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

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Let me get this right.’ Land ticked off his fingers. ‘Oskar Kasavian worked for Theseus, so you’re saying he knew about this. Then he found out that one of his employees was about to turn whistle-blower, so he ordered Jukes’s death and made it look like an accident.’

  ‘It certainly seems that way,’ said May. ‘Jukes died because he was planning to go public on the MOD breach. He was killed, then smeared by the tabloids for having “satanic” connections. Sabira found out that her husband had sanctioned murder. Either she went through his belongings at home or read something at his office. She told the photographer, Waters, because he worked for a press agency and she had no one else to confide in. When Sabira led us to the painting I simply thought of madness, but she was smarter than that. She was pointing to the Rakes’ Club and to the Scarlet Thread experiment, a bioweapon that could make its targets lose their reason and commit suicide. Those who had been experimented on drowned themselves; according to Giles here, it would have been the least painful way to alleviate toxic symptoms. They shared the information online with each other. When Kasavian discovered that his wife knew about his involvement, he realized that he needed to discredit her. Which is exactly what he did.’

  ‘Is Kasavian explicitly named in Jukes’s documents?’ asked Land.

  ‘Jukes was more concerned with laying out the legal breaches in the case than with blaming any one man. His documentation is dry reading, but it states a clear case. However, it doesn’t help us make an indictment.’

  ‘You’re telling me you have proof of murder—’

  ‘Effectively, yes.’

  ‘—and there’s no way we can use it to put Kasavian in court?’

  ‘That’s about the gist of it.’

  ‘You do realize that he heads to Paris tomorrow? If we attempt to indict him after he’s appointed head of this international initiative, we’ll cause an international scandal. One of the purposes of the Paris meeting is to monitor the movements of terrorists and prevent their access to biochemical products.’

  ‘I’m aware of that,’ said Bryant. ‘I did warn you. We could arrest him on suspicion, let him know that we have Jukes’s evidence and hope that he indicts himself.’

  ‘No, there has to be something else,’ said Land. ‘Some other way of reeling him in.’

  ‘Stuart Almon is our only remaining informant,’ said May. ‘He was prepared to name his boss. We need to try him again.’

  ‘Jack’s keeping an eye on his movements right now,’ said Longbright. ‘Maybe there’s a reason to bring him in.’

  Everyone looked to Bryant for approval. The PCU staff were under no illusions about who actually ran the unit. Bryant did not look happy. To be precise, he had a face like a codfish with a liver complaint.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked May.

  ‘All the way through this investigation, we’ve been several steps behind the Home Office,’ Bryant said. ‘That was my fault, sending us off on a wild-goose chase, but we haven’t been moving fast enough. Kasavian had us thrown out of the Rakes’ Club and we simply bowed to his superiority and walked away!’ Bryant shook his head angrily. ‘He knew that his director was about to tip us off, which means he either has to get rid of Almon – which he can’t do – or enlist his aid in clearing things up. There must be something that tangibly links him to the Scarlet Thread deaths. I’m betting he’ll use Almon to get rid of it. Kasavian has to be completely clean before the Paris meeting begins. If there’s any more dirty work to be done, it has to be done tonight.’

  ‘How do you know he won’t just get rid of Almon as well?’ asked Longbright.

  ‘Because Almon is a player, and the ones with power are never at risk. Look at the victims: a bunch of low-paid Indian workers, a researcher, a backroom biochemist and his girlfriend, a freelance photographer and the immigrant wife of a civil servant. These aren’t people who hold influential positions within the class system. They’re outsiders, lower castes, which means that nobody will be questioning their loss in the House of Commons. But someone has to bring the whole ugly business to light, and it has to be us.’

  44

  CONFLAGRATION

  STUART ALMON HAD never been to Whitechapel before, and was dismayed by what he saw there.

  He lived in one of London’s most expensive streets, situated at the top of Campden Hill in verdant Holland Park. Now he found himself walking past shuttered shops that sold Asian DVDs, plastic washing baskets and money orders. It was almost midnight and the street was busy. Groups of Indian kids were hanging around on corners, looking at him, he thought, with menace and malice in their eyes. The accountant slipped his hand over the smartphone in his pocket as he walked past them. The boys, however, were concerned with their own lives and barely noticed him. To them he was just another awkward-looking white guy heading home from one of the fancy restaurants that had begun to border the area.

  Almon wanted to check the streetfinder on his phone, but did not dare to withdraw it from his jacket in case somebody spotted the light and mugged him. In all honesty, the only time he ever saw this many black faces was when he had to pass through a railway terminal. What the hell was Kasavian doing leaving his ‘Pandora’s box’ in such a poor neighbourhood anyway? Any number of private banks and financial institutions could have offered him twenty-four-hour access to a safety-deposit box. Of course they would have recorded the event, and there Almon had the answer. Around here half the street lamps were out and the CCTVs would fail to pick up identifiable images.

  He looked for the warehouse and finally found it in a narrow backstreet that, over 120 years earlier, had been inhabited by the desperate women who had fallen foul of Jack the Ripper. Stepping over the sodden trash in the gutter, he searched for a way in. Someone had left a foil tray of curried rice on the steel code box, and it had leaked over the keypad. What was wrong with these people? Almon punched in the number Kasavian had given him and waited while the steel shutter rolled up.

  He couldn’t locate a switch inside, but his mobile had a torch app. Turning its beam around the bay before him, he found himself in the storeroom for the Spitalfields Art Fair. The smell of curry was pervasive.

  A series of immense papier-mâché props peered out at him: Perseus, Heracles, Hippolyta and the Minotaur stared down from gold-sprayed pedestals. Behind them stood a pair of rearing stallions, a silver chariot, a scale model of the Parthenon, plus assorted braziers, columns and pediments.

  This cloak-and-dagger stuff is absurd, thought Almon. He had not expected that his clumsy attempt to betray Kasavian would dump him in a rundown Whitechapel warehouse at midnight.

  The safe stood in the rear corner of the bay, an absurdly theatrical affair made of green-painted iron, with a huge old-fashioned steel dial on the front. Using the code he had been given, he matched up the numerals and hauled on the safe’s handle. It seemed to be stuck, but then it gave way with an agonized groan. Inside was a red wooden despatch box with a brass lock, into which he inserted the key.

  At first he thought the box was filled with taxi receipts. There were lots of small rectangles of paper. When he saw the accompanying letterheaded notes from Porton Down, it crossed his mind that if he took the contents he might be able to gain the upper hand over Kasavian. But even as he considered the idea, he knew he would never be able to pull it off. He did not possess the Machiavellian gene. Something was bound to go wrong. If this was one incriminating box Kasavian had missed, there had to be others he’d managed to destroy, and even more he’d salvaged for his own purposes. It was better to follow the instructions he’d been given: burn the contents and have done with it.

  Doing this was not as easy as he thought it would be. Almon was not a smoker, and had no lighter or matches on him. Searching around, he tried to find something on the shelves that would burn the paperwork.

  Outside he heard footsteps and low laughter. Waiting in the shadows until a group of boys had passed, he tipped out one crate after another, searching for a light. Fin
ally, in one of the artists’ craft boxes, he found what he was looking for: a can of petrol and a box of matches.

  He sprayed most of the can into the despatch box and struck a light, tossing it in. He figured he’d let it burn through, then kick the box lid shut, but the fiery explosion caught him by surprise. A moment later the flames had leaped up to the oil-burnished papier-mâché statue of the Minotaur. The fire swept over its great bull-thighs, jumping across to Perseus and Hippolyta, and within seconds the entire back wall of statuary and model buildings was alight.

  Before his eyes, an ancient civilization was collapsing. Almon jumped back, dropping his mobile and the paper with the code for the bay door. The fire was spitting oily droplets that spattered when they landed, spreading gobbets of molten lava. Acrid black smoke roiled across the low roof in silken folds. The statues were weakest at their legs and had already started to collapse, spraying more burning debris as they tipped and fell.

  In the cramped rooms above the warehouse, Mandhatri Sahonta and his wife Jakari were asleep with their four children.

  The couple had abandoned their village in Karnataka and moved to London to run a catering company. They worked long hours and sent most of their money home every month, with the result that they had not been able to move from the apartment they had lately come to despise. Jakari was the first to smell the varnish blistering on the flat’s outer doors. Shaking her husband awake, she told him of her fears and they set about rousing the children.

  Outside, Renfield saw the flames flare behind the warehouse windows. A light went on in the flat above, but was extinguished with a pop; the fire had already reached the building’s electrics.

  He needed to deal with Stuart Almon, but first there were families to warn. Renfield had spent some time behind the sergeants’ desk at Bethnal Green Police Station, and knew how crowded many of these old houses were. Few had fire escapes, and most had only one narrow staircase in or out.

  He reported the fire as he ran into the burning bay, seizing Almon just as his jacket caught alight. Swiftly cuffing him, he dragged the dazed, smouldering civil servant outside and left him against a lamp-post on the opposite side of the road while he went back in to find a way of reaching the building’s imprisoned residents.

  Stuart Almon watched in horror as the flames flared to extraordinary heights, splintering windows and filling the night with the cries of the trapped. He had no interest in the lives he had placed at risk. All he could see was his career going up in flames.

  45

  DEAD IN THE WATER

  EARLY ON THURSDAY morning, Edgar Digby, a lizard-eyed lawyer with hair as shiny as a mackerel and a suit that cost more than the average annual wages of a fisherman, turned up at the unit to give Stuart Almon some outrageously expensive advice, to whit: Don’t say anything that incriminates you.

  ‘Christ, Digby, I think I could have figured out that part for myself,’ muttered Almon as the pair sat before Raymond Land, Renfield and May. ‘You’re here to get me out.’ He needed to talk to Kasavian urgently and update him on what had happened.

  ‘I don’t think that’s going to be quite as easy as you think,’ warned Digby. ‘You were observed entering the warehouse and torching it.’

  ‘I didn’t “torch” it, I was …’ But Almon could not say what he was doing. He decided to follow his lawyer’s advice and shut up.

  ‘It’s thanks to the sergeant who was following you that you’re not here on a manslaughter charge,’ said John May. ‘If he hadn’t managed to evacuate the building—’

  ‘Well he did,’ Almon snapped impatiently. ‘So what happens now?’

  ‘Before we get to that,’ said May, ‘perhaps you’d care to tell us what you were doing setting fire to a Whitechapel warehouse in the middle of the night?’

  ‘I was – it got out of hand. I dropped a match.’

  ‘You don’t have to say anything at this juncture,’ reminded Edgar.

  ‘Well, I’m not going to sit here and let myself be incriminated, am I?’

  ‘Perhaps you would excuse us while I brief my client?’ the lawyer asked Land.

  ‘Forget it, that’s not going to happen,’ Renfield replied, turning to Almon. ‘You nearly killed six people, matey. Four kids, two of them little girls aged six and four years old – they almost died because of you.’

  ‘That wasn’t my fault,’ Almon complained unconvincingly. ‘You can’t keep me here without charging me. I know my rights.’

  ‘We can hold you for thirty-six hours on the authority of a police superintendent, which we have,’ said Land, ‘but we can push arson under the Terrorism Act, which gives us the right to hold you for fourteen days. And we have all the evidence we need to keep you here without bail. So you can start by admitting the truth, or we’ll make damned sure you’re charged with attempted manslaughter.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as attempted manslaughter,’ Edgar pointed out. ‘You can’t attempt to accidentally kill someone. In the event, nobody was hurt.’

  ‘You were happy enough to name names yesterday,’ said May. ‘You struck a deal with Kasavian, didn’t you? Clear up his mess and get back in his good books, something like that?’

  ‘I had no choice,’ said Almon pathetically. ‘You don’t understand how the Civil Service works. It’s all about reciprocity. You get caught up in the favours you owe, and I’m in deeper than I ever intended to be.’

  ‘I would really stop there,’ warned Edgar.

  The accountant would not be interrupted. ‘Kasavian buried the story, but it resurfaced.’

  ‘I’m afraid we’re ahead of you, Mr Almon,’ said May coldly. ‘We’re going to give you a chance to do the right thing. We need evidence that your boss was directly involved. Did he send you there?’

  ‘I never said that,’ said Almon, trying to buy enough time to think.

  ‘We’re going to find proof that he is a murderer. The documents you burned can be reconstituted.’ May had no idea if they could be or not, but it was worth a try.

  Almon was shocked by the bluntness of May’s words. The language of the Civil Service was tapestried with euphemism and allusion. ‘Oskar never gets his hands dirty. Nothing sticks to him. He commissions the services of others. I can’t imagine for one moment that he’d leave a trail that could be followed back to him.’

  ‘Well, he’s having to act spontaneously now. He can’t have thought of everything.’

  ‘You still don’t understand who you’re dealing with,’ said Almon. ‘He has all the resources he needs to cover his traces, and they’re not accessible to you except through official government channels. Your unit is answerable to him. He’s made sure that it’s impossible to bring him down. Why else would he have come to you in the first place? He knew you were incompetent.’

  Renfield had never hit a civilian before but came close to it now. ‘You were never going to give us what we needed,’ he said. ‘You were just trying to keep your own career from tanking. Well, it’s over now. After this you won’t be able to get a job cleaning toilets.’

  ‘You still have nothing on Kasavian,’ said Almon simply. ‘And you won’t find it, because there’s nothing to find. He’s wiped his prints from everything. You talk about my career being over? You’re screwed, all of you. You’ve been played. You’re floating corpses. Your unit is dead in the water, just how he planned it would be from the very beginning.’

  That was when Renfield jumped at him.

  46

  SHADOW IMAGE

  AFTER STUART ALMON signed a statement negotiated to the satisfaction of all parties, he was charged with arson and reluctantly released on bail.

  A sickly grey and yellow dawn broke over King’s Cross. The clouds looked as if they had fallen down a flight of stairs and badly bruised themselves. The news reports promised heavy rain as the capital’s traditional summer weather – squalls of disappointment with intermittent outbursts of gloom – returned.

  The PCU team had worked through the ni
ght, but the atmosphere was one of defeat.

  They knew they had nothing and would find nothing. As each lead was followed and came to a dead-end, the detectives saw just how carefully the web of their downfall had been constructed. Kasavian had clearly been testing them to see what could be uncovered, secure in the knowledge that even if his original crime was known, there was no way of connecting it back to him.

  Colin and Meera had returned to tell of the night’s events. ‘They’re ex-military lads, these bikers,’ Colin told them. ‘Freelancers, up for anything. I can tell the type. Guys like that used to come to our boxing club. They were lousy at playing by the rules but they were tough as nails, the kind of men who trained out in the snow in shorts and vests. Kasavian probably found them through his old MOD connections. They’re taught to keep their mouths shut no matter what happens. They’re as solid as railway sleepers. I checked to see if they had a shared base here, somewhere they might meet or train together, but they’re real loners.’

  ‘I’m getting a warrant to turn the Rakes’ Club inside out,’ said Banbury, ‘but the chances of finding anything there now are unlikely.’

  ‘What time is Kasavian heading to the station?’ asked Land.

  ‘He’s got a car coming at four thirty p.m.,’ Longbright told him. ‘I’m sending out for breakfasts.’ She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and rose from her desk, where a tundra of reports had spread in the last dark hours.

  ‘Arthur, can I get you something?’ she offered, looking in on Bryant’s office.

  ‘Just a cup of tea. I’m not hungry.’