The Victoria Vanishes

∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧

21

Dating & Dancing

Raymond Land indignantly refused to follow his own detective’s orders to return to the Albion in Barnsbury, so Colin Bimsley and Meera Mangeshkar took on a double shift, first travelling to where Jazmina Sherwin had been found dead. After spending half the evening here, they planned to split up and tackle two further public houses.

For months, Bimsley had fantasised about being in a pub with Meera, a combination of pleasures that made him heartsick with delight. In previous investigations he had been happy enough to spend the night rummaging through suspects’ dustbins with her, searching for pieces of food-stained evidence, but just when his wish had been fulfilled, he found that his changing attitude to the diminutive DC had robbed him of happiness.

In short, he had gone off her.

After putting up with her sulks, her tantrums, her cynicism, her sarcasm, her ability to start small bin fires with her pre-menstrual temper, the scales had finally fallen from his eyes, and he fancied he could see her as the woman she had become; bitter, bad-tempered, happy to keep him dangling on the promise of a date which would never be arranged.

As a consequence, the mood between them was polite but arctic. Seated side by side in the Albion, they stared into their soft drinks and allowed the silence to stretch between them.

Finally, Meera spoke. “This girl, Sherwin, she was supposed to be young and streetwise. She wouldn’t have let some creep just come up and touch her. We’re not going to find anything here.”

“Well, that’s a positive attitude. You’re just saying that because you don’t believe in Bryant’s methods.”

“Colin, look around you. The place is virtually empty. What are we looking for? The barman who served her isn’t even here, so he can’t point out anyone he saw.”

“How do you know that?”

“I talked to the girl who served me these drinks.”

“Well, has anybody else seen him?”

“He was sent by the brewery to fill in for someone who hadn’t turned up for work.”

Bimsley jumped up so quickly that he knocked his orange juice across the table. While obtaining a cloth at the counter he summoned the barmaid, who wrote him a number on a slip of paper. He waited for an answer on his cell phone, turning his back on Meera.

“The brewery never sent anyone,” he told her, returning. “They didn’t get the message in time. If he wasn’t a barman or a punter, he could just have ducked behind the bar to serve Jazmina. That’s how he got close enough to be sure of his latest choice. There was only one staff member on duty last night instead of two, and if she was in the kitchen or the other bar there would have been no-one at all at the front.”

“We need to find someone else other than Raymond who was in the pub. Someone observant.”

“This is the sort of place that has regulars. You can spot them a mile off. Those two in the corner, for a start, and that old guy by the fireplace. I’ll do one end of the bar, you do the other. Look for unsteady hands and broken nose veins.”

Hard drinkers make unreliable witnesses. Several people professed to have seen someone behind the counter, but none of them could agree on a description. He was tall, thin, broad, blond, black, Asian, blotched with a crimson birthmark. Mangeshkar tallied her notes with Bimsley’s, and they headed to their next destinations.

♦

Speed-dating Night was held at the Museum Tavern on the corner of Museum Street, where Jazmina Sherwin had worked and met her boyfriend. The pub retained the seedy bookishness of Bloomsbury because its crimson leather seats were filled with half-drunk proofreaders poring over drinkdampened manuscripts. Like the Cross Keys in Endell Street or the Bloomsbury Tavern in Shaftesbury Avenue, it remained constant in a sliding world: the distinctive odour of hops, the ebb of background chatter, muted light through stained glass, china tap handles, metal drip trays, mirrored walls, bars of oak and brass. The Victoriana was fake, of course, modelled on obsolete pub ornaments and anachronistically updated with each refurbishment to create an increasingly off-kilter view of the past, but the blurry ambience remained undisturbed.

The tiny round tables in the rear of the room had been arranged to accommodate the couples who were about to tackle their abridged liaisons. Bimsley was assigned a number by the evening’s hostess, a pleasant-faced, overweight girl who reminded him of a character from a Pieter Brueghel painting. Her name tag proclaimed her to be Andrea from the Two of Hearts Club. She spoke with the singsong condescension of a suburban Kentish housewife, and probably had a heart of gold until it came to gays and immigrants. “First time? Lovely! You’re a nice big fellow, we shouldn’t have too much trouble pairing you up. Pop your badge on and we’ll get you settled in. What’s your name, lovey?”

“Bimsley,” said Bimsley.

“I think it would be nicer to be on first-name terms with the ladies, don’t you?”

“Colin.”

“Oh, we haven’t had one of those for a while. There.” She patted a sticky yellow square onto his lapel. Bimsley looked around the saloon. There were several presentable, even sexy, women but the quality of the males was abysmal: a couple of boney-faced accountant types with VDU pallor, a leaker with lank hair stuck to his forehead and sweat rolling down his cheeks, a middle-aged man dressed as a giant toddler in a sleeveless T-shirt and three-quarter-length trousers, an ageing media type in club gear who was probably not as interesting as his haircut, a very old gentleman cruising for an heir or possibly an enjoyable way of having a heart attack. In Russia there were ten million more women than men, so at least the males had an excuse for not bothering to look their best.

His speed dates were allocated just three minutes each, at the end of which time he was required to give his women a rating of between one and three points. Bimsley’s decision to ask questions about a murder victim instead of enquiring about hobbies, favourite films or dining out brought him looks of incomprehension, confusion and outright hostility until Andrea took him to one side and gave him some advice.

“I think you need to lighten up, darling,” she informed him. “Whatever you’re asking these lovely ladies seems to be having a negative effect on their opinion of you.”

After achieving a rating score two points lower than the leaker, Bimsley decided to sit out the next batch of rounds and talk to the barmaid instead. This time he found himself onto a winner.

“I worked the same shift as Jazmina most nights,” said the pixie-faced Polish girl with earnest blue eyes, whose name was Izabella, and whose jet hair framed her face like Louise Brooks’s in Pandora’s Box. “She was very nice, but I did not like her boyfriend.”

“Why not?” asked Bimsley, succumbing to a pint of lager.

“He was not interested in her. He had other girlfriends.”

“Did she ever come in here and drink on her nights off? Maybe with someone other than her boyfriend?”

“Oh, no. She hated this place.”

“Why?”

“Because she had a what-you-call-it, a stalker. You get men in every pub who try and talk to you on quiet nights, but this one came in all the time.”

“Did you ever see him? What was he like?”

“Too old for her, probably in his early thirties. Brown hair, tall, with a red mark on his face. I was here one night when he started on her.”

“Can you remember anything he said?”

Izabella thought carefully. “I think he’d been fired from his job, he was a bar manager. North London somewhere. We laughed about him after he left.”

“This is really important,” said Bimsley. “I need you to make a note of everything you remember about this man.”

“Wait until I finish work tonight,” said Izabella with an impish smile. “I will tell you anything you want.”

♦

Meera Mangeshkar was at The Apple Tree in Mount Pleasant, which Carol Wynley had sometimes visited with her work colleagues, but asking questions of the staff and customers proved difficult because there was a country-and-western line dancing night in progress.

This had been a postman’s pub for many years due to its proximity to the sorting office, but had now been refurbished for the benefit of tourists visiting from nearby hotels. As Dolly Parton warbled through ‘Heartbreaker’ on the speakers and couples in checked shirts and fringed cowboy jackets stamped their stitched boots on the ancient Axminster carpet, Mangeshkar was forced into stupefied silence on a nearby counter bar stool. The combination of beery British boozer and traditional Texas toe-tap made her uncomfortable, partly because she was the only Indian girl in the room, and felt as if she might get shot. The well-drilled lines of dancers did not whoop and yell like their more liberated U.S. cousins, but concentrated on their footwork, determined to master exercises more culturally alien to the London mind-set than Morris dancing.

She became annoyed that, once again, she had been given an assignment that would yield nothing useful or practical, and was thinking about calling it a night when one of the men grabbed her hands and pulled her onto the dance floor for ‘My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys’.

For the next twenty minutes, Meera forgot her frustration and regret about moving to the Peculiar Crimes Unit as, much to her surprise, she discovered the joys of line dancing to the strains of Willie Nelson.