On the Loose

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Even so … I keep thinking if I just wait for a while, Mr Bryant will somehow persuade them to re-form the unit.’

  ‘I did too at first. I think when something gets this badly broken, it’s pretty tough to fix. We went down upsetting a hell of a lot of people.’

  ‘We got letters of support.’

  ‘Yeah, but more of them were glad to be rid of us. I was sent a black wreath from some joker at Albany Street nick.’

  ‘I thought the old man had some well-placed government pals. I was hoping he’d pull in a few favours. That’s what he’s done in the past.’

  ‘I don’t suppose Arthur’s in the right frame of mind to whip up fresh support in Whitehall.’

  ‘You’ve known Bryant and May longer than anyone, Janice. Why did they never accept promotion?’

  ‘Because they knew most investigations would go to DCs, TDCs and PCs. They didn’t want desk jobs, and they didn’t want to end up in something specialist like working with Tactical Support Groups.’ Riot police needed their senior ranks to be involved on the ground, but it was a general rule of thumb that the higher you went in the police force, the less chance you had of regaining the excitement of your early days.

  ‘Hang on, why did you call Bryant’s old work number?’

  ‘Because he’s not answering his mobile, and there’s something wrong with his house line. I’m worried about him. I went round there and knocked the other day but there was no answer. The only other way of getting in touch is through Alma’s church.’

  ‘The thing is, I’ve got an interview with a software development company in Manchester and they seem pretty keen to get me in. The work’s not very interesting but the pay’s good, and it could tide me over until something better comes along. I just feel so bloody disloyal.’

  ‘You have to go for it, Dan. We all need to find a way through this, and you’ve got a family to take care of. No-one’s going to think any less of you. I’ve spoken to Giles, and he’s been going for interviews, reckons there’s a couple of good jobs around. Raymond was relieved to be able to take early retirement. He’s been wanting to do that for a long time. April’s pretty devastated, though. I think she feels let down by her grandfather.’

  ‘It’s so bloody unfair. You work for years honing your skills, thinking you’re going to end up using your experience and making a difference—’

  ‘You’re still young, Dan.’ Longbright laid a gentle hand on Banbury’s arm. ‘You’ll find something to inspire you. Do you want to get a cup of tea? I’m just brewing up.’

  ‘No, I can’t stop. Well, give my regards to the others when you speak to them.’

  ‘I will. Here, take these home to the missus. You might start something.’ She handed him a packet of ruby-sequined nipple tassels.

  Banbury pocketed them and was about to leave but stopped in the doorway, rubbing the stubble of his hair, suddenly as lost as a child on a beach. ‘Tell them to stay in touch. I mean, I don’t suppose they will, but—’ At a loss for anything further to say, he turned and left.

  As Longbright watched Banbury go, she wondered if she would ever see him again. She had come to regard the PCU staff as the closest members of her family. This is how mothers feel when their kids leave home, she thought, folding an embroidered satin girdle and snapping it smartly into a drawer.

  6

  TROUBLE IN STORE

  Rafi Abd al-Qaadir looked around the filthy shop and wondered if he had made a mistake. Buckled metal sheeting marked the spot where the shawarma spits had turned, splattering grease onto the walls and ceiling, and there had clearly been a fire at some point in the past. The meat counters and the bolted-down tables had been left behind, but the ovens and the refrigerator had been ripped out, leaving ragged holes in the plaster.

  Rafi had borrowed money from his brothers to buy the lease of the Paradise Chip Shop, Caledonian Road, and knew that he would have to carry out most of the conversion work himself. The first consignment of pottery and rugs was already on its way, and the task before him was daunting because he could not afford to hire a team of professional builders. Even though the lease he had purchased would soon need to be renewed, the handsome young Arab felt sure he could use his charm and wits to turn a profit. The site was good, a corner store in an up-and-coming area with plenty of passing foot traffic.

  As he walked through the empty room, his boots crunching on scattered debris, he studied the task ahead. The trickiest part would be the removal of the enormous ventilation system that wound across the ceiling before punching its way out onto the roof. He could get hold of the right equipment easily enough, but the physical element of the job was beyond him. Rafi’s left leg had always been weak, and would not support him if he tried to carry anything too heavy. What he needed to find was a strong labourer who would work cheaply and quickly.

  When the man with the shaven head and shoulders like an upended bed appeared in the doorway asking if he needed any work done, Rafi knew that fate had smiled upon him.

  Former Detective Constable Colin Bimsley needed to make some fast money. He had already drunk his way through the pitiful payment granted to him by the Home Office. He was now broke. Walking back toward King’s Cross tube station, he had passed the derelict takeaway outlet and watched the guy inside measuring up.

  ‘Do you know how to take one of these out?’ Rafi asked, pointing up at the cylindrical ventilation shaft.

  ‘Easy,’ said Bimsley. ‘I can get that down for you, and put in new electrics. I can handle just about anything except plumbing.’

  ‘That’s fine, I’ve already got someone for that.’ Bimsley walked through to the far wall and gave it an experimental slap. Dirt showered down. Lathe and plasterboard, it would come apart easily enough. He could render and cement the outer wall, reboard the interior, sand and paint, put in new electrical sockets—it wouldn’t take long. ‘So you’re not going to be cooking in here?’

  ‘No, I’m going to be selling homewares.’

  ‘You could apply for a grant from the local council.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Why would they give me a grant?’ ‘You’re going to be improving the area, mate. This road has too many junk food outlets attracting trouble. You’ll be doing everyone a favour. I could probably help you with that as well.’

  ‘I’m Rafi,’ said the young man, smiling broadly as he shook Bimsley’s heavy hand. ‘Let’s talk about the money over tea.’

  They agreed upon a fair price, and Bimsley offered to start at once. After making a trip to B&Q in Rafi’s van, they borrowed an industrial vacuum cleaner, a pickax, a drill and a box of tools from the mosque across the road, and set to work. Clouds of plaster dust billowed through the shop as Bimsley hammered through the partitions, tearing out the ventilation tubes to emerge looking like a herder caught in a sandstorm.

  ‘Hey, Rafi, the power’s still live in the back room.’ Bimsley lowered his paper mask and thumbed back through the white fog. ‘It must be on a separate circuit. I need to turn it off.’

  Rafi headed down to the basement, found the breaker box beside the meters and killed the power. Upstairs, Bimsley checked the light and assured himself that it was safe to proceed. Ripping down the last of the wall with the end of a crowbar, he waited for the dust to settle. Something smelled bad. A broken drain? He dragged a stepladder beneath a small, high window, chiselled through the crusted paintwork and forced it open.

  As the air became more breatheable, he shifted a stack of folding chairs, empty drums of ghee and flattened cardboard boxes away from a large white metal object as long as a coffin.

  ‘Hey, did you know you’ve got a freezer back here?’ he called.

  ‘I thought they’d thrown everything out,’ said Rafi as Bimsley tried the lid.

  ‘It’s got a padlock.’

  ‘Why would they lock it?’

  ‘Allow me. This is a job for a skilled professional.’ Bimsley eased his new friend aside and pulled out a set of slender keys, a memento of hi
s days at the PCU. Deftly popping the padlock in a matter of seconds—an old party trick Arthur Bryant had taught him—he unstuck the lid.

  ‘Whoa.’ Bimsley backed away as the sour-sweet smell of putrescent meat filled the room, making them retch. ‘They must have left food in it.’

  Rafi took a look inside. When he did not speak but merely covered his mouth and stared back into the freezer, Bimsley came and followed his gaze.

  ‘Blimey, no wonder they kept it padlocked.’

  The body was that of a naked male in a bad state, knees bent to fit into the freezer. His hairless stomach was bloated by expanding intestinal gases, ruptured and blistered from attacking bacteria. Bimsley had seen plenty of frozen turkeys stacked in supermarket freezers, but the sight of a human being similarly arranged was made more grotesque by a further detail. The body was missing its head. The white knobble of the exposed spinal stump was as neatly carved through as any pork or poultry joint, even if the skin was marbled green and purple.

  The freezer had not been airtight. Bimsley could see that insects had already burrowed deep into the decaying flesh, and hastily closed the freezer lid before any more could be attracted. At this time of the year swarms of flies appeared because the shop was near the canal, and he was aware of the dangers of further contaminating the corpse.

  ‘Who had this place before you?’

  ‘This has nothing to do with me, I swear—’

  ‘All right, calm down, nobody’s saying it does, okay? Who had the place?’

  ‘I don’t know, some Nigerian guy. I didn’t deal with him, just the agent. Then it was empty for a while.’

  ‘So when did you first see it?’

  ‘About a month ago. I came here with my brother a few times, but I couldn’t always lock it up behind me. There’s something wrong with the door. I figured there wasn’t anything worth stealing.’

  ‘Does the agent know about the problem with the door?’

  ‘I don’t know—I just said I’d rent it, it was cheap, I don’t know anything about the building or who had it before.’ Rafi’s cheerful confidence had vanished. Now he was sweating and fearful.

  ‘This is going to put back the opening of your store a little,’ said Bimsley, digging for his mobile and punching out John May’s number. ‘It looks like you’ve got yourself a murder site.’

  ‘Oh, no.’ Rafi covered his eyes with his hands. ‘I’ll lose all my money. Couldn’t we just get rid of him? Who would know? I could call my brothers—’

  ‘No, mate, we can’t do that. I’m a copper. I have to call it in.’

  ‘I thought you were a casual labourer. You’re with the police?’ Rafi looked betrayed.

  ‘Well, I was until recently. I’m sorry.’

  ‘What will happen now?’

  ‘Someone from the Coroner’s Office will come and take the body away. Then I think the investigation team will want to find out what happened to the most important part of him.’

  7

  SHRINKAGE

  Alma Sorrowbridge longed for the clear skies, white beaches and warm salty sea breezes of her homeland, Antigua. Instead, all she saw when she looked out of the window in Chalk Farm on Thursday afternoon was a man trying to shove a sodden mattress into a van. In her garden, sooty rain pattered on a sprawling bush of half-dead rhododendrons, underneath which a stray ginger cat sat with trembling haunches, trying to pass a stool. Alma pulled her cardigan over her immense bosom and sighed. If there was one thing more depressing than waiting for spring to arrive in London, it lay in the other direction of her view, sitting by the gas fire in a ridiculously long scarf and a ratty quilted crimson dressing gown, moaning about everything and everyone. And when he wasn’t complaining, he was extrapolating on subjects of no interest to anyone but himself.

  ‘—Looking for a lost Roman city full of treasure somewhere under Watling Street,’ Arthur Bryant was explaining to no-one in particular. ‘There’s still a place called Caesar’s Pond on Stan-more Common where Boudicca’s final defeat took place. It seems absurd to celebrate Boudicca as a rebel leader, considering she lost most of her battles, her troops were barbarians, she slaughtered her own people and she burned down half of London.’ When Alma next tuned in, Bryant’s topic had changed. ‘The Shoreditch Strangler took his last victim home in a taxi, and was almost caught by passing constables because the bollards in Boot Street prevented him from parking near the disposal site. Traditional street bollards were fashioned from French cannons captured at Trafalgar, but now—do you know what I’m talking about?’

  ‘Bollards,’ said Alma, who was only listening to one word in ten. Living with Mr Bryant, you soon learned to tune out most of his rambling diatribes and concentrate on something more important, like unclogging the sink. She turned to him in annoyance. ‘Why don’t you get out of the house for a while? Go on, go for a walk or something. It would do you good.’

  ‘I can be just as miserable here as in a park, thank you.’

  ‘For Heaven’s sake, will you just go somewhere? You can’t just sit around all day. Sometimes I can’t tell where you end and the armchair begins.’

  Bryant set aside his copy of British Boundary Lines: 1066–1700 and turned his attention on her. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he asked. ‘You’ve been acting strangely all morning.’

  ‘It’s you, stuck here at home with no office to go to, just plonked in front of the fire feeling sorry for yourself, reading out loud from all those dusty old books. Look at these things.’ She picked up several at random from the sideboard. ‘Intestinal Parasites, Volume Two; A Guide to the Cumberland Pencil Museum; Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers; The Pictorial Dictionary of Barbed Wire. And why are you learning Hungarian? Filling your head up with all this rubbish—and the mess you make with those chemical concoctions in your bedroom, and the language! I don’t mind a bit of swearing, it’s only natural, but I draw the line when you involve Jesus.’

  ‘Oh, please spare me the sanctimony. The Christian legend is an embarrassingly childish reiteration of hoary old vegetation myths, the simple impregnation-and-resurrection cycle of pagan tree gods. You should try one of the more complex, grown-up religions from the Far East for a while, rather than worrying over a bunch of ghost stories concocted by bored shepherds in tents. Wait until they confirm life on other planets, that’ll mess up Christianity for you.’

  ‘Shame on you, you wicked old man! Every time you blaspheme, an angel is stripped of its wings.’

  ‘A good job, too. Sanctimonious bloody things drifting about with their harps, ticking people off all the time like feathered traffic wardens.’

  ‘I don’t think you’ll ever get into Heaven.’

  ‘The only reason why people need to believe in an afterlife is because they’re fed up with this one.’

  Alma tried to deflect his remarks by busying herself with the pile of washing stacked on the dining room table. She loved her old friend dearly but he was an affront to her sense of order. Bryant was not a private person. The details of his life were not kept under lock and key, but messily spread about him for everyone to see. Any door he passed through was left open, any chair he inhabited slowly filled with books, magazines, scraps of paper, pens and envelopes containing everything from seeds to microscope slides. He invited everyone into his world, the better to embroil them. ‘I don’t know why I should have to spend my day repairing your pants while you sit there having a go at me,’ she told him. ‘I’m not a wife. I tried that with Mr Sorrowbridge and look where it got me. Go on, sling your hook and give me some room to breathe.’

  ‘And where would you have me go, pray tell? My unit has been turned into some kind of electronic fraud investigation agency and I have been put out to pasture, sent off to the knacker’s yard to await execution.’

  ‘There’s no need to talk like that. What about your guided walking tours? I thought you were going to introduce a new one.’

  ‘I was planning to cover London’s forgotten burial groun
ds in a walk entitled “Whose Head Are You Standing On?,” but the response was so abysmal that I decided not to bother. You’d think people would be interested in what they’re walking over, but no, they’re too busy messing about on the interweb, indulging their infantile preoccupation with bosoms by perusing photographs of actresses falling out of nightclubs.’

  ‘Well, you could still go for a walk. I’ll get your hat and coat; just a half hour will do you the world of good.’

  ‘I am not creeping about Primrose Hill in the pouring rain, peering into shop windows and frightening small children. Or am I supposed to take myself off to the pictures and sit through some appalling Hollywood adventure about people who can turn themselves into giant ants?’

  ‘I just think a change of scenery—’

  ‘What are you up to?’ asked Bryant suspiciously. ‘And what have you got in your pocket? Not that one, the other one. Come on, I can see a letter poking out.’

  ‘You don’t want to hear about this right now,’ said Alma, suddenly solicitous. ‘It can wait until later.’

  Bryant attempted to lever himself out of his cracked leather armchair, but had trouble getting upright. Since the PCU closed down and he had nothing to do anymore, he seemed to be ageing with undignified celerity. In the last few days he had even taken to staying in bed mornings, and Alma could do nothing to make him get up. She had heard of people who simply lost the will to live, and was beginning to fear for him. Mr Bryant had no faith with which to protect himself.

  ‘I’m not a child, Alma. If it’s bad news I might as well have it now. Come on, hand it over.’

  ‘I don’t know why you should want to read this particular letter,’ she huffed. ‘Look at that great pile of mail sitting over there. You haven’t opened anything in weeks. If I hadn’t fished out the electricity bill and paid it, you’d be sitting in complete darkness right now.’

  ‘Just give it to me.’

  She knew he would worry at her until he had discovered the truth. Reluctantly, she pulled out the letter and passed it to him. ‘You won’t like it,’ she warned. ‘We’re going to be made homeless.’