Bryant & May - The Burning Man

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘This is a joke, right? Who sent you over?’

  ‘You’ll have the chance to think about whether it was a joke in a cell if you don’t halt them all right now,’ said Banbury.

  The marshal relayed the message, but all Meera could hear was static. ‘Atmospheric conditions,’ he said apologetically. ‘Two of them are already lit.’ He pointed to the glowing pyres across the field.

  ‘Then we’ll need your marshals to check every fire as fast as they can,’ Banbury yelled. They ran towards the nearest crowd of yellow-jackets and began to round them up.

  Bimsley and Renfield tore at the first of the burning stacks and tried to see inside. ‘Janice!’ Renfield shouted, but there was no answer. ‘She could already be suffering from smoke inhalation,’ he warned, tearing at the staves.

  ‘She’s not in that one, Jack, I can see right through it from here,’ Colin shouted. ‘The furthest one has to be nearly a quarter of a mile away. We’ll never get to it in time.’

  ‘Then I hope to God Meera and Dan are nearer,’ yelled Renfield as they ran over the treacherous furrows towards the next flame-engulfed effigy.

  One side of the second bonfire was trailing intestines of choking smoke from the old varnished tables and chairs that had been axed and piled on to it. The air was filled with dancing red devils that stuck to their jackets and melted holes in the neoprene of their sleeves. Renfield’s eyes were watering so badly that he could barely see. Marshals who had yet to be warned about the search were shouting at him, trying to force him back from the fire’s heat radius.

  He knew it was too late to break into this one; the flames were roaring within its conical updraught, tornado-whirling, sucking crimson fire into the sky. He threw his arm in the direction of the next bonfire, the largest of the six. At its peak the governor of the Bank of England sat on a golden throne.

  Bimsley saw Renfield’s signal and veered off towards the pyre, but the churned-up field made it impossible to run. The bonfires had been spaced far apart so that there was no danger of the wind carrying sparks from one to the other before the marshals were ready to ignite them. The muddy ditches made the going hard, and they did not reach the central bonfire until it was just being lit.

  Renfield tried to push the marshals away but one of them took a swing at him. Bad idea; Colin came forward and floored him with one well-placed punch. Throwing himself at the unlit side of the stack, Colin started to scramble up it, but the wood kept sliding down beneath his boots.

  Renfield was frantically climbing too, clambering over the rough-hewn ladders of broken furniture with surprising agility. He shone his torch through the staves, but could see nothing.

  All he could do was continue to climb, but now the flames were spreading out below him, and he could feel the heat on his legs. He knew that a point would come when he would have to abandon his search or risk being trapped on the pyre himself.

  As he pressed his face to the slats, he saw something dark moving inside. ‘Janice!’ he shouted. This time he received a faint response. The detective sergeant’s soot-smeared face came into view. ‘My God, hang in there.’ He shouted down to the marshals: ‘Don’t just stand there! She’s inside!’

  Now the fire was spreading swiftly around the circumference of the pyre, igniting the petrol-soaked planks below him, and a deafening roar filled his ears. Renfield could feel his hair singeing as he clawed at the wooden structure, which remained solid and immovable.

  51

  BAD TIMING

  By the time Bryant and May had managed to get across town from Victoria Station to Holborn, the only tube station still open, the protest rally was reaching its climax at the Bank of England. The bonfire was already ablaze, washing the bank’s double columns with bloodstained light.

  High Holborn was impassable. Most of the street lights had been smashed. The mob was torch-lit and orderly, and there was no way of passing through it. A rhythm of drums, trumpets and reed pipes echoed from the canyon of buildings. The centuries had rolled back to reveal the city at an earlier time. Tracksuits had replaced tunics, but the stoic faces had barely changed.

  ‘Can you feel it?’ asked Bryant. ‘They know that by the end of the night they’ll be in charge. What will happen after that?’

  Some running youths slammed into Bryant, lifting him off his feet and spinning him around. May was just able to grab him before he hit the pavement. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘it’s not safe for you here.’

  The detectives were owed a stroke of luck, and now one finally came. May spotted an ARV being loaded by an old friend from Snow Hill nick. He ran over and arranged for them to get a lift inside the perimeter.

  ‘We’re too late to do anything,’ May said as the ARV pulled up behind a wall of burning debris in Queen Victoria Street. ‘We’ll never get across the crowds.’

  The protestors were hemmed in by makeshift barriers, some of which had been shoved aside and stood across the road like rows of angry teeth. Ahead was a vast ocean of chalk-white Guy Fawkes masks, moving with the instinctive patterns of shoaling fish. Rain swept over the blank-featured mob in great grey drifts. Many of the protestors were carrying sputtering flambeaux in an urban version of the anti-papist parades in Lewes. The banners which read ‘NO MORE GANGSTER BANKERS’ and ‘INSIDERS OUT’ had been professionally printed, but now they had been joined by a new ubiquitous slogan: ‘TAKE BACK LONDON’.

  Police and newsroom helicopters droned overhead, spotlighting the rally for their cameras. Bryant saw a hundred thousand moving bodies outlined against a painterly frieze of fire. The march was no longer the province of anarchists. There were whole families here, children and pensioners. Some had even brought baby buggies. And yet it felt that at any instant the mood might suddenly change, and the streets would run with blood.

  In front of the bank’s neoclassical façade the mood was uglier. Here rose a great funnel of fire, its flames fleeing up into the sulphurous furnace of the night. Explosions of glass occurred with metronomic precision; the few shop windows that had not been boarded up were being kicked in. Indistinct instructions were being barked through megaphones, adding to the sense of Orwellian oppression.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said Bryant, awed. ‘It’s truly out of our hands now.’

  ‘It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?’ May asked. ‘Anarchy?’

  ‘Not like this, not for the pleasure of the mob. To change things you have to dismantle and rebuild, not wantonly destroy. It looks like a fascist rally.’

  ‘These are our people,’ said May sadly. ‘This is what we’ve become.’

  Bryant stopped for a moment longer to frame the scene with his hands. ‘It’s like that painting by William Holman Hunt. London Bridge on the Night of the Marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, Tennyson’s famous “river of fire” brought to life with torches.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ said May patiently. ‘Come on, let me get you out of here before someone lobs a brick at you.’

  As they left, the great bonfire behind them began to fall in on itself, releasing a fresh firestorm into the air, and the mob bellowed its approval.

  ‘As you can see, there’s nobody left in the building because we followed your instructions and discontinued the investigation,’ said Raymond Land. Unfortunately the unit chief was painfully incapable of telling a lie, and the effect of his statement was the exact opposite of what he had intended. He’d once stolen an ashtray from the Grand Hotel Eastbourne, only to have it fall out of his jumper as he walked through the reception area.

  Darren Link gave him a deeply sceptical look. ‘Where are they?’ he demanded, looking around as if expecting the other members of staff sheepishly to pop their heads out of cupboards.

  ‘They’re not here,’ replied DuCaine truthfully. ‘It’s just the two of us. We’re in the middle of closing down the investigation and filing reports.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me, lad. I’m not one of your Brixton brothers.’

  ‘That’s r
acism—’

  ‘Or one of your boyfriends.’

  ‘—and homophobia.’

  Link stuck an index finger in his face. ‘Don’t get smart me with, sonny. I know you lot are up to something. The whole team’s on voicemail – isn’t that a bit bloody strange?’

  ‘It’s Saturday evening; they’re not required to keep their phones on,’ said Land. ‘They’ve probably gone ice-skating.’ He didn’t know where that came from, but thought of high-fiving DuCaine, only he wasn’t quite sure how to do it. ‘Anyway, why have you come here?’ he asked hastily. ‘I don’t suppose you just happened to be passing.’

  ‘I thought you might be able to shed some light on what happened tonight.’ Link was looking at Land’s neatly laid-out pen tray with distaste.

  ‘Why? What happened?’

  ‘I guess you’ve been too busy to see the breaking news. About an hour ago, Dexter Cornell was burned alive in front of thousands of people outside the Bank of England. His killer filmed the whole thing and released the footage on to the internet. It’s getting millions of hits. The inmates have finally taken over the madhouse. Your Mr Bryant will be pleased, I imagine. Doesn’t he have anarchist affiliations?’

  ‘So you took back the operation and failed to save Cornell,’ said Land. ‘I don’t suppose you caught his abductor, either.’

  ‘This was never your case.’ Link’s fractured eye glinted wildly. ‘We’ve been monitoring you from the beginning. If you hadn’t muddied everything with your half-arsed investigation, we might have stood a chance. He’s got what he wanted now – he’s taken out the villain and won over the country. Things are going to change around here, starting with this place.’ He looked around the walls and up at the damp-stained ceiling, nodding. ‘I reckon this’ll be a heavy-metal bar and a couple of knocking shops in three months’ time. And you’ll all be locked away on the Isle of Wight.’

  Right now, thought Land, the Isle of Wight doesn’t sound like a bad idea. ‘I hope you’ll admit your culpability in all this. If you don’t, I’ll make sure it goes in my report.’

  Link placed his hairy knuckles on Land’s desk. Leaning forward on his fists, he suddenly bore an alarming resemblance to his nickname. ‘I don’t think you want to start playing that game,’ he said darkly. ‘You might find the unit going up in smoke as well, with you inside it.’

  ‘You’re a thug, Link,’ replied Land, trying to keep the tremble from his voice. ‘You were always a thug, right from our training days. That’s why you’ll always make a lousy copper, and it’s why you’ll always get passed over for promotion. Your bosses know it. Go back and look at your own unit. Ask yourselves why you failed to stop all of this. You’re all batons and water cannons, locks and keys. Well, I don’t believe in incarceration. I don’t want to come back in another life.’

  For a moment, DuCaine thought that Link was going to lash out and send Raymond Land through the window, but instead he rose to his full height, glared, opened his mouth, closed it and silently left the room.

  ‘I reckon you got to him, sir,’ said DuCaine with a smile.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ said Land, breathing out. It felt good to stand up against a bully, even though he felt sure he hadn’t seen the last of Link.

  ‘Janice, get back as far as you can.’ The wood shifted beneath Renfield’s weight. He leaned out as much as he dared and slammed down his right boot, cracking several of the bonfire’s staves, but nothing gave. He saw why when he looked down; the cords were held together with baling wire. ‘Cutters!’ he shouted down. ‘Somebody chuck me up a pair.’

  One of the marshals threw him the tool and he caught it, snapping open the wires, cracking back branches and boards. He could feel the skin on his arms blistering through the sleeves of his jacket. He worked blindly, without thinking, with no thought but a determination to break through. The wood splintered, then gave way. He punched out the staves and grabbed at her.

  ‘So the prince got through the thicket to rescue Sleeping Beauty,’ said Longbright as he appeared before her, but there was a shake in her voice. ‘My wrists are tied.’

  From below came a loud crack, and the pyre lurched alarmingly. There was no time to waste. Renfield forced his way into the crawlspace, dropped to his knees and cut Longbright’s hands free. As they climbed out of the bonfire, the flames caught the central updraught and ignited the wooden interior where Longbright had been sitting.

  Bimsley and the marshals helped them down and led them away from the fire. Longbright’s hair was so badly singed at the front that she looked suddenly androgynous. Her wrists were bloody from the wire. When she tried to talk, she coughed until she had to rest her elbows on her knees and fight for breath. A marshal gave her a bottle of water.

  ‘My dream came true,’ she wheezed, looking back at the roaring bonfire as she caught her breath. ‘I was the burning man. Maggie Armitage was right.’

  Renfield turned her around. ‘What the hell happened? How did you put yourself in that situation? If anything had happened to you—’

  ‘I didn’t put myself in any situation, Jack. I was walking behind you all and his hands came over my face. It was so dark on the way to the field, nobody could see anyone else.’

  ‘But he knew you were with the unit.’

  ‘We’re in matching jackets and badges,’ she reminded him. ‘It’s a bit bloody obvious.’

  He held her so tightly that she started coughing again. ‘I thought I’d lost you. I want you to do something for me.’

  ‘Can’t breathe,’ she said. ‘Smoke inhalation. What?’

  He let her go, but only a little. ‘Marry me,’ he said.

  Janice took a step back and studied him. Their faces were black with soot. ‘You’ve got a really lousy sense of timing,’ she said finally. ‘I lost my shoes.’

  ‘I’ll buy you a thousand pairs,’ Renfield said.

  ‘There’s something weird about this.’

  DuCaine studied the footage again. He and Land were watching the sequence that Sky News had released of Dexter Cornell inside the bonfire. The shots were intercut with police footage taken from the other side of the road. Across the bottom of the screen ran a bright-red caption: ‘Caution – some images may cause distress.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Land, peering at the footage. ‘I need my reading glasses. What am I looking at?’

  DuCaine tapped at the screen with a long index finger. ‘The internal shots of the bonfire were supposedly taken on the killer’s phone. The news centre seems to have censored it for network use, cutting away to long shots of the bonfire. Their cameras are set up on Threadneedle Street, beside the statue of that soldier-dude. But the shots don’t match up. Look at this.’

  The footage taken from the inside showed Dexter Cornell unconscious against a post, just as Longbright had been tied. ‘Check out the planks behind him. They’re not touched by the fire. Now look at the cutaway. The flames are all around.’ He flicked back and forth between the images.

  ‘So the phone footage is from an earlier point, before the bonfire could fully catch alight,’ said Land.

  ‘No.’ DuCaine pointed to a corner of the screen. ‘The phone’s time-coded: 21.43. The long-distance footage was first shown earlier, at 21.41. The fire didn’t suddenly die down.’

  ‘I don’t see what difference it makes,’ said Land, confused.

  ‘He couldn’t have arranged for the phone to shoot Cornell if there were flames in the background.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Cornell would have been backlit by the fire. He needed us to see the guy’s face, to prove that it was him.’

  ‘He’s not in the bonfire,’ said Land, awed.

  ‘The footage was shot somewhere else and released live,’ said DuCaine, picking up the phone. ‘Dexter Cornell could still be alive.’

  52

  SKYFIRE

  There was no time to waste, so Arthur Bryant dawdled. He leaned on his stick in the doorway and looked around at the offic
e he shared with his partner. One side of the room was immaculate, elegant, stylish even, and the other side was like an illegal street market after a police raid. He wondered how he had inherited the old copies of the 1950s naturist magazine Health & Efficiency, or why he still used the tip of a meat cleaver to open his letters.

  He knew that the Haitian voodoo bowl had been presented to him by a grateful murder witness, and that he couldn’t store bananas in it because they went black overnight, but he had no idea what was in the cylindrical glass jar full of cloudy liquid on his windowsill, except that when you gave it a swirl something with eyes lazily drifted around to stare at you. And he remembered that the varnished purple fish holding down his unpaid bills had once sent Longbright to A & E after she jabbed herself on its spikes. Likewise he recalled every detail of the cases outlined in the broken-spined volumes behind his chair. Each was a self-contained human drama that proved, over and again, that there was nothing so mysterious in the cold reaches of space as the turning of the human heart.

  Rain was smacking against the windows, classic midnight rain, drizzling and dripping and leaking in through the rotten frames. The room was his home, his head, and he could not leave it behind. And that ergonomic Spanish leather armchair opposite the soil-filled ashtrays that marked the end of his territory needed John May sitting in it, leaning back with his long legs stretched out under the desk, squinting at a page of evidence because he was too vain to wear glasses. No wonder they had never been able to settle with new women in their lives. How could anyone else hope to fit in when the two of them spent so much time in each other’s company? At least John, who needed the kindness of female companionship as he needed air, had found peace with a succession of spectacularly unsuitable lady friends.

  Bryant had taken a lonelier path, finding companionship at the office, spiritual union in the pages of books, company in libraries and museums, peace in the solitude of crowds. He was as embedded in London as the Piccadilly Line, or the paving stones of Trafalgar Square. Although he was never one to feel sorry for himself, it was sad, not to mention entirely unacceptable, to be ending his career on a failure.