On the Loose (18 page)

The prints led to behind the door, where the intruder must have waited—they were heavier here—before attacking Delaney. Now the bootprints danced in a tight circle, to be joined by twin drag marks, Delaney’s shoes, the toes rather than the heels, as he was pulled away to the couch and laid down on his stomach. A single droplet of blood had fallen, and there was a small patch of dried fluid on the carpet that looked like spittle. Banbury sniffed delicately, wondering if he might catch a faint chemical odour in the room, but found none. Yet Delaney had simply fallen to the floor. Not a drug, then; something else with the power to render a man unconscious in a second—or perhaps kill him outright. A thin knife or long needle, through the underside of the jaw or behind the ear, straight up into the base of the brain. The signs were so easy to read that Banbury felt as if he had witnessed the entire scene unfolding before him.

But if Delaney had surprised a burglar, and had been killed while the robbery was in progress, how had he wound up in a shop freezer?

‘Everyone says Terry Delaney is one of the good guys,’ Long-bright told John May, setting a mug of tea on his desk. ‘He never touched drugs, had no known connections with anyone dodgy, was working hard to pay his wife money, saw his daughter every other weekend.’

‘Why was he divorced?’ asked May.

‘Nothing unusual there. He and his wife were working all hours and their schedules never matched up. She’s a nurse at
UCL. Actually, we know her. Niamh Connor takes shifts in A and E. She treated Meera for her cut arm. These are the last jobs Delaney took on.’ She dropped an additional page of addresses on the desk.

May studied the sheet and tapped the last line. ‘Allensbury Place—that’s near the railway line bordering the King’s Cross site. It’s within walking distance of where he was found, and where he was living.’

‘He mainly worked on local projects. Didn’t do the West End because his boss was having some kind of row with him over unpaid parking tickets. He drove a white van, but we didn’t find it outside his flat.’

‘We need to know who Delaney was working with in the days leading up to the burglary. Get Bimsley over there. And have Meera talk to his ex-wife.’

‘Dan’s convinced that Delaney didn’t know his attacker. He says the footprints in the apartment suggest he surprised a burglar, simple as that.’

‘So there’s a fight and the burglar kills him, bundles him into his van in a panic, can’t think what to do with the body, takes it home and cuts it up, then remembers the empty shop up the road and dumps him in the freezer. Or he takes him straight to the shop, out into the back room, lays him out on the plastic sheets and does his cutting there. It would be ironic if the first straightforward case we’ve handled in years turns out to be the one that gets us the unit back.’

‘What are you going to do, John? Do you want some help?’

‘No, just keep an eye on the others for me. Arthur and I will try to have this place running more efficiently by the morning, providing he gets back soon from wherever he’s wandered off to. At least we have electricity and the neighbourhood has Wi-Fi, so I can use my laptop.’

‘Where did Mr Bryant go?’

‘He wrapped that disgusting old scarf around his head and told me he was meeting an old friend in a graveyard. If we keep operating by the book, we might be able to clear this whole thing up in time to satisfy the Home Office. I do hope Arthur isn’t going to try and muddy the waters with some unlikely scenario involving, oh, I don’t know, resurrectionists or pagan worshippers.’

‘I’ve heard him mention forest gods quite a few times.’

May sipped his tea, thinking. ‘He sees ghosts, you know.’

Longbright’s brow furrowed. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Not in the conventional way. It’s just—I think the past is always there. The ghosts walk beside him. All the things that have happened here in times gone by remain burned into his vision like afterimages. It’s Arthur’s weakness. And, of course, his greatest strength.’

23
A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS

S
t Pancras station soared up above him, its pink granite columns supported on drums carved with shields and figures in late Victorian extravagance. The niches had been designed to hold statues, but the Midland Railway had baulked at the extra expense, so they had remained empty. Here, at the hotel which prefaced the station, Venetian High Gothic met the beginnings of the Aesthetic Movement, the whole edifice looking down on the surrounding area as if in command of it.

Bryant rested himself, remembering how King’s Cross, Euston and Somers Town had looked when he was a child. He vaguely recalled a Christmas party held at Reggiori’s restaurant, a genteelly shabby dining hall with a chipped fountain of turquoise porcelain standing at its centre. A neon amusement arcade now stood upon the site. Further back had been the fragments of Regency terraces that had miraculously survived the wartime bombings; the Rising Sun boxers’ pub; the German eating rooms where they sang ‘Lili Marlene’ as they served boiled sausage; the great gasometers. The peculiar old lighthouse that stood on the roof of the building in the centre of the road had supposedly been built to advertise a long-vanished fish shop. The lighthouse was still there, but had fallen into disrepair.
In a way it was a perfect symbol of the area, in such plain view that nobody noticed it.

Bryant turned, trying to conjure the past, but as fast as he dragged one piece from his memory another slipped away. He wondered if the few remaining residents older than he looked down from their windows and saw how it had once been, or whether they could see only what was now before their eyes. Remembering was pointless; but forgetting somehow seemed immoral.

Bryant’s right leg was troubling him, so he used his cane as he walked. Although it had rained earlier, the unseasonably warm day had caused a soft mist to rise from the earth and shroud the low buildings behind the station. Across from St Pancras station was Pancras Road, beneath which the Fleet River ran on its way to Blackfriars. The streets to the rear had been built on the banks of the river valley, and were noticeably cooler.

His path took him behind the frenetic theatre of the station, into the dim backstage area of silent roads and empty pavements. He had reached St Pancras Old Church, its graveyard gardens reaching down to the curving edge of the canal. Between the trees he could see ducks and moorhens nesting, and a single heron standing alone in the reeds. The grave digger was dragging an old-fashioned hand-operated lawn mower across the green, but stopped to watch balefully as Bryant passed.

The church itself suggested a building in repose, weathered by centuries of devout prayer. It was a strange melange of styles: Roman, German and English. Its bell tower was inset with elegant convex clock faces, finished in shiny black lacquer painted with gold numerals. Only these, and the elaborately regilded railings around the graveyard, gave any hint of the structure’s true importance to the city.

Austin Potterton was on top of a Gothic monument doing something unsuitable to a sundial. Above him, leathery crows cawed in the clawlike branches of the trees.

‘Austin, what on earth are you up to?’ asked Bryant, poking him on the boots with his cane.

‘Ah, it’s you, Arthur. You’re early.’ The man who clambered down had straggling shoulder-length hair the colour of tobacco ash, but wore a pin-striped suit with a navy tie and matching handkerchief, like an old hippie going for a job interview. He had a filthy toothbrush behind his ear. When he rubbed his nose and shook Bryant’s hand he left charcoal on his face and on the detective’s sleeve.

‘Tempus Edax Rerum
—a bit gloomy, don’t you think? I cleaned it up a bit; somebody has to. The crows have been using it as a toilet for years. Toothbrushes seem to work best. I think this monument was paid for by Baroness Burdett-Coutts. Rather nice mosaic panels. I was just making an impression.’

‘Well, you weren’t making one on me,’ sniffed Bryant, scowling at his sleeve. ‘These tombs and monuments aren’t meant to be climbed over. It’s not an amusement park, you know.’

‘I’m doing some research for the diocese. They’ve hired me to photograph and catalogue everything in the churchyard, because the last time they did it the documents were stored in the undercroft and sustained water damage when it flooded.’ Potterton dusted himself down and replaced his materials in his briefcase. ‘St Pancras Old Church deserves decent treatment—it’s very possibly the oldest Christian site in Europe. And it’s finally getting a bit of a makeover now that the rail link has come here.’

‘Saint Pancras,’ Bryant mused. ‘He was fourteen when he died, wasn’t he? A Christian martyr, decapitated on the orders
of the Emperor Diocletian. I read somewhere that his severed head still exists in the reliquary in the Basilica of San Pancrazio.’

‘You’re absolutely right, although Heaven alone knows why you’d want to retain such information. His name was anglicised.’ Puffing out his cheeks, Potterton leaned back and looked at the old building.

‘The place doesn’t look like much, does it?’ said a new voice. A minuscule vicar appeared from behind the fountain. He gave the impression of warily walking on tiptoe, as if checking for broken glass. He clasped Bryant’s hand and gave it a limp shake. ‘The Reverend Charles Barton. Welcome to St Pancras Old Church. This is a very well-connected little parish. We’d be terribly proud of it, if pride wasn’t a sin, ha-ha.’

Bryant refused to laugh. He rarely chose to make friends with clergymen.

‘I’m not, ah, part of the usual ecclesiastical team here. I’m sort of filling in.’ Charles Barton was young and untested, of ineffectual appearance and extremely pale, as if he had been washed clean too many times. There were vicars who fought battles for the souls of their parishioners, and vicars who were more interested in pointing out the stained glass. Barton was of the latter sort.

‘Are you acquainted with some of the illustrious residents in our little churchyard?’ he asked.

‘Do introduce me,’ Bryant suggested, offering up a frightening smile.

‘Well, Sir John Soane, the architect of the Bank of England, has his tomb here. Charles Dickens makes reference to it in
A Tale of Two Cities
. The shape of the tomb inspired Scott’s design for the traditional red telephone kiosk. And I’m sure you know that Mary Shelley was wooed by Percy Bysshe Shelley in the
churchyard. It used to be much bigger, but the Midland Railway cut away a great chunk for its sidings. Mary Shelley used to come here because her mother had been laid to rest in these grounds. The family lived nearby, but then the Midland Railway destroyed their house, too. The couple romanced each other on the gravestones, not my idea of an appropriate venue for a date, but I suppose tastes change. Have you seen the Hardy Tree?’

‘No,’ Bryant lied. In fact he had sat under it when he was a child, before railings had been placed around it. The old ash tree was beset by great grey gravestones, laid end on end against the trunk like a rising tide of stone, so that the wood had grown over them, nature engulfing the remains of man. Hardy was forever linked with Wessex, and it was odd to think of him here in town, fighting with locals over land the railway had usurped.

‘Most of the graves—some eight thousand of them—were relocated to Highgate and Kensal Green,’ Barton told them. ‘The young Thomas Hardy helped to clear them, and spent many hours in this churchyard. I’m just brewing up. Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘Good idea, Rev, I’m spitting feathers.’

Barton led the way to the vestry, where a brown china teapot stood warming on an electric ring. Potterton joined them unasked and squeezed himself into a wicker chair, ready to be served.

‘Apparently Thomas Hardy was very upset about the lack of respect shown to the graves when they were moved,’ Potterton explained. ‘It sounds like many of the bodies were simply shoved in together.’

‘We found this in the sacristy.’ The vicar clearly did not like Potterton usurping his position as parish historian, but was not the sort to complain, at least within earshot. Barton detached a
yellowed scrap of lined paper from the stack of documents on his desk and carefully unfurled it. ‘Hardy wrote a little poem which he called “The Levelled Churchyard.”

‘We late-lamented, resting here,
Are mixed to human jam,
And each to each exclaims in fear,
“I know not which I am!”’

‘Mary Shelley predates Hardy by quite a bit, doesn’t she?’ asked Bryant. ‘When she walked with her lover through the churchyard it would still have been its original size.’

‘Quite so. She often popped in to put flowers on her mother’s grave.’

‘You don’t suppose she first caught a glimmer of the idea that would become
Frankenstein
here?’

‘No, she wrote that while summering on Lake Geneva,’ Potterton reminded Bryant.

‘But imagine how the churchyard would have looked in those days, wild and overgrown. The bodies weren’t always buried properly, you know. The trees uprooted coffins, thrusting them to the surface. Human remains, bones and skulls would have been found all over the site. The church had a much more cavalier attitude to death in those days. What a ghoulishly picturesque place for inspiration! Of course the story goes that Shelley wrote the story in Switzerland, but ideas take a long time to come bubbling up through the soul, and this was her spiritual home, after all.’

‘Oh, you just like to imagine her sitting under a London plane tree creating monsters.’

‘I suppose so. Austin, you usually know about these things. Is there any history of strange sightings in the area?’

‘Are you being funny?’

‘No, why?’

‘Arthur, I thought you would know more than anyone. The entire area is rife with them. It’s long been associated with pagan hauntings. There’s a pre-Christian barrow around here somewhere.’

The vicar harrumphed childishly at the mention of paganism.

‘I know a little about the hauntings,’ Bryant admitted.