The Victoria Vanishes Part 14

'You're a fine one to talk. Alma hasn't forgiven you for b.u.g.g.e.ring up her Bedford van.'

'We were stuck in a snowdrift, Arthur; it's hardly surprising the radiator cracked. Any next of kin listed?'

'None, but there's a social services officer. Actually, it's someone we've dealt with before: Lorraine Bonner, the leader of the Residents' a.s.sociation at the Roland Plumbe Community estate. At least we know where to find her.'

'Then that's our next stop.' May paused, uncertain. 'Do you still want to see Jane?'

'Yes, I'd like to.'

May led the way upstairs and through the cheerfully painted corridors, to a ward separated from the rest of the floor. Nodding to the duty nurse, he headed toward the corner room and gently pushed back the door.

'Jane, it's me.' There was no answer. 'I've brought somebody to see you. You remember Arthur Bryant, don't you?'

She wore a tightly drawn fawn cardigan over a long pleated skirt. Her white sneakers had no laces. She had kept her figure and removed any trace of grey from her auburn hair, but when she turned around, Bryant saw the pain and confusion of the intervening years etched under her eyes and around her thin mouth. There was a loss of focus in her face, as though she was searching for something she could not quite make out. After a moment of composure during which she absently touched a hair into place, she drew a breath and seemed to straighten a little.

'Jane, do you remember Arthur?'

She raised a finger at him and tried to smile. 'Yes, we've met, but I'm afraid I don't know wherea"'

'I came to your wedding,' said Bryant gently.

'My wedding. How nice. Of course you did. You were always so kind.' The smile held, the eyes even twinkled, but her concentration was disturbed by the movement of branches beyond the window, the sc.r.a.ppy flight of a magpie above the grounds, a murmur of conversation in the corridor. 'I wonder ifa"' She stopped, a cloud of anxiety crossing her features. 'We could go to the coast. I'd like that, John. On a day when it's sunny, a day like today. I'd like to walk on the cliffs. But it must be warmer.'

'I know you don't like the cold, Jane, but spring will be here soon. I'll come for you then.'

'You've always been so good to him, Arthur.' She reached out for Bryant's arm, gently plucking a thread from his sleeve. As she did so, he glimpsed the scribble of scars whitening the flesh of her inside arm. 'I felt sure you would have both retired by now.'

'Oh, no, we're in this together right until the bitter end.' There was indulgent gaiety in Bryant's chuckle, but he could see a lasting winter in her eyes.

'Well, I feel terribly special today. It's good to see you both. I'm very privileged. Perhaps you'll come back another time. Come and see me again.'

The audience was over. Her attention had started to diminish, like a boat pulling away from the sh.o.r.e. She started to turn away. 'I'm quite happy here. I know everyone. You needn't rush back, not if you don't want to.'

'Jane, did you meet a patient here, a gentleman called Tony Pellew?' Bryant could not stop himself from asking.

Her waning interest was suddenly checked. Here was something she could grasp, someone she could recall from re-cent days. 'Of course I did. He spoke to me.'

The answer had come too quickly. He doubted she was telling the truth. 'Really? You knew him?'

'Long brown hair, slight, under-nourished. They let him out.'

'That's right.'

'He seemed decent enough, very bright, but such a mother's boy. There was something too soft in his eyes. He talked about his mother all the time. He told me that when she died, all the clocks in the pub stopped at two minutes past eleven.'

'What pub?'

'Where she lived. They let him leave. He wasn't well enough, in my opinion. You can tell which ones are well enough to go.' She pulled her cardigan a little tighter. 'How is my little girl?'

May looked guilty. 'She's well, Jane. Much better than she's been in years.'

'You must take very good care of her. She's all I have now.' She looked away, touching a finger beneath her eye. 'Perhaps one day you can bring her here.'

'We discussed this, Jane. If the doctor feels you can copea"' 'I know, I know, it's a stupid idea.' Her features set in a smile of practised hospitality. 'Well, I must go now, or I'll miss my lunch.'

Bryant looked back once as he walked away, and wished he had not seen her. The tiny, hunchbacked figure framed against the window bore no resemblance to the woman he remembered laughing between their linked arms. The tragedy of losing those she loved had robbed her of the right to happiness.

29.

WRAITH.

L.

orraine Bonner was a broad black woman with a laugh like someone unbunging a sink and enough courage to make the surliest delinquent think twice about disrespecting her. They found her surrounded by cardboard files in the chaotic first-floor office of the council estate's main block.

'I didn't think I'd see the two of you again,' she said, pouring thick brown tea from a steel pot the size of an upturned bucket. 'I thought that thing with the Highwayman was all over.'

'It is, Lorraine, but Mr May and I have a new problem,' said Bryant, 'and we thought you might be able to help us.'

'Can you walk with me while I do my pensioners?' Mrs Bonner delivered meals to the mobility-challenged seniors on the estate every lunchtime. When their own relatives could not be bothered to look after them, she was there to dispense patient kindnesses that had sophisticates sneering, while offering such practical help that they felt ashamed. May explained their mission as she manhandled her protesting trolley into the corridor.

'A lady from the Broadhampton phoned Islington Council to add Tony Pellew to my roster,' she informed them. 'They'd got him a one-bedroom apartment on the De Beauvoir estate. He didn't want to live in South London. His family was originally from around there. Normally we try to return home, don't we? It's only natural. You'll want the address of his flat.'

'How can we get that?'

'My filing system's in my head, love.' She took a card from May and wrote on the back of it. 'When did you last see him?'

'Well, I got him settled in and popped over a couple of times during the first week, but two weeks ago he went missing. He didn't have many belongings, just enough to fill a back-pack, but the wardrobe was emptied out and the bed hadn't been slept in.'

'How do you know he wasn't staying at a friend's?' asked May.

'His shoes were all gone. You don't take all your shoes unless you're not coming back, do you? I had to make a report to his probationer.'

'What was he like?' Bryant wondered, intrigued.

'Very quiet and sad, needed fattening up. The sort of man an older lady would like to take under her wing, you know? I heard he'd had a difficult upbringing. I'm not trying to excuse what he did, you just want to understand, don't you? Well, it's only human nature, isn't it?'

'Do you have any idea at all where he went?'

Mrs Bonner gave a shrug. 'They come and go, these lost souls, can't settle, don't feel comfortable in themselves, do they, just take off one day. London can be so lonely. He can't leave the country because he hasn't got a pa.s.sport. And I don't think he wants to go far from where his old mum lived, even though she disowned him. He'll turn up in a shelter somewhere, if he hasn't already.'

Anthony Pellew's apartment had an air of abandonment. Its resident had moved on, taking his clothes and the few personal belongings he possessed. Beneath the smell of dust and damp carpeting was the musk of stillness and solitude. The flat had been used for dozens of short-term residents who had pa.s.sed their time here, seated forlornly on the corner of the single bed, or propped at the square Ikea kitchen table, staring from the window into an unforgiving future. Discoloured edges on the carpet mapped furniture phantoms. The pale squares on the wall left ghosts of old picture frames. Pellew had not succeeded in leaving his mark in the apartment.

The first thing to do was check that he had not tried to re-turn to his former home. Bryant pushed back the door of a kitchen cupboard with the tip of his walking stick and peered inside. The few tins he found were the kind of staples stocked by someone with no interest in food. 'He must have left something behind. Everybody who moves out leaves some faint trace. I need to know this man's history. The b.l.o.o.d.y cheek of the Broadhampton, palming us off with a bit of paper.'

'It's not their fault,' said May defensively. 'They provide some of the best care in the country. Someone there has been stepped on by the a.s.sessment committee. Get April on the phone and have her call the clinic every hour on the half hour until someone gives her the full story.'

While May made the call, Bryant wandered from room to room, wrinkling his nose in the stale, dead air. They were about to lock the place up and head back to the unit when Bryant saw the newspaper cutting that lay pressed behind a sheet of gla.s.s on the kitchen table. Withdrawing his reading gla.s.ses, he read through it and called May in.

'It looks like he was going to frame this, John. It's Pellew's mother.'

The photograph was of a blond crop-haired woman with a hard, almost perfectly square face. Her son's grainy photo-graph was inset, and showed a boy with a bowed head emerging from court, his features in shadow.

'She sold her story to our friends at Hard News just a few weeks before her death. "Why My Son Must Never Be Freed," She used the article to envisage what he would do if he was ever to be granted his freedom. Do you think she'd heard he was being a.s.sessed for release? My G.o.dfathers.' He sat down and peered closely at the page. 'It reads like a blueprint of his activities over the last week. In his state of mind, it's hard not to think that he'd have seen this as some kind of fateful prediction. "Mrs Anita Pellew, the manager of London's famous old Clock House pub in Leather Lane,"'

Bryant slapped his hand on the gla.s.s-covered sheet. 'That's where he's gone.'

30.

SOLIDARITY.

Janice Longbright was ahead of them. April's search for Pellew's trial coverage had already uncovered his mother's interview. As the information was distributed and digested around the unit, Longbright threw on her jacket and headed for Farringdon before Renfield could try to stop her.

The Clock House occupied a shaded corner of Leather Lane. As she pa.s.sed beneath the heraldic red lion and white unicorn over the front door, she wondered how a building with so many windows could remain so gloomy inside, as if the smokers' fug that had obscured the mirrored interior for more than a century was now beyond mere dissipation by a smoking ban. Making her way through a saloon crowded with market traders and local office workers, she introduced herself to a barmaid, another pretty Polish girl, called Zosia.

'I understand that a woman named Anita Pellew lived here,' said Longbright.

'I don't knowa"I'm new here. You should talk to Patrick over there.' Zosia pointed at the old boy collecting gla.s.ses.

'That's right,' said the Irish pot man, thinking. 'She went to the hospital and didn't come back.'

'Were her rooms above the pub?'

'Second floor.' He put down his pint mugs to point at the ceiling.

'Can I get up there?'

'It's all locked up,' said Zosia.'The new manageress has the keys, and she's gone out.'

'What about the bas.e.m.e.nt? Does that stay locked?'

'No, because the bar staff have to get down there to change barrels.'

'Is that a single staircase behind the bar?' 'No, there's an access door outside as well.' 'Thanks, I'll need to take a look.'

Zosia raised the bar for her and led the way to the cellar door. 'I can't leave the bar,' she warned Longbright. 'Call me if you need anything.'

The floor below occupied a far greater area than the bar overhead. At least six rooms opened from the central battleship-grey corridor, their doors pulled shut. The dusty overhead bulb provided barely adequate light. Down here, only the faintest murmurs and footfalls could be heard from the saloon.

The first two rooms were filled with metal beer barrels and crates. Beyond these, a small office had been set up for the manager to work on the accounts. Had Mrs Pellew once sat here adding up figures while her son played in the bar?

Longbright groped for the Bakelite light switches, as round and high as pudding bowls, clicking them on as she went. At the far end of the corridor, a door opened onto a narrow stepped pa.s.sage originally designed for the delivery of coal. Its latch was easy to slip apart. Tony Pellew would have been able to come and go without anyone in the pub seeing him.

It took a lot to frighten the detective sergeant; she had spent too many years searching London's derelict buildings, climbing through its rubbish-strewn yards and alleyways, chasing panicked men through sc.r.a.ps of waste ground and across windswept car parks. The evidence suggested that Pellew had no intention of causing women pain, even though he had killed them. But to Longbright, that paradox made him all the more disturbing. It left a gap in his genetic makeup, a void that could not be explained away. It made him impossible to read.

When she opened the door of the darkened end room and saw a green nylon sleeping bag on the floor, she knew she had found him. She stepped inside, drawn by the desire to rummage through the empty white packets beside his bed, and realised they were boxes that had contained clear plastic drug ampoules, diabetic needles so small and fine that n.o.body would notice them.

What she failed to notice was that the door had started closing silently behind her.

A rag of shadow flung itself forward, seizing her in a practised grip. She should have been able to throw him over her head, but he had caught her off balance.

Stupid, stupid, she thought as she fell. I didn't consider myself old enough to be a target, but of course I'm exactly the right age.

The needle must have been tiny, similar to the one on an insulin pen, because instead of sliding in hotly it just plucked at the skin of her arm like an insect. A warm dental numbness flooded her body with astonishing speed.

His arms extended to catch her as she fell, to ease her to the floor, but she was heavier than he'd expected and slipped through his welcoming embrace. She jarred her hip and the side of her skull as she slammed onto the cement ground.

Anaesthetists always suggested counting to ten. She tried that now, but struggled beyond the number four. Will I die? she wondered distantly. Have I joined the sisterhood of his victims? Will this be my last conscious thought?

He wanted to stay with her, but the circ.u.mstances were not right. She should have been seated next to him in the warm ochre light of the saloon bar, her thigh lightly touching his, her gla.s.s almost full. She should have been watching him with his mother's eyes, listening intently, smiling and nodding as music and laughter surrounded them in soothing sussurance. The timea"somewhere between nine o'clock P.M. and the last bella"would have stretched to an eternity. But instead she was lying on the floor of the cellar, dying.

Knowing it was time to leave, he grabbed his backpack from the floor, ran out into the corridor and headed for the coal steps.

Longbright had been facedown on the cement for about twenty minutes when John May found her. Her breathing was shallow, her pulse faint but steady. When he saw the emptied ampoule beside her, he immediately searched for the mark on her exposed skin. Her hands and feet were still warm. He could only think that Pellew had underestimated her size, that the amount discharged had been nowhere near enough to kill her.

The ambulance had trouble reaching the pub because a bendy-bus had become wedged across the turn at Holborn Circus, and the traffic was backed up in every direction. When the medics finally arrived, they took her to University College Hospital.

'We should have gone with her,' said May, climbing into the driving seat of the BMW.

'Right now we're more useful going after him,' said Bryant.

'The ambulance boys say she's going to be all right, and we have to believe them. We'll need someone to meet us there.'

'Where? You know where he's heading?'