the base of her skull like a sting, possibly from a needle. Whoever did this has found an effective method of disposal, and is probably planning to stick with it.”

“Interesting choice of phrase there,” said Banbury. “Disposal. That’s what it feels like, doesn’t it? He can’t be getting sexual gratification, and presumably he’s not gaining anything financially from his victims, so why is he doing it? Plus, he’s picked the worst possible place to get away with murder, acting inside a roomful of strangers. I’m no psychologist, but you don’t think that’s it, do you?”

“An act of exhibitionism, taking a risk in front of the punters? Possible, I suppose. Murder is an intensely revealing act, best performed in privacy. Seems a bit perverse to stage it as some kind of public performance. Besides, do people pay much attention to each other in pubs? You tend to concentrate on the friends you’ve come out with. I’m sure if Bryant was here he’d regale us with a potted history of public murder. She’s roughly the same age as the other two. Is the killer looking to take revenge on a mother substitute? What were they doing drinking alone?”

“You always get one or two by themselves in London pubs. That’s the difference between a pub and a bar,” Banbury explained. “Pubs are about conviviality and community, meeting mates. Bars are for being alone in, or for meeting a stranger. So why would he pick his victims in the former? It doesn’t add up.”

“Perhaps the killer has a mother or an older sister who was a drunk,” Kershaw suggested. “If he’s in his early thirties, she’d probably be in her fifties. Are the victims all similar physical types?”

“Not at all. This one was Jocelyn Roquesby, fifty-six, a former copy typist and human resources officer, divorced, one daughter, no current partner, lived alone in a flat in Holloway. She had just finished a bout of treatment for breast cancer. According to the daughter she liked a drink, but never went into a pub alone unless she was meeting someone. Also, the chemotherapy made her sick if she drank. So who was she here to meet?”

♦

Meanwhile, April had gone to the Devereux on the mission of locating Oswald Finch’s remains.

“You were working behind the bar on the night of Mr Finch’s wake, weren’t you?” she reminded the barmaid in the upper bar. “If you cashed up the till, you must have also cleared the counter, so you’d remember if there was something as odd as a funeral urn left behind on it.”

“I told your boss, there was nothing left behind,” declared the girl, who regarded all men over thirty with narrow eyes and a cold heart. “People leave their briefcases, umbrellas and handbags here all the time, but I’d have remembered an urn.”

“So someone took it with them.”

“And it had to be one of your lot, because you had the room to yourselves for most of the evening. Your Peculiar Crimes Unit have a reputation for being a bunch of practical jokers, you know. The manageress warned me. Your unit has had parties here before. Somebody left an inflatable sheep in the ladies’ toilet last time, frightened the life out of the cleaner.”

“Not much of a practical joke, is it?” said April. “Swiping the ashes of a dead colleague.”

“Depends on what they’re going to do with them,” said the barmaid, with a disapproving sniff.