‘Mr Land, I assume you’re calling to update me with a progress report. As far as I’m aware you have only two minor cases in hand, neither of which is likely to require much attention.’
‘Mr Bryant is dealing with the Tower of London, as you know,’ said Land carefully, ‘and he hasn’t provided me with anything yet.’
‘Is it your custom to wait until he deigns to show you something?’
‘Well, yes,’ said Land. Banks made him too nervous to come up with fast excuses.
‘But this vandalism in the churchyard – surely it’s a fairly simple matter? We’re dealing with multi-million-pound cases of fraud over here. I assume you’ve wrapped that up.’
‘No, our team is still out on the beat.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What you have to understand, Miss Banks, is that we get our best results when we spend time gaining public trust, and that requires getting to know people at a personal level.’
‘So we’re to stand by while you organize coffee mornings with the local parishioners, is that it?’
‘We’re a street force. We work from the ground up.’
‘You’ll be working from the ground down if I don’t get my report first thing tomorrow,’ Banks snapped, hanging up.
By 7.00 p.m. Bryant had still not appeared, and the PCU changed shifts. At May’s request, Colin Bimsley agreed to visit St George’s Gardens on his way home, to check that Thomas Wallace’s grave had been properly restored to its former condition. Meanwhile, Meera Mangeshkar arranged to keep watch on the flat where Shirone Estanza lived with her mother.
At 8.00 p.m., Longbright met Sennen Renfield in the Ladykillers Café, King’s Cross, where her mother had deposited her. Sennen had dyed the front of her black fringe several different shades of pink, and hid her pale features beneath the stripes as if sheltering under a beach umbrella. What was it, Longbright wondered, that drove teenagers to conceal themselves? Her clumsy attempt at an introduction was met with silence, a sigh, a fidget, a turned-aside head. Renfield shrugged an apology and went to fetch teas, glad of an escape route.
‘Sennen – that’s a very pretty name,’ said Longbright.
‘I hate it.’
‘You go to school around here, don’t you?’
‘There’s only one decent school, so we all have to go there.’
‘You’re at the Albany?’ Longbright remembered that Romain Curtis was a pupil there. ‘Do you like it?’
‘The teachers are these old, old women who are all, like, forty.’ Sennen stared pointedly into her face.
Longbright was no stranger to the rudeness of teenagers, but was more used to interviewing them in criminal investigations. ‘What do you like to do at the weekends?’ she asked, trying another tack.
‘I don’t know. Sleep.’
God, Longbright thought, it’s like pulling teeth. ‘Well, what do you like to do best in London?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Not even shopping?’
‘I’m not interested in shopping. There are more important things to do.’
‘I thought you said you liked to sleep.’
‘So am I being interrogated then?’ Sennen sat back and folded her arms, ready to close off the conversation until her father returned.
Longbright was made of sterner stuff. ‘In a way, yes,’ she countered. ‘That’s what we do. Perhaps I should take you into my confidence. Your father might have mentioned that we’re conducting an important investigation at the moment. I’m not officially allowed to discuss it, of course, but I can say that it involves a terrible murder. I have a problem. One of our key witnesses is a schoolgirl roughly the same age as you, and we think someone is watching her, possibly stalking her. It’s a long time since I was at school. I need to find out if she knows more than she’s told us, but I can’t really imagine how she thinks. If I could just understand—’
‘Well then, how are you two getting along?’ asked Jack with lousy timing.
‘I was just about to ask Sennen if she’d like to see what detectives do,’ said Longbright. ‘Maybe she could spend a day at the unit helping us with an investigation.’
‘I don’t think that would be permissible,’ said Jack. ‘You wouldn’t want to do that, would you, love?’
Sennen was about to reply but something stopped her.
Well well, guess who’s suddenly interested in something, thought Longbright, not that she dares to show it. Too cool for school, this one. She quickly moved away from the subject, asking Jack a series of deliberately inconsequential questions.
Renfield glanced at his mobile. ‘You’d better get off, love, your mother is waiting outside,’ he said, rising and giving his daughter an awkward hug. As Longbright rose, she was careful to avoid catching Sennen’s eye.
When they reached the door, she briskly turned and shook the girl’s hand. ‘It was nice to meet you, Sennen,’ she said. ‘Perhaps our paths will cross again.’ She made to leave, then stopped. ‘Oh, and if you get the time, think about what we discussed?’
I’ll get you, my pretty, she thought, casting a sidelong glance back at the girl’s puzzled face as she left.
As he walked towards St George’s Gardens, Colin Bimsley pictured Amanda Roseberry and felt his heart glow. The young intern was smart, attractive, single and very laid-back. After months of angry sarcasm and only the vaguest grudging pleasantries from Meera, Amanda was a breath of fresh air. He wondered what she would say if he really did ask her out for a drink. He knew Meera was right and that he would be punching above his weight, but surely it was worth a try?
Climbing over the railing, he headed to the far perimeter where Thomas Wallace had been re-interred. It took a minute to find the grave in the gloom. The soil was wet from the day’s rainfall, but had been packed down and neatly resown with grass. A sad little bouquet of peonies had been left on the fresh earth.
A dozen further graves were irregularly spaced behind a thicket of bushes, reaching to the railings on the other side of the gardens. Some were so old that lichen and ivy had split the granite headstones and worn away their epitaphs.
Colin had been feeling perpetually tired and fed up of late. He wasn’t earning enough to be able to afford a car or move from his poky, cluttered flat. He missed having a steady relationship, but his long working hours put women off. He thought of Roseberry again and decided he would definitely go for it when they next met.
Having checked the gardens, he headed over to Judd Street and queued for a vast lamb kebab covered in crimson chilli sauce. He was just about to take a bite from it when his mobile buzzed.
‘Colin, how close are you to St George’s?’ asked May.
‘Only a couple of streets away. I just checked it and everything was fine. Why?’
‘Get round there again, fast. A woman overlooking the grounds called in a disturbance. King’s Cross routed the call to me. She’s still on the line.’
‘On my way, boss.’ Colin reluctantly threw his kebab tray in the bin and hoofed it. Afterwards, he realized that running into the street and vaulting the railing was a mistake. Beyond the light thrown by the park’s spindly lamps, he could see only a vague shape shifting in the leaves. As he approached, he realized that the sound he’d heard was that of a shovel hitting earth.
It was too late to remain unnoticed. They had already seen him coming. Bimsley was a bulky man who dominated most spaces smaller than aerodromes and stadiums. When he attempted to quell his presence the results were absurd, like a rhinoceros performing in ballet shoes. There was nothing to be done except push rowdily ahead into the foliage and make a grab for whoever was standing there.
The sight that confronted him brought him up short: a fresh grave, already half dug out, the shovel sticking out of a mound of soil; a nimble figure, almost certainly male, launching itself away and hopping over the wall behind the plot.
Incredible, Bimsley thought, I was here only twenty minutes ago. He followed, but had trouble scrabbling up the
brickwork. On the other side was a poorly lit alleyway that led to the Drug Rehabilitation Centre at the end of Heathcote Street. The man in front of him swung nimbly over another railing and landed on a flight of steps above. Bimsley sized up his opponent; he had the agility of youth and was familiar with the area. A moment later he had slammed through the doors of the drug centre.
Bimsley followed and found himself in an empty, bright municipal corridor lined with closed wood-veneer doors. There was an eye-watering smell of disinfectant. He tried the first door and found it locked. He stopped and listened. A faint sway of the far fire door set him off in pursuit once more.
This time he found himself in an unlit stairwell leading up to other floors. Bimsley’s spatial awareness diminished in the darkness, and moments later he was clutching the stair-rail, trying to stay on his feet.
There could only be another half-dozen steps to the first landing, but he did not dare to look down. Then he heard the breathing. Someone was standing very close by.
Spinning about, he lashed out hard and caught a stubbled chin. There was a yell, a grab, a tangle of legs as they fell back down the bottom five steps and hit concrete.
Feeling for a jacket collar, he seized it and dragged the protesting man towards the fire doors, hurling him on to the linoleum floor. Under the lights he immediately realized his mistake.
‘Don’t hurt me,’ begged the man, raising a skeletal hand to a parchment-coloured face. He was young but looked old: a recovering heroin addict – a much rarer sight on the Central London streets these days. ‘I came here for my prescription but they’re shut. It’s warm in the stairwell.’
‘Did you see anyone go past you?’
‘Yeah, some studenty-looking bloke, he ran past just before you come along.’
‘Did you see where he went?’
‘Out the back. You can get out on to Heathcote Street from there.’
‘What did he look like other than “studenty”?’
‘I don’t know – glasses – it was dark.’
Bimsley helped the man back on to his feet and apologized.
‘I’m broke – can you let me have a quid?’
‘That won’t even buy you a coffee, will it? You need to start asking for two pounds fifty, mate.’ Bimsley gave him a couple of pounds and headed out to Heathcote Street.
It was too late – the object of his pursuit could have fled in any direction. He ran back to St George’s Gardens and found the disturbed gravesite. The digger had already reached the coffin – it had not been buried as deeply this time – and a corner of the polished lid was exposed.
Then Bimsley realized his mistake. He was not looking at Thomas Wallace’s grave at all, but the next one over. A small wooden marker read: ‘Elspeth Mary Duncannon “Always In Our Hearts”’. She had died at the age of eighty-seven and had been buried ten days ago.
Someone had been digging up a second plot.
Bimsley wrapped the handle of the dropped shovel in the plastic bag that had held his foil kebab box, then phoned in his findings and headed back to the unit, angry with himself for having let the possible cause of their investigation slip through his fingers.
The figure by the grave had hardly looked human, bouncing, no, hopping, over the gravestones – what would he have done to this second grave if he had not been interrupted?
Bimsley recalled an engraving he had seen of Victorian bodysnatchers at work. It had been pinned on the wall behind Bryant’s desk.
19
ALONE
‘A resurrectionist,’ said Bryant. ‘Or the modern-day equivalent, at least. In both cases he was either interrupted in his task or got what he came for – perhaps just the thrill of digging up the dead. This is the sort of area in which I shine, Raymondo. You have to put me back on the case.’
It was a little after eight on Thursday morning, and in the last twenty-four hours the investigation had not significantly advanced. Any moment now Orion Banks would start pressuring them all for more results. She wasn’t looking to take the case elsewhere. She just wanted to prove that they were incompetent.
‘That depends,’ said Raymond Land. ‘How are you getting on with the ravens?’
‘I have an idea how they were smuggled out and why, but I don’t have any proof.’ Bryant gave him a wide-eyed look that at least contained a vague suggestion of honesty.
‘All right,’ Land agreed finally, ‘I’ll bring you back on one condition: that you get something more on those damned birds by the close of play today.’
‘I’ve got an idea about that,’ said Bryant, ‘but I don’t think I shall tell you what it is. It’s a bit of a wig-lifter and you’ll only get angry.’
Land watched his top detective unsticking sherbet lemons from his cardigan, which was amateurishly embroidered with shaky outlines of Mithraic temples, a gift from one of his old-biddy admirers. He knew that the unit’s hopes were now pinned on this strange old man’s thought processes, and his stomach flopped. ‘The City of London Police won’t co-operate until they’ve stopped regarding us as a joke,’ he warned, ‘and we can’t get anywhere without Banks. They all know we were once under the jurisdiction of the Met.’
‘Ah. I heard that in the bar at Snow Hill, or whichever City nick is closest to the Old Bailey,’ replied Bryant, ‘some CoL jokers put up a rack of coat pegs at a height of about five foot six, then raised a sign that said “For the use of Met officers and traffic wardens only”. The height restriction for City PCs used to be over six feet, didn’t it? A bit antagonistic, one feels.’
‘They’ll do a lot worse than that to us if we screw up, I promise you.’
‘Right you are, meine alte wurst.’ He held up a sherbet lemon covered in grey fluff. ‘Do you think these are still edible? I’m off to get some results, then.’ Bryant popped the sweet into his mouth and looked about for his coat.
‘Do me a favour and take John with you,’ said Land. ‘He can help you.’
‘You’re right. I’ve been working by myself too much lately. We’re better as a team. But not just yet. There’s something I have to do first. It involves visiting a pub – purely business, you understand.’
‘And this is about the theft of the ravens?’
‘A theft, yes, but ravens, no – it concerns operettas and dead cats.’ He smiled and sauntered from the room.
John May and Janice Longbright arrived at the shopfront in Lamb’s Conduit Street and looked in the window. An arrangement of faded plastic flowers had been set in a wooden model of a Viking boat that bore the inscription:
Cattle die,
Kinsmen die,
All men are mortal.
Words of praise
Will never perish,
Nor a noble name.
Above, in a tasteful white serif typeface on black marble, it read: ‘John Wells & Sons, Founded 1806, Funeral Services’; and below that, painted on diamond-shaped panels of ruby and emerald glass: ‘Funerals – Cremations – Embalming – Private Chapel’.
‘The Viking saying, it’s from the Hávamál, the great Eddaic poem from AD 800,’ said May.
Longbright gave him a funny look. ‘How would you know that?’
May shrugged. ‘I’ve been hanging around with Arthur for a long time.’
They went in and found themselves in a mahogany-panelled room that had absorbed two centuries of salt tears. The man who came out to greet them was clearly in the wrong job; he looked like a camp pork butcher who was too happy in his work.
‘Sorry to keep you,’ he said, holding out a pudgy hand, ‘our embalmer just passed his driving test and we were having a bit of a laugh backstage. We call it backstage because, you know, we can be ourselves back there. My name’s Mr Rummage, but call me Ronald, please.’ He adjusted huge round tortoiseshell glasses on his nose. ‘I think I’ve got the answers to your questions. Come on back, there might be some chocolate cheesecake left.’
Behind the sombre surroundings of the receiving parlour was a slightly more cheerf
ul room with late-eighties pastel sofas, two computer desks and a tea station. ‘That’s Andy, our embalmer, in the corner,’ said Rummage, indicating a more traditionally cadaverous young man. ‘And that’s our Betty. She handles the accounts.’ Betty looked up from her screen, gave a tentative smile and hastily shrank again. ‘William’s my partner; he’s out seeing a client about floral arrangements. There are only four of us now, down from sixteen at one time. Cholera. Our peak. A tragedy, of course, but a wonderful opportunity to build up the business. Have you got that bit of paper, Betty?’ He accepted a page and unfolded it. ‘Yes, you see, it’s a legacy bequest. Mr Thomas Edward Wallace. There are only six of them left.’
‘Six what?’ asked Longbright.
‘Burial plots. After St George’s Gardens stopped being a churchyard it was turned into a public park.’
‘Why did it stop?’
‘Because the land company went bankrupt. Three funeral firms supplied the churchyard, one in King’s Cross, one in Holborn and us, here in Bloomsbury. When the other two went, we were the only ones whose clients still had an entitlement to be interred there. But by then the council had decided to create a public space for local residents, so we agreed not to sell any more plots.’
‘When was this?’ asked May.
‘Nineteen sixty-something. I don’t have an exact date. But in the interim, a few more plots had already been sold. We contacted our clients and asked if they would like to be interred elsewhere, and I think three – yes, there you see, three said yes. The others still had families in the area, so we came to an arrangement with the council. They agreed to let the last three be quietly settled in the gardens, near the back wall.’
‘So the lady who was buried a week and a half ago—’
‘Elspeth Mary Duncannon, she lived in the council flats just over the road, bless her. Emphysema, a lifelong smoker. She’d been virtually bedridden for ten years and didn’t really have much quality of life, poor soul. We chose the headstone inscription because there was no immediate family to do it for her.’ Rummage pushed his glasses back up his nose. ‘And then just a few days later, Mr Wallace. He lived over in Marchmont Street in his father’s house, and had been bought the plot by the old man. Funny they went so close together, but that’s life, isn’t it?’
Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart Page 14