‘One day you’ll make me change the percentage.’ She closed his book with great care and removed it from the dining table. ‘What is this big case you’re working on that’s more important than your dinner?’
‘I’m afraid that’s classified information.’
‘You think I’m going to tell the ladies at the church?’
A fair point, thought Bryant. Besides, he had always told her everything before. ‘A woman named Chakira Rahman,’ he began. ‘She’s—’
‘Oh, I know all about that, it’s been on the telly all afternoon.’
Bryant gratefully pushed away his pie and galloped into the living room, turning up the sound on the BBC News. A reporter was standing on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields interviewing the Reverend Stephen Mallory.
Bryant immediately rang his partner.
‘Are you at home?’ asked May, preempting him. ‘I’m just around the corner from you.’
‘You are? Then come by. There’s a bucket of fish pie here that I’m desperate to get rid of.’
May arrived five minutes later to find another setting at the table. He folded his coat neatly on a chair and bent to kiss Alma’s cheek. ‘Alma, you’re looking well. Are you feeling better?’
‘Much better, thanks. You’re the one we were all worried about. You’ve lost weight. Eat it all—he doesn’t like it. Did they get the bullet out?’
‘They gave it to me as a souvenir.’ He took it from his pocket and passed it to her. She handled it as if it was the Koh–i–Noor diamond.
Bryant sat well back as Alma ladled out hot pilchards. ‘Who leaked the story?’
‘I’ve a feeling Land might have put his foot in it,’ said May. ‘Unless someone was daft enough to talk to Hard News.’
‘Ah—I think that was possibly me,’ Bryant admitted. ‘I spoke to Paula Lambert. I was after some background information on your litigious millionaire businessman, Peter English, but I didn’t tell her anything about the case.’
‘You didn’t have to. She’s incredibly suspicious, she’ll have made the link at once, especially as you’re rubbish at lying.’ He looked at his plate with suspicion. ‘Have we heard how Michael Claremont is doing?’
‘Janice called his private clinic earlier but wasn’t allowed to speak to him.’
‘What do you want to do?’
‘Go after English, find out if he knew the victims.’ There was nothing Bryant enjoyed more than interviewing someone who was dismissive of the police. ‘Something else struck me as odd. Because of the locations of the deaths, neither of the victims could be left in situ for long.’
‘Meaning what?’ asked May.
‘Meaning it wasn’t possible to secure the site for forensics. Claremont lying in the road; Rahman dead on the steps. Dan had a moan about that. Ideally he likes people to be attacked in a more controlled environment.’
May tried to avoid catching the glassy eye of a pilchard. ‘We have to spread the net wider and find more witnesses. There was supposed to be a facial recognition system working in the Strand but we’ve had nothing from it so far. The footage from the camera on Duncannon Street shows Chakira Rahman passing behind pillars just before the attack. The City of London Surveillance Centre are putting together a shot reel for us.’
Alma opened the kitchen window. From downstairs came the shriek of their neighbour’s TV. ‘You can’t rely on technology to find him,’ said Bryant. ‘Take a look at those.’ He pointed to a wad of papers from the briefcase he had left on the sideboard. ‘They’re the witness reports from St Martin-in-the-Fields, a completely contradictory set of statements. The only thing they agree on is that there were others on the steps, and one person came close to the victim. We’ve got four sightings of a man, three of a woman.’
May read for a few minutes, then abandoned his meal and took the pages to the floor, where he began laying them out. ‘There’s a timeline here,’ he said. ‘We can work out when each of the witnesses arrived near the steps and departed. So these ones’—he waved a hand over the right side of the pages—‘are in the before group, heading towards Rahman, and these are predominantly after her encounter with the stranger who passed by. You see the problem.’
Bryant knew it was almost impossible to reconstruct an event exactly as it had happened. Even after decades of analysing the Zapruder footage of the Kennedy assassination, nothing definitive had ever been produced. Accurate recollection wasn’t helped by the fact that witnesses did not like to give fragmentary accounts, and remade events into miniature stories.
May pressed his hand on the pages. ‘Arthur, it takes a lot of nerve to attack someone in a public place. This is the action of someone operating with complete confidence. We need to look at his next target.’
‘Very well. The third line of the song is: “ ‘When will you pay me?’ say the bells of Old Bailey.” ’
‘What do you know about that?’
‘It’s usually assumed that the bells refer to the twelfth-century church of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate.’
‘The one near the Old Bailey.’
‘That’s right, by the Central Criminal Court. And the Fleet Prison nearby was mainly for debtors, so the “When will you pay me?” part makes sense. St Sepulchre is opposite, or without it. And it has an unusual bell, a handbell in a glass case fixed to one of the pillars inside the church in the south of the nave. It’s known as the Execution Bell and was rung outside every condemned prisoner’s cell at midnight before his execution. It’s probably where we get “Here comes a candle to light you to bed” as well, seeing as the church clerk would have needed a lantern to find his way to the cell.’
‘Which is all very fascinating but hardly helps us stop a killer,’ said May.
‘It’s worse than that,’ Bryant pointed out. ‘The vicar won’t let us put officers inside the church or in its grounds. He has the right to do so, but it means we’ll have to get Met officers on the pavement near the junction with the Old Bailey, and that can’t happen until tomorrow morning.’
‘So in other words, anything could occur at any time to anyone and we have no way of stopping it,’ said May.
‘But we’ll have done our job by reporting back on Michael Claremont’s emotional state,’ Bryant said. ‘Everyone agrees he was mentally fine before the attack. They can write it off as an accident and say Chakira Rahman died in an unrelated case of mistaken identity or something, and everyone can go back to feeling safe and comfortable.’
‘Until it happens again,’ said May.
* * *
|||
While she waited for her coffee in the Ladykillers Café, Janice Longbright took the blue leather volume of poetry from her pocket. Considering Cristian Albu had been found lying on his back in a puddle of linseed oil, the book had survived remarkably well. She flicked through it, stopping here and there to read a passage. As a teenager she had copied sections into her diary and memorized them.
‘What are you reading?’ asked Niven, handing over her flat white. She held up the cover. ‘Oh, him. “Charge of the Light Brigade.” “Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die.” What a load of old bollocks. I can’t stand him and I have to face him every day.’ Noting Longbright’s quizzical look, he pointed over her shoulder to a pair of lines painted along the opposite wall of the café.
Kind hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood.
‘It’s associated with the café,’ Niven said. ‘I don’t get it myself.’
‘There’s nothing to get,’ said Longbright, paying him. ‘It means breeding isn’t everything.’
She had never noticed the other painted slogans, posters and bits of memorabilia around the walls. They all related to the group of postwar films known as the Ealing comedies. The café was named after one of the most famous, which had been
shot in King’s Cross, just around the corner. She tried to recall the name of the poem that housed the quote on the wall and failed. She was about to look it up but saw she was running late and quickly rose.
‘Oi, have you just left me cash?’ called Niven. ‘Haven’t you got plastic? Nobody wants the old-fashioned stuff anymore.’
‘And yet you have a café dedicated to it,’ she replied. ‘Figure that one out.’
‘I don’t like him,’ said Meera Mangeshkar as she changed at the staff lockers in the first-floor bathroom. ‘My mother says you can’t trust a man in tight trousers.’
‘That’s because she’s obsessed with fertility,’ said Colin Bimsley, swapping his blue PCU sweatshirt for what he referred to as his ‘evening wear,’ a faded red T-shirt from the Repton Amateur Boxing Club.
‘Plus, his beard is too neat, he smells too nice and I can’t understand a bloody word he says.’
‘That’s because Mr Floris is public school. They didn’t talk like that in your Southall comp, did they? He’s probably a regular bloke once you get to know him.’
Meera shook her head. ‘He still has to report everything back to his relatives at the Home Office. Faraday’s done this to us before. What’s that awful smell?’
Colin held up a bottle of aftershave. ‘Mr Bryant gave it to me. Jaguar for Men. Price three shillings and sixpence. Also available as soap on a rope.’
‘It smells like Toilet Duck.’
‘Floris was pushed into this assignment by someone a lot more powerful than Faraday. But just to quell your suspicious little mind, let’s find out from the man himself.’
‘How do we do that?’ asked Meera, pulling a black sweater over her head.
‘Simple. We take him for a cleansing ale.’
‘That’s your answer to everything, isn’t it?’
Colin threw his hands wide. ‘Look around you. There’s nothing going on. The investigation is stuck. The killer is dragging us around by the nose. All of our leads are dead ends. We’re becalmed. We might as well take him to the pub and pump him for information.’
Meera sighed. ‘Come on, then.’
‘I don’t really drink,’ said Floris when they offered to take him to the Racketeer for a beer.
Meera was incredulous. ‘That’s a challenge. You have to come for a quencher, it’s traditional.’
‘Yeah, I could smash a pint in the face,’ said Colin. ‘And I already chose the boozer for us. A little hipster hangout, top of the topknots, Banterbury Cathedral.’
Floris eyed them both suspiciously. ‘Just one, then.’
* * *
|||
Taking a tray of glasses to the pub’s candlelit basement, Colin settled on a sofa that looked as if it had lost a fight with a bear. A fake fire flickered in the grate, washing the floor with orange light.
Janice Longbright was in the corner of another sofa with Sidney, taking her through a folder of documents. In accordance with the rules of public house society the group had split in order to make rounds affordable, although they were all listening to each other’s conversations.
Colin paid the barman to keep delivering beers until Floris started slurring. He had no meat on his bones so it didn’t look as if it would take too long.
‘I imagine it’s a bit of a culture shock, coming to us after Whitehall.’ Colin wiped a foam moustache from his upper lip.
‘It’s more chaotic than I’d expected,’ said Floris. ‘We only ever hear terrible things about Mr Bryant. I didn’t know my boss had left you with no resources.’
Meera removed a slice of orange from her rum. ‘You don’t know the half of it, mate. Faraday’s taken everything from us but old Bryant still has a few friends in government who can help out. Although I think we’re running out of favours.’
Floris sipped his lager as if he’d never tried alcohol before. ‘Perhaps you can explain something I don’t understand.’
‘Entropy. Relativity. Consciousness,’ suggested Meera, sucking her fingers. Colin glared at her.
‘I’m told the Unit was founded by theorists and academics. Backroom boffins who were never meant to go out in the field.’
‘The thinking was different in those days,’ said Janice. ‘It was believed that crime would one day be computed out of existence. We thought we’d understand human behaviour so completely that we’d be able to predict it and stop it from happening.’
‘Your current investigation proves the theory wrong.’ Floris set down his beer. ‘You can’t explain why people are being targeted. The Unit appears dysfunctional. Your detectives’ supposedly instinctive methodology doesn’t seem to get results. You have no answers and the situation feels as if it’s worsening, but you act as if it’s just another working day.’
‘Because that’s what it is for us,’ said Colin. ‘We’re not the Met. We don’t run shifts. Even doctors go home eventually. They watch patients die of flu but don’t go to the pub to discuss the future of epidemiology; they go to let off steam.’
‘And Mr Bryant?’ Floris checked to make sure he had not come in.
‘He’s different,’ said Janice. ‘He’s looking for the impossible. Real, definitive answers. He doesn’t like Faraday hindering us with rules.’
‘Mr Faraday has no control over me.’ Floris loosened his tie. He was overheating. Some of his words were starting to elide. ‘It was my idea to get the case to you, not his. You know the system from the ground up. This is my first job after university.’
Meera coughed beer over Floris’s trousers. He turned down her offer to mop him dry.
‘I’ve tried to tone down my accent. I think I’m starting to sound a bit more street.’
‘Mate,’ said Colin, ‘trust me, you don’t. First you’ve got to widen your mouth for vowels, lose most of your Ls and Ts, and watch Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday. He speaks proper Queen’s English. An absolute ledge.’
‘I take it you’re both from London.’
‘I’m Southall, then Elephant and Castle,’ said Meera. ‘He’s East End. It’s stamped through him like a stick of rock.’
The barman set down a cold collation. ‘Ah, my master cheeseboardier,’ said Colin, passing around plates.
‘That’s not a word.’ Meera checked out the board. ‘No pork scratchings.’
‘I didn’t mean to follow the rest of my family’s big flat feet into policing,’ Colin said. ‘I wanted to be a boxer until I got whacked in the head and was left with spatial issues.’
‘What sort of issues?’
‘He walks into things,’ said Meera, stealing a chunk of cheddar.
‘It’s a perceptual problem called Irlen Syndrome. The Unit was prepared to take me.’
‘I thought I’d find you all sitting behind desks in darkened rooms staring at screens,’ said Floris.
‘When the PCU started out it was all lab coats and slide rules until somebody realized you can’t police people without talking to them. So a lot of it is still old school. Hands-on stuff, blagging your way into flats and going through bins.’
Meera could sense that Floris disagreed with the approach but was keeping his counsel. He never had to get his manicured hands dirty. He drained his glass and set it down. ‘It seems to me that you do all the work and your detectives get all the acclaim.’
‘The old man likes the limelight,’ said Meera.
‘That’s not fair,’ said Colin. ‘He closes the cases.’
‘So you don’t mind Mr Bryant taking the credit?’ Floris was intently gauging their reactions. ‘We only ever hear about him and his partner in Whitehall, never anyone else.’
‘We’re not looking to be famous,’ said Colin.
‘Neither are they, I’m sure. But how will you ever advance through the Unit if they remain at the top?’
‘They’ll see us all right.
’ Colin looked to Meera for support but failed to catch her eye. The seed of doubt had been planted and the conversation quickly cooled.
* * *
|||
Further along, Janice was struggling to understand Sidney, who sat poised and static, clutching a medicinal-looking pink cocktail.
‘You need a few years’ experience under your belt. Perhaps you should come back when you have more to offer.’
‘It will be too late then. I’ll be full of their rules. I can be useful now. You were young when you started.’
‘Nineteen,’ Janice admitted. ‘But it was different in those days. None of us knew what we were getting into. I didn’t go to university. I got the job because they saw something in me and took a leap of faith.’
Sidney stared down her drink. ‘They need to take a leap of faith with me.’
Longbright sat back in her armchair. ‘And what are you going to teach us about policing this country?’
‘I can see how our history drags us down. There’s a new generation arriving that doesn’t care about the past. You can’t understand them and they won’t understand you. I can bridge that.’
‘I don’t understand. How?’
‘We never lived in any one country for long when I was growing up, so I never made friends. I lived online and studied. But I only studied the subjects that interested me.’
‘Like this Unit.’
‘It became an obsession. So you see, I have a head start.’
‘And that makes you think you can bring something fresh to this case.’
‘To every case. I know them all, even the early investigations that Mr Bryant gave silly names to. The Leicester Square Vampire, the Dagenham Strangler, the Shepherd’s Bush Blowtorch Murders. One hundred and twenty-eight major homicide cases on public record, plus all the others that were never listed.’
‘OK, you’ve done your reading. But Mr Bryant doesn’t think like anyone else. And no one thinks like him.’
Sidney held her gaze until she broke away.
Bryant & May Page 20