wake.”
“You run a unit full of detectives,” said Alma. “John’s granddaughter, she’s a clever one. Give her the job of finding them.”
Bryant smiled. “What would I do without you?” he asked.
“You’d be getting evicted by Camden’s health and safety officers, and run out of this house by neighbours with burning torches, for all the experiments you’ve kept them awake with and the disgusting smells you’ve made,” Alma told him. “Now stop feeling sorry for yourself and start solving something.”
“It’s all very well for you,” Bryant wheedled, “you remember every single thing that ever happened to you, particularly if it was my fault. You do it so you can bear the grudge forever. But my brain cells aren’t like yours; they’re like footprints on wet sand. They only last for the length of a single tide. I need to improve my memory.”
Alma pushed past the overstuffed armchairs and pulled a card from behind her ebony troll letter rack. “Try calling this number,” she said. “Mrs Mandeville is an old friend of mine from the church. She cured the late Mr Sorrowbridge’s smoking habit, and replaced the springs in his ottoman.”
Bryant read the card:
Kiskaya Mandeville
“She sounds like my kind of woman,” he said, brightening up and reaching for the phone.
? The Victoria Vanishes ?
14
Disposal
Just after ten o’clock on Tuesday evening, a chill drenching rain began to fall on Fleet Street. Once, the pavements would still have been crowded with couriers, journalists, printers, picture editors, typesetters, artists and accountants, and the lights of the buildings would have formed unbroken ribbons of luminescence from the Strand to St Paul’s, but now the thoroughfare was almost deserted. The great rolls of paper that had been brought by barge up to the presses of Tudor Street had been moved to the eastern hinterland of the city.
Mrs Jocelyn Roquesby tilted the address she had printed out and tried to read it without her glasses. By doing so, she walked straight past her destination, and was forced to back up before the black-framed windows of the little Georgian house that housed the Old Bell tavern. The pub’s rear door opened out into the courtyard of St Bride’s Church. The cramped corners and angled nooks of its interior had barely changed in centuries. Mrs Roquesby’s fingers itched to punch out a number on her cell phone, at least to tell her daughter where she was going, but she had promised not to call anyone.
She scanned the front bar, then moved to the rear of the pub, wondering if she had somehow managed to miss her contact. She had been surprised to receive the text message, and would normally have suggested a morning coffee in the local Starbucks, especially now that she was trying to give up alcohol. However, a tone of anxiety in its phrasing had struck a chord, and she had replied with an agreement to meet in one of their former haunts.
She looked around the pub with a growing sense of disappointment.
¦
Arthur Bryant stood on the corner of Whidbourne Street and studied the supermarket opposite, kicking at the kerb with a scuffed Oxford toe cap. The Victoria Cross had stood here for the best part of a hundred years, casting its welcoming saffron light onto the paving stones, its revellers wavering home to their wives at eleven – fewer women, and certainly no single ones of decent repute, would have been out drinking in the early years – or perhaps there had been a lock-in, with the heavy velvet drapes drawn tight to eliminate all light on the street. There the drinkers would have remained – so easy to forget the world outside – until the landlord decided they’d all had enough. “Ain’t you got no ‘omes to go to?” he would call jocularly. “You’re going to cop a right earful from your missus when you fall through the front door, Alf.”
Bryant remembered having to pull his father out of virtually every pub in the East End, Bow, Whitechapel, Wapping and Canning Town. It had surprised no-one when he died young.
He looked back at the corner, and the image of the public house shimmered into points of light that faded to reveal the blank bright windows of the Pricecutter Food & Wine Store, its Indian proprietor staring dully at the sports pages of
¦
The girl behind the bar had just called last orders. Mrs Roquesby leaned back and listened to the song that was softly playing on the pub’s CD deck. The Everly Brothers, wasn’t it? “All I Have to Do Is Dream.”
She wanted to sleep, but not dream. Dreams too easily turned into nightmares. Tired, she rested her head against the wall and listened to the lyrics. She had been stood up, but had at least found herself a drinking companion, although now he seemed to have disappeared, and she just wanted to let the night slide away into warm, wood-dark oblivion.
When Mrs Roquesby began to slide majestically from her stool, Lenska, the barmaid, thought she would snap awake, but she kept going all the way to the carpet, landing hard on her knees. Running around from behind the counter, Lenska pulled at the lady, but was unable to wake her. Mrs Roquesby’s head fell back and her wig slid off, revealing the sparse, wispy grey hair of a head that had undergone cancer therapy.
Lenska loosened the collar of her blouse and tried to find a heartbeat. She looked around for help, but the bar had cleared since she had rung last orders. A thick yellow froth was leaking from the mouth of the woman in her arms. Lenska knew a little about first aid, but this was beyond her, so she laid the woman down and ran to call for an ambulance.
¦
Dan Banbury saw the world from a different perspective, usually starting at floor level. Gravity required everything to fall. Dust and skin flakes, hairs and sweat drops, everything sifted down through the atmosphere to land on the ground. Any movement stirred up the air, shifting molecules in swirls and eddies that resembled hurricane patterns on weather charts, and tumbling particles cascaded from one resting place to the next. You could track them if you were able to define the direction of the air current. Sometimes particle movement would lead you back towards the source of a disturbance; it was like hunting in reverse.
Banbury’s long-suffering wife was all too aware of his enthusiasm for exploring the detritus of death, as it took the form of ruined trousers and jacket sleeves, and since her husband hated buying new clothes, she was forever racing to the dry cleaners during her lunch break. At that very moment, he was sprawled on the carpet of the Old Bell public house, pushing strips of sticky tape along the underside of the counter, which appeared not to have been cleaned since Boswell propped up the bar.
“I’m glad you managed to keep Bryant away for once,” he muttered through clenched teeth, for he was holding a pencil torch in his mouth. “It’s a mystery how he always manages to make a mess of any crime scene.”
“He’s gone to see someone about improving his memory,” John May explained. “He forgot the urn containing Finch’s ashes, and now he’s feeling guilty. He got a crack on the noggin and lost his memory a while back. I’m wondering if he’s suffered some kind of a relapse. Are you getting anything down there?”
“Far too much, that’s the problem. It’ll take chromatography to sort out the tangle of dead cells that have
