‘Which we did,’ said May. ‘I emailed you a full report the next day.’
‘But you didn’t stop there.’
‘No, because we didn’t think it was death by misadventure, and were awarded the case as it developed.’
‘I’ll tell you what you did.’ Link swivelled his laser eye at each of them in turn. ‘You trespassed into the Serious Fraud Squad’s territory by going to see Dexter Cornell, and now he’s lodged a legal complaint that could affect the outcome of an investigation that’s been going on for the past two years.’
‘We were following up a connection between Cornell and Freddie Weeks,’ said May. ‘It was an entirely valid—’
‘We’ll come back to that. I’ve been contacted by your unit GP, Dr Marcus Gillespie.’
May’s heart sank. Link had been told about Bryant.
‘Your partner has been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, but instead of signing him off on leave you allowed him to continue working the case.’ He relented a little. ‘I know how close the two of you are. I’d probably be tempted to do the same if it was one of my mates. There’ve been four deaths in five days. What if any of them could have been prevented?’
‘Arthur’s been under constant supervision since the diagnosis,’ May said. ‘Taking him off the team right now would kill him.’
‘And not taking him off might kill innocent people. Where is he?’
‘He’s continuing to make inquiries in accordance with the properly planned procedure of the investigation,’ Longbright answered hastily, glancing at May.
‘You have a planned procedure.’ Link stared about at the room again, turning his entire body in the direction of his good eye. ‘A properly planned procedure. So you have internal documentation you can show me.’
‘We don’t keep internal reports, for security reasons,’ May told him. ‘We prefer to hold face-to-face sessions with staff in the briefing room.’
‘Let me tell you what’s going to happen here.’ Link’s speech had the ominous clarity of a warning. ‘You’re going to close up the investigation immediately. You will make your final report and email it to me before you leave tonight. It’s Friday evening. I don’t want anyone working in here over the weekend, trying to patch things up so that it looks like you know what you’re doing. This is the end of your involvement in this case. You can leave it to the CoL’s specialist team and get back to whatever it is you normally do on Monday.’ He gathered up his coat. ‘And one other thing. I want you to place your partner on disability leave. Now. And get that hole in the corridor covered over before somebody kills themselves.’
His gaze finally fell upon Land, who swallowed nervously. ‘I want you to know that I have nothing personally against the members of this unit. I’m aware that you’ve done some good work for us in the past. But you don’t have the facilities to deal with something this serious. And I can’t have you putting lives at risk.’ His aura of menace grew as he leaned forward. ‘Do I make myself quite clear?’
Land held his breath until he heard the main entrance door close, then went to the window to make sure that the superintendent was off the premises. ‘At risk!’ he snorted, his courage returning. ‘Does he have any idea how many lives we’ve saved over the years?’
‘I didn’t hear you speaking up for us.’ May was disappointed in his chief. What, he wondered, did it take to rouse Land to ire?
‘What was I supposed to say? Do you even know where your partner is right now? Or has he wandered off into fairyland again?’
‘He’s working towards the resolution of this case,’ May answered with dogged vehemence. ‘Right now there’s nothing in the world that matters more to him.’
‘It’s my fault,’ moaned Land weakly. ‘I should have seen this day coming. I should have forced him to retire instead of letting things come to a head like this. I should have recognized the signs years ago, when he started growing rhubarb on the roof of the Mornington Crescent office. You have to stop him, John.’
‘I’m not sure any of us can now,’ said May.
44
ABDUCTED
‘What are we going to do?’ Longbright asked.
‘Call one last briefing,’ said May, pushing open the door. ‘If we have nothing at the end of it, we do as the man says and close it up.’
As the rest of the staff gathered in the common room, there was none of the usual sixth-form smut and japery that usually accompanied such assemblies. Word had got around about Link’s visit, and an air of doom had settled over the unit.
‘Do we have to do this?’ asked Raymond Land as he walked in and found himself confronted by a row of depressed faces. He always tried to be the last to arrive in order to make an impression, but it never worked.
At the front of the room Bryant’s freestanding blackboard had sprouted more coloured strings, chalk-lines, pins, clippings, maps, printouts and numbered photographs. He had been rolling it into each first-floor room in turn so that staff members could look for – well, nobody was sure what exactly, but it seemed to make him happier to have it trundling about.
‘Mr Bryant thought it would help us to visualize connections,’ said Fraternity, whose new horn-rimmed Tom Ford glasses had transformed him into a black Clark Kent.
‘We’re not on a Swedish cop show,’ Land snapped. ‘Sticking up a few pictures and drawing lines between them isn’t going to help us solve anything.’
‘I thought you were in favour of it earlier,’ said May.
‘I just don’t see that it helps.’
‘It always helped Arthur when we first started out.’ May omitted to mention that his partner also labelled various items of crockery and cutlery from his kitchen, spreading them over the floor with exhortations to remember that all of the apostle spoons were suspects.
‘Fine!’ barked Land. ‘We’ll stare at Bryant’s mobile scrapbook for a while and have a revelation, then maybe they’ll turn us into a TV series with me shouting “Enlarge that image” at a computer instead of sitting alone in my office, filling in forms and fishing teabags out of the pot with the end of a dart. One day the public will twig that police work is as stupefyingly boring as any other job. I don’t know why I bother. Go on then, bring us up to date.’
May stood up. ‘OK, final recap. On Monday, October the thirty-first, we were brought in to identify a homeless man.’ He pointed to a taped photograph of Freddie Weeks taken in a happier time, just after he had won a school running trophy. ‘It seemed he had died from burns after being caught in crossfire between police and protestors outside the Findersbury Bank, Crutched Friars, near the Bank of England. However, we were able to revise that opinion after the arsonist was caught on camera checking out the site before he threw a Molotov cocktail. We couldn’t identify him because of his Guy Fawkes mask. Yes, Colin, what is it?’
Bimsley lowered his hand. ‘Where’s Mr Bryant?’
‘He’s helping us sort something out. He seemed to know that Link would close the case tonight, and asked me to present his thoughts. I know he’s been calling some of you with instructions, and I’ll come back to that.’
Land refolded his arms and unleashed a grunt of disapproval.
‘On Tuesday morning, Glen Hall, a financial manager at Findersbury and collector of film memorabilia, was found dead in a burned-out shop in Brixton Market. He’d been lured there on the promise of buying a rare poster. He’d been tarred and feathered. All attempts to find out who rented the shop came to nothing.’
May indicated a further tier of photographs. ‘On Wednesday, Jonathan De Vere, a businessman who funded IT start-ups, was killed in his Belgravia apartment. Mr Bryant says the M branded on his face was a traditional London punishment, standing for “Malefactor”.
‘On Thursday, Frank Leach, a loan shark, was killed in a highly localized bomb blast just off Leicester Square. This morning, an ambitious young accountant, Joanna Papis, was attacked in her Bermondsey flat, and nearly died after being pushed from Blackfriars Bri
dge. Miss Papis isn’t able to add anything more to our picture of her attacker, other than to confirm that it’s the same suspect in all cases, a strong-armed male wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, grey sweatpants, hoodie and black Nikes.
‘So, connections.’ He traced the coloured strings that ran between the photographs. ‘Papis had met both Weeks and Hall in the pub where she works part-time. We have CCTV footage of her attacker outside her house. The same figure was seen leaving the first two crime scenes. The verger of St Mary’s Church, Camden Town, is the only person to have seen him without a mask, but he wasn’t able to give us anything usable, as they’d been standing in the church aisle without any lights on. Jack checked the CCTV files from the surrounding area and found very little, but somebody broke into De Vere’s car after his death. We can’t be certain it was the same person, but if it was and we go by that ID we can confirm that he’s around six foot two, mid-thirties, bulked up, Caucasian.’
‘I studied the stats and tried to see how else they would fit the victims,’ said Longbright. ‘Except for Weeks, who was younger, they were all roughly the same age, late twenties to early thirties, and all lived in Central London, although not in the same boroughs. Hall, De Vere and Leach had connections to banks.’
‘Leach was a loan shark,’ Renfield pointed out. ‘Hardly a financial player. And that leaves Joanna Papis, who only knew two of them socially, and Freddie Weeks, who didn’t know any of them.’
‘Is that it?’ asked Land. ‘Is that the best you can come up with?’
‘One other thing.’ Longbright’s crimson nail returned to the fourth photograph. ‘Frank Leach changed his name when he arrived in London. He was born Jakob Tarnobrzeg, a Polish Jew. When she was eighteen, Joanna Papis got married. It lasted for less than six months, but after the divorce she kept her husband’s name. She was born Joanna Smietana.’
‘So what?’ said Land. ‘People change their names all the time.’
‘Janice means we haven’t looked at the group collectively under their original names,’ said Meera.
‘I can do that right now,’ said Banbury, opening his laptop. ‘Weeks. Hall. De Vere. Spell the last two?’
‘T-a-r-n-o-b-r-z-e-g. S-m-i-e-t-a-n-a.’
He waited a moment, then shook his head. ‘Anything else you can give me?’
‘Try Insurrection Club London,’ May suggested.
Banbury finished typing and sat back. ‘Well, we’ve got Smietana and Tarnobrzeg, members of something called Riot. Let me check that.’
Everyone waited while Banbury scanned the pages.
‘Riot, defunct website – hipster concierge service and nightclub in Shoreditch, now closed … Hang on. Oh, you’ll like this.’ He turned the screen around. ‘Who’s that?’
The Evening Standard headline read: ‘The Banker Who Spent £37,000 on Champagne in One Night’. The photograph showed Dexter Cornell in Riot nightclub, toasting his fellow financiers.
‘That’s enough of a connection,’ said May. ‘We’re not shutting the case down.’
‘We don’t have a choice, John,’ Land warned. ‘You heard what Link said.’
‘We’re in with a chance. We keep a low profile over the weekend and make the building look as if it’s shut by using the back door. And we bring Cornell back in for further questioning.’
‘We can’t—’
‘We can, Raymond.’ May was adamant. ‘We’ll cut a deal with Cornell to keep him quiet, but we have to speak to him.’ He turned to the assembly. ‘I’ll talk to you individually about Arthur’s instructions.’
As everyone went off to their offices, Land fussed around them like a chicken under a convoy of military trucks, trying to turn them back.
At 10.37 p.m. Longbright called Cornell’s lawyer, Edgar Digby, and found him in a state of extreme distress.
Cornell had just been reported missing.
At 11.05 p.m., May, Renfield and Banbury arrived at Cornell’s flat in Moon Street, Islington. Yolanda, the Spanish housekeeper, was sitting in the kitchen, and two local DCs were awaiting further arrivals from the Upper Street nick.
After the usual demarcation wrangle, May took control of the situation. ‘Can you tell me what happened?’ he asked the distraught housekeeper. ‘What did you see?’
‘The doorbell rang. It was just after ten, I don’t know exactly. Mr Cornell went down to answer the door. He was very angry because Augustine was asleep—’
‘Where was the boy?’
‘In his room on the floor above. He’s supposed to be at his mother’s this week but she was called away on business. The poor boy never knows where he’s supposed to be; their schedules change all the time. Mr Cornell didn’t want him woken up.’
‘Did he know who might be calling at that hour?’
‘No. He gave me a look, like: “Who is this?” He went down, and I heard someone fall.’
‘What, on the floor?’
‘No, back against the door. I heard the door hit the wall. You can see the mark. I didn’t go down because I’m thinking my job is to protect the boy.’
‘You did the right thing.’
Yolanda pressed a hand to her bosom in a theatrical gesture of gratitude. ‘I went to the window and saw Mr Cornell being pulled into a van by a man in a mask – you know, like the ones the protestors wear, Guy Fawkes. Mr Cornell looked … I don’t know, like he was injured. The man sprayed something in his face.’
‘I could smell hydrocarbon solvents on the way in,’ Banbury said. ‘Mace, maybe. I can get a sample from the front door.’
‘You say a van,’ said May. ‘What colour? Did you get a look at the make or the licence plate?’
‘I know the make, a white Ford Transit, my brother used to drive one; it had something about the gas board on the side, but I couldn’t see the plate.’
‘It won’t be hard to track,’ May told Banbury. ‘There are cameras at the top of the road. Where is the boy?’
‘One of the officers is sitting with him,’ Yolanda said. ‘He didn’t know anything about it. He only woke up when the police arrived.’
‘Dan, stay and give this place the once-over, will you?’ May tapped Renfield on the arm. ‘Come on, there’s nothing we can do here.’
‘Think it’s our man?’ asked Renfield, following him.
‘Right now half the country hates Cornell’s guts, and over a million of them have passed through the city wearing Guy Fawkes masks,’ said May, heading for the door. ‘Why wasn’t he protected? Where the hell were his bodyguards, just when they were needed?’
45
PAGAN FIRE
Saturday morning loomed into view with the kind of ligneous dampness the city had only intermittently seen since the invention of the motorcar. The newly refurbished outer walls of King’s Cross Station were already coated with the verdant velvet of emerald moss, and near its roof buddleia sprang in sturdy clumps, as it had since the terminus first opened in 1852. A frosty mist refused to unveil the passing buses, and barely visible cyclists risked their lives in the traffic at the corner of the Euston Road, where Bryant had become so hopelessly unmoored.
The dank atmosphere seemed to go hand in hand with the evening’s planned festivities. Guy Fawkes Night always took place in such grim weather, as if English pleasures were to be endured rather than savoured. Summer was delineated by the sight of men huddled over rain-sodden barbecues, royal processions were surrounded by fields of umbrellas, and at the Lord Mayor’s Show the mournful climate blew a raspberry at the pompous dignity of the city’s leaders. But Guy Fawkes Night was usually the most inclement of all, and this one looked unlikely to buck the tradition.
Paradoxically, Arthur Bryant awoke in the smudged grey dawn with a perfectly clear head. He knew who and where he was, but not how he had got here. The hours after his meeting with Kirkpatrick were missing, as neatly as if someone had clipped around them and thrown them away.
He opened his bedroom door at his landlady’s first knock, making her jump. ‘Yes, wha
t do you want?’
‘I came to see how you were,’ said Alma.
‘Do you come bearing toast? Crumpets? Anything remotely edible?’
‘I’ve made you some sandwiches for lunch, and I have orange sultana muffins in the oven.’
‘Then kindly bring them with strong tea, scalding, as soon as is humanly possible.’ The door slammed shut.
At least he’s back to normal, thought Alma, hastily heading for the kitchen.
Bryant had indeed found his rightful place in the world once more, but was angrier than he had ever been in his long, eventful life. Always his own harshest critic, he was appalled by the encroaching failures of his body. Eyesight could be ameliorated, hearing artificially restored, hips replaced and joints scraped. Digestive acid, stomach ulcers, veins, lumps, bumps and blemishes were all easy to deal with, but this stealthy stealing away of time horrified him.
His mental fogs followed no line of reason, appearing and vanishing without will or purpose. If he tried to rationalize the process, noting that the fugue states seemed more precipitous before he slept and after he had eaten, he knew that he was merely attempting to impose a rational pattern over something perniciously unpredictable.
The answer, he decided, was to focus on the case and nothing else, so as soon as he had washed and shaved he called his partner. But before anyone could answer, the bedroom door opened and there May stood, immaculate as ever in his elegant cashmere overcoat and navy silk tie.
‘What did Alma tell you?’ Bryant asked suspiciously, after listening to his partner’s account of the abduction. ‘You have a look of supercilious concern about your features.’
‘She didn’t say anything,’ May lied. ‘I take it you’re feeling all right?’
‘If one more person asks me that this morning they’ll feel the benefit of my Georgian toasting fork where they least expect it. I’m perfectly fine. About Cornell—’
‘Oh, so you know.’
Bryant & May - The Burning Man Page 28
