Bryant & May 04; Ten Second Staircase b&m-4

by Christopher Fowler

  “I wouldn’t go walking about near the – ” began Meera, but it was too late; Bryant’s boots were already trailing spilled formaldehyde across the floor.

  “Oh, very cunning,” Bryant was muttering, studying the glass case from every angle. “A very slick piece of showmanship, sadly ruined now, of course.”

  “What’s he saying?” asked Bimsley, mouthing the words at Meera, who shrugged back.

  “I have a new battery in my hearing aid, so I advise you to be circumspect,” warned Bryant without turning around. “Did you do everything I asked?”

  “Yes, sir,” replied Meera. “The entrance doors have been sealed. You should have seen some officers posted there when you came through.”

  Bryant grunted. “A couple of single-cell constables from Lambeth, hardly a watertight cordon. I suppose the Met are too busy sorting out motoring fines.” When the PCU had been separated from London’s Metropolitan Police Force and placed under Home Office control, the move had ostensibly been made to provide the unit with new powers. The truth, however, was a little more complex. Home Office officials wanted to keep a closer watch on the PCU’s spending, and prevent further antagonism between Bryant and the Met officers who wanted him disciplined for continually breaking their rules.

  “There’s only one way into the gallery apart from the emergency exit, and that’s now locked,” said Dan Banbury, snapping on a fresh pair of plastic gloves with unnecessary theatricality. “The outside of the building is also being monitored.”

  “You’re confident that whoever did this is still inside here, then.”

  “Don’t see how he could have got out, sir,” said Bimsley with inspiring conviction. “The guard shut the doors the moment he found the body.”

  “What about the visitors, where are they?”

  “They’re all in the café, sir. Sergeant Longbright is taking their details. Somebody must have seen something.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, there were people in just about every room,” Bimsley explained.

  “You there, how often do you make your rounds through the gallery rooms?” Bryant tapped the redheaded attendant on the arm with his walking stick.

  “They were asking me that and I was trying to explain – ”

  “It’s not their job to ask you, it’s mine. Try not to waffle. How often?”

  “It varies, but at a rough guess – ”

  “I don’t want a rough guess. I want accuracy.”

  “It’s hard to say, but – ”

  “Is there something wrong with you that requires all answers to be preceded by a conditional clause?” Bryant turned his full attention to the attendant. “A straightforward answer, is that too much to ask?”

  “Every fifteen minutes,” replied the attendant, swallowing.

  “When was the last time you came through the room and found everything fine?”

  “Er, I think it might have been – ” Simon caught his inquisitor’s eye and began again. “Ten-thirty A.M.”

  “And you returned at ten forty-five A.M. to find the body in the tank.”

  “No, sir.”

  “What, then?”

  “I heard a noise and started walking back. I hadn’t got much further through the gallery; it must have been about five minutes after I’d left the main chamber.”

  “What kind of noise was it that required you to walk but not run?”

  “That was it, you see, just a sort of shout, but then a crash, like someone hitting glass but not breaking it.”

  “What did it sound like to you?”

  “Like someone messing with an exhibit. There had been a bit of commotion in here since we opened, because of the press conference.”

  “You had a press conference this morning?”

  “Yes, sir. Three of the most controversial artists, a chance for them to answer their critics. We had most of the national press here.”

  “No television crews?” Bryant looked for a place to throw the rest of his sandwich and momentarily considered adding it to a bronze sculpture of objets trouvés.

  “No, sir, Mr Burroughs wouldn’t allow them in.”

  “Mr Burroughs is the new gallery owner, I take it.”

  “That’s right. He didn’t want television crews because of the documentary.”

  “Ah, yes – I can understand his point.” A week earlier, Channel 4 had broadcast an inflammatory programme about the new owner of the former Saatchi gallery, implying that he was merely a showman and self-publicist, attempting to ape his predecessor by commissioning outrageous works of art at inflated fees.

  “The press conference finished at ten, but a few guests were still inside when we opened the doors to the public at that time, and – ”

  “I’m sure you’ll give the others a full report,” said Bryant dismissively, heading back towards the tank. He cupped his hands over the glass and peered through the eerie green fluid, where six curled pink babies hung on wires, suspended like sea-horses beneath the murky sun-shafted verdure of a pond. The corpse floating facedown above them was clearly that of a female, her hands splayed beneath her torso, her long brown hair spread wide and held in still suspension by the viscosity of the liquid, magnified by thick glass as in an aquarium; a modern Ophelia, distracted and driven into harsh chemical waters. Her eyes were wide, her lips slightly parted in an attitude of surprising calm. If it hadn’t been for the fact that she disrupted the symmetry of the installation, she might almost have been a part of the piece. A single slender brown strand of blood curled around her head and chest like drifting pipe smoke. Distorted by the green tank and surrounded by infant corpses, her body had taken on the timeless density of a painting; a damned soul fallen from the raft of the Medusa, left to drift in Géricault’s icy green ocean…

  “He’s getting his prints all over the evidence.” Meera rubbed a hand across her face. “He must know he’s contaminating the site. Why does he always have to do that?”

  “He’s getting a feel for it,” replied Bimsley from the side of his mouth. “He’s using his instincts.”

  “Couldn’t he use gloves as well?”

  “The press conference – was Saralla White one of the three artists interviewed? Was she articulate? Angry? Rude? Distracted? Did she seem upset about anything?” Bryant fired questions as if they were medicine balls; you had to damn well make sure you could catch them.

  “Yes, she was interviewed,” answered the attendant. “I watched the whole performance. She sounded very confident, her usual self. If she was upset, she didn’t show it. She had smart answers to every question they asked. There was a lot of interest in her.”

  “And there’ll be a lot more,” Bryant promised. “Now that she’s become a part of her own sculpture.”

  ∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧

  6

  Orchestrating Outrage

  The new owner of the County Hall Gallery, Calvin Burroughs, was producing a prodigious amount of sweat; it broke into rivulets on his broad forehead, dripped from beneath his limpid Turnbull & Asser cuffs, and bloomed darkly across his blue striped shirtfront, lending him the air of a tropical pilot. His floppy, boyish hair and expense-account gut suggested an earlier career in the wine trade, or possibly an auction house. “How did you know it was her?” he asked, exasperated and distracted by the police officers precariously suspended above the Eternal Destiny tank.

  “I watched the top half of the documentary on my landlady’s television,” replied Bryant. “Her tube is going. The brown fluid in front of Miss White’s face obscured her features and confused me for a minute. I don’t know how vitriolic that stuff is, but it probably gave her a nosebleed.”

  John May appeared from the gallery’s caféteria, where he had been helping Longbright set up a system to take witness statements. Everyone in the unit was used to helping out with each other’s workloads. Only April had been refused permission to leave the Mornington Crescent base, as May feared that the scene of the death would prov
e too distressing for her. “You know who it is in the tank?” he asked, surprised. “They haven’t fished her out yet.”

  “I remembered seeing Saralla White’s distinctive red-and-blue tattoo. She has a Russian gang symbol just below her navel; they’re currently fashionable in a disreputable way, appropriate for a Hoxton artist like Miss White. I could distinguish the markings on her exposed midriff.” Bryant discounted his knowledge of popular criminal tattoos as the kind of cultural awareness May chided him for ignoring. He had always been interested in tribal scarification, and owned a number of disturbing books on the subject.

  “We’re ready to raise her out now, sir,” called one of the officers. “Put something under her,” Bryant called back, “and take it slowly. Giles hasn’t finished measuring the tank splashes.”

  “Thank you, Mr Bryant.” Giles looked up from his prone position on the gallery floor, where he was finishing his grid calculations.

  “Taking into account the high room temperature, which has thinned the viscosity of the liquid compound – it’s not pure formalin, by the way, which is a health hazard – the spread of the fluid outside the tank would be consistent with the body falling in from above. She weighs about sixty-three point five kilos. At a guess I’d say she fell in from half a metre above the surface of the tank.”

  “I do wish you’d use pounds and feet,” complained Bryant, sticking his finger into the pool of green liquid and sniffing it. “That’s impossible,” Meera pointed out. “How could she have got up so high? There’s no ladder, no furniture to climb on.”

  “We don’t like to keep anything else in the gallery chambers other than the exhibits themselves,” Burroughs explained, padding a paper tissue around his soaked neck. “It would detract from the art, and I don’t want to leave potential weapons lying around in the general public’s way; we’d never get insured.”

  “Yet you’ve gone out of your way to orchestrate public outrage.”

  Watching Burroughs leaking sweat made Bryant feel cold. He found his eye straying to the body being raised from the tank behind them, and tugged his moth-eaten scarf tighter around his neck. “I’m not going to get into an argument with you about the legitimacy of modern art,” snapped Burroughs impatiently. “You’re a public servant, you’re meant to be finding out what the hell happened here.”

  “Fine,” Bryant snapped back. “At this point I would normally ask you if the victim had any enemies, but in this case the question is redundant. Who were the other two artists Miss White appeared with this morning, and where are they now?”

  “We had Sharinda Van Souten here, and McZee.”

  “He has no other name?”

  “His life is his art, Mr Bryant. I assume they both left after reading out their statements to the press.”

  “So there was no Q and A?”

  “Sharinda and McZee chose to declare their manifestos without facing press questions. Saralla White was a more accomplished speaker, and wanted to confront her critics. The event had been arranged in answer to charges levelled in the documentary. I assume you saw the picket line of anti-abortionists when you entered the building. They’ve been here for almost a week, ever since the programme aired. Orchestrating public outrage, as you put it, might raise our profile in the art world, but in this case it’s been detrimental to ticket sales. Sensationalism is becoming old hat; the public taste is turning back to more conservative fare.” It was tempting for Bryant to embroil himself in an argument about the value of art, but he resisted for once, restraining himself in order to concentrate on the immediate problem. “Rather appropriate, though,” Bryant couldn’t resist. “Someone recently described as ‘The Most Hated Woman in England’ is found drowned in her own installation. Just think of the headlines you’ll get. There should be queues around the block after this.”

  “I don’t care for your implication,” snapped Burroughs. “This is a gallery, not a circus. I’m not interested in providing cheap thrills.” Behind them, the folded, dripping body of Saralla White was winched from her own tank, and six foetuses turned slowly in the swirling fluid, as if silently signalling farewell to their creator.

  “We have a witness.” Bimsley hiked a thumb back at the figure squatting in the corner of the café bench. “I think he saw what happened, but he ain’t saying much. Too shaken up.”

  “Leave him to me,” suggested Longbright. Coaxing accounts from distraught members of the public was her speciality. Anyone disturbed by the sudden upsets of crime could find comfort in the maternal sexiness of her tightly buttoned bosom. “What’s the breakdown of this group?” She looked around the gallery café, mentally counting the hushed, fidgeting bystanders.

  “Fourteen off-the-street visitors, seven more pre-booked. The place had only just opened to the public. Plus a class of fourteen children and their teacher. Six attendants. The woman standing by the coffee counter is the gallery’s PR officer; she arranged the press event for Burroughs. Two admission staff, a barista in here, one cleaner clearing up after the press. That’s it.”

  “Who’s the witness?”

  “He’s just a kid, looks about twelve years old, part of the class drawing in the gallery.”

  “Okay. Let’s do the teacher first.” Longbright made her way over to a young man in jeans and white shirt patrolling around the seated boys. “Mr Elliot Mason? You’re in charge of these boys?”

  Mason rose. With his knitted Kangol cap, soul patch, and low-slung jeans, he appeared little older than his charges. He gave the sergeant a limp handshake. “I handle the outings for this group; the Science Museum, the V and A, the British Library, stuff like that. Their regular master, Mr Kingsmere, was going to take today’s class, but he’s off with food poisoning. A faulty prawn apparently, but I remain unconvinced. I could have done without any trouble today.”

  “Isn’t this exhibition a bit too adult for children?” wondered Longbright.

  “It’s a progressive school. It favours the creative arts over competitive sports, but I think that’s because they don’t have their own playing field. And they’re city kids – there’s very little they haven’t been exposed to. They get taken to most of the important plays and films. They’re pretty adept at handling sophisticated themes.”

  “Some of these boys look very young.”

  “I think the youngest is thirteen, but he’s exceptionally mature. Most are fifteen and sixteen. What happened in there? It’s nothing to do with us, is it?” Mason’s eyes held the faraway look of a dreamer whose ideals had yet to be compromised.

  “There’s been an incident, and we need to find out if anyone saw it happen. So, your class – it’s a mix of different years, isn’t that unusual?”

  “The field trips are graded according to the children’s capacity for appreciation, not by their form levels.”

  “Perhaps you could run me through your movements this morning, starting from your arrival?”

  Mason looked around, checking the whereabouts of his charges. “We got here at ten A.M. The entrance was pre-arranged by the school, but it took a few minutes to sort out the groups because there was a press conference ending at the same time. I ran a head count and made them turn their mobiles off, and we took a walk through the gallery. I let the kids choose the installations they liked most, then set them drawing. They’re keen artists. Sit them on the floor with a box of pencils and you usually have to drag them away.”

  “So they were spread throughout the gallery in different rooms? How could you watch over them?”

  “They’re easier to keep an eye on when they’re engrossed in an activity.”

  “You spend the same amount of time with each group?”

  “I try to, but you inevitably spend more with some than others.”

  “I’m told one of the boys saw something.”

  “Yes – Luke Tripp, over there. He was one of four or five kids in the main chamber. They were actually sketching the giant head, but he’d gone across to the tank and had started drawing t
hat instead.”

  “Do you mind if I talk to the group?”

  “No, but try not to upset them. I could lose my job.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr Mason, I’m not going to provide them with any more information than I have to.” Longbright walked over and introduced herself to the row of boys dressed in blue-and-gold blazers. “I’m Detective Sergeant Longbright, but call me Janice. What are your names?”

  A thin, moody-looking sixteen-year-old raised a tentative hand. “I’m Nicholas Gosling.”

  “Daniel Parfitt,” said the small-boned boy with the bad complexion next to him. “What happened? Somebody’s died, haven’t they?”

  “Who are you two?” she asked the pair seated beside them, one slim and dark, with deep-set eyes, the other red-blotched and still carrying puppy fat.

  “Jezzard and Billings, miss.”

  “When did you first know something unusual was going on?”

  “We heard a splash and got up to see.” They would have had to come around the corner to view the tank clearly.

  “So all of you were in the alcove drawing the giant head?”

  “Yes, miss. Except Luke, who was drawing the tank.” Jezzard pointed down at one she had missed. Janice knelt beside the youngest boy, bringing herself into his sight line. “Hey, there.” She checked Bimsley’s notes. “Luke Tripp, that’s you?”

  The child nodded faintly. He was small for his age, a pale bulbous head balanced on a pipe-thin neck, eyes staring intently at the drawing in his lap. Longbright turned the page around and examined it.

  “That’s pretty good. Do you like art?”

  Another mute nod.

  “How come you decided to draw the big green tank instead of the giant head?”

  “The babies looked easier to draw.” His voice was barely more than a whisper.

  “It’s a pretty big tank. Hard to get it all into one picture. I used to like drawing, but if something moved I could never catch it on paper. While you were drawing, did something move?”