Link, who displayed an eschatological attitude about the riots that would have alarmed his bosses had they known, was working with the anti-terrorist squad to identify known activists and lift them off the streets before they had a chance to act. Ideally he would have liked to get each of them in a dark corner for a twenty-minute debrief with a blunt instrument, but senior eyes were watching him.
The weather forecast for Tuesday was at least partially fine, and with Dexter Cornell continuing to goad his adversaries by promising in TV interviews that he would not be intimidated into leaving the bank before he was good and ready, it now seemed likely that further violence would erupt in the next twenty-four hours.
In fact, a bizarre act of violence occurred soon after, but not in a way anyone had imagined, and not in the City’s Square Mile.
His muscles were sore and stiffening fast.
He had been working without light for the last two hours, dragging everything he needed up the steep staircase to the roof. The rising dust in the attic triggered his asthma, and he needed to sit quietly on the tiles for a while until he could catch his breath again.
He found he could see more clearly with the skylight propped open. It was never truly dark in the city. The heavy cloud layering the London sky was afflicted with a sickly jaundice that reflected light back. Below, the pitched-glass rooftops of Brixton Market snaked between the buildings, and he could see the traders arriving for the day. He smoked a cigarette, carefully pocketing the stub afterwards.
It was important to make sure that he could effect a fast escape. He knew that it would be tempting to stay and see what happened, but if he took too long they would quickly find a way to cut off his escape route. The old shops that lined the market were terraced, and he had paced out two separate exits across their gutters to fire escapes, back to pavement level. From there he could slip away through the crowds of morning shoppers, beneath the old brick arches on Electric Avenue. The pavements would work in his favour; they were among the most cluttered and impenetrable in London. Now all he had to do was wait for the target to arrive.
He thought about yesterday’s death. He’d been sorry to kill the boy but it seemed to him that in any great plan an innocent had to suffer. Sleeping rough was never without attendant risks, but to be burned alive … He forced himself to put the thought aside, remembering why Freddie Weeks had had to die. It was better to focus his hatred now and concentrate on humiliating his second victim in the most excruciating manner possible.
Heading back inside the attic, he checked on the camera and the electronic door buzzer, making sure he could take the small equipment with him when he left. Everything else was fingerprint-free and could be dumped. So long as he could travel light and move fast, there was no hope of anyone catching him.
Bryant got the call while he was still at home. After much carphology with the duvet, he tipped his phone out of his pillowcase.
‘Morning, Mr Bryant,’ said Colin Bimsley. ‘I found her.’
‘Found who?’ asked Bryant. ‘Try forming complete sentences.’
‘Sorry. The girlfriend.’
‘What girlfriend?’
‘Weeks had one. She’s doing bar work at the Enterprise pub on Red Lion Street, just down in Holborn. She dated Freddie Weeks for a while but it didn’t work out between them. I took a statement and gave her my hotline, but I thought you’d want to talk to her. She’ll be there at eight thirty this morning. I hope you didn’t mind me calling so early.’
‘I’ve been lying here thinking since five,’ said Bryant. ‘At my age you get more night than day. Where are you? What’s that funny noise in the background?’
‘I’m at the Shad Thames Boxing Club. When I’m angry, it’s best that I hit things before I come to work.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ replied Bryant, ringing off and heading for the bathroom to see if he could find out what Alma had done with his clean shirt.
The sign above the window showed a bemused polar bear looking up at a four-masted schooner. At 8.37 a.m. Bryant knocked on the door of the Enterprise pub and was admitted into what appeared to be a Victorian hall of emerald ceramic tiles, dark wooden floors and milky pendant globe lamps. The interior had undergone the kind of reverse pimping that had lately taken off in central London, in the realization that traditional pubs were in danger of vanishing altogether. Lagers had been replaced by seasonal beers, plastic signs had been superseded by blackboards and only the presence of roulades and alfalfa sprouts on the snack menus revealed that these were fanciful reimaginings of 1930s boozers, their design ethic influenced by old films and the desire to charge £17.50 for a cube of crusted pork belly.
If the girl had been a craft beer she would have been described as full-bodied and pale with a refined finish. She had ice-blue eyes, a tangle of glossy blonde hair and the kind of happily confident attitude that got her noticed even by London’s jaded populace. The faintest trace of an accent suggested that she was Polish.
‘I’m Joanna Papis. You must be Mr Bryant.’ She shook his hand warmly and ushered him in, guiding him around the pub’s vacuum-cleaning equipment. If she was surprised by his age, she hid it well. ‘There’s a room behind the bar where we can talk without being in the cleaner’s way.’
‘I understand one of our DCs took a statement from you,’ said Bryant, settling himself in the cluttered manager’s office. ‘But I thought you could tell me a bit more about your friendship with Mr Weeks. We’re hoping something in his past will lead us to his killer.’
‘I heard Freddie was sofa-surfing for a while, then using hostels,’ she said, finding somewhere to perch. ‘I feel a bit responsible, you know? I keep wondering whether if I’d stayed with him maybe he’d have got back on an even keel, but it was just too difficult for me.’
‘When you say “an even keel”, do you mean financially?’
‘Yes, but also … his behaviour. It wasn’t always easy to be around him. We met here in the pub.’ She pointed out into the saloon bar. ‘Right in that corner. He’d been working in the neighbourhood, in the local market. Before that he’d been employed by an IT company, but it went bust and they had to let him go.’
‘From IT to selling spuds – that’s a bit of a drop,’ said Bryant.
‘He couldn’t find anything else. He was planning to leave the market because he wasn’t happy there, and was looking for another position.’ She brushed a blonde strand behind one ear. ‘I suppose I only really started seeing him because he was so insistent, and I felt a bit sorry for him. It’s not easy having a social life when you work until midnight. I have a day job and I’m working here four nights a week. Freddie used to wait at the bar for me to finish, and usually ended up drinking too much. It wasn’t an easy relationship, but he was sweet and I knew he was really trying. But he couldn’t find the work he wanted, and his attitude didn’t help.’
‘In what way?’
‘He was very politicized. He felt that all information should be liberated.’ She looked out at the TV, which was displaying footage of Julian Assange running a gauntlet of photographers. ‘He was a big supporter of that guy. Then he got involved in the Occupy movement. Which would have been fine, but Freddie never knew when to stay quiet. I thought he’d have difficulty finding employment. I paid his rent a couple of times, but eventually I’d had enough of it and broke up with him.’ She gave a shrug of apology. ‘A couple of weeks later I saw one of the guys he used to come in with, and heard he was sleeping on their floors. I think by that time he’d pretty much run out of options.’
‘Given his outspoken views, do you think he made enemies?’ asked Bryant.
‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’ She absently touched the neckline of her T-shirt, remembering. ‘Freddie was so gentle that it was hard to be angry with him for long. He had a kind of … innocence. He was thin and had a slight limp, and always looked so downcast. Like the kind of man who would always end up getting hurt. I had a feeling that one day he would suffer some terrible tragedy.
I know it sounds selfish, but I didn’t want to be around him when it happened. This is my time to build a career and get my life together. We have to make our own futures, and I couldn’t understand the choices he made.’
‘He was asleep in a doorway when he died, Miss Papis,’ Bryant pointed out with a touch of severity. ‘He was hardly the engineer of his fate. Some of us need more protection than others. When was the last time you saw him?’
Papis sighed. ‘Look, I wasn’t perfect, OK? There was never a right time to tell him.’
‘Tell him what?’ prompted Bryant.
‘That I needed to put myself first for a while and that I couldn’t see him any more. I’m only working here temporarily while I finish my training in accountancy. I already took an AAT foundation course. I didn’t have time to be a mother to him. Freddie was very upset about it. And I probably said things I shouldn’t have.’
‘When was this?’
‘More than six weeks ago. I heard he left his job at the market just after that and started sleeping rough. You don’t think it was my fault, do you?’
‘I can’t absolve you of that,’ said Bryant, creaking to his feet. ‘When you’re out on the street you become an easy target.’
Afterwards, as he walked back up Red Lion Street towards the unit, Bryant felt uneasy. The arsonist had not torched Weeks in an act of mindless cruelty; he’d deliberately launched an attack. Someone who could do that might be capable of doing it again. For all he knew, Weeks’s death was a practice run for something much worse.
As he cut through King’s Cross Station, he glanced up at the television monitors and saw a blue phalanx of officers being driven back by dozens of hurtling masked figures. The red ribbon running beneath the footage read ‘Police cut off by protestors’. Men and women were helping to carry debris, bins, bollards and furniture, laying them across the roads to form a flaming boundary line. By the look of it, the skirmishes had now crossed Ludgate Circus, spreading to the far end of Fleet Street. It meant that the chaos was breaking free of the Square Mile.
Link’s men had lost the battle to contain the war. Anything could happen now.
13
FIRE AND SNOW
The young man checked his watch and peered over the filthy parapet of the roof, looking down at the canopy. When Glen Hall suddenly appeared, pausing inside the market entrance to check the directions on his phone, he spotted him at once. Hall always wore expensive dark suits and had a distinctive walk born of easy confidence and a sense of entitlement. You half expected him to stroll with his hands folded behind his back, like the Duke of Edinburgh.
Slipping down from his perch, he dropped back inside the attic. The brazier had been on for hours and was so hot that he could hardly get near it. The tar glowed dully in the cauldron, popping and churning like a miniature volcano. The loudness of the electronic door buzzer made him jump. Hall had found the shop and was pressing the entry button repeatedly. The moment for action had arrived. As he checked the preparations, he realized his hands were shaking. Getting rid of Freddie Weeks had been the trial run. This was where it really started.
The shop had no sign, but Glen Hall could see around the paper blinds to the posters on the unlit walls, including a rare one-sheet for the original Japanese release of Firestarter and a version of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom that he had been trying to buy for years. The latter showed Harrison Ford suspended over a pit of lava. Was it a reprint or an original? If it was genuine, did the shop owner have any idea of its real worth? Hell, it was a pop-up gallery in Brixton Market, so probably not. Then again, the way he’d been contacted by the owner suggested that there was something underhand about the whole enterprise. Maybe he was selling stolen goods or copyright-infringing forgeries. When it came to collecting, Hall wasn’t averse to bending the rules, but he wasn’t about to pay for a fake.
He thumped the buzzer again, but nothing appeared to be happening. Cupping his hands around his eyes, he peered inside and tried to see if there was anyone in the shop. Just then the catch was electronically released and the door popped open by itself.
He stepped inside and looked around. Against the wall was the 1968 poster for You Only Live Twice, the quad in which Sean Connery was depicted strolling at a 45-degree angle across the roof of a volcano in a tuxedo. What made the poster so unusual was that Connery had cloven hooves instead of shoes. The artist had read in the script that Bond would scale a sheer wall, but as he hadn’t seen the film he’d used his own imagination to work out how the superspy might manage such a feat. His solution made the artwork unique.
Hall could see the price tag from here: £160, an insanely low figure that instantly suggested it was a forgery.
He was starting to feel as if he had been tricked. Why was there no one here? What had he been set up for? God knew there were plenty of people who’d enjoy sending him on a wild-goose chase.
Above Hall, he watched and waited, telling himself to hold on for just a little longer. The heat from the cauldron was starting to sear his bare arms. His thighs were trembling from the strain of steadying it.
Just a little further …
Hall was clearly unhappy with the non-appearance of the gallery owner. He stepped closer to the Bond artwork and peered at it, realizing now that it was a cheap photocopy.
He heard a movement overhead, smelled something as pungent as hot liquorice in the air and looked up.
The young man shifted his legs, bracing against the heavy pot, watching through the hole in the ceiling. Just one more step forward and his target would be in place. He had configured the layout of the tiny shop so that his victim would be forced to stand immediately below the hole. Now he slammed all of his weight against the cauldron and swung it over. The bubbling tar lolloped out, decanting more slowly than he’d expected. It dropped into the aluminium funnel he had made for it and fell through the ceiling, down into the shop.
Hall sensed the movement above his head but couldn’t see anything at first. He peered up into the hole. What he discerned made no sense: a kind of wide metal tube with something dark and fiery falling out of it.
The heavy liquid hit him with its full weight, searing and sticking, catching him by surprise and hammering him down to the floor. As it made contact with skin and the material of his shirt it burst into flame, exploding in crusted splashes of orange and black, scattering droplets of fire everywhere.
It poured and poured, spattering all over the shop, catching alight wherever it fell. Satisfied with his work, the man above released the white blizzard from the second bucket.
The gallery had no lights on, and at first the paper blinds stopped any of the early-morning shoppers from looking inside. By the time one of them noticed and stepped forward to see, the fallen tar had already started to cool and harden, sealing Hall to the floor like a king trapped within his own treasure house. The swansdown settled like a sudden snowfall and stuck. The little shop was transformed into an art installation of Icelandic fire as the walls scorched and the paper blinds caught alight, smoke drifting through the fluttering flurry of feathers.
From outside, what people saw made no sense. A fiery maelstrom had been released inside the building. And at the centre of the apocalypse was a fallen golem.
14
BRIMSTONE
Fraternity DuCaine was the first to arrive at the PCU on Tuesday morning, and caught the incoming message. He had been transferred to the North London Met for the last couple of months, and was anxious to get back to the unit where his older brother had died in the line of duty. As soon as he found out what had happened, he called the detectives and set the day’s events in motion.
‘They don’t want us here,’ Bryant told his partner, trying to stay upright as their taxi roared into Brixton High Street. ‘It’s not our jurisdiction. I told them we had a connection to the Freddie Weeks case.’
‘We do?’ It was news to May. They all leaned as the cab swung a hard right. ‘How?’
‘Method of death,
’ answered Bryant cheerfully. ‘You took the call, Fraternity – tell John.’
‘He was burned alive, Mr May.’
The railway bridge that crosses Brixton Road was just ahead. There was a truck pulling out of a bay in front of Marks & Spencer, and it didn’t look as if the taxi was going to brake. ‘Hang on, guv,’ warned the driver, sashaying into the space. May noticed that he was on the phone, drinking a coffee and possibly scanning the headlines of the Daily Mirror at the same time.
‘Burned? How common is that in London?’ May asked as he alighted. ‘I mean outside of house fires?’
‘This doesn’t look like a house fire,’ said Fraternity. ‘They’re treating it as suspicious.’
‘Then why isn’t Brixton CID handling it?’
Fraternity pointed to his black face. ‘What do you think?’
‘Oh.’ May got the message. The last thing Brixton wanted to deal with was the murder of a white outsider in a predominantly West Indian community. The area had been gentrified, but a lot of people still suspected that Brixton stood on a racial fault line. With some parts of the press happy to play on the community’s worst fears, it was easier for the CID to pass the ball.
They were barely out of the cab before it launched back into the traffic with a screech. The canopied front avenue of the market had been cordoned off, and as the shop owners argued with local officers, Bryant and May, together with DuCaine, slipped between the barriers.
The market had changed out of all recognition since Bryant was last here. Once it had been filled with counters of dazzling fruits, bejewelled fish and forests of vegetables. Now the shops had largely been replaced by hipster cafés serving Brazilian, Spanish, Mexican and Italian food.
Bryant & May - The Burning Man Page 7