Ten Second Staircase (27 page)

A pair of Met officers forced a bottle of brandy on him to numb the shock, not caring that they were breaking the law by doing so. May drank too deeply. He was to blame, he told them, for ignoring the rules, for not trusting his senses. Back at the unit, he insisted on signing a document to that effect, and used the officers as witnesses.

Nobody had spotted the reemergence of the Vampire from the grey dead-ended alley. An open door led to the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, but the cook insisted that no-one had entered or left. He had, however, seen a tall man in a cloak halfway up the end wall of Bear Street's alley—the idea was preposterous, the details unforthcoming, so that the sighting only made matters worse. But the drainpipes made perfect ladders here, and it was clear that he had climbed them. The phantasm's panicky mythology had hidden obvious truths.

May had taken a brief leave of absence, returning to work too quickly, assuring them all that he was coping well.

Elizabeth's daughter was just nine years old when she became motherless. Her father had moved out from the family apartment five years earlier, and had by then remarried in New Zealand. April's worst childhood fear, that she would one day find herself alone, suddenly became true. She found herself unable to talk to the man who had discovered her mother's body, and was sent to live with his sister Gwen. Her problems began soon after.

May knew he should never have involved his daughter in a hunt for a killer. The detectives had proven too adept at attracting evil. As forensic experts combed the walls and roofs searching for evidence of the Vampire's escape, May damned himself. Bryant, too, cursed his own arrogance, but no amount of blame could bring Elizabeth back.

And April changed. The girl with smiling eyes was replaced by a sombre, fearful child who found terrors in every building's shadow. In the absence of factual evidence, legends took hold. The Vampire became a bogeyman, an elusive phantom that existed only in tortured dreams.

Trails grow cold, and need evidence if they are to be revived. Elizabeth's death had marked the Vampire's last appearance. What, wondered May, could now be gained by reopening the wounds of a tragic past?

26

SHARED TRAGEDIES

John May sat up in the passenger seat and looked around. 'Why are we on Prince of Wales Road?' he asked.

Bryant had stopped the Mini Cooper before a familiar Victorian redbrick building. 'I've been talking to you for the last ten minutes,' he said. 'Weren't you listening?' Whacking a 'disabled' sticker onto his windscreen, he clambered out to tap his walking stick on the wooden sign that had been affixed to the tiny church's gate:
Coven of St James the Elder—North London Branch
. The crimson neon above the door still read 'Chapel of Hope,' a leftover from the previous tenant.

'I know you detest the idea, but we need to talk to Maggie Armitage,' Bryant explained. 'The Vampire files may have been destroyed, but she's been keeping diaries for years. If you remember, she acted as my occult consultant throughout the case. I'm hoping she still has records of every sighting.'

'Yes, but they'll be useless because she's mad.'

'You say that about every woman over forty who holds strong convictions.'

'I know all about her convictions, Arthur. I've seen her arrest file.'

'Our cases don't have traditional signifying elements, so I have to rely on people like Maggie. You never warmed to her, did you?'

'I know she means well, but when the two of you get together, she

fills your head with these ridiculous ideas, like the time she convinced you that she could trap the Black Widow of Blackheath inside the Woolwich Odeon by spraying the balcony with luminous paint.'

'We caught her, didn't we?'

'Only because you blinded her halfway through
South Pacific
and she fell down the stairs trying to get to the toilet.'

'I'll admit it sounds odd when you put it like that. What are you trying to say?'

'Just that there's no point in looking for things that don't exist.'

'You think things don't exist just because you can't see them,' Bryant scoffed.

'Well, yes, strictly speaking, invisibility is a fair indication of nonexistence.'

'Rubbish. What about gases, subatomic particles, magnetism, religious faith, the unfathomable mysteries of romantic attraction?'

'Don't drag biology into this. The Leicester Square Vampire and the Highwayman have nothing in common beyond the fact that they've both caught the public imagination. I just don't see how going through some barmy old white witch's rambling diaries is going to help reopen—'

The woman standing in the doorway listening to him was small, plump, and resplendent with sparkling appendages. Shells, amulets, chains, bracelets, semiprecious gemstones, and what appeared to be pieces of broken china tied in string dangled from her unnerving bosom. Chiming and jangling, she threw her arms wide to hug Bryant, leaving him smothered in cat hairs and cake crumbs. 'Darling, monstrous man!' she laughed. 'You only ever call when you want something, but do come in.'

'You look very well,' said Bryant cheerfully. 'You seem to be ageing backwards.'

'Yes, I probably am,' said Maggie casually. 'We conducted Day of the Dead celebrations in Miccailhuitontli last month, and the high priest traded me some Mexican rejuvenation paste for my Vodafone battery. It does wonders for the epidermis, although it did take the glaze off my mixing bowl. And Mr May, my favourite nonbeliever, we'll make a disciple of you yet, come in. Your granddaughter is here, so pretty and vulnerable that one fears for her. But so clever—she's one to watch.'

'I don't understand,' said May. 'What's April doing here?'

'Oh, we're friends of old, although I've yet to dispel the darkness from her soul, something I suspect only you can do. Do come through.'

She led the way through pools of gloom into the hall of the deconsecrated chapel, past oaken pews, across the perished parquet floor treacherous with loose blocks, through a miasmic aura of lavender, ginger, and sandalwood. The late afternoon sunlight illuminated two grim stained-glass windows illustrating the suffering of Christ, and threw bloody patches across the ragged walls.

'Sorry about the Christian symbols,' Maggie apologised. 'We've been meaning to replace them with something more inclusive. If I have to look at the beatific Virgin Mary every time I cross the nave, I think we should at least have a representation of Ormazd, the Persian principal of goodness, as well. Maureen's been up Columbia Road on the lookout for a nice Buddha, but they're an arm and a leg. She found one in a salvage yard but had no way of getting it back because she had her Lambretta stolen while she was meditating.'

May shot his partner a weary look. 'Arthur says we need to talk to you about the bogeymen of London,' he said, trying to sound benevolently indulgent. 'I suppose you know we have one on our hands.'

'I've read about it; who hasn't? Quite catching the public imagination.'

'Arthur also wants to go back to the Leicester Square Vampire.'

'And you wish to expose my diaries to the light. Very well, but in return, you must help me put up our Christmas tree; we're short of strong lads.' She pointed to a bedraggled pine propped in the corner.

'Don't tell me you've forsaken your usual pagan iconology and have become infected with the pernicious spirit of Christmas,' said Bryant in surprise. 'Aren't you a few months premature?'

'We're equal opportunity worshippers,' Maggie pointed out. 'Anyway, Christmas is incorrectly placed in the calendar, so we've moved it forward by way of recompense. The celebration is rooted in the belief that during the winter solstice, the door between our world and the one containing evil spirits is left open. When dark entities attempt to step across the gap in search of human souls, we ward them off with talismans; hence all the ornaments. And that's not a Christmas pine, it's a representation of the great snake Ydragsil.'

'It wasn't last year, when you stuck a fairy on top of it,' Bryant reminded her. He still recalled the deformed angel she had constructed from dead pigeon wings, crepe paper, and a cat skull that owed less to the spirit of St Nicholas and more to that of Ed Gein.

'I hope you won't try to weasel out of our canticle service again this year,' said Maggie. 'Maureen dropped beetroot salad inside the harmonium, so it sounds like it's being played by Hornblas, the patron devil of musical discord, but that's what happens when you eat snack lunches from a Jiffy bag. Come into the office.' She led the way to a small room stacked with books and newspapers, in the midst of which an ancient computer screen stuttered and rolled. April sat in one corner, almost buried behind the white witch's notebooks.

'Your handwriting is awful, Maggie,' she complained. 'Half of it looks back to front.'

'That's because it is, darling. Mirror-writing. Arthur taught me years ago. I'm left-handed, you see; it makes less mess to go right to left on right-hand pages. Arthur is here with your grandfather.'

'I think we've got what you asked for, Arthur,' said April, tapping her notebook.

'You've already briefed her?' asked May, surprised.

'You'd be proud of me, Grandad—I got on a tube train this morning.' She raised a small amulet shaped like a miniature astrolabe. 'Maggie gave it to me for my agoraphobia.'

'Chased silver,' said Maggie proudly. 'A colony of druids on the Orkney Islands nearly blinded themselves making it.'

'Wait a minute, how long have you two known each other?' asked May, waggling a finger between them.

April smiled conspiratorially. 'Get in the game, John. Uncle Arthur introduced me to Maggie years ago. We don't all have to stay in touch through you, you know.'

'I don't want you filling her head with strange ideas,' May admonished. 'She has quite enough to worry about.'

'Rubbish, the child is old enough to make up her own mind about the world.'

'I've been assisting Maggie on-line for a while now,' April explained. 'When I couldn't go out, Maggie found me incantations that could help.'

'There was nothing magical about them, it was just good psychology,' Maggie assured him. The white witch stood beside April, examining the books. 'Would you care to hear what we've found?' Maggie hauled up her spectacle chain and squinted at a sheet of paper containing April's notes. 'The first publicly recorded attack of the Leicester Square Vampire was, as you rightly mention, in 1973, but the first time you mentioned such an incident to me was just after the war.'

'Are you sure?' asked Bryant, rubbing his watery cobalt eyes. 'I don't remember that.'

'Because your predator had no name at that point,' Maggie reminded him. 'It was an isolated incident. He sucked blood from a Wren.'

'Show me.'

She turned the diary to him. 'Two days after that, he attacked a nineteen-year-old typist from Dagenham, bit her on throat and wrist, cracked two ribs, multiple bruising.'

Bryant read the entry. 'Didn't I follow this up? John, do you remember?'

'Only vaguely,' May admitted. 'I recall that the girl was badly shaken. We had no leads, and there were more important things to worry about. We were trying to find a murderer stalking the cast of
Orpheus
in the Palace Theatre.'

'You may not have realised it, but the Leicester Square attacks continued with a fair amount of regularity,' said Maggie. 'We only found it because of the Panic Site. It's a Web site set up by Dr Harold Masters.'

'That strange academic who runs the Insomnia Squad?' asked Bryant. Masters's group of intellectual misfits regularly stayed up all night arguing about everything from Arthurian fellowships and Islamic mythology to the semantics of old Superman comics. It was a wonder they were still able to hold down regular jobs.

'Lately he's been cataloguing social panics and outbreaks of mass hysteria. He noted activities consistent with mob violence around the square and traced them to dozens of attacks over a period of over forty years.'

'That's rather a long time for someone to operate in such a small area without getting caught, don't you think?' said May.

Maggie ignored him. 'You wanted to know how he picked his victims, Arthur, when and where he decided to strike, so I rang an old psychic friend of mine.'

It was on the tip of May's tongue to ask if the psychic had answered the phone before it rang, but he thought better of it.

'Unfortunately, Madame Lilith's information proved to be incorrect.'

'There's a surprise,' May said without meaning to.

Maggie fixed him with an eye that could have drawn the past from a paperweight. She returned to April's notes. 'The various witness descriptions are remarkably constant.'

'I checked news files on the Web and found myself going back even further,' said April. 'His first appearance may well have been in the 1740s.'

'You mean we're looking for some kind of ageless, mythical monster?' asked Bryant with excited incredulity.

That was enough for May. He threw his hands up in protest. 'Has everyone gone mad? We are not looking for him or any other kind of monster, thank you, we're after someone completely different, someone who has been operating for barely a fortnight.'