The Victoria Vanishes

∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧

6

Observation

Arthur Bryant cursed himself. I should have handled the matter of my resignation better, he thought. After all these years of working with John, I should at least have taken him into my confidence first.

But John May had always been able to talk him out of making sudden foolhardy decisions. His was the healing voice of reason, a counterbalance to the maddening pandemonium of Bryant’s mind. John might protest, but he could survive perfectly well on his own. People enjoyed his company and opened up to him because he didn’t do anything that made them nervous. Right from the outset of their partnership, when the pair had launched a murder investigation at the Palace Theatre and solved the Shepherd’s Market diamond robbery, Bryant had been upsetting applecarts and overturning the status quo while his partner followed behind, smoothing raised hackles and restoring order. Across the years, from the tracking of the Deptford Demon to the final unmasking of the Leicester Square Vampire, this out-of-kilter relationship had allowed them to resolve a thousand cases great and small. But everything came to an end, and knowing when to leave was crucial.

Now Oswald Finch was gone, and soon they too would pass into oblivion, to be faintly recalled as members of the old school of police work, a pair of characters, representatives of a classic style of investigation that had since passed into obsolescence. Would anything about them be remembered, other than a few oft-told anecdotes, funny stories to be trotted out wherever old men gathered in pubs? Had they really achieved anything at all, changed any laws, improved the lot of Londoners? Or would they soon be as forgotten as old music hall stars, the pair of them described as the Flanagan & Allan of the Met?

Bryant raised his head from his scarf and looked about. He was passing along the cream stucco edge of Coram’s Fields, the seven-acre park on the site of the old Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury which no adult could enter unless in the company of a child. The wind was rising, to clatter the leaves of the high oaks and plane trees above him. At 10:40 p.m. Bloomsbury was almost deserted, but even during the day there was hardly anyone around. The area between Gower Street and Gray’s Inn Road remained reticent and dignified, seemingly trapped in an earlier era between world wars. There were still a few indifferent secondhand bookshops housed in its mansion buildings, barber shops and fish bars left over from the 1930^s, corner pubs that faded back from the street in a deliberate attempt to shun passing trade.

He crossed the top of Marchmont Street into Tavistock Place, feeling his legs twinge in protest as he climbed the kerb. There would be plenty of cabs on Euston Road. Cutting across the pavement in the direction of Judd Street, he found himself in a road he did not know, little more than an alley that opened out into a dog-leg. The sound of traffic had all but disappeared. There was only the wind in the trees, and the distant twitter of birds who had mistaken the perpetually sulphurous skies for dawn.

The effect of the alcohol in his system was starting to evaporate. Untangling his distance spectacles from the other pairs that rattled loose in his pocket, he wrapped the flexible metal arms around his ears and examined the street ahead.

So Raymond Land thought he had failing powers of observation, did he? He squinted at the narrow pavement with its high redbrick wall, the rustling cherry trees, the old-fashioned gas lamps that had been wired to hold electric bulbs. The jaundiced lighting gave the street an air of melancholy neglect, like a yellowing newspaper photograph found beneath the floorboards of a derelict house.

Note what you see, he told himself. Remember how you used to do it when you were a young man.

Okay, the street had been severed at the far end by a grim granite office building, the other side of which presumably faced the hellish traffic of Euston Road. Several houses had been torn down – they had probably survived wartime bomb damage to last for another two or three decades – and replaced with council flats. Their windows clumsily referenced the design of the surrounding Victorian terraces, but everything about the newer properties was cheaper and smaller.

A single original house, number 6A, had been left behind. Tall and narrow, gapped on either side, it had been stranded alone in the present day like an elderly aunt at a funeral.

A slender street to the left: Argyle Walk. An alleyway leading off to the right, with black traffic barriers raised through its centre, copies of a traditional design; once, the city had found new lives for its naval gun barrels, upending them in the streets and inserting red cannonballs in the mouths to form bollards.

Above and behind the buildings, the sallow, ghostly clock on the Gothic tower of St Pancras Station floated like a second moon.

What else could he discern?

A pale keystone over a door, initials entwined in a county badge, a concave shell-hood above another entrance, a feature used by early Georgians to provide protection from inclement weather, although this one was an Edwardian copy.

A carved blind window, created to provide balance for other openings in the side wall of the terrace. Or perhaps it had been bricked in because of William III’s window tax.

A black-painted fresh air inlet with a grating on its top, like a ship’s periscope, designed to prevent vacuums occurring in the sewage system below the street.

The fragile lacework of a wrought-iron ornamental balcony, complete with a curving zinc hood.

A square iron lid recessed into the flagstones that read Patent Air-Tight-Flap, the cover plate for a coal-hole which would have been converted into a basement after the arrival of central heating.

A cast-iron railing of daisies and ivy leaves, one which had survived the mass removal of ironwork during the Second World War. Britons had been told that their railings, along with their saucepans, would be melted down ‘for the war effort’ in what was largely a propaganda exercise.

What else?

A door-knocker consisting of a hand holding a wreath, painted over so many times that the form had been all but lost. Carpenters, metalworkers and battalions of servants would have ensured that these domestic items remained in perfect restoration. Now no-one had the skills, and so they were scoured into oblivion by successive tenants.

A pair of small stone lions stood on a balustrade. Once, the lion could have been regarded as the architectural symbol of London, the leonine essence distorted into decorative devices throughout the metropolis, sprawled in sunlight on the Embankment side of Somerset House, winged and majestic at Holborn Viaduct.

A corner pub, The Victoria Cross, with a sign above it depicting its namesake, the highest recognition for bravery in the face of the enemy that could be awarded to any member of the British and Commonwealth armed forces. The decoration took the form of a cross pattée, bearing a crown surmounted by a lion, and the inscription ‘FOR VALOUR’. Beneath the sign were opaque lower windows, gold letters in a spotted mirror panel establishing the types of beers served and the foundation date. A deserted bar unit, mirrored and shelved, where bottles of whisky and gin remained in places they had doubtless occupied for decades. Above, an old clock was set at the wrong time, seven-fifteen.

One expected to find untouched areas like this in Kensington and Chelsea, where old money had preserved past features that the poor were resigned to lose, but Bryant was surprised to see that parts of Bloomsbury, the West End’s shabbily genteel cousin, were still so complete. That’s my trouble, he thought. I always see things, not people.

A single pedestrian coasted the corner ahead of him. Bryant narrowed his eyes and conducted the same observational survey on her. She was between forty-five and fifty, and would once have seemed old, branded invisible and treated brusquely by the inhabitants of the Victorian buildings around them. “She could very well pass for forty-three in the dusk with the light behind her,” W.S. Gilbert had written of an attorney’s daughter in Trial by Jury. An unmemorable face, rounded and fattened by time, lined a little by care, or what was now termed stress. Mousey hair cropped close to her jaw-line, makeup a little too thick, small eyes downcast, head lost in thought. Her raincoat had seen better days, but her shoes were polished and of good quality. The heels suggested that she was conscious of her height, for she was small and broad-hipped. She looked like a council official. A bag on her shoulder, brown and shapeless, bulging with – what did women take with them these days? Documents, most likely, if she was returning from working late in an office. A drink after work, or rather drinks, for she appeared a little unsteady on those heels. Somebody’s going-away party, a birthday celebration. A mother, a wife, going home late and alone after a hard day, heading in the wrong direction for King’s Cross station.

Bryant watched as she stopped and looked up at the pub sign, then negotiated the kerb to the entrance. He slowed to watch through the window as she headed to the counter, and a barman emerged to greet her, appearing like an actor catching his cue on a stage set.

There was nothing more to be noted here. It crossed his mind that he was becoming less observant because there was less of interest to see in London these days. He needed the lights and noise of the station, where one could witness meetings and farewells, the discovered, the lost and the confounded. That was the best way to check whether his powers were truly waning. But he was tired, and as he passed into the covered alley that led out onto Euston Road, he decided to find a cab. It had been a long, exhausting day, one that marked an end, and a new beginning that would not involve him. Appointments, resignations, speeches and arguments. And on top of all this, he had been entrusted with the ashes of his old colleague.

The ashes. Only now did he realise that he had no idea what had happened to the aluminium urn containing the remains of Oswald Finch.