White Corridor

by Christopher Fowler

  How he longed to let the Devil in, just to see what he would do. He wanted to talk to his grandfather, to understand why the old man’s daughter was so much stricter than any of the mothers in the village, but the yellow-faced old man in the wicker chair was growing feebleminded, and the time was fast approaching when he would have no remaining power of speech.

  One Saturday morning in early October, just before the weather turned, Johann slipped the great iron latch and ran off down the hill towards the village. His mother allowed him no money, but he had already planned to do without; he would hitch a lift with one of the lorry drivers who drove vegetables down to the city. Once aboard, he knew he would be safe, for she would have no way of finding him. He hung around the dusty grocery store waiting for a delivery, and his patience was rewarded when a truck pulled into the depot.

  One look told him that the driver would never allow him on board. He waited until the lorry had been loaded, and was still trying to climb into the back when his mother arrived at the store on her bicycle, and spotted him.

  This time, his mother whipped him with the oiled birch she kept in the shed, in order to impress the fullness of her love upon him. After that he was kept at home, where he could be watched by God and his family. Her intention was to keep him pure and untouched by evil, but her prescription had the opposite effect. The boy became sly and dark. Subterfuge came naturally to him.

  He remained in the little house for five more years, waiting for an opportunity to free himself, and when the chance finally came, he seized upon it with the full violence of his trapped spirit.

  It was a storm-ravaged morning in late autumn, soon after his grandfather had been placed in the gravelled cemetery behind the dry-stone wall shared by the village’s only petanque pitch. He stood in the middle of his mother’s bedroom, knowing exactly what had to be done. Raising the ceramic pitcher she kept on her dresser, he hurled it with all his might onto the floorboards, and when he heard the approaching thump of her stick, went to wait for her in the corridor, where she kept the leather strap.

  Beating an old lady should be easy if you have the stomach to do so, he thought, if she has done everything within her power to deserve it, but it’s not if God can see you. If He witnesses your fall from grace, you are damned for eternity. His mother stood before him, her small sharp teeth bared, the whip raised, about to strike him down—and then a miracle occurred.

  Earlier that morning the first snowstorm of the season had ridden over the mountain peaks and across the haute route above the village, whitening the tarmac. In seconds the sky had grown dark, as if someone had thrown a sheet over the sun, and God was blinded from His view of mortals. The silent blizzard dropped over the house and all around them. Now, he thought, he could do whatever he needed to survive. Hidden inside the caul of falling snow, protected by the purity of nature, he snatched back the whip and beat his unrepentant mother to her knees.

  He did not stop when the sky suddenly cleared and he could once more be seen by the Almighty, because he decided that God should see what he had done. If I am to be damned, it is how I will live, he decided. He looked up into the pin-sharp panel of azure that had appeared inside the banks of clouds, and openly defied his Maker. See what I have done, I defy you to save me. God saw all, and once He did there could only follow judgement, trial, repentance and suffering.

  He walked to the front door, kicked it back, and stepped out into the front garden. In the sky above, the white corridor that had opened through the vaporous mountains shone all the way up to the heart of the sun.

  3

  GOOD MORNING, ARTHUR

  ‘The urge has come on me to speak to you about carpet slippers, Mr Bryant,’ Alma Sorrowbridge told her former lodger. ‘You wander in from the garden with half of London on your boots, all over my spotless kitchen floor, and it does my head in.’

  ‘I thought you wanted me to get into the great outdoors,’ grumbled Arthur Bryant, lowering his library book with reluctance. He wore his tweed overcoat and pyjama bottoms to the table, in protest over Alma’s restrictions on the bar heater, which had been faulty ever since he had tried to fix it with a fork.

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t expect you to bring it back in with you. I thought you might come to Regent’s Park with me, instead of digging holes in the garden looking for—whatever old rubbish you expect to find out there.’

  ‘Old rubbish? Relics, madam!’ Bryant peered over his pages and scowled. ‘You have no idea of the history upon which you stand, do you? I don’t suppose you know that near this site, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey was slaughtered in most vexing circumstances.’

  ‘I read the papers,’ Alma bridled.

  ‘I doubt you’d have been reading them in 1678, when his body was discovered among the primroses near Lower Chalcot Farm. He had been strangled until his neck broke, and a sword run through him, yet spatters of candle wax placed him miles away at Somerset House. His three murderers eventually confessed to having brought him to this lonely spot by horse and sedan chair. We live in Chalk Farm, a corruption of Chalcot Farm, within the cursed circle of Mother Shipton, the area’s most famous witch, who said that once the farmland was hemmed in on all sides by London houses, the streets of the metropolis would run with blood. She proved correct, for the area became famous for its fatal duels. And so I dig through London clay, the most recalcitrant material imaginable, in the hopes of finding evidence of those deaths. And once I find it, as I surely will, it will end another chapter of my biography.’

  ‘Here, am I in this book you’re writing?’ asked Alma, suddenly suspicious.

  ‘You most certainly are. So I should watch your step, especially when it comes to forcing me on route marches and making me eat your bread-and-butter pudding.’

  ‘You’re a stubborn old man,’ Alma decided, folding her arms. ‘A proper walk would do you the world of good.’

  ‘I am not being dragged around a park to feed ducks and admire crocuses while you hand out evangelical leaflets to disinterested passersby,’ snapped Bryant. ‘Besides, I’m already planning a trip of my own this week which will require the commandeering of your decrepit Bedford van, and I intend to drive with the windows closed specifically to avoid breathing in the odours of the so-called countryside.’

  ‘But your lungs is filled with London soot. When you cough it’s like a death rattle. You’ve got clogged phlegm in your tubes.’

  ‘I am trying to eat a boiled egg, if you don’t mind,’ Arthur Bryant complained. ‘I can’t imagine how long you cooked it. The yolk isn’t meant to be this colour, surely.’ He shut one eye and peered into the eggcup as if half expecting to find baby chicks nesting inside. ‘And your toasted soldiers are rudimentary, to say the least. You’re meant to use fresh bread.’

  ‘You can’t make proper toast with fresh bread. You’ve never complained before, and you’ve been eating it for over forty years.’ Alma bristled.

  ‘That’s because I used to be your tenant, and was scared of you. We all lived in fear of making the place untidy, only to have you come charging forward with your squeegee and your lavender polish. Well, now you’re my tenant, and I can finally take revenge.’

  Arthur Bryant had conveniently forgotten that it was he who had persuaded his long-suffering landlady to part with her beautiful Battersea apartment, in order to live with him in a converted false-teeth factory set back from North London’s Chalk Farm Road. The area was peppered with warehouses, sheds, huts and light industrial manufacturing plants that had now been transformed into expensive loft-style homes. The difference was that Bryant’s place was the only one not to have been converted, for it still looked like a factory. He was too old and twinge-prone to start renovations himself, and as Alma could no longer be tempted up a ladder with a claw hammer and a mouthful of tacks, they were forced to make the best of things, carrying out odd bodge-jobs as the need arose. If the situation became desperate (as it had last month, when part of the kitchen ceiling fell, mostly into Alma’s casserole), Br
yant would then head for the Peculiar Crimes Unit to make sad kitten-in-a-boot eyes at his colleagues, who could be relied upon to rally around at the weekend armed with tools and planks and electrical tape to aid a poor helpless old man. It was shameless, but a perk of being officially classed as elderly, and he knew he was sufficiently loved to be able to get away with it.

  ‘It would be nice if you could put the book down long enough to eat,’ Alma suggested.

  Bryant’s great watery eyes swam up from his copy of The 1919 Arctic Explorer’s Handbook Volume II: Iceberg Partition. ‘This is fascinating stuff,’ he told her. ‘Maggie Armitage sent it to me.’

  Alma harrumphed and made a face. Bryant’s theatricality was catching. ‘That woman is godless,’ she complained.

  ‘Quite the reverse. As a practising white witch she’s more aware of true religion than most Christians, whose experience usually only extends to miming “O God Our Help in Ages Past” during weddings and christenings.’

  ‘Well, I hope you’re going into work today, and not just sitting around reading.’ Alma disapproved of such pointless activities. ‘I’m planning on a spot of hoovering.’ She shifted him to clear away the breakfast things.

  ‘Just in time, I’d imagine. There was a rumour the BBC was coming around to film an insect documentary inside your hall rug.’

  ‘Are you insinuating I don’t keep a clean house?’ asked Alma, mortified. ‘All these years I’ve been looking after you, with your spilled chemicals and your disgusting experiments. Who fed rotting pork to carnivorous plants on top of his wardrobe during the heat wave of 1974?’

  ‘That helped me catch the Kew Gardens Strangler, if you recall.’

  ‘You boiled my tropical fish in 1968, and filled my bedroom with mustard gas.’

  ‘In order to track the Deptford Demon, as well you know. I didn’t realise your aunt was sleeping in the house at the time.’

  She could have mentioned that the ancient detective also grew plague germs in her baking trays and ruined her best kitchen knives putting stab wounds in sides of beef to determine methods of death. He had also rewired the toaster to see if it could be made to electrocute anyone walking across a wet kitchen floor in bare feet, and had been able to answer in the affirmative after nearly setting fire to a Jehovah’s Witness. ‘You filled my sink with sulphuric acid last Christmas, and if I hadn’t been wearing rubber gloves to do the washing up, I’d have ended up in hospital. Took the finish right off my plug, but did I complain?’

  ‘You most certainly did, madam, and the fact that you bring it up at the drop of a hat reminds me how long you bear the grudge.’ He rose and collected his battered brown trilby from the table.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t leave that thing over the teapot; it’s unsanitary.’

  ‘Most probably, but it keeps my head warm. When you’ve as little hair as I have, such small comforts are appreciated.’ He smoothed the pale nimbus of his fringe back in place. ‘I might remind you that I am still the breadwinner in this household, attending to police work for six decades with an unbroken record, despite your regular attempts to poison me. I could have taken holidays but was too conscientious.’

  ‘Too scared of missing out on a good murder, more like.’ Alma sniffed. ‘It’s not natural, all this morbidity, especially at your age.’

  ‘It’s not morbidity, it’s my job. In my field there’s no substitute for firsthand experience. You knew what to expect when you took me in.’

  ‘I knew you was on the side of law and order; I didn’t expect you to experiment in my lodgings with meat and germs and explosives.’

  They bickered to such an extent each morning that they might as well have been married. The plump Antiguan landlady (she still thought of Bryant as her tenant) attempted to reform Bryant by tricking him into church attendance, goodwill whist drives and assorted charity events, but he invariably saw through the subterfuge and reminded her that his adherence to paganism precluded any chance of a late conversion.

  ‘Will you be home in time for dinner tonight?’ Alma asked, waggling a cake slice between thick brown fingers.

  ‘That depends on the form of culinary witchcraft you’re intending to inflict upon me.’

  ‘I’m baking a mutton pie with sweet potatoes, callaloo and cornbread.’

  ‘If I’m back in time, I’ll join you at supper. I don’t suppose another hour in the oven will adversely affect the texture of your concoctions.’

  Alma folded her arms against him. ‘You’re a very rude man, Mr Bryant. I don’t know why I put up with you.’

  ‘Because you know the quality of your life would be immeasurably poorer in my absence,’ said Bryant, pushing his luck. Still, Alma could hardly disagree. The old detective had always brightened her days with surprises, even if many of them had proven disagreeable. If he appeared with a bunch of daffodils, there was a good chance that a neighbour would call to indignantly demand their return to the front garden from which they had been torn. The thing about Bryant was that he always meant well. She was filled with a patient and loyal adoration for him that defied sense or logic.

  ‘I thought you said the unit was quiet at the moment. Do you have to go in?’

  ‘Raymond Land is thinking of holding a retirement party for our medical examiner, and wants me to help him arrange it,’ he explained. ‘It could take a while, as I have to plot out a number of unpleasant practical jokes for the evening’s festivities.’ Oswald Finch, the only member of London’s Metropolitan Police Force who was older than Bryant and still gainfully employed, had finally made good his promise to leave the Peculiar Crimes Unit, although why he thought he would be happier in Hastings than in a mortuary mystified Bryant. Everyone assumed that the irascible pathologist was to be replaced by Giles Kershaw, the Eton-educated junior staff member whom Finch had trained to take over unit operations at the Bayham Street Morgue.

  Bryant buttoned the shapeless brown cardigan he had worn for the past twenty years, dragged his horribly moth-eaten Harris tweed coat over the top of it and finished the ensemble with a partially unravelled scarf in an odd shade of plasticinemauve. The February weather had been unseasonably warm, but he was taking no chances. As he left the house, he hoped the week ahead would prove to be a busy one, for although he tired more easily these days, hard work made him feel alive. Retirement was an option only suitable for people who hated their jobs. Arthur loved working with his partner John May, and revelled in the fact that they performed a service no-one else in the city could offer. No-one had their arcane depth of knowledge, or was able to use it in the cause of crime prevention. Across the decades they had continued to close the cases few could understand, let alone solve. The Peculiar Crimes Unit was less of a secret now than it had been, but few really appreciated how it operated, or even what it did. It had been founded in a spirit of invention and experimentation, along with Bletchley Park and the Cabinet War Rooms, and would hopefully survive as long as London remained confounded by impossible crimes.

  He tightened his scarf around his throat and, whistling an off-kilter air from The Pirates of Penzance, set off towards the tube station.

  4

  PECULIARITIES

  ‘Mr Bryant is so old that most of his lifetime subscriptions have run out.’ Leslie Faraday, the increasingly portly liaison officer at the Home Office, poked about on his biscuit tray looking for a Custard Cream. ‘He’s only alive because it’s illegal to kill him.’ He wasn’t used to being summoned to work so early, and needed tea before he could concentrate. ‘If we made him redundant he’d not be entitled to a full pension, technically speaking, because he’s working beyond our recommended statutory age limit. How would he be expected to survive?’

  ‘Sentimentality can’t be allowed to stand in the way of modern policing procedures,’ replied Oskar Kasavian, peering from the window into the tiled Whitehall courtyard. Faraday took a quick peek to see if the new supervisor in charge of Internal Security cast a shadow, as his cadaverous pale form created offic
e rumours of supernatural lineage. ‘We’re not here to provide the inefficient with a living.’

  This last remark confused Faraday, who believed that this was precisely the purpose for which Whitehall had been created. ‘Quite,’ he said, ‘but surely we must take into account his long and illustrious career working with John May. One doesn’t force admirals into retirement simply because they no longer go to sea. We benefit from their experience.’

  ‘Old generals are the cause of military disasters,’ said Kasavian, drumming long fingers on the windowpane. ‘The elderly are weak precisely because they live in the past.’ It was his absence of humanity others found so perturbing, as if Countess Bathory and Vlad the Impaler had mated to create the perfect bureaucratic hatchet man. ‘It would be prudent to act before someone causes a criminal outrage that could have been prevented by the PCU.’

  ‘You sound as if you have something in mind,’ said Faraday, who preferred to allow others to put forward their ideas, so that he could appear blameless if they failed.