Bryant & May - Oranges and Lemons

by Christopher Fowler - Bryant

  Flowers’ cheeks changed colour. ‘You used your own pathologist. Why are you trying to stitch me up?’

  ‘We just need to know exactly what happened. The bed cover had been cut with a penknife blade, and no knife was found on the deceased.’

  He studied her in silence. She knew he would deny having anything to do with it. He was the type who would stay with his story no matter what happened. Huffing and eye-rolling failed to hide his panic.

  ‘Before you speak, I want to check that you understand the implications of this. If you go on record insisting that you removed his belt, your testimony will change the verdict from suicide to murder by person or persons unknown. It seems obvious to me that you switched it because you forgot to take it from him when you booked him in. That’s not a crime, George, it’s an honest mistake.’

  Flowers still said nothing but shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other.

  ‘You’ve got one lad still at school and the other at uni, you have another twenty-three years on your mortgage and you’re forty-six. I think I can save your job.’

  ‘Negligence,’ said Flowers finally, picking at his fingers. ‘That’s what they would say. That I caused his death by leaving him with the means to kill himself.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ replied Longbright. ‘If Mr Albu had really wanted to kill himself he would have found a way to do it. We once had someone under arrest at Mornington Crescent who blocked a toilet bowl with paper and drowned himself. He couldn’t do it in a cell because they’re designed to prevent suicide, but the staff toilets aren’t. Albu died in the toilet because Holborn has no provision for an in-cell facility. You didn’t kill him, George.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything.’ His gaze was steady and unflinching. ‘That bloke was drunk and stank of petrol. I have no idea what his state of mind was like, and it’s not my job to find out. All I know is that he wasn’t wearing a belt. You can check the CCTV if you want. The cell has had a lot of occupants. Maybe one of them smuggled in a blade and started to cut the bed cover just to vandalize it. They do anything they can to show their disrespect. It’s not a crime if none of us noticed.’

  Longbright’s conscience was clear; she had offered him a lifeline and Flowers had thrown it back at her.

  She made her way across town to the ugly stone and glass box that housed the new Holborn Police Station. It was pelting with rain and her collapsible umbrella had done just that. The streets were suddenly deserted, improving the city no end.

  As she reached the covered entrance, she tried to wipe the water from her face. Inside, she found herself alone. The duty desk was due to change at 8.00 p.m. It was now a quarter past and no one was around. She stopped a passing constable sporting the kind of weapons-grade acne that only afflicted the very young. He told her the incoming sergeant was running late because of flooding.

  ‘Can you let me into the overnight cell?’ she asked.

  ‘Sorry, I can’t do that without the duty officer’s permission.’ He looked apologetic.

  ‘But he’s not here.’

  ‘You’re PCU, aren’t you?’ He looked a little awed. ‘I thought you’d been closed down.’

  ‘We’re on special assignment. I spoke to someone earlier.’

  ‘They must have forgotten,’ the constable replied. ‘I was told not to let anyone down there by themselves.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘Sergeant Flowers. He’s off on sick leave at the moment. There’s nothing I can do.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Longbright ran a hand through her wet hair, making sure to get some water on the floor. ‘Can I use the staff bathroom?’

  He led her across the reception area and buzzed the door for her. ‘Down the stairs, first door on the left.’

  Inside the bathroom, she checked the sinks and taps. The place reeked of disinfectant. There were a few taped-up health and safety posters beside a mirror including ‘Your Anonymous Tip-Off Helpline’ and ‘Call for a Free Chlamydia Kit’. Dispensers full of pink liquid soap were riveted to the wall. Nothing out of the ordinary. At the top of the rear wall was an opaque window covered in steel mesh. There was no handle and it looked as if it didn’t open but she needed to be sure.

  In the corridor outside she found a blue plastic chair and took it into the bathroom, placing it below the window. Hoping that the constable would remain upstairs to cover the empty desk, she climbed on the chair and pushed against the glass.

  The window was sealed and unbreakable. Of course it would be. Overnight visitors were sometimes so drunk and full of anger that every edge and corner, every doorknob or imperfectly tightened screw became a possible cause of injury. In the bathroom Albu had found a way to hang himself with a type of noose he could only have made if he’d had access to a knife.

  Even setting aside the unlikeliness of the whole thing, it made no sense. If he was to be killed, why hadn’t it happened in the alleyway near the bookshop? Or did it have to look as if he had taken his own life? No one would plan a murder in multiple stages: burn down a shop, blame an innocent, fake his suicide. It was just too complicated. Killers weren’t usually very bright.

  She returned the chair and headed upstairs.

  ‘I thought you were going to dry your hair,’ said the constable cheerfully.

  ‘I think I’ll stick with the wet look. What does Sergeant Flowers do when he’s here all night?’

  ‘He reads a lot of science fiction,’ the constable told her. ‘And he eats.’

  ‘I’m going behind his desk – turn your back,’ she warned. ‘What does he eat?’

  ‘Apples mostly. He’s got this thing about getting the peel off in a single piece.’

  In the bottom drawer she found a Swiss Army knife. It had so many blades and recesses that there was a good chance it had picked up plastic threads from the cell bed. She slipped it into her pocket.

  ‘Who checks your CCTV?’

  ‘Normally me but it’s out of action at the moment. It’s been out for a while. We’re waiting for a service.’

  ‘It’s been out since Flowers went sick?’

  ‘Yeah, about then.’

  CCTV files were meant to be tamper-proof but she’d heard of staff getting into them. She was convinced now that Albu had been locked in the cell still wearing his belt. Proving it would be a problem if Flowers had cleaned up, but having made one mistake he had probably made others. Since it was impossible that Albu once dead had removed the belt from his own neck and substituted another material, the death would now appear on the books as unexplained, which the PCU classed as grounds for a murder investigation.

  ‘Thanks anyway,’ she told the constable, glancing out at the rain.

  ‘Did you want the book?’ the boy suddenly asked.

  ‘What book?’

  ‘The bloke who died. Albu.’ He pointed vaguely in the direction of the cells. ‘He had a little book in his jeans but it must have fallen out when he was lying down in his cell. I put it aside for you. Didn’t George tell you?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she replied. ‘Thanks for reminding me. I was supposed to pick it up.’

  ‘Hang on.’ He loped off and returned, handing her a tiny blue leather book, quite old, with onion-skin pages and gold edges. The Poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson.

  ‘You’re a lifesaver.’ She flashed him a smile and headed out to the staircase that led to the rainswept street.

  25

  Old Stuff

  Bryant’s landlady was not a woman to be trifled with, even so soon after a stay in hospital. ‘If you tell me you’re going to be here for eight o’clock, that’s when the dinner goes on the table,’ Alma admonished, setting his reheated portion of stargazy pie before him.

  ‘Madam, when I stare at a meal it’s not supposed to stare back at me,’ Bryant complained.

  ‘The fish heads are meant to be above the crust like that. They’re pilchards. It’s a Cornish recipe.’

  ‘You’re from Antigua, not the West Country.’

 
‘West Indies is still west.’ She stuck her hands on her hips – never a good sign. ‘You’re having baked Alaska for dessert and I’m not from there either.’

  ‘Then perhaps I should have a say in the weekly menu.’

  ‘No thank you. I’m not having steak and kidney pudding every day, and crisps aren’t a vegetable. Just try to get home on time.’

  ‘I can’t help the long hours. We’ve got a murderer on the loose.’

  ‘You’ve always got a murderer on the loose. They’re a bloody nuisance. Make them wait. Have you been to see John?’

  ‘He’s back at the unit.’

  Alma looked horrified. ‘He can’t possibly be ready for work yet.’

  ‘It’s more harmful being stuck at home. Men are like parrots.’

  ‘You mean they repeat everything you say.’

  ‘No, they tear their feathers out if left unattended.’ He propped a dust-encrusted copy of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman against the cruet set and thrust a fork into his pie.

  ‘Can you at least put that filthy thing down while you’re eating? You’ll give yourself indigestion.’

  ‘This “filthy thing” is a masterpiece of Russian literature, madam, as you’d know if you’d ever opened a book.’

  ‘Reading’s never done you any good, has it? It’s not stopped you from being rude to everyone. Instead of stuffing all those words into your head you could have given me a break and found yourself another wife. And Russians are nothing but trouble.’

  Bryant tapped his book, releasing a shower of dirt from the pulverized binding, and spoke through a mouthful of pilchards. ‘I was reading about the temple illusions of the ancient Greeks this morning and you didn’t like me reading that either.’

  ‘Only because it made you forget to lock the toilet door. You can’t possibly be reading that rubbish for work.’

  ‘I am, actually, and it’s not rubbish. It will help me catch our man.’

  ‘How do you know it’s not a woman?’

  ‘Because it hardly ever is. Over eighty per cent of all killers are male.’

  ‘One day you’ll make me change the percentage.’ She closed his book with great care and removed it from the dining table. ‘What is this big case you’re working on that’s more important than your dinner?’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s classified information.’

  ‘You think I’m going to tell the ladies at the church?’

  A fair point, thought Bryant. Besides, he had always told her everything before. ‘A woman named Chakira Rahman,’ he began, ‘she’s—’

  ‘Oh, I know all about that, it’s been on the telly all afternoon.’

  Bryant gratefully pushed away his pie and galloped into the living room, turning up the sound on the BBC News. A reporter was standing on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields interviewing the Reverend Stephen Mallory.

  Bryant immediately rang his partner.

  ‘Are you at home?’ asked May, pre-empting him. ‘I’m just around the corner from you.’

  ‘You are? Then come by. There’s a bucket of fish pie here that I’m desperate to get rid of.’

  May arrived five minutes later to find another setting at the table. He folded his coat neatly on a chair and bent to kiss Alma’s cheek. ‘Alma, you’re looking well. Are you feeling better?’

  ‘Much better, thanks. You’re the one we were all worried about. You’ve lost weight. Eat it all – he doesn’t like it. Did they get the bullet out?’

  ‘They gave it to me as a souvenir.’ He took it from his pocket and passed it to her. She handled it as if it was the Koh-i-noor diamond.

  Bryant sat well back as Alma ladled out hot pilchards. ‘Who leaked the story?’

  ‘I’ve a feeling Land might have put his foot in it,’ said May. ‘Unless someone was daft enough to talk to Hard News.’

  ‘Ah – I think that was you. She told me you were after some background information on your litigious millionaire businessman, Peter English. You shouldn’t call people when you’re on medication. I don’t, any more.’

  May was contrite. ‘I wouldn’t have told her anything about the case.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have to. She’s incredibly suspicious. She’ll have made the link at once, especially as you’re rubbish at lying.’

  May eyed his plate with suspicion. ‘Have we heard how Michael Claremont is doing?’

  ‘Janice called his private clinic earlier but wasn’t allowed to speak to him.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘Go after English, find out if he knew the victims.’ There was nothing Bryant enjoyed more than interviewing someone who was dismissive of the police. ‘Something else struck me as odd. Because of the locations of the deaths, neither of the victims could be left in situ for long.’

  ‘Meaning what?’ asked May.

  ‘Meaning it wasn’t possible to secure the site for forensics. Claremont lying in the road; Rahman dead on the steps. Dan had a moan about that. Ideally he likes people to be attacked in a more controlled environment.’

  May tried to avoid catching the glassy eye of a pilchard. ‘We have to spread the net wider and find more witnesses. There was supposed to be a facial recognition system working in the Strand but we’ve had nothing from it so far. The footage from the camera on Duncannon Street shows Chakira Rahman passing behind pillars just before the attack. The City of London Surveillance Centre are putting together a shot-reel for us.’

  Alma opened the kitchen window. From downstairs came the shriek of their neighbour’s TV. ‘You can’t rely on technology to find him,’ said Bryant. ‘Take a look at those.’ He pointed to a wad of papers from the briefcase he had left on the sideboard. ‘They’re the witness reports from St Martin-in-the-Fields, a completely contradictory set of statements. The only thing they agree on is that there were others on the steps, and one person came close to the victim. We’ve got four sightings of a man, three of a woman.’

  May read for a few minutes, then abandoned his meal and took the pages to the floor, where he began laying them out. ‘There’s a timeline here,’ he said. ‘We can work out when each of the witnesses arrived near the steps and departed. So these ones’ – he waved a hand over the right side of the pages – ‘are in the before group, heading towards Rahman, and these are predominantly after her encounter with the stranger who passed by. You see the problem.’

  Bryant knew it was almost impossible to reconstruct an event exactly as it had happened. Even after decades of analysing the Zapruder footage of the Kennedy assassination, nothing definitive had ever been produced. Accurate recollection wasn’t helped by the fact that witnesses did not like to give fragmentary accounts, and remade events into miniature stories.

  May pressed his hand on the pages. ‘Arthur, it takes a lot of nerve to attack someone in a public place. This is the action of someone operating with complete confidence. We need to look at his next target.’

  ‘Very well. The third line of the song is: “‘When will you pay me?’ say the bells of Old Bailey.”’

  ‘What do you know about that?’

  ‘It’s usually assumed that the bells refer to the twelfth-century church of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate.’

  ‘The one near the Old Bailey.’

  ‘That’s right, by the Central Criminal Court. And the Fleet Prison nearby was mainly for debtors, so the “When will you pay me?” part makes sense. St Sepulchre is opposite, or without it. And it has an unusual bell, a handbell in a glass case fixed to one of the pillars inside the church in the south of the nave. It’s known as the Execution Bell and was rung outside every condemned prisoner’s cell at midnight before his execution. It’s probably where we get “Here comes a candle to light you to bed” as well, seeing as the church clerk would have needed a lantern to find his way to the cell.’

  ‘Which is all very fascinating but hardly helps us stop a killer,’ said May.

  ‘It’s worse than that,’ Bryant pointed out. ‘The vicar won’t let us put office
rs inside the church or in its grounds. He has the right to do so, but it means we’ll have to get Met officers on the pavement near the junction with the Old Bailey, and that can’t happen until tomorrow morning.’

  ‘So in other words, anything could occur at any time to anyone and we have no way of stopping it,’ said May.

  ‘But we’ll have done our job by reporting back on Michael Claremont’s emotional state,’ Bryant said. ‘Everyone agrees he was mentally fine before the attack. They can write it off as an accident and say Chakira Rahman died in an unrelated case of mistaken identity or something, and everyone can go back to feeling safe and comfortable.’

  ‘Until it happens again,’ said May.

  While she waited for her coffee in the Ladykillers Café, Janice Longbright took the blue leather volume of poetry from her pocket. Considering Cristian Albu had been found lying on his back in a puddle of linseed oil, the book had survived remarkably well. She flicked through it, stopping here and there to read a passage. As a teenager she had copied sections into her diary and memorized them.

  ‘What are you reading?’ asked Niven, handing over her flat white. She held up the cover. ‘Oh, him. “Charge of the Light Brigade”. “Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die.” What a load of old bollocks. I can’t stand him and I have to face him every day.’ Noting Longbright’s quizzical look, he pointed over her shoulder to a pair of lines painted along the opposite wall of the café.

  Kind hearts are more than coronets,

  And simple faith than Norman blood.

  ‘It’s associated with the café,’ Niven said. ‘I don’t get it myself.’

  ‘There’s nothing to get,’ said Longbright, paying him. ‘It means breeding isn’t everything.’

  She had never noticed the other painted slogans, posters and bits of memorabilia around the walls. They all related to the group of post-war films known as the Ealing comedies. The café was named after one of the most famous, which had been shot in King’s Cross, just around the corner. She tried to recall the name of the poem that housed the quote on the wall and failed. She was about to look it up but saw she was running late and quickly rose.