Bryant & May

by Christopher Fowler

‘This has nothing to do with you.’ English stared into the upturned bell, then carried on climbing around it.

  Colin waited a moment, then continued up. Above his head the octagonal walls narrowed. The steps turned to a slim wooden platform running around the edge of the steeple. There were no more handrails to rely upon. He was not the ideal person to send to the top of a spire, but none of the Met’s backup officers had appeared. He tried not to think about the drop beside him. He could sense Meera closing in behind.

  There was a papery thrashing of wings as half a dozen pigeons were shaken from their roost, spraying feathers, dust and guano, batting their way up to the broken wood panels at the steeple’s peak.

  Edging past an immense brown curtain of dirt-encrusted cloth, Colin caught a glimpse of English as he reached the great bell at the top and leaned over the edge of the parapet towards it. What was he trying to do?

  English was no more than ten feet away from him. Colin had gone as high as he could. The tower plunged away just beyond his right boot. The bolts holding the ramp in place squeaked and grated as he moved upwards.

  English reached out over the railing towards the bell, intent on his task.

  Colin barrelled into him. The great bell of Bow shifted from its upright position, but English threw himself after it as the flywheel turned. The momentum was impossible to stop. He went over the edge as the bell swung down. His feet caught other bells, which began pealing cacophonously from the tower.

  When the dust cleared Colin saw that English was hanging from the clapper of the great bell. His tie clip—who wore those anymore?—pinged from his tie and bounced down through the bell chamber.

  Colin ran back down to the point where the stairs became a ramp. He was underneath the great bell now. English was swinging helplessly back and forth above him, just out of reach. He looked less elegant with his stomach hanging out of his striped shirt. The echoing ring of metal shook down dust and pieces of mortar.

  ‘Let go and I’ll try to break your fall,’ Colin shouted, unsure whether English could hear him over the din.

  On the third swing English’s grip slipped and he had no choice but to drop. Colin spread his arms wide and snagged his catch but the weight pulled them both over, crashing them onto the wooden platform as the bolts popped from the walls, firing across the interior of the spire like bullets.

  Meera was less concerned about stopping English than making sure that her sudden offer of marriage didn’t end before it had begun. Grabbing Colin and shoving him back from the edge, she dropped beside English and locked his arms behind his back just as a chunk of the platform pulled away from the wall.

  They half dragged, half walked the bedraggled businessman back to safety, the clanging of the bells subsiding above them.

  ‘You bloody idiots,’ he warned them, ‘you don’t know what you’re doing.’

  When they reached the base of the spire Meera picked up the grimy paper packet that had fallen from its place on top of the upturned bell’s clapper. She pushed it inside her jacket as Colin dragged English out of the church, the verger watching them in amazement.

  English attempted to maintain his poise, but he had been reduced. Out in the courtyard he quietly called his lawyer, then fell silent and allowed himself to be led away.

  ‘We came in that patrol car,’ said Bryant, watching them go. ‘Why are we the ones who have to take the tube?’

  ‘You know we can’t travel with the prisoner,’ said May. He turned to find an impossibly young Met officer running up to them.

  ‘Sir, we just had a phone call about a stabbing on Bread Street. We heard some bloke got hit with a machete, really bad, like his head is hanging off.’

  ‘Have you been there?’ asked May, checking his badge: Adrian Tomkins.

  ‘We had a quick shufti but couldn’t see anything so I thought I should come and get you.’

  ‘You should have conducted a thorough search first, Tomkins,’ Bryant told him, but May was already heading over to the next street.

  ‘You can see the church from there,’ May called back. ‘ “Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.” ’

  * See Bryant & May: England’s Finest.

  Ever temperamental, London had wiped away its azure sky to hurl rain at the windows of 231 Caledonian Road.

  Raymond Land sat back in his chair and considered his choice of words. The email to Leslie Faraday sat unfinished on his computer screen.

  He scanned the sentences once more and signed the letter with a heavy heart. Having taken Faraday’s periodic silences as a rebuke, he had written out a measured strategic retreat from the investigation. Although he was a good man at heart, Land gave up too easily. He had always been willing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. As he read back over his words, he realized he was looking at the Unit’s suicide note. It couldn’t be helped. It was time to admit that they were beaten.

  He hit Send.

  Sitting back in his chair, he waited for the whoosh that would signal the end. Any second now the dead weight of responsibility would begin to rise from his shoulders.

  Nothing happened.

  He checked that the sound was turned up. He tried to figure out whether the email had gone or not. It wasn’t showing in his sent folder. He was suddenly looking at a blank screen. What had Tim repeatedly told him to do? Turn it off and turn it on again.

  That didn’t work. There was something odd going on. He wandered out into the corridor. Where was everyone?

  Janice Longbright was not at her desk, and there was no one in the operations room. Floris’s office was empty. Land picked up the framed photograph beside the civil servant’s laptop. It showed the Home Secretary and his police team around a champagne-laden table at a black-tie bash. Nobody at the PCU had been invited to a formal event since the jelly fight at the Met Excellence Awards Dinner. From somewhere upstairs came the sound of rainwater pinging into a bucket.

  When he went back into his office something caught his attention in the corner of the room. A tiny red eye was staring at him. Had Dan installed some kind of new surveillance equipment?

  ‘Is there anyone around?’ he called. Silence. Something tapped at the window. He turned to find Stumpy the pigeon on his sill, giving him a death stare.

  As he headed back out and turned the corner he bumped into Dave One and nearly went into cardiac arrest.

  ‘Blimey, Mr L., don’t creep about like that,’ said Dave One. ‘I wanted to see you. Have you got a sec?’

  ‘I’m really busy,’ Land lied, unnerved.

  ‘It’s just here, look.’ He bent down and lifted the corner of a corridor carpet tile. Beneath it was a fine black cable. ‘It’s not one of ours. Someone’s playing silly buggers. Has anyone from outside got keys to the Unit?’

  ‘You know we’re the only ones who can get in,’ said Land. ‘And sometimes even we can’t. So what is it?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it goes all the way down to the basement and it wasn’t there a few days ago. Mr Faraday must have access to the site, mustn’t he?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Land lamely.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Dave One, pulling at his moustache, ‘the first victim, that Mr Claremont, he didn’t die, did he? You lot have been trying to reach him without any luck, as far as I heard. That struck me as odd. ’Cause I read an Agatha Christie once where these people went to an island—’

  ‘What, you want to be a detective as well now?’ asked Land. ‘We’ve already got a girl barely out of her teens running around giving us the benefit of her great experience. And what’s wrong with the phones? Why can’t you ever get them working properly?’

  Dave One did not care to have his workmanship maligned. ‘There’s nothing wrong with them. Maybe the person you’re calling sees your number come up and doesn’t want to speak to you.’

 
; Land had not thought of that.

  As he went downstairs and hurried out of the building he realized he had set himself a daunting task: to find a working telephone box in King’s Cross that didn’t have someone breaking the law in it.

  Trying to ignore the astonishing odour of McDonald’s boxes marinated in urine, Land stepped into one and called Leslie Faraday’s direct line, wiping the receiver before gingerly putting it to his ear.

  Faraday’s PA was screening his calls. After he laboriously explained why he was calling, she put him through just to get him off her phone.

  ‘I’ve been trying to track you down for ages,’ Faraday complained, which was clearly a lie. ‘Where the hell have you been? Miss Hamadani rang you several times and kept getting put through to a Turkish gentleman who insisted he was an electrician. He tried to sell her a flat. Now Mr Floris informs me you’ve arrested Peter English without authorization.’

  So much for promising to take our side, thought Land, misremembering their conversation. I knew he was a creep from the moment I laid eyes on him. He had already forgotten that Floris had just spent several days helping him out.

  ‘We have new proof linking English to the investigation,’ Land explained hurriedly. ‘I tried to send you an email requesting a detention period of ninety-six hours. We have no holding cell at the moment but there’s an arrangement in place with the hotel on the corner.’

  ‘I don’t even know where to begin with that last sentence,’ said Faraday, suddenly sounding tired. ‘Are you really committed to this?’

  ‘It will end the investigation,’ Land promised.

  Faraday thought for a moment. ‘You have to take full responsibility for him.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Land, accepting that whatever happened he would always get the blame. ‘Any minute now we’ll have the killer in custody.’

  He rang off and ducked back through the rain, but when he reached the Unit he found that the hall stairway lights were now out. The two Daves were supposed to have installed new LEDs in the ceiling, but he could see only bare wires hanging down. It looked as if someone had deliberately pulled the fittings out.

  Thunder rumbled overhead, bouncing off the rooftops of Caledonian Road. As Land climbed, he wondered where Bimsley and Mangeshkar had got to. They should have arrived with English by now.

  On the first floor he checked the operations room, then Longbright’s office, but found no one around. The building was dark and wet and oddly deserted. There was usually someone left behind. He felt a prickle of cold air on the back of his neck, as if a window had suddenly opened.

  Land turned sharply, but there was no one there.

  With an involuntary shudder he returned to his office and tried the lights, but the switch did not work. His computer was still functioning so there had to be a problem with the fuses. The junction box was in the basement and he had no intention of going down there by himself.

  What on earth was going on?

  * * *

  |||

  Bryant and May stood in the middle of Bread Street and looked along the glass palisade of offices that lined it. The pavements on both sides were empty but for a ragged lad with a sleeping bag at half mast, going through a bin.

  ‘Who took the call about this chap with his head chopped off?’ asked May.

  PC Tomkins shifted uncomfortably. ‘It came through on the emergency number. We thought what with the church being so near we’d better—’

  ‘—walk over to us before checking whether it might possibly be a hoax,’ said Bryant. ‘You stupid boy.’

  ‘I don’t know what we’re doing, sir. Everyone’s telling us different things.’

  Bryant angrily ground at the kerb with his stick. ‘I sent a warning out to everyone: Don’t trust what you see, check it first. It was a hoax designed to get you all away from the church. It’s a good job we got to him before he could cause any further harm.’

  May gave up with his phone. ‘I can’t get through to anyone at the PCU. Tomkins, can you try?’

  The officer called in, waited, rang again. ‘No answer. It sounds like a line fault. I can have it checked.’

  ‘No time—something’s wrong.’ Bryant headed to the junction, searching for a taxi. ‘We need to get back right now.’

  ‘Calm down,’ said May, ‘I’ll find a cab. You know they don’t like to stop for a scary old man waving a walking stick about.’

  May hailed a black cab before it had a chance to turn into Bread Street and opened the door for his partner. ‘English will set his lawyer on Colin and Meera. They won’t get anywhere with him.’

  Bryant climbed in and dug out his Spitfire.

  ‘Oi, mate, you’re not going to smoke that in here,’ the driver warned.

  ‘Police officers,’ said Bryant. ‘Open a window and get to King’s Cross within ten minutes or I’ll find over thirty reasons to nick you.’

  May fell back as the disgruntled driver tore away. Bryant filled the bowl of his pipe with Ancient Mariner Full Strength Naval Shag and lit it, sucking noisily.

  ‘You know, late-sixteenth-century printers made up all kinds of wild stories to sell news pamphlets,’ he said, as if continuing some academic banter that had begun earlier. ‘They ran stories of seven-headed monsters and women who lived on nothing but air, men with goats’ legs and battles that had been won instead of lost. The art of lying has been with us since the birth of civilization.’

  ‘As usual I have no idea what you’re on about, Arthur.’

  ‘Why do we believe things we’d be better off not believing?’ Bryant jabbed his point home with the end of his Spitfire, scattering sparks. ‘Tricksters know how to override our natural instincts. By averting our gaze they turn us blind.’ He threw his partner the grimy envelope English had collected from the great Bow bell. ‘This is why he went to the church. Not to attack anyone but to get his hands on this. The one job he couldn’t trust to anyone else. Take a look.’

  May studied the bank statements in his hand. It didn’t require a bookkeeper to see that the Better British Business deposit account held in the Cayman Islands contained an eye-watering amount of cash. ‘Monthly transactions with no provenance,’ May noted. ‘Dan already checked that out but found no red flags.’ The second page showed the same transactions held at a different bank. He gave a low whistle. ‘No wonder English was anxious to get this back. London, Algeria, Indonesia—it’s a money-laundering route.’

  Bryant tapped at the bottom line. ‘The National Fraud Authority will kill his party before it gets launched.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said May. ‘Why is someone blackmailing English at the site where he’s meant to commit his final murder?’

  ‘You have a knack for overcomplicating things,’ said Bryant as they swung past St Paul’s. ‘I admit it takes some nerve to use a man like English as a stooge, but it worked. We’ve had the same bait-and-switch trick pulled on us again and again, and we’ve fallen for it every time. They say the perfect deception is the one that fools the victim twice.’

  ‘But what’s the point of sending English out to Bow and phoning in a nonexistent attack?’ asked May. ‘We have him in custody. The end of the rhyme has been reached. All we need to do now is wring a confession out of him.’

  ‘Those pages are all you need,’ said Bryant, puffing away so furiously that the driver opened all of the windows and made retching noises. ‘The fraud trial hasn’t received a revised date, so I guess this can be introduced as new evidence.’

  ‘What about his involvement in murder?’

  ‘You asked me if he was guilty and I said yes—but not of murder.’

  May’s eyes narrowed. ‘You know what’s going on.’

  ‘And you know I’m superstitious. I can’t explain until I’m absolutely certain.’ Bryant looked out of the window. They were on Farringdon Road heading
north, passing Exmouth Market, climbing the incline to King’s Cross. Thunder boomed above them. Dumbfounded, John May watched as the cab sped on through the evening rain towards the Unit.

  Raymond Land pulled the plug out of his dead computer and followed its lead under his desk, lifting up carpet remnants to expose the trail. Crawling around on the floor covered him in cat hairs but finally proved pointless as the cable disappeared down a jagged hole in the floorboards. He was sure it had always been plugged into the skirting board by the window where Stumpy the pigeon sat watching him. Pressing his eye to the floor, he tried to see into the darkness below.

  Something was faintly beeping.

  There was a louder noise in the corridor, a roll and a thump. Were the two Daves still here? Now there was silence. He sat up and tilted his head, listening.

  Clear and loud, chiming through the corridors, came the clamour of a bell being swung back and forth, back and forth. It sounded like a teacher in a school playground gathering her pupils.

  Land couldn’t work while the power was out but nor could he leave the building, not when their only suspect was about to be brought in and charged. There was more light in the operations room because it faced the dazzling bar of the youth hostel opposite and had taller windows, so he headed there.

  The bell suddenly stopped ringing, as if a hand had clamped itself over the clapper. The operations room was bathed in a cartoonish crimson chiaroscuro, much of it flooding from a large bar sign in the street that was written in neon and read Soup of the Day: Negroni.

  The grey pewter handbell had a pocked iron handle and was very old. It sat in the middle of the Formica-topped table at the front of the operations room. It looked suspiciously like the one that had been stolen from St Sepulchre-without-Newgate.

  Land took another step forward and trod on the cat’s tail. Strangeways screamed and sank its teeth into his trouser leg, mercifully missing flesh.

  A candle flame popped alight on the other side of the table. Land could not see who was holding it. As Unit chief this would have been a perfect time to assert his authority, but instead he said meekly, ‘Look here, what’s going on?’