Bryant & May – England’s Finest

by Christopher Fowler

  Longbright handed Hope a handkerchief.

  ‘If you can’t inherit and Mr Scott’s daughter is protected, there is no reason why you should be charged,’ said Bryant. ‘You can have your life back.’

  ‘We still have to file a report,’ said May. ‘But we’re an autonomous unit, we don’t report to the HSCC. You should be with Emily now.’

  Longbright took her by the arm and led her out.

  ‘The dress,’ said Bryant, ‘you can take it with you.’

  ‘Give it to the officer who fitted it,’ said Hope. ‘I never want to see it again.’

  As Rebecca Hope was met by her stepdaughter and led off into the rain, May turned away from the window of their office and tore up the charge sheet. ‘I hope we did the right thing,’ he said. ‘We’ll get hell for this.’

  ‘Probably,’ Bryant agreed. ‘Too much of this job is about taking things away from people. It feels good to give something back. Perhaps we restored her to visibility.’

  Bryant & May and the Consul’s Son

  In the damp, unlit basement of number 231 Caledonian Road, King’s Cross, Central London, a workman shouted across to his mate. Confusingly, they were both called Dave. The basement smelled of drains and fungus and something rich and dark from the river below that prickled the skin and cleared the sinuses.

  ‘I think we’ve got a problem,’ said Dave, stepping over the flooded areas of the basement floor. ‘Look.’ He ran his torch beam across the stone, where a foot-wide channel reflected slow-moving, brackish water. The stream disappeared into an iron grate set in the stone slabs. Long smears cut through the green slime that had formed on the floor.

  The other Dave scratched his backside with the end of a bradawl, knelt down, stuck his forefinger in the water, tasted it and spat. ‘It’s sort of fresh.’

  ‘What do you mean, “sort of”?’

  ‘Not sewage.’ He rose and spat again. ‘Nasty though. Freezing cold. It’s probably coming from the River Fleet. Half of the old buildings around here still have wells in their basements.’

  ‘Is that how this place gets its drinking water? It would explain a lot about the nutters upstairs. Lead in the pipes.’

  ‘No, they’re on Thames Water here.’ Dave Two shone the torch across the far wall, lighting up a modern steel door. ‘That shouldn’t be there. Two entrances to the same basement?’

  ‘That must belong to the joint next door. Maybe it was all one big building, then got flogged off separately.’

  ‘What’s next door?’

  ‘The Ladykillers Café and a bar. It looks like they’re storing their stock down here.’ He waved his torch beam over wine racks and crates.

  The second Dave poked about in his tool bag and found a claw hammer. ‘Did you ever go to Becky’s Dive Bar in Borough, under the Hop Exchange?’ He stepped across the channel and checked out the far side of the room. ‘Becky’s barman had the biggest belly in London. To reach the loos you had to step across an underground river cut into the floor, exactly like this.’

  ‘Blimey. Is it still there?’

  ‘What, the bar? No, I think she got closed down for selling tainted sausages. What’s that?’

  In the centre of the river-damp floor sat a striated concrete box, approximately eight feet long and three feet wide.

  ‘It can’t be a substation,’ said the first Dave. ‘Not with a concrete lid. That’s Portland stone. Half of London was once made out of it. Comes from the Isle of Portland in Dorset. White limestone. They used it to build St Paul’s Cathedral. And Buckingham Palace.’

  ‘How do you know all that?’

  ‘My old man was a stonemason.’ Dave One sidled over with a cage lamp and set it down. Taking his place at the corner of the lid, he indicated that Dave Two should do the same at the other end. Together they strained to lift it off. The slab proved too heavy to raise so they were forced to slide it over. Even then it would only move inch by painful inch.

  After a few minutes they had managed to shift it halfway, but then it reached its tipping point and dropped, slamming to the floor. The Daves jumped out of the way to avoid having their toes crushed.

  One of them crept forward with the cage light and gingerly lowered it over the edge.

  ‘Is there something inside?’ asked Dave One, straining to see.

  ‘Not something,’ replied Dave Two. ‘Someone.’

  They peered in together. Within was a slender body wrapped in a red plastic tablecloth covered in purple hyacinths. ‘Blimey,’ said Dave One. ‘Is he alive?’

  Dave Two gave a gesture of despair. ‘Of course he’s not bloody alive, he had half a ton of Portland stone on top of him.’

  Dave One considered the point. ‘Then how did he get in there?’

  They walked around the tomb, their torch beams criss-crossing. ‘Here.’ Dave Two crouched down and ran his hand along the side of the box. ‘This bit’s a different colour. Painted wood.’ He pushed against it and found that the upper edge had a sprung swing-hinge. ‘The body could have been pushed in.’ Rising, he studied the box from a little further back. ‘What’s it for? You wouldn’t make a junction box out of stone. All the electrics are up on the ground floor.’

  ‘It’s like an altar or something,’ said Dave One. ‘I thought we’d find some gas meters and a pump, not a corpse in a tablecloth. My missus has one just like that.’

  ‘Maybe she did it, then.’

  Dave One looked back at the staircase. ‘The PCU’s main entrance has facial recognition software, so he couldn’t have come that way. How did it get here?’

  His partner pointed back at the steel door in the far wall. ‘There’s another method of egress.’

  ‘Egress?’

  ‘Going in and out.’ Dave Two gave himself another scratch with the bradawl. ‘I think there are bugs down here. You know the first thing I’d do? Check with the owners of the café, find out where the key to that door is.’

  ‘Which sounds like a perfectly viable plan until you remember you’re not a detective like them upstairs, but a builder-decorator with a certificate in plumbing.’

  Dave Two began to pack up his tools with a deep sigh. ‘I’m wasted in this job,’ he said.

  Some weeks later, Janice Longbright was looking around the PCU’s ground-floor waiting room, trying to summon an inner reserve of patience that she knew she did not possess. Part of the unit’s new commitment to accountability involved encouraging members of the public to come forward and talk to local officers in the weekly clinic, and today it was her turn to deal with them.

  The routine was simple. You listened, filled out a form and directed them to another department. It achieved nothing and helped no one. If you were lucky, they didn’t come back. Sometimes she ended up giving them money from her own purse. She studied the core of familiar faces. They fell into three distinct groups: people undergoing genuine hardship; complainers to whom Raymond Land referred as ‘squeaky wheels’; and lonely men and women who had no one left to talk to but shopkeepers and public officials. There were six waiting to see her, one of whom was wrapped in a red nylon sleeping bag and cradling a sickly-looking terrier.

  She checked her list. ‘Mr Jamel Raif?’

  The one in the sleeping bag raised his hand. She beckoned him to follow, waiting while he climbed out of the bag. He had no trousers. Taking him into the overheated interview room, she wedged open the window to let some fresh air in. Raif smelled rank. ‘Please take a seat. Do you have any clothes?’

  He looked forlornly down at the dog. ‘Somebody stole my holdall.’

  ‘Is that why you’re here?’

  ‘No, I can get clothes at Cally Road Worship. My work jeans are in the wash right now.’ There was an evangelical hall nearby that gave out clothes on Sunday mornings. Raif modestly folded the sleeping bag over his boxers. The terrier stared at her expectantly. ‘A friend of mine has gone missing.’

  ‘You still sleeping on the street?’ She had seen this one before, living in a red nyl
on tent under the canal bridge at Royal College Street.

  ‘Nearly a year now.’

  ‘That’s a long time. Are you—’

  ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ve got myself a job, I work nights cleaning up at the Vinyl Café over by the Tileyard Studios. I just don’t have a home. This is about Jerry. That’s what I call him. His name is Jericho.’

  ‘Jericho.’ Longbright opened a drawer and took out a notepad. A pen and paper were still best for interviews. ‘When and where did your friend go missing?’

  ‘Just up the road, around five months ago. August.’ He handed over a crumpled photograph. It showed a lean-bodied young man with shoulder-length blond hair, a wispy blond beard and no shirt, leaning against the side of a camper van brushing his teeth. He had wooden beads around his neck and the sun in his eyes.

  Longbright tapped a crimson nail against her teeth. She knew where the shot had been taken. Students used to sell their gap-year utility vehicles there until the police stopped them. ‘This is on Market Road, near Cally Road tube station, isn’t it?’

  ‘He had an old VW camper van,’ Raif explained. ‘He was going to get rid of it, but he had an accident and couldn’t afford to get it fixed. I saw him most mornings. Then one night he just disappeared.’

  ‘One night. How do you know that?’

  ‘I was trying to get some kip – my sleeping bag was against the wall behind his van. His light was on. It went off some time after midnight, then I heard the side doors open and close. The van is still there. The council took all the other abandoned vehicles away but they had trouble trying to move the VW.’

  ‘You haven’t seen him since this was taken?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why did you wait so long to report him missing?’

  ‘I didn’t know you were running the clinic again. The old King’s Cross station closed down.’

  ‘There are constables covering your area.’

  ‘We don’t have a good relationship with them, because of the girls.’

  Ah yes, the ‘girls’, she thought, remembering the hardboiled line-up of gender-fluid ladies who stalked the street after midnight. A few of the roughest ones still worked the lower end of the road. ‘You’ve been around here a long time now.’

  ‘I want to get settled but they keep moving me over the border,’ said Raif sadly. Camden and Islington had a habit of shifting transients across the line that separated the two boroughs.

  ‘How do you know your friend didn’t just go travelling again?’

  ‘He had connections but no money. Really, like no money at all.’

  ‘Do you remember the exact date he went missing?’

  ‘I didn’t see him after the beginning of August.’

  ‘Does Vice still do round-ups?’

  ‘Not so often now. Most of the girls have moved on. They come by once in a while.’

  ‘Do you have anything that would help me find Jericho?’

  ‘Just the picture. He never told me his last name. Maybe Camden still has the van. I think they sell them at auction.’

  Longbright checked the clock above the door. ‘And this is all you have?’

  ‘I can give you a physical description. And I can draw him for you. I went to art college. Not that a degree in fine art can get you a job.’

  ‘It could help us identify him. I’ll check for the vehicle. If you leave details of where we can contact you …’ She walked to the door and opened it; the queue in the waiting room had built up considerably.

  ‘You already know where to find me.’ Raif shuffled to his feet and held the sleeping bag over himself. The dog watched him anxiously. ‘There was one thing,’ he said. ‘He told me about his father, like it was a big deal, but I don’t know if it’s true.’

  ‘What about his father?’

  ‘You’re going to think I’m crazy.’ Raif shook his head in disbelief. ‘He said his old man was the American consul in London. He couldn’t get anyone to believe him. He said they’d fallen out and the old man wouldn’t speak to him or give him any more money.’

  She pointed a finger at him. ‘You, don’t go anywhere.’ She grabbed a phone and called John May’s extension. ‘John, it looks like we have a lead on the boy they found in our basement.’

  Longbright stood just beyond the doorway of Raymond Land’s office.

  ‘Don’t hover at the threshold,’ called Land irritably. ‘You’re not Dracula waiting to be invited in.’

  The two Daves had assured him they would find a door that fitted properly and fix it in place. So far they had come up with a pair of hinged brackets and an indentation chiselled into the frame for a strike-plate, but no actual door. Now that his divorce was through, Land’s New Year resolution had been to become technically adept on handheld devices so that he could register to start online dating, but filling in the profile had utterly defeated him. Lately he had been feeling increasingly useless. He couldn’t even get his office door fixed.

  ‘What do you need me for?’ he snapped.

  ‘Last month our workmen discovered the body of a twenty-two-year-old man called Jericho Flint in our basement, yes?’ Longbright slipped a sheet of paper on to Land’s eerily tidy desk. ‘His head had been bashed in and he was wrapped in a tablecloth. The body went to Giles Kershaw over at the St Pancras Mortuary, but was taken away from him before he could conduct a preliminary examination.’

  ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,’ said Land unconvincingly. ‘Where did it go?’

  ‘He was identified as the son of Howard Flint, the US consul in London, the one who recently left office.’

  ‘They all leave office,’ replied Land. ‘They have to be gone before the next inauguration day. What do you mean, already identified?’

  ‘Apparently two men turned up at the mortuary flashing US secret service accreditation and took the corpse away with them.’

  ‘How did they know he was there, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘I always assume the Americans know everything. It’s safer that way.’

  ‘Wait, this is the consul who told the press he was sick of being served lamb and was looking forward to having hamburgers again?’

  ‘I don’t think he enjoyed his time in the job. You probably want to know how the body was identified.’

  The thought had not occurred to Land but he nodded gratefully.

  ‘He had some sensitive documents inside his jacket. Mr Flint was on hand to identify his son. The lad had joined him here in London after completing a gap year. Apparently Flint Senior and Junior weren’t on speaking terms. The father had cut off the boy’s trust fund.’ Longbright handed Land a hard copy of a press clipping. ‘I had to pull this from a tabloid. Information on the family is hard to come by.’

  Land skimmed the page. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘There’s some kind of press embargo on their personal lives, so the only articles out there are bits of society gossip. Reading between the lines you get a bit more of a picture. The father is a hawkish Republican; the son was an artistic counter-culturalist. Jericho was interviewed by the paper nine months ago. At that time he was living in Hackney, smoking dope, selling paintings to earn a living. He’d settled in London because it was one of his father’s conditions for being granted any sort of an income. Flint Senior wanted the boy where he could keep an eye on him. They argued and the money tap was finally switched off. That much seems common knowledge.’

  Land handed back the article. ‘Tell me about the part that isn’t.’

  ‘It looks like Jericho Flint was in financial trouble. He lost his flat and borrowed from everyone, so he probably made a few enemies. I spoke to a mate of his who was pretty sure that something bad had happened to him.’

  ‘Why does he think that?’

  ‘If Flint had been so short of cash he would have sold his van, even though the engine needed to be repaired. Instead he vanished overnight, leaving the vehicle behind. It’s only a fifteen-minute walk from Tufnell Park to our building
, so how did he end up in the basement?’

  ‘It’s not our job to answer that any more,’ said Land wearily. ‘I’m sure the US Embassy has plenty of granite-faced agents looking into it right now.’

  ‘Then I guess you haven’t seen this,’ said Longbright, passing him a letter. ‘The Home Office is handing us the responsibility.’

  Land was horrified. ‘They can’t just do that – can they?’

  ‘His body was found on our premises, Raymond. As you can see, they feel it’s incumbent upon us to lead an investigation and avoid souring our so-called “special relationship”. We’re waiting for their coroner’s report.’

  Land’s eyes widened. ‘You’ve spoken to them?’

  ‘I just had them on the phone.’

  He slapped the desk purposefully. ‘Then get Bryant and May in here.’

  ‘They’re tied up with another case.’

  ‘This is more important. I don’t want the Americans saying we can’t handle it.’ Land’s hand went to his lips. ‘No, wait. If I bring Bryant in he’ll start involving witches and shamans. We’ll become a laughing stock.’ There crept upon his face the anxiety of an Englishman stricken with indecision. It was a look you could see every day in Pret A Manger when middle managers struggled to choose sandwich fillings.

  ‘Then don’t officially involve him,’ said Longbright. ‘It would be better if the embassy didn’t see their names on the investigation team. Let them think Jack and I are handling it.’

  ‘Do you think you’re up to it, Janice?’

  Longbright shot back a look that could have cracked a window.

  ‘All right, I’ll keep their names out of the official report. See what you can do.’

  ‘I’ll need to talk to Mr Bryant about how the body was found.’

  Land sighed. ‘This is how it always starts. First we ask his opinion, then a couple of days later the unit is overrun with members of the maniac community. I don’t want him reporting to the Yanks that Flint was ritually sacrificed by druids. That weird illness he had made him worse than he was before.’