Arthur Bryant: Have you met him before? If not, imagine a tortoise minus its shell, thrust upright and stuffed into a dreadful suit. Give it glasses, false teeth and a hearing aid, and a wispy band of white hair arranged in a straggling tonsure. Fill its pockets with rubbish: old pennies and scribbled notes, boiled sweets and leaky pens, a glass model of a Ford Prefect filled with Isle of Wight sand, yards of string, a stuffed mouse, some dried peas. And fill its head with a mad scramble of ideas: the height of the steeple at St Clement Danes, the tide table of the Thames, the dimensions of Waterloo Station, and the MOs of murderers. On top of all this, add the enquiring wonder of a ten-year-old boy. Now you have some measure of the man.
Bryant jammed the ancient trilby harder on his bald paté and fought the rain on the Caledonian Road. Typically, he was moving in the wrong direction to the elements. He seemed to spend his life on an opposite path, a disreputable old salmon always determined to head upstream.
As he marched, he tabulated life’s annoyances in escalating order of gravity. He was sleeping badly again. He had forgotten to take his blue pills. His left leg hurt like hell. He had six days in which to close the Unit’s cases, and no money to pay his staff. He was likely to be thrown out of his home any day now. A good officer had died in the line of duty. And he had a murderer on the loose who was likely to return and commit further acts of violence. Not bad for a Monday morning. With a gargoyle grimace, he looked up at the rain-stained clouds above and muttered a very old and entirely unprintable curse.
Everyone talks about the unpredictable weather in London, but it actually has a faintly discernible pattern. At this time of the year, the second week in May, caught between the dissipation of winter and the failed nerve of spring, the days were drab, damp and undecided, the evenings clear and graceful, swimming pool blue melting to heliotrope, banded altostratus clouds forming with the setting of the sun. You can forgive a lot when a dim day has a happy ending.
On this Monday morning, though, there was no hint of the fine finish yet to come. Bryant made his way to the threadbare ground-floor flat in Margery Street where their escaped assassin, Mr Fox, had been living.
The building was a pebble-dashed two-storey block set at an angle to the road, possessing all the glamour of an abandoned army barracks. Dan Banbury, the Unit’s Crime Scene Manager, had already been at work here over the weekend, tying off the apartment into squares for forensic analysis. Bryant stepped over the red cords in his disposable shoe covers, but managed to lose one and dislodge a stack of magazines on the way.
“Just sit over there on the sofa, can you?” Banbury snapped irritably. “Stay somewhere I can see you. You’re supposed to wear a disposable suit.”
“I am. Got it from a secondhand stall on Brick Lane.”
“At least put your hands in your pockets. There’s supposed to be a constable on guard to log visits but Islington wouldn’t provide one. Some stupid dispute over jurisdiction.”
“You’re an SCO, you can let in who you want. Have you had your ears lowered?”
“Oh, my nipper came back from school with nits and wanted his hair cut off, but he wouldn’t let me do it until I’d tested the electric shaver on myself. I went a bit too short.”
“Wise lad.” Bryant stuck his hands in his coat and found a boiled sweet under the pocket fluff. He sucked at it ruminatively, looking about. “Still using pins and bits of string? I thought you could do it with a special camera now.”
“That’s right. Buy me the equipment and I’ll mark out the grid electronically. I think it only costs seven grand.”
“Point taken. Bagged much up?”
Banbury sat on his heels and massaged his back. He had been staring at biscuit crumbs and dead flies for the last half hour. “There’s no physical evidence to take.”
“Don’t be daft. There’s always evidence.” Bryant sucked a bit of fluff off his barley sugar sweet and flicked it onto the floor.
“Not in this case.”
“Have you started on the bedroom?”
“Not yet. But if you’re going to poke around in there, please don’t – you know – just don’t.”
Bryant was infamous for his habit of traipsing through crime scenes and fingering the evidence. He had begun his career at a time when detectives had been trained to merely observe with their eyes rather than to illuminate body fluids with blue lights and Luminol reagents. These days, specialist equipment came with specialists who charged by the hour. Many routine cases of criminal damage and assault were dumped simply because it was too slow and expensive to send away samples.
Bryant stood at the head of Mr Fox’s narrow bed and studied the room. No books on display. Hardly any furniture. A framed photograph of a girl with long blond hair and blue eyes, vacuous to the point of derangement. It was the photograph that had come with the frame. Mr Fox was a human sponge, a magnet for the knowledge of others, but he had no interest in real human beings, and therefore possessed no real friends. He couldn’t trust himself in any relationship that demanded honesty.
According to the rental records, their murderer had lived here for almost ten years under the name of Mr Fox. Yet there was no character to be found in these rooms, nothing that would reveal his personality traits or give any clue to his real identity. Most people’s hotel rooms offered up more than this. To Mr Fox, the flat was a place to sleep and visit periodically for a change of clothes, but even here he had been careful not to leave spoor.
“Fox,” said Bryant aloud. “Dictionary definition: a wary, solitary, opportunistic feeder that hunts live prey. Good choice of a name. No sign of who he really is, I suppose.”
“Nothing,” Banbury called back. “It’s really odd. You and John met the man. You interviewed him for hours. You didn’t get anything at all?”
“We did, but it was all lies. Our mistake was taking what we saw at face value. The man played us beautifully. I don’t understand how he disarmed me. I’m usually so suspicious.”
Bryant felt that he understood very little about serial killers. Demonstrable motivation was the keystone of criminology, and just as altruists made the best benefactors, murderers were at their most comprehensible when it was possible to see what they gained from their actions. This chap was a total cipher.
Mr Fox should have been easy to find. After all, he had initially killed for gain, not because he derived pleasure from it. But, Bryant wondered, would he have to continue killing, now that he had discovered the taste?
A parasite, he thought. He takes and takes without giving anything back, and remains in place until the host is dead. He studied the lair of his quarry, and felt an ominous settling in his stomach that warned him of imminent danger, although it might have been the germs on the brittle candy in his mouth.
∨ Off the Rails ∧
4
The Void
“A serial killer,” said Banbury, standing up to stretch his aching calves. “That’s what I reckon we’ve got here. We’ve not had many of them at the PCU, have we?”
“Not proper saw-off-the-arms-and-legs-boil-the-innards-put-the-head-in-a-handbag-and-throw-it-from-a-bridge jobs, no.” When it came to fathoming the private passions of serial killers, Bryant felt lost. What were their most notable attributes? Solitude and self-interest. The rest must surely be conjecture. Novels and films were filled with the abstruse motivations of intellectual murderers – fictional killers carved designs into corpses according to biblical prophecies and hid body parts in patterns that corresponded to Flemish paintings – but the reality was that the act of murder remained as squalid and desperate as it had always been. It was the province of the spiritually impoverished.