Bryant & May_Hall of Mirrors

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Fab,’ said May, eyeing their charge venomously. ‘We can all be chums.’

  Hatton-Jones sent him the kind of look that might cross the face of a vet waiting for a dog to die. ‘I don’t know you,’ he said finally. ‘You’re policemen. My family never socialized with anyone in public service. I suppose in our brave new world we’re all required to be comrades.’

  ‘I thought you were in trade,’ said May, refusing to concede the point.

  ‘I’m a company director,’ Hatton-Jones elucidated. ‘If I were in the army, that would make me a general. One of your colleagues, a chap called Farthingshaw, told me I needed to be accompanied until my court appearance.’ He waggled an index finger between them. ‘That is the only reason why you and I are speaking.’

  Sweet Suzy arrived with a tray. ‘Two cappuccinos. That’ll be one and fourpence.’

  ‘I only want to drink the coffee, not buy the cup as well,’ said Bryant, digging out change.

  ‘I say, she’s a delicious little dolly bird,’ murmured Hatton-Jones, watching Sweet Suzy’s bottom as it undulated away. For one horrifying moment Bryant thought he was going to lick his lips. A weekend in Monty’s company was suddenly starting to feel as though it might be a very long time indeed.

  ‘You don’t seem too worried about your situation,’ said May, echoing his partner’s thoughts.

  ‘Of course I’m bloody worried, that’s why I asked you to meet me all the way out here in bedsit land,’ Monty steamed. ‘Chamberlain knows some very unsavoury characters. They could well be looking out for me in London.’

  ‘I understand you’re staying at the National Liberal Club, is that right?’ May asked.

  ‘Well, under normal circumstances that would be the case.’ Hatton-Jones twisted a tiny sliver of lemon into the remains of his black coffee. ‘However, I’ve been invited to spend the weekend with a business acquaintance, so I’ll be travelling down to Kent tonight and staying until Sunday night. It’s invitation-only.’

  ‘I’m afraid you can’t do that,’ said May.

  ‘I’ve already accepted.’

  ‘We have to be with you at all times.’

  ‘I do understand the concept of accompanying a witness,’ said Hatton-Jones. ‘I discussed it with the prosecutor. Clearly we’ll have to come to some arrangement.’

  May stood his ground. ‘There’s no arrangement to come to. It’s absolutely out of the question. You’ll have to cancel.’

  Hatton-Jones flicked his lemon peel on to the pavement. ‘I shan’t be doing that. No one needs to know, old chap. I’ll be back in plenty of time.’

  ‘You really think that a highly respected architect and knight of the realm would come after you like a common thug?’ May asked.

  Hatton-Jones looked him over. ‘How old are you? What do you think happens when men who stand to make millions of pounds see it all going down the drain? You think they reach gentlemen’s agreements over cups of tea? The war put an end to all that. You chaps can take the weekend off. I got through a war; I can manage this. You’ll only be a hindrance. Go on, bugger off and I’ll come to collect you first thing Monday morning.’

  ‘We’re responsible for your safekeeping,’ May pointed out. ‘If you wish to leave our sight you have to sign a form.’

  ‘Very well then, give me the form and I’ll sign it.’

  ‘I don’t think you quite understand,’ said Bryant. ‘The waiver allows you to go to the lavatory, not hare off to Kent.’

  Hatton-Jones’s features were suffused with an alarming rush of blood. ‘Look here, you little oik, I’m booked on the five thirty from London Bridge so we’ll obviously have to work something out.’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said May, catching his partner’s eye. ‘You’re staying here with us.’

  Hatton-Jones pushed his crimson face so far forward that May could count the broken veins in his nose. ‘I think you’ve got yourself a little confused about which of us is the criminal. I’m going into the witness box because someone has to stop Charlie from destroying the already shaky reputation of our industry. You heard what happened at Ronan Point, I presume?’

  ‘That wasn’t his building.’

  ‘It could easily have been. I expect some support from the police, otherwise I’ll have to reconsider my offer to appear for the prosecution. Now, listen to me carefully. I’m staying with Lady Banks-Marion and her son Harry, Lord Banks-Marion, at Tavistock Hall. They’re having a weekend party. It’s the last weekend party they’re ever likely to hold. The hall was once one of the nation’s grandest country houses, and I have important business to conduct with someone there, so I’m afraid you’ll just have to come with me.’

  ‘How did you wangle an invite?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘I didn’t need to wangle one, as you put it. An invitation was naturally forthcoming. I suppose I could ask for it to be extended to you two. Our fathers were friends.’

  ‘My father was friends with all sorts and never got invited anywhere.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they throw weekend bashes in Wapping. Dinner will be a formal affair. You’ll need to pop home and have someone pack your wardrobe, assuming either of you owns such a thing as a decent jacket.’ He smirked fiercely at each of them in turn.

  May pushed back. ‘You’re telling me that you’re prepared to conduct your business affairs with a pair of common police officers in tow? That would put a bit of a crimp in your style, wouldn’t it?’

  Hatton-Jones rolled his eyes. ‘Obviously you wouldn’t be able to announce your professions. You’ll have to be incognito.’

  ‘How are you going to introduce us?’

  ‘I’ll say we were in the army together or you were employees or something. Anyway, no one will be interested in you. There are always a couple of invisible guests invited as ballast at these weekends.’

  ‘He’s insufferable,’ May said while Hatton-Jones was away from the table. ‘We can’t let him do this. We have to insist that he stays in town.’

  ‘And risk having him pull out before the trial? He could collapse the entire case, and he knows it.’ Bryant looked around to ensure they weren’t overheard. ‘I’m afraid I was sort of warned about this.’

  ‘What do you mean, sort of warned?’

  ‘I forgot to tell you. Roger Trapp said if he absolutely insisted on going to Kent we should go with him. He knows someone there who can help us.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The groundskeeper at Tavistock Hall is a chap called Brigadier Nigel Metcalf, “Fruity” to his friends. He happens to be an old army pal of Trapp’s who owes him a favour. Trapp says he’d trust him with his life. Metcalf was a career soldier, but was badly injured at Arnhem during Operation Market Garden. Lost an arm and a leg. After the war he couldn’t get a job as anything but a liftman, so when he was offered a position looking after the hall he jumped at the chance. Now he’s got his own accommodation in the gatehouse and is taking care of the grounds.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘It was in the notes you were supposed to read. I imagine the war taught him to stay invisible and keep to himself, so he’ll be a good observer. He can help us keep an eye on our witness.’

  Hatton-Jones was back. From the irritated look on his face, Bryant surmised that he had tried chatting up Sweet Suzy and had been rebuffed.

  ‘We’d better get a move on if you’re coming with me,’ he snapped. ‘Let me do the talking when we get there. It’s bad enough me having to pretend that I actually know you. You’d better invent new names for yourselves just in case anyone asks. Keep it simple and don’t do anything that will draw attention.’

  ‘Like what?’ asked May.

  The director eyed May’s fashionable get-up with distaste. ‘Try not to speak, mind your manners and find something less vulgar to wear,’ he suggested with a weary sigh. ‘I look at you two and wonder, what was the point of beating the Germans?’

  MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR

  It
was a question that many had asked themselves.

  After the war, austerity had dragged on for another decade. In railway stations it was impossible to buy a cup of tea without queuing. Stores were more shut than open. Shelves remained empty, meals stayed small and fruit came in tins. Coal was rationed. Sweaters and socks were darned. Even hotel sheets were patched. Across the capital, the cheapest option was exercised without consideration. Cracked church steeples were demolished instead of being repaired, bomb-sites were boarded up instead of being built upon and prefabs sprouted like mushrooms where proud family homes had once stood. Stone and mahogany were replaced with asbestos and plywood. Stop-gap measures became so permanent that soon no one could remember how life had been before.

  The war’s warriors had died to make way for an army of lovers; nearly half of all Londoners were now under twenty-five, and an aura of unwarranted confidence lit up the capital. For kids with credit, contraception and cool, the city was suddenly sexy. And those who had fought were forced to confront the first generation of people who did not need to know the meaning of obligation.

  Arthur Bryant could see that although London had exploded like a brilliant rocket across a winter sky, the flare path was now fading. The liberated women and feminized men who constituted that tribe known as the Beautiful People pointed out that ravaged battlefields were filling with wild flowers, but the idea proved a little disingenuous.

  Still, optimism lingered; opportunities still existed for anyone with talent and determination. To John May the sixties meant a fresh start, money in the bank and promotion to a fully independent police unit. He was able to move his parents into a new flat in the relatively cheap student neighbourhood of Belsize Park. It was a time when he fell in and out of love, and took his first holiday in Spain. Suddenly there was money to spend and life was good.

  His partner remained less impressed. Bryant watched the streets fill with happier people in brighter clothes, driving smart new British cars bought on instalment plans, but the streets themselves were still black with soot and gap-toothed from bombing. He had never possessed the right kind of mind or physical shape to be fashionable. His wispy hair had mostly vanished in his mid-twenties and his neck had thickened so that he was starting to look prematurely middle-aged. As a consequence he remained imperceptible to the long-legged girls who made John May stop and gape.

  While everyone else became enraptured with new music, art and fashion, Bryant remained convinced that the city’s primary-coloured vibrancy would evaporate almost as soon as it had begun, and, as always, it was because he had done a little more homework than anyone else. He could see that the nation’s balance of payments was already causing concern. Britain was still shut out of the Common Market. It won’t make any difference that we won the World Cup or that our pop singers invaded America, he thought gloomily. The seeds of Swinging London’s collapse had been borne on the winds of its arrival.

  ‘Just a load of barrow-boys with pudding-basin fringes and wide-collar shirts, and a few rich nobs cashing in,’ Bryant had sniffed, and perhaps he’d had a point. As May adjusted his paisley-print kipper tie and squirted himself with Aqua Manda, ready for another night out in Soho, he’d decided that his partner probably had reason to be downbeat. But what was the point of being young and in London if you weren’t going to enjoy it?

  Now, as he quickly folded a purple nylon dinner shirt into a suitcase, he wondered how much of a liability Arthur would prove over the coming weekend.

  They had never gone undercover before. The witness didn’t seem to think he was at risk in the countryside, so perhaps it was wrong to worry. Hatton-Jones would be at ease among those of his own class. Arthur was another matter; he tended to become obstreperous when surrounded by ladies and gentlemen of the upper echelons. May remembered their assignment to provide security at Lord Beaverbrook’s charity ball. After an argument about hereditary peers Bryant had accidentally knocked an earl into a fishpond. His unrepentant response (‘They were both only ornamental’) did nothing to placate their host.

  The detectives met up again at London Bridge Station. It was rush hour, and the place was unbearably crowded. Bryant had a porter with him, pushing a huge cabin trunk on a trolley.

  ‘Good Lord, Arthur,’ May exclaimed, ‘how much stuff are you taking with you?’

  ‘I don’t have any actual weekend clothes,’ Bryant explained, ‘so I asked the amateur theatre group next door if I could borrow something. They’re running a Noël Coward season at the moment, so I was able to cadge some togs from Cavalcade. There’s a thing called a shooting jacket and a sort of horse-riding hat, along with some plus fours, spats, tails and a top hat from the 1935 London Gang Show. I haven’t actually looked to see what else is in there. I suppose you already own the right gear, what with your habit of going out.’

  ‘Look, there’s Hatton-Jones,’ said May, pointing through the crowds. ‘Come on.’

  ‘I haven’t been on an electric train yet.’ Bryant beckoned to the elderly porter, who tried to keep up. ‘I suppose they’ll be cleaning this place now.’

  He pointed up to the darkened station roof, its glass canopy still stained sepia from coal dust. The last steam train had made its final run, but the acrid smell of burning coal still hung in the air. It lurked in blackened corners, walkways and corridors, as if it had been absorbed into the bricks and tiles.

  Hatton-Jones flicked away his cigarette end. ‘Look out, here come Sooty and Sweep again. I thought you weren’t going to make it. I hope you bought first-class tickets.’

  ‘No, third, I’m afraid,’ said Bryant, secretly delighted to see his face fall.

  ‘On the way you can fill us in about Sir Charles Chamberlain,’ said May, ‘starting with why you’re turning him in.’

  They boarded and made their way along a corridor, finding some empty seats in a compartment acrid with stale smoke. Bryant insisted on giving Hatton-Jones a hand with his luggage. He didn’t trust their charge, and took the opportunity of checking out Monty’s case, which was peculiarly heavy.

  ‘Let me explain something to you,’ said Monty. He checked that the seat was clean before seating himself opposite Bryant and May. ‘I’m fifty-two years old. My parents were Victorians. I was born in one world war and survived another. When you wonder why I find you both so annoying, try to bear that in mind. Ask me what you will.’

  ‘How did you …’ Bryant began.

  ‘… meet Sir Charles Chamberlain?’ May completed their question.

  ‘We met at St Paul’s.’ Hatton-Jones watched the platform passing as the train pulled out.

  ‘What, the cathedral?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘The school. We both went to Brasenose and followed our fathers into the Foreign Office. Charlie and I were due to inherit our families’ respective estates, as generations had before us.’

  ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘We were hit by the cost of the war and rising death duties. Taxes became crippling, just as they had been after the Great War. Charlie’s grand family home had been designed by Robert Adam, but it was demolished.’

  ‘Why?’ asked May.

  ‘It would have cost too much to repair, and his family was stony broke. It was one of the reasons why Charlie decided to train as an architect. Our family home was sold to a foreigner.’ He virtually spat the word. ‘Britain’s great country houses are being knocked down at a rate of one a week, and this has been going on for the last fifteen years! The damned Labour government was determined to dismantle England’s upper echelon.’

  ‘So what did you do?’ asked May.

  ‘What could I do?’ Hatton-Jones sucked his moustache, remembering. ‘I went into business, invested in new technologies. Charlie completed his training and spent the next decade helping to rebuild Berlin. Not directly, of course – it was hard to get tenders without being part of the market there – but the post-war years were good to him. He told me that the future of building lay not in bricks but in concrete, and when he returned I
agreed to supply him with materials.’

  ‘So at this point you were obviously still friends,’ said Bryant.

  ‘I saw him in the season, of course, but yes, I suppose you could say we still had much in common.’ As the train clattered over the points, he allowed his Brylcreemed head to loll back against the seat. ‘Clubs, sporting events – and our wives were cousins.’

  ‘You say they were cousins.’

  ‘I’m divorced now. Charlie’s wife died in Germany. Three years ago we built the Harrington Centre for Applied Sciences in—’

  ‘—Coventry, yes, I know about it,’ said May. ‘The auditorium collapsed. Something about it having been built over a wartime bomb?’

  ‘That story was invented by Charlie’s public relations officer.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  Hatton-Jones looked out at the passing bomb-sites, factories, back gardens. ‘I don’t know for sure. Charlie had a friend on the council. To get the budget signed off, they needed to start work within days of approving the contract. The land survey hadn’t been completed but they decided to go ahead anyway. Charlie has a signature design he uses in all his buildings, a simplified cross-beam pattern that replaces interior structures. The external walls are pre-stressed and have these steel rods running through them so they can’t crack. You’ll find the same design in every one of his projects; it’s cheaper than putting up more internal walls. It’s innovative, but it’s also experimental. There was a new building in East London that had previously suffered bomb damage, so it was torn down and replaced with the design developed in Charlie’s practice. I think that’s what caused the collapse.’

  ‘Wait, you’re not talking about Ronan Point now,’ said May. ‘A block of maisonettes in Hackney subsided, killing two little girls and their parents. So you decided to turn him in.’

  ‘The Ronan Point designers will probably escape jail,’ said Hatton-Jones. ‘The DPP doesn’t want to see the same thing happen with Chamberlain.’