‘Hey, Sidney, I hope you’ve been keeping notes this week,’ said Meera as they passed beneath Waterloo Bridge, now washed in bilious pink and orange. ‘I’ve enjoyed watching you recoil every time Mr Bryant opens his mouth.’
‘His language is offensive,’ Sidney said breezily, ‘but I can live with it.’
‘Just as well because you’re not going to change anyone.’ Meera raised her beer cup in a toast.
‘Just remember that before you were born he was fighting to ensure your rights,’ said Longbright. ‘If you’re going into the force you’ll need to be very patient and accepting.’
‘And suspicious,’ added Colin. They all raised their glasses to that.
‘I know young people look at Mr Bryant and only see an old man but I know what he’s done,’ Sidney assured her.
‘I am here, actually,’ said Bryant. He had been staring at the racing black waters lost in thought. Something had changed in him these last few weeks. The truths upon which he had always relied had been turned on their heads. Nothing was as it seemed, and far from being perturbed by the thought of a world in flux he was exhilarated by the challenges this new life presented.
Banbury swerved to avoid something he hoped was a log and not a floating body. Freezing spray doused them, making everyone shout.
‘How was your first case with the PCU?’ May wanted to know.
Sidney studied him pointedly. ‘First?’
‘Of course, the decision’s not up to me. The final decision is your mother’s.’ He looked at Longbright.
Everyone’s eyes followed.
‘You are Janice’s daughter, are you not?’
‘We were going to tell you,’ Longbright began, warily awaiting Sidney’s reaction.
‘It was obvious from the outset,’ said May. ‘The name on her internship form is Hargreaves. I’m old enough to remember that you used to live with a detective inspector named Ian Hargreaves. His favourite actor was Sid James. Sidney looks exactly like a combination of you and him, although mercifully nothing like her namesake. Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘It was my fault,’ Sidney said, stopping her mother from answering for her. ‘I wanted to be judged on my own merits. I knew you’d be predisposed towards me if I told you who I was.’
‘Well, you’re not in yet,’ said Bryant. ‘Where have you been all this time?’
‘I wasn’t working at the unit when I had Sidney,’ said Longbright. ‘Ian was offered a management position in New Zealand that was too good to turn down. He wanted to take Sidney, and I let him. I came back to work at the PCU.’ Longbright looked fondly at her daughter. ‘When Ian announced he was moving to Madrid I talked to you both about leaving, but you convinced me to stay. Ian remarried. My daughter and I stayed in touch.’
‘So that’s why you have an unplaceable accent,’ said Meera, turning to Sidney. ‘I just assumed you were being annoying.’
‘Anyone else got a surprise they’d like to share?’ Land asked. ‘Gender reassignment, spontaneous generation, evil twin?’ He winced as he accepted a glass of wine. ‘I’ve got one. I had an email from Dr Gillespie claiming that you’ – and here he pointed at Bryant – ‘have some kind of ageing disease that’s making you prematurely decrepit, although I’d question prematurely.’
‘Did you check to see if it was really from him?’ asked Bryant, huddling himself around his gin.
‘No! He is the company doctor; I shouldn’t have to, should I? If you can’t trust your own doctor …’ He stopped himself. ‘The real Tim Floris didn’t consider that someone might have copied his swipe card. You can’t check everything.’
‘He guessed you wouldn’t, my little pierrot,’ said Bryant. ‘That’s what the disseminators of disinformation count on. Do you remember all that fuss back in the seventies about the Bermuda Triangle? How everyone thought planes and boats were vanishing from the map? Some time later the mystery was solved. It was all down to poor data research. Every so-called “missing” vessel in the North Atlantic could be accounted for. The full tracking information was eventually published but it was so densely detailed that nobody read it. The mystery is always more popular than the solution. Now when somebody leaks several thousand pages of incendiary material to a newspaper only a tiny handful of people ever read it all.’
‘You didn’t answer the question,’ said Land.
‘What, am I suffering from some kind of Methuselah syndrome? I can’t believe that after all this you’re still prepared to believe any old nonsense you’re told. No I am not, thank you. I find the question most offensive. Although I may have lied about my age.’
‘What, younger or older?’ asked May, disconcerted.
‘It happened in my teens,’ Bryant explained. ‘I wanted to get into a saucy Soho show but you had to be twenty-one, so I raised my age a little. Suddenly people treated me with more respect and I sort of forgot to go back. I’m actually the same age as John.’
May dropped his head in his hands. ‘That was my one advantage over you. I demand to see your birth certificate.’
‘Is there anyone on board who hasn’t lied about something tonight?’ called Land. ‘Any more life-altering announcements?’
Colin caught Meera’s eye but she gave her head a sharp little shake.
‘I altered your multiple-choice competency tests,’ said Sidney, turning to the detectives. She was seated at the bow and had droplets of river water in her hair. ‘I was looking through your emails – sorry. The entries were full of mistakes so I corrected them.’
‘How could you have done that?’ asked Bryant. ‘I sent them both off.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ Sidney replied. ‘They were still stuck in your outbox.’
‘It was wrong of you to break the law,’ said May.
‘You set the example.’
‘You do understand what you’ll be taking on?’ asked Bryant. ‘We are the final repository of the city’s knowledge. This lot, and a handful of other tiresome outsiders most people would cross the road to avoid, know and remember everything that has happened here. It is our joy and our curse.’
‘What do you remember?’ asked Sidney with a challenging gleam in her eye.
‘It’s patently absurd,’ Simon Sartorius told him when they met in a tessellated time warp of a French restaurant in Knightsbridge. He set the manuscript aside, hopefully beyond the edge of his peripheral vision. ‘I think we’d have to publish it under fiction.’
‘You asked me for a big case,’ said Bryant. ‘It all happened, just quite not the way I’ve described it.’
‘So you made parts up.’
‘Certain scenes were edited to fit the format,’ Bryant told him. ‘Any changes will be made OMDB.’
‘I don’t think you’re using these computer acronyms correctly,’ said Simon. ‘Perhaps you should stick to normal English.’
‘Thank goodness for that. I’m saying that everything is true except for the parts that aren’t,’ Bryant mouthed at him. ‘Our murderer really did turn out to be female. Her mother believed she would be safer if she dressed as a male. That’s why she was never christened, why she went to nursery school under an assumed name and was immediately taken out of it. I assumed the killer was a man because it was more statistically likely, and to me the manuscript felt as if it had been written by a male. When I checked through it later, I saw that she had never lied. She must have been in terrible pain while she assumed the identity of Tim Floris. She could not be seen to limp because the real Floris walked normally, so she had to leave off her brace. She was very nearly the perfect trickster. We never did discover what happened to her mother, which only makes the truth more impossible to reach.’
‘We’ll have to edit the manuscript,’ said Simon, his attention drifting to the ambitiously priced wine list. ‘The second half is filled with the most shocking typing errors. How anyone could mistake the word “hostage” for “sausage” is beyond me.’
‘I had to finish it myself at the office,
’ Bryant explained. ‘My ghostwriter Cynthia made off with my laptop, our ice-cube trays, my Kings & Queens of England cigarette card collection and all our teaspoons. I’ve been unlucky with my biographers.’
The others had weaved their way home from the Bankside riverboat landing, leaving Bryant and May to head back from Blackfriars Station. ‘What do I remember, she asked,’ said Bryant, leaning against a dolphin lamp-post to look out across the tar-black Thames. ‘The cheek of it. As if I could list all the things I remember. I’ve forgotten more than I can remember and I remember everything except the things I’ve forgotten.’
Just beyond them the tide furled and unfurled in brackish blooms. No other river possessed this strange atmosphere, of time and death and forgetfulness.
‘Oh, I remember everything,’ said Bryant softly. ‘All the places, the people, the events and names from London’s history. Everything that happens in this city has a phantom lurking behind it, and another phantom behind that, stretching back into the mist.’
He said no more, but as they walked in friendly silence he thought to himself, I remember William the Conqueror building the Tower of London, Canaletto painting the Thames, Sargent, Whistler, Wilde and Radclyffe Hall all living in the same Chelsea street. I remember Samuel Johnson and William Blake, Derek Jarman and Hattie Jacques, the Hither Green disaster, the Judd Street bomb and the Cato Street conspiracy. So many protests! The suffragettes, the Battle of Cable Street, Ban the Bomb, Clause 28, the Notting Hill riots, the Poll Tax riots. All the royal fusses and political betrayals mean less to me than the things Londoners really care about: Windrush, Grenfell, the terrorist bombings. I close my eyes and my head is full of images: Violet Kray blindly supporting her sons, Elisabeth Welch singing ‘Stormy Weather’, the Beatles crossing Abbey Road, the Pythons in the Caledonian Road pet shop. My head is filled with London faces: Charlie Chaplin, Joyce Grenfell, Alfred Hitchcock, Margaret Rutherford, Florence Nightingale, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Jimi Hendrix. In my mind Steptoe and Son are still in Oil Drum Lane, Shepherd’s Bush, the Trotters are in Nelson Mandela House, Peckham, and Tony Hancock lives at 23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam.
I remember the London pranks and anecdotes. Sir Thomas Beecham asking a lady in Fortnum’s what her husband was doing nowadays, and her replying, ‘He’s still king.’ The editor of the Sun firing his astrologer with a letter that began, ‘As you already know …’ Beachcomber leaving dozens of brown-ale bottles on stuck-up Virginia Woolf’s doorstep, Sir John Gielgud accidentally insulting everyone. Most of this information is entirely useless but every now and again two names or events lock together to produce an unexpected third, and that is the moment I live for.
I have to remember it all because no one else will.
Now I must remember someone new. I will find a murderer’s mother and put her child beside her. I’ll give her the identity she was denied in life.
‘You should have answered Sidney,’ said May. ‘Perhaps she’s the right person to pass it all on to.’
‘I’m not sure I want to do that,’ said Bryant, taking his partner’s arm. ‘The past is a weight that can end up crushing your life.’
They stopped at the station entrance. ‘Well, this is me,’ said May. ‘How are you getting home?’
Bryant smiled. ‘I’m already home,’ he said, adjusting his homburg and leaning on his snakehead walking stick. And looking at his unmistakeable outline against the shining Thames, it was very hard to disagree.
Bryant and May will return.
Acknowledgements
Considering this is the nineteenth Bryant & May book, I’m amazed how little the team has changed over the years. Editor Simon Taylor, who has forgiven me for actually writing him into the recent novels, and Kate Samano and Richenda Todd, who keep tabs on the most tangled of stories and gracefully steer me back on course, make my life so much easier that I can’t imagine doing it without them. A warm welcome to Hayley Barnes on PR, and as ever a tip of the homburg to my agent James Wills, and Meg Davis, my film agent, who still believes that someone might be crazy enough to bring Bryant & May to TV.
Find me on Twitter @peculiar or on www.christopherfowler.co.uk
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Christopher Fowler 2020
Cover illustration by Max Schindler
Cover design by Beci Kelly/TW
Christopher Fowler has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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7: Golden Buddha
1Excuse for absence.
2Boringly repetitive.
3One who speaks pointlessly.
30: Misinformation
1Too Long, Didn’t Read
50: The Great Bell
1See Bryant & May: England’s Finest.
Bryant & May - Oranges and Lemons Page 37