The Victoria Vanishes (12 page)

When Mrs Roquesby began to slide majestically from her stool, Lenska, the barmaid, thought she would snap awake, but she kept going all the way to the carpet, landing hard on her knees. Running around from behind the counter, Lenska pulled at the lady, but was unable to wake her. Mrs Roquesby's head fell back and her wig slid off, revealing the sparse, wispy grey hair of a head that had undergone cancer therapy.

Lenska loosened the collar of her blouse and tried to find a heartbeat. She looked around for help, but the bar had cleared since she had rung last orders. A thick yellow froth was leaking from the mouth of the woman in her arms. Lenska knew a little about first aid, but this was beyond her, so she laid the woman down and ran to call for an ambulance.

Dan Banbury saw the world from a different perspective, usually starting at floor level. Gravity required everything to fall. Dust and skin flakes, hairs and sweat drops, everything sifted down through the atmosphere to land on the ground. Any movement stirred up the air, shifting molecules in swirls and eddies that resembled hurricane patterns on weather charts, and tumbling particles cascaded from one resting place to the next. You could track them if you were able to define the direction of the air current. Sometimes particle movement would lead you back towards the source of a disturbance;
it was like hunting in reverse.

Banbury's long-suffering wi
fe was all too aware of his en
thusiasm for exploring the detritus of death, as it took the form of ruined trousers and jacket sleeves, and since her hus-band hated buying new clothes, she was forever racing to the dry cleaners during her lunch break. At that very moment, he was sprawled on the carpet of
the Old Bell public house, push
ing strips of sticky tape along the underside of the counter, which appeared not to have been cleaned since Boswell propped up the bar.

'I'm glad you managed to keep Bryant away for once,' he muttered through clenched teeth, for he was holding a pencil torch in his mouth. 'It's a mystery how he always manages to make a mess of any crime scene.'

'He's gone to see someone about improving his memory,' John May explained. 'He forgot the urn containing Finch's ashes, and now he's feeling guilty. He got a crack on the noggin and lost his memory a while
back. I'm wondering if he's suf
fered some kind of a relapse. Are you getting anything down there?'

'Far too much, that's the problem. It'll take chromatography to sort out the tangle of dead cells that have drifted down here. Forensically speaking, this sort of place is my worst nightmare. Dog hairs, crisps, meat pies, beer, mud flecks, skin, mites, a few mouse droppings, it's like Piccadilly Circus.'

'You're sure she was alone?' May asked the barmaid.

'She ordered a drink and sat in the corner,' said Lenska. 'I can show you the receipt.'

'So she was here by herself for about forty minutes. Look like she was waiting for someone, did she?'

'Maybe, I don't know. I think I saw her check her watch a couple of
times.'

'And she didn't speak to anyone else.'

'She was reading a copy of the
Metro
—actually, there was someone else. Some guy talked to her. He ordered two drinks, so I guess he bought her one.'

'What was he like?'

'I wasn't really paying attention, early thirties maybe, I didn't really pay attention.'

'You wouldn't be able to recognise him again?'

'God, no. I didn't register his face at all—he was just one of those blokes you always get in a pub like this, sort of invisible.'

'You didn't see him leave?'

'No. I had to go downstairs to change barrels. When I came back up he'd gone, and she was alone. Right after that she fell off her stool. I thought she was drunk.'

'If it's the same MO, Kershaw reckons he'll find traces of benzodiazepine again,' said May. 'She had a red mark at the base of her skull like a sting, possibly from a needle. Whoever did this has found an effective method of disposal, and is probably planning to stick with it.'

'Interesting choice of phrase there,' said Banbury.
'Disposal. That's what it feels like, doesn't it? He can't be getting sexual gratification, and presumably
he's not gaining anything finan
cially from his victims, so why is he doing it? Plus, he's picked the worst possible place to get away with murder, acting inside a roomful of strangers. I'm no psychologist, but you don't think that's it, do you?'

'An act of exhibitionism, tak
ing a risk in front of the punt
ers? Possible, I suppose. Murder is an intensely revealing act, best performed in privacy. Seems a bit perverse to stage it as some kind of public performance. Besides, do people pay much attention to each other in pubs? You tend to concentrate on the friends you've come out with. I'm sure if Bryant was here he'd regale us with a potted history of public murder. She's roughly the same age as th
e other two. Is the killer look
ing to take revenge on a mother substitute? What were they doing drinking alone?'

'You always get one or two by themselves in London pubs. That's the difference betwe
en a pub and a bar,' Banbury ex
plained. 'Pubs are about conviviality and community, meeting mates. Bars are for being alone in, or for meeting a stranger. So why would he pick his victims in the former? It doesn't add up.'

'Perhaps the killer has a mother or an older sister who was a drunk,' Kershaw suggested. 'If he's in his early thirties, she'd probably be in her fifties. Are the victims all similar physical types?'

'Not at all. This one was Jocelyn Roquesby, fifty-six, a former copy typist and human resources officer, divorced, one daughter, no current partner, lived alone in a flat in Holloway. She had just finished a bout of treatment for breast cancer. According to the daughter she liked a drink, but never went into a pub alone unless she was meeting someone. Also, the chemotherapy made her sick if she drank. So who was she here to meet?'

Meanwhile, April had gone to the Devereux on the mission of locating Oswald Finch's remains.

'You were working behind the bar on the night of Mr Finch's wake, weren't you?' she reminded the barmaid in the upper bar.
'If you cashed up the till, you must have also cleared the counter, so you'd remember if there was something as odd as a funeral urn left behind on it.'

'I told your boss, there was nothing left behind,' declared the girl, who regarded all men over thirty with narrow eyes and a cold heart. 'People leave their briefcases, umbrellas and hand-bags here all the time, but I'd have remembered an urn.'

'So someone took it with them.'

And it had to be one of your lot, because you had the room to yourselves for most of the evening. Your Peculiar Crimes Unit have a reputation for being a bunch of practical jokers, you know. The manageress warned me
. Your unit has had par
ties here before. Somebody left an inflatable sheep in the ladies' toilet last time, frightened the life out of the cleaner.'

'Not much of a practical joke, is it?' said April.
'Swiping the ashes of a dead colleague.'

'Depends on what they're going to do with them,' said the barmaid, with a disapproving sniff.

15

VISIBLE EVIL

R

aymond Land tipped his armchair forward, cleared a steamed-up arc of glass and peered down into the street. Was there anything in the world more miserable, h
e won
dered, than a wet Wednesday morning in Mornington Crescent? Especially when you
felt you were no longer the cap
tain of your destiny, more a third mate dragged in the under-tow of someone else's foundering vessel?

'You and your partner like to work in a pincer movement, don't you?' he complained. 'First John creeps up on me with dire warnings, and now you. Three dead, at the very least! If the Home Office get wind that the proles think it's not safe to venture into a public house without risking death, our entire national fabric will collapse. The idea of a Britain without any-one in the boozers is unimaginable.'

Bryant lounged back in Land's sofa and felt about in his pocket. 'There's no doubt about it now, cheeky chops. Three murders in London pubs, all within a mile of each other, and this new woman, Roquesby, pushes the affair much further into the public arena
because her former husband was
security-cleared for some kind of government work. I think there's something really big going on here. Don't tell me we can't get the case prioritised now.'

'That's not an issue.' Land continued searching the street below, as if expecting to find the rest of his thought there. 'I just worry.'

'Good Lord, I know articulacy has never been your forte, Raymond, but at least take a stab at piecing together an entire sentence.'

'I'm not sure the unit is up to handling something like this. It's a potential minefield.'

'What are you talking about?' Bryant dug the little silver box from his pocket and flicked it open. 'Don't worry, I haven't taken up cocaine, I'd thought I'd try snuff, seeing as nobody will allow me to light my pipe.'

'Well, suppose you fail to stop this lunatic, and in the process undermine national co
nfidence in the security of pub
lic places?'

'You think you'll be given the order of the boot, don't you?' Bryant sniffed, then sneezed abundantly. 'This is no time to start worrying about your frankly moribund career, old sausage; there are greater issues at stake. Suppose your wife was to walk into a public house by herself for a quiet drink and a gander at the papers?'

'Leanne would never do such a thing,' said Land indignantly.

'Far from what I've heard, but we'll let that pass. Imagine how much you'd worry for her
safety, then magnify that a mil
lion times across the country, you see my point? When nobody feels protected, the economy simply starts to unravel. Look at the terrible side effects of
bombing campaigns against civil
ians. The public house is virtually the country's last unassail-able place, now that so many churches lock their doors. For hundreds of years it has occupied a unique position in our culture. What's the one thing every pub is supposed to have?'

'I don't know.' Land scratched at his chin. 'At least two brands of bad lager?'

'A welcoming hearth created by centuries of tradition. Wasn't it Hilaire Belloc who once said "When you have lost your inns drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England"?'

Land looked back blankly and shrugged.

'Pubs tend to stay constant because they're rebuilt on the same plot of land. The extraordinary thing is that brewers don't keep historical information on their own properties, so histories often only exist in the form of hand
ed-down anec
dotes. That's why they're different from any other type of building around us. The public houses of London are its key-stones. Good Lord, the Romans brought them here two thou-sand years ago and put vine leaves outside to advertise their wares;
no wonder they occupy such an important—'

'Look here, Bryant, don't give me one of your historical lectures on the subject of beer, I'm
interested in catching a crimi
nal, nothing else.'

'But that's my point,
vieux haricot,
you can't catch the criminal if you don't understand his
milieu.

'Yes, you can,' snapped Land, irritated. 'You can catch him by bringing in the victims' relatives and shouting at them in a windowless room for a few hours. And don't throw words like
milieu
at me. Renfield's going to be a breath of fresh air in this place. He won't stand for any of this nonsense, I can tell you. He's out there right now, tra
cking down contacts and conduct
ing doorstep interviews. He
grills
people, makes the innocent feel miserable and uncomfortable until they provide him with accidental information.'

'General Pinochet did that;
i
t's called torture and has noth
ing to do with police duties.'

'Listen, I know footslogging has become unfashionable, I know it's all computers and DNA matches now, but some-times a bit of shoe-leather and the odd threat of a slap is needed, and this is one of those times.'

'After all these years, you still don't understand how we operate, do you?' said Bryant. 'It's a complete mystery to you, isn't it?'

'Well, no, not exactly,' stalled Land. 'I know you use various undesirables to give you information and that you wander off the beaten track a lot, that you won't stic
k to established proce
dures and that you once threw a sheep carcass out the window of your old office at Bow Street to measure skull fractures. I know your methods are obscu
re, unsavoury and probably ille
gal, but somehow you seem to get the job done, but I don't know...'Land
looked
up
and realised he
was talking
to him
self.
'Where are you going?'