Bryant & May - The Burning Man

by Christopher Fowler

  On Thursday evening Superintendent Darren Link met with senior officers to formally request a curfew in the Square Mile. This was a radical move that could override tube hours and licensing laws. Although the 2003 Antisocial Behaviour Act had created zones allowing officers to hold and escort home unaccompanied minors whether they were badly behaved or not, they had this ability only between the hours of 9 p.m. and 6 a.m., and the act was compromised by High Court rulings that denied police the power of arrest. At no other time in its long history had the City of London faced a blanket curfew.

  Meera Mangeshkar went to look for Joanna Papis at the Enterprise pub, where she was due to start her shift. As she pushed open the door, the smell of hops assailed her.

  ‘Hi,’ Papis called, ‘come in. You’re probably the only person who will today. All of our regulars are getting out of the City while they still can.’

  The two women sized up each other with the curiosity of exact opposites. Mangeshkar was short, dark and intense. Papis had the elegance of height and glossy pale hair framing blue-silk eyes. It didn’t feel like a fair fight.

  ‘Why did you withhold information from us?’ Mangeshkar demanded after the curtest of explanatory introductions. Realizing that warmth was not her strongest suit, she always found it better to attack.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Papis rubbed at the back of her neck and dropped down on to a barstool, as if expecting that this moment would come.

  ‘You didn’t tell us you knew another of the victims.’

  ‘Your boss came to talk to me about Freddie Weeks,’ she explained. ‘He never mentioned Glen Hall. I only found out about his death from the press reports.’

  ‘There was an information blackout while we were following leads,’ said Mangeshkar. She knew questions were already being asked about the embargo. In a world of instant information, people expected to receive news as it happened.

  ‘So, yeah, it turns out I knew them both.’

  ‘Seems a bit unlikely in a city this big.’

  Papis shrugged. ‘I meet a lot of people.’

  ‘How did you get to know Mr Hall?’

  ‘His accountant Aaron used to come into the pub. He was dating Glen, but he’d been in trouble with the law for running some kind of anarchist website. He knew Glen was really paranoid about anyone in his office finding out about his record. The bank had high security clearances for its staff and he said they would find ways of firing anyone they didn’t trust. Aaron felt it wasn’t fair. He asked me what I thought he should do.’

  ‘Aaron … What’s his last name?’

  ‘Mossman, I think. He was very loud and funny, too much for someone like Glen.’

  ‘Are you still in contact with him?’

  ‘Aaron? No, he’s a New Yorker. He went back home. Glen was very cut up about it.’

  ‘So, I want to get this right,’ said Mangeshkar. ‘You met Freddie Weeks first, then Hall. Did Weeks know Hall?’

  ‘I don’t see why he would. They both drank here, that’s all.’

  ‘There’s a chance you might have met their killer.’

  ‘What, you think I’m at risk? Why would I be? They didn’t have anything in common.’

  ‘They did. They had you.’

  ‘Are you saying I’m a suspect?’

  ‘No.’ Meera tapped her notepad. ‘I just want you to be sure that you’ve told me anything that might help us to find this person.’

  ‘Are you from London?’ Papis asked.

  ‘Born and bred.’

  ‘Then you probably have no idea how strange your pubs are. A millionaire stands next to a homeless guy and they start talking. They don’t introduce themselves, or ask each other what they do for a living. They talk about politics or sport or movies or food. In all my time in this country it’s been the hardest thing to understand.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Meera asked.

  ‘The British,’ Papis replied. ‘They’ll tell you about everything and anything – except themselves.’

  ‘Couvre-feu,’ said Bryant, savouring the word. ‘Cover-fire. Lights out. A metal shield in the shape of a half-bell, to be placed over an open fire when the curfew bell rang. Well done, Mr Cornell, you’ve managed to return us to the eleventh century.’

  Having been hauled into the King’s Cross unit for a formal interview, Dexter Cornell was more defensive than ever. Bryant had decided to conduct the interview himself, and arrived to find him prowling around the edge of the room looking as if he was waiting for his opponent to step into the ring. In one corner perched a small blond boy whose legs were not long enough to let him reach the floor. In the other sat Edgar Digby, a lawyer with whom Bryant had previously crossed swords.

  ‘I want it noted that I’m here of my own volition,’ huffed Cornell. ‘I wasn’t about to drag my family lawyer in for something like this so I had to settle for a jobsworth from Lincoln’s Inn. Digby, introduce yourself.’

  ‘Mr Bryant and I have met before,’ Digby said. ‘My client is prepared to discuss only matters pertaining directly to your investigation. He is not required to answer any questions concerning the financial operations of the Findersbury Private Bank or its employees, or regulations covering the shareholdings of—’

  ‘Shut up, Digby, I want to ask him about the anomalies in his written statement.’ Bryant turned to the financier. ‘Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you again, Mr Cornell, without your henchmen this time, unless you’ve taken to employing midgets.’

  ‘That’s my son,’ said Cornell through clenched teeth.

  ‘Oh. He’s dressed like an adult so I assumed he was a dwarf.’

  ‘I am here,’ said the boy. ‘I have a name.’

  Cornell ignored him. ‘What kind of anomalies?’

  Bryant switched his trifocals. He had five pairs dating from different eras, and could partly see through a different focal band in each pair, but as they were all of the same design (tortoiseshell, heavy) he had to cycle through all the pairs before settling on the right ones. As he squinted about like a mole with cataracts, the lawyer rolled his eyes at Cornell, who glared back. ‘Right,’ Bryant said finally, reshuffling his pages, ‘we have fairly accurate timings now … Perhaps this isn’t for his ears.’ He indicated the boy.

  ‘He stays,’ said Cornell impatiently. ‘For God’s sake.’

  ‘The new timings aren’t properly covered by your statement. The lad who was sleeping rough on the steps of the bank, Freddie Weeks – we have CCTV footage that places his attacker at the site while you were in or near the building. You don’t have adequate camera coverage.’

  ‘We’re a private financial institution, not a bus station. Digby, do I have to answer these?’

  ‘Under the present requirements of the City of London, witness statements are by their nature—’

  ‘Oh, shut up. What else have you got there?’

  Bryant squinted at the pages again. ‘You’ve been briefed about the bomb that was planted in the Insurrection nightclub early this morning. We know when and how it was placed, and the timings are not covered by your movements. You were apparently on a train.’

  ‘I’m sure there must be some record of me leaving the station.’

  ‘You didn’t use a chauffeur.’

  ‘Amazing as it sounds, not many people do any more. Nor do I have an under-butler or a grouse-beater. If you honestly considered me a murder suspect you’d realize it’s the one situation where I’d get someone else to do the dirty work. Anything else?’

  ‘I think we can allow one more question,’ said Digby, redundantly.

  ‘This is rather more of a problem,’ said Bryant. ‘Jonathan De Vere died at approximately eight thirty a.m. on Wednesday – yesterday. You haven’t given me your whereabouts.’

  ‘I was with Augustine.’

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘That’s me,’ said the boy.

  ‘You must get beaten up a lot,’ said Bryant.

  ‘He doesn’t go to the kind of school where child
ren get “beaten up”, as you put it,’ Cornell replied.

  ‘Yes, but his classmates must take the piss. Why wasn’t he going to school, anyway?’

  ‘Augustine is already eighteen months ahead in his studies. He has an IQ of one hundred and twenty-five. I also have a private tutor on permanent standby. Are we done here?’ Cornell was very close to losing his temper again.

  ‘Look at this,’ Bryant insisted, pointing at the boy, ‘he’s got arms like bits of wet string. With a name like that you could at least teach him to box.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ said Digby, closing his briefcase and rising. ‘My client—’

  ‘Your time’s up.’ Cornell was icily calm. ‘I have another meeting to attend.’

  ‘You still haven’t said where you were when Jonathan De Vere was murdered.’

  ‘Ask the boy.’ Cornell slammed out of the room with the confused Digby in his wake, torn between cautioning Bryant, taking the child or doggedly trailing behind his client. With grim inevitability, the lawyer chose the option that paid his bill.

  ‘Where was your father?’ Bryant asked Cornell’s son.

  ‘Like I’m just going to tell you,’ Augustine replied. ‘You’ll have to work harder than that.’

  ‘Well, it’s just you and me now. Does he often dump you like this?’

  ‘He’ll send for me after his meeting,’ Augustine said. ‘So don’t freak, it’s not like you have to do anything.’

  Bryant had no experience of children and no emotional connection to them, beyond an ability to make them cry simply by removing his dentures. But this one looked like he wouldn’t crack easily. ‘How long do you think your old man will be?’

  ‘Old man? Look who’s talking. An hour. I can amuse myself.’ Augustine took out his phone and unlocked a game.

  ‘Would you like me to show you around?’

  ‘Is this a real police station?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then no.’

  ‘Can’t you go over to the pub for an hour?’

  ‘I’m not old enough.’

  ‘That’s a pain. Well, you can’t stay in here. The room’s booked. You can sit in my office so long as you don’t touch anything.’

  He led the boy along the corridor. Augustine looked around the door and wrinkled his nose. ‘It smells gross.’

  ‘We have an incontinent cat. If you find a packet of Custard Creams, don’t eat them. Just go and sit in that armchair and don’t move until your father comes back. If you twitch so much as an eyelid I’ll have you thrown to the rats in the basement.’ He studied the back of the child’s head, his long thin neck and arms. He really was very small indeed.

  Bryant fled to Longbright’s office. ‘Janice, what am I supposed to do?’ he pleaded. ‘This boy of Cornell’s. He’s just sitting there staring at his phone like a little – robot or something.’

  ‘Cornell said he was sending someone to pick him up,’ Longbright explained. ‘He’ll be fine with you for now.’

  ‘Do you think I should show him my book collection?’

  ‘What, rare tropical foot funguses and murder victims of the nineteenth century? Probably not. You don’t have to do anything. Children amuse themselves.’

  ‘But it’s not a safe place for a child.’

  ‘He’s not made of glass, Arthur.’

  Bryant thought for a second. ‘I’m sure Cornell is using his son as an alibi. I need to talk to him, but you know I can’t talk to children. I don’t understand how they think. He’s an alien and I’m a dinosaur.’ He headed back to his office to try to solve the conundrum of modern childhood.

  35

  THE LIST

  It was late, and Bryant was tired. The air was cool and misted, the streets wet and striated with yellow reflections. May took his arm and walked him into Bloomsbury.

  ‘Did you ever see that Michael Powell film A Matter of Life and Death?’ Bryant asked. ‘There’s a scene in it where David Niven doesn’t know if he’s dead or alive. He wakes up and there’s fog all around him, and he wonders if he’s in heaven. Do you know how the director created that effect? He breathed on the camera lens.’

  ‘Not sure I’m with you,’ May admitted. ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘The point is that perhaps you’re right: sometimes the answer is much simpler than you think.’

  ‘Come on, then, give me your simple theory.’

  ‘An anarchist, presumably one who’s smart enough not to be listed among the members of organizations like Disobey, seeks to destabilize the system. And he does it by choosing random names from a metaphorical hat. He tries to torch a controversial financial institution but fails, accidentally killing Freddie Weeks in the process. He tars and feathers a banker, but he’s not very good at doing that either because the prank goes wrong and Glen Hall dies. Why would he then pick on a supposedly all-round decent chap like De Vere? Because he’s met him and something doesn’t ring true. De Vere’s a bit too much of a white knight, a tad too charming. So our killer digs a little and finds out that De Vere’s a hypocrite, a chancer whose charities are about to declare themselves bankrupt. That way he feels justified in picking him off. What we need to do now is find out what he discovered about Mr Leach.’

  ‘You think the fact that Leach was a loan shark had something to do with it?’

  ‘Well, I found out one thing. With the exception of Freddie Weeks, all of the victims were on that linky thing—’

  ‘LinkedIn.’

  ‘And the bookface thing and the tweety thing—’

  ‘Facebook. And Twitter.’

  ‘And De Vere and Leach both visited the Disobey website. Disobey is one of the splinter protest groups that’s currently camped outside the Bank of England.’

  ‘You’re sure about that?’ May asked. ‘Where are you getting this from?’

  ‘Dan got a subscription list from Darren Link. And if Weeks and Hall went to the same pub, the others may have as well.’

  ‘When were you going to share this with me?’ asked May, irritated.

  ‘After I’d had a pint,’ replied Bryant serenely, rubbing his nose with a paper handkerchief.

  ‘What else have you been holding back?’

  ‘I think I know how the news about Cornell’s insider trading got out.’

  May stopped so suddenly that a couple of Scandinavian tourists ploughed into the back of him. ‘You do? How?’

  ‘Well, obviously Cornell would have been very careful at the bank. He deliberately distanced himself from the other directors, sitting with his underlings in an open-plan office. And as I’ve said, apart from the lawyers he was the only other person who knew that the Chinese weren’t going to come to the table. So if it wasn’t any of the lawyers, the information had to come directly from Cornell himself.’

  ‘But that makes no sense. Why would he jeopardize his own deal?’

  ‘That’s what I intend to find out.’ Bryant was examining the contents of his tissue. ‘It’s funny. At the beginning of the week I thought we were simply identifying a dead homeless kid. Now we’ve got a global conspiracy.’

  May stepped back and took a good look at his partner. ‘You’re all there today, aren’t you? How do you feel?’

  Bryant looked straight ahead, buried deep inside what he called his ‘summer scarf’, his usual implacable self. ‘Fine, thank you.’

  ‘You never told me the rest about your visit to Dr Gillespie.’

  ‘Didn’t I? I’ve forgotten all about him, actually. He needs to give up the oily rags. He’s on forty a day by my calculations. His lungs must be like the bottom of a sink trap.’

  ‘Well, what else happened?’

  ‘He showed me some ink blots and asked me what they meant. I told him they were a sign that he should switch to a Biro. Then he asked me to name a current television star.’

  ‘Who did you say?’

  ‘Bruce Forsyth. To my knowledge he hasn’t been off our screens for the last sixty years, so I couldn’t go wrong. We went ba
ck and forth like this for a while and I could tell I was having my usual effect on him.’

  ‘He was getting annoyed.’

  ‘The veins were standing out on his forehead. So I told him to cut to the chase and give me a prognosis.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Alzheimer’s. Trust me to get something German. I’m not nuts, which is a relief. It’s a physical disease, it just happens to affect the brain.’

  ‘Yes, I know what Alzheimer’s is.’

  They stopped at the corner before Bryant’s street, beside a lamp-post that threw their shadows across the opposite wall like a shadow play.

  ‘I looked it up in a few of my books,’ Bryant said. ‘Quite fascinating, really. Protein plaque builds up in the structure of the old brain-box, leading to the death of a few cells. Big deal. One in fourteen over the age of sixty-five gets it. We all eat too many carbs. Some also get a shortage of important chemicals, so the nerves no longer transmit messages, and that makes the process much faster.’

  ‘Do you think that’s what’s happening? Are you scared?’

  Bryant blew a raspberry. ‘So you end up a few clowns short of a circus. All feathers, not much chicken. I can get by.’

  ‘I’m not stupid, Arthur. I know you.’

  Bryant turned his watery blue eyes to May. ‘The honest truth?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘It’s a little more complicated than that. It seems I’m developing an unusual form of cognitive impairment.’ Ever the showman, he waited for the effect of the announcement to sink in. ‘Gillespie thinks my blank moments might be due to mini-strokes, transient ischaemic attacks that are caused by blockages in the blood supply to the brain. It’s irreversible and developing fast. I’m definitely becoming confused. I may have been hiding some of it from you. I write it all down, you know, and I have every one of the symptoms. Loss of memory, mood changes, problems with communication and reasoning. I can’t remember where I’ve been, why I’ve gone somewhere, how to count out change in shops or how to work the TV remote. Although I’ve never been able to do that. I enter into fugue states and can’t remember anything afterwards. Oh, look at you now, all very serious. Are you sure you want to know about this? It’s extremely boring.’