brighter because their parents had to pay for their education. Actually, they downplay their intelligence because they have a choice of being smart or popular. My job is to single out the smart ones and keep them here long enough to find practical applications. The pressures on them are enormous. Since the dot-com gold rush, private schools have been treated like banks – parents put their kids in when they’re flush, draw them out again when they’re broke. If you think divorcing parents are bad for a child, try removing his peers and dumping him in some budget-strapped state school. Here we are.”
They were now deep within the venerable building. Kingsmere swiped a card on his study door, which surprised May. The reason quickly became apparent, for the room was a technological revelation: flat-screen computers, underlit glass tables, transparent circuitry and touch panels, the graceful white plastic of Apple Macintosh, the pristine organisation of an operating theatre. “This is where I take my extracurricular classes. The best way to encourage learning is to trick them into doing it for themselves. After twenty minutes surrounded by this equipment, they have to be torn away from it.”
“A far cry from the book-lined studies of earlier times,” said May, looking around with approval.
“It’s a modern version, that’s all. The school was left an endowment for technology. Thank God for rich St Crispin’s old boys. Look, I’m sorry if my lads embarrassed your partner. I’ve taught them to question authority, but they can sometimes take things too literally. It wouldn’t have happened if I had been here, I can assure you.”
“Don’t worry. Mr Bryant prefers a spirited exchange of views. It happens a lot.”
“Perhaps I should allow you to explain the purpose of your visit now.”
May felt he was being led through the conversation like a pupil but put it down to the teacher’s habitual manner of dealing with his young charges. “I understand you were off sick this week, so I don’t know whether you’ve heard much about our investigation.”
“I read about it in the newspapers, of course. The police seem to be going out of their way to avoid the suggestion that London might have a serial killer on the loose.”
“The term usually denotes someone driven to commit murder by aberrant, uncontrollable passions. That hardly seems appropriate in this case. The victims fall into the common geographic profile – both murders were committed in the same area – but they were not the focus of violent desires. I’ve heard that some of the pupils here have been getting into fights with a gang on the nearby estate.”
Kingsmere appeared disappointed by the mundanity of the enquiry. “So I understand,” he said. “The seniors, mostly. It’s a territorial matter of little interest. The sixth form use the rear grounds of the estate to reach the rugby pitch and the athletic ground. It’s a very old dispute.”
“I thought the Saladins were new. We have around thirty-seven registered – that is, official – gangs currently operating in central London, so it can be hard keeping track of them.”
The teacher cocked his head, intrigued. “How does a gang become official?”
“It gets registered if one of its members tries to shoot you, Mr Kingsmere.”
“What I meant was that the territorial dispute goes back a long way before gangs. Our school has been on the same site for centuries, and the estate was built during the postwar slum clearance. Our boys argue, with some justification, that we were here first. Tensions have existed here for many generations. I set a local area research project last year, and we found that as early as the eighteenth century, the poorer residents of the neighbourhood had appointed someone to champion their rights. Hang on, let me see if I can find the document.”
A new light of enthusiasm fired him as he powered up his laptop and began searching through project files. The white square board above his chair filled with data.
“This one, in particular, may strike a chord.” He briskly tapped the screen as if drawing the attention of an unruly class. “In 1929, a guy called Albert Whitney led a revolt by the tenants of Three Bells Street against exorbitant rents charged by their landlords, to wit, the owners of this school. Three Bells Street was destroyed during the war, and now lies beneath the rear grounds of the Roland Plumbe Community Estate.” Kingsmere flicked off the light, as if keen to keep any further information to himself. “If ever there was a case to believe in psychogeography, this is it.”
“Psychogeography is a process based on empirical data,” said May with a certain amount of malicious relish. He had used this argument before with his partner.
“Data that comprises the temporal value judgements of the superstitious, uneducated masses,” snapped Kingsmere.
“Either way, it’s the kind of hostile territory that attracts the attention of vigilantes,” May told him. “It will warrant further investigation.”
As he left the school, a nagging doubt about Kingsmere wedged itself in May’s mind. Connections were slow to form, synapses failing. He felt sure there was something he had forgotten, as though a harmful half-remembered dream was even now fading from his memory.
¦
“I’m over here,” said the hole, as a fistful of toothbrushes came flying out of it.
John May walked to the earth mound surrounding the edge and looked down. His partner was on all fours in the muddy pit, scrabbling at sheaves of half-buried Bakelite handles. What on earth did he think he was doing?
“I told you it was a toothbrush factory,” Bryant panted. “The estate agent insisted it was dentures.”
“I’m sorry?”
“My new apartment, it’s converted from the only remaining part of a toothbrush factory that survived the wartime bombing. This whole area was riddled with small workshops.”
“After all this time I still don’t understand you,” complained May, giving him a hand out of the quagmire. “You go missing from the unit without telling anyone where you’re heading, and now I find you at home? And why do you have to know the history of the ground you live on? Why can’t you just leave things alone?”
“Well, yes, that would be the easiest thing to do,” Bryant admitted, “but so many questions would remain unanswered. Did you not wonder how I managed to buy this place so cheaply?” Bryant had made his new home on the unfashionable side of Chalk Farm, which bordered the fashionable, expensive, celebrity-riddled Primrose Hill.
“Let me guess. It was cheap because it has a peculiar shape, uneven floors, damp patches, a leaky flat roof that appears to be made of tin, and is built on a triangular piece of overgrown waste ground barely ten yards from a heavily used railway line?”
“It has character.”
“It has mice.”
“And it has no foundations. That’s why it was cheap.” Bryant stamped mud from his Wellingtons and entered the yellow brick apartment through an old-fashioned green stable door divided across the middle.
“So it’s liable to fall down as well. You know it was never designed to be lived in. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was illegal to do so. Poor Alma, how she must miss her cosy apartment in Battersea. Have you got any heating?”
“Not as such,” Bryant admitted. “Now that you mention it, Alma has been covetously glancing at brochures on Antigua lately. The toothbrush-making machinery probably kept the whole place warm in winter. Never mind, there’s a stack of broken trestle tables at the end of the garden. I could burn them if it gets really cold.”
“Look, I’ll bring you a portable radiator. And throw out all those filthy toothbrushes.” May’s St John’s Wood flat was as clean and bare as an operating theatre. Even April had warned her grandfather that he was exhibiting signs of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. May reacted to the chaos of the world around him by creating a hygienic haven where he could work and think far into the night. Bryant, on the other hand, seemed to be living with the ants.
“I rather thought I’d create an artwork with the toothbrushes, although I’m not sure how easy it is to carve Bakelite. I suppose my fleeting interests are a bit of a curse. To whom will I pass on all my arcane knowledge? I do admire your ability to draw a line underneath the past and leave it alone.”
“It’s the best thing to do,” said May, searching for somewhere clean to sit. He was worried by the fact that his partner was digging in the garden at a time when he should have been concentrating on the case. Every few months, fresh fears assailed him about Bryant’s advancing age affecting his abilities. Everyone had doubts as they grew older, but when wrong decisions were made in the course of crime detection, lives were at stake. He hoped he would once again be proven wrong but could not shake the feeling that they were now living on borrowed time.
“Exactly, you see. England has the most contemporary spiritual landscape in Europe. Why not make the most
