Bryant & May - The Burning Man

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Of course I’m aware, but there’s nothing I can do about it, is there?’

  ‘On that point I’m afraid you’re right,’ May agreed. ‘Early this morning Raymond was called to a bank in the City by a superintendent called Darren Link. Ring any bells?’

  ‘Oh, yes, ex-Whitechapel mob, fancies himself a real hard nut. To paraphrase J. B. Priestley, what he doesn’t know about policing isn’t worth knowing, but what he does know isn’t worth knowing either, because of the bad effect it’s had on him. We all used to call him “Missing” Link. He didn’t like that much. You know how coppers sniff out weaknesses and play on them. After we went a bit too far with the teasing, he set fire to two of our vehicles in the Whitechapel car pool and disappeared. He surfaced a few weeks later in West End Central, transferred to vice.’

  ‘Not someone to mess with, then.’

  ‘Oh, it’s the ones you can’t get a handle on who are trouble,’ said Bryant, scratching his pug nose as he pondered the matter. ‘I can see through Darren Link. He’s an evangelist. That’s why he joined the force: to clean up the streets. He can’t, of course – nobody can truly control people, they’re too wilful, and it drives him crazy. I suppose he’s not a bad bloke, really. If he called Raymond, it means he can’t spare his own men for a clean-up job.’

  ‘It’s exactly that, I’m afraid. Raymond wasn’t going to tell us but I called him on it. There’s a body.’

  ‘Oh?’ Bryant’s furry little ears perked up. Death was his stimulant of choice.

  ‘A homeless guy was asleep on the steps of one of the banks the protestors attacked.’

  ‘That hasn’t made the news, has it?’

  ‘No. I was wondering whose decision it was to keep it out of the press. The BBC is trying hard not to demonize the protestors but I’m betting they weren’t given the story.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ said Bryant thoughtfully. ‘There are usually so many reporters on the ground that you’d think someone would have picked it up. I smell a rat.’

  ‘You don’t smell anything,’ warned May, sitting up, ‘because it’s got nothing to do with you. Or with me, for that matter. Dan just has to sign off on the crime scene.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Bryant with suspicious nonchalance. ‘That means he’ll ask Giles to ID the cause of death, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Very possibly.’

  ‘Hm. I might just pop along and take a look.’

  ‘No, you won’t. Raymond will go bananas if you do.’

  ‘Yes, but I have to pass the mortuary later, anyway.’

  ‘You don’t. It’s not on your way home. Why can’t you just go to the pub like normal people?’

  ‘I could just stick my head around the door …’

  ‘You know, it wouldn’t hurt to let someone else take the credit,’ said May tactfully. ‘Leave them alone for a while and let’s see what they come up with.’

  Bryant enjoyed handling cases that required a bit of showmanship. Identifying the corpse of a rough sleeper accidentally caught in the crossfire between capitalists and rioters was the sort of chore that usually fell to Met officers, and in all likelihood it would never be fully cleared up; wherever there was conflict there would always be innocent victims.

  But he thought he might look in anyway. And if he was going, it seemed silly to wait until the end of the day, when Giles had finished and was about to leave, so why not go right now?

  7

  ABYSS

  Bryant headed around the corner to Camley Street, past St Pancras Old Church, one of the most ancient sites of Christian worship in England, to the bizarre Victorian gingerbread house that sat beside it. The squat ivy-covered building was home to the Camley Street Coroner’s Office, and as Bryant stumped up the winding path to the front door, he caught a glimpse of Rosa Lysandrou’s pale face peering out of a lead-light window at him.

  ‘Thank goodness that was you,’ said Bryant cheerfully as the housekeeper opened the door. ‘For a horrible moment I thought it was Miss Jessel from The Turn of the Screw.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means,’ said Rosa flatly, ‘but I suppose you are being rude as usual.’ She stood aside to allow him entrance.

  Bryant tentatively extended his walking stick into the hall as if checking for landmines. ‘It’s a book. And a film. And an opera. Do you enjoy reading?’

  ‘I enjoyed Fifty Shades of Grey.’

  Bryant quailed at the thought. ‘That’s not really reading, is it? More like staring at an assortment of words.’

  ‘It is very popular.’

  ‘So is taking photographs of your dinner for Facebook, but that doesn’t mean it adds to the total sum of human knowledge.’

  ‘You can’t see him,’ Rosa pointed out. ‘He knows you’re not supposed to be here.’

  ‘Who said I came to see him?’ Bryant’s aqueous-blue eyes were as innocent as a kitten’s. ‘I find myself inexplicably drawn to you. Every time I imagine you in that shapeless black whatever-it-is you’re wearing I get quite—’

  ‘Mr Bryant, will you please stop antagonizing my assistant?’ said Giles Kershaw, striding into the hall. Out of his lab coat and tucked into faded jeans, a crisp white shirt and a black waistcoat, he looked like a waiter for a once-fashionable restaurant rather than the guardian of the borough’s main mortuary.

  ‘We were just chatting about literature.’ Bryant produced a battered but extravagantly beribboned box of chocolates from his overcoat. ‘These are for you, Rosa.’

  She hesitated before accepting them, perhaps wondering whether they were poisoned, then wrinkled her nose.

  ‘Ah, yes. The cat peed in my pocket, but they should be all right,’ Bryant explained. ‘They’re your favourite, I imagine: hard centres. And you’re absolutely correct, of course. We avoid matters of importance and concentrate on the trivial. If we didn’t, the burden of life would simply prove too much for us.’

  ‘Spoken’, replied Rosa, ‘like a man without a god.’ She pointedly set the chocolates aside.

  ‘I think I know what you came for,’ said Kershaw hastily, flicking back his blond fringe and marching along the hall towards the main autopsy room with Bryant in his wake.

  ‘Oh, I’m not here for anything,’ Bryant explained. ‘I was just in the neighbourhood.’

  ‘So you didn’t know that Dan was here as well?’

  ‘Is he back from the Findersbury Bank already? Well, that’s a stroke of luck.’

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t be able to stay away,’ called Banbury, who was poking through the contents of an opaque green plastic bag on Kershaw’s counter. ‘There’s nothing more to see than this. He’s in a terrible state.’

  ‘I’ve probably seen worse,’ said Bryant.

  ‘I tell my students to detach themselves from the fact that this is a human body. If you really start thinking about it, you’ll realize that after all your years in the job you’ve looked at too many corpses, and there’s a lot of nightmare potential in that. Just don’t—’

  ‘I know – touch anything.’ He let Kershaw cut open the bag. ‘Well, that’s pretty disgusting. His viscera look cooked. How will you get anything out of them?’

  ‘In this job you need to have good visual acuity for pattern recognition. The ability to put together what’s been going on. Take a look at that.’ Without glancing up, Kershaw brandished a pair of tweezers in the direction of the steel tray further along the counter.

  Bryant went over to it and peered in. He saw a small metal rod with blackened ends. ‘What is it?’

  ‘An implant,’ said Kershaw. ‘Probably from his right foot.’

  ‘What kind of implant?’ He picked up the rod and sniffed it.

  Kershaw took it out of his hands. ‘What did I just ask you not to do? It looks like a titanium allogenic graft for segmental lengthening, to replace a part that was damaged. From the upper part of the foot. It’s likely he crushed a bone and had it replaced. These things are pretty common, but I thought it would help to
narrow down the search field. Then I discovered that the newer models are etched with a unique serial number so that each one is registered to its owner. We’ll run a check tonight.’

  ‘Why can’t you do it now?’

  ‘The medical database requires search clearance. If that doesn’t work out, we’ll get him on dental records. If there’s time, that is. I’d rather not have to start trawling around the hostels. Link has slapped a limit on our billable hours. He wants this closed as quickly as possible.’

  ‘What about cameras? Don’t tell me you can’t track his movements?’

  ‘In and out of the street, certainly,’ said Banbury, ‘but it’ll take a while sifting through the hard drives covering the main thoroughfares, unless he went into a shop, somewhere we’d get a close-up.’

  ‘So all this technology we have in the Square Mile is useless,’ Bryant harrumphed.

  ‘Not at all. It’s just time-consuming. We have another clue as to his ID. In the bottom of the sleeping bag was a plastic wallet. It melted but there were a couple of cards inside, and once we separate them out we might get the remains of a chip from one.’

  ‘If he was sleeping rough, they won’t have been credit cards. Are they here?’

  ‘Hang on.’ Kershaw carefully shook out a plastic envelope, and a gnarled, blackened lump dropped into his desk tray. Bryant untangled a pair of reading glasses and squinted at it.

  ‘That’s a staff card for the Bloomsbury Sustainable Market,’ he said without a second’s hesitation. ‘It’s a collective where students stack shelves in return for groceries.’

  ‘I don’t see how you can possibly know that,’ said Banbury. ‘We’d need to get some chromatography on it before—’

  ‘When I was a child,’ Bryant interrupted, ‘I was very good at jigsaws. That little mark in the corner …’ He tapped the blob. ‘… that’s the bottom part of a picture. It’s the handle of a kitchen whisk – the market’s symbol. I’d recognize it anywhere.’

  ‘OK.’ Banbury shrugged. ‘We’ll get on it.’

  ‘What do you think happened?’ Kershaw asked.

  ‘Scylla and Charybdis,’ said Bryant. ‘He got caught napping between them. The riot police arriving on one side, the protestors kettled on the other.’

  ‘It’s hard to believe he didn’t wake up with all the noise in the next street,’ said Kershaw.

  ‘Have you ever spent a day on the streets?’ asked Bryant. ‘You’re on the move all the time. It’s incredibly tiring. By the time it gets dark all you want to do is drop down in your tracks and sleep. I doubt this poor devil would have been woken by a bomb going off.’

  ‘Right,’ said Kershaw. ‘I’ll make some calls back at the PCU and we’ll get this wrapped up.’

  But Bryant showed no signs of budging from the remains of the body. ‘It’s worse than it ever was,’ he muttered. ‘Bankers with million-pound bonuses stepping around kids who aren’t even guaranteed a place to lay their heads. The poor are worse off now than they were in Victorian times. What’s happened to my city?’ For a moment he looked as if he was standing at the edge of an unimaginable abyss.

  ‘Come on,’ said Banbury gently, taking his boss’s arm. ‘I’ll walk back with you.’

  8

  MASKS

  John May sat back in his chair and thought about the office he had shared for so long with his partner.

  It wasn’t the same room, of course – that had changed many times since Bryant had accidentally burned down the unit years before – but somehow it always reinvented itself with the same layout, the same esoteric books, the same haphazardly accumulated bric-a-brac. Looking at the empty green leather chair opposite, May suddenly had a change of heart. Bryant had flung caution aside and followed his instincts, heading off to visit St Pancras simply because he could not allow his natural curiosity to be quelled. So, May wondered, why was he sitting here content to follow orders? What did that ever gain him?

  Grabbing his coat, he left the building and hailed a taxi to Crutched Friars. The least he could do was take a look at the façade of the Findersbury Bank. He did not expect to find anything of value there, but it usually helped to understand the exact geographical layout of the incident scene.

  As he walked over the wet tarmac towards the bank’s blackened foyer, he saw a pair of firefighters bent over by the entrance examining something in the soot-stains. One stood up at his approach and raised a hand in greeting. ‘Hey, John, they’ve got you on this too, eh?’

  ‘Just an ID job,’ said May. ‘What have you got there?’

  The other officer rose and turned to him. ‘Senior Officer Blaize Carter. Good to finally meet you, Mr May. I’ve heard a lot about your unit.’

  May blinked and stared, lost for words.

  Carter looked at her colleague wearily, then back at May. ‘Go on then, have a laugh. It’s not my fault – I was christened with it, OK? My mother actually wanted me to be a concert pianist.’

  May decided it was better to let her assume he was taken aback by her name, but he was thinking something else entirely. Carter was slim and tough-looking, with the build of a runner or a gymnast, in her upper forties, her kinked auburn hair tied back, her face free of make-up. There was a world of patience and kindness in her eyes, something he often saw in nurses and firefighters.

  ‘I, um, it’s … a nice name.’ He mentally kicked himself. ‘You looked like you’d found something.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe nothing but – here …’ She stood aside to let him see the base of the entrance. ‘The doors have varnished wood surrounds. One side doesn’t open. You’d think anyone trying to torch the place would throw missiles here, against the doors, where there was the best chance of setting something alight, but the shards’ – she indicated the spot with her boot – ‘well, they’re all in the opposite corner, so that’s your impact spot. Johnnie Walker label, see?’

  ‘That’s a concrete step.’

  ‘Exactly. Nothing to burn. Not strictly true. There must have been one thing in the corner: the homeless guy’s head. Arsonists often miss their targets but he got pretty close before throwing the bottle. You can see by the force of the impact. So, was he aiming for the bank or the sleeper? Have you got someone doing the site forensics?’

  ‘Yes, my chap’s already been,’ said May. ‘Didn’t anyone tell you?’

  ‘He’s supposed to be in charge, isn’t he?’ She jerked her thumb back at Link, who was having some kind of argument with a junior officer. ‘I don’t think he knows what he’s doing. Maybe you could get your—’

  ‘Banbury,’ said May quickly. ‘Dan Banbury.’

  ‘Great, if you could get him to call us direct, maybe we can cut through some of the red tape. At the moment the bank staff are having to use the side entrance. It’s not fit for purpose, but they refuse to close so I’d like to get the doors reopened as soon as possible.’ She rubbed the tip of her nose with the back of her hand, leaving a smear of soot.

  ‘Of course. How do I—’

  ‘This isn’t my jurisdiction,’ interrupted Carter. ‘I’m based at Euston Road. I guess you know most of the team there.’

  ‘A few, yes.’

  ‘Then now you know me as well.’ She turned and knelt once more.

  Blaize, thought May as he walked away towards the bridge. Blaize Carter.

  Superintendent Darren Link held a meeting with the specialist support unit for public order at the CoL’s Snow Hill station, one of the three he worked between in the Square Mile. The building had mullioned bay windows set in discoloured Portland stone, and looked like the headquarters of some benevolent Victorian charity. Inside, there was very little charity to be found today. On its first floor, Link was losing his temper.

  ‘You’re telling me you can’t even round up the ringleaders?’ He stared down the support unit with his fractured eye, daring them to argue back.

  ‘Not while they’re engaged in legitimate protest,’ said one of them, a legal expert named Ayo Onatade. ‘They h
eld meetings with us about the prescribed route and the road closures, and we agreed hours and dates up front, all of which they’ve adhered to.’

  ‘Did you agree which windows they could chuck bricks through? Which cars they could set alight?’

  ‘We’ve been over this,’ said Onatade with weary patience. She was used to bearing the brunt of police wrath. ‘The original protest group was joined by unregistered outsiders who were bussed in from other parts of the country.’

  ‘But if the march hadn’t been announced in the first place, these thugs wouldn’t have come down to join them. How are we supposed to tell them apart?’

  ‘We told you to issue the legitimate campaigners with passes. And you can blame the media for the uproar, not the marchers. There’s been a lot of scaremongering coverage. It was intended to be a peaceful demonstration. The press were out on the streets looking for trouble long before the march had even begun.’

  Link pulled out the updated fact sheet he’d been handed and read from it. ‘Twelve burned-out vehicles, six office buildings set on fire, a “peace camp” which consists of some Glastonbury tents and a lot of cardboard, the Bank of England barricaded, Cannon Street and Mansion House stations still closed down. The Square Mile’s becoming unsafe. One hundred and three civilian injuries so far, twenty-one officers injured and one fatality.’

  ‘A fatality?’ repeated Onatade, shocked.

  ‘A homeless guy sleeping rough in a doorway, burned to death by one of your peaceful protestors.’ He paused to let the news sink in. ‘And I hope you haven’t got any shares invested right now, because the FTSE’s taken a right old hammering this morning.’