Bryant & May

by Christopher Fowler

  The news teams that had threatened to stake out the terrain, lying in wait for the Oranges & Lemons Killer, had taken one look at the barren streets and hastened back to their newsrooms to report on the other main stories of the day. It was clear that nothing of interest would be happening around here.

  Arthur Bryant felt the same way. St Dunstan’s was much larger than he had remembered but the land around it was too featureless, too bare and open. You couldn’t imagine Magwitch jumping out from behind a tombstone even if you could find one tall enough to hide him. The locals were locked indoors ordering pizzas and staring at their screens.

  ‘Maybe we should head back to the Unit,’ said May, leading his partner across the over-clipped grassland. ‘There’s a forecast for rain in half an hour.’

  ‘He has struck at every church in the right order,’ said Bryant steadfastly. He looked around and found nothing to hold the eye. ‘He will be here. Where’s Janice?’

  ‘A couple of streets over. Turn your headset down, I don’t want anyone knowing we’re police.’

  ‘Nobody ever mistakes us for police anyway,’ Bryant complained. ‘I haven’t walked around here in decades but it looks even more depressing than I remember it.’

  ‘It’s changing. They have an organic farmers’ market now, and yoga in the park. There’s no one here, Arthur. I don’t think he’s going to go through with any more. Four murders in just under a week—’

  ‘There were six fatal stabbings of teenagers in four days just last week,’ Bryant pointed out. ‘Their killers’ motives were just as unfathomable.’

  A crow left a tree, its branch bouncing up. Outside the churchyard railing, a boy was walking along the pavement with a plastic bag of shopping. White cords hung from his grey cotton hood. He bounced a little to his music.

  ‘Have you got any of those weird sweets on you?’ asked May.

  ‘What weird sweets?’

  ‘You know, those paper bags you have in your pockets full of sherbet saucers or shrimps or Spangles. You always have something they stopped making years ago. You’re a mobile sweetshop.’ He made a grab for Bryant’s coat.

  The shopping boy checked his phone, carried on walking, disappeared behind some bushes for a moment, reappeared on his way to the open park gates.

  ‘All I’ve got is this.’ Bryant pulled out a tin of treacle. ‘It’s quite difficult to eat on the move. Oh, hang on a minute.’ He felt in the other pocket and produced some sachets of Marmite and a white chocolate Magnum in its sealed plastic wrapper.

  ‘How long have you had an ice cream in there? It must be liquid by now.’

  ‘Yes, but they’re quite nice to drink. You have to be careful you don’t swallow the stick.’

  The boy was drawing level with them on the pavement beyond the railing, but was preparing to enter a gap in the churchyard railings and cut off the corner. Clearly most people did so; the grass was worn away in a diagonal path. He disappeared behind more bushes.

  May looked disgusted. ‘You’re like a schoolboy who’s been nicking stuff at the local tuck shop.’

  ‘Things just accumulate,’ Bryant admitted. ‘Strangeways seems to like the Marmite sachets.’

  ‘I can’t go near him, he keeps trying to bite me.’

  ‘Yes, he’s not a people cat. He passes out if you make him jump.’

  This time the hooded boy did not reemerge. The change caught Bryant’s attention. He looked around. ‘Where’s he gone?’

  ‘Who?’ asked May.

  ‘There was a lad over there a second ago.’ The street was empty.

  They began moving towards the gate. As they reached the pavement they saw a trainer-clad foot twitching, its heel repeatedly hitting the pavement—thump—thump—thump. The plastic bag lay on its side, a split container of curry oozing out. The boy was grunting and clutching the top of his left arm. Crimson through grey cotton.

  ‘He’s been stabbed. There’s no one around. How is that possible?’ May dropped to his knees and tried to remove the crying boy’s right hand from the wound so that he could assess the damage. ‘It’s a gash, about three inches long, not deep. Have you got any tissues?’

  It did not surprise him when Bryant produced a full-sized tissue box from his coat. Ripping it apart, he wadded the tissues over the cut as the boy pointed towards the church.

  ‘Where did he go?’ asked Bryant, searching the street.

  ‘He must be in the bushes,’ said May. ‘Call the Unit.’

  Bryant looked at his phone. ‘I’ve got no signal.’

  ‘Go closer to the church.’

  Bryant hurried off to make his call. May pressed hard on the boy’s shoulder. He checked the tissues and saw that the blood was still blooming. This is the real face of violence in the East End, he thought, a teenage kid lying on the pavement with a stab wound.

  ‘You’re going to be okay, it’s not deep,’ he told the boy. ‘We’ll take care of you.’

  He looked back towards St Dunstan’s. He could not turn fully around without easing his pressure on the cut. Through the dark trees he saw the leaves of a bush rustle and part. He could sense the changing shadows, the displacement of branches as someone stepped out.

  The boy coughed. Trying to keep his hand pressed on the bloodied tissues, May twisted. The figure was moving into the long narrow avenue of trees. They provided him with all the cover he needed. At their end was the edge of a housing estate where he could easily vanish within the corridors and staircases.

  The tissues were soaked crimson but the boy’s wound had started to clot. He was alert and trying to sit up. This time they would have a living witness. May showed his ID and conducted a search of the boy’s pockets.

  He found a phone, a sheathed knife and a small plastic Ziploc bag. Thinking it might be drugs, he unrolled it carefully. Inside were ten twenty-pound notes. He looked back and saw Bryant on his phone, leaning against a tree.

  May wiped the wound again and saw now that it was only surface. He had seen plenty of self-inflicted cuts before. Releasing the boy, he started to rise. No, he thought, no. He began moving towards Bryant, who was now ambling into the church.

  He broke into a run, but Bryant had vanished inside.

  ‘Get out!’ he shouted, ‘Arthur, get out!’

  He saw the flash before he heard the blast, a deep echoing note that funnelled through the nave and burst from the entrance in a haze of gravelly dust. He felt a hot wind in his face.

  Pressing a tissue over his nose and mouth he headed inside as the orange-grey cloud billowed over him. The stained-glass Christ in the apse had gone, and the unanchored front pews had been blasted backwards. The main stone structure and wooden fixtures of the church had not been damaged. The explosion had been highly localized.

  He looked around for Bryant but found no sign of him. There was no fire. At the base of one of the stone columns he followed a thick smear of blood.

  With a sinking heart he stepped back along the pew-strewn nave, searching for any sign of the body. No, he thought, no, not after all we’ve been through, not like this. How far could Bryant have been thrown?

  On the floor lay a Bible, its pages blasted apart, as if there had been a visitation from an angry god. When he raised his eyes he realized he was looking at a ragged figure crumpled against the wall, beneath one of the low side arches. Behind him, something fell from the balcony and cracked on the tiled floor. Waving the dust from his face, he went to the body and eased himself down beside it.

  He found himself looking at a short, barrel-stomached man in jeans and cowboy boots. Where his head should have been was a tattered grey stump. The rest of him had been dashed across the stones.

  When May emerged he found his partner standing behind the church’s thick protective wall. He appeared unharmed, although he was covered in more dust than usual.

  �
��Were you there when I ran in?’ May asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I couldn’t see anything. I still can’t.’ He removed his glasses and gave them a wipe.

  ‘Your ears—one of them is bleeding.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bryant vaguely. ‘I’ve gone a bit deaf. My hearing aid fell out. It’s okay, I have another one.’ He concentrated on fishing it from his pocket while May tried to wipe his bloody ear.

  ‘Will you get off me?’ Bryant asked. ‘It’s a scratch. You shouldn’t be charging about. How’s the poor devil in there?’

  May looked surprised, which was a feat considering his hair was already standing up. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Trickery,’ Bryant said, shaking out his hat. ‘He has to stay one step ahead of us each time.’

  ‘He paid the boy out there a couple of hundred quid to stick himself with his own knife,’ said May. He ran outside, heading back to the spot where he had left him sitting on the pavement. There was no one there now.

  May turned about, desperate to find anyone who could help. The houses opposite might have been shuttered against a storm. Had the noise of the blast not carried?

  One man stood in the porch of his house, vaguely staring over in the direction of the church. ‘Did you see a boy running?’ May shouted. ‘Black kid, tall, grey hooded top?’

  The man stared back as if looking right through him.

  His headset buzzed at his collarbone. He’d forgotten the sound was turned low. ‘Next street, White Horse Road,’ said Janice Longbright. ‘I’m on the corner.’

  They arrived to find Janice with the boy pinned against a garden wall, his wrists locked together with a plastic tie.

  ‘How did you do that?’ May asked, amazed.

  ‘I could see you from the pavement. You ran off and this one upped sticks and came my way, so I thought I’d better bring him down.’

  ‘Yes, but how?’

  ‘I threw my brick at his shin.’ Longbright always kept half a house brick in her bag, and had a deadly aim. ‘He’s going to be limping for a while.’

  ‘Hey, sonny, who are you?’ he asked the boy.

  ‘His name’s Jemaine Clark,’ she said, patting him on the head. ‘Go easy on him. He didn’t know he was being used as a decoy. He just wanted to make some quick money.’

  ‘I knew it was too good to be true,’ said Jemaine. His nose was running. Longbright wiped it.

  ‘So next time follow your instincts,’ Longbright suggested. ‘Let’s get your shoulder looked at, and don’t worry, no one’s going to tell your mates that you stabbed yourself.’

  ‘There’s been a bomb at St Dunstan’s Stepney, one fatality,’ Colin Bimsley called across the operations room. ‘It’s all a bit confused. Hang on.’ He listened for a moment. ‘I’ve got Janice on the line. The old boys are all right. She arrested a sixteen-year-old lad. The body of a man is being recovered from the church’s interior.’

  ‘Sixteen? He can’t be the right one,’ said Meera.

  ‘You don’t think sixteen-year-olds are capable of murder.’ Sidney looked up, presenting a statement of fact.

  ‘They were right by the church,’ said Colin. ‘The boy was paid to be a decoy, just like last time. They’re taking the victim to St Pancras. There, now you know as much as me.’

  ‘Which isn’t much,’ said Meera. ‘All you’ve told me is that it’s happened again and will keep happening because no one can stop it.’

  ‘You’re looking at me as if it’s my fault.’

  ‘It’s not you, Colin, it’s everything.’ She turned about on herself in frustration. ‘The system doesn’t work anymore, does it? Us, this place, this “radical alternative unit” no longer functions because someone has figured out a way around it.’ Unable to sit still for a second longer, she angrily stormed out.

  Sidney watched her go without a flicker of emotion.

  Colin’s phone rang again. ‘Wait, slow down, repeat that.’ He headed off to Raymond Land’s office.

  Tim Floris was in there with him, studying spreadsheets. The pair were becoming as thick as thieves. Knowing that Land was unable to keep his mouth shut, Colin wondered how much information he was passing through Floris to the ears of the Home Office. They looked up in unison when they saw him. Colin felt his face glowing with anger.

  ‘John just called,’ he said. ‘It’s happened again, inside St Dunstan’s Church. Some kind of lightweight explosive device. Mr Bryant got blown up but he’s all right.’

  ‘Blown up?’ Land stared at him in stupefaction. ‘Again?’

  ‘There’s a man dead. We don’t have an ID yet.’

  ‘I tried to stop him from going,’ said Land. ‘You all heard me.’

  As the calls poured in, the information they imparted grew stranger. While they were waiting for an ambulance, the boy Janice arrested got into a fight with another local teenager and was stabbed again. He had been taken to Mile End Hospital. John May was attempting to identify the victim, and Bryant—well, as far as anyone could understand, it seemed he was heading for Warwick Avenue tube station. He called in to say that his ears were hurting but he was all right and had something very important to do.

  ‘It’s always like this around here these days,’ said Land with a shrug, failing to notice the cynicism in Floris’s eyes. ‘I remember when work used to tail off around six o’clock and we all went to the pub.’ He rolled his eyes in a what-can-you-do gesture, but found himself without an ally.

  * * *

  |||

  ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t come to you this evening, I know how busy you are,’ said Maggie Armitage, giving him a tight hug that left him covered with dog hairs and bits of something that looked like cake icing. She had toned down her usual funfair wardrobe to a graceful coordination of purple and black. ‘I’ve just been at a Wiccan baking fundraiser at East Greenwich Library. Where were you?’

  ‘I was blown up.’

  ‘What, again?’ She could smell smoke on him.

  Bryant looked around. ‘What are you doing here?’

  She pointed to a nearby board announcing tonight’s event: Hell’s Spells, an Evening of Urban Magic with Maggie Armitage, Grand Order Grade IV White Witch of the Coven of St James the Elder, Kentish Town. ‘I’ve got a few minutes before I’m on. Dame Maude Hackshaw gave a talk on owl-grooming last week and nobody showed up. Tip your head to the left. No, your other left.’

  Bryant was puzzled but did as he was told. Some pieces of gravel fell out of his ear.

  ‘Oh, that’s much better.’ He stuck in his little finger and wiggled it around. ‘I think that was a bit of church.’

  ‘You’d better have a glass of vermouth; I seem to have two.’

  ‘It feels like I’m hallucinating. What is this place?’ Bryant looked about the grand saloon at the ashlared stonework inset with chandeliers. Corinthian pilasters supported the encrusted gilt-beamed ceiling. There were too many cherubs. ‘I think I need to sit down,’ he said, and fell into the gold-legged red velvet chair behind him.

  ‘It’s a Lebanese restaurant. It used to be known as Crocker’s Folly,’ Maggie told him. ‘A man called Frank Crocker built it to be ready for the Great Central Railway Terminus, but the officials moved the railway line to Marylebone, leaving him stranded. They say when he heard the news he threw himself out of a window and now his ghost haunts the place. Are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘Not at all.’ Bryant knocked back the vermouth in one gulp.

  ‘What did you need to see me about?’

  ‘Maggie, you’re the only person who might understand. I’m having absolutely the worst week of my life. Death after death, and I can’t stop them because I’m going the wrong way.’

  Her kohl-rimmed eyes stared into his. ‘Which way should you be going?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to understand. Could
I have another vermouth? My ears hurt.’

  Maggie passed him another immense drink from the hospitality tray.

  ‘You know I went missing for a while? I was trying to understand something about myself.’

  ‘Do you want me to read your mind?’

  ‘No, it’s simpler if I just tell you. The Grand Lama said I lack empathy but actually I don’t care about people.’

  ‘Well…that’s what a lack of empathy is.’ Maggie looked even more confused than usual.

  He seemed pained for a moment, then removed a piece of gravel from inside his shirt. ‘I rely on empirical truths because facts don’t lie and human beings do.’

  ‘A Wiccan would argue for the reverse,’ said Maggie. ‘Mr Crocker needed to believe in something untrue and built this place. That’s what drew you to me today.’

  ‘I can’t change who I am, Maggie. I know I frighten people. I don’t fit into the modern world. I don’t want to share everything with everyone all the time.’ He downed his drink.

  ‘You’re going to tell me something’s changed.’

  ‘I suppose I am. At the start of the investigation I talked to Elise Albu, the wife of the man I believe to be the first victim. What she told me made me care about her, so I left all the Oranges and Lemons interviews to John and the others. I didn’t want to feel any more of those painful emotions. Instead I concentrated on understanding the killer’s methods, but I found nothing.’

  ‘Arthur, your murderer is a chameleon, a liar, a shell. Damaged people are dangerous, you know that.’

  ‘Is there any more vermouth?’ Now that he had started to unburden himself, he felt like a deflating balloon. ‘It’s as if the world is half an inch from chaos and is about to collapse in on us, so why not just let it? Why keep trying to make sense of things? Why be the one who tries to hang on to the last little bit of irrefutable truth? Why should I be Winston Smith? Remembering the rest of “Oranges and Lemons” didn’t do him any good, did it?’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, you dear old thing.’ Maggie’s smile held a strange sadness. ‘It’s in our nature to believe that truth will bring order to chaos. People always hope.’