Bryant & May 04; Ten Second Staircase

doorstep.

“Highwayman’s achieving fantastic popularity among teenage girls,” Banbury pointed out. “Check this.” He opened another site. “‘Why I want the Highwayman to be the father of my unborn baby.’ The girl who wrote this is fifteen years old. ‘Why the Highwayman may be good for us all. Rough Justice: Hard News is the first national newspaper to openly support the Highwayman.’ There’s much darker stuff turning up on the fan sites, pornographic stories and homemade movies about him. We’re going to have imitators on our hands.”

May threw his hands up in disgust. “What is wrong with these people?”

“I suppose you could cite underdog heroes like Bonnie and Clyde – ”

“They were grassroots thieves, robbing banks that were universally hated by the disenfranchised for foreclosing land,” said May. “The Highwayman is just a killer.”

“Think about it, though. The last decade saw the rise of celebrity culture, personality replacing altruistic ideals. This could be the start of the backlash.”

“So he replaces such ideals with romanticised images of himself?” asked May. “How does that work?”

“I guess in some twisted way he thinks he can become the anticelebrity celebrity. And it looks like he’s right. He’s committing the kind of crimes people love to read about or see at the movies, the sort of murders that hardly ever occur in real life. He’s pandering to his public.”

“That’s what Arthur said. He wants us to set a trap.” He glanced back at the Hard News headline. “I think we’ve found someone who can help us.”

? Ten Second Staircase ?

33

Criminal Language

“Where’s Dorothy Huxley?” Bryant demanded of no-one in particular, sauntering into the dingy southeast Greenwich Library that smelled of fish glue, lavender polish, fungus, and cats, with just a hint of warm tramp.

He glanced at the depleted shelves and stood some books upright, checking their covers – The Papal Outrages of Boniface VIII; Lost Zoroastrian Architecture, Vol. VI: Iran; A Treatise on Catastrophe Theory Concerning Saturn and the Number Eight; The Cult of Belphegor; and Biggles and Algy: Homoerotic Subtext in Childhood Literature. No wonder nobody ever browsed here, he thought. Hard- core readers only.

Jebediah Huxley’s literary bequest appeared even more run-down than it had been on Bryant’s previous visits. Lurking in the grim shade of the rain-sodden bypass, awaiting the wrecking ball of cashkeen councillors, it remained a defiant bastion of the abstruse, the erudite, and the esoteric. The crack-spined volumes were flaking with neglect; Dorothy and her gloomy unpaid assistant Frank were unable to save more than a few books a week with their meagre resources. That they continued to do so at all was a miracle. As he peered into the shadowed shelves, Frank’s face materialised between two volumes of the Incunabulum like an unpopular Dickensian ghost.

“You nearly gave me a heart attack,” said Bryant, theatrically palpitating his waistcoat. “You haven’t got the sort of face you should be creeping about with. Kindly don’t do it.”

“I was expecting you earlier, Mr Bryant,” Frank gloomed. “You missed her.”

“Well, when will Dorothy be back?”

“A good question. It depends on how soon we can arrange for the medium to visit.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Bryant had little patience with the prematurely aged assistant librarian.

“He can’t come round for a few days because he was cat-sitting for a sick aunt, but her Persian swallowed a hair ball and coughed itself to death, so he had to find an identical replacement, and the trouble is that the new one has one green eye and one yellow, so he’s waiting to hear back from the vet about whether they can put a contact lens in.”

“I’m sorry, Frank; you seem to be speaking some alien language designed for people who care about your problems. Back to me. Where is Dorothy?”

Frank glumly pointed a long forefinger to the floor. “She’s dead.”

“Dead? I was picking her brains on Etruscan pottery a fortnight ago; how can she be dead?”

“Stroke. We buried her on Tuesday. I tried calling your mobile, but there was no answer.”

“There wouldn’t have been. I traded one, and dropped the other in a hole I was digging. This is awful news. Poor old Dorothy, what a terrible shame. I suppose she had a good run, though. Give me the name of her nearest relative and I’ll send some pears.”

“She had no relatives left alive, Mr Bryant. I was the closest to her. Er, pears?”

“Golden Delicious. She loved them, and they can plant the pips.” A horrible thought struck the detective. “What’s going to happen to the Huxley collection now?”

“It’s in safe hands,” Frank assured him. “She passed the building over to me on the condition that its purpose as a library remained unaltered.”

“Could she do that? I mean, you’re not her next of kin.”

“Actually, I am.” Frank stroked the side of his long nose thoughtfully. “She legally adopted me four years ago.”

“Dorothy never told me that.”

“That’s because you only ever came to see her when you wanted information.”

Bryant wasn’t used to someone answering back, and was momentarily stumped for a reply.

“She did it so that Greenwich Council wouldn’t be able to touch the building. They’ve been sniffing around, sensing a real estate killing to be made, but we’ve foiled them.”

“Good for her. She was always a crafty old bird.”

“I always wanted to ask you – did you go out with her once?” asked Frank. “I heard she was a bit of a goer in her time.”

“That’s none of your business, even if you are her son.” Bryant bridled. “Really, this prurience is most distasteful. I’m sure she would have wanted us to continue as normal, so I’m here to avail myself of your utilities.”

“You mean you’re looking for a book.”

“Precisely so.” He looked around, smacking his lips, uncertain. “Dorothy always knew where everything was…”

“And so do I, Mr Bryant. It’s hard to share a room with someone for twenty years without learning everything they know. What are you after?”

“A canting dictionary. You know, an English code of thieves and cutthroats. I understand that highwaymen and outlaws used their own language to leave messages for each other, in much the same way that burglars still mark houses today. I wondered if they had ever committed their code to print.”

“Such a book would, by its very nature, have been illegally published, but I’ll see what I can find in our Private Reference section.”

Thunder rolled lazily across the roof of the library, rustling the damp pages of forgotten periodicals and sharpening the air with static. “I’ll need to get a light,” Frank explained. “The electrics don’t work back here.”

Bryant extracted a long metal usherette’s torch from the voluminous folds of his overcoat. “Don’t worry, I have my partner’s Valiant.”

They made their way between stacks of books, like divers negotiating coral reefs, until they reached a row of rusting cabinets. True to his word, Frank knew exactly where to look. He lifted down a heavy leather volume with mouse-chewed corners and laid it on the table. After consulting the index beneath Bryant’s beam, he tapped the page meaningfully. “Do you know about the Thieves’ Key?”

“Yes, done that; what else is there?” asked Bryant with characteristic rudeness.

“Well, there’s the Thieves’ Exercise. It goes hand in hand with the key.”

“What is it?”