Bryant & May

by Christopher Fowler

  At the close of March, four members of the PCU staff decided to commemorate the end of an era by going for a drink. The Racketeer on King’s Cross Road was named after the nineteenth-century term for pickpockets who used firecrackers to distract their targets. It was fake, of course, a Dickensian makeover of an actively unpleasant 1970s boozer, but somehow appropriate in its newly minted incarnation. Carrying their drinks down to the candlelit, crimson-curtained basement, the team settled in and tried to come up with a plan of action.

  ‘We could firebomb the joint,’ said Meera Mangeshkar, taking a pint of bitter from Bimsley’s proffered tray.

  ‘Bit extreme, Meera,’ said Colin.

  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time the Unit burned down. We could fill it full of rats. Health and safety would have to clear the place.’

  ‘How about something that doesn’t involve blowing up buildings or poisoning everyone?’ Colin suggested.

  Janice Longbright took her gin martini from the tray. ‘Meera, I think you have to accept that the Unit has gone. Has anyone received a Home Office communication yet?’

  ‘Not a dicky bird.’ Dan Banbury lifted his Guinness.

  ‘I went to see John last night,’ Longbright told them. ‘He’s up and about now, but…’

  The others waited.

  ‘Well, it’s hard to say exactly. He’s not himself. He’s depressed.’

  ‘No shit,’ said Dan. ‘He’s going to trial and Mr Bryant hasn’t bothered to get in touch with him.’

  ‘You don’t suppose Bryant’s old memory-loss problem has come back?’ Colin asked the group.

  ‘I don’t think so. I checked all the hospitals, hostels and homeless shelters. I even called a number of high-end hotels where he knew the concierges well enough to blag a room. He hasn’t been seen anywhere. Here.’ Longbright opened her handbag and removed half a house brick from it along with her mother-of-pearl compact and a startling number of postwar lipsticks. She held up Bryant’s Dead Diary. ‘These are some of the people I’ve tried so far: Fraternity DuCaine, Maggie Armitage, Coatsleeve Charlie, Audrey Beardsley, Edwardian George, Raymond Kirkpatrick, the Friends of the British Library and those crazy tramps he befriended. Meera and I are working our way through every contact but it’s tricky. A few are dead and some seem to be completely fictitious, plus he’s alphabetized them thematically rather than by their last names. We started with academics, anarchists and astrologers, and now we’re up to creationists and conspiracy theorists. I’m even trying the ones in prisons and mental health institutions. And all the addresses are in code, of course. Luckily I have his symbol key. He used an Atbash cypher.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Colin, picking something out of his beer. His bulky, well-proportioned frame overwhelmed the puny stool he was perched upon.

  ‘It’s just the alphabet backwards. It’s designed to slow down users, not stop them.’

  ‘Look, I know he’s brilliant and everything,’ said Dan, ‘but he’s a royal pain in the arse.’

  ‘It’s a very British habit,’ said Janice. ‘The BBC used to help espionage units by sending coded messages to private individuals via the radio.’

  ‘Bryant’s landlady must know where he is. He tells her everything, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Either she genuinely doesn’t have a clue or she’s covering for him. I couldn’t get anything out of her.’

  ‘Have you talked to Raymond? Maybe he’s heard something.’

  Janice shook her head. ‘He’s at his cottage on the Isle of Wight. He hasn’t spoken to anyone.’

  ‘So that’s it.’ Colin examined his pint philosophically. ‘After all we’ve been through, we’re just going to leave it like that and go our own ways, are we? Who’s going to hire us now? Mr Bryant saw talents in all of us, but individually we’re just not special enough. I mean, look at us. Dan’s a geek, I have diminished spatial awareness, Janice thinks it’s 1960, Meera’s got anger management issues—’

  ‘Say that again and I’ll split your lip,’ said Meera.

  ‘But together—that was what made it work. We’ve got to remain a team.’

  ‘I don’t know, Colin.’ Meera looked doubtful. ‘At this rate we’re going to end up as another of old Bryant’s weird old societies, like druids or evangelists.’

  ‘Yeah, you be a team,’ said Dan. ‘I can get a job tomorrow outside of the police service. I’ll put in for something closer to home. I’ve already been offered a job in Sevenoaks mending digital readouts on refrigeration units.’

  ‘That sounds pulse-racing,’ said Meera.

  ‘I want to spend more time with the kids.’

  ‘I thought you only had a boy?’

  ‘I’ve a little girl, too.’

  ‘You didn’t say.’

  ‘You never asked.’

  ‘No, because it’s boring.’ Meera said this as if it was obvious. ‘It’s like when people drag their partners along to company parties; nobody wants to talk to them—we’d rather hang out with our coworkers. You won’t be doing that with fridge-parts people.’

  ‘Look here, I spent my days and nights in that building with hardly any free weekends and no life of my own,’ said Dan vehemently. ‘I’m amazed my wife didn’t leave me like Raymond’s did. Now I can have a proper work-life balance.’

  Janice wondered where her gin had gone. The glass was empty and she appeared to have eaten her slice of lemon. ‘I don’t want a work-life balance. My parents were both coppers, it’s in my blood and there’s nothing I can do about it. I don’t want to get married and I don’t trust anyone except you lot, so what else is there?’

  Colin was crestfallen. ‘I just fancied a beer with my mates. I wasn’t expecting a basement full of existential grief.’

  ‘I’m getting sick listening to you lot,’ said Meera. ‘You’re all talking as if you’re washed up. I’m the youngest here. I was just getting started. I admit I hated the Unit at first because nobody explained how anything got done and even when they did it didn’t make any bloody sense. And I got stuck with dustbin duty. I’m not built for inactivity. It feels weird not having any cases on.’

  ‘But we have got a case,’ said Longbright, handing them the pages she had scanned from the Dead Diary. ‘Your mission is to find Arthur Bryant.’

  SCRIPT EXTRACT FROM ARTHUR BRYANT’S ‘PECULIAR LONDON’ WALKING TOUR GUIDE. (MEET AT EMBANKMENT TUBE, DURATION 1 HR, SAUSAGE ROLLS PROVIDED, TIPS GRATEFULLY ACCEPTED.)

  In London, nothing is ever where it’s supposed to be.

  To turn right you may first need to turn left (on roundabouts), to go north you must sometimes head east (on the Underground), to travel between stations it might be quicker to walk (Leicester Square to Covent Garden) and to cross a road you must wait for the green man except when his appearance has nothing to do with the passage of pedestrians or traffic, which is most of the time.

  It comes as no surprise, then, that just as Islington’s Upper Street is in fact its lower street, the Strand, one of London’s grandest streets, is not a strand at all. A strand is the edge of a river but the river in question here is the Thames, which follows a path only in the sense that you can eventually follow one end of a hurled rope to the other. The river meanders, but the Strand, its edge, does not.

  This is because the Strand is not a bridle path but one of the straightest thoroughfares in the capital, paved as the royal road to London, connecting the City’s Square Mile to Westminster Abbey via the little village of Charing. It now finds itself lying inland, high and dry because of the Victoria Embankment. The ornate cross of Charing Cross, inconveniently stuck outside the station, is one of twelve monuments erected in the thirteenth century to the memory of Eleanor of Castile. They mark the resting places of her funeral procession. There are three others still knocking around.

  What else can I tell you? There’s a deep and ancient ho
ly well just outside the law courts. It was used by the Saxons who lived in Aldwych because they were too scared to live in the haunted Roman ruins of the City.

  Once the Strand was the home of dukes and earls. The governors of the Empire headed here to purchase their solar topees. Dickens enjoyed the Roman bath on Strand Lane, the Strand magazine introduced the world to Sherlock Holmes and Strand cigarettes told smokers ‘You’re never alone with a Strand.’

  The Wig and Pen Club, the only Strand building to survive the Great Fire of London, has now been closed down, trapping the headless ghost of Oliver Cromwell inside it. The gaiety theatres and music halls, the brothels, taverns and supper clubs have nearly all vanished in the twenty-first century, unable to compete with office rents.

  One end of the Strand is guarded by a dragonlike beast: the silver Temple Bar gryphon. Theoretically the Queen is not allowed to go east of it without receiving a formal invitation from the Lord Mayor.

  The Strand was ahead of its time. It had the first gas lamps, the first public electric lighting, the first plate glass windows along its length. But it was also a steadfast barrier between rich and poor. While the royal family owned the land from the south side to the river, its northern half was threaded with dark alleyways and ginnels where mountebanks, stage-door Romeos and good-time girls loitered to smoke and flirt. A few of them are still there.

  The Strand is full of surprises. The playwright Ben Jonson used to drink in the Palsgrave Head Tavern, which was turned into London’s most elegant bank, Lloyds, covered in mosaics of beehives, fish and owls. The story goes that the dining room of Lloyds was air-conditioned by two ladies riding a tandem in the basement to power a pair of bellows. It sounds ridiculous, but when the building was renovated workmen found the bicycle and its attached air pipe. So a bank was once a pub, and a tea shop was once a coffee house: Twinings, the world’s oldest tea shop, took over Tom’s Coffee House in 1706. If you head down the tea-caddy-lined hall you’ll find a wooden box with the gold-painted initials ‘T.I.P.’ on it, standing for ‘To Improve Promptness.’ If you wanted your beverage a bit faster you’d drop a few pence in, from which we get the word ‘tip.’

  Just a hint there.

  We shall be stopping at a nearby hostelry for oesophageal easement, so for those nondrinkers among you: Bad luck, the tour is now over.

  Nineteen year-old Koharu Takahashi had been in London for less than twenty-four hours and was struggling to cope with the chaos of the city.

  There seemed to be no standard codes of behaviour. People wandered out into busy roads, changed their minds halfway and came back onto the pavement. It was cool and wet but they stood about as if it was a hot day, and were strangely dressed even though they weren’t kogals or men-gals or part of any urban tribe she had ever seen in Tokyo.

  After breakfast she had walked from her hotel in Trafalgar Square along the Strand, looking up at the ornate buildings, but there was hardly anyone around. It was a Sunday morning in a Christian country so she had expected a few stores to be shut, but there was nothing open at all.

  Her parents had forced her on the trip because they were fearful that she was developing hikikomori from spending too much time shut up at home with her laptop. They had heard about the phenomenon on TV and had paid for the two-week vacation to London, although they had sent her older brother along as a chaperone.

  This morning he was sleeping in, so she had ventured out into this alien world alone. The streets were grey and quiet, glossy and rained on even though it was not raining, or at least not quite. A fine wet mist hung in the air, a kind of semi-rain that reminded her of home.

  If she tipped back her clear plastic umbrella she could see an ornate white church with a tiered spire. She could hardly have missed the building, for it was stuck right in the middle of the road so that traffic diverted around it on either side.

  The surrounding terraces were low and grubby and old. There was a building connected with colonnades, with ships on the top of it, and another old off-white block with fake Greek columns like some kind of temple, and a crimson tiled Underground station called ‘Strand’ that appeared to be closed, and some ugly offices and lots of tall trees that made an avenue of interlocking branches, and there were no helpful signs, just one that said, randomly, Elephant & Castle, and no shops open anywhere.

  It was all highly confusing.

  That was when she looked up at the building with the colonnades and saw the man coming out of the entrance, a fellow with a neat grey beard, dressed in a black suit with a carnation in his lapel and a white silk shirt, like a figure from a steampunk manga. He disappeared from view. She walked about for a few minutes, trying to match the street scene with the map on her phone. She was worried that if she wandered off into any of the narrow lanes she might not find her way back out. Perhaps she should head back to the hotel.

  The smartly dressed gentleman was back. He was about to cross the road but suddenly a pulse of buses and cars streamed past him. He stepped from the kerb between two parked vehicles, a tall-sided delivery van and a council dustcart, but never emerged from the other side.

  When Ms Takahashi looked again she saw that something very strange had happened. The spot through which the smart gentleman had passed was filled with wooden crates that had fallen from the back of the van. The van was pale blue and said Kent Farmhands Organic Fruits on the side, above a painting of oranges and lemons. There was no sign of the man at all. Further along, a smartly dressed middle-aged lady had stopped and was also staring at the van in amazement.

  She could not help feeling that, even for London, whatever had just happened was not a normal occurrence.

  * * *

  |||

  Ms Takahashi was one of two witnesses. The other was Mrs Margot Brandy, who did not want to be at the Inns of Court on a Sunday morning but had no choice; one of the lawyers she looked after had managed to mislay his notes and as a court officer she had agreed to check the offices for him.

  The clouds above were the colour of boiled fish. The weather was in a very British state, in that it was trying hard to rain. Margot’s little flat was on Gray’s Inn Road, just a few minutes’ walk away, which meant that she could always be called upon at the weekend. She had passed the red and silver dragon that marked the boundary of the City of London and was now on the Strand, hoping to find a shop open that would sell her some Superkings. Running out of fags on a Sunday morning around here was as fatal as smoking them.

  She at least had the consolation of knowing that there were others working today. On her right were the mean-windowed offices of various government quangos, many of which employed weekend staff to perform admin chores. Margot had a full house in court this week, including a major fraud case going to trial, too many ill-prepared defendants and too few police witnesses. Unless her lawyers could get more coppers into the box their cases would collapse, but that was the legal system for you, forever on the edge of disaster yet somehow scraping through to fight another day.

  Margot was dying for a gasper and a doughnut. And a coffee, ideally as strong and bitter as her ex-husband. There was nothing open, not even the funny little kiosk run by the old Korean lady whom she suspected of sleeping behind her stacks of cartons. She caught sight of something moving just past her eyeline. The back of a fruit van had opened, and there was someone trying to get across the road.

  Margot recognized him mainly because of his goatee. She’d seen him often enough on the news, the former firebrand lawyer who had shone a light on police corruption and entered Parliament to become the nation’s upholder of procedural civility, Michael Claremont. She could hear his familiar voice rage as he called order in Parliament. The sighting forced her to rummage through her bag for her distance glasses. She watched dumbfounded as a tall stack of crates from the back of the van toppled forward and engulfed Claremont at the exact moment he chose to cross the road.

 
The crates were wooden and filled with fruit, and some must have split on impact because in a moment Claremont was buried beneath them. She ran over to help, pulling at the boxes and stabbing splinters into her palms.

  Claremont was at the bottom. She assumed he would be bruised and shocked, possibly cut, but when he was uncovered she saw that a stave from one of the crates, as sharp as any dagger, had punctured his ample stomach. A single scarlet flower had blossomed through his silk shirt. Six inches of rough wood protruded from it but it was impossible to tell whether it went deep or was a surface wound. Then he coughed and blood welled around the stave’s entry point, pouring off his belly in a thick stream. That was when she knew he was in serious trouble.

  The Speaker of the House of Commons lay on his back, surrounded by sun-brightened oranges and lemons from the smashed crates, the straw that had settled over his midriff soaked with blood. Pieces of fruit lolloped across the tarmac as cars slowed to avoid them. A Japanese girl was staring at the scene, frozen to the spot.

  My God, Margot thought as she rose unsteadily to her feet, there are going to be questions asked in the House about this.

  ‘I won’t do it.’

  Leslie Faraday believed in structure. His emails required responses, his tea needed biscuits and his working day had to proceed in an orderly fashion, which was why, whenever he committed some appalling political gaffe and was forced to hide from the press for a few days, the thing he hated most was the way it disturbed his calendar. He needed order. At university he had been nicknamed the Olympic Flame—because he never went out.

  He was particularly unhappy about being called in early on a Monday morning and having to be here before his PA, Deirdre, had had time to put the kettle on, but his protests were starting to sound like petulance.