The Victoria Vanishes

∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧

27

Last Orders

“Don’t you see?” said Bryant. “He’s leaving clues in the histories of the pubs, knowing we’d track him down. The Seven Stars – seven victims, perhaps some kind of Dutch connection. The Victoria Cross – an anachronism, an impossibility I was meant to pick up on. It’s true that there are some pubs I haven’t worked out how to fit into the picture yet, but then there’s the Exmouth Arms, chosen because it bears his own surname. How desperately he wants to be caught! We must oblige him immediately.”

“Really, Arthur, this insatiable desire of yours to tie everything into neat parcels is infuriating.”

“Then prove me wrong. Contact Twelve Elms Cross and find out if Tony Pellew was released before the first murder occurred.”

May made the call while Bryant impatiently slammed about among his books, but it took the best part of an hour for staff to collate the information they needed. With the receiver crooked under his ear, he gave his partner an update.

“Looks like you’re right. Pellew was transferred to the Broadhampton Clinic two years ago, then released back into the community three weeks before the death of Mrs Kellerman, the first victim.”

Bryant’s face crumpled in puzzlement. “The Broadhampton’s not a secure hospital, at least not in the same way as Twelve Elms Cross. Pellew was dangerous; you of all people know that. Why would they have transferred him at all?”

“The head nurse sounds uncomfortable. She says it’s a matter of some delicacy. I don’t think she’ll give us anything else over the phone.”

“Then we must go and see her at once. Tell her we’ll come today.”

♦

The train from Victoria was almost empty. “I wasn’t planning to leave London again for a while,” said Bryant, heaving himself into a seat after gingerly removing sandwich wrappers and a Coke can from it. “Not after our trek into the snowdrifts of Dartmoor. That little escapade played havoc with my chilblains.”

“Nobody has chilblains anymore,” said May. “This is the twenty-first century. Global warming has knocked them on the head.”

“A glance at my plates of meat would reveal a different story.” May sighed. “Come on then, get it all out – bunions, chilblains, Pakamacs, cap bombs, Jamboree Bags, MacFisheries, bombsites, Shirley Abicair and her zither, real coal fires, smog, gabardine, milk stout, rag-and-bone men – let’s hear about all the weird old English stuff you miss from the past,” he cried in exasperation. “It’s amazing how you never remember the dreadful things like TB and whooping cough and only two channels on the telly. I wish you could hear yourself sometimes.”

Bryant gave a disdainful sniff. “You can still get milk stout, actually. Trains have lost the odd smell they had when the carriages were separate, have you noticed? There was an odour of iron filings, mica and dust. Now we all have to be communal and watch each other eating while staring from windows savaged by graffiti. Did you see the youths on the platform back there? When I was a kid we had to go to the circus if we wanted to see the fat lady and the tattooed man. Now they’re all over the place.”

May fell wearily back into the seat and snapped open his newspaper. The annoying thing was that he knew Bryant was playing with him. He caught the twinkle of his partner’s eye over the top of his page and decided to let the old man blow off steam. During the journey, he was treated to a detailed description of the usefulness of the Adlestrop Railway Atlas, a diatribe on the unoriginality of the modern criminal mind, a complaint about the discontinuation of Fry’s Five Fruit Chocolate, and sundry reminiscences concerning London’s burglars, thieves and confidence tricksters of the late 1950^s. Bryant’s monologues were rarely less than entertaining, but today May wasn’t in the mood. He was quite relieved when the train finally pulled into Otford railway station.

“You’re very quiet today,” Bryant observed as they alighted. “I hope you’re not having a mid-life crisis.” He hastily threw up his hands. “I jest, I jest!”

Twelve Elms Cross was a melancholy yellow-brick mansion built on the gentle slopes of royal parkland three miles beyond the station. Since 1902 it had provided a secure home for some of the country’s most disturbed mental patients, but now the listed interiors were proving unsuitable for modern health care, and the building was in the process of being decommissioned.

The chief warden, Abigail Cochrane, was also its curator. She led the detectives from her office to the patients’ quarters via a corridor reserved for visitors. It spared them the discomfort of seeing the inmates, and vice versa.

“Why do they always have to line these places with horrible daubs?” whispered Bryant, referring to the patients’ paintings that hung on the passage walls. “Being nuts doesn’t make them more creative, it just shows they have time on their hands.”

“Once in a while,” May whispered back, exasperated, “it wouldn’t hurt you to be a little more politically correct, would it?”

“The hospital was designed to incarcerate rather than rehabilitate,” Nurse Cochrane explained. “The grounds are pleasant enough, but the day-rooms are pitifully inadequate, and the personal quarters are too small. The Edwardians had rather fixed ideas about the amount of private space that should be allocated to offenders. I tend to think they treated the institution as if it were some kind of human zoo.”

She pushed back a door leading to a wide corridor with a floor of polished linoleum and institutional green-and-cream walls. The faint scents of cabbage and disinfectant hung in the undisturbed air. “As I’m sure you’ll remember, Mr May, Tony was of above-average intelligence. Under different circumstances he could really have made something of himself. He was rather a favourite of ours, even though I felt he was likely to be a repeat offender.”

“Why was he transferred to a low-security clinic?”

Nurse Cochrane withdrew a large, old-fashioned key and unlocked the iron door they had stopped before. “Because of this,” she told them, gesturing about the room. “We never got around to clearing it.”

The cell was ten feet by twelve, little more than a space for a bed and desk, without separate bathroom facilities. A single barred window faced out to the pasture where the twelve elms must once have existed. The cell walls were cream-painted brick, but had been obscured by dozens of taped photographs and reproductions of paintings. Most of the art was from the late nineteenth century, and showed groups of men sociably smoking, drinking, bantering. A few featured pugilists posing in pleasure gardens.

The photographs were all of one person, a blowsy middle-aged woman in heavy makeup. Her features showed the signs of poor diet and too much drink. “Tony was distraught when his mother died. He worshipped her, even though she never once bothered to visit him. Tragic, really. We contacted her so many times over the years, whenever he was ill or particularly hard to settle, but she only ever responded once. There.” Cochrane pointed to a taped postcard with the words ‘Tony wishing you better love Anita’ scrawled across the back. “I think she only wrote to get him off her back for a while. When he found out she had died from cirrhosis of the liver, the fight went out of him.”

“Are you saying there was something more than a normal mother-son relationship going on?” asked May.

“I’m not able to comment on that.”

He sensed that a shutter had closed between them, and knew she would cite patient confidentiality if he tried to press her.

“This is an ongoing murder investigation, Miss Cochrane. We’ll sequester his hospital notes if we have to, and remove any files we feel might pertain to his case if it means we can prevent him from harming anyone else.”

Cochrane’s cold manner thawed a little. She had simply not realised the gravity of her charge’s situation. “I’m sorry, sometimes it is necessary to protect our patients from the eagerness of the public to condemn and demonise. I’m sure you understand.”

“Then perhaps you could help us to understand him more fully,” Bryant suggested. “Did he ever talk about the girl he kidnapped?”

“There are extensive therapists’ notes in his case history, but I can probably save you a lot of time with a précis. Tony’s story is sad, but hardly uncommon. Pellew’s family was originally from Zandvoort, in Holland. His father had been in and out of jail all his life. He was a violent alcoholic whose first two sons had been taken into care. He met Tony’s mother in the pub where she worked, and their relationship was a familiar cycle of alcohol misuse and physical abuse. She left him, taking Tony with her, and worked in City of London pubs, usually in bars that had live-in premises above them. Although we have only anecdotal evidence, it seems likely that she supplemented her income through bouts of prostitution. Oddly, I think Tony was at his happiest during that period. He would have been about eleven then.”

“Camus suggested that we spend our adult lives seeking to restore childhood’s brief moments of happiness,” said Bryant.

“Tony told me he felt safest during those evenings he spent waiting for his mother to finish behind the bar, or waiting for her to return after seeing a punter. She always left him in the pub. He tried to strangle his first girlfriend, did you know? It didn’t take long for a pattern to emerge. He would latch onto girls he met in his mother’s pub, come on too strong and scare them off by trying too hard to keep them with him.”

“The serial killer Denis Nielsen murdered because he wanted companionship,” May reminded them. “He was not only lonely but incredibly boring. The only way he could make his victims stay around was by rendering them unconscious.”

“Tony told us something similar,” said Cochrane. “He had all sorts of scenarios worked out to keep women by his side. He didn’t need to kill them to re-create his happiest hours, merely make them immobile. It seems he experimented for a number of years without getting caught, although there were a few close calls. He felt at home in pubs, and dreaded the sound of the last bell, knowing that the place would empty out and leave him alone.”

“The girl he kidnapped was anxious to point out that she was never hurt by him in any way,” said May. “And yet it seems he decided to start killing them.”

“You say he changed after his mother died. How did that change manifest itself?”

“He’d always been boisterous, eager to join in and organise meetings. He enjoyed a good argument with the others, although he could be very attention-deficit and tended toward over-excitement. After her funeral he withdrew from everyone, wouldn’t talk or think for himself, exhibited the classic signs of depression, became morbidly introspective, lost weight, spent too much time asleep.”

“If he was unwell, why was he transferred?”

“This building has been sold, Mr Bryant. It is about to become luxury apartments. The pressure is on for us to place all of our patients elsewhere as soon as possible. Tony Pellew was apparently no longer considered to be a threat to himself or anyone else. It was decided that the Broadhampton was better equipped for his needs.”

“Are you aware that he’s no longer at the Broadhampton, either?” asked May.

“I knew the board decided to release him recently, because they contacted me in order to obtain my personal files,” Cochrane explained.

“Don’t you think their decision was rather odd?”

“Not so much these days. You’d be amazed if you knew about some of the people who get sent back out onto the streets.”

“You must have made your own judgement as to whether he was in any fit state to be released.”

Cochrane regarded Bryant with a cool detachment that suggested she had an opinion but wasn’t keen on sharing it. “I’m afraid you’ll have to take that up with the staff at the Broadhampton,” she replied.

As the echoing rooms of Twelve Elms Cross were emptied and barred, it seemed as if their past melancholies would fade and die with them, to be replaced by the bright, light cubicles of a luxurious new prison.