Bryant & May

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Up to six weeks at home. I’ll be able to do some work from there.’

  Land hastily skipped over the remark. ‘We thought we’d lost you, you know. It’s a good job the other bullet missed. It ruined the skirting board. It was quite a shock, finding you lying there on the floor of your office. You had a nasty crack on the head.’

  ‘Apparently I have a thick skull. What’s happening at the Unit?’

  ‘The Home Office sent in a team to seal all documents and pack everything away. We tried to get rid of as much as we could before they arrived. Janice was shredding like mad. It was like Watergate. The atmosphere is awful.’ Land did his duck face. ‘They’ve already started clearing the building. They reckon it will only take them a couple of days. The computers were removed yesterday. Dan went bananas. They nicked all his cables.’

  May stopped trying to sit up and fell back. ‘Have the staff been told where they’re going?’

  ‘That’s just it. Nobody knows.’ In the next room something electronic began pinging ominously and two nurses pelted past. ‘I suspect there are no placements available in any of the London specialist units. Most of them are being closed down and centralized. We’ll try for voluntary redundancies first.’

  ‘And my prosecution?’

  ‘Are you sure you want to hear this before going into surgery?’

  May regarded him with a steady eye. ‘How much worse can it be?’

  Land pulled an envelope from his pocket and skimmed through its contents. ‘It says here they’re going to pin a whole raft of misdemeanours on us, using your case as an example to others. As far as I’m concerned you’ve committed no offence. You’ve seen a lot of changes in your life; it’s not always easy to adapt to new rules.’

  ‘Stop being so polite, Raymond.’ May lifted his eyes in exasperation. ‘It was my own bloody fault, mixing my personal life with business. God knows it happens often enough in the Met.’

  Land tried a puckish smile. ‘Well, I’m sure they’ll wait until you’re fully recovered before starting proceedings against you.’ As reliable assurances went, it was on a par with Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich.

  ‘Did you come bearing any good news, by chance?’ May asked with some testiness. ‘Where is Arthur? He hasn’t been to see me.’

  Land fidgeted about awkwardly on his orange plastic chair. ‘Nobody’s seen him. Even his landlady doesn’t know where he is. He’s disappeared before. You know what he’s like.’

  ‘I thought he might have changed his mind about how he felt.’

  ‘I wish I had better news, John.’ Land pocketed the offending letter.

  ‘You need to find him. He’s out there somewhere and may be in trouble. You know he’s not good by himself.’

  A nurse appeared at the door and pointedly waited.

  ‘I’ll make some more calls.’ Land fiddled with the buttons of his coat in a prelude to departure. ‘It’s raining out. I suppose I should—’

  ‘They’ll let you know how my operation goes.’ May sank back in his pillow, dismissing his boss. Land had never been the most inspirational of men and now seemed physically diminished, a faded photograph found tucked in an unread paperback, unplaceable and out of time.

  ‘We’re going to take you down now,’ said the nurse as an orderly crashed a gurney into the door lintel.

  ‘I don’t need that,’ May snapped. ‘I can still walk.’

  ‘We don’t want you raising your blood pressure, do we?’

  ‘Who’s “we”?’ Don’t use a plural when you mean a singular.’

  ‘You sound just like your partner,’ said Land unhelpfully.

  ‘We have to make allowances for him, don’t we?’ said the nurse, attempting to collude with Land.

  ‘You may have to, I don’t,’ Land replied, confusing things further.

  ‘Please, somebody knock me out,’ May begged.

  The nurse and the orderly took over. A feeling of hopelessness sank into May. Everything was out of his hands now. In the course of their careers the detectives had been admired and hated in equal measure, but never before had they been ignored.

  * * *

  |||

  As John May was taken down into surgery, further along Euston Road the barbarians were storming the gates of Rome. Specifically, the Home Office agents in the employ of their police liaison CEO, Leslie Faraday, had entered the PCU’s headquarters on Caledonian Road and were ransacking it room by room.

  ‘Oi, give us that back,’ warned Dave Two, one of the builders who had taken up permanent residency at the Unit, ‘that’s DC Bimsley’s exercise bike.’

  ‘Sorry, squire, evidence,’ replied the burly lad who was dragging Colin’s gym equipment into the street.

  ‘I don’t see how an exercise bike is pertinent to the investigation,’ said Dave Two.

  ‘It’s a good job you’re just a handyman, then, isn’t it?’ The lad vengefully threw the red steel frame into the back of their van. ‘We’re stripping out the operations room next.’

  The two Daves had been working at the PCU for so long that they felt like part of the family, bringing in baklava and Turkish red velvet cake on Fridays, offering suggestions on policing the capital and attending the monthly film night.

  Dave One patted Dave Two’s back consolingly. ‘Let’s take up a couple of floorboards in the hallway. That’ll slow them down a bit.’

  ‘And the light switch outside the operations room could give someone a nasty shock,’ Dave Two surmised, unsheathing his electrical screwdriver and heading back into the Unit.

  * * *

  |||

  ‘It must be here somewhere. We have to find it.’

  Janice Longbright stood astride the mess with her knuckles on her hips. ‘I have no idea where to start looking. How close are they getting?’

  Meera Mangeshkar peered around the door jamb. ‘One of them is going into the operations room with a trolley and a stack of boxes. They won’t reach this office for a while yet.’

  There was a crackle and a yell and the lights momentarily dimmed. When Meera looked again she saw one of the Home Office agents sitting on the floor with sports car hair.

  Longbright was standing in the office used by the Unit’s most senior detectives. Today she had abandoned her ‘Forgotten British Stars of the 1950s’ look for a more practical outfit of jeans and a red sweater, although she had knitted the top herself from a pattern created by the late singer Alma Cogan. Before her was a habitat without its inhabitants, part man-cave, part bat-cave.

  One side of the room was John May’s, bare, pristine and Bluetooth-empowered, its clean glass desk sporting a silver laptop, a notepad and a squared-off Mont Blanc pen.

  Beyond this arctic border lay Arthur Bryant’s territory. It was the difference between the room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the junkyard in Steptoe and Son. Janice was convinced that the air changed as she crossed the two halves. Even the Bluetooth connection disappeared. May’s side smelled faintly of electricity and aftershave. Bryant’s smelled of old dog, rolling tobacco, dope, gravy, horsehair cinema seats, Jeyes cleaning fluid, sherbet lemons, Vicks VapoRub, aniseed balls, hops, tea and, for some reason, burning coal.

  In the middle of his desk was a galvanized bucket filled with receipts that had not been emptied in four years. There were hummocks of paperwork that would never find their way to the cloud, brown cardboard folders tied with green string and balanced like rock formations, a mountain range of books not organized under any currently recognized system because the alphabetized shelves were all full, a boneless armchair and a filthy roll-top desk covered with what appeared to be unpopular exhibits from a provincial museum, including a ceramic statue of a goat being torn to shreds by hounds, a tea mug commemorating Daniel Defoe’s description of the hanging of Jack Sheppard and a satirical etching of an eighteenth-c
entury French water closet.

  ‘Give me a clue,’ begged Meera. ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘If it was anyone else I’d say an address book, but he calls it his Dead Diary. Knowing Arthur, it could take the form of an Enigma machine. He’s very precious about anyone touching it because it holds all his private contacts. He told me it never leaves the room.’ Longbright rolled up her sleeves and prepared to shift the dusty volumes from the desk.

  ‘There must be an easier way of finding him.’

  ‘I know Arthur. He’s far more likely to have confided in one of his contacts.’

  ‘How about this?’ Meera held up a black leather book with an embossed head of Lucifer on the cover. A single page stuck out from it, encouraging withdrawal.

  ‘What does that say?’

  ‘I think it’s poetry.’

  She was about to cast it aside but Longbright stopped her. ‘Let me have a look.

  ‘Grip my coat and hold on tight!

  Here we reach a central height,

  Where the mountain brings to view

  Fires of Mammon shining through.

  ‘The word “Mammon” is in bold type.’ She turned it over and read out the note on the back: ‘ “It’s from Faust’s flight with Mephistopheles if you must know—you won’t find the key to begin with—AB.” ’

  A brass lock kept the book’s pages safely sealed. ‘We could try smashing it off,’ Meera suggested.

  ‘If it really is his Dead Diary he’ll already have thought of that,’ she told Mangeshkar. ‘He’s set the finder a puzzle.’

  ‘Why does he have to turn everything into some kind of obscure board game?’

  ‘Because he knows that we’ll be able to find the information but nobody at the Met will. It’s the way his mind works. He doesn’t know how to encrypt passwords on his laptop so he hides things on bits of paper. He’s always done it. You have to remember that the Unit started out as one of Churchill’s secret ministries, full of boffins hiding passwords and encrypting everything.’

  Out in the hall, the Home Office agents were calling to each other, coming nearer. Once they entered the room it would automatically become off limits to staff. ‘Think. Where would he have hidden the key?’

  ‘Maybe he has it on him.’

  Longbright turned around on herself. ‘No, we’re meant to find it.’ From next door came a crash of dropped furniture. ‘I have to phone a friend.’

  * * *

  |||

  Raymond Kirkpatrick was one of the country’s leading experts in semantics and cryptography, even if he did look like a nineteenth-century naval commander crossed with a yeti. He was currently in the medieval map restoration department of the British Library listening to a Mongolian death metal band on his headphones, which was his favourite thing to do after verbally duffing up the students who dared to cross his path looking for places to charge their laptops.

  ‘Janice, you gorgeous beast, where have you been keeping yourself?’ he boomed into his phone, clearing his study area and plonking himself down on a protesting desk.

  ‘Rather short of time,’ she said. ‘You don’t know where Arthur is, do you?’

  ‘His every movement is entirely mysterious to me. Mr Bryant’s thoughts fall into a special category that includes my wife’s erogenous zones and the city of Perth. I’m fairly sure they exist but I can’t be arsed to go there. Why?’

  ‘We need to find him urgently and our best bet is to go through his address book, which of course is locked. The key must be in his room but everything’s about to be confiscated. We thought you might know this.’ She explained the Goethe quote.

  Kirkpatrick sucked the end of his beard, thinking. ‘That’s the Philip Wayne translation, if memory serves. I won’t ask a more obvious question, exempli gratia, why his office is being emptied out. If you’re looking for something that appears in Faust you’re royally shagged, because Faust is stuffed to the gills with arcane symbolism: Walpurgis night, jars containing images of Cabirian deities and all that stuff about Helen of Troy. Mammon is the personification of wealth. Faust and the Devil look upon the lights of the rich—’

  ‘The rich.’ He heard Longbright turn aside. ‘Meera, what’s the most valuable object in this office?’

  ‘There’s nothing here I’d want.’

  ‘What about that hideous thing? It’s not telling the right time. Mr Kirkpatrick, there’s a baroque carriage clock on Arthur’s mantelpiece. Any clue there?’

  ‘Ah, I know the one. The definition of Mammon is “wealth regarded as an evil influence or the false object of worship and devotion.” I reckon it would cover a naff fake gold clock.’

  ‘Hang on. It’s got a cable hanging off it. Meera, is there a switch?’

  ‘I’m sorry to interrupt your little treasure hunt,’ Kirkpatrick shouted, ‘but I’ve got a 1560 map of London to get under glass before one of these spotty twerps spills his mung-bean latte on it.’

  ‘I think we could be on to something,’ said Longbright. ‘I’ll call you back.’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t. I’ll have to bill you for my time. May I go now?’ Kirkpatrick cranked his death metal back up and rang off.

  * * *

  |||

  The door to Bryant’s office opened and one of the Home Office agents pinned it back. The face above the tie was young, dough-faced and quite punchable. ‘What are you two doing?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe us if we told you,’ said Meera.

  ‘Don’t touch anything, either of you,’ he warned. ‘We’re boxing it all up so you have to leave right now.’

  ‘Give us two minutes.’ Meera turned on the carriage clock’s light. A soft yellow glow shone from its face. A plaque beneath the glass read: ‘To Mr Arthur Bryant & Mr John May in gratitude from the Rector of St Bride’s Church.’ Meera opened the glass and ran her fingers behind the minute hand. ‘There’s something here.’

  Longbright waited. The agents waited. Meera withdrew a miniscule key, holding it high between thumb and forefinger. She tried the lock on the address book, but it was too small to fit. ‘There must be another one,’ she said. ‘What is this, Alice in bleeding Wonderland?’

  ‘That’s it, we need you two outside this minute,’ said the foreman of the removal team.

  Dave Two appeared alongside them in the doorway. In terms of chest measurement and moustache luxuriance he outranked the foreman. ‘Mate, show some manners and give them a moment, all right?’ he suggested in a tone of friendly threat.

  ‘This entire building is now under Home Office jurisdiction,’ the foreman warned him, taking half a step back just to be on the safe side.

  ‘Wait, is there a copy of Faust on his shelves?’ Longbright squeezed past the men, who were now starting to remove books. Thank God for Arthur’s alphabetizing fetish, she thought, locating a battered paperback. She turned it over and shook it out. The only things that fell from the pages were other pages.

  ‘If you don’t put that down and leave the premises immediately, we’ll have to remove you,’ said the foreman, lifting a rather club-footed ceramic angel from the mantelpiece.

  Longbright ignored him and studied the note her boss had left behind. ‘ “You won’t find the key to begin with,” ’ she repeated. ‘That sounds clumsy. Did he mean we’d get it eventually?’ She turned to the front of the book and read the opening lines. ‘ “Philosophy have I digested, / The whole of Law and Medicine…” ’

  ‘No,’ said Meera, ‘he means you won’t find it at the beginning.’

  Longbright turned to the very end. ‘Now what?’ She glanced back up at the clock. ‘It’s stopped at seven minutes to five. Seven, five. The final chorus is eight lines long.’ Her finger ran down the page. ‘The last sentence starts on the penultimate line and has five words. “Eternal Womanhood / Leads us
above.” The infinite feminine.’ She looked at the homemade statue of the angel in the removal man’s hands and nodded to Meera, who grabbed it from him and dropped it on the floor.

  Inside the smashed meringue of china she found the key. ‘Why couldn’t he have just said it’s in the sodding angel?’ she asked.

  ‘Right you two, bugger off before you cause any more damage.’ The foreman ushered them out and started to tape the door shut.

  ‘Watch it, mate,’ warned Dave Two in the crowded corridor outside, ‘they’re ladies, even the short one, so treat them with some respect or you’ll get my claw hammer across the bridge of your nose.’

  ‘You heard him,’ said Longbright. Armed with the key and Bryant’s address book, she and Meera beat a retreat, leaving behind the shattered seraph.

  The operation on John May’s lung proved successful, and the detective was returned to his bare, bright flat in Shad Thames for a period of enforced recuperation. Over the next three weeks he organized the place to within an inch of its life, including the microcalibration of his home entertainment system and the cataloguing of his music, and learned how to navigate the byzantine structure of his streaming services. It was easy to empty the small plastic drain in his chest and change the dressing, but being forced to remain still for long periods had brought on a bout of cabin fever.

  During this time he received an unexpected visit from Fire Officer Blaize Carter, whose feelings he had hurt most deeply during the Unit’s last investigation. Ashamed, he apologized and she ostensibly forgave him, but he sensed that she watched him now with a jaundiced eye. She made it clear that what they’d once had could never be repeated.

  Of his partner there was not one single word.

  The building on Caledonian Road had been stripped out and the staff dispersed to their homes to await notification of their transfers. The city continued its diurnal ebb and flow without noticing that its most venerable specialist crime unit had ceased to exist. London’s beautiful curse is its ability to completely forgive and completely forget.