“I did some work on his case, purely out of interest. Have a look on that shelf for me, would you?” He pointed to a rack of plastic folders above his workstation. “Dr Jukes.”
Longbright found a slender yellow file with the doctor’s name written across the top.
“He originally came from Salisbury, Wiltshire,” Shad explained, tipping the sheets out into his lap and examining them. “Last year his body was found floating off Black Head on the Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall. The coroner thought it was a simple matter of death by drowning, but a local newspaper decided to take up the case, and their reporter believed that Jukes had sustained some unexplained injuries. The inference was that the coroner didn’t do his job properly. Jukes’s boat was washed into a local harbour more than fifteen miles further down the coast. The coastguard thought it unlikely that he had fallen into the sea, because local tides and currents would have taken both the body and the boat into the nearest shore. Jukes told some drinking pals he was going fishing with a mate, but no friend was ever found. I got bugged by the story for a while, even asked Mrs Roquesby about it when she came by. I thought perhaps she might have heard something that didn’t get into the papers.”
“Why were you so interested?” asked Longbright.
“I did my training on the regional court circuit,” answered Shad. “When you hear the names of certain litigious organisations come up time and again, alarm bells go off in your head. In this case I was intrigued because Jukes was a consultant at Porton Down.”
¦
“Roquesby’s colleague was a doctor who worked for the Ministry of Defence,” Longbright told the detectives when she met them an hour later. They were seated in the Hope & Anchor, sipping a dark malty liqueur poured from a mysterious and rather dusty brown bottle Arthur had ordered down from behind the bar. It was nearly eleven p.m., and they had sent the rest of the crew home.
“Jukes was chief scientist for chemical and biological security at the MOD’s main laboratory. There was some kind of scandal over part of the lab being outsourced into the hands of privatised companies.”
“I thought that happened all the time,” said May.
“One of them had been under investigation for allegedly offering bribes. It made a couple of the papers, but the story was dropped pretty sharpish. You once talked to me about the case, Arthur; you said something about turning up darker connections.”
“Did I?” asked Bryant, amazed. “I don’t remember at all. Not that that’s saying much.”
Longbright thought for a minute. “This would have been back in the summer, you told me something about witches or warlocks – no, Druids.”
“Wait a minute, that’s right, I do remember.” Bryant was genuinely amazed. “I told you that Jukes had formerly belonged to a Druid sect – his family had insisted it was only a hobby, but according to the Sunday rags they suggested that he had drifted into Satanist circles.”
“You didn’t tell me about this,” said May, grimacing over his bitter drink.
“Well, no, Janice and I look into all sorts of interesting stories behind your back, don’t we, Janice? But there’s not much point in bringing them to your attention if we don’t think they’ll fly.”
“So what happened?”
“Oh, the Met detectives refused to believe there was a connection between Jukes’s injuries and his interest in black magic. They vindicated the coroner and agreed with the verdict of accidental death. But you know how my mind works.”
“Not really, no.”
“I couldn’t help wondering if Jukes had become an embarrassment to his employers because he was operating under the Official Secrets Act. I’m not suggesting they assassinated him, of course, merely that they encouraged people to believe that he was mentally unstable. I actually petitioned the Home Office for a look at his notes, but the Defence Secretary refused to acknowledge that there was a case at all. He pointed out that Jukes had been suffering from clinical depression for a number of years, and had long been recognised as a security risk, so I let it drop. And now it turns out he knew Jocelyn Roquesby. Well, well.”
“So what do we have?” asked May. “Carol Wynley worked for another company that doesn’t exist – April couldn’t find any specialist law firm under the name of the Holborn Security Group.”
“And Shad Thomson has another set of employment dates that match those of his girlfriend’s murdered companions,” Longbright added.
Bryant stirred the thick sediment in his glass thoughtfully. “Four women work for phantom companies. One of their colleagues commits suicide or accidentally drowns. Then, in the space of two weeks, the women, plus a fifth, are put to sleep in public places by a former mental patient.”
“It may be that none of these facts are connected. You know how often we’re criticised for jumping to conclusions; I think we have to be very careful this time, and only build the case with documented facts. We could be looking at the result of information gaps, misinterpreted events, simple clerical errors.”
“No. I spoke to one of the doctors who signed Pellew’s release form. Hopelessly evasive about the procedure, pleaded patient confidentiality, believe it or not. And I keep coming back to the pubs in which they died. The Old Dr Butler was named after a deranged doctor; the Seven Stars and the Magpie and Stump give us ‘seven’ and ‘conspiracy’; The Victoria Cross is the name of a pub that could not even exist; the Exmouth Arms provides the name of Pellew himself. My God, he couldn’t have left us much plainer clues.”
“You’re forgetting the Old Bell,” said May.
“Well, I don’t have anything interesting on that one, other than the fact that it used to be called the Seven Bells.”
“Seven
“The mad see things differently,” said Bryant. “It’s just a question of interpretation.”
“You think he intended to take the lives of two more victims?”
The little group sensed the room growing colder as they considered the possibility that more lives were in danger.
? The Victoria Vanishes ?
36
Greater Darkness
The icy night dragged past in a knot of sweat-soaked sheets and twisted blankets. At three-thirty a.m., Bryant disentangled himself and stood at the window in his dressing gown, staring out at the iridescent garden. A strange aura of disturbance had settled over him. He sensed that things were coming to a head. Pellew’s case bothered him more than he cared to admit; it was a sure sign that something was wrong when Raymond Land felt confident enough about the investigation to go running off to the Home Office.
You didn’t work this long without knowing when something bad had happened. Grounds were shifting, tides were turning against them. Perhaps it was already too late for them to save themselves.
The street outside was quiet. Frost sparkled in the lamplight, as if the air itself was gelid and starting to crystallise. Bryant felt slow-witted and incomplete, unable to grasp the significance of the week’s events. Mrs Mandeville’s memory lessons were working wonders but something continued to elude him, some passing remark that had pricked his interest, only to return to the indistinct background of bar chatter that had filled the last few days.
A larger fear assailed Bryant, that the neat confluence of reasons driving Pellew to commit murder was deliberately misleading. Their murderer had re-created the comforts of his childhood, killed for the companionship that brought relief from his nightly fevers, but his psychosis wasn’t the whole story. Something else had driven him, and perhaps was working still.
The nurse at the Broadhampton had insisted that her patient was of above-average intelligence. Pellew had sent his would-be captors messages, but he was no historian; he just liked pubs because he felt safe inside them.
