Bryant & May and the Invisible Code (Bryant & May 10)

by Christopher Fowler

  The sensation was growing, starting to envelop her. Perhaps God had finally decided to make himself known, and would apologize for screwing up her life. The colours in the oval window above the altar grew more vivid by the second. Even the oak pews that faced each other across the church seemed to give off waves of warmth.

  It wasn’t her imagination. The church was definitely getting hotter. The light streaming through the glass was tinged crimson. The floor was rippling in the heat. It was as if the entire building had divorced itself from its moorings and was sinking down to hell.

  Suddenly she felt very close to a watchful being, but it wasn’t God – it was the Devil.

  She twisted her head to see the children leaning in from outside the church door, still staring at her intently. And someone or something no more than a stretched silhouette was behind them, dark and faceless, willing them on to evil deeds.

  I am going to suffer, she thought. This is all wrong. I can’t die before knowing the truth.

  As the church tipped and she fell slowly from her chair, all she felt was frustration with the incompleteness of life.

  3

  HEALTH CHECK

  ‘YOU NEED TO start acting your age,’ said Dr Gillespie.

  ‘If I did that, I’d be dead.’ Arthur Bryant coughed loudly, causing the doctor to tear off his stethoscope.

  ‘Would you kindly refrain from doing that when I’m listening to your heart?’ he complained. ‘You nearly deafened me.’

  ‘What?’ asked Bryant, who had been thinking about something else.

  ‘Deaf,’ said Dr Gillespie. ‘You nearly deafened me.’

  ‘Yes, I’m quite deaf, but don’t worry, it’s not catching. You’re a doctor, you should know that. I’ve got a hearing aid but it keeps picking up old radio programmes. I put it on yesterday morning and listened to an episode of Two-Way Family Favourites from 1963.’ He coughed again.

  Dr Gillespie coughed too. ‘That’s not possible. How long have you been coming here?’ he asked, thumping his chest.

  ‘Forty-two years,’ said Bryant. ‘You ought to cut down on the oily rags.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The fags. The snouts. Gaspers. Coffin nails. Lung darts.’

  ‘All right, I get the picture.’

  ‘The doctor I had before you is dead now. He was a smoker, too.’

  Dr Gillespie coughed harder. ‘He was run over by a bus.’

  ‘Yes, but he was on his way to the tobacconist.’

  ‘You smoke a pipe.’

  ‘My tobacco has medicinal properties. Is there anything else wrong with me?’

  ‘Well, quite a lot, but nothing’s actually dropping off. It’s mostly to do with your age. How old are you, exactly?’

  ‘My date of birth is right there in your file.’ Bryant reached forward and slapped an immense sheaf of yellowed paperwork.

  Dr Gillespie donned his glasses and searched for it. ‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘Well, I suppose, all things considered, you’re doing all right. Mental health OK?’

  ‘What are you implying?’

  ‘I have to ask these things. No lapses of memory?’

  ‘Well of course there are, all the time. But I know if I’m at the park or the pictures, if that’s what you mean. It proves quite convenient sometimes. Birthdays, anniversaries and so on.’

  ‘Jolly good. Well, you should make sure you get adequate rest, take a snooze in the afternoons.’

  Bryant was apoplectic. ‘I can’t suddenly go for forty winks in the middle of a case.’

  ‘Yes, but a man of your age …’

  ‘Do you mind? I am certainly not a man of my age! I’m running national murder investigations, not working for the council,’ Bryant bellowed.

  ‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with your voice.’ Dr Gillespie made a tick on his list. ‘You could always take up a hobby.’

  ‘What, run the local newsletter or work in a community puppet theatre? Have you met the kind of busybodies who do that sort of thing? I’m not interested.’

  ‘That’s not what I heard.’ Dr Gillespie coughed again and blew his nose. ‘I think I’m coming down with something. What was this about you thinking someone had been murdered by a Mr Punch puppet recently?’

  ‘Where did you hear about that?’

  ‘Your partner Mr May is one of my patients too. He’s in very good nick, you know. Takes care of himself. He’s got the body of a much younger man.’

  ‘Well, he should give it back.’

  ‘He’s wearing much better than you.’

  ‘Thank you very much. I’m so pleased to hear that. We solved the Mr Punch case, by the way. Beat people a quarter of our age.’

  ‘Well done. Good appetite? Bowels?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Are they open?’

  ‘Not right at this minute, no, but they will be if you keep me here much longer.’

  ‘I’m almost through. How’s your eyesight?’

  ‘It’s like I’m living in a thick fog.’

  ‘You should try cleaning your glasses occasionally.’ Dr Gillespie’s cough turned into a minute-long hack. ‘God, I’m dying for a cigarette.’

  ‘If you need one that badly, I’ll wait.’

  ‘Can’t,’ Dr Gillespie wheezed, ‘no balcony.’

  Bryant absently patted him on the back, waiting for him to catch his breath. ‘You don’t sound too good. Ciggies just bung up your lungs. I bet your chest feels sore right now.’

  ‘You’re right, it does.’ The doctor hacked again.

  ‘Like a steel strap slowly tightening around your ribs. Hands and feet tingling as well, no doubt. You’re probably heading for a stroke.’

  ‘I’ve tried to give up.’

  ‘Lack of willpower, I expect.’

  ‘I know, it drives me mad.’

  ‘Perhaps you should think about retiring.’

  The doctor bristled. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, I’m perfectly capable of doing my job.’

  ‘There, now you know how I feel.’ Bryant was triumphant. ‘Let’s call it quits.’

  ‘Fair enough. Put your – whatever that is – back on.’

  ‘It’s my under-vest. Then I have my vest, my shirt and my jumper.’

  ‘Aren’t you hot in that lot? It’s summer.’

  ‘Ah, I thought the rain was getting warmer. I need these layers. They keep my blood moving around.’

  ‘I saw a case that was right up your street the other day,’ said Dr Gillespie as Bryant dressed. ‘Young woman, Amy O’Connor, twenty-eight, pretty little thing, dropped dead in a church on Saturday.’

  ‘Where was this?’

  ‘St Bride’s, just off Fleet Street. It was in the Evening Standard.’

  ‘Why do you think that’s a case for us, then?’

  ‘You run the Peculiar Crimes Unit, don’t you?’ said Dr Gillespie. ‘Well, her death was bloody peculiar.’

  After the doctor had outlined what he knew about the case, Arthur Bryant left the GP’s scruffy third-floor office situated behind the Coca-Cola sign in Piccadilly Circus and set off towards the Peculiar Crimes Unit in King’s Cross, to check out the case of a lonely death in a City of London church.

  Bryant ambled. In Paris he would have been a boulevardier, a flâneur, but in London, a city that no longer had time for anything but making money, he was just slow and in the way. Accountants, bankers, market analysts and PR girls hustled around him, cemented to their phones. The engineers and artists, bootmakers, signwriters and watch-menders had long fled the centre. Who worked with their hands in the City any more? The ability to make something from nothing had once been regarded with the greatest respect, but now the Square Mile dealt in units, its captains of industry preferring to place their trust in flickering strings of electronic figures.

  Bryant would not be hurried though. He was as much a part of London as a hobbled Tower raven, a Piccadilly barber, a gunman in the Blind Beggar, and he would not be moved from his determined path. He
was, everyone agreed, an annoying, impossible and indispensible fellow who had long ago decided that it was better to be disliked than forgotten.

  And over the coming week, he would find himself annoying some very dangerous people.

  4

  STRING

  ‘WHY DID I have to hear about this from my doctor, of all people?’ asked Bryant petulantly.

  ‘It’s not our jurisdiction,’ replied John May, unfolding his long legs beneath the desk where he sat opposite his partner. ‘The case went straight to the City of London Police. They’re a law unto themselves. You can’t just cherry-pick cases that take your fancy, they’ll come around here with cricket bats.’

  Bryant was aware that the City of London’s impact extended far beyond its Square Mile inhabitants. Marked out by black bollards bearing the City’s emblem and elegant silver dragons that guarded the major entrances, it contained within its boundaries more than 450 international banks, their glass towers wedged into Palladian alleyways and crookbacked Tudor passages. As the global axis of countless multi-national corporations, it demanded a bespoke police force equipped to protect this unique environment with special policies and separate uniforms.

  ‘If there’s a reason why we should take over the investigation we can put in a formal request,’ he suggested.

  ‘True, but I can’t think of one.’

  ‘How did you know about it?’

  ‘I picked up the details as they came in,’ said May. ‘It was kept away from us because Faraday wanted it to be handled by the City of London.’

  Leslie Faraday, the Home Office liaison officer charged with keeping the Peculiar Crimes Unit in line, was under instruction from his boss to reduce the unit’s visibility, and therefore decrease their likelihood of embarrassing the government. His latest tactic was to starve them of new cases.

  ‘But you made some notes, I see.’

  ‘Yes, I did, just out of interest.’

  ‘Well?’ asked Bryant, peering over a stack of old Punch annuals at May’s papers like an ancient goblin eyeing a stack of gold coins.

  ‘Well what?’ May looked innocently back across the desk, knowing exactly what Bryant was after.

  ‘The details. What are the details of the case?’ He waved his ballpoint pen about. ‘There, man, what have you got?’

  ‘Look at you, you’re virtually salivating.’

  ‘I have nothing else to concern myself with this morning, unless you happen to know where my copy of The Thirteen Signs of Satanism has got to.’

  ‘All right.’ May pulled up a page and held it at a distance. Vanity prevented him from wearing his newly prescribed glasses. ‘It says here that at approximately two twenty p.m. on Saturday, a twenty-eight-year-old woman identified as Amy O’Connor was found dead in St Bride’s Church, just off Fleet Street. Cause of death unknown, but at the moment it’s being treated as suspicious. No marks on the body other than a contusion on the front of the skull, assumed by the EMT to have been incurred when she slipped off her chair and brained herself on the marble floor.’

  ‘So what did she die of?’

  ‘It looks like her heart simply stopped. There was a lad running the church shop, but he left his post to go for a cigarette a couple of times and didn’t even notice her sitting there. She was found by one of the wardens returning from lunch, who called a local med unit. The only note I have on the initial examination is an abnormally high body temperature. The building has CCTV, which the City of London team requisitioned and examined. They know she entered the building alone, and during the time that she was in there nobody else came in. That’s about all they have.’

  ‘Where was she before she entered St Bride’s?’

  ‘She was seen sitting on a bench in the courtyard outside the church. A lot of the area’s local workers go there at lunchtime. Quite a few work on Saturdays. O’Connor was alone and minding her own business, quietly reading a book.’

  ‘Was she working in the area?’

  ‘No. She had a part-time job as a bar manager at the Electricity Showroom in Hoxton.’

  ‘Why would an electricity showroom have a bar?’

  ‘They kept the name from the building’s old usage. It’s a popular local hostelry. There aren’t any electricity showrooms as such any more, Arthur, even you must have noticed that.’

  ‘What about her movements earlier in the morning?’

  ‘Nobody’s too sure about those. She was renting a flat in Spitalfields, had been there a couple of years. Her parents live on the south-west coast. She’d never been married, had no current partner, no close friends. There, now you know as much as anyone else.’

  ‘Where was her body taken?’

  ‘Over to the Robin Brook Centre at St Bart’s, I imagine. They handle all the cases from the Square Mile. But you can’t go near the place.’

  ‘Why not? I know the coroner there. We used to break into empty buildings together before my knees packed up.’

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘Oh, just to have a look around. I think I’ll pop over.’

  ‘No, Arthur. I absolutely forbid it. You can’t just walk into someone else’s case and stir things up.’

  ‘I’m not going to, old sport. I’ll be visiting an old friend. There’s a big bowling tournament coming up. He’s a keen player. I think I should let him know about it.’ Bryant rose and jammed a mouldy-looking olive-green fedora so hard on his head that it squashed his ears. ‘Want me to bring you anything back?’

  The hospital and the meat market occupied the same small corner of central London, the saviours and purveyors of flesh. In Queen Square, the doctors lurked like white-coated gang members, grabbing a quick cigarette before returning to their wards to administer health advice. Not far from them, in Smithfield, the last of London’s traditional butchers did the same thing. Both areas were at their most interesting before 7.00 a.m., when the doctors were intense and garrulous, the butchers noisome and amiably foul-mouthed.

  Dr Benjamin Fenchurch’s parents had been among the first Caribbean passengers to dock in Britain from the SS Empire Windrush in 1948. He had spent his entire working life in the St Bartholomew’s Hospital Coroner’s Office. Over the decades, he had become so institutionalized that he hardly ever left the hospital grounds. He owned a small flat in an apartment building that was so close to his office he could see into it from his kitchen window. He ate in the St Bart’s canteen and always volunteered for the shifts that no one else wanted. Perfectly happy to cover every Christmas, Easter, Diwali and Yom Kippur, he actively avoided the living, who were loud and messy and unreliable, and always let you down. Bodies yielded their secrets with far more grace.

  It seemed to Arthur Bryant that this was not a healthy way to live, and yet in many ways he was just as bad, preferring the company of his staff to the world beyond the unit. Working for public-service institutions had a way of making conscientious people feel as if they were always running late. They spent their lives trying to catch up with themselves, and Fenchurch was no exception.

  Threading his way through a maze of overlit basement corridors, Bryant reached the immense mortuary that served both the two nearby hospitals and the City of London Police. In the office at the farthest end, Fenchurch was at his lab desk, hunched over his notes, lost in a world of his own.

  Bryant cleared his throat.

  ‘I know you’re there, Arthur. You don’t have to make that absurd noise. I know the sound of your shoes.’ Even after all these years, Fenchurch had retained his powerful Jamaican accent. He removed his glasses and raised a huge head of grizzled grey hair.

  Bryant was surprised. ‘Really? My Oxford toecaps?’

  ‘Nobody else I know still wears Blakey’s.’ He was referring to the crescents of steel affixed to Bryant’s toes and heels that saved leather and ruined parquet floors. ‘I haven’t seen you since that disgusting business with the Limehouse Ratboy.’

  ‘Yes, that was rather nasty, wasn’t it?’ Bryant looked around.
‘All by yourself today?’

  ‘Do you see anyone else? My assistant’s off having a baby. I mean it’s his wife who’s having the baby. Why he has to be there as well is a mystery to me. It’s a simple enough procedure. So, what have I done to deserve a visit?’

  ‘Amy O’Connor.’

  ‘Oh yes. Thought you might be sniffing that one out. Very interesting.’

  ‘That’s just what I thought.’

  ‘Pity it’s not your jurisdiction.’

  ‘It should have been. She died in a church. Part of our remit is to ensure that members of the general public aren’t placed in positions of danger. If people can’t trust the sanctuary of a church, what can they trust? But I’m not here in an official capacity. I thought you might like some company. Here, I brought you some sherbet lemons.’

  Bryant rustled the corner of a paper bag. Fenchurch sniffed. ‘Not much of a bribe, is it?’ He fished inside and took one anyway.

  ‘We’re playing the Dagenham Stranglers at the Hollywood Lanes Saturday week. I’ll put you on our team.’ For some peculiar reason, bookish Bloomsbury was the home of two decent central London bowling alleys.

  ‘I thought you’d been banned after that incident with the nutcases.’

  ‘New ownership. Don’t think you should call them nutcases.’ Bryant sucked ruminatively on a sherbet lemon, clattering it loudly against his false teeth. Last year he had fielded a team of anger-management outpatients to play in a bowling tournament against a group of Metropolitan Police psychotherapists. The outpatients had proven to be sore losers. One of them had tried to make a psychotherapist eat his shoes before knocking him unconscious with a bowling pin. ‘Have you carried out a post-mortem yet?’

  ‘Last night. I’m afraid it’s going to be an open verdict.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘You know I’m not allowed to tell you.’

  ‘Oh come on, Ben, who am I going to tell? I’m old. Most of my friends are either dead, mad or on the way out.’

  ‘How’s John?’