Bryant & May – England’s Finest

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘And he is. Sadly my warning came too late.’ He rose to show the detectives out. ‘If only there was something I could do, but I’m leaving tonight and taking up residence in a new chapel.’

  Bryant also rose but paused. ‘Perhaps there is one thing you can do. Submit to a DNA test.’

  May knew his partner was bluffing. The unit could not afford to call in tests after a case was closed. ‘Arthur,’ he said, ‘I think we should be going.’

  ‘Nonsense. If Mr Haranai really wishes to help us he’ll let us eliminate him from our inquiries.’

  An air of hesitation shimmered over Haranai’s eyes and then was gone. ‘Of course,’ he said finally. ‘Anything to help.’

  ‘A piece of evidence has come to light, making the move necessary,’ said Bryant casually.

  Haranai’s ever-confident smile faltered.

  ‘She knew it was you who burgled her, of course,’ Bryant continued. ‘If I’d have thought a little faster I’d have realized the truth and might have saved her life. She was telling the truth. She didn’t give you the key code; you gave it to her.’

  ‘I didn’t give her anything, Mr Bryant.’

  ‘Not the physical number, no. But you made her fearful enough to go home and revise the sequence.’ He dug in his pocket and removed the sliver of paper on which Mrs Granville had written her new code. ‘This is the code she used after the burglary: two – eleven – four – six.’

  ‘I fail to see what any of this has to do with me,’ snapped Haranai.

  ‘That’s the thing about old ladies,’ Bryant pointed out. ‘They do love bits of paper.’ Turning over the scrap, he showed Haranai the other side. ‘Mrs Granville kept the drawing you made for her, the one you used to explain why she should change her number.’

  He flattened the paper on the tabletop between them. On the reverse were two tiny pencil diagrams, one of an inverted crucifix, and one the right way up.

  ‘You pointed out that if you draw lines through the numbers of the main gate’s code, which everyone knew, it forms a symbol of the Antichrist, an inverted cross. That’s why she asked the porter to change it, even though it wasn’t within his power to do so. It could only be done by the managing agent. I must say it was smart thinking on your part, coming up with that one. You suggested that she could keep the Devil at bay by changing her front-door code to make the universally recognized sign of the cross. Then all you had to do was wait a while and try it for yourself while she was out.’

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ said Haranai. ‘She must have done this herself. You cannot prove—’

  Bryant raised an interrupting hand. ‘One other point. It was clear to me that the burglar wore gloves when using the key pad to open the box, and inside the flat, but he would have had to take them off to get the actual key out of its box – it’s such a fiddly little thing.’ Bryant smiled innocently. ‘I tried to remove it several times and failed. We don’t even need a DNA match for you, just a fingerprint. You killed her, Haranai.’

  ‘The power of suggestion,’ muttered Bryant, poking a thumbful of Old Mariner’s Filthy Shag into the bowl of his pipe. ‘Without it there would have been no need for the Malleus Maleficarum. It was a weapon cruelly wielded against the trusting innocent. Some editions had a pentacle adorning the cover. I suppose a man like Haranai is always on the lookout for signs and portents that will help him take advantage of others. If Mrs Granville’s entry code had consisted of six numerals instead of four, it might have been ten – six – four – twelve – two – ten.’

  ‘Why,’ asked May, ‘what would that have been?’

  ‘You tell me,’ Bryant replied with a smile, sitting back to enjoy his pipe. ‘Draw it out.’

  Bryant & May and the Invisible Woman

  ‘You said I could have an ice cream.’ The boy aggressively pulled against his mother’s hand.

  ‘I said you could have one after we’d been around the gallery.’ Her grip tightened. The rain was seeping in veils now. She hung on to her partially collapsed umbrella with the other hand, trying to keep them both dry.

  ‘The gallery’s deadly boring. It’s just bits of rope and wood.’

  ‘It’s not deadly boring, it’s the Tate Modern.’ She slowly dragged him towards the corner of the building. ‘Mummy wants to see the Rothkos.’

  The little boy rolled pleading eyes. ‘I’ll just stay here without moving until you’ve finished.’

  That’s what I say to your father, she thought. Aloud she said, ‘It’s tipping down. You’ll catch your death if you stay here. You’re coming with me.’

  He pouted and puffed and dug in his heels. ‘But it’s so deadly boring.’

  At that moment the Tate Modern became somewhat less boring when a body hurtled past them and smacked into the concrete walkway, spattering them both with blood.

  The boy looked up at the building, stunned into silence, his jaw slack with wonderment. A man had apparently fallen from the sky. All thoughts of ice cream had evaporated. As the mother looked down at the crimson speckles covering her fawn raincoat, then at her son, all she could think was, His school trousers are ruined. Moments later there were security guards everywhere. The shattered body was hastily covered with a red blanket and a police car was pulling up on to the pedestrian walkway with its blue lights revolving, but no siren.

  When the mother realized they could both have been killed if her son had not held her back, she felt a rush of released tension sweep over her, and hugged him to her, overwhelmed by the preciousness of life.

  ‘A fifty-two-year-old Caucasian male named Mark Scott,’ DS Renfield informed Arthur Bryant and John May, handing them photographs because he knew Bryant was unlikely to open his email attachments. ‘He did a swan dive from the open-sided viewing gallery of the new Tate extension. Nearly killed a couple of bystanders, a mother and her son.’

  ‘Dead, I presume,’ said May.

  ‘As he fell six storeys on to his head, I’d say yes,’ Renfield pointed out.

  ‘What were you doing there?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘I was out on patrol with a mate of mine in the Met when the call came in,’ Renfield explained. ‘He was about to end his shift so we were going for a drink.’

  ‘And this was last night, so why are you telling us now?’

  ‘Blimey, I’m trying to do you a favour. I thought you’d be interested.’ He shot a look at Janice Longbright. The pair had come into the detectives’ office at the PCU thinking it was the kind of case that would excite their interest.

  ‘We’re very busy,’ Bryant complained. ‘We’ve got a dead woman found in a locked garden in Holland Park, and no leads. Now is not the time to … Why do you think it’s one for us? This isn’t our jurisdiction.’

  ‘We’ve got the woman who killed him, plus a witness who saw the whole thing.’

  ‘Then what do you need us for?’ Bryant pointed out of the window with a stick of liquorice. ‘Have you seen the plaque on our building? “PCU”, it says. “Peculiar Crimes Unit”. I don’t call that peculiar, I call it a two-inch double column in the Evening Standard. Early edition, replaced by a piece about a baking show.’

  ‘You really have no empathy at all, have you?’ said May in perpetual wonderment at his partner’s insensitivity.

  ‘I have something more important – curiosity.’ Bryant turned to Renfield. ‘All right, I’ll bite. Why did she do it?’

  ‘This is where the peculiar part comes in,’ warned Renfield. ‘The killer is Rebecca Hope, Scott’s partner, and the witness is a woman she met a few minutes earlier at the gallery. No one else was up on the deck at that moment and there’s a camera above the main door. Hope rode back with us after being taken into custody and talked all the way. She admitted killing him. I couldn’t shut her up. She spent the night at Snow Hill. The admitting officer took an initial statement from the witness, but I imagine you’ll want to take another one.’

  ‘Nothing Hope said in the car is admissible,’ said May. ‘She has to make
a statement under supervision and without coercion.’

  ‘I know,’ said Renfield. ‘She’s on her way here. The HSCCfn1 think we might be more suited to dealing with her.’

  ‘Oh, they do, do they? Who’s running the local Murder Investigation Team for that area?’

  ‘An old pal of yours, Rupert Harmsworth. He says he has his hands full at the moment.’

  ‘Ça explique tout,’ said Bryant. ‘The only thing he knows about work is how to work the system. From the sound of things we won’t have a problem getting a statement out of her.’

  ‘What, so we’re going to take this on in the middle of another case, are we?’ asked May, nettled.

  ‘Good heavens, you can manage more than one thing at the same time, can’t you? Look at Janice, she does half a dozen things at once. What did Hope say in the car?’

  ‘That she’d met him soon after his wife died. That she loved him with all her heart but had to kill him, and that’s all we needed to know.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Bryant. ‘It says a lot.’

  Renfield looked mystified. ‘Does it? I don’t see how.’

  Bryant already had the bit between his teeth. ‘Janice, pull out everything you can find on her history, will you? And look into his background. John, can you handle the statement?’

  ‘You know you can sit in on interviews yourself, Arthur.’ May knew that his partner had an aversion to them.

  Bryant waved the idea aside. ‘I don’t need to. You’ll only tell me off for leading the suspect. Just make sure she’s relaxed and feels safe, and let her talk for as long as she likes. The answers always come when the recorder is turned off, so don’t turn it off.’

  ‘Arthur, she’s a suspect, not a witness,’ May reminded him.

  Bryant wasn’t listening. ‘Send someone to get a statement from the witness. I’ll read the finished documents when you’ve collated them. It’ll be faster that way. Maybe we can get this done while we’re waiting for the Holland Park case to break.’

  Renfield and May went to the interview room and made arrangements.

  Excerpt from the transcribed statement of Rebecca Hope, taken at the Peculiar Crimes Unit, 231 Caledonian Road, King’s Cross, on 19 November at 10.30 a.m.

  I was standing before a painting by Salvador Dalí called The Image Disappears. It’s not very big, maybe fifty centimetres square, rendered in ochre and amber oils. It shows a young woman reading a letter by a window. She’s very clearly painted; you can see her hair, her nails, the folds of her dress. But when I stepped back a little and studied it again, the girl had vanished and had been replaced by the face of a stern-looking man. I feel like that now. Like I’ll disappear to let the man appear.

  The panel on the wall said that Dalí had painted a number of these optical-illusion pictures in the 1930s. I wanted to see others but the rest of the room was filled with bits of wood and coils of wire. The exhibition at the new Tate Modern extension was called Seeing Is Not Believing. It was a private view, very dressy, so I had glammed up for the occasion. We were going to go together, Mark and I.

  An awkwardly tall blonde woman was standing beside me sipping white wine from a plastic cup. ‘I have no idea what that’s meant to be,’ she said. ‘I don’t come here to look at the art.’

  ‘So why are you here?’ I studied her from the side. She had one of those upside-down mouths that couldn’t smile, and the kind of thin skin you get from counting calories and pushing salads around plates in expensive restaurants.

  ‘I’m looking for a date,’ she said, wiping maroon lipstick from the rim of her cup. ‘A lot of my friends come here to meet men. You know they’re going to be cultured, right? Look at that one over there. He’s carrying a book. That’s a good sign.’

  She pointed to a man in a beautiful grey suit, dark-haired, a little thinning on top, brown shoes, expensive but the wrong colour. He had his back to us, so I couldn’t see how she could tell if he was dating material. ‘That’s my partner,’ I told her. As if sensing that she was talking about him, Mark moved out of range.

  ‘This wine is rubbish,’ said the blonde, draining her cup. ‘I need a refill. Wish me happy hunting.’

  I followed Mark upstairs to the viewing deck. He was walking just a little way ahead of me, a paperback in his right hand. The lifts were too crowded to board so I continued up the stairs to the deck. I pushed open the glass panel to the exterior walkway. It was darker and mistier now, and the river air smelled brackish and dank. I remember the concrete floor was soaked and puddled in places, which made it slippery. It was too murky to see out over the city.

  Mark was walking a little way ahead. The paperback was Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. The blonde downstairs would probably have approved.

  I called out to Mark, ‘Hey, you.’

  He raised his head and looked around, waiting apprehensively while I caught up. For a moment I thought he’d failed to recognize me. There was a faraway look in his eyes. A gust of wind brought more rain over the balcony. At that height London weather plays havoc with your hair. The event was invitation-only and glamorous, so I hadn’t dressed for warmth. There weren’t enough lights working on the deck, so I stood beneath one where he could see me.

  The cold night air didn’t seem to bother him. I wasn’t sure what else was left to say. I knew things were as bad between us as they could ever get.

  He asked me what I thought of the exhibition, almost as if I was a perfect stranger.

  I told him I liked some of the paintings but to be honest a lot of it was lost on me. One room was full of ductwork and cables. I thought the workmen were still finishing the ceiling but it turned out to be an installation about Syria.

  I remember looking out into the sky and thinking the clouds had jaundice – light pollution, I suppose. I was glad there were no real stars to be seen above the city, only the red pinprick lights of cranes. Stars make me feel lonely.

  ‘I’m not sure we’re supposed to be out here,’ he said, leaning back against the railing. ‘It looks like they’re still working on the exterior. They were rushing to get it finished for the opening. I thought they were going to glass the whole thing in. Someone could fall over …’

  We stood there a little longer, just looking at each other. He was always so reasonable, so pleasant, so English, and at first it had worked. He had always made me want to be kind in return.

  Behind us someone came up to the glass doors and looked at the bad weather, but was driven outside by the need for a cigarette. Then I heard her footsteps, high heels on concrete. It was the woman I’d been speaking to downstairs.

  I looked back at Mark. I was sick of arguing with him. I was defensive and angry. I don’t remember much about what happened next. I saw my hand hitting his shoulder, and Mark’s expensive brown shoes slipping on the wet concrete. I raised my arms and put my hands on both his shoulders, and pushed as hard as I possibly could. I heard him cry out, and then he was gone. The beautiful grey suit blurred with the falling rain and simply vanished over the edge. The paperback fell on to the wet floor.

  I stared at the railing that was too low, the safety barrier he had fretted about, and realized I was left with the other woman who stood there struck dumb by what I had done. Then she turned and ran away. She wanted nothing to do with it. He disappeared in seconds. The observation deck was filled with swirling rain. I couldn’t even see Mark’s footprints any more.

  I remember the accusing looks of people lining the staircase as I made my way down, soaked and shaking violently.

  As I passed the room with the Dalí painting I briefly caught sight of it again, and this time I couldn’t see the woman in it. I later found out that it isn’t about a woman at all, but two men, Vermeer and Velázquez. The woman in the picture is just a trick, a phantom. The woman was never real.

  Only I know what happened between us, and the pain will never go away. I think there are always some things that should be held back. There’s only one person who should know everything abo
ut you, and that’s the person you love the most. Not a police officer who looks at you with suspicion and spends all his time trying to catch you out.

  If I told you how much I suffered because of him, would that make it any better? His daughter and I, we only ever wanted what was best for him. Mark was so self-destructive, I’d always thought that there was nothing we could do. But last night I realized that there was something I could do. I could kill him.

  ‘Am I missing something?’ Longbright asked. ‘I didn’t hear any mention of a motive.’

  ‘That’s the problem,’ May replied, turning the page around and studying it again. ‘When I asked her why she did it, she said she didn’t know. All she’ll admit is that she needed to do it for his sake, and that she’s glad she did.’

  ‘That makes no sense. I’ve got some background history on them.’

  Bryant looked around Longbright’s desk. ‘Where’s the file?’

  ‘I emailed it to you.’

  ‘But you know I like you to print it out.’

  Longbright adopted her don’t-mess-with-me look. ‘You know we’re paper-free, Mr Bryant.’

  ‘You may be, I’m not. What happens to my file if the power fails, like it did last week?’

  ‘It only failed because you blew up the junction box,’ May pointed out.

  ‘John, can you print out the document for him?’ asked Longbright. ‘There’s something odd about the whole set-up.’

  Excerpt from the transcribed statement of Lisa Harper, taken at Snow Hill Police Station, 5 Snow Hill EC1, on 18 November at 8.37 p.m.

  I met the woman I now know to be Rebecca Hope at an exhibition at the Tate Modern called Seeing Is Not Believing, which I suppose is appropriate, considering what I saw earlier tonight. It was a private view and the press were there and some of the artists were in attendance. She and I got talking; I can’t remember how. She was wearing a beautiful black cocktail dress – vintage I think, because it was high-necked with a backless triangle but had sleeves, very 1930s. I’m in fashion, I notice these things. I pointed out a nice-looking man carrying a book, something by Charles Dickens, I think, and she said it was her partner. Then she went off. I remember thinking she seemed very agitated. I thought it was odd, him standing over there and her over by me, almost as if they didn’t know each other. It wasn’t as if either of them were off talking to other people. They were just standing … apart. I thought, Either she’s lying or they’ve had a fight.