Bryant & May

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘You can’t possibly. The depth of his knowledge—’

  ‘I don’t have that yet, but I know how his mind works because mine’s the same.’

  Janice tilted her head, trying to understand this delicate-featured girl in crazy trainers, one orange, one lemon. ‘How is that possible?’

  ‘I met him a long time ago,’ said Sidney.

  * * *

  |||

  Floris knocked back the remains of his beer and accepted another. He was speaking rapidly and becoming inarticulate.

  ‘Anything my father wanted he got, although I guess he didn’t want the heart attack, and certainly not during an embassy ball. He told my mother he wanted her but dumped her, just as he’d done with his ex-wife. He certainly didn’t want me. He once pulled a gun on a maid at a funeral. That’s when they were still living in South Africa with my uncle, who became my aunt but no one ever mentioned it. We owned a cheetah that got loose at a party. Cheers, all.’ Floris picked up his beer and drained it. ‘Actually, I don’t normally drink this much.’

  ‘No shit,’ said Meera, awed.

  * * *

  |||

  ‘Admit it, you fancy him,’ said Colin after they had manoeuvred Floris onto his tube train. ‘You were on him like a rash. All it takes is a noncey haircut and a funny accent and you come over all Pride and Prejudice. I’m surprised you didn’t get the vapours and pass out.’

  ‘Well, what about you?’ Meera shot back as they headed off along the wet pavement. ‘All it takes to become your bezzie is a couple of hours in the nearest boozer.’

  They argued all the way home until Meera realized that she was following Colin back to his flat, and he said well as you’re nearly here you may as well stay over, and she said may as well, that’s not very flattering is it, and he said I’m sorry your royal highness you know what I mean, and she said no, what, and he said I really, really want you to stay with me tonight, and she said that’s better yeah I’ll stay over then but don’t think I’m going to stay every time you ask because I’m no booty call, and he said you got that right, and besides I can’t get the duvet cover on by myself and the kitchen needs a tidy-up and she punched him hard in the stomach.

  An hour after they left the pub an event occurred in another part of London that brought their respite to an end.

  SCRIPT EXTRACT FROM ARTHUR BRYANT’S ‘PECULIAR LONDON’ WALKING TOUR GUIDE. (MEET AT ST PAUL’S TUBE STATION. FOR DETAILS OF UPCOMING TOURS CONSULT MY FULLY UPDATED WEBSITE. I’M JOKING.)

  Straight ahead of you, ladies and gentleman, behold the Old Bailey, a bailey being another name for a city wall. The Central Criminal Court of England and Wales has been housed in several buildings near this one since the sixteenth century, but the current edifice was only built in 1902. Anyone can visit the public gallery and sit in on a case. It’s good fun so long as you don’t smuggle in a meat pie and open it in your lap before realizing it’s really, really hot.

  The twenty-two-ton golden statue on the top of its dome is Lady Justice. She holds the sword of retribution and the scales of justice, and contrary to popular belief she’s not blindfolded, which explains a lot.

  Inside, the courtrooms are all arranged the same way, with the accused standing in the dock facing the witness box and the judges. Before gas lighting the rooms were dark and shadowy, so mirrors were attached over the bar to reflect light onto the faces of the accused. The members of the court believed that studying their features would help them decide innocence or guilt.

  In the nineteenth century, the courthouse was still part of Newgate Prison, and in 1868 anyone could catch the tube to see a good hanging, but the following year Charles Dickens helped to get the practice stopped in public. Newgate was always an overpoweringly sinister place. It remained in use for over seven hundred years and didn’t shut until the start of the twentieth century.

  There’s a secret tunnel running between the Old Bailey and the church of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, so that the chaplain could nip over with his execution bell and administer last rites without having to plough through the waiting crowds. The ritual involved him ringing the handbell twelve times and reciting a bit of doggerel.

  The next morning the prisoner would be given flowers and made to listen to another prayer before getting his neck stretched. He was led along Dead Man’s Walk through a series of white brick doorways that became incrementally smaller and smaller, a rare example of an architect practising psychological torture prior to the building of the Shard. At the end of this tunnel a huge crowd would gather to chuck rocks and rotten fruit at the condemned prisoner, and here he would eventually be buried. The church had a Watch House with windows facing into its graveyard so that the wardens could keep an eye out for Resurrectionists.

  In 1670 a couple of Quakers (one of them the future founder of Pennsylvania) were arrested for preaching, and the Old Bailey’s jury found them innocent. The judge refused to accept the verdict and locked the jurors away without food or water until they returned a guilty verdict. Instead of doing so they got a writ of habeas corpus issued, and established the right of juries to give verdicts according to their convictions. A big result for democracy. A few of our present-day leaders would do well remembering that.

  Take a look around. The Old Bailey, the church and the Viaduct Tavern pub across the road look a bit stranded now. Few workers scurrying past this great court of justice appreciate its notoriety as a place of vengeful punishment.

  The April wind had turned suddenly bitter. London was entering the season of unpredictable weather that usually lasted until Wimbledon. During this time it felt cold enough for a jacket and warm enough not to wear it.

  PC Donnalee Martin stood on the corner of Green Arbour and Old Bailey, sweating slightly, looking over at the curved façade of the Viaduct Tavern. There were few cars and even fewer pedestrians. St Sepulchre was dark, its doors locked, hardly the welcoming community church its rector wished it to be. There were still some forty churches left in the Square Mile, but she imagined the area’s residents would struggle to make up a single congregation.

  It was just after midnight and PC Martin had only just come on shift. She hadn’t expected to be stationed out here tonight, especially not until seven A.M., but a directive had come through requesting officers for surveillance around St Sepulchre and the Old Bailey.

  Usually some intel leaked through, but tonight they had been told nothing. One of the superintendents had suggested it was linked to the death of a woman who had fallen down the stairs of a church, but how that connected to being sent here was a mystery. She was supposed to be paired with another officer, but the shift had started and he’d yet to appear.

  The Square Mile was a lonely place to be posted late on a weeknight. It felt as if it had entered a state of suspended animation that only a workforce could bring back to life. There were probably more homes here now than there had been a hundred years ago, flashy penthouses tucked behind and above the endless offices, but where did anyone do their food shopping?

  The sliding of the window alerted her, and a shout. She glanced around. There was nothing at ground level. Just past the curving cul-de-sac of Green Arbour she saw a man in the second-floor window of an office building.

  As she watched, he took a little skip up onto the window ledge, then onto the stone sill. He turned his head and stared down to her. PC Martin was so surprised by his attention that she froze. Before she could call out he stepped off the sill, sending himself to the pavement.

  He hit a rectangular brick flower bed just in front of the building. One highly polished shoe flew off and bounced into the gutter. From where she was standing she could not see his fallen body. She looked back, wondering if there were any other witnesses, but the street was empty.

  As she rounded the end of the concrete flower bed his right leg appeared, bent forward at the knee. Under the yellow street li
ghting a spatter of blood showed up black on the paving stones.

  She knelt down beside him, feeling for his pulse. His head looked like someone had taken a bite out of it. Unfortunately the corner of the flower bed had caused a compound skull fracture. Blood still pumped from opened bone. An unmoving eye looked up at her. The small shiny object she picked up from the pavement turned out to be the crown on his front tooth. Unnerved, she could only reach for her phone.

  By the time Janice Longbright arrived an EMT tent had been erected over the body. She had been the only member of staff still on duty at the PCU when the call came through. She took PC Martin to one side. ‘Why were you out here by yourself?’

  ‘There was supposed to be someone else on my shift but he didn’t show up.’

  ‘Always the night when something happens, eh?’ She handed the officer her coffee. ‘Go on, you need it more than me. You didn’t go up there?’

  ‘No, he was down here.’

  ‘You say a shout attracted your attention. You mean from him?’

  ‘I suppose so. I wasn’t concentrating.’ PC Martin looked embarrassed.

  ‘But you heard the window open. Was that before or after the shout?’

  ‘I think it was before. The shout came from inside the room.’ There was a look of dread on PC Martin’s face. ‘I’m sorry, I should be better at this; I take enough statements.’

  ‘It’s always harder when it’s you,’ said Longbright patiently. ‘How many voices?’

  ‘Just one.’

  ‘So he was, what, arguing with himself?’

  ‘I guess so. He sounded surprised.’

  Longbright looked at the still-open window. ‘What is that building?’

  PC Martin craned her neck back and looked up with half-closed eyes. ‘I think there’s some kind of financial company on the ground floor.’

  ‘Do you wear glasses?’

  ‘Disposable contacts. I usually—I thought I had some in my jacket.’

  ‘Who’s up there now?’

  ‘A couple of my mob. I keep seeing him drop from that window like a dead weight. It was awful. His head hit the edge of the flower bed with a terrible smack.’

  ‘You saw him standing in the window. You heard him shout. Is there anything else you can remember?’

  ‘There was something creepy about the way he stared at me.’

  Longbright followed her eyeline. ‘He just suddenly looked at you.’

  ‘Yes, then at the church, and finally over at the Old Bailey.’

  ‘Have you been over there?’ Longbright ran across the road and checked the church’s entrance and the wall of the Old Bailey, but found nothing.

  ‘I thought of something else,’ said PC Martin when she returned. ‘The light.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It was out. The room behind him was in darkness. He was only lit by the street lamps. And the way he moved was odd.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Like he was dancing. He sort of swayed, then suddenly stepped up onto the window ledge. It was just an odd sort of movement.’

  ‘Why do you think it was odd?’

  ‘I’m not really sure. It didn’t look natural. More like a skip. If I was going to climb out onto a ledge I’d grip the window frame on either side and pull myself up. His hands, that’s it—they stayed by his sides. I’m sorry, it’s not much.’

  ‘You did good. I’m going inside,’ said Longbright. ‘Sit down and have a quiet think. See if there’s anything you’ve missed.’

  As she headed into the building Dan Banbury arrived and was annoyed to find the crime scene already tented. Across the road, behind the engulfing walls of St Sepulchre, the wall-mounted glass box that housed the executioner’s bell was being smashed apart. The handbell was lifted out and stolen away, its task of ringing a pathway for the condemned not yet complete.

  By dawn’s early light, the Peculiar Crimes Unit looked as if it had been bombed.

  Nobody had been able to get the landlines working properly. Calls made everyone sound as if they were phoning from the bottom of the sea. One floorboard in the first-floor corridor was operating as a seesaw, and the flushing of the second-floor toilet periodically caused coffee cups in the kitchen to explode (it later transpired that the shaking pipes had the power to shift crockery along an unsecured shelf. ‘Magnetic energy,’ according to Maggie Armitage. ‘Wrong-sized rawlplugs,’ according to Dave One).

  Speaking of whom, the two Daves had Frankenstein-stitched cabling across the building, turning it into an assault course and somehow electrifying everything made of metal in Raymond Land’s office. By eight A.M. the PCU staff were crowded into the operations room awaiting the arrival of their boss. May had made it back to the Unit, and looked rejuvenated. Bryant was muttering to himself and filling his whiteboard from corner to corner with crabbed handwriting. Land appeared to have slept in his car, even though he didn’t own one. He stared at them with one jaundiced eye, then the other. Perhaps he’s turning into his pigeon, Bryant thought.

  ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ Land asked. ‘Actually there is no good news, just bad and really bad, starting with the latest fatality, who turns out to have been a highly respected judge. I’ll allow that to sink in for a moment, shall I? Who will tomorrow’s victim be, I wonder? The queen of Sweden or Elton John?’

  ‘At the moment the death is being reported as a suicide,’ said May.

  ‘At least his got reported. Cristian Albu’s didn’t,’ said Bryant.

  Land glared at him. ‘Judge Kenneth Tremain, working late and deciding on a whim to chuck himself from a second-floor window. He was due in the Old Bailey this morning to preside over a fraud case indirectly involving a certain Peter English, cited on this board as a Person of Interest, if I’m reading Mr Bryant’s hieroglyphics accurately.’

  ‘We haven’t been able to get a foot in the door,’ said May.

  ‘You’re officers of the law, not double-glazing salesmen.’

  ‘And -women,’ said Sidney without looking up from her notebook.

  ‘What was he doing so close to the Old Bailey late at night anyway?’ Land asked.

  ‘The Central Criminal Court has a number of leased apartments nearby so that senior staff don’t have to bother with hotels on late nights,’ said Longbright. ‘Tremain was in one of them doing some research. Dan, you went into the building.’

  ‘There’s a videophone in the flat, but its image quality is appalling,’ said Banbury, rising to attach photographs of the building to the whiteboard. ‘There’s a camera over the main entrance. We’ve got footage of everyone who entered and left from the front. The problem is the back, which opens onto a walkway behind bushes.’

  ‘Wait, he shouted, according to…’ Bryant searched for his notes.

  ‘PC Donnalee Martin,’ said Longbright.

  ‘So he was arguing with someone inside the flat.’

  ‘Now hang on a minute…’ Land began, raising an objecting hand.

  ‘It’s a couple of feet up to the window ledge.’ Banbury added more shots. ‘There’s nothing below the sill. When he climbed out he didn’t raise his hands to pull himself up. Instead Martin says he managed a sort of skip. He stared at her, then the church and the courthouse, moving his head to do so.’

  Bryant’s brow furrowed, although one more wrinkle made no difference.

  ‘But that isn’t how people look at things.’ Dan drew the sightlines on the board. ‘Our eyes use saccades, rapid eye movements between fixed points. When we see something that grabs our attention we move our eyes, not our heads, otherwise we’d look like robots. Then there’s the odd climbing-out action with the hands kept straight down.’

  ‘That fits.’ Bryant looked from one puzzled face to the next. ‘You must see how suggestive the eye and hand gestures are.�
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  ‘He killed himself,’ cried Land. ‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’

  ‘Of course you don’t, it would be like a cow trying to follow Hamlet, but I think this young lady might know.’

  ‘He was already dead when he fell,’ said Sidney, finally paying full attention.

  ‘Precisely. Dan, please continue.’

  The interruption threw Banbury, who had to refer to his notes. ‘I went inside just after four A.M. I would have been there earlier but the traffic coming through Croydon was surprisingly—’

  ‘Get on with it,’ snapped Land. ‘Why are middle-aged men always so interested in arterial roads?’

  ‘I reached the room just after the local officers had finished trashing it.’

  ‘So you didn’t get anything?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. Even though the scene was contaminated, I could see that someone else had been there. The floor rugs are new, so I got heel prints. Killer and victim.’

  ‘Wait, back up,’ said Land, raising his hands. ‘At the moment this is still a suicide. The man stepped out of an upstairs window. You can’t just make sweeping judgements. Were there two distinct sets of footprints?’

  ‘No,’ Banbury admitted. ‘The rugs are woollen. But the patterns of movement suggest two.’

  Bryant took the floor. ‘Tremain hit the corner of the brick flower bed in a way that smashed his frontal bone and opened up the coronal suture behind it. But according to Giles he also had a broken neck. The two traumas weren’t dependent upon the same directional force. In other words, the injuries occurred separately.’

  ‘And if that’s the case I suppose you know how they were inflicted,’ said Land.

  Bryant rearranged the photographs. ‘The judge’s attacker broke his neck, set him down, opened the window and manoeuvred him outside.’

  ‘Why on earth would he do that?’ Land hated complications.

  ‘His grievance may not be with these people but with what they stand for. He’s taking them off their pedestals and showing that they have feet of clay, so they die by accident or suicide, anything but murder. Confuse, distract, obfuscate: These are magicians’ tricks.’