16
Faking It
It was the first time in an age that Arthur Bryant had been by himself to see Giles Kershaw. The holly-framed cottage at the back of St Pancras Old Church cemetery housed the pathologist’s office and looked like a Victorian stage set. In its backstage area was sunk the brutal grey concrete bunker where the science of death was navigated.
Bryant realized he would have to face Rosa Lysandrou alone. Usually when he made fun of Giles’s dour housekeeper he had John to back him up.
She opened the door to him before he’d had a chance to knock.
‘Blimey,’ said Bryant, ‘do you have ESP?’
‘No, we have Sky,’ said Rosa, peering around him. ‘Where is the one I like?’
‘Still shot, I’m afraid. He wanted me to thank you for the chocolates. I passed the hard-centred ones on to him. You’ll have to make do with me today. Did anyone ever tell you how lovely you look in the morning light?’
‘No,’ she said suspiciously.
‘They never will. But we must desist in this foolish dream. Our love can never be. I’m from leafy Whitechapel and you’re from the wrong end of Mykonos. My father was a lowly tram conductor and yours was the head of the SS. Can Giles come out to play?’
‘Do you have an appointment?’
‘No, but I have a little badge that allows me to see him whenever I want.’ He flashed his bus pass at her. ‘I’ll wait in your Chapel of Rest.’
‘You will not. I’ve just polished it.’
‘There’s not much point in having a Chapel of Rest if you can’t rest in it. Announce me, you espresso bar Jezebel.’
‘Ah, there you are,’ said Giles, coming to find him. ‘Don’t lurk out there annoying Rosa, come and see your corpse.’
‘I’ve got wintergreen, sherbet lemons or rhubarb and custard,’ said Bryant, rattling a bag of boiled sweets at Kershaw as they headed for the autopsy room. ‘They’re all horrible but it’s better than smelling of your chemicals.’
Giles led the way. ‘You’re still finding plenty of cases “likely to cause public affright”, I see.’
‘That’s our remit, old sausage. People default to a state of trust. It’s the way we’re programmed. As I see it, the unit is responsible for maintaining that trust. Which one is he in?’ He pointed to the cadaver-storage drawers.
‘You know, it always annoys me when you see morgues in films,’ said Giles, ‘all those half-naked bodies lying about. I’ve never met a pathologist who keeps a corpse out when there are visitors. Mind you, you’re nobody’s idea of a detective.’
‘Then what am I?’
‘A disrupter.’
Bryant popped in a sherbet lemon. ‘Is that a good thing, do you think?’
‘It’s not a bad thing. I suppose you heard I didn’t get a look-in with Michael Claremont.’
‘Well, he’s not technically dead.’
‘I know, but I thought I might give you a hand by talking to a survivor. I’m a pretty good judge of character.’
‘I don’t see how you can be, when the only people you usually see are staring up at the ceiling.’
‘Anyway, I hear he’s been whisked off to the countryside. I guess the NHS wasn’t good enough for him.’
‘You went to a school for poshos, didn’t you? I thought you had family connections to the Home Office?’
‘Had being the operative word,’ said Giles. ‘She left me. Why?’
‘I’m trying to find a way of interviewing someone who’s too rich to return my calls.’
‘Be careful not to confuse posh with rich, dear chap. The former are poor and the latter are vulgar.’ Giles knew whereof he spoke, hailing from an ancient estate that was flogged off to pay taxes. ‘How’s John doing?’
‘He’s as well as can be expected,’ said Bryant, reaching the crunching stage of his sherbet lemon. ‘The case has given him something to aim for but at the moment he’s in durance vile at his flat on the river.’
‘Let’s hope he’s back soon. You need him to keep yourself anchored.’
‘We are not a ship. Why did she leave you?’
Giles looked surprised. ‘My wife?’ He thought for a moment. ‘We disagreed on the correct ingredients for a salade Niçoise and I had an affair. Let’s see what we’ve got here.’ He pulled open a drawer and unzipped its sanitized bag.
‘Cristian Albu, late proprietor of Typeface Books, Bloomsbury,’ Bryant murmured. He was always amazed by the human body in repose. ‘How much did you find out?’
‘Janice scanned your decoded notes for me but I still couldn’t read them. Your handwriting is atrocious. This chap’s been kicking around the system for far too long. He’d been mislabelled and put in storage at University College Hospital. What went wrong?’
‘We did, I’m afraid. The case came in just after the unit was shut down. I need to make it up to his widow.’ He sniffed inside the bag, then backed off.
‘The most obvious thing is the distinctive smell, even after all this time,’ said Giles. ‘A mix of burning wood and varnish plus linseed oil.’
‘It was used on his wood floors and stored in a can under the stairs.’
‘So Janice told me. I thought I’d find splashes on his hands and trainers. Instead I found it under his arms. And no ashes on him, not an ember. There’s alcohol in his system but not enough to put him out, so I looked for the presence of narcotics. I wasn’t sure I’d still find anything but there are mineral traces from a neural blocker. They’re factory-made synthetics, unfortunately very easy to get hold of these days.’
Giles moved around to the head of the drawer. It pleased Bryant to see him using the retractable steel pointer their previous pathologist had bequeathed to his successor. Continuity gave him an irrational sense of pleasure.
‘There’s a small contusion on the back of his head, specks of gravel on the heels of his trainers, as if he was dragged a short distance and dropped. No oil on his hands, yet the cap was off the empty can. Nothing unusual in his clothes: small change, a paperback, his wallet, a phone. He should have had everything taken off him. He’d made one call home.’
‘So a scenario presents itself,’ said Bryant. ‘He takes a drink with this stranger to celebrate a sale, he’s drugged and is half-walked, half-dragged across the courtyard into a corner of the alley. The stranger takes his keys, sets fire to the shop and leaves the can beside him.’
‘A relatively easy frame-up in an empty backstreet,’ Giles concurred.
‘The next part is weirder. Albu is arrested and put in Holborn station’s overnight holding cell. There’s nothing in there you could hang yourself on, so he tears the plastic cover off the bed in a strip and asks to use the bathroom. Once inside, he ties it into a makeshift noose, attaching one end to the cold tap, the other around his neck. He then drops towards the floor, choking himself to death. And that’s where my problem begins.’
‘I’m glad you have a problem, Mr B.,’ said Giles, ‘because so do I. Let’s see if they match.’
‘OK, mine is the bed cover.’
‘Oh.’ Giles was surprised. ‘Tell me yours first.’
‘It’s impossible to tear. It’s thick, strong plastic and designed not to be ripped. Oddly enough I was testing my theories on deaths in custody and tried tearing a jacket made of roughly the same substance. I couldn’t do it. Mind you, I can’t get the lid off a jar of gherkins. You could tear it if you could find something to puncture it with first, but Albu had nothing sharp on him.’
‘His teeth?’
‘Not consistent with the marks on the bed. According to Dan the cover had been punctured before being torn, probably with a penknife – an item Albu did not possess. Tell me your problem.’
Giles traced his pointer across Albu’s throat. ‘See these livid crimp marks? There’s blood trapped under the skin. You get them from elasticated material as the threads stretch and then contract, like the marks your socks leave when you take them off. There’s no give in the plastic st
rip we found around his neck, so it couldn’t leave a mark like this, and it doesn’t quite match up. Sergeant Flowers says he took Albu’s laces and belt away from him, and later found him hanging from the plastic strip. But his belt was elasticated and matches the earlier throat markings.’
‘So it was swapped for the torn bed covering after he had already died.’
‘Which is where I hand the problem back to you,’ said Giles, looking around for a box of swabs. ‘I’ve got something on your arsonist, too. If he lifted this fellow up to move him I assumed he’d lift him under the arms, so I smelled his armpits.’
‘Nice.’
‘All part of the service. I wondered if he’d left any transfers on the body but I didn’t find any fibres, so sometimes it pays to use your nose. Smell this.’ He ran a swab on Albu’s armpit and waved it under Bryant’s nostrils. ‘It’s a transferred scent. He doesn’t just smell of smoke.’
‘No,’ Bryant agreed. ‘He smells of oranges.’
Part Two
* * *
THE BELLS OF ST MARTIN’S
The English are bears in all places, except in their own houses; and only those who make their acquaintance in their dens know how amiable, kind and mannerly they really are.
Max Schlesinger
17
Overture
Script extract from Arthur Bryant’s ‘Peculiar London’ walking tour guide. (Duration 45 mins, meet beside statue of Dame Edith Cavell.)
In the year 334, Jesus appeared to St Martin in a dream. Martin wasn’t a saint then, just another gormless Roman soldier, but he was canonized and buried at the edge of Covent Garden, where Henry VIII created the parish of ‘Saynt Martyns-yn-the-Ffelds’ in 1536.
His graveyard later came to hold the victims of the Great Plague, because Henry didn’t want them coming anywhere near the Palace of Whitehall with their filthy germs. The original cockney thief and jailbreaker Jack Sheppard was hanged at twenty-two and buried there. William Hogarth too, and Nell Gwyn, at thirty-seven. She had probably been born in Coal Yard Alley off Drury Lane, went on stage as a man, became Restoration comedy’s superstar and Charles II’s mistress, although everyone still thinks of her flogging oranges in Covent Garden because they never let you forget your roots.
St Martin’s got grander. The church owns the adjacent alleyway so it has its own inscribed lamp-posts. Everyone hated the new design, yet it became copied all over the world, especially in America. It’s the parish church of both the royal family and the Prime Minister.
But it’s an oddly unlovable building, elegant within, severe without, rectangular and faced with a portico whose pediment is supported by giant Corinthian columns. It almost defies you to step inside, although the crypt is welcoming and you can have lunch on top of the gravestones in there. Don’t worry, we’ll be stopping there for a cuppa and a sausage roll with meatless option as I have a bit of a deal going on with the cook.
St Martin’s commands the upper right-hand corner of Trafalgar Square. Forget finding it in fields; you’re hard-pushed to find any trees. Surprisingly, it’s always been a community church. It has a history of sheltering the homeless and in both wars soldiers were billeted in the crypt. And check out the arched central East Window, which looks like there’s some kind of space-time warp going on. It makes a nice change from shepherds, halos and fat little children tangled in sheets.
‘What do you mean, I can’t come in?’
Raymond Land looked from one Dave to the other, trying to remember which was which. They stood on either side of the door in the chipboard wall that had been constructed around the Peculiar Crimes Unit. From the grim look on their faces they might have been set to guard a keep, armed with monkey wrenches instead of pikes.
‘The front-door lock isn’t working properly,’ explained Dave One. ‘Mr Bryant has set up a password system to secure the premises.’
‘Oh, this is ridiculous. Let me in, you know who I am.’ Land looked around the door to the staircase, wondering if he should just push past them.
‘He said you’d say that,’ said Dave Two.
‘How would I know what the password is? He hasn’t bloody told me.’
‘You could try guessing. We can give you a hint. It’s something Mr Bryant stored in the evidence room.’
Land’s eyebrows nearly met his comb-over. ‘Dear God, that could be anything. Bomb-making equipment. A goat’s head. The Dagenham Cannibal’s Cuisinart. Crippen’s corpse. Madame Blavatsky.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Dave One. ‘In you come.’ He took Land’s right hand and smacked it with a rubber stamp. Land looked down and read:
ADMIT ONE
Santa’s Grotto
Gamages Department Store
Valid until end of 1956
He ushered the unit chief inside. Land felt his way along the darkened plywood corridor and emerged by a blue plastic Portaloo with a sign on it reading: ‘Raymond Land’s Office – Please Knock’.
Furious, he blundered back and shoved the snickering builders out of the way. ‘I know you think this sort of thing is amusing but police work is no laughing matter. I will not work in a toilet. A very important political figure has been buried under a pile of fruit.’
‘Cheers, Mr Land,’ Dave One called after him. ‘Top bantz, you’re a total ledge.’
‘Ah, Raymondo, mi idiota favorito,’ cried Bryant as Land stormed past his office. ‘I’d like my desk lamp back.’
‘I’ll give you a broken back if you do that again,’ seethed Land.
Bryant paused to take his Spitfire out of his mouth. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Your little jest with the two Daves.’
‘I only asked them to keep an eye on the door.’
‘You’ve infected them with your appalling sense of humour. You’ve already turned a simple accident into a ludicrously complex murder mystery. I want results, not guesswork. If you’re so sure Claremont was deliberately attacked find me some proof fast. And stop smoking that thing indoors, it stinks.’
Bryant took the tobacco pouch from his top pocket and read it. ‘“Fort William Old Naval Bengali Hemp”. Yes, it’s a bit pungent, isn’t it? Says here it’s made with cardamom and marigold seeds but it smells like burning mice. I’d love to help out but this morning I’m dealing with the bookseller who killed himself.’
‘What bookseller? I don’t remember anything about that.’
‘The case came in while you were fretting over your daffodils in Ventnor. Last month a bookseller burned down his shop, except he was framed and killed himself and nobody did anything about it.’
‘Why are you getting involved when we still need you on Claremont?’ Land demanded.
‘Because I can’t do anything on that until – what ho, Dan.’
Land felt sure that his detective had been about to reveal something important, but it was too late; Dan Banbury was bounding up the staircase as fast as anyone could, considering there were several steps missing.
‘How did you get in?’ asked Land, annoyed.
‘I’ve been at the Westminster vehicle pound.’ Dan swung his case on to a table and opened it. ‘Looks like Mr B. was right. I found this under the van’s front seat. Incredible. They hadn’t even tagged and bagged it.’ He lifted out a clear pouch containing an unprepossessing grey rag.
‘I have no idea what I’m looking at,’ said Land, mystified.
‘It’s a stick-on goatee made exclusively by a theatrical costumiers in Shaftesbury Avenue. Unfortunately they say they haven’t sold any in months, which suggests it was nicked from the store.’ He took a piece of wood from his bag and showed it to Bryant. ‘This is similar to the one that speared Claremont. I experimented with several bits and they all broke into sharp pieces. If Claremont was attacked in the van, the driver had to have inflicted the blow before going upstairs. Here, push down on this.’
He held out the spear of wood. Bryant gripped it and pushed, but had to let go.
‘The
re’s no way you can do it without piercing your hands, is there? Imagine someone trying to fight you off at the same time.’ Banbury took the wood back and closed up his bag. ‘I think your new girl has some good ideas. Claremont’s air passages were blocked with tissues and he was stabbed in the stomach while he was groggy. You were brought on board to find an information leak and got attempted murder instead.’
Bryant shook out his hands. ‘I’m getting a tingling feeling in my fingertips.’
‘Perhaps you’re having a stroke,’ Land suggested.
‘Something wicked this way comes. I’m going to need my books. I’m missing certain key volumes. I can live without my British Nautical Almanac and my Practical Guide to Keeping Geese but I must have my Encyclopaedia of English Folk Song.’
Land looked around. ‘Does anyone know what he’s on about?’
‘What I’m on about?’ Bryant dragged noisily on his pipe. ‘I fear the attack on Michael Claremont was just the start. The overture to the main event.’
18
On the Steps
Chakira Rahman was late, and the BBC did not like to be kept waiting.
Broadcasting House was still a healthy walk away so she needed a city-bike or a taxi, but she was not dressed for the former and there were none of the latter available. It was occluded and inclement. The spring rain looked soiled, as if it had already been recycled through several city drains.
Rahman was recording an interview about the construction of the new Museum of London, but her nanny had chosen today to have her dog put down, so she had bundled her phone-focused girls into the car and run them to school herself, calling her assistant to collect the vehicle so that she could keep to her schedule and get to her next appointment before eleven.
It was always like this, running from briefings to construction sites, arguing with the architect, the client and the banks while making sure that her two girls were fed, watered and educated, but there was even more pressure on her than usual. She was in a position of privilege that had taken a long time to earn. When others fought hard she fought harder, but right now if she didn’t get to the studio, turn on her formidable charm and explain why part of the museum project was running late, the press would be attacking her before noon and her directors soon after that.
Bryant & May - Oranges and Lemons Page 14