Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart

by Christopher Fowler - Bryant

  ‘Have you ever heard of Thomas Wallace?’ Bryant asked.

  ‘No, why, did he come back from the dead?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  McEvoy was barely listening. ‘Someone came to see me, wanted to know how to open a coffin, but I said I don’t give out that kind of information, be off with you.’ He waggled his fingers at the empty air.

  ‘Do you recall who this person was?’

  ‘No, no, I wouldn’t let them in – ringing on the doorbell out of the blue. Besides, I was busy.’

  ‘Was it a man or a woman?’

  McEvoy ignored the question. ‘I’ve devised various solutions of my own invention, naturally. I wouldn’t just rely on a Gutsmuth and Taberger Security Coffin even if it had a filibrated air tube. I have the equipment all prepared and my burial plot already purchased.’

  ‘Why not just be cremated?’ asked Bryant, tinkling one of the bells.

  ‘And wake up in flames? No, thank you so very much!’ McEvoy tightened the dressing gown about himself. ‘I’ve left strict instructions for my doctor based on tests devised by the great German physicians of the late eighteenth century. There were all kinds of tests to see if the dead were actually alive: blowing pepper into the nostrils, shoving red-hot pokers up the jacksie, slicing the soles of the feet with a razor, tobacco-smoke enemas, galvanic muscle revivers, Lebensprüfer—’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Metal cones covered in cloth that’s saturated in sal ammoniac. They generate an electric current when attached to a body’s lower lip and eyelids, I have some here if you’d like to test them—’

  ‘No thanks, I really should be going …’ Bryant took a step back towards the door.

  ‘I have my own magazine – self-published, obviously,’ McEvoy continued. ‘WH Smith weren’t keen to take it. The latest issue has an interesting article on galvanizing techniques.’ He thrust an issue of The Casket at the detective. Bryant opened it and found himself looking at graphic photographs of corpses with electrodes clipped to their extremities.

  ‘I’m adapting a device that revives unconscious cows for use with comatose human beings that’s not dissimilar to Dr Laborde’s Rhythmic Tongue Puller. I tried to hand out some illustrated pamphlets concerning the dangers of premature interment, but I’ve been banned from distributing them anywhere near the local schools. So lately I’ve switched tack.’ He flipped the page and held it high. ‘I’ve been developing an updated version of Dr Plouviez’s patented metabolizing heart acupuncture needles—’

  That pulled Bryant up short. ‘Wait. I’ve seen something like that before.’

  McEvoy released a sharp bark of a laugh. ‘Of course, at the corner just outside, on the tavern sign.’ He dragged Bryant to the window and wiped away a patch of condensation. ‘There, look.’

  On the other side of the courtyard, the pub sign swung in the rainy wind. On it was painted a crimson heart, pierced in five places with silver arrows. ‘The Blessed Virgin’s heart,’ said McEvoy, awed. ‘The five sorrowful mysteries of the Rosary. The symbol dates back to before the Reformation. It signifies a compassion too vast for finite conception, the enduring love that led God to give up His only son to the nails and the crucifix, the spear, the burning wrath of the universal destroyer and the loathsome grave-pit beyond, that He might redeem us from the curse of human frailty. But it’s also a practical test, you see? If you pierce the heart and it still bleeds, then it means that a corpse may live on and be revived!’

  ‘Er, yes, thank you, I think you’ve answered all my questions,’ said Bryant, backing out. ‘It’s been very interesting—’

  ‘Don’t go!’ cried McEvoy. ‘Don’t you see, it’s a sign that you were sent here to me, very possibly by the Virgin Mother herself. We must pray together!’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s a very good idea,’ said Bryant. ‘I’m a practising heathen, I’d put the mockers on any prayers you sent.’ With that he headed for the door and launched himself down the unlit stairs.

  ‘Idolater! Sybarite! Denier!’ yelled McEvoy from his upstairs window as Bryant beat a hasty retreat across the rainswept courtyard. ‘The final blast of heaven’s trumpet is upon us! Vento dei venti! You cannot deny the proof of the Bleeding Heart!’

  17

  ABANDONED

  John May was worried. Nobody had seen his partner today, and he wasn’t answering his phone – although that wasn’t unusual; it was probably in a washing machine or down the toilet. Over the years he had learned not to worry when Bryant went missing, but Arthur had been in a very odd mood for the last couple of days.

  ‘I called Alma,’ said Longbright, coming into May’s office. ‘She says he left before she got up at seven.’

  ‘Where would he go at that hour? The libraries and archives aren’t open.’

  ‘He has his own keys to some of them,’ Longbright reminded him. ‘They say widowers never sleep beyond dawn.’

  ‘I don’t know where you get these old-fashioned sayings from,’ said May, irritated. ‘I never think of him as a widower. Nathalie died so long ago.’

  ‘He hardly ever mentions her,’ said Longbright.

  ‘No, and he doesn’t even keep any pictures. I’ve only ever seen one photograph, although of course I met her several times.’

  ‘What was she like?’ Longbright had never been able to form an image of Bryant’s wife in her head.

  ‘Small, delicate-featured. But strong-willed and stubborn, just like him. I liked her a lot. They used to fight all the time, but in a constructive way. Arthur says that was the best part. I wonder where he could have got to.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s got some personal errands.’

  ‘He has no surviving family members that I’m aware of. Plenty of loopy insomniac friends he might have gone to visit, I suppose.’

  ‘Where would you begin to look?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. My codebreaking skills aren’t up to his contacts book; it’s written in Babylonic cuneiform. I always get suspicious when he goes missing. It means he’s up to something and doesn’t want me to find out.’

  ‘You think he’s put himself back on the Wallace case?’

  ‘I’m willing to place a bet on it. If he was dealing with the missing ravens he’d be calling me every five minutes to let me know what he’d discovered.’

  ‘Well, in that case we’ll have to cover for him until he turns up,’ said Longbright. ‘We’ve done it before, we can do it again.’

  ‘But for how long? We desperately need a break, Janice. Colin and Meera are still wading through interviews, Jack’s on Curtis’s friends and relatives, Dan’s having another look at St George’s Gardens. Even the intern’s checking local blogs. We’ve solved serial killings faster than this. Did you talk to Wallace’s wife and son again?’

  ‘Neither of them recall Thomas Wallace mentioning he was scared of being buried alive. Perhaps it’s something he felt more comfortable discussing with a colleague rather than a member of the family. You know how funny men can be about death.’

  ‘Well, that’s it, then,’ said May. ‘I don’t see what else we can do.’ He checked his watch. ‘Four hours. Raymond wants a breakthrough by five p.m., and at this rate he’s not going to get it.’

  Bryant’s day was taking another strange turn.

  The London Metropolitan Archives in Northampton Road housed an extraordinary range of documents, images, maps, court rolls, films and books about London. Bryant was so well known there that he had been given his own keys. He was searching the stacks for the legend of the Bleeding Heart.

  He vaguely recalled that the courtyard had been named after the tavern that still stood there, but there was some story attached involving a ghost. He would probably not have bothered to look it up, but the LMA was only a few streets away, and as the rain was coming down like stair-rods it made sense to shelter for a few minutes, if only to calm down after his bizarre encounter with McEvoy.

  He found the legend easily enough, but there wer
e several contradictory versions. According to Charles Dickens, who had written about it in Little Dorrit, a lovelorn young lady had been imprisoned in her bedchamber by a cruel father, and had murmured a love song with the refrain ‘Bleeding Heart, Bleeding Heart, bleeding away,’ until she died. Unusually for Dickens, it wasn’t much of a story.

  But there were older sources: a poem set in 1626 described one Alice Hatton, the wife of Sir Christopher Hatton, whose family owned the area around Hatton Garden. Alice summoned the Devil and made a pact with him in return for wealth and social standing. On the Eve of St John at a grand housewarming ball, a tall figure in a black cloak entered at midnight. As a violent storm broke overhead he jigged like a dervish and spirited Alice Hatton away with him, bursting up through the roof. Their danse macabre left the tapestries and dinner tables scorched and blackened.

  The next day the horrified guests found all that remained of Lady Hatton in the courtyard outside; her heart had been pierced with silver arrows and thrown down beside a pump filled with her blood – and the heart was still bleeding.

  It was said that on the night of a full moon, she returned in a white gown to work the pump, trying to wash the blood away, but it continued to gush scarlet, and the ragged hole in her ribcage never healed, for the bleeding heart had been taken out and buried in an unchristian spot.

  At this point, Bryant decided he had been sidetracked somewhat from the problem at hand, and took himself off for a Chelsea bun and some tea.

  I’m a foolish, selfish old man, he thought, sitting in the empty café beneath the archives, breaking off pieces of bun and soaking them in his mug. I should be toeing the line, helping John and Janice and the rest of them, instead of going off on these wild-goose chases.

  But he also remembered why he was here.

  He had been ten years old when it had happened, on a chill night in early March. His father had been thrown out of the house for drunkenness again, and was sleeping it off in the backyard shed. Young Arthur had tiptoed out to meet up with the kids from the next street, over on the bombed-out waste ground that had once existed beside Aldgate East tube station.

  The plot of broken earth and rubble from demolished houses hid a hundred potentially lethal traps, and was naturally a huge draw for adventurous ten-year-olds. He could see the others in his mind’s eye but had no recollection of their real names. They were known only by attributes, Fatty and Ginger and Breathless. He was known as Swotty. It was growing dark as they commenced their last game of the night, a complex rule-ridden chase-and-catch competition that involved spies and traitors, blame and punishment, and, being the smallest, he had lost.

  The others had grabbed him by his jumper and dragged him across the puddled mud to a half-collapsed brick tunnel, shoving him into the dark. Then they had found a heavy sheet of rusting corrugated iron and wedged it across the tunnel mouth, sealing him inside.

  He had not become scared until he realized he could no longer hear their taunts. Shivering in the dank darkness, he waited for them to grow bored with their game and release him. But after a while no sound came from without. He shoved against the iron sheet but it refused to budge. It got colder and darker. This was his first intimation of death; its power crept over him, numbing his limbs and filling his heart with a terrible panic.

  He threw himself at the sheet until his shoulder was black with bruises, but still it failed to give more than half an inch. He picked at the rusted edges of the corrugated iron until his nails bled, but could not prise off more than a few small patches.

  As the slow minutes passed, the others did not return. All was quiet outside his makeshift tomb. In the distance he heard two men stop to chat on the street, but no one answered when he yelled, and soon they went. He had never cried before, not even when his father had spanked him for coming into the public bar of the Crown & Goose and shaming him in front of his mates, just for saying that Mum said his dinner was getting cold. But now hot tears coursed down his cheeks, and he sat down in the mud to prepare for the terrors that death would bring.

  A full two hours later, a policeman tore down the sheeting and released him. The constable had thrown the other boys off the waste ground, refusing to listen to their tangled explanations about punishments and forfeits. But when Bryant’s mother missed him the bobby had grown suspicious and returned to search the ground. Young Arthur threw himself at the constable’s waist and refused to let go. He wanted a father like this, someone who would come and find him and lead him to safety instead of an unreliable drunk, a failed street photographer who barely even noticed that he had a family.

  On that day, Arthur Bryant had sworn that when he grew up he would become an officer of the law, and rescue others in need of protection, others like himself.

  He had been left with a horror of abandonment, a deep-rooted dread that surfaced when the stone chill of the grave reached into his heart. He could feel it now, and the only way of dissipating the fear was by saving others.

  He was convinced that Romain Curtis had been killed for something he had seen in the churchyard, and resolved not to rest until he discovered what it was.

  18

  DISTURBED

  ‘He was dead, Mr May. I don’t know any other way of putting it. Deceased. I know how to search for signs of clinical death, believe me.’

  Thomas Wallace’s doctor operated from a small local practice in Marchmont Street, Bloomsbury. May had finally secured an interview with him towards the end of the afternoon. Dr Iain Ferguson was in his mid-thirties but looked creased and older, the way politicians did. He appeared to have been battered by the day’s parade of patients and was half asleep at his desk, but on the point of Wallace’s demise he was adamant. ‘Death used to be defined by the cessation of the heartbeat. Now if there’s any doubt we check for brain activity.’

  ‘How do you define brain death?’ May asked, looking around the depressing little room filled with warning posters.

  ‘We look for structural damage, a blood clot or hypoxia, hypothermia, overdose, metabolic disturbance. Obviously one has to be more careful in cases of trauma to the regions of the spine, neck and head, but the state is still finite and infallibly diagnosable. He was drug-free and inside the house.’

  ‘Of what relevance is that?’

  ‘Well, if he’d taken morphine, say, and hanged himself from a tree in the middle of winter, there might have been reason for caution when determining the cessation of the heart. At a lower temperature you need less oxygen. The heart can reduce the pulse rate to just a handful of beats per minute. Even EEG readings could conceivably prove false. But Mr Wallace was found in a warm environment. And in the last few decades there have been changes in the criteria for declaring patients brain-dead. There are no mistakes made in this field any more, I can assure you, despite what the tabloids may have you believe. I certainly don’t feel the need to stand by the details of the death certificate – to do so would be insulting.’

  ‘A witness says he heard Mr Wallace speak,’ said May.

  ‘Then your witness was mistaken. If you want my advice, you should talk to the funeral home, Wells and Sons in Lamb’s Conduit Street, a highly reputable family firm. As far as I know they’re the only undertakers still with a dispensation to conduct burials in St George’s Gardens. They would be able to tell you about post-demise anomalies.’

  ‘What do you mean – anomalies?’

  ‘Corpses have been known to explode quite noisily,’ Dr Ferguson explained. ‘A build-up of bacterial gases in the gut. It’s possible the boy heard something like that and imagined the rest. What happens after the cessation of life is beyond my remit. It’s probably better that you get the details from them.’

  ‘Did you ever treat Thomas Wallace for depression?’

  A harassed woman knocked and stuck her head around the door. ‘Are you going to be very long?’ she asked. ‘Mr Turner’s here to have his – you know.’ She grimaced and mimed something unpleasant.

  ‘Just keep him there
for a sec,’ Dr Ferguson suggested. ‘We discussed the possibility of therapy, Mr May, but it was never pursued. Sometimes it’s not the doctor’s place to voice an opinion.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I could see problems in their marriage. I think the father and son were close. The mother felt – thwarted.’

  ‘An odd word to choose.’

  ‘Wives don’t like to see weakness. Thomas Wallace was clearly upset about something he could not or would not explain. There’s little point in me prescribing treatment if the root of the problem lies somewhere else. I’m not a psychiatrist.’ Ferguson stifled a yawn. He looked as if he was testing for a broken jaw. May tried not to yawn as well. ‘Forgive me, I’ve been up for thirty-two hours on the trot. I’m cream-crackered. There’s a virus working its way through the Cromwell Estate. From the number of callouts I’ve been getting in the last couple of days you’d think it was the return of the Black Death, but mostly it’s people panicking over ordinary colds. I suppose you realize the residents know.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Your miraculous resurrection in St George’s. They’re wondering why they haven’t seen anything about it in the papers. They think you’re hiding something. It’s always the same with you lot, you go blundering in and leave us to clear up the mess.’

  Raymond Land’s self-imposed deadline came and went.

  He paced the corridors fuming, feeling sidelined and ineffectual, unable to discover why his instructions were being ignored. Everyone seemed to be following agendas set for them by Bryant and May. Whenever he stopped someone to ask why they had failed to appear in the common room, he was presented with strange, and in some cases incomprehensible, explanations. Realizing that the investigation had stalled, he placed his call to Orion Banks and was silently grateful when it was diverted to her voicemail. He was just about to hang up when she suddenly answered, making him jump.