tonight. If any of them turned up a similar description, they would finally have a suspect.
¦
Dan Banbury found himself wedged against a wall in the claustrophobic Seven Stars pub, which was located behind Lincoln’s Inn Fields and packed to the gills with boisterous, merry legal workers. Normally he would have enjoyed himself in such an environment, but his conversation with the bar staff had been turned into a shouting match by the deafening combination of courtroom rhetoric and cheap beer.
The barmaid who had served Naomi Curtis on the night of her death could think of no other details, and was too busy to concentrate on the subject for long. Banbury jammed himself further into the corner with his pint and wondered. What kind of man would she have allowed close? In his experience women preferred cocktail bars to pubs, especially ones this intimate and rowdy. He felt sure that she could only have come in here to meet a man. This kind of pub was the choice of a male.
With difficulty, he unfolded the spreadsheet April had supplied and checked the notes she had printed. The same injected sedative, giving symptoms that had been mistaken for heatstroke. A swift, virtually painless method of killing, putting someone to sleep so easily and quietly that their death could pass unnoticed in a crowded bar. Curtis wasn’t rich, had no unusual beneficiaries, no-one who might excessively profit from her demise. It seemed unlikely to be anyone she knew, which meant that she had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
This place was a crime scene manager’s worst nightmare, trampled flat day in and out, vacuumed and disinfected, scoured by the scrum of bodies, sloshed with centuries of beer. In a way, the man they were looking for had hit upon the perfect location to commit murder. Every night in every pub there would be petty feuds, heated arguments, friendships forged, sexual liaisons proposed and enemies made, the threats of tears and laughter. Alcohol heightened the emotions. Providing he did not draw attention to himself, a killer could easily hide inside such a world. Bryant was right; coming here had started to give him a different perspective on the problem. He studied the room again, screening out unlikely candidates. The loudmouths and drunks, the shrieking office girls and their stentorian workmates vanished one by one.
Banbury found himself left with a handful of introspective loners, any one of whom might be nursing an uncapped syringe in his jacket pocket.
? The Victoria Vanishes ?
21
Dating & Dancing
Raymond Land indignantly refused to follow his own detective’s orders to return to the Albion in Barnsbury, so Colin Bimsley and Meera Mangeshkar took on a double shift, first travelling to where Jazmina Sherwin had been found dead. After spending half the evening here, they planned to split up and tackle two further public houses.
For months, Bimsley had fantasised about being in a pub with Meera, a combination of pleasures that made him heartsick with delight. In previous investigations he had been happy enough to spend the night rummaging through suspects’ dustbins with her, searching for pieces of food-stained evidence, but just when his wish had been fulfilled, he found that his changing attitude to the diminutive DC had robbed him of happiness.
In short, he had gone off her.
After putting up with her sulks, her tantrums, her cynicism, her sarcasm, her ability to start small bin fires with her pre-menstrual temper, the scales had finally fallen from his eyes, and he fancied he could see her as the woman she had become; bitter, bad-tempered, happy to keep him dangling on the promise of a date which would never be arranged.
As a consequence, the mood between them was polite but arctic. Seated side by side in the Albion, they stared into their soft drinks and allowed the silence to stretch between them.
Finally, Meera spoke. “This girl, Sherwin, she was supposed to be young and streetwise. She wouldn’t have let some creep just come up and touch her. We’re not going to find anything here.”
“Well, that’s a positive attitude. You’re just saying that because you don’t believe in Bryant’s methods.”
“Colin, look around you. The place is virtually empty. What are we looking for? The barman who served her isn’t even here, so he can’t point out anyone he saw.”
“How do you know that?”
“I talked to the girl who served me these drinks.”
“Well, has anybody else seen him?”
“He was sent by the brewery to fill in for someone who hadn’t turned up for work.”
Bimsley jumped up so quickly that he knocked his orange juice across the table. While obtaining a cloth at the counter he summoned the barmaid, who wrote him a number on a slip of paper. He waited for an answer on his cell phone, turning his back on Meera.
“The brewery never sent anyone,” he told her, returning. “They didn’t get the message in time. If he wasn’t a barman or a punter, he could just have ducked behind the bar to serve Jazmina. That’s how he got close enough to be sure of his latest choice. There was only one staff member on duty last night instead of two, and if she was in the kitchen or the other bar there would have been no-one at all at the front.”
“We need to find someone else other than Raymond who was in the pub. Someone observant.”
“This is the sort of place that has regulars. You can spot them a mile off. Those two in the corner, for a start, and that old guy by the fireplace. I’ll do one end of the bar, you do the other. Look for unsteady hands and broken nose veins.”
Hard drinkers make unreliable witnesses. Several people professed to have seen someone behind the counter, but none of them could agree on a description. He was tall, thin, broad, blond, black, Asian, blotched with a crimson birthmark. Mangeshkar tallied her notes with Bimsley’s, and they headed to their next destinations.
¦
Speed-dating Night was held at the Museum Tavern on the corner of Museum Street, where Jazmina Sherwin had worked and met her boyfriend. The pub retained the seedy bookishness of Bloomsbury because its crimson leather seats were filled with half-drunk proofreaders poring over drinkdampened manuscripts. Like the Cross Keys in Endell Street or the Bloomsbury Tavern in Shaftesbury Avenue, it remained constant in a sliding world: the distinctive odour of hops, the ebb of background chatter, muted light through stained glass, china tap handles, metal drip trays, mirrored walls, bars of oak and brass. The Victoriana was fake, of course, modelled on obsolete pub ornaments and anachronistically updated with each refurbishment to create an increasingly off-kilter view of the past, but the blurry ambience remained undisturbed.
The tiny round tables in the rear of the room had been arranged to accommodate the couples who were about to tackle their abridged liaisons. Bimsley was assigned a number by the evening’s hostess, a pleasant-faced, overweight girl who reminded him of a character from a Pieter Brueghel painting. Her name tag proclaimed her to be Andrea from the Two of Hearts Club. She spoke with the singsong condescension of a suburban Kentish housewife, and probably had a heart of gold until it came to gays and immigrants. “First time? Lovely! You’re a nice big fellow, we shouldn’t have too much trouble pairing you up. Pop your badge on and we’ll get you settled in. What’s your name, lovey?”
“Bimsley,” said Bimsley.
“I think it would be nicer to be on first-name terms with the ladies, don’t you?”
“Colin.”
“Oh, we haven’t had one of those for a while. There.” She patted a sticky yellow square onto his lapel. Bimsley looked around the saloon. There were several presentable, even sexy, women but the quality of the males was abysmal: a couple of boney-faced accountant types with VDU pallor, a leaker with lank hair stuck to his forehead and sweat rolling down his cheeks, a middle-aged man dressed as a giant toddler in a sleeveless T-shirt and three-quarter-length trousers, an ageing media type in club gear who was probably not as interesting as his haircut, a very old gentleman cruising for an heir or possibly an enjoyable way of having a heart attack. In Russia there were ten million more women than men, so at least the males had an excuse for not bothering to look their best.
His speed dates were allocated just three minutes each, at the end of which time he was required to give his women a rating of between one and three points. Bimsley’s decision to ask questions about a murder victim instead
