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

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘He was really travelling,’ said Banbury. ‘It must have been like driving straight into a concrete wall. No tags in his clothes. The bike was bought through an online site, and the seller was given an alias. Think it was the same guy who went after Waters?’

  ‘Well, he’s right-handed, and his build is consistent with Waters’s attacker. He recently took anabolic steroids and cocaine.’ He held up the rider’s left wrist and turned it over to reveal a dense, smudged square of deep blue ink. ‘That’s a Russian prison tattoo, made by repeatedly jabbing yourself with a darning needle dipped in household ink. He tried to remove it with a razor blade but it looks like it went septic. If you’re thinking of a criminal career, it’s not a good idea to trademark yourself with something traceable.’

  ‘What is it?’

  Kershaw drew closer and shone a penlight over the patch. ‘A church or a monastery. The crucifix at the centre indicates that the wearer is the prince of thieves. Four spires on the church. That’s either the number of years or prison terms he’s served. And that looks like a spider at the base. The joints on the legs are irregular, see? That gives us his admittance date. Russian prisoners take great pride in tattoo codes, and they’re evolving all the time. I’ve seen these coming out of St Petersburg.’ He snapped his gloves off. ‘You should be able to fill in the rest, shouldn’t you?’

  ‘An ID won’t be enough to link him to anyone at the Home Office. They’re covering their tracks.’

  ‘My dear fellow, you give up far too easily,’ said Kershaw. ‘This chap wasn’t supposed to go under a lorry. That was a mistake, and mistakes leave a trail you can follow.’

  ‘You say that, but I can’t even check to see if he ever contacted Kasavian’s department because we can’t access their phone records, and this guy wasn’t carrying a mobile. We retraced his route on the off chance that he dropped it somewhere, but no luck.’

  ‘There’ll be a mistake,’ Kershaw insisted. ‘I can’t be doing with conspiracy theories; they really are the province of crackpots. Just how many could be in on this? I mean, really?’

  ‘I don’t see that it would have to be that many. We’re talking about, I don’t know, five, maybe six people who are already signed up to the Official Secrets Act.’

  ‘So what’s the big international secret they’re all protecting?’

  ‘You tell me. Amy O’Connor worked in a bar. Anna Marquand, if it goes back that far, was a biographer. Jeff Waters was a paparazzo. And Sabira Kasavian, when it comes down to it, was an Eastern European bride coming to the realization that she’d made a bad marriage. They must have shared a piece of knowledge that got them all killed, but I can’t begin to think what it might have been.’

  ‘You’ve linked them,’ said Kershaw. ‘Good. Let’s go from there.’

  34

  DOXIES AND RAKES

  LONGBRIGHT CHECKED HER reflection in the glass-covered menu outside La Cuisine des Gourmets and barely recognized herself.

  She was dressed in a high-necked grey trouser suit she had only worn once before, to her aunt’s funeral. Meera had tied her hair back with tortoiseshell clips. In gold earrings, a single strand of pearls, a tiny gold Cartier watch Bryant had borrowed from the ‘unclaimed’ drawer in the PCU’s evidence room, low patent black heels and a matching bag, she looked like the Thames Valley wife of a professional golfer.

  The restaurant was hung with gleaming copper pots, bunches of dried lavender and other pastoral French knick-knacks. And there they all were, seated at a long table by the largest window, the Home Office wives.

  Longbright still had Sabira’s notes about them. She could identify Cathy Almon, whose spouse headed the HO’s Workforce Management Data System, and Lavinia Storton-Chester, whose husband Nigel was the security division’s public relations manager. She also recognized a highborn woman named Daniella Asquith, wizened and birdlike, from staff files Dan had downloaded. At the head of the table sat Lady Anastasia Lang and Emma Hereward. The empty chair beside Ana Lang had clearly been left for Longbright.

  Introductions were made, but the swirl of conversation was barely interrupted by Longbright’s arrival. Apparently the chef had prepared a set menu for the group. Longbright’s dietary requests – not that she had any – were obviously not to be taken into account. A first course arrived, something with asparagus tips and quails’ eggs fussily laced with a crimson sauce that reminded her of blood-spatter patterns. Longbright trotted out her prepared mission statement about building evidence against the press.

  ‘If you could do something about the Guardian journalists,’ Emma Hereward piped up, ‘we get a very rough ride from them.’

  You picked the only left-wing newspaper out of nearly a dozen national dailies, thought Longbright, who had been in the public-service sector long enough to be able to spot a table of union-busters at a hundred paces.

  ‘All our expenses have to be checked now,’ Ana Lang agreed. ‘All this rubbish about the taxpayer having to fork out to have MPs’ moats cleaned. The lack of trust is appalling.’

  Inflamed by the topic, Daniella Asquith became so animated that there seemed a chance she might be going into cardiac arrest. ‘I think we behaved impeccably,’ she said. ‘You know what it’s about? Jealousy. We have got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral, but it’s a merchant’s house from the nineteenth century. It was Labour who introduced the Freedom of Information Act and it is Labour who insisted on the things that caught us on the wrong foot.’

  The wives chorused their dissatisfaction with the press reportage of the expenses scandal. The irony was that the story had been brilliantly uncovered by the Daily Telegraph, traditionally a bastion of right-wing journalism, but this appeared to have passed them by.

  ‘They won’t leave us alone,’ Ana Lang told Longbright. ‘It’s because we’ve publicly voiced support for our husbands. They think we’re fair game now.’

  ‘I imagine Mr Kasavian’s wife made the situation worse,’ said Longbright.

  ‘Well, of course it was terribly sad that she chose to kill herself, but she was unstable,’ said Lang.

  ‘I didn’t know she killed herself.’

  ‘They’ll keep it out of the press, but it was an overdose. She was taking so many prescription drugs that she couldn’t keep track of them all.’

  ‘You know that for a fact?’

  ‘No, but it was common knowledge.’ All the wives nodded agreement.

  ‘Did anyone actually see her take pills?’

  Ana Lang spoke for the others. ‘Not as such. But she told us she was taking them. She couldn’t even remember what they were all for. She said something about not wanting her doctor to find out. In fact, I advised her to stick with her prescribed regime and avoid taking anything else.’

  ‘When you have a situation where one wife doesn’t … fit in,’ Longbright said carefully, ‘what usually happens?’

  ‘We never exclude,’ Ana Lang pointed out. ‘We just don’t go out of our way to include.’

  As Longbright watched everyone playing with expensive meals that didn’t really interest them, she suddenly felt sorry for the government wives. She could see their endangered lives laid out like forgotten biological displays: winter in Barbados, summer in Tuscany, kids at Eton and Harrow, lunches at the Delaunay and Hawksmoor, an endless round of preparations for cocktail parties and charity dinners that nobody actually wanted to be at, an atrophying existence of slow and steady strangulation until divorce or dotage beckoned.

  ‘So you’ll do what you can to help us limit press intrusion,’ said Ana Lang, as if a decision had been reached by consensus. ‘Hard News has been especially tiresome about publishing pieces that don’t have our approval. I suppose you know that the editor, Janet Ramsey, had an affair with Oskar? We simply had to put a stop to that.’

  ‘How did you do it?’

  ‘We leaked information about her unsuitability. She had an abortion a few years ago. We couldn’t have him going out with
a leftie.’

  ‘Surely public servants have to undergo vetting and are required to be non-partisan?’

  ‘Our spouses are required to make public displays of even-handedness, but that doesn’t affect their beliefs,’ said Emma Hereward. ‘Whether they realize it or not, they do what we tell them. The public thinks we simply turn up at photo opportunities to support our husbands, but I assure you, we are the power behind their thrones.’ She pointed at Ana Lang and laughed. ‘And she is our Lady Macbeth.’

  ‘Edona Lescowitz was right,’ Longbright told her fellow detectives that afternoon. ‘They are witches, all of them. They honestly think they can make or break their men, and I get the feeling that the fourth man in the Pegasus set-up, Stuart Almon, isn’t long for this world. They want him out.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘Because he’s weak. He’s “not performing”, whatever that means. The husbands all toe the line around their women, if the wives are to be believed. They do what they’re told. Except when they go to their club, which they’re allowed to do no more than once a week.’

  ‘Where do they go, the Garrick, White’s, the RAC Club? I’ll bet most of them still don’t allow women members.’

  ‘Exactly. I can’t blame the wives for forming their own society, so long as men want to play their little power games behind closed doors. Apparently the boys belong to a place in Westminster called the Rakes’ Club.’

  ‘You have got to be joking,’ said Bryant. ‘The Rakes’? The club founded around the time of Guy Fawkes – that Rakes’ Club? How could I have missed it?’

  ‘What?’ asked May.

  ‘The Hogarth painting Sabira died beneath. She wasn’t trying to tell us something about the nature of madness, because she wasn’t indicating the picture of Bedlam. I was misled by the red string around O’Connor’s wrist and the red wound around her own. She was drawing attention to the series, not a specific painting. The Rake’s Progress.’

  ‘Now wait a minute,’ said May, raising his hands, ‘this sounds like one of your loopy—’

  ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? The directors of Pegasus Holdings all belong to the Rakes’ Club.’

  ‘So they’re the kind of men who belong to clubs. What does that prove?’

  ‘You don’t understand the Rakes’,’ said Bryant. ‘That’s why she went to the Hogarth room. We have to go back there.’

  With the second layer of doors closed, the high-ceilinged, wood-veneered room was too poorly lit to reveal its corners. May used his Valiant torch and shone its beam into the cracks and crevices. When he examined the base panels he saw the sliver of an envelope sticking out.

  ‘This is why she came here,’ said May, carefully extracting the paper.

  Bryant seized the envelope and examined it in the torch beam. ‘She must have slipped it behind the Bedlam painting.’

  ‘Then when she fell against the doors it shook loose and slipped down between the lower layers. It looks like it matches the one that was posted to you. Sabira took a chance leaving it here. We might never have come across it.’

  ‘Except that she knew we would follow her route,’ said Bryant. ‘I wonder where she was planning to go after this.’

  ‘She didn’t have her passport. I guess she could have hidden out somewhere, waited to get straight in her head. Maybe she suspected she was being poisoned.’

  ‘And with any luck, this will give us the poisoner’s identity.’ Bryant pocketed the envelope with a flourish.

  35

  BRING IT DOWN

  AT 11 P.M. on Tuesday night, the staff of the PCU were still at their desks.

  Banbury and Kershaw were collating notes when they received an ID confirmation for the Triumph rider. His name was Luka Terebenin, a 32-year-old Russian who had spent four years of a twelve-year sentence in the Kresty Prison in St Petersburg for armed robbery before having his sentence commuted. Emerging from the overcrowded jail when he was twenty-six, he disappeared from state records before turning up in the UK eighteen months ago.

  ‘Sounds like somebody recognized his talents and recruited him,’ said Kershaw. ‘What have you got on his residence here?’

  ‘Bugger all,’ said Banbury, checking through the online file. ‘No residential address, no employment stats, nothing except a visa entry. It looks like he had a sponsor to take care of his file for him. I’ll try to contact his family in St Petersburg.’

  ‘It seems unlikely that they’ll know anything about his life here.’

  ‘It’s not that. If they want his remains shipped home, they have to pay for it. Not our responsibility.’

  Everyone looked up as Bryant sauntered in looking more at peace with himself than he had for a while. He was definitely less wrinkly. ‘This is what you’re all waiting to see, I take it.’ He removed Sabira’s envelope from his pocket. ‘The card. I need to compare it to the Cardano grille.’ He held out his hand.

  ‘I don’t have it,’ said May. ‘You must have it.’

  ‘Ah yes, I think you’re right. I put it somewhere safe.’ He stroked his stubbled cheek, thinking for a moment, and then wandered out to the kitchen, returning with the card. ‘I hid it in the staff refrigerator.’

  ‘Why would you do that?’ asked May.

  ‘Oh, my mother always used to keep the rent money in the larder, where my old man couldn’t get at it.’

  ‘Why can’t you do things the normal way, just once?’ asked Land, irritated.

  ‘I find your emphasis on conformity hard to fathom,’ Bryant replied as he donned his glasses and matched up the cards. ‘Really, if you look at the average family there’s no such thing. People behave in the most extraordinary fashion and think nothing of it. They have weird food habits and funny sleeping arrangements and rituals: “Oh, we always go to Grandma’s the day before Guy Fawkes Night to lock the cat up” – that sort of thing. You know the butcher on the Cally Road, the big bloke with one eye? When he’s not chopping up cows he plays gypsy accordion with three other fat butcher-musicians who call themselves the Gastric Band. Is that normal? Of course not. There’s no such thing as normal.’

  ’Well,’ said May, ‘does it fit?’

  ‘Perfectly. Take a look.’ Bryant had placed the card with the cut-out sections over a pencilled panel of random letters on the inside of the second card. ‘It clearly isn’t just a Caesar’s shift. We need a keyword.’ He grabbed a pen and wrote out a list of names. ‘Let’s try everyone in the security department first.’

  ‘Your notions of normality fascinate me,’ said Land, unable to drop the subject. ‘You formed your opinions in London in the second half of the twentieth century, you must have some idea that they go against the generally accepted flow of things.’

  ‘Au contraire, old sausage, I’ve lived through Marilyn Monroe, the Suez crisis, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Edward Heath, the Jeremy Thorpe scandal—’

  ‘Jeremy Thorpe?’ said Land. ‘That name rings a bell.’

  ‘It should do. A fairly definitive example of political lunacy,’ said Bryant without looking up. ‘Thorpe was the Old Etonian leader of the Liberal Party in the early 1970s. He was alleged to have had an affair with a male model, Norman Scott, and to have hired a hitman to murder him. The hitman shot Scott’s Great Dane, Rinka, but the gun jammed before he could kill his target. Thorpe was forced to resign and was eventually acquitted in a very peculiar trial, while the hitman married a woman who fell nine hundred feet off a mountain in the Alps. This was the chairman of the United Nations Committee, and this is British politics, not some tiny Mexican town where the mayor is sleeping with the chief of police’s daughter. You think you know normal? You have no idea.’ He slapped down his pen. ‘I’ve tried everyone’s names and none of them work. Anyone got any bright notions?’

  ‘Try “Pegasus”,’ said May.

  ‘Hang on.’

  The room went quiet as it became clear that Bryant was transposing letters.

  Bryant creaked back in his green lea
ther armchair, looking at his partner in alarm. He showed none of the satisfaction that usually crossed his features when he knew something the others did not.

  ‘I think we’re in more trouble than we realized,’ was all he said.

  He refused to speak to any of them. When May approached, he shook his head and left the room.

  ‘Tell me,’ said May, stepping over Crippen as he tracked his partner along the corridor, ‘what’s wrong? What did it say?’

  ‘I thought I might be putting you in danger before,’ said Bryant, ‘and now I know it. Sabira was killed by her knowledge. I don’t want any of you to be targeted.’

  ‘Arthur, how long have I known you? How many times have we been threatened? Have we ever backed down or given in? Of course not. What can you achieve by yourself?’

  Bryant’s silent glance chilled him. He had only seen his partner like this twice before in their long careers together.

  ‘All right, I’ll put it another way,’ tried May. ‘Nobody knows we have both the cards, do they? So long as they’re not aware of their existence, we’re safe.’

  ‘Has Dan gone?’

  ‘No, he’s still at his desk.’

  ‘I want the unit swept for bugs. The phones, the walls, under the floorboards, everywhere. He needs to check the cars as well.’

  ‘With all this clutter? Aren’t you being a little—’

  ‘I know, John. Do you understand? I know.’

  ‘You know who’s behind all this?’

  Bryant quietly folded the card away inside his jacket.

  May held out his hand. ‘Show me, Arthur. I’m in this with you. We agreed to see it through, didn’t we?’

  ‘I’ll deal with it by myself,’ said Bryant. ‘There’s no need for us all to go down.’

  ‘Let me see what you’ve got,’ May persisted, ‘and I’ll decide what to do. You have to trust me. I’ve always been the sensible one, haven’t I?’