On the Loose (12 page)

It was perhaps appropriate, then, that the Peculiar Crimes Unit should find its spiritual home here, among the debris of the past and the construction of the future. Early on Monday
morning, Raymond Land placed Crippen in a box and reluctantly left his pleasant house in Putney to trudge his way across London. In truth, he was happy to be getting out from under his wife’s feet. Leanne found him more annoying than ever since he had been at home, which was odd because she was hardly ever at home herself. She was forever disappearing for one-on-one tuition with fitness trainers, makeover artists, yoga gurus and dance instructors, all of whom seemed to be suntanned males half her age. The fact that she needed to have her hair done before attending a pottery class mystified Land.

The acting temporary head of the PCU had been wooed with a promise of promotion; if this case was resolved quickly and quietly, he would finally be bumped up to Superintendent, a job title he would have been granted long ago if Bryant and May had not upset so many important people. Still, the thought of coming back to work was undignified. It was like making tearful farewells at a leaving party, only to have to come back and collect your scarf. Perhaps the investigation would fail and he would once more be released. Perhaps he could borrow some of Bryant’s little blue pills to get him through the week. So on Monday morning, Land stood before the black-painted door of Number 231 Caledonian Road, drew in a great lungful of traffic fumes, then rang the bell.

Janice Longbright dragged chairs along the warped corridors of the musty warehouse, trying to ignore the smell of old oysters, cloves and candlewax. She had spent Sunday arranging empty packing crates into makeshift desks, and trying to find places for everyone to sit. At least the electricity had been left on; the building had little natural light, and the agent had no desire to be sued by anyone taking a tumble in the gloom. April
had already prepared a briefing room, and had arranged for some secondhand computers to be delivered from Mornington Crescent later in the day, but the place was still a shambles. Bryant had demanded that the office be ready for immediate operation after the weekend, but there was too much to do.

‘What’s this I hear about you going on a date with Jack Ren-field?’ April asked Longbright as they shook open dust-crusted curtains to allow dirty sunlight into the room. ‘I thought nobody liked him.’

‘Nobody did, and I still don’t like the way he behaves, but I think working at the PCU is changing him for the better. Anyway, it wasn’t a proper date. We just went up Brick Lane for a Ruby.
¹
He’s still got a bloody great chip on his shoulder, but I can deal with that.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought he was your type.’

‘These days my type is any type who still likes my type,’ said Longbright, slamming down the chairs. ‘It’s been a while since I even bothered to look at a man. Jack hasn’t got a clue how to treat women. He hasn’t got an ounce of imagination. He’s more like an Alsatian than a human being.’

‘Then his ears have probably pricked up,’ said April, ‘because you’re talking about him enough.’

‘God, I am, aren’t I? I must be getting desperate.’

‘If you don’t mind me asking, how old are you?’ asked April, who thought she was young enough to get away with asking such things.

‘I’m old enough to have to memorise a date before which I’m not supposed to be able to remember anything. Let’s get on before I change my mind about coming back. You’ve got your grandfather’s cheek.’ She glanced around the chaotic room. ‘We
should give this space to John and Mr Bryant. It would be a good idea to have them working in the same room again. I wonder where Jack is. He’s supposed to be here giving us a hand this morning.’

‘There are rat droppings everywhere. And what
is
that revolting smell?’ April sniffed the stale air.

‘I dread to think,’ replied Longbright. ‘Something’s probably dead in here. I’m going to risk opening some windows. It feels like the place has been sealed for years.’

They set about making the warehouse fit for human habitation.

Leslie Faraday always looked forward to the end of his working week. By lunchtime on Saturday he had expected to have an empty In box and a desk swept clean of paperwork. Then his superior had called with instructions for handling the newly risen PCU, and the happy harmony of his weekend had collapsed abruptly. Now he found himself wrangling an alarming number of expenditure requests from the very detectives he thought he would never have to deal with again. Plus, Renfield was proving obstreperous.

‘You’re trained in surveillance,’ Faraday told the telephone wearily.
‘Surveillance
is the continual observation of a person or a group.
Spying
is the gathering of clandestine intelligence. So don’t think of it as spying; think of it as surveillance.’

‘I know the difference between them, Mr Faraday. I’m not an idiot.’

From what he had heard about the detective sergeant, Faraday thought he would have jumped at the chance, but Jack Renfield was audibly uncomfortable with his proposition. ‘All I’m asking you to do is keep a diary for the duration of the investigation,
Sergeant Renfield. At the end of each day, starting today, you will call me on this line, which is direct and secure, and inform me of anything out of the ordinary. This way, we can call a halt to any unauthorised procedures before they get out of hand.’

‘You’re asking me to rat on my colleagues.’

‘That’s a rather old-fashioned way of thinking. We’re all being monitored these days. If I wanted to, I could have CCTV cameras installed in the PCU’s offices.’
But you’re cheaper
, Faraday thought.

There was a time when Jack Renfield would have been happy to obey the instructions of the Home Office to the letter, but he had recently undergone a change of heart. He had only just gained the trust of the others in the unit. Now he would be risking his new career to please this porcine paper-shuffler. Renfield could be an obstinate man when he chose, and he chose to be so now.

‘What if I tell you I’m not prepared to do it?’ he asked, already sensing the answer.

‘Then we will have to question your suitability for the PCU, and return you to the Met.’

‘You know I can’t go back there. I guess you’re also aware that the CID turned me down.’

‘Yes, I heard you rather burned your bridges when you joined the Peculiar Crimes Unit. So I take it you’ll accept this task?’

‘You’re not leaving me much choice,’ snapped Renfield, hanging up.
But I’ll do it in my own way
, he decided, astonished by his new allegiance to the unit.

¹
Ruby Murray=curry.

15
VENGEANCE MADE MANIFEST

H
e never puts his bloody tools away,’ Clive the chief electrician complained as he rolled up the heavy red plastic cables and kicked them across the floor. He checked his watch: 7:45 p.m. The place had been deserted since one minute past six.
They couldn’t have cleared the decks of the Titanic this quickly
, he thought. That was the trouble with the lazy sods that management was hiring these days. No pride in their workmanship. It was a bloody disgrace. It was a matter of principle in Clive’s family to work hard and joylessly until the day you dropped dead.

‘From Essex, isn’t he, your friend?’ said Constantin, his trainee.

‘What’s that got to bloody do with it?’

‘They are all cowboys, the ones from Essex.’

‘What do you know? You’re from bloody Romania.’

‘We are a hardworking people. When you have so little, it makes you work. Your friend has too much, I think.’

‘Can you stop calling him
my bloody friend?’
The two electricians were clearing up for the night. The central block of the building that would eventually become the shopping mall now had power. Three of the floors were temporarily lit, dimmed at night for the sake of the council flats opposite. Constantin unplugged
the extension cords and carefully set them aside. Clive cut the remaining spotlights, and the floor was suddenly darker than the surrounding land, so that they had to be careful reaching the open staircase to the site exit.

Two hundred and seventy men and women were currently working full-time on the Royal Midland Quadrangle, a retail complex being constructed around a raised concrete platform that would form the centrepiece of the new town to the north of King’s Cross station. Tonight, apart from two security guards, Clive and Constantin were the only workers still left on site.

When Constantin stepped outside and found himself facing the railway embankment, he was aware of another human presence standing nearby. He could feel someone watching him. He scanned the dug-up fields, the park for the earthmovers, the construction-site cabins, but nothing moved in them.

When he turned back to the embankment, it seemed that his worst childhood fear had sprung to life. A great half-human creature rose on its spread haunches against the deepening orange skyline. It slowly raised its glinting antlered head until it seemed to be staring directly at him. The electrician let out a groan of fear and backed away.

‘Hey, Dinu,’ Clive called, using the diminutive version of Constantin’s name, ‘look where you’re going.’ But it was too late. The Romanian boy was so entranced by the creature standing on the ridge of earth before him that he did not remember the newly dug basement at his back, and fell into darkness.

Ten thirty-five p.m. Another night, another party.

Izabella and Piotr had been going out for over three months, and had never slept together. Izabella had no idea what had gone wrong, but they had passed the point where they might
have fallen into bed, and had now drifted into a limbo world of friendship. She still fancied him, craved him even, but it was difficult to bring the subject back now that it had gone. She was Polish and smart and thought too much about what boys wanted. He was a dirt-common Russian from the suburbs, weighed down with his father’s new money, and he enjoyed playing the field.

On that night, they too saw the horned man. He was draped in deerskins and wearing metallic stag antlers that shone in the streetlamps. He stood against the low wall of the bridge across the canal, sometimes moving out of sight when a car pulled up at the traffic lights.

They were picking their way over the field from Battlebridge Road to York Way, going for a drink before heading for the Keys club, and the stag-man was handing out flyers; several had been tossed aside and were tumbling away toward the embankment. Izabella had thought nothing of it. So many flyers were handed out, usually at the end of the night. She picked one up and tried to read it in the dim light: a horned skull and some kind of poem. The printing was poor and she could only catch the last four lines.

Long have two springs in dull stagnation slept,
But taught at length by subtle art to flow,
They rise; forth from oblivion’s bed they rise;
And manifest their vengeance to mankind
.

What was it advertising, a Goth pub? There was nothing printed on the back. The stag-man was still there when they left the Keys several hours later, and this time his appearance was more memorable, perhaps because he stood out in stark silhouette
against the electric darkness. From the way he was weaving about beside the bridge, he appeared to have been drinking.

She recalled thinking that the sky was strange, a sickly ochre reflection of the radiant city beneath. The air was cold and gritty, and left a cuprous tang in the mouth, like being near a steelworks or in the proximity of blood. The night was not right. They had argued over something ridiculous—a spilled drink—and left. A lone girl was tottering ahead of them, fawn-thin legs in a too-short dress. She looked awkward, frozen and friendless, as if, leached of life and colour, she might fall over and expire at any moment.

Izabella was still sniping at Piotr on their way to the night bus stop, a hectoring banter they had evolved when they were feeling frazzled and fractious. She saw the thin girl approaching the bridge from the corner of her eye, saw her long black hair whip up around her dark eyes, and then the stag-man was there as well, towering over her. Backlit by the canal lamps behind the bridge, Izabella saw his antlers glitter and fracture the light. She heard the girl scream or laugh hysterically, but the sound was snatched away by the wind. She watched in shock as he lifted her up, placing her under one arm, and seemed to drop beneath the bridge.

By the time Izabella reached the spot with Piotr, there was no sign of either of them. No ripple on the petrol-iridescent surface of the canal, only the cold breeze from the tunnel and a fading sigh in the trees, as if the pair had evaporated into the thickening mist like a pair of exorcised ghosts.

16
FIRST DAY

I
spent two hours at something called the King’s Cross Police Shop in the early hours of this morning, waiting to be seen, and after I got to make a report they made a phone call and finally sent me to you, only you weren’t open, ‘Izabella told DS Janice Longbright. All I wanted to do was explain what I saw, okay?’ She took a look around the room and wrinkled her nose, trying to make sense of it. ‘This isn’t a police station. What is this place?’

‘We’re in the process of moving in,’ said Longbright. ‘We’re a specialist unit.’

‘What do you specialise in, pest control? I just saw something in the hall that looked like a rat.’

Smart mouth
, thought Longbright.
She’ll make a good witness
. ‘Yeah, we have a few of those. Look, I’ve read your statement and I know you’re telling the truth about the man you saw, but are you sure he actually abducted someone?’

‘I was with my—’ She stopped herself. ‘A friend. He saw it, too. The dressed-up guy, he was pretty big—’