Bryant & May

by Christopher Fowler - Bryant

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because the last person left alive will still want to set a dinner table.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that.’

  ‘I mean it. She runs a restaurant in Norway, a terribly nice lady. She hasn’t been born yet, of course. She’ll be the sole survivor of our planet’s catastrophe. We had a lovely chat last week.’ She batted away Bryant’s look of incredulity. ‘Oh, it was a space-time continuum thing. It was raining and there was nothing on the telly. I suppose you’d call it lucid dreaming.’

  ‘I’d call it avoiding reality,’ Bryant muttered.

  ‘To answer the question you came here with: Your disconnection from “normal people” as you call them is your blind spot. It prevents you from seeing the truth. What terrible thing could make you cease to value life?’

  Bryant thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps if I felt my own life had been damaged somehow—’

  ‘Keep going.’

  ‘Or even—taken away.’

  ‘By whom?’

  Bryant’s eyes widened. ‘Oh.’

  ‘You see?’ said Maggie. ‘You put so much faith in facts that you’ve been blinded by them.’

  He clutched at Maggie’s arm. ‘I need to think of it the other way up.’

  ‘And if you do so, what does it tell you?’

  ‘That the churches and rhymes are nothing, and the victims aren’t as innocent as they appear. It’s the villain who’s had his life wiped away.’

  ‘I’m just the facilitator,’ Maggie reminded him. ‘Whatever conclusion you reach is your own.’

  ‘No, you’re right. He’s planned this carefully because it’s the only thing that’s important to him, so of course he’s hard to find. He believes in his cause. And you have to keep believing in yours.’

  She touched his arm. ‘I must go on. By the way, Mr Crocker didn’t jump out of a window. People just said he did. His memorial is all around you. Life is a trick played on the unsuspecting.’

  He watched as she walked up to the microphone and tapped it, looking around the room. Only five of the chairs were filled, but she spoke as if there were a thousand.

  They had put the boy on the worst ward, with the disturbed yammerers and detoxing junkies. He was another stab victim, treated fairly and equally by amazing nurses working in a system that had stopped functioning efficiently years ago. Slipped into a pale blue hospital gown and tucked up in bed without his hoodie and tracksuit bottoms, Clarke looked like a schoolboy again.

  When Janice had finished the paperwork she came to find him. There were no parents beside Jemaine’s bed, only an elderly Antiguan lady in a pleated floral dress.

  ‘Alma?’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Alma Sorrowbridge pointed to the church badge on her cardigan. ‘We visit all the victims of knife crime, Janice. I was here seeing another boy. The nurse was just telling me that Jemaine lives with his granddad who’s in another hospital having a heart bypass. What happened?’

  She hardly knew where to start. ‘I arrested him. I had his hands behind his back to stop him from running. I was on the phone to the ambulance and a kid he knew came up. I told him to stay back but the EMT leader thought I was talking to her, and the next thing I knew the boys were shouting at each other and the other one stuck him.’

  Jemaine had now been bandaged on the other arm. He lay staring at the ceiling, half-conscious and clearly hating his life.

  Alma straightened the sheet under Jemaine’s hand. ‘What happened to the other boy?’

  ‘He’s in custody, something that seems to have come as a total surprise to him. He says he’s going to sue me for wrongful arrest even though me and my little shoulder cam saw the whole thing.’

  ‘You can’t help some of them. Look at the way they live.’ Janice found it touching that the old lady was prepared to sit with an angry young stranger, expecting nothing. ‘We find out what the boys need and try to stop them from stressing about the little things. Half a dozen this week and they can’t be put on the same ward because sometimes they carry the fights into the hospital. The nurse said he was lucky, and I suppose she’s right.’

  ‘Has he spoken at all?’

  ‘He was awake earlier but got a bit wound up, so the nurse gave him something to help him sleep. She’s keeping him in overnight because of the medication.’

  ‘He’s had some pretty bad luck today.’

  ‘That’s what he told me, but it’s hard to know if they’re telling the truth or just giving their side of the story.’

  ‘I wanted to ask him about the man who gave him this.’ She showed Alma the money from Jemaine’s pocket. ‘He uses other people. He used this kid.’ She handed Alma the money. ‘Put it in his locker.’

  Alma smiled up at her, calm and imperturbable. ‘Healing needs privacy. I can’t stay with him. There are others to see. When you’ve sorted all this out, come to dinner. I remember you like pork with sour cherries. Spend a little time with Arthur. He’s been a bit lost lately.’

  He’s not the only one, Janice thought. Aloud she said, ‘Dinner would be very nice.’

  A man paid him to stand there, she remembered as she headed down the hospital steps. He tricks them, he tricks us and we just don’t see it.

  * * *

  |||

  A dozen photographers were waiting outside the Unit, ready to pounce on anyone who stepped outside. These were not the kind who made appointments; they were the ones who hung around the Ivy restaurant hoping to catch soap stars leaving in tears.

  ‘I’m not sure you want to go out there,’ said Meera, stopping in the shadow of the PCU’s ground-floor entrance. ‘Perhaps you should wait until they disperse. They’re in every doorway. They won’t just take photos of you, they’ll try to wind you up.’

  ‘And I want to get something to eat, so stand aside,’ said Colin. ‘Never get in between a man and his food.’

  ‘She’s right,’ said Tim Floris. ‘We can keep you off the radar so long as you’re in here, but not once you’re outside.’

  ‘Who’s we?’ Colin asked. ‘You and your new best pal Raymond? Oh, wait a minute, you mean the Home Office is protecting us? That’s a turnaround. Faraday has a history of trying to shag us over a hostess trolley. Don’t make poor old Raymond think he’s got an ally, because in a few days you’ll be back in your uncle’s office and we’ll be stuck here with the mops and buckets. Open the door.’

  Floris pushed it back and hastily stepped aside. Colin peered out. Where had the press been earlier, when Bryant was nearly killed in St Dunstan’s?

  The PCU building only had one exit, so the news teams and camera crews fought each other for space. They knew the names of every Unit member, and the second Bimsley appeared they began shouting.

  ‘Hey, Colin, how do you feel about letting another innocent victim die? What’s your guilt on a scale of one to ten? Why are you all hiding away in there?’

  ‘Oi, Colin, mate, over here! Who’s dead this time? Anyone else been shot up there?’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be out on the streets looking for this nutter? Why aren’t you telling us anything?’

  One fat little photographer in a backward Kangol cap kept shouting louder than the rest. ‘Colin, where’s your girlfriend? Can I get one of the two of you having a bit of face time? My paper just needs one decent shot. You’d be helping me out of a hole.’

  ‘I’ll be helping you into one in a minute,’ warned Colin.

  He turned to see Meera storming out of the entrance with thunder in her eyes. ‘Get away from the building or we’ll arrest the lot of you,’ she shouted.

  The men all laughed. ‘Like to see you try, love!’

  ‘Press privilege! The public need to know, don’t they?’

  ‘Are you putting on weight?’

  ‘Where’s the young girl w
ith the legs? Can we get the pretty one out there?’

  ‘Oi, Colin, where’s old Bryant?’ called the annoying little one. ‘Did we miss his funeral?’

  Colin tore across the road. Picking up the photographer by his coat, he slammed him against the shop window at his back, cracking the glass from corner to corner. The gentlemen of the press yelled like geese and flapped about ineffectually.

  Colin thought better of his action and set the snapper back on his feet, but the cameras had been ready and the shot of the day was captured. A few more were taken of the PCU members gathered in confusion and anger at the Unit entrance, then the street cleared once more as word reached the photographers that a minor royal had been seen shopping in Oxford Street’s Primark.

  Eight A.M. on Sunday the press siege returned to the building on Caledonian Road, and John May arrived to find his partner already seated in their office. ‘How did you get in?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t see you outside.’

  ‘I waited in the Ladykillers’ Café until everyone was distracted by the sound of a broken window.’

  ‘That was a lucky chance.’

  ‘That was Janice’s brick.’ Bryant popped two white pills from a bubble pack and swallowed them with his tea.

  ‘How do you feel after yesterday?’

  ‘My ears are still ringing but I have tinnitus anyway.’

  ‘You could have been killed,’ said May with some vehemence.

  ‘And I could have died years ago like a great many of my contemporaries,’ Bryant replied. ‘I have not done so. We need some way of getting officers stationed at St Mary-le-Bow. Who was the victim at St Dunstan’s?’

  May held up a page. ‘Gavin Spencer, part-time shop fitter, fifty-six. He doesn’t fit the profile at all. He’s done time, six years for aggravated assault, by first accounts a nasty piece of work. The bomb was locked around his neck with a plastic cable tie. They’re still looking for his ears. Dan says the device was small but concentrated, very simple, homemade. He says he sometimes knocks them up in his kitchen, which must thrill his wife.’

  ‘Does Spencer have any connection to the others?’

  ‘None that I can see. He grew up in South London, dropped out of university and fell into the usual tiresome pattern: DJ, club promoter, small-time drug dealer. Soon got a couple of convictions under his belt. Met a girl at a party and knocked her about. Families complained about the lightness of his jail sentence, et cetera. I looked for connections to the others but only have the vaguest trace of one.’

  ‘Even that will do,’ said Bryant. ‘The killer can’t have hidden every single thing about his victims. He doesn’t leave a hair behind. What does he do, carry a tiny vacuum cleaner around with him?’

  ‘So there’s this.’ May handed him a photocopy of a note. ‘Sidney spotted it in his Met file. Some bright spark thought to file it as proof of his home address.’

  ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘Not itemized. Receipt for goods.’

  ‘How did she even get to see it?’

  ‘She seems to have electronic access to everything. When I asked her how, she looked at me as if I was mad.’

  ‘She thinks we’re not terribly au fait with technology here. She might have seen me trying to remove my SIM card with the end of a kebab stick. Go on.’

  ‘Sidney checked for juvenile offences. When Gavin Spencer was seventeen he had his collar felt by some local cops. They came around his parents’ house and asked him a few questions. There are no details of the suspected offence. The prison records base him at his mother’s home in Essex but on this delivery receipt, which is older, they’re in East Greenwich. The note has to be right because it bears a timed stamp. We’re aware that Michael Claremont was living somewhere nearby in Greenwich around that time, so there’s a faint chance that they knew each other.’

  ‘Not much to go on, is it?’ Bryant threw his pencil stub across the room. ‘We could come up with a hundred different theories for their crossed paths. Pass me that book behind you with the purple binding next to Maltese Cross: Mediterranean Eye Injuries Volume Two.’

  May searched the shelf. ‘What’s Volume One called?’

  ‘Venetian Blind.’

  ‘I swear you have these specially printed. Is this it?’ He blew the sawdust from a copy of Mileposts of Old London. ‘What are you expecting to find?’

  ‘Cockneys.’ Bryant cracked the spine and ran down the list of contents. ‘Here we are. We know the killer’s last site has to be St Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside. The great bell of Bow.’

  ‘Ah, got you. Anyone born within its sound is a cockney.’

  ‘Correct. Except it’s gone.’

  ‘What has?’

  ‘The great bell of Bow was the tenor bell of the church’s twelve bells. Hang on, let me find the page.’

  ‘Why would it be in a book on mileposts?’ May asked.

  ‘You haven’t done much research, have you?’ He flattened out a double page and read. ‘ “The bell…cast in 1762…weighed fifty-eight hundredweight”—yadda yadda yadda—“six tons of reinforced ironwork braces”—boring…Ah, it was destroyed in an air raid in 1941:

  ‘Of such importance is the church that on the road from London to the coast there are mileposts measuring outwards from its doors. These are cut with cast-iron rebuses, pictographic puzzles. The Bow mileposts show four bells and an archer’s bow. The bells ring out across the world and are regarded as the epitome of London. On top of the Bow steeple is a golden dragon with a St George’s cross.’

  ‘Which tells us plenty about the church but absolutely nothing about the killer,’ said May.

  ‘It’s an appropriate ending for the task he’s set himself, don’t you think? An atrocity in the bedrock of England?’

  ‘I don’t know, Arthur. I don’t know how he thinks. I don’t know who he is.’

  ‘But I do, sort of.’ Bryant closed the book. May looked up. ‘If Bow is to be his last attack, he’ll make it especially tricky for us.’

  ‘We need more staff on the ground, Arthur. The Met isn’t going to help us out.’

  ‘I realize that. But I need to talk to you about something else.’ Bryant rose and closed the office door. ‘The arson attack. Elise Albu and I went back to her husband’s bookshop. I was looking for something that would link it with the later deaths.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I imagined a scenario in which one of Albu’s customers gave him a manuscript to read, presenting it as a work of fiction. Albu overenthusiastically printed a few copies. When the killer decided to turn his fantasy into deed he needed the manuscript back to protect himself from discovery. Perhaps he looked in on Cristian one day and asked for it casually, only to have the bookseller stall him, and that’s when he realized he had opened himself to blackmail. Worse, he discovered there was a printed edition!’

  Bryant looked through the stack of books he had taken from the burned-out shop. ‘Cristian was a connoisseur. I think he knew he wasn’t just reading a novel but seeing a blueprint. In their pub meeting, he underlined “Kind hearts are more than coronets” in his poetry volume, pointing out the marked similarity to a cheated murderer leaving behind his memoirs. The killer couldn’t find all the copies so he torched everything.

  ‘I found a number of intact books that Cristian had printed privately, but not the one we need. What I did find, however, was the one book in the shop that couldn’t be burned.’ He opened his desk drawer and drew it out. ‘The rare asbestos-covered edition of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, printed in 1953 and signed by the author, selling for twenty-eight thousand pounds, earmarked for his mystery buyer. There were some faint pencil marks on the title page so I had Dan take a look at it.’

  He held it up so that John could read Peter English’s name.

  Sidney found her way to the map restoration department at the back of th
e British Library’s first floor and was met by a bearded man-mountain in a checked flannel shirt, red braces and dungarees who looked as though he’d just been replacing a truck carburettor in Arkansas. Raymond Kirkpatrick, academic, antiquarian and heavy metal enthusiast, pulled his headphones from his ears and greeted her with a bone-crushing double-clasp handshake.

  ‘Mr Bryant says you’re the best,’ said Sidney.

  ‘I’m the best available on the PCU budget. And I come in on Sundays, just for the sheer bloody joy of working. I know all about you, Miss Hargreaves. Welcome, come on through.’ He led the way through to the map room. ‘I need a break. I’ve been hunched over a Stanford all week, recolouring a balloon view of London. Janice warned me you’d be over. What have you got for me?’

  Sidney opened her satchel and removed a clear plastic folder. ‘I know you restore stuff. Can you get anything from this?’

  Kirkpatrick carefully removed the blackened page from the folder and placed it under an immense rectangular magnifying glass. ‘Blimey, there’s not much of it left, is there?’

  ‘It got burned.’

  He gave his beard a good scratch. ‘May I ask where it came from?’

  ‘Mr Bryant brought it back from a bookshop that suffered an arson attack. It’s all there is left.’

  ‘Why didn’t he bring it to me himself?’

  ‘He doesn’t know I have it. It was stuck to the end of his scarf. I didn’t want to waste his time.’

  ‘So you thought you’d waste mine. What makes you think it contains anything?’

  ‘I could read one word.’ She pointed to the least burned corner.

  ‘ “Murderer.” That’ll do it. Well, I usually test paper for acidity, pH balance, thickness, age and weave but in this case it’s best to start with these.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘The peepers. We might be able to intuit something first.’

  She watched as he bent over the sheet, working with a scraper and an eyedropper containing a blue liquid. ‘How’s John doing? I heard he was out of hospital and back at work.’