Bryant & May 07; Bryant & May on the Loose b&m-7

by Christopher Fowler

  As the sergeant sat on the corner of Delaney’s bed in the gathering gloom, he thought about his hopeless situation. If he lied to Faraday, he would be exposed when the PCU failed to deliver. If he told the truth, news of his secret disclosures would soon reach the unit. If he asked Longbright on a date and she discovered that he was ratting on his colleagues behind her back, she would never talk to him again. Forget it, Fat Boy, he told himself. She’s too good for you anyway.

  He had always wanted to do the right thing, but how many times had it placed him in a spot like this? It was the wayward guys who made friends, the womanizers, the hard drinkers, the ones who bent the law around themselves. The officers at his old station had nicknamed him Captain Bringdown because of his determination to play by the rules. The PCU had merely made a harmless literary joke out of his name before accepting him for who he was. Yes, he wanted to do the right thing, but perhaps this time the right thing was something different.

  ♦

  Meanwhile, DS Longbright found herself opposite the great letters sculpted in white concrete that spelled out the team named ‘Arsenal’. The new football grounds filled the skyline of the street like a great spaceship. Opposite, the remaining rows of shabby Victorian terraces stretched away uphill, from Drayton Park toward the horrors of North London’s crack-addled Blackstock Road.

  Longbright checked the ID card, but spotted the builders’ outlet before needing to search for street numbers. She could hardly have missed it; picked out in the Gunners’ shades of red and white, K&B Decorating stood in homage to the team grounds that had existed in the area since 1913. A muscular boy with strong Grecian features was carrying in a delivery of planks and dropping them noisily inside the store. The ground floor was a confusion of sawdust and shouting.

  “It’s funny,” the Greek boy told her. “Terry ain’t been in for more than a week, ‘as ‘e? Nobody knows where he is.”

  “Can you give me an exact day when you last saw him?”

  “Monday before last, something like that. It’ll be on his work sheet.”

  “Didn’t any of you think to talk to the police?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

  “The police?” He almost laughed in her face. “Listen, love, the blokes here go a bit mad every now and again, then come back and pick up where they left off and nobody mentions it. Not worth going to the police about.”

  “They get paid by the number of days they do?”

  “Yeah, so if they don’t come in, it’s up to them, innit.”

  “Anyone been around to Delaney’s flat to check on him?”

  “Terry don’t like people going round there. His missus kicked him out of the house and I think he’s a bit ashamed of the place he’s renting. I told him he wouldn’t get back on his feet if he kept taking time off.”

  “So he’s done it before. Has he been here long?”

  “About four years. He had a couple of days off the last week he was here. Is he in trouble or what?”

  “You could say that. I need to know everything you know about him. If you can’t remember right now, that’s fine, call me first thing tomorrow morning.” Longbright gave him one of the cards Bryant had printed up for everyone at Mornington Crescent, an odd little art deco number in black and silver that looked more like a calling card for an antiques store. She had crossed out the old address and hand-written the new one.

  “He’s not been hurt, has he?”

  “Why, you think he’s done something to deserve it?”

  “Terry? You’re joking.” The young man called over his shoulder. “Oi, Jess, tell this lady what Terry’s like.”

  “One of the nicest blokes I’ve ever met,” replied Jess. “If he was a bird I’d marry him.” They all laughed.

  “Keeps his nose clean, does he?” asked Longbright. “Stays out of trouble?”

  “Honest as the day is long. Always helping other people. That’s Terry’s trouble, if anything. Does charity work in his spare time. One of the best.” It seemed that everyone in the shop agreed with that sentiment.

  “What did he do here?”

  “Painting, decorating, some building work, welding, a bit of demolition.”

  “Do you have a list of his most recent jobs?”

  “They’ll be in the book,” said Jess. “Come with me.”

  ♦

  Dan Banbury was in many ways the PCU’s least likely member, in that there seemed to be nothing wrong with him. He was the married one who lived with a loving wife and a well-adjusted ten-year-old son in the suburbs of South London. He was the unit’s voice of common sense, and had been selected for precisely this reason. However, he possessed a skill that singled him out as unusual: He had an almost preternatural ability to understand what had happened in a vacated room. He followed standard procedures, establishing a three-dimensional grid pattern at a crime scene to mark off prints and collect fibres for analysis, but above this he had an understanding of the way in which frightened humans confronted one another. He saw the shape of their fears and passions, the psychology of their actions, the way in which they translated their emotions into physical movement. The ghosts of violence were visible to him.

  The extraordinary thing was that, until being asked to join the PCU, he had been entirely unconscious of this sensitivity. Bryant had found such a skill present in only a handful of forensic experts, and had campaigned for Banbury’s inclusion in the unit. He needed people who saw more deeply than those around them.

  When Banbury entered Delaney’s flat, he quickly recognised four people: Terry Delaney, his girlfriend, his daughter and a stranger. Terry was the most noticeable. Signs of his occupancy were everywhere, from the newspaper he had folded back to read over breakfast, to the whiskers rinsed from his razor and imperfectly cleaned from the sink, to the toothpaste that had dried on his brush. The bed had been occupied by one, but there were magazines, titles that would be read by a woman in her mid-twenties, thrown onto the bedside table beside a half-emptied tub of makeup remover and a brush containing long hairs. She was a dyed blonde, untidy, and her habits had annoyed Terry. He kept his territory tidy and separate. The little girl had slept on the couch in the neutral zone of the lounge. A single duvet was stored beneath it, together with her pyjamas, pink slippers, a jewelled hair clip.

  But it was the stranger who interested Banbury most. Judging by the faint oily striation on the front door lock he had first tried to use a simple burglar’s tool to gain entrance, but had been defeated by the London bolt set in place on the inside of the door. He had gone down the hall and climbed out of the window, reaching around to the apartment’s bathroom casement. The carpet tiles at the end of the hall were rarely walked on, but the pile was slightly flattened at their edge, as if someone had reached out on tiptoe.

  The conversion of the house into flats had placed the bathroom sill in a shaded corner behind a tree, and had left the second floor vulnerable. The window was awkward to access, but easy to open if you recognised the type of catch. This had been no ordinary burglar. He had not been looking to steal a CD player or a television. Anything heavy or awkwardly shaped would have proven difficult to manhandle across the building’s exterior. This thief was after something that he could pocket. He had ransacked the place without bothering to put anything back, but had not been able to avoid precision. He wanted Delaney to know that someone smart was onto him.

  But then the householder had unexpectedly returned. He had unlocked the door from the hall, stepped inside, let the door swing shut behind him and stopped, confronted by his dismantled apartment.

  And in the next room, the stranger had stopped, too. His search had suddenly ceased at this point. It had not been a good idea to wear workman’s boots because they had steel inlays, and were so heavy that they were easily discernible from any other marks on the carpet. Some criminals kept a specific pair of shoes to burgle in. Banbury would have liked to be able to access FIT, the Footwear Intelligence Technology system that catalogued over 14,000 image
s of shoe print types. He crouched on the floor and looked for pattern, wear, size and damage features, but could not see enough detail with his naked eye.

  The prints led to behind the door, where the intruder must have waited – they were heavier here – before attacking Delaney. Now the bootprints danced in a tight circle, to be joined by twin drag marks, Delaney’s shoes, the toes rather than the heels, as he was pulled away to the couch and laid down on his stomach. A single droplet of blood had fallen, and there was a small patch of dried fluid on the carpet that looked like spittle. Banbury sniffed delicately, wondering if he might catch a faint chemical odour in the room, but found none. Yet Delaney had simply fallen to the floor. Not a drug, then; something else with the power to render a man unconscious in a second – or perhaps kill him outright. A thin knife or long needle, through the underside of the jaw or behind the ear, straight up into the base of the brain. The signs were so easy to read that Banbury felt as if he had witnessed the entire scene unfolding before him.

  But if Delaney had surprised a burglar, and had been killed while the robbery was in progress, how had he wound up in a shop freezer?

  ♦

  “Everyone says Terry Delaney is one of the good guys,” Longbright told John May, setting a mug of tea on his desk. “He never touched drugs, had no known connections with anyone dodgy, was working hard to pay his wife money, saw his daughter every other weekend.”

  “Why was he divorced?” asked May.

  “Nothing unusual there. He and his wife were working all hours and their schedules never matched up. She’s a nurse at UCL. Actually, we know her. Niamh Connor takes shifts in A and E. She treated Meera for her cut arm. These are the last jobs Delaney took on.” She dropped an additional page of addresses on the desk.

  May studied the sheet and tapped the last line. “Allensbury Place – that’s near the railway line bordering the King’s Cross site. It’s within walking distance of where he was found, and where he was living.”

  “He mainly worked on local projects. Didn’t do the West End because his boss was having some kind of row with him over unpaid parking tickets. He drove a white van, but we didn’t find it outside his flat.”

  “We need to know who Delaney was working with in the days leading up to the burglary. Get Bimsley over there. And have Meera talk to his ex-wife.”

  “Dan’s convinced that Delaney didn’t know his attacker. He says the footprints in the apartment suggest he surprised a burglar, simple as that.”

  “So there’s a fight and the burglar kills him, bundles him into his van in a panic, can’t think what to do with the body, takes it home and cuts it up, then remembers the empty shop up the road and dumps him in the freezer. Or he takes him straight to the shop, out into the back room, lays him out on the plastic sheets and does his cutting there. It would be ironic if the first straightforward case we’ve handled in years turns out to be the one that gets us the unit back.”

  “What are you going to do, John? Do you want some help?”

  “No, just keep an eye on the others for me. Arthur and I will try to have this place running more efficiently by the morning, providing he gets back soon from wherever he’s wandered off to. At least we have electricity and the neighbourhood has Wi-Fi, so I can use my laptop.”

  “Where did Mr Bryant go?”

  “He wrapped that disgusting old scarf around his head and told me he was meeting an old friend in a graveyard. If we keep operating by the book, we might be able to clear this whole thing up in time to satisfy the Home Office. I do hope Arthur isn’t going to try and muddy the waters with some unlikely scenario involving, oh, I don’t know, resurrectionists or pagan worshippers.”

  “I’ve heard him mention forest gods quite a few times.”

  May sipped his tea, thinking. “He sees ghosts, you know.”

  Longbright’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “Not in the conventional way. It’s just – I think the past is always there. The ghosts walk beside him. All the things that have happened here in times gone by remain burned into his vision like afterimages. It’s Arthur’s weakness. And, of course, his greatest strength.”

  ∨ Bryant & May on the Loose ∧

  23

  A Warning To the Curious

  St Pancras station soared up above him, its pink granite columns supported on drums carved with shields and figures in late Victorian extravagance. The niches had been designed to hold statues, but the Midland Railway had baulked at the extra expense, so they had remained empty. Here, at the hotel which prefaced the station, Venetian High Gothic met the beginnings of the Aesthetic Movement, the whole edifice looking down on the surrounding area as if in command of it.

  Bryant rested himself, remembering how King’s Cross, Euston and Somers Town had looked when he was a child. He vaguely recalled a Christmas party held at Reggiori’s restaurant, a genteelly shabby dining hall with a chipped fountain of turquoise porcelain standing at its centre. A neon amusement arcade now stood upon the site. Further back had been the fragments of Regency terraces that had miraculously survived the wartime bombings; the Rising Sun boxers’ pub; the German eating rooms where they sang ‘Lili Marlene’ as they served boiled sausage; the great gasometers. The peculiar old lighthouse that stood on the roof of the building in the centre of the road had supposedly been built to advertise a long-vanished fish shop. The lighthouse was still there, but had fallen into disrepair. In a way it was a perfect symbol of the area, in such plain view that nobody noticed it.

  Bryant turned, trying to conjure the past, but as fast as he dragged one piece from his memory another slipped away. He wondered if the few remaining residents older than he looked down from their windows and saw how it had once been, or whether they could see only what was now before their eyes. Remembering was pointless; but forgetting somehow seemed immoral.

  Bryant’s right leg was troubling him, so he used his cane as he walked. Although it had rained earlier, the unseasonably warm day had caused a soft mist to rise from the earth and shroud the low buildings behind the station. Across from St Pancras station was Pancras Road, beneath which the Fleet River ran on its way to Blackfriars. The streets to the rear had been built on the banks of the river valley, and were noticeably cooler.

  His path took him behind the frenetic theatre of the station, into the dim backstage area of silent roads and empty pavements. He had reached St Pancras Old Church, its graveyard gardens reaching down to the curving edge of the canal. Between the trees he could see ducks and moorhens nesting, and a single heron standing alone in the reeds. The grave digger was dragging an old-fashioned hand-operated lawn mower across the green, but stopped to watch balefully as Bryant passed.

  The church itself suggested a building in repose, weathered by centuries of devout prayer. It was a strange melange of styles: Roman, German and English. Its bell tower was inset with elegant convex clock faces, finished in shiny black lacquer painted with gold numerals. Only these, and the elaborately regilded railings around the graveyard, gave any hint of the structure’s true importance to the city.

  Austin Potterton was on top of a Gothic monument doing something unsuitable to a sundial. Above him, leathery crows cawed in the clawlike branches of the trees.

  “Austin, what on earth are you up to?” asked Bryant, poking him on the boots with his cane.

  “Ah, it’s you, Arthur. You’re early.” The man who clambered down had straggling shoulder-length hair the colour of tobacco ash, but wore a pin-striped suit with a navy tie and matching handkerchief, like an old hippie going for a job interview. He had a filthy toothbrush behind his ear. When he rubbed his nose and shook Bryant’s hand he left charcoal on his face and on the detective’s sleeve.

  “Tempus Edax Rerum – a bit gloomy, don’t you think? I cleaned it up a bit; somebody has to. The crows have been using it as a toilet for years. Toothbrushes seem to work best. I think this monument was paid for by Baroness Burdett-Coutts. Rather nice mosaic panels. I was ju
st making an impression.”

  “Well, you weren’t making one on me,” sniffed Bryant, scowling at his sleeve. “These tombs and monuments aren’t meant to be climbed over. It’s not an amusement park, you know.”

  “I’m doing some research for the diocese. They’ve hired me to photograph and catalogue everything in the churchyard, because the last time they did it the documents were stored in the undercroft and sustained water damage when it flooded.” Potterton dusted himself down and replaced his materials in his briefcase. “St Pancras Old Church deserves decent treatment – it’s very possibly the oldest Christian site in Europe. And it’s finally getting a bit of a makeover now that the rail link has come here.”

  “Saint Pancras,” Bryant mused. “He was fourteen when he died, wasn’t he? A Christian martyr, decapitated on the orders of the Emperor Diocletian. I read somewhere that his severed head still exists in the reliquary in the Basilica of San Pancrazio.”

  “You’re absolutely right, although Heaven alone knows why you’d want to retain such information. His name was anglicised.” Puffing out his cheeks, Potterton leaned back and looked at the old building.

  “The place doesn’t look like much, does it?” said a new voice. A minuscule vicar appeared from behind the fountain. He gave the impression of warily walking on tiptoe, as if checking for broken glass. He clasped Bryant’s hand and gave it a limp shake. “The Reverend Charles Barton. Welcome to St Pancras Old Church. This is a very well-connected little parish. We’d be terribly proud of it, if pride wasn’t a sin, ha-ha.”

  Bryant refused to laugh. He rarely chose to make friends with clergymen.

  “I’m not, ah, part of the usual ecclesiastical team here. I’m sort of filling in.” Charles Barton was young and untested, of ineffectual appearance and extremely pale, as if he had been washed clean too many times. There were vicars who fought battles for the souls of their parishioners, and vicars who were more interested in pointing out the stained glass. Barton was of the latter sort.