Bryant & May 01; Full Dark House b&m-1

by Christopher Fowler

  May had seen enough photographs of unexploded bombs in the Evening News, with proud ARP men standing beside them. By the end of the war, fifty thousand would have been defused in streets, factories, shops and homes. Sixty years later, they would still be discovered and deactivated.

  “We’ll all go together, to the real Hell, not one made of paint and plaster,” said Todd sadly. “It’s for the best.” He raised the sledgehammer higher over his head.

  “No” – Bryant threw up his hands – “don’t do it, Todd. Remember all the girls above us, the young dancers, like the one you didn’t want to hurt.”

  “None of them will have me. Who would want me? I’m a man, not a child. I have no face. I have no life. Can’t go. Can’t stay. And now I am a murderer.”

  “Todd, please.” A sense of dread flooded over Bryant. He was horribly aware of Maggie’s warning, that death would come from an unexploded bomb. He held out his hands. “Please,” he begged the boy again. May was standing right in its path.

  The muscles in Todd’s arms flexed, and he swung the sledgehammer down into the bomb with all his might. Bryant and May threw themselves down onto the floor.

  The only sound that followed was a violent splintering of wood. May groped for the fallen torch and twisted its beam back towards the boy. The head of the sledgehammer was lodged firmly inside the bomb case.

  “It’s a prop, a bloody balsa-wood stage prop,” cried May.

  “Blimey.” Bryant rose clumsily to his feet as May ran past him. He saw his partner wrestling with the boy, then watched as they fell with a crash that jolted aside the torch beam. Grunts and shouts filled the enveloping darkness. A few moments later came a terrible cry. Bryant thought of Maggie’s death warning again.

  “John!” he shouted, but there was no reply. Nothing but silence in the turgid claustrophobia of the darkened underworld.

  ∨ Full Dark House ∧

  60

  THE MOON IN A BOX

  Biddle pulled a Woodbine from behind his ear and kept his eyes on Elspeth Wynter as he dug around for a light. He didn’t like the look of her. Panic was flickering in her eyes. She was searching for a way out. From the street outside came the familiar whine of the siren mounted on the roof of St Anne’s Church. For a moment he thought she was going to drop in her tracks.

  “It’s all right, Mrs Wynter, our lads will find your son. Everything’s going to be fine.” It was the reassurance everyone gave each other throughout the war.

  “He’s very strong,” she warned. “I feel a little faint. Do you mind if I sit down over there, where it’s cooler?”

  “Here.” He took her arm and helped her to the stool in the boxoffice booth. “They timed the raid well tonight. The show’s just turning out.”

  Behind them, the ushers opened the auditorium doors as the sound of applause billowed into the foyer. Moments later, they were engulfed by members of the audience, leaving quickly to obey the warning of the air-raid siren. Biddle took his eyes off her for only a second. When he looked back at the booth, Elspeth Wynter had gone.

  ♦

  “John, where are you?” called Bryant. “Shine your torch.” He heard a strangled grunt in the dark. Water was dripping somewhere.

  “Over here.” May was coughing, trying to catch his breath. He grappled for the Valiant and pointed its beam up once more. Bryant saw that he was sitting beside the mouth of the artesian well. He limped over and joined May at the glistening ring of stone.

  “Down there.” May shone the torch over the side and saw Todd hanging by one claw-like hand from the slippery green brickwork.

  “Good Lord, look how deep it is.” Bryant got onto his knees and leaned as far over the well mouth as he dared. “Todd, give us your hand. We can get you out of there.” He turned to May. “You’re taller than me, you can reach further.”

  The boy was shaking his head rhythmically, scraping the damaged skin of his forehead along the brickwork until a dark caul of blood veiled his eyes. “No,” he called up. “I come from deep inside the Palace. This is where I belong. I see the stars from the skylight, lying up on the grid, just under the roof. The moon is always in a box, and the box is only full of tricks. I want something to be real. Death is real.”

  As the detectives cried out in unison, Todd opened the fingers of his left hand and dropped down the centre of the well, a fall of almost seventy feet before he hit the black water below. There was nothing either of them could do. For a moment they lost him from view. Then they turned the torch on the distant oily surface until it settled once more into an unbroken mirror, the remaining effect of a vanishing act.

  ♦

  Biddle pushed through the crowds, shoving his way out of the congested theatre foyer. His one chance to make good, to do something positive, and he had messed up. He threw his cigarette aside and looked around desperately as the theatregoers began making their way towards the shelters. There was no sense of urgency on the street, no rush or panic. Couples crowded the narrow pavement outside the Palace as ARP wardens directed them to the nearest shelter. He couldn’t see her. There were people everywhere. As Biddle searched the faces, the detectives arrived beside him.

  “Where’s Elspeth?” asked Bryant, wheezing badly. “What have you done with her?”

  “It’s my fault,” Biddle admitted. “She ran out as the stalls started emptying into the hall. My eyes were off her only for a second.” He looked at Bryant’s dirt-covered clothes. “What happened to you?”

  “We have to find her, Sidney.”

  “She can’t have got far. Here, give us a hand up.” Biddle leaned on the detective’s shoulders and hoisted himself onto the edge of a stone horse trough. On the other side of Cambridge Circus he saw the back of a woman in a brown cardigan and skirt, fleeing in the direction of the British Museum. “I can see her. Come on.”

  The detectives lost precious seconds extricating themselves from the crowds. When they managed to catch sight of Elspeth Wynter again, she was running blindly across the intersection beside the Shaftesbury Theatre.

  “Where’s she heading?” asked Biddle.

  From somewhere near the river came the dull drone of a bomber squadron.

  “Out,” said Bryant, “just out into the open, away from the theatre, but the more open it gets, the more frightened she’ll be.”

  They were fifty yards behind her when she turned into Museum Street and froze, standing in the middle of the road, looking up.

  Overhead, the thick grey clouds had parted to reveal a midnightblue sky glittering with stars as bright and sharp as knives. As the gap grew larger, the oval of the moon appeared, flooding the street with silvered light.

  Bryant, May and Biddle came to a stop some way back, amazed by the sight of the buildings’ dark recesses melting away beneath the lunar brightness. “She’s reached it,” said Bryant, “she’s reached the light. If she can survive this, she’ll be free.”

  “She’s still going to gaol,” said Biddle indignantly.

  “Freedom will be inside her head.”

  They could hear Elspeth sobbing in awe and relief as she looked up, transfixed by the quiescence of the moon. The droning of the bombers was fading now, growing quieter and quieter until the four of them were standing in unshadowed silence.

  Bryant knew he could not compete with the world that beckoned to her. He watched as she took a faltering step away from him, then another. Part of him wanted Elspeth to run and keep on running, until she was liberated from the city’s life-crushing influence, free to live a normal life. Go, he thought, don’t look back. Whatever you do, keep going.

  “Look, are we just going to stand here and let her get away?” asked Biddle impatiently.

  “No, I suppose not,” said Bryant with a sigh as they walked forward. “Elspeth,” he called gently. “Please. Let us help you.”

  She stopped in her tracks and looked back over her shoulder with sad deliberation. She saw Bryant and held his eye, unable to move any further, and in that mo
ment she was lost.

  Up ahead there was a muffled thump, and the road vibrated sharply beneath their feet.

  “What the bloody hell was that?” asked Biddle.

  Elspeth had heard the noise too.

  “Oh no,” was all Bryant managed to say before the two-storey front of the antiquarian bookshop lazily divorced itself from the rest of the terrace and fell forward in an explosion of dust and bricks.

  As the airborne sediment settled, they saw the neat rooms inside the bookshop exposed like a child’s cutaway drawing. The building’s frontage lay collapsed across the road, virtually unbroken. As a fresh wind picked up, the entire street was scattered with the pages of rare books. Colour plates of herons, butterflies, monkeys, warriors and emperors drifted lazily past them. There were diamond shards of glass everywhere. The detectives’ clothes were pincushioned with sparkling slivers.

  “Bloody hell,” said Biddle, scratching his head in wonder.

  Of Elspeth Wynter, there was no sign at all.

  ∨ Full Dark House ∧

  61

  SPIRITS OF THE CITY

  Margaret Armitage sipped the glass of vervain tea made from leaves she had specially shipped to her from a French necromancer in the town of Carcassonne. Beside her, Arthur Bryant and John May dangled their legs over the ancient wall of the riverbank, nursing foamy pint mugs of bitter. Above the pub door was a large blackboard that read: HITLER WILL SEND NO WARNING – ALWAYS CARRY YOUR GAS MASK.

  The waitress of the Anchor had looked at Maggie as if she was mad when she asked for a glass of freshly boiled water. It did not help that the teenage leader of the Camden Town Coven, an organization that had counted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe among its members, was wearing a purple and gold kaftan belonging to an African tribal chief, topped with a peacock-feather hat and half a dozen amber necklaces inscribed with carvings representing the souls of the dead.

  “I’m a bit disappointed about there not being an actual phantom at the Palace, just a poor tortured boy,” said Maggie, looking out across the placid grey water at the bend in the river, where it widened to the docks. “Let me get under your overcoat, it’s big enough.”

  “Yes, that was rather an intriguing aspect,” Bryant agreed as he extended his gaberdine. “Of course, Todd Wynter was never at Jan Petrovic’s house, so there were no walls to walk through, so to speak. But when he vanished from the top-floor corridor, and again from the roof, he had me fooled for a while. John, you remember I asked you about the wind that night?”

  “Yes, I wondered what you were on about.”

  “We found Todd’s jacket,” he told Maggie. “The one his mother had made for him, just a hood and cloak stitched out of blackout curtain, but it was absolutely huge, rolled up like a sheet. When I ran after him, I imagine he simply remained still at the end of the passageway and unfurled the cloak. It was too dark for me to see him. An old magician’s trick; he’d witnessed plenty of those at the Palace. He threw it off the roof when he was finished with it, and waited until he could return to his private quarters. We found it hanging from the steeple of St Anne’s Church in Dean Street. The wind had carried it like a sail.”

  “What a pity,” said Maggie. “I had hoped you might be able to give us proof of the spirit world.”

  “Oh, I’ve no doubt Andreas Renalda is possessed, but he’s possessed by the spirits of his childhood.” Bryant swallowed some of his bitter, savouring the pungent taste of hops. “In her own way, so was Elspeth Wynter. Her life was shaped by the ghosts of the theatre. She was a woman forced to survive in a world of harmful magic.”

  “That’s what witches are. Do you think she was a witch?”

  “Well, someone dropped a house on her,” said Bryant, “so she might have been.”

  “You can’t fool me. You were keen on her.”

  “I was only ever keen, as you quaintly put it, on one girl. Once you’ve met the one, all the others are just phantasms.”

  Maggie lightly stroked his hand. “Perhaps it’s time to let her memory go, Arthur.”

  Bryant looked out at a pair of swans settling on the oily water. “It’s not a matter of choice. I have to wait for her to do that.” He took a ruminative swig of beer. The evening’s chill had blanched his cheeks and knuckles.

  “Did you hear about your landlady?” May was anxious to change the mood. “She stabbed the editor of Country Life in the foot with your swordstick.”

  “Serves him right,” said Bryant, cheering up. “He has no business being in London.”

  “And Davenport’s very pleased. He came into the unit this morning and wandered around for a while, shifting pieces of paper about, looking into drawers, fiddling with things. Turned out he’d come to congratulate us formally, and was having trouble uttering the words.”

  “Perhaps he could jot it on a postcard,” offered Bryant. “He means well but he’s such an awful clot. Fancy ordering our front door to be barred.”

  “I think he was a bit embarrassed about that. You should have seen his face when Biddle stood up for you. He looked as if he’d been stabbed in the back.”

  “I don’t suppose Davenport’s good mood will last. The Lord Chamberlain has changed his mind about the show. Says it’s indecent and has to come off. I think somebody higher up must have had a word with him.”

  “So all of Elspeth Wynter’s efforts were wasted. The production would have closed anyway. How sad. God, we’re such a lot of hypocritical prudes.”

  “You didn’t sleep with her, did you?” asked Maggie. “You didn’t get your conkers polished by a murderess?”

  Bryant looked horrified. “No I did not, thank you,” he said, as though the thought had never even occurred to him. “For a spiritualist, you can be very crude.” He suddenly brightened. “Mind you, he did, our Mr May, he made love to a murderess.” He pointed at John May.

  “Unproven,” said May hastily. “I mean Betty’s involvement in the death of Minos Renalda. There’s nothing on record, only the conversation I had with Andreas.”

  “I thought her real name was Elissa.”

  “That’s right, abbreviated to Betty. She has a sister in the Wrens. I should introduce you.”

  “I don’t think so. Once bitten and so on.” Bryant raised his trilby and shook out his floppy auburn fringe.

  “I should be going.” Maggie Armitage set down her tea glass. “I’ll be late.”

  “What have you got tonight?” asked May. “Druid ceremony? Séance? Psychic materialization?”

  “No, Tommy Handley on the radio at eight thirty. I never miss him.” She thrust a lethal-looking pin through her hat. “I was listening when Bruce Belfrage got bombed. We hadn’t laughed so much in ages.” Belfrage was a BBC news announcer who became a national hero after carrying on his live radio broadcast even though the studio had received a direct hit and several people were killed. “I actually think I’m going to miss the war when it’s over.”

  “Don’t be obscene, Margaret,” said Bryant hotly, swinging his legs down from the weed-riven embankment wall. “Death is stalking the streets, death made terrifying by its utter lack of meaning.”

  “The closer you are to death, the more attached you become to life,” the coven leader reminded him. “The city is filled with strengthening spirits.”

  “The city is filled with brave people, that’s all,” said May, and took a long drink of his beer.

  “If people ever stop thinking about the ones they leave behind, Mr May, your job will cease to exist. All that you see – all this,” she gestured around her, “is about generations yet to be born.”

  “Don’t take her too seriously,” Bryant warned his partner. “You were wrong about one of us dying in an explosion, Maggie.”

  “It’s never a dead cert, otherwise I’d make my fortune on the geegees instead of helping the police with their inquiries,” she snapped at him, stung.

  “You told me you once copped a monkey on a nag called Suffragette racing at Kempton Park
because he was possessed by the spirit of Emmeline Pankhurst,” complained Bryant.

  Maggie saw more than she ever dared to tell anyone. Time compressing, days blurring into nights, speeding skies, great buildings whirling into life, wheels of steel and circles of glass. She saw a girl her age but half a century away, a girl too afraid of life to leave her house.

  She saw the future of John May’s grandchild.

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized suddenly. “I have to go. Don’t be downhearted, Mr May. And don’t worry about the future. Things have a way of working out. The song of the city will live on, so long as there is someone to sing it.”

  “Well, I wonder what got into her?” exclaimed Bryant. The detectives watched as she walked off down the street, pausing to stroke a tortoiseshell cat on a doorstep, listening to it for a moment, then moving on.

  “You know some very peculiar people, Arthur,” May pointed out.

  “Oh, you haven’t seen the half of it. I intend to bring many more of them into the unit. I have a friend who can read people’s minds by observing insects. He’d be useful. And I know a girl who’s a ventophonist.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She can throw her voice down the phone.”

  “Now you’re teasing me.”

  “Our work is far from finished. I think I’ve finally found a purpose to my life. Something I can dedicate myself to. Thanks to you.”

  Bryant looked over at his partner and grinned as the sun came out above them, transforming the river into a shining ribbon of light. He rubbed his hands together briskly.

  “But where to start? We have yet to discover the lair of the Leicester Square Vampire. He’s still got my shoes, you know. And that poor girl he snatched, buried alive with all those rabid bats and someone else’s head. There are other cases starting to come in. We’ve got a twenty-one-year-old Hurricane pilot accused of a brutal stabbing in Argyll Street, several witnesses, his bloody fingerprints on the body, and a cast-iron alibi that places him in the middle of Regent’s Park, tied to the back of a cow. He’s one of the Channel heroes, so it’s in everyone’s interests to exonerate him, but how? No, our labours here are only just beginning. This city is a veritable repository of the wonderful and the extraordinary. Isn’t that right, Mr May?”