her own personal morality into question.
? Ten Second Staircase ?
24
Shadow City
As Meera Mangeshkar arrived for her shift, she heard the detectives arguing in their room opposite. She had become used to the see-saw sound of their bickering, but went over to listen.
“You may as well come in, Mangeshkar; we have no secrets here.” May rolled a chair over to her. “Ever hear of the Leicester Square Vampire?”
“Before my time, sir.”
“Accidents of birth do not excuse your ignorance,” snapped Bryant. “Caligula reigned before you were born, but you’ve heard of him, haven’t you? We were asking ourselves what the Highwayman has in common with the Leicester Square Vampire, and the answer is that they both started social panics. Look at the hysterical press reaction, and remember what Lord Macaulay said: ‘We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.’”
“You mean like the video nasties scare of the eighties?”
“Exactly. Panics occur when individuals feel threatened and mobilise themselves into vigilante groups. Mods and rockers, paedophiles, even UFO sightings have all sparked waves of hysteria. Saralla White and Danny Martell are being tarred and feathered because they represent the failures of a generation. Martell ran a show that was popular with teenagers but hated by their parents, until he lost his remaining audience. White advocated multiple partners, abortion, and drugs, but was a hypocrite. As people age, they form habits and take sides. The Highwayman is a godsend. According to the right-wing press, he’s only doing what people across the country don’t have the guts to do. The general consensus is that his victims had it coming. Journalists are so busy tracking down dubious witnesses that they’ve not stopped to consider the effect of their actions.”
“You mean they’re writing a bunch of toss about him.”
“Succinctly put, Mangeshkar. This editor at
“Janet Ramsey,” Longbright pointed out.
“She’s intent on turning the Highwayman into some kind of hero. And to think she started out writing in the
“As you said, sir, no shortage of enemies ready to put the boot in.”
“Wait, it goes on: ‘
“Why?” asked Meera. “What happened?”
“His victims were accused of bringing their fate upon themselves, just because they were women out alone at night, some postwar notion about unaccompanied females being of loose character. Crime reporters turned the whole thing into a moral issue and a political point-scorer. Janice, where are the Vampire files?”
Longbright caught her breath. She had managed to hide the essential page in the back of her desk. “I think they all burned,” she replied. “Your fault, I’m afraid. I’ll see if there’s anything else left, but don’t expect much.” She rose from her desk and clumped off, returning a few minutes later with the singed cardboard container, denuded of its single incriminating document.
“Is that all we have to show for three decades of sightings?” Bryant settled his spectacles on his nose and peered into the carton, where a handful of damp clippings lay stuck to the bottom.
“We’d have more if you hadn’t blown the place up,” Longbright reminded him, tipping the pitiful contents across his desk. The best form of defence against Bryant, she knew, was distraction.
“Don’t worry, I remember most of the assault details.” May spread the jaundiced newspaper clippings out. “First recorded assault was March twenty-sixth, 1973, in the alleyway connecting Leicester Square to Charing Cross Road. It’s bricked in now as part of the Odeon complex; another smelly, piss-stained piece of old London gone, and good riddance. A nineteen-year-old female on her way home from a nightclub was beaten and bitten around the chin and neck. The same MO occurred six times that summer, enough for us to link the cases and for the press to coin a nickname. The early victims were all women between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three, all on their way home from nights on the town. Two of them were known to us because they’d been arrested on immorality charges. Two were of mixed race. The press weren’t told, but it didn’t stop them from implying that the victims had led their attacker on because they were provocatively dressed in miniskirts, and because they weren’t white. A message there to anyone who thinks the seventies were enlightened.
“The Vampire returned in 1974 after a quiet winter, the attacks continuing intermittently until a boy – Malcolm somebody, his name isn’t here – died of his wounds. He was the first of two fatalities that year. We didn’t have computers to help us find bite marks then, and at first we missed the link, but he was the son of an Austrian diplomat, and suddenly there were funds available to pursue a full investigation. The problem was that, like the alleyways where the Vampire carried out his attacks, every lead turned into a dead end. We ended up with numerous witness reports – ”
“There are a couple of brief descriptions here,” Bryant interrupted. “Tall, athletic, dressed in a black cape, spotted running into a cul-desac, thought to have scaled a sheer wall and escaped somehow. The ‘Vampire’ tag stuck not because of his clothes, but because nearly all of the victims had been bitten, the severity depending on how long the Vampire had been left alone with them. We didn’t know then that biting was so common in sexual assaults. Databases were still difficult to cross-reference in those days. And you have to realise that in 1973 his outfit wasn’t so strange.”
“That’s right.” May took up the story again. “Victorian capes for men had enjoyed a revival. Just the previous year, Christopher Lee had starred in a modern Dracula film which saw him running along the King’s Road in a billowing cape. The image had already been planted in the minds of the young. The press played up the danger, and pretty soon we had drunken vigilante groups roaming the West End as the pubs turned out, searching for this phantom figure who drained his victims’ blood and walked through walls. The whole thing became a ridiculous urban legend. People supposedly sighted him stalking across the rooftops. The Vampire operated in a tight area that, thanks to geographic profiling, we now know wasn’t where he lived. We made mistakes. The unit had been brought in to try and stem the escalating anxiety in the capital. The mythology became self-perpetuating as the Vampire started to act on his own press reports; if they said he’d been seen wearing a top hat, then he wore one the next time he ventured out. If they said he could escape through solid brick, he staged a stunt to suggest that was exactly what he’d done. He played up to his public, and started taking risks. We nearly caught him.”
“What do you mean, nearly?” asked Meera.
An awkward glance passed between the detectives, and they fell uncharacteristically silent. “The operation went wrong,” said Bryant, gathering up the clippings and tidying them away.
“Did the attacks continue?” asked Mangeshkar.
“For a while, yes.”
The room went quiet. The constable shot the detective sergeant a look, as if to say
“Could we get back to the case in hand? Perhaps we should take another look at possible suspects.”
“All right,” May agreed. “Let’s start with the boy, Luke Tripp. We know his testimony is over-imaginative – there’s no way he could have seen a man on a horse in that chamber – so we have to assume that fear made him exaggerate what he saw.”
“Therein lies another paradox,” said Bryant, who loved paradoxes. “The pose Luke drew is exactly the same as the one described by Channing Gifford, the dancer living opposite the Smithfield gym who spotted the Highwayman from her window. It’s the same as the pose struck in the digital shots taken by the estate girls. The
