Wild Chamber

by Christopher Fowler

  Heading over to the window, he looked down into the road. The black BMW opposite was an unmarked police vehicle; it sat too low in the rear and there was too much kit on the dashboard. As he watched, Darren Link lumbered out from the driver’s side and looked up at the unit’s windows.

  Land fell back against the wall, hoping he hadn’t been seen. He would have to warn the others to stay away from the windows and the phones. If Link was going to cut them off from the outside world, they could cut themselves off from Link. God knows life here hasn’t been easy, he thought. The pay is lousy, the targets are impossible and my detectives ridicule me, but at least … He couldn’t think of a way to complete the thought. What have our bosses ever done for us except try to shut us down and make our lives hell? Well, it’s time to pick a side and make a stand. They may not be much, but the PCU staff are all the family I have, and families should stick together.

  Thus fortified, he went to the operations room. And found nobody there.

  Janice Longbright reached the bottom of the basement’s scaffolded staircase and pushed at the riveted iron door that stood before her. ‘Has anyone else been down here recently?’ she asked over her shoulder.

  ‘Arthur told the two Daves not to allow anyone to use the steps,’ said May. ‘They’re only held together with nails.’

  Renfield tried the torch on his phone. ‘Where are the lights? I thought they were supposed to finish the electrics ages ago.’

  ‘They haven’t been put in yet,’ May explained. ‘The old wires went under the floor and were corroded because of the damp down here. We’re built over a tributary of the River Fleet.’

  Janice put her shoulder to the door and screeched it back a couple of feet. Colin tried the switch to a single overhead bulb. Dead.

  ‘God, what’s that awful smell?’ Janice covered her nose and mouth. ‘It’s like rotting fish!’

  ‘Let me go first,’ said Meera. ‘I’m used to bin duty and Colin. Weird smells don’t bother me.’

  The basement covered almost the entire footprint of the building, but the air was so dust-filled that their torchlights failed to reach the far walls. ‘It smells like death,’ said Dan Banbury, who knew exactly what death smelled like.

  Their lights delineated the grey concrete sarcophagus that rose from the far end of the floor. ‘That’s not very old,’ Banbury remarked. ‘You can see the striations where cement was poured into a planked mould. Concrete’s only been around since 1824.’

  ‘Hey, the body’s still in here.’ Renfield reached the edge and shone his torch inside. ‘I thought someone said it had gone to Giles’s mortuary?’

  ‘So did I.’ Joining him, Longbright ran her light over its length to reveal a human form beneath rotted grey rags. ‘He’s well preserved. I thought the air down here was too damp to do that.’

  Suddenly the corpse sat up. Everybody yelled. The corpse yelled back. For a moment the unit’s basement turned into the set of a Hammer horror film.

  ‘Jesus, you just took a year off my life,’ said the corpse. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘It’s a bloody Terence!’ said Meera.

  ‘I’m not a tramp, I’m a gentleman of the road. I’d shake your hand but it’s not very clean. Harry Prayer,’ said Harry Prayer. ‘I’m a friend of Mr Bryant’s.’

  ‘Of course you are. What are you doing here?’ Longbright asked, backing off.

  ‘Mr Bryant said I could doss down here if I got into a situation.’

  ‘What kind of situation?’

  ‘One involving a rare edition of the King James Bible, a boxing priest and the likelihood of me getting my face punched off.’

  ‘Fair enough. How did you get in?’

  ‘The café next door,’ he said, which explained everything. The Ladykillers Café was a perfectly respectable cake shop on the ground floor but had a sex shop in the basement, and their fire escape door connected to the basement of the PCU.

  Renfield rolled his eyes. ‘So much for being a secure unit.’

  ‘At least we can get out,’ said Longbright.

  ‘No,’ said Harry. ‘I came in here for a kip last night but when I got up this morning and went to find some gentleman’s reading matter to peruse while performing my ablutions I found that someone had barred the door from the other side.’

  ‘How do you know Mr Bryant?’ asked Bimsley.

  ‘I’ve many strings to my bow,’ Harry explained. ‘I’m a theologian and a cobbler.’

  ‘Great,’ said Meera. ‘If we need someone to dispute the existence of God with a mouthful of tin tacks we’ll let you know. Can you just get out of our unit?’

  ‘He can’t leave, Meera,’ said Longbright. ‘We’re stuck with him.’

  ‘I’m right here, I do have feelings,’ said Harry, pulling the lapels of his ragged overcoat about him like an affronted landlady tightening a dressing gown.

  ‘He’s right,’ said Renfield, ‘and he might be able to help us. Harry, if we disguised you, do you think you could pass for Mr Bryant?’

  ‘He doesn’t need a disguise,’ said Meera disgustedly.

  They took Harry Prayer upstairs. With the addition of a striped scarf and a homburg, Prayer made a more than passable Arthur Bryant, although he could also have passed for a particularly disreputable greyhound trainer.

  ‘Thank God you’re back,’ exclaimed Land as they all trooped in. ‘Good Lord, what on earth is that awful smell?’

  ‘That would be me,’ said Harry cheerfully. ‘My socks have passed peak cleanliness. Harry Prayer. You must be Raymond Land. I’ve heard a lot about you, you poor devil.’

  Land looked in horror at Prayer’s proffered hand. ‘Who is this revolting-looking creature and what is he doing here?’

  ‘I’d like to know what it is that encourages everyone to refer to me in the third person,’ Harry complained.

  ‘We need you to walk back and forth in front of this window, maybe open it and look out a couple of times,’ said Renfield. ‘Actually, let’s open it now. Do you think you can do that?’

  ‘I have a master’s degree in theology and honours in hermeneutics, Greek and Hebrew,’ replied Harry. ‘I should be able to open a window.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said John May. ‘My partner is the smartest man I’ve ever met and I’ve watched him shoving at a door marked “PULL” for at least five minutes.’

  After setting Harry Prayer to work and leaving Meera to oversee his movements, they headed to the operations room. ‘Right,’ said Land, ‘we can’t wait any longer for Bryant to appear with some miracle breakthrough, so we’ll have to come up with something ourselves.’

  May’s phone rang. ‘It’s him!’ he told the room. ‘Arthur, where are you?’

  ‘I know what’s going on,’ Bryant shouted above the noise of traffic, ‘I just need to check one more thing, but I’m not sure if it’s safe to try it alone. Could somebody come with me?’

  ‘You never usually ask for help,’ May reminded him. ‘Unfortunately this is the one time we can’t give it to you. Link is using your excuse about the plague body to quarantine us. Nobody’s coming in or getting out until after the health and safety officers from the Crick Institute have given the building the all-clear.’

  ‘That’s a bit of a nuisance,’ said Bryant. ‘I’ll have to go it alone, unless …’ And he hung up.

  46

  ‘SOMETIMES WHAT LOOKS LIKE CRUELTY IS ACTUALLY KINDNESS’

  Arthur Bryant was sitting in Nino’s, the scruffy Italian café that stood diagonally opposite the headquarters of the PCU. ‘Is that supposed to be me?’ he asked Maggie Armitage, watching as Harry Prayer marched theatrically back and forth past the first-floor window. ‘I don’t look like a Terence, do I?’

  Maggie considered the idea. ‘Not a tramp exactly, but he’s wearing one of your overcoats. Wherever did you get that belt?’

  ‘I shut my old one in the doors of a Piccadilly line tube train,’ Bryant explained. ‘That’s a curtain sash I liberate
d from one of the windows at Somerset House. I design my own clothes, you know. But enough about haute couture, I need your help. There’s no one else who can do this. The staff have been barricaded into the building and I’m shut out. Would you be able to accompany me somewhere?’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said Maggie. ‘Dame Maude Hackshaw and I were supposed to hold a spirit-raising at the Quakers’ Society later today but the meeting was cancelled. You need thirty-two knives to materialize Asmodeus, and that’s a lot of cutlery to smuggle through a metal detector. Plus he’s the Lord of Conjugal Discord and the organizer is trying for a baby, so it wasn’t advisable. What do you need?’

  ‘I’ve lost my primary suspect. I told you about Jeremy Forester, didn’t I?’

  ‘The businessman who was in the park when his wife was killed.’

  ‘Yes. I was thinking about that M. R. James story “Casting the Runes”. You know the one: a man is slipped a piece of paper with a spell on it, and if he isn’t able to pass it on to somebody else before a certain length of time elapses, a demon comes to kill him.’

  ‘I’m sorry, chum, I’m not entirely sure where you’re going with this.’ It was a familiar feeling among those whom Bryant counted as friends: the sense that she’d missed some crucial link in his logic.

  ‘Let me see if I can explain it a bit better. I’d assumed Forester was trying to get out of the country because he was wanted for fraud and deeply in debt – heaven knows those are good enough reasons for needing to leave in a hurry. But Steffi Vesta thinks there’s another reason. His fraud case concerns the hiding of assets in a free port storage facility. We know about one in Luxembourg but she says there’s a second registered account number. He was spending a lot of time in Hong Kong, so it’s likely the other one is there. He just can’t get to it.’

  ‘How is it accessed?’

  ‘By a lengthy code that only Forester knew, and it has to be entered in person at the site. Obviously, he couldn’t do that. This morning he let himself into the private members’ entrance of Number One, Poultry, where his office was based. The club on the roof hadn’t opened yet but he gained access via his old swipe card and was able to get out into the garden. He climbed over the guardrail, on to the left-side buttress that hangs out over the road, and jumped.’

  ‘He’s dead, I take it?’

  ‘A bit more than dead. He dispersed himself over a fairly wide area. Link thinks that’s the end of the case.’

  ‘But you don’t.’

  ‘I agree that on the surface Forester looks culpable. He was there when his wife died, and had good reason to wish her dead because she was about to take him for everything he had left. We don’t know if she had knowledge of his hidden assets, but considering he never even told her he’d lost his job it seems unlikely that she knew the full extent of his dealings. But I never really suspected Mr Forester. He just seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. If you had a fortune stashed away in a spot where you couldn’t get at it, what would you do?’

  Maggie twisted a length of iridescent funfair beads around her fingers, thinking. ‘I suppose I’d try to find someone else to get it for me. Somebody I could trust completely.’

  ‘Except that he was a loner, and there was no one to whom he could turn.’

  ‘You’re telling me that a rich, successful businessman like Forester had no friends?’

  ‘Think about it, Maggie. His colleagues could no longer speak to him, and his wife and child were gone. What do you see when you head down the City Road? Rows and rows of secure apartment buildings filled with people just like him. They work and sleep, and barely interact with anyone else. Whom could he rely on to dispose of his assets? Plus, there was another problem. If Steffi is able to work out that he had a second account in Hong Kong, the City of London Fraud and Economic Crime Squad can, too. So you see the code is no longer the key to untold riches – it’s the proof of guilt. That innocuous slip of paper is like the curse in “Casting the Runes”. Forester couldn’t access the money and he couldn’t trust anyone else with the code. The thing was a millstone around his neck. But of course there was one person to whom he could give it.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Arthur, I feel like I’ve wandered into the middle of a particularly confusing film.’ Maggie shook her head and rattled her many Incan beaded earrings. ‘Who did he give this code to, and why do you need me?’

  ‘Good Lord, woman, do try to pay attention, it’s very simple,’ snapped Bryant, exasperated. ‘There was one person in Forester’s life whom he still loved and cared about in spite of everything that had happened. His wife. That was why he went to Clement Crescent that morning – to catch her and tell her that he was sorry, and to give her the code. He’d jotted it on the back of the piece of card he used to find the gardens recommended by the Rough Sleepers Community. That was why it was under his shoe – it had been in his hand, and he dropped it when he saw her killed. It happened so fast that he didn’t even have time to react. He watched and then fled. But here’s the other thing – he couldn’t have recognized her murderer. It would have been the first thing he’d have told us.’

  ‘I don’t really have the faintest idea what you’re talking about, Arthur. You still haven’t answered my question.’ She laid a bangled hand on his, speaking slowly and loudly. ‘Are. You. Having. A. Relapse?’

  ‘Certainly not.’ He pushed back his chair and gathered his hat and scarf. ‘But I need you to come with me.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘I have to look at something. It’s not very far.’

  ‘What, exactly?’ she asked, pulling on her raincoat.

  ‘Drains,’ said Bryant. ‘My fault. Easily distracted, I can see that now. It would help to know what Lauren Posner was wearing on the day she killed herself. Also, she was shortsighted. Was she wearing her glasses when she died? Let me call John and ask him. Then there’s the matter of the budgerigar. It all fits. Come along.’

  He’s telling me the case hinges on drains, clothes, glasses and a budgie? thought Maggie as they stepped back into the street. ‘Shouldn’t we tell John and the others where we’re going?’ she suggested gently, not entirely convinced that her old friend hadn’t mentally left the building.

  ‘They can’t help us now and nobody else would believe me. Hurry up, there’s no time to lose.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m going to be of any use to you,’ she warned, impeding the traffic with a stab of her umbrella. ‘I’m not terribly brave.’

  ‘Oh, I think you are,’ said Bryant. ‘You stopped the Arsenal Electrocutor from making an escape, remember? You chased him into your garden.’

  ‘Strictly speaking, he fell over my lawnmower cord.’

  ‘Still counts.’

  On the other side of the road, Darren Link watched and told his men to stand down. ‘No, let them go,’ he told them. ‘What are those two going to do? It’s over. A hallucinating old man and a crazy white witch? I almost feel sorry for them. We’ll miss them when they’ve gone, but I think their time has finally passed.’

  He stared after the scruffy old fellow in the striped green scarf and crumpled hat as he linked arms with his tiny rainbow-cloaked companion, trying to find a way across the traffic-choked road.

  Link looked at his impassive sergeant, Bassett, then back at the retreating pair. ‘You know, after my old mum died we wondered whether my father could cope, living by himself out in the middle of Kent. He swore he was fine, preparing his own meals, going for walks, staying well. He didn’t need to go into care. But I was worried, so one day I told him I was going to watch him all day long, from when he got up to when he went to bed, and all he had to do was go about his usual daily routine. Old people can be really crafty. By mid-afternoon he still hadn’t eaten anything hot. He didn’t have the strength to get the freezer open; he’d been living on bread and jam. At the end of the day I asked him: How do you think you did? And he started crying. Finally he said, “Perhaps I do need help. Perhaps it’s time.�
��’

  He glanced over at his sergeant, who was not even bothering to pretend he was listening. ‘That’s what this is, Bassett. An intervention. We had to let them see for themselves that they can’t handle crimes of this magnitude any more. It’s better to let them fail and understand why I’m doing it than to just close down the unit without their approval. Sometimes what looks like cruelty is actually kindness.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said Bassett. ‘How much longer do you want to hold off?’

  ‘Faraday’s found a health and safety officer from the Crick Institute who’s prepared to sign the order for sealing off the unit,’ said Link. ‘She doesn’t even have to view the property first if there’s a reasonable suspicion that it’s a risk to the public. It looks like we won’t have to wait until tomorrow morning. As soon as we have a verbal verification of the order we can enter the property by force, evacuate it and sequester all the files.’

  ‘It’s a bloody embarrassment,’ said the sergeant angrily. ‘Bryant and May should have been packed off into an old folks’ home decades ago. They’re just holding everything up for the rest of us.’

  Link bristled. ‘You haven’t earned the right to say that! Those two have done more good for this city than you or I could ever do. The same thing’ll happen to us when the next lot comes in, did you ever think about that? Show some bloody respect.’

  All tenures come to a close eventually, he thought. So long, lads, you had a good innings.

  47

  ‘HE’LL ONLY SOUND LIKE CASSANDRA IF HE TRIES TO EXPLAIN’

  Even at the best of times the offices of the Peculiar Crimes Unit resembled student accommodation, not the kind that consisted of elegant Oxford rooms filled with tidy hardworking pupils quietly tapping at laptops, more like an off-campus overspill where someone was likely to leave a motorcycle in the common room. On Sunday afternoon the PCU offices reached a new level of chaos.