Bryant & May

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Video games,’ May explained. ‘She was in films based on a game. Hard News can link any story back to a celebrity.’

  ‘Well, I hope nobody’s stupid enough to fall for this rubbish.’

  ‘People can only react to what they’re told,’ May replied reasonably. ‘It’s not their fault if they’re fed lies.’

  ‘It is if they believe them without evidence. Where’s she getting her information from?’

  ‘I think Raymond’s been speaking to her. I just saw him in the corridor and he scuttled past me like a crab.’

  ‘Do you think he’s all right? Perhaps I should go and talk to him.’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ May said. ‘It usually has a deleterious effect.’

  ‘There is something very odd going on around here.’ Bryant prowled to the window and wiped it with his sleeve. ‘There are people outside just standing around and staring up at the building.’

  ‘Have you looked at our website?’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘There’s some pretty fierce feedback on it today about taxpayers’ money being wasted. Apparently Faraday doesn’t want us to hold a press conference because he thinks it’ll turn into a PR disaster.’

  ‘Of course, because he’s not interested in whether the Oranges and Lemons Killer is ever found—’

  ‘Please don’t call him that, Arthur.’

  ‘—but we have to let Faraday know that he doesn’t control Raymond. We control Raymond.’

  ‘All right, let’s talk to him,’ said May, grabbing his partner’s hand and dragging him out into the half-repaired corridor.

  Land was standing at the window, too. His office looked barer and even less finished than before. Above his unstable desk the ceiling’s innards were hanging out. ‘What do those people want?’ he asked as they entered. ‘It’s like…like…’

  ‘Night of the Living Dead?’ Bryant ventured. ‘The Leeds Dripping Riot of 1865?’

  ‘You had better have some very bloody good news for me,’ Land warned, turning from the glass. ‘This Jackson Crofting bloke copped it a week after winning the Business Personality of the Year Award. “Entrepreneurial excellence,” apparently, not “Most likely to be brained with a clock.” ’

  ‘He wasn’t,’ said Bryant. ‘He was stabbed in the back of the neck.’

  ‘Well, that makes it so much better, thank you. What was he doing at a church anyway? Nobody in London goes to church. Why can’t anyone answer the simplest questions? Leslie Faraday seems to have stopped talking to me. He knows we’re dead in the water. This is how dictators feel in their last days of power. Everyone walks away from them.’ Bryant raised a puzzled eyebrow at his partner. ‘And every time I open my computer it fills up with the most appalling lies about us from websites I’ve never heard of. Could you get Dan to come and clean it up for me?’

  ‘Darling Raymond, as much as we’d love to discuss your janitorial issues, perhaps you could explain why we haven’t held a press conference? I mean, apart from the fact that you always cock them up?’

  ‘Faraday expressly forbade it—’

  ‘—because he doesn’t want it to come out that MI5 was investigating Claremont’s mental health, I get that, but shouldn’t you hold one anyway?’

  ‘We need to get the public on our side,’ May urged. ‘We have no evidence and no suspects other than this fellow English and that poor dupe who was given five hundred pounds to stand in a churchyard. We’re supposed to be putting all our energy into policing St Dunstan’s now but we’ve barely started dealing with what happened yesterday. We’re one step behind all the time.’

  ‘St Dunstan’s,’ Land repeated. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a thousand-year-old Anglican church in Stepney,’ said Bryant, ‘the next connection to the rhyme. It’s known as the Church of the High Seas because so many sailors are buried there. It has a delightfully arched nave, if memory serves.’

  ‘I don’t care if it has a jacuzzi and a disco ball, I don’t want you going anywhere near it. The press will be there ahead of you.’

  ‘There’s another human life at stake,’ May reminded him, ‘or perhaps the victims have been forgotten in this travelling circus.’

  Land stood firm. ‘Your staff were on site at the time of the last attack and failed to catch even a glimpse of the killer, so why go there? It’s physically impossible to run surveillance on the entire borough of Stepney.’

  ‘We need to be near the church,’ said Bryant.

  ‘And do what?’ Land almost screamed. ‘You never put batteries in your hearing aid and he’s starting to look like a man who’s been recently shot.’

  ‘We’re perfectly capable of—’ May began.

  ‘I don’t care what you’re capable of, I care about what photographers see through their camera lenses, a sepia tint of two mature Victorian gentlemen who’ve just come from the park after feeding the pigeons, not the dynamic leaders of a major murder investigation. Don’t you understand? This is out of your league now. People are saying that a cell of radicals is planning the country’s downfall, warming up for bigger attacks.’

  ‘We’ve heard that,’ said Bryant defensively. ‘Even if they exist they’re hardly likely to hide clues in an old nursery rhyme.’

  ‘Well, it’s the word on the street,’ said Land.

  ‘The street?’ Bryant was incredulous. ‘You’ve never ever been to the street. You’re like the captain of the Pinafore.’

  ‘I thought he went to sea,’ said May, confused.

  ‘He never ever went to sea, that’s the whole point,’ Bryant explained. ‘What have you heard about a radical cell?’

  Land scrabbled about for his notes. ‘Only that a bunch of disgruntled business leaders are forming a so-called populist political party to “take back control,” as their slogan puts it. Let me tell you how this will play out. At some time in the near future a call will come through to arrest extremists. And that is what Faraday wants. That’s what will clear the streets of dissidents in the eyes of the Home Office and win him a promotion.’

  ‘I hardly think that’s likely.’

  ‘What, you think it couldn’t happen here, given the way things are going?’

  ‘No, Faraday being promoted. He has the mental agility of a beanbag.’

  ‘I’m warning you to stay here.’ Land was tempted to thump his desk but feared the leg might come off. ‘Let Floris see that you’re performing the duties expected of you. Don’t disappear. You can send off Mangeshkar and Bimsley and anyone else with their body parts in full working order but I do not want to turn on my TV and see you threatening the Channel Four cameras with a walking stick, do you understand? I need a case built on solid evidence. You must have missed the last attack by seconds.’

  ‘He was watching,’ said Bryant. ‘His clues aren’t actually clues because they’re not solvable, and he knows it. The “Oranges and Lemons” thing is a con.’

  ‘I’m confused,’ said Land, who was increasingly familiar with the sensation. ’Is he following the rhyme or not?’

  ‘That’s the problem,’ said Bryant. ‘It’s not about the rhyme but it could be about the churches. Every ward in the city has at least one venerable place of worship. The general public barely notice any of them, whether they’re Catholic, Anglican or pagan.’

  ‘There aren’t any pagan churches,’ said Land irritably. ‘Pagans are just nutters in headbands forming a conga line around old rocks four times a year.’

  ‘You misunderstand, my dear old mumper. Historically, churches have a connection with paganism because many were built on top of temples, including our very own St Paul’s Cathedral. The central image of Catholicism, Mary seated with her son, is drawn from the depiction of Isis with her child Horus. It’s known as the lactans pose, and is—’

  ‘Enough!’ Land slammed his
hand so hard on the desk that his tea mug slopped, surprising everyone, including himself. ‘You’ve done this for the last time. I want you to catch a murderer, not give me a lecture in philately.’

  ‘That’s stamp collecting,’ said Bryant calmly. ‘Perhaps you mean theology—it’s hard to tell when you get het up like this. Have one of your pills.’

  ‘I don’t need to take a Valium, I am quite—’

  ‘Second drawer down.’

  ‘—capable of—’

  Bryant quietly slid his tea in front of him. ‘Better take two.’

  ‘Get him out of here,’ Land pleaded to May, ‘and don’t let him leave the building. If anyone from the press calls you, you are not to speak to them.’

  As soon as the detectives had gone, Land opened the drawer and reached for his tablets. After he reread Dr Gillespie’s email about Bryant’s health, he was left wondering what to truly believe.

  The operations room looked like an abandoned cinema. The two Daves’ plasterboard panels had been propped against the windows to block out light and increase the contrast of Banbury’s images. Looped segments of camera footage stuttered across screens, flecking the walls with fragments of repeated action.

  Janice Longbright looked around for her coffee cup and found it cold. She had catalogued the footage codes for Dan so that they could be edited into a single film clip that even Raymond Land, who had the attention span of a sugar-addicted toddler, could follow.

  ‘The hardest part is working out where the killer is standing in all of these takes.’ She pulled out chairs in front of the main monitor. Dan waited until the detectives had sat and began spinning through the footage.

  ‘In the Strand we have to assume he’s inside the van with the driver. We can see through the window in some shots but the shadows are too deep to make out much. He either threatened Alkesh or paid him to turn a blind eye. No wonder the lad ran off afterwards. MI5 seems to think that Alkesh is no longer in the country. They’re not keeping us informed about their findings.’

  Banbury moved to the next sequence.

  ‘The attack on Chakira Rahman. Two cameras picked her up on the steps of St Martin’s. Watch this: There’s an elderly Indian man, a middle-aged woman and…I don’t know what this guy is, he’s dragging a piece of cardboard around, maybe begging. Here comes Rahman, cutting across the corner of the staircase, not really looking where she’s going. Now, a little further on’—he checked the coding note and span forward—‘the cardboard guy passes closest.’

  ‘How close?’ asked John May.

  ‘It’s hard to tell exactly because the cardboard is under his left arm, which obstructs our view. Here’s the crucial moment. We can see him start to raise his right hand. That’s where the contact occurred.’

  Banbury moved through the frames. Two grey figures were visible in a tangle of arms and coats. Nothing was clear, nothing definite.

  ‘We can’t see Rahman’s face so we don’t know what her reaction was. The cardboard guy moves on but doesn’t speed up or change the way he’s moving. His body language should give him away but it doesn’t. Then nothing for three seconds, and finally we see Rahman go down the steps, here. We had Colin reenact it and he nearly broke his nose. The cardboard sheet acted as a screen for the stabbing action.’

  Dan froze the image. ‘The toxin on the knife blade is interesting. There’s a drug similar to scopolamine, the active ingredient in seasickness tablets, called burundanga. It’s a ground-up extract from the seeds of the borrachero shrub and accounts for half of all ER admissions in Colombia. It’s also known as Devil’s Breath. It’s commonly blown into the face, and is available here as a street drug. Lately it’s been used by Chinese nationals on women in Parisian night clubs.’

  ‘Two cheers for human ingenuity,’ said Bryant. ‘Let’s move on before I get too depressed.’

  ‘The next one won’t make you feel any better,’ Kershaw warned, pulling forward another screen. ‘The death of Judge Tremain presents us with a familiar problem. Evergreens. Why couldn’t he have worked in an office behind a tree that sheds its leaves? The foliage obscures the window because the camera is only concerned with the doorway.

  ‘Which brings me to the fourth, and here it gets messy. There were people and cameras everywhere in Shoreditch, but we’ve nothing from St Leonard’s churchyard because it’s on ecclesiastical land and they see no reason to spend money on cameras when the property is locked at night. I thought there must be a direct view of the portico from the other side of the road. There’s a 360-degree camera installed on the first floor of that terrace, but guess what, it’s been stolen. The property owner looked shocked, couldn’t remember the last time he checked it, et cetera. The failure would have been flagged up at the surveillance centre but no one seems to have noticed, which means we have no footage of the suspect’s egress from the churchyard. We’ve plenty of video from the drone but it’s of the runner who was hired to decoy us.’

  ‘This is not working,’ said Bryant, waving his hand at the screens. ‘All this overreliance on technological data. It’s not your fault, Dan, it’s what we all do now, sit around being fed electronic half-truths, using that’—here he stabbed a finger at Dan’s monitor—‘when we should be using this.’ He knuckled the side of his head. ‘Whatever happened to hunches, feelings, taking a few chances?’

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s how Timothy Evans ended up being hanged by mistake,’ said Meera.

  ‘Who’s been hanged?’ asked Colin, who had momentarily zoned out.

  ‘Evans was executed for murder in 1950, but his landlord was the serial killer Reginald Christie, who fed the police false information to cover up his own guilt,’ Bryant explained.

  ‘Why did the cops listen to him?’

  ‘Because they liked him. They wanted to believe him.’

  ‘Which was over seventy years ago and I know that seems like yesterday to you, Mr Bryant, but can we get back to the present?’ Banbury asked. ‘I can’t fix the drone in time to use it for St Dunstan’s.’

  ‘Can’t we borrow one?’

  ‘I can try, but there’s not a lot of goodwill out there at the moment,’ said Dan. ‘Do you know the area?’

  ‘The streets are quiet. Anyone turning up at the church will be there for a reason. It isn’t a place you just happen to be passing. It’s flat and exposed. He won’t be able to slip away into a crowd this time.’

  Bryant had stopped listening. Tired and frustrated, he left the operations room and returned to his desk, settling himself with the items he had taken from Elise Albu: the sales ledger, four scorched self-published volumes and some correspondence that had survived the flames.

  But he couldn’t simply let go of the ‘Oranges & Lemons’ rhyme. There was something about its harshness that drew him back. He looked along his bookshelves and plucked down a title—The Compendium of British Nursery Rhymes, published the previous year by Eleanor Chester.

  The chanted children’s game of Oranges & Lemons began as a square dance with the same tune, which imitates the sound of church bells. It was first noted around the year of the Great Plague, 1665, and was sung on festival days. It is fanciful to think that the end of the song, ‘Here comes a chopper to chop off your head,’ is the logical conclusion of the prisoner’s journey to Tyburn Tree, as debt was not a capital offence, although offenders could be hanged for ‘fraudulent bankruptcy.’ Charles Dickens’s father was sent to the Marshalsea Prison in 1824 for a debt owed to a baker.

  The rhyme is based on an older, considerably longer version called ‘London Bells.’ In it, ‘ “Bull’s-eyes and targets,” say the bells of St Margaret’s’ refers to nearby archery ranges and ‘ “Brickbats and tiles,” say the bells of St Giles’ is a reference to neighbouring builders’ yards. ‘ “Pokers and tongs,” say the bells of St John’s’ is more sinister. This church is situated on the second floor
of the White Tower inside the Tower of London, where instruments of torture were stored.

  Other verses refer to local tradespeople and businesses within the vicinity of each church. St Dunstan’s has existed for well over a thousand years. It has been suggested that the reference ‘ “When will that be?” say the bells of Stepney’ could refer to sailors’ wives wondering when they would see their husbands again.

  Eleanor Chester had an email address and was based in Bloomsbury, barely ten minutes’ walk away. That was good enough for Bryant. He put in a call, then stuffed his battered hat onto his tonsured head and grabbed an umbrella.

  ‘I’m coming with you.’ Sidney was standing in the doorway.

  ‘You don’t even know where I’m going,’ said Bryant in some irritation.

  Sidney laughed. ‘Do you know you talk to yourself? I literally just heard you say where you were going.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to come with me?’ Bryant eyed her red rain hat, matching jacket and sparkly black leggings with suspicion. ‘I thought perhaps you had a job interview at Cirque du Soleil.’

  ‘Has anyone ever told you you’re funny?’

  ‘No, and—’

  ‘—they never will,’ they both said.

  ‘Come on, then.’ He held out an arm to her. ‘I could do with a walk.’

  ‘Do you want me to book an Uber?’

  ‘I do not wish to stare at a small drawing of a car turning back and forth while I shout “You’re going the wrong way” at it, thank you.’

  ‘But I thought as you’re old you would prefer—’

  He patted her arm. ‘Try not to speak.’

  They argued all the way there.

  Raymond Land looked up as Sidney led a scrofulous pile of clothes past his door. ‘He’s not going out, is he?’ he asked Tim Floris, who was seated beside him. ‘Where’s she taking him?’

  ‘Who?’ asked Floris, looking around.

  ‘Him. That one-man slum. Bryant. I explicitly told him not to leave the building. You have to treat the staff here as if they’re children. Sometimes they need to be smacked.’