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

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Nobody else got in or out?’

  ‘It doesn’t appear so. There are no cameras inside the house but there’s one on the wall next door and it didn’t pick up anyone entering or leaving the front door.’

  ‘No other exits?’

  ‘The back door leads into a walled courtyard three storeys high.’

  Bryant studied the photograph, tracing the livid crimson mark on Sabira’s wrist. ‘Did someone remove her dressing?’

  ‘Not at the clinic. They think she must have taken it off after she left this morning.’

  ‘Interesting. The arm. She’s pointing. What’s above her hand?’

  May flicked to the next shot showing the muddy sepia paintings.

  ‘Hogarth. The Rake’s Progress,’ said Bryant. ‘She’s been trying to leave evidence for us.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A few weeks ago Sabira was as sane as you or I. Do you remember how vivacious she was when we first met her? I’m an idiot, I should have been able to prevent this.’

  ‘I don’t see how you could have done. Why didn’t she confide in us?’

  ‘She couldn’t tell anyone connected with her husband’s office. That’s why she talked to Jeff Waters, and possibly to Edona Lescowitz. They were both outsiders.’

  ‘No, Waters had a connection. He was employed by Janet Ramsey, Kasavian’s former girlfriend.’

  ‘I don’t think that has a bearing on it. Those kinds of connections sometimes just happen, even in a city the size of London.’

  ‘When you say she was trying to leave evidence, what do you mean?’

  ‘Sabira broke out of the clinic prior to her psychiatric examination and tried to show us what was happening to her.’ Bryant tapped the screen. ‘She’d studied art history. She told us so herself. She headed here deliberately. I’ll show you.’

  He went to his room and returned with an immense, sooty, leather-bound volume, throwing it open and thumbing carelessly through the pages.

  ‘Look. Hogarth’s pictures tell stories. All you have to do is study the allusions in each one of the series, and you have a tale as complex as any novel. Look at them: each picture peppered with tiny details, signs and maps, globes and scrolls and what-have-you, all these bits and bobs mean something. There are classical references, of course, but any first-year art history student could figure out what’s going on. It doesn’t take a genius to tell you that when there’s a black dog in the painting it means the subject is suffering from depression. The Rake’s Progress tells the story of a spendthrift son wasting his father’s fortune in boozers, marrying the wrong woman for her fortune, going to debtors’ jail and ending up here, in scene eight, the painting Sabira was indicating.’ His index finger stabbed at the page in question.

  ‘In Bedlam,’ said May, studying the picture.

  ‘Indeed. The Bethlehem Royal Hospital where the mad were committed, and where Sabira was also to be sent. I think that’s why she tore her dressing off. Look at the red ring around her wrist. The mark of madness. She wasn’t trying to kill herself; she was sending us a message. No, more than a message – a warning. But I didn’t pick up on it the first time, so she gave us another chance. She was far too frightened to talk, but if we reached the same conclusion by ourselves that was a different matter.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said May. ‘What was the message?’

  ‘Amy O’Connor was found in St Bride’s with a red cotton thread around her left wrist. I knew that it was once considered a treatment for madness, although in olden times you were supposed to attach a clovewort to the cord. Clovewort was a herb that supposedly cured lunacy. Sabira may not have known what the cord signified, but was leaving a mark on her wrist to link herself to O’Connor and the condition of madness.’

  ‘That makes absolutely no sense. She didn’t know she was going to drop dead in the museum, did she? So what was it – suicide? How did she think this “message” was going to reach us?’

  ‘Er, I don’t know.’

  Bryant turned back to Banbury’s photographs of the body. ‘We don’t know why her left shoe was half off?’

  ‘We think it happened when she fell,’ said Banbury, ‘but I’m going to examine the shoes as soon as I have a chance.’

  ‘Kasavian has demanded to see us first thing tomorrow morning,’ said May. ‘I assume he’s going to throw the book at us.’

  ‘Then we have to stall him while we look into this.’

  ‘I don’t see that we can do much until Giles has obtained permission to carry out an autopsy.’

  ‘Sabira sent me a clue, a very simple code-reader, but I don’t have the document it was intended to read. I think it might be in the folder of taxi receipts she brought back from the Home Office. Do we still have it?’

  ‘It’s on my desk,’ said Renfield. ‘Hang on.’

  He brought it in and emptied it out on the common-room table.

  Bryant pulled on his spectacles, withdrew the Cardano grille and started running it over folded pages of figures. ‘There’s something you can do,’ he said while he checked the slots for codes. ‘Go back into Amy O’Connor’s history. Get inside her life. We need to know how the pair of them came to meet. That’s the key to this. Whether she was mad or sane, Sabira left evidence that would lead us to the truth. She can still help us even though she’s gone.’

  The door opened behind them with a bang.

  ‘Well done, lads, seems like you’ve done a grand job.’ The tone was sarcastic. Charles Hereward studied each of them in turn, as if he was seeking to memorize their faces. He appeared to have been drinking. ‘You couldn’t manage to keep her alive, though.’

  ‘We didn’t exacerbate the problem by shutting her away in a private clinic,’ said Bryant angrily. ‘Who let you in?’

  ‘We own you, pal. Oskar was under pressure from the Deputy PM to do something about his bloody wife before the Paris summit. All you had to do was keep an eye on her until she could be sectioned, you realize that, don’t you? You weren’t supposed to do anything.’

  ‘Look here, you can’t blame my team,’ said Raymond Land. ‘They were acting under Mr Kasavian’s instructions.’

  ‘Yes, to keep his wife under lock and key for a while, not to let her die and let the Paris talks die with her. I’m sorry, does that seem callous? Putting our work ahead of a dim, unfaithful cokehead who decided she wanted a bigger wardrobe than her Albanian leks could buy her?’

  ‘We’ve done nothing that should affect Mr Kasavian’s meeting,’ said Land, alarmed.

  ‘No? I put six years of my life into building the case for stronger border controls.’ Hereward drifted between them like an untethered blimp. ‘I started work on it three years before Kasavian even joined the department, and now all that work will be wiped away, and the clock will be reset to zero because Oskar will be in no fit state to present his case, and there’s no one who can deputize for him.’

  ‘I thought you were a supporter,’ said Renfield. ‘Why can’t you do it?’

  ‘Because it’s more than just a change in the law. He’s the one who’s up for the job of co-ordinating the entire initiative, not me. He’s the one who’s meant to keep every tax-dodging immigrant and would-be terrorist out of this country. And now he’s in no fit state to do it. Instead of studying the protocols of twenty-seven member states this week, he’ll be burying his wife. And you know what? He blames himself for not being there for her when she needed him, instead of blaming you.’

  ‘It’s not our fault that—’

  ‘I want you to know that we’re going to take you down, no matter whose fault this was.’ Hereward looked like an unpricked sausage about to explode. ‘It’s time you learned something about the department that pays your salaries. When it comes to getting rid of its enemies, it’s a vindictive, irrational son of a bitch. We’ll grind you into the dust, then blow the dust away. It’ll be as if you never existed.’

  He turned to leave, but then stopped. ‘Don’t think I dro
pped by just to threaten you. I happened to be in the neighbourhood.’

  ‘I didn’t know the currency of Albania was the lek,’ said Bryant, stacking his books in the stunned silence that followed Hereward’s departure. ‘Where were we? Ah yes, I think we need to conduct a search of the Sir John Soane Museum.’

  Raymond Land was not a violent man, but he shot Bryant a look that could have blasted his desk into splinters and stripped off the wallpaper behind his head.

  ‘What?’ asked Bryant innocently. ‘Have you never seen a civil servant explode before? You’d better get used to the sight. This is just the start.’

  28

  THE STRANGENESS OF CHURCHES

  BRYANT SENT THE rest of the demoralized team home at 10.00 p.m. on Sunday night. John May stayed behind, settling into his partner’s huge leather armchair to keep him company, trying to stay awake while Bryant attempted to break encrypted messages in the taxi-receipt folder.

  Two problems stood in the way of his success. If Sabira had been leaving a message for them, she would have written the encryption herself; he knew he wouldn’t find it in a receipt or a company document unless she had forged it. Second, if it was written with the commonplace Caesar shift, he would need the keyword that preceded the coding.

  ‘It’s no good,’ he said finally, poking May awake and handing him a Calvados. ‘It’s far too elaborate. If Sabira hid anything at all, surely she would have kept it simple. It only needed to be something her tormentor wouldn’t spot. Until I can understand the nature of the algorithm, I’ll have to pursue another tack. Would you see Kasavian by yourself tomorrow morning? I need you to buy me some time.’

  May was exhausted and depressed. He had never felt closer to taking retirement. ‘What for?’ he asked. ‘You heard Hereward. Whatever happens now makes no difference. We’re done for.’

  ‘That may be, but we have to right a wrong. Sabira Kasavian was hounded to her death.’

  ‘If you believe that, you’re accusing everyone of complicity,’ said May. ‘We’re talking about conspiracy to murder, cover-ups, perverting the course of justice and God knows what else. Don’t you see what’s happening? We’ve finally come up against something that’s utterly impervious to investigation. All we can do is react to each new disaster.’

  Bryant tapped his teeth, thinking. ‘I need to understand the nature of madness.’

  ‘No, Arthur, we need basic evidence, cause of death, witness IDs, not some fanciful research into the history of bloody Bedlam.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ said Bryant simply. ‘No traditional approach can possibly work against something like this. I’ll prove it to you in the next twenty-four hours. I’m so close, I can feel the answer shifting beneath my hands. The threads – those red threads that cured madness – they’re coming together but I can’t see why.’ He held out his hands and examined their backs. ‘It’s right in front of me. Whoever did this has done it all before. It’s second nature to him. I just need to find a way in. I know I’m probably not making any sense right now, but—’

  ‘You’re right,’ said May wearily. ‘You’re not making any sense at all. It’s late; let’s go home.’

  ‘No, you go. I’ll stay.’

  ‘Then I’ll stay too.’

  The light in the old warehouse at 231, Caledonian Road, burned on through the lonely night.

  May felt lousy. He washed in the unit’s leaky, cantankerous bathroom and had a shave, but still felt ill prepared to face Kasavian’s wrath first thing on a Monday morning.

  To his surprise the security chief’s assistant called to tell him that Kasavian was walking on Primrose Hill and would meet him on the bench at the top in half an hour, so that was where he headed.

  The day was cool and pinkly misted. From the height of the emerald mound, London was softened in a silky haze that smoothed out its mean-spirited edges. Some of the city’s buildings appeared to have been speared with cranes in order to keep them from floating away.

  Oskar Kasavian was slumped on the bench in his long black raincoat, looking like an abandoned umbrella. May sat some distance from him in case he decided to lash out. There was a coiled power in the security supervisor that almost everyone found threatening, but today his mood caught May by surprise.

  ‘I used to come up here with her,’ he said, looking down towards Westminster. ‘I never saw the beauty in it myself. I asked her, why this park? It’s so small. She told me that when she was a little girl she saw a Disney cartoon at her local cinema, One Hundred And One Dalmatians, and this park and the surrounding houses were in it. She liked it because it looked so neatly organized. She arrived here expecting it to look different, but it was exactly as she’d seen it in the film. That’s the difference. I looked and only ever saw the exits, the railings, the inadequate lighting, the signs and the bins. She saw what this place represented. An image of Englishness, something she craved.’

  May had no response. Words of comfort would sound false, so he waited.

  ‘I don’t hold you responsible for what happened. I should have spotted the signs and done something about it. I should have been there for her. One gets focused on work to the exclusion of all else. It becomes very hard to live a normal life.’

  ‘You’ll have to sign the autopsy consent today,’ said May. ‘There’s no obvious cause of death.’

  Kasavian sighed, an exhalation of air that sounded like defeat. ‘I’ll be at the office. The Belgians and the French are planning a final attempt to derail the border-control process.’

  ‘Nobody needs to know about your wife just yet. We’ll keep it out of the press for as long as we can.’

  ‘John – may I call you that? There’s no point in you continuing the investigation. My wife is dead. I’m withdrawing you from the case. I’ll make sure there’s no reflection on your abilities.’

  ‘It’s a murder investigation, Mr Kasavian. I’m afraid even you don’t have the power to stop it now.’

  ‘But your unit is under the jurisdiction of the Home Office.’

  ‘You have the ability to direct prosecutions and investigations, but not once a murder inquiry is under way. We have a responsibility to the public. If we call a halt it means that somebody out there is tempted to kill again. Each time we catch a criminal the desire is lessened in others. Prevention of public disorder; it’s a fundamental part of our remit.’

  ‘Then you must do what you have to do. I’m going ahead with the presentation of the initiative. It won’t be easy to get the work done in time, but I can’t lose this as well. I’ll need your findings before I leave. I can’t go into the chamber of representatives without knowing what happened. I have to start putting it behind me as soon as possible.’

  ‘Then I’ll personally provide you with the report before you set off,’ said May.

  Maggie Armitage acted as a PCU contact point for crimes containing elements of mental and spiritual abnormality. In addition, she offered advice on anything from ghostwriting to rhinoplasty. What she lacked in logic she made up for in a kind of deranged effervescence that sometimes shed light into penumbral corners.

  Today Bryant had arranged to meet her at Liverpool Street Station. The white witch and self-proclaimed leader of the Coven of St James the Elder turned up in a purple woollen tea-cosy hat, a green velvet overcoat and orange leggings. Her glasses, winged and yellow-tinted, hung on a plastic daisy chain around her throat. She looked like a small seaside town celebrating a centenary.

  ‘The colour of vitality and endurance,’ she said, pointing to her tights. ‘I thought we might need it today, judging by the tone of your call.’

  Bryant explained the case as they passed through the diaspora of commuters. ‘The remains of Bedlam were uncovered here, right beneath Liverpool Street Station in 1911,’ he explained. ‘It had been on this site since the thirteenth century. The workmen found dozens of layers of human skulls. The patients had died of sweating sickness. I thought you might pick up some useful vibrations.’

 
‘At the moment all I can feel is the Tube trains through my trainers, but I’m pretty insensitive until I’ve had my first cup of coffee,’ she replied, taking his arm. ‘I would have worn blue had I known – it was Bedlam’s trademark colour.’

  Bryant barely heard her. ‘Madness, melancholy and distraction, that’s what they attempted to cure. The so-called “moon-sick” had a red thread tied on them. Kasavian’s wife didn’t have any red thread – Janice looked through the clothes in her wardrobe – so she scratched a red line around her wrist and died pointing to the picture of Bedlam. She was telling me that her madness held the key to this.’

  ‘I don’t know why you thought I’d know more about being barmy than one of your textbooks,’ said Maggie. ‘OK, I’ve lit the teapot instead of the kettle occasionally and I once used Strangeways in a revivification ritual by mistake.’

  ‘How could you revive a cat by mistake?’

  ‘I thought he was dead but it turned out he was asleep. The ritual had a reverse effect and put him in a trance for the entire winter. I just stuck him in a box with the tortoise and he woke up in the spring. I’m not really the person to ask about madness. You’d be better off with Dame Maud Hackshaw. She’s been inside, you know. Bethlem, the real one, now in Bromley. That was back when she was still getting visits from Joan of Arc. The hospital’s still going strong, although they’ve got rid of people poking the patients with sticks for a shilling a time.’

  ‘Tell me anything you know about madness.’

  ‘I know a few bits and pieces. The hospital was called “Bethlehem”, from the Hebrew meaning “house of bread”, because its founder got lost behind enemy lines during the crusades and followed the Star of Bethlehem back to camp. Let’s see, what else? Madness is known as the English Disease. Wasn’t Hamlet sent here because it was thought his behaviour would go unnoticed? Bedlam was used to incarcerate political prisoners, which sounds apt to your case.’

  ‘My thinking precisely. They considered her a political danger.’