Hall of Mirrors

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘In that case,’ said Bryant with a secretive grin, ‘I think I have the perfect case for you.’

  ‘Lovely, although perhaps a little more accuracy in the telling this time, eh?’ Simon was concerned that his author’s biographical outings had elevated unreliability to a mission statement. ‘If you do a good job on this and sell well, there’s no reason why we can’t cover the rest of your cases chronologically, right up to your retirement.’

  ‘I haven’t retired,’ Bryant replied, nettled.

  Simon mentally checked his notes. ‘Oh, I assumed—’

  ‘John and I are still working. You’re still working, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m much—’

  ‘Back then being in a specialist unit was very different,’ Bryant recalled. ‘Typewriters sounded like lawnmowers. Reports were filed with carbon copies. We knocked off at six. Telexes took forever to send. Most specialist units were shut at the weekend. If we were outside and needed to call in we had to use public telephone boxes, because we weren’t issued with two-way radios and weren’t allowed to use the Met’s police boxes. But I’ll give it a shot. Or, to use your parlance, I’ll drop-kick it over the, er, net.’

  Simon looked at him uncertainly. ‘Super,’ he decided. ‘Let’s get the case written up. Just so long as there’s a nice horrible murder at the beginning.’

  ‘There isn’t. In fact, for a while I didn’t think there was going to be a death at all.’

  ‘Oh. I was rather hoping for a whodunit.’

  ‘This case was more of a when-is-someone-going-to-do-it-and-to-whom. To utilize our technical parlance.’

  ‘Look, Arthur—’

  ‘Please, call me Mr Bryant.’

  ‘I trust you to find something that will please your readers. Clearly they’re interested in hearing about the strange investigations you’ve handled at the PCU.’

  ‘I think they must be,’ Bryant agreed. ‘One of them followed me home and shouted through my letter box. But I think that was because I called him a murderer. It was a misprint.’

  ‘Perhaps we could have ninety thousand words by September?’

  ‘“Strawberry Fields Forever”,’ said Bryant.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The Beatles track. It’s four minutes, three seconds long.’

  Simon was nonplussed. ‘Not sure I’m quite following you.’

  ‘It took fifty-five hours of studio time to record that brief track,’ Bryant explained. ‘If I write my own memoir it’ll take a lot longer, exponentially speaking.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘Luckily for you, I’ve already taken the problem into account.’ He smiled at Simon with wide innocent eyes. ‘You can have the book in a couple of days.’

  ‘Er … ah …’ Simon managed, now completely flustered.

  ‘Shall we order?’ said Bryant, rubbing his hands together. ‘I’m starving.’

  2

  * * *

  CONCRETE AND CLAY

  Jackie Bushell checked the clock on the mantelpiece and realized that her daughters should have been home half an hour ago.

  They had told her they were going to play with school friends at the end of Columbia Road. They knew that they always had to be back by six, but now Dixon of Dock Green was about to start – not that their TV picked up much of a signal. The tea things had been laid out ready for the girls’ arrival. Paul liked to say goodbye to them before he went off to work at the Kardomah restaurant, where he was a waiter.

  Jackie prepared tea as her mother did, standing the loaf on end and buttering it before slicing. On the transistor radio Cilla Black was singing ‘Anyone Who Had A Heart’. Jackie blew the ash off her cigarette without removing it from her lips. A whimpering came from under the table. She reached down to the Yorkshire terrier. ‘Ratty, go to your basket, you’re not allowed in here at mealtimes.’

  The dog remained where he was. Something was bothering him. His eyes were turned up at her and he was shivering, but the room was warm.

  ‘Go on, you big soft thing, go and see if they’re home.’

  Ratty did not move. His eyes rolled up at hers piteously, as if he was frightened of being beaten.

  ‘If you don’t stop that noise I’ll have to put you out.’ She took another look at the dog. She hoped it wasn’t distemper. A lot of the dogs in the neighbourhood were feral, and she knew the disease was highly contagious. His nose felt cold enough.

  Jackie rose and squared off the china, putting the spoons straight. Since moving into their new flat on Hackney Road she had become extremely house-proud. The neatly pebble-dashed block was prefabricated and had balconies and picture windows. It was only a few months old. She had never lived in a new house before. The family had always rented a room from Paul’s parents in Bow. They had been lucky to get their names on to the list.

  It was a maisonette, and had come with a built-in top-loading washing machine that looked as if it had been delivered direct from the Ideal Home Exhibition. The paintwork and wallpaper were still fresh and clean, oranges and yellows, and she was determined to keep them looking bright, even though Paul still insisted on leaving his bicycle in the hall.

  She looked at the clock again. The girls were trustworthy. They knew better than to talk to strangers, but they weren’t usually late for tea. Violet was headstrong and tomboyish, and gentle Daisy followed her sister everywhere, so there was a chance Violet had taken her to the bomb-site. It occupied an entire block on one side of Hackney Road and was full of half-collapsed walls and razor-sharp sheets of corrugated iron. Heaven knew who hung around there in the shadows, or what they got up to after dark.

  ‘Ratty, please stop making that awful fuss.’ She glanced under the table again. Whatever was up with him? Usually he only got like this just before a storm.

  She was just wondering if she should go over to the bombsite and start looking for the girls when the front door opened. Ratty stopped whining for a moment but stayed hidden behind the chair legs, crouching low.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she called, untying her apron. ‘Your dad’s got to get off in a minute.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Daisy called. ‘It wasn’t my fault, it was Vi.’ They stood in the doorway in matching blue summer frocks and cardigans, their hair tied back in plaits, peas in a pod.

  ‘Violet, you’re supposed to keep an eye on the time. Did you go over to the bomb-site? Tell the truth and shame the devil.’

  ‘No, Mum—’ Violet began, but Daisy cried, ‘Yes we did, Vi.’

  ‘Vi, you know it’s not safe over there, remember what happened to Percy at number thirty-three, they had to make him a new ear. Show me.’ She examined Daisy’s hem. ‘You’ve put a tear in that. It’ll need a stitch.’

  Violet was looking under the table at the whimpering Ratty. They had found him abandoned as a puppy under the station arches and had mothered him, turning him soft – at least, that was what Paul said. ‘Mum, what’s wrong with Ratty?’

  ‘Nothing. Now go and wash your hands, both of you, and hurry up.’

  Jackie nipped out to the kitchen and returned with sausages and beans just as the girls came back and slid into their chairs. On inspection, Violet’s hands were clean but her knees were covered in smudges of dirt and one cardigan sleeve was snagged. ‘Look at the state of you,’ said Jackie, appalled. ‘Nanny Kath knitted you that top. It’ll be lovely once you grow into it.’

  ‘My arms aren’t going to get a foot longer, are they?’

  ‘No backchat. You’re supposed to set an example to your sister.’ She went to the doorway and called, ‘Paul, it’s on the table, come and eat.’

  When she reached down to the dog it backed away from her, still whining. ‘Ratty, what’s come over you? You know the rules.’

  ‘That dog’s been on my sleeves,’ said Paul, appearing at the dining-room door with his waiter’s jacket over his arm. ‘Have you got the brush?’

  ‘He wouldn’t fall asleep on it if you hung it up occasionally,’ she s
aid, locating the brush. ‘Give it here. The dog’s under the table. Can you get him out? But eat something before it gets cold. Tell Violet off for ruining her cardie.’

  ‘You been on that bomb-site again?’ said Paul, squeezing to the end of the laden table, trying to find the dog at his feet. ‘Nanny Kath can’t see well enough to knit, you know that, Jackie.’

  ‘Support,’ Jackie mouthed at her husband, casting an eye at the girls.

  ‘You shouldn’t get your clothes dirty, either of you,’ said Paul dutifully. ‘Your mother has eczema.’

  ‘Then she should wear rubber gloves when she washes them,’ said Violet defiantly.

  Daisy didn’t appear to be listening. She was squinting and looking up at the ceiling. Ratty howled again, in a higher and more plaintive register.

  ‘What’s the matter now?’ asked Jackie, fork raised in one hand.

  ‘There’s something in my hair,’ Daisy said. She shook her fringe and white dust sifted out. Violet laughed.

  ‘Not over the table!’ Jackie cried. ‘That does it. That’s the very last time you play on the bomb-site. They’re supposed to be building houses on it soon and then you’ll have to find somewhere else.’

  Daisy was sitting with her knife pointing upwards. ‘It’s not me, it’s coming from the ceiling,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ said Paul, cutting into his sausages. ‘That’s your bedroom up there.’

  ‘She’s right,’ said Jackie, half rising. ‘Look.’

  Floury blooms of dust were falling on both of the girls. As they looked up at the ceiling the centre light began to swing in a gentle arc like a Foucault pendulum.

  ‘What the bloody hell is causing that?’ Paul asked, jumping up. ‘It’s not trucks going past, is it?’

  ‘A cobweb,’ said Jackie.

  ‘What?’ Paul looked at her in puzzlement. He followed her eyeline and saw a feathery black line appearing across the ceiling. He was about to make a joke about her cleaning skills when one side of the ceiling split and fell down.

  It wasn’t just lath and plaster, though, it was a great triangle of concrete, followed by a square-cut beam of grey stone. A second crack produced another loose section. One hovered above their heads at an angle, then seesawed down on them with a bang.

  Daisy screamed as Violet vanished in a dense cloud of cement dust. The next beam fell squarely across the table, slicing it clean in half. Ratty was crushed and silenced. More and more debris dropped through the hole. The whole ceiling was coming down now.

  With a terrible tired groan the bricks in the outer wall of the flat began to move away by themselves, exposing the gloomy interior of the room to the sunlit street. There was a bang in the kitchen next door. The crack had spread and brought down that ceiling too.

  Jackie jumped up but could barely see her hands in front of her face. Behind Paul more of the street appeared, and then the dining-room window was buckling inwards, shining like a great soap-water balloon. Moments later it exploded as if it had been fired from a cannon. There were screams and yells beneath the roaring fall of stonework.

  Jackie tried to find her daughters in the blizzard of plaster and cement. She saw a sandal-shod foot and pulled at it, but there were long slabs of concrete on top. The rubble was frosted with crystal fragments that looked like sprinkled diamonds.

  ‘Paul,’ she cried out. ‘Give me a hand.’ It was absurd, she thought, like something from the Blitz, but the war had ended over twenty years ago. ‘Paul,’ she cried again, ‘the girls.’

  But when no answer came she saw that Paul was folded up on the linoleum floor, covered in shards of glass and dark blood like splashes of paint, and a great concrete beam stood where his head should be.

  I can get them out of here, all of them, she thought. I’ve always been able to fix this family.

  But then the kitchen gas main ruptured, and that was the end of that.

  3

  * * *

  YELLOW SUBMARINE

  ‘All right, here’s another one,’ said Arthur Bryant. ‘Fish.’

  ‘“Fish”,’ John May repeated. ‘Any particular fish?’

  ‘No, just generic fish.’

  ‘OK. Ready?’

  ‘Go.’

  ‘From Russia With Fish.’

  ‘Fishfinger.’

  ‘The Good, the Bad and the Fish.’

  ‘A Fishful of Dollars.’

  ‘A Fish for all Seasons.’

  ‘The Charge of the Fish Brigade.’

  ‘Link?’

  ‘Historical.’

  ‘Accept. Thoroughly Modern Fish.’

  ‘Half a Fish.’

  ‘What’s that meant to be?’

  ‘Sixpence. Half a Sixpence. Musicals.’

  ‘Damn. Accept. Twenty Thousand Fish under the Sea.’

  ‘Snow White and the Seven Fish.’

  ‘Link?’

  ‘Walt Disney.’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  ‘Now let’s do “Carburettor”.’

  ‘No, you’re too good at this,’ May complained, flipping him a coin. ‘Here’s my tanner.’

  ‘You still owe me two bob from yesterday.’

  ‘I’m not playing any more stupid games with you. I always end up broke before payday.’

  On a muggy, overheated Saturday afternoon in September 1969, the detectives met up for a pint in Camden Town, a nondescript neighbourhood imprisoned between smoky railway lines and rubbish-filled canals in North-West London.

  For as long as anyone could remember, the impoverished, treeless brick terrace of Camden High Street had been stained the colour of stewed tea, but now it was being transformed, painted over in bursts of sunflower yellow, tomato red and ocean blue. Its drainpipes were entwined with tangerine sunflowers, its awnings shaded in candy-stripes. The old fruit and vegetable stores had been plucked out like bad teeth and replaced by boutiques selling Indian kaftans, ruffle-necked shirts and brocaded waistcoats. Butchers, bakers and coffin-makers were being turfed out to make way for gaudy emporia selling military tunics, Victrolas and Crimean helmets.

  The area was still in a state of flux; fashionable little antique shops and hippy bookstores were sandwiched between old-man cafés and nicotine-rinsed betting shops. The art students who had brought this about were a peculiar mix, nostalgic for empire and war, experimenting with futurism and optical art. This nascent oasis was hardly bigger than a couple of football pitches; it began where two old pubs named after witches, the Black Cap and the Mother Red Cap, stood diagonally opposing each other, and ended just after the bridge over the Regent’s Canal.

  The old Irish families complained about the influx of mods and their dolly birds; young money was flooding in but precious little of it got into the surrounding streets, which were as shabby and rivalrous as they had ever been. Besides, the swinging scene wasn’t here, not really, but over in Carnaby Street and the King’s Road; you needed money to be a dedicated follower of fashion and there was precious little of it in this part of North London.

  John May stepped aside to let two girls pass. In matching white knee-boots, lime-green sunglasses and sunburst minidresses they left behind them a beaming trail of turned heads. May stared as they clambered on to the back seat of a Mini Moke painted all over with a cartoonish military band. They were sharing a private joke, or perhaps laughing from the sheer pleasure of knowing that they were young and pretty and being stared at.

  ‘I feel sorry for those young ladies,’ said Bryant disapprovingly.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Having you leer after them. You’re like one of those creepy paintings whose eyes follow you around the room.’

  ‘I’m appreciating the female form, you bookworm,’ said May, his eyes continuing to follow the girls as their car headed across the lock bridge. ‘I’m interested in them intellectually as well, you know.’

  ‘You’re not looking at their brains.’

  May was still hypnotized. ‘God, Arthur, look around yourself! Don’t you eve
r stop to stare at girls?’

  ‘No,’ said Bryant firmly. ‘I can’t afford to. They distract the mind and muddy the senses.’

  ‘But they’re everywhere and willing! You’re a bit of a panda about sex, aren’t you? Don’t you like them? I mean, that’s cool too …’

  ‘They don’t like me. I’m the wrong shape or something.’ He hopped out of the way to avoid some prancing twerp in an Adam Adamant cape and top hat.

  ‘There’s a lid for every teapot.’

  ‘By which I take it you mean I should be happy with a horrible one. It’s a matter of timing. Girls are never around when I need them, and I never need them when they’re around. I’m waiting until they invent robot companions.’

  ‘Did you never—?’

  ‘I had a soulmate once.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘She fell off a bridge.’

  ‘Oh.’ May hardly knew what to say. He caught sight of his profile in the window of Totally Gear and mentally gave himself the thumbs-up. His chestnut hair tumbled over his Regency collar. His flared jeans and Edwardian boots looked good on his long legs, and the woven leather belt emphasized his slim waist. Perhaps leaving the neck open on his thong-tied paisley shirt was too much. Next to him he saw a shorter, chunkier fellow dressed like other people’s fathers. Bryant wasn’t just uninterested in buying fashionable shirts, he couldn’t be bothered to iron the handful he owned.

  It’s hard to imagine London’s oldest detective as a young man, isn’t it? An unlined face, an unclouded eye, an unjaundiced viewpoint, a 32-inch waist, just one chin. His good points then were pretty much unchanged: naïvety, an ill-concealed sense of amusement, a willingness to believe in almost anything that fought the tide of popular opinion. His bad points were in evidence too: a determined refusal to take life seriously, a disregard for rules, a taste for the incendiary, a tendency towards anarchy. Not the off-the-peg anarchy of the times, though: an altogether more personal and peculiar form of rebellion. He was immune to the tidal pull of popular opinion.