‘Why not go with the nursery rhyme theory for now?’ asked May in an effort to placate the pair.
‘Because whenever your partner goes looking for crazy he always finds it,’ hissed Land.
‘It won’t harm the investigation if we keep it in this room.’
Land looked around for something to grip and throttle. ‘And how do you propose to do that when we have a government observer sitting in with us half the time?’
‘He’s easily taken care of,’ said Bryant cheerfully, putting his coat on. ‘Feed him the report on Claremont’s mental health.’
‘I know you’re going to do something that will make me look bad again.’
‘You had a shooting on the premises and lost the unit: how could we possibly make you look any worse?’
‘But you can’t just go wandering off,’ Land cried, exasperated.
‘I have a meeting to attend,’ said Bryant. ‘I’m off to practise my ollies with Radical Alf.’
He slipped out of the door before Land could begin to frame an answer.
It was a short walk to the Thameslink train from the unit. Crossing the grey expanse of York Way to reach it was like changing into a freshly laundered shirt. A gleaming new metropolis had arisen from the ashes of the old King’s Cross slums, as if a city block from Dubai’s business quarter had been airlifted into one of North London’s poorest neighbourhoods. It had created a new social stratum: Google class, filled with small-portion restaurants, cushion shops and portly security guards watching for signs of disrespect.
Bryant reached the Thames by train in no time. As he marched along the South Bank with the skateboard under his arm, he wondered why people were giving him strange looks.
The Undercroft, a shadowy graffiti-spattered concrete space beneath the riverside buildings, had been co-opted by skaters for over forty years. The clatter and snap of boards echoed through the brutally geometric chamber day and night. The skaters were indifferent to the fact that they had become a tourist attraction.
Radical Alf was far too old to still be boarding, but if anyone told him so he always replied, ‘Look at Tony Hawk.’ He wore a voluminous Hawaiian shirt covered in tigers but was as thin as a sapling, with hair like a spaniel in a sports car. He pumped Bryant’s arm energetically but his eye had already strayed to the board. He was twitching to get his hands on it.
‘That’s an old customized Sk8Mafia – what have they done to the wheels? Where did you get this?’
‘I found it in the Strand,’ said Bryant. ‘What can you tell me about it?’
‘It’s brand-new but it’s been given some kind of overhaul. May I?’ Radical Alf dropped it on to the ground, set off and executed a 180-degree turn. He kicked it up and returned holding it before him in reverence. ‘Fast and silent. I’m not sure what the wheels are made of but I’ve never seen anything like them. I didn’t know there was a skate shop in the Strand.’
‘There isn’t. It was under a bin lorry. You can keep it. I can’t introduce it as evidence. I just want to know where you’d get one.’
‘You are a total dude.’ Radical Alf pulled a yellow plastic tube from his top pocket and took a drag on it. He offered it to Bryant. ‘It’s a phytochemical vape. This one’s called Gorilla Glue, very mellow.’
‘Not while I’m on duty but I’ll stick one behind my ear for later.’ Bryant slipped the cannabis oil tube into his jacket as Radical Alf called to another skater.
‘Hey, Trainwreck, have you seen one of these before?’
Trainwreck was limping badly and had lost enough skin on the left side of his skull for there to be little chance of growing his hair back. He examined the board like an antiques dealer doubting the provenance of a Fragonard.
‘See, here’s your problem.’ Trainwreck ran the remaining nub of his forefinger along the board’s deck. ‘The ply is standard and available anywhere but the trucks and risers are custom. Chopping a board this way makes no sense. The grip tape would wear out first.’
‘I don’t think the maker cared about long-term usage,’ Bryant said. ‘This was put together for a single purpose.’
‘Home-crafted, man. Sorry we couldn’t help more.’
Radical Alf gave Bryant an odiferously skunky hug and bounced away.
As the detective made his way back to Blackfriars Station he saw the entire performance in his mind’s eye. When Claremont’s attacker went behind the van and triggered the crates, the skateboard was already in position beneath the bin lorry’s cabin. With a little practice, dropping on to the board and pushing back to the truck’s far end could have been accomplished in a single fluid motion.
The second performance was even simpler. A brush-past on the steps of St Martin’s; a dab of toxin on a blade. In many ways a perfect crime, yet it could easily have gone wrong. He had assumed that the hardest part was getting hold of a poisonous chemical, but Dan had disabused him of the notion. ‘You just have to look in your garden shed or under your kitchen sink,’ he’d explained. Which made him fearful about what might happen next.
This is insanity, Bryant told himself. Who in their right mind would kill like this? But of course he had answered his own question.
23
Making a Murderer
Fireman. Policeman. Magician. The things I wanted to be when I was a child.
Most of all, I wanted to commit murder. I wanted to think of myself as a hero.
When my mother told me about the Event everything fell into place, and I finally understood. She cried, how could she not, at the memory. I felt disgusted, then ashamed, and later when she couldn’t stop crying I overcame my revulsion and comforted her.
She said it was because of the London streets, and that I would never understand how it was. The way the streets were laid out.
South London was different then, every neighbourhood had its character but the trouble began at the points where they butted up against each other. Every town has a bad spot, sometimes just a street or a pavement corner. In Greenwich the western part of the town was rich, the home of architects and playwrights, filled with museums and galleries. The eastern part was working class, decent but scruffy, lined with charity shops and takeaways. The two halves met at the top of the street where I was born.
At the end of this street, set back from the intersection, was an elaborate Victorian railing that had once belonged to the church. There was only about ten yards of it left but it had remained standing for well over a century, a gateway between the two worlds. That was where they gathered.
That’s how she knew them.
Beyond the remains of the church were the fancy houses, the ones that had once had boot-scrapers and servants’ entrances. They still had high hedges and ponds in walled gardens, while ours had a bicycle-filled back yard. The boys hung over the railing watching her pass, their long arms dangling. They never called out; they were too well educated for that.
My mother went to the local comprehensive school. One of the boys was privately educated in a grand Georgian house close to the Cutty Sark. The others went to different schools in the nicer part of the borough. There were all sorts of stories about them. They had a private clubhouse no one had ever seen. One of them had been sent home from school for defacing a portrait of Jesus in the chapel. They had secret rituals and initiation ceremonies and rules – lots of rules about who you could be seen talking to, who you could befriend, who you had to treat as a sworn enemy. One of them was a girl, an honorary member, nobody knew why. Nobody knew where the stories came from, or if any of them were true.
One day as my mother was passing the railing one of them spoke to her, gently and respectfully. He said as they saw each other so often they should be friends. He was the tallest and the most handsome, and as none of them had ever teased her or said anything nasty she smiled back, but went on her way. She was eleven, they were twelve and thirteen. The next time she passed, she stopped.
She never stayed for more than a few minutes, but as she got to know her new frien
d better he introduced the others. They were shy and uncomfortable around her, largely mute. The girl hung back, avoiding her gaze. On airless summer evenings they lay listlessly draped over the stumps of masonry beyond the railings, boneless with boredom. She suspected they saw her as a distracting interloper.
Finally she was invited through the railings to the other side.
The handsome one showed her the street’s private gardens. He took her to the places where they congregated, showed her the comics they collected, the magic tricks they performed, the arcane games they played. Their most secret and sacred spot remained St George’s Church. It had been bombed out during the war, but unlike wealthier churches it had not been funded and repaired. Locals said the vicar had been killed in a raid, and no one was ever appointed to take it over. Instead it had continued to crumble apart, the land untouchable because it was still owned by the Church. Rocket and mint sprouted between the bricks. The apse had erupted with broken tiles and rubble. There were a few crusts of stained glass in the windows. The rest had been destroyed with hurled bricks. Only the stretch of railing remained at the edge, like the lace hem of a rotted coat.
My mother lived with her grandmother in those days – her parents had long before fought and split up. The grandmother said she remembered the church when it had still been complete. There had been a nativity scene in the largest window, picked out in red, blue and gold. She had been christened there, back in a time when most people still had family in the streets where they were born. Continuity made people comfortable. All that has gone now.
My mother never told her grandmother that she was friendly with boys from the other world. She knew the old lady wouldn’t approve. When the handsome boy invited her over she proved herself by joining in their games, silly sing-songs, tugs-of-war, catch games, hiding games. She was never one of the gang – she sounded too different – but they accepted her on their own terms, and I suppose that was all she had ever wanted. The other girl never spoke to her, hardly spoke to anyone.
As time passed she saw less of the boys. Under the instruction of their parents they put away childish things and spent more time studying. My mother had no such supervision and spent her days alone, helping her grandmother with the housework – she lived above a grocery shop – but sometimes she saw the handsome one out with his parents. The first time it happened he pretended he didn’t know her, although she wondered if he simply didn’t recognize her because her body was changing and she now wore her hair differently.
But he did notice her.
If he hadn’t done so, I would not have set out on a path to burn this city to the ground.
Part Three
* * *
THE BELLS OF OLD BAILEY
The past is round us, those old spires
That glimmer o’er our head;
Not from the present are their fires,
Their light is from the dead.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
24
Lifesaver
Elise Albu sat on a stool restitching the torn seat of her husband’s favourite armchair, and tried to think of him without crying.
She could not yet begin to grieve. She had promised herself that no tear would be shed until after his funeral, but the ceremony had been postponed pending the endlessly delayed police investigation. She would do what all the women in her family did: busy herself with something that could temporarily take away the pain.
The armchair had been his grandmother’s, packed up and shipped from Romania. It had caramel-coloured upholstery and deep soft cushions, and was wing-backed so that Elise could rest her head in its corners and close her eyes, and smell his aftershave, his skin, his hair. Perhaps if she kept her eyes closed for long enough and waited for just the right moment to open them again the world would be reset back before that terrible night, and she would hear the click of the kettle in the kitchen and know he was making himself a cup of tea, and would come in carrying a mug for her, because he always made her one without needing to ask.
When she opened her eyes the flat was still empty and silent. Nothing had changed, but now it felt inhabited by one, not two. She could hear the traffic in Dalston High Street, and the tick of the old tin alarm clock in the bedroom they had set aside for a baby. She found a tissue in her sleeve and blew her nose. The nursery could be painted white and turned into an office.
The strange old man from the semi-derelict building in King’s Cross had asked her to go through all of her husband’s letters, notes and bills. Now they covered the kitchen table. Cristian would have hated the mess she’d made. Booksellers liked order. What she had found was too painful to think about: requests for loans and payment extensions, endless finance restructuring documents, politely desperate begging letters to relatives. He had never let her see the lengths to which he had gone to secure their future.
In the last month she had called Sergeant George Flowers at Holborn Police Station so many times that he stopped answering. Now he was on sick leave and the case seemed to have been taken up by Mr Bryant, but despite his promises the detective had not been in touch again.
She picked up her phone and looked for his contact details. She wanted to call him, just to know that there was someone genuinely trying to help, but he was a confused old man who should clearly never have been passed the case, and she did not know what to say to him. How could the police help her if they were prepared to hand her over to a pensioner after a month of doing nothing?
She returned to the task of sorting through her husband’s correspondence. Cristian kept an empty Nike box in a kitchen cupboard that he used as his ‘pending’ file. She fetched it now and emptied it out on to the floor.
Here were the rest of the unpaid bills along with details of the loan they had taken out, several final demands and threats of private debt-collection agencies. Repairs to the shop roof that Cristian had paid for had not been reimbursed by the landlord, and private dental work for Elise that the NHS had been too stretched to handle had amounted to a small fortune.
She opened his laptop and checked his email account. In it was a file she had not noticed before marked Titles Cash Only. His record of under-the-counter sales.
She scrolled down through the volumes.
Richard Quittenden, Giant-Land, author’s own edition with hand-coloured plates.
Oscar Wilde, Salomé, first edition, one of fifty copies, printed on Van Gelder stock.
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Maracot Deep, four science fiction stories 1929. V. rare.
There were dozens of titles, many more than she had expected. The sales had begun in August of last year and ran until just before Cristian’s death. She tried to think of any sign that this shadow-trade had been going on behind her back but nothing came to mind. They had gone to work, eaten together and seen friends like any other couple. Their love life had lost its early urgency and there had been some money worries but otherwise their day-to-day affairs had run on the same solid rails as always, or so she’d thought.
With the exception of this one undeleted file he had covered his tracks very carefully. She could find email addresses for his buyers but what could she write that would elicit anything but furious responses and threats from lawyers?
As she tried to find a solution something broke inside her and she finally cried, the way a man cries, with head lowered in silent shame, swiping at her eyes so that no one would see her wet face. She had thought that his death was the worst thing that could ever happen, but this made it even more unbearable.
She found Arthur Bryant’s number and deleted it. She would never be able to understand her husband now, so what was the point of asking anyone to investigate his death?
‘I’m afraid he’s asleep,’ said Mrs Flowers, blocking her view. ‘You should have called instead of just turning up like this. He’s on official sick leave.’ She had opened the front door by about a foot, the standard width preferred by those who were suspicious of unsolicited callers.
Janice Lon
gbright was used to the response. Members of the public were easier to deal with than Met officers and their families, who treated her and the rest of the PCU staff like interlopers. ‘I’ll wait until he’s awake,’ said Janice, checking her watch and showing that she was prepared to settle in on the doorstep.
‘He’ll sleep right round the clock now.’ Mrs Flowers opened the door wider and folded her arms across her chest, her husband’s gatekeeper. ‘It would be best to come back another day.’
‘Mrs Flowers, I apologize for not calling first but if I leave without seeing him, George’s career in the force is going to end tonight. Could you fetch him for me, please.’
That did the trick. Longbright waited patiently in the lounge, hearing muffled, urgent whispers behind the wall. She looked around the room. When you stepped into someone else’s living space you always made assumptions; it was an observational skill that came with the job. Everything here had been chosen by a woman. Sergeant Flowers had no interest in his home because he chose to spend more time at work.
Six minutes later, George Flowers appeared, buttoning up a blue work shirt and smoothing down his hair.
‘I thought someone might come around here,’ he said, studying her. ‘You’re DI Longbright. I’ve heard all about you and your lot.’
‘Sergeant Flowers, we have to clear this up,’ she said. ‘On March the twelfth of this year a man being held under suspicion of arson committed suicide in the bathroom of Holborn Police Station while you were on night duty.’
‘I’ve been over this with everyone concerned a dozen times already, and I’ve made an official statement to my own division which I’m sure you will have read.’
‘I’ve no argument with what’s in the statement. The problem is what you left out.’ She paused to see if he would respond. ‘Our pathologist’s report on Mr Albu is going to be submitted today, and it will state that he was hanged with an elasticated belt, not with a strip of plastic torn from the mattress of his cell.’
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