Bryant & May 06 - The Victoria Vanishes

by Christopher Fowler

  Now, the annoyingly upper-class pathologist Giles Kershaw was to be promoted into Finch’s position in charge of the Bayham Street morgue, which meant that the PCU was losing another member of staff. With grim inevitability, the Home Office would doubtless seek to use the loss as a method of controlling and closing them down. The oldest members of staff would be for the chop. Land had given up hope of ever finding a way to transfer out. He had nailed his colours to the unit’s mast when he had reluctantly supported his own staff and attacked his superiors. Now, they would never find him a cushy detail in the suburbs where he could quietly wait out the remaining years to his retirement.

  Land sighed and looked about the pub’s upstairs room. Plenty of officers from Albany Street, West End Central and Savile Row nicks, even former ushers from Great Marlborough Street Magistrates Court had turned up for the wake, but the Home Office had chosen to show their disdain by staying away. Finch had upset them too many times in the past.

  Sergeant Renfield, the ox-like desk officer from Albany Street, was watching everyone from his lonely vantage point near the toilets. Land headed over with two bottles of porter clutched between his fingers. ‘Hello, Jack,’ he said, refilling Renfield’s beer glass with the malty liquid. ‘I wondered if you’d show up to see Oswald off.’

  ‘You bloody well knew I’d be here.’ The sergeant regarded him with a baleful eye. ‘After all, it’s partly my fault that he’s dead.’

  ‘There’s no point in being hard on yourself,’ said Land. ‘People working in close proximity to death face unusual hazards. It’s part of the job.’

  ‘Try telling that to this lot.’ Renfield gestured at the room with his glass. ‘I know they blame me for what happened.’ The sergeant had made a procedural shortcut that had been revealed as a bad decision in the light of Finch’s death. To be fair, it was the sort of mistake that often occurred when everyone was under pressure.

  ‘Actually, Jack, today isn’t about you. Besides, you’ll get a chance to have your say.’

  Renfield looked anxious. ‘You haven’t already told them, have you? Have you said something to Bryant and May?’

  ‘Good God, no. Call me old-fashioned, but I thought we’d get Oswald into the incinerator before I gave them the good news. Come to think of it, perhaps you should be the one to make the announcement.’ Land patted the sergeant on the shoulder and moved away. He wasn’t alone in disliking Renfield, who was a Met man, as hard and earthy as the ground he walked on. Renfield had no time for the airy-fairy attitudes of the PCU staff, and didn’t care who knew it. Left alone in the corner of the room once more, he decided to concentrate on fitting sausage rolls into his mouth between slugs of beer.

  Over at the bar, Arthur Bryant adjusted his reading glasses, held up the aluminium funeral urn and turned it over to examine its base. ‘Made in China,’ he muttered. ‘A lightweight wipe-clean screw-top final resting place. I suppose Oswald would have approved. But how quickly we sacrifice dignity for expedience, even in death.’

  ‘Well, he didn’t choose it for himself,’ said John May. ‘He’d have picked something less vulgar. He was always so thorough, and yet he decided to entrust his remains to you.’

  ‘He knew I’d do the right thing,’ said Bryant with a knowing smile.

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘I’ve been instructed to plant his ashes in a place that would annoy Raymond. I thought the little park behind Pratt Street would do nicely, because Land always goes there for a quiet smoke. I’m going to stick it right opposite the bench where he sits, so he’ll have to keep looking at it. I’ve already had a word with the park keeper.’

  ‘Do you think Oswald would want to be buried there?’

  ‘Why not? It’s handy for the office. He worked in the same place for fifty years. People don’t like change, alive or dead.’ Bryant lifted his rucksack from the floor to place the urn inside it, but changed his mind. ‘One thing puzzles me, John. He didn’t want floral tributes, but requested posthumous contributions for the Broadhampton Hospital. He never mentioned the place before. I thought it might be where his old school pal was kept, but no. Maybe he has a family friend staying in there, some kind of debt to be honoured. He probably wouldn’t have wanted to discuss the matter in life. It’s an asylum, after all.’

  ‘No,’ replied May indignantly, ‘that’s exactly what it’s not. It’s no longer a place of confinement. Nowadays it specializes in advanced treatment and research into mental-health care.’

  ‘You know its sister hospital is the oldest psychiatric hospital in the world?’ Bryant poked about among the canapés and thought about dipping a battered prawn. ‘The Bethlem Royal was once known as Bedlam, famous for the ill-treatment of its patients. Visitors were given sticks so they could poke the loonies. Insanity was viewed as the result of moral lassitude, you know. Charlie Chaplin’s mother and the artist Richard Dadd were both locked up in there. But I don’t think Hogarth’s ghastly engraving of the place is entirely to be believed. There were flowers and birdcages in its women’s wards, and a few surprising instances of enlightened thinking on behalf of the doctors. It’s been knocking around since the mid-thirteenth century and is still going strong, as part of the South London Trust.’ Bryant removed a prawn-tail from his dentures and absently put it in his pocket. ‘I don’t trust this Mary Rose sauce, far too pink for my liking. Oswald told me he had no other living relatives. So why would he want us to leave money to a mental hospital?’

  ‘I really have no idea.’

  May was a poor liar and glanced uncomfortably at the floor. Bryant sensed there was something he had not yet been told about the deceased coroner.

  4

  * * *

  BRINKMANSHIP

  ‘Look out, here comes trouble.’

  Bryant spoke from the side of his mouth and stuck out his little finger in the direction of Renfield, who was heading towards them. His comment might have been intended as a discreet aside, but came over as offensively loud and theatrical. Luckily, Renfield was as thick-skinned as a pub comic, and kept his course.

  ‘Ah, Sergeant Renfield, given up flies for vol-au-vents?’

  ‘What?’ Renfield pushed a mouthful of pastry to one side of his teeth with a fat finger.

  ‘Forget it, Renfield, Mr Bryant is making a joke,’ said John May.

  ‘I don’t understand his sense of humour.’ Renfield regarded them with the irritation of a perpetual outsider.

  ‘Your name,’ explained May. ‘There’s a character in Bram Stoker’s Dracula called Renfield who lives in a madhouse and eats flies.’

  ‘Perhaps your geriatric comrade will be laughing on the other side of his face when he hears my news.’ The sergeant talked over the top of Bryant’s shiny bald head.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve decided to pursue a lifelong dream and join the South African police?’

  ‘No, matey,’ said Renfield with a smug smile. ‘I’ve been kicked upstairs. I’m joining you lot. Just been appointed Duty Sergeant at the Peculiar Crimes Unit.’

  Bryant was aghast. ‘That’s not possible,’ he said. ‘Raymond decides who comes and goes, and he only ever does what I tell him.’

  ‘These are direct orders from the Home Office, chum.’ Renfield’s smile grew darker, like a portly cat moving in on a crow. ‘I’m looking forward to a switch of scenery. I’ll be going back to the manuals and doing things properly for a change. You can guarantee that I’ll be putting a curb on some of your more illegal habits.’

  ‘But you’re not a detective,’ May pointed out.

  ‘I don’t need to be, pal. It’s about monitoring procedure and making sure there are no more of your famous breaches of conduct. You don’t need to be a bloody detec- tive to do that.’

  So, this is the price of getting Giles Kershaw appointed as the new pathologist, thought May. The Home Office was planting Sergeant Renfield into the unit as a practical field man who would force them to play by the rules. The ministry officials had tried using Raymond Land
to control the PCU, and that had failed. Now an alternative strategy had presented itself. He wished the unit could just get on with the business of solving crime, but instead it was mired in inter-departmental politics, despite the fact that it had been set up as an independent body to avoid government red tape. Its original purpose had been to deal with crimes that could cause civil unrest and political embarrassment, but over the decades (and under the guidance of Bryant and May) it had proven itself adept at cracking cases where even the most advanced technology failed to identify a culprit. No computer could replicate the sheer peculiarity of the PCU’s techniques. England had a history of creating think-tanks where freedom of thought was more important than adherence to procedure.

  Renfield is just another hurdle we’ll have to find a way of leaping, he thought. We’ve always managed in the past, and we’ll do it again. He was already imagining ways of defusing this latest strategy when Bryant dropped his bombshell.

  ‘You’re too late, Renfield,’ Bryant told the sergeant. ‘I’m not your chum, your pal or your mate. Rather, I have some news of my own that may surprise you. I’ve put in for official retirement. I stuck the envelope into Raymond Land’s top pocket a few hours ago.’

  May looked thunderstruck. Renfield’s broad jaw fell open. Everyone knew that the day Bryant retired he would most likely drop dead.

  ‘I know it’s a shock,’ said Bryant, ‘and I know what you’re thinking, retirement will probably kill me, but I’ve made up my mind. Actually, you’re partially responsible for my decision.’

  ‘Me?’ Renfield distractedly set the remains of his mushroom vol-au-vent to one side. ‘This is about our pathologist’s death, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well of course,’ said Bryant. ‘Although I’m not really blaming you. Oswald Finch died because of the case you brought into his morgue, it’s true. But it’s not about what you did. You made me understand something in myself that I hadn’t seen before. It’s as you’ve always told me, I’m miles past my best. My powers of observation were at their peak thirty years ago. When Oswald died in such tragic circumstances, I was as much in the dark about the cause as everyone else. Oh, I understood at once what had happened to him, but not why. I couldn’t appreciate the human origins behind the tragedy. When you lose that ability, you start putting others in danger.’

  ‘But Arthur, you were out of town when it happened,’ his partner reminded him. ‘How could you be expected to fully comprehend a crime that had taken place hundreds of miles away? You couldn’t conduct an investigation without any resources.’

  ‘The point was that I thought I could,’ said Bryant. ‘I should have shared information instead of hogging the little knowledge I had. I failed to observe the most fundamental rules of crime detection. I wanted to test Janice and the others, to make them come to their own conclusions.’

  ‘Jack, leave us alone for a minute,’ May told Renfield. ‘I need to speak with my partner.’ He pushed Bryant away from the bemused sergeant.

  ‘Outside, you. I’m not having this argument in front of our staff.’

  Seizing Bryant by the shoulders of his absurdly baggy coat, he steered him down the steep nicotine-brown stairs of the Devereux public house and into the narrow courtyard that filled with bankers and lawyers on summer evenings.

  ‘How on earth could you do this to me, Arthur? Could you not have had the decency to discuss it with me first?’

  ‘What, and have you try to talk me out of it?’ asked Bryant. ‘Just look at me, John. I’m half-blind. I have to use four sets of spectacles: my reading glasses, my bifocals, my computer lenses and my distance-driving goggles. My observation skills are limited to noting whether or not it’s raining. I wear a hearing aid. I take tablets twice a day. I use a walking stick, but might be better off with a spirit level. I’m older than Picasso’s minotaur paintings. I can’t remember my email address. My memory operates in an almost entirely arbitrary fashion. My sense of orientation is so poor that I’m lucky to find the front door of my house without the aid of an Ordnance Survey map. And on top of all that, I appear to be shrinking. How many more organs have to pack up before I accidentally cause somebody’s death?’

  ‘Look, I know Raymond said that your powers of observation were failing, but he was talking rubbish as usual, and I am absolutely not going to have this kind of self-pitying conversation with you,’ May protested, holding up his hands. ‘You’re as tough as an ox. Your father was a weight-lifting champion, for God’s sake. You told me his neck was the same size as Victoria Beckham’s waist. Your dentist reckons you have the strongest tongue in London. He has to put you out just to clean your teeth. You know how you always exaggerate your faults. You’re feeling guilty because you weren’t here to save Oswald Finch, but there’s no point in blaming yourself because you couldn’t have done anything. A detective is someone whose life operates on a strict binary system, Arthur – you’re either working flat out and fully committed or completely off the case. If you stop now, you’ll really see how many parts of your body can start to fail. It’s the job that keeps you supple in mind and spirit, can’t you see that? I’m going to find Land and take that damned envelope away from him.’

  ‘You’ll do no such thing, John, not if you value our friendship.’ Bryant looked up at him with an aqueous, azure gaze. ‘Don’t you see? It’s important to know when the time has come to stop, and Oswald’s death has made me realize that I’ve reached the point. Back in that pub there are younger, more energetic members of the PCU who can continue our legacy.’

  ‘Wait a minute, what about me?’ said May hotly. ‘You may have decided that it’s time to give up the ghost, but suppose I’m not ready to go yet? I’m younger than you—’

  ‘Only by three years.’

  ‘ – And I’m certainly not ready to retire. We’ve been a team for as far back as I can remember. How am I supposed to survive without you? We can’t just walk away from everything we’ve built, not now, not after all the battles we’ve fought.’

  ‘We’re not part of the Met any more, remember?’ Bryant rarely raised his voice, but was close to doing so now. ‘There’s no one fighting for us, John. We’re under the control of the Home Office, whether we like it or not. You’ve met that faceless little weasel Leslie Faraday. Worse, you’ve met his boss, the Phantom of Whitehall. They’ll wear us down eventually.’

  ‘So that’s it? You just give up and walk away? What do you think you’re going to do at home all day – thumb through your scrapbooks of past cases, stare vacantly out of the window jingling the change in your pockets? Or worse still, phone the office offering advice until nobody wants to take your calls any more? That’s what happens when people retire, you know. Their colleagues tell them to keep in touch but they don’t mean it. They’ll just think you’re too slow and out of the loop. They’ll be too busy proving themselves to bother with you. You’ll be nothing more than a nuisance to them. Ageism is the last real taboo.’

  May knew he had to make his partner see the truth, even if it meant being cruel. ‘If you leave now, you know what we’ll have wasted? All those years spent showing that we could hold our own against overpaid young hotshots, the bean-counters brought in by government ministers eager to prove themselves. All our efforts to make Raymond understand why the unit needs to survive – ’ Wait a minute – Raymond. Why hadn’t the chief mentioned Bryant’s resignation to him? Could it be that he hadn’t had a chance to read the letter yet?

  ‘Come with me.’ Seizing Bryant by the arm, he dragged him back inside the crowded pub. Land was standing near the bar, talking to his wife. A thin band of white paper protruded from his top pocket. May could not tell from this distance if it had been opened. ‘You are going to get that letter back right now,’ he told his partner.

  ‘I most certainly am not.’ Bryant stood his ground. ‘And kindly take your arm off me. I am still quite capable of perambulating around a room, thank you.’

  ‘Then stay here while I get it and tear the damned thing up
.’ May pushed his way through the clusters of officers until he found himself standing beside Raymond Land’s wife.

  ‘Well, hello stranger. Where have you been?’ Leanne’s eyes were half closed and her lipstick was smudged, but she was sending out signals to her favourite detective. For many years she had held not so much a torch for John May as a smugglers’ lantern, but his ship had never been tempted to ground upon her rocks.

  ‘Hello, Leanne. I’m afraid Arthur was a little overcome after his speech and needed some fresh air.’ He smiled while surreptitiously checking Land’s top pocket.

  ‘Ha, he’ll be hard pressed to find anything fresh round here.’ Leanne laughed, a tad commonly. ‘Tell me.’ She leaned in so closely that he could smell Tia Maria on her breath. ‘How do you manage to work with Mr Bryant without losing your temper? My husband wants to wring his neck most days.’

  ‘I never said that, Leanne,’ Land bristled.

  ‘Oh, Raymond and I have our ways of dealing with Arthur, don’t we?’ May smiled awkwardly as he casually placed his hand on Land’s shoulder. He tried moving it around to the envelope in his top pocket and would have succeeded, but Leanne suddenly pulled him to one side.

  ‘You know, John, I have a long-felt want that needs taking care of.’ She made it sound like a furniture-restoration project. ‘You awaken something in me that Raymond can’t handle. He’s too busy with his golf. I’ve no one to talk to. I live the life of a spinster.’ In moments of desperation, Leanne’s Morecambe accent surfaced. ‘Can’t we go out for a quiet drink one evening?’

  ‘You’re my boss’s wife,’ May reminded her, knowing that she never forgot. ‘It’s a matter of protocol.’

  Staring over her shoulder, he realized he had drawn attention to the letter, which Land was now pulling from his pocket in curiosity.

  ‘Raymond, don’t read it,’ he begged.

  Land studied the envelope. ‘This is Bryant’s handwriting. What’s he doing sending me letters?’ His forefinger drifted towards the poorly adhered corner.