Christopher Fowler Read online

  Bryant pottered over to the sooty, rain-streaked window and tapped it. ‘He’s still out there somewhere,’ he warned, ‘and now he’ll do one of two things. Having had his fingers badly burned, he’ll either vanish completely, never to be seen again, or he’ll returneth like a dog to vomit, just to taunt me further. Proverbs chapter twenty-six, verse eleven.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said May. ‘Why are you taking this so personally?’

  ‘Because I’m the one he’s after. DuCaine just got in the way.’ Bryant had never exhibited much empathy with his co-workers, but this struck May as callous even by his standards.

  ‘Liberty DuCaine’s parents have just lost a son, Arthur, so perhaps you could keep such thoughts to yourself. Don’t turn this into a private feud. It concerns all of us.’ May rose and left the room in annoyance.

  Bryant was sorry that the lad had died—of course he was upset—but nothing could bring DuCaine back now, and the only way they could truly restore order was by catching the man responsible for his murder. With a sigh he popped open his tobacco tin and stuffed a pipe with ‘Old Arabia’ Navy Rough-Cut Aromatic Shag. His gut told him that Mr Fox would quickly resurface, not because the killer had any romantic longing to be stopped, but because his rage would make him careless. His sense of respect had been compromised, and he was determined to make the police pay for cornering him.

  I’ll get you, sonny, Bryant thought, because I owe it not just to DuCaine, but to every innocent man, woman and child out there who could become another of your statistics. You’ll turn up again, soon enough. You’ve tasted blood now. The need to let others see how big you’ve grown will drive you back out into the light. When that happens, I’ll have you.

  Unfortunately, Bryant tried to avoid reminding himself, it would need to happen this week.

  TWO

  Choreography

  DC Colin Bimsley and DC Meera Mangeshkar were watching the train station. They had no idea what their suspect might look like, or any reason to assume he would appear suddenly before them on the concourse. But Mr Fox knew his terrain well and rarely left it, so there was a chance that even now he might be wandering through the Monday morning commuters. And as the St Pancras International surveillance team was more concerned with watching for terrorist suspects after a weekend of worrying intelligence, it fell to the two detective constables to keep an eye out for their man. At least it was warm and dry under the great glass canopy.

  Each circuit of the huge double-tiered terminus took half an hour. Bimsley and Mangeshkar wore jeans and matching black nylon jackets with badges, the closest anyone at the PCU could come to an official uniform, but Bimsley was a foot taller than his partner, and they made an incongruous pair.

  ‘Down there.’ Meera pointed, leaning over the balustrade. ‘That’s the third time he’s crossed between the bookshop and the florist.’

  ‘You can’t arrest someone for browsing,’ Bimsley replied. ‘Do you want to go and look?’

  ‘It’s worth checking out.’ Meera led the way to the stairs. Colin checked his watch: 8:55 A.M. The Eurostar was offloading passengers from Brussels and Paris, the national rail services brought hordes of commuters from the Midlands and the north, the tubes were disgorging suburbanites and reconnecting them to overland services. Charity workers were stopping passers-by; others were handing out free newspapers, packets of tissues and bottles of water; a sales team was attempting to sell credit services; the shops on the ground-floor concourse were all open for business—and there was a French cheese fair; tricolour stalls had been set out down the centre of the covered walkway. Travellers seemed adept at negotiating these obstacles while furling their wet umbrellas and manhandling their cases through the crowds. Was a murderer moving among them?

  ‘There he goes again,’ said Meera.

  ‘You’re right, he just bought a newspaper and a doughnut, let’s nick him. Uh-oh, look out, he’s stopped by the florist. I’ll make a note of that; considering the purchase of carnations. Definitely dodgy.’

  ‘Suppose it’s Mr Fox and you just let him walk away?’

  ‘You want to call it? I mean, if we’re going to start stop-and-search procedures down here, we’d better have some clearly defined criteria.’

  ‘You can come up with something later—let’s take him.’ Meera paced up through the crowd, then stopped by the French market, puzzled, looking back. ‘Colin?’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Something weird.’ She pointed to the far side of the concourse. There half a dozen teenagers had suddenly stopped and spaced themselves six feet apart from each other. Bimsley shrugged and pointed to the other wall, where the same thing was happening. ‘What’s going on?’ Meera asked.

  All around them, people were freezing in their tracks and slowly turning.

  ‘They’re all wearing phone earpieces,’ Meera pointed out.

  Now almost everyone in the centre of the station was standing still and facing front. Beneath the station clock, two young men in grey hooded sweatshirts set an old-fashioned ghetto blaster on a café table and hit Play.

  As the first notes of ‘Rehab’ by Amy Winehouse blasted out, the two young men raised their right arms and spun in tight circles. Everyone on the concourse copied them. The choreography had been rehearsed online until it was perfect. The station had suddenly become a dance floor.

  ‘It’s a flash mob,’ Meera called wearily. The Internet phenomenon had popularised the craze for virally organised mass dancing in public places, but she had assumed it had fallen out of fashion a couple of years ago.

  ‘I took part in a flash-freeze in Victoria Station once,’ Bimsley told her, watching happily. ‘Four hundred of us pretending to be statues. It’s just a bit of harmless fun.’

  ‘Well, our man’s using it to cover his escape.’

  ‘Meera, he’s not our man, he’s just a guy buying a newspaper and catching a train.’

  But the diminutive DC did not hear. She was already running across the concourse, weaving a path between the performers. The song could be heard bleeding from hundreds of earpieces as the entire station danced. The tune hit its chorus—they tried to make me go to rehab, but I said no, no, no—and the choreography grew more complex. Colin could no longer see who Meera was chasing. Even the transport police were standing back and watching the dancers with smiles on their faces.

  As the song reached its conclusion there was a concerted burst of leaping and twirling. Then, just as if the music had never played, everyone went back to the business of the day, catching trains and heading to the office. Meera was glaring at Colin through the crowds, furious to find that her target had disappeared. But just as Meera started walking toward Colin, someone grabbed at his shoulder.

  Colin turned to find himself facing a portly, florid-faced businessman who was slapping the pockets of his jacket and shouting incoherently. ‘Hey, calm down, tell me the problem,’ Bimsley advised.

  ‘You are police, yes?’ screeched the man. ‘I have been robbed. Just now. I was crossing station and this stupid dancing begins, and I stop to watch because I cannot cross, you know, and my bag is taken right from my hand.’

  ‘Do we look like the police?’ Colin asked Meera via his headset.

  Her derisive snort crackled back. ‘What else could you be?’

  ‘Did you see who took it?’ Bimsley asked the businessman. ‘What was the bag like?’

  ‘Of course I did not see! You think I talk to you if I see? I would stop him! Is bag, black leather bag, is all. I am Turkish Cypriot, on my way to Paris. The receipts are in my bag.’

  ‘What receipts?’

  ‘My restaurants! Six restaurants! All the money is in cash.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘You think I have time to count it? This is not my job. Maybe sixty thousand, maybe seventy thousand pounds.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Bimsley, ‘you’re telling me you were carrying over sixty thousand on you—in cash?’

  ‘O
f course is cash. I always do this on same Monday every month.’

  ‘Always the same day?’ Bimsley was incredulous. How could anyone be so stupid?

  ‘Yes, and is perfectly safe because no-one knows I carry this money, how could they?’

  ‘Well, what about somebody from one of your restaurants?’

  ‘You tell me I should not trust my own countrymen? My own flesh and blood? Is always safe and I have no trouble, is routine, is what I always do. But today the music start up and everybody dance and someone snatch the bag from me. Look.’ The irate businessman held up his left wrist. Dangling from it was a length of plastic cable, snipped neatly through. ‘I want to know what you will do about this,’ the man shouted, waving his hairy wrist in Bimsley’s perplexed face. ‘You must get me back my money!’

  Meera came back to his side. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Colin said, sighing. ‘Just another bloody Monday morning in King’s Cross.’

  THREE

  Parasitical

  Bryant stared down into the sodden streets. It was hard to detect any sign of spring on such a shabby day. At least the doxies and dealers had been swept out of the area as the fashionable bars moved in. Eventually the raucous beckoning of hookers would be recalled only by the few remaining long-term residents. Such was life in London, where a year of fads and fancies could race past in a week. Who had time to remind themselves of the past anymore?

  Maybe it’s just me, thought Bryant, but I can see everything, stretching back through time like stepping-stones, just as if I’d been there.

  No-one now remembered Handel playing above the coal-shop in Clerkenwell’s Jerusalem Passage, or Captain Kidd being hanged from the gibbet in Wapping until the Thames had immersed him three times. Thousands of histories were scrubbed from the city’s face each year. Once you could feel entire buildings lurch when the printing presses of Fleet Street began to roll. Once the wet cobbles of Snow Hill impeded funeral corteges with such frequency that it became a London tradition for servicemen to haul hearses with ropes. For every riot there was a romance, for every slaying, a birth; the ancient city had a way of smoothing out the rumples of the passing years.

  The elderly detective tossed the remains of his tea over the filthy window and cleared a clean spot with his sleeve. He saw coffee shops and tofu bars where once prophets and anarchists had held court.

  The recent change in King’s Cross had been startling, but even with buildings scrubbed and whores scattered, the area had retained enough of its ruffian character not to feel like everywhere else. Bryant belonged here. He basked in the neighbourhood’s sublime indifference to the passing of time and people.

  Less than a week to solve a case. Well, they had risen to such challenges before. Carefully skirting the alarming hole in his office floor, Bryant donned his brown trilby, his serpentine green scarf and his frayed gabardine mackintosh, and headed out into the morning murk. At least it felt good to be back in harness. As he left the warehouse that currently housed the Peculiar Crimes Unit he almost skipped across the road, although to be fair he had to, as a bus was bearing down on him.

  Arthur Bryant: Have you met him before? If not, imagine a tortoise minus its shell, thrust upright and stuffed into a dreadful suit. Give it glasses, false teeth and a hearing aid, and a wispy band of white hair arranged in a straggling tonsure. Fill its pockets with rubbish: old pennies and scribbled notes, boiled sweets and leaky pens, a glass model of a Ford Prefect filled with Isle of Wight sand, yards of string, a stuffed mouse, some dried peas. And fill its head with a mad scramble of ideas: the height of the steeple at St Clement Danes, the tide table of the Thames, the dimensions of Waterloo Station, and the MOs of murderers. On top of all this, add the enquiring wonder of a ten-year-old boy. Now you have some measure of the man.

  Bryant jammed the ancient trilby harder on his bald pate and fought the rain on the Caledonian Road. Typically, he was moving in the wrong direction to the elements. He seemed to spend his life on an opposite path, a disreputable old salmon always determined to head upstream.

  As he marched, he tabulated life’s annoyances in escalating order of gravity. He was sleeping badly again. He had forgotten to take his blue pills. His left leg hurt like hell. He had six days in which to close the Unit’s cases, and no money to pay his staff. He was likely to be thrown out of his home any day now. A good officer had died in the line of duty. And he had a murderer on the loose who was likely to return and commit further acts of violence. Not bad for a Monday morning. With a gargoyle grimace, he looked up at the rain-stained clouds above and muttered a very old and entirely unprintable curse.

  Everyone talks about the unpredictable weather in London, but it actually has a faintly discernible pattern. At this time of the year, the second week in May, caught between the dissipation of winter and the failed nerve of spring, the days were drab, damp and undecided, the evenings clear and graceful, swimming pool blue melting to heliotrope, banded altostratus clouds forming with the setting of the sun. You can forgive a lot when a dim day has a happy ending.

  On this Monday morning, though, there was no hint of the fine finish yet to come. Bryant made his way to the threadbare ground-floor flat in Margery Street where their escaped assassin, Mr Fox, had been living.

  The building was a pebble-dashed two-storey block set at an angle to the road, possessing all the glamour of an abandoned army barracks. Dan Banbury, the Unit’s Crime Scene Manager, had already been at work here over the weekend, tying off the apartment into squares for forensic analysis. Bryant stepped over the red cords in his disposable shoe covers, but managed to lose one and dislodge a stack of magazines on the way.

  ‘Just sit over there on the sofa, can you?’ Banbury snapped irritably. ‘Stay somewhere I can see you. You’re supposed to wear a disposable suit.’

  ‘I am. Got it from a secondhand stall on Brick Lane.’

  ‘At least put your hands in your pockets. There’s supposed to be a constable on guard to log visits but Islington wouldn’t provide one. Some stupid dispute over jurisdiction.’

  ‘You’re an SCO, you can let in who you want. Have you had your ears lowered?’

  ‘Oh, my nipper came back from school with nits and wanted his hair cut off, but he wouldn’t let me do it until I’d tested the electric shaver on myself. I went a bit too short.’

  ‘Wise lad.’ Bryant stuck his hands in his coat and found a boiled sweet under the pocket fluff. He sucked at it ruminatively, looking about. ‘Still using pins and bits of string? I thought you could do it with a special camera now.’

  ‘That’s right. Buy me the equipment and I’ll mark out the grid electronically. I think it only costs seven grand.’

  ‘Point taken. Bagged much up?’

  Banbury sat on his heels and massaged his back. He had been staring at biscuit crumbs and dead flies for the last half hour. ‘There’s no physical evidence to take.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. There’s always evidence.’ Bryant sucked a bit of fluff off his barley sugar sweet and flicked it onto the floor.

  ‘Not in this case.’

  ‘Have you started on the bedroom?’

  ‘Not yet. But if you’re going to poke around in there, please don’t—you know—just don’t.’

  Bryant was infamous for his habit of traipsing through crime scenes and fingering the evidence. He had begun his career at a time when detectives had been trained to merely observe with their eyes rather than to illuminate body fluids with blue lights and Luminol reagents. These days, specialist equipment came with specialists who charged by the hour. Many routine cases of criminal damage and assault were dumped simply because it was too slow and expensive to send away samples.

  Bryant stood at the head of Mr Fox’s narrow bed and studied the room. No books on display. Hardly any furniture. A framed photograph of a girl with long blond hair and blue eyes, vacuous to the point of derangement. It was the photograph that had come with the frame. Mr Fox was a human spong
e, a magnet for the knowledge of others, but he had no interest in real human beings, and therefore possessed no real friends. He couldn’t trust himself in any relationship that demanded honesty.

  According to the rental records, their murderer had lived here for almost ten years under the name of Mr Fox. Yet there was no character to be found in these rooms, nothing that would reveal his personality traits or give any clue to his real identity. Most people’s hotel rooms offered up more than this. To Mr Fox, the flat was a place to sleep and visit periodically for a change of clothes, but even here he had been careful not to leave spoor.

  ‘Fox,’ said Bryant aloud. ‘Dictionary definition: a wary, solitary, opportunistic feeder that hunts live prey. Good choice of a name. No sign of who he really is, I suppose.’

  ‘Nothing,’ Banbury called back. ‘It’s really odd. You and John met the man. You interviewed him for hours. You didn’t get anything at all?’

  ‘We did, but it was all lies. Our mistake was taking what we saw at face value. The man played us beautifully. I don’t understand how he disarmed me. I’m usually so suspicious.’

  Bryant felt that he understood very little about serial killers. Demonstrable motivation was the keystone of criminology, and just as altruists made the best benefactors, murderers were at their most comprehensible when it was possible to see what they gained from their actions. This chap was a total cipher.

  Mr Fox should have been easy to find. After all, he had initially killed for gain, not because he derived pleasure from it. But, Bryant wondered, would he have to continue killing, now that he had discovered the taste?

  A parasite, he thought. He takes and takes without giving anything back, and remains in place until the host is dead. He studied the lair of his quarry, and felt an ominous settling in his stomach that warned him of imminent danger, although it might have been the germs on the brittle candy in his mouth.