England's Finest

by Christopher Fowler - Bryant

  It was a perfect September day, hot and bright, with a sea-blue sky that fitted around the low rooftops of King’s Cross like a theatre backcloth. These days the seasons seemed to arrive in London a month or so later than they had when Bryant was a child; it felt like early August.

  The elderly detective explained what he felt were the key points of the mystery, then looked expectantly at the builder.

  ‘This may take a while,’ Dave Two warned. ‘I’m not good with people. I’m better with floorboards.’

  ‘Take all the time you want,’ said Bryant, inviting him out on to the middle of the pavement. ‘I’ve asked you here specifically because of your area of expertise. I have a theory, and I want to see if you come up with something that fits into it. Think of this as a kind of “Spot the Mistake” puzzle.’

  Dave Two screwed up his eyes and looked around. He saw the four corner buildings, the one-way system, the tattoo parlour, the motorbike shop, the café and various pedestrians trying to cross the road. Gradually his focus narrowed to one spot. ‘Well, there’s one problem that I can see, right there,’ he said, pointing.

  ‘And what’s that?’ asked Bryant, craning forward.

  ‘Hinges,’ said Dave Two.

  * * *

  —

  ‘Has he not come back yet?’ asked May, leaning into the common room. ‘Has anybody here seen Arthur?’

  Colin looked up. ‘He went out with one of the Daves. He was telling him something about the Bermuda Triangle.’

  May headed down to the black spot and found no sign of his partner or the builder.

  ‘We’re up here,’ Bryant called, leaning dangerously out of a first-floor window. ‘We’re about to conduct the experiment. Come up!

  ‘You remember the Bermuda Triangle,’ he said excitedly, bouncing about at the top of the stairs as May made his way up. ‘It was also known as the Devil’s Triangle, although it’s a vague sort of region in the western Atlantic. Supposedly aircraft and ships vanished under mysterious circumstances. But it’s one of the most heavily travelled shipping lanes in the world, and a huge number of aircraft fly over it.’

  ‘You’re saying it’s analogous to Witches’ Cross or whatever your mad friend told you it was called?’ asked May.

  ‘The number of incidents seems high until you set it in context with the number of people who pass through the junction. Then it seems low. It turns out that planes and ships weren’t vanishing in the Devil’s Triangle at all. They crashed or went off course or their radar failed for perfectly ordinary reasons. The number of ships and aircraft reported missing in the area was not proportionally greater than in any other part of the ocean. But there was a factor that increased their chances of vanishing. It’s an area of tropical cyclones. So I began to wonder, what if there is a similar anomaly at work here? Something that might appear to link a variety of different events?’ He punched out a number on his phone. ‘Are you ready, Dave Two?’

  ‘Ready, Mr B.’

  Bryant took his partner by the arm and made him lean out of the window. ‘Watch over there,’ he said, pointing at the building which stood diagonally opposite. Suddenly there was a flash of dazzling light on the first floor, and another across the same floor of the building on the other side of Britannia Street. A moment later there was a screech and a crash. Below them, an Amazon delivery van had hit a lamppost. ‘Yes!’ shouted Bryant, punching the air.

  The Amazon driver was not hurt, but his airbag had inflated suddenly and fired his glasses out of the window, so he was not best pleased. Bryant ignored him and took his partner to one side.

  ‘When you said that the blind woman was fine but the sighted one wasn’t, you set me thinking. It had to be something they could all see. The last of the new buildings was completed two years ago. There were several accidents that first summer, but not as many as this year. You remember number twenty Fenchurch Street, the Walkie-Talkie building? How its glass curvature caused a so-called “death ray” to set fire to parked cars? I did some checking on Henry Carrell, the tattooist. Unfortunately, when you went to see him, he hadn’t yet undergone any tests. The doctor says he suffers from photosensitive epilepsy. He lied on his job application. I was sure it had to be something to do with the buildings themselves.

  ‘I thought about the Sir John Soane’s Museum, and the way the architect had redirected light through his dark building with the aid of hinged mirrors. Dave Two here spotted the problem. When the builders finished those two office blocks’—he pointed out the pair of ugly red-brick boxes that stood on the opposite corners of King’s Cross Road—‘they hinged the mirrored windows on the wrong sides. As a result, when the sun is at a certain height and both sets of windows are opened out, a shaft of light bounces between them and down into the street. And on some days when it’s hot and very bright, the beam also hits that student block, intensifying its power.’ He indicated the building clad in warped sheets of shiny steel.

  ‘The light blinded Mrs Foster, heated up the tank of one of the motorbikes, caused traffic accidents, sent a dog into a rage and even made a woman walk into a plate-glass window. But the worst part was that most of this could have been prevented. The various cases were written up by different officers on different forces. There’s a demarcation line running right across the roadway here. As a result, no one person ever read all the statements, or they would have realized that several of the victims recalled seeing a flash of light.’

  ‘So it was human error, not psychogeography,’ said May.

  ‘Was it though?’ Bryant replied with a grin. ‘Those two buildings are where Mother Merlin and Mother Green once had their houses.’

  ‘So, do I get to be on the Unit now?’ asked Dave Two, proudly smoothing his great moustache as he joined them.

  ‘No, it’s back to sinks for you,’ said Bryant.

  The builder shrugged. ‘I’ll go after the contract to put their windows in the right way around. The pay will be better,’ he replied, sauntering off.

  ‘As I won the bet,’ said Bryant, ‘there’s a very rare edition of the plays of Aeschylus that I’d like.’

  ‘You didn’t win,’ May pointed out. ‘You said, and I quote, if you found a common culprit. I think you’ll find that the dictionary definition of a culprit is “a person who is responsible for a crime or other misdeed.” You found a thing. I’d like to have dinner at Dinner, the Heston Blumenthal restaurant.’

  Bryant considered the idea as they headed back to the Unit. ‘I think in this instance you’ll have to settle for a kebab from Kebabs on King’s Cross Road. I’m not on a builder’s salary.’

  Bryant & May and the Antichrist

  ‘ “Devils have no power at all, save by a certain subtle art,” ’ Arthur Bryant muttered darkly from behind an enormous leather-bound volume.

  ‘What are you reading?’ asked John May, tapping at the pudgy fingers he could see curled around the gold-edged pages opposite him. They were seated in Bryant’s Bloomsbury flat amid the detritus of a late Sunday morning breakfast that had involved kippers, Lincolnshire sausages and baked beans.

  ‘It’s a quote from the Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches,’ replied Bryant matter-of-factly. ‘Not the 1486 edition of course, just a facsimile. It was designed as a guidebook for inquisitors to aid them in the identification of witches.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Bryant started explaining again. May wondered how many times he could ask his partner to repeat what he was saying before he gave up and tuned out. Bryant’s enthusiasm for esoteric subjects could be trying. It was like having a complicated joke explained to you by an earnest child while looking for your turn-off in heavy traffic.

  ‘And that’s why midwives were burned at the stake,’ Bryant finished blithely. ‘The point being that the Devil’s “subtle art” lies in his insidious power to influence the way you think.’

 
; May set his Sunday Times aside. ‘Why don’t you read something normal for once? A novel, a newspaper, a Batman comic or something. Do a crossword. You’d relax more.’

  ‘I don’t want to relax, thank you.’

  May threw the newspaper across. ‘Read the obituaries, then. You like those.’

  ‘No, they never tell you how the subject died. Painfully, happily, in a freak accident, filled with regret for lost loves? Surely that’s the best bit.’ He tapped the cover of the Malleus Maleficarum. ‘Millions carked it because of this book. Anyone who didn’t fit the standard image of a pious Christian, anyone who was poor or old or simply different. It’s a lesson we’ve still not learned.’

  ‘And you’re reading it now because…?’

  Lowering the volume, Bryant raised his eyebrows and furrowed his chin as if the answer was painfully obvious. ‘Manoj Haranai has come back.’

  ‘Haranai? This is the hate preacher who got kicked out of Islington a few years ago?’

  ‘Yes, and I think he’s up to his old tricks again.’ Bryant put down the book and removed his boots from the table.

  ‘Is that why you made me come and see you on a Sunday morning?’

  ‘He’s reinvented himself as another type of fire-and-brimstone preacher.’ Bryant poured himself a fresh cup of tea. ‘If there’s one thing I really hate, it’s preachers taking money from gullible believers.’

  ‘You hate a lot of things, Arthur,’ May reminded him.

  Over their years of being partnered at the Peculiar Crimes Unit, the pair had developed an ever-increasing list of pet hates. May’s included disorder, officialdom, committees, radio DJs, chain restaurants, selfies, uncomfortable English furniture, musicals and restaurant critics.

  Bryant’s list was somewhat more extensive, including authority, hypocrisy, parochialism, cowardice, complicated cocktails, people who stood outside stations with megaphones telling him to heed the word of Jesus, Transport for London calling passengers ‘customers,’ signs that warned him the end of the escalator was approaching, bad sculpture (specifically Paul Day’s embracing lovers at St Pancras Station and Maggi Hambling’s Oscar Wilde coffin near Trafalgar Square), men who talked about cars, television producers, press releases, twenty-somethings with beards who weren’t sea captains and all music written after 1975 except EDM, although typically there were a great many changes, updates, exceptions, cavils and footnotes to his choices.

  May was the kind of man who listened to others and amended his opinions accordingly. Bryant nurtured his list of grievances and fantasized about Jacobean methods of revenge. Happily, their likes continued to outweigh their dislikes, which at least kept them mentally fresh and employable.

  ‘But here’s the odd thing,’ Bryant continued, climbing to his feet and lighting his pipe beside the window, although it would have helped if he’d bothered to open it. ‘So far there have been no reports of him ripping anyone off, which makes me think that he’s on to a new type of scam. He’s back on his old beat, just up the road from here.’

  ‘Then he must be up to something that stays below our radar.’

  ‘The Met haven’t picked up on anything, so they can’t act. Which is why I think it may be our job to keep an eye on him.’

  ‘What do you want to do about it?’ asked May. Watching his partner smoke made him want to pat his pocket for a cigarette until he remembered that he’d quit again.

  ‘I think we should go to church,’ Bryant replied brightly.

  Their meeting with the preacher occurred on a normal London day, which is to say it was veiled with rain and as grey as a sock. That Sunday morning the whole of King’s Cross had a hangover. Nothing was open, there was hardly any traffic and the only sound came from suitcases being rolled back to the station by sodden football supporters.

  By contrast, the little church on Pentonville Road was flourishing. It hid among the usual array of low-rent stores, a filthy betting office, a shop that sold elderly Turkish pastries, a run-down bar full of obese men in three-quarter-length trousers and baseball caps who looked like giant toddlers, an old-fashioned minicab company, a place that unlocked stolen phones and mailed money orders overseas and a partially burned-down nightclub called Cocks & Hens.

  The congregation stood patiently outside the hall waiting for the doors to open, and were attired for a wedding. Nearly all of the worshippers were of Caribbean and West African extraction, and most were women over forty. Among them was Alma Sorrowbridge, Arthur Bryant’s landlady. Her usual church in Finsbury Park had been temporarily closed down by the council, but nobody had been able to tell her why. She suspected it was being sold off for flats. Regular churchgoers had been redirected to a number of smaller chapels, including this one, the Brotherhood of the Rejoicing Heart.

  ‘Did you ever read the official profile on this fellow?’ Bryant asked May as they slipped in behind Alma. ‘He’s a piece of work, a lay preacher who supposedly studied a hotchpotch of sketchy belief systems. He’s been pulled in many times for causing an affray, public nuisance, cyberfraud, money laundering, even a couple of B and Es.’

  ‘So he got deported?’

  ‘No, he left ahead of an official push.’ Bryant brushed at a ketchup stain on his shirt. ‘There was a story going around that the Met lacked the hard evidence they needed for a formal prosecution. Haranai plays the long game. I guess he laid low for a while. A bit of a charmer in his time, especially with lonely widows. He beat a bigamy charge by arguing that within his religion it was legal. The psychiatric report diagnosed him with a host of disorders including paranoid schizophrenia.’

  May was surprised. ‘Yet he still got back into the country?’

  ‘Oh, he knows the ropes, whom to talk to and what to say. Let’s see what he’s got to say this time.’

  The church had been decked out with red nylon curtains and Christmas lights so that it looked more like a fringe theatre than a place of worship. As the lights dimmed, the detectives seated themselves behind Alma, who did her best to ignore them. For all his much-professed atheism, Bryant found his landlady’s faith touching. She had a powerful, optimistic belief that everything happened for a purpose. Nothing seemed to depress her.

  A small gospel choir robed in purple rose from folding chairs and sang angelically. They were followed by a fat little motivational speaker who talked in vague, wide-ranging terms about the Kingdom of Heaven. Manoj Haranai had clearly been held back as the headline act. He was a larger-than-life presence who commanded the audience from the moment he entered, walking gravely to the front of the stage to deliver his address, then roaming through the congregation as he drove each point home, warning each of the attendees with a laser stare.

  Bryant leaned in to May’s ear. ‘I’m surprised anyone believes in all this rubbish.’

  ‘I don’t, Mr Bryant,’ said Alma, overhearing him, ‘but one of my ladies does. She says his soul shines forth.’

  ‘That’s not his soul, it’s sweat. Look at him, he’s making the stage wet.’

  Haranai was ranting now. ‘DENY the kingdom of the LORD and you will invite SATAN into YOUR home!’ Back and forth he strode, thrusting an accusing forefinger at members of the audience.

  ‘I’m here to represent her,’ Alma confided.

  Bryant craned forward. ‘Your friend? Why isn’t she here?’

  ‘She’s at home resting. She had a nasty shock yesterday evening. She’s very upset.’

  ‘Wait, does this have something to do with Mr Haranai?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Alma whispered. ‘When she got home from the shops she found she’d been burgled. She lost all her savings, poor thing.’

  The audience rose to its feet and applauded loudly. Apparently this part of the event was at an end. ‘What happens now?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘He does individual consultations,’ Alma replied.

  ‘And o
f course he charges a fee.’ A thought struck him. ‘Did your friend have a consultation with him?’

  ‘Yes, she told Mr Haranai where she lived.’

  ‘What, and you thought you’d come and investigate this by yourself? You do remember you share a flat with a detective, don’t you?’

  ‘I didn’t like to bother you with something like this, so I went to Islington Police Station.’

  Bryant’s exasperation grew. ‘Why would you do that?’

  Alma looked at him with shame in her face. ‘I thought it might be better to talk to a younger officer from, you know, a more ethnic background.’

  ‘What, instead of the old white bloke who couldn’t possibly begin to understand your friend’s problem? Where does this gullible old trout live, anyway?’

  It was a red rag to a bull, of course. To think that his own landlady wouldn’t avail herself of his services! As soon as the performance was fully at an end, Bryant made Alma give him the address and the detectives headed to Canonbury to visit Mrs Eustacia Granville.

  * * *

  —

  Stepping away from the Caledonian Road, a thoroughfare of dry cleaners, minimarts and shops with mystifying window displays, they soon found themselves in an elegant street of terraced houses with Ionic pilasters and Doric columns, to which had been added sphinxes and obelisks.

  ‘They were built about a hundred and eighty years ago when Britain was very concerned about Egypt and Syria,’ said Bryant. ‘Nothing really changes, does it? That must be the place, just there.’

  Between the villas stood a new block of flats with meanly proportioned balconies of grey steel. The gated entrance had a large illuminated key pad and a porter call button. Mrs Granville had clearly been informed that the detectives were coming to visit, because she had set out tea with the best china and arranged a choice of lurid, unappetizing cakes. The flat was crammed with far too much furniture, all of it purchased for a more spacious property.