drifted down here. Forensically speaking, this sort of place is my worst nightmare. Dog hairs, crisps, meat pies, beer, mud flecks, skin, mites, a few mouse droppings, it’s like Piccadilly Circus.”
“You’re sure she was alone?” May asked the barmaid.
“She ordered a drink and sat in the corner,” said Lenska. “I can show you the receipt.”
“So she was here by herself for about forty minutes. Look like she was waiting for someone, did she?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. I think I saw her check her watch a couple of times.”
“And she didn’t speak to anyone else.”
“She was reading a copy of the
“What was he like?”
“I wasn’t really paying attention, early thirties maybe, I didn’t really pay attention.”
“You wouldn’t be able to recognise him again?”
“God, no. I didn’t register his face at all – he was just one of those blokes you always get in a pub like this, sort of invisible.”
“You didn’t see him leave?”
“No. I had to go downstairs to change barrels. When I came back up he’d gone, and she was alone. Right after that she fell off her stool. I thought she was drunk.”
“If it’s the same MO, Kershaw reckons he’ll find traces of benzodiazepine again,” said May. “She had a red mark at the base of her skull like a sting, possibly from a needle. Whoever did this has found an effective method of disposal, and is probably planning to stick with it.”
“Interesting choice of phrase there,” said Banbury. “Disposal. That’s what it feels like, doesn’t it? He can’t be getting sexual gratification, and presumably he’s not gaining anything financially from his victims, so why is he doing it? Plus, he’s picked the worst possible place to get away with murder, acting inside a roomful of strangers. I’m no psychologist, but you don’t think that’s it, do you?”
“An act of exhibitionism, taking a risk in front of the punters? Possible, I suppose. Murder is an intensely revealing act, best performed in privacy. Seems a bit perverse to stage it as some kind of public performance. Besides, do people pay much attention to each other in pubs? You tend to concentrate on the friends you’ve come out with. I’m sure if Bryant was here he’d regale us with a potted history of public murder. She’s roughly the same age as the other two. Is the killer looking to take revenge on a mother substitute? What were they doing drinking alone?”
“You always get one or two by themselves in London pubs. That’s the difference between a pub and a bar,” Banbury explained. “Pubs are about conviviality and community, meeting mates. Bars are for being alone in, or for meeting a stranger. So why would he pick his victims in the former? It doesn’t add up.”
“Perhaps the killer has a mother or an older sister who was a drunk,” Kershaw suggested. “If he’s in his early thirties, she’d probably be in her fifties. Are the victims all similar physical types?”
“Not at all. This one was Jocelyn Roquesby, fifty-six, a former copy typist and human resources officer, divorced, one daughter, no current partner, lived alone in a flat in Holloway. She had just finished a bout of treatment for breast cancer. According to the daughter she liked a drink, but never went into a pub alone unless she was meeting someone. Also, the chemotherapy made her sick if she drank. So who was she here to meet?”
¦
Meanwhile, April had gone to the Devereux on the mission of locating Oswald Finch’s remains.
“You were working behind the bar on the night of Mr Finch’s wake, weren’t you?” she reminded the barmaid in the upper bar. “If you cashed up the till, you must have also cleared the counter, so you’d remember if there was something as odd as a funeral urn left behind on it.”
“I told your boss, there was nothing left behind,” declared the girl, who regarded all men over thirty with narrow eyes and a cold heart. “People leave their briefcases, umbrellas and handbags here all the time, but I’d have remembered an urn.”
“So someone took it with them.”
“And it had to be one of your lot, because you had the room to yourselves for most of the evening. Your Peculiar Crimes Unit have a reputation for being a bunch of practical jokers, you know. The manageress warned me. Your unit has had parties here before. Somebody left an inflatable sheep in the ladies’ toilet last time, frightened the life out of the cleaner.”
“Not much of a practical joke, is it?” said April. “Swiping the ashes of a dead colleague.”
“Depends on what they’re going to do with them,” said the barmaid, with a disapproving sniff.
? The Victoria Vanishes ?
15
Visible Evil
Raymond Land tipped his armchair forward, cleared a steamed-up arc of glass and peered down into the street. Was there anything in the world more miserable, he wondered, than a wet Wednesday morning in Mornington Crescent? Especially when you felt you were no longer the captain of your destiny, more a third mate dragged in the undertow of someone else’s foundering vessel?
“You and your partner like to work in a pincer movement, don’t you?” he complained. “First John creeps up on me with dire warnings, and now you. Three dead, at the very least! If the Home Office get wind that the proles think it’s not safe to venture into a public house without risking death, our entire national fabric will collapse. The idea of a Britain without anyone in the boozers is unimaginable.”
Bryant lounged back in Land’s sofa and felt about in his pocket. “There’s no doubt about it now, cheeky chops. Three murders in London pubs, all within a mile of each other, and this new woman, Roquesby, pushes the affair much further into the public arena because her former husband was security-cleared for some kind of government work. I think there’s something really big going on here. Don’t tell me we can’t get the case prioritised now.”
“That’s not an issue.” Land continued searching the street below, as if expecting to find the rest of his thought there. “I just worry.”
“Good Lord, I know articulacy has never been your forte, Raymond, but at least take a stab at piecing together an entire sentence.”
“I’m not sure the unit is up to handling something like this. It’s a potential minefield.”
“What are you talking about?” Bryant dug the little silver box from his pocket and flicked it open. “Don’t worry, I haven’t taken up cocaine, I’d thought I’d try snuff, seeing as nobody will allow me to light my pipe.”
“Well, suppose you fail to stop this lunatic, and in the process undermine national confidence in the security of public places?”
“You think you’ll be given the order of the boot, don’t you?”
Bryant sniffed, then sneezed abundantly. “This is no time to start worrying about your frankly moribund career, old sausage; there are greater issues at stake. Suppose your wife was to walk into a public house by herself for a quiet drink and a gander at the papers?”
“Leanne would never do such a thing,” said Land indignantly.
“Far from what I’ve heard, but we’ll let that pass. Imagine how much you’d worry for her safety, then magnify that a million times across the country, you see my point? When nobody feels protected, the economy simply starts to unravel. Look at the terrible side effects of bombing campaigns against civilians. The public house is virtually the country’s last unassailable place, now that so many churches lock their doors. For hundreds of years it has occupied a unique position in our culture. What’s the one thing every pub is supposed to have?”
“I don’t know.” Land scratched at his chin. “At least two brands of bad lager?”
“A welcoming hearth created by centuries of tradition. Wasn’t it Hilaire Belloc who once said ‘When you have lost your inns drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England’?”
Land looked back blankly and shrugged.
“Pubs tend to stay constant because they’re rebuilt on the same plot of land. The extraordinary thing is that brewers don’t keep historical information on their own properties, so histories often only exist in the form of handed-down anecdotes. That’s why they’re different from any other type of building around us. The public houses
