Bryant & May - Oranges and Lemons

by Christopher Fowler - Bryant

  ‘One more circuit of the church and then we do the surrounding streets again.’

  The gardens at the rear of St Leonard’s must once have felt like countryside but were now overlooked by mean little houses. The former graveyard was deserted, its sheltering sycamores muffling the noise of people and traffic, leaving only sparrows and the faint susurration of rainfall. A few gravestones stood against a wall like the tabs on an old-fashioned cash register. The grass was studded with cigarette ends and empty fifths of Scotch.

  ‘What is that?’ May asked, stopping.

  Janice sniffed the air. ‘I don’t know. Wood varnish? Something dusty.’

  ‘Like old theatres.’ He shrugged. ‘A smell I remember as a kid.’

  ‘You know we’re near the site of the first London playhouse?’ Janice said. ‘That’s why so many Elizabethan actors are buried here.’

  ‘You’ve been listening to my partner again.’

  ‘No, the vicar. I think he’s a bit lonely.’

  ‘You might get a date out of it.’

  Janice’s walkie-talkie blipped. ‘We’re across the road from you,’ said Banbury. ‘Look up.’

  The drone had just arrived above them, a darting black spider unable to advance beyond the edge of the tree cover. Away from the street its buzz was annoyingly loud.

  They carried on around the side of the building. The arched windows had long ago lost their stained glass and emerald moss extruded from the cracked brickwork. The building repairs appeared to have stalled. They stepped over a pair of graves garlanded with roots which burrowed beneath them, no doubt splitting the coffins below.

  The bang made them start, a percussion of metal and glass cascading on stone. They headed towards the sound.

  The church’s pedimented portico was in such deep shadow that it was hard to see at first. A dark bird hopped across the steps as if scuttling away from trouble. Something lay on the flagstones. When Janice looked up she saw that where there had been a clock over the door there was now just a circular hole sifting dust.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ As she walked closer, drawing out her phone, she discerned the figure of a man lying face down with the clock mechanism smashed around him, the brass back of its white enamel face concealing his head. The gold minute-hand had been hurled to the stones nearby.

  ‘We have the body of a fifty-something male, hit by falling debris at St Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch,’ she told the controller.

  May lowered himself with difficulty to examine the shattered glass. ‘“When”,’ he said. ‘“When will you pay me?”’

  Janice touched him on the shoulder. ‘Who do you want me to call first?’

  ‘Find Arthur,’ he told her. ‘And get hold of Giles.’

  They both became aware of him at the same time: a slim dark man in his late twenties, Ethiopian in appearance, dressed in a dirty red tracksuit, standing in the open side door of the church. He suddenly snapped to attention and darted off into the bushes.

  From his control box across the road, Dan picked up on the movement and directed the drone to follow. There was no gate at the rear of the churchyard. The suspect would have to pass by Longbright and May to get out. He was fast approaching the bushes before the rear wall and showed no sign of slowing down.

  The runner smashed into the foliage without stopping, vaulting up at the wall and scrambling over the high railings as if he barely noticed them being there. The drone shot over the fence with him, blasting leaves from the ends of branches.

  May could not move any faster. His limbs had grown suddenly heavy. He dropped his hands to his thighs, trying to catch his breath. A streak of fire shot through his chest and shoulder, a warning that he needed to remain where he was. Exhausted, he fell to the wet grass and sat back, waiting for his pulse to slow.

  Janice had always been a powerful runner but the Ethiopian was moving like Mo Farah, bounding and striding, slipping along the crowded street like a fish in a stream. He turned into Columbia Road – No flower market today, thank God, she thought – then crossed into the park and notched up the speed.

  There was no chance of catching him. As she ran, she called Meera Mangeshkar with their coordinates. ‘Can you get to your bike?’

  The connection crackled angrily. ‘I’m right by it, just tell me where I’m going.’

  The runner had already reached the far side of the park. Janice slowed up to concentrate on the call. ‘He’ll come out on to Ravenscroft Street and either turn on to Shipton Street or go for Hackney Road.’ She gave Meera a description and rang off, heading back towards John May.

  She found him lying on the grass and for a moment thought that he’d had a heart attack.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he told her as she gently raised him up. ‘We need to stay with the body. Did he get away?’

  ‘Meera’s on it; she’ll put out the word. Dan’s got the drone above him and he’ll be on my jacket-cam. I’ve seen another lad very similar to him, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the CCTV footage from the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields.’

  May brushed wet grass from his waterproof jacket. ‘Decoys. He employs them like a general sending in cannon fodder. It won’t matter if we catch them or not.’

  Meera slowed the bike on Hackney Road and checked the store fronts. Artisanal cake shop. Vintage clothing. Tattoos. Plumbing supplies. Craft beer bar. Vietnamese supermarket. Each ground-floor entrance led to a maze of small rooms, for these were terrace houses that had once been inhabited by large families. Nearly all had some kind of back entrance that led to yards and storage units. A steady flow of customers streamed in and out of them, making it the perfect place to disappear.

  The ghostly rain had evaporated, and each pub and bar now had a growing cluster of customers surrounding it. She turned on to Shipton Street and cut up towards Columbia Road, but knew she had lost him.

  Driving around slowly, Meera watched the shops and pavements. People were buying supper, drinking with friends, carrying shopping home. Ordinary life, something that seemed almost alien to her now. She looked up as Dan’s drone tilted forward and buzzed past her, heading in the opposite direction. It had spotted something.

  She turned back towards Colin, passing a store with a red neon sign that read ‘Booze & Fags’, very Shoreditch. She very nearly missed him. White shoes, red tracksuit, soaked forehead, standing in the doorway of a bar called Sherpa Tenzing. It had to be the runner. He had dark patches under his arms and was fighting to catch his breath.

  As he stepped outside he was engulfed by some kind of event that required its participants to dress as Powerpuff Girls and Power Rangers. There was an opening party taking place. A girl in Turkish national dress was playing an accordion. Beside her was a man selling large metallic animal balloons.

  Dan’s drone was just above them. The drinkers looked up at the whining spy and started jeering. Somebody threw a plastic beer glass at it, which was enough to set the others off. They grabbed a bunch of helium-filled unicorns from the balloon-seller and floated them up around the flying camera.

  Banbury found his screen obscured by rainbow colours. He tried to push the drone forward but the unicorns crowded out his view.

  ‘Bloody typical,’ he complained into his headset. ‘Londoners, a red rag to a bull, they just can’t resist it, can they? Can you go and stop them?’

  Meera cut across the street on her bike. She could see the runner fighting to get out of the jeering crowd as beer cascaded and unicorns bobbed about. When he tried to escape he found his exit blocked by Colin, who swiftly moved in, barrelling the drinkers out of his path. Tangled in red and silver ribbons, the drone hit the wall of the bar and fell on to the runner as a great roar went up. Moments later Colin had him locked down and handcuffed.

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ he called up at them. ‘It’s wet down here. There’s beer everywhere. These are Nike Yeezys, man, first time I’ve worn them. Get me up.’

  Colin
pulled him up and checked out his trainers. ‘Those aren’t real Yeezys, they’re Chinese knock-offs. You shouldn’t have run.’

  ‘I don’t know nothing about it. Some bloke slipped me five hundred quid, it’s in my right-hand pocket. Honest, take a look.’ He wriggled about, trying to show them the money. Colin reached into his pocket and confirmed the fold of notes as Meera pushed the drinkers back.

  He held out the billfold. ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How could you not know?’

  ‘I was in the churchyard. He come up behind me, told me not to turn around, asked me if I wanted to earn some fast money, nothing illegal.’

  ‘What, and you said yes, just like that?’

  The runner assessed him. ‘Mate, are you joking me? Five hundred? To stand outside the church for five minutes? I’d do a lot more than that for a monkey.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I just sell a bit of weed but I used to be a professional runner.’

  ‘Well, mate, you’re involved in a professional murder now,’ said Colin, hauling the prisoner to his feet. ‘Let’s go.’

  Banbury came panting over and hunted for his downed drone. It lay on the pavement looking like a smashed crab. He was appalled. ‘All that money spent on R&D, putting in dual optical, zoom and thermal cameras and it gets destroyed by a cheap balloon?’

  ‘Oi, mate, it wasn’t that cheap,’ said one of the lads.

  ‘You killed a unicorn,’ said his friend. ‘That’s seven years’ bad luck.’

  34

  Burning Pages

  In the failing light Elise Albu was just able to recognize the shambling heap clattering his way past the bins outside her kitchen window. It could only be the poor old detective she had talked to about Cristian. Why was he here, and what on earth was he wearing? It crossed her mind that he might be senile.

  She pulled open the front door before he had a chance to ring the bell with the end of his walking stick, which caused him to widen his eyes and startle her because they were a shocking shade of blue and he looked as if he might fall over backwards into the hydrangea bush.

  ‘Hello, are you all right?’ she asked, holding open the door.

  ‘Of course I’m all right. I’m always all right. Can I come in?’ Bryant lowered his stick and made a performance of stepping hugely across her threshold. ‘Your husband. The bookshop. I’ve been thinking. My dear lady, I owe you an apology.’

  ‘You’d better come and sit down.’

  ‘I’ve been remiss. I promised to help you and then other matters stole away my attention. I was meant to tell you something, what was it? Well, several things, really. I wrestled your husband away from the City of London and had my top man take a look at his corp— corporeal form.’

  Elise stared at him in astonishment.

  ‘He committed suicide.’

  ‘Oh. I’m not sure if—’

  ‘—that’s better or worse, I know. Well, here’s where it gets a bit more …’ He tried to remember the life lessons he had learned at the Golden Buddha temple but they had already faded, the curse of an ageing brain. Something about being more mindful of others. ‘I’m sorry that your poor husband chose to, ah, divest himself of, ah, precious life with, um, so much to live for. We thought he’d been strangled.’

  The strongest brandy available in the UK is the Polish Uderzyć vintage 1987, and comes in a bottle shaped like an angry bear. Elise Albu happened to have some in her kitchen cupboard, a gift from an alcoholic aunt. Guided to it under her instruction, Bryant poured her a large tot, taking a nip himself. Being nice to people clearly had its pitfalls.

  ‘Don’t you see,’ he said, patting her hand in a consoling fashion, ‘it changes everything.’

  Much to his amazement, Elise burst into tears. She tried to speak but had to keep stopping. Bryant dragged a handkerchief from his pocket, looked inside it and hastily put it back.

  ‘I think I’ve approached this the wrong way.’ He pointed at the front door. ‘I can go out and come in again if that would help.’

  ‘No, I don’t think it would,’ said Elise. ‘If you knew this why didn’t you tell me earlier?’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you first. Then I forgot. There’s a lot going on at the office.’ He took a deep, wheezy breath. ‘Let me start over. Sergeant Flowers failed to remove your husband’s belt when he took him down to the cell, and I’m afraid Mr Albu took his own life.’ He explained how the belt had been replaced with a strip of material. ‘Flowers complicated everything. We found traces of the mattress cover on a knife that belonged to the sergeant. Here’s the tricky part. Although your husband, um, became deceased by his own hand, I think it was the direct result of meeting that man.’

  Elise was momentarily lost. ‘What man?’

  ‘The one he went for a drink with. We spoke to the barmaid at the Museum Tavern. She has a vague recollection of them sitting in a corner of the pub, but couldn’t describe either of them. Do you know if any of the books Mr Albu had in stock were valuable?’

  She tried to keep up. ‘There was a glass case containing a few first editions, good ones, but we didn’t have enough money to be serious dealers.’ She wasn’t sure whether to tell him about Cristian’s cash-only trade in books of dubious provenance.

  ‘So you were involved in the bookshop?’

  ‘I helped out occasionally. I’m a medical practice manager – I don’t have much free time. The bookshop wasn’t really a going concern.’

  ‘I wonder.’ He scrabbled about in his overcoat pocket and produced the pocket edition of Alfred Lord Tennyson. ‘Have you ever seen this before?’

  Elise wiped her eyes and examined the leather cover. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘There’s a poem in it – hang on a mo.’ He donned his spectacles and checked the index. ‘“Lady Clara Vere de Vere” – ah, here it is. Tennyson was a baron who hung around with a lot of other aristos and wrote about one after he stayed at her country mansion.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Elise said, ‘I don’t know it. I don’t understand what you’re getting at.’

  Bryant turned the open pages around to face her. ‘There’s a quote in the poem that was used for the title of a famous film. These words are heavily underlined, do you see? “Kind hearts are more than coronets”. And as this book was found in your husband’s cell after he died, I can’t help thinking that it might be a clue.’

  ‘A clue to what?’

  ‘To his state of mind. You said you didn’t know why he would go for a drink with his buyer. I think he had a very good reason for going. He had this little book on him when he went, and during the course of their time together he marked those words. He was found with a pen in his pocket. We’ll need to match the ink.’

  ‘But if he had something special to say why not write it out on one of the blank pages?’

  ‘He couldn’t; he was with the very person it concerns. He had to do something completely innocuous, so he thumbed through the book as he listened and drew a simple line under that phrase. Did he like films?’

  ‘Very much, especially the old British ones.’

  ‘And there we have it.’ Bryant sat back, satisfied. ‘Why would the buyer wish to destroy the books? I wondered from the start if there could be something in the shop that he wanted not to steal, but to get rid of.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand your thinking, Mr Bryant. I don’t recall anything unusual on the shelves. Cristian didn’t keep his records up to date but I’m familiar with his stock. At least I thought I was.’

  Bryant had a gleam in his eye. ‘Do you still have the keys to the shop?’

  ‘Yes, but the fire brigade warned me—’

  ‘Oh, they always do that. I take no notice. Can we go there?’

  Elise worried at a nail, thinking. ‘I don’t know, I don’t think I can – when?’

  ‘There’s no time like the present.’

  Silver needles passed through the lamp l
ights as the pair made their way along Bury Place, Bloomsbury, to the boarded-over bookshop. The fire officers had sent in builders to seal the frontage and had inset a plywood door with a new Yale lock.

  ‘Allow me,’ said Bryant, hauling out a spectacular array of skeleton keys from his satchel.

  ‘I thought those only worked in films,’ said Elise, holding an umbrella over him.

  ‘These just have the serrated edges removed. They’re a bit fiddly but one of them usually does the trick.’

  It took him moments to unlock the door. ‘They’ll have turned the electricity off,’ he said, taking an ancient Fidelius battery-powered torch from his satchel. He shone its beam on the blackened floor, lighting Elise’s way through the shop. Rainwater cascaded through a shattered light fitting. Many of the shelves had collapsed and the books upon them were carbonized, but near the floor a few had been shielded by an armchair. It felt as if they were in a cave.

  Bryant shone his torch on a copy of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, its back half burned. ‘I guess we’ll never know how this one ends. Independent booksellers still write down the titles of the stock they sell, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes, Cristian was very thorough. If his ledgers survived they’ll still be here. I wasn’t allowed to take anything away with me.’

  ‘Can you show me where?’

  They stepped between oily pools, the floor crunching and crackling beneath their feet. The air was still acrid with charcoaled wood and burned paper. Bryant’s torch beam picked out stalagmites of incinerated books.

  Elise climbed behind the crusted remains of the counter. One side was untouched, the other virtually cremated. It reminded Bryant of a wartime photograph his mother had kept: a chemist’s half blasted away, the other half still open for business.

  ‘It breaks my heart to see a bookshop lost,’ he said. ‘I got very depressed when I realized that if I read one book every night between the ages of ten and eighty I could still only get through about 25,500 books.’

  ‘I lost a husband,’ said Elise.

  ‘Fair point and sad obviously, but …’ His eyes strayed to the burned books.