There was a firecracker pop as Banbury fired his stain pellet.
“Tell me what’s happening,” demanded May.
“Okay, I fired and caught our man on the back of the left wrist. He’s wearing gloves, but the needle should have gone right through. There’s ink everywhere. He’ll be out of the front door any second now. There’s nowhere else for him to go.”
May shoved open the van’s tinted side window and watched. “Who’s in charge of keeping the street clear?” he asked, as he saw the gates of St Crispin’s swinging open from the corner of his eye. “What’s going on? I thought Kershaw had both ends of the road sealed off.”
“He does. It’s Saturday – there’s nobody in the school – ” Pupils were pouring out through the gate, a sea of navy-and-gold blazers moving quickly through the drizzle, filling the street.
“It’s private,” said May, shocked at his own stupidity. “They hold classes on Saturday as well. We have to get them off the street.”
May saw the door of the warehouse’s entrance hall swing open, and the Highwayman stepped out into the rain.
“Colin,” called Mangeshkar, “get around the front. He’s on the steps.”
There were children everywhere now. The Highwayman stood head and shoulders above them all.
“Christ, where are our men?” cried May, slamming back the van door and alighting. “Meera, stay with me.”
Bimsley came sliding around the corner and took a number of schoolboys down like skittles. The black-clad figure was slipping through crests of blue and yellow, moving farther away. May tried to keep him in focus, but the blinding rain reduced his vision.
“He can’t get out without being seen,” called Mangeshkar. She charged into the crowd, slipping between the children, heading towards her target. Moments later she was looking back at him with her hands raised, puzzlement and apprehension flooding her features. Bimsley and DuCaine fought their way through the children towards her as Banbury appeared on the steps clutching his arm. Longbright was there, too, buffeted by the raucous tide of pupils, searching amongst them.
“He can’t have just vanished,” cried May in exasperation. He looked from the dissipating teenagers to the high brick walls of the converted warehouses, then down at the slowly clearing road. He saw only two other adults, a teacher heading for the school’s car park, and a single parent who had managed to slip through the cordon.
“Didn’t anyone realise that the school was holding classes?” he asked, exasperated.
“The Highwayman obviously did,” said Mangeshkar. May knew then that they had lost their quarry.
¦
“Well, he didn’t climb a wall, and he didn’t drop into the sewers,” Longbright concluded. “There was nowhere else he could have run, except onto the estate. Both ends of the street were closed.”
“Anything show on the CCTV outside the school gates?” asked May, opening the rear door of the van.
“I’ve already got an up-link, but I think you need to see it for yourself,” warned Banbury. “They’ve a new system that records directly onto a hard drive. The picture resolution is much clearer. Here we go.” He punched in the code and forwarded to the moment when the school gates opened. “Watch the background.” The sea of uniformed pupils swirled across the lower half of the screen, but the Highwayman could clearly be seen descending the steps of the building. Banbury slowed down the images and tapped the screen with his pen. “He stopped here for a moment, as if he was remembering an escape route. Now watch.”
Suddenly, the leather-clad man stepped forward and dropped lower in the picture. For a moment it seemed as though the children were engulfing him. At the point when he reached the bottom of the steps, he continued to descend until he was below the height of the surrounding pupils.
“It looks as if he’s going right into the ground,” said May, amazed. “Not possible,” said Banbury. “I checked. There’s nothing there but tarmac.”
The little group continued staring at the screen in disbelief. The tide of schoolchildren gradually parted and withdrew, leaving nothing behind but blank pavement.
“That’s insane. Where’s he gone?” May was mystified. “Rerun the footage.”
They watched again, stepping through one frame at a time, but the images yielded no further clues. The Highwayman’s movement became too fast and blurred to be fully discerned. He lowered his head and folded down in a tumble of passing figures. The collapsing image disturbed May more each time he watched it, but it took him a few minutes to realise why. The Leicester Square Vampire had supposedly vanished in the same manner, over thirty years earlier.
¦
Arthur Bryant trudged doggedly through the downpour, checking each litter-cramped alleyway as he passed. He had forgotten to bring the address of the lockup with him, and was now no longer convinced he would recognise the turnoff by sight.
Lately, certain sections of his memory had started to retreat. The process was peculiarly selective, so that, while he recalled every detail of the trial of Neville Heath, the whip-wielding wartime RAF sadist who suffocated and mutilated his girlfriends, or the investigation surrounding Gordon Cummins, the brutal ‘Blackout Ripper’ traced by the serial number on his gas mask just as he was about to strangle his fifth victim, Bryant could not remember where he had parked Victor, or when he had last filled it with petrol (the gauge was not to be trusted).
He felt as though he had been quietly but firmly sidelined from the investigation, given some displacement activity to get on with while the real work was being undertaken by professionals. Nobody trusted Bryant with the contemporary investigation. Instead, somewhat at his own behest, he found himself relegated to rooting about in the detritus of the past. Bryant was a contrary man; in other circumstances this would have been his ideal assignment, but today he felt as if he was missing out on something important. The unit had sailed near the edge of disaster before, but never quite this close.
He raised his rain-spattered spectacles, peering down a cobbled alley with nasturtiums and vines splitting its dripping brown bridges, and knew he had found the right place. Paddington had always been a contrary, broken- backed area, riven by rail lines and fragmented by landlords, but rendered lively by the economic migrants who perched behind the counters of its late-night shops or cooked in take-aways that filled the air with unfamiliar spices. Now, the smart new basin and rows of expensive executive apartments had supposedly regenerated the area, but as far as Bryant could see, the renovation was merely driving out the people who made the neighbourhood so intriguing.
He checked the bunch of keys Longbright had released to him, and stood before the creosoted wooden door cut into one of the last bricked-up arches. The evidence archive was one of four kept by the PCU across London to house items from earlier investigations. The catalogued bags and boxes could not be disposed of until all of their cases were concluded, but court appeals and queried verdicts kept many investigations ‘live’ far beyond the unit’s involvement. DNA profiling had meant that many of the items stored here were now active once more, and Bryant was under strict instructions not to handle or remove anything.
He stepped through the narrow slatted door into the spidery gloom and searched for a light switch, before remembering that the Paddington and King’s Cross lockups had no electricity. Hefting May’s Valiant into his palm, he shone the cinema torch around the arch. Mildew and moisture had taken their toll; many of the heavy clear plastic sacks were now acting as greenhouses for fungus. Bryant found himself looking at the accumulated details of his career. Here was a painted mask worn by Euridice in a scandalous – not to mention murderous – wartime production of
It took the best part of an hour to locate the file box marked LSV1973, and another ten minutes for his cold- slowed hands to cut open the seals.
Bryant needed to remove the instruments of death. The Vampire had thrown his knife into the alley after the last attack. The bloodstained handle had been examined and its group noted at the time, but this had been before the era of DNA testing. At least the result could now be matched against the samples taken from the stored bodies.
As he unwrapped the knife, a wintry draught raised the hairs on his arms. Other hands had gripped this
