Bryant & May – England’s Finest

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ John May replied. ‘The Big Brother house. Ten Downing Street. Anywhere Kim Kardashian’s been. Why?’

  ‘I’m reading about how the Belgians ruined the Congo. It seems as if everything that’s happened there since has been tainted by King Leopold’s reign of terror. Of course, the Congo was a perfect target: it had unclaimed land, precious minerals, no central government. Whereas Britannia Street has a bike shop, a tattoo parlour and some scruffy rented flats.’

  May looked as if he was getting a headache. ‘Once again, Arthur, your mind has jumped off the tracks without taking me along. What are you talking about?’

  Bryant set the book aside and opened the Ordnance Survey map he kept on his desk. Removing a biro from behind his ear, he pointed to a road junction. ‘You know where Britannia Street meets King’s Cross Road?’

  ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘It’s just down the road from here. A black spot. It doesn’t have one of those signs saying “Accident Black Spot” but it’s one nevertheless.’

  ‘Well, there’s a lot of traffic whipping around that one-way system.’

  ‘It’s not just traffic – it’s crime. This part here, the north-west corner’ – he tapped his pen on the map – ‘has a much higher incidence of criminal activity than anywhere else in the neighbourhood.’

  ‘Just that corner? Are you sure?’ May was intrigued, and came around the desk to study the road layout. ‘Who lives there?’

  ‘That’s the odd thing. There are no problem families, no illegal residents, but the local cop shop has been clocking up incidents there at a rate of one a week since the start of July and it’s now’ – he looked at his watch – ‘September.’

  ‘What kind of incidents?’ asked May.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve asked me that because I’ve broken them down into groups,’ said Bryant.

  ‘Bored, are you?’

  ‘It’s been quieter than usual, I’ll admit, but look at this, all on one corner.’ He pulled out a roll of paper and held it flat with an ashtray and a box of fruit gums. ‘Janice noticed it first and printed it out for me. Four burglaries, two fatal car accidents, one lorry mounting the kerb and seriously injuring a pedestrian, a suicide attempt, two cases of arson, one lady killed under a bus and now a violent assault.’

  May thought for a moment. ‘That’s a heavily trafficked area. It’s coincidence. What else could it be?’

  ‘That’s what I intend to find out,’ Bryant said, rising and slipping his arm into his coat sleeve. ‘The latest incident took place just over an hour ago. I thought I’d go and take a look.’

  May didn’t need to be invited along. The pair left the Peculiar Crimes Unit and headed in a south-easterly direction towards Britannia Street. It was a pleasantly sunny morning, which always put Bryant in a good mood because it meant his knees didn’t ache.

  ‘What makes you think you’re going to find something?’ May asked as they crossed the traffic-clogged one-way system.

  ‘Wouldn’t you hate to miss out if I do?’ Bryant replied, peering at his partner with eyes like the sun on the sea.

  The conjunction of roads below King’s Cross had a careless, random quality that rendered it virtually invisible. London was now a patchwork of pockets, an elegant Edwardian building here, a forgotten Victorian garden there, stitched together with nondescript thoroughfares and cheaply constructed modern blocks. Although Britannia Street was surrounded by more interesting places – verdant Bloomsbury to the west, the restored customs houses of Granary Square to the north and the oddly elevated Percy Circus to the east – its junction with King’s Cross Road was nothing more than a connection point.

  The morning sky was clear and bright, a cue for Bryant to wrap himself in so many layers that he looked like the Michelin Man. In the gap between the top of his striped scarf and the brim of his homburg all that could be seen were the tip of his nose and his milk-bottle-thick glasses. When he needed to look around he had to turn his entire body to do so. ‘Over there,’ he said, pointing.

  May saw a blackened patch of concrete around ten yards long, and at the end some twisted pieces of metal bolted into the concrete: the remains of a railing.

  ‘Somebody torched it,’ Bryant explained. ‘It was full of motorbikes at the time. One of the petrol tanks caught fire and the whole lot went up. They had to evacuate the building behind it. To date, no one’s been charged. On the opposite kerb two people died from collision injuries and a woman shoved her fist through a plate-glass door, slashing her wrist. Thefts, burglaries, assaults – a dog even attacked its owner, putting her in the hospital, all on the same corner. And now this.’ He pushed open the door of the tattoo parlour and ventured into the gothic interior. Black velvet swathed the walls and flickering candelabra provided pinpoints of wavering illumination. On the back wall was a purple neon sign: ‘Damnation Tattoos’.

  ‘Good heavens, you don’t tattoo people under this kind of lighting, do you?’ Bryant asked of Alix, the receptionist, a pale, spiderwebbed girl with mauve ropes arranged on her partially shaved head.

  ‘No, this is the consultation zone,’ she said in a surprisingly refined voice. ‘The surgery is upstairs at the front. Do you have an appointment?’

  ‘I once considered having something on my right bicep but I couldn’t make up my mind between Sir Robert Peel and Diana Dors,’ Bryant admitted.

  ‘Oh.’ In confusion she turned to Bryant’s partner. ‘Then have you come about Henry Carrell?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said May. ‘Have we?’

  ‘That’s the fellow. What happened, exactly?’ asked Bryant, following Alix up the stairs.

  ‘He’s only been with us a month,’ Alix explained. ‘He came highly recommended. His design portfolio was amazing. I haven’t moved anything.’ She showed them into a room very different to the one downstairs, white-walled and clinically clean, with mirrors and a white-tiled workbench. But where the tattooist’s instruments should have been neatly aligned beside a stainless-steel autoclave, they were spread across the floor in a thin trail of blood.

  ‘Henry’s client had already approved his design and signed our contract.’ Alix remained at the edge of the room. ‘It was her second session with him. He had already drawn the outline of the image—’

  ‘Which was what?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘A leopard,’ said Alix. ‘It was a complex piece with a lot of shading. To make a tattoo permanent, the ink has to get into the dermis. The needle Henry was using has eighteen heads. Each type of needle has a different effect.’

  ‘I’ve always wondered how these things work,’ said Bryant, about to bend down and pick up the corded tattooing instrument.

  ‘You’d better not touch it, Arthur,’ warned May. ‘Perhaps we should get Dan in to take a look.’

  ‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ said Bryant. ‘There wasn’t anyone else here, was there?’

  ‘No, just Henry and the client, and I was downstairs. I heard a thud and thought something was wrong. Then the client started screaming. She tried to take her arm away while he was tattooing, but it was clamped in place.’

  ‘Who was she?’ asked May.

  ‘A young woman who already had a couple of designs on her back.’

  ‘So she knew what to expect,’ said May.

  ‘She screamed, and he just kind of went crazy, threw his needles about, thrashed around, hit her in the face, then collapsed. She was taken to University College Hospital with a damaged right forearm – the needle had badly torn her skin – and he’s being treated there right now.’

  ‘You came up here when the commotion started, is that right?’

  ‘Yes. She was clutching her arm and he was rolling on the floor over there. The tattooing instrument was pulled out of the wall.’

  ‘Was anything else out of place or different to how it usually was?’

  ‘Not that I can recall,’ Alix told them, looking about the room. ‘Wait, that was shut.’ She pointed to where th
e window over the street stood wide open.

  ‘Well, what next?’ asked May as they left the tattoo parlour.

  ‘I’m going there,’ said Bryant, raising a great woolly arm at the Subway sandwich shop across the road.

  ‘Good Lord, you’re not going to eat one of those things, are you?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Bryant replied, pulling a face at the thought. ‘I want to ask them some questions. Can you go to UCH and check on Henry Carrell and his client? I’ll meet you back at the unit.’

  The serving girl in Subway examined Bryant’s PCU ID card and removed her blue plastic gloves before coming around to his side of the counter. ‘I was here when the bikes blew up,’ she told him. ‘The heat cracked our window. It had to be replaced. People could have been killed. Luckily we were quiet.’

  ‘Did you see anyone nearby?’ Bryant asked.

  ‘The police asked me that. They had a theory that someone was upset with the motorbike shop – most of the bikes belonged to them – but I don’t know if they ever caught anyone. Some bikers drove past shortly before it happened but apart from that the street was just … normal, you know? It was about eleven in the morning. We had to close up, because of the damaged window and the police cordon. Lately it seems there are always funny things happening around here.’

  Bryant stood at the junction with his hands in his voluminous pockets, watching the traffic and the passers-by. King’s Cross Road had a rather colourful mix of shops: a fetish rubberwear outfitters, a hipster cocktail bar, a place that sent money orders to Africa and unlocked mobile phones, a student building clad in buckled steel panels that looked like a very bad architect’s attempt to copy the Bilbao Guggenheim on a budget. Ahead lay the great concourse of King’s Cross Station. Behind him the road wound to Mount Pleasant, then dropped through Clerkenwell to Farringdon and the river. There was no reason he could think of that would make this neglected little corner of London more dangerous than anywhere else, but he could not shake the idea that some unusual force was at work.

  To decide the matter he made a phone call.

  Maggie Armitage, Grand Order Grade IV White Witch in the Coven of St James the Elder, Kentish Town, said she could be there in ten minutes, as she was just up the road at Euston trying to buy two hundred feet of fishing line and a handbell. Maggie always appeared en fête, brightly clothed in primary colours, layered with enough trailing chiffon and silk to stall an escalator. She had dyed her hair cinnamon and pinned a badge-covered bobble hat on the back.

  ‘Isn’t that a rather old-fashioned method of registering a ghostly presence?’ asked Bryant as they greeted each other and headed into a coffee shop.

  ‘You can do it with lasers now,’ Maggie agreed, ‘but Dame Maude tried that and nearly took her eye out, so we’re taking the old-fashioned route. Two coffees, please.’

  ‘What kind?’ asked the barista, not unkindly. There were forty varieties listed on his blackboard, the most complex being a free-trade organic half-whole milk split-quad decaf soy-whip vanilla cinnamon great white with sugar-free syrup.

  ‘The one made with beans.’ Bryant turned his attention back to Maggie. ‘Why are you still holding séances anyway?’ he wondered.

  ‘Easy money, darling,’ said Maggie in a rare moment of sanguinity. ‘There are still plenty of haunted people out there looking for reassurance. You could say we’re deceiving them but I think of it as cheap therapy. Why are we standing on Witches’ Cross?’

  Bryant looked around in puzzlement. ‘What, here? This has an actual name?’

  ‘That’s what it used to be called in the late eighteenth century. On the two opposing corners lived two witches, there and there, where the Subway shop and the tattoo parlour are now. Of course, it was all residential around here, and very poor. The old houses have been knocked down and replaced.’

  Both properties had been remodelled extensively and unsympathetically above their ground floors. At the junction’s four corners, two buildings had been recently rebuilt in their entirety.

  ‘When you say witches …’ Bryant began.

  ‘You know the two witch mothers of Camden Town, “Red Cap” and “Black Cap”?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Bryant. For centuries two public houses had commemorated the Camden witches. The first had changed its name in the 1980s, and the second had only just been closed down.

  ‘Then you’ll know they weren’t actual witches. Every neighbourhood once had a matriarchal figure who offered marital and sexual advice to the young women in her street. Some people – husbands, mostly – took against them and accused them of witchcraft. It was the same on this corner. Mother Merlin and Mother Green supposedly lived opposite each other. When they were driven out they cursed the site and it became known as Witches’ Cross, a black spot where terrible things would always happen.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Bryant, ‘but there’s a difference between folklore and fact.’

  Maggie regarded her coffee with suspicion. ‘Not in my book.’

  ‘With all due respect, Maggie, you believe your fridge stopped working because you upset it. In the real world, a pedestrian walking under a bus can’t be the fault of ghostly manifestations.’

  ‘Excuse me, but you were just charged six pounds sixty for two coffees purely on the basis of their folkloric origin,’ she said, indicating the board. ‘And you believe in psychogeography, Arthur, I know you do.’

  ‘Yes, but only because of historical factors. Certain sites have always been associated with public assembly. Others are endemically poor.’ They seated themselves at a table in the window.

  ‘Oh, absolutely,’ Maggie agreed. ‘The buildings themselves have architecturally symbolic designs. Squares suggest masculine power, circles represent calmness and femininity, and triangles encourage energy and stimulation. It’s why demonstrations and protests occur in squares, people pass fluidly through circles and become restless in triangles.’

  Bryant dug a paper bag from his pocket. ‘Do you want a Jelly Baby?’

  Maggie accepted a yellow one and bit off its head. ‘They used to be known as “unclaimed babies” in the nineteenth century,’ she said, chewing ruminatively. ‘I presume you’re wandering around here because a crime has been committed.’

  ‘Possibly. Possibly not.’

  This was the kind of conversation Bryant and his old friend had been having for decades, conducted in reverse and sidetracked by irrelevant anecdotes.

  ‘Attack by tattoo needle, over there,’ said Bryant. ‘Fellow went bonkers; he and his client are both in UCH. The latest in a series of misfortunes that have befallen people at this exact location.’

  ‘How exact?’

  ‘I’d say to within a hundred feet. I don’t think it’s a witch’s curse, though. There was even a dog. Usually placid, suddenly decided to bite its owner.’

  ‘What breed?’

  ‘Welsh, I think.’

  ‘I meant the dog.’

  ‘Oh. Something big with a lot of teeth. I’m thinking telephones.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Up there.’ Bryant pointed to a rooftop with his paper bag. ‘Phone mast. You know, high-frequency electronic signals. Dogs have a different audio bandwidth, don’t they?’

  They looked up at the tilted grey slate roofs and the rows of defunct orange chimneypots. There among them stood a sinister steel sentinel, a bundle of ribbed phone masts pointing in all four directions above the crossroads.

  ‘She’s been bandaged up and sent home; he’s still out cold,’ said May, hanging up his jacket. The morning sunshine showed the detectives’ office at its worst; dust lay thick across Bryant’s collection of rare, abstruse and mouldering books. Spores floated in the sunlight. ‘How did you get on?’

  ‘Maggie made as much sense as a cat in a bin,’ said Bryant, ‘so as there are too many incidents for you and I to handle by ourselves, I’ve asked everyone else to help.’

  ‘Raymond won’t like that,’ May warned. ‘He wants us to clear
our backlog. Something to do with end-of-month targets.’

  ‘I don’t know why he stays on here.’ Bryant went to the mantelpiece and knocked his pipe out on the beak of a stuffed owl. ‘He’d be much happier with a nice little job in a local council, launching endless unworkable health and safety initiatives.’

  ‘You do realize you’re not going to find a connection between cases of arson, assault, road rage and a dog attack?’ May was amused but sympathetic. Stranger things had made their way into the PCU’s case files.

  Bryant’s azure eye held the gleam of determination. ‘Care for a small wager?’

  ‘Not money, I’m broke this month.’

  ‘Heavens, nothing so vulgar.’ Bryant rolled his eyes. ‘If I find a common culprit, you can buy me a book I’ve wanted for a little while. If I fail, I’ll treat you to dinner at the restaurant of your choice.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ May agreed, ‘but let’s set a time limit on it.’ May checked his old Timex. ‘It’s coming up for noon, so how about twenty-four hours from now?’

  ‘Deal.’ They shook hands and May found he had jelly-baby sugar all over his fingers.

  Meera Mangeshkar drummed her bitten nails on the counter of the Harley Boys motorcycle centre. She had been waiting in the bike shop for a while now. As the manager wandered past, still ignoring her, she thrust her hand in front of his face. ‘Oi, you’ve got a customer.’

  ‘Yeah – well, I’m a bit busy right now, my love.’ According to the stitched lettering on his blue overalls, his name was Gary.

  Meera had brought her Kawasaki here to be serviced in the past, only using the place under sufferance because of its proximity to the unit. ‘I’m not your love,’ she said, ‘I’m a police officer. It’s a bit sexist, calling this place “Harley Boys”.’

  ‘What do you want me to call it – “Girl on a Motorcycle”?’

  ‘It’d be a start. You’ve been upsetting the customers again, I hear.’

  ‘What you talkin’ about?’ Gary grabbed a paper towel and smeared oil from a doughy cheek.

  ‘I heard somebody set fire to your bikes,’ said Meera.