The Victoria Vanishes

∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧

16

The Heart of London

He was always watching the women.

Interesting how they were treated at different times of day, in different places. In lunchtime city pubs they sat at their counters completely ignored, men reaching around them for beers and change as if they were mere obstacles. At early evening they were engaged in conversation by men who used a cheerful, chatty manner with older women, as if talking to their mothers. Late at night, when the lights were lower, they became easy targets for leering drunks who felt sure they could never be rebuffed.

He felt sorry for these women, even when he had to take their lives.

The cavernous inns of the Strand, the narrow taverns of Holborn, the fake rural hostelries of Chelsea, the brash bars of Soho – each had their own tribes. The lotharios, the jobsworths, the brasses, the bosses, brash drunk kids, braying toffs, swearing workmen, all united by the desperate need for companionship. The single careerists were frightened to go back to their pristine apartments and sit on the ends of their beds, staring into the void of their dead lives. The ones in relationships delayed heading home to warm sleeping bodies they could barely stand to touch.

He knew all about the power of pubs, and the invisible customers who kept them alive. The lonely matrons who drank a little too much, the ones with full, sensual bodies and sad old eyes that caught his gaze, holding it a moment too long in bar mirrors. He had been with them all his life.

He loved these women. As he prepared his poison, he prayed they would escape him.

♦

“A little early in the day to be drinking, isn’t it?” asked John May. “It’s only just gone noon.” Williamson’s Tavern in Groveland Court was nearly empty, except for a pair of Asian IT managers playing a jittery fruit machine.

“Tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce, crushed celery, beetroot and horseradish sauce, John. No vodka, sadly.” Bryant held up his glass. “Kiskaya Mandeville recommended it to sharpen my brain. She’s prescribed a series of memory tests I must perform every day and put me on a juice diet, reckons I’ll quickly notice the results. I have to drink three different types of fish oil tonight. My poor bowels will be positively peristaltic. This is Dr Harold Masters. Oddly, I don’t think you’ve ever met.” He gestured at the curator/lecturer from the British Museum. May found himself facing an absurdly tall man with unsuitable tortoiseshell glasses and slightly mad grey hair.

Masters unleashed a great length of arm and shook May’s hand vigorously. “Not sure we’ve ever had the pleasure. But Mr Bryant has consulted me many times in the past.”

That figures, thought May. He ordered a half of Spitfire bitter. “Let’s hope this memory course of yours works,” he told Bryant. “Perhaps you’ll recall what happened to Oswald’s ashes.” He looked around at the sepia-tinted walls, the framed photographs and dust-gathering knickknacks. “What made you pick a pub in an alleyway off another alley? It was a bugger to find.”

“I wanted to make a particular point, and I find that sometimes, if I just talk to you, you sort of tune out.”

“That’s because you have a habit of lecturing me,” said May.

“I most certainly do not. I try to direct your attention toward topics of interest.”

“Yes, and you used to tap me with a pointing stick until I broke the damned thing in half.”

“That was you, was it? Amongst other things, Dr Masters here is an expert on the mythology and etymology of London. He’s been helping me with a few ideas lately, and I thought it would be a good idea for the two of you to meet because he knows an awful lot about English pubs.”

My God, thought May, studying the academic, we could all do with more women in our lives. This is what happens when men get lonely. They dry out.

Dr Harold Masters knew far more about the dead than the living. Human beings were too emotional and messy. He had only been able to tolerate Jane, his wife, because she shared his arcane interests, and now she was gone. The awful truth was that her death allowed him to spend more time concentrating on his studies. He missed her, in the distant way that a man misses the regular arrival of dinner and fresh laundry, but relished the extra time he now had to spend among his research documents. Understanding the past was far more interesting than understanding people, especially women.

“Mine is a professional perspective, of course,” Masters snorted cheerfully. “Take a look at this place. It looks quite unremarkable from the outside, yes? But it was built from the ruins of the Great Fire.”

“Surely not. This bare-wood-and-ironwork-lamps look is 1930^s, with a touch of last year chucked in.”

“The present-day building, perhaps, but it’s been a tavern for centuries. In fact, it’s constructed over Roman ruins that still survive some five metres below us. And it was once the official residence of the Mayor of London. William and Mary liked the place so much that they provided it with the iron gates outside. A gentleman called Robert Williamson turned it into a proper public house in 1739. And it has a ghost.”

“All London pubs say they have a ghost – it gets the tourists in.”

“Ah, but this one has something else,” Masters enthused. “The heart of London. The bar is supposed to contain an ancient stone that marks the dead centre of the old City. The parade of historical characters through here has gone unrecorded and barely remarked upon. Why? Because the pubs of London are taken almost completely for granted by those who drink in them.” The doctor stabbed a long pale finger at the air. “Every single one has a unique and extraordinary history.”

“That’s true,” Bryant agreed with enthusiasm. “Did you know that the basement of the Viaduct Tavern in Holborn contains cells from Newgate Gaol? Its walls have absorbed the tortured cries of a thousand poor imprisoned souls. These places survived because of geography. The Tipperary in Fleet Street used to be called The Boar’s Head. It was built in 1605 with stones taken from the Whitefriars Monastery, stones that allowed it to survive unharmed in the raging inferno of the Great Fire of London. And the Devereux, where we held Oswald’s wake, is named after Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who was imprisoned in the Bloody Tower and beheaded. The point Harold is trying to make is that these places hold the key to our past, and therefore the present. They’re an unappreciated indication of who we are, and a sign of all we’ve lost and remember fondly, in which bracket I would include nurses’ hats, single railway carriage compartments, quality umbrellas, the concept of public embarrassment, correct pronunciation and the ability to tell a child off in the street without risking a stab-wound.”

“Pubs are just shops that sell booze, Arthur. What’s more, they’re dying at a rate of sixty-five a year in London because of property developers. You’re over-egging the pudding as usual.”

“Not at all,” said Masters, jumping in eagerly. “Walk the streets of London, and the only time you’ll speak to strangers is when you apologise for stepping in their path. Public houses act, as their name implies, as homes for the general populace where opposites can meet and confront each other without prejudice, on neutral territory. This is why the landlord is referred to as the host, and why rooms in pubs were always used to hold local inquests, so that the deceased could be sure of a fair and impartial verdict on his death.”

“I think you’ll find that the desire for alcohol also plays a part in their popularity,” said May.

“Obviously, but there’s something more fundamental at the root of it. Walking into a pub alone is for many young people their first act of real independence. Such places have had a profound effect on our society throughout history, acting as every kind of salon and meeting place, from coffeehouse pamphleteers to the cruelties of the gin palace. And of course, they reinvent themselves endlessly. Once, where political and philosophical meetings were held, there are now karaoke and Jenga evenings, book readings and sexual-fantasy nights. And they come with an amazingly complex set of social codes, of course.”

“True, I suppose,” May admitted. “There’s nothing more embarrassing than finding that your pint-to-toilet cycle has become synchronised with that of a total stranger.”

“Why, public houses have even influenced our language. Drinkers used to share the same mug, in which the level of ale was marked with a wooden peg, hence the expression ‘to take someone down a peg.’ The masons who built our churches were housed at inns, hence the Masonic connections of certain pubs, and of course, the Knights Templar had their own inns at Clerkenwell. When the polluted waters of London proved unpotable, everyone drank at alehouses. Pub names provide markers for all the historical events of England. Red Lion, White Hart, Crown and Anchor, Royal Oak, Coach and Horses, each has its own convoluted meaning. We even find our way around by the location of public houses like the Green Man and the Sun in the Sands.”

“Think about it, John,” said Bryant. “A couple of weeks ago, you and I had a drink at The Anchor, where others had sat drinking before us for half a millennium, seeing the same view.”

“Do you realise that in the late Victorian era there was a pub for every hundred people in the country?” asked the academic. “We talk about the inner-city schools where pupils speak dozens of languages, but what about the melting pots that exist on almost every street corner?”

“And the history they hold, true or false as the case may be,” mused Bryant, drifting off the point, as he was wont to do. “The Sherlock Holmes in Northumberland Avenue, presented as if Holmes was a real detective, and The Old Bank of England, a bar on Fleet Street, touted by guides as the site of Sweeney Todd’s shop, if you please. What complete and utter nonsense.”

“Whereas the pub in which I am usually to be found most evenings, in Smithfield, was once called the Path of Hope, because it stood on the route of condemned prisoners, like the Old King Lud at Ludgate Circus,” said Masters. “Although it was always associated with St Bartholemew’s Fair, the pub sign depicts a pair of stranded sailors. In Victorian times one often finds the idea of hope attached to the sea, hope of finding land or another ship. A popular maritime motto was ‘We anchor in hope,’ but by depicting sailors the sign-maker has misunderstood the meaning of the pub’s name. You see? By decoding the tangled symbols of the past, we get close to the truths that history books miss.”

“What we’re trying to say is that perhaps these places,” Bryant gestured around the bar, “are as germane to the solution of a case like this as the identity of the victims. What if these unfortunate women met their deaths not just because of who they were, but where they were?”

“That’s ridiculous,” said May hotly. “It would mean they were selected from the population at random, and we have too many correlating factors to believe that.”

“Then imagine a man who, for reasons we cannot yet fathom, strikes only in public houses, and does so because of what they represent. By killing these women he is unstringing the very fabric of England.”

“It’s true,” exclaimed Masters. “If you wished to undermine everything we stand for as a people, you could do no better than damage the institution of the pub. You’d be striking at the heart of the city.”