Bryant & May 06; The Victoria Vanishes

of enquiring about hobbies, favourite films or dining out brought him looks of incomprehension, confusion and outright hostility until Andrea took him to one side and gave him some advice.

“I think you need to lighten up, darling,” she informed him. “Whatever you’re asking these lovely ladies seems to be having a negative effect on their opinion of you.”

After achieving a rating score two points lower than the leaker, Bimsley decided to sit out the next batch of rounds and talk to the barmaid instead. This time he found himself onto a winner.

“I worked the same shift as Jazmina most nights,” said the pixie-faced Polish girl with earnest blue eyes, whose name was Izabella, and whose jet hair framed her face like Louise Brooks’s in Pandora’s Box. “She was very nice, but I did not like her boyfriend.”

“Why not?” asked Bimsley, succumbing to a pint of lager.

“He was not interested in her. He had other girlfriends.”

“Did she ever come in here and drink on her nights off? Maybe with someone other than her boyfriend?”

“Oh, no. She hated this place.”

“Why?”

“Because she had a what-you-call-it, a stalker. You get men in every pub who try and talk to you on quiet nights, but this one came in all the time.”

“Did you ever see him? What was he like?”

“Too old for her, probably in his early thirties. Brown hair, tall, with a red mark on his face. I was here one night when he started on her.”

“Can you remember anything he said?”

Izabella thought carefully. “I think he’d been fired from his job, he was a bar manager. North London somewhere. We laughed about him after he left.”

“This is really important,” said Bimsley. “I need you to make a note of everything you remember about this man.”

“Wait until I finish work tonight,” said Izabella with an impish smile. “I will tell you anything you want.”

¦

Meera Mangeshkar was at The Apple Tree in Mount Pleasant, which Carol Wynley had sometimes visited with her work colleagues, but asking questions of the staff and customers proved difficult because there was a country- and-western line dancing night in progress.

This had been a postman’s pub for many years due to its proximity to the sorting office, but had now been refurbished for the benefit of tourists visiting from nearby hotels. As Dolly Parton warbled through ‘Heartbreaker’ on the speakers and couples in checked shirts and fringed cowboy jackets stamped their stitched boots on the ancient Axminster carpet, Mangeshkar was forced into stupefied silence on a nearby counter bar stool. The combination of beery British boozer and traditional Texas toe-tap made her uncomfortable, partly because she was the only Indian girl in the room, and felt as if she might get shot. The well-drilled lines of dancers did not whoop and yell like their more liberated U.S. cousins, but concentrated on their footwork, determined to master exercises more culturally alien to the London mind-set than Morris dancing.

She became annoyed that, once again, she had been given an assignment that would yield nothing useful or practical, and was thinking about calling it a night when one of the men grabbed her hands and pulled her onto the dance floor for ‘My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys’.

For the next twenty minutes, Meera forgot her frustration and regret about moving to the Peculiar Crimes Unit as, much to her surprise, she discovered the joys of line dancing to the strains of Willie Nelson.

? The Victoria Vanishes ?

22

Questions & Answers

“In the film The Ladykillers, what was the screen name of the old lady Alec Guinness and his cronies were trying to murder? We’re talking about the original British version here, not the remake.”

May looked around at the hunched shoulders and lowered heads. The room in The Old Dr Butler’s Head, London Wall, where Joanne Kellerman had been found dead, was silent but for the scratching of 2H pencils. As he wrote ‘Mrs Wilberforce’ on the sheet before him, May accidentally caught the eye of the woman at the next table. She snatched her sheet aside, suspecting him of trying to cheat. They want to be back at school, he thought, each of them vying to be top of the class once more.

“Last question in our film round: Give me the name of the ancient kingdom discovered in Passport to Pimlico.”

May wrote ‘Burgundy’ and turned over his paper, ready for collection. He looked around the room at the assembled players, trying to see if any were alone. We always assume killers operate singly, he caught himself thinking. But what if there are two of them, perhaps even a man and a woman? Suddenly the conspiring, whispering pairs in the room appeared more sinister. None of the victims had told their partners, relatives or friends where they were going. Was that in itself significant? If the attacks were completely random and their killer moved to a fresh venue every time, catching him became a matter of luck. There are nearly six thousand pubs in London, he thought. What are we expected to do, close them all down? Suppose he switches to another crowded public place, inside the tube, on rush-hour buses or crowded city pavements?

The case had resonance with a number of other, more extraordinary killings that had occurred in London over recent years. A Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov, had been poisoned on Waterloo Bridge with the sharpened tip of an umbrella. Roberto Calvi, the Vatican banker, had been found hanged in a convincingly staged suicide underneath Blackfriars Bridge. And former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko was fatally dosed with radioactive thallium in a busy sushi bar. In all three cases there had been no guns, no knives, just the careful and quiet determination to end a life.

It was difficult to shake off a sense of impending failure.

May was inclined to disagree with his partner, who felt that the attacks were based on opportunity and location as much as on the women themselves, but the fact remained that they had uncovered no common denominators other than the link between their cell phones. None of the calls had been under surveillance, so there was no way of tracing what had been said.

And there was another problem: Jazmina Sherwin’s cell phone had been found on her body, so the killer wasn’t using a consistent MO. If it can be proved that they all knew each other, May thought, it might be possible to discover the identities of other women in danger. He handed in his quiz form and sipped at his pint, watching the quizmaster at work. That’s who I need to talk to, he decided. He’ll remember everyone who’s ever come here to play. The kind of men who compile quizzes always do….

¦

The Grand Order of London Immortals were, in their own words, primarily interested in London’s most infamous characters: political brigands, celebrity criminals, unapprehended murderers and anyone else who had been stencilled into the city’s collective memory by doing something notorious and getting away with it.

Dr Harold Masters knew that the order shared some members with his own Insomnia Squad, and had recommended it to Bryant as a group who might unwittingly shine a light on the path to uncovering a murderer. This month they were meeting in the Yorkshire Grey, Langham Place, a small greenpainted Victorian establishment with hanging baskets, exterior tables and memorabilia from the nearby BBC on its walls. Workers from the garment district frequented the bar, but tonight the Immortals, a grandiose term for what was essentially a band of disgruntled scholars, were holding loudly forth in the rear of the saloon.

Bryant recognised a number of old friends who had helped him in the past, including Stanhope Beaufort, a bombastic architectural expert who volunteered advice on London’s ancient monuments, and Raymond Kirkpatrick, a verbose English-language professor who had been banned from lecturing at Oxford because of his habit of playing deafening heavy-metal music while he researched. The Immortals attracted their own groupies, not as glamorous