Bryant & May 04; Ten Second Staircase

muscles. And because of that, we never managed to close the case. I don’t want history to repeat itself. Do you have any earlier prints of legendary London murderers? Engravings, stuff like that?”

“The usual plates of Spring-Heeled Jack, Charley Peace, Jack Sheppard, things you’ll have seen plenty of times before.”

“Let me see them. You never know.” They returned to the print files, where Golifer pulled down a vast, mildewy volume of prints. “Who are these characters?” asked Bryant, stabbing at a page. The print showed four black-faced men, covered in dirt and ashes, making off with several screaming children.

“Ah, they’re the Flying Dustmen,” Golifer whispered. “A good example of real-life characters who were absorbed into London’s mythical history. Charles Fox was one of a group of bogus refuse collectors known around St Mary, Islington, as the Flying Dustmen.

He and his cronies stole baskets of ashes from households. Back in 1812, contractors paid seven hundred fifty pounds a year to the parish and employed several men and their carts to empty the dustbins. They hired women and children to sift cinders, which fetched half the price of coal, and siftings for brickmaking. The regular dustmen feared they would lose their Christmas bonuses from households, and issued written warnings to customers about the rogue collectors. The ringleader was caught and prosecuted, but for many years, parents used the image of the dust-clad thieves to frighten their children into good behaviour.”

“How one misses the ability to frighten children.” Bryant turned the pages, fascinated.

“Now, if you’re looking for a man with the reputation of vanishing through walls, there’s John Williams, who supposedly slaughtered a draper and his own family with a ripping chisel before striking a second time and killing a publican, his wife, and his maid with a crowbar.”

“You’re talking about the infamous Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811.”

“That’s right.” Golifer indicated an etching that showed a curlyheaded sailor stretched out on an inclined platform. “This is a good example of how the public colluded in manufacturing a legend.

Hysteria swept Wapping and the surrounding area because the murderer seemed superhuman, vanishing from the upper rooms where the deaths occurred, and there were over forty false arrests. Finally, a seaman named John Williams was taken in with virtually no evidence against him, and after he hanged himself in suspicious circumstances at Coldbath Fields Prison, he was paraded through the streets with the maul and the chisel inserted into a board beside his head. The High Constable of Middlesex and hundreds of parish officers and constables escorted the cart. Suicides were buried at crossroads in those days, and Williams is interred at the crossroads of Cannon Street and St George’s Turnpike. But for years after, the area was infected with a kind of poison. Residents said they heard and saw his vengeful ghost, and even to this day the area has a strange feeling, especially when it’s rainy and the wind is high, and everyone else is indoors. Murderers who operate in mysterious – that is to say, unsolved – circumstances, are survived by a peculiar assonance that can last across generations.”

“Exactly so.” Bryant studied the prints on the crowded walls. “Wait a minute.” He raised up the copy of the photograph Golifer had shown him, a small blurred shot taken in Leicester Square by a tourist, and narrowed his eyes, comparing it to the lithograph on the wall. The Met had discounted it, but Bryant had long believed that the snap of the Vampire was genuine. This was the evidence no-one else remembered, not even Longbright, who assumed she was official custodian of all remaining documents. He laid the curled photograph on the table. “Bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?” he asked Golifer, pointing to the wall print that showed a strangely outfitted man standing on a rock. “The clothing of the two figures is almost identical.”

“I never noticed that before,” Golifer admitted.

“I think we were misled by the nickname conjured up in the press,” Bryant surmised. “The cloak, the boots, the jerkin, the high collar; it appears the Leicester Square Vampire wasn’t modelled on Dracula at all, but upon someone else entirely. This print you have is familiar from my childhood. You know who this is, of course.”

“Yes, he’s a myth – ”

“Not at all. He was very real. Born in the reign of Henry the Second, with a pedigree ab origine no higher than a shepherd’s. He trained as a butcher, and was equally brilliant with a backsword, a quarterstaff, or a bow. He fell in with a bad lot, taking to such a level of violent thievery and murder that travellers lived in terror of him, and would pay him for safe passage through the woodlands.

He died in a Yorkshire nunnery at the age of forty-three after a nun bled him and took too much out. Rehabilitated after his death as a righter of wrongs, a working-class champion.” Bryant lifted the print from the wall and set it down. “We know him today as Robin Hood.”

¦

May studied the gang before him. He rarely thought about his own frailty; he was usually too concerned with his partner, whose lack of robustness, coupled with a curiously youthful impetuosity, frequently lowered him into the freight-train path of harm. But right now he could see the risk in his own situation. He noted the gentler mix and grew warier; the girls could present a shocking ferality that bolstered the boys into more violent acts.

He waited for them to make a move, but nothing happened. They formed an unbroken barrier across the stairway, waiting in silence, unnervingly still. They wore the uniform of the disenfranchised: thin grey hoods over curve-peaked caps, sweatpants or lowslung jeans. The girls had scraped-back hair, gold hoop earrings, pale bare midriffs with tattooed mock-Celtic symbols, the usual fake brands worn in too-small sizes that made them appear thin and feral. May knew that their language would comprise a barrage of shorthand patois, street American, and incomprehensible slang. He felt an equal measure of sorrow and respect for those who had been stranded here by circumstance, but lately his faith in the redemptive power of the nation’s youth had been tested to breaking point. He knew that their spectrum also included a percentage of vicious teens trapped between the twin hatreds of innocence and adulthood. The difficulty lay in divining the composition of the group.

Drawing all the confidence he could muster, he moved forward to the next flight of stairs. Almost imperceptibly, the crowd closed around him, sealing off his exit. A girl popped gum loudly. A boy spoke in murmurs too low to be perceptible. Somebody laughed.

Knives, thought May. They’ll be carrying knives, and I have no way of alerting anyone before they make their move. Did they know who he was? It was absurd to be caught out in such a place, surrounded by families and apartments, without recourse to aid, but he knew that estates like these could be the loneliest places on earth. The Borough of Camden, which had more such estates than most, had the highest suicide rate in London, and all their efforts at treeplanting and traffic-calming were undermined by the desire to continually cram in more housing.

He felt the shock of contact with a stranger, a boy’s fist shoving at his back, then another, and within seconds the entire group was pushing him towards the staircase, others making way in front of him, clearing the path to the concrete steps. His centre of balance shifted as they kicked at his legs, and then he knew that nothing could stop him from plunging headlong down the stairs, because they would not allow him to catch at their arms, only watching in insolent silence as he fell.

And fall he did, as the shatterproof light on the landing spun overhead, the rough brick wall grazing his hands but affording no purchase.

He glimpsed the landing below, and braced himself for the bonecracking jolt of the concrete.

But it never came. Instead, broad hands caught him beneath the arms, raising him upright and setting him down on the landing. As he caught his breath, he found himself looking up into the faces of two police constables in yellow traffic jackets. Pushing between them came a stocky sergeant with a familiar, if unpleasant, face.

“Go on, you lot, piss off before I run you in,” he told the group, waving them away dismissively before turning his attention to the detective. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, May, apart from trying to get yourself kicked senseless.”

Sergeant Jack Renfield’s father had been Sergeant Leonard Renfield, an old enemy of Bryant’s at the Met; like his father, Jack Renfield had been pointedly denied promotion several times, for which he blamed Bryant’s damning reports. For once, though, May was pleased to see him.

“I suppose your grubby little partner is somewhere around here, too,” said Renfield, looking around with suspicion.

“No, I’m here alone.”

“Christ, May, I’d have thought you would have more sense. You’re lucky my lads didn’t knock off early, and were still keeping an eye out.”

“I owe you one, Jack. What are you doing here, anyway?” asked May, dusting himself down.

“Chameleon,” replied Renfield somewhat confusingly.