Bryant & May 04; Ten Second Staircase

“Banbury,” May said aloud, “help me out here. Find something normal for me; tell me it was an accidental death, that he just blundered onto an unfinished floor.”

“Can’t do that, sir,” Banbury apologised. “Nothing remotely normal about this at all. We’ve got another decent set of boot marks, though. I need to bag the carpet tiles and run some tests, but I can already tell the prints are similar to the ones in the Burroughs gallery. If it’s the same attacker, we’re getting a pretty unusual profile.” He wiped his hands on his jacket. “He doesn’t like to touch his victims. Always keeps his distance, never gets his hands dirty. No contact means no prints, no DNA, no fibres. The outfit helps, although it seems unnecessarily theatrical.” He doubled down and pulled another carpet tile free. “There’s some kind of gunk on the boot heel. Smells like wood glue. He might have picked it up around here, but it’s worth checking.”

“Look out for a symbol scratched somewhere outside the building. Arthur thinks he always leaves a mark, a pair of V’s, one inverted. He stands and watches them die,” said May, realising the truth. “Or he arranges it so that he’s near enough to be sure of their deaths. And there’s no emotional response at all, except perhaps a very controlled level of dispassion. If you need me, I’ll be over the road.”

May made his way to the dark bar of the Jerusalem Tavern in Britton Street, sidling along a squeezed, warped corridor to a minuscule back room filled with stuffed animals. The pub’s name was another reminder of Clerkenwell’s strange connection with the Knights Templars. He ordered a marsh-green bottle of King Cnut ale and sipped it, tasting barley, nettles, and juniper.

What could I have said? he thought. Maybe I’ve finally cracked up. Too many years spent dealing with abnormalities, listening to Arthur and his pals explaining why dowsers and sunspots can help catch criminals, instead of following my instincts and using more traditional procedures. I could have become a Met superintendent years ago, a nice safe earner. Instead I spend my time wandering about in the realms of the unnatural, looking for vampires and shape-shifters.

At such times, May knew, there was only one course of action. His partner operated as the other side of his brain; the two halves needed to be reunited, in order to find some sense in the surreal. If Bryant really thought he could uncover the truth, now was the time for him to use any method necessary to do so.

? Ten Second Staircase ?

29

Deification

In the last two months, Hard News, self-billed as Great Britain’s first daily magazine, had become the periodical with the fastestgrowing circulation in the country. Janet Ramsey, former cable newsbabe and Page Three model, was its senior features editor. On Friday morning, she swooped into the Covent Garden office that had once been the headquarters of the British Cabbage Association and searched for somewhere to dump her Starbucks Double-Shot Skinny Latte on the mess of smoked-glass desks. “Are you the new runner?” she snapped. “Get me a fresh one of these.”

“Do you have the money?” asked the lanky young man who had been leaning outside Ramsey’s office, waiting for instructions.

“I don’t carry loose cash on me, darling, I’m like the queen. Sub me until I get change of a twenty.”

“Not on my wages,” the runner told her. “Cash up front, I’ll get change.”

“I don’t know where we find you lads these days,” Ramsey complained, digging in her purse to grudgingly pay him. “A century earlier we’d have been putting you up chimneys and lowering you into drains with canaries.” She beckoned to Roat, her art director. “Dump the old shot we had of the Highwayman; the picture quality was horrible. What was it photographed through, a heavy denim veil?”

“This isn’t Vanity Fair,” said Roat. “It was taken by a barista through a steamed-up coffee bar window.”

“Can’t you find another shot of him, one that isn’t so blurred?”

“He’s a murder suspect, not a catwalk model.” The designer sighed. “We’ll retouch the jaw and lips, bring out the tricorne and the mask, make his eyes more sinister.”

“That’s not technically legal,” Ramsey warned.

“It was good enough for Time magazine and O.J. Simpson,” the designer reminded her. “It would help if I could reduce the size of the splash.”

“Then put it on page three and come up with a symbol for the front cover, something we can use to identify the Highwayman whenever he’s sighted. Don’t go over the top, but make it demonic and sexy.”

“This just arrived for you, Janet,” said the runner, handing her a brown envelope.

“You’re not entitled to use my first name,” Ramsey warned. “Actually, you can open it; it might be hate mail.”

“You’ve been peed on by a member of Oasis; surely you can withstand a little anthrax,” sniffed the designer, watching as the boy tore open the package.

“What do we have here?” Ramsey scanned the four photographs. “Well, well, just in time for this Sunday’s edition.” She dropped the photographs on her desk with a smirk that revealed the mouthenhancing limits of her lipstick. “Someone appears to be on our side. The Highwayman has had some professional pictures taken. Look at them; they’re like forties studio shots.” She rattled her Versace charm bracelet at the runner. “Envelope, envelope. Where did this come from?”

The runner was examining something he had removed from the lining of his nose. “Dunno. Post room?”

“Show some initiative and find out.” She passed the pictures to the designer. “See if you can do something with them.”

“Can I spend some money on artwork?”

“All right, but don’t go mad. We’ll run a large strap across the cover, something like Highwayman Delivers Death Vengeance Twice in One Night. Deliver, you see? Like ‘Stand and deliver’?”

“Okay, but ‘vengeance’? He killed two innocent people.”

“For God’s sake, nobody’s innocent anymore. Two very disliked people. All right, I take your point, give me something bland and non-committal like Masked Man’s Double Slaughter Rampage. Get Francesca to work out the details, and shift Pope Admits There Is No Afterlife to the bottom of the page; the story’s unsubstantiated.”

“She’s your sub, you tell her,” said Roat, stumping back to his desk.

“I have to do everything around here.” Ramsey slammed her office door behind her and examined the cuttings on her wall. To date there had been seven amateur snaps taken of the Highwayman, only four of which were verifiable. It would help if they knew where he was going to strike next. According to Simon, the tubby queen who handled the insider’s pop page, the Highwayman’s face had already made an appearance on stencils and flyers for a club night in the West End. She could take a leaf from the trend, ask Roat to tidy up the symbol a bit, get it adopted by the nation’s teenagers. Publish some souvenir memorabilia, do a contra-deal with T-shirt printers and knock up some shirts bearing his image, hand them out at gigs and clubs; condemn his actions in print, of course, but run some iconic imagery on mobile phones to whet the public’s appetite. It was important for the magazine to own his image. She called Francesca in.

“Couldn’t we get a band to record a song about him?” she asked. “What would it take to turn him into a cult hero?”

“A little cash,” said Francesca, who loathed her boss and coveted her job, but was forced to smile and offer help until she could think of a way of derailing her. “You don’t need to shift many downloads for a hit single. We’ll be fine so long as he sticks to attacking unloved celebrities, but what if he decides to go after a national hero? Launching a campaign around him could backfire.”

“Never worry about things that haven’t happened yet,” snapped Ramsey. “The public has a ten-second memory. We’re not condoning his actions, Francesca, we’re riding on his awareness level. When six million people show an interest in a lousy paperback about finding God, it’s your job to understand why they do so; it doesn’t mean you have to like it. The English are irrational creatures, and ipso facto, unintentionally hypocritical. We merely reflect their failed ability to appreciate their reduced moral status.”

“Sometimes I think you’re working on the wrong paper,” said Francesca. “Lately you’ve been using long words and showing scruples.”