‘Yes, when I’ve finished with the past. I want to know everything before I die, and I’m running out of time.’ His knife slipped and catapulted breadcrumbs across the office. ‘It’s an awful paradox. The more I learn the less I truly understand. Have you looked in our box of unsolved cases lately? The Chamber of Horrors Maniac. The Deptford Demon. The Odeon Strangler. The Limehouse Ratboy. We’ll never be able to close them. The verdicts were all “murder by person or persons unknown.” I’m only hanging on to the files out of sentimentality.’
There was a bang and the lights went out. Unconcerned, Bryant withdrew his knife from the smoking toaster and lit a candle in a saucer.
‘D’you know, at night I recall everything about London that I thought I’d lost. I remember the dockyards at Deptford Creek and the walk from Blue Anchor Road to the China Hall, and waiting for my father outside the Dog and Bell—he met Rudyard Kipling, did you know? Long story—and my mother went to prison and I investigated the bombing of the Post Office Tower.’
May lost his place in the conversation. ‘Wait, your mother—?’
‘It’s all stored away up here.’ Bryant tapped his temple. ‘My head’s like an attic full of ephemera, old record albums, paperbacks you can’t bear to throw out and those moulds dentists used to make of your teeth.’
May sighed and pulled his chair closer to his desk. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘do you want to talk about it?’
Bryant’s refulgent blue eyes widened. ‘What?’
‘Well, there’s obviously something on your mind that’s making you introspective, so out with it.’
‘I think the world has moved into a new technological phase, and it hasn’t taken me with it.’
‘I could have told you that years ago.’
‘All these apps and drones and smart-doodads—they don’t make life simpler or easier. What’s the point of buying things online that don’t fit when you can go to the shops? I don’t understand what anyone gets at the end of it all.’
‘Have you tried asking Dan?’
‘Yes, he spoke to me in great detail. When I woke up he’d gone.’
‘Look,’ said May, ‘this is you.’ He cleared a space on their conjoined desks and placed a pencil on it. ‘You see something online that you want to buy, and you contact the seller.’ He placed a rubber band next to the pencil. ‘This seller takes your money and passes your information along to another company, who pays the seller.’ Here he set down his fountain pen. ‘The company uses your details to find you another product, advertising it on the site you first looked at, and sells you something new. Everyone pays everyone else.’
‘I’m not happy being a pencil,’ Bryant complained. ‘I’d be happier as a fountain pen. The pen makes more money.’
‘Yes, but you get the product.’
‘That was a straight transaction. I’m not in profit, plus I lost my information. Even the rubber band’s better off than me.’
‘Perhaps you should stay away from transaction technology,’ said May.
‘How can I when it’s everywhere?’ Bryant’s wrinkled face loomed over the flickering candle. ‘I read in the paper that a private school asked its pupils to make Christmas cards, and the pupils outsourced them to a Chinese service they found online. I’d happily go back to living without the Internet. And electricity, for that matter.’
The lights came back on. Bryant winced theatrically, a portly vampire hit by dawn’s rays.
‘Thank God for that,’ said May just as Janice Longbright stepped into the room.
‘I thought you’d already gone,’ said Janice.
‘Where?’
‘There’s a case in. Didn’t anyone tell you? A murder in Soho. Sounds pretty nasty. They’ve got someone in custody.’
Bryant rose, pushed his trilby over his ears and knotted his scarf. ‘Then why do they need us?’
‘The young lady says it was all the fault of her phone.’
‘How come we only get the nutters?’ May asked.
‘Because urban madness is our trade.’ Bryant handed Longbright the blackened toaster. ‘Throw this out, would you? Something’s gone wrong with it.’
* * *
—
‘That is the most disgusting bloody thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen what Colin eats,’ said Meera Mangeshkar, peering into the waste bin. They were standing in one of Chinatown’s shadowy back alleys, at the rear of Gerrard Street.
Dan Banbury stood back against the alley wall, breathing deeply and trying to prevent himself from throwing up. John May stayed with the accused while his partner took a positively unhealthy interest in the bin. It was a brown plastic trough with a broken lid, filled with the remains of a hundred Chinese dinners, and a body. Sticking out from the noodles, bean sprouts, special fried rice, chicken feet and fish heads were a pair of jean-clad legs ending in snakeskin cowboy boots. It was an unpleasantly humid evening and the smell was almost tangible.
‘It looks like he drowned in someone’s sweet and sour sauce,’ said Bryant, fascinated. Banbury made another throwing-up noise.
‘What happened?’ May asked the suspect. ‘Wait a minute, who are you and who’s the bloke in the bin?’
In her floral summer top and white jeans the girl looked normal enough. She seemed a little annoyed and impatient, but was not confused or disturbed in any way. ‘My name is Naomi Sams,’ she replied, holding up her smartphone. ‘I don’t know who he is, and if it wasn’t for this stupid thing I wouldn’t even be here.’
‘Right, we have to get him out,’ said Meera, uncapping a pot of Tiger Balm and dabbing some under Banbury’s nose. ‘Dan, grab a leg.’
‘Really? Is this in my job description now?’ The crime scene manager looked over at the body half submerged in meal remains.
‘It does you good to get away from the keyboard occasionally,’ said Meera. Together they leaned over the lip of the bin and each pulled an ankle. It took longer than they expected to get him out, thanks to the suction effect of so much warm wet food. The body emerged with the sound of a Wellington boot being pulled from mud.
Sitting him up in the bin proved to be a bad idea as he started to sink again, so they laboriously lifted him out and propped him against the alley wall. ‘OK,’ said Banbury, wiping pieces of pork from his sleeves, ‘we’re looking at a white male, late thirties, light build, suffocated.’
‘You’re already sure of that?’ asked Bryant.
‘It seems highly likely, Mr B.,’ said Banbury. ‘There’s a prawn up his nose.’ The corpse’s head was covered in bright orange slime. Even his eyeballs were treacly with sauce. There were noodles hanging out of his mouth and slices of lemon stuck to his neck.
‘Do you want to talk us through what happened here or back at the station?’ May asked the suspect.
‘What, I get a choice?’ Miss Sams looked surprised. ‘You’re not normal police, are you?’
‘We’re from the Peculiar Crimes Unit and this doesn’t look like a normal crime,’ he replied.
‘OK.’ She took a deep breath, but glanced over at the corpse and hesitated.
‘Can you get that fellow out of here, Dan?’ May asked.
‘He’s stuck to the wall,’ said Meera.
‘Just get rid of him.’
‘I’ve got this stupid app on my phone,’ said Sams, showing May her mobile screen. ‘It’s called Breadcrumb. The idea is that—’
‘Is this relevant?’
‘I’m not an idiot. You asked me what I was doing here.’
‘Sorry.’
She tapped her screen and a series of orange dots appeared on a black map. ‘It keeps track of where you are so you can always find your way back. It doesn’t show you the surrounding streets, just your route. Breadcrumbs, get it? But it’s buggy. I was trying to find the tube station and it sent me down here. As soon
as I realized it was a dead end I stopped and tried to get it working properly again. I looked up and realized that this guy was standing in the doorway at the end watching me. He had a knife in one hand, a big kitchen knife, the sort of thing you use for cutting through bones, and he made this gesture like—oh, I don’t know, like I was the last straw and he’d had enough of everything. Then he ran at me. The knife was still in his hand. I just sort of—froze, I suppose. It all happened so fast.’
‘Was the knife raised?’ asked May. ‘Was he threatening you?’
Sams gave him a look. ‘What do you think? Just as he reached me he slipped.’
May looked down and saw that the alley pavement was black with oil. A single skid-mark led to the bin.
‘I gave him a shove while he was off-balance and he fell in headfirst. He tried to get out but sort of floundered around, sinking in deeper the more he wriggled, and there were bubbles of sauce coming out and he stopped moving.’
‘You didn’t try to help him.’
‘He came at me with a bloody knife!’
‘So if we empty that bin out we’ll find a knife,’ said May.
‘I am so not doing that,’ Meera warned.
* * *
—
DS Mangeshkar unearthed the kitchen knife after ten minutes of poking about with a piece of bamboo she had found in the restaurant.
‘It’ll be interesting to see if we can get prints off the handle,’ said May as he and Bryant walked to the end of the alleyway.
They reached the back door of the Lucky Dragon Chinese restaurant, an insalubrious Cantonese joint with yellow flock wallpaper, waterfall calendars and red paper lanterns. Banbury called out a warning: ‘If you go in there you’ll be compromising a potential crime scene.’
‘Don’t care, going in,’ Bryant called back. May found a light switch. The restaurant’s storeroom was filled with drums of oil and poly boxes of vacuum-packed duck breasts. ‘Cooked on the premises, my arse,’ said Bryant. He stood in the doorway and looked back into the alley. ‘Do you think her story makes any kind of sense?’
‘It does now,’ said May. When Bryant turned, he saw that there was another pair of legs sticking out from between the boxes. The concrete floor was sticky with blood.
‘I think she caught her attacker in the middle of something,’ said Bryant.
* * *
—
Back at the PCU, the detectives gathered everyone in the operations room and set up whiteboards. Information was coming in thick and fast, but at this stage the problem lay in assigning importance to each detail.
‘I can smell sweet-and-sour fish,’ said Raymond Land. ‘Can you not eat lunch in this room? Where are we?’
‘Two dead, one suspect,’ said John May. He explained the circumstances to the Unit chief.
‘You think she saw him attacking this other bloke and he went for her, is that it? Get rid of the witness?’
‘We don’t know yet,’ May admitted. ‘He may not have realized he was still holding the knife. She says she saw him as a threat and shoved him.’
Dan Banbury arrived and set down his kit. ‘I’ve got an update if you’re ready?’
May sat down and gave him the floor.
‘Everything at the site fits with Miss Sams’s description of what happened. I’ve got footprints of the two males going inside, one coming out again, one set for Sams entering the alley.’
‘Have you got IDs on the men for us?’
Banbury ran his hand over his tufted fair hair. ‘The chap who asphyxiated in the bin is Archie Marlow, a small-time “entrepreneur” very familiar with the staff at Southwark Crown Court. Marlow died from inhaling a mixture of liquids and solids. There was a spring roll stuck in his throat. The chap on the floor of the storage room is Nikos Petrides, known to his pals as “Little Nicky,” equally dodgy. He died from a single stab wound to the heart. Floor prints are all consistent with Marlow launching an unexpected attack on Petrides.’
‘Any idea how they knew each other?’ asked May.
Dan checked his notes. ‘Little Nicky is also, guess what, an entrepreneur. They both toyed around with IT start-ups, failed to raise VC—’
‘Explain,’ said Bryant.
‘Sorry, Mr B., venture capital. Most start-up entrepreneurs are losers who still think the Internet is a meritocracy. After running up debts they have a habit of turning up in other corners of the nonemployed universe hawking stuff to mugs. No obvious connection between the two just yet, but I’d suggest we’re looking at a falling-out among thieves. Open and shut. Except.’ He unfolded a note and pinned it to the board. ‘Little Nicky had 250,000 pounds in his current account, put there by an offshore company in the last week. Before that the account averaged a figure of less than three hundred. If you’re wondering about Archie Marlow’s money, there isn’t any. He died broke.’
‘So a young lady studying her phone app takes a wrong turn into an alleyway just as Mr Marlow finishes off Mr Petrides,’ said Bryant, scrawling across the whiteboard in handwriting no one could decipher. ‘Marlow spots her at the worst possible moment and goes off on one. Someone in the restaurant must know what Petrides was doing there.’
‘We’re on it,’ Banbury said. ‘Nothing so far.’
‘What about phone records?’ asked Longbright. ‘Petrides and Marlow might have spoken to one another.’
‘It seems there was a flurry of calls two weeks ago, on Thursday at, let me see, eleven twenty-four P.M. They continued for the next four days. We’ve no transcripts.’
‘Two weeks ago,’ Bryant repeated. ‘Wasn’t that the day…?’
‘Yes,’ said Banbury.
‘Could this be something for the Special Ops bods?’
‘It’s our case, Mr B., our problem.’
Bryant passed a hand across his face. This was the last thing they needed. Two weeks earlier, at the end of the evening’s rush hour, a van had mounted the pavement in Piccadilly and had gone through the window of a fashionable, busy and very expensive champagne bar and restaurant called Servicio that was frequented by international politicians. Four people had died, with a further two still in intensive care. The driver of the van had been captured alive. He proved to be an incoherent British national from Manchester with a history of mental problems.
‘Can you get anything on Petrides’s political persuasion?’ asked May.
‘I already have it. St George’s Cross flags in the windows of his flat.’ Banbury handed out screenshots.
‘Are you telling me that these two no-hopers are somehow connected to a massacre?’ asked Bryant. ‘I don’t believe it. Look at them.’ He jabbed a finger at the shots Banbury had added to the board. ‘Archie the jobless wonder and Little Nicky, Dr Frankenstein’s assistant. They’d be turned away from a McDonald’s. And how could there be any connection with the money that turned up in Petrides’s account?’
‘I may have a way to find that out,’ said May, handing Bryant his trilby. ‘Come with me.’
* * *
—
‘We’re going around the corner to York Way, to a place you walk past every day. I bet you’ve never even noticed what goes on in there.’ May gripped Bryant’s arm and marched his partner along the pavement.
‘Rubbish. I know every square inch of this revolting neighbourhood.’
‘Not this inch, you don’t,’ replied May.
Although he must have passed the place a thousand times, Bryant had never before taken note of the building. It existed between two restored warehouses, a dark glass wall with heavy curtains obscuring the rooms beyond. May used a swipecard on the door panel.
‘This is HubKX,’ he said.
‘It doesn’t have a sign,’ said Bryant indignantly.
‘It doesn’t need one. Everybody who needs to use it knows where it is.’
The door opened and they stepped beyond the black curtains. It took a few moments for Bryant’s eyes to adjust. He saw why no further light was needed. A handful of laptop users were sitting close to the ground on green and pink toadstools. It looked like Alice in Wonderland for nerds.
‘What’s going on here?’ he whispered, loosening his scarf.
‘This is Casper. He’ll explain.’
The teenager on the floor had clearly been expecting them. He scooted over to allow May access to his laptop. As Bryant looked more closely he saw that Casper was not a child at all but a man in his mid-thirties, dressed in a grey hoodie several sizes too large.
‘Usually we’re raising money for community land trusts,’ Casper explained. ‘We crowdfund restoration work and launch start-ups via share offerings through blockchain banks.’
‘I see your lips moving but only nonsense comes out,’ said Bryant apologetically. ‘You might as well be French.’
‘Look at it this way.’ Casper walked Bryant over to the coffee bar that stood in a recess at the side of the room. ‘Traditionally nobody shares information across different industries, but we can because our disruptive new networks are replacing the old hierarchies.’
‘It’s like tuning in an old radio,’ said Bryant. ‘I’m hearing slightly less than thirty percent of what you say. Keep going.’
‘In a hierarchy you report to the floor above and receive information from the floor below, yes? So you’ve no room to manoeuvre. In a network everyone receives information equally.’ Casper gestured to a toadstool. ‘Have a seat.’
‘Thank you, I’m not a pixie,’ said Bryant. ‘John, how is this relevant to the investigation?’
‘Dan and I keep you away from this sort of thing because we know how you feel about technology. This is what I want to show you.’ May folded his legs with easy elegance and dropped before the screen. Casper took his phone and transferred three numbers. Pulling up a map of London, he expanded the image to reveal an animatic of the streets around them, pulsing in real time.
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