Bryant & May

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘So he wants it to look like Tremain killed himself,’ added May.

  ‘He could see that PC Martin was on duty. In her hi-vis jacket, she was impossible to miss. He showed Tremain climbing onto the window ledge by hiking him up and shoving out his right leg, but he couldn’t make the movement look natural because the judge was heavy and his arms hung at his sides. Still, it was important to make PC Martin see everything. He wasn’t to know that she had forgotten her contact lenses. He moved Tremain’s head so that it looked like he was staring at the church—it was a bit blatant but he needed to connect the death to the others.’

  ‘Why?’ begged Land. ‘Why does it have to look connected?’

  ‘He doesn’t think we’re joining the dots. He wants recognition. He made sure Tremain went headfirst, hoping injuries incurred in the fall would cover any marks he’d left, and we now have a matching MO.’

  ‘How is that matching?’ asked Land. ‘It’s nothing like the others.’

  Bryant ticked off the points on tobacco-tarnished fingers. ‘They’re preplanned, they’re witnessed in public, they fit a song everyone knows. Claremont didn’t suffer a mishap, Rahman didn’t slip on the church steps and Tremain didn’t suddenly decide to kill himself.’

  ‘Then why make it look like they did?’ Land persisted.

  ‘Because—’ Bryant began.

  ‘Because it gives the killer a smokescreen,’ said Sidney. Everyone waited for Bryant’s reaction. Interrupters did not normally survive for long in the operations room.

  Bryant nodded at the intern. ‘Misinformation is his secret weapon. What he’s doing and what he wants us to think he’s doing are two different things.’

  Raymond had the beginnings of a migraine. ‘So what is he actually doing?’

  ‘Perhaps he wants his targets to see that they’ve sinned in the eyes of God.’

  ‘Fine, I’ll subpoena an assortment of higher spiritual beings as witnesses. You’re just making wild guesses now, aren’t you? This is what it’s come down to. The Unit’s celebrated left-field thinking is in fact a tombola of random thoughts.’

  ‘You could put it like that.’ Bryant considered the idea. ‘Add this to our tombola—the handbell from St Sepulchre-without-Newgate was stolen last night. The church was locked but the staff are profligate with keys, so it was fairly easily accessed. The bell has a place in history but no monetary value. Its glass case was smashed. There was nothing left behind.’ He shot Land a meaningful look. ‘Why would somebody take it, if not to point public attention back towards the rhyme?’

  * * *

  |||

  Seen from a distance they appeared as a pair of sentinels, standing motionless at the railings of Waterloo Bridge, looking towards the Tower of London.

  The sacrament took place during the course of every investigation. It was a rite of continuity and an homage to Bryant’s lost love, who had died at the spot where they stood. Police officers are all a little superstitious: Walls are touched, items stored in a certain order, working nights feel good or bad. Bryant and May stood on Waterloo Bridge, either at the end of the day or around this time, just before noon, in the calm lacuna before the lunchtime stampede.

  The skyline resembled the contents of a knife drawer upended, but as rain silvered the surface of the Thames the buildings were reduced so that they appeared as they had in earlier centuries: low and dark. When the tide retreated this far the grey-green stones of the embankment were exposed and the shoreline looked ramparted.

  The detectives were armed with umbrellas and coffees, and in Bryant’s case a pipe, a walking stick and a croissant filled with apricot jam, although how he managed to eat and smoke at the same time had always been a mystery to May.

  ‘After all this time I still see her,’ said Bryant, chewing ruminatively. ‘I’ll always associate Nathalie with the river. Hard not to, considering how I lost her.’

  ‘You couldn’t have done anything more than you did,’ said May.

  ‘Youthful high spirits. No reason to die.’ Bryant had barely heard him. He stared down into the murky waters and into another time. ‘The night of her eighteenth birthday,’ he murmured. ‘She’d climbed onto the balustrade and was walking along it. I should never have let her, but we’d been celebrating at the Anchor and were both a bit tipsy. I remember the bus honking, the driver thinking I was about to step back into the road, and how the noise made her start. When I turned around to grab her she’d gone. I jumped into the water but the current was too strong. I was instantly pulled under and had trouble saving myself. Nathalie couldn’t swim. As I felt the stones beneath my feet I knew at that moment my world had ended. The search teams dragged the river for weeks, but never found her body. At this point there is nothing between where we stand and the infinity of the sea.’

  May respectfully waited for his partner’s memories to settle. Tilting back his umbrella, he tested the rain. ‘I think we should talk about the case.’

  Bryant came back. ‘Of course.’

  ‘I checked to see if our captain of industry, Peter English, left his residence last night. His assistant told me he was home, and his wife and children could vouch for him. I put in a formal request for an interview but it looks as though I’m unlikely to get it. English is setting up some kind of business initiative with the government so they’re bound to protect their investment.’

  ‘He’s not above the law.’ Bryant eyed his partner through raindrops and pipe smoke.

  ‘Unless those in power are covering for him.’

  ‘John, our country has a centuries-old tradition of being fed up with its leaders. When democracy is working correctly nobody is satisfied. Even so, they don’t usually offer sanctuary to murderers.’ He finished his croissant and dusted flakes into the Thames. ‘The fraud case will have to await a new judge. I can see why you want to go after English. He’s a good fit with the victims, but don’t go looking for conspiracies. We need to find a real connection between them. I’m consulting my experts about this.’

  ‘Arthur, your experts are a bunch of mumbling dysfunctionals who hold their trousers up with string,’ said May. ‘I’m not dealing with psychics, necromancers or astrologers. I’d end up doing something they didn’t see coming.’

  ‘Very well. Janice can talk to the Conspirators’ Club.’

  ‘When you say conspirators…’ May began.

  ‘They’re academic theorists, John. They feed me information I wouldn’t otherwise hear about. Very little of it is of any use at all, but occasionally they point me in the right direction.’

  May winced. Most officers of the law held their cards close to their chests. Bryant was fabulously indiscreet. ‘If you’re going off to talk to crazy people again, you can’t let Floris find out what you’re up to.’

  ‘Don’t worry, nothing will get back to him. The people I consult are cheerfully untroubled by social skills. The last time I went to a Conspirators’ Club dinner they pelted me with boiled potatoes for suggesting that George Michael was dead.’

  May raised his profile to the breeze, looking, Bryant noted, like one of Landseer’s noble stone lions. ‘I don’t understand why some people insist on believing in alternatives to the truth.’

  ‘Belief is the opposite of knowledge.’ Bryant finished his coffee and dropped the cup into his voluminous coat pocket. ‘Even so, trusting facts is not enough; you need the mind of an inventor. Churchill’s boffins built the first limpet mine with the aid of a porridge bowl and some aniseed balls. Sometimes it’s important to look at problems from the side.’

  ‘I know if I look sideways I’ll miss something right in front of me. I’ve always been rather straightforward, I’m afraid.’

  ‘And it’s one of your finest qualities, old chap. But lateral thinking is a necessity nowadays.’ Bryant leaned over the parapet and knocked out the walnut bowl of his Spitfire. ‘You alw
ays used to know where you stood, especially with Londoners. Butcher, milkman, secretary, cleaning lady. Nearly everyone did something tangible and practical for a living. Set hours, nine to five, weekends in the garden with the kids. You could arrest someone more easily if you knew where they were. Not anymore. Who knows what people do now? Entrepreneur, influencer, money-mover, data-miner. Do they have more satisfying lives than bakers? Twenty million ghost workers under minimum wage are doing all the boring jobs we failed to automate. What if our criminal only exists as an online cyber-thingy originating in the Philippines? How do you find someone hidden in a digital labour force? I wasn’t trained to separate guilt from innocence on a laptop.’

  ‘Then concentrate on the parts you’re good at and leave the rest to me,’ said May.

  Bryant looked pointedly at his partner’s damaged chest. ‘Do you think you’re up to it?’

  ‘Arthur, if you can do it, I can, too.’

  He sipped his coffee, breathing steam from beneath his umbrella. ‘What is that supposed to mean? I’m in the pink.’

  May gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘I presume you remember thinking that the war was still on? We all assumed you had Alzheimer’s and it turned out you’d poisoned yourself.’

  Bryant held up a forefinger. ‘One time. I made one mistake.’

  ‘You got strangled in the British Library and had the Unit quarantined.’

  ‘Pfft. Those are just facts.’

  A truck thundered past, spraying rain mist over them. May turned to face his partner. ‘Suppose an Oranges and Lemons killer doesn’t exist and Peter English is outsourcing hits on his enemies? He’s halfway through, with three more to go, and then, “Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.” But whose head?’

  Bryant set down his pipe and coffee to reach into his coat pocket, which was playing a horrendously off-key version of ‘Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes’ from Iolanthe. He read the text message. ‘It appears your request to meet Peter English has been processed after all. He’s expecting to meet you in an hour’s time.’

  The two Daves had managed to find the missing leg of the Unit chief’s desk and glue it back on, and even Stumpy the one-legged pigeon was back on Land’s windowsill eyeing him malevolently. In order to feel as if everything had completely returned to normal, Land needed something to go spectacularly wrong, and at two o’clock in the afternoon it did so.

  He stared at his phone in horror.

  ‘We’re posting the piece on our site in one hour,’ Paula Lambert told him. ‘I wondered if you’d like to comment.’

  ‘Where are you getting your information?’

  ‘You know our sources are protected, Raymond. Your extremely minimal press release suggests that Justice Kenneth Tremain committed suicide, but we’re hearing that he was murdered. Why are you hiding the truth?’

  ‘How could you possibly have heard that? Let me put you on hold for a moment.’ After trying Bryant’s number and getting no answer, he called Longbright. ‘Janice—where are you? It sounds like you’re in a pub. Oh, you are. The press think we deliberately falsified the briefing on Tremain. We’ll be accused of a cover-up prior to an Old Bailey trial. It’ll look like we’re working for Peter bloody English. Try and find out where they’re getting their intelligence.’ He switched calls to Paula. ‘Obviously we can only give you the information we have at the time.’

  ‘So you’re changing your story now? It will throw suspicion on the participants in a major fraud case,’ Lambert warned. ‘We’ll also be running a sidebar pointing out that the detectives in charge are searching through a compendium of nursery rhymes for a solution.’

  Land was outraged. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘It’s true, isn’t it?’

  ‘A path of inquiry only, because of the locations, and one that was quickly dismissed.’ The pigeon stared at him with one orange eye as if to say, She’ll never believe you. ‘We have other avenues of exploration. We’ll be addressing your speculations very shortly.’ I wonder if it’s too late to get back to the Isle of Wight before then, he thought.

  He could hear Paula tapping a pen against her teeth. ‘Are you going to tell us he was murdered like the others?’

  ‘You’ll have to wait to find out,’ said Land. ‘You only have to report the news, not manufacture it. I’m trying to keep this Unit together, Paula, and you’re not helping.’

  ‘It’s not our job to help.’

  ‘It’s not your job to hinder, either. Our past success rate speaks for itself.’

  ‘The past is the beginning of this conversation, Raymond. That’s how far back people’s minds go. Nobody wants to hear about your greatest hits. They’ll think a couple of old men in charge of a major case derailed a criminal trial.’

  Land could feel his face heating with anger. ‘If you print that we’ll stop feeding you information.’

  ‘Let me know how your avenues of exploration work out,’ said Paula, ringing off.

  * * *

  |||

  Janice Longbright was in the Sutton Arms, a scuffed artisanal public house in Smithfield that had been redecorated via another selectively remembered past. The elegantly curved frontage gave way to an interior of early Victorian wall plates, plant pots and newly galvanized metal workshop stools. Sitting on one of the latter was Monica Greenwood, her red hair arranged in a chignon, her charcoal suit fresh from its dry-cleaning bag.

  ‘We’ve met before, haven’t we?’ Monica held out her hand. ‘You came to the Conspirators’ Club one night.’

  ‘That was a memorable evening,’ said Janice, sitting beside her.

  Monica ordered coffees for them. ‘Our numbers have swelled since the whole fake-news thing. We have a lot of fun arguing about whether that Facebook fellow is a robot. The club is going through a bit of an existential crisis at the moment.’

  ‘Why, what’s happened?’

  ‘Last week’s lecture was about President Eisenhower destabilizing the Congo by ordering the CIA to murder its prime minister, but some of our members have started to adopt a rather alarming new stance.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They’re saying who cares? It’s a fact of life that America and Russia fix overseas elections. The hot new idea is “existential history”—that things are changing so rapidly the only way to deal with them is by confronting each issue afresh, carrying over no baggage from the past. It sort of makes sense. Most wars of attrition are based on historical antipathies. I think I preferred it when the talks were about the Loch Ness Monster.’

  ‘We wondered if the group has started talking about the Oranges and Lemons deaths,’ said Longbright.

  ‘Not yet but I’m sure they’ll come up at the next meeting, just as I’m sure that the speakers will suddenly start linking the deaths to Kurt Cobain, brainwashing and the moon landings. God, they love those moon landings.’

  ‘You have a degree in understanding the neurological reasons for conspiracy theories—did I get that right?’ asked Longbright. ‘What do you make of it?’

  ‘There’s a unified-theory approach to conspiracies that says they’re all interconnected, and in one sense it’s true. All leaders desire power over others. First of all I’d decide if you’re looking for a group or one person.’

  ‘Which would you choose?’

  ‘It’s a loner’s plan. Complicated and risky, but easy to adapt.’

  ‘We have footage from several sites,’ said Longbright. ‘There’s no single face common to all. You don’t think they could be exactly what they look like: accidents and suicides?’

  ‘I’m sure you already have forensic evidence proving they’re not.’ Monica sipped her coffee and smiled. ‘But then I’m a paid-up member of a conspiracy society.’

  * * *

  |||

  John May had been summoned to Simpson’s in the Strand
, one of the most venerable restaurants in London. After nearly two centuries it was still serving marbled sirloins of beef and crimson saddles of mutton from silver-domed trolleys. The great wood-panelled room smelled of gravy, cabbage and something mustier, a hint of school dormitories remembered from forty years away.

  The maître d’ led May across the herringbone parquet floor to where Peter English was already seated, watching the ritual pouring of a preprandial gin. The businessman had perhaps not intentionally modelled himself on John Bull but the effect was the same. His red waistcoat, anachronistic enough to stick in the memory, was straining at its buttons even before his meal. Indeed, he appeared to have been stuffed into his clothes with great difficulty. The corporate stewards of Great Britain are not known for their fine grooming. Like old country houses far past their best they are usually in need of repointing and a damp course. English was no exception. He never reached the state of being hungover because he never entirely stopped drinking, and from bedroom to boardroom he did nothing for himself when there was someone else available to do it at a cheaper rate.

  Accompanying English was a familiar face, Edgar Digby, a sunlight-deprived lawyer who had crossed swords with the Unit several times in the past. English gave a desultory wave at the seat opposite.

  ‘It’s not been the same since they tarted up the menu,’ he said to no one in particular, least of all the selectively deaf waiter who was pouring his cocktail. ‘The Victorians used to play chess in this room. That’s why the food comes around on trolleys, so the players wouldn’t be interrupted. Now it’s full of foreigners trying to work out which end of a fork to pick up. Do you want a drink? I suppose you’re on duty.’ He poured May a water. ‘This is—’

  ‘I know Mr Digby,’ said May. ‘You’ve come up in the world, Edgar. Not representing petty criminals anymore?’