Bryant & May – England’s Finest

by Christopher Fowler

  He helped himself to a shot of rum and downed it in one. He tried to imagine a young man with shaggy blond hair perched on the next bar stool.

  Jericho Flint, estranged from his wealthy, powerful parents, painting surreal scenes of a London that never was, in love with the dark-eyed retro-hippy Rose, who collected his frames and stayed over in his cramped VW van until one night – what?

  What brought you here? he wondered.

  He slid from the stool and walked out into the corridor. There were three doors: two for the toilets and a third which led to the basement that connected to the PCU.

  The basement floor was wet with river water. Between the stacks of yellow plastic crates was a cleared path leading to the door that opened to the unit’s stairs. There before him stood the stone casket.

  He thought about the contours and patterns of the water-riven neighbourhood. The Canal Museum was just two streets away, situated further along the course of an underground stream. In its basement was a circular stone ice cave, built in the mid-nineteenth century. Everyone who visited the basement commented on the lowered temperature. Barges had come from Norway to deliver vast slabs of ice via the canal system to Carlo Gatti, the Swiss-Italian who first brought ice cream to London. The wharf in the next street was named in his honour.

  The stone box that stood before him was not a sarcophagus but an ice-holder, unusual anywhere else but once ubiquitous in this part of North London, the first place in the city to have fresh ice delivered.

  To reach the box required passing through three doors: the main entrance to the Ladykillers Café, the door to the Wilberforce cocktail bar and the downstairs basement door. But it was still a more likely route than getting past the locked entrance and video identification system of the PCU.

  Someone knew about the ice box. They had drawn Flint down here, killed him and shoved him inside it, knowing that there was little chance of anyone finding him. The cold would delay the body’s decomposition.

  The café and club were part of the new sleaze-free, upmarket King’s Cross. The days of protection rackets, bent coppers and working girls had passed. The cocktail bar held ironically hip knitting parties, for God’s sake. He had met the owners and spoken with them. Their lease for the premises had been paid from the Bank of Mum and Dad. They rarely visited their own property. But what about the managers? They were there every evening.

  There were only two ways to lure a man into the dark: by force or deception. Suddenly it became obvious that he needed to find the girlfriend, Rose. A scenario came into focus: a betrayal, a smile in the shadows, a desperate girl using a gullible dropout to get herself out of trouble, a situation that resulted in Jericho Flint losing his life.

  The Wilberforce’s bar manager would live by night and know all the regulars. Rose Clavi was a regular; she had to be in order to know about the ice box in the basement. Everything depended on finding her.

  As the wet streets cleared in King’s Cross, the lights of the PCU burned on beyond midnight. Raymond Land was wandering from room to room stifling yawns, a habit that spread like measles.

  In the common room Meera Mangeshkar had made vast amounts of chai and Turkish coffee to keep everyone awake. Bimsley was doing stretches at the window to try and stop his back from seizing up. Renfield and Longbright were staring at laptop screens that had now switched to night mode. The others were hourly adding to the progress boards that stood against the rear wall of the common room. Only the two Daves were missing.

  ‘Where is she?’ asked Jack Renfield, scrolling through onscreen pages of missing persons. ‘Rose Clavi. It’s not a common name.’

  ‘There’s a mid-length haircut called a Clavi-Cut online, but that’s about all,’ said Janice, sitting back and repinning her hair. ‘We shouldn’t be relying on Google searches. We should have the same resources as the Met’s MIT.’

  ‘Bees,’ said Bryant, looking for somewhere to bash out his pipe bowl. ‘That’s all I’ve got. Hoplitis claviventris. They’re known to nest in rose bushes. Common to the North of England and some of the Midlands. They’re univoltine. Rather like my downstairs neighbour.’ He spotted blank looks. ‘They produce offspring every year.’

  ‘You think she’s named after an insect?’ Banbury scoffed. ‘Sorry, Mr B., think you’re barking up the wrong tree.’

  ‘Barking is right,’ muttered Raymond Land, sticking a tube of Vicks up his left nostril. ‘There must be something else on Jericho Flint. Good God, the Yanks can’t have buried everything. Any luck with the bar manager?’

  ‘He left in October,’ Longbright replied. ‘Kharmel Hunter. He was there for seven months. Paid off the books, cash in hand. He’s dodgy.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked May.

  Longbright ran a nail down the screen. ‘A history of small-scale trouble, some odd gaps in his timeline, a couple of suspect associates. Jobs include debt collection, bouncer, security.’ She added him to the list as a Person of Interest.

  The night was mild despite the drifting rain that glossed the neon-crazed pavements. They sat beneath the red and green striped awning of Simmons Bar on the Cally Road as Meera came outside with three bottles of pale ale.

  ‘Colin was telling me that when you first turned up you were meant to be undercover, but he forgot to keep it a secret,’ said Abi, the engineer from the Vinyl Café.

  ‘Yeah, he has the honesty gene.’ Meera shot him a look. ‘We have another lead on Jericho Flint and wondered if it might trigger any more memories. We hear he had a girlfriend called Rose. Young, hippyish, long dark hair. She probably stayed in the camper van with him. Did you ever see someone like that?’

  Abi thought for a minute. ‘She came into the Vinyl Café with him a couple of times. Very pretty. They had matching tattoos. I remember thinking they must be in love. They were very attentive towards each other.’

  ‘What about after August the tenth, when Jericho was last seen? Did you see her again?’

  ‘She came in alone once or twice, just for lunch. She kept pretty much to herself.’

  ‘Can you remember exactly when?’

  ‘I don’t know, late autumn, November maybe. She was in winter clothes but it was still mild out.’

  ‘Can you think back and try to remember any conversation at all that passed between you?’ Colin asked. ‘What did she order?’

  Abi took a slug of ale. ‘A beer. Maybe a salad. I don’t remember anything else.’

  ‘Hey, Abi.’ A slender Japanese boy with tied-back dreadlocks was standing beside their table. Unable to stay still, he shifted constantly as if responding to the music in his head.

  ‘Hey.’ Abi didn’t seem pleased to see him. She turned to the others. ‘This is Finchley. He works in the Vinyl Café.’

  ‘Finchley?’ Colin repeated.

  ‘People call me Finch.’

  ‘Where’d you get that from?’

  ‘My mother went into labour on the platform of Finchley Central tube station.’

  ‘Blimey, it’s a good job she didn’t drop you at Cockfosters.’

  ‘I remember the girl. The one you’re talking about.’ Finchley hopped from one foot to the other, drumming his fingers on the edge of the table. ‘She had a rose on her upper arm, yeah?’

  ‘You don’t know what we’re talking about, Finch,’ said Abi.

  ‘Yeah I do.’ Finchley smiled at the memory. ‘She was outside the café when I closed up one night. You’d gone home, Abi.’ He turned to Colin and Meera. ‘She was upset about something. I thought she might need someone to talk to.’

  ‘What was the problem?’ asked Colin.

  ‘She’d just had a big bust-up with her boyfriend. I guess it must have been a really big fight ’cause there were drops of blood on her dress. She said they were his.’

  ‘Do you know what the fight was about?’

  ‘She said she was leaving him. Something about some pictures.’

  ‘He was an artist,’ said Colin.

  The bar door swung open,
releasing a gale of laughter from within. ‘I walked with her a little way, trying to be sympathetic and that,’ said Finchley. ‘I asked her if she wanted to go for a drink and she said no.’

  ‘That was sensitive of you, Finch, trying to pull her while she was distraught. I guess she was lucky you didn’t pour chloroform into a Kleenex.’ Abi folded her arms in annoyance.

  ‘She didn’t say where this fight had taken place?’ asked Meera.

  ‘No, but it must have happened somewhere near because she pointed back, over her shoulder.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘I guess it was August because I remember a lot of the studio engineers who use the café were away on holiday.’

  ‘Is there anything else you can recall about her?’

  Finchley shook his head. ‘Do you know how many customers we get in there? There’s no time to stop and hold a conversation. She seemed kind of paranoid. It put me off her a bit. You know when girls—’

  ‘Careful,’ warned Abi.

  ‘Yeah, well, I left her at the corner on York Way.’

  ‘And was that the last you saw of her?’ Meera asked.

  ‘No, there was one more time. It must have been just before Christmas. She was in that organic place, Butterfly. She looked great, very together.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Dressed like a grown-up, like she was in a career as opposed to a job? I said hi but she left. I guess she had to be somewhere.’ Finchley slapped at the table, beating out a rhythm.

  ‘So her boyfriend vanishes off the face of the earth and she looks radiant,’ said Meera, catching Colin’s eye.

  ‘She couldn’t have done it,’ said Colin. ‘Getting a body into a stone coffin – a strong bloke could barely manage it.’

  ‘Then maybe she had an accomplice,’ said Meera.

  Back at the unit, Renfield and Longbright were having no luck. All they had on the Flint family were a couple of suspiciously tidy CVs, a handful of inconsequential criticisms from political journalists, nothing remotely libellous. ‘They’re holding the party line,’ said Janice. ‘The whole thing feels stage-managed. Have you ever googled Madonna? You get exactly the same thing. Most of the results have been removed under European data protection law. How can we find out anything about their relationship with their son?’

  Jack thought for a minute. ‘Every family has a black sheep. Brothers are usually disastrous to high-fliers. Jimmy Carter had Billy, Richard Nixon had Donald.’

  ‘There’s a cousin,’ said Janice. ‘Jericho has Nathan.’ She scrolled her screen, peering close.

  ‘There’s no one around to see that you wear glasses,’ said Jack gently.

  Longbright batted the thought aside. ‘He escaped accusations of insider trading and the harassment of a female work colleague.’

  Jack leaned closer and stole one of her chocolate digestives. ‘See if he has a Facebook page.’

  ‘Don’t eat those, they’re fattening. Nathan Landry Mandell. Jackpot.’ She tinked the screen with a lacquered nail. ‘The cousin’s the wild card. Dropped out of college, busted for possession, DUI and sex with a minor, although he was just sixteen and she was one week from legality. Parents kicked him out so he came to Europe. There are shots of him working in the outdoors in a uniform.’ She sped through the sidebar of photographs. ‘This is why I never post on Facebook. I can tell you exactly where he is.’

  Jack brightened. ‘How?’

  She enlarged one of the photographs. ‘That white curve in the corner of the shot is a giveaway. It’s the ramp of the Lubetkin Penguin Pool at London Zoo.’

  ‘You think he and Jericho kept in touch?’

  ‘It’s worth a try,’ said Bryant, wandering past. For a man with a faulty hearing aid he seemed to pick up on everything. ‘John and I can head there as soon as the staff arrive for work.’

  They went to the zoo together a little after eight the next morning, taking May’s BMW to Regent’s Park. Bryant was in fine garrulous form, having managed to grab a couple of hours’ sleep on the PCU’s ratty sofa bed. May was suffering. He had not been sleeping well lately and had stayed up with Longbright and Renfield through the night. Now he felt distanced and disconnected from his surroundings.

  London Zoo had been the brainchild of the founder of Singapore, Stamford Raffles, and was the world’s oldest scientific zoo, having begun life as a place for the study of natural history. The animals from the menagerie at the Tower of London were moved in, and a peculiar range of neo-Georgian pavilions, galleries and kiosks took their place beside the streamlined sweep of the art deco penguin pool and the mountainous outback-themed Mappin Terraces. Here elephant rides and chimps’ tea parties delighted children for decades until the tide of public opinion turned against them.

  They found Nathan Mandell in the Nightlife area, a day-for-night world of bats, rats, lorises and blind-eyed cave creatures. Mandell wore the red sweater of a volunteer, and was attempting to slide a sheet of glass back in place over a tank of lizards. Rotund and flushed, he lacked the bloodless hauteur of the Flint clan. For a moment it looked as if he might turn and run, so startled was he to be approached without warning.

  ‘It’s all right, we only want to ask you a few questions,’ said May, raising a calming hand containing his identification. ‘Is there somewhere we can go?’

  ‘Sure, I guess.’ Mandell put the glass back in place and stepped down from the edge of the lizard cabinet. Behind him, fruit bats hanging from a tree branch unfurled their spidery wings and rewrapped themselves.

  Mandell lowered his bulk on to a plastic chair in the zoo’s café and patted his thinning sandy hair into place. He glanced apprehensively from one detective to the other. ‘I don’t have anything to do with them. Not Howard or Kate, or Jerry. We used to play together as kids – everyone called us Tom and Jerry, you know? But I was kind of wild and he dropped out to recreate himself. That’s what he told me: “I’m going to recreate myself. I’m not like my parents. I’m going to be an artist.” I thought maybe we’d get to hang out, being in the same country and all, but he didn’t want to stay in touch. He’s kind of a loner.’

  ‘How did you end up working here?’ asked May.

  ‘I like animals. I look after the pygmy slow lorises and some of the lizards. Animals don’t have agendas or ambitions. Everybody in my family has a hidden agenda. They don’t talk, they negotiate deals with you, and you always come out worse off.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw Jericho Flint?’

  ‘Over a year ago. We had a family gathering, rented some grand old manor in Kent called Tavistock Hall. It was my aunt’s eightieth birthday. She lives over here. Jerry didn’t get an invite but he turned up anyway. We talked for a few minutes. He didn’t stay.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘His father, man. Howard hates him.’

  ‘Why?’ Bryant cut in.

  Mandell gave a small laugh. ‘Where do I start with that one? Let’s see now. He refused to stick to the family plan and get himself into law school. He chose to live like a bum and turned down his father’s handouts. He didn’t want to be obligated to his old man. That’s what Howard does, he ties everyone to his side with favours.’

  ‘How did his son manage without his father’s offer of money?’

  ‘He sold a lot of commercial art at first, but then he did some crazy stuff – “terrorist graffiti”, he called it. He hacked a bunch of personal files on MPs and corporate chiefs, and spray-painted their dirty secrets all around Spitalfields. He did these caricatures in the style of old circus posters, really sinister. Howard kept him out of jail.’ His face clouded with concern. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ said Bryant. ‘We need to know who was close to him.’

  ‘Well, not me. But still, that’s a shame. He was kind of a lost soul.’

  ‘Do you think he made enemies over his terrorist art?’

  ‘He certainly upset his father. Jerry painted a huge picture of him, just off Brick Lane.
You can still see it on the wall there, next to the Pride of Spitalfields pub on Heneage Street.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know. Jerry laughed about it. There were others, one outside the Star of Bombay Balti House, and one on Bacon Street, but both those buildings got knocked down.’

  ‘Did you and Jericho Flint have any friends in common?’ asked May.

  ‘We were both the black sheep of the family but that didn’t make us bosom buddies. How did he die?’

  ‘We don’t know yet. The day of your aunt’s birthday, did he bring his girlfriend?’

  ‘Who, Rose?’ Mandell shook his head. ‘No, he said he wanted to introduce her but he changed his mind when the old man announced he was attending. I guess Jerry didn’t want to make her feel uncomfortable. He knew Howard would humiliate her.’

  ‘Do you think he got into some kind of trouble he couldn’t tell his parents about?’

  ‘He was free-spirited but he didn’t hang out with bad people. He wanted to be left to live his own life, just like I did. It caused a lot of fights between all of them. I told him, you can’t argue with the old man, you just have to say your goodbyes and get out. I thought me and Jerry would be friends. He was smart. He didn’t think I was smart. He didn’t want to be around me.’

  ‘You can do something for him, Nathan,’ Bryant suggested. ‘We need to find the girl. We have to report back to the consulate by the end of the week, and right now I don’t have any information to give them.’

  Mandell stabbed a finger at him. ‘Be careful of Howard Flint. He always gets what he wants. If you let him down in any way he’ll destroy you. I asked him for help. I’d gotten myself into a bad situation and needed a hand. I almost went down on my knees and begged him.’ He looked around at the almost deserted café. ‘He doesn’t know it but he did me a favour. I’m happier here. There’s no pressure. I’ll never have to see any of them again. Poor Jerry. He was the only one I ever liked.’