The Victoria Vanishes

∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧

41

The Path of Hope

“He told me himself where he spends his evenings.” Bryant hurried his partner through the fine soaking rain toward the car. “He’s a creature of habit, and he doesn’t know we’re looking for him.”

May’s immaculate BMW wound its way down through the fading light toward Smithfields, and the welcoming lights of the Hope tavern in Cowcross Street. The roads around them were deserted. They would not come to life until the clubs started up later in the evening.

“The pub usually opens early for the market’s meat porters, and apparently derived its name from the Path of Hope,” Bryant told him, “a section of the route taken by condemned prisoners from Newgate on their way to execution. The market didn’t appear until around 1855, but the pub’s curved-glass bay windows date it from an earlier time. Look at the etched windows, mythical birds surrounding twined T s and H s.”

“This is no time for one of your guided tours, Arthur.”

“Many years ago I took it upon myself to educate you, and I have not yet given up hope. Don’t feel bad; it’s been a reciprocal process. You showed me how to use my cell phone correctly. Those calls I was accidentally making to Kuala Lumpur were costing me a fortune. Why have you got a tennis ball in your glove compartment?”

“Leave that alone,” warned May. “It’s there in case I lose my keys again.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Something Renfield taught me. You make a small hole in the ball, stick it over the lock and punch it. The air pressure pops the lock open.”

“That man has a touch of the tea leaf about him,” said Bryant with a look of disapproval.

“What do you expect? He was dealing with thieves on the street all day before he came to us. Anyway, you could learn a bit from him.” Like other members of the unit, May had begun to grudgingly reassess the sergeant.

As they locked the vehicle and alighted, Bryant started examining the pub’s woodwork until May pulled him inside.

“I think Jackie Quinten did discover that some of her colleagues were dead, and at that point she must have realised what connected them all,” Bryant declared, heading straight for the bar. “She needed to confide in someone, to visit a person in a position of trust. The Official Secrets Act remains in place after you leave a government establishment. She couldn’t unburden herself to an outsider. It had to be someone she had known through the company she had worked for.”

“And you think she came here?”

“I’m convinced of it. I tried a couple of Kiskaya Mandeville’s memory techniques and remembered something Masters said to me when I went to see him about Christ’s blood going missing in Clerkenwell.”

“Christ’s blood?” repeated May, more confused than ever. Bryant irritably waved the thought aside. “He said something very odd, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Masters thinks aloud; it’s not always easy to follow what he’s on about. With people like that, you let a certain amount of what they say slip by you. He said, ‘I lecture on mythology these days, I’m not in haematology anymore, unless you count the Athenian.’ I knew he studied medicine, of course, he’s a doctor, but I had no idea of the branch he specialised in. Haematology, the study of blood, blood-producing tissues and more importantly in this case, sanguinary diseases. So why would he mention the Athenian? Well, to a lecturer in mythology there can only be one Athenian: the greatest king of Athens, Theseus. I think he was referring to the Theseus Research group euphemistically, one of those bright little remarks he can expect to toss out and have ignored by his acolytes.”

“Except that you didn’t miss it,” said May, pleased. “Let’s search the place. You can explain the rest later.”

“Alas, it’s unlikely I’ll be able to do that. We need to find Mrs Quinten before we get any further answers.”

Asking the bar staff if any of them had noticed a tall, greyhaired academic in the saloon during the last few days merely started an argument between them about height, weight and hair colour, at which point the detectives realised they would not get any easy answers.

“She needed to seek him out,” said Bryant, “but there’s no record of her calling him from her house phone or her cell, so she must have known where to go.”

“Either that, or she’s somewhere else entirely.”

“I can’t allow myself to think that, John. I need to be right about this. We’ve nothing else left.”

♦

Colin Bimsley was too big for Jackie Quinten’s home. Owing to his difficulties with space and balance, he had grown up in a house where the only ornaments were unbreakable and usually cemented down. Now he edged his way through rooms cluttered with pottery jugs, dainty china bowls, display glassware, antique violins, rare maps and fragile Edwardian dolls’ furniture. “I don’t know where to begin looking with all this crap about,” he complained.

“She’s a collector,” said Meera. “I’ve already been here once today; I didn’t need you to come back with me.”

“Maybe you missed something.”

Meera shot him a look that could have peeled wallpaper. “Go and do the kitchen. I’ll check the bedrooms. I don’t trust you on the stairs. Wait.”

Bimsley’s eyes widened in alarm. “What?”

“That girl who dropped you off – have you seen her again?”

“Izabella? Not yet. I was going to give her a ring tonight, see if she was up for a beer and a curry, but now it looks like we’ll be working late. At least we’ll be together, eh?” Meera seemed to be immune to his smile, but he tried one hopefully.

“Yeah, great.” It was hard to tell if she was being sarcastic.

With a sigh, Bimsley headed for the kitchen and went through all the drawers, even looking inside the microwave. There was nothing here that he would not have expected to find. He leaned back on the draining board, looking around the tiny galley, and knocked a cup into the sink. He was trying to fit the handle back on when he noticed the empty cardboard boxes in the small backyard.

The brand-new leaf incinerator seemed an odd thing to own, as there were no trees overhanging the property. Outside, he removed the steel lid and peered in at the charred remains of paperwork. He knew that burned pages could sometimes be deciphered if they were layered between sheets of cotton and sent to forensic-document experts, but the rain had worked its way into the metal container and had soaked the remains. Reaching in, he dug his shovel-like hands into the soggy mess. The downpour had put the fire out, and only the top sheets had been burnt. Underneath, entire folders were wet but intact. He began to lift them out.

“Meera,” he called, “give me a hand.”

Together they managed to bag half a dozen barely scorched folders of paper. “Let’s get this inside and read it,” he suggested.

“We should take it back.”

“No time for that, and no place to take it back to, remember? If there’s something here that can tell us where Quinten went, we need to know right now.”

They started to sort through the documents. You chase thieves and murderers through the city streets, thought Bimsley with a sigh, but somehow you always end up doing paperwork. That’s how they caught Al Capone. That’s what always gets the convictions in the end.