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

by Christopher Fowler

  Later that day Dunwoody asked me if I was expecting a commendation. This was when we were alone in his ugly office with photos of his fat kids funereally arranged around his laptop. I’d twisted my left ankle and torn a thigh ligament performing my flying leap, and wasn’t in the mood for a fight.

  It turned out that when I intervened, the Italian’s arm had struck Desmarais in the face, knocking her against the car. She suffered a wardrobe malfunction that made the front pages and brought a spectacular loss of dignity down on her, which was far worse than being shot, from a diplomatic point of view. She had been humiliated – and on British soil.

  To my horror, it turned out that Carlo Fabrizi was one of the surveillance team’s own undercover men. He announced that he would be trying to sue me because I’d fractured his collarbone. The Met internal investigator lodged a formal complaint against me for failing to communicate my plan of action. Dunwoody was furious and told me he’d got it in the neck for not keeping me under control.

  The Met team said they would testify against me. I complained about Dunwoody’s inappropriate handling of the event, including his request for the ambassadorial limo. I was immediately removed from active duty. That was when I knew I wasn’t going to last out the month. Dunwoody said, ‘We can put you on gardening leave, with one difference. You’ll be expected to go and bury yourself in the garden.’

  I explained that my brief had been to see things others couldn’t. I asked him: ‘You didn’t recognize one of your own team. I couldn’t take the risk. Do you honestly think what I did was wrong?’ I was hoping, just this once, for a straight answer.

  ‘That’s not for me to say,’ Dunwoody replied primly.

  ‘Did you know Fabrizi had done time in jail?’

  ‘It wasn’t my job to know.’

  There’s a lot in our business that goes unsaid. I knew I should never have acted on impulse. I left Dunwoody’s depressing office, returned to my own and even though I was only on temporary secondment it felt like I’d been fired from the force. I put my stuff in one of those cardboard boxes the company specifically kept to give dumped personnel, and was out on the street without an office key fob or a job, having earned Dunwoody’s ridicule and hatred.

  I went back to the PCU with my tail between my legs, a miserable failure. I bumped into Mr Bryant, bumbling along the hall with his hands in his pockets, looking as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

  ‘Do I smell amber oil?’ he asked, sniffing the air. I must have looked confused because he said, ‘I thought you went to Marrakech.’

  ‘No,’ I told him, ‘that was John’s suggestion. I just got chucked out of Adrian Dunwoody’s security detail.’ I explained the circumstances.

  ‘Oh dear, that doesn’t sound right,’ he said, fishing in his top pocket for his pipe stem, which he’d lately taken to noisily chewing as Raymond wasn’t allowing him to smoke it. ‘He’ll try to mark your record, and it could affect your career. Luckily you don’t have much of a career as you’re with the PCU. I’ll have to sort this out. Something isn’t right. Give me a minute, will you?’ He wandered off in the direction of his office, then stopped and came back. ‘Dunwoody approached you, yes?’ I nodded and he left.

  I wondered what he meant. A few minutes later I found out when Mr Bryant appeared in my doorway. ‘Can you spare a moment?’ he asked vaguely. I ushered him in.

  He unfolded a creased sheet of paper and held it up before me. ‘Tell me, what can you see?’ he asked.

  It looked like a child’s art class scribble. ‘Just some grey crayon strokes,’ I told him.

  ‘Ah, well, there we have it.’ From his jacket pocket he pulled an old-fashioned pair of cardboard 3D glasses, the kind with red and green lenses, and handed them to me. ‘Look at it again through each lens in turn, covering the other one up.’

  I did as I was instructed. When I looked through the red side some lettering jumped out.

  ‘It says, “We’re out of tea,”’ I told him, mystified.

  Bryant gave a happy laugh. ‘You see?’

  ‘What, that you’re out of tea?’

  ‘Oh, that’s just the first coded phrase I ever sent to John. You could see it through the red lens but not through the green one.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You’re colour-blind,’ he said. ‘You should have been able to tell that Carlo Fabrizi was a member of Dunwoody’s team by the green diagonal stripe he wore on his blue hooded jacket, but you couldn’t read it, so you thought he was a member of the public. They say Americans always tell you too much and Europeans never tell you enough. Dunwoody deliberately withheld information from you. He knew about Fabrizi’s prior history and wanted him out to spare himself embarrassment, and he also wanted to humiliate the French Ambassador’s wife.’

  ‘But why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because she had bad-mouthed British surveillance details on previous visits to London. Dunwoody didn’t want to have his own team blamed, so he approached you for the secondment. There was a game being played at another level that you could only glimpse, Janice. He hired you after looking at your records. He knew you were colour-blind and told Fabrizi to behave as he did. True to form, you took care of the rest.’

  ‘How did you know?’ I asked, amazed.

  Mr Bryant waved the thought aside. ‘Oh, as soon as I checked up on Fabrizi I realized that Dunwoody had made a mistake hiring him. When I saw his name scathingly singled out in a despatch from Madame Desmarais it became a little clearer. But the clincher was realizing that Dunwoody had requested your medical records. He hired you because your colour-blindness was right there on the page. He was out to kill two birds with one stone.’

  ‘I never mentioned my medical result to you,’ I said.

  ‘You didn’t need to,’ Mr Bryant replied. ‘When you came to work wearing that hideous green sweater with a bright purple shirt last month, I jokingly asked if you were colour-blind and you fudged your answer, so I checked your records. The most common type of colour-blindness muddles greens, reds, purples and blues. The only question that remains is, how do we get rid of Dunwoody?’

  Luckily, that problem took care of itself. In the course of the investigation the internal security team discovered that Dunwoody had been single-handedly supporting the Colombian export industry, which explained his perpetual cold. Realizing that his chances of promotion had suddenly become less likely than having a sophisticated night out in Blackpool, he took himself off on gardening leave. And I hoped that while he was at it, he would bury himself in the garden.

  To celebrate, I treated the whole of the PCU to a night at the pictures. We went to see a loud, stupid Hollywood space movie in 3D. The modern kind – without the red and green lenses.

  fn1 Diminished Spatial Awareness

  This title was suggested by a reader in a competition I held on my website. I thought it was very suggestive of political shenanigans, and set about writing a story to go with it. It was also my second stab at a period Bryant & May tale. I find the old cases work very well in the short format, and plan to write others set in specific time periods. I’m particularly drawn to the idea of using 1960s swinging London as a backdrop – a vibrant time I managed to entirely miss out on, as I was still at school. Damn!

  BRYANT & MAY AND THE BELLS OF WESTMINSTER

  1.

  It was one of the only cases they failed to crack. Not only that, they failed twice, and there was nothing they could do about it.

  The year was 1969. It was the year that Richard Nixon was made President of the United States, the year a man walked on the moon, the year Concorde and the hovercraft took off, Mick Jagger performed in what appeared to be a Victorian nightdress and Queen Elizabeth II caught an underground train on the new Victoria Line, which had just three stations. It was also the year Arthur Bryant bought his yellow Mini Minor, Victor, and John May grew unfeasible sideburns, a look he compounded by purchasing an astoundingly ugly patch-pocket wide lapel electric-blue suit from the
outfitter Lord John in a fit of trendiness that his partner referred to as being indicative of an early middle-aged nervous collapse.

  And it was the year that Bryant and May met Mia.

  Her name was Mia Waleska. She was twenty-three, originally from Tallinn, of Estonian–Polish parentage, and she had the astonishing beauty of so many women from her country, where Swedish and Baltic blood mingled to produce tall, ice-eyed blondes. She was studying early-twentieth-century European history, and to augment the meagre income she received from a trust fund left by her uncle, she modelled for glamour photographs that appeared in the kind of magazines newsagents had once sold from under their counters in the Charing Cross Road.

  Mia told everyone she lived at the Howard Hotel, but she was actually broke and sleeping in the hotel’s beauty spa after it shut, thanks to the kindness of a male benefactor who worked there. Her magazine work was getting harder to find because she refused to appear in pornography, and the changing times demanded something more than a few coy naked poses.

  One Saturday night in August, a murder occurred in Bayham Abbey, a grand old ‘Georgian Gothick’ mansion on the Kent–Sussex border, set in grounds designed by the famous landscape gardener Humphry Repton, who also planned the grounds of Kenwood House in London. Simon Montfleury had been found stabbed to death there. He was the last of its original inheritors and unmarried, and therefore the family line stopped with him.

  At the time of which we speak, the Peculiar Crimes Unit was stationed in Bow Street, this being before the period when they occupied offices above Mornington Crescent tube station (a fondly remembered workplace which Arthur Bryant unfortunately blew up). The reason why they were invited to the countryside to investigate the case only became apparent when they arrived at the mansion.

  ‘He’s got a load of sensitive papers scattered about,’ said Inspector Ian Hargreave, who was handling the investigation for the Met. ‘Friends in high places and all that, so we thought we’d better call you in.’

  ‘You did a wise thing,’ said Arthur Bryant, handing the inspector his chewing gum. ‘I’m trying to give up the pipe.’

  ‘Er, the body’s in the library,’ said Hargreave, passing the wet, pink gum to his constable. ‘We’ve got ourselves a suspect but there’s a problem.’

  The library was like the library of every country house Bryant had ever glimpsed on a National Trust tour. It had a hideous chandelier, two grand windows overlooking the gardens and tall bookcases filled with green and orange leather-bound volumes no one had opened in years, mainly because they were all so boring.

  ‘Skelton’s Arms and Armour,’ Bryant read out, checking the shelves. ‘European Scenery, A Tour in Greece, The Architecture of British Cottages, Landowners of Great Britain Volume 1: Bedford to Norfolk. Stone me, I wouldn’t pay a rag-and-bone man to get rid of this lot.’

  ‘There’s a body over here, if you’d care to come and look at it,’ said May drily.

  ‘I’m not sure I want to stand near you in that suit,’ said Bryant, sidling over nevertheless. A pair of gunshots sounded which were in fact Bryant’s knees clicking as he bent over. Simon Montfleury lay face down on the floor with a deep cut at the height of his kidneys. His blood had soaked into the carpet, and he was cold. ‘When did this happen?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘Last night. He was having a bit of a party, and we think he was killed just before the guests arrived.’

  ‘What, nobody moved him or bothered to call an ambulance?’

  ‘Nobody knew where he was. He wasn’t missed because he very often failed to attend his own bashes, and the servants were instructed never to disturb him. Our idea – as much as we have one – is that one of the guests killed him and slipped back into the party afterwards. Funny thing, though. I can’t see how it was done. Apparently the old man was paranoid about being attacked. He had some outrageous political views and quite a few enemies.’ Hargreave knelt beside the body. ‘We think the wound was caused by some kind of exotic dagger. It had a long, scalloped blade. We searched the guests, the room and grounds, and found nothing at all.’

  John May pointed back at the library door. ‘Is that the only way into the room?’

  ‘Apart from the French windows, you mean? Well, there’s that thing, but yes, I suppose so.’ He was referring to the huge, dark, iron-grated fireplace. ‘It hasn’t been used for years. The chimney’s closed up. The windows are bolted shut. The library door closes by itself and can’t be opened from the outside. It was eventually broken open by the servants. They didn’t come into the room, just stuck their heads in, saw he was dead and called the police.’

  ‘So you’re saying Mr Montfleury was found stabbed to death in a locked room?’ said Bryant. ‘We’ve never had a locked-room mystery before, have we, John?’

  ‘It’s not a parlour game, Arthur,’ said May. ‘I’ve read about Mr Montfleury in the papers. “Send the blacks home”, “Bring back hanging” and so on. How long has it been since the death penalty was suspended?’

  ‘Nearly five years,’ said Bryant without thinking. ‘The last hangings were Evans and Allen, twenty-four and twenty-one, Strangeways, Manchester.’

  ‘So there were plenty of reasons to kill him,’ said Hargreave.

  ‘You say you searched the guests as well as the house? Who were they?’

  ‘Mostly high Tories, a couple of MPs and their dolly birds.’

  ‘So they didn’t come with their wives,’ said Bryant, returning to the bookcase. ‘Have you had this lot out?’

  ‘Every single damned one. It took half the night,’ said Hargreave wearily. ‘I’ve got tickets for the Rolling Stones tonight and I haven’t slept in twenty hours.’

  ‘Well, you won’t get any sleep while they’re on,’ said Bryant. ‘What about the caterers?’

  ‘Just the family chef and two footmen, a couple of jungle-bunnies they brought in for the bash.’

  ‘Can you not call them that?’ asked Bryant, annoyed. ‘Did you talk to them?’

  ‘Yeah. They didn’t even know who they were working for. Clean as a whistle.’

  The detectives left with the names and addresses of everyone who had attended the party the night before. There were twenty-eight people in all, most of whom were such household names that they had to be placed entirely above suspicion. Bryant wandered about his office in Bow Street with fistfuls of paper, periodically tearing pieces off and scribbling notes.

  ‘I don’t know the women’s names,’ he admitted. ‘They’re nearly all wives. I find it incredible that in this day and age there are so few female politicians. Can you imagine what England could be like if we got a woman prime minister? We might finally get a few things done.’

  ‘Who are you missing on that list?’ asked May, peering over his shoulder.

  ‘Six ladies. This one, Eudoria Fanning, she’s an old Tory benefactor, twenty stone if she’s a day,’ said Bryant. ‘They probably had to put a gangplank on the stairs for her. And Maureen Lippincot, she’s eighty-five, in a wheelchair and nearly blind. They bung the old guard pots of dosh whenever the campaign funds are running low. But none of the other names are familiar. They’re young, though; they have young names. Mia, Jackie, Sandra, Lisa – ring any bells? No one you’ve dated there, for example?’

  ‘Very funny. No, no one familiar. I’ll have to go and see them.’

  ‘We’ll have to go and see them,’ Bryant corrected him. ‘I don’t trust you around young ladies at the moment, what with your hot flushes.’

  They all knew each other, it turned out. They perched demurely around the table in the tearoom of the Howard Hotel. They spoke in the softest of tones and were mindful of each other’s opinions. They were attired in miniskirts and kinky boots, and two wore hairpieces of the kind that were popular in the late 1960s. They had large plastic earrings and Alice bands. Their eye shadow was black, their lips and nails were pink. They had attended the party at Bayham Abbey because they were friends with two MPs who were friends of Simon Montfleury. They
were all students, and all had part-time jobs.

  Mia caught John May staring at her. She had the greenest eyes he had ever seen. They were enough to trip the most absurd comparisons in his head. He was entranced, and phrased his questions with exaggerated politeness. Bryant’s view was somewhat more jaundiced. The girls wore good watches and expensive clothes. They did not bear any resemblance to typical students. More intriguingly, they seemed to speak as if they were a single organism, listening and agreeing in low murmurs with one another. They had each been the guest of a single male invitee, the names of whom they willingly surrendered. They were terribly upset about the tragedy. They wanted to do anything that could help the investigation.

  They seemed to be sharing some secret joke.

  Mia enchanted John May. Bryant could see that his partner was utterly smitten. The more he tried to feign disinterest, the more he gave himself away.

  ‘Did any of you see Mr Montfleury that evening?’ Bryant asked, checking his notebook for timings.

  ‘I saw him,’ said Mia. ‘He asked me to meet him in the library, soon after we arrived. He sent word by way of a servant.’

  ‘Did he know you?’

  ‘No, he’d never met me before.’

  ‘Isn’t that rather an extraordinary thing to do?’

  ‘I gather that my escort for the evening had spoken of me,’ Mia explained.

  ‘And he was …?’ Bryant searched his notes but couldn’t lay his hands on the name.

  ‘David Stuart-Holmesby, the MP.’

  ‘Right. So why did Montfleury want to see you?’

  ‘I won’t lie to you, Mr Bryant. I think David – Mr Stuart-Holmesby – had told him that I was studying European history and that I was pretty. He showed me some of his books, making me climb one of those library ladders to bring down a particular volume, and when his hand wandered a little too close to my leg I made an excuse and left.’