Bryant & May – England’s Finest

by Christopher Fowler

  These specially trained divisions consisted of around four thousand uniformed guerrillas who worked far beyond the usual constraints imposed on wartime personnel. Their members were known as Scallywags, and during active service their life expectancy was just twelve days.

  Britain was uniquely placed to set up experimental, multi-level resistance units because it had seen the nations of Europe collapse in quick succession, and had a head start when it came to planning a counterattack.

  The average age of the scientists, inventors, engineers, tacticians and boffins who made up Britain’s Scallywag force was twenty. They were sworn to secrecy and disguised as members of the Home Guard. Often those around them thought they were cowards, not realizing that they were fighting a secret war.

  After the hostilities, a number of special operations units continued working in peacetime. Some were military, some scientific, some were involved in espionage and surveillance, and many employed freethinkers using untried methods. One branch was the Peculiar Crimes Unit.

  But that was long ago. And two young men who had been chosen to think in new ways about the policing of the capital had worked together ever since. Their techniques were eccentric and, to the casual observer, contradictory. Singly they became lost in thickets of information, but together they cut paths to the truth.

  Of course, that was long before the truth became lies, news became fake and politicians became children. The art of policing changed dramatically. It was now about numbers and targets and customer care, except at the PCU, where life continued largely untroubled by modernity. Occasionally the detectives were handed cases because nobody else could understand them, and on some very quiet days they uncovered crimes that nobody even knew existed. Today was one of those days.

  It started because Alma Sorrowbridge, Arthur Bryant’s landlady, complained about his books.

  ‘I don’t mind you reading but they’re everywhere,’ she said as she set a slice of her treacle, lemon and sultana ginger cake before him. ‘There’s a compendium of medieval socks on my cooker hood.’

  ‘Now that’s a very interesting book,’ said Bryant, digging his fork into the hefty slice without a thank you. ‘Some of their socks were divided at the toes so they could be worn under thonged sandals, which suggests that the English never had any dress sense.’

  The kitchen was as fresh and neat as a café on its first day of opening. The plants had been recently watered, a new gingham tablecloth had been laid, coffee had been brewed, bread baked and home-made jams set out. The pair bickered like an old married couple. It was Arthur’s favourite time of the morning.

  ‘All right, what about this?’ Alma said, holding up an enormous volume entitled A Complete History of Bloomsbury. ‘It was in the toilet.’

  ‘That’s probably a good place to read it,’ said Bryant, munching.

  ‘No, it was in the toilet. It had fallen down from that dodgy shelf you put up above the cistern. It could have killed somebody. Books are dangerous. George Bernard Shaw broke my father’s nose. His teacher threw the collected works at him, caught him square in the middle of his face. That’s how dangerous books are.’

  Bryant set his fork aside. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘As you won’t let me eat in peace, is there anything else you’d like to get off your chest?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alma, picking greenfly off her love-lies-bleeding. ‘Poisons. I gave you those spice bottles to keep your samples in.’

  ‘And I used them as instructed.’

  ‘Then why are they back in my spice rack?’

  ‘I left them on the counter. You must have muddled them up.’

  ‘Well, that’s nice. I’ve got my church ladies coming later, and now I don’t know if I’m going to feed them or kill them.’

  ‘None of the samples are lethal but a few are amphetamine-based,’ Bryant pointed out. ‘Your ladies will just get through their hymns a bit quicker. Any other complaints?’

  ‘No,’ said Alma. ‘Go on, finish that and get off to work. I’ll leave your mittens on the teapot until you’re ready to go. Is Mr May picking you up?’

  Bryant was tempted to lick his plate but resisted. ‘No, I’m strolling into the West End this morning, Mrs S. My comedy partner is at the dentist and we’ve no cases on.’

  ‘Then you should cut across the garden squares and get yourself some fresh air.’ She poured herself a cup of coffee. ‘I’ve complained to the council about the planting. Their summer bedding is a disgrace and the grass in the college quadrangle is wearing out.’

  ‘You know the gardens play havoc with my hay fever around this time of year,’ he complained. ‘My nose has been blocked for a week.’

  ‘Fresh air, Mr Bryant,’ she repeated. ‘You need to breathe more. It’ll make you a nicer person.’

  You know when summer has finally arrived in London because if you go up a few floors and open a window you can hear people everywhere. Foliage forms great green barriers between the streets, and beneath the trees, in the back gardens, outside the pubs and on the pavements there rises a steady, dense murmur of conversation, punctuated with the odd shriek of laughter.

  London was blooming. Bryant found himself surrounded by the buildings of University College. A series of new squares and quadrangles had been constructed over the old gardens. Once there had been open fields here. Now students from around the world sat in groups waiting for lectures to begin. The detective took a good look at the green in Torrington Square and concluded that while the planting didn’t measure up, the square itself was well kept. He paid special attention to the slender rectangle of lawn.

  At first he thought it had been worn bald by children, but there had been recent heavy rain, and the ground was still soft and damp enough to sprout grass overnight. The bare patches were neatly spaced at regular intervals. They ran north-east to south-west in pairs, with the largest bald patch, about the size of a man’s shoe, at the start in the uppermost corner. After seven paces they started to fade out, and by the time Bryant reached the lower edge of the lawn they had disappeared completely. He knelt and examined them more closely. They were very clearly footprints.

  ‘Oh, so you’ve found them.’

  Bryant looked up and saw the ursine academic Ray Kirkpatrick towering above him, hands on hips, studying his old friend with amusement. With his foresty beard, ponytail and studded leather jacket he looked more like a heavy-metal biker than an English professor. Hauling the detective to his feet, he led him back to the start of the footprints. ‘They go that way,’ he explained, ‘from the top to the bottom. I said to myself, I wouldn’t be surprised if Arthur turns up for a look. It’s odd seeing them back again.’

  ‘What do you mean, again?’ Bryant asked, tipping back his hat.

  ‘You mean you don’t know about them? Have you got a few minutes to spare? There’s a book I’d like to show you.’

  ‘I’ve nothing urgent on at the moment,’ Bryant admitted. ‘I can be led astray.’

  They wandered over to the British Library, where Kirkpatrick was attempting to prove the provenance of a medieval manuscript that had been found during the City of London’s Crossrail excavations. Up at his first-floor desk, he tunnelled beneath a hill of documents and emerged with a yellowed pamphlet. ‘I was reading this last night.’

  He carefully unfolded the booklet and showed it to Bryant. ‘The legend of the Field of Forty Footsteps. The earliest reference we have is from 1692, when the lands around the British Museum were still open meadow. It was always a dodgy area, ladies of ill repute, cutpurses and so on. At the time of the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion, which was, let’s see, in 1685, there were supposedly two brothers in love with the same titled lady. She couldn’t choose between them so they fought a duel at Southampton Fields while she watched. They were both fatally wounded. After that it was said that the grass never grew where their bodies fell or where their feet had trod. The Poet Laureate Bob Southey was told about the footsteps by his friend John Walsh, whose mother had seen the steps pl
oughed up, only to mysteriously reappear.’

  Kirkpatrick ran his finger down the page, looking for the relevant section. ‘Here we are. “We could find no steps within half a mile of Montague House.” That’s the building which existed before the British Museum.’ He went on:

  ‘We were almost out of hope, when an honest man who was at work directed us to the next ground adjoining to a pond. There we found what we sought, about three-quarters of a mile north of Montague House, and about five hundred yards east of Tottenham Court Road. They are of the size of a large human foot, about three inches deep. We counted only seventy-six, but we were not exact in counting.’

  He closed the booklet. ‘Now, Southey’s directions don’t match other descriptions, so we think he was guessing about the location. Some put the prints beside a Baptist chapel on Keppel Street, where Senate House now stands. The librarian of Lincoln’s Inn first showed Walsh the steps twenty-eight years earlier, and he remembered them being there at least thirty years, and the man who first showed them to him about thirty more. The story of the duel caught the public imagination. Right through the nineteenth century playwrights produced dramas about the phantom footsteps. We’re pretty sure now that they were just north of Senate House and in front of Birkbeck College, on the remains of the old Torrington Square. The piazza was recently rebuilt, and suddenly the footsteps have reappeared.’

  Bryant was unconvinced. ‘As much as I adore old London legends, this one seems pretty hard to swallow. Why would they come back now?’

  ‘I’m sure psychogeographers would be happy to offer all kinds of explanations about the past pushing up through the soil,’ said Kirkpatrick as he put the pamphlet away. ‘I think it’s a load of old bollocks, but the odd part of this particular legend is its longevity. Three centuries is a long time to keep up a hoax, don’t you think?’

  On his way home that night, Bryant considered the point. Three possibilities loomed before him. First, perhaps it was just chance that the grass had worn away in a similar pattern. Second, students who had read about the legend could have decided to recreate it. Or third, somebody knew and was using the story for reasons of their own.

  He could not resist returning for one more look at the footprints. The grass around the edges of the prints appeared to have been burned. Kirkpatrick had said that the footsteps went from top to bottom, and when Bryant put the grass under his magnifying glass he found that the professor was right. The leaves were crushed at the heel and dragged at the toe, indicating a clear direction. There were just fifteen individual footprints altogether, not forty pairs, and some of them were only partial.

  Bryant hauled himself upright and followed the footprints back. On either side of him were rows of post-war college buildings, but the nearest block appeared to be lived in. He stopped a young Lebanese woman weighed down with folders that looked about to slide out of her arms.

  ‘Excuse me, what’s in that building?’

  ‘They’re using it as temporary student accommodation until the new dorms are finished,’ the student explained before hurrying off.

  He entered the reception area and showed his PCU card to the girl at the desk.

  ‘Are you here about Alysha?’ she asked.

  ‘Why should I be?’ Bryant countered, removing his hat. ‘Did something happen?’

  ‘Sorry, I thought you knew,’ said the girl. ‘The police were here before. Alysha died here last Thursday evening. Nobody’s told us what happened.’

  ‘Alysha Hussein, twenty-one,’ said Bryant, dropping into his desk chair and sliding a page across to his colleague.

  John May raised it and squinted. ‘It’s very small type.’

  ‘If you weren’t so vain you’d wear glasses and be able to read things properly. She was found unconscious in her room overlooking the square at eleven forty-five p.m. last Thursday. At first the admitting doctor at UCH thought she’d suffered heart arrhythmia. Your heart rate is usually between sixty and a hundred beats per minute but it can become irregular.’

  ‘I’ve read about that somewhere,’ said May. ‘Doesn’t it particularly affect people in their early twenties? Students have been known to die in their sleep.’

  ‘Exactly. They’re supposed to be more at risk because they suffer from stress, and that’s what this was put down to.’

  ‘So why has it come to your attention?’

  ‘Because her father kicked up a fuss and got a second opinion. And this time they decided it was something she ate.’

  ‘Students eat a lot of rubbish,’ May remarked. ‘I lived on tins of tomato soup and packets of processed cheese at college. I imagine today’s students are more conscious of what they eat. What did she consume on Thursday evening?’

  ‘She was seen sharing a takeaway with a friend, sitting on a concrete bench outside her flat.’

  ‘Have you spoken to the friend?’

  ‘Nobody knows who it was. The girl who saw them together recalls he was male and young, around the same age as her, possibly of Middle Eastern extraction, that’s all. But here’s the funny thing. They were eating the same meal from a silver foil container.’

  ‘So he would have got sick too.’

  ‘I called the college infirmary but they’ve had no cases of food poisoning reported. We don’t know if he became ill because we can’t find him.’

  ‘Can we even get involved?’ May asked. ‘Is this our case?’

  ‘It falls under our remit,’ Bryant replied. ‘I’m going to ask for an analysis of her stomach contents.’

  An hour later, the breakdown of ingested foodstuffs came in from the pathologist. ‘An excessive amount of dichlorophenoxyacetic acid,’ said May, tapping his laptop screen. ‘Not enough to kill her on its own, but there are several other non-specified trace chemicals in her system. So if we find who she was with …’

  ‘… and he’s not sick, we could be looking at murder,’ said Bryant, raising an eyebrow.

  The door handle suddenly rattled. ‘Why is this thing locked?’ called Raymond Land.

  ‘Do you have your membership card?’ Bryant called back.

  ‘No, I came out in a rush and left it at home.’

  ‘Then you can’t come in.’ He shot a cheeky look at his partner.

  ‘Oh, this is ridiculous,’ their superior complained. ‘Unlock it at once.’

  ‘We’re admitting you this time,’ said Bryant, opening the door, ‘because we’re keen to show you that the management listens to its members.’

  ‘I’m management, not you,’ said Land testily. ‘I’ve told you before, you cannot turn government-owned rooms into private clubs. What’s this about you making requests to UCH about a case? You need to run it by me first.’

  ‘We didn’t want to trouble you with it,’ said Bryant. ‘It may be nothing.’

  ‘If it cuts into your time I have to charge it back. Why didn’t it come to us in the first place?’

  ‘Because according to this the coroner hasn’t posted anything conclusive yet,’ said May. ‘She’s trying to avoid an open verdict. Perhaps we can help her.’

  Behind them, the door unlocked and Janice Longbright came in.

  ‘How did you get in?’ asked Land, amazed.

  ‘I don’t need my membership card,’ she replied. ‘I’ve got a VIP pass.’

  ‘Well, obviously there’s a two-tier membership system in place,’ Bryant explained. ‘I didn’t mention the case because we don’t know what we’re dealing with yet. Janice, did you get anything?’

  Longbright dropped some notes on the detectives’ conjoined desks. ‘Everyone says Alysha Hussein was a good student and a hard worker, majoring in urban sociology. Non-drinker, non-smoker, no one she was especially close to, not much of a mixer. Very quiet. Plenty of people saw her around but not many spoke to her. Apparently her father examined her dorm room after the emergency services had been through it, but he found nothing unusual.’

  ‘So based on a single witness report it looks most likely to have been fo
od contamination,’ said May.

  ‘She met someone she liked enough to share his meal,’ said Bryant.

  That evening at seven, May, Bryant and Longbright set off for the old Torrington Square site together. The pleasant weather had been knocked aside by a thunderous sky that chose to empty itself just as they moved beyond the shelter of the plane trees. The college’s quadrangles and open passageways were now deserted, and had a melancholic, forlorn air. When they reached the corner of the square they found it harder to find the footprints in the rain.

  ‘The legend has them reappearing throughout history,’ Bryant said, pointing down at the bald patches.

  ‘You do realize this is completely bonkers?’ said May. ‘If we want to find out what happened to her we should talk more to her friends.’

  ‘And we will,’ Bryant replied. ‘I have a feeling about this. Someone has heard of the legend and is using it to bring us in.’

  ‘No, Arthur, even you didn’t know about it and had to be told by that mad head-banging professor.’

  ‘I don’t understand either,’ said Janice. ‘How did you get from the footprints on the lawn to a dead student?’

  ‘I followed them back.’ Bryant pointed up at the student’s window behind them.

  ‘So what happens if you follow them forward?’ asked May.

  The trio looked through the falling rain towards the grey building in the lower right-hand corner of the square.

  There were seven males and fourteen females renting rooms in the block at the opposite corner. Four of the male students were Caucasian and two others were away, leaving a single economics student, Raj Kamesh.

  May’s knock was answered by an exhausted-looking stick insect with bed hair and a distinct odour of weed hanging about him. His room looked like it had been turned on to its ceiling and suddenly righted. After the preliminary introductions had been made the group invited itself in. May crossed to the window and noted that Kamesh had a clear view of Hussein’s flat. He could see into the kitchen and bedroom.

  Bryant was about to start questioning the student when Longbright stayed his hand and stepped in. ‘It’s just a formality,’ she explained gently. ‘We think a friend of yours may be in trouble. How long have you known Alysha Hussein?’