Full Dark House

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘May I remind you,’ said Bryant, trying to muster some dignity, ‘that this is called the Peculiar Crimes Unit?’

  ‘The day we met, you told me that their definition of peculiar and yours were different. You just didn’t warn me how different. I know you’re a bit older than me, but I’d like a chance to handle things another way, before Davenport hears what you’ve done and nails boards across the entrance to the office. I should have put my foot down when you brought in the clairvoyant, then perhaps none of this would have happened. Why don’t you take a break, go and give the ARP boys a hand, make use of yourself, and try not to think so much?’

  ‘I’ll admit that as a team we’ve been having a few teething troubles.’

  ‘Teething troubles? You just accused a man who has the ear of the Home Office of practising witchcraft! Christ on a bike.’

  ‘John, at least let’s leave it until the morning,’ Bryant pleaded. ‘You might feel differently then.’

  John raised his hands defiantly. ‘No, because in the morning you’ll try to convince me that Renalda is part of a satanic sect, or that the theatre is built on an ancient Saxon burial ground. Besides, it has nothing to do with me. Renalda—and Biddle, come to think of it—will be on the phone to Davenport right now, and he’ll have taken you off the case before dawn. I’m prepared to go a long way with you, Arthur. I even see some demented sense in what you say. The killer is a psychopath driven by desperation, fine, yes, I agree with that. But Muses, curses, protective spells? That’s where we part company.’

  He stopped when he realized that his partner was no longer following him. Looking back, he saw Bryant standing in the rain, his head dropped forward onto his chest. He looked close to tears, but May knew he couldn’t be because nothing ever seemed to upset him.

  ‘Where are you going now?’ asked May.

  ‘I promised my mother I’d look in on her,’ Bryant replied miserably.

  ‘I’ll drive you. There won’t be any buses running at this hour. Then you must try to get some sleep. At least it’s a quiet night. I’ll go back to the theatre and make sure Forthright has everything she needs.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Bryant said softly. ‘I thought it was—I don’t know what I thought. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be, just get some rest. Leave it to me. You won’t have to do anything. I’ll sort everything out with Davenport. Just accept that things didn’t work out with us, that’s all.’

  Bryant suddenly looked so pale and fragile that May felt a rush of pity for him.

  He drove his distraught partner slowly back through the smouldering ruins of Hackney and Bow, past a makeshift hospital set up on the broken pavements. There were patients lying on brass beds outside McFisheries and Woolworths. A woman was sitting on the steps of a church with her head in her hands. When a nurse tried to comfort her, she pushed her away.

  As they drove on, the devastation grew. The house where Bryant asked to be dropped was in a bomb-scarred terrace of slum dwellings long due for demolition. May was shocked to find that his partner hailed from such a rough neighbourhood.

  Embarrassed by the events of the night and by his own impoverished circumstances, Bryant stood awkwardly in the entrance to the alley beside his mother’s house and waited until the Wolseley had pulled out into the deserted road, its tail-lights fading in the thickening drizzle.

  As he watched John May drive away, he knew that the unit’s last chance for survival was leaving with him.

  52

  TAKING LEAVE

  Early on Sunday morning Londoners once more awoke to the drone of the bombers, but the drizzle had persisted through the night, and only a few aircraft had managed to drop their loads. Several fires were started, and their smoke added to the city’s dawning pallor of eye-watering gloom. After the RAF released two thousand bombs on Hamburg as a reprisal for Coventry, Germany turned its attention to the Southampton docks, steadily bombing them for the rest of the day. Attack, reprisal; the process continued in a depressing rhythm of retaliation.

  Sidney Biddle sat on the bench near the tea stall with his hands stuffed deep in his overcoat, watching the oily water surge back and forth around the barricaded pillars of Waterloo Bridge like the action of some vast diseased lung. Daylight had begun to creep across the sky, and now he could see the silver barrage balloons following the shoreline. One of them was tied to the top of Bank power station’s chimney. Another had partially deflated, and hung amorphously over the river like a creature in a Salvador Dalí painting. Biddle’s foot was throbbing, but it was strapped up with splints and bandages and he was able to walk with the aid of a crutch.

  ‘Your char’s getting cold, love,’ said Gladys Forthright, churning the contents of her mug with the end of a pencil. ‘They never leave enough chain on the teaspoon to give you a good stir, do they?’

  Neither of them had slept. Biddle was angry and confused, but invigorated by the action of the night before, newly hooked on the case and on the unit. ‘I mean, you outrank him,’ he said finally. ‘Can’t you do something?’

  ‘It may have escaped your notice, Sidney, but although I have the rank, I’m still a woman. Davenport won’t even talk to me. He acts as if I’m not there. My appointment was approved because women have to be drafted into the force. We’re fine for driving fire engines and ambulances, tracking aircraft and manning switchboards, but they don’t want to give us jobs that involve strategic decisions. You won’t find policewomen in positions of power. The men want to keep those for themselves.’

  Biddle took a sip of his tea. ‘Why does Bryant always come here? PC Crowhurst told me he sits at this spot nearly every day at sunset.’

  So that’s it, thought Forthright, he wants to understand.

  ‘You don’t know the story?’ she asked, surprised. ‘I thought someone would have told you by now. I know it’s hard to believe, but our Mr Bryant was once a man in love. Back then he was still training out of Bramshill on a one-year intensive. So many were pushed through the courses because of the approaching war. He was very young, of course. Boys leave school at fourteen in the East End, and they marry early. By the time I came up from Hendon as a DC he had met the love of his life and become engaged to her.’

  ‘Bryant had a fiancée?’

  ‘Nathalie was from France, Marseille, I think. She was dark and rather beautiful. Not easy, mind you—very independent. When they met, she was working in ground command, co-ordinating air-support units. There were so many rehearsals for war that I was relieved when it finally happened.’

  Forthright warmed her hands round her enamel mug. ‘This is where she died, on the evening of her eighteenth birthday, May nineteen thirty-seven. She fell from the bridge, just in front of us. She’d climbed up onto the balustrade and was walking along it. They’d been out drinking, celebrating, and were both a bit tipsy. He’d asked her to marry him. She would probably have been fine, but at that moment a bus horn sounded behind them, and it made her start. She lost her balance, and when he turned round to grab her, she’d gone. Arthur jumped into the water and tried to save her, but the tide was going out, and the current was too strong. He was wearing his overcoat and hobnailed police boots. He nearly drowned as well. Underwater search teams dragged the river for weeks, but they never did find her body. The river widens here. There’s nothing between us and the sea.’

  She rested the mug on her strong, shapely knees and sighed. ‘He was taken very bad for a while, tried to enlist when war was declared, but the War Office looked at his mental health record and wouldn’t take him. They marked him down as unstable. He was training to spend his life helping others but hadn’t found a way to save the girl he loved. She was the point of his life, the one he felt fated to be with for ever.

  ‘That was three years ago, and although he never talks about her, he never looks at anyone else either, not in a serious way. Oh, he thought he’d fallen in love with me for a while, but I could see it was just a crush, and put him straight. As far as he’s
concerned, he was given his chance for happiness and buggered it up. It’s something he’ll never find a way to make amends for. That’s why none of this touches him.’

  ‘I wish someone had told me.’

  ‘We all have our private tragedies. You can’t change the past. You keep going.’

  Biddle swallowed from his mug. ‘I’m not part of your past. You all seem suited to each other. I don’t think I’m the right person for your kind of operation.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong. We’re all so different. They say all the good men have gone to war, that only the unemployables are left. That’s why we were lucky to find Mr May. He’s practical, he’ll give Arthur the grounding he needs. We’ve no permanent staff over the age of twenty-five. I’m the oldest person in the unit. The Home Office will close us down as soon as the war ends. Davenport hates us, thinks we’re a bunch of academic pansies. Now he’s got all the ammunition he needs.’

  ‘I don’t see what I can do.’

  ‘You’ve got Davenport’s ear. You can protect us if you stay.’

  ‘I already told Bryant I was going.’

  ‘Then eat your words. No one will think less of you. Tell him you’ll stay.’ Forthright followed his gaze to the river beyond the railing. ‘I came back, didn’t I? Swallowed my pride. I was supposed to get married. I could have kept away, but I didn’t.’

  Biddle looked at her. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Mr Bryant needs me.’ She checked her watch. ‘God, I can’t remember the last time I ate. You must be starving.’

  ‘There’s a decent workman’s café near Coin Street.’

  ‘I need sausages. You’re allowed a hearty breakfast on the morning of your execution, aren’t you? I’m in charge of the unit’s petty cash, and you won’t shop me, will you? You can tell me more about this monster you saw in the rafters.’

  They passed a skinny brown nag drinking noisily from a corporation horse trough. Forthright paused to give its milkman a cigarette. The poor man looked on his uppers, as thin as his horse and the empty wire crates on his cart. It was the first animal she had seen in days; she wondered if they were being taken out of the city.

  Biddle waited for her, then they resumed walking in comfortable silence through the miasmic mist that ebbed over the Embankment, down to the roads where daylight and life were returning to the city.

  Arthur Bryant gently placed the framed photograph of Nathalie, the one he had taken by the river that terrible afternoon, into a cardboard box, added his carved Tibetan skull, tossed in some incense sticks, some mystical diagrams of Solomon’s Temple, several beeswax candles, a gramophone record of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s Te Deum, two volumes of criminal records from Newgate Gaol, a three-dimensional bronze model of the Kabalistic Pentagram of the Absolute, a rare limited edition of Seymour’s British Witchcraft and Demonology and a paperback copy of RAF Slang Made Easy, then closed the lid and bound it with thick brown tape. Set beside each other, the three crates contained almost everything he owned. It’s not a lot to show for my life so far, he thought gloomily.

  He propped the letter of resignation, addressed to Davenport, against May’s desk lamp. He wanted to leave before his partner arrived. He felt that he had passed the point beyond which no amount of apology and retraction could return him, and he did not wish to place John in the embarrassing situation of having to defend him to their superior.

  Perhaps it was for the best. He wasn’t cut out to be a politician. It was clear now that the unit was little more than a public relations exercise. For a while he had believed that the old-money occupants of the HO could be superseded by a new breed of experimentalists for whom the past held no loyalties, that brave new rules would operate throughout British government, from the lowliest town council to the offices of Whitehall. Now he doubted that the war would make any difference to government at all.

  Bryant loved London. He had been born in Whitechapel, in the lowliest of circumstances, and had grown up on the streets of Wapping and Borough and Mile End. He was proud of having got this far. But now the city was changing. Its sense of good cheer was being chipped away by bombardment in a war that Neville Chamberlain had insisted would never happen.

  He was going to load the boxes into a cab if he could find one, but remembered that he had packed some hefty mementos, including a paving stone that held the burned-in handprint of Jack the Ripper, and decided to have them delivered instead.

  There was no place for his arcane studies in the police force of the future. He thought of his friends in the Camden Town Coven, and their arch-rivals, the Southwark Supernaturals. He gathered together the scrawled addresses of the Mystic Savoyards and the Prometheus League, the emergency numbers of the Insomnia Squad’s sleepless academics, the diary that contained lists of assorted primitives, paranormalists, idiot savants, mind-readers and madmen, all available to the unit if someone only trusted him enough to use them wisely.

  All for the best, he told himself. John was young and bright. He might be able to modernize the unit and bring fresh technology into their casework once Bryant himself was out of the way. They were clearly doing something wrong if they couldn’t keep lads like Sidney Biddle interested enough to stay on.

  He unclipped a small glass case of poisonous caterpillars from the wall behind his desk and emptied it into the bin. There was a time when he would have taken them out of their case and dropped them in Oswald Finch’s teapot, but the spirit had gone out of him.

  Bryant saw now that he had willed a culprit into existence because he wanted to be challenged. The real solution would doubtless prove to be rather ordinary, not peculiar or paradoxical at all, a disgruntled employee, a youth filled with such directionless anger that he could equally have decided to attack the staff of a bus depot or an insurance office. Grey crimes for a grey nation.

  It was the second time he had failed. Overcoming his guilt about Nathalie’s death had been tough, and just when the world was starting to make sense again he saw that he hadn’t made sense of it at all. He knew he would have to write a formal apology to Renalda.

  He looked about the desktop to see if there was anything he had forgotten, and saw that the drawing of the statue he had deciphered as the key to a mythological conundrum was just another memento. He carefully folded it into a square, tucked it into his tattered briefcase and snapped the lock shut.

  Pausing in the doorway, he took one last look around the room he and May had shared for the past few days, and wondered about the cases they might have solved together.

  Then he quietly pulled the door shut behind him.

  53

  TOUCHING THE TORTOISE

  Mementos and conundrums, all the cases we solved together, thought May. It was always Bryant who had set the puzzles. He himself had just been the faithful sidekick, an anchor of reason to his partner’s flights of fancy. We solved our first case together. I’ll solve our last one if it kills me.

  His bandaged leg was swollen and sore. He looked along the crowded platform of the tube station, unpleasantly sweaty even though the day was cold, and waited for the approaching train. He felt his coat pockets. The tortoise; he had left the damned shell in Maggie’s flat, but he wasn’t going back for it now. I’m old, I’m tired and I’ve been stabbed by a ghost, he thought angrily.

  Not that he remotely believed in such things. The breadboard had fallen, hitting the handle of the knife. More accidents happened at home than anywhere else. Besides, even if he was a believer it would have made no sense. Why would his best friend return from the grave to hurt him? The only person who could do that now was very much alive.

  Except that it wasn’t him . . . unless he had grown fangs . . .

  And then he saw the error he had made. He saw how badly he had misread the situation, just as Arthur had all those years before. How guilty he had been of jumping to the same mistaken conclusion.

  May pushed his way back up the stairs of Camden Town tube station, fighting the onrushing flow of travellers. He needed
to obtain a signal for his mobile. Outside, wedged into a litter-strewn corner, he punched out Alma Sorrowbridge’s number. He waited for fourteen rings, but there was no answer. The shadow of the buildings opposite had begun to reach this side of the street. He looked at the keypad of his mobile, and was about to try her again when it rang.

  ‘Grandad, is that you?’

  ‘April?’

  His granddaughter couldn’t have picked a worse time to call, but it was good to hear her voice.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to ring you for days. I was so sorry to hear about Mr Bryant. He was always nice to me. You must be—’

  ‘Listen,’ May cut across her, ‘I’m more sorry than you could ever be. Arthur asked me to call you and I didn’t. I’ve been too wrapped up in my own problems. How are you? Have you been able to get out at all?’

  ‘A little. It’s tough. Open spaces still do my head in, but I’m handling it.’

  ‘Remember what the doctor said, one step at a time.’

  ‘I know, but I want to go back to work,’ April complained. ‘I’ve seen enough of these walls to last a lifetime. I could do with some advice.’

  ‘Sure. I’ll come and see you.’

  He wanted to tell her he was ashamed, that he would make up the time they had lost. Instead he could only promise to ring her again in a day or so. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

  ‘It’s funny speaking to you at this hour. It’s the time I always think of you.’

  May was puzzled. ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, you know. You always took a walk with Mr Bryant at sunset. It was the only real ritual you had.’