The Victoria Vanishes (10 page)

'Then perhaps you made a mistake about the name of the pub,' May suggested.

'We'll soon see.' Bryant climbed the small stool behind his desk and reached up among his books, pulling down a green linen volume with untrimmed pages. 'Here we are,
The Secret History of London's Public Houses,'

'Wait, when was that printed?'

Bryant checked the publisher's page. '1954. Not one of my more recent acquisitions.' He flicked to the index. 'Here you are. Going mad, am I? Look at this.' He turned the book around and held it up with the pages open.

The others found themselves looking at a photograph of a public house built on the corner of Whidbourne Street, Bloomsbury, but they did not seem pleased.

'What's the matter?' asked Bryant. 'I was right after all, wasn't I? We just overlooked it. Let's go back and—'

Arthur, this can't be the place,' said May.
'This picture was taken two years before the pub was demolished, in 1925. It's been gone for over three quarters of a century.'

12

ECDYSIAST

W

hat do you think you're doing?' asked DC Colin Bimsley.'That belongs to Mr Bryant.' 'It's a marijuana plant,' said Renfield, dragging the great ceramic pot along the corridor toward the top of the stairs. 'It's for his rheumatism.'

'And it's illegal, or did nobody bother to point that out to him?' asked Renfield.

'Give him a break, Jack, he gets pains in his legs.'

'Then he should be retired and relaxing at home. He could be working as a consultant.'

'It's not your job to decide what he does.'

'It is if he can't do his job without the aid of psychoactive narcotics.'

'Wait, what else have you got there?' Bimsley pointed to the battered cardboard box Renfield had also dragged out of the office.

'Old books. They're everywhere, even blocking the fire exits. I'm stacking them by the rubbish. They can go to charity shops.'

'You can't do that;
he's taken a lifetime to collect them.' 'Land has asked him to take them home dozens of times, but they're still here, so out they go.' 'But he needs them for research.'

'Really?' Renfield bent down and retrieved a stack of slender volumes.'Let's see what he's been researching, shall we?
Yoruba Proverbs. The Anatomy of Melancholia. Embalming Under Lenin. Cormorant-Sexing for Beginners. The Apocalypsis Revelata Volume Two. A Complete History of the Trouser-Press. Financial Accounts for the Swedish Mining Board, Years 1745-53.
I suppose the next time they bring a gunshot victim in from Pentonville, he'll be able to use these in his investigation.'

'You'd be surprised,' said
Bimsley, 'how an intimate knowl
edge of the workings of the trouser press might aid in the capture of a determined rapist.'

Are you making fun of me?' asked Renfield suspiciously.

'You'll never know, will you?' Bimsley stood his ground.

'I say, what are you doing with Mr Bryant's books?' asked Giles Kershaw, who had found his path blocked upon entering the hall. 'He'll go bananas if he sees you've moved them. They're very useful.'

'Not you as well.' Renfield w
as starting to wonder if the se
nior detectives had brainwashed the unit staff. Kershaw raised his long legs in a spidery fash
ion to climb around the obstruc
tion, and admitted himself into the detectives' office.

'I'm thinking the bash was incidental,' he began, throwing himself into the guest's armchair.

'I'm sorry, what are we talking about?' asked May.

'Mrs Wynley. There's an abnormality in the base of her skull. The bone is extremely thin. It wouldn't have taken much of a knock to damage it, but even so, I think it occurred as the result of something else.'

'Like what?' asked May.

Kershaw sucked his teeth pensively. 'Not entirely sure yet. Gut feeling. People don't usually keel over like fallen trees, with their arms at their sides. Not very scientific, I know, but there's something else. Mid
azolam—it's a fast-acting benzo
diazepine with a short elimination half-life. A pretty potent water-soluble sedative, but the imbiber doesn't actually lose consciousness unless it's taken in overdose. I found a tiny trace of it inside her mouth. If you were to inject it between the gums and the inside of the cheek, it could enter the blood-stream immediately. She would have dropped like a log.'

Bryant wrinkled his face, thinking. He looked like a tortoise chewing a nettle.
'This is making less sense by the second,' he said.
A woman walks into a pub—which, by the way, hasn't existed for the best part of a hundred years—gets injected in the face and leaves without complaint. She falls down outside, bashes her head and is left for dead by everyone else who leaves the pub, including the staff. I don't suppose we have any suspects, either.'

'Her partner was just a couple of miles away, home alone watching TV, no witnesses, says he had several phone calls, but all on his cell phone, none to their flat.'

'So they're traceable but don't prove he was there. Then we should bring him in,' said May.

'There's a problem with that,' April told her grandfather. 'He's in a wheelchair after suffering a stroke some while back, can't do much for himself at all.'

'A legal PA,' said Bryant, looking up from one of the books Renfield had tried to throw out,
Religious Philosophers of the 18th Century.
At the Swedenborg Society, no less. Swedenborg was a Swedish philosopher famed throughout Europe for his contributions to science, technology and religion. When he got older, he supposedly experienced visions of the spirit world. Reckoned he visited both heaven and hell, where he held conversations with angels and devils. Upon his return, he wrote something called the
Apocalypsis Revelata,
or
Apocalypse Revealed.
He claimed he'd been directed by Christ himself to reveal the details of the Second Coming. Understandably, everyone thought he'd gone round the twist. Died in Clerkenwell in 1772. His building in Bloomsbury still houses the Swedenborg Society.'

'Your point being?' May wondered.

'What? Oh, nothing, it's just odd, that's all.' Bryant poked about in his jacket and produced the walnut bowl of his pipe. He peered into it wistfully.
'I don't suppose I might be allowed to—'

'No,' said May and his granddaughter in unison.

'It's just that the Swedenborg Society lost another of their legal secretaries at the beg
inning of the month,' Bryant ex
plained, screwing the pieces of his pipe together. 'I believe she was found dead in a London pub, the Seven Stars, just behind Lincoln's Inn Fields.'

'Why on earth would yo
u remember that?' asked May, in
trigued.

'Because it reminded me of the nun found unconscious in The Flying Scotsman,' said Bryant, not really managing to answer the question.

'Wait, explain the part about the nun first,
'April demanded.

'The Flying Scotsman is one of the most disgustingly awful pubs in London,' replied Bryant, 'a grubby little sewer of a King's Cross strip-joint, crammed for many years with the most unsavoury characters imaginable. But the lady in the wimple who passed out inside it was no ecdysiast, disrobing for a handful of coins collected in a beer mug. When I saw the incident report, I naturally wondered what she was doing in such a place.'

'Ecdysiast?' April raised an eyebrow.

'She wasn't a stripper,' Bryant explained.
'I followed the case and made notes on it. I have them somewhere.'

He withdrew a drawer from his desk, removing a handful of pipe-cleaners, a Chairman Mao alarm clock, a collection of plastic snowstorms and a bottle of absinthe, to finally unearth a small black book.

'Here, in my Letts Schoolboy Diary.' He held open a page filled with tiny drawings of flags. A full report of the case— well, by the look of it I appear to have written up the salient facts in a code of Edwardian naval signals, but you get the idea. Sister Geraldine Flanne
ry from Our Lady of Eternal Suf
fering said she was in the pub to collect for charity and was overcome by the pressure of the crowd, but it turned out her robes had been specially constructed to hold wallets and handbags. She wasn't a nun at all but a dip, and not a very good one, obviously, otherwise she wouldn't have chosen to pick-pocket some of the poorest punters in London. The point is—' Bryant's raised index finger
wavered in the air.'I've forgot
ten the point.'

'The legal secretary from the Swedenborg Society,' April prompted. The old man really seemed to be losing it. 'The Seven Stars.'

Ah, yes. This time the face on the barroom floor belonged to a respectable middle-aged lady named Naomi Curtis, the daughter of a clergyman. What had she been doing by herself in a pub?' Bryant popped the empty pipe into his mouth.
'Most people don't stray far from their natural habitat, and according to her father, Mrs Curtis was a creature of habit. She liked a tipple, and had been drinking more heavily in the last couple of years, but rarely went to a pub without arranging to meet someone. Suddenly she turns up dead one night in a Holborn boozer. I kept notes on her, too.' The others looked at him blankly.

'Don't you see? When som
ething's out of whack, when peo
ple don't match their locations, a little bell goes off inside my head. There was something else. One of th
e punters remem
bered Curtis checking her cell phone at the bar, but by the time the ambulance arrived she had no phone on her. Land wouldn't allow me to investigate at the time, but he will now. Two women, two public houses and an investigation involving drink, drugs, death and Swedish philosophy.'

'I assume this means you want to handle the case,' said May drily.

'Oh, don't worry, I will whether I'm allowed to or not. I'm far too old to start obeying the rules now.' Bryant made a hideous draining noise through the pipe stem.'If
anyone needs me, I shall be in the pub, conducting a little research.'

13

FORGETTING

W

e can't take it on,' decreed Raymond Land. A case doesn't just come under PCU jurisdiction because you two have a funny feeling about it.'

'Giles and Dan agree with us,' said May.
'They think there's enough circumstantial evidence to link the two cases. The Naomi Curtis death was given an open verdict, although the coroner told relatives that she probably suffered heart failure following heat-stroke.'

'I don't know,' said Land, wiggling a finger in his ear, then examining it. 'All you've got is the fact that they both worked for the same organisation as legal secretaries.'

'Which meant that they probably knew each other. And they also died in a similar manner, in or near public houses,' May added.

'But they didn't, did they?' Land pointed out.
'This Wynley woman wasn't in a pub, unless Bryant somehow managed to cause a rift in the bloody space-time continuum and plunge himself back to Victorian England. He's gone to Bloomsbury for another look, hasn't he? It's not like him to miss coming in here and having a go at me.'

'He doesn't believe he could have made such a mistake.'

'Look, it was late, he was a bit plastered, the road was dark and knowing Bryant, he was probably thinking about the history of the area. He'd read about the pub or seen a picture of it in one of his weird old books, and superimposed it over the scene. This wouldn't be the first time he's been wrong. He's not infallible, you know.'

May had an image of the retirement letter in Land's pocket. He would have transferred it to his desk by now, perhaps even left it at home. He suddenly saw a way to protect his partner. If they were given the case, Bryant would be presented with an opportunity to come up with a
solution. It was the type of in
vestigation at which he excelled. His confidence would be re-stored, the letter would be withdrawn and Land would be satisfied that his senior detectives were still on the ball.
'There's the issue of undermining safety in public areas,' he added.

'What are you talking about?'

'If we imagine for a moment that there really is someone out there who has struck at tw
o innocent women in crowded pub
lic places without anyone else even noticing their deaths, we have a real problem on our hands.' May knew that one of the less-frequently invoked remits of the PCU was to 'ensure the maintenance of public comfort and confidence in the free and open areas of the city.' In other words, if someone dangerous was running loose in any building or public space to which the residents of London enjoyed open access, it could undermine their faith in the police, and ultimately, the state, creating scenes of public disorder. It had happened many times before in London's past.