Christopher Fowler - The Water Room

Kallie saw the three of them across the crowded bar: Bryant in his baggy scarf and squashed trilby, May erect and smartly suited, Longbright with her extraordinary movie-star hair, ledge-like bosom and heavy make-up.

She and Heather Allen had come over to meet Jake Avery for a drink, but he was already a quarter of an hour late. The producer was working on a new BBC sitcom, and had warned them that he might be held up if rehearsals overran.

‘Those detectives are back again,’ said Heather unenthusiastically. ‘What do they expect to find around here?’

‘They’re locals. They’re probably off duty.’

‘That type never goes off duty. I don’t like being watched all the time. They have no right to treat us like suspects.’ Heather was prone to exaggeration when she was upset, and tonight she was as tense as a cat on a wire, chewing her nails and stubbing out half-smoked cigarettes.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Kallie. ‘You’re a bundle of nerves.’

‘George came back this afternoon and picked a fight with me over the divorce settlement, before heading off to stay with his new girlfriend at the Lanesborough. Do you know how much that place is a night? He’s never taken me there. I didn’t get married for love, Kallie. I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but I wanted security, and now he’s pulled that rug from beneath me. What am I supposed to do, just go quietly?’ She raised her head and looked around. ‘Where the hell is Jake? Why do men think women will always wait for them?’

‘The traffic’s probably bad. A lot of roads are flooded.’

Heather would not be mollified. ‘I’m not going to hang around for him.’ She drained her tomato juice. ‘I’ll go to the gym and run for a while.’ She swung her bag on to her shoulder. ‘Tell those damned people to stop spying on us.’

Intrigued, Kallie went over to join the detectives.

‘We meet again,’ said May, ‘and in rather more convivial circumstances.’

‘Is this your local?’

‘Not really, but I like the unusual mix of types you get in here.’

‘As opposed to the unusual types you’ve been interviewing in our street.’

‘Oh no, they’re fairly usual. You remember Sergeant Longbright and my partner Mr Bryant?’

‘Of course.’ She shook their hands. ‘Thanks for sending your officer round. Did she have any luck?’

‘We know the hostels where Tate is registered,’ explained Bryant. ‘It’s just a matter of waiting for him to turn up. We should be able to take him in shortly and have a word with him. I hope you won’t be troubled again.’

‘I don’t think he meant any harm, but it was unnerving, being watched like that.’

‘It’s not nice for a young woman alone in a house. I mean, with your boyfriend being away.’ May shot Bryant a look that silenced him.

‘I don’t mind being in an empty house,’ Kallie admitted, ‘but this rain is so depressing. I miss Paul, I wish he’d come home. He sends postcards from all over Europe-I just want him to get the travel bug out of his system and come back to me.’ She hadn’t meant to mention him, but realized she was with good people who were used to listening, and suddenly needed to talk. There was something so peculiarly old-fashioned and comforting about them, as though they belonged in the crepuscular sooty gloom of King’s Cross and St Pancras, between the shunting yards and brown-painted pubs filled with bitter-sipping railwaymen. Sergeant Longbright resembled the photographs of Ava Gardner she had seen in old movie magazines, but was kind and approachable. Bryant was the key, of course, the one who held them together in lopsided camaraderie. You could go to them with a problem. Perhaps this was how all police once were.

‘I’m sure he’ll come back to you when he’s ready,’ said Longbright. ‘Some men get a fire in them that has to be allowed to burn itself out.’

‘We were just discussing forgotten murderers,’ said Bryant, in a terrible attempt to change the subject. ‘I suggested Tony Mancini, real name Cecil England, unjustly forgotten in my view, very big at the time, though.’

‘The Brighton Trunk Mystery,’ May explained, a little embarrassed.

‘A good example of the dangers of jumping to conclusions,’ Bryant forged on. ‘His mistress, Violette, was a vaudeville artiste turned prostitute. He sent her body to his house in a trunk. The Crown suggested that he had beaten her to death with a hammer, but it was likely that she fractured her skull falling down the stairs under the influence of morphine. Found not guilty. Yet ten days earlier, another trunk had turned up at Brighton railway station containing a woman’s severed torso: victim and murderer never identified. Were the cases connected? If the Peculiar Crimes Unit had existed then, would we have uncovered new evidence?’ He gulped his beer, blue eyes glinting above hoppy brown bitter, just a little mad.

‘The thirties were a rich time for sensational murder,’ May explained. ‘The level of moral snobbery was outrageous, but far worse in Victorian times, so I’d have to pick George Joseph Smith, the “Brides in the Bath” murderer. He was born in Bow in 1872-’

‘Near me,’ interjected Bryant. ‘I was a Whitechapel boy.’

‘-spent most of his childhood in a reformatory and emerged with that strange emptiness of the soul one still sees in disappointed youths. Proceeded to marry gullible women and steal their savings before deserting them-he ditched one in the National Gallery-then moved on to drowning them in a zinc tub, but his refusal to vary the method of execution led to suspicion and capture.’

‘Personally, I always felt for Ruth Ellis,’ said Longbright, stirring the lemon in her gin and French. ‘If her affair with Blakely had occurred a few years later, neither of them would have acted as they did. If ever a woman was a victim of her time, it was Ellis. She thanked the judge for sentencing her to death, did you know that? Even the gallows seemed preferable to her miserable existence.’

‘Oh yes, there have been some interesting deaths in London,’ said Bryant with relish. ‘Did you know that Peter Pan threw himself under a train at Sloane Square? Peter Llewelyn Davies had been adopted by J. M. Barrie, and was the model for Barrie’s fairy-tale hero, but he got sick of fans asking him where Neverland was and chucked himself on to the live rail.’

‘Is that true?’

‘Absolutely.’ Bryant crossed his heart with a finger.

‘Aren’t there any interesting modern murderers?’ Kallie asked.

‘Oh, a few,’ sniffed Bryant, ‘but nothing to write home about. We’ve handled most of the decent cases. Motivation has changed, of course. Victims still become trapped in the same debilitating circumstances, but now there’s so much money swilling around that there are other ways to solve your problems. Get a divorce, have an abortion, take some pills-there’s less of a stigma.’

‘I suppose it’s easier to solve a crime since the discovery of DNA.’

‘New technologies will never explain the actions of desperate people,’ said Bryant. ‘They were using fingerprints to catch murderers in twelfth-century China.’

‘How did you become so interested in crime?’

‘My grandfather was one of the first constables on the scene when Martha Tabram died,’ Bryant explained. ‘The previous summer had been the hottest on record. The streets were alive with rats. The following August, all hell broke loose. He used to frighten the life out of us with the story. Tabram was stabbed thirty-nine times. Her body was discovered in George Yard, off Whitechapel High Street. These days she’s usually discounted, you see. Mary Ann Nichols is the first universally accepted victim in the canonical order, but the old man didn’t believe that. Inspector Abberline himself thought there were six murders. Others in the force reckoned there were as many as nine. Only five are undisputed. Even back then, there were so many Jack the Ripper theories that the case became lost in them. The few surviving files that had been kept in some order by the Met weren’t opened until 1976, long after my grandfather died, but he never stopped trying to understand it, and I suppose his curiosity was passed on to me.’