Bryant & May - The Burning Man

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Penny for your thoughts,’ said May, sliding past him. ‘What’s that awful smell?’

  ‘Goat’s cheese,’ replied Bryant absently.

  ‘Where is it?’ May looked under the desk, hunting the source of the stench.

  ‘It’s in a shoe on the radiator. Remember that corpse in the elevator shaft at Marconi House?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You must do. September 1968. I think I made a mistake in my report.’

  ‘It doesn’t begin to explain that thing.’ May waved his hand in the direction of the radiator. ‘Can you get it out of here?’

  ‘He’d been down there for a while before we found him. The putrefaction disguised the smell of the chèvre. If we’d known he’d been to the cheesemonger on the day he’d died we’d have nailed his assailant.’

  ‘We’ve got a rather more pressing problem to deal with right now. With Cornell dead, we have no way of catching our killer. Why are you looking into this old stuff anyway?’

  ‘I thought I might try to clear up my unsolved cases.’

  ‘Why, are you going somewhere?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’ Bryant snapped out of his funk. ‘Does Raymond know we’re back? We need to talk to him.’ As the Armed Response Vehicle had dropped them off, they had spotted the unit chief’s desk light from outside the building. It was 11.59 p.m. Land usually went home at the first available opportunity.

  ‘He must have heard us come in,’ said May. ‘Let’s go and wake him up.’

  ‘Hang on, I have a paper bag somewhere.’

  ‘No, don’t frighten him. The last time you did that he tipped a prawn curry into his lap.’

  The detectives went to his office. ‘Knock, knock,’ said Bryant, miming on the door that wasn’t there. He found Land and DuCaine hunched over a computer terminal. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Cornell’s alive,’ said DuCaine.

  ‘What?’ Bryant dug out one pair of his trifocals. ‘I saw the news flash about his death on John’s phone. Are you sure?’

  ‘Positive,’ said DuCaine.

  ‘You’re going to love this—’ Land began.

  Bryant waved him aside. ‘Not you, the lad.’

  DuCaine proceeded to outline his discovery.

  ‘We have to find him and get hold of the others,’ said May. ‘Is there anything else in that footage?’

  ‘I’ve been through the sequence over and over again but there’s nothing.’ DuCaine’s nimble fingers stepped through the frames that showed the banker’s blurry form within the bonfire.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to say this,’ said Bryant, leaning on the desk. ‘Enlarge that image. Take it up to 360.’

  ‘I have no idea what that actually means,’ said DuCaine. ‘I can make it a bit bigger.’

  ‘Did you speak to the officers at the site?’ asked May. ‘What did they find in the bonfire?’

  ‘They can’t get in there. It’s still too hot, and the council officials won’t let them spray water on it because it will make the pavements more slippery, which would contravene health and safety regulations, so they’re waiting for the rain to put it out.’

  ‘So they have no footage and no body.’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  ‘He couldn’t have set this whole thing up himself, could he?’

  ‘It seems rather unlikely, don’t you think? There must be a simpler explanation. This,’ said Bryant, thumping the screen. ‘It’s vaguely familiar. What is it?’ He pointed to the image, which showed a dark curve behind the sticks of wood at Cornell’s back. May leaned in and stared hard, but remained silent.

  ‘There’s another one further over. Look. Fraternity, can you move along a few frames?’

  ‘It doesn’t look like anything, Arthur.’

  ‘They’re letters. It could be a name on the side of a building. I need my books.’ Bryant stumped off to his room.

  ‘What?’ said Land. ‘He thinks he’s seen something the rest of us have missed? He can’t even see across the road.’

  ‘He knows London better than anyone,’ May reminded them. ‘Give him a chance.’

  Bryant pulled at the books, causing an avalanche of dust, dinner and dead insects to cascade over his desk. Finally he found the volume he was seeking, volume R–W of the Derelict London Properties Manual. Riffling through the pages, he found what he was looking for and released a cry of triumph. Chucking the book under his arm, he headed back to Land’s office.

  ‘Skyfire,’ he told them. ‘I knew I’d seen it before. The S and the R are unique. The sign was hand-painted back in the mid-nineteen thirties. It’s a firework factory. They went out of business in 1993. Cornell was never at the Bank of England. The whole thing was a set-up.’

  ‘Why?’ Land was bewildered.

  ‘To keep fuelling the bloodlust of the protestors. They think they’ve won. We have to show them that they haven’t. Cornell’s in the old Skyfire warehouse behind Metropolitan Wharf at Wapping Wall.’

  As Bryant, May, Land and DuCaine set off towards East London, the rolling storm followed above their heads.

  53

  WIRED

  I could have brought Augustine to Wapping, Bryant thought, at the drop of the Thames and just a spit from Tower Bridge, where Captain Kidd was hanged twice before being chained and left for three tides.

  Nothing remained of this piratical past except an ancient set of oxidized green steps leading to the muddy foreshore. The flooded ginnels and mildewed alleyways of Bryant’s childhood, once so dauntingly forbidden and mysterious, had been paved over, filled in and floodlit as London homogenized its riverside in the rush to build bankers’ apartments.

  The streets were unrecognizable now, colonnaded with blank suburban properties of orange brick. Between them stood a few emasculated warehouses for those seduced by the notion of a loft lifestyle. The wealthy were never there and the rest stayed in. The dead new streets of the Thames shoreline horrified Bryant.

  ‘This is the evidence of what’s wrong, right here,’ he complained from the back of May’s BMW. ‘Inequality rising faster than at any other time in history. The government furthering its own corrupt ideological agenda.’

  ‘I’d be happy to argue political theories with you at some time, Arthur,’ said May, taking a rainswept corner at twice its safe speed, ‘but I’m a little preoccupied right now.’

  ‘I was thinking about Dexter Cornell, actually,’ said Bryant. ‘I came up with reasons why the others should be targeted, but not him.’

  ‘But you said yourself he’s a hate figure,’ said DuCaine.

  ‘But why bother to fake his death? Why not just let him die?’

  ‘Well, perhaps—’ DuCaine began before Bryant stopped him.

  ‘It was a rhetorical question. I know the answer.’ Everyone banged their heads on the car’s roof as May cut a corner and went over a kerbstone. Bryant was unperturbed. ‘Why not run wild with a gun, like they do in America? I’ll tell you why. Because that shows weakness. A massacre is a display of anger, not strength, and either you get caught or you have to kill yourself. This isn’t about the pleasure of killing, but justice.’

  ‘Arthur, you know I’m always ready to listen, but right now I’m trying not to miss a turning and send us into the river.’

  Bryant sat back and turned to DuCaine. ‘You see? He can only do one thing at a time.’

  ‘I know,’ said DuCaine. ‘Men. Useless.’

  Bryant looked out at the racing view. ‘It’s changed around here since I was a nipper. I remember playing in Crown and Anchor Alley, waiting for my old man while he was cadging in the pubs. If he could have seen what I saw in the City tonight, how he would have hated it.’ He leaned forward suddenly. ‘There, on the left.’

  Although the Skyfire Firework Factory had been closed down, the building had been saved ready for conversion into apartments. A pair of black wrought-iron gates separated the three-floor warehouse from the street.

  ‘It looks empty,’ said Land.
>
  ‘He’s not in there,’ said Bryant, ‘he’s somewhere opposite. The sign I saw is still up there on the outside, so he has to be’ – he turned around and unsmeared the rear window – ‘over in that corner.’

  May parked and everyone got out, scanning the buildings.

  ‘There’s nothing there,’ said Land, ‘just trees.’

  ‘Behind them.’

  DuCaine was off and running. As the others followed, they saw the low boarded-up warehouse tucked behind the main road, and could tell from here that its upper windows faced the faded factory sign.

  ‘We could have done with having Jack and Colin on board tonight,’ said May. ‘We have no back-up.’

  ‘You’ve got me,’ said DuCaine, checking the wooden loading bay doors and windows. ‘These are locked. What about the back? If I have to kick my way in it’s going to tip our hand.’

  May tried the handle of the rear door and watched as it swung open. ‘That’s not good.’

  They entered warily. DuCaine had a pencil torch that he shone around the graffiti-stained walls. There was a sound like a falling telephone directory: pigeons scattering in the rafters. They found nothing on the ground floor, just old filing cabinets, binders, broken office chairs and stacks of carpet tiles. The air smelled of lost contracts, printer ink, redundancies.

  They took the rear stairs to the floor above. ‘It has to be up here,’ insisted Bryant. ‘That’s where you’d see the sign from.’

  May pushed open the doors and they entered the area.

  ‘Don’t come any further!’ Cornell shouted from the middle of the room.

  DuCaine’s torch beam fell over the banker’s bruised face, making him flinch. He was attached to an office chair with white plastic cable ties, still dressed in the T-shirt and grey tracksuit bottoms he’d been wearing when he was abducted. In front of him was a phone on a tripod, powered off, its timer finished. ‘Please,’ Cornell croaked, ‘get back against the wall.’

  DuCaine saw the problem: blue and red wires spiralling away from the rear of Cornell’s chair, running to a pair of small black-mesh sensors set out on the floorboards in front of him, about ten feet apart.

  ‘Stay there,’ Cornell instructed. ‘It’s an infrared beam. If you break it I’m dead. I’ve got some kind of explosive taped around my waist. He’s gone. He went hours ago. I’m the only one here.’

  DuCaine’s torchlight picked out the squashed oblong panel strapped to the front of Cornell’s shirt, into which the wires were fixed. It looked as if it was made of putty.

  Before May or DuCaine could stop him, Bryant donned his trifocals and stepped forward, thumping his walking stick hard on the floor. He leaned his weight on it.

  May waved the others back. It was a straight choice now: to take control, or to trust the man who had just been diagnosed as unstable and a danger to others. The man he had known all his adult life.

  ‘Do it, Arthur,’ he whispered.

  ‘You know what I used to like playing with most when I was a kid?’ Bryant asked Cornell. ‘Plasticine. I made whole armies out of that stuff. I seem to remember restaging the Crimean War with a different outcome, carving the cavalry figures with a palette knife. The only trouble was that at some point you had to throw it all away. It was when all the colours started merging into one, a disgusting shade of purple. And the smell. It stayed on your clothes for weeks.’

  DuCaine shot an urgent warning glance at May. Has the old man lost it again? Bryant took another step forward and raised his stick across the beam, breaking it as everyone shouted and dropped.

  ‘It was the exact colour of the modelling clay stuck to your chest, Mr Cornell.’ He turned to the others. ‘You can cut him free, Fraternity. There is no bomb. There’s nothing more dangerous here than the odd rat.’

  As DuCaine pulled out his Swiss army knife and sawed at the cable ties pinning Cornell’s arms, May examined the mobile. ‘He put the feed online remotely,’ he said. ‘Right now everyone out there is thinking the anti-banking movement has claimed its biggest victory. We need to get the truth out fast, before they send in the militia and cross a line that changes everything.’

  ‘I’ll leave the nuts and bolts to you, shall I?’ said Bryant magnanimously. ‘I just do the abstract thinking around here.’

  Released, Cornell fell forward on to his knees. ‘I’ll destroy you for this,’ he warned, staggering to his feet and massaging his wrists. ‘I’ll make sure you never work in this city again.’

  ‘So much for gratitude,’ said May. ‘You shouldn’t have dismissed your bodyguards. What was it, a cost-cutting exercise?’

  ‘I didn’t dismiss them, he did.’

  ‘So you know who he is?’

  ‘You’re the detectives,’ spat Cornell bitterly. ‘You tell me.’

  54

  A FACE IN THE CROWD

  It was three twenty-seven on Sunday morning by the time everyone managed to find their way back to the offices of the PCU, Bryant having insisted on compulsory attendance. The staff members wove their way through the clutter of the common room looking as if they’d been raised from the dead. Out of respect for their bleary state, the lights had been turned down low. Bryant perched himself on a stool, sensing that if he sat in his comfortable armchair he might never get up again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he began. ‘I know you want this to be over but it isn’t, and it might never be. But I need to get it off my chest while I still remember everything clearly.’

  Bimsley was the first to ask a question. ‘Where’s Cornell?’

  Bryant waved him down. ‘I’ll get to that in a moment. If I have another one of my attacks right now you’ll never have any answers. I made some notes.’ He dragged a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket and flattened it. ‘It starts with Monica. I have an old academic friend called Monica Greenwood. She knows a lot about art. I asked her to go through all the images of the riots that were taken by photojournalists. Dan put them on a memory stick for me. I asked her to look for the faces of our suspects. She’s a natural at this sort of thing, better than any piece of software that’s been devised.’

  ‘Probably not true,’ said Banbury. ‘There’s a very sophisticated face-recognition programme—’

  ‘Shut up, Dan,’ said Bryant. ‘Monica is what they call a super-recognizer. They only have to see someone once. The second time they spot the same face, they know exactly where they saw it before. Monica remembers faces with such accuracy that her hit rate beats DNA evidence. She discovered her ability quite by accident, and now she’s allowed to visit VIIDO.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Bimsley.

  ‘God, I can’t remember what it stands for,’ Bryant said. ‘John?’

  ‘The Visual Images Identification and Detections Office at Charing Cross,’ said May obligingly.

  ‘Monica’s one of two hundred super-recognizers currently helping the MPS to identify faces in crowds,’ Bryant explained. ‘And she found an unmasked face for me. Actually, she found dozens of them. Some were troublemakers who were just wading from one police confrontation to another; others were mere bystanders who enjoyed gawking at the riots from a safe distance.’ He wet his lips with a sip from his glass. Before the meeting, he had instructed Meera to break out a bottle of Chinese gin that Land had been given by his local takeaway last Christmas.

  ‘So I had Monica’s faces, the ones that were common to many of the photographs, but I didn’t know what to do with them. Then I watched the TV footage again. The major channels were showing the same loops of film over and over again. I had a rough description of who we were looking for. He was tall, strong, broad-shouldered, early thirties – but then I remembered where that description came from: the shots from Jonathan De Vere’s car park, when somebody broke into his Mercedes. We’d only assumed it was the arsonist. But if it was, what was he after? I couldn’t make sense of it. Then, tonight, poor old Raymondo here told me that Darren Link said something odd to him: “We’ve been monitoring you from the beginn
ing.” That’s when I realized.’ He eyed each of them in turn. ‘We’d been frustrating Link at every point in the investigation, so he was conducting his own covert reconnaissance. One of his lads went a bit too far looking for evidence, and broke into De Vere’s vehicle. Dan has now managed to pull some shots of him leaving the car park. It’s definitely one of Link’s plods.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Longbright. ‘What did he get from the car?’

  ‘Nothing. You also lost some statements from your desk, didn’t you? Link was clumsily trying to gather intelligence. But all he did was put the wrong image in my head. Which is why I didn’t spot who we should have been looking for until it was too late. John?’ He indicated that May should take the floor.

  ‘We wondered if Weeks, Hall, De Vere, Leach, Papis and Cornell had all met at one point in their lives,’ said May. ‘We thought if they had all visited the same bars or clubs we might find a pattern. But there was nothing. How could there be no connection at all?’

  ‘You ain’t half dragging this out,’ Meera complained. ‘Do you know what the time is?’

  Bimsley raised Land’s bottle of Shanghai Blossom-Taste Happy Dry Gin. ‘Do you want a drink?’ he asked.

  She glared at him. ‘No. Do you want a smack in the mouth?’

  May called for quiet. ‘For me, there was one question we hadn’t asked ourselves: Why couldn’t we find this guy? All these terrible deaths and still no sign of him? No prints, no forensic track, nothing. During the briefing Raymondo said something important.’

  ‘I did?’ said Land, looking surprised.

  ‘He said, “It’s as if he doesn’t exist.” And of course that was the answer. He didn’t exist.’

  ‘This is driving me mad,’ said Meera, rising. ‘Either you tell us—’ Everyone forced her back into her seat.