White Corridor

by Christopher Fowler

‘Clearly, I should have treated my last attempt to close the unit as a warning. The detectives have a few friends in senior positions, including, it seems, the Lord Chancellor, who are eager to protect the unit whenever it is threatened with closure. Therefore, we need recourse to a higher power.’

  ‘Higher than the Lord Chancellor?’ Faraday looked as if he could not imagine such a thing.

  ‘Naturally, I have someone in mind,’ said Kasavian, looming over the civil servant with threatening proximity. ‘Leave all the arrangements to me.’

  ‘The trouble with Arthur Bryant is that he treats us all as though we’re uninvited guests gate-crashing his private world,’ complained Raymond Land, the acting head of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, as he adjusted his navy blue golf club tie. ‘That’s what I resent most of all, the sheer lack of respect.’

  Land had failed in his attempt to be transferred to another division following the unit’s success in capturing the murderer dubbed ‘the Highwayman’ in the national press. He reluctantly accepted the fact that he would probably be stationed in Mornington Crescent forever, but it didn’t stop him from vilifying the chief engineer of his fate. Land had arrived at the unit in the early 1970s, expecting to while away a single summer of lightweight criminal cases that fell below the radar and beyond the interest of his superiors. Instead, he had found himself thrust blinking and ill-prepared into the limelight of a series of sensational high-profile murder investigations. He blamed Arthur Bryant and John May, the founders of the unit, for poking him above the parapet of visibility, but managed to enjoy the national attention for a while.

  However, during the Thatcher years, things began to go wrong for the PCU; a number of investigations were mishandled and the unit’s funding was cancelled. Suddenly, Raymond Land realised he was being scapegoated for a division now considered to be unreliable and unworthy of public trust. Arthur Bryant’s much-publicised willingness to hire psychics, necromancers, eco-warriors, numerologists, clairvoyants, crypto-zoologists, chakra-balancers and all manner of alternative therapists placed him in the firing line when his techniques failed. Over the years, only the gentle arbitration of his partner John May mollified the Whitehall mandarins.

  The simple fact remained that Land was a bureaucratic phantom working in a highly unorthodox specialist police division, which made him redundant, the kind of man who needlessly checked his e-mails on trains and complicated things by interfering. He appreciated order, hierarchy, structure, accountability. What he got was a unit that behaved with the unruliness of a backpackers’ hostel. The PCU got away with murder because few of their suspects ever did. In short, they achieved results, and so long as the statistics continued to add up, they would continue to be funded in spite of their procedural irregularities. Thus, Land found himself paying for a success he had never wanted, while the engineers of his fate continued their wayward course through London’s criminal world, causing indignation and admiration in equal measure.

  ‘On Bryant’s insistence we worked right through Christmas,’ he told his wife, who had actually enjoyed the unusual yuletide peace in the house, ‘because he thought he’d found another victim of the Deptford Demon, a case that was supposedly solved in 1968! So now I feel entirely within my rights to do what I’m about to do.’

  ‘And what is that, dear?’ asked his wife, who was only half listening and longed for him to return to the office so that she could get on with painting the kitchen a disagreeable shade of heliotrope that she had spotted in the latest issue of Homes & Gardens.

  ‘I’m closing the unit down for a week,’ he explained in irritation. ‘A compulsory holiday. We’ve no outstanding investigations under way at the moment. It’s the perfect time to reorganise our operational systems.’ Land loved the idea of reorganising things. He fantasised about clean paper-free offices where colour-coded computer files were backed up and alphabetised, as well as being catalogued by subject, theme, date and importance. Arthur Bryant was as likely to arrange papers by the colour of his correspondents’ eyes as by a nationally recognised system. Sometimes he wrote up his notes in naval code or medieval cryptograms. Land was convinced he did it just to be annoying.

  ‘I don’t think Mr Bryant will like that very much,’ replied Mrs Land, eyeing the kitchen cabinets with ill-concealed impatience. She knew that if her husband stayed home, they would never get painted. ‘You’ve always said he only manages to stay alive because of his work. You can’t shut down the unit without his approval.’

  ‘Bryant isn’t the only important member of staff, Leanne. We can all be conscientious. We each have our part to play. No-one is more valuable than anyone else.’

  ‘That’s not strictly true, though, is it, dear?’ said his wife, who enjoyed needling him. ‘I mean, there would be no unit without Arthur and John. They founded it, didn’t they, and they continue to set its policies, whereas I’ve always thought of you as more of a middle manager. You excel at expediting things. You handled shipments in that tinned-fruit warehouse in Wapping when you were younger, remember?’

  Land narrowed his lips, his eyes and the zip on his windcheater with annoyed determination. ‘I’m going to the office,’ he snapped. ‘And I won’t be back until late.’

  Leanne smiled to herself and headed for the paint cans under the stairs.

  John May thoughtfully examined his mail as he sipped his first strong black coffee of the day. He looked down from his kitchen window into the narrow cobbled street, the planked porters’ crosswalks bridged at angles between the warehouse buildings of Shad Thames. The sky was ocean green. A sliver of cloud held a tinge of jade. The weather was darkening, the temperature falling; the wind had changed direction, sweeping down from Norway into the estuary and along the Thames. He reread Monica Greenwood’s letter with a sinking heart, knowing that she was gone, and that he had to let her go.

  In spite of everything, I still love my husband…best not to see each other for a while…don’t want to hurt your feelings…you know how special you will always be to me…my duty is to remain with him.

  He folded the pages with precision and placed them in a drawer. He had known Monica long before she had become the wife of a former murder suspect. She was an artist, stifled by a passionless academic husband, and yet she had returned to him. May’s vanity was dented. The women in his life had provided him with more heartache than any man deserved. His wife, his daughter and now Monica, all gone. Only his granddaughter April had been saved. She was working under his watchful eye at the unit, her agoraphobia held in check for the first time in years. The barriers between the pair had finally fallen, the circumstances surrounding her mother’s tragic death laid bare and forgiven. April was all he had left now. He would let nothing bad ever happen to her.

  John May always felt old at the onset of winter. He was three years younger than his partner—and looked considerably more youthful—but his bones were just as tired. As the days grew shorter he questioned his motives for continuing. Suppose something happened to Bryant, as he knew it eventually would? Arthur veered between untapped reservoirs of strength and fault lines of frailty. How much longer could either of them draw enough stamina to continue fighting for the unit?

  May grew annoyed with himself; self-doubt felt weak, but it expanded with age. The young were confident because they did not know any better. And for once it was he, and not Bryant, who needed a decent investigation in which to become absorbed. It was the best way to reconcile himself to the loss of such a wonderful woman.

  As he shaved and dressed, he became more infuriated about the way in which the PCU was treated. The unit regularly suffered budget cuts and redundancies because it was a specialist investigation agency. As the nation converged on a single set of public services, the experts were being lost to countries that still held their seniors in high regard. He and Bryant were too old and too attached to London to ever consider leaving, and that made them obvious targets. After all this time the job should have got easier. Instead, they were now fighting for e
verything they had once been able to take for granted.

  Our time must come, he told himself, although he had to admit that it was getting a little late.

  The backlit fascia of the Mornington Crescent all-night taxi office bathed Detective Sergeant Janice Longbright in an unflattering shade of canary yellow. She shoved up the new roller-shutter covering the entrance of the Peculiar Crimes Unit and locked it in place with a strong right arm. The shutter had been added at the insistence of Raymond Land, after a gang of local thugs had rammed the door with a stolen builders’ van. Mornington Crescent, once an area of rough-edged gentility, of brown brick terraces bordered by damp green canals and soot-blackened railway lines, of dirt-grimed walls and windows and battered street signs, was becoming another London no-go zone of drunks and crazies, where keeping a watchful eye was no longer enough to protect you from harm.

  Figures for robbery, burglary, drug offences, fraud and theft were falling across the Western world, but here sexual attacks, acts of terrorism and brutal murders were on the rise. Small crimes could be thwarted by improved technology, but that left something stranger and more menacing on the streets. Bryant and May had insisted on staying at the epicentre of violent crime in the national capital, arguing—rightly, as it turned out—that they were as badly needed as any other emergency service.

  The difference lay in the PCU’s operating methods. Unshackled from the endless backup procedures of the Metropolitan Police, they were able to occupy a unique place in the city’s investigative system. London remained a security nightmare despite its reliance on CCTV cameras, but the Met coped well with mopping blood, drying tears and calming fears; taking care of commonplace crimes was their job. Once, streets like Islington’s notorious Campbell Bunk had existed in gruelling poverty, beyond the boundaries of order and safety. Now, at least, the path was clear for specialist units like the PCU to investigate the misdemeanours that would have gone undiscovered in such areas.

  Bryant told every prospective member of staff that their agenda knew no borders of class, age or race. Their remit was to settle sensitive cases with abstruse thinking, their purpose to prevent public panic and moral outrage. In recent years, the unit had become adept at handling the investigations the Met no longer had time to consider in depth. The Home Office now called the shots, and their demand for paperwork had increased until younger, more energetic staff were wasted in the daily untangling of office life that took place behind the crescent windows above the tube station.

  As Longbright straightened her seamed nylons and gathered the weekend’s post from the mat, Crippen, the unit’s moth-eaten feline mascot, shot past her into the street, searching for somewhere to micturate. Arthur’s been to the office on a Sunday again and locked the cat in without putting its tray out, she thought. Doesn’t that man ever rest?

  She clumped up the bowed stairs in her film-star heels, savouring the emptiness of the unit, wrinkling her nose at the smell of Bryant’s stale pipe tobacco. How long will the calm last this time? she wondered. Peace was both desired and dreaded, for although most of them welcomed a break from the long hours, it turned Bryant into a tyrant, as he stalked about the corridors getting on everyone’s nerves and under everyone’s feet.

  That, she supposed ruefully, was the trouble with the Peculiar Crimes Unit; you never knew what you were about to get. Recently they had spent an unnerving week clambering about on the city’s rooftops looking for a man who called himself the Highwayman, only to discover that the unusual nature of his identity probably meant the guilty would never be properly punished. If anything, the Highwayman had become even more popular with teenagers in the weeks that followed his arrest. You still saw T-shirts bearing his logo on the market stalls of Camden Town. When ordinary people started glorifying cruelty and throwing rocks at the police, maybe it was time to find another job. Except that Longbright’s mother had worked at the unit before her, and had charged her with its protection. Janice felt possessive about the place, and knew that as long as she was needed here, she would face any challenge the detectives set her.

  Sorting through the morning’s mail, she turned on the lights and began the day.

  5

  OUBLIETTE

  The winter sun seared the back of Madeline Gilby’s bare neck.

  Only in the café’s shade were the chill tendrils of the season felt. She closed her book, pushed the blond fringe from her eyes and slid Euros across the palm of her hand, tipping them to the light in order to count them; the denominations were still confusing. The boy looked up at her anxiously from across the tiny wrought-iron table. Above them, swallows dropped to the eaves of the building, then looped out across the dark sea. Placing the money for the bill in the little white dish, she returned to her novel.

  ‘Put the book down,’ said Ryan. ‘You’re always reading.’

  ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about, all right?’ she said for the third time, setting the paperback aside. ‘We’ve enough to get by. I’ve told you, let me take care of the cash. You’re ten. You can start worrying properly in about eight years’ time, when we have to stump up for your student loan.’

  ‘I’m not going to university,’ said Ryan. ‘I’m going to get a job and help you.’

  ‘Over my dead body. Finish your croissant.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You wanted an ice cream half an hour ago.’

  ‘That’s different.’ Ryan stared dolefully at the picked-apart croissant. ‘Only the French could invent bread that explodes when you try to eat it.’

  Madeline looked into the sky. ‘I wanted a child, I got Noel Coward,’ she complained.

  ‘Who’s Noel Coward?’ Ryan asked.

  ‘A very funny man who lived a long time ago, to you anyway.’ She reached across the table and stole the remains of the croissant. ‘If you’re not going to eat it, I will.’

  ‘How long do we have to stay here?’

  ‘It’s a holiday, Ryan, you’re meant to be having fun.’ She tore off a buttery flake and chewed it, watching him. The blue bruise over her right eye was fading. The grapevines in the trellis above them patched their shoulders in green and yellow light.

  ‘I don’t know anyone.’

  ‘Then go out and make a friend.’

  ‘There’s no-one here my age. They’re all in school.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s not exactly high season. You’ll be at a new school as soon as we’ve found a place.’ She squinted up at the deceiving sun, then resettled her sunglasses. ‘Meanwhile we have to make the best of it. Besides, we’ll only stay for a few more days, until the cheque comes through.’

  ‘What if it doesn’t?’

  Madeline sighed. ‘It will. Your father is required by law to pay up. It’s called a divorce settlement, and it should have been cleared by now. So we just sit tight until it arrives.’

  ‘If you hadn’t left Dad—’

  ‘If I hadn’t left him I’d be in A and E with my arm in a sling or worse, so drop it, okay?’ She softened, aware of his growing alarm. Her lies about the origins of her cuts and bruises had made him realise the truth. ‘I’m sorry, baby, I don’t mean to shout at you, it’s just—everything at the moment. Look, I can pay the bill without managing to get us thrown in jail, and if the sea’s too cold to go swimming we’ll take a walk, all right?’

  They descended to the steep pebbled beach and strolled across banks of rank-smelling olivine seaweed, passing through pools of shadow cast by the cypress trees that grew behind the walls of secretive villas. Out of the sunlight, the air was chill.

  ‘Who do you think lives there?’ asked Ryan, jumping in an impossible attempt to see through the railings.

  ‘Rich people, honey, no-one we’re ever likely to meet. They hide behind their high walls and don’t talk to people like us. Actually, I don’t think they’re here out of season. All the windows are shuttered, see?’

  ‘Then where are they?’

  ‘At other houses, in other countries.’


  ‘What do they need more than one house for?’

  ‘Good question. To get away from each other, I guess.’

  She thought about the world she had left behind. Back at the Elephant & Castle, Madeline’s days were split between her supermarket shifts, working afternoons in East Street Laundromat and evenings in The Seven Stars, a deafening bar popular with the area’s young professionals. Jack, her husband, changed oil and tyres at the local MOT centre, answering to a boy ten years younger than himself. The marriage had failed years earlier, largely because Jack could never control his drinking or his unfocussed anger, and after one remorseful fight too many she had pushed for a legal separation. Things had soured between them when her promised support payments failed to materialise.

  When Jack’s brother turned up in the bar to tell her that she was a headcase, and accused her of trying to destroy their family, the escalation of hostility was so unnerving that she had grabbed Ryan from school, borrowed some cash from her mother and booked an easy Jet flight from the nearest Internet café. They had ended up in the South of France because a flight to Nice was affordable and available, but living here was almost as expensive as in London, and she was running low on funds.

  All she could do was wait for the cheque to clear in her bank account, knowing that Jack would try to cancel it when he realised where she had taken Ryan. They had caught a train east, along the coast, looking for somewhere cheap to stay, and disembarked from the first tiny station they reached, the village of Eze-sur-Mer.

  High above them—an hour’s walk into the Savaric cliffs—was the other Eze, an ancient village perché consisting of shops selling tasselled velvet cushions and Provence tablecloths in the colours of sea and sunshine. Low-ceilinged galleries were filled with lurid daubs of boats at rest, postcards and fridge magnets. Far below, away from tourists searching for a taste of the old country, there was barely anything to indicate a town; a single restaurant called La Vieille Ville, a closed bar, a modest little hotel without stars, commendations or any other guests, and stepped parades of shuttered villas built on the forested scree beneath the cliffs. At the only café, the passing of a car was enough to make the proprietor step out and watch with his dishtowel over his shoulder.