By the time Janice Longbright arrived an EMT tent had been erected over the body. She had been the only member of staff still on duty at the PCU when the call came through. She took PC Martin to one side. ‘Why were you out here by yourself?’
‘There was supposed to be someone else on my shift but he didn’t show up.’
‘Always the night when something happens, eh?’ She handed the officer her coffee. ‘Go on, you need it more than me. You didn’t go up there?’
‘No, he was down here.’
‘You say a shout attracted your attention. You mean from him?’
‘I suppose so. I wasn’t concentrating.’ PC Martin looked embarrassed.
‘But you heard the window open. Was that before or after the shout?’
‘I think it was before. The shout came from inside the room.’ There was a look of dread on PC Martin’s face. ‘I’m sorry, I should be better at this; I take enough statements.’
‘It’s always harder when it’s you,’ said Longbright patiently. ‘How many voices?’
‘Just one.’
‘So he was, what, arguing with himself?’
‘I guess so. He sounded surprised.’
Longbright looked at the still-open window. ‘What is that building?’
PC Martin craned her neck back and looked up with half-closed eyes. ‘I think there’s some kind of financial company on the ground floor.’
‘Do you wear glasses?’
‘Disposable contacts. I usually – I thought I had some in my jacket.’
‘Who’s up there now?’
‘A couple of my mob. I keep seeing him drop from that window like a dead weight. It was awful. His head hit the edge of the flowerbed with a terrible smack.’
‘You saw him standing in the window. You heard him shout. Is there anything else you can remember?’
‘There was something creepy about the way he stared at me.’
Longbright followed her eyeline. ‘He just suddenly looked at you.’
‘Yes, then at the church, and finally over at the Old Bailey.’
‘Have you been over there?’ Longbright ran across the road and checked the church’s entrance and the wall of the Old Bailey, but found nothing.
‘I thought of something else,’ said PC Martin when she returned. ‘The light.’
‘What about it?’
‘It was out. The room behind him was in darkness. He was only lit by the street lamps. And the way he moved was odd.’
‘In what way?’
‘Like he was dancing. He sort of swayed, then suddenly stepped up on to the window ledge. It was just an odd sort of movement.’
‘Why do you think it was odd?’
‘I’m not really sure. It didn’t look natural. More like a skip. If I was going to climb out on to a ledge I’d grip the window frame on either side and pull myself up. His hands, that’s it – they stayed by his sides. I’m sorry, it’s not much.’
‘You did good. I’m going inside,’ said Longbright. ‘Sit down and have a quiet think. See if there’s anything you’ve missed.’
As she headed into the building Dan Banbury arrived and was annoyed to find the crime scene already tented. Across the road, behind the engulfing walls of St Sepulchre, the wall-mounted glass box that housed the executioner’s bell was being smashed apart. The handbell was lifted out and stolen away, its task of ringing a pathway for the condemned not yet complete.
28
Democracy in Action
By dawn’s early light, the Peculiar Crimes Unit looked as if it had been bombed.
Nobody had been able to get the landlines working properly. Calls made everyone sound as if they were phoning from the bottom of the sea. One floorboard in the first-floor corridor was operating as a seesaw, and the flushing of the second-floor toilet periodically caused coffee cups in the kitchen to explode (it later transpired that the shaking pipes had the power to shift crockery along an unsecured shelf. ‘Magnetic energy,’ according to Maggie Armitage. ‘Wrong-sized rawlplugs,’ according to Dave One).
Speaking of whom, the two Daves had Frankenstein-stitched cabling across the building, turning it into an assault course and somehow electrifying everything made of metal in Raymond Land’s office. By 8.00 a.m. the PCU staff were crowded into the operations room awaiting the arrival of their boss. May had made it back to the unit, and looked rejuvenated. Bryant was muttering to himself and filling his whiteboard from corner to corner with crabbed handwriting. Land appeared to have slept in his car, even though he didn’t own one. He stared at them with one jaundiced eye, then the other. Perhaps he’s turning into his pigeon, Bryant thought.
‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ Land asked. ‘Actually there is no good news, just bad and really bad, starting with the latest fatality, who turns out to have been a highly respected judge. I’ll allow that to sink in for a moment, shall I? Who will tomorrow’s victim be, I wonder? The Queen of Sweden or Elton John?’
‘At the moment the death is being reported as a suicide,’ said May.
Land glared at him. ‘Judge Kenneth Tremain, working late and deciding on a whim to chuck himself from a second-floor window. He was due in the Old Bailey this morning to preside over a fraud case indirectly involving a certain Peter English, cited on this board as a Person of Interest, if I’m reading Mr Bryant’s hieroglyphics accurately.’
‘We haven’t been able to get a foot in the door,’ said May.
‘You’re officers of the law, not double-glazing salesmen.’
‘Salespeople,’ said Sidney without looking up from her notebook.
‘What was he doing so close to the Old Bailey late at night anyway?’ Land asked.
‘The Central Criminal Court has a number of leased apartments nearby so that senior staff don’t have to bother with hotels on late nights,’ said Longbright. ‘Tremain was in one of them doing some research. Dan, you went into the building.’
‘There’s a videophone in the flat, but its image quality is appalling,’ said Banbury, rising to attach photographs of the building to the whiteboard. ‘There’s a camera over the main entrance. We’ve got footage of everyone who entered and left from the front. The problem is the back, which opens on to a walkway behind bushes.’
‘Wait, he shouted, according to …’ Bryant searched for his notes.
‘PC Donnalee Martin,’ said Longbright.
‘So he was arguing with someone inside the flat.’
‘Now hang on a minute …’ Land began, raising an objecting hand.
‘It’s a couple of feet up to the window ledge.’ Banbury added more shots. ‘There’s nothing below the sill. When he climbed out he didn’t raise his hands to pull himself up. Instead she says he managed a sort of skip. He stared at her, then the church and the courthouse, moving his head to do so.’
Bryant’s brow furrowed, although one more wrinkle made no difference.
‘But that isn’t how people look at things.’ Dan drew the sightlines on the board. ‘Our eyes use saccades, rapid eye movements between fixed points. When we see something that grabs our attention we move our eyes, not our heads, otherwise we’d look like robots. Then there’s the odd climbing-out action with the hands kept straight down.’
‘That fits.’ Bryant looked from one puzzled face to the next. ‘You must see how suggestive the eye and hand gestures are.’
‘He killed himself,’ cried Land. ‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’
‘Of course you don’t, it would be like a cow trying to follow Hamlet, but I think this young lady might know.’
‘He was already dead when he fell,’ said Sidney, finally paying full attention.
‘Precisely. Dan, please continue.’
The interruption threw Banbury, who had to refer to his notes. ‘I went inside just after 4.00 a.m. I would have been there earlier but the traffic coming through Croydon was surprisingly—’
‘Get on with it,’ snapped Land. ‘Why are middle-aged men al
ways so interested in arterial roads?’
‘I reached the room just after the local officers had finished trashing it.’
‘So you didn’t get anything?’
‘I didn’t say that. Even though the scene was contaminated I could see that someone else had been there. The floor rugs are new, so I got heel prints. Killer and victim.’
‘Wait, back up,’ said Land, raising his hands. ‘At the moment this is still a suicide. The man stepped out of an upstairs window. You can’t just make sweeping judgements. Were there two distinct sets of footprints?’
‘No,’ Banbury admitted. ‘The rugs are woollen. But the patterns of movement suggest two.’
Bryant took the floor. ‘Tremain hit the corner of the brick flowerbed in a way that smashed his frontal bone and opened up the coronal suture behind it. But according to Giles he also had a broken neck. The two traumas weren’t dependent upon the same directional force. In other words, the injuries occurred separately.’
‘And if that’s the case I suppose you know how they were inflicted,’ said Land.
Bryant rearranged the photographs. ‘The judge’s attacker broke his neck, set him down, opened the window and manoeuvred him outside.’
‘Why on earth would he do that?’ Land hated complications.
‘His grievance may not be with these people but with what they stand for. He’s taking them off their pedestals and showing that they have feet of clay, so they die by accidents or suicides, anything but murder. Confuse, distract, obfuscate: these are magicians’ tricks.’
‘So he wants it to look like Tremain killed himself,’ added May.
‘He could see that PC Martin was on duty. In her hi-vis jacket it was impossible to miss her. He showed Tremain climbing on to the window ledge by hiking him up and shoving out his right leg, but he couldn’t make the movement look natural because the judge was heavy and his arms hung at his sides. Still, it was important to make PC Martin see everything. He wasn’t to know that she had forgotten her contact lenses. He moved Tremain’s head so that it looked like he was staring at the church – it was a bit blatant but he needed to connect the death to the others.’
‘Why?’ begged Land. ‘Why does it have to look connected?’
‘He doesn’t think we’re joining the dots. He wants recognition. He made sure Tremain went head-first, hoping injuries incurred in the fall would cover any marks he’d left, and we now have a matching MO.’
‘How is that matching?’ asked Land. ‘It’s nothing like the others.’
Bryant ticked off the points on tobacco-tarnished fingers. ‘They’re pre-planned, they’re witnessed in public, they fit a song everyone knows. Claremont didn’t suffer a mishap, Rahman didn’t slip on the church steps and Tremain didn’t suddenly decide to kill himself.’
‘Then why make it look like they did?’ Land persisted.
‘Because—’ Bryant began.
‘Because it gives the killer a smokescreen,’ said Sidney. Everyone waited for Bryant’s reaction. Interrupters did not normally survive for long in the operations room.
Bryant nodded at the intern. ‘Misinformation is his secret weapon. What he’s doing and what he wants us to think he’s doing are two different things.’
Raymond had the beginnings of a migraine. ‘So what is he actually doing?’
‘Perhaps he wants his targets to see that they’ve sinned in the eyes of God.’
‘Fine, I’ll subpoena an assortment of higher spiritual beings as witnesses. You’re just making wild guesses now, aren’t you? This is what it’s come down to. The unit’s celebrated left-field thinking is in fact a tombola of random thoughts.’
‘You could put it like that.’ Bryant considered the idea. ‘Add this to our tombola – the handbell from St Sepulchre-without-Newgate was stolen last night. The church was locked but the staff are profligate with keys, so it was fairly easily accessed. The bell has a place in history but no monetary value. Its glass case was smashed. There was nothing left behind.’ He shot Land a meaningful look. ‘Why would somebody take it, if not to point public attention back towards the rhyme?’
Seen from a distance they appeared as a pair of sentinels, standing motionless at the railings of Waterloo Bridge, looking towards the Tower of London.
The sacrament took place during the course of every investigation. It was a rite of continuity and an homage to Bryant’s lost love, who had died at the spot where they stood. Police officers are all a little superstitious: walls are touched, items stored in a certain order, working nights feel good or bad. Bryant and May stood on Waterloo Bridge, either at the end of the day or around this time, just before noon, in the calm lacuna before the lunchtime stampede.
The skyline resembled the contents of a knife drawer upended, but as rain silvered the surface of the Thames the buildings were reduced so that they appeared as they had in earlier centuries: low and dark. When the tide retreated this far the grey-green stones of the embankment were exposed and the shoreline looked ramparted.
The detectives were armed with umbrellas and coffees, and in Bryant’s case a pipe, a walking stick and a croissant filled with apricot jam, although how he managed to eat and smoke at the same time had always been a mystery to May.
‘After all this time I still see her,’ said Bryant, chewing ruminatively. ‘I’ll always associate Nathalie with the river. Hard not to, considering how I lost her.’
‘You couldn’t have done anything more than you did,’ said May.
‘Youthful high spirits. No reason to die.’ Bryant had barely heard him. He stared down into the murky waters and into another time. ‘The night of her eighteenth birthday,’ he murmured. ‘She’d climbed on to the balustrade and was walking along it. I should never have let her, but we’d been celebrating at the Anchor and were both a bit tipsy. I remember the bus honking, the driver thinking I was about to step back into the road, and how the noise made her start. When I turned around to grab her she’d gone. I jumped into the water but the current was too strong. I was instantly pulled under and had trouble saving myself. Nathalie couldn’t swim. As I felt the stones beneath my feet I knew at that moment my world had ended. The search teams dragged the river for weeks, but never found her body. At this point there is nothing between where we stand and the infinity of the sea.’
May respectfully waited for his partner’s memories to settle. Tilting back his umbrella, he tested the rain. ‘I think we should talk about the case.’
Bryant came back. ‘Of course.’
‘I checked to see if our captain of industry, Peter English, left his residence last night. His assistant told me he was home, and his wife and children could vouch for him. I put in a formal request for an interview but it looks as though I’m unlikely to get it. English is setting up some kind of business initiative with the government so they’re bound to protect their investment.’
‘He’s not above the law.’ Bryant eyed his partner through raindrops and pipe smoke.
‘Unless those in power are covering for him.’
‘John, our country has a centuries-old tradition of being fed up with its leaders. When democracy is working correctly nobody is satisfied. Even so, they don’t usually offer sanctuary to murderers.’ He finished his croissant and dusted flakes into the Thames. ‘The fraud case will have to await a new judge. I can see why you want to go after English. He’s a good fit with the victims, but don’t go looking for conspiracies. We need to find a real connection between them. I’m consulting my experts about this.’
‘Arthur, your experts are a bunch of mumbling dysfunctionals who hold their trousers up with string,’ said May. ‘I’m not dealing with psychics, necromancers or astrologers. I’d end up doing something they didn’t see coming.’
‘Very well. Janice can talk to the Conspirators’ Club.’
‘When you say conspirators …’ May began.
‘They’re academic theorists, John. They feed me information I wouldn’t otherwise hear about. Very lit
tle of it is of any use at all, but occasionally they point me in the right direction.’
May winced. Most officers of the law held their cards close to their chests. Bryant was fabulously indiscreet. ‘If you’re going off to talk to crazy people again, you can’t let Floris find out what you’re up to.’
‘Don’t worry, nothing will get back to him. The people I consult are cheerfully untroubled by social skills. The last time I went to a Conspirators’ Club dinner they pelted me with boiled potatoes for suggesting that George Michael was dead.’
May raised his profile to the breeze, looking, Bryant noted, like one of Landseer’s noble stone lions. ‘I don’t understand why some people insist on believing in alternatives to the truth.’
‘Belief is the opposite of knowledge.’ Bryant returned the lid to his coffee and placed it in his accommodating coat pocket. ‘Even so, trusting facts is not enough; you need the mind of an inventor. Churchill’s boffins built the first limpet mine with the aid of a porridge bowl and some aniseed balls. Sometimes it’s important to look at problems from the side.’
‘I know if I look sideways I’ll miss something right in front of me. I’ve always been rather straightforward, I’m afraid.’
‘And it’s one of your finest qualities, old chap. But lateral thinking is a necessity nowadays.’ Bryant leaned over the parapet and knocked out the walnut bowl of his Spitfire. ‘You always used to know where you stood, especially with Londoners. Butcher, milkman, secretary, cleaning lady. Nearly everyone did something tangible and practical for a living. Set hours, nine to five, weekends in the garden with the kids. You could arrest someone more easily if you knew where they were. Not any more. Who knows what people do now? Entrepreneur, influencer, money-mover, data-miner. Do they have more satisfying lives than bakers? Twenty million ghost workers under minimum wage are doing all the boring jobs we failed to automate. What if our criminal only exists as an online cyber-thingy originating in the Philippines? How do you find someone hidden in a digital labour force? I wasn’t trained to separate guilt from innocence on a laptop.’
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