Bryant & May

by Christopher Fowler

  LAND: Accidents, Paula, they’ve all been accidents.

  LAMBERT: So the fact that the latest victim happened to be struck on the head by a falling clock on the very steps of the next church in your nursery rhyme is just a coincidence, is it?

  LAND: It’s not my nursery rhyme, it’s hundreds of years—

  LAMBERT: You’re not getting behind this, are you? It’s a dream case for us, the kind our readers live for. I’m amazed Netflix haven’t sent a documentary team over yet. We’re placing bets as to how long this can go on before one of you accidentally trips over the killer in the dark.

  LAND: You’re underestimating the amount of work involved—

  LAMBERT: Just around the corner from where your clowns were this afternoon, two seventeen-year-old kids were stabbed to death, and the Met arrested eight people less than an hour later. Eight people. On a day when they also managed to foil one of the country’s biggest terror plots.

  LAND: I say, that’s a bit unfair—

  LAMBERT: I’m just telling you what worries our subscribers, that’s all. When they hear about kids being shot they think it’s drug gangs and shrug. But when the targets are just like them they panic because it’s relatable. We’re going with the headline ‘Oranges and Lemons Murders: Attacker Pips Police.’

  LAND: You’re running a punning headline and you’re claiming the moral high ground?

  LAMBERT: If you haven’t had time to catch up with our coverage you can read all about it on our site. We’re getting our information straight from source.

  LAND: Wait, what do you mean? Has the killer been in contact with you?

  LAMBERT: I’ve told you before, we’re claiming press confidentiality on that.

  LAND: If you’ve heard from him you have to turn over your evidence. You can’t obstruct the investigation.

  LAMBERT: What investigation? We don’t see any progress being made at all. When you start getting somewhere, we’ll consider sharing our information with you. Until then, I’ve got a team coming up with fruit-based jokes for future editions.

  LAND: You’re a very shallow human being, Paula.

  LAMBERT: Darling, I’m a journalist.

  LAND: You’re way lower than that. You’re a feature writer.

  LAMBERT: See you tomorrow for the next headline event.

  It was past nine by the time the detectives met up with Giles Kershaw. There were no spring flowers crowding the tombstones outside the St Pancras Coroner’s Office. Winter had crept back under cover of darkness. They approached the building beneath pattering umbrellas, Bryant stumbling over a gravestone in the gloom.

  ‘We should leave this country and set up somewhere warm,’ said May. ‘It would do my rheumatism a world of good.’

  ‘Except that most really sunny places are boring,’ Bryant replied, enveloping them in pipe smoke. ‘I took a holiday in Greece once. I ate a lot of olives and saw a goat. It’s a trade-off; you have to choose between freezing and interesting or hot and dull. Although I wouldn’t mind living in a country where it’s practically a legal requirement to fall asleep after lunch. Janice says she sent you an ID on the victim who was clocked at St Leonard’s.’

  ‘His name is Jackson Crofting,’ said John May. ‘He lives in part of a warehouse off Columbia Road, so St Leonard’s Church was on the way home.’

  ‘Bit of an odd place to head for after work, but go on.’

  ‘He’s twice divorced, a real loner—someone from his office came in to identify him. The director of a very successful video game company in Old Street. There were no messages on his phone but he has dozens of devices and accounts, so he could have been contacted and persuaded to go the church in order to meet someone.’

  ‘Any connection to the others?’

  ‘Nothing yet.’ May rang the doorbell and Kershaw admitted them.

  The lanky coroner looked absurdly fresh and healthy, as if he’d just come off a lawn tennis court.

  ‘Hello, Giles, has Rosa gone home?’ asked May. ‘That spares her from being tormented by my comedy partner.’

  ‘Go right through,’ said Giles. ‘Let’s see if the latest victim puts a sense of urgency under you.’

  The body in the white plastic bag was shorn of identity, the broad, fleshy face washed but bruised and peppered with small maroon cuts. Mr Crofting had been lifted out of a tangled, hurtling life and placed in this timeless room, calm and still and precise, where every action was considered and calibrated. Giles had set his computer to play Debussy nocturnes, playlists chosen for working with the dead.

  ‘What did he do to incur this?’ Bryant wondered. ‘Do you have a cause of death?’

  ‘See for yourself.’ Kershaw carefully lifted Crofting’s head and revealed a small but deep-looking incision above the left side of his collar bone. ‘It looks like the same kind of blade that was used on Ms Rahman outside St Martin-in-the-Fields. Thin, strong, wielded by a right-hander. Obviously I haven’t had time to run toxicology tests yet. I assume we’re meant to think that the clock did the damage, but no forensic examiner would buy that.’

  ‘He doesn’t care about being believed,’ Bryant replied. ‘He wants to cause confusion.’

  As Giles searched inside the incision May turned away from the body. The sight of death disturbed him more since his own brush with mortality. ‘They must have all known each other,’ he said. ‘There would be no sense in planning something like this and then picking random victims.’

  Arthur peered at the body with cheerful prurience. ‘I suspect the answer lies in the book that Cristian Albu should never have had printed. The only trouble is, I can’t find it.’

  ‘Even for you two I have to say that this is extreme.’ Kershaw removed his tweezers from Crofting’s neck. ‘Someone arranges to meet this chap in a church, stabs him and then drops a clock on him? In what world is that normal?’

  ‘The boundaries of normality are shifting, Giles.’ May kept his eyes averted. ‘None of us ever imagined that the nature of criminality would change. Each time the world tilts a little more you have to readjust and work with it. When Russian spies start putting radioactive poison in teapots and perfume bottles, don’t you think others might learn from them and follow suit? Crazy leaders teach us crazy habits. Do you have anything else?’

  ‘Only that he was about to die anyway.’

  ‘You haven’t opened him up yet,’ said Bryant, puzzled.

  ‘I had a look at his NHS file,’ Giles explained. ‘Pancreatic cancer. He’d known about it for over a year.’

  ‘I wonder if his killer knew,’ said Bryant. ‘You’d have to really hate someone to make sure you beat the reaper.’

  ‘We have a suspect but we can’t get to him,’ May explained. ‘He’s surrounded by lawyers and comes up clean on every search. We’ve got some of his cached emails. Everything else has been declared off limits by the commissioner.’

  ‘Then may I make a suggestion?’ Kershaw offered. ‘If the legal approach isn’t working, do something less legal. It wouldn’t be the first time. Your evidence wouldn’t be admissible in court but you might get a confirmation of guilt.’

  ‘Perhaps we should burgle his offices,’ Bryant pondered aloud.

  ‘I merely posited a theory.’ Kershaw looked blankly at May. ‘Did you hear me say anything about a break-in?’

  ‘You said “less legal.” ’

  ‘Before we start arguing about semantics, here’s what was in his pockets.’ Kershaw handed over a clear plastic Ziploc bag, which Bryant promptly tore open and dumped out onto a nonsterile table. ‘I give up,’ said Giles, walking away.

  Bryant thumbed through Crofting’s wallet.

  ‘I don’t know what you expect to find in there,’ said May dismissively. ‘He ran a games company. He has a virtual wallet.’

  ‘Virtual means nearly,�
� said Bryant. ‘He can’t nearly have a wallet but he does have this.’ He held up a white plastic card. ‘It’s a swipey-thing.’

  ‘It’s not a swipey-thing,’ said May, feeling suddenly tired. ‘Any more than a phone app is a “buttony-thing” or a Kindle is a “plastic book.” It must be exhausting to be in such a continual state of amazement at the modern world.’

  ‘As soon as I get used to something it changes,’ Bryant complained.

  ‘That’s because it takes decades for you to get used to anything. You’re only just coming to terms with Wi-Fi.’

  ‘I’m happier with cables. Anything solid. You used to know where you were with a piece of string.’ Bryant flicked the card across to his partner. ‘Look at the logo.’

  The symbol above the name was a drawing of a green pea with a shoot rising from it. ‘Pea?’

  ‘P.E.A. Peter English Associates. It seems Mr Crofting had his own pass for English’s building. There’s a barcodey-thing on the back.’

  ‘You’re just doing it to annoy me now. Why would he have this?’

  ‘I assume English funds, part owns or deals closely with Mr Crofting’s company. We have a legitimate reason for going in. I’m sure I had another one but I’ve forgotten what it was.’

  * * *

  |||

  ‘Giles has a point,’ Bryant said as they left the St Pancras Coroner’s Office. ‘Less legal might be better.’

  May felt that the seed had now been planted in his partner’s mind, but Bryant was way ahead of him, mentally filling a holdall with wire cutters, balaclavas, grappling hooks and coils of rope.

  ‘We’ll go in first thing tomorrow,’ Bryant said. ‘The weekend staff will be on.’

  ‘Or we could keep it all aboveboard and conduct an official inquiry,’ said May.

  ‘You know that will get us nowhere. You’ve already experienced how this fellow deals with the authorities. Deflect, lie, blame, confuse, avoid.’

  ‘And what are we looking for?’

  ‘A smoking gun,’ Bryant replied. ‘If you’re all right with that image.’

  May looked sceptical. ‘I have a feeling it won’t make any difference if we find one. You said it was all about planning. If that’s the case, he’ll have already thought of everything we might come up with.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I think we should let him know we’re on to him.’

  May led the way through the tunnel that returned them to King’s Cross. ‘He’d never get his own hands dirty, but if he hired others to do it there’ll be communications between them.’

  ‘Unless they met in the park, like spies always do on TV.’ Bryant had to put on a burst of speed to avoid a pizza delivery bike. May noticed he didn’t need his stick to do it, either. Had he been faking the need for his brass-bevelled malacca cane?

  As they headed towards the Unit, he wondered what else the old devil was holding back from him.

  Dan Banbury pushed back from his desk and pressed the heels of his hands over his eyes. He had been examining footage from all the locations for hours, and could no longer tell one blurred human shape from another. He was delaying the call to his wife because he hadn’t said goodnight to the kids and was going to be home late again.

  He turned his attention back to the blue-grey pixels. The new security cameras contained facial recognition software, but as always the biggest problem was a physical one: The lenses weren’t rainproof. On dry days they accumulated a powdery fine-grain residue from vehicle tyres. The rain made it stick to the lenses and it had to be removed manually.

  He had broken down the sequence from St Martin-in-the-Fields frame by frame, had watched the poor woman fall to her knees a hundred times, and still could not see the most vital moment. The killer had examined every camera angle before his victim’s arrival. Rahman could have climbed at any number of different angles across the steps, which meant that her attacker had studied all of the sightlines and memorized their weak points.

  Banbury had examined the remains of the clock from St Leonard’s church. It was almost two feet across but not as heavy as it looked, an almost empty cylinder that sat unsecured in a carved roundel in the stone. Not the original clock, the vicar had explained, but a battery-operated replacement made fifteen years ago, and slightly too small so that it was easily shifted. Access? Oh, that was easy, straight up the stairs to the side of the narthex and there it was, the back of the clock, but who would ever think of standing on a chair and pushing it out?

  A madman, thought Banbury grimly, but there’s method in it. He had stabbed Jackson Crofting first and positioned the body below, running up the steps to send the clock down. Dan timed the run up the staircase and felt sure that the entire act could have been completed in less than a minute.

  Colin Bimsley wandered past with a piece of toast wedged in his mouth. He extracted it and stared at the screen. ‘Did you get anything from your drone?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Dan, ‘I got some Power Rangers, a few unicorns and some sweaty little sod who’d been bunged a monkey to keep Her Majesty’s law enforcement officers amused for the afternoon. Is there any more toast?’

  ‘Last slice. You can have a bite of this one.’

  ‘No, thank you. You’ve got ketchup on—actually it’s all over you. And lettuce and something else.’

  ‘Liver sausage.’ Colin flicked the debris away.

  ‘I can’t look at this anymore. Either he’s a master of disguise or I’m seeing a bunch of different people involved.’

  ‘What, you mean like a group of subversives?’

  ‘I don’t know, Colin,’ said Dan irritably. ‘He’s chucking money at a few chancers, getting them to stand around at his crime scenes and stir the mud a little. Like the van driver he hired, Mohammed Alkesh. Make a delivery and get lost—easy. I bet if you went out onto the Caledonian Road right now and asked the first sketchy roadman you saw to go and stand in the station, no questions asked, cash up front, he’d volunteer and offer to bring a friend.’

  ‘You could be right.’ Colin dropped backwards onto the swivel chair next to Banbury. ‘If somebody wanted to destabilize things, right, like the leader of a protest group, it would be easy to make everyone paranoid about going out. I’ve been looking into them. There’s a bunch of incels demanding justice for meat-eaters because they feel threatened by vegetarian options on menus—it was good for a laugh until they started kicking in restaurant windows and poisoning foodstuffs. It’s like this bloke: The nursery rhyme stuff is great publicity.’

  ‘We should be holding a press conference to get all the rumours dismissed,’ said Dan. ‘Raymond told me he wanted to do it but Faraday never got back to him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’re playing silly buggers. How can you get anything done when two people on the same side won’t talk to each other?’ Banbury fast-forwarded to the end of his footage and binned the file. ‘What are you going to do after this is over?’

  Colin stopped in mid-chew. ‘What do you mean? Career, like? I kind of assumed everything was all right now, the way it’s always been in the past. Like when Meera says she never wants to see me ever again and then asks me if I want to go to the pub.’

  ‘No, Colin, this was our last hurrah. Epic fail. We were given it because everyone else knew it would be toxic. We’ll be punting around for new jobs within two to three days.’

  ‘Unless Mr Bryant—’ said Colin. He decided not to tempt fate and swallowed his toast.

  At the other end of the building, Meera yawned and stretched her neck. ‘I have to go home. I’m knackered. What a day. What time is it?’

  ‘Half ten,’ said Sidney, her face made paler by the light from her laptop. The pair were sharing an office full of plasterboard panels at the end of the first floor, but Meera had surrendered her territory without grace. Even so, it was hard to dislike the intern. She ha
d a natural feel for the job, almost as if she had been briefed on what to expect. ‘So,’ Sidney said again, ‘Mr Bryant. Tell me.’

  ‘Why are you always asking about him?’

  ‘He has to undergo a core competency test or he’ll be thrown out.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘It was in Mr Land’s emails.’

  ‘You hacked into them?’

  ‘He doesn’t exactly make it difficult. I also tried to get into the Peter English Associates website but it’s got dual-tier protection.’

  ‘Should you have been doing that?’

  ‘Someone’s convinced your bosses that English is untouchable.’ Sidney flicked through screens of data at a dizzying speed.

  ‘Do you take all that in?’ Meera rose and looked around for her PCU jacket. She wore it off duty as well because it stopped her thinking about what to wear.

  ‘I know what I’m looking for. English looks invulnerable but he’ll have a weak spot.’

  Meera zipped up her jacket. ‘Are you coming?’

  ‘I’ll stay here for a while.’

  ‘You’ll be able to get home okay?’

  ‘You don’t have to worry about me.’

  As Meera left she looked back at Sidney, working in semidarkness, hunched over a new window on her laptop screen. Something nagged at the back of her mind. The girl reminded her of someone or something else. She dismissed the thought and headed out, passing the detectives, who were coming up the stairs and looked as if they were just arriving for work, except that John May’s face was grey with exhaustion. Bryant seemed to age backwards when he was on a case.

  * * *

  |||

  The detectives had returned in order to file their competency tests before their midnight deadline passed.

  ‘It’s ridiculous,’ Bryant complained. ‘It’s late and we’re both tired. I don’t have time to waste on gibberish like this.’