“The boy who was drawing in the gallery.”
“Then return to him. Even if he doesn’t know it, the boy holds the key. While you do that, do I have your permission to bring in some alternative expertise?”
“You have my blessing,” May agreed. “Just make sure there’s nothing to connect us in the event of an internal investigation.”
? Ten Second Staircase ?
30
Secret Landscapes
As he struggled with a recalcitrant length of bookbinding tape, Arthur Bryant thought back to the white witch’s comments about London’s legendary monsters.
How many had left their marks behind in ancient streets, to be traced through to the present day? As a tour guide, he had taken tourists around Chelsea, showing them the artists’ houses where nervous talk of foreign fiends once filled the drawing rooms, then on to Vauxhall and Rotherhythe, where cutthroats and footpads had operated in the alleyways and under the arches. In London’s poor areas the dangers had been more real, and the residents had found little time to fret over the presence of imagined devils, but in wealthy and penurious neighbourhoods alike, the legendary monsters of London had left few physical signs of their presence. All that could be seen were a few untended plaques, a gravestone or two, sometimes a public house where a villain had gathered with his cronies. Monsters lived on in family memories, and were turned into stories to frighten children.
Bryant patted the binding tape onto his copy of
Londoners still spoke of the Leicester Square Vampire precisely because he had never been caught. Was that the purpose of the Highwayman, to provide a nemesis for generations to come, to achieve perverse immortality through incompleteness?
Bryant sat back and untangled his pipe from the scarf he kept wrapped around him in the overheated office. The geographical factor bothered him. Two of the murders had occurred in the area surrounding Smithfield, the former execution site of London’s villains for over four hundred years, before it was moved to Tyburn Tree. Once the mob had gathered there to witness death by fire and roasting chair. Was it really coincidence that modern-day scoundrels should suffer similar fates in the vicinity? Bryant kept coming back to Clerkenwell, and its connection with the blood of Christ. All London areas maintained links with the past, no matter how well hidden they were. Even the pubs surrounding Lincoln’s Inn Fields had bars named after the Templars. Everything was there for a reason. The past misled and taunted him but tightened its grip as his age advanced.
And now that he had been given permission to explore the city’s history of murderers, he sensed a recurring pattern at work, something that ran all the way from the London Monster to the Leicester Square Vampire and the Highwayman. Certainly similar murderers seemed to have existed under a variety of names. London’s bogeymen were part of the folklore that crusted around the city like barnacles on a slow-sailing liner.
Bryant raised his collapsed trilby from the chair and bashed it back into shape. It was time to consult an expert on the meanings of London’s secret landscapes. Creaking up from his seat, he decided to start by paying a visit to his old friend, Oliver Golifer, owner of the Newman Street Picture Library.
¦
Oliver Golifer’s broad, broken nose, badly shaved pate, and ironingboard forehead gave him the appearance of an East End thug sired by Magwitch. Strangers picked Saturday-night fights with him just to prove to their girlfriends that they were hard, which was unfortunate because, although he had the heart of a kitten and the intellect of an Oxford don, he was still happy to knock someone into the floor for their arrogance. He had developed this pugilistic tendency at an early age in response to taunting about his admittedly ridiculous name. This amused Bryant greatly, because while Golifer had the reputation of a bruiser, he could also be as camp as a French operetta. He welcomed the detective with meaty hands the size of Sunday roasts before ushering him through the cramped storefront.
“Nice to see you looking so well, Arthur,” he whispered. As a child, he had accidentally drunk some bleach his stepfather had saved in an orange squash bottle, and it had corroded his vocal cords, reducing his voice to a sinister sussurance as menacing as his demeanor. “I see you’re all over the news again. I’m assuming that’s what you’re here about. What’s on your mind?”
“It’s a question of motive. You’ve read about the investigation?”
“How could I have avoided it? The gentleman you’re searching for is a self-publicist. The tabloids have been praying for someone like him to come along for years. I’ve already opened a picture file on him, although I’m sure they’re only variations on the shots you already have.” He led the way through the warren of rooms to racks of yellowing envelopes, filed in a complex system involving dates, locations, and subjects. The proliferation of Internet picture sites meant that Golifer no longer needed to keep the library open, but it appealed to his sense of continuity to do so; Newman Street had housed picture libraries as long as photographs had been taken. Its walls were lined with famous images: Emmeline Pankhurst being carried away by constables, a fascist throwing a Molotov cocktail at a police cordon, Ban the Bomb gatherings in Trafalgar Square, Poll Tax riots, vacant celebrities alighting from limousines into photographers’ light storms.
“I’m interested in his field of operation,” Bryant explained. “I was waylaid by Clerkenwell’s historical connections for a while, but I think that may be a blind. If you connect the murder sites properly, one place seems to exist at the centre. What do you have on Smithfield?”
“Hm. Bull in a china shop,” replied Golifer enigmatically. He rooted about for a few minutes and finally held up a damaged print of one such enraged bovine creature destroying several hundred Wedgwood vases. “In the early part of the seventeenth century, drunken herdsmen used to stampede their cattle on the way to the market at Smithfield, just for a laugh. The beasts used to rampage into shops and houses, hence the expression.” He studied Bryant’s face thoughtfully. “You want to go even earlier, don’t you? Thinking about the old execution site?”
“The area’s psychogeography is hard to ignore.”
Golifer dragged over another box and opened it. “Is your partner still seeing that married woman behind her husband’s back?”
“Monica Greenwood? I’m afraid so.”
“Dirty old sod, good for him.” Golifer’s gurgling laugh sounded like someone unblocking a sink. “What about you? I heard you were knocking about with some old bird as well.”
“Mrs Quinten and I have an understanding, that’s all,” Bryant bridled. “I enjoy her company. We play skittles together.”
“Your landlady won’t be pleased. Alma always had a soft spot for you.”
“Can we get back to the subject in hand? I don’t ask you about your bedroom arrangements.” Bryant reknotted his scarf, tightening it in some agitation. “What else do you have on Smithfield?”
“I know it used to be called ‘Smoothfield,’ a flat ten-acre grass field with a horse market on Fridays. Early twelfth century, that was. Farmers added other livestock, punters went to watch tournaments and jousts, then they came for public hangings. It was all considered entertainment. Witches and heretics were roasted alive in cages. In Mary Tudor’s reign, over two hundred martyrs were burned. Duels and disorder, death and drunken debauchery, that’s Smithfield for you. Now it’s all rowdy nightclubs. Goes to show some things hardly change.”
“Perhaps it was no accident he picked these sites,” said Bryant.
“What about the other two?”
“I thought of that. The Oasis Swimming Pool is very near the site of Seven Dials’ notorious rookeries; they sheltered many a famous murderer. Which leaves Burroughs’s art gallery on the South Bank as the odd one out.
