Read Online Ten Second Staircase by Christopher Fowler - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Christopher Fowler
Tags: Historical Mystery
Ads: Link
the Crystal Palace prehistoric park, so you can imagine how many celebratory meals they must have had in here. I fancy it still smells of institutional cooking.' He sniffed disapprovingly. 'There's definitely an undertone of cabbage.'
Standing beside one another in the cool shadowed corridors of County Hall, silhouetted by the tall, dusty courtyard windows, the detectives could have been mistaken for elderly councillors themselves, stopping to confer about arcane LCC rulings. Few would have taken them for policemen, but from their earliest years they had dedicated their lives to the rebalancing of inequalities.
Their official biographer (for there would eventually be a biography) felt that Arthur Bryant was driven by a sense of distilled outrage, perhaps over the loss of his wife during the war, and by the possession of a temperament that prevented him from ever finding peace with anyone else. Cherchez la femme had been the biographer's maxim, but in this case nothing was quite that simple.
Bryant was an anomaly; a working-class academic who had positioned himself on the outside of humanity, beyond a moral view point. The fact that he studied people as if they were insects or igneous rocks was cited as a fault, but it was also his secret strength. While the men and women of the Metropolitan Police mopped spilt blood and wiped away tears, comforted and calmed the fearful, and locked up those who were a danger to themselves, Bryant never truly became involved; he lacked the basic emotional mechanism to do so. But he was no mere machine; distrusting scientific proof, he preferred to follow humankind's more overgrown paths, those instinctual routes he felt had been buried by modern reliance on technology. Criminals and victims were linked to the land, to history, and to their own irrepressible natures; it was an unfashionable view, particularly in a country that was fast becoming disconnected from its past, but it suited the government to employ such a believer, and proved ideal for the work of the Peculiar Crimes Unit.
John May, on the other hand, had successfully remained in contact with both his feelings and the tumbling mess of humanity surrounding him. In a sense, he was his partner's only link with the outside world. In return, Bryant gave him something he never had: a sense of his place in the invisible world that lay beyond facts and statistics, a connection to the vanishing past.
'What do you think about this business?' John May asked quietly. 'The case is clearly within our jurisdiction. If the public start thinking they're not safe in museums and art exhibitions, the damage to other public institutions could be immeasurable.'
'Saralla White was hardly an ordinary member of the public, John. It will be important to stress that she was an employee of the gallery, and, from what I've heard, somewhat under the control of her ringmaster, Mr Burroughs. There's no question that we should take it on. This is either murder or the most public suicide I've ever come across. One is apt to suspect that drugs will be present in her system. How else could she die so calmly? We can certainly rule out an accident, unless she had decided to hang from the light fittings in order to change a bulb.'
'We can't afford another unsolved case at this point, Arthur. Any way you look at it, the scenario seems wildly unfeasible.'
'You always say that, but everything becomes unlikely when you analyse it. It's unlikely the planet still survives without having blown itself to bits. It's unlikely that society will reach a balance without murdering itself first, or that any of us will get through our lives without going mad. Open any newspaper on any day and you're confronted with unlikely crimes. What about the seventeen Chinese cockle pickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay? Or that fellow in Norfolk who suffocated his workmates in chicken slurry? What about that doctor who managed to kill over two thousand patients undetected, how likely is
Standing beside one another in the cool shadowed corridors of County Hall, silhouetted by the tall, dusty courtyard windows, the detectives could have been mistaken for elderly councillors themselves, stopping to confer about arcane LCC rulings. Few would have taken them for policemen, but from their earliest years they had dedicated their lives to the rebalancing of inequalities.
Their official biographer (for there would eventually be a biography) felt that Arthur Bryant was driven by a sense of distilled outrage, perhaps over the loss of his wife during the war, and by the possession of a temperament that prevented him from ever finding peace with anyone else. Cherchez la femme had been the biographer's maxim, but in this case nothing was quite that simple.
Bryant was an anomaly; a working-class academic who had positioned himself on the outside of humanity, beyond a moral view point. The fact that he studied people as if they were insects or igneous rocks was cited as a fault, but it was also his secret strength. While the men and women of the Metropolitan Police mopped spilt blood and wiped away tears, comforted and calmed the fearful, and locked up those who were a danger to themselves, Bryant never truly became involved; he lacked the basic emotional mechanism to do so. But he was no mere machine; distrusting scientific proof, he preferred to follow humankind's more overgrown paths, those instinctual routes he felt had been buried by modern reliance on technology. Criminals and victims were linked to the land, to history, and to their own irrepressible natures; it was an unfashionable view, particularly in a country that was fast becoming disconnected from its past, but it suited the government to employ such a believer, and proved ideal for the work of the Peculiar Crimes Unit.
John May, on the other hand, had successfully remained in contact with both his feelings and the tumbling mess of humanity surrounding him. In a sense, he was his partner's only link with the outside world. In return, Bryant gave him something he never had: a sense of his place in the invisible world that lay beyond facts and statistics, a connection to the vanishing past.
'What do you think about this business?' John May asked quietly. 'The case is clearly within our jurisdiction. If the public start thinking they're not safe in museums and art exhibitions, the damage to other public institutions could be immeasurable.'
'Saralla White was hardly an ordinary member of the public, John. It will be important to stress that she was an employee of the gallery, and, from what I've heard, somewhat under the control of her ringmaster, Mr Burroughs. There's no question that we should take it on. This is either murder or the most public suicide I've ever come across. One is apt to suspect that drugs will be present in her system. How else could she die so calmly? We can certainly rule out an accident, unless she had decided to hang from the light fittings in order to change a bulb.'
'We can't afford another unsolved case at this point, Arthur. Any way you look at it, the scenario seems wildly unfeasible.'
'You always say that, but everything becomes unlikely when you analyse it. It's unlikely the planet still survives without having blown itself to bits. It's unlikely that society will reach a balance without murdering itself first, or that any of us will get through our lives without going mad. Open any newspaper on any day and you're confronted with unlikely crimes. What about the seventeen Chinese cockle pickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay? Or that fellow in Norfolk who suffocated his workmates in chicken slurry? What about that doctor who managed to kill over two thousand patients undetected, how likely is
Similar Books
