? Ten Second Staircase ?
46
Appearances
It was hardly the confession they had been expecting.
Brilliant Kingsmere stared into the shadowed oaken corners of his study. “The other masters will be arriving soon,” he said. “Perhaps there’s just time to explain a little.”
He rose and locked his office door before sitting on the edge of the desk in front of them. “You know, it’s strange watching someone slide into an illness brought on by the very things in which he believes,” he said. “My grandfather was an idealist. He wanted people to be better than they ever could be. When they repeatedly failed him, he grew bitter. We thought he would be content to turn into one of those caricature colonels, firing off angry letters to the press. Instead, he started accosting people in the street. At first his demands were trivial, telling them to pick up litter, warning them about antisocial behaviour. Later my father discovered that he had been following teenagers and threatening them. He could be a very intimidating man.
“Even then, we thought it was harmless enough. My father had started to follow in his footsteps, preaching to classrooms when he should have been watching what was happening in his own family. One day, he was picked up by the police after threatening a young girl who had been attending his class. She didn’t press charges and they dropped the case. We never mentioned the matter. Families like ours rarely discussed their problems in those days.”
“Then how did you discover he was carrying out attacks on women?” asked May.
“I only found out the truth about his late-night disappearances when he was dying. The outfit was in a mildewed cardboard box on top of his wardrobe. I didn’t know what it was, so I asked him. By this time, my father was eaten away with bowel cancer. It seemed so wrong, me questioning this shrunken yellow man, lying in hospital dosed up with morphine, pestering him about things he had done when I was just a baby. It seemed absurd to imagine him spending his nights dressed up in a cloak, accosting young women. During the war, Leicester Square and the surrounding area had long been used by prostitutes known as Piccadilly Commandos. After the fears of the war faded, some measure of old-fashioned morality returned, but then came the original Summer of Love. My father was horrified. He had become a champion of morality, and the strain of his evangelical zeal took its toll. Look through history, and you’ll see a point is reached when rabid Christians decide that killing is better than curing. No- one suspected him. The police were searching for someone of a lower station in life. The idea that the murderer might be a middle-class academic was unthinkable to them. The only one who came close to realising the truth was you, Mr Bryant. You understood why he acted as he did. You even interviewed him once. But instead of following your instincts, you trusted the word of a fellow academic.”
Bryant looked back at the pile of black clothes in the cupboard. He realised now that the Highwayman’s outfit had been modelled on its earlier incarnation. The present-day killer was someone close to Kingsmere.
“I don’t understand how you can preach social responsibility to children, knowing what you do about your father,” said May.
“I would have thought it was obvious. I want to make amends for the things he did. I’m not ashamed of my family history. Nor have I tried to cover up my father’s misdeeds. Quite the reverse; I told my extracurricular class about him, and even brought his clothes along as proof. It was our secret, a matter of trust between us.” Kingsmere surveyed the darkened schoolroom. “Ten years ago, I was idealistic enough to try teaching in a state school in Deptford, but my tenure proved disastrous. I wasn’t prepared for what I found there, and things are worse now. You see eleven-year-olds who can textmessage faster than I can write, but who can’t read a book because the teachers don’t know enough grammar to teach them. Kids who can name a hundred clothing brands but can’t tell you why it’s wrong to stab someone. The national literacy strategy has left everyone confused about the fundamental basics of teaching. Pupils are encouraged to pick soft subjects because it makes everyone’s lives easier. There’s no discipline, no interest, no empathy. The few who learned anything in my Deptford class did so against superhuman odds. In the absence of any enforced methodology, children invent their own language, new ways of communicating, and as George Orwell pointed out, once they start to do that, they change the way they think. Remove the language of sustained concentration from their vocabulary and you remove the concept itself. I want to help put a stop to that. It’s a reasonable dream.”
“If you knew about the crimes your father had committed, you should have gone to the police,” said May.
Kingsmere appeared not to hear. “I know teachers who are as stoic as bollards, ploughing on through a wild sea of feral children, never trying to tame and shape their ideas but accepting their new world order with implacability. The intelligence of Western youth is being transformed. You either accept the fact, or fight a losing battle of old ideals. I retreated to the calm haven of a private school, into the world of so-called proper education, where I could create an attentive audience. But I found the same strange dissonance existed here, too, albeit in a subtler form. The children are craftier, more knowing; they’ll say what you want to hear in the hope that you’ll be fooled and will leave them alone.
“Once I saw through that, I petitioned the board of governors to start conducting extracurricular classes. All you need is a hint of achievement, and you get messianic about such things. You think you can change the world, but the world incrementally changes you. My father had been filled with the same fervour, but he allowed his lack of achievement to wear him down. He would lecture teenagers on the importance of civility, barely noticing the laughter behind his back. He preached old-school socialism to heckling, disinterested Thatcherites at Speakers’ Corner, wrote letters, fought councils, demanded answers, to no avail. His desire to challenge the system corrupted him, and he became mad in the process, committing terrible, desperate crimes. Then he died in agony. Tell me, what good would it have done to come forward?”
“At the very least, it would have helped the victims’ survivors,” May said flatly. “The state can’t take all the blame for an individual’s behaviour. Are you prepared to give us a statement?”
“I suppose it’s the least I can do, given the trouble you’ve been through over the years,” said Kingsmere, pulling his coat from the back of the chair.
“Wait,” said Bryant. “Mr Kingsmere, I wonder if you would be so good as to roll up the left-hand sleeve of your shirt for me.” Puzzled, the teacher did as he was asked, revealing pale unmarked flesh. Banbury had specifically mentioned hitting the Highwayman’s left wrist with his dart gun.
“You can go ahead, John.” Bryant looked back at the piled clothes. “I’ll bag these up as evidence and follow you in a while.”
As the pair left the room, he took over the teacher’s chair and bounced back in it, thinking. Something was not right. If Kingsmere had told his favoured pupils about his father, painting a picture of a life spent struggling against the system, why had none of them mentioned it? Was it because they knew the Vampire had inspired another murderer, and were anxious to keep him hidden? The shadow of the Highwayman remained here in the school, in the very bricks and stones of ancient Clerkenwell. The Vampire had merely provided a template for his successor, the latest in a line of mythical London monsters stretching back into the city’s distant past…
He carefully folded the Vampire’s mask inside the tunic, and was about to remove it as evidence when he noticed something lying under a chair in the corner of the room. Unzipping the fallen backpack, he saw what appeared to be the Highwayman’s tricorn hat sticking out of one of the pockets. But when he went to pull it free, the hat came apart.
Bryant found himself looking at two plain black baseball caps, one with its brim curled upwards, the other with its brim twisted down. Placed over each other with the peaks at opposite ends, they formed a perfect tricorne.
He dug deeper into the bag and found a second leather mask. Somewhere, he now realised, there was another tunic. His submerged suspicions began to surface, synapses reconnecting, tumbling logic on its head. The effect of the red pills seemed to be phasing his electrical responses into disturbing new configurations.
The paradoxical impossibility of Saralla White’s murder.
The convoluted absurdities of the deaths.
Elliot Mason changing his shoes at the gallery because they hurt his feet.
The placing of the Highwayman at the site of Alex Paradine’s death, outside the recording studio; two witnesses had seen the killer, but only one had mentioned his cape.
