where a smouldering mattress slumped beside stacks of broken Argos kitchen furniture. He shook his head in wonder, unable to imagine why anyone would deliberately despoil their home territory.
Bryant’s parents had conformed to the wartime London cliche about East End pride and poverty. In Bethnal Green, it was common for a wife to embarrass her old man by taking his Sunday lunch down to the pub. His mother aired the family’s bed linen but never her emotions. Whenever she was angry she cleaned the house, and the house was always spotless. Women of whom she didn’t approve were accused of keeping a dirty home. He wondered what she would make of the estate.
Lorraine Bonner, the leader of the Residents’ Association, was waiting for him. She had called the unit an hour earlier to tell him that the Highwayman had been sighted again. “Mr Bryant, this is getting to be a habit,” she smiled, passing him a plastic cup. Word of Bryant’s heroin-like addiction to strong tea had obviously got about. “The girls are over here.”
She led the way beneath an arch to a mesh-glassed stairwell door. Inside, two teenagers sat on the steps. Bryant recognised the look they shared: pale scraped-back hair tied into a short ponytail in a style derogatively referred to as a Croydon facelift, hoop earrings, Puffa jackets, studded jeans, charm bracelets, baby-pink shoes over white socks. One was smoking, both were chewing gum. They appeared to be soured, sullen, and battle-hardened at thirteen, and perhaps they were, but Bryant wondered how far he had to scratch beneath the brittle surface before discovering girls with ordinary hopes and insecurities. Such youngsters had been referred to as chavs for decades, but this mysterious term had only recently passed into universal use.
“Danielle, Sheree, this is Mr Bryant. I want you to tell him what you told me.”
“I’m not a policeman, strictly speaking,” he quickly explained. “I’m trying to find out if the man you saw is – ”
“We seen him on the telly,” said Danielle suddenly. “The Highwayman. It’s the same bloke. We all know who he is ‘cause he’s in like a gang and that. We seen you and all. What you going to give us if we tell you?”
Bryant had been hoping they had not seen him before. The testimony of his witnesses would now be tainted by previous exposure. “Where did you see the Highwayman?” he asked.
“Third-floor bridge.” Danielle looked at her friend for confirmation.
“You mean the balcony that runs along the front of the block?” asked Bryant.
“The bridges connect the two newer wings to the central block,” Lorraine explained. “There’s one on the third floor, and one on the sixth.”
“He was standing there like come on then come and get me like he was disrespecting and fronting out being so hard,” said Sheree in a sudden rush.
“Can you describe him to me?”
“He was wearing these raw leathers, you know, like a biker, only a black mask over his eyes and this cap thing and boots and whatever.”
Bryant knew it would be a struggle getting the girls to articulate clearly enough for a witness statement; they had rarely been challenged to describe anything in detail. How much of what they saw was culled from artists’ impressions on TV and in newspapers? Perhaps they simply wanted attention, and had invented the sighting.
Sheree launched another assault on the English language. “St C is blatantly taxin’ us saying it’s someone on this estate just ‘cause we got the Saladins and they’re Yahs and they diss us and saying we’re slack and that, so when they come here sharkin’ us we’re gonna bust ‘em up.”
“I’m not at all sure I understand.” Bryant turned to Lorraine for help. His recent reading had taught him that most London teen slang was Jamaican, but that it changed from one borough to the next. He tried to imagine how it would be to grow up in a permanent atmosphere of threat.
“The Saladins are a gang of boys who hang around here causing trouble,” the community officer explained. “A couple of them have ASBOs, so we’ve been able to curfew them, but they still turn up on the estate after dark.”
“Is there anything else?” Bryant asked the girls doubtfully.
Danielle pulled her mobile from her jacket and flicked it open. “I took a picture,” she said, turning the image to him. “He was there for ages, so I zoomed in and got some really cool close-ups. Sell it to ya.”
Bryant accepted the mobile in amazement. It was like being handed a photograph of the Loch Ness monster, except that these children were unlikely to have tampered with the image. More important, it was their first piece of real proof that the Highwayman really existed.
“I’ll need to borrow the phone,” he told the girls.
“That is like so no chance on that!” squealed Danielle, with her friend in support.
“I’m afraid you don’t have a choice. This is police evidence.”
“You ain’t having it.” Danielle thrust out a defiant chin.
“Tell you what, I’ll trade you this.” He removed the beautiful chrome-trimmed state-of-the-art mobile May had bought him for his birthday and flicked it open.
Danielle examined it carefully, then turned over her phone.
The area of Clerkenwell, and specifically the Gothic arch of St John’s Gate, was the dwelling place of London’s most venerable traditions and legends, the home of old religions and ancient mysteries. For half a millennium, the Knights Hospitallers had flourished in Clerkenwell. The charitable hospital of St John of Jerusalem had been filled with wounded Crusaders, and its priory church was inextricably bound with the Knights Templars. In 1187, when Saladin retook Jerusalem, he had allowed the Hospitallers to flourish. On the third of October, 1247, the Knights Templars presented King Henry III with a thick crystalline vase containing the blood of Christ. The authenticity of the relic had been attested to by the seals of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and by all the prelates of the Holy Land. The fateful secret of Christ’s blood supposedly lay lost in the ruins of Clerkenwell.
And the Saladins still survived.
Lorraine had shown him the gang markings of the Saladins painted along the walls of The Street, a red-and- white cross-hilt, the symbol of the knights themselves. The wiping of a Crusader’s sword represented an undefiled life. He had seen other gang markings: a spray-painted chevron between three combs, the arms of Prior Botyler, the design taken from the original priory window of St John’s. The prior of St John had ranked as the first baron of England. In the eight-hundred-fifty-year-old diagonally buttressed crypt, caskets had been stood upright and ghosts had supposedly shuffled through the silent nights.
Bryant wondered now if Clerkenwell, the home and heart of the Crusades, an area forever linked to the city of Jerusalem and to the blood of Christ himself, had spawned new acolytes every bit as dangerous as their Christian ancestors.
? Ten Second Staircase ?
21
Loyalties
At the end of Wednesday afternoon, Dan Banbury flicked on his desk lamp and ushered Bryant into his office at the PCU. He tried not to appear excited, but this was his first time to shine before his superior, and his mask of calm rationality was slipping.
He opened his computer file on Danny Martell’s murder before the unit’s most senior partner, tapping up a scaled photograph of the copper coil. “I think we’ve an extremely demented individual on our hands,” he said, pointing to the image. “I asked myself: Why didn’t he kill White and Martell in unprotected private spots? Why wait until it was virtually impossible to get at them?”
“Because the impossibility is what makes it appealing,” said Bryant.
“Exactly. Martell kept to a regular schedule, so first of all, our perpetrator needed to make a floor plan of the building, and he found what he needed next door, in an apartment kept empty for half the year. This was a lot easier to gain access to than the gym. Of course, the idea was to make us think he’d been in the gym when Martell
