The Victoria Vanishes

∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧

36

Greater Darkness

The icy night dragged past in a knot of sweat-soaked sheets and twisted blankets. At three-thirty a.m., Bryant disentangled himself and stood at the window in his dressing gown, staring out at the iridescent garden. A strange aura of disturbance had settled over him. He sensed that things were coming to a head. Pellew’s case bothered him more than he cared to admit; it was a sure sign that something was wrong when Raymond Land felt confident enough about the investigation to go running off to the Home Office.

You didn’t work this long without knowing when something bad had happened. Grounds were shifting, tides were turning against them. Perhaps it was already too late for them to save themselves.

The street outside was quiet. Frost sparkled in the lamplight, as if the air itself was gelid and starting to crystallise. Bryant felt slow-witted and incomplete, unable to grasp the significance of the week’s events. Mrs Mandeville’s memory lessons were working wonders but something continued to elude him, some passing remark that had pricked his interest, only to return to the indistinct background of bar chatter that had filled the last few days.

Five years ago this is not something I’d have missed, he thought angrily. I’m becoming slow and lazy. He dug out his tobacco pouch, stuffed and lit a pipe, watching as the aromatic smoke curled against the condensation on the window. Two more women – possibly three if you did not count the death of Jazmina Sherwin – were still at risk, but how and from what? A dead man?

A larger fear assailed Bryant, that the neat confluence of reasons driving Pellew to commit murder was deliberately misleading. Their murderer had re-created the comforts of his childhood, killed for the companionship that brought relief from his nightly fevers, but his psychosis wasn’t the whole story. Something else had driven him, and perhaps was working still.

The nurse at the Broadhampton had insisted that her patient was of above-average intelligence. Pellew had sent his would-be captors messages, but he was no historian; he just liked pubs because he felt safe inside them. The clues he’d left behind had been simple enough to decipher. But where they led…

The embers in the pipe glowed and crackled. Bryant had always felt possessed of – well, psychic ability was perhaps the wrong term, but a sensitivity, faint and tremulous, to the fluctuations of his waking world. That mental gauge had been shaken badly during his investigation of the Highwayman, the murderer who had courted fame in the tabloids by killing failed celebrities on London’s streets. Now it was vibrating again, more violently than ever before. Some greater darkness had empowered Pellew, and made him as much a victim as a murderer. You needed to see the complete picture, not just a corner…

“Are you going to be smoking that disgusting thing for long?” asked Alma Sorrowbridge, making him jump.

“Good Lord, woman, can you not go creeping about the house in the middle of the night? Especially not looking like that.” She was standing in the doorway in a vast red-andyellow-striped nightdress, with crimson silk ribbons knotted through her hair.

Alma placed her formidable fists on her hips. “Like what?” she demanded to know.

“Like a marquee for a particularly disreputable travelling circus. What are you doing up, anyway? I suppose you’ve been at the fridge again.”

“I hear you moving about because the floorboards creak. You’re thinking about work.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s all you ever think about.”

“Nonsense, I frequently have other thoughts about – things,” he finished lamely. “It so happens that I’m stuck on a problem.”

“Maybe you should do what you usually do: go and see that crazy devil-woman. I can’t help you with your case, but I can help you sleep. I’ll make us some hot chocolate with vanilla pods and cinnamon.”

“I’m sorry, Alma.” Bryant’s appreciative smile would have been more attractive with his teeth in. “I haven’t been very nice to you lately, have I?”

“I haven’t noticed, you’re always horrible.” Alma sniffed. “But I know you don’t mean any harm, so I never pay much mind.”

“You’re very good to me, you know.”

“I know.” Unimpressed with this late display of sentiment, his landlady went off to make the chocolate.

♦

It was early morning, and the streets were still milky with mist. He rang the doorbell again, and this time the sound of the vacuum cleaner stopped. Bryant looked around at the front garden, where a motor scooter had been carelessly parked on top of some diseased-looking begonias. There were slates falling off the roof, and a pair of front-door keys were sticking out of a hanging basket of dead snowdrops, where every thief in the neighbourhood could see them.

He waited while somebody thumped and crashed toward the front door. He usually went to the deconsecrated chapel in Prince of Wales Road, Kentish Town, to see his old friend, but this morning he had decided to catch her at home in the little terraced house on Avenell Road, Finsbury Park. Maggie Armitage, the white witch from the coven of St James the Elder, opened the door in yellow rubber gloves and a purple pinafore. Bryant wondered if she had been taking fashion tips from Alma.

“I’m afraid you caught me hoovering,” said Maggie, snapping off her gloves to give him a hug. She had dyed her hair bus-red and painted on the kind of lipstick that could only be removed from a collar with a nail-brush.

“I thought you preferred things dusty.” Bryant gave her a squeeze. “You shouldn’t leave your keys in the flowerpot.”

“It’s all right, I put a curse on them. And I don’t mind a bit of dust, but I draw the line at involuntary emissions of ectoplasm. Maureen had a visit from Captain Smollet last night and got it all over the place. It might be good for the purging of tortured souls but it’s a bugger to get out of the carpet. Maureen’s familiars are all military men. I’m not sure if it’s because she held her first séance near the Chelsea Barracks, or if she just likes a man in a uniform. Come in and have some breakfast.”

Maggie remained the PCU’s affiliated information source for all crimes involving elements of witchcraft or psychic analysis, but she was prepared to offer advice on any number of subjects from numerology and necromancy to pet horoscopes and the care of orchids. Her information was spiritually sound but lacking in logic and probability.

Bryant entered the hall, climbing past a bicycle and all kinds of junk, including what appeared to be an old Mr Whippy ice cream machine. Her little house was always overflowing with dead people’s belongings, which made it simultaneously cosy and creepy. “What do you know about conspiracy theory?” he asked.

“Not really my subject, lovey. You need Dame Maud Hackshaw for that.”

“Can I contact her?”

“I imagine so; she’s in the kitchen straightening out my spoons. She’s been practising her parapsychology on my cutlery. Come through.”

Maggie ushered her visitor through to a kitchen cluttered with Wiccan icons, headless Barbie dolls and mouldering seaside souvenirs. Dame Maud Hackshaw, a mauve-haired, pearlfestooned Grade III witch from the coven of St James the Elder, stared at Bryant through the thickest spectacles he had ever seen.

“Hello, ducks, how are you?” she demanded. “We met in an army truck outside Dartmoor, remember? And this week I was introduced to your lovely lady sergeant at the Sutton Arms. She’s got the gift of second sight, which is nice for her. Doesn’t realise it at the moment, of course, still a bit too young. They never do until they’re in their second blossom.”

“Maggie says you know a thing or two about conspiracy theories,” said Bryant, gingerly examining several teaspoons that had been twisted into silver spirals.

“They’re usually supposed to involve covert alliances of the rich and powerful, brought together to deceive the general populace,” said Dame Maud, rubbing hard at a set of fish knives. “The most common ones involve a 9/11 cover-up, Zionist global domination, Kennedy, Monroe, the Bavarian Illuminati, the moon landings, the New World Order. For some reason, they seem to be mostly American these days. They’ve been described as ‘the exhaust fumes of democracy,’ a kind of release valve for the pressures of living in an intense consumer society, but of course such theories go back to Roman times.”

“I see.” Bryant was unfazed by women like Dame Maud. He had been around them all his life.

“Europe is traditionally associated with old-world conspiracies to do with the Vatican, the Knights Templars, the hidden meanings of the Codex Argenteus – basically anything with Latin derivatives. It’s human nature to try and make sense out of chaos, to join the dots and come up with a picture. And of course it’s a guilty pleasure, as long as you don’t take it all at face value.”

“What do you know about the Cato Street Conspiracy?” asked Bryant, accepting Maggie’s offer of a slice of strangely heavy bread pudding.

“That was real, of course: a plan to bring down the government, like the Gunpowder Plot. Conspiracies are not necessarily the product of overheated imaginations.”

“Would you say there are ones we could consider true today?”

“Almost certainly,” said Dame Maud, shining the cutlery and carefully replacing it piece by piece. “There are corporate conspiracies to keep company prices artificially inflated, and government schemes to slip through parliamentary bills under the cover of controversial world events.” She indicated the teaspoons. “I didn’t bend these with the power of my mind, by the way, but with my fingers. It’s a parlour trick. I was just showing Margaret how it was done.”

“You think your murderer was playing a similar trick on you,” said Maggie, smiling as she set down tea. There seemed to be holly in her hair, although Christmas had long gone. “What makes you say that?”

“You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“Do you think he was? Playing some kind of trick on us? I told you my doubts on the phone. I feel I’ve been hoodwinked somehow.”

“You have no reason to disbelieve this person’s history, have you?”

“That’s the problem; I don’t,” said Bryant, a little perplexed.

“It’s all true. And his culpability has been proven beyond doubt.”

“Then he must be cleverer than you imagined.”

Bryant munched his pudding thoughtfully and somewhat carefully. “But to what end?”

“In conspiracy theory there’s the issue of cui bono, ‘who stands to gain?’ You must ask yourself the same question. If your chap Pellew is found guilty of these murders, who is the beneficiary? Certainly not the doctor who discharged him, for he can only appear in a bad light after the confirmation that his patient has been released to commit murder. Who else? Five women are dead. Who gains an advantage from their deaths?”

“Someone who featured in all of their lives. Someone who was important to each one of them.”

“Someone you haven’t found.”

“We’ve made detailed examinations of their recent movements.” Bryant sighed. “There’s a dark patch on the X ray, so to speak, a period when they all just – went missing.”

“There you are,” said Dame Maud, who had been so sensible up until this point. “Alien abduction.”

“No, dear, he thinks they worked together,” Maggie explained, “doing something they couldn’t tell their relatives about.”

“Oh, ladies of the night? Jezebels, is it? Painted harlots?”

“No, in an office,” said Bryant, giving Dame Maud a wary look. “Legal secretaries.”

“I’m confused. Why would they lie to their loved ones about working in an office?”

“That’s rather the question,” Bryant admitted.

“ATM machines,” said Dame Maud, perking up suddenly.

“They’ll have needed lunches, won’t they? Find out where they drew their money from. Women have to eat in the morning, it’s a metabolism thing. Read their journey details from their Oyster cards, then check the coffee bars nearest to the stations from which they all alighted.”

“Are you sure you haven’t worked with the police before?” asked Bryant. “You have a criminal turn of mind.”

“No, dear, I haven’t worked with the police.” Her moon-eyes swam innocently behind aquarium glass.

“No, but you’ve been in trouble with them a few times,” Maggie pointed out.

“It wasn’t my fault that last time; it was your Maureen and her familiar, pulling my skirt off like that.”

“You were in the Trafalgar Square fountain swearing like a navvy.”

“I was in a state of advanced transcendentalism.”

“You were in a state of advanced inebriation, dear.” As Bryant left the witches arguing in the little terraced house, he found himself wondering what a handful of kindly, maternal legal secretaries could have done to place themselves on the death list of a deranged killer.