‘The information age tempts too many students to cherry-pick from a variety of philosophies and beliefs,’ said Bryant, ‘even when they’re mutually exclusive or even opposed.’
‘I wouldn’t like to find out my GP was messing about with black magic. It would be like discovering that your bank manager was also a stand-up comic. Get anything on his movements prior to Hyde Park?’
‘Nothing much. He doesn’t seem to have had any friends. He was seen having dinner alone in the Edgware Road. Has he got a desk?’
‘Nope.’
‘Bedside table, then. Let’s have a nose.’ Bryant picked his way through to the bedroom and started pulling open drawers.
‘I was going to say it’s OK to touch them now,’ called Banbury with no small degree of sarcasm. When he received no reply, he went to the door. Bryant had unfolded an immense sheet of taped photocopy paper on the unmade bed. ‘What’s that?’
The detective looked up with concern. ‘It’s a map of our unit, 231 Caledonian Road,’ he said in astonishment. ‘The whole building, marked out floor by floor. What the hell was he planning to do?’
28
ICE IN THE HEART
London is connected.
It’s wired-up, hotlinked, Wi-Fied and broadbanded to the max. So why, Orion Banks wondered, was it so hard to get hold of anyone at the PCU?
When she rang to speak to Raymond Land, her call went unanswered. All other extensions went to voicemail, except Arthur Bryant’s, which went to a horrible, squawking version of ‘I Am the Monarch of the Sea’ from HMS Pinafore. Eventually a constable from the City of London Police was dispatched to the unit to find out what was going on.
John May sent him away with a flea in his ear. The unit had gone into lockdown. Nobody else was permitted to enter the building until Emes’s floor plans could be interpreted. The remaining Dave had had his mobile confiscated, and had threatened to call the police until he remembered where he was. Even the cats were secured. The PCU was to work in isolation for the rest of the day and the whole of the weekend until a breakthrough had been achieved. Although like all good plans, that wasn’t what happened.
‘The books,’ said Bryant, when they were once more ensconced in their shared office. ‘They’re what worry me most. Black-magic rituals for raising the dead don’t sit well with the Hippocratic oath. We need to track down the other New Resurrectionists.’
‘You know you can’t do that until Banks approves it,’ May reminded him. ‘And she’s not inclined to grant any of your more unorthodox requests right now.’
‘Surely she must see that since the beginning of the week we’ve been surrounded by superstitions concerning death? This place is covered in black cats. Did somebody smuggle them in?’
‘Now you’re being paranoid.’
‘Something bad is insinuating its way into my life, John. I love this city but sometimes it gets on top of me. The buildings have too many histories, too many secrets. Things – collect. I knew I shouldn’t have had anything to do with ravens – they’re harbingers of the Grim Reaper.’
‘Please, don’t start infecting everyone else with your omens,’ May pleaded. ‘There are enough Gothic trappings in this case as it is without you adding to them.’
‘Speaking of which, this turned up in the mail.’ Bryant flicked a card over to May’s desk.
On the front was a black panel showing a pierced human heart placed inside a pentacle. Inside it read, ‘You were warned about visiting the Tower again. Prepare for the consequences.’
‘A bit hokey, isn’t it?’ said May. ‘Let’s bring him in and stand on his fingers for a while.’
‘What for? He knows we’ve got nothing on him. Dan checked the card for prints. Clean. He’s trying to put the frighteners on me. It’s the oldest psychological trick in the book, piling on the portents, pure M. R. James stuff. I’ve had worse than that in the post. Somebody mailed me a dead penguin once.’
‘This sort of stuff never works, though, does it?’ said May. Bryant said nothing. ‘Does it?’ he tried again. ‘Look, we’ll get him on public nuisance, wasting police time, whatever. They got Al Capone for tax evasion.’
‘What else have you got on Emes?’
May checked his notes. ‘He was expelled from King’s College on the advice of his senior professor, just as you said. Professor James Garrick, highly respected, has a lot of sway at the college. He’s working in Ethiopia; we haven’t been able to get hold of him yet. Emes’s mother is in Wales, hasn’t seen him in years. Dan hasn’t turned up any addresses in his flat and he was found without a mobile. Maybe it was taken from him in Hyde Park. I guess you could say that’s a pattern, although it’s become the norm these days. There are so many people involved in this, yet it’s hard to break anyone open.’
‘You’re right,’ said Bryant, sitting back. The lights were now turned down low, and his expressive blue eyes were lost in eddying shadows. ‘In the old days I would have brought everyone in and subjected them to as much mental cruelty as my twisted mind could come up with. Now I have to be more circumspect. Delay leaves room for tragedy. We’re left with a trail of funeral mourners, a son without a father, a mother without a son, a wife without a husband. And that’s not even counting Stephen Emes – we have no idea who might be mourning him.’
‘What do you suggest?’
‘Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that this is not a series of merely unfortunate events and that they’re all connected: the exhumations, the hit-and-run, the harpooning of the student.
‘Let’s also assume that the same person is responsible in each case.
‘Who do we have in the frame, really? Who has the motive, the window of opportunity, the lack of an alibi? And what if he decides to strike again? How can you stop a murder from occurring when you have no idea why it might be committed, or on whom?’
He dropped his head and spoke into his hands, so quietly that May hardly heard him. ‘I keep thinking of the Bleeding Heart, and what McEvoy said: if you pierce the heart and it still bleeds, a corpse may live on. That’s what all this is doing to me, don’t you see? I feel as if someone is pricking me to ensure that I bleed but live on. It’s the sense we all get as our lives near the end.’
‘In all the time I’ve known you, you’ve never shown any fear of dying,’ said May vehemently. ‘Quite the reverse – you’ve been positively gleeful on the subject. Look at the way you tease Giles’s housekeeper, and the awful way you make fun of Alma’s belief in an afterlife.’
‘I always felt that the receptive mind was the one you could damage most easily. Why should I be immune from the rule? I have no creed but my own, no family to put flowers on my grave. I don’t have your unshakeable faith in science. I have nothing ahead but the darkness of the burial plot.’
‘Oh, this is unbearable,’ said May. ‘For a start, I care for you. So does everyone here. And Alma is devoted to you. Now stop feeling so ridiculously sorry for yourself and get on with your work.’
Bryant did as he was told, but the image of the Bleeding Heart lodged in his mind like a frozen shard.
29
DISBELIEF
Saturday was a strange day, Sargasso-becalmed, fractious and ill at ease with itself.
The week’s earlier promise had truly vanished now, and the unending summer rain thudded relentlessly across the London rooftops, testing the inhabitants. The PCU always remained open through the weekend when it had an active investigation, and did so this weekend as well, although a lockdown was meant to be in place. Longbright arranged a roster so that the staff could get a few spare hours to themselves. Most of the time she was able to provide cover with three or four officers, but occasionally the shifts went out of synchronization so that she was left with an imbalance. When that occurred she became a Jill-of-all-trades, doing everyone’s jobs.
This was what happened on Saturday morning. Normal life had got in the way of work: Bimsley was due a checkup at UCH to see if he had damaged his back fallin
g down the stairs at the drugs clinic, Land had been forced to meet with a divorce lawyer and Renfield had promised to pick up his daughter from the dentist.
Longbright knew that nobody had had time to double-check the sets of phone records Banbury had requested, so she prepared for the arduous job of running down the call columns, highlighting each in turn. The Met had specialist software for this, but it wasn’t licensed to the City of London, and certainly not to the PCU. She checked each message against a set of half a dozen phone addresses, hoping that something would jump out at her.
When it did, she very nearly missed it. Making a note of the call, she went through to the detectives’ office, where she found John May at work.
‘I’ve got something,’ she said. ‘Mrs Wallace rang Krishna Jhadav on the morning of her husband’s death. Eleven thirty-five a.m., little more than three hours after he died. Why would she have done that? And the doctor, Iain Ferguson, he called the funeral parlour several times, which I suppose is to be expected, but there were an awful lot of calls between them. I think about seven in all.’
‘Let’s find out about Mrs Wallace first.’ May took the number and rang Jhadav’s mobile.
Jhadav sounded out of breath. He was at the gym burning off more corporate anger. ‘It wasn’t exactly a phone call,’ said Jhadav. ‘Hang on, let me get off this thing.’
May answered Longbright’s quizzical look. ‘He’s on a running machine.’
‘You still there? Yeah, Mrs Wallace – she called me to scream a load of abuse, said her husband had killed himself because of me. She said it was because I took the account away from him.’
‘So you lied to us when you said you didn’t know that Wallace had died.’
‘Come on, man. You come breezing into my office in front of my colleagues, putting me on the spot like that, what am I supposed to say?’
‘What did you tell Mrs Wallace?’
‘Nothing – I couldn’t get a word in edgeways. I let her rant on for a while. I knew she was being irrational and needed someone to blame. Finally I said I was sorry for her loss and rang off as quickly as I could. She was obviously very upset about what had just happened and I was in her firing line. She probably rang all her husband’s ex-clients.’
‘No,’ said May, glancing up at Longbright again, ‘it seems she just rang you.’
‘Do you have any more information about why he killed himself?’ asked Jhadav.
‘His wife said he’d been very agitated since he lost your account. He wasn’t expecting to keep his job, and didn’t think he’d get another one at his age.’
‘I’m sorry to sound callous, mate, but we aren’t in charge of ensuring the mental health of our suppliers. He started doing his work badly, and no amount of advice from me could put him back on track. I must stress that it was just our business arrangement that suffered. I still valued him as a friend.’
‘Hold on one sec.’ May had become aware that Longbright was trying to attract his attention. He looked over and saw her holding up a piece of paper: ‘DID WALLACE RETURN ALL WORK FILES?’
‘Do you know if Thomas Wallace gave you back all your work files?’ said May.
There was a pause on the other end of the line. ‘No, not everything. Thomas ceased to handle our company contract but continued to deal with my personal affairs.’
‘I may have to take this further with you, Mr Jhadav. It depends on the direction of the investigation.’ He rang off. ‘Janice, where did you get that?’
‘Arthur left me a note yesterday. Why would he need to know if there were any files left behind?’
‘I don’t know, but you got your answer. Wallace continued to handle Jhadav’s personal affairs, which I imagine involved retaining private financial documents. Arthur clearly knows something we don’t. I hate it when he does this. What’s the old buzzard got up his sleeve? For that matter, where is he? It’s like sharing an office with the Scarlet Pimpernel.’
‘He’s gone to a shooting range in Harrow on the Hill to learn how to fire a crossbow,’ said Longbright matter-of-factly. ‘He’ll be back this afternoon.’
‘Of course he has,’ said May. ‘I suppose we’re lucky he didn’t buy a shovel and head off to Highgate Cemetery for a practical lesson in bodysnatching. Now what?’ Longbright was staring at her phone.
‘Oh, a text from Jack. His car’s broken down. Would I go and collect his daughter.’
‘Go on, off you go. I can look after things here.’
After Longbright had gone, May turned his attention to the board behind his desk and studied it. Everyone they had interviewed to date featured somewhere on there, their timelines drawn with blue and green Pentels in a nightmarish maze of connections. One thing he noticed when he stepped back and studied it from a distance was how the living and the dead were all geographically linked. Every single one of them had connections inside Bloomsbury.
Broadly speaking, the area was bordered by four main thoroughfares: Euston Road, Tottenham Court Road, High Holborn and Grays Inn Road. The first two exhumation sites, Wallace’s legal practice, Curtis’s flat and the funeral parlour: all fell within the jurisdiction.
He wrote: ‘All 3 burials handled by Wells & Sons.’ In red he added the only three locations that were outside of the area: the site of Stephen Emes’s death at the north edge of Hyde Park, Jhadav’s Threadneedle Street office and the headquarters of the New Resurrectionists somewhere in Peckham.
What particularly annoyed him was the lack of contradictory information in the case. Usually participants failed to agree on timings and alibis, but here everything fitted seamlessly – too much so for his liking.
That could only mean one thing. Someone was collaborating in the creation of a lie. But with Banks still sitting on the file of requests for forensic tests and search warrants put in by various members of staff, there was nothing more that could be done. She had restricted their access to the tools they most needed.
‘Is there anything to eat?’ asked Bryant when he returned. ‘I’m starving. It’s a Saturday, we’re supposed to get a sandwich allowance.’
‘You were gone a long time.’
‘Are you surprised? Harrow on the Hill is a pain in the arse to get to, out past Wembley on the Metropolitan Line. That’s where my Freedom pass comes in handy. Saves me having to jump over the barrier.’
‘Couldn’t you have gone somewhere nearer?’
‘No, because of Deirdre Cornholt.’
‘Who—’
‘She owns a fish shop. She sells them. I mean for aquariums – do we say aquaria? Do you remember I took a week off in 1982 to go to Majorca?’
‘Very, very vaguely, by which I mean no.’
‘I gave her my Siamese fighting fish to look after and she accidentally boiled them.’
‘I’m not entirely sure where this is going, but pray continue,’ said May patiently.
‘Well, she still feels guilty, and she always said if there was anything she could do for me – and then I remembered that her son is a sports master at Harrow, so she arranged for me to be taught how to use a crossbow.’
‘And how was that for you?’
‘Interesting. It wasn’t as heavy as I thought it would be. The new ones are made of lightweight compound materials, all very state of the art. I had a bit of trouble with my cocking. But you can use a cocking rope or a winch to take the effort out of loading it. There are plenty of full-sized models but there’s also a pistol crossbow that’s incredibly portable and light. They’re virtually silent, too. The shocking part is how readily available they are. You can pick one up for as little as twenty quid, and that’s brand new. They go up to five hundred pounds, though, and then there are hundreds of accessories. You have to be eighteen to purchase one, but you can buy them virtually anywhere because they count as hobbyist items. I’m amazed we don’t find them being used on the street more often.’
‘You think it was easy for someone to pick off Emes even in the dark like that?’
&n
bsp; ‘I think so, if you’d had a little practice. Accuracy proved to be my problem. I was aiming at a target but one of my arrows went into an ice-cream van and quite a few simply shot up into the air and vanished. Dan got some forensic feedback from the shaft that went through Emes and reckons we’re looking for something called a Trueflight carbon-tipped bolt. Unfortunately, almost all crossbow specialists sell them online. How have you been getting on?’
May indicated the board. ‘See if anything on that makes any sense. I’ve been staring at it for ages.’
‘Yes, I did the same thing last night until I felt one of my heads coming on. I had to hang a eucalyptus-oil-soaked tea towel over the standard lamp. The odd thing is, I don’t get the feeling that we’re missing something obvious. It’s all right here, if only we could put it together in the correct order.’
May rose and stretched his back. ‘Why did you want Janice to find out about Jhadav’s files?’
‘Oh, you know, talismans,’ said Bryant, his off-handedness making him sound all the more mysterious. He followed May’s eyes to the board. ‘Do you notice something?’ he asked. ‘The funeral parlour is at the centre of everything on that rather spidery map you’ve drawn.’
May looked, and realized his partner was right. Wells and Sons sat in the middle of a circle that included Jhadav’s and Wallace’s offices at its southern base, the homes of Romain Curtis, Elspeth Duncannon, and even the owners of the dead Jack Russell, Prince, at its east and west sides. Just below the northern edge were the Scala nightclub and St George’s Gardens.
Bryant pulled an old-fashioned tailor’s tape measure from his pocket and slapped it on the board.
‘It’s an area no more than a mile wide,’ he said finally. ‘They all know each other. Everyone’s involved somehow – we just have to prove it.’ He avoided looking at the neighbourhood that lay immediately below. Bleeding Heart Yard was marked in red, and had a question mark scrawled above it. Instead he went to the eastern edge of the area he had marked and tapped his pen on the roundabout at London Wall. ‘And there,’ he said, ‘overlooking all of us, sits Mr Merry, planning our demise.’
Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart Page 21