Bryant & May - The Burning Man

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Is it connected with the banking scandal?’ Bryant asked, leaning forward.

  ‘No, I mean there’s a demonstration going on in Parliament Square so I’m going via Birdcage Walk,’ said the driver. ‘I don’t know why the Queen lives in Victoria; it’s a bloody rough neighbourhood.’

  ‘You’d think there would be raging mobs burning down Parliament by now,’ Bryant said as they alighted in King’s Cross. ‘And you wonder why I’m glad that people are at last doing something.’

  ‘But what exactly are they doing?’ asked May, swiping their way into the PCU. ‘Chucking a few petrol bombs? Burning an innocent kid alive and pouring hot tar on a banker? When you set out to topple a system, you’d better make sure you have something to replace it with. And another thing: what if the connection between Weeks and Hall is just coincidental?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. The method links them. That’s why we were summoned.’

  ‘No, you and Fraternity made the connection, nobody else. It’s what you always do.’

  ‘Then why are they letting us take it on?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘Because they obviously don’t want the case! A murder in Brixton? If it’s fumbled, there’ll be attacks from both sides and it’ll take down anyone associated with it.’

  Bryant girded himself for the climb to the first floor. ‘You see, that’s the problem,’ he told May. ‘I’m not as devious-minded as you. I didn’t consider the area. In 1873 Vincent van Gogh was living in Brixton, did you know that? One of those odd London facts that seems so unlikely, like Lenin and Marx in Soho, Poe in Stoke Newington or Rimbaud and Verlaine sharing a flat in Camden. Hard to imagine, isn’t it? Van Gogh might have painted Electric Avenue at Dusk. There’s something quite Jamaican about his use of colour. Wouldn’t that have been wonderful?’

  May felt as if he was going mad. Then he realized, No, it’s not me, it’s Arthur. ‘By the way,’ he asked, ‘where did you go last night?’

  ‘When last night?’ Bryant paused halfway up to catch his breath until May gave him a gentle push.

  ‘After you left the unit. I called you and there was no answer.’

  ‘What did you want?’

  ‘To ask you a question, but that’s not important. Alma didn’t know where you were, either.’

  ‘I wasn’t anywhere.’

  ‘You walked home?’ May knew that it was no more than a fifteen-minute stroll from the PCU to Bryant’s flat, but according to Alma he had not arrived for another two hours.

  Bryant carried on up the stairs. ‘I remember now, I stopped for a bag of chips.’

  ‘Where exactly?’

  ‘Hang on, let me get to my office and I’ll tell you.’ Entering the room, he turned the pockets of his overcoat out on to his desk and revealed an old threepenny bit, a pencil with a 1970s troll on top, a conker, a sherbet lemon out of its wrapper, a flick-knife, three pairs of glasses, two hearing-aid batteries, a third-class train ticket for Windsor dated 9 June 1953 and a membership card for the Pentonville Model Battleship Society. ‘I must have lost the receipt,’ he said, surprised.

  ‘Only there was a report of somebody fitting your exact description sitting on the kerb outside the St Pancras Grand Hotel last night. The doorman called me. When he went back to check, he couldn’t find anyone.’

  ‘Well, that was hardly likely to have been me, was it?’ said Bryant indignantly.

  May meant to ask his partner why he had been planning a trip to Windsor one week after the coronation, but another thought assailed him. The doorman saw them pass the hotel nearly every day, and was unlikely to have made a mistake. Bryant was concealing something.

  16

  TAR AND FEATHER

  On Tuesday afternoon, Giles Kershaw found himself with two scorched corpses in his mortuary. ‘We’re not a burns unit,’ he complained, leading Dan Banbury back to the autopsy room. ‘I’m not really equipped to deal with this. Fire examination’s a pretty intricate discipline.’

  ‘I know a bit about it,’ said Banbury. ‘There was a fire officer named Carter at the Weeks site. She’s offered to provide us with advice.’

  ‘I think we’ll need her,’ said Kershaw. ‘I’ve spared you the sight of Mr Hall. A lot of his skin came off with the tar. It had set like concrete.’ Even with the extraction fan on and the bodies hidden from sight, the place reeked with the smell of road-surfacing material. As there were only two small high windows at the ends of the room, the overhead LED panels were always illuminated, and their light gave the living a ghastly anaemic pallor.

  ‘It’s funny, a bloke like you doing this.’ Banbury sniffed, looking around at the laden anatomy station and the scrubbed steel cadaver tables.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Kershaw pulled off his hairnet and flicked blond curls out of his eyes.

  ‘Well, you being so posh, friends in high places, shooting grouse, dining on larks’ tongues and all that. Seems like an unlikely place for you to have ended up.’

  ‘I always loved biology.’ Kershaw shrugged. ‘The girlfriend’s parents aren’t keen, of course. Nor is she, much, especially when I have to meet her from work and she can smell chemicals on me. Did you find any presence of unburned fuels or solvents at the Brixton site?’

  ‘I didn’t really know what I was looking for,’ Banbury admitted.

  ‘Liquid stains, irregular pooling marks, anything like that?’

  ‘Giles, it was fairly obvious how he died. He was covered in flaming tar. He didn’t exactly need a fistful of firelighters chucked on him.’ Banbury picked up a steel instrument, realized that it was for hooking something out of cavities and quickly set it down. ‘I could see that some of the bitumen had dripped through the floorboards, but I didn’t think it could reignite. We should have used hydrocarbon detectors to trace any concentrations of agents used to speed up the fire.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Kershaw.

  ‘The shop caught fire again right after the body was removed.’

  ‘No fire officer?’

  ‘No one at the local nick considered it worth dousing the site. It didn’t burn for long because the bloke in the café opposite raised the alarm, but the smoke messed up the interior, making our job a lot harder. The tar had already set and the arsonist had cleared out his stuff apart from the heavy equipment in the upper storage area.’

  ‘Surely the main purpose wasn’t to commit arson,’ said Kershaw. ‘It was to kill someone.’

  ‘We don’t know that. I mean, it’s not exactly a bullet to the head, is it? Standing someone underneath a hole in the ceiling and pouring hot tar on them? It’s a bit random.’

  ‘Maybe not as much as you think, old chum.’ Kershaw checked the screen on his desk, which listed the contents of the victim’s wallet. ‘Hall worked in Dexter Cornell’s bank. He couldn’t be attacked at his office so I guess he had to be lured outside. He lived on the City Road, so he was hardly likely to be caught hanging around any dark alleys. That means the killer knew a bit about his tastes.’

  ‘Good point,’ Banbury agreed. ‘Collectors will go anywhere. You should see how my lad is with video games. A rare one comes available and he’ll travel miles to get his mitts on it quicker.’

  ‘Quite so. You got a good look at the shop, though?’

  ‘Yeah. A single white-painted room with half a dozen posters on hooks. Typically arty and minimalist. Probably took less than half an hour to set up. I’m trying to find out where our killer got the posters from. He didn’t leave them behind, but passers-by saw them on the walls. The tar scorched the hardwood floor, it was that hot.’

  ‘I’ve run prelims,’ Kershaw said, ‘and it’s pretty clear that Mr Hall suffocated. His burns are horrific. The stuff got into his throat and nasal passages. Can you get chromatography on the burned particles?’

  ‘I can put in a request for an outsource budget. I’m not sure we’ll find anything more than I already know.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Tar is obtained from organic materi
als, through what we call destructive distillation.’ Banbury picked up a small black chunk and turned it over in his hand. It was one of many that had been removed from the body. ‘It’s a mixture of hydrocarbons and free carbon. This one is the type used by road-menders. It’s a viscous form of petroleum mixed with aggregate particles. We’d have to wait for spectromatic results to be sure. I tested its solubility with carbon disulfide and compared it to standard road-asphalt emulsion, which has a lower boiling point than traditional tar.’

  ‘You can do that at the unit?’ Kershaw sounded surprised.

  ‘Mr Bryant’s got his old equipment set up on the top floor. Raymond doesn’t know it’s there, which is just as well as we don’t have any safety certificates for it. I reheated a sample of the tar and it got pretty runny, which meant that our man was able to heat it quickly and pour it with relative ease. It was capable of igniting anything with a similarly low burn-point, and stuck like buggery to everything it touched, including Hall’s hair and flesh. But I guess it also sealed his nose. I’ll send you copies of the splash patterns. In liquid form it’s also dense, and turns back into a solid very quickly. I guess once he started pouring it kept on coming down, and knocked the victim to his knees. His attacker was able to direct the flow, and poured it over the whole of his upper body until he was stuck to the boards.’

  ‘That would explain the bruising on the kneecaps,’ said Kershaw. ‘Which brings us to the topping. Why would his assailant cut open a pillow and scatter its contents into the room afterwards? That’s the act of someone who’s not in control of their mental faculties.’

  ‘I’d say it was quite the reverse,’ said Banbury. ‘Your killer was totally in control. He tarred and feathered his victim, and did a bloody good job of it.’ He smiled. ‘I’m sure Mr Bryant will have a field day with that.’

  ‘A sign of cowardice,’ Bryant explained to his partner, slapping down the email he had just laboriously printed out from Kershaw. ‘Tarring and feathering started as a uniquely British punishment, an act of humiliation inflicted on betrayers. Look at this.’ He clambered behind his desk and dragged down a dust-crusted volume, banging it open. ‘Here you go. Tar and feather. Asphalt emulsion. It has a low melting point, just like the pine tar they used to use on victims.’

  ‘I thought it was an exclusively American technique,’ said May, batting aside the flying dust.

  ‘No, only in vigilante use,’ Bryant explained, ‘and much later. Richard the First allowed it as a punishment in his navy as early as 1189, and we think it continued for centuries. Over four hundred years later it was found to be used in Madrid monasteries. There was a nastier version called pitchcapping, which involved pouring boiling tar into a cone-shaped paper cap. The cap was fitted over the victim’s head and allowed to cool. Then it was quickly removed, tearing off the skin. That was used by British forces against Irish rebels during the period of the Irish Rebellion back in 1798. Sometimes they shaved the head before tarring and feathering it, or they held a match to the feathers to keep relighting the tar. It’s all here.’ He tipped up the grubby gold-trimmed volume, entitled The Origins of British Military and Religious Chastisement. How Bryant came to have such a book at his fingertips in the office was the sort of thing May knew better than to ask.

  ‘The French and the Irish used it on women they suspected of having sexual relations with the enemy. And more recently it’s been used to humiliate drug-dealers. It’s a form of punishment that resurfaces every few years, usually in connection with street mobs.’

  ‘Well, we have plenty of street mobs roaming London at the moment,’ May pointed out. ‘Right now I think we need to concentrate on the practical problems. Let’s have a proper briefing session.’

  ‘Good,’ said Bryant, rubbing his hands. ‘I’ll get everyone together.’

  ‘You’d better suggest it to Raymond and let him do it,’ May warned. ‘You know how he likes to fantasize that he’s in control.’

  After Banbury had returned from the St Pancras Mortuary, the unit members gathered in the first-floor briefing room for assignments. Armed with tea and a plate of stale biscuits, Bryant seated himself on one of the room’s uncomfortable orange bendy chairs, leaving space for Raymond behind the only desk. It was always fun watching Land pretend to know what was going on. As soon as everyone had assembled and settled, the PCU’s nominal chief arrived with a fat sheaf of papers which he carried for show, shuffling and re-ordering them with an air of importance before asking his detectives what they thought he should do first.

  ‘Do you want a Jammie Dodger?’ Bryant asked as Bimsley sat down.

  Colin peered over. ‘Have you got any Garibaldis?’

  ‘No, the raisins get under my dentures. I had some Custard Creams in my drawer but Crippen had a wee on the packet. She’s been a bit incontinent since she had all those kittens. Pass them around.’

  ‘Right, you lot,’ said Land. ‘Can somebody tell me what’s going on?’

  ‘Shall I start?’ May offered, rising to his feet. ‘Glen David Hall, a thirty-seven-year-old corporate banker found dead in Unit 72, Brixton Market, this morning. He was discovered by a Mr Metish Kapur, proprietor of the New Delhi Express Diner, the café that diagonally faces the shop. Kapur was opening up when he saw someone inside and thought he’d go over to introduce himself. The site is regularly rented out on short leases. When he entered, the person Kapur saw had gone and Mr Hall was lying in the centre of the room, cemented to the floorboards with burning tar. He was also covered in feathers from a split pillowcase, which we found in the attic above the shop. There were several gawkers, and we’re trying to trace them now. Giles Kershaw puts the time of death between eight thirty and nine a.m., so Hall should have been heading from his flat on City Road to his office in Crutched Friars, which means he was well outside his usual commute. Why did he go there? Witnesses say the shop contained rare movie posters.’

  ‘Rare? Somebody say that?’

  ‘Just not the usual images. The idea being that these were valuable originals.’

  ‘Not necessarily real ones,’ Bryant threw in.

  ‘Probably not,’ May agreed. ‘We think it was likely that Hall was lured there on the promise of a sale. He’s known to have collected graphic art. We’ve got his mobile, but there’s nothing on it.’

  ‘What about websites?’ asked Longbright. ‘Suppose he belongs to some kind of a group, I don’t know – specialist art galleries – and found this address?’

  ‘The problem is getting a trace,’ said May. ‘He could have logged in from anywhere under any name. Mr Kapur thinks the unit has been let as a pop-up art gallery before, because he remembers seeing colour on the walls, so we’re checking out the previous lessees. By the time we got there we only found a few pinholes, so the attacker must have taken the posters away with him. We’re examining the CCTV at Brixton tube station, but it’s possible that he had a vehicle in the area. The market is pedestrian-only, so he’d have to have parked in one of the backstreets. He left behind the tar bucket and the pillowcase, no prints, so we need to trace their origins. Also, someone must have seen him moving the gear in, even though the market stores weren’t open. This took a fair bit of planning, so while it’s reasonable to hope that he left a trail, the likelihood is that he’s thought carefully about covering his tracks.’

  ‘Then why don’t we go to the other end and start with the victim?’ asked Land.

  ‘That’s what we’re doing,’ said Longbright. ‘We’re talking to Hall’s colleagues and trying to track down his family, but we have to do this under conditions of press secrecy so we need to proceed carefully.’

  ‘Good, we don’t want them splashed all over the pages of the tabloids again,’ said Land, pointing at his detectives.

  ‘I can’t help having a following,’ said May. ‘I’m a grey icon.’

  ‘About the link between Hall and Freddie Weeks,’ said Bryant, sniffing his biscuit with suspicion.

  ‘There isn’t one,’ snapped
Land. ‘We’re getting a crack at this because Brixton doesn’t want it.’

  ‘Excuse me, but there is most certainly a link—’

  Land raised a firm palm. ‘No, one man died during a protest and the other was targeted for some kind of stunt that went wrong, that’s all. You always think everything is connected.’

  ‘Everything is connected: the riots, the deaths, all of it,’ Bryant insisted. ‘Like Herodotus, we can’t understand the histories of kings without first knowing about the Three Dynasties of the Earth. The Taming of the Shrew came from A Thousand and One Nights. Columbus’s belief in Eden led him to the Orinoco. Christopher Wren led us via the Freemasons to George Washington. And without Dionne Warwick, Cilla Black would never have had a hit.’

  ‘Just once I would like us to get through a case without you dragging in all sorts of irrelevant tosh,’ erupted Land. ‘Why did you decide to become a copper? All you do is question everything.’

  In the silence that followed, Bryant carefully replaced his uneaten biscuit on its plate. Then, as if suddenly remembering where he was, he treated the room’s puzzled occupants to a long-range smile of eerie beatitude. ‘Do you know, I think … I’m going out for a walk.’ Having made this proclamation he rose and toddled from the room as everyone stared after him.

  ‘Is he all right?’ asked Land, shocked by the absence of an insulting rejoinder, but nobody could give him an answer.

  17

  JUNGLE

  ‘Where the hell did he go this time?’ May demanded as soon as the briefing ended and Land had left the room.

  ‘He’s not showing up,’ said Banbury, checking the screen of his mobile.

  ‘But that was the whole point of resetting his phone, so that you could track his GPS. We have to keep tabs on Arthur from now on.’ He was more fearful than angry. Bryant’s otherworldly air had always protected him on the London streets, but to wander about in King’s Cross with an aura of innocent confusion was inviting trouble.