Bryant & May 04; Ten Second Staircase

“You can see the whole estate from up here,” he said aloud.

“Yes, I can keep an eye on the troublemakers. We employed some guardians to patrol and separate the gangs, but we had to get rid of them after they started taking sides. This job has a dangerous habit of getting personal on you. There are two main trouble sectors here, one Anglo-Asian, one African, but they’re not really drawn along ethnic lines; it’s mostly territorial and circumstantial.”

“What do you mean?” asked Bryant, who knew little about everyday urban life.

“It’s circumstantial because they’ve got no money, Mr Bryant, so they’ve got nowhere to go, which means they stand around in groups, and that makes it territorial. Doesn’t help that the rich kids have to cut across their turf three times a week.”

“Who gives them guidance?” Bryant asked. “Are there still such things as youth clubs? We had all sorts of activities available when we were young.”

“No disrespect, Mr Bryant, but youth clubs went out with Teddyboys. These kids should spend less time with their mates and more with their folks. They needed role models, but now they’re beyond the age where they’ll trust any adult to give them guidance. They’ve no shame. They’ll terrorise the older tenants, then lie straight-faced to the police. They know their rights. It’s all ‘Lay a finger on me and I’ll call Claims Direct’.” She checked a large appointments book on her desk. “Don’t get me wrong, we’ve never had gun crime here – that’s for the drug- problem estates – but most of the kids routinely carry knives, and in flashpoint situations they do get used. This is the estate diary. We enter all incidents, no matter how small. The idea is to catch the rising problem, not its aftermath. See here, just this morning a couple of kids told their parents they saw this Highwayman of yours. He was running through The Street – that’s what they call the ground-floor passage under the stilts; it runs the entire length of the three blocks. Nobody uses it unless they have to.”

“Do you have CCTV?”

“Yes, but the camera lenses are so scratched and fogged that they don’t show anything. The council was supposed to replace them last year. Besides, the kids all wear hoodies. We rely on other residents to keep watch.”

“This sighting, do you know if it was before the story broke in today’s papers?”

“I couldn’t say, Mr Bryant. Don’t imagine they read papers.”

“Well, do you have an accurate description of what they saw? They might have noticed some detail we’ve missed.”

“Here, I typed it out for you. Black leather suit, riding boots, eye mask, hat. Looks like a comic book character, they said, tall and broad. They reckon they’ve seen this man on the estate before, dressed exactly the same way each time. He always appears just as it’s getting dark.”

“Always?” asked Bryant, alarmed. “When did they first see him?”

Lorraine crossed to a file cabinet and checked her notes. Bryant noticed that she had the lolloping gait of a woman with hip trouble. “Six months ago, maybe longer. A couple of kids say he’s always been around the estate, as long as they can remember, even when they was little babies.”

“Does he scare them?”

“No, apparently they think of him as a kind of guardian. Sort of a protector of the estate. Because of the badge, see.”

She tapped the Roland Plumbe Community Estate’s logo on the Residents’ Association letterhead, an artisanal fifties symbol that owed its influence to the Festival of Britain’s design ethic. At its centre was the outline of a horseman in a black cape and tricorn hat. The date on the logo was 1954.

My God, thought Bryant. Don’t tell me he’s been around for over fifty years.

? Ten Second Staircase ?

15

Winter Lightning

Danny Martell was in trouble. His natural atavism usually left him with nothing worse than a hangover. He jokingly dismissed these lapses of character to friends as Out-of-Pocket Experiences, but the latest occasion had proven altogether more serious.

Marc Morrison, his agent, had called him this morning with a warning to watch out for the next day’s press. The agent did not admonish; what point was there in telling his clients to stay away from hookers and cocaine? In for a penny, in for a pound, the agent figured. Some clients were always going to screw up their careers, so they might as well crash and burn now to leave room for the ones with more self- discipline.

Morrison had learned the hard way. The agent had once taken on a well-behaved Blue Peter presenter who, out for a drink one evening, had been drawn into a nightclub act by a fire-eater, who had pulled open the boy’s shirt and teased his chest with a flaming brand; no big deal, just part of the act. Except that the act was onstage in a club hosting weekly gay nights, and the show had been taped by the management, and the tape had found its way to the News of the World, which ran an outraged feature suggesting that the boy was unfit to be allowed near children. They included a photograph of the bare-chested presenter grimacing as the flame neared him, surrounded by copy that had somehow managed to suggest the club was a haven for paedophiles, heterosexual orgies, gay sex, and Satanism. Nobody in the industry believed the story except the BBC, which fired the presenter, who took a barbiturate overdose and was found dead in his Maida Vale flat, which at least solved his image problem. So it was best not to get Morrison started on the subject of tarnished images.

But Martell was a bigger challenge. He wasn’t likely to kill himself, and he wasn’t likely to get another high- profile job after this, either. It wasn’t his first slip from grace; this particular romp was the third in an ongoing series of dropped hurdles. Freelance paparazzi spoke disparagingly of his weakness for Brazilian supermodels, so cliched, so vanilla, but they were happy to exploit it.

For the past two years, Martell had been hosting Britain’s most popular Saturday teenage lifestyle show on ITV1. Now he could see himself having to present lunchtime cookery quizzes on zero-audience channels like ChefTV. He was going through a bad patch; his wife had left him, which would have gained him sympathy except that he had sold his side of the story to Sunday People, and it wasn’t very sympathetic, or even feasible.

No-one understood the pressure he was under. Danny was a perfectionist. He had turned a lousy show into a smash hit; work ate up every hour of his day. How could he hold down a relationship, or have any stability in his life? Who could he trust?

Even when you’re a success, he thought, it becomes a matter of degree. You’re not as successful as a hit show on another channel, you’re successful in England but not the U.S., you’re successful for a season but not on a yearly aggregate. These days even his leisure time was pressurised. Celebrity is about access, he remembered. It’s your only weapon: Someone pisses you off, you deny them access. But he could no longer afford to do that.

One lousy Monday evening in a Clerkenwell lap-dancing bar – a couple of short lines, a few cocktails, and home to bed; he hadn’t exactly behaved like Caligula. He hadn’t seen anyone he’d recognised, either, hadn’t had his picture taken, so where were the shots coming from?

His agent told him to expect a headline in the national tabloids, and at least four pages of revelations, maybe more, in the Sundays. In just a few hours his career would be downgraded, and there was nothing he could do about it.

As he pushed open the door to the gym, he wondered if the channel would carry out their threat to terminate his contract. He was due to start a new season of shows but was still in pay negotiations. At the very least, they’d bargain a cut in salary.

For a second he thought he heard something, a sound he hadn’t heard in years – but it disappeared before he could properly register it.

As he headed for the changing room, he told himself there was no point in stressing about the future.