Bryant & May – England’s Finest

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘He wasn’t much help,’ said May as they left the zoo and walked back to the car park.

  Bryant batted some weeds with his walking stick. ‘We’re either asking the wrong questions or being taken for fools.’

  ‘Not by Mandell,’ said May. ‘I don’t think he’s smart enough to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes.’

  ‘Imagine, John, you’re offered a position in the family dynasty. You can have anything you want so long as you behave in a manner that befits your status. Instead you turn it all down and choose to live as a penniless artist. Your art earns you some notoriety, so your family breaks off all contact with you. You’re off the grating—’

  ‘You mean off the grid.’

  ‘Yes, that too, and you sell paintings to make ends meet. You’re on the way to joining other artists who died in poverty. Blake, Toulouse-Lautrec, El Greco, Rembrandt, Vermeer – but you don’t have enemies. You fight with your girlfriend. Where is she? We need someone who can place them both near the unit on the night he died.’

  May looked away. The clouds had formed a great tilting lid of blue above a silver-pink sky. ‘We could do a knock along Market Road, see if anyone remembers him. I know it was over five months ago—’

  ‘We don’t have the time or the resources for that.’

  ‘What about this picture he did of his father?’

  ‘It may have been painted over but there might be something left,’ said Bryant.

  ‘Want me to come?’

  ‘Go and get some sleep. You look like you’ve been dynamited.’

  ‘And I suppose you feel fine,’ May grumbled.

  ‘Of course I feel fine,’ said Bryant, swinging his stick. ‘I’m working.’

  While Bryant headed off to study the site where Jericho Flint had painted his father, Colin and Meera went to find Kharmel Hunter, the former manager of the Wilberforce.

  The Commercial Tavern, Spitalfields, would not be opening its doors for another two hours, but the staff were already on site. The pub was classically schizophrenic, full of garrulous locals at lunchtime, seated with their elbows on the bar and pints of cloudy bitter before them, and piratically bearded Shoreditch hipsters in the evening, sipping craft ales and discussing video games. The décor was equally divided, being traditional and solidly Victorian without, whackily collaged within: a magpie mix of artwork pasted from old Janet and John books, with one entire wall covered in jigsaw pieces attached to the plaster by plastic clothing tags. Catering to mismatched clienteles had doubled its revenue.

  When Kharmel Hunter looked up and saw Meera and Colin coming towards him, he knew at once that they were police officers, mainly because he had seen them in the Ladykillers Café. Hunter was built for strength, not speed, and remained in place, quietly continuing with the stocktake.

  Hunter was much older than Meera had expected him to be. In the lines of his face were the tracks of the music industry, riffing from Pink Floyd through prog rock to punk.

  He kept his answers to a minimum, knowing that the more he said the more they would suspect him, but he could not stay silent on the subject of why he was fired from the Wilberforce. ‘You’ve been to the bar, you know what it’s like. There’s a cold room at the back where they keep the spirits and mixers. It never had a lock on it the whole time I was there.’

  ‘So punters stole from it?’ asked Meera.

  ‘No, they went in there to conduct business. You have to go through the bar to reach the toilets and the stockroom. They’d come down and order a drink, then go through to the back and buy a couple of grams. Small-time stuff.’

  ‘You didn’t report them or try to stop them?’

  ‘I threw a few out, but only if I was sure they wouldn’t come back later. I had no back-up behind the bar. I told the management agency that we needed locks but they didn’t do anything. I had to keep a tight watch on the customers after that.’

  ‘If you did your job so well, why did they kick you out?’ Meera asked.

  ‘Some cases of Scotch went missing. I explained that it couldn’t have happened on my watch.’

  ‘Do you remember a young woman and a man in the bar on the night of August the tenth last year, sometime after midnight?’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked from one to the other.

  Colin and Meera looked at one another. ‘Yes?’

  ‘She was in her early twenties, long dark hair, hippyish. They went in the back, but only the girl came out.’

  ‘Wait, how could you remember this?’ Meera asked.

  ‘It’s simple,’ Hunter replied. ‘On August the tenth the bar was closed for a private party. Mine. It was my birthday.’

  ‘So they tried to gatecrash?’

  ‘Yeah, they downed a few drinks and disappeared, then she came back by herself. I figured he couldn’t have left without me seeing him go past.’

  ‘You didn’t think that was odd?’ asked Meera.

  ‘It was a party,’ said Hunter, slowly and clearly.

  ‘Was this the girl?’ Colin held up a photocopy of the painting.

  ‘Definitely, that’s her.’

  ‘And the guy?’ He found a shot of Jericho Flint on his phone and turned it around.

  Hunter looked puzzled. ‘No, that’s not him. He was in his late thirties – and bald.’

  Arthur Bryant stood before the poster-covered wall on Heneage Street and tried to find any trace of painted brickwork. It was still raining hard, and the brim of his trilby had decided to channel water down the back of his neck.

  He looked up at the wall and studied it carefully. There were brash ads for bands, clubs and art installations that meant nothing to him or to anyone else outside of the immediate area. He might have been looking at a wall from an earlier century. Beneath so much fly-posting, Jericho Flint’s rendition of his father had been obliterated.

  The posters were an inch thick. It sounded as if Jericho Flint’s portrait of his father had been painted straight on to the brickwork. Seizing a corner of the pasted layers, Bryant pulled hard. The paper had set solid at some point, but the constant rain had softened the glue.

  Bryant raised a boot and braced it against the wall, pulling harder at the corner. The compacted posters started to tear. They came off in a single great panel, falling on top of him and sending him sprawling. When he finally managed to fight himself clear and climb to his feet, Bryant found himself looking up at Jericho Flint’s original painting.

  ‘We need a photo ID of any bald male working for the consul,’ said May.

  ‘You know we don’t have access to that kind of information,’ Longbright reminded him.

  May thought for a moment. ‘Dan, can you pull CCTV footage from the street cams opposite the consulate?’

  ‘I should be able to,’ Banbury told him. ‘They were installed by Metropolitan Police Directorate, not Westminster Council. What period of time do you want to cover?’

  ‘Flint’s team started moving out at the beginning of the week, didn’t they? You need to go back four months from then.’

  ‘We have a facial-recognition system that can handle that.’ Banbury made a call to Anjan Dutta at the King’s Cross Surveillance Centre.

  ‘I hope it’s better than the one you put in on our front door.’ Everyone turned as Bryant arrived in the doorway of the common room.

  ‘What happened to you?’ asked May, astonished.

  Bryant had leaves, train tickets, pieces of paper, chicken bones, cigarette ends and other assorted bits of street trash stuck all over his coat, trousers and hat. There was a dog-end cemented to his left ear. He looked as if he had been magnetized.

  ‘Glue,’ he explained. ‘I tried to get some posters off a wall and they fell on me. The rain had melted their paste.’ He sank into his armchair. ‘I went to Spitalfields. I found Jericho Flint’s original painting. Could somebody get me a cup of tea?’

  Longbright and Banbury came through with results at the same time. Just as the crime scene manager’s laptop received a photograph of a
bald man in his late thirties leaving the consulate, Longbright nailed the ID. ‘Samuel Fellowes, former head of Manchester special constabulary, now seconded to Howard Flint. Take a look.’

  Bryant discovered that he could not get up. He was forced to slide himself out of his overcoat and leave it stuck to the armchair.

  ‘I took a picture,’ he said, passing over his phone. ‘That’s Jericho Flint’s painting. It’s what this has all been about.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said May, trying to unstick his hand from the phone’s screen.

  ‘You will,’ Bryant promised. ‘I just need one more thing to prove my point.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked May.

  ‘A biography of Marcel Duchamp,’ Bryant replied cheerfully.

  At first the consul refused to take their calls, but finally agreed to visit the unit after Bryant had a few quiet words with him. Seated in the common room in a grey Gieves & Hawkes suit, he looked as out of place as a racehorse in a greyhound stadium.

  ‘Welcome to the unit’s nerve centre,’ Bryant said. ‘Don’t sit there. That armchair’s got glue all over it.’

  Flint made no protestation as he was steered to a desk, but made it clear that he found his surroundings repellent. ‘Well, this had better be good,’ he warned, checking his watch. ‘I have a flight to catch.’

  ‘I’m not sure that will be possible,’ said Bryant, handing over a printout of the photograph he’d taken in Spitalfields. ‘I imagine you thought you’d seen the last of this.’

  Flint studied the page and tried to hand it back dismissively, but it stuck to his fingers. ‘My son had a warped imagination, that’s all.’ He pulled at the page and managed to stick it to the desk.

  ‘He wanted to shame you into doing something about it.’

  The consul’s face did not move a muscle.

  ‘His reinvention as an artist was more than just an embarrassment, though, wasn’t it? Perhaps I can focus your attention on the strings of numbers at the top and bottom of the picture. Those are bank deposit account codes, aren’t they? Actually, I don’t know why I’m asking you because we’ve already checked them out. Jericho Flint wasn’t just painting retro circus posters on walls, he was humiliating the rich and powerful by airing their secrets in public. And in your case, he was exposing the accounts you kept hidden. You sent Samuel Fellowes to threaten him into silence.’

  ‘I asked Sam to have a word with him, that’s all,’ said Flint. ‘He was embarrassing himself.’

  ‘So you weren’t embarrassed by the series of posters he painted depicting you as an object of ridicule?’

  Flint remained silent.

  ‘Arthur, where are you going with this?’ asked May quietly.

  ‘You’re not an art lover, I take it,’ Bryant asked the consul. ‘The name Rose Clavi means nothing to you.’

  Flint got to his feet. ‘This is going nowhere, and I have important business to attend to. File your report, and we’ll take the action we deem appropriate.’

  ‘Jack, stand by the door and make sure he doesn’t get out,’ said Bryant.

  ‘You have no right—’ Flint began.

  ‘Probably not, but you will do us the courtesy of hearing what the unit is going to put in its report. Please sit down.’

  Flint stayed where he was.

  ‘Your son told everyone he had reinvented himself as an artist, and the artist was a woman. Rose Clavi. Here was the consul’s son, painting scurrilous portraits, dressing as a female and refusing to accept what you saw as his adult responsibilities. His van was filled with colour plates torn from old art books. Marcel Duchamp had an alter-ego. Rose Sélavy – a terrible pun: Rose C’est La Vie. He taunted you, pushed you and pushed you again. Finally you sent in your enforcer, Sam Fellowes. He went to find Jericho at the Wilberforce cocktail bar, and found himself in the company of a young woman. I wonder how long it took him to realize it was Jericho. I imagine that as soon as he twigged, a little bit of unconscious sexism kicked in and he thought his job would be a lot easier. There was a party going on in the bar, so he forced Jericho through the back door into the basement.’

  ‘If you think I’m going to stand here while you accuse me—’

  ‘You can sit if you want,’ said Bryant. ‘I’m not accusing you of anything. You sent Mr Fellowes to talk some sense into your son, and get back any incriminating data he had on you. You didn’t know that the river was going to play its part.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  Bryant pointed down at the floor. ‘The River Fleet, Mr Flint. It’s little more than an underground stream now, but it passes through the basement beneath us. And it makes the stonework slippery. Our workmen noticed footmarks in the slime. There was a scuffle and your man slipped over, cracking his head on the ice box. Your son thought fast. He put the documents he was carrying into Fellowes’s jacket and rolled him into the box, covering him with a cloth that was left in one of the café’s catering packs. Ice keeps things fresh. He bought himself some time. Then he left. As soon as you saw the body, you knew exactly what had happened. Your son wasn’t capable of physically hurting anyone. You thought you’d use us to find him, knowing he couldn’t reveal himself because you had declared him dead. So what you could do, Mr Flint, is leave your son alone now, and let him be free.’

  ‘You don’t know that’s what happened,’ said Flint. ‘You’re guessing,’

  ‘I’m guessing, but I’m right,’ Bryant replied.

  The consul studied each of them with distaste, an explorer stumbling across an alien species. ‘You Brits,’ he said finally. ‘You’re nothing in the world any more, just warm beer and wet weather.’

  Bryant and May went to the Scottish Stores for two pints of Old Sheepshagger. ‘He’s right, you know,’ said Bryant, setting their beers down on a copper-topped table. ‘I’m glad we no longer have an empire. It’s better to live in a country that doesn’t want to be a world power. Get this down you before the others arrive. Raymondo can break open the petty cash.’

  Meera put her head around the door. ‘You going to finish your round, sir?’

  Bryant tutted. ‘You’d rob an old man out of his pension.’

  ‘You haven’t got a pension. Wait, that’s Abi, the sound engineer.’ She darted between the tables and seized Abi by the sleeve of her jacket. ‘You told me you saw Jericho and Rose together. You knew they were one and the same person.’

  Abi smiled. ‘Jerry’s a mate of mine.’

  ‘So you know where he is.’

  Abi collected her drink from the bar. ‘Of course I do, but I’m not about to tell you.’

  ‘Let her go,’ said John May. ‘We can’t prove anything. The case is closed.’

  ‘Not for the family of Samuel Fellowes,’ said Bryant, sipping his beer. ‘We’ll never know whether he provoked an attack. It’s better the consul’s son remains hidden for now. Cheers.’

  Bryant & May Meet Dracula

  Charlie Kemp knew the country wasn’t getting many tourist visits at this time of the year because everyone else in the arrivals hall was standing on the ‘Nationals’ side of the passport line, coming home after working in England. He had headed in the opposite direction, returning to Romania because of Dracula.

  There were people who would tell you that Charlie was one of the world’s most knowledgeable experts on popular Victorian novels. Charlie knew that you had to be an expert before you could become a great forger.

  Alexandra Constantin was also an expert, but she was on the level. Charlie had followed her here to Romania once before, but this time the arrangement was purely business. She had agreed to provide him with access to a very special library, and in return – well, he wasn’t sure what she expected to get back. To be honest, he hadn’t expected her to agree to anything. The last time he’d seen her she had threatened to call the police on him. But Charlie knew how to turn on the charm, and he was in deep enough debt to take a chance. So he had come here to steal the undead count away fro
m his homeland.

  In the world of Victorian pulp fiction the vampire’s popularity was second only to that of Sherlock Holmes, but it hadn’t always been the case. Stoker had died broke. Although Dracula was enthrallingly lurid it was also epistolary and fragmented in form, and had been published to decidedly mixed reviews. Everyone remembered the films and nobody thought much about the book, which suited Charlie just fine. He was seeking to find and forge a very special edition.

  He knew that the original Stoker manuscript had been heavily amended and signed by the author. At that point the novel had still borne the title The Undead, and contained several marked differences. In Stoker’s first version, after Harker and Morris kill Dracula the count’s castle is destroyed in a volcanic eruption. The idea wasn’t so far-fetched; Transylvania was an earthquake region, although Stoker never went there and only saw Bran Castle, the model for the count’s home, in a photograph.

  A 529-page manuscript that formed the basis of its first printed incarnation had vanished for nearly a century. In 1980 it reappeared as if from nowhere and was put up for auction by Christie’s in New York. When it failed to reach its reserve price it was withdrawn. Nobody knew what happened to it after that. The story of the world’s rare objects is a hidden history of wealth and deception.

  Alexandra Constantin was a Lithuanian currently living in Transylvania, and Charlie had come here because news had reached his ears through a third party that she might know of the Blue Edition’s whereabouts. He thought about her spiky crimson hair and the red fur coat she kept wrapped around her, the Gitanes she drew from the packet with her lips, the cool, assessing look she gave him, the way she never said goodbye when she left a room but turned to leave without a word, the way she watched him from the taxi as it pulled away.

  Charlie Kemp was more of a lover than a book lover, but he knew there was a lot of money to be made from the right purchase. Bram Stoker was just another pulp hack who got lucky and died a pauper, accidentally leaving a thousand critical essays by academics like Alexandra in his wake.