The Victoria Vanishes (33 page)

'She might not have been meeting anyone,' said Longbright. 'She might simply have bec
ome frightened and gone away un
til everything has blown over.'

'No, she was definitely seeing a friend;
she told me so her-self.'

Everyone looked dumbfounded.
'What do you mean?' asked May.

'When I saw her in the pub she said something about going out on Saturday to meet one of her gentleman academics.' It was typical of Bryant to leave
out a piece of information any
one else would have felt compelled to pass on, but in this case he had only just remembered.

'You might have told us earlier,' said Longbright. 'You don't suppose she killed them, do you? And somehow blamed Pellew?'

'That makes no sense at all,' May told her.

'The DNA matches were perfect on both blood and sweat,' Kershaw reminded them, 'and the thumbprint matched Pellew's. We know it was him.
Quod erat demonstrandum.'

'But he was the symptom, not the cause,' Bryant insisted. 'The most dangerous element in this case was not Pellew at all, but the person who impelled his actions. I don't think we have a way of dealing with the matter now. We're simply not equipped.'

He needed to give the others some air. Clambering up and heading for the back door, he stepped outside, breathing deeply, standing beneath the eaves as rain fell in sheets before him.

Pellew and Quinten,
he thought.
There's really no connection between them. How could there be? Did Pellew really go to the Exmouth Arms, just to leave behind the clue in the photograph?
He had never come across a case remotely like this. Nothing hung together, none of it was linked.
Anthony Pellew. A research laboratory. A clinic for mental disorders. Five—no, seven—lonely, maternal women. The Ministry of Defence. If only my memory—

And then he remembered, something small, no more than a single sentence.
Thank God for Mrs Mandeville,
he thought.
I take it all back, your system works!

He shot back to the lounge much lighter in his step.

Arthur, we've been talking this round in circles,' said Longbright, 'and we're convinced that you must be able to remember something more about Jackie Quinten. Do you have any idea who it was she went to see?'

'Oh, I think I know now, I just don't understand why, or what her connection is with him.'

'Oh, for God's sake, Arthur, spit it out!' cried May finally.

Bryant widened his eyes. 'She went to find Dr Harold Masters.'

'Wait a minute, your old friend Masters, the lecturer, the one I met in that odd little tavern?'

'I'm afraid so. Anyone will tell you that academics have a tendency toward sociopathic behaviour, and I think my old friend has finally overstepped the line.'

'I don't understand,' May admitted. 'What has Masters got to do with Jackie Quinten?'

'That I'm not sure of yet. But I think he's got a lot to do with this,' Bryant told the others, dragging on his overcoat. 'And I can guess where to find Mrs Quinten. There's no time to waste. I've known Harold for years, if only in a sort of distant way, but I'm familiar with his habits. He's likely to be in one of three places. Colin and Meera, I need you to go to his house in Spitalfields. John and I will try the pub he told us he frequents. Janice, I'd like you and Sergeant Renfield to head for his office at the British Museum. And be careful. By now he may well be ready to kill in order to protect his secret.'

41

THE PATH OF HOPE

H

e 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 Ts and Hs.' '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 ex
amining the pub's woodwork until May pulled him inside.

'I think Jackie Quinten di
d discover that some of her col
leagues 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 establi
shment. She couldn't un
burden 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 miss
ing 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, grey-haired 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 orn
aments were unbreakable and usu
ally 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 w
hen he noticed the empty card
board 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 re
mains. 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 li
ft 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.

42

BLOOD MONEY

J
ackie Quinten had all but given up hope of finding Dr Harold Masters.

She had tried his darkened house in Spitalfields before heading back to the lecture hall in the British Museum, where an assistant had traced him to a rear section of the basement. Jackie was presented with instructions for finding Room 2135, but the building was a labyrint
h of identical corridors and of
fice doors. This was the backstage area of the British Museum that the public never saw: institutional, drab, unchanged in decades.

Overhead, neon strip-lights buzzed faintly behind dusty plastic panels. The last of the visitors had gone. Only the night guards and a few members of staff were left, but the museum was larger than a city block, and the handful who remained were hidden somewhere behind sound-deadening walls. The building that acted as a great repository of the past had defied many attempts to make it less oppressive, and only the dim-pled glass roof of the new Great Court was truly capable of raising spirits. Elsewher
e, in the narrow back channels,
morguelike chambers and suffocating windowless rooms, the weight of history bore down with a melancholy pressure that slowed movement and reduce
d all conversation to awed whis
pers.

Jackie had been feeling unsettled ever since she awoke that morning. She had discovered some days ago that Joanne Kellerman had died, and although it seemed a tragedy there was nothing to be done, for they had hardly been close friends. But in today's issue of
Hard News
she found two more names, Naomi Curtis and Carol Wynley, dead within a day of
one an
other. She scoured the newspapers looking for further articles, found one small piece in the
Evening Standard,
another in a lo
cal free sheet, but the rest of the new
s items were only con
cerned with a pretty young black girl who had died of unnatural causes in a pub Jackie had never heard of.