Bryant & May

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Probably.’ Sidney smiled at Meera. ‘I don’t know anything about Shakespeare.’

  ‘Well, I must remember to tune in again next week to Let’s Talk Bollocks,’ said Meera. ‘We see through your little act, Little Miss Idiot Savant who aced her exams and now thinks she can breeze into any job she pleases by waving her special mental health credentials.’

  ‘You’ve got me all wrong.’ Sidney slapped the coffee machine and it sputtered into life, pouring a perfect espresso. ‘I failed my finals. That’s why I’m here.’

  She headed off with her coffee and her tree shavings.

  * * *

  |||

  ‘We can’t stake out every neighbourhood mentioned in the rhyme,’ said Bryant, ransacking another bookshelf. His treasured volumes amounted to little more than a hodgepodge of bookshop clearances and charity-shop rejects, yet he treated them as if they belonged in the great library at Alexandria. He cast a baleful glare at his Special Reference Section. ‘This office has to be put back exactly how it was, with the books all in perfect order, then I can start thinking clearly. Where’s my goat’s head lampshade? And my plant?’

  ‘It was marijuana, Arthur.’

  ‘It was medicinal. According to Raymond, that fellow Floris is holding the Unit’s purse strings. He may be a perfumed twerp with a ludicrously complicated beard but if we exploit him ruthlessly he can grease a few wheels for us. What I need most now is your marvellous common sense. I’m unmoored without it. What do we do?’

  May had never felt that he truly pulled his weight on the team—Arthur had once called him his capstan because ‘we can tie everything to you and none of it will float away’—but today he could see how much his partner needed help.

  ‘First let’s give the Home Office what it wants,’ he suggested. ‘The file on Claremont’s mental health. There’s enough material in it to keep them busy for a while.’

  There was a knock at the door. Bryant opened it to find Meera standing with his plant in one hand and what appeared to be a furry dishcloth in the other. ‘Raymond wants you at a meeting in the operations room right now,’ she said, setting down the plant and turning to go.

  ‘Wait, what have you got there?’ asked Bryant. ’Is there a cat inside that?’

  ‘He’s a rescue moggy.’

  ‘It smells horrible.’

  ‘He got into the kitchen bin,’ said Meera. ‘I left some pilchards in there. I thought he would cheer Raymond up, seeing as Crippen died.’

  ‘Does it have a name?’

  ‘Strangeways.’

  She set the cat down on the floor. It promptly fell over.

  Strangeways was black and white and looked as if he’d been in a wind tunnel, and had quite a few clumps of fur missing and one eye partially shut. When Meera scuffed his half-chewed ear he started making a rasping noise like a baby with croup.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’ Bryant asked. ‘It’s got that squinty look on its face you only normally see on dead things, like it’s just returned from the grave. I don’t want another cat, especially one that looks like a zombie.’

  Meera turned to May. ‘It’s nice to see you back, sir.’

  ‘You’ve never called me sir,’ Bryant complained.

  ‘You might want to work out why that is,’ said Meera.

  Bryant turned to his partner. ‘It’s her, that girl Sidney. She’s upsetting everyone, spreading her postmillennial malaise through the Unit.’

  ‘It might not be such a bad thing,’ said May, rising.

  Strangeways sneezed. Bryant decided to steer well clear of him. ‘And why would you name that thing after a prison?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s a he, not an it. Our last one was named after a murderer and changed sex,’ Meera pointed out. ‘Raymond says right now or you’re all fired again.’

  ‘What is this?’ cried Raymond Land, banging on the whiteboard with his pointing stick.

  ‘It’s your wand,’ said Colin.

  ‘This, this.’ He slammed his hand over the words to ‘Oranges & Lemons’ that Janice Longbright had written out on Bryant’s instructions. ‘One attempted murder and one very public death, and you’re linking them together with a nursery rhyme? I cannot have our Home Office spy reporting this back to Faraday.’ He hastily checked to make sure that Tim Floris was not within hearing distance.

  Colin shifted around on his seat. Out of the corner of his eye he saw something that looked like a hairy version of the facehugger from Alien scamper past. ‘Did I just see some kind of animal?’

  ‘We’ve got a new cat,’ said Meera.

  ‘What’s wrong with it? It was moving like its legs are on backwards.’

  ‘If I can have your attention, Mr Bimsley,’ called Land, tapping his stick on the board. ‘I do not want this theory bandied about. We are here to extrapolate rational explanations from irrational events, not make up new irrational ones.’

  Bryant and May seated themselves on chrome 1970s Indian restaurant chairs. ‘I take it you don’t think the deaths are in any way related to the rhyme,’ said Bryant. He removed some items from the voluminous pocket of his overcoat and set them down on the table before him.

  ‘No, and it’s not your job to link them without evidence,’ Land reminded him. ‘You don’t even have proof that the victims were linked, so don’t start adding fairy tale elements.’ He saw what Bryant had set down. ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘The evidence,’ said Bryant, holding up an orange and a lemon. ‘Claremont was surrounded by them when he was attacked. It was a complicated little trick that made everyone think it was an accident.’

  He picked up the coins. ‘Five farthings, thrown onto the steps of St Martin’s beside Chakira Rahman’s body in order to deliberately create a link. She died from a lethal toxin on the blade that was used to stab her. If he keeps to this pattern he has to kill four more times.’

  ‘But for the love of God, why?’ Land was desperately trying to understand. ‘What could he possibly hope to achieve?’

  ‘That’s rather the question, isn’t it, old sock? The rhyme’s rather vague.’

  ‘You think this is all a game, don’t you?’ Land scrubbed the lyrics from the whiteboard. ‘A storybook puzzle designed just for you to solve.’

  ‘You don’t understand, Raymondo, it’s not about the puzzle.’

  ‘You just said it was.’

  ‘The victims aren’t connected to the churches. They weren’t christened or married in them, although the Claremonts occasionally attended services at St Clement’s. The rhyme is simply being used to draw the public’s attention. The attacker understands how publicity works.’

  ‘And how does it work?’ asked Land.

  ‘By fixing on a colourful detail. When our prime minister says something spectacularly stupid it distracts us from the real issue. Most people in the country won’t have heard of Claremont, but they’ll remember the oranges and lemons. It’s misdirection. The attacks serve a murkier purpose.’

  ‘The trouble with you is—’

  ‘Don’t say it.’

  ‘—you hate the idea of murder lacking a motive. Most are driven by hatred and anger and nothing else.’

  ‘That doesn’t make them motiveless,’ Bryant said heatedly. ‘Killers strike because they feel inadequate and powerless. I agree most are inarticulate with rage. This one is articulate.’

  ‘Why not go with the nursery rhyme theory for now?’ asked May in an effort to placate the pair.

  ‘Because whenever your partner goes looking for crazy he always finds it,’ hissed Land.

  ‘It won’t harm the investigation if we keep it in this room.’

  Land looked around for something to grip and throttle. ‘And how do you propose to do that when we have a government observer sitting in with us half the time?’

  ‘He’s easily ta
ken care of,’ said Bryant cheerfully, putting his coat on. ‘Feed him the report on Claremont’s mental health.’

  ‘I know you’re going to do something that will make me look bad again.’

  ‘You had a shooting on the premises and lost the Unit: How could we possibly make you look any worse?’

  ‘But you can’t just go wandering off,’ Land cried, exasperated.

  ‘I have a meeting to attend,’ said Bryant. ‘I’m off to practise my ollies with Radical Alf.’

  He slipped out of the door before Land could begin to frame an answer.

  * * *

  |||

  It was a short walk to the Thameslink train from the Unit. Crossing the grey expanse of York Way to reach it was like changing into a freshly laundered shirt. A gleaming new metropolis had arisen from the ashes of the old King’s Cross slums, as if a city block from Dubai’s business quarter had been airlifted into one of North London’s poorest neighbourhoods. It had created a new social stratum: Google class, filled with small-portion restaurants, cushion shops and portly security guards watching for signs of disrespect.

  Bryant reached the Thames by train in no time. As he marched along the South Bank with the skateboard under his arm, he wondered why people were giving him strange looks.

  The Undercroft, a shadowy graffiti-spattered concrete space beneath the riverside buildings, had been co-opted by skaters for over forty years. The clatter and snap of boards echoed through the brutally geometric chamber day and night. The skaters were indifferent to the fact that they had become a tourist attraction.

  Radical Alf was far too old to still be boarding, but if anyone told him so he always replied, ‘Look at Tony Hawk.’ He wore a voluminous Hawaiian shirt covered in tigers but was as thin as a sapling, with hair like a spaniel in a sports car. He pumped Bryant’s arm energetically but his eye had already strayed to the board. He was twitching to get his hands on it.

  ‘That’s an old customized Sk8mafia—what have they done to the wheels? Where did you get this?’

  ‘I found it in the Strand,’ said Bryant. ‘What can you tell me about it?’

  ‘It’s brand-new but it’s been given some kind of overhaul. May I?’ Radical Alf dropped it onto the ground, set off and executed a 180-degree turn. He kicked it up and returned holding it before him in reverence. ‘Fast and silent. I’m not sure what the wheels are made of but I’ve never seen anything like them. I didn’t know there was a skate shop in the Strand.’

  ‘There isn’t. It was under a dustcart. You can keep it. I can’t introduce it as evidence. I just want to know where you’d get one.’

  ‘You are a total dude.’ Radical Alf pulled a yellow plastic tube from his top pocket and took a drag on it. He offered it to Bryant. ‘It’s a phytochemical vape. This one’s called Gorilla Glue, very mellow.’

  ‘Not while I’m on duty but I’ll stick one behind my ear for later.’ Bryant slipped the cannabis oil tube into his jacket as Radical Alf called to another skater.

  ‘Hey, Trainwreck, have you seen one of these before?’

  Trainwreck was limping badly and had lost enough skin on the left side of his skull for there to be little chance of growing his hair back. He examined the board like an antiquarian doubting the provenance of a Fragonard.

  ‘See, here’s your problem.’ Trainwreck ran the remaining nub of his forefinger along the board’s deck. ‘The ply is standard and available anywhere but the trucks and risers are custom. Chopping a board this way makes no sense. The grip tape would wear out first.’

  ‘I don’t think the maker cared about long-term usage,’ Bryant said. ‘This was put together for a single purpose.’

  ‘Home-crafted, man. Sorry we couldn’t help more.’

  Radical Alf gave Bryant an odiferously skunky hug and bounced away.

  As the detective made his way back to Blackfriars Station he saw the entire performance in his mind’s eye. When Claremont’s attacker went behind the van and triggered the crates, the skateboard was already in position beneath the dustcart’s cabin. With a little practice, dropping onto the board and pushing back to the truck’s far end could have been accomplished in a single fluid motion.

  The second performance was even simpler. A brush-past on the steps of St Martin’s; a dab of toxin on a blade. In many ways a perfect crime, yet it could easily have gone wrong. He had assumed that the hardest part was getting hold of a poisonous chemical, but Dan had disabused him of the notion. ‘You just have to look in your garden or under your kitchen sink,’ he’d explained. Which made Bryant fearful about what might happen next.

  This is insanity, Bryant told himself. Who in their right mind would kill like this? But of course he had answered his own question.

  Fireman. Policeman. Magician. The things I wanted to be when I was a child.

  Most of all, I wanted to commit murder. I wanted to think of myself as a hero.

  When my mother told me about the Event everything fell into place, and I finally understood. She cried, how could she not, at the memory. I felt disgusted, then ashamed, and later when she couldn’t stop crying I overcame my revulsion and comforted her.

  She said it was because of the London streets, and that I would never understand how it was. The way the streets were laid out.

  South London was different then; every neighbourhood had its character but the trouble began at the points where they butted up against each other. Every town has a bad spot, sometimes just a street or a pavement corner. In Greenwich the western part of the town was rich, the home of architects and playwrights, filled with museums and galleries. The eastern part was working class, decent but scruffy, lined with charity shops and takeaways. The two halves met at the top of the street where I was born.

  At the end of this street, set back from the intersection, was an elaborate Victorian railing that had once belonged to the church. There was only about ten yards of it left but it had remained standing for well over a century, a gateway between the two worlds. That was where they gathered.

  That’s how she knew them.

  Beyond the remains of the church were the fancy houses, the ones that had once had boot-scrapers and servants’ entrances. They still had high hedges and ponds in walled gardens, while ours had a bicycle-filled backyard. The boys hung over the railing watching her pass, their long arms dangling. They never called out; they were too well educated for that.

  My mother went to the local comprehensive school. One of the boys was privately educated in a grand Georgian house close to the Cutty Sark. The others went to different schools in the nicer part of the borough. There were all sorts of stories about them. They had a private clubhouse no one had ever seen. One of them had been sent home from school for defacing a portrait of Jesus in the chapel. They had secret rituals and initiation ceremonies and rules—lots of rules about who you could be seen talking to, who you could befriend, who you had to treat as a sworn enemy. One of them was a girl, an honorary member, nobody knew why. Nobody knew where the stories came from, or if any of them were true.

  One day as my mother was passing the railing one of them spoke to her, gently and respectfully. He said as they saw each other so often they should be friends. He was the tallest and the most handsome, and as none of them had ever teased her or said anything nasty, she smiled back, but went on her way. She was eleven, they were twelve and thirteen. The next time she passed, she stopped.

  She never stayed for more than a few minutes, but as she got to know her new friend better he introduced the others. They were shy and uncomfortable around her, largely mute. The girl hung back, avoiding her gaze. On airless summer evenings they lay listlessly draped over the stumps of masonry beyond the railings, boneless with boredom. She suspected they saw her as a distracting interloper.

  Finally she was invited through the railings to the other side.

 
The handsome one showed her the street’s private gardens. He took her to the places where they congregated, showed her the comics they collected, the magic tricks they performed, the arcane games they played. Their most secret and sacred spot remained St George’s Church. It had been bombed out during the war, but unlike wealthier churches it had not been funded and repaired. Locals said the vicar had been killed in a raid, and no one was ever appointed to take it over. Instead it had continued to crumble apart, the land untouchable because it was still owned by the church. Rocket and mint sprouted between the bricks. The apse had erupted with broken tiles and rubble. There were a few crusts of stained glass in the windows. The rest had been destroyed with hurled bricks. Only the stretch of railing remained at the edge, like the lace hem of a rotted coat.

  My mother lived with her grandmother in those days—her parents had long before fought and split up. The grandmother said she remembered the church when it had still been complete. There had been a nativity scene in the largest window, picked out in red, blue and gold. She had been christened there, back in a time when most people still had families in the streets where they were born. Continuity made people comfortable. All that has gone now.

  My mother never told her grandmother that she was friendly with boys from the other world. She knew the old lady wouldn’t approve. When the handsome boy invited her over she proved herself by joining in their games, silly singsongs, tugs-of-war, catch games, hiding games. She was never one of the gang—she sounded too different—but they accepted her on their own terms, and I suppose that was all she had ever wanted. The other girl never spoke to her, hardly spoke to anyone.

  As time passed she saw less of the boys. Under the instruction of their parents they put away childish things and spent more time studying. My mother had no such supervision and spent her days alone, helping her grandmother with the house—she lived above a grocery shop—but sometimes she saw the handsome one out with his parents. The first time it happened he pretended he didn’t know her, although she wondered if he simply didn’t recognize her because her body was changing and she now wore her hair differently.