‘Perhaps you should try and get some rest.’
‘If I fall asleep now I may not wake up again.’ Bryant peered blearily over a stack of books and rubbed at his wrinkles. ‘Why is it that we always run to the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour? Just once, I’d like to close an investigation a few days earlier than expected.’
‘You still think we’re going to wrap it up?’
‘Yesterday I felt sure we’d arrest Kasavian before his departure. But there’s something wrong here. I keep asking myself: Why is there no evidence?’
‘You know the answer: everything was pre-planned.’
‘No, Janice. He didn’t know that Jukes had left something for his girlfriend to find. Nobody did. Fancy leaving it in a bloody crypt!’
May passed Longbright as she was leaving. ‘I hope she just convinced you to eat.’
‘Food makes me sleepy. I’ve got a quarter of pineapple cubes here.’ Arthur rattled a paper bag. ‘The sugar will keep me going. Tell me, John, you’re absolutely sure there’s nothing on that flash drive that can convict Kasavian?’
‘No. There are some classified reports on Scarlet Thread and the inquiry findings on the research scientists’ deaths. Jukes was more concerned with damning the science behind the project. There’s nothing to indict Kasavian because Jukes didn’t know he was going to die and leave us with no bloody proof.’
‘We still have a few hours left to find something. But we won’t, and I’m beginning to think I know why.’
May seated himself and waited patiently, but could finally bear the suspense no longer. ‘Do you want to tell me?’
Bryant dug out a grubby hanky and blew his nose. ‘No, because you’ll really hate the answer.’
‘You always say that. It’s an incredibly annoying habit.’
‘I know, isn’t it? Let me at least try to elucidate. Come and sit beside me.’
May pulled a chair up next to his partner. ‘What’s that funny smell?’
‘I got kebab juice down my vest last night, so I sprayed it with air freshener from the toilet.’ He turned back to an immense sheet of paper covered in scribbled names. ‘You have a rough idea of how my brain works.’
‘Sort of. Yes. But not always,’ May admitted.
‘You know how much I trust your instincts and working methods.’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, we differ on one major point. You believe that from the outset of every investigation the most obvious facts point to the right solution. Occam’s razor. I don’t. Fair?’
‘Fair enough,’ agreed May.
‘In this case, what did our instincts tell us?’
‘That Kasavian wasn’t to be trusted.’
‘Exactly. Whether we were conscious of it or not, that was the agenda we were pursuing. And we got the result we wanted. We proved his guilt to ourselves. We’ve followed the line all the way from the sanctioned death of Peter Jukes, right through to poor, dim Stuart Almon setting fire to the evidence.’
‘Except that we still can’t make an arrest.’
‘Indeed. I’ve been over the timeline from beginning to end and it’s solid – and yet there’s a shadow image behind it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Another theme, as it were. An undertone that contradicts everything we know.’ His words hung ominously in the still air of the office.
‘But the one thing we know is that Kasavian is guilty.’
‘Yes, nothing can change that fact. He’s implicated in a murder dating back to his time at Porton Down.’ Bryant rubbed his forehead wearily. ‘But suppose there was something we missed right from the start? Not a direct fact – something foggier and more obscuring.’
‘You’re losing me.’
‘I know. What I’m trying to say is that there’s another agenda at work here. I think it may have something to do with class. Perhaps this whole thing is really only about class.’
‘Arthur, I’ve seen you reach this point many times before, and I still don’t quite understand the journey you take. And I don’t know what you’re trying to say.’
‘You know that at heart I’m an academic, not a criminologist. I’m out of my depth when it comes to the construction of empirical data. That’s your speciality. But when I look at the victims and the suspects, you know what I see? Two entirely separate classes. Anna Marquand, living in a run-down council house with her mother. Amy O’Connor, working in an East End bar. Jeff Waters, a barrow boy turned photographer. Sabira Kasavian, a disadvantaged Albanian kid whose parents worked in a smelting plant. Then there are the attacks on Edona Lescowitz and even on you and me. The ruling elite consider everyone here to be several classes below them, and therefore thrashable. But they’re wrong. They’ve misjudged us.’
May was anxious to return the conversation to more solid ground. ‘Do you think you can get something concrete on Kasavian before his delegation heads off?’
‘I honestly don’t know. We’re trying to indict our own supervisor for murder, John. If it doesn’t stick, it won’t be just you and I who’ll be thrown to the wolves.’
‘But if we get him, we’ll be exonerated once and for all. There will have to be a new regime.’
‘I wish I had your faith, but I know nothing will change. My parents always obeyed the instructions of the authorities, from town-hall officials to railway clerks. It was a working-class habit I was determined not to take into my life.’
‘Kasavian doesn’t intimidate you, does he?’
Bryant blew a raspberry of defiance. ‘No, of course not. At my age the only thing that still commands respect is death. But Kasavian makes me fearful for others with more to lose. I have no right to risk their careers.’
‘They already gave you their vote. If we let him off the hook now, we’ll be bowing to authority once more.’
‘All right. There’s something else that’s been troubling me. Kasavian was involved in an illegal programme of research that resulted in sickness and suicide. But he couldn’t have been alone in this; I imagine the whole thing was government sanctioned. His wife saw some papers that proved she was married to a man who was, at best, morally deficient. Why should he have cared? I mean, really? Nobody was going to listen to her. She could tell a couple of friends, and nobody would listen to them, either. She had no solid proof. So why would he still go to the trouble of killing her?’
‘Arthur, you cannot be this full of doubt at this late stage.’
‘I’m afraid I am.’
‘Well, I’m going to stop Kasavian from leaving the country, whether you give me reason to or not. So you’d better get back into those books and find whatever it is you’re looking for, before it’s too late. Find me your assassin’s shadow image, or whatever you call it. And you’d better get a bloody move on because I’m leaving soon.’
Bryant watched his partner blast out of the office and felt suddenly alone. May was right to force his hand, but he had no idea how to give his partner the evidence he needed.
47
MR MERRY
JOHN MAY STOOD on the corner of Euston Road with Banbury and Longbright, trying to shield his watch from a light drizzle of sooty rain. He felt as if he could hear the seconds ticking by in his heart. Of course you’re anxious, he told himself. Who wouldn’t be? You’re heading off to commit career suicide.
‘We can’t leave it any longer,’ he said finally. ‘Let’s go and do it discreetly, without any fuss.’
‘Are you certain we’ve got cause for arrest, John?’ Longbright was still uncomfortable with their line of inquiry. Hell, it hung on a web of slender threads including a bizarrely encrypted note from an unstable wife and some research carried out by a supposed suicide who believed in witchcraft. It wasn’t anywhere near enough.
‘No, I’m not,’ May admitted.
Giles Kershaw was still waiting for the St Pancras Biomedical Centre’s verdict on the contents of Sabira Kasavian’s stomach, and Dan Banbury had found nothing of a chemically
hazardous nature in her room at the Cedar Tree Centre. Without evidence of poisoning it would prove impossible to link Kasavian to his wife’s demise.
No further evidence had come from May’s wrecked BMW. Nothing more had come to light from Waters’s flat. The delivery man’s mobile phone had been found by the kids on the Walthamstow rooftop, but apart from that there was nothing. A sense of demoralization flooded over the melancholy group.
‘We have enough to make Kasavian miss his train, but that’s about all,’ May replied. ‘If we pick him up before he boards, we undermine his career and derail the initiative, he calls his lawyer and the burden of proof returns to us. I’ve never done anything like this before. It doesn’t look like it will end well for anyone.’
‘If we don’t do anything and he gets his promotion, I imagine he’ll become pretty much untouchable under European jurisdiction,’ said Banbury. ‘Did Mr Bryant say what he was going to do or how long he’d be?’
‘He just said he was going out.’ May checked his watch again. ‘Why does he always have to cut it so fine? He was exactly the same in his early twenties, running for trains just as they were pulling out of stations.’
‘I don’t know where he’s gone,’ said Longbright. ‘He just said he was going to follow up an idea. He wasn’t in his office when I left, and his phone is going straight to voicemail.’
‘Right.’ May wiped rain from his face and headed towards the only spare staff car, a battered blue Fiat that Land kept for his exclusive use. Longbright had filched the keys. ‘I guess we just have to pray he comes through with something in time. Dan and I will handle the actual arrest. You stay in the car. We make it as discreet as possible, call him down to the foyer and request that he accompanies us. He’s going to go crazy but we have to hold our nerve.’
‘Let’s do it,’ said Longbright, getting behind the wheel of the Fiat. ‘I hope Arthur’s really concentrating on getting us out of this.’
‘Of course, one of the most common themes in early Christian writings was female subservience to men,’ said Maggie Armitage, riding the escalator to the first floor. ‘You’d expect it from the patriarchy of the Church. If any group chose not to conform to Christian teachings, they were immediately attacked. You know I’m doing this under protest, don’t you?’
‘I appreciate that,’ said Bryant, stepping off the escalator and taking Maggie’s hand as they made their way around the raised concrete circle. On either side, stone sections of the original London Wall thrust up between glass office buildings, preserved to remind the City’s inheritors of their debt to the past. ‘Go on.’
‘There’s nothing shared between the genders in traditional Christianity. Religious and financial power always returns to the hands of males, even now. You haven’t met Mr Merry before, have you?’
‘No,’ said Bryant, ‘I’ve only heard you speak of him.’
‘He is my nemesis. It could be argued that we are of equal power, and therefore cancel each other out, but I believe he thinks he is stronger, which I can only pray is mere arrogance. He’s certainly very bright. He teaches at the museum. Many years ago we trained together, but we took different paths. My studies took me to the light and his led him towards darkness.’
Bryant studied his old friend with great affection. Maggie had donned legwarmers of different lengths and colours, one pinned with an ankh, the other with a Star of David. It was easy to get distracted by her wayward wardrobe choices. ‘Are you saying he’s a Satanist?’
‘That’s such a slippery word. Mr Merry believes he is Ipsissimus, an equal of the gods. He uses his abilities for personal profit and the cruellest of pleasures, whereas I cannot take a penny from clients, and I never venture towards that borderland of pernicious and sinister influence wherein he operates. He believes in something called Paradox Philosophy, a psychological system that involves freeing yourself from so-called “old impediments”: right and wrong, true and false. I wouldn’t be taking you to see him if I thought there was any other way, believe me. There’ll be a price to pay.’
In his desperation to break the deadlock of his stymied thinking, Bryant had called his old friend to ask for advice. After some considerable soul-searching, Maggie agreed to lead the detective to Mr Merry.
‘We’ll be safe here,’ she said, pulling Bryant ahead, ‘he won’t be able to hurt us, not in a public place. Listen to me, Arthur, I must give you some rules to follow. Under no circumstances should you shake his hand. At no time must you come into contact with his person. If he reaches out to touch you, step out of his way. If he tries to get you to take anything, you must politely refuse. If he drops anything, do not pick it up. If he looks you in the eye, break contact. If he asks you a question, reveal nothing of yourself. It would be better if you didn’t speak and let me do the talking. At least I know how to handle him.’
‘OK, I’ll keep my distance. That sounds easy enough.’
‘It sounds easy but it won’t be.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you have to tell him everything about the case, just as you told it to me. You must do so honestly, or he’ll know you’re lying, and you can leave nothing out because he’ll sense that, too. As you talk together, he’ll start to lower his voice until it seems barely audible to you, and you’ll find yourself moving in closer, straining to hear. You must not do this, because he’ll be trying to plant subconscious commands in your mind. He is extremely manipulative.’
‘You’re making him sound like some kind of monster,’ said Bryant as they reached the entrance to the Museum of London. ‘As a rationalist, I can’t afford to start believing that such people have supernatural powers.’
‘He certainly has a magnetic effect on people,’ said Maggie. ‘The majority of believers in Satanism are also avid readers of the Bible. Insecure people are drawn in by such readings as they look for something to believe in, and Mr Merry knows exactly how to exploit them. It’s free admission: go around the ticket counter to the right and follow the stairs to the lower ground floor.’
The Museum of London does not merely hide its light under a bushel. It extinguishes the light, and then buries the bushel inside a series of unrelentingly grim walkways, making the building entirely invisible from its exterior. Even those who know of its whereabouts venture there by following other lost visitors.
‘What makes you so sure Mr Merry can help us?’ asked Bryant.
‘I’m not,’ Maggie replied. ‘But he has a strange way of getting to the root of things.’
They reached the bottom of the staircase and pushed open glass doors into a dimly lit exhibition space. Taking up the entire wall facing them, millions of plague rats scampered in a moving carpet down a flight of stone steps. The video projections were designed to disgust, and the sight was met with appropriate noises of horror from a party of schoolchildren.
‘The Great Plague of 1665 was caused by the fleas that infested the Dutch cotton bales, then travelled on rats and jumped on to humans,’ intoned a deep, mellifluous voice. ‘They bit into the flesh and spread the disease by sucking in and spitting out blood. The fleas lived on the rats, and the rats lived on the ships, and the ships arrived at the London Docks, in the poorest part of the city.’
Bryant looked around but could not see anyone speaking.
‘They hopped and jumped across filthy floors and dirty beds, into babies’ cots and on to sleeping mothers, burrowing into unwashed hair and wriggling into sweaty clothes, and they bit and drank and spread their poison. The houses of the poor were close together, so the infection spread. The authorities ordered all the cats and dogs of London to be killed, and by doing that they destroyed the only creatures that could catch the rats. So then they told everyone to smoke, and to burn pepper and hops and frankincense, to kill the evil humours in the air. By now one-fifth of all the people in London had died. Then something happened that ended the plague – can you tell me what it was?’
‘Fire!’ shouted a few of the children.
‘That’s right, fire,’ said the voice. ‘The sparks leaped across the narrow lanes and the inferno roared through the city, gutting the grandest churches and the lowest slums, destroying ninety per cent of the houses it reached. And so one great evil cancelled out the other. So perhaps we could say that this second evil was a good one.’
From the centre of the schoolchildren rose an extraordinary figure, dressed as a pirate. Mr Merry was as round as a pudding. His barrel chest was covered by a gold-braided coat with turned-back sleeves. His great black bushy beard was sewn with coloured beads. He had smiling kohl-lined eyes and thick black eyebrows, possibly dyed. His large head was topped with a black felt tricorn hat, from which protruded a thick beaded ponytail. In his right fist he held a rat. The children screamed in delighted horror, but as many reached out to touch the stuffed rodent as fell back.
Before Maggie Armitage could stop him, Bryant had stepped forward to the edge of the children’s circle. ‘The Great Fire of London didn’t end the plague,’ he said cheerfully. ‘The disease was already dying out before the fire started.’
Mr Merry slowly turned to look at him. The eyes missed nothing. He smiled faintly, and the smile grew, and then he laughed, patting children on the head and shooing them away. ‘To your drawing pads, you homunculi,’ he boomed. ‘I want to see works of genius, or I’ll send all your souls to the Devil.’
As the children dispersed he turned his attention to the small wrinkled old man wrapped in an olive-green scarf who stood blinking at him, waiting for an answer.
‘Who’s to say if the flames really burned away the germs?’ he replied. ‘We were none of us there to witness the events of that terrible year. You are Arthur Bryant, I take it?’ He held out a welcoming hand.
Bryant ignored the proffered palm. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever met.’
‘No, but your reputation precedes you.’ Mr Merry dropped his hand and smiled again. ‘I imagine you’ve come to talk to me about your problematic case.’
As Mr Merry took a step forward towards him, Bryant took one back. ‘I don’t believe I’ve discussed it with anyone.’
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