The Victoria Vanishes (25 page)

A rag of shadow flung itself
forward, seizing her in a prac
tised grip. She should have been able to throw him over her head, but he had caught her off balance.

Stupid, stupid,
she thought as she fell.
I didn't consider myself old enough to be a target, but of course I'm exactly the right age.

The needle must have been tiny, si
milar to the one on an in
sulin pen, because instead of sliding in hotly it just plucked at the skin of her arm like an insect. A warm dental numbness flooded her body with astonishing speed.

His arms extended to catch her as she fell, to ease her to the floor, but she was heavier than he'd expected and slipped through his welcoming embrace. She jarred her hip and the side of her skull as she slammed onto the cement ground.

Anaesthetists always suggested counting to ten. She tried that now, but struggled beyond the number four.
Will I die?
she wondered distantly.
Have I joined the sisterhood of his victims? Will this be my last conscious thought?

He wanted to stay with her, but the circumstances were not right. She should have been seated next to him in the warm ochre light of the saloon bar, her thigh lightly touching his, her glass almost full. She should have been watching him with his mother's eyes, listening intently, smiling and nodding as music and laughter surrounded them in soothing sussurance. The time—somewhere between nine o'clock
p.m
. and the last bell—would have stretched to an eternity. But instead she was lying on the floor of the cellar, dying.

Knowing it was time to leave, he grabbed his backpack from the floor, ran out into the corridor and headed for the coal steps.

Longbright had been facedown on the cement for about twenty minutes when John May found her. Her breathing was shallow, her pulse faint but steady. When he saw the emptied ampoule beside her, he immediately searched for the mark on her exposed skin. Her hands and feet were still warm. He could only think that Pellew had underestimated her size, that the amount discharged had been nowhere near enough to kill her.

The ambulance had trouble reaching the pub because a bendy-bus had become wedged across the turn at Holborn Circus, and the traffic was backed up in every direction. When the medics finally arrived, they took her to University College Hospital.

'We should have gone with her,' said May, climbing into the driving seat of the BMW.

'Right now we're more useful going after him,' said Bryant.

'The ambulance boys say she's going to be all right, and we have to believe them. We'll need someone to meet us there.'

'Where? You know where he's heading?'

'He finds sanctuary in pubs, and probably salvation. Before Anthony and his mother lived at the Clock House, they came from south of the river, Gre
enwich. He grew up in a pub, re
member. We think that was most likely the Angerstein Hotel, on Woolwich Road. It's the only other location from the old days he mentioned to nurses.'

'Do you think it's still there?'

'I hope so. I'm meant to be p
laying in their skittles tourna
ment this summer.'

'There may have been other pubs in between. I thought he and his mother moved around a lot.'

'Pellew was at the Angerstein from the ages of eight to fourteen, his formative years. And I know the place;
it's huge. That makes it the likeliest venue. He clearly feels most comfortable living and even killing inside crowds. Hardly the usual lone wolf.'

'You can be as alone in a city like London as you can in the secluded countryside, Arthur.'

'Poor Janice, she shouldn't have gone ahead without us. I'd never forgive myself if anything happened to her. We have to find him today, John. Judging by the number of emp
ty am
poule boxes in his room, he's carrying enough lethal doses to take out a dozen people.'

Back at the unit in Mornington Crescent, Dan Banbury had looked in on May's granddaughter and found April frowning over her computer screen. He was starting to worry about how much time she was spending at the PCU. The others were used to it; April had only just managed to reconnect with the world, and he couldn't help feeling she had swapped one cage for another. 'You've got that look on your face again,' he warned, seating himself beside her.
'What's the matter?'

'I've been studying the photograph,' said April. 'Naomi Curtis. Jocelyn Roquesby. Joanne Kellerman. I don't think they just bumped into each o
ther in a pub and had their pic
ture taken together.'

'Why not?' Dan studied the digitised photograph on her screen.

'Look at the way they're standing. These women haven't just met. They're too close. I'd only relax like that if I was with a best mate. It doesn't look right.'

'Maybe they had to squeeze in for the photo.' Banbury squinted at the picture, tilting his head.
'It bothers you?'

'Enough to make me run
some more checks. I finally man
aged to track down their resumes for date comparisons. It looks like all three changed jobs at the same time, in September 2005.'

'You mean they were working together?'

'No, that's just it.' She pulled up the documents and opened their windows beside each other on the screen.
'Curtis was at a place called Sankari Exports, Roquesby was at Legal and General and Kellerman worked for a
loss adjustment com
pany called Cooper Baldwin, but they all left in the same month.'

'Probably just a coincidence.'

'That's what I thought. So I called Legal and General's HR department, just to get a general idea about why she left. No-one by the name of Jocelyn Roquesby ever worked there. And it gets better. Sankari Expo
rts in High Holborn ceased trad
ing in 1997, and according to Companies House, Cooper Baldwin doesn't even exist.'

'People exaggerate their resumes.'

'Come on, Dan. Three impossible jobs
, three matching de
parture dates, three deaths?'

'What about start dates?'

'They're all different.'

'Have you checked the other two victims?'

'I've ruled out Jazmina Sherwin because she doesn't fit the pattern, and I'm waiting for Carol Wynley's partner to e-mail me back. It should be in any minute.'

'Then hold off until you've got Wynley as well,' advised Banbury. 'If they did all know each other, it would mean Bryant was right;
these women weren't chosen at random.'

'I don't know where that takes us,' April mused. 'I never go to a pub unless I'm meeting someone. What if Pellew worked with them somehow, perhaps even employed them? He arranges to meet each in turn, which is how they let him get close enough to jab them with a needle.'

'I don't see how that could happen. He'd been locked up for years.'

'Do you think he would have had Internet privileges? Could it have been some kind of
on
line deal?'

Banbury rubbed at his eye, thinking.
'I don't know. How can we tell if Pellew's even the right man? He's not in custody yet.'

'There's one other thing. Cochrane, the warder at Twelve Elms Cross, sent through Pelle
w's medical file. There's a pho
tograph of him taken at age
eight without the crimson blem
ish on his face. And another one taken when he was seventeen, still clear-complected.'

'So if it's not a birthmark, what is it?'

'A disguise,' said April.

31

THE ANGERSTEIN

I

t was said that the Angersteins descended from Peter the Great himself, that John Julius Angerstein was the illegitimate son of either Catherine or Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, but the truth was somewhat less salubrious. John Julius, a Lloyd's underwriter, had grown rich from his West Indian slaves, and parlayed their miseries into an art collection that became the envy of kings, and the foundation of the National Gallery.

The Angersteins made their home in Greenwich, the birth-place of Henry VIII and the home of time itself. Woodlands, their house in Greenwich Park, was built to house his growing collection of Rembrandts and Titians, and a grand Victorian hotel commemorated his name.

But part of the maritime town had been allowed to die. Away from the splendours of the Royal Naval College, the Royal Observatory, the Queen's House and the
Cutty Sark,
East Greenwich grew dusty and rotted apart, its community shattered by the roaring motorway flyover that split the quiet streets in half. Here, the g
reat Angerstein Hotel, now just
another shabby pub, was situated. Like so many other public houses of its era, it had been repaired with thick layers of paint, blue-grey this time, and its windows were rainbowed with the lights of gambling machines and posters for karaoke nights.

John May edged his BMW through the isthmus of the one-way system and parked by the entrance just as Meera Mangeshkar arrived on her
Norton, with Bimsley riding pil
lion. He opened his window and called over to the two young officers.

'We've spoken to the pub's manager. He was a bit shocked when I explained he might be harbouring a murderer in the building, but he's going to co-operate. He says Pellew's hiding place can only be upstairs, a
s the basement is pass-code pro
tected.'

Shielding their eyes from the breaking rain, they looked up at the hotel, as arrogant and imposing as a battleship.

'Looks like more than twenty rooms, plus a fire escape and a basement exit,' said Bimsley.

'The second and third floors are accessible by a small side entrance round the corner, but the manager keeps the gate locked. If he's in there, Pellew's only escape route is down through the bar and out the front, or down the rear fire escape.'

'How do you want to do this?'

'You two, cover the floors above. Arthur, you're staying on the ground floor. The bar staff are ready to close the main doors once we're inside. I'll get the fire escape.'

'No-one except the manager sees what we're doing, understood?' said Bryant. 'If Pellew is panicked into running again, he may hurt someone or try to take a hostage. There's no way of getting all the drinkers outside without tipping him off.

Don't forget that he's armed with the kind of weapon we may not even notice him discharging.' He struggled to unlock his recalcitrant seat belt. 'For heaven's sake get me out of this bloody thing, John.'

They went in.
'Bloody hell, it's mobbed!' said Meera.
'What's going on?'

'Charity match,' a punter shouted back.
'Charlton Athletic.'

Just as she asked, a mighty cheer went up. The crowd was watching their local team charge across a luminous emerald screen.

'You know what he looks like; shut everyone else out of your vision and concentrate on his face,' said May.
'The birth-mark makes him stand out.'

On the narrow sepia-wallpapered second floor, Bimsley ran forward with the manager, a slender Asian man armed with a fat bunch of master keys for the rooms. 'We've hardly anyone staying here at the moment,' he explained,
'certainly no-one fit-ting your description. There's a service room at the end, a storeroom and another guest bedroom, but we've stopped renting it out because it's got some damp problems.'

'Open it up.'

The room smelled of wet wood, old newspapers, standing water. Black stalactites crawled down the discoloured plaster cornicing of vines and grapes. A reproduction of a painting, a black boy in a golden turban, leaned against the mantelpiece. It would have been an attractive piece until one considered it against John Julius Angerstein's background. There was no sleeping bag this time, though, no cigarette butts, no ampoule boxes, no sign of habitation at all.

'What else have you got?'

'Laundry room on the floor below. There's another small room beside it where the linens are kept.'

They moved lightly down the fire stairs and checked each room. Bimsley made a supreme effort not to crash into any-thing. There was no sign of human occupancy except a few muddy sneaker prints, an empty pack of gum, and a crumpled piece of notepaper which Bimsley pocketed.

And yet there was something, a disturbance in the stillness of the atmosphere, a faint trail of warmth that was enough to tip off an experienced officer that the room had been recently entered.