Bryant & May – England’s Finest

by Christopher Fowler

  I’m an idiot, he thought, turning and pushing back through the guests in the direction of the restaurant’s central base. Here, between two absurdly narrow waiters’ stations, stood the steel dumb waiter to the kitchen on the floor below.

  Bryant beckoned to his partner, pointing at the emergency staircase. Together they descended a floor. The chefs froze in surprise as they entered. ‘Has a heavyset bald man with a face like a constipated mastiff come in here?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘He jumped out of the dumb waiter and ran off,’ said the head chef. ‘He was about to get my soup ladle around the back of his head, but he’d gone before I could stop him.’

  ‘So we’ve lost him,’ said May.

  ‘Not at all, old bean. I knew if there was trouble it would be caused by the person closest to Miss Qamar ud-Din, so I pointed him out to the Daily Mirror photographer and said if he leaves early, detain him. It was in his interests to do so as there’s a story in it for him.’

  They took the stairs because it was faster than commandeering the lift. In the foyer they found the photographer taking shots of a police constable sitting on the bodyguard, who was swearing colourfully and blasphemously in several languages.

  ‘Have you searched him?’ asked May.

  ‘Thought we’d leave that for you,’ said the photographer. ‘When I got near him he bit me.’

  ‘I asked him to behave until you got here, Mr Bryant,’ said the PC, ‘but he called me a – well, he suggested that my mother was no stranger to the embrace of a camel.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ve been called worse,’ said Bryant. ‘Let’s see what’s in his pockets.’

  The Monarch of the Sands was a sunlit desert encased in crystal. The flaw that made the diamond glow saffron made it a magical symbol of the prince’s country.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said May. ‘I saw you standing there just after the lights came back on. You already knew she’d had the diamond stolen without even seeing that it was missing from her finger.’

  ‘Well, I did have an idea it was about to happen,’ Bryant admitted. ‘When I listened to the party chatter I overheard Miss Qamar tell someone she’d been given a new bodyguard. And I couldn’t help noticing he looked remarkably like “Nosher” Stibbs from Canning Town.’

  ‘But that’s not why you reacted like that.’

  ‘No, it was for a much simpler reason. When the lights went out – not the storm’s fault, I suspect, but someone the bodyguard bribed – Miss Qamar was sitting at one of the VIP tables. When the power returned, she was in a different seat.’

  ‘So what had happened?’

  ‘I think we’ll find that the bodyguard slipped something into her orange juice a few minutes earlier. As soon as it was dark and the outside view provided the only lighting in the room, “Nosher” removed her from the room and took her to the central waiters’ station, where he managed to get the ring off, possibly with the help of an accomplice. Then he returned her to her chair. But he slipped up in the dark. The restaurant revolves 360 degrees every twenty-two minutes, which means that in the time he had been removing the ring from her finger, her chair had shifted about forty-five degrees. He returned with her from the waiters’ station and sat her down in the wrong place, outside of the VIP section. The moment I saw her there, I knew what had happened.’

  ‘Let’s go and return the ring,’ said May. ‘We could have a bit of fun and tell her the culprit was Michael Caine.’

  Bryant & May and the Breadcrumb Trail

  ‘Arthur – don’t do that.’

  ‘What?’ Bryant looked up at his partner in surprised innocence.

  ‘Take your knife out of the toaster. Or at least unplug it first.’

  Bryant waggled the table knife between his thumb and forefinger. ‘You know, when I was a lad we used to get a two-prong plug into a three-prong socket by wedging the third hole open with a pencil stub. Everyone’s so safety-conscious now.’

  ‘So you’re prepared to risk electrocution for a slice of toast. Amazing.’ May rattled his copy of the Guardian and vanished behind it once more.

  The detectives were seated opposite each other in their private room (private insofar as it had a lockable door) on the first floor of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, King’s Cross. Outside, the steady rainfall made the sound of a bonfire. Bare-headed office workers in soaked summer shirts darted between vans and taxis; the rain has to be heavy to make a real Londoner raise an umbrella.

  Bryant had the toaster balanced on a pile of encyclopaedias, alongside a 1960s Pifco Teasmade that invariably shot boiling water over their paperwork.

  ‘We should get a modern coffee machine with those little capsules,’ said May. ‘You can choose the strength of your coffee.’

  ‘I don’t want to choose the strength of my coffee, I want a cup of tea. Leaves, not bags. Whole milk. No sugar.’

  ‘You’re stuck in the past,’ sighed May, returning to his paper.

  ‘I’m not, I’m just too busy catching up to deal with the present. I’ll get to the present eventually.’ He dug his knife back into the toaster.

  ‘You mean you’ll get to it at some time in the future.’

  ‘Yes, when I’ve finished with the past. I want to know everything before I die, and I’m running out of time.’ His knife slipped and catapulted breadcrumbs across the office. ‘It’s an awful paradox. The more I learn the less I truly understand. Have you looked in our box of unsolved cases lately? The Chamber of Horrors Maniac. The Deptford Demon. The Odeon Strangler. The Limehouse Ratboy. We’ll never be able to close them. The verdicts were all “murder by person or persons unknown”. I’m only hanging on to the files out of sentimentality.’

  There was a bang and the lights went out. Unconcerned, Bryant withdrew his knife from the smoking toaster and lit a candle in a saucer.

  ‘D’you know, at night I recall everything about London that I thought I’d lost. I remember the dockyards at Deptford Creek and the walk from Blue Anchor Road to the China Hall, and waiting for my father outside the Dog & Bell – he met Rudyard Kipling, did you know? Long story – and my mother went to prison and I investigated the bombing of the Post Office Tower.’

  May lost his place in the conversation. ‘Wait, your mother—?’

  ‘It’s all stored away up here.’ Bryant tapped his temple. ‘My head’s like an attic full of ephemera, old record albums, paperbacks you can’t bear to throw out and those moulds dentists use to make of your teeth.’

  May sighed and pulled his chair closer to his desk. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘do you want to talk about it?’

  Bryant’s refulgent blue eyes widened. ‘What?’

  ‘Well, there’s obviously something on your mind that’s making you introspective, so out with it.’

  ‘I think the world has moved into a new technological phase, and it hasn’t taken me with it.’

  ‘I could have told you that years ago.’

  ‘All these apps and drones and smart-doodads – they don’t make life simpler or easier. What’s the point of buying things online that don’t fit when you can go to the shops? I don’t understand what anyone gets at the end of it all.’

  ‘Have you tried asking Dan?’

  ‘Yes, he spoke to me in great detail. When I woke up he’d gone.’

  ‘Look,’ said May, ‘this is you.’ He cleared a space on their conjoined desks and placed a pencil on it. ‘You see something online that you want to buy, and you contact the seller.’ He placed a rubber band next to the pencil. ‘This seller takes your money and passes your information along to another company, who pays the seller.’ Here he set down his fountain pen. ‘The company uses your details to find you another product, advertising it on the site you first looked at, and sells you something new. Everyone pays everyone else.’

  ‘I’m not happy being a pencil,’ Bryant complained. ‘I’d be happier as a fountain pen. The pen makes more money.’

  ‘Yes, but you get the product.’

  ‘That was a straight
transaction. I’m not in profit, plus I lost my information. Even the rubber band’s better off than me.’

  ‘Perhaps you should stay away from transaction technology,’ said May.

  ‘How can I when it’s everywhere?’ Bryant’s wrinkled face loomed over the flickering candle. ‘I read in the paper that a private school asked its pupils to make Christmas cards, and the pupils outsourced them to a Chinese service they found online. I’d happily go back to living without the internet. And electricity, for that matter.’

  The lights came back on. Bryant winced theatrically, a portly vampire hit by dawn’s rays.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ said May just as Janice Longbright stepped into the room.

  ‘I thought you’d already gone,’ said Janice.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There’s a case in. Didn’t anyone tell you? A murder in Soho. Sounds pretty nasty. They’ve got someone in custody.’

  Bryant rose, pushed his trilby over his ears and knotted his scarf. ‘Then why do they need us?’

  ‘The young lady says it was all the fault of her phone.’

  ‘How come we only get the nutters?’ May asked.

  ‘Because urban madness is our trade.’ Bryant handed Longbright the blackened toaster. ‘Throw this out, would you? Something’s gone wrong with it.’

  ‘That is the most disgusting bloody thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen what Colin eats,’ said Meera Mangeshkar, peering into the waste bin. They were standing in one of Chinatown’s shadowy back alleys, at the rear of Gerrard Street.

  Dan Banbury stood back against the alley wall, breathing deeply and trying to prevent himself from throwing up. John May stayed with the accused while his partner took a positively unhealthy interest in the bin. It was a brown plastic trough with a broken lid, filled with the remains of a hundred Chinese dinners, and a body. Sticking out from the noodles, beansprouts, special fried rice, chicken feet and fish heads were a pair of jean-clad legs ending in snakeskin cowboy boots. It was an unpleasantly humid evening and the smell was almost tangible.

  ‘It looks like he drowned in someone’s sweet and sour sauce,’ said Bryant, fascinated. Banbury made another throwing-up noise.

  ‘What happened?’ May asked the suspect. ‘Wait a minute, who are you and who’s the bloke in the bin?’

  In her floral summer top and white jeans the girl looked normal enough. She seemed a little annoyed and impatient, but was not confused or disturbed in any way. ‘My name is Naomi Sams,’ she replied, holding up her smartphone. ‘I don’t know who he is, and if it wasn’t for this stupid thing I wouldn’t even be here.’

  ‘Right, we have to get him out,’ said Meera, uncapping a pot of Tiger Balm and dabbing some under Banbury’s nose. ‘Dan, grab a leg.’

  ‘Really? Is this in my job description now?’ The crime scene manager looked over at the body half submerged in meal remains.

  ‘It does you good to get away from the keyboard occasionally,’ said Meera. Together they leaned over the lip of the bin and each pulled an ankle. It took longer than they expected to pull him out, thanks to the suction effect of so much warm wet food. The body emerged with the sound of a wellington boot being pulled from mud.

  Sitting him up in the bin proved to be a bad idea as he started to sink again, so they laboriously lifted him out and propped him against the alley wall. ‘OK,’ said Banbury, wiping pieces of pork from his sleeves, ‘we’re looking at a white male, late thirties, light build, suffocated.’

  ‘You’re already sure of that?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘It seems highly likely, Mr B.,’ said Banbury. ‘There’s a prawn up his nose.’ The corpse’s head was covered in bright orange slime. Even his eyeballs were treacly with sauce. There were noodles hanging out of his mouth and slices of lemon stuck to his neck.

  ‘Do you want to talk us through what happened here or back at the station?’ May asked the suspect.

  ‘What, I get a choice?’ Miss Sams looked surprised. ‘You’re not normal police, are you?’

  ‘We’re from the Peculiar Crimes Unit and this doesn’t look like a normal crime,’ he replied.

  ‘OK.’ She took a deep breath, but glanced over at the corpse and hesitated.

  ‘Can you get that fellow out of here, Dan?’ May asked.

  ‘He’s stuck to the wall,’ said Meera.

  ‘Just get rid of him.’

  ‘I’ve got this stupid app on my phone,’ said Sams, showing May her mobile screen. ‘It’s called Breadcrumb. The idea is that—’

  ‘Is this relevant?’

  ‘I’m not an idiot. You asked me what I was doing here.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  She tapped her screen and a series of orange dots appeared on a black map. ‘It keeps track of where you are so you can always find your way back. It doesn’t show you the surrounding streets, just your route. Breadcrumbs, get it? But it’s buggy. I was trying to find the tube station and it sent me down here. As soon as I realized it was a dead end I stopped and tried to get it working properly again. I looked up and realized that this guy was standing in the doorway at the end watching me. He had a knife in one hand, a big kitchen knife, the sort of thing you use for cutting through bones, and he made this gesture like – oh, I don’t know, like I was the last straw and he’d had enough of everything. Then he ran at me. The knife was still in his hand. I just sort of – froze, I suppose. It all happened so fast.’

  ‘Was the knife raised?’ asked May. ‘Was he threatening you?’

  Sams gave him a look. ‘What do you think? Just as he reached me he slipped.’

  May looked down and saw that the alley pavement was black with oil. A single skid-mark led to the bin.

  ‘I gave him a shove while he was off-balance and he fell in head first. He tried to get out but sort of floundered around, sinking in deeper the more he wriggled, and there were bubbles of sauce coming out and he stopped moving.’

  ‘You didn’t try to help him.’

  ‘He came at me with a bloody knife!’

  ‘So if we empty that bin out we’ll find a knife,’ said May.

  ‘I am so not doing that,’ Meera warned.

  DS Mangeshkar unearthed the kitchen knife after ten minutes of poking about with a piece of bamboo she had found in the restaurant.

  ‘It’ll be interesting to see if we can get prints off the handle,’ said May as he and Bryant walked to the end of the alleyway.

  They reached the back door of the Lucky Dragon Chinese restaurant, an insalubrious Cantonese joint with yellow flock wallpaper, waterfall calendars and red paper lanterns. Banbury called out a warning: ‘If you go in there you’ll be compromising a potential crime scene.’

  ‘Don’t care, going in,’ Bryant called back. May found a light switch. The restaurant’s storeroom was filled with drums of oil and poly-boxes of vacuum-packed duck breasts. ‘Cooked on the premises, my arse,’ said Bryant. He stood in the doorway and looked back into the alley. ‘Do you think her story makes any kind of sense?’

  ‘It does now,’ said May. When Bryant turned, he saw that there was another pair of legs sticking out from between the boxes. The concrete floor was sticky with blood.

  ‘I think she caught her attacker in the middle of something,’ said Bryant.

  Back at the PCU, the detectives gathered everyone in the operations room and set up whiteboards. Information was coming in thick and fast, but at this stage the problem lay in assigning importance to each detail.

  ‘I can smell sweet and sour fish,’ said Raymond Land. ‘Can you not eat lunch in this room? Where are we?’

  ‘Two dead, one suspect,’ said John May. He explained the circumstances to the unit chief.

  ‘You think she saw him attacking this other bloke and he went for her, is that it? Get rid of the witness?’

  ‘We don’t know yet,’ May admitted. ‘He may not have realized he was still holding the knife. She says she saw him as a threat and shoved him.’

  Dan Banbury arrived and set
down his kit. ‘I’ve got an update if you’re ready?’

  May sat down and gave him the floor.

  ‘Everything at the site fits with Miss Sams’s description of what happened. I’ve got footprints of the two males going inside, one coming out again, one set for Sams entering the alley.’

  ‘Have you got IDs on the men for us?’

  Banbury ran his hand over his tufted fair hair. ‘The chap who asphyxiated in the bin is Archie Marlow, a small-time “entrepreneur” very familiar with the staff at Southwark Crown Court. Marlow died from inhaling a mixture of liquids and solids. There was a spring roll stuck in his throat. The chap on the floor of the storage room is Nikos Petrides, known to his pals as “Little Nicky”, equally dodgy. He died from a single stab wound to the heart. Floor prints are all consistent with Marlow launching an unexpected attack on Petrides.’

  ‘Any idea how they knew each other?’ asked May.

  Dan checked his notes. ‘Little Nicky is also, guess what, an entrepreneur. They both toyed around with IT start-ups, failed to raised VC—’

  ‘Explain,’ said Bryant.

  ‘Sorry, Mr B., venture capital. Most start-up entrepreneurs are losers who still think the internet is a meritocracy. After running up debts they have a habit of turning up in other corners of the non-employed universe hawking stuff to mugs. No obvious connection between the two just yet, but I’d suggest we’re looking at a falling-out among thieves. Open and shut. Except.’ He unfolded a note and pinned it to the board. ‘Little Nicky had 250,000 pounds in his current account, put there by an offshore company in the last week. Before that the account averaged a figure of less than three hundred. If you’re wondering about Archie Marlow’s money, there isn’t any. He died broke.’

  ‘So a young lady studying her phone app takes a wrong turn into an alleyway just as Mr Marlow finishes off Mr Petrides,’ said Bryant, scrawling across the whiteboard in handwriting no one could decipher. ‘Marlow spots her at the worst possible moment and goes off on one. Someone in the restaurant must know what Petrides was doing there.’