Her eye ran down the columns of names, matching and discarding until one name jumped out: Joanne Keller-man.
Her death pre-dated the other three, having occurred four days before Curtis’s, but it fitted the pattern. She had succumbed in a tiny, crowded pub called the Old Dr Butler’s Head, in Mason’s Avenue, by London Wall. Last orders had been rung early, and as the drinkers thinned out, Mrs Kellerman had fallen to the floor in what appeared to be a faint. The barman had been unable to revive her, so he had called an ambulance, but she was pronounced dead on the way to the hospital.
A cocktail of narcoleptic drugs found in her system suggested that she had taken her own life, although why she had chosen to do it in a crowded pub remained a mystery – hence the coroner’s decision to record an open verdict. There was no history of mental-health problems on record, although she apparently took prescription anti-depressants and sleeping pills. The Met had noted the death and uploaded her file to the Diary, even though they had chosen not to consider the case worthy of further investigation.
April ran her finger across the screen to the tabulated comments from her next-of-kin, and noted that she had often enjoyed pub quizzes. Did all of the women regularly attend events in London pubs? If so, did their presence bring them to the attention of someone stalking victims in such an environment?
April’s discovery of the death placed the women in a new running order: Kellerman, Curtis, Wynley, Roquesby. In a city where so many died in unexplained circumstances each day, each event occupied a slender borderline of visibility. Only when compiled together did they form some kind of new and alarming picture. This faint but discernible pattern had begun to coalesce from the mist of empirical data that blurred every death in the city. If no one agency possessed all the facts, there could be no resolution. This, she felt, was why the PCU existed. To transform a killer from smoke and shadows into flesh and bone. To make evil visible.
April began writing up her report for her bosses.
16
* * *
THE HEART OF LONDON
He was always watching the women.
Interesting how they were treated at different times of the day, in different places. In lunchtime city pubs they sat at their counters completely ignored, men reaching around them for beers and change as if they were mere obstacles. In the early evening they were engaged in conversation by men who used a cheerful, chatty manner with older women, as if talking to their mothers. Late at night, when the lights were lower, they became easy targets for leering drunks who felt sure they could never be rebuffed.
He felt sorry for the women, even when he had to take their lives.
The cavernous inns of the Strand, the narrow taverns of Holborn, the fake rural hostelries of Chelsea, the brash bars of Soho, each had their own tribes. The lotharios, the jobsworths, the brasses, the bosses, brash drunk kids, braying toffs, swearing workmen, all united by the desperate need for companionship. The single careerists were frightened to go back to their pristine apartments and sit on the ends of their beds, staring into the void of their dead lives. The ones in relationships delayed heading home to warm, sleeping bodies they could barely stand to touch.
He knew all about the power of pubs, and the invisible customers who kept them alive. The lonely matrons who drank a little too much, the ones with full, sensual bodies and sad old eyes that caught his gaze, holding it a moment too long in bar mirrors. He had been with them all his life.
He loved the women. As he prepared his poison, he prayed they would escape him.
‘A little early in the day to be drinking, isn’t it?’ asked John May. ‘It’s only just gone noon.’ Williamson’s Tavern in Groveland Court was nearly empty, except for a pair of Asian IT managers playing a jittery fruit machine.
‘Tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce, crushed celery, beetroot and horseradish sauce, John. No vodka, sadly.’ Bryant held up his glass. ‘Kiskaya Mandeville recommended it to sharpen my brain. She’s prescribed a series of memory tests I must perform every day and put me on a juice diet. Reckons I’ll quickly notice the results. I have to take three different types of fish oil tonight. My poor bowels will be positively peristaltic. This is Dr Harold Masters. Oddly, I don’t think you’ve ever met.’ He gestured at the curator/lecturer from the British Museum. May found himself facing an absurdly tall man with unsuitable tortoiseshell glasses and slightly mad grey hair.
Masters unleashed a great length of arm and shook May’s hand vigorously. ‘Not sure we’ve ever had the pleasure. But Mr Bryant has consulted me many times in the past.’
That figures, thought May. He ordered a half of Spitfire bitter. ‘Let’s hope this memory course of yours works,’ he told Bryant. ‘Perhaps you’ll recall what happened to Oswald’s ashes.’ He looked around at the sepia-tinted walls, the framed photographs and dust-gathering knickknacks. ‘What made you pick a pub in an alleyway off another alley? It was a bugger to find.’