Bryant & May 09; The Memory of Blood b&m-9

by Christopher Fowler

  His partner John May knew this, and was usually on hand to head him off from conversational culs-de-sac. But when the two of them were alone, Bryant could banter on about everything from geomancy to abrakophilia, and May would simply tune in and out of his friend’s lectures, remembering to interject the odd ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘really’, because that was what old friends did.

  The rest of the PCU had grown accustomed to his ramblings, but Bryant’s erudition – albeit an erudition of the most abstruse kind – always made Raymond Land feel duped and dull-witted. He was convinced that Bryant deliberately tried to undermine his authority at every available opportunity. He was wrong about this; Bryant had no interest in power games. He simply soaked up knowledge and sprayed it back out, hoping to breed enthusiasm in others, like a gardener cultivating ideas instead of flowers.

  May found some cleaning fluid and squirted it on a sponge, wiping away the grime on the glass. The round pug-nosed face of Madame Blavatsky slowly appeared. She was made of beige wax that had taken on the translucence of dead flesh. She had green eyes (one slightly sunken) and an ebony hair-clip, and was dressed in the grubby black crinolines of a dowager duchess. Her right fist was raised to her formidable bosom. She wore a cameo brooch and had golden earrings. Her hair looked suspiciously real.

  Gladdened by the distraction, the staff moved in for a closer look.

  “Have a shufti around the back, John,” Bryant instructed. “There should be a plug somewhere.”

  “There’s just a lead with bare wires,” said May, crouching down.

  “Well, stick them in the wall socket.”

  “There are only two wires and there are three holes.”

  “Jam a fork into the earth, that’s what I do at home.”

  “Wait – you’re not going to plug that thing in here!” Land protested.

  Too late. May flicked the switch and the case started buzzing. There was a smell of burning hair. Slowly the medium’s eyes glowed into life. The figure was life-sized, constructed with what appeared to be opticians’ glass eyes and cracked rubber lips.

  “But what exactly is it?” asked Meera, who had been trying to look uninterested.

  “I might be mistaken, but I believe she’s an automaton. She tells your fortune,” said Bryant.

  “We’ll need an old penny,” said May. “Anybody got one?”

  “Don’t be so ridiculous,” Land snapped. “The government got rid of pounds, shillings and pence in 1971.”

  “I’ve got one,” said Bryant, pulling a handful of illegal tender from his overcoat pocket. “Let’s see, a threepenny bit, a florin, a couple of conkers, half a crown – ah, here we are.”

  May took the huge brown coin from him and inserted it in the slot at the front of the machine.

  “You don’t honestly think that ridiculous contraption is still going to work after all these years, do you?” Land stood back and folded his arms, refusing to be drawn in.

  “Now give me your hand,” said Bryant, grabbing Land’s wrist, “and place it palm down on the brass panel.” The automaton was humming with errant electricity.

  The rectangular plate beneath the wax figure was dotted with a hundred tiny holes. Unwilling to appear a spoilsport, Land placed his hand over it. Pins shot out of the holes in a ripple, stinging his fingers. “Bloody hell!” Land shouted, trying to pull his hand free, but Bryant held it in place. He had a surprisingly strong grip.

  The medium’s eyes flickered more brightly and she jerked forward, as if trying to examine Land’s palm. Inside the case, gears groaned and unoiled pistons squealed in discomfort. “I’ll get some WD-40 on that later,” said Bryant.

  Land’s hand was tingling – the metal pins had delivered a mild shock. “I’ve just been electrocuted,” he complained dramatically.

  “Yes, some automata do that,” said Bryant with interest. “The Victorians thought it was very health-giving. Wait a minute.”

  Madame Blavatsky’s eyes dimmed, then flared. Her right arm swivelled forward and her fist partially opened to drop a white oblong card, which rattled into the slot at the front of the machine. Rubbing his fried hand, Land retrieved it and examined the stamped-out lettering.

  DEATH WILL REPAY ALL DEBTS

  “What kind of fortune is this?” he exclaimed. “It’s a paraphrased quote from The Tempest,” said John May. “Even I know that.”

  “Well, it’s a bloody depressing thought for a Monday,”

  Land said, tossing the card onto his desk. “Get this thing out of here.”

  “Fine,” said Bryant. “I’ll have it beside my desk.”

  “Must you? The office is already starting to look like your old space in Mornington Crescent.”

  “But of course. It’s the contents of my head.”

  “Well, it certainly contains the contents of a head, unless you’ve had the brainpan of that stinking Tibetan skull cleaned out.”

  “No, I mean it acts as my excess memory. It contains all the things there’s not enough room in my head to hold. Clutter, either mental or physical, is the sign of a healthy curiosity.” As Bimsley began rolling the automaton towards the door under Bryant’s guidance, Raymond Land looked back at his own bare office space and tried to figure out whether he had just been insulted again.

  ∨ The Memory of Blood ∧

  3

  Indiscretion

  “Madame Blavatsky?” said May as they headed downstairs later to a newly opened tea shop just beneath the Unit. “You’re the last of your species, you know that, don’t you? One day you’ll be in your own glass case in a museum. Label: the London Eccentric, Londinium insolitum, shy, hardy, solitary worker, difficult to breed, uncomfortable out of its native habitat – an area extending no more than five miles either side of the Thames, liable to bite when provoked.”

  “You missed out my key attribute,” said Bryant. “My eidetic memory. It’s unconventionally arranged, but more useful than any of your fancy computers. The world seems so intent on erasing its past that someone has to keep notes. That’s why I’m good at my job. I make connections with my surroundings. It’s like throwing jump leads into a junkyard and sparking off the things you find there. No one else can do that. It’s why we’re still in business.”

  Bryant was being a little disingenuous, and knew it. In truth, his mental connections were extremely haphazard and just as likely to short out. Moreover, he was unable to function without his partner. John May was indeed the acceptable face of the PCU, friendly with officials, kind to staff, linked to the Zeitgeist. May had never allowed himself to become an institutional officer, the kind who blankly processed criminals through the system. He believed in the innate decency of humankind, and Bryant’s innocence kept his belief alive. Such an old-fashioned approach to teamwork was not encouraged in the league-table mentality of the new century.

  “I want you to meet someone,” said Bryant, pushing open the door of the Ladykillers café. The new tea shop had been named after the famous 1955 Ealing film that had been shot in the neighbourhood. It had begun life a few weeks earlier as a pop-up shop, but the owners, two sisters who dressed in identical postwar fashions, had taken up the lease and now served teas in a setting that perfectly replicated a period neither of them was old enough to remember. The girls were in their early twenties, and had adopted the café’s styling as an ironic pose. Instead, they had attracted the wrong clientele: older locals who took the environment entirely at face value.

  Bryant made his way to the blue Formica counter and studied the merchandise: Battenberg cake, quiche Lorraine, Bath and Banbury buns under glass.

  “Hello,” said one of the girls, “can we help you? I’m Brenda and this is Yvonne.”

  “That seems highly unlikely,” said Bryant rudely. “Those are working-class names and judging by your accents your families are from the stockbroker belt, Thames Valley, probably. Any blue-collar customer would find your prices outrageous.”

  Yvonne looked at Brenda nervously.

&n
bsp; “It’s all right,” May explained to them, “that means he likes you. We’re from the police unit upstairs. I’m Mr May and this is Mr Bryant. A pot of English Breakfast tea and a couple of those buns, thanks.”

  Now the girls studied the men; appearances had proved deceptive in both directions. “There’s a lady over there waiting for you,” said Yvonne. The pair set about serving.

  “Anna Marquand is editing my memoirs,” replied Bryant, waving an ebony walking stick in the direction of a thin, oval-faced woman of around thirty-five, seated alone at the furthest table.

  “I thought your editor was male,” said May as they made their way over.

  “I had to fire that one. He accused me of being inconsistent. I told him it wasn’t true, because he had annoyed me from the outset, so we parted company. Anna was recommended by my old friend Dr Harold Masters, at the British Museum. She called to tell me she’s got proofs of my first volume of memoirs. I thought you might like to meet her.”

  May was slightly puzzled by this, as his partner rarely asked him to meet friends. Anna Marquand rose and removed her pink plastic spectacles, shaking their hands with an air of grave formality.

  “Anna transcribes for the historians in the Classical Studies department, and freelances for Icarus, the specialist publishing house that has taken the book. Anna, this is my partner at the PCU, John May.”

  “You’re younger than I was led to believe,” Anna remarked as they seated themselves.

  “You were doubtless expecting someone more decrepit,” said May.

  “Well, Mr Bryant’s description – ” She stopped awkwardly, then dug into her plastic shopping bag. “I have the finished text, Mr Bryant. They told me it’s not likely to be a big print run, but it’s going to be a nice-looking volume.”

  “Hopefully the first of three,” Bryant beamed, thumbing through the proofs.

  “Wait, let me see,” said May, snatching it away. “Where does this go up to?”

  “It’s not chronological; rather it’s a selection of our more eccentric cases,” said Bryant carefully. “I’ve covered the Leicester Square Vampire, that business with the Belles of Westminster, the Deptford Demon, the Shepherd’s Bush blowtorch murders and the hunt for the Odeon Strangler.”

  “I’m afraid I had to take out some of the more politically sensitive passages,” said Anna apologetically. “Your boss was very concerned about showing the Home Office in a bad light. Also, I checked with a lawyer and found that three of the sections fell foul of the Official Secrets Act. I excised those, but I couldn’t make all the minor changes you wanted. I mean, you sent me an awful lot of revisions, and many of them contradicted each other. There simply wasn’t time to include them all, and the deadline was so tight – ”

  “There’s nothing in here that’s going to upset anyone, is there?” asked May, riffling the pages. His partner had a reputation for being appallingly indiscreet.

  Anna Marquand glanced uncertainly at Bryant. “Well, um, there are one or two passages that could be construed – ”

  “What has he said? Arthur, what did you put in this book?”

  “So many sections were blue-pencilled and then reinserted that I don’t honestly remember,” Bryant admitted. “But I think I mentioned Raymond’s wife.”

  “What did you say about Leanne Land?”

  “I might have pointed out that she was having an affair with her flamenco instructor. But I only did it to explain why Raymond was going bald and was so hopelessly inefficient at work.”

  “Mr Land wanted to read it for himself,” Anna explained, “so I sent him the section on disc.”

  “Oh, Arthur,” May admonished. “Did it never occur to you to spare Raymond’s feelings?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “When did you do this, Anna?” asked May.

  “About a week ago.”

  “Then there’s still time to get it back. Raymond’s not good with books. He virtually moves his lips as he reads. He probably hasn’t got around to looking at it. You two stay here. I’ll go back and find it. It was very nice meeting you, Anna.”

  “I didn’t mean to cause any trouble,” said Anna when May had gone. Bryant looked at her anxious brown eyes and his heart softened. He could see her history laid out before him as neatly as parts in a model aircraft kit. Erudite and quick-witted but nervous and lacking in confidence, afflicted with apology, generous but broke, partnerless, the renter of a small flat in Stepney or Bermondsey, a solitary drinker, underpaid and underappreciated, she was probably still dominated by her mother.

  All this could be easily read by anyone with a vaguely Holmesian turn of mind. Anna Marquand’s plastic shopping bag was from a cheap supermarket usually situated at the wrong end of a high street, where the rents were lower. In the bag he could see a loaf of white processed bread and a half-litre of Gordon’s gin – if she lived with a partner, she’d probably have bought a full-sized bottle. There was also a packet of menthol cigarettes in there, but Anna wasn’t a smoker. Not a man’s brand, but one popular with older women starting to worry about their health. She had recently given money to charity – there was a sticker from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children on her jacket. There was also a slim paperback of Robert Browning’s poetry collection Men and Women in the pocket. Her hair was a mess and the ballpoint pen she had laid on the table was badly chewed. There was something inexplicably South London about her. Bryant wanted to clasp her hands and tell her to be as strong as she felt inside.

  “I can’t stay long, I’m afraid,” she told him. “Since my father died I’ve been looking after my mother, and she doesn’t like to be left alone. Our area – well, there’s been trouble before. You said you didn’t want to keep the original notes and documents, so once I’d inputted them I made a single copy on disc and wiped my hard drive. I usually just return the material, because I don’t like to leave potentially sensitive documents lying around on an old computer somewhere.” She removed a clear plastic slipcase from her shopping bag and handed it to him.

  “Have you got a pen?” Bryant asked. “I’ll forget what it is otherwise.” She handed him a felt-tip and he scribbled his name across the disc’s label. “Mind you, I’m just as liable to leave it on the bus. I got a terrible ear-bashing for losing the cremated remains of our coroner.”

  “I keep a safe at home. My academics are paranoid about their work, so I always shred their annotated copies once I’ve retyped them and file away my version. You’d be surprised what I get sent – Ministry of Defence work, big oil companies… I feel like a spy sometimes. Except it’s mostly boring technical stuff. I enjoyed doing your book, though. A breath of fresh air for me.”

  “Then perhaps you’d better keep hold of this.” Bryant handed the disc back. “Your hands are clearly safer than mine.”

  Anna rose to go. “I must be heading home. My mother will worry.”

  “Well, I’ll see you at the launch party. I mean, it’ll just be a drink in a scruffy old pub, but – ”

  “I’d like that very much.”

  “So would I,” said Bryant, offering up such a genuine smile that his false teeth nearly fell out.

  On his way back up to the office, he realized he had really taken quite a shine to Miss Marquand, and decided he would try to find a way to help her. Perhaps Raymond Land could be persuaded to employ her in some freelance capacity – provided he didn’t stumble across her exposure of his wife’s extramarital sex life first.

  ∨ The Memory of Blood ∧

  4

  Atmospherics

  “There’s nothing more exhausting than an entire roomful of people calling each other darling,” declared Mona Williams. The veteran actress cast a jaded eye around the crowded penthouse apartment. “God, when I was in Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle the conversation was a bloody sight more enlivening than tonight’s, and I was playing a goat farmer. Is there any more red wine?”

  “They’ve probably run out. You know how cheap
our host is. Oh, he’s clever, of course, but so unbearably common.” Neil Crofting ran a hand ineffectually around the crown of his head, a habit he had lately picked up to indicate that his hair was real, although everyone knew it was not. Before curtain-up it sat on a false head in his dressing room and was carefully brushed prior to every performance. Neil and Mona had once been a successful song and dance double act, but by the eighties they were cajoling uninterested punters through lounge sets in third-rate supper clubs. They continued to audition with grim dignity, but now listed only Shakespeare and Noel Coward roles on their CVs. After her third drink, Mona would reminisce about the time Olivier coached her through ‘Gertie’ in Hamlet. After his third drink, Neil would reach for a fourth.

  “What time do you make it?”

  Mona squinted at a tiny gold watch. “Eight-thirty. I shan’t be staying late. I’m voice-coaching in the morning, teaching a class of Essex girls not to use glottal stops. They hardly need elocution to work in nail salons, but the money’s good.”

  The vast semicircular lounge had a sweeping curve of glass overlooking the Palladian streets below Trafalgar Square. All along the blue silk back wall were arranged dozens of theatre souvenirs: playbills, autographed head-shots, programmes and props. At any one time there were over two hundred plays booking in London, and their convoluted histories were well represented here. The Duchess, the Duke of Yorks, Wyndhams, the Garrick, the Aldwych. Gielgud, Olivier, Richardson and Bernhardt, they all smiled down at the guests. There were Indonesian silhouettes and Chinese shadow puppets, Italian harlequins and French Guignol dolls.

  On one side of the lounge door stood a grotesque cast-iron minstrel that grinned and rolled its eyes when fed coins. On the other side was a Jolly Jack Tar in a wooden case. The Victorian seaside amusement was a museum piece that seemed designed for the specific purpose of giving children nightmares. Its skin was just plaster, its rictus smile mere painted wood, but it looked leathery and cancerous, like an embalmed corpse. When a ten-pence piece was inserted, it rocked back and forth squealing with laughter while a crackly organ recording of ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’ played. The sailor grinned and eyed the guests from the side of its moulting head, as if to say I know what you’re up to.