Full Dark House (41 page)

‘Where’s she heading?’ asked Biddle.

From somewhere near the river came the dull drone of a bomber squadron.

‘Out,’ said Bryant, ‘just out into the open, away from the theatre, but the more open it gets, the more frightened she’ll be.’

They were fifty yards behind her when she turned into Museum Street and froze, standing in the middle of the road, looking up.

Overhead, the thick grey clouds had parted to reveal a midnight-blue sky glittering with stars as bright and sharp as knives. As the gap grew larger, the oval of the moon appeared, flooding the street with silvered light.

Bryant, May and Biddle came to a stop some way back, amazed by the sight of the buildings’ dark recesses melting away beneath the lunar brightness. ‘She’s reached it,’ said Bryant, ‘she’s reached the light. If she can survive this, she’ll be free.’

‘She’s still going to gaol,’ said Biddle indignantly.

‘Freedom will be inside her head.’

They could hear Elspeth sobbing in awe and relief as she looked up, transfixed by the quiescence of the moon. The droning of the bombers was fading now, growing quieter and quieter until the four of them were standing in unshadowed silence.

Bryant knew he could not compete with the world that beckoned to her. He watched as she took a faltering step away from him, then another. Part of him wanted Elspeth to run and keep on running, until she was liberated from the city’s life-crushing influence, free to live a normal life. Go, he thought, don’t look back. Whatever you do, keep going.

‘Look, are we just going to stand here and let her get away?’ asked Biddle impatiently.

‘No, I suppose not,’ said Bryant with a sigh as they walked forward. ‘Elspeth,’ he called gently. ‘Please. Let us help you.’

She stopped in her tracks and looked back over her shoulder with sad deliberation. She saw Bryant and held his eye, unable to move any further, and in that moment she was lost.

Up ahead there was a muffled thump, and the road vibrated sharply beneath their feet.

‘What the bloody hell was that?’ asked Biddle.

Elspeth had heard the noise too.

‘Oh no,’ was all Bryant managed to say before the two-storey front of the antiquarian bookshop lazily divorced itself from the rest of the terrace and fell forward in an explosion of dust and bricks.

As the airborne sediment settled, they saw the neat rooms inside the bookshop exposed like a child’s cutaway drawing. The building’s frontage lay collapsed across the road, virtually unbroken. As a fresh wind picked up, the entire street was scattered with the pages of rare books. Colour plates of herons, butterflies, monkeys, warriors and emperors drifted lazily past them. There were diamond shards of glass everywhere. The detectives’ clothes were pincushioned with sparkling slivers.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Biddle, scratching his head in wonder.

Of Elspeth Wynter, there was no sign at all.

61

SPIRITS OF THE CITY

Margaret Armitage sipped the glass of vervain tea made from leaves she had specially shipped to her from a French necromancer in the town of Carcassonne. Beside her, Arthur Bryant and John May dangled their legs over the ancient wall of the riverbank, nursing foamy pint mugs of bitter. Above the pub door was a large blackboard that read: HITLER WILL SEND NO WARNING—ALWAYS CARRY YOUR GAS MASK.

The waitress of the Anchor had looked at Maggie as if she was mad when she asked for a glass of freshly boiled water. It did not help that the teenage leader of the Camden Town Coven, an organization that had counted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe among its members, was wearing a purple and gold kaftan belonging to an African tribal chief, topped with a peacock-feather hat and half a dozen amber necklaces inscribed with carvings representing the souls of the dead.

‘I’m a bit disappointed about there not being an actual phantom at the Palace, just a poor tortured boy,’ said Maggie, looking out across the placid grey water at the bend in the river, where it widened to the docks. ‘Let me get under your overcoat, it’s big enough.’

‘Yes, that was rather an intriguing aspect,’ Bryant agreed as he extended his gaberdine. ‘Of course, Todd Wynter was never at Jan Petrovic’s house, so there were no walls to walk through, so to speak. But when he vanished from the top-floor corridor, and again from the roof, he had me fooled for a while. John, you remember I asked you about the wind that night?’

‘Yes, I wondered what you were on about.’

‘We found Todd’s jacket,’ he told Maggie. ‘The one his mother had made for him, just a hood and cloak stitched out of blackout curtain, but it was absolutely huge, rolled up like a sheet. When I ran after him, I imagine he simply remained still at the end of the passageway and unfurled the cloak. It was too dark for me to see him. An old magician’s trick; he’d witnessed plenty of those at the Palace. He threw it off the roof when he was finished with it, and waited until he could return to his private quarters. We found it hanging from the steeple of St Anne’s Church in Dean Street. The wind had carried it like a sail.’

‘What a pity,’ said Maggie. ‘I had hoped you might be able to give us proof of the spirit world.’

‘Oh, I’ve no doubt Andreas Renalda is possessed, but he’s possessed by the spirits of his childhood.’ Bryant swallowed some of his bitter, savouring the pungent taste of hops. ‘In her own way, so was Elspeth Wynter. Her life was shaped by the ghosts of the theatre. She was a woman forced to survive in a world of harmful magic.’

‘That’s what witches are. Do you think she was a witch?’

‘Well, someone dropped a house on her,’ said Bryant, ‘so she might have been.’

‘You can’t fool me. You were keen on her.’

‘I was only ever keen, as you quaintly put it, on one girl. Once you’ve met the one, all the others are just phantasms.’

Maggie lightly stroked his hand. ‘Perhaps it’s time to let her memory go, Arthur.’

Bryant looked out at a pair of swans settling on the oily water. ‘It’s not a matter of choice. I have to wait for her to do that.’ He took a ruminative swig of beer. The evening’s chill had blanched his cheeks and knuckles.

‘Did you hear about your landlady?’ May was anxious to change the mood. ‘She stabbed the editor of
Country Life
in the foot with your swordstick.’

‘Serves him right,’ said Bryant, cheering up. ‘He has no business being in London.’

‘And Davenport’s very pleased. He came into the unit this morning and wandered around for a while, shifting pieces of paper about, looking into drawers, fiddling with things. Turned out he’d come to congratulate us formally, and was having trouble uttering the words.’

‘Perhaps he could jot it on a postcard,’ offered Bryant. ‘He means well but he’s such an awful clot. Fancy ordering our front door to be barred.’

‘I think he was a bit embarrassed about that. You should have seen his face when Biddle stood up for you. He looked as if he’d been stabbed in the back.’

‘I don’t suppose Davenport’s good mood will last. The Lord Chamberlain has changed his mind about the show. Says it’s indecent and has to come off. I think somebody higher up must have had a word with him.’

‘So all of Elspeth Wynter’s efforts were wasted. The production would have closed anyway. How sad. God, we’re such a lot of hypocritical prudes.’

‘You didn’t sleep with her, did you?’ asked Maggie. ‘You didn’t get your conkers polished by a murderess?’

Bryant looked horrified. ‘No I did not, thank you,’ he said, as though the thought had never even occurred to him. ‘For a spiritualist, you can be very crude.’ He suddenly brightened. ‘Mind you,
he
did, our Mr May, he made love to a murderess.’ He pointed at John May.

‘Unproven,’ said May hastily. ‘I mean Betty’s involvement in the death of Minos Renalda. There’s nothing on record, only the conversation I had with Andreas.’

‘I thought her real name was Elissa.’

‘That’s right, abbreviated to Betty. She has a sister in the Wrens. I should introduce you.’

‘I don’t think so. Once bitten and so on.’ Bryant raised his trilby and shook out his floppy auburn fringe.

‘I should be going.’ Maggie Armitage set down her tea glass. ‘I’ll be late.’

‘What have you got tonight?’ asked May. ‘Druid ceremony? Séance? Psychic materialization?’

‘No, Tommy Handley on the radio at eight thirty. I never miss him.’ She thrust a lethal-looking pin through her hat. ‘I was listening when Bruce Belfrage got bombed. We hadn’t laughed so much in ages.’ Belfrage was a BBC news announcer who became a national hero after carrying on his live radio broadcast even though the studio had received a direct hit and several people were killed. ‘I actually think I’m going to miss the war when it’s over.’

‘Don’t be obscene, Margaret,’ said Bryant hotly, swinging his legs down from the weed-riven embankment wall. ‘Death is stalking the streets, death made terrifying by its utter lack of meaning.’

‘The closer you are to death, the more attached you become to life,’ the coven leader reminded him. ‘The city is filled with strengthening spirits.’

‘The city is filled with brave people, that’s all,’ said May, and took a long drink of his beer.

‘If people ever stop thinking about the ones they leave behind, Mr May, your job will cease to exist. All that you see—all this,’ she gestured around her, ‘is about generations yet to be born.’

‘Don’t take her too seriously,’ Bryant warned his partner. ‘You were wrong about one of us dying in an explosion, Maggie.’

‘It’s never a dead cert, otherwise I’d make my fortune on the gee-gees instead of helping the police with their inquiries,’ she snapped at him, stung.

‘You told me you once copped a monkey on a nag called Suffragette racing at Kempton Park because he was possessed by the spirit of Emmeline Pankhurst,’ complained Bryant.

Maggie saw more than she ever dared to tell anyone. Time compressing, days blurring into nights, speeding skies, great buildings whirling into life, wheels of steel and circles of glass. She saw a girl her age but half a century away, a girl too afraid of life to leave her house.

She saw the future of John May’s grandchild.

‘I’m sorry,’ she apologized suddenly. ‘I have to go. Don’t be downhearted, Mr May. And don’t worry about the future. Things have a way of working out. The song of the city will live on, so long as there is someone to sing it.’

‘Well, I wonder what got into her?’ exclaimed Bryant. The detectives watched as she walked off down the street, pausing to stroke a tortoiseshell cat on a doorstep, listening to it for a moment, then moving on.

‘You know some very peculiar people, Arthur,’ May pointed out.

‘Oh, you haven’t seen the half of it. I intend to bring many more of them into the unit. I have a friend who can read people’s minds by observing insects. He’d be useful. And I know a girl who’s a ventophonist.’

‘What’s that?’

‘She can throw her voice down the phone.’

‘Now you’re teasing me.’

‘Our work is far from finished. I think I’ve finally found a purpose to my life. Something I can dedicate myself to. Thanks to you.’

Bryant looked over at his partner and grinned as the sun came out above them, transforming the river into a shining ribbon of light. He rubbed his hands together briskly.

‘But where to start? We have yet to discover the lair of the Leicester Square Vampire. He’s still got my shoes, you know. And that poor girl he snatched, buried alive with all those rabid bats and someone else’s head. There are other cases starting to come in. We’ve got a twenty-one-year-old Hurricane pilot accused of a brutal stabbing in Argyll Street, several witnesses, his bloody fingerprints on the body, and a cast-iron alibi that places him in the middle of Regent’s Park, tied to the back of a cow. He’s one of the Channel heroes, so it’s in everyone’s interests to exonerate him, but how? No, our labours here are only just beginning. This city is a veritable repository of the wonderful and the extraordinary. Isn’t that right, Mr May?’

‘I couldn’t agree with you more, Mr Bryant,’ replied May with a lift of his glass, and this time he really meant it.

Bryant looked over his friend’s shoulder, in the direction of Waterloo Bridge. Something drew his eye to the centre of the bridge. There was a coruscating flash of dark sunlight, a spear of greenish yellow, and for the briefest moment two elderly men could be seen leaning on the white stone parapet. Then the light settled, and they were gone.

Far above them, the silver-grey barrage balloons that protected the city turned lazily in the early evening air, like old whales searching for the spawning grounds of their youth.

62

SLEIGHT OF HAND

‘What time is it?’

‘Almost sunset.’ May came away from the hospital window. ‘You can see the river from here.’

‘Look, John, I’ve still got the mobile phone you bought me.’ Arthur Bryant pulled the silver Nokia out from under the bedclothes and waved it at his visitor, waiting for a compliment. The hospital room was awash with garish flowers and get-well cards.

‘I thought you’d lost it,’ said May, tearing off a grape and eating it.

‘No, I’d accidentally switched it with the television remote. Every time Alma changed channels to watch QVC she speed-dialled the Berlin headquarters of Interpol.’

‘Well, why didn’t you use the speed-dial to call me?’

‘I wasn’t thinking very clearly. I’d been hit on the head,’ Bryant complained.

‘How is the old noggin?’ May peered at the top of his partner’s skull. A row of neat stitches extended from his right ear to the middle of his left eyebrow. ‘You’re going to have a scar there. Can you remember what happened that night after I left you?’

‘Only bits,’ Bryant admitted. ‘I went downstairs to get my paperweight back.’

‘What paperweight?’

‘The one I threw at the lads from Holmes Road when they came by to make fun of me. It must have been around six in the morning when I went out. I thought I’d better get the thing back because it was a souvenir from the war. I was just coming up the stairs when I saw him. The top door was wide open, and Elspeth Wynter’s son was standing there. He had a green metal cylinder in his fist. He started accusing me of persecuting him, and said he was going to kill me. I should never have sought him out at the Wetherby. I’d upset him when I reminded him how his mother had died. It’s funny the way little things can trigger memories. Give me those, for God’s sake.’ He reached forward and emptied grape pips from May’s cupped palm. ‘Ow.’ He clutched at the top of his head and fell back onto the pillow.