Wild Chamber Read online

  And then the security guard was walking him down the corridor to his office and everyone was looking at him through the glass partitions because he saw to his horror that they knew, they all knew he was being fired although they probably had no idea why, and being humiliated like this was more than he could stand, because he had always prided himself on looking the best and being the best. Was there time to talk to Melissa, to admit that their night together should never have happened, and that he might never see her again?

  The bubbling nausea within him really started to rise when Jeremy Forester realized that this would be only the first of the humiliations, that they would start now and keep on coming until everything was gone and there was nothing left at all, because he had always lived beyond his means, making reckless decisions when it came to loan terms. Now he owed more than he could ever pay back, so it wasn’t simply a matter of seized assets and frozen bank accounts, it was smashed faces and broken legs and, God, what if they found out about the gallery? What if they discovered where Helen worked? They couldn’t take what he didn’t have, but they could harm his wife. Suddenly this distant woman to whom he had barely spoken lately except to co-ordinate diaries was desperately precious to him.

  That was when he decided there was nothing for him to take from his office, that he would leave empty-handed and gain a head start while he worked out some kind of a game plan that would keep Helen safe and him in one piece. He would sell the car and get some ready cash; that would keep him going for a while. It no longer mattered what the staff of Washbourne Hollis thought; it was only important to stay ahead of his creditors. The loan he had taken out in Hong Kong and could not pay back was large enough to get him killed.

  He began to run towards the lifts.

  THE FIRST DAY

  4

  ‘BETTER VALUE FOR MONEY’

  From today I will learn to take charge of my organization by blaming other people, Raymond Land repeated to himself, using one of the thirty or so mantras he had memorized from a self-help business manual called Lower Your Expectations & Raise Your Profits by a bearded American professor called Osbert Desanex. Having been told that he needed to run his wayward police unit like a private company, Land had taken the message somewhat too heavily to heart.

  Leaning forward, he squinted at his computer screen, checked that he had the date right and the correct staff list pulled up, then touched the microphone symbol with his mouse arrow. For some reason it opened his email, so he closed down Mail because he didn’t like to have two windows open at once, and tried again. This time the mouse accessed his recent history and revealed a page about Beautiful Russian Women Just Waiting to Meet You. Embarrassed, he panicked and stabbed randomly at the keyboard until a window popped up reading Are you sure you want to shut down now? If so all current data will be lost YES NO. He meant to click NO but for some unearthly reason found himself clicking YES, and then it was too late.

  While the computer restarted he rose and went to the window. Over time Land had acquired the features of an ineffectual man, soft-boned, thin-haired and seething with small irritations. He was a visual representation of constipation, marked with the look of a fellow who knows he will never be listened to with anything other than disrespect. But for all of that, he meant well. Outside, the bedraggled one-legged pigeon that had made its nest on his windowsill stared back at him. It looked like an avian version of a very sick Camden Town punk from the late 1970s.

  ‘I’ll get you this time, Stumpy,’ muttered Land. Pressing himself against the wall, he picked up a copy of Time Out, rolled it up tightly and reached across to the window catch. In one swift movement he slid up the sash and thwacked the magazine down on the sill. The pigeon strutted around the weapon, flicked one staring orange eye at it, warbled, then dropped a white splodge on to a photograph of the mayor.

  ‘Why not,’ Land sighed. ‘Everybody else treats King’s Cross like a toilet.’ He returned to his desk to begin dictation.

  Peculiar Crimes Unit

  The Old Warehouse

  231 Caledonian Road

  London N1 9RB

  STAFF ROSTER MONDAY 11 DECEMBER

  Raymond Land, Unit Chief

  Arthur Bryant, Senior Investigator

  John May, Senior Investigator

  Janice Longbright, Operations Director

  Jack Renfield, Operations Director

  Dan Banbury, Crime Scene/Forensics

  Giles Kershaw, Pathology (off-site)

  Meera Mangeshkar, Coordination

  Colin Bimsley, Coordination

  Steffi Vesta, Scientific Services

  Crippen, staff cat

  PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL MEMO

  FROM: RAYMOND LAND

  TO: ALL PCU STAFF

  As I’m sure you know, the police service in England and Wales is currently reducing its budget by 20 per cent, while another wonderful new quango, the Police and Crime Commissioners Office, has been created by the Home Secretary for purposes only she understands, so you’ll see from the attached list that there are some changes. Your former Metropolitan Police titles have been removed, so you’re no longer locked into their pay structure. This doesn’t mean you can make up your own job titles. I’ve already told Mr Bryant he can’t be Sultan, Emperor or Supreme Being. I’m willing to humour him a bit because he hasn’t been well, but if anyone else starts winding me up they’ll soon discover the less forgiving side of my nature. I can be a right Dr Jekyll when I have to.

  ‘He does know that Mr Hyde was the bad one?’ asked Arthur Bryant as he read the memo back later.

  Stay with me, it gets worse. The new pay structure is performance related, so if I can’t regularly put a few biscuits in the tin you don’t get any wages. As we’re starting out with a deficit from the building renovations, we have to win our next case or PCU goes down. I know you’ve all heard that before but this time it’s about hard cash, not meeting quotas. Conducting an investigation is expensive, and we have to pay for every outsourced service we use. This isn’t some Swedish crime show where they only have to snap their fingers to get a bucketful of tested DNA dropped into their laps. We’ll be lucky if we can run to chocolate digestives.

  Now, some of you may remember that Jack Renfield used to work with the PCU. You should do, as it was just six weeks ago, before he threw a moody and walked out, leaving us all in the shit. He rejoins us after completing an exhausting month-long stint back at the Metropolitan Police Force, during which time his so-called mates filled his locker with dead fish and superglued his trousers to an armed response vehicle. As his homecoming proved somewhat less than welcoming, and the exciting opportunities afforded by a unit offering low pay and even lower esteem proved irresistible, he’s come back just in time to qualify for Christmas overtime. I imagine it was this or working in an Oxfam shop, so unless he’s good at pricing teapots and Harry Potter wands we’re stuck with him.

  Also joining us on a temporary secondment is Steffi Vesta from Cologne. She has a background in scientific services and a degree in criminal law, and wanted to spend a couple of weeks in a respected, world-class specialist unit. Instead she got us. She says she’s looking forward to meeting you all and is therefore clearly out of her mind. When I say make her feel at home, that doesn’t mean telling her what your granddad did during the war. I’d like to remind you that our own royal family is German, so if you want to have a go at someone, do the proper British thing and pick on the French.

  The closure of the King’s Cross Police Station means that we’re now the only unit operating between Holloway Prison and Bloomsbury, so the City of London Police have asked us to handle public consultation sessions one morning a week. Yes, that’s ‘public’ as in ‘general public’. Janice will produce a duty roster, so be prepared for a lot of witless questions about fly-tipping and whether it’s illegal to have a fire in your back garden, no doubt mixed in with some disturbing theories about immigrants from our neighbourhood’s highly volatile mix of tracksuited wombles, nutc
ases and cat ladies, a technical term for a certain type of unmarried female that I am assured by Equality & Diversity is not yet listed as derogatory.

  ‘He’s become quite angry since Leanne left him, don’t you think?’ said John May. ‘It’s an improvement.’

  You may be aware that I recently attended a business seminar called ‘Policing & Profit’, as the powers that be have decided we should offer better value for money to our ‘customers’, quote unquote. I shall be sending each of you exercises designed to increase your awareness of customer care and value. Our politicians think they can rebrand their way out of budget cuts and I’m only amazed that they haven’t changed ‘crime prevention’ to ‘product satisfaction’. Perhaps they’re planning to turn the ground floor of the PCU into a Patisserie Valerie. I thought of taking sponsored advertising but I don’t suppose your chances of gaining respect will be improved by having ‘Barclays’ emblazoned across your jackets, especially as it’s rhyming slang.

  You’ll notice that we now have a smart new operations room on the first floor, created by the two Daves, who’ve miraculously managed to take out the right walls without this doss-house falling down. You’ll see from my floor plan that all staff except myself and our two senior detectives will share this space in order to improve communications. Obviously Mr Bryant and Mr May will remain in their own office, preferably with the door shut. I don’t want you catching any of their habits, ideas or germs. We don’t want a repeat of what happened when that polio-infected rabbit got loose.

  Right, a little housekeeping. The third-floor stairs are finally in place; there’s just not enough of them, so be careful at the top. Speaking of stairs not going all the way to the attic, Mr Bryant insists he is almost back to his old self, which might explain why the fire brigade called me at two o’clock this morning. According to them somebody catapulted a burning chicken from our building into the Caledonian Road. I know we’re a ‘hands-on’ unit but I draw the line at aerodynamic experiments with flaming poultry.

  ‘Was that you?’ asked John May. ‘What were you trying to do?’

  ‘I wasn’t trying to do anything,’ Arthur Bryant replied cheerfully. ‘I succeeded. I’d like to see you fire a petrol-soaked capon two hundred yards into a litter bin. Two out of three wasn’t bad. OK, one bounced through the door of the Hen Hut Takeaway, but I proved the point.’

  ‘Which was?’ May asked, but his partner had gone.

  As of today we have a clean case slate, but I want you all ready for the week ahead. As for Mr Bryant, I believe he expects to make a full recovery, although at the moment he is still experiencing some side effects from his treatment. If you catch him in heated arguments with lamp-posts, try to show some patience.

  The two Daves have now cleared all harmful materials from the basement with the exception of the eight-foot stone casket they found in the floor, which appears to have a cadaver in it. You saw what happened when archaeologists found the remains of Richard III buried in a Leicester car park, so if you don’t want Health & Safety creeping around here for the next six months I suggest you keep any word of this from getting out. I’m sure we can handle one ancient body; God knows we employ enough of them. We’re going to smuggle it over to the St Pancras Mortuary and let Giles work out whether it’s worth flogging on eBay.

  Right: the Police Benevolent Society Christmas dinner is fast approaching and we’ve been instructed to buy tickets. They’ve promised not to seat us next to the toilets this time, which will save the embarrassment of you lot sliding under the table and shuffling it to the front again. You ruined the seating plan last year, and we won’t talk about the other incident, for which the words ‘jelly fight’ barely suffice.

  I’ve been advised there’s a change to this week’s Film Club screening of Interstellar after staff requests for something we can all follow, so we will now be showing Camelot.

  Finally, it has come to my attention that members of staff are planning to hold a Christmas party in the evidence room. There will be no festivities on my watch, thank you, especially not with stolen vodka and confiscated marijuana. Besides, you can’t have a party without bringing other halves, and as most of us haven’t got one I don’t think we want to sit around in paper hats trying to be vivacious with people we see every day at murder sites. My Christmas Day is going to consist of a microwaved chicken tikka lasagne in front of Morecambe and Wise and I don’t see why yours shouldn’t be just as miserable.

  My management manual suggests ending any pep talk with a summary, so – go and find something useful to do, try not to fall through anything and don’t get us closed down this week. My nerves won’t stand it.

  5

  ‘SO MUCH VIOLENCE IN LONDON’

  Ritchie Jackson surveyed his kingdom.

  Strong and well formed, he took pleasure in simple things: the dew on the early morning grass that shimmered like the surface of a lake when the breeze touched it; the sharp clear scent of a freshly minted morning; the wet green bushes and trees that turned the scene before him into an Impressionist painting. Ritchie’s Samsung Galaxy had a high pixel rate and his photographs usually looked great as screensavers. Crouching low, he steadied his phone on the back of the wooden bench and took a series of HD shots.

  Lately he had seen emerald-green monk parakeets in the tops of the plane trees. One of the gardeners told him they’d escaped from a cage at Pinewood Studios, where the birds were being used in a film, but there didn’t seem to be any around today. A shame; they would have added a nice touch of colour.

  Jackson’s father had worked in Kew Gardens, and had told him that American greys had killed off England’s native red squirrels by infecting them with a virus back in the 1920s. Survival of the fittest. A pity, because a red squirrel would have looked good against that wall of bright red Pyracantha coccinea berries.

  He was just thinking about finding something else to put into the shot when she appeared.

  It wasn’t just that she was beautiful – she was, of course, in a sad way – but it was how she walked in her pristine white tracksuit with a scarlet coat carelessly thrown over her shoulders, so confident and sure of herself, with a swing of her arm and a spring in her step, as if this was her own private space where no one else would ever see her.

  And he supposed it was. Like many other well-heeled streets in London, Clement Crescent had its own garden set aside for exclusive use by residents. The woman had a small white West Highland terrier on a tartan-handled leash. Ritchie had seen her here before, but her blonde hair partially hid her face and he realized that he had never seen her eyes. Her clothes could have been donned directly from a shopping bag. Even the dog was immaculate.

  As he looked through his viewfinder and took the shot, he saw something else in her body language, a kind of wariness, and he suddenly felt uncomfortable about spying on her, so he lowered the phone and slipped it into his pocket. He was about to make his way back to the bushes he had been pruning. Women like her were not for men like him.

  But he stopped and looked over once more. He was shielded from her by the green blades of the overgrown philadelphus bushes. Their dew brushed his shoulders, dripping water down his neck. The dog stopped suddenly and pricked up his ears.

  ‘Beauchamp?’ she said, also stopping. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Ritchie wondered if the dog had sensed his presence. The logical thing would have been to make himself known, but instead he stepped further back into the bushes and held his breath in the still morning air.

  The dog looked straight at him.

  ‘What is it, Beauchamp?’ she asked. Looking around, she reached down and unclipped the leash from his collar. Dogs were only allowed in the gardens on a leash. Beauchamp pranced towards Ritchie, then suddenly veered away, as if he’d seen a squirrel.

  ‘Beauchamp, come back.’ She took a tentative step forward but seemed unnerved. Now he saw her eyes, wide and violet. She was captivating, but somehow haunted. He looked around, thinking that if he brought
the dog back the gesture might please her, but the animal was nowhere in sight. He tried to listen for its movements in the bushes but the park faced a main road, and a peristaltic line of double-decker buses was grinding past.

  Beauchamp couldn’t have travelled far; the gardens weren’t very large. Ritchie looked for paw prints in the dewy grass. A milky sun had appeared from behind heavy grey cloud. He was annoyed to see a McDonald’s bag lying in a flowerbed near the railings. No junk food was allowed in the park, so someone must have thrown it over from outside. He had a horrible thought, that Beauchamp was voiding his bowels in the newly planted herbaceous border. Following the line of bushes, he spotted his shovel and fertilizer bag, but there was no sign of the terrier.

  Ritchie decided to announce his presence. When he returned to the bench and looked across the grass he expected to see her still standing against the banked berries of the Pyracantha coccinea. Instead she had gone. Had the dog come back?

  He stayed on the path, following it around the perimeter until he reached the evergreen Aucuba japonica that he had not yet trimmed. He stopped, his mouth slack.

  The woman was lying on her back in the middle of the gravel path, part of her scarlet coat laid over her neck. She seemed tidily arranged, as graceful as a fallen angel.

  As Ritchie approached, he instinctively reached out and pulled back her lapel, revealing a raw black-red mark across her throat. He thought of giving her mouth-to-mouth but sensed there was nothing he could do; and besides, it would mean marking himself, and what if the police thought he’d done something to her?