‘I don’t think I’d fit it. I’m a size six, mostly.’
‘What do you mean, mostly?’
‘I spend too much time at the gym. Upper body strength.’
Janice checked the label. ‘This is a six so you should be fine.’
Meera looked horrified. ‘I’m not trying that on; it looks like it’d fall apart. What’s it made out of, anyway?’
‘It’s satin and crêpe de chine. I used to model clothes like this.’
‘What, before you ended up stripping?’ Meera held up the dress and poked at it.
‘I was never an ecdysiast, I was a hostess.’
‘Sure you were. All right,’ said Meera, pulling off her sweater, ‘but don’t laugh.’
* * *
—
‘If you could just describe what was going through your head when he went over the edge,’ said May, checking his watch. ‘Just give us something, Miss Hope, and we may be able to have the charge mitigated.’
‘I wouldn’t want that,’ said Hope flatly.
‘You must have had a reason,’ snapped Bryant. ‘You didn’t leave home to go to the exhibition together; he left first and you caught him up. Why?’
Hope looked down at the floor, refusing to catch his eye. ‘You have to charge me with murder or let me go.’
‘Arthur, we’re out of time,’ said May. ‘I can’t get an extension without Raymond’s approval and he’s gone off somewhere.’
‘There must be someone in the Murder Investigation Team who can grant approval.’
‘They need Land’s signature.’
‘Charge me,’ Hope challenged. ‘You have to do it.’
Bryant looked at the page that lay between them. On top of it was a black Biro. All that was needed now were two signatures.
The alarm on May’s phone made them both jump. Hope remained immobile. Realizing what the tone signified, she suddenly looked more peaceful. ‘That’s it,’ said May, reaching across and picking up the pen. He uncapped it and started to sign the charge sheet.
The door to the interview room slammed open. ‘Don’t sign it!’ Longbright cried. ‘She didn’t do it.’
‘You know nothing,’ replied Hope.
‘I know you couldn’t have killed him.’ Longbright set the dress down on the interview table. ‘It’s a size six from 1935. The satin is worn thin.’
‘It was my grandmother’s,’ said Hope, looking uncomfortable.
‘Mr Bryant, Meera is a size six. She just tried the dress on,’ Longbright explained. ‘It fitted her perfectly, but people were slimmer when it was made. It’s physically impossible to raise your arms above waist height. She couldn’t have pushed Scott in the way she described without tearing the sleeves to pieces.’
‘If you didn’t push him, what did you do?’ asked May.
Hope’s shoulders sagged forward. She gnawed at a knuckle, thinking through the implications of her response. The room remained silent. Finally she spoke. ‘I didn’t do anything,’ she said.
‘Then how did he—’ May began.
‘He jumped,’ said Bryant. ‘She followed him there because she knew he was going to try.’ He turned to Hope. ‘That’s why you and he were standing on opposite sides of the gallery’s reception room, wasn’t it? He hadn’t seen you until that moment.’
Her voice was so quiet now that they could hear the rain falling into the basement stairwell, and had to strain forward to hear her. ‘Have you ever dealt with someone who’s severely depressed, any of you?’ she asked. ‘There’s no rationality to it. There’s nothing you can say or do that will make them feel better. He suffered from bouts of depression all through his life,’ she went on. ‘He’d tried to kill himself before. I had always managed to stop him. But we reached a point where he just wanted to die. He had stopped taking his meds, and wouldn’t allow me to get him any more help. You don’t understand what the strain of living with someone like that does to you. The more time we spent together, the more this—thing—took over our lives, until I had all but disappeared.’
She rose and walked unsteadily to the window, where raindrops were cutting through the dirt on the panes.
‘I knew he was determined to do it this time. He wouldn’t alter his will to favour Emily. He wanted to leave everything to me. I followed him up to the observation deck, and I knew there was nothing I could do to stop him. Then that blond woman followed us up. As he moved towards the railing I knew I had to make it look like murder, so I closed in on him, knowing she would back up my story.’
‘You knew what would happen afterwards,’ said Bryant.
‘What?’ asked May. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You can’t inherit from somebody you’ve murdered if it can be proved you had something to gain, and the will was made in Miss Hope’s favour,’ said Bryant. ‘The house in Hampstead would pass to his daughter. That’s right, isn’t it, Miss Hope?’
‘He wouldn’t change the will, and there was a clause in it preventing me from passing it to her,’ she said numbly. ‘But she would inherit if I couldn’t.’
‘A loophole,’ said Bryant. ‘You didn’t plan this. You wouldn’t have worn the dress if you had.’
She looked up at them, wiping her eyes. ‘The thought occurred to me when I was up there, standing before him, listening to him explain yet again why I would be doing him a favour by letting him end it all. I suddenly thought: This time I don’t have to beg and plead. This time Emily could be protected, and perhaps the court would show me mercy when the facts surrounding his medical history emerged.’
‘You needn’t have taken that route,’ said Bryant. ‘You’re a declared bankrupt. If you receive an inheritance after filing for bankruptcy, it usually becomes part of your bankruptcy estate. The property would most likely have passed to Emily anyway.’
Longbright handed Hope a handkerchief.
‘If you can’t inherit and Mr Scott’s daughter is protected, there is no reason why you should be charged,’ said Bryant. ‘You can have your life back.’
‘We still have to file a report,’ said May. ‘But we’re an autonomous unit, we don’t report to the HSCC. You should be with Emily now.’
Longbright took her by the arm and led her out.
‘The dress,’ said Bryant, ‘you can take it with you.’
‘Give it to the officer who fitted it,’ said Hope. ‘I never want to see it again.’
As Rebecca Hope was met by her stepdaughter and led off into the rain, May turned away from the window of their office and tore up the charge sheet. ‘I hope we did the right thing,’ he said. ‘We’ll get hell for this.’
‘Probably,’ Bryant agreed. ‘Too much of this job is about taking things away from people. It feels good to give something back. Perhaps we restored her to visibility.’
* Homicide and Serious Crime Command.
Bryant & May and the Consul’s Son
In the damp, unlit basement of number 231 Caledonian Road, King’s Cross, Central London, a workman shouted across to his mate. Confusingly, they were both called Dave. The basement smelled of drains and fungus and something rich and dark from the river below that prickled the skin and cleared the sinuses.
‘I think we’ve got a problem,’ said Dave, stepping over the flooded areas of the basement floor. ‘Look.’ He ran his torch beam across the stone, where a foot-wide channel reflected slow-moving, brackish water. The stream disappeared into an iron grate set in the stone slabs. Long smears cut through the green slime that had formed on the floor.
The other Dave scratched his backside with the end of a bradawl, knelt down, stuck his forefinger in the water, tasted it and spat. ‘It’s sort of fresh.’
‘What do you mean, “sort of”?’
‘Not sewage.’ He rose and spat again. ‘Nasty, though. Freezing cold. It’s probably coming f
rom the River Fleet. Half of the old buildings around here still have wells in their basements.’
‘Is that how this place gets its drinking water? It would explain a lot about the nutters upstairs. Lead in the pipes.’
‘No, they’re on Thames Water here.’ Dave Two shone the torch across the far wall, lighting up a modern steel door. ‘That shouldn’t be there. Two entrances to the same basement?’
‘That must belong to the joint next door. Maybe it was all one big building, then got flogged off separately.’
‘What’s next door?’
‘The Ladykillers Café and a bar. It looks like they’re storing their stock down here.’ He waved his torch beam over wine racks and crates.
The second Dave poked about in his tool bag and found a claw hammer. ‘Did you ever go to Becky’s Dive Bar in Borough, under the Hop Exchange?’ He stepped across the channel and checked out the far side of the room. ‘Becky’s barman had the biggest belly in London. To reach the loos you had to step across an underground river cut into the floor, exactly like this.’
‘Blimey. Is it still there?’
‘What, the bar? No, I think she got closed down for selling tainted sausages. What’s that?’
In the centre of the river-damp floor sat a striated concrete box, approximately eight feet long and three feet wide.
‘It can’t be a substation,’ said the first Dave. ‘Not with a concrete lid. That’s Portland stone. Half of London was once made out of it. Comes from the Isle of Portland in Dorset. White limestone. They used it to build St Paul’s Cathedral. And Buckingham Palace.’
‘How do you know all that?’
‘My old man was a stonemason.’ Dave One sidled over with a cage lamp and set it down. Taking his place at the corner of the lid, he indicated that Dave Two should do the same at the other end. Together they strained to lift it off. The slab proved too heavy to raise so they were forced to slide it over. Even then it would only move inch by painful inch.
After a few minutes they had managed to shift it halfway, but then it reached its tipping point and dropped, slamming to the floor. The Daves jumped out of the way to avoid having their toes crushed.
One of them crept forward with the cage light and gingerly lowered it over the edge.
‘Is there something inside?’ asked Dave One, straining to see.
‘Not something,’ replied Dave Two. ‘Someone.’
They peered in together. Within was a slender body wrapped in a red plastic tablecloth covered in purple hyacinths. ‘Blimey,’ said Dave One. ‘Is he alive?’
Dave Two gave a gesture of despair. ‘Of course he’s not bloody alive, he had half a ton of Portland stone on top of him.’
Dave One considered the point. ‘Then how did he get in there?’
They walked around the tomb, their torch beams crisscrossing. ‘Here.’ Dave Two crouched down and ran his hand along the side of the box. ‘This bit’s a different colour. Painted wood.’ He pushed against it and found that the upper edge had a sprung swing-hinge. ‘The body could have been pushed in.’ Rising, he studied the box from a little further back. ‘What’s it for? You wouldn’t make a junction box out of stone. All the electrics are up on the ground floor.’
‘It’s like an altar or something,’ said Dave One. ‘I thought we’d find some gas meters and a pump, not a corpse in a tablecloth. My missus has one just like that.’
‘Maybe she did it, then.’
Dave One looked back at the staircase. ‘The PCU’s main entrance has facial recognition software, so he couldn’t have come that way. How did it get here?’
His partner pointed back at the steel door in the far wall. ‘There’s another method of egress.’
‘Egress?’
‘Going in and out.’ Dave Two gave himself another scratch with the bradawl. ‘I think there are bugs down here. You know the first thing I’d do? Check with the owners of the café, find out where the key to that door is.’
‘Which sounds like a perfectly viable plan until you remember you’re not a detective like them upstairs, but a builder-decorator with a certificate in plumbing.’
Dave Two began to pack up his tools with a deep sigh. ‘I’m wasted in this job,’ he said.
* * *
—
Some weeks later, Janice Longbright was looking around the PCU’s ground-floor waiting room, trying to summon an inner reserve of patience that she knew she did not possess. Part of the Unit’s new commitment to accountability involved encouraging members of the public to come forward and talk to local officers in the weekly clinic, and today it was her turn to deal with them.
The routine was simple. You listened, filled out a form and directed them to another department. It achieved nothing and helped no one. If you were lucky, they didn’t come back. Sometimes she ended up giving them money from her own purse. She studied the core of familiar faces. They fell into three distinct groups: people undergoing genuine hardship; complainers to whom Raymond Land referred as ‘squeaky wheels’; and lonely men and women who had no one left to talk to but shopkeepers and public officials. There were six waiting to see her, one of whom was wrapped in a red nylon sleeping bag and cradling a sickly-looking terrier.
She checked her list. ‘Mr Jamel Raif?’
The one in the sleeping bag raised his hand. She beckoned him to follow, waiting while he climbed out of the bag. He had no trousers. Taking him into the overheated interview room, she wedged open the window to let some fresh air in. Raif smelled rank. ‘Please take a seat. Do you have any clothes?’
He looked forlornly down at the dog. ‘Somebody stole my holdall.’
‘Is that why you’re here?’
‘No, I can get clothes at Cally Road Worship. My work jeans are in the wash right now.’ There was an evangelical hall nearby that gave out clothes on Sunday mornings. Raif modestly folded the sleeping bag over his boxers. The terrier stared at her expectantly. ‘A friend of mine has gone missing.’
‘You still sleeping on the street?’ She had seen this one before, living in a red nylon tent under the canal bridge at Royal College Street.
‘Nearly a year now.’
‘That’s a long time. Are you—’
‘Don’t worry about me, I’ve got myself a job, I work nights cleaning up at the Vinyl Café over by the Tileyard Studios. I just don’t have a home. This is about Jerry. That’s what I call him. His name is Jericho.’
‘Jericho.’ Longbright opened a drawer and took out a notepad. A pen and paper were still best for interviews. ‘When and where did your friend go missing?’
‘Just up the road, around five months ago. August the tenth, I think.’ He handed over a crumpled photograph. It showed a lean-bodied young man with shoulder-length blond hair, a wispy blond beard and no shirt, leaning against the side of a camper van brushing his teeth. He had wooden beads around his neck and the sun in his eyes.
Longbright tapped a crimson nail against her teeth. She knew where the shot had been taken. Students used to sell their gap-year utility vehicles there until the police stopped them. ‘This is on Market Road, near Cally Road tube station, isn’t it?’
‘He had an old VW camper van,’ Raif explained. ‘He was going to get rid of it, but he had an accident and couldn’t afford to get it fixed. I saw him most mornings. Then one night he just disappeared.’
‘One night. How do you know that?’
‘I was trying to get some kip—my sleeping bag was against the wall behind his van. His light was on. It went off some time after midnight, then I heard the side doors open and close. The van is still there. The council took all the other abandoned vehicles away but they had trouble trying to move the VW.’
‘You haven’t seen him since then?’
‘No.’
‘Why did you wait so long to report him missing?’
/> ‘I didn’t know you were running the clinic again. The old King’s Cross station closed down.’
‘There are constables covering your area.’
‘We don’t have a good relationship with them, because of the girls.’
Ah yes, the ‘girls,’ she thought, remembering the hard-boiled lineup of gender-fluid ladies who stalked the street after midnight. A few of the roughest ones still worked the lower end of the road. ‘You’ve been around here a long time now.’
‘I want to get settled but they keep moving me over the border,’ said Raif sadly. Camden and Islington had a habit of shifting transients across the line that separated the two boroughs.
‘How do you know your friend didn’t just go travelling again?’
‘He had connections but no money. Really, like no money at all.’
‘Do you remember the exact date he went missing?’
‘I didn’t see him after the beginning of August.’
‘Does Vice still do roundups?’
‘Not so often now. Most of the girls have moved on. They come by once in a while.’
‘Do you have anything that would help me find Jericho?’
‘Just the picture. He never told me his last name. Maybe Camden still has the van. I think they sell them at auction.’
Longbright checked the clock above the door. ‘And this is all you have?’
‘I can give you a physical description. And I can draw him for you. I went to art college. Not that a degree in fine art can get you a job.’
‘It could help us identify him. I’ll check for the vehicle. If you leave details of where we can contact you…’ She walked to the door and opened it; the queue in the waiting room had built up considerably.
‘You already know where to find me.’ Raif shuffled to his feet and held the sleeping bag over himself. The dog watched him anxiously. ‘There was one thing,’ he said. ‘He told me about his father, like it was a big deal, but I don’t know if it’s true.’
‘What about his father?’
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