Bryant & May

by Christopher Fowler

  The candle flickered and moved. The bell was raised—for a brief moment Land thought it was supernaturally lifting itself—and went along with it. The figure kept the light low. It seemed lopsided and somehow shortened, until Land realized that it was limping.

  * * *

  |||

  Downstairs, Sidney tried the newly installed electronic code and found that the main entrance’s temporary door would not open. She had received a text from Janice asking if she would pick up a package at the railway station. Just as she was trying the door again, Longbright turned up.

  ‘There was nothing there for me to collect,’ Sidney said. ‘Did I go to the wrong place?’

  ‘I didn’t ask you to collect anything.’

  Sidney showed her the text she’d received. ‘It was sent from your office laptop.’

  Janice turned her attention to the door. ‘Why do these codes never work?’ She gave the door’s base a hard back-kick with her boot. The lock popped and the chipboard panel swung open. ‘Dave Two taught me that. Good job I wasn’t wearing heels today.’ She held the door wide.

  ‘No one’s answering,’ Sidney told her, going ahead. ‘The phones are down and it looks like all the lights are off.’

  ‘That’s nothing unusual,’ said Janice. ‘I’ve just arranged for the Happy Hotel and Bistro to take Peter English tonight. They have a secure room on the lower ground for “problem guests.” It’s like a drunk tank with a trouser press. It’ll take us until tomorrow to get through the charge sheets.’

  ‘We could put a cell in our basement,’ Sidney suggested. ‘It’s big enough down there.’

  The light from the street faded as they climbed. ‘Have you been down there?’

  ‘I’ve measured it. The council keep the plans online.’

  Janice stopped her at the top of the stairs. ‘You know we have to tell them the truth sooner or later, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘I’m surprised nobody’s figured it out.’

  Sidney stopped again. ‘Are you sure you didn’t send me a text?’

  ‘Not me.’

  Janice took out her brick. Together they went into the darkened corridor.

  * * *

  |||

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Land nervously asked the pool of candlelight.

  There was no answer. He was being led back to his office, the cat darting ahead of him. It was obviously unwise to keep following, but curiosity overcame his fear.

  As he stepped into the room, the door swung shut behind him and a lock turned, which was surprising as he was pretty certain that the last time he looked his office had not only been missing a lock but was also minus a door.

  The pewter handbell was rising again and began to toll with shocking loudness, its cavity swinging at him like the jaws of an animal.

  Land tried to remember where his phone was. He felt his pockets. ‘Put down the bell and we’ll talk,’ he said, trying to muster a commanding voice.

  The candle grew brighter in the still air and Land saw who was holding it. The awful weight of the truth fell upon him. As did the bell, which caught him on the side of the head, knocking him off his feet.

  The candle went out.

  * * *

  |||

  Peter English had forced Bimsley to stop the car at his lawyer’s office in Duke Street, Mayfair. ‘Because he has to be present at the meeting, you amoeba,’ he said, stabbing at his phone.

  ‘It’s not a meeting, mate,’ said Colin. ‘There’s nothing to negotiate. You’re being charged with murder.’

  ‘I am not your “mate.” You are my public servant.’ English turned his anger to the phone. ‘I’m looking forward to seeing your face when you discover what a horrible mistake you’ve made. Digby, we’re outside your office right now. Why the hell aren’t you here?’

  They waited as English’s lawyer bobbed through the rain to the Vauxhall Astra. Edgar Digby burst into the vehicle, lowering a Financial Times from his head and spraying everyone with water. ‘I was about to leave for the airport, Peter,’ he said, budging into the back seat. ‘A couple of days’ golf in Geneva.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have got very far,’ said Meera, pulling away. ‘Your client’s in for multiple counts of murder.’

  ‘First of all, you’re not allowed to share this information in the car,’ warned Digby, who had been eating garlic. ‘And second—’

  Nobody found out what the second thing was, as a young woman on a phone ran across the road ahead and Meera was forced to brake sharply. The rain-slick road caused a Toyota Prius to drive into the back of them, spraining English’s neck and giving him a bloody nose.

  * * *

  |||

  As the taxi drove away, Arthur Bryant stood at the edge of the pavement on Caledonian Road and looked up at the PCU’s first floor. He saw a ghostly light drifting across the penumbral operations room.

  ‘Why is it in darkness? And what’s that?’ asked May, pointing.

  ‘He’s striking at our heart. It’s where he always intended to end this.’

  May stared at his partner, appalled. ‘Do you actually know what he’s doing?’

  ‘I have a pretty good idea. It makes sense. He’ll have found ways to send everyone else away. He’s terribly good at misdirection.’

  Bryant set off for the front door.

  There was no sign of the Incident Response Vehicle bringing in Peter English. May looked around. ‘He should be here with Colin and Meera.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll have found a way to stall them,’ said Bryant. ‘Everything he does now will just make him look more guilty. It’s the superciliousness, coupled with the fact that he’s not very bright. People fear his power but they don’t like him. We decide within seconds whether we’re drawn to someone or repelled by them. That’s why the best actors are complete blanks offstage.’

  ‘You didn’t stop any of us suspecting English,’ said May, even more confused.

  ‘Perhaps not but I know you, John. You would have continued to be suspicious anyway. It was good fun annoying him, though.’

  ‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me earlier?’

  ‘You’ll see why in a moment.’

  May grabbed Bryant’s arm. ‘Nobody died at Bow. We’re still a victim short. Tell me who it is now.’

  ‘Oh, John.’ Bryant’s eyes were filled with sorrow. ‘If only it had been anyone other than Raymond.’

  ‘Raymond? You mean our Raymond?’

  ‘Oh yes. You see, that’s why we’re back here. All of this—it began with Raymond and it ends with him. We’ve come full circle, like the rondo bell-ringing in St Mary-le-Bow.’

  May was dumbfounded. He reached the entrance and found the door hanging open. Pushing it back with an outstretched arm he entered, hauling himself into the gloom.

  Arthur overtook him. ‘Let me go first; you’ve got your stitches to think about.’

  ‘All right, but be careful,’ May warned.

  Bryant reached the top of the stairs. ‘At my age there’s nothing more to be afraid of.’

  At the end of the dark corridor they saw a distant flickering candle.

  Bryant reached Raymond Land’s office and was surprised to find a door on it. He tried the handle and it swung open. There was no one at his desk.

  He continued on to the operations room. He could see funfair lights ahead.

  The PCU was most definitely not a church, yet here in the broad communal room that overlooked the street was a tableau as striking as any stained-glass window: a figure with its head bowed, kneeling on the floor, with an executioner standing tall beside him, the handle of a sword resting in the executioner’s fist, the tip of its blade touching the floorboards. The pair were motionless but alive with neon rivulets, yellow and purple flashing to scarlet.

>   Bryant kept back in the shadowed corridor, pushing May to the wall beside him. He held his finger to his lips. The detectives listened.

  ‘I always knew you would have to be killed last,’ said Tim Floris. ‘The little coward who took the final turn. I can’t think of it without becoming physically ill. I look at each of you as so-called respectable adults and find it impossible to imagine that you were there in the church at my conception.’

  ‘Well, it’s impossible for me to imagine it because I wasn’t bloody there,’ said Land, his indignation overriding his fear. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He tried to push himself upright but was held firmly in place. ‘I’ve got nothing whatsoever to do with this.’

  ‘Of course you think you haven’t. You’ve all been in denial for years. It’s understandable, something to be so ashamed about. A very British trait, avoiding a subject until it goes away. You can say whatever you like but I will always know the truth.’

  ‘Then you know bugger all,’ said Land, chancing his arm. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The truth came from the one person who would never lie to me.’

  Land wanted to move his knees but was terrified of having his head cut off. ‘I didn’t know your mother. I never met her. How could I have done anything wrong?’

  He thought back to the moment when he had finally studied the photograph on Floris’s desk. The awards dinner, and the smiling lineup that included the sweating Faraday, the elegant Floris, the startled Fatima Hamadani and the clearly bored Home Secretary himself. He had glanced at it at least twenty times in the last week, but this time he truly saw.

  Making a Murderer

  I suppose I should have taken it as a compliment, Cristian Albu editing and typesetting a copy of the manuscript I’d sent him to read, then having it printed and bound as a very attractive book. Twelve copies, he told me shyly, handing me the first. A deep red cover, the title picked out in gold, my name underneath. He thought it could be a breakout success.

  I was horrified.

  If anyone read it, my identity would be revealed, all the years of sacrifice and planning for nothing. He said the other copies were all in the shop but he wouldn’t tell me exactly where they were. All obsessives have a greedy side, an attitude that makes them throw their arms around their valuables and draw them back like poker players gathering in winning chips. Sensing my panic, Albu had backed away and become possessive about his discovery. He promised me he would get rid of the copies but I knew he was lying. He had far too much love for his little sideline.

  I’m good with chemicals. They’re easy to learn about, easy to get hold of and carry around. I added a little benzodiazepine to his drink, a retroamnesiac sedative about a dozen times more potent than Valium. The trick was getting him out of the pub before it kicked in so heavily that he became a dead weight. I sat him in the alley, took his keys and searched the shop.

  Albu’s filing system was nonexistent. It was impossible to find anything. I only thought of torching the place because he had cans of linseed oil left over from when he had varnished the wood floors. I poured it through the shop and lit it. I knew it would look like arson but it didn’t matter. The important thing was to destroy every last one of the copies.

  And then, the strangest thing happened.

  A bowl of oranges burst into flame.

  I had no idea that oranges could burn. It turns out that their oily skins contain a hydrocarbon called limonene that’s highly flammable. All through the shop you could smell varnish and paper but, above all, oranges, sharp and overpowering.

  I thought of my mother’s story—she had just one, repeated in endless variations until she could speak of nothing else. The church, the boys, the childish games that stopped being childish, a grotesque version of ‘Oranges & Lemons,’ the pain of each of them on her in turn. The second half of her downfall, which could be elaborated infinitely over time—that being the one thing we always had—was my birth, her shame, the slow destruction of our lives.

  She remembered their faces. She remembered all their names. Michael Claremont, who started it all. Chakira Rahman, who did nothing to stop it. Kenneth Tremain, Jackson Crofting, Gavin Spencer and Raymond Land. How could she have failed to remember every last detail about them?

  She was far too frightened to tell the police. She said she didn’t know, couldn’t remember, didn’t want to know. Filled with guilt and shame, she cut herself off from everyone. She wanted to forget but the more she tried the more she remembered. Whenever she felt the need to talk she sat at the end of my bed and told me. To begin with I didn’t understand her because she left so much out. I was five years old the first time she spoke of it.

  Gradually she described more and more. But even after she had explained everything I still didn’t understand, because she hadn’t told me how sex worked. I couldn’t connect it all, the boys, the baby, it made no sense. So I started asking questions.

  And then she never stopped explaining. The details never ceased. They grew ever more elaborate, ever more appalling. I was outwardly a normal child. I thought of myself as having a normal life, but it wasn’t at all. She made me memorize their names. I went back to the church but it had become a pine merchant’s, then the grounds were torn up and the site was filled with offices.

  After she died I thought things would be better, but I woke every night to find her at the end of my bed reciting their names. There was only one way to rid myself of her ghost.

  ‘She remembered wrongly,’ said Land. He was not in a position to lie right now. ‘I suppose I might have seen one or two of them in the street from time to time but I didn’t know their names and I was never invited to their stupid bloody clubhouse. They wouldn’t have had me, a kid whose parents lived above a newsagent’s. Perhaps I saw them at the football fields on Blackheath or at the shops, how do I know? Boys often look nothing like the adults they become. I hated being a kid. My life was hell. I spent years trying to forget about it.’

  ‘In these times of overeducated police chiefs, you’re a refreshing change,’ said Floris. Land tried to remain motionless but Floris had brought down the edge of the sword blade until it touched the back of his neck.

  There was a sharp sting as it cut the skin. Land cried out. He felt blood pooling inside his shirt collar. If anyone was coming to rescue him they were leaving it a bit bloody late.

  ‘Your mother was wrong,’ Land said again. ‘I don’t suppose she meant to lie to you but she made a mistake. She couldn’t have remembered my name.’

  The blade cut a touch deeper. ‘Why not?’ asked Floris.

  Land forced himself to remain calm and coherent. It was crucial that he explained. ‘Because after we moved away my mum remarried,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘She married a man called Roger Land. When I was a teenager my name was Raymond Codd. I hated it because my classmates all made fish jokes, so I had it legally changed when I was in my early twenties. Your mother mixed me up with someone else. There was a posh kid about my age called Graham Land who used to hang out near the church. Sounds like she meant him.’

  He felt the blade turning his neck to bloody ice.

  ‘My mother would never have lied to me,’ Floris replied, raising the sword high above Land’s exposed neck.

  Some years were bad, others bearable, but my mother always reappeared to me at twilight. She never left the end of my bed, and as long as she stayed there my luck followed hers downward.

  I knew that in order to take a full and fair revenge I had much to learn.

  While I was studying the structure of police divisions I came across the Peculiar Crimes Unit. I met an officer in the Met who told me that they only handled a very specific type of case, and noticed it was run by a man called Raymond Land.

  I knew the police would soon be following my every move, so I used the ‘Oranges & Lemons’ rhyme to
ensure that only the PCU could be appointed. I knew I would have to work from the inside, and that I needed them to trust me. I couldn’t take the place of any Unit member but I could be mistaken for someone from the outside.

  The best solution was to pick a real person, someone close but slightly out of the frame, someone who would naturally stay away from the Unit. Land visited the Home Office, so I chose someone in his liaison team. It was easy to find them all online. I watched them all and listened to everything they said to each other in public. Lunchtimes were best; they always discussed the morning’s work as they walked to their salad bar.

  I set off the fire alarm at the Home Office so that we would meet outside the building in a street overcrowded with workers. Keeping a watchful eye out for the man I was planning to impersonate, I introduced myself to Land as Tim Floris. I wasn’t sure if Land had met him, but if he had it would only have been once, and briefly. Floris and I were both slim-built but I didn’t look like him. The beard was a godsend, the sort of thing people focus on. They make many men look similar. It took a while to get right, but I learned to apply and remove it in less than a minute.

  I needed to keep the real Floris away, so I cut all contact between Land and the Home Office and relayed Land’s emails. Wherever I could, I added layers of confusion and mayhem. The devil was in the details. I planted false memories, ‘reminding’ Land of when we had met at the Home Office, and he was happy to agree with me. I told lies, created suspicions, sowed doubts.

  I mastered the art of misleading observers into making false assumptions. Even when they tried to get me drunk I managed to stay in character.

  I made a few mistakes. I failed to ensure that Michael Claremont was dead, although I planned to finish him after he left his clinic. I changed Land’s email homepage but forgot to change the date, not that he noticed. When I found the photograph of the Home Office department at an awards dinner in a staff magazine I decided not to doctor it. I have never been able to look at my own face. Others say they find me attractive but I look in the glass and see a horrified Caliban reflected back.