On the Loose(45)
‘He dumps them at this spot because it’s his hallowed ground,’ said Bryant. ‘Then he dresses up and appears immediately afterwards. It’s a pagan ritual of appeasement and celebration. Meera said she was reminded of the Highwayman, but he was driven by indifference, a blankness of character. This man is in the vanguard of Europe’s oldest religion. I’ll be a little presumptive and suggest that we’re looking for a neo-hippie, a tree-hugger, a modern-day shaman who probably smokes too much weed and believes he can impede the onward trundle of progress. He sees the big bad corporations moving into King’s Cross and wants to show them that the old ways still prevail. We should find out who’s been attending the local protest groups, who’s been taking pagan volumes out of the local library and attending alternative-religion societies, check the notice boards in Camden’s head shops.’
‘But these are your kind of people, Arthur, the ones you usually regard as allies.’
‘Murder makes enemies of us all,’ said Bryant, fixing on his hat and staggering back to the dry firmness of the road.
21
THE QUIET ONES
The following morning, Raymond Land sat down tentatively on the leather swivel chair Longbright had found for him and looked out of the filthy window. Below, traffic on the Caledonian Road had choked itself to a standstill. He should have been at home in bed, reading the papers.
He turned back to study the dingy brown room and realised with a sinking sensation that he was now worse off than he had been before. His fate was once more tied to the unit, his dreams of retirement had retreated even further, and his new surroundings were positively Dickensian. Creaking forward in his chair, he peered into a cobwebbed corner of the room, then rose to examine it. A patch of stained wallpaper had divorced itself from the grey plaster, as if the room had died and was sloughing its skin. Something was revealed underneath, part of a design. Reaching on tiptoe, he brushed aside the spiders and seized the edge, gently pulling. A metre of damp paper rolled slowly down, tore and fell on the floor in a cloud of mildew spores.
Land found himself looking at a drawing of a naked man poised between two tall iron braziers. He appeared to be having intimate congress with a goat that was standing on its hind legs and wearing black leather thigh-boots. Shocked, Land attempted to cover over the drawing, but the paper would no longer stick to the wall.
In his own room, Arthur Bryant was seated on top of some packing boxes, nonchalantly swinging his legs back and forth as he thumbed through a reference book.
‘What the hell was this place?’ Land demanded to know, storming into the detective’s office. ‘There’s something really unpleasant and unwholesome about it. There’s a very bad feeling here. You told me it was a warehouse.’
‘No, mon vieux fromage, I said it was a whorehouse,’ replied Bryant, not bothering to look up. ‘Later it reverted to its original use as a warehouse.’
‘That doesn’t entirely explain why there is a picture of a man passionately embracing a farmyard animal on my wall.’
‘Show me.’ Bryant climbed down from his packing crate and led the way.
They examined the picture together. ‘That’s a puzzler,’ Bryant agreed. ‘It’s rather too well sketched to be the work of a bored workman. Look at those flesh tones. And the perspective is most convincing. Don’t you think?’
‘I don’t give a stuff about its artistic merit, I want to know what it’s doing here. Look.’ Land pointed across to the corners of the room, to where the two blackened iron braziers stood. ‘They’re the ones in the drawing. Does that mean there’s been a goat up here, too?’
‘Oh, it’s probably some bored packing clerk’s idea of a joke,’ said Bryant, unconvincingly. ‘How are you settling in?’
‘I can’t do any work without at least some rudimentary equipment. I thought we had it bad at Mornington Crescent but this is infinitely worse. Look at this.’ He indicated a dark gap beside the ratty armchair he had placed in the corner. ‘There’s a hole that goes all the way down to the basement. The floor’s rotten. Suppose I fell through it? The place isn’t fit for habitation.’
‘We needed something near the site that was instantly available, and this was all I could find,’ Bryant explained. ‘I’ll tell you what—why don’t you work from home for a few days?’
‘Oh, no, I’m not falling for that old trick. I need to be here, where I can keep an eye on you. God knows what you’ll get up to otherwise.’
‘Then I guess you’ll have to make the best of it.’ Bryant dragged out the pieces of his pipe and began to fit the bowl to the stem.