The Victoria Vanishes

∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧

33

Conspiracy

They met on the bridge, always on Waterloo Bridge, because the light was sharper here, because the sky was high and wide, because for them it was a part of London that never changed.

In all the years they had been meeting above the river, the northern horizon had never changed as quickly as it was changing now. Instead of the barges and blackened warehouses, the working cranes and silhouetted derricks, glass balconies protruded from blank pastel walls like boxes at the theatre. The Thames itself had been transformed from a pulsing aquatic artery to an empty scenic backdrop provided for the amusement of shore-dwelling businessmen, a cosmetic alteration that in Arthur Bryant’s opinion mainly benefited the rich in their holiday flats. What else would be provided for them, he wondered, the kind of gaudy floating pageants that had been staged in the presence of le Roi Soleil? Fireworks and hot-air balloons? But of course the mayor, following in the great tradition of London mayors, was already providing them with such distractions. To be the Lord Mayor of London was to accept the city’s poisoned chalice, and always be hated by at least half the capital’s residents.

In his younger days, Bryant had passionately supported marches, rallies and protests through the capital, even though as a public servant he was required to be non-partisan. His partner had managed to avoid taking sides, simply because he felt that the science of investigation should be considered away from distracting influences, and he regarded himself as an impartial technician. However, this stance had lately been eroded by the continued efforts of the Home Office, whose attempts to close the PCU had become tiresome and predictable, just another obstacle to factor into any protracted investigation.

Bryant leaned against the balustrade of Waterloo Bridge and looked across at the graceful glass span connecting St Paul’s to the Globe Theatre. The new bridge had drawn attention away from mere stone river-crossings like Waterloo.

“I hate small-mindedness,” he suddenly announced after several minutes of contemplative silence. “The notices everywhere warning us not to trip over or turn left or take our dogs off leads. That annoying recorded voice in post offices telling you which counter is free. I bought some peas in the supermarket last week and do you know what it said on the packet? ‘Does not contain nuts.’ I hate the endless admonishments of a nanny state that lives in fear of its lawyers. While colonies of dim-witted traffic wardens swarm about looking for minor parking infringements, nobody seems to notice that our very social fabric is falling apart.”

“What’s brought this on?” asked May, puzzled. “Have you got another court summons over your car?”

“Several, in fact, but that’s not the point.” Bryant poked his pipe between his lips and lit up. “Once our children played on bomb sites and collected unexploded shells. Now they’re driven to school by paranoid parents in SUVs. The determination of dullards can always be counted upon to challenge the merits of innovators.” He noisily sucked on the pipe until the bowl’s embers sparkled against the cloud-grey waters. “To be popular in this city you have to be average, and the PCU’s unusual approach to the attainment of excellence won’t allow it to survive.”

“No-one else can handle a case like this,” said May. “We’ll be here so long as there are cases like this.”

“I don’t think so. Have a chocolate banana.” Bryant pulled the pocket fluff from a sweet and passed it over. He felt guilty having a smoke without giving May a sweet. “I bet Raymond can’t wait to slam the lid on the Pellew investigation. He’ll be able to let Faraday know that there’s no more danger lurking in the capital’s public places.”

“Kershaw reckons he’s got a couple of unidentified skin flakes from two of the women, but I suppose it’ll take a while to see if there’s a DNA match with Pellew’s tissue samples. We don’t rank very highly in the queue for equipment use these days. You’re not in any doubt Pellew’s guilty, are you?”

“Me?” asked Bryant. “Didn’t you hear? Kershaw’s also got a complete thumbprint from one of the emptied plastic ampoules Pellew left in his room at the Clock House. A perfect match. We just need to complete the link by making sure that the residue inside it has the same chemical composition as the drug we found in his victims’ bloodstreams.” He tightened his collar against the early evening mist. “No, it’s not his identity that bothers me now, there’s no question of that; it’s his motive I find troubling. I went over April’s background notes again. There’s a very peculiar disparity I find myself unable to account for.”

“Perhaps I can help.”

Bryant raised himself to look May in the eye. “What do we now know about Anthony Pellew? That he was a disturbed and lonely child, brought up in pubs by an alcoholic, unfaithful father and a mother who turned tricks when they were short of cash. As a kid I imagine he was probably left hanging about in the beery haze of the barroom while the girls flirted around his old man. Upon his father’s death, he and his mother settled into the Angerstein, and later, after she’d been kicked out for prostitution, they moved to the Clock House. Anthony hit adolescence only to find himself ignored and unable to talk to the opposite sex in any place other than the pub.”

“He also started drinking heavily.”

“So, after his mother was taken ill for the first time, he kidnapped a girlfriend of his own and kept her locked up in the basement of a boozer, staying with her, talking to her. Agreed so far?”

“I think so.”

“After his trial and incarceration Pellew supposedly underwent rehabilitation, and had frequent assessments. Somehow – we still don’t know how – he managed to secure an early release. But unbeknown to the doctors, his desire to re-create the small comforts of the past had twisted into something darker. He knew that if he kidnapped another girl, the authorities would come for him and take her away, so it seems clear he decided on a new method of fulfilling his dreams. He could keep them with him forever by fatally drugging them. They would simply fall asleep by his side in a place that made him happy. No sexual assault, no violence, just the everlasting companionship he craved, and found he could create by taking lives.”

“You think the women he picked reminded him of his mother?”

“I wondered about that. But it would make everything so psychologically neat, wouldn’t it? Even the phoney birthmark makes sense because the argument would be that he was using it as a mask, a way of proving that even though he had deliberately made himself unattractive, he could draw a woman to his side. What he was really doing, though, was marking himself out to us. Pellew could be regarded either as a tragic figure doomed to re-create the only moments of happiness he ever had, or as an arrogant grotesque preying on the lonely and vulnerable. With the exception of Jazmina Sherwin, he only selected women with maternal instincts.”

“Either way, Raymond is right to close the case,” said May.

“Except for one fact that unravels this neatly bow-tied little package. Three of these gentle, harmless ladies knew each other. So the notion of a lonely, embittered, mentally ill man wandering from pub to pub looking for random victims is suddenly thrown out, because his acts are carefully premeditated.”

“Unless it’s sheer coincidence. Look at the makeup of city pubs and you’ll find workers from the same professions, many of whom know each other.”

“A fair point. You can talk to someone in a pub and yet hardly acknowledge them in another environment. So many overlapping circles.”

“I should produce a set of Venn diagrams.”

“Please don’t.” Bryant exhaled a wreath of blue smoke around his head.

“And what if one victim led to the next? He makes friends with Kellerman, and she leads him to Curtis, who leads him to Roquesby. Was any one of them aware of what had happened to the other two? Presumably not, or they’d have steered clear of doing the same thing, standing around alone in a pub. Although no-one’s ever really alone in a pub, are they? That’s the attraction, to be counted as part of a social milieu.”

“Perhaps, but I’m not at all happy,” said Bryant firmly. “And I won’t let Raymond close this case until I am. I want to see the psychiatric evaluations that got Pellew released from the Broadhampton, I need to know how those women came to be in that photograph, and why their employment records were falsified over the same periods. We have to go back and take another look at the pubs. Why did I see a Victorian public house that didn’t even exist under that name? Most of all, we need to find out how on earth an outpatient under observation was able to lay his hands on such highly toxic drugs.”

“That’s going to take time,” said May, “and Land wants this wrapped up fast.”

“Then he’ll have to wait.”

“But if no-one else is attacked – ”

“I don’t care,” said Bryant stubbornly. “We’ve missed something essential.”

“Not to the outcome of the case, Arthur, only to your personal satisfaction. You know we don’t always get every last detail correct. It would be like suggesting we’ve solved the mysteries of human nature. It’s not simply a matter of genomes, there are social variables and – ”

“I know it’s not an exact science, John, but there’s something here that Simply. Does. Not. Make. Sense.” He thumped his walking stick on the pavement for emphasis.

“Then tell me, what do you think that is?”

Bryant punched him in the chest with a mittened hand. “What have I always told you? The kind of crimes that reach our little unit can best be appreciated and resolved through a consideration of the laws of paradox. Pellew himself led us to him, then fled when we arrived. Why? Although he wanted – needed – us to catch him, why did he run to his death on a busy motorway?”

“He was trying to get away and made a mistake.”

“No. You saw him hesitate and look back. He knew that we couldn’t be allowed to take him alive. If we did, he would find himself charged and interrogated, and he couldn’t afford to let that happen.”

“Why in God’s name not?” asked May, mystified.

“Because under interrogation he would incriminate someone else,” said Bryant, looking out into the incoming mist.

“But Arthur, there isn’t anyone else. He operated alone, acting for the private gratification that he alone could receive.”

“So it would seem. And we are presented with the textbook apparatus to understand his motivation. In fact, there’s little left for us to do beyond conducting a few scientific matches and placing the case in archive. The Broadhampton’s medical faculty will be at great pains to justify their decision to release Pellew into the community. Everyone walks away with their hands clean.”

A police launch passed beneath them, a white arrow cleaving sepia waters.

“And there’s something else. I thought about the drawing Bimsley found on the floor of Pellew’s makeshift hiding place at the Angerstein Hotel. That scrappy rendering of a black-and-white bird with a long tail, sitting on a tree stump. Bimsley gave it to me when I visited him at the hospital.”

“What of it?”

“It only took me a few moments to come up with the pub name, the Magpie and Stump, opposite the Old Bailey, but I was a little slower in making the connection. Pellew left us a more deliberate clue than any of his clumsy earlier attempts. What does the name Thomas Spence mean to you?”

“The Cato Street Conspiracy,” said May. “Spence was a former schoolteacher who believed that if all the land of Britain was shared out equally, every man, woman and child would get seven acres each.”

“Very good; you know your history. Did you also know that Spence founded the Society of Spencean Philanthropists? They believed that instead of a centralised governing body, Britain should be run by small groups based in London public houses. I made a list, hang on.” Bryant rooted out another of his scraps of paper and squinted at the huge lettering on it. “The Spenceans met at the Nag’s Head in Carnaby Market, the Carlisle in Shoreditch, the Mulberry Tree in Moorfields, the Cock in Soho, the White Lion in Camden and a host of other pubs. In rented rooms in Cato Street, they hatched plans to assassinate a group of government ministers attending a dinner party in Grosvenor Square. The conspirators were caught by police and tried at the Old Bailey, while their supporters watched from the windows of the Magpie and Stump public house. Some of the accused were executed, some transported. So, we get a second ‘seven’ after the Seven Stars pub, a third with the Seven Bells, the former name of the Old Bell pub, and on top of the other keywords Pellew has given us, we must now add ‘conspiracy.’ ”

Bryant balled the paper and tossed it down into the fastflowing river. “Look at the view we take so much for granted. Politicians are fond of telling us how much cleaner the Thames is now, how you can catch dace and sole in its reaches once again. Everyone wants to believe in appearances. What was the Thames ever but a gigantic sewer, somewhere to empty the waste of a wealthy nation? The steamships churned up so much shit that the fine people crossing this bridge died of cholera. You can burnish a city’s image, but you never really change its nature. There’s something hidden and corrupt running beneath it, there always is, and this time it’s not just the acted-out fantasies of a lost soul.”

“Oh, really,” May complained. “You’re saying you see some kind of citywide conspiracy at work?”

“Most definitely.” Bryant nodded with vigour. “And I intend to discover exactly what it is.”

“If you’re wrong, our reputations will be ruined once and for all.”

“Given the nature of my suspicions, I pray I’m wrong,” said Bryant gloomily.