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

by Christopher Fowler

‘Well, he’s fine, obviously. And he’s not a friend; he’s the other half of my brain. I’d discuss it with him, I admit, but it would go no further.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Cross my hardened heart.’

  ‘To be honest it’s a bit of a puzzler, and I could do with some feedback. She had a slight contusion to the orbital frontal region, but was otherwise clean of any marks.’

  ‘You mean falling from the chair and banging her head wasn’t enough to kill her?’

  ‘Our bodies are a little tougher than that, Mr Bryant. Otherwise we’d be smashing ourselves to bits like bone-china teacups.’

  ‘Then what else could it have been?’

  ‘With the heightened body temperature it feels like toxicosis – systemic poisoning of some kind – but there’s no agent present that I could trace. No oesophageal trauma, so she hadn’t ingested anything severe. Stomach’s fine. That’s the thing with City of London workers – you always find the same gut contents, courtesy of our friends at Pret A Manger. The City workers tend to favour the crayfish and rocket sandwiches.’

  ‘She wasn’t a City worker. She had a job in a bar in Hoxton. No other marks on the body at all?’

  ‘None that I could see. The admitting officer says they checked the CCTV and she’d been alone outside the church and inside it. There was a boy working in the shop, but he was in and out – a smoker – and went nowhere near her. There’s a witness report from him that’s the blankest document I’ve ever seen. She was completely alone except for a couple of kids.’

  Bryant’s ears pricked up. ‘What kids?’

  ‘The officer said it looked like she had an argument with two small children a few minutes before going into the church. She was trying to read. They were playing ball near her, annoying her apparently. Not hoodies – well dressed.’

  ‘Has anyone tried to track the children down?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so. What would be the point? What could a small child do?’

  ‘You never know these days. Nothing else unusual at all? Clothes, personal belongings, mobile, handbag?’

  ‘You’d have to ask someone else about that. I’m only dealing with the physical remains. Wait a minute – there was one thing.’ He rose and went over to a stack of steel drawers labelled alphabetically. ‘Hang on, it’s gone.’

  ‘Not “C”,’ said Bryant. ‘Try “O” for “O’Connor”.’

  ‘Don’t know my own filing system.’ Opening the lower drawer, Fenchurch pulled out a clear plastic bag and held it up. ‘I hung on to this because I had to cut it off her body. She had a piece of red string knotted around her left wrist.’ He threw it over to Bryant. ‘My first thought was Kabbalah.’

  ‘No,’ said Bryant. ‘A Kabbalah string is usually a single strand of red woollen thread, and it’s associated with Judaism. It’s called a roite bindele in Yiddish. With a name like O’Connor she certainly wasn’t Jewish, and it wasn’t her married name because she’d never had a husband. St Bride’s is the church of St Bridget of Ireland, so I daresay it attracts Irish worshippers.’

  ‘Then maybe it was just decoration.’

  Bryant turned it in the light, thinking. ‘St Bride’s. An interesting place to die. It’s one of the oldest churches in London, at least the seventh to have stood on that site. Wedding cakes.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘A baker called William Rich saw the spire from his window and had the idea for the shape of his daughter’s wedding cake. Oh, and journalists always used it. A few old ones still do. Suggestive, don’t you think?’

  ‘No, I don’t, Arthur. My mind doesn’t store things up for later use like yours does. I prefer to have a brain, not a shed.’

  ‘A couple of things,’ said Bryant. ‘You had to cut the string off, yes?’

  ‘Yes, the knot—’

  ‘Precisely. Not the sort of knot you could do up by yourself. So someone else tied it on for her.’

  ‘What’s the other thing?’

  Bryant had second thoughts. ‘Well, the colour is indicative – but I’ll have to do some research on it.’

  ‘Except that it’s not your case.’

  ‘I know, everybody keeps saying that.’ Bryant jammed his hat back on and walked to the door. ‘Ben, will you do me one favour for old times’ sake? Don’t file your conclusions for a couple of days. Say the printer ran out of paper or something. I want to try and get the investigation transferred to the unit.’

  ‘All right,’ said Fenchurch. ‘There’s no one pressuring me, and we’re short-staffed. I suppose I can sit on it for forty-eight hours without too much trouble.’

  ‘You’re a pal. Saturday night, weekend after next, bowling, you’re playing for us. Eight p.m. sharp for warm-up drinks at the Nun and Broken Compass.’

  ‘I won’t do it,’ said Raymond Land, shaking his head angrily.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said John May. ‘The City of London’s on a high alert because of the banking protests, their resources are overstretched and I’m sure they’d appreciate the offer of help.’

  ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ Land hissed. ‘They hate us. All of them, from the Commissioner downwards. Not just us. They especially hate Arthur. He makes them look bad. He swans in and nicks all the high-profile work, solves the cases and gets the column inches, and accidentally forces up their targets. Why should they give him a case that’s already been assigned? He’s been in to see me about it and I said no. Absolutely not. We have to keep our noses clean for a while.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said May, raising his hands. ‘The others wanted me to ask.’

  ‘Wait, what others?’

  ‘Everyone. Janice, Jack, Meera, Colin, all of them.’

  ‘Are you telling me you’ve been going around canvassing support behind my back?’

  ‘Of course not. But you know when Arthur gets a hunch it usually turns out to be right.’

  Land caught sight of himself in the mirror and saw the usual mix of puzzlement, frustration and anger stirred together like a pudding in a bowl. The little hair he had left was turning grey. He wanted to show authority, but how could he when his detectives defied him at every turn? ‘Look, it’s bad enough having to fight everyone else in the police service without internal divisions as well. Bryant is a detective, not a mystic. He chases these cases because he fancies having a crack at them, not because he has some strange psychic ability to know exactly when—’

  Land’s office door opened and Bryant shambled in, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of a shapeless, patched corduroy jacket, his unlit pipe jutting from the side of his mouth. ‘Wind’s changed direction. It’s in the east,’ he said meaningfully. ‘Looks like there’s a storm coming.’

  ‘Where have you been?’ asked Land, annoyed.

  ‘Ah. I was on my veranda having a quiet smoke and a think.’

  ‘You haven’t got a veranda. This is King’s Cross, not New Orleans. It’s a rickety old loading platform and it’s unsafe. Please don’t stand on it.’

  Bryant gave a derisive snort. ‘It doesn’t matter at my age. These days I’m amazed if I just wake up in the morning. Senior citizens should take more chances, not less. Teenagers sleep all the time and us oldies manage four hours a night. Life is upside down. I have a hypothesis about how Amy O’Connor died.’

  ‘You can’t possibly know anything about her,’ Land protested as a faint but ominous roll of thunder rattled the windows. He glanced out at the seething grey skies above the station, unnerved.

  ‘The old insurance office,’ said Bryant, removing his pipe. ‘They were tearing down a Victorian building in Salisbury Court, right behind the bench where O’Connor was sitting, but work stopped while they excavated a Roman floor in the basement. Some very nice mosaics. I’ve just been over there. I looked down into the ruined brickwork and saw something lying in the shadows. It might have been the reason for her death.’ The raising of his eyebrow was a study in Stanislavskian method acting.

  Land
was dumbfounded. His attempts to show leadership were always undermined by his utter amazement at the abilities of others. As a student of human nature he would have made a fine pastry chef. ‘Are you telling me that she was murdered?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. But I can see how she might have died. I need to find the children who were playing ball in the courtyard.’

  ‘Well you can’t, it’s not your case.’

  ‘No,’ said Bryant, ‘but it soon will be.’

  ‘So you’re some kind of clairvoyant now?’ said Land, exasperated.

  ‘Answer the phone,’ said Bryant, pointing to the desk. ‘It’s your wife.’

  The phone suddenly rang, making Land jump. He gingerly raised the receiver. ‘Raymond Land. Oh, Leanne, it’s you. Yes, I know. I won’t be late. All right.’ He put the phone down. ‘How did you …?’

  ‘The same way I know that you’ve developed a fear of rats, that you think you’re undergoing a mid-life crisis and you’ve recently started to believe in the supernatural,’ said Bryant.

  ‘You can’t possibly – who have you been speaking to?’

  Bryant rolled his eyes knowingly and grinned, exposing an amount of white ceramic not seen since the reduction of the East Midlands Electrification Programme had resulted in a surfeit of semi-conductors on the London black market.

  ‘I know everything about you, Raymondo, even things you don’t know yourself.’ Bryant gave a lewd wink as Land stared at him in ill-disguised horror.

  Suddenly, the eerie sound of a theremin started up, the oooo-weee-oooo call sign of a hundred old monochrome science-fiction films. ‘That’s my mobile,’ said Bryant, ‘I must take this call. If anyone wants me, I shall be in my boudoir.’

  ‘You haven’t got a boudoir,’ Land called after him helplessly, ‘you’ve got an office!’

  ‘All right, what’s with the Sherlock Holmes stuff?’ asked May, closing the door behind him. ‘You’re really getting up Raymond’s nose.’

  ‘Oh, it was a dreadfully cheesy trick, I know,’ said Bryant airily, ‘but I couldn’t resist getting him back for refusing to let me try for the case. He’s so adorable when his mouth is hanging open, like a spaniel trying to understand house-training instructions.’

  ‘How did you know all that stuff about him? Or did you just make it up?’

  ‘It’s easy. His wife just called me by mistake and I rerouted it. He left a card from a rodent exterminator on his desk. We had rats at the old headquarters in Mornington Crescent and they never bothered him, but ever since Janice mentioned she’s heard noises in the walls in this building late at night, he’s been on edge.’

  ‘The mid-life crisis?’

  ‘He found out about his wife’s affair, yes?’

  ‘Only because you told him.’1

  ‘Now she’s talking about divorce and he’s suddenly realized he’ll be back on the dating scene, hence his recent purchase of several appallingly unsuitable shirts. Oh, and that horrible aftershave he’s starting pouring over himself. You must have noticed that he’s smelling like a perfumed drain. And before you ask, he’s started to believe in the supernatural because I can see that he’s borrowed some books from my top shelf, notably Psychogeographical London, Great British Hauntings and my 1923 copy of Mortar and Mortality: Who Died in Your House? He’s been upset ever since he discovered that Aleister Crowley ran a spiritualism club in our attic. Nearly every London house has been lived in by somebody else, and Crowley was all over this town like a cheap suit. It’s hardly anything to get upset about.’

  ‘You could try being nice to him for a change,’ said May. ‘He’s been very supportive lately. I feel sorry for him, stuck in a job he hates, having to look after us lot. He can’t understand how you think.’

  ‘I should hope not,’ said Bryant indignantly. ‘I would be most offended if he could. But perhaps you’re right. I’ll make it up to him.’

  ‘No.’ May hastily held up his hand. ‘Don’t do anything unusual. Just do what he says for a while.’

  ‘You mean don’t push for the Amy O’Connor case.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘All right,’ said Bryant, ‘but don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.”’ He sauntered to the door. ‘I’m going to the terrace for a pipe of St Barnabas Old Navy Rough Cut Shag. But I’m telling you, there’s more to Amy O’Connor’s death than meets the eye.’

  ‘Because of what you saw in a Roman excavation?’ asked May.

  ‘That, and because of the string that was tied around her wrist.’

  1 Bryant used his newly rediscovered ventriloquism skills to inform Land of Leanne’s affair with her flamenco instructor. See Bryant & May and the Memory of Blood.

  5

  THE ENEMY

  ‘YOU’RE NOT GOING to be happy about this,’ warned John May. ‘Home Office Security has backed up the City of London. They won’t let you have the O’Connor case.’

  ‘Why not? What’s it to them?’ Bryant asked, as he and May made their way across Bloomsbury’s sunlit garden squares towards the Marchmont Street Bookshop.

  ‘Your pal Fenchurch has already tipped someone off about his likely verdict, although he seems to be holding back the full official report. Once that’s been filed, the case is technically closed unless you get Home Office dispensation, and they won’t grant it.’

  ‘That’s odd. I was with him this morning and he said he’d delay the process by forty-eight hours. Why would he have told someone?’

  ‘You weren’t supposed to go there. Maybe he’s being pressured.’

  ‘That makes no sense unless someone at the Home Office thinks the case is more important than it looks. Amy O’Connor was a low-paid bar manager. Apparently she studied biology at Bristol University, but dropped out. She’s not connected to anyone important. Unless there’s something in her past. I could take a look at her employment records and see if—’

  ‘Arthur, maybe she really did just black out and fall.’

  ‘Without a cause of death? Next you’re going to tell me she was struck down by the hand of God. Nobody dies without a reason, and no reason has been found. If I can just go back through her history …’

  ‘But it’s not your—’

  ‘Don’t say it again, all right? Here we are.’ Bryant stopped in front of the bookshop and pointed proudly at the window. ‘Sally’s given me pride of place.’ Bryant’s wrinkled features peered up from the cover of a slim volume entitled The Casebook of Bryant & May, by Arthur Bryant, as told to Anna Marquand. Beside it, a joss stick protruded from the head of a green jade Buddha, as if in funereal remembrance.

  ‘It’s just the first volume, as you know, but it covers quite a few of our odder investigations, from the Leicester Square Vampire and the Belles of Westminster, to the Billingsgate Kipper Scandal and the hunt for the Odeon Strangler.’

  ‘And you honestly think the public wants to read this stuff? People aren’t interested in the past any more. The young want to get on and make something of their lives. They don’t want to wallow about in ancient history.’

  ‘I didn’t write it for the ambitious young,’ said Bryant primly. ‘I wrote it for the mature and interested. And, if you don’t mind, it isn’t ancient history, it’s my life. Yours, too.’ Privately, though, Bryant had to admit that the events of his life were receding into history. Last Christmas the milkman had come in for a warm-up and had asked his landlady if she collected art deco. ‘No,’ Alma had replied, ‘this happens to be Mr Bryant’s furniture.’ Yesterday’s fashions were today’s antiques.

  The owner of the small bookshop greeted Arthur. Now in her early fifties, Sally Talbot was an attractive blue-eyed blonde with the natural freshness of someone raised on a warm coastline. John May was a great appreciator of beautiful women, and his pride required him to smooth his hair and pull in his stomach.

  ‘Nice to see me in the window,’ Bryan
t commented. ‘I’m not sure about the incense, though. It looks as if I’ve died.’

  ‘Oh, we’ve got damp,’ said Sally. ‘It’s better than the smell of mildew. Thank you for coming by to sign the stock. You only went on sale this morning but we’ve already sold a few copies.’

  ‘One of them wasn’t to a man who looks like a vampire bat, was it?’ asked Bryant. Oskar Kasavian, the cadaverous Home Office Security Supervisor, had made it publicly known that he objected to Bryant writing his memoirs, and had been trying to get hold of the manuscript so that he could vet it for infringements. The Peculiar Crimes Unit was the flea in his ear, the pea under his mattress, the ground glass in his gin, but at least he had lately abandoned his attempts to have it closed down. So long as the unit’s strike rate remained high, there was little he could do to end its tenure. He was not against the idea of the place so much as its method of operation, which defied all attempts at rational explanation, beyond a vague sense of modus vivendi among its staff.

  ‘No, they went mostly to sweet little old ladies who love murder mysteries,’ said Sally.

  Bryant dug out his old Waterman’s fountain pen, uncapped it and shook it, splodging ink about. ‘How many do I have to sign?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, five if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Is that all you have left?’ Bryant beamed at the bookseller. ‘How many did you sell?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Oh. What’s your bestselling biography?’

  ‘Topless by Katia Shaw,’ said Sally. ‘She’s a glamour model.’

  Bryant turned to his partner in irritation. ‘You see? This is what’s wrong with the world. A young lady with bleached hair, an estuarine accent and unfeasible breasts can outsell a respected expert with decades of wisdom and experience.’

  ‘She’s human interest,’ replied May. ‘You’re not. People reading her story will feel that if she can make it without talent, maybe they can.’

  ‘Well, I find that phenomenally depressing.’ Bryant’s theremin call sign sounded once more. ’Well, speak of the Devil,’ he said, checking the number, ‘it’s Mr Kasavian himself. I bet I know what this is about. I’d better take it outside.’