The Victoria Vanishes

∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧

35

Interpretation

A pair of disembodied legs sealed in black fishnet tights and crimson satin garters was balanced gracefully on a mound of red plastic poppies. Nearby, a torso clad in a basque with lavender rhinestones set in its staves glittered menacingly.

DS Janice Longbright peered into the shop window and sighed at the clothes she could not afford. She was tired of being broke and unloved. Checking her watch, she realised that she was running late. Carol Wynley’s partner was awaiting her arrival in the flat beside the shop.

Shad Thomson had suffered a stroke in his late fifties, three years earlier, and the apartment he shared with Carol Wynley had been adapted to allow his motorised wheelchair to pass easily from room to room. Although she was unsure how much help she should offer her host, Longbright suggested making tea for them both, and he comfortably acquiesced.

“I suppose I got lazy living with Carol,” he told her. “It’s surprisingly easy to let someone do everything for you.”

“You must miss her a great deal,” Longbright said.

“I’ll never know anyone else like her,” he replied. “She knew me before the stroke, so she remembered a different person, the one who was still on his feet, racing around town taking meetings, hitting deadlines, thinking that work was so damned important. No-one will ever see me like that again. Carol was the last person to really know me. I’m someone else now. I can never go back.”

“How long were you together?”

“Seven years. I met her in a pub, the Seven Stars in Carey Street. I remember it had some kind of connection with Holland. She had worked for a law firm in Amsterdam, and we got talking about the history of the place. I’m a journalist. At least it’s a job I can still do like this.”

“Carol was still working in a law firm, wasn’t she?”

“That’s right, as a legal PA for the Swedenborg Society.”

“Where was she before that, do you remember?”

“Of course. She was at the Holborn Security Group, a firm of specialist solicitors on Theobalds Road.”

“When did she leave that job?”

“I think it was a couple of years ago now.” Around the same time that the other three had left their non-existent jobs, thought Longbright. Where had these women all been? What were they really doing?

“Did you ever meet anyone she worked with at the Holborn Security Group?”

“I met one of her bosses, some kind of consultant,” said Shad, “and once a woman of about her age dropped her off here.”

“One of these three, perhaps?” Longbright showed him the photograph of Roquesby, Kellerman and Curtis taken in the pub.

“That one,” said Shad, pointing at Roquesby without hesitation. “I think she and Jocelyn briefly shared an office. I remember because Mrs Roquesby was an old colleague of Dr Peter Jukes. You must have read about him in the papers.”

“I don’t think I have,” said Longbright, but she could vaguely recall someone at the PCU mentioning his name.

“I did some work on his case, purely out of interest. Have a look on that shelf for me, would you?” He pointed to a rack of plastic folders above his workstation. “Dr Jukes.”

Longbright found a slender yellow file with the doctor’s name written across the top.

“He originally came from Salisbury, Wiltshire,” Shad explained, tipping the sheets out into his lap and examining them. “Last year his body was found floating off Black Head on the Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall. The coroner thought it was a simple matter of death by drowning, but a local newspaper decided to take up the case, and their reporter believed that Jukes had sustained some unexplained injuries. The inference was that the coroner didn’t do his job properly. Jukes’s boat was washed into a local harbour more than fifteen miles further down the coast. The coastguard thought it unlikely that he had fallen into the sea, because local tides and currents would have taken both the body and the boat into the nearest shore. Jukes told some drinking pals he was going fishing with a mate, but no friend was ever found. I got bugged by the story for a while, even asked Mrs Roquesby about it when she came by. I thought perhaps she might have heard something that didn’t get into the papers.”

“Why were you so interested?” asked Longbright.

“I did my training on the regional court circuit,” answered Shad. “When you hear the names of certain litigious organisations come up time and again, alarm bells go off in your head. In this case I was intrigued because Jukes was a consultant at Porton Down.”

♦

“Roquesby’s colleague was a doctor who worked for the Ministry of Defence,” Longbright told the detectives when she met them an hour later. They were seated in the Hope & Anchor, sipping a dark malty liqueur poured from a mysterious and rather dusty brown bottle Arthur had ordered down from behind the bar. It was nearly eleven p.m., and they had sent the rest of the crew home.

“Jukes was chief scientist for chemical and biological security at the MOD’s main laboratory. There was some kind of scandal over part of the lab being outsourced into the hands of privatised companies.”

“I thought that happened all the time,” said May.

“One of them had been under investigation for allegedly offering bribes. It made a couple of the papers, but the story was dropped pretty sharpish. You once talked to me about the case, Arthur; you said something about turning up darker connections.”

“Did I?” asked Bryant, amazed. “I don’t remember at all. Not that that’s saying much.”

Longbright thought for a minute. “This would have been back in the summer, you told me something about witches or warlocks – no, Druids.”

“Wait a minute, that’s right, I do remember.” Bryant was genuinely amazed. “I told you that Jukes had formerly belonged to a Druid sect – his family had insisted it was only a hobby, but according to the Sunday rags they suggested that he had drifted into Satanist circles.”

“You didn’t tell me about this,” said May, grimacing over his bitter drink.

“Well, no, Janice and I look into all sorts of interesting stories behind your back, don’t we, Janice? But there’s not much point in bringing them to your attention if we don’t think they’ll fly.”

“So what happened?”

“Oh, the Met detectives refused to believe there was a connection between Jukes’s injuries and his interest in black magic. They vindicated the coroner and agreed with the verdict of accidental death. But you know how my mind works.”

“Not really, no.”

“I couldn’t help wondering if Jukes had become an embarrassment to his employers because he was operating under the Official Secrets Act. I’m not suggesting they assassinated him, of course, merely that they encouraged people to believe that he was mentally unstable. I actually petitioned the Home Office for a look at his notes, but the Defence Secretary refused to acknowledge that there was a case at all. He pointed out that Jukes had been suffering from clinical depression for a number of years, and had long been recognised as a security risk, so I let it drop. And now it turns out he knew Jocelyn Roquesby. Well, well.”

“So what do we have?” asked May. “Carol Wynley worked for another company that doesn’t exist – April couldn’t find any specialist law firm under the name of the Holborn Security Group.”

“And Shad Thomson has another set of employment dates that match those of his girlfriend’s murdered companions,” Longbright added.

Bryant stirred the thick sediment in his glass thoughtfully. “Four women work for phantom companies. One of their colleagues commits suicide or accidentally drowns. Then, in the space of two weeks, the women, plus a fifth, are put to sleep in public places by a former mental patient.”

“It may be that none of these facts are connected. You know how often we’re criticised for jumping to conclusions; I think we have to be very careful this time, and only build the case with documented facts. We could be looking at the result of information gaps, misinterpreted events, simple clerical errors.”

“No. I spoke to one of the doctors who signed Pellew’s release form. Hopelessly evasive about the procedure, pleaded patient confidentiality, believe it or not. And I keep coming back to the pubs in which they died. The Old Dr Butler was named after a deranged doctor; the Seven Stars and the Magpie and Stump give us ‘seven’ and ‘conspiracy’; The Victoria Cross is the name of a pub that could not even exist; the Exmouth Arms provides the name of Pellew himself. My God, he couldn’t have left us much plainer clues.”

“You’re forgetting the Old Bell,” said May.

“Well, I don’t have anything interesting on that one, other than the fact that it used to be called the Seven Bells.”

“Seven Belles.” Longbright raised her eyes from the dark liquid in her brandy glass. “Seven women.”

“The mad see things differently,” said Bryant. “It’s just a question of interpretation.”

“You think he intended to take the lives of two more victims?”

The little group sensed the room growing colder as they considered the possibility that more lives were in danger.