‘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 bows 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 tassellated 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 not quite 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 and Queens of England cigarette card collection and all our teaspoons. I’ve been unlucky with my biographers.’
* * *
|||
The others had woven 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 lamppost 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, 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, Elizabeth 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.
For Peter Chapman
And Sophie Christopher
6/9/90–3/6/19
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.
BY CHRISTOPHER FOWLER
PECULIAR CRIMES UNIT MYSTERIES
Full Dark House
The Water Room
Seventy-Seven Clocks
Ten Second Staircase
White Corridor
The Victoria Vanishes
; Bryant & May on the Loose
Bryant & May off the Rails
The Memory of Blood
The Invisible Code
Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart
Bryant & May and the Burning Man
London’s Glory: The Lost Cases of Bryant & May and the Peculiar Crimes Unit
Bryant & May: Strange Tide
Bryant & May: Wild Chamber
Bryant & May: Hall of Mirrors
Bryant & May: The Lonely Hour
England’s Finest: More Lost Cases from the Peculiar Crimes Unit
Bryant & May: Oranges and Lemons
Paperboy: A Memoir
Film Freak
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHRISTOPHER FOWLER is the acclaimed author of the award-winning Full Dark House and sixteen other Peculiar Crimes Unit mysteries, as well as the PCU story collections London’s Glory and England’s Finest. In 2015, Fowler won the coveted Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in the Library Award in recognition for his body of work. He lives in London, where he is at work on his next Peculiar Crimes Unit novel.
Christopherfowler.co.uk
Twitter: @Peculiar
Instagram: @peculiarcrimesunit
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Bryant & May Page 38
