Ten Second Staircase (44 page)

'The boys told Longbright that he gave them a lesson using artifacts from his family's history. I think we'll find what we're looking for in there.'

Felix stepped forward and pinged open the tiny lock with a disdainful flick of the finger. Bryant opened the cupboard and checked inside to find cricket pads, footballs, broken pieces of science equipment, a master's gown, rugby kit, and stacks of schoolbooks. 'Funny how school cupboards all smell the same. Give me a hand,' he instructed.

Together, he and May lifted down a cardboard box and removed the lid. This was May's abiding image of his partner; nosing into some neglected corner of the city to check out its contents. The box had been taped shut, but Bryant happily slit it open with his Swiss Army knife. It was filled with photographs and newspaper clippings.

'Take a look at this,' Bryant suggested. 'Kingsmere's family tree. I knew he would keep his mementoes here. This room is very important to him; it's where he passes on his wisdom. He couldn't resist a little show-and-tell with his favoured pupils. The St Crispin's pupils are at war with the boys on the estate, so the Saladins are always looking for ways to bring them down. And recently I think they made a discovery about St Crispin's favourite teacher. They were annoyed with Kingsmere because he had the nerve to conduct goodcitizen classes at their centre, so they took revenge on him—and by extension, their enemies—by embedding clues about Kingsmere's culpability in their graffiti, for all to see. How typical of teenagers to take such an unnecessarily complicated route.'

'You've lost me, Arthur,' May admitted.

'This is where a little reading of London history books comes in

useful, John. Kingsmere's grandfather was a legendary fascist. Nobody is given a forgotten Victorian Christian name like "Brilliant" without a good family reason. The name rang a bell the first time I heard it. There's a famous photograph of Kingsmere's ancestor throwing a Molotov cocktail at a police cordon in 1935. I saw it at Oliver's picture library.'

Bryant raised a fistful of sepia photographs depicting a thin-faced man shouting on a podium at Hyde Park Corner. 'He went to jail for attacking the so-called anarcho-socialists he deemed harmful to the well-being of England. Judging from these photographs, he modelled his appearance on a history of earlier protestors. We tend to adopt the look of those we admire; think of the tree-huggers in the nineties, and how they had modelled their appearance on Californian hippies. Kingsmere could have buried his ancestry, but instead he chose to celebrate it and explain it to his class. That says a lot about his state of mind.'

May stood back. 'I don't understand. You think some piece of ancient family history makes Kingsmere the Highwayman?'

'I think he's been following in his family's infamous footsteps. This is about their perception of social injustice. Imagine a dynasty of outsiders and anarchists, each generation committing the crimes that it deems necessary to improve society. The grandfather is politically committed and indoctrinates his children, so that eventually Brilliant Kingsmere is encouraged to follow in the family footsteps, and wipe out those he imagines are symptomatic of society's ills.'

'You can't honestly believe that's enough of a motive to turn Kingsmere into some kind of avenging angel,' said May.

'I'd seen the grandfather's picture on the wall of the Newman Street Picture Library; I just didn't register the central connection. It makes perfect sense. The old man's radical background obsesses and poisons his son, and his son in turn. Ergo, Kingsmere is the Highwayman, continuing his grandfather's work.'

'You've come up with some rubbish theories in your time, but this beats them all.' May shoved the photographs back in their box. 'You think the grandson's motive must also be about upsetting the social order? The targeting of celebrities considered to be champions of the masses is a bit of a perverse way of meting out social justice.'

'I haven't worked out the finer points yet,' Bryant admitted, looking sheepish.

May was unconvinced. 'This is one of your potty dot-joining exercises. I don't see any damning evidence here.'

'You don't?' Bryant was holding something aloft with a smile creeping across his eerily white false teeth. Dipping into the box once more, he withdrew a black leather eye mask. A moment's more rummaging brought forth a padded courier's jerkin, similarly stitched in black leather. 'The mask and tunic of the avenger. We're going to find Kingsmere's prints all over these. He followed his grandfather's aberrant ideologies. We've found our Highwayman. Let's bring him in.'

'I know why you're so out of salts,' said Alma Sorrowbridge, picking up Bryant's mud-spattered trousers and bundling them for the wash. 'You're working too hard and it's stressing you out, making you forget things. Worry will play merry hell with the bowels.' The Antiguan landlady tutted and shook her jowls. 'Fancy leaving piles of filthy old toothbrushes all over the hall with germs and ungodly crawlies leaping off them, and forgetting the nice packed lunch I made you.'

'It wasn't nice, it was covered in lard,' Bryant complained.

'You need some fat on your chest with the bad weather coming. And eat some fruit. You're an old man. You got to eat properly and make your peace with God before it's too late,' she warned.

'Thank you very much; that makes me feel a lot better,' said Bryant with heavy sarcasm. 'All this emphasis on youth and fitness is unhealthy. Why, only a few weeks ago I was shut inside a London sewer, and suffered no aftereffects.' He searched the mantelpiece for his pipe, but Alma had hidden it again.

'I had to burn your clothes and fumigate the house,' replied the landlady, releasing a burst of lavender polish into the air and grinding it into her sideboard. 'It's Sunday. Why don't you come to church with me?'

'My dear good woman, at some point you must realise that you're wasting your breath. I am quite beyond redemption. I'll only come to the church with you if the vicar has been found murdered.'

'I don't care for blasphemy, Mr B. Did you take your pills? You know you mustn't get them muddled up.'

'Just for once I wish everyone would stop mollycoddling me!' Bryant exploded. 'I'm not a six-year-old. I'm in charge of a major murder investigation!'

He managed to beat her to the phone when it rang. 'Ah, John, any luck with our man?'

'He's out of contact at the moment, walking in the country according to his girlfriend, and he doesn't have his mobile with him,' May replied. 'He's due back in two hours' time. I don't like the idea of him being on the loose—could we get him picked up?'

'It'll take that long just to bring him into the unit,' said Bryant. 'He's got no reason to run. Let's keep him under close surveillance until the morning, and talk to him the moment he arrives at the school. This needs to be handled with tact and care. I don't want him put on his guard.'

'All right, but I hope you know what you're doing.'

'Don't worry. I've got everything under control,' said Bryant, swigging his pills down with a small tumbler of whisky. He replaced the tablet box in his pocket, failing to notice that he had switched his energising morning blue pills with his disorienting nighttime red ones.

44

LOCKDOWN

'What's the problem?' asked Meera Mangeshkar, drawing alongside and pulling off her motorcycle helmet. It was seven-thirty A.M. on Monday, October 31. Unit staff usually arrived early at Mornington Crescent for a group meeting that decided the week's schedule, but this morning they were all stranded outside the building.

'The front door's stuck,' said Longbright, fiddling with the key to the PCU's main door. She stepped back and looked up at the unlit windows beneath the crimson-tiled arches.

'Let me take a look.' Mangeshkar peered through the keyhole, then tested the latch. 'The lock's been changed. The old one's been drilled out.'

'That's impossible, I was the last to leave yesterday evening.' Longbright threw her considerable shoulder against the door, but it would not budge. She dug out her mobile and snapped it open. 'I'm going to call Faraday. This is his doing.'

'I'm afraid you won't get in by bashing the door down.' Leslie Faraday's tone was regretful when she managed to track him down, apologetic even. 'I fear my hands are tied.'

'But I don't understand,' said Longbright, shielding her mobile from the spattering rain. Bimsley and Mangeshkar were huddled in the unit's doorway, waiting for her to finish the call.

'Mr Kasavian,' said Faraday. His speakerphone made him sound as if he was in a public toilet. 'He's terribly exercised about the bungled attempt to catch the Highwayman on Saturday. And then the attack on Mrs Ramsey was the last straw, you should have seen him, utterly distraught—'

'He's not taking the case away from us?' asked Longbright.

'No,' replied Faraday. 'He's closed your unit down for good.'

The detective sergeant was outraged. 'He can't do that.'

'I'm afraid it's entirely within his remit to do so. I was hoping to tell you myself, but things are rather hectic here, what with London's tourism-development seminar occupying all my time at the moment. I have a lot of functions to attend, and frankly, the closure of a small unproductive department is all in a day's work.'

Longbright decided it might be for the best not to lose her temper. 'What happens to the investigation now? All our details are inside the unit.'

'Mr Kasavian has handed this case back to the Metropolitan Police,' explained Faraday. 'They'll take charge of all the contents.'

John May's confession was still lying in Longbright's unlocked desk. She needed access to the building right now.

'Sergeant Renfield is on his way over to remove all your files from the building. I do hope you're not going to be awkward about this, Longbright.'

If Renfield can get in,
she thought,
that means we can, too.

April watched the falling rain from the window of her Holloway Road apartment and wondered if it was about to become her prison again.

DS Longbright had called her a few minutes ago with news of the unit's closure, warning her not to come in, but without the offices at Mornington Crescent to visit every morning, she knew she might easily slip back into her old ways and become a recluse once more. How could her grandfather have allowed such a thing to happen? Clearly, the detectives had been so used to getting their own way that they had failed to notice how badly matters had slipped from their control.

She blamed herself for not warning them that Janet Ramsey was conducting an affair with Oskar Kasavian. She had made the connection two days earlier, while compiling Internet information about the editor. There had been no direct references to their relationship, but April was adept at reading between the lines, and noticed a matching pattern in the duo's published schedules. Ramsey was divorced, but Kasavian was reported to be happily married. Civil servants were expected to behave with impartiality, and Ramsey's paper, for all its sexual salaciousness, was harshly and actively conservative. Law and order had been a political issue since the time of Dick Turpin, to be used as ammunition by the opposing party, but Kasavian clearly considered himself above such rules.

She knew that he had taken his vendetta to a personal level, and as he was the most senior official in charge of the unit, there was no higher court of appeal. The PCU would remain closed, and its longest-serving detectives would finally be forced into retirement without honour or the satisfaction of finishing the task at hand. It would be the end of Bryant, if not her grandfather. John had hobbies and friends, but Arthur lived for his work.

It was too late to save the unit, but she wondered if there was a way of rescuing the partners from their predicament. Seating herself back at her computer, she followed a line of thought that she suspected might prove beneficial to them. Arthur had taught her always to trust her instincts above the facts, an attitude that irritated her grandfather. Bryant solved the most tangled cases by tracing barely visible psychic paths hidden under the weight of empirical data. For him, it was like following emergency lights through dense fog. This time, though, she was sure that the opposite was needed. The basic elements of logic in the case had been ignored, and it was time to reinstate them. April had a head for connecting simple facts.

She had sent her office notes to her home computer, in order to work at her apartment over the weekend. Now she looked through them, beginning with the first interview of the investigation, and its most fundamental paradox: the testimony of Luke Tripp.

She wanted a cigarette. She wanted to rearrange her desk so that all the pencils were in perfect alignment. Instead, April forced her mind towards the bare facts.
Do it for them,
she told herself.

Luke Tripp had gone on record stating that he had seen the horseman ride into the gallery and raise Saralla White up to the tank. Despite the absurdity of the claim, Banbury had been required to check it out. Where was the summary of his notes? She trawled through the hundreds of pages they had already amassed on the Highwayman and found his conclusion, an obvious point, but one that had been consistently sidelined: that it would have been quite impossible for a horse and rider to enter the building and secrete themselves within it.