Her eye ran down the columns of names, matching and discarding until one name jumped out: Joanne Kellerman.
Her death predated the other three, having occurred four days before Curtis’s, but it fit the pattern. Joanne Kellerman had succumbed in a tiny, crowded pub called The Old Dr Butler’s Head, in Mason’s Avenue, by London Wall. Last orders had been rung early, and as the drinkers thinned out, Mrs Kellerman had fallen to the floor in what appeared to be a faint. The barman had been unable to revive her, so he had called an ambulance, but she was pronounced dead on the way to the hospital.
A cocktail of narcoleptic drugs found in her system suggested that she had taken her own life, although why she had chosen to do it in a crowded pub remained a mystery – hence the coroner’s decision to record an open verdict. There was no history of mental health problems on record, although she apparently took prescription anti- depressants and sleeping pills. The Met had noted the death and uploaded her file to the diary, even though they had chosen not to consider the case worthy of further investigation.
April ran her finger across the screen to the tabulated comments from her next of kin, and noted that the dead woman had often enjoyed pub quizzes. Did all of the women regularly attend events in London pubs? If so, did their presence bring them to the attention of someone stalking victims in such an environment?
April’s discovery of the death placed the women in a new running order: Kellerman, Curtis, Wynley, Roquesby. In a city where so many died in unexplained circumstances each day, each event occupied a slender borderline of visibility. Only when compiled together did their collective information form some kind of new and alarming explanation. This faint but discernable pattern had begun to coalesce from the mist of empirical data that blurred every death in the city. If no one agency possessed all the facts, there could be no resolution. This, April felt, was why the PCU existed. The unit was transforming a killer from smoke and shadows into flesh and bone. It was making evil visible.
April began writing up her report for her bosses.
? The Victoria Vanishes ?
16
The Heart of London
He was always watching the women.
Interesting how they were treated at different times of day, in different places. In lunchtime city pubs they sat at their counters completely ignored, men reaching around them for beers and change as if they were mere obstacles. At early evening they were engaged in conversation by men who used a cheerful, chatty manner with older women, as if talking to their mothers. Late at night, when the lights were lower, they became easy targets for leering drunks who felt sure they could never be rebuffed.
He felt sorry for these women, even when he had to take their lives.
The cavernous inns of the Strand, the narrow taverns of Holborn, the fake rural hostelries of Chelsea, the brash bars of Soho – each had their own tribes. The lotharios, the jobsworths, the brasses, the bosses, brash drunk kids, braying toffs, swearing workmen, all united by the desperate need for companionship. The single careerists were frightened to go back to their pristine apartments and sit on the ends of their beds, staring into the void of their dead lives. The ones in relationships delayed heading home to warm sleeping bodies they could barely stand to touch.
He knew all about the power of pubs, and the invisible customers who kept them alive. The lonely matrons who drank a little too much, the ones with full, sensual bodies and sad old eyes that caught his gaze, holding it a moment too long in bar mirrors. He had been with them all his life.
He loved these women. As he prepared his poison, he prayed they would escape him.
¦
“A little early in the day to be drinking, isn’t it?” asked John May. “It’s only just gone noon.” Williamson’s Tavern in Groveland Court was nearly empty, except for a pair of Asian IT managers playing a jittery fruit machine.
“Tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce, crushed celery, beetroot and horseradish sauce, John. No vodka, sadly.” Bryant held up his glass. “Kiskaya Mandeville recommended it to sharpen my brain. She’s prescribed a series of memory tests I must perform every day and put me on a juice diet, reckons I’ll quickly notice the results. I have to drink three different types of fish oil tonight. My poor bowels will be positively peristaltic. This is Dr Harold Masters. Oddly, I don’t think you’ve ever met.” He gestured at the curator/lecturer from the British Museum. May found himself facing an absurdly tall man with unsuitable tortoiseshell glasses and slightly mad grey hair.
Masters unleashed a great length of arm and shook May’s hand vigorously. “Not sure we’ve ever had the pleasure. But Mr Bryant has consulted me many times in the past.”
“I wanted to make a particular point, and I find that sometimes, if I just talk to you, you sort of tune out.”
“That’s because you have a habit of lecturing me,” said May.
“I most certainly do not. I try to direct your attention toward topics of interest.”
“Yes, and you used to tap me with a pointing stick until I broke the damned thing in half.”
“That was you, was it? Amongst other things, Dr Masters here is an expert on the mythology and etymology of London. He’s been helping me with a few ideas lately, and I thought it would be a good idea for the two of you to meet because he knows an awful lot about English pubs.”
Dr Harold Masters knew far more about the dead than the living. Human beings were too emotional and messy. He had only been able to tolerate Jane, his wife, because she shared his arcane interests, and now she was gone. The awful truth was that her death allowed him to spend more time concentrating on his studies. He missed her, in the distant way that a man misses the regular arrival of dinner and fresh laundry, but relished the extra time he now had to spend among his research documents. Understanding the past was far more interesting than understanding people, especially women.
“Mine is a professional perspective, of course,” Masters snorted cheerfully. “Take a look at this place. It looks quite unremarkable from the outside, yes? But it was built from the ruins of the Great Fire.”
“Surely not. This bare-wood-and-ironwork-lamps look is 1930s, with a touch of last year chucked in.”
“The present-day building, perhaps, but it’s been a tavern for centuries. In fact, it’s constructed over Roman ruins that still survive some five metres below us. And it was once the official residence of the Mayor of London. William and Mary liked the place so much that they provided it with the iron gates outside. A gentleman called Robert Williamson turned it into a proper public house in 1739. And it has a ghost.”
“All London pubs say they have a ghost – it gets the tourists in.”
“Ah, but this one has something else,” Masters enthused. “The heart of London. The bar is supposed to contain an ancient stone that marks the dead centre of the old City. The parade of historical characters through here has gone unrecorded and barely remarked upon. Why? Because the pubs of London are taken almost completely for granted by those who drink in them.” The doctor stabbed a long pale finger at the air. “Every single one has a unique and extraordinary history.”
“That’s true,” Bryant agreed with enthusiasm. “Did you know that the basement of the Viaduct Tavern in Holborn contains cells from Newgate Gaol? Its walls have absorbed the tortured cries of a thousand poor imprisoned souls. These places survived because of geography. The Tipperary in Fleet Street used to be called The Boar’s Head. It was built in 1605 with stones taken from the Whitefriars Monastery, stones that allowed it to survive unharmed in the raging inferno of the Great Fire of London. And the Devereux, where we held Oswald’s wake, is named after Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who was imprisoned in the Bloody Tower and beheaded. The point Harold is trying to make is that these places hold the key to our past, and therefore the present. They’re an
