Bryant & May 06; The Victoria Vanishes

∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧

44

Accountability

“Wait, we have to go back,” said Longbright. All the passages had begun to look the same. “We’re too far over.”

“Do you know where he is, or don’t you?” Renfield looked around. The buzzing overhead panels bathed the halls in seagreen light.

“The corridors are supposed to be painted differently in this section.” She turned about. “We’ve gone wrong somewhere.”

“We need to go back to the big marble stairwell, where the bloke with the Frisbee was. You can work it out again from there.”

Renfield broke into a run, forcing her to keep up. They reached a narrow staff staircase and he took the steps three at a time, as if he had finally come to terms with the idea that Bryant was not playing the fool, and that a murder could only be halted by their intervention. She followed closely behind, almost slamming into him as he stopped dead and listened.

They both heard the voice, too loud for normal speech in a museum. Renfield continued back along the passageway, putting on an extra spurt of speed when he spotted something she had yet to see.

He knows something bad is about to happen, she thought. She had seen this instinctive talent, born of experience and an almost supernatural prescience, in just a handful of policemen. It was the last thing she expected to encounter in a man like Renfield. He’s one of us, she realised, surprised to recognise her own ability.

♦

Jackie Quinten made a run for it but wasn’t as young as she thought, and her ankle twisted beneath her weight on the slippery tiled floor. She fell hard.

Masters didn’t come after her. If anything, he seemed mortified at having to sort out the mess he now found himself in. He was fumbling about in his desk drawer, looking for something.

“Please,” he called after her. “I just came up with the solution, it was a theoretical conundrum, that’s all. I didn’t want to be involved. I’m not cut out for this sort of thing. My career here is over, did I tell you? The museum is letting me go. Some new people have come in, and they don’t approve of my lecture style. I’m too partisan. It seems you can’t have opinions in public these days; it’s not sensitive enough. I don’t get the audience figures they want. I have to do other things now in order to survive. But this is too much to expect of anyone, let alone me.” He found the object of his search and removed it from the drawer, a long red and green tartan scarf. “I’ve been looking for this everywhere. Please, you mustn’t be frightened. It’ll do neither of us any good.”

He watched as she climbed to her feet and hobbled to the door, then came around the desk to her, holding up the scarf.

“I’m afraid I don’t have anything else I can use,” he apologised, wrapping the scarf around her exposed throat and pulling it tight. “I promise you, I’ve never done anything like this before. I don’t want to do it now, but there’s no other way out of the situation. Of course I admit it’s my fault. I didn’t think the police would close in on Anthony so quickly, and I certainly never imagined he would start leaving them clues. Now I have to clear up the mess he’s created or they’ll deal with me, too. You do understand, don’t you?”

With the fiery noose of the scarf across her throat, Jackie could only stare helplessly up at her captor. His height gave him an immense advantage; he was able to keep her off balance as he dragged her back into the corridor toward the staircase.

“When you’re young, you imagine rising to the top of your profession, but of course you never can.” He was almost talking to himself now, paltering in a plea to be understood. “There’s always someone above you, someone behind you, someone to watch out for, someone to answer to. Do you know how far up this chain goes? Further than you’d ever dream. There’s no-one who can help me, no sympathy for what I’ve done, and why should there be? We live in a society that can only function by finding someone to blame, and they will rightly blame me. My solution to their problem was brilliant in its simplicity, but of course things never stay simple. I found them a madman, and now that he has failed I am being forced to finish his work.”

The more she struggled, the tighter the noose grew. He yanked on the scarf, as one would pull on a dog’s chain to rein it in. She fought to stay upright, knowing that if she fell she would be strangled to death.

“It’s a matter of accountability. Contract out the work and it seems almost inevitable that the person you’ve entrusted it to will let you down. In the old days it was ‘Never mind, old chap, you did your best.’ Now it’s ‘Fix it yourself or be prepared to take the blame for everything.’ Are you familiar with George Orwell? You remember in 1984, how Winston Smith tells Julia ‘We are the dead’? That’s how I feel now.”

He yanked hard on the scarf, causing her to gasp in pain. Her heels left ragged black lines along the cream linoleum floor.

“Once I was a brilliant academic with a soaring future ahead of me. When you agree to do something you know to be wrong, you tell yourself it will just happen once. Then you find yourself doing it just to remain afloat. Finally you become just like them – one of the dead, a walking cadaver obeying orders in order to stay alive.”

He hauled her to the edge of the balustrade and kicked her legs out from under her, easily holding her squirming body against the stonework. Jackie felt her centre of gravity shifting as he pulled her over the edge. They were only two floors up, but he was tipping her upside down to cause the maximum impact. She felt her stomach flop, as though she was boarding a funfair ride.

Her greying auburn hair fell over her face, obscuring her sight. His hand slipped between her thighs, sliding over her tights, so that he was holding her almost vertically. She knew that the fall would kill her. She could only fear that it would not be instant.

♦

They were above Masters, Longbright saw that now. They had passed along the passage at the very top of the building, aligned with the roof of the Great Court, to emerge in the service area at the top of the stairwell. The academic was diagonally below them, trying to unhook Mrs Quinten’s legs from the balustrade, but now her right hand had gained purchase on the rail, so he was pummelling at her back and stomach in a desperate attempt to make her release her grip.

The impossibility of the situation was enough to paralyse Longbright. If they made their presence known to Masters he would either release Mrs Quinten, allowing her to fall under her own weight, or attack her with greater violence.

She was still trying to reach a decision when Renfield threw his broad frame straight down the stairs in a foolhardy but spectacular airborne rugby tackle that slammed Masters to the steps so hard that it cracked his ribs and punched the air from his lungs.

Renfield climbed to his feet, unfazed, and reached over the balcony just as Mrs Quinten’s grip failed, dragging her back across the balustrade like a sack of flour. He fell onto the stairs beside Masters, with Mrs Quinten lying on top of him. It was undignified, but seemed to have done the trick.

“You make one sudden move, sunshine,” he told the inert doctor, “and I’ll tear your bleeding head off.” But with the scarf loosened from her throat, Mrs Quinten suddenly started to scream and thrash about in shock, and in the brief moments it took Renfield to quell the tangle of limbs, Masters had risen and run into the gallery straight ahead of them.

Renfield abandoned his charge and was following now, but Longbright had the lead. She closed in behind Masters as he blundered past the Cetole, the only surviving English musical instrument of the Middle Ages, resplendent in its glass case.

He was limping, clutching at his cracked rib cage, and she caught up with him in the clock room, by Congreve’s rollingball timepiece of 1810. He flung out his right arm with such suddenness that she was taken by surprise. The blow to her face knocked her head back, sending her to the floor, but she was up on her feet even before Renfield appeared in the doorway.

“No, Jack,” she told the sergeant. “He’s mine.”

Masters was more shocked than anyone when Longbright slammed into him, pressing down on the fractured ribs in his chest. Masters yelped painfully and fell back, hitting the case behind with his full weight. Inside, the bulbous black-and-white vase tilted onto its rim.

Longbright stepped back in horror. “Oh no,” she said quietly. “The Portland Vase. Not again.” The priceless antiquity had survived two millennia only to be shattered once before. In one of the greatest restoration feats ever attempted in modern times, it had been made whole once more. She watched the vase in horror as it rolled around on the edge of its base, teetering on its plinth.

The vase had passed its point of equilibrium, and tipped over.

The glass case was not wide enough to allow it to properly fall, and the vase was held at a forty-five-degree angle, settling safely as the wounded academic slid down to the floor and began to cry for his own shattered life.