Bryant & May 06; The Victoria Vanishes

“Left here.” Hopping to pull her shoe strap back in place, she led them along a harshly lit passage painted in searing stripes of cadmium yellow.

“How do you know where to go?”

“Mr Bryant has a lot of friends who use these offices. Restorers, engravers, historians.” She tried a heavy oak door as they passed, but it failed to open. “He sounded worried, and when he gets like that I know there’s something going on in his head that he hasn’t told us about. I think Masters should be in one of the chambers along here.”

“You all seem to have so much respect for him, but he doesn’t do a lot, does he, your Mr Bryant?”

“People either get him or they don’t; he’s old school. He does things quietly, in his own way. Doesn’t like to waste words or expend unnecessary energy. He believes in unfashionable concepts – grace, calm, gentility, tolerance, understatement.”

“Then he’s out of step with the world, and he’ll get trodden on.”

“I thought you were going to try to understand.”

“I’m still biting my tongue sometimes, okay? What are you doing?”

“I’m calling him.” She pressed an ear hard against her cell phone. “The reception’s terrible down here. Can you hear me? Yes, we’re there now, Masters is supposed to be somewhere nearby. What? We’ll try it, but you need to get here as soon as you can.”

“What did he say?” asked Renfield as Longbright closed her cell phone.

“He says we’re to try rooms twenty-one hundred to twenty-one forty.” Longbright pointed to the corridor ahead. “And he thinks Jackie Quinten’s life is in the balance.”

? The Victoria Vanishes ?

44

Accountability

“Wait, we have to go back,” said Longbright. All the passages had begun to look the same. “We’re too far over.”

“Do you know where he is, or don’t you?” Renfield looked around. The buzzing overhead panels bathed the halls in seagreen light.

“The corridors are supposed to be painted differently in this section.” She turned about. “We’ve gone wrong somewhere.”

“We need to go back to the big marble stairwell, where the bloke with the Frisbee was. You can work it out again from there.”

Renfield broke into a run, forcing her to keep up. They reached a narrow staff staircase and he took the steps three at a time, as if he had finally come to terms with the idea that Bryant was not playing the fool, and that a murder could only be halted by their intervention. She followed closely behind, almost slamming into him as he stopped dead and listened.

They both heard the voice, too loud for normal speech in a museum. Renfield continued back along the passageway, putting on an extra spurt of speed when he spotted something she had yet to see.

He knows something bad is about to happen, she thought. She had seen this instinctive talent, born of experience and an almost supernatural prescience, in just a handful of policemen. It was the last thing she expected to encounter in a man like Renfield. He’s one of us, she realised, surprised to recognise her own ability.

¦

Jackie Quinten made a run for it but wasn’t as young as she thought, and her ankle twisted beneath her weight on the slippery tiled floor. She fell hard.

Masters didn’t come after her. If anything, he seemed mortified at having to sort out the mess he now found himself in. He was fumbling about in his desk drawer, looking for something.

“Please,” he called after her. “I just came up with the solution, it was a theoretical conundrum, that’s all. I didn’t want to be involved. I’m not cut out for this sort of thing. My career here is over, did I tell you? The museum is letting me go. Some new people have come in, and they don’t approve of my lecture style. I’m too partisan. It seems you can’t have opinions in public these days; it’s not sensitive enough. I don’t get the audience figures they want. I have to do other things now in order to survive. But this is too much to expect of anyone, let alone me.” He found the object of his search and removed it from the drawer, a long red and green tartan scarf. “I’ve been looking for this everywhere. Please, you mustn’t be frightened. It’ll do neither of us any good.”

He watched as she climbed to her feet and hobbled to the door, then came around the desk to her, holding up the scarf.

“I’m afraid I don’t have anything else I can use,” he apologised, wrapping the scarf around her exposed throat and pulling it tight. “I promise you, I’ve never done anything like this before. I don’t want to do it now, but there’s no other way out of the situation. Of course I admit it’s my fault. I didn’t think the police would close in on Anthony so quickly, and I certainly never imagined he would start leaving them clues. Now I have to clear up the mess he’s created or they’ll deal with me, too. You do understand, don’t you?”

With the fiery noose of the scarf across her throat, Jackie could only stare helplessly up at her captor. His height gave him an immense advantage; he was able to keep her off balance as he dragged her back into the corridor toward the staircase.

“When you’re young, you imagine rising to the top of your profession, but of course you never can.” He was almost talking to himself now, paltering in a plea to be understood. “There’s always someone above you, someone behind you, someone to watch out for, someone to answer to. Do you know how far up this chain goes? Further than you’d ever dream. There’s no-one who can help me, no sympathy for what I’ve done, and why should there be? We live in a society that can only function by finding someone to blame, and they will rightly blame me. My solution to their problem was brilliant in its simplicity, but of course things never stay simple. I found them a madman, and now that he has failed I am being forced to finish his work.”

The more she struggled, the tighter the noose grew. He yanked on the scarf, as one would pull on a dog’s chain to rein it in. She fought to stay upright, knowing that if she fell she would be strangled to death.

“It’s a matter of accountability. Contract out the work and it seems almost inevitable that the person you’ve entrusted it to will let you down. In the old days it was ‘Never mind, old chap, you did your best.’ Now it’s ‘Fix it yourself or be prepared to take the blame for everything.’ Are you familiar with George Orwell? You remember in 1984, how Winston Smith tells Julia ‘We are the dead’? That’s how I feel now.”

He yanked hard on the scarf, causing her to gasp in pain. Her heels left ragged black lines along the cream linoleum floor.

“Once I was a brilliant academic with a soaring future ahead of me. When you agree to do something you know to be wrong, you tell yourself it will just happen once. Then you find yourself doing it just to remain afloat. Finally you become just like them – one of the dead, a walking cadaver obeying orders in order to stay alive.”

He hauled her to the edge of the balustrade and kicked her legs out from under her, easily holding her squirming body against the stonework. Jackie felt her centre of gravity shifting as he pulled her over the edge. They were only two floors up, but he was tipping her upside down to cause the maximum impact. She felt her stomach flop, as though she was boarding a funfair ride.

Her greying auburn hair fell over her face, obscuring her sight. His hand slipped between her thighs, sliding over her tights, so that he was holding her almost vertically. She knew that the fall would kill her. She could only fear that it would not be instant.

¦

They were above Masters, Longbright saw that now. They had passed along the passage at the very top of the building, aligned with the roof of the Great Court, to emerge in the service area at the top of the stairwell. The academic was diagonally below them, trying to unhook Mrs Quinten’s legs from the balustrade, but now her right hand had gained purchase on the rail, so he was pummelling at her back and stomach in a desperate attempt to make her release her grip.

The impossibility of the situation was enough to paralyse Longbright. If they made their presence known to