Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection)

by Christopher Fowler

  I thought it would be nice to include a tale told from a different perspective, so here’s a first-person account from the old boys’ detective sergeant and long-time friend, Janice Longbright. I’d already touched on her years as a nightclub hostess in the graphic novel The Casebook of Bryant & May, but here she is on secondment to another unit. I worked out everyone’s backstories many years ago, and now I’m getting to reveal them little by little. If this book of cases goes well I hope to produce another volume in the future.

  BRYANT & MAY AND THE BLIND SPOT

  ‘No fuss,’ I’d told them. ‘Don’t make it obvious.’ Instead, the whole street was a sea of red and white plastic ribbons.

  They were all over the road, coming loose from orange traffic cones, sagging and snapping in the rain, wrapping themselves around people’s legs, tangling and trailing across the wet pavements. The cordon sealed off the entire centre section of Oxford Street. Shoppers tried to climb over them but were turned back by uniformed cops. There was a sale at Selfridges department store but nobody could reach the main entrance.

  This was in November, on the sort of miserable, barely visible London day where you think it won’t bother to get light at all. I had taken a break from the Peculiar Crimes Unit and was working on a public-security detail, which wasn’t what I’d planned to be doing at all.

  What had happened was this: I’d been dating a married DS on and off and he’d finally decided to go back to his wife, which was the last straw, and when John May found me clearing up my office in a sort of frenzy at nearly midnight, he had told me to take some time off. ‘I’ve been looking at the files,’ he said. ‘You haven’t had a holiday in years.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I told him, emptying more redundant paperwork into a bin bag. ‘I don’t need to take time off. I had a full medical earlier this year. I’m in perfect health. Good BMI, low heart rate.’ I didn’t tell him that my optometrist had failed me on several counts and wanted me to start wearing reading glasses. After all, Colin Bimsley was still working on the street despite suffering from DSA.fn1

  ‘I agree there’s nothing actually wrong with you,’ John said. ‘But you should take a month off. Go and lie by a pool in a Moroccan riad, and come back refreshed.’

  I’d explained that I couldn’t just sit frying in the sun without some kind of work, and I’d prefer to remain in the UK in case I was required for active duty, so he let it be known that I was available for a one-month secondment to another unit. Which is how a man called Adrian Dunwoody found me and suggested I start working in his security detail.

  ‘He’s a control freak and a miserable excuse for a human being,’ John told me, ‘but it’ll be easy, well-paid work, which should prove a novelty for you, plus you’ll be able to run rings around him if he gets difficult.’ So that was what I did.

  The first thing Dunwoody had told me on my third morning was that I shouldn’t have joined his detail at all. He said, ‘You don’t need to be here. You’ve already helped us enough by going over the scenarios for today’s visit. There’s nothing else to do. Wait a minute. Turn around.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What are you – Are you wearing a Kevlar vest?’ He flicked a hand at my untucked shirt.

  ‘I got it out of stores,’ I explained. ‘I thought I might have to, you know, go down there into the street at some point. In case of trouble.’ I liked to be prepared. I decided not to tell him I still keep a house brick in my handbag for bouncing off difficult customers.

  The first task of the week should have been easy. The French Ambassador’s wife had decided to do a little shopping in London. She travelled over on the 1.30 p.m. Eurostar from Paris to St Pancras International, and was on her way to Selfridges without her entourage. With the exception of the American Embassy, which always makes its own arrangements, most embassies use security logistics provided by the Home Office, working with the Met. The cost of covering Madame’s little retail expedition was charged to the taxpayer.

  ‘She’s going shopping,’ said Dunwoody. ‘There’s not going to be a firefight. You won’t need to dive behind a bollard and bang off a few rounds.’

  ‘I was told to be ready for anything,’ I said, sensing that nothing would induce Dunwoody to leave his surveillance post. ‘I enjoy field work.’

  Dunwoody snorted, then was forced to blow his nose. He always seemed to have a cold. He said, ‘Field work? This isn’t the CIA, Longbright, it’s one step above being a shopping-mall guard. It’s easy money. That’s why your boss was happy to let you come here – it’s a paid holiday.’

  It had already become clear that Dunwoody was a natural moaner. Weather, staff, transport, workload, I’d already learned to screen out most of his conversation. Apart from the fuss and mess, I saw something down on the pavement that bothered me.

  ‘Why have the Met got so involved?’ I asked him. ‘They’ve made the area look like a murder scene. I thought the point was not to draw anyone’s attention to the visit.’

  He said the instruction came from their side, not ours. Dunwoody’s official title was Senior Security Liaison Officer, which basically meant that he passed his problems over to the techs and took all the credit. The surveillance room had no heat but he was sweating. It seemed he could produce sweat in a meat locker. I told him they shouldn’t have closed the street.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘one day when you’ve given up playing silly buggers at the PCU and you’re in charge of operations at the Met, you’ll be able to tell everyone what to do. Meanwhile you sit here and do as you’re told.’ He looked around for something to wipe his forehead with, and for one horrible moment I thought he was going to use the end of his tie. ‘I don’t know why there are so many people milling around down there. She’s the wife of the personal envoy of the President of the Republic to the Court of St James, not some footballer’s tart.’

  Protecting London is a complicated business. The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Security and Counter-Terrorism reviews public places, working out how they can be better protected from attack. Coordinating everything means analysing the routes of all state visits and reducing risk without disrupting normal services. I’d attended a seminar on the subject and it amounted to a single rule: Don’t let the great unwashed disturb the privileged.

  I told Dunwoody that the new wife was a liability. Her political opinions had turned her into a target for extremist groups. Madame Natalie Desmarais had a habit of opening her mouth in public without thinking and had received death threats from a number of officially recognized organizations. During the briefing, I’d suggested that the best way to protect her would be to downgrade the visibility of her visit. Instead we turned it into a circus.

  People are like dogs before earthquakes; they always know when something’s about to happen. Shoppers were hanging around on the off chance of seeing Tom Cruise turn up. Foot traffic had slowed to a crawl around the store. A much bigger risk. I complained about it.

  Dunwoody stood at the window, wiping his forehead with a tissue and starting on his pet subject: bombs. He said, ‘You could drop an IED from any one of those buildings and catch her between the car door and the store entrance.’

  I dismissed the idea. Improvised explosive devices range in size from pedestrian-borne rucksacks to large goods vehicles. I know what explosions can do. There are six main effects: the blast wave, the fireball, the brisance or shattering effect, the primary and secondary fragments, and ground shock. But no amount of scientific analysis could account for the sheer sense of chaos, disorientation and confusion created by a bomb.

  An official group would send a coded call first. The worry was that a lone nutcase might decide to try his luck.

  When I looked across the street I saw a misshapen grey lump near the top of the opposite building. I pointed up at it. Whatever it was, it made the frontage look wrong.

  ‘That’s a curtain,’ Dunwoody said. ‘Someone didn’t shut a window.’

  I hate untidiness. I prefer everyt
hing to be neat and square. Ideally I’d place London in a grid and rearrange it borough by borough until all the roads had right angles and the buildings were correctly aligned. Straighten the river out, drop in the offices like Tetris blocks. And get rid of all the litter. How hard can it be to keep the streets clean? They manage in other European countries. John May and I are similar in that respect. We’d like to rearrange the world. The difference is that I’m naturally untidy. I spill nail polish on my keyboard and leave tights in my office drawers. But I looked at Dunwoody and knew he was sloppy. He couldn’t even keep his sideburns level.

  I went back to my laptop and studied the plan. Actually I’m not great with technology, just the planning. I knew I could highlight all the key risk points between Oxford Circus and Marble Arch tube stations, and check the street closures via their CCTVs. Red dots pinpointed the police positions. The Met was handling the job with minimal personnel, trying to meet their seasonal budget figures. Which would have been fine if they’d been in the right places. The surveillance team had a couple of their own people in place, identifiable to us by a discreet stripe on their hooded jackets.

  We were stationed in a storage room above a Miss Sixty clothes shop opposite the department store, so we could remain in visual contact with the ground crew. I’d requested an observation post at ground level near the store entrance, but the Met refused to let us come any closer. I had every reason to be angry. I don’t like opportunities for error. I didn’t care about Desmarais – it was the fact that Dunwoody hadn’t taken into account all the families in the street that bothered me.

  Dunwoody dug a handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose again. ‘You’re wasting your time even bothering to look.’

  I told him it never hurt to double-check. Before coming here I’d read Dunwoody’s profile; his military years had left him with a disconnect from civilian life. By contrast, I’d spent my spare time away from the PCU at endless evening classes, taking courses in everything from crowd control to first aid.

  Madame Desmarais had changed her itinerary three hours earlier. It didn’t give an extremist group enough time to react. I thought if there was any kind of situation it would definitely come from a lone operative, and that meant close contact.

  I checked my watch, then looked at Dunwoody’s monitor. The French Embassy’s chauffeured vehicle was turning from Wigmore Street into Duke Street, prior to entering Oxford Street. It meant that Desmarais was going to step on to the pavement in less than three minutes. Dunwoody had allowed the French Embassy to arrange for a black stretch Mercedes 450SL with diplomatic flags, the kind of vehicle that was only used at state funerals and coronations. It would have drawn attention to itself in a Pride parade.

  I rose and looked down from the window, then checked my laptop map again. A red flarepath flashed along the street grid, marking the route.

  How easy is it to say now that something felt wrong? But it did. When I looked at a street plan it was like studying a video game. Dimension, flow, bottlenecks, exposures, at-risk players, potential threats, the GIS tech neatly tagged and flagged in my head.

  Geographic Information Systems. I had checked the Met’s positioning plan. Each officer operated in a triangle of observation that could be overlapped with the position of a team-mate. There was nothing immediately obvious, not the usual sense of disparity that pointed to a breach in the line, but something was still amiss.

  I’m an old-fashioned policewoman through to the marrow of my bones, as my mother had been before me. We were all the same in our family. If you wanted to convince us of your innocence, you had to work at it. I think if you know your rights you should also know your responsibilities. I don’t want to hear lies from members of the public. I looked down at the street and studied each person I saw in turn.

  My private life, such as it was, hadn’t been good for a while, which was why John had wanted me to take a break. When I was young I had looked after my little brother, so I’d had to grow up fast. He was killed on his motorbike when he was seventeen. Life became very precious to me. I always felt like an outsider until I followed my mother’s path and joined the PCU.

  Some nights I’d be the last one left in the office – this was when we were still based in Mornington Crescent, before Mr Bryant managed to blow it up – and I’d sit there fantasizing about a big plate of fish and chips with vinegar and pickled onions. I’d look out of the window and see a single tall, icy lamplight on a blue-grey street, lifeless and melancholy, hardly a soul around. All the lads and lasses up at Camden Lock would be tipping out of bars and getting into fights, not venturing as far as the residential streets around our office, where there was only the scuttle of rats in the bins and frightened thoughts in cold bedrooms. And I remember feeling so alone. Which was why when Ian Hargreave announced he was leaving me and returning to his missus, not because he loved her but for the sake of the kids, I just lost it a bit.

  John had been right. Working for Dunwoody and his team was like working with idiots. It was rather relaxing.

  I studied the real-time footage on Dunwoody’s monitor, then went to the window and watched the scene below again. It was like one of those ‘Spot the Difference’ competitions that showed two photographs with mismatched elements. Except that everything was as it should be. Too much so.

  ‘The kiosk at the edge of the pavement,’ I said. ‘Is it still open?’

  ‘Shouldn’t be.’ Dunwoody checked the image. The green wooden stall sold tourist crap: Union Jacks, teddy bears, pillar boxes and plastic police helmets.

  But it didn’t look shut. It should have had flaps that closed over it and were padlocked. He said, ‘You can’t have everything looking shut. Things are meant to look normal.’

  ‘Why has he still got a customer?’

  Dunwoody looked again. ‘I don’t know. He’s beyond the cordon, he’s just looking at stuff.’

  ‘It’s three fifteen p.m. now,’ I said. ‘Rewind to three oh five p.m.’ Dunwoody sped the footage back. He slowed the image at 3.05 p.m. The same skinny young man was standing in exactly the same place.

  There were children milling around, grandmothers, pregnant women, a huge family of tall Somalians, their kids playing on the concrete bus benches. I saw the skinny guy turn to face the diplomatic vehicle as it drew into Oxford Street, and knew he was cupping the palm of his right hand over something in his jacket pocket. He was counting the number of police officers inside the cordon. I could see him actually counting, moving his lips.

  I got a lock on his face and to my amazement a database profile came up, courtesy of the system Dan Banbury had installed on my phone. The guy’s name was Carlo ‘Loco’ Fabrizi. Three lines of text appeared beneath his mug shot. Later I got the rest of the details. Four years ago Fabrizi had emerged from Poggioreale Prison in Naples where he’d finished a three-year sentence for stabbing a student in the leg at a climate change protest rally. He’d been released into psychiatric care, but I guessed the Italian system was so disorganized that he was easily able to leave and make his way here. The last time I’d seen someone like him hanging around near a police cordon, he’d turned out to be a crazed fan of Kristen Stewart, who’d gone to the Odeon Leicester Square, where she was attending a film premiere. He tried to threaten her with a knife, and later told interrogators that he had been instructed to kill her by a secret society of vampires. Elated by the thought that he was carrying out Satan’s work, he was pronounced unfit to stand trial. I couldn’t take any chances with this one, in case he was cut from the same cloth.

  I looked back at Fabrizi and saw him duck his head, staring intently at Desmarais in the back of her car. He made a movement that I instantly recognized; his left hand was cradling the underside of a gun while he used his right to slip the safety catch off. Dunwoody hadn’t noticed a thing. Before he could stop me, I went for it. I had no choice.

  I took the stairs three at a time and slammed open the shop’s side entrance door. A knot of rubbernecking tourists bloc
ked my path. Everyone was trying to see who was getting out of the car.

  I was slipping and sliding on the rain-slick pavement, trying to tear my way through the cordon of plastic tape, but a beat copper stuck his arm across my chest. I suddenly realized that he thought I was a member of the public. At the PCU we wear black jackets with unit logos, but today I was in civvies. There was no time to explain. I backed around him and ran straight through the cordon.

  The ambassador’s wife made most English politicians’ partners look like sacks of potatoes. She waited for the chauffeur to open the door before stepping out of the Mercedes in a low-cut fawn trouser suit and huge Sophia Loren sunglasses, despite the fact that it was dark and raining. Very 1960s. I liked her style.

  By this time, the skinny guy at the tourist stand was on the move. His eyes were locked on the movement of the vehicle.

  I watched the distance closing between them and knew I wasn’t going to make it in time. The crowds had been alerted by the cordon and the car. They stopped to watch and take pictures on their mobiles. There were umbrellas up everywhere, obscuring the scene. The police were looking in the wrong direction; I followed their attention and saw a cluster of teenagers drifting about, just being young and annoying and in the way.

  The assailant was closing in. The ambassador’s wife slowly looked around. It felt as if the moment was stretched out to breaking point. Everything got slower and slower.

  There are times when I change gear without first engaging my brain. This was one of those moments.

  Without even being aware of what I was about to do, I stepped up on to the black metal bollard beside the kiosk and used the leverage to throw myself forward. I’m a strong woman, and it was a big leap. I hit the would-be attacker in the small of his back and brought him down. Heard his knees hit the pavement with a crack. His gun clattered to the pavement undischarged, and the screaming began.

  What a mess. The surveillance team went bananas. There was me thinking I’d saved a life.