Bryant & May

by Christopher Fowler

  The look of surprise on Maggie’s face touched him. ‘But how are people supposed to know that?’ she asked, bewildered.

  That, thought Bryant, is what we’re all wondering.

  * * *

  |||

  Raymond Land highlighted a paragraph in his report and moved it to the top of the page but it promptly vanished, along with the rest of his document. Fifteen minutes later he was still trying to get it back when he became aware that Floris was dithering in his doorway. There was a look of indecisiveness on his face that probably captivated the emotionally susceptible but was utterly wasted on Land.

  ‘Are you just going to hover about there or come in?’

  ‘You’ve no door,’ Floris said.

  ‘Yes, I know. For a brief, blissful period there was one, but it was taken away again. What do you want?’

  Floris cautiously approached and peered over the edge of Land’s screen. ‘Are you having trouble?’

  ‘No, I often sit staring at a blank screen. Your colleague Mr Faraday wants a daily report. I’ve lost it.’

  Floris reached over and tapped a couple of keys. The missing paragraph reappeared, which only annoyed Land more. ‘Do you tell your bosses everything that goes on here?’ he asked.

  ‘Almost everything. They’re not my bosses, Mr Land. As I explained, I report to the Home Secretary. You only see me in with Mr Faraday and his team because I’m seconded there until the investigation can be resolved.’

  ‘Because I know how it looks to outsiders,’ said Land. ‘They stick their heads around where the door should be and think there’s nothing going on and it’s all a bit of a joke in here, but they’re wrong. This is the nerve centre of a major homicide investigation. Only because the SCC initially turned it down, admittedly, but Faraday thinks we’re incompetent. That lumbering diplodocus thinks we’re incompetent. He’s the one who was caught making racist jokes about Muslim women. Every time I enter his office I have to remind myself that it’s not 1975. I even wrote him a document entitled “Understanding the modern PCU,” ’ Land added with some pride. ‘I included it in your introductory briefing.’

  ‘Yes, I know, TLDR.* At the end of the week I have to submit an overview on the investigation. I can run it by you, although I won’t be able to let you edit it.’

  Land hated this young man’s glib, patronizing tone. He hated his perfect beard, his shaved side-parting and his immaculately pressed white shirt. How could he have climbed the governmental food chain so quickly? There could only be one answer: family connections. Land had gone to a second-rate grammar school where he had been beaten up for his pocket money, and every hammering had stamped resentment into his heart.

  ‘You don’t have to run it by me,’ he said. ‘We have nothing to hide.’ He suddenly wondered if Bryant had moved his marijuana plant back into his office.

  ‘Fine,’ said Floris with a disarming smile. ‘If you have any further questions about our working relationship during this investigation please feel free to share them with me.’

  I wouldn’t share a Pret sandwich with you, matey, Land thought, because Faraday will know I’ve opted for a crayfish-and-rocket before I’ve finished eating it. ‘Of course I’d be delighted to “share,” ’ he said aloud, realizing he had put inverted commas around the verb.

  ‘I’ve been informed that the HO’s legal department has been fielding calls from Peter English’s office this afternoon,’ said Floris. ‘Mr May’s attempt to interview him in connection with the case did not go well, and Simpson’s reported some kind of theft.’

  ‘Were they just having a moan or are they planning to take action?’ Land impatiently stabbed at his keyboard. ‘I mean English’s lot, not the restaurant.’

  ‘They’re demanding that both Mr Bryant and Mr May take the new PPCC test by the end of the week.’

  Land blanched. He knew that the Met’s new Police Psychometric Core Competency tests had to be conducted online without preparation, and checked for verbal reasoning skills, critical analysis and emotional awareness. May might be able to scrape through but Bryant wouldn’t pass even if they wired his hearing aid to accept incoming advice from Stephen Fry.

  ‘And if they don’t take the test?’

  ‘Mr English’s lawyer, Edgar Digby, is going to file a harassment charge against them on behalf of his client.’

  ‘All right. Fine, I’ll arrange it,’ snapped Land. He knew that Floris would have grown up with regular online evaluations and regarded them as entirely normal. ‘They’ll need to be printed out, though.’

  A look of puzzlement crossed Floris’s tender face.

  ‘Mr Bryant prefers a fountain pen,’ Land ended, feeling as if he had just signed the Unit’s death warrant.

  * Too Long, Didn’t Read

  So we come to the Event, and I’m sure you who understand the nature of men can already tell what came to pass. It is an old, old story, appropriately biblical.

  After the handsome young sixth-former had ignored my mother in the street while he was out with his parents, he called on her to apologize. He admitted that he was embarrassed, and knew it was wrong.

  She did not accept his apology. She was all too aware that her reception into his gilded circle only went as far as childhood games. She would never be allowed to cross the boundary of her street because although she was attractive she looked and sounded common. Perhaps that’s too harsh. She was different. Wrong for him. She would be examined by his parents and instantly dismissed.

  The boys were not bohemians; they did not set out to break down borders. Whatever their pretensions, they were really just suburban children anxious to fit in. And so they were duly slotted in, he to the middle class, she to a level below him marked ‘Not good enough.’

  Yet the boy was persistent. She turned sixteen and he continued to call, and one day she agreed to go out with him. She offered to come to his house, but he said his parents would not understand and he would rather collect her.

  Her grandmother picked out a dress and paid for it, then sent her to a hairdresser.

  He called for her on a warm July evening, and they set off along the street, and climbed through the old railings to St George’s Church, just to stop there briefly for old times’ sake.

  The others were there waiting for her. One even complained that she was late. The girl who hid behind them all was there, too, not willing to condone or condemn, and at some point she slipped away. My mother soon found out why.

  ‘Remember how we used to play Oranges and Lemons?’ he asked, handing her a bottle of rum. The others looked apprehensive. The evening took a sinister turn.

  She remembered the boys’ eyes, bright with excitement. They had started drinking as soon as the light faded. The songs and games were harder-edged than she remembered. Rougher. To each winner went the rum bottle, and then it went to each loser.

  They played another game. He sang ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and she had to fill in the name of each church. If the questions had been about TV shows or pop songs she could have answered. She didn’t know the names of churches. Each time she hesitated the rum bottle passed her way. She was laughing with the rest of them. They broke out joints, and soon no one could stop laughing.

  It had been a little after seven P.M. when she arrived in the ruins of the church. They let her leave at some time past nine, perhaps a quarter past. Her dress was not torn. Her face was not dirty. There were no marks or bruises on her skin. They had held her down gently and with great care, always checking to see that she was comfortable, but stifling her pleas to be released. It was a game that got out of hand, that’s all.

  Were they scared that she would tell someone? It seemed not to have crossed their minds. My mother was raised to be devoutly Church of England, so silent shame came more naturally than confession.

  One of the questions that ha
s stayed with me the longest is: Why did she not tell anyone?

  Of course the silence couldn’t last indefinitely. As summer turned to autumn she began to show with me. By then the boys had gone, moving smoothly from their schools to art colleges and universities, scattering across the country.

  I assume her grandparents were shocked. My mother was uncomfortable with that part of her story. I imagine an alternative narrative where, after arguments and tears, she stayed at home and helped around the house, and in return her grandmother took care of her until I was born into a loving, understanding household.

  That was not what happened.

  Her grandmother called the police, who questioned my mother and eventually dragged a garbled story from her. They were at a loss to understand why she had said nothing at the time. They were especially interested in the part where she explained that she had been given copious amounts of alcohol and a joint. They made it quite clear that they suspected her complicity, but promised to investigate and arrest the young men who were responsible.

  Of course, by this time the boys had long gone. The matter was further complicated by my mother’s continued refusal to give up any names or descriptions. This is the part I have never been able to comprehend. I can only think that as a practising Christian she was not prepared to destroy their lives even though they had sinned against her. I am baffled, but can see no other explanation. Part of every heart is hidden.

  According to my mother nothing came of the investigation, but shortly before she was due to give birth a complete stranger came running up to her in the street and punched her in the stomach. That’s how I was born, delivered screaming onto a Greenwich backstreet, my soft-boned right thigh damaged in the attack. Whether or not it was connected to the boys no one ever found out. I think of her story as a book with some pages missing, and others containing only half-remembered truths.

  I set out to write down her account, filling exercise pads with as many details as she would admit to me.

  When my mother finally chose to tell me everything about how I was conceived, she believed her confession would begin a healing process and our lives would slowly improve.

  Instead, things got much worse.

  PART FOUR

  | | |

  The Bells of Shoreditch

  How do you like London? How d’you like the town?

  How d’you like the Strand, now Temple Bar’s pulled down?

  How d’you like the ‘La-di-da,’ the toothpick, and the crutch?

  How did you get those trousers on, and did they hurt you much?

  —NELLY POWER, SINGER, 1880

  ‘They’re looking at it the wrong way,’ said Sidney, standing before the whiteboard with her arms folded.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She waved her hand across the whiteboard. ‘All this stuff about the nursery rhyme.’

  It was seven-thirty A.M. on Friday 12 April, and Tim Floris was the only other person in the Unit. He had seen Sidney Hargreaves approaching the building; she was hard to miss in her red leather jacket and black leggings. Rain slashed the windows of the operations room, giving them a welcome spring-clean, but water was running from the sills across the floorboards, so the pair of them had to lay down towels and lift all the cables and connectors off the ground.

  ‘It’s taking them in the wrong direction. They should dump it and start at the other end.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She sat on the edge of a desk facing him. ‘The victims are the cause. They’ve been targeted because of something they’ve done.’

  ‘They’re called victims because they’re innocent,’ Floris pointed out. He tried not to touch his beard but his fingers had a habit of straying to it.

  ‘They were all born within two years of each other, Tim. Suppose they met somewhere before but not professionally? Maybe as students?’

  ‘It doesn’t seem likely, given that they’re from different parts of the country.’

  ‘They are now, but what if they weren’t back then?’

  ‘I’m an observer,’ Floris reminded her, ‘and you’re an intern. We can’t take the investigation in a different direction without their approval, and you won’t get that without proof.’

  ‘Then I’ll find it,’ she said. ‘I may need your help. Do you have to put everything in your reports to Faraday?’

  One look in his eyes told her he would do anything she suggested.

  * * *

  |||

  An hour later, Janice Longbright stood before the same whiteboard and studied Bryant’s diagrams carefully, following lines, triangles, circles and three-dimensional boxes filled with tiny indecipherable scribble. She might as well have been staring at Egyptian hieroglyphics.

  ‘Bloody hopeless,’ she said aloud, wandering to the window.

  The weather was like London itself, secretive in its intentions. Thunder trundled over the rooftops of the shops on Caledonian Road but no storm appeared. In the street below, an elderly woman carrying a red and blue laundry bag was sprayed to her kneecaps with charcoal-coloured water displaced by a bus. A tramp had passed out beneath the window of the newsagent’s, underneath a poster of the Seychelles that said, ‘What are you waiting for?’

  Janice needed a holiday, a proper one with beaches and outdoor restaurants overlooking the sea, but she was broke. She couldn’t spend much more time peering out at one of the world’s ugliest neighbourhoods without going mad. Sometimes when she got home, she moved through exotic cities on Google Street View, knowing that she would never go there. She had spent so much time doing this lately that it came as a surprise to go out onto a real street and see that the roads did not have white arrows on them.

  What am I waiting for? she wondered, looking back at the poster, but Arthur had already answered her question, breezily telling her that she had a one in 45,057,474 chance of winning the National Lottery.

  With an inward sigh she turned her attention back to the whiteboard. The nursery rhyme at its centre had three of its verses crossed through.

  ‘ “When I grow rich,” say the bells of Shoreditch.’ The tabloid hacks had been starved of new details and had resorted to fantasy, but even their attention had suddenly evaporated this morning after receiving news that the police had foiled a major terrorism attempt. A van full of explosives had been discovered near Waterloo Station, timed to go off in the rush hour, but the timer had malfunctioned, with the result that the Oranges & Lemons killer had been unceremoniously booted from the front pages.

  She turned her attention back to Bryant’s mad little drawings.

  ‘Staring at them won’t make them go away,’ said John May, standing in the doorway.

  ‘I wish it would,’ said Longbright. ‘Shoreditch is too big an area to cover. It’s spread across two boroughs. There are hundreds of bars, restaurants and businesses. I can’t find the staff to police it. Why is it we always get the personnel we need after an event, never before?’

  ‘You can’t investigate what hasn’t happened yet. “When I grow rich,” ’ May repeated. ‘Where do the rich hang out in Shoreditch?’

  ‘There are half a dozen high-end hotels there now. God, to think that we used to patrol it in pairs for safety. Is that supposed to be the church in Shoreditch?’ She pointed to Bryant’s mysterious rendering.

  May took a closer look. ‘St Leonard’s.’

  ‘What does it say underneath? You’d think I’d be able to read his writing after all this time.’

  ‘The trick is to imagine it the other way up. It says “twelve bells, Tudor actors buried here, parish stocks and whipping post still in porch.” That’s all.’

  ‘Nobody’s been attacked inside a church.’

  ‘Who have we got over there?’

  ‘Colin and Meera, plus a couple of beat coppers keeping an eye out, and
a patrol car passing every hour. The Met get more coverage for a robbery.’

  ‘Then let’s get a drone,’ said May. ‘Try Dan.’

  Longbright called Banbury in. ‘Can you put something in the air above St Leonard’s Church?’

  ‘You do know they’re technically illegal.’ Banbury came in eating a bowl of Shredded Wheat. The school run forced him to skip breakfast at home, but he got no sympathy because no one else in the Unit could relate to the idea of having children. ‘It’s a pity because I’ve got a fantastic program for one, beta of course and full of bugs. It doesn’t meet any of the regs but one day I hope we might—’

  Janice cut in. ‘Is the drone here?’

  ‘I couldn’t sanction that. It would be totally—’

  ‘We just want to sneak it up there for a few minutes and have a look around,’ said May. ‘Is it in working order?’

  ‘You have to understand that it’s bespoke specialist equipment—’

  ‘Meaning you cobbled it together from bits of old kit.’

  ‘I’ll have to make a lot of adjustments, then charge it.’

  ‘How long will that take?’

  ‘I can probably get it there by late afternoon.’

  ‘That’ll have to do. We’re heading over there now,’ said May. ‘Bring it as soon as you can. I’ll take full responsibility. Sidney needs to stay here. Where is Floris?’

  ‘He went to Raymond’s office.’ Dan gave up on his breakfast. ‘We really should keep him informed.’

  ‘You’re right, of course we should.’

  They slipped past Land’s room and made a run for it.

  SCRIPT EXTRACT FROM ARTHUR BRYANT’S ‘PECULIAR LONDON’ WALKING TOUR GUIDE. (MEET AT SHOREDITCH TOWN HALL, STAY CLOSE TO ME AT ALL TIMES AND TRY NOT TO LOOK LIKE TOURISTS.)

  This ancient, ill-used parish extends from Norton Folgate to Old Street, and from part of Finsbury to Bethnal Green. Originally it was a village on the old Roman northern road called Old Street by the Saxons.