Bryant & May: England’s Finest is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Bantam Books Ebook Original
Copyright © 2019 by Christopher Fowler
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
BANTAM BOOKS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by Doubleday, a division of Transworld, a division of Penguin Random House UK, in 2019.
Ebook ISBN 9781984820525
Cover design: Victoria Allen
Cover art: Max Schindler
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
A Brief History of the Peculiar Crimes Unit
Bryant & May: Dramatis Personae
Private & Confidential Memo From: Raymond Land, Peculiar Crimes Unit To: All Readers
A Note from Mr Bryant’s Biographer
Bryant & May and the Seventh Reindeer
Bryant & May’s Day Off
Bryant & May and the Postman
Bryant & May and the Devil’s Triangle
Bryant & May and the Antichrist
Bryant & May and the Invisible Woman
Bryant & May and the Consul’s Son
Bryant & May Meet Dracula
Bryant & May and the Forty Footsteps
Janice Longbright and the Best of Friends
Bryant & May up the Tower
Bryant & May and the Breadcrumb Trail
Author’s Notes on the Cases
Murder on My Mind: An Afterword
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Also by Christopher Fowler
About the Author
Go where we may—rest where we will,
Eternal London haunts us still.
—Thomas Moore
A Brief History of the Peculiar Crimes Unit
Britain has a long history of ‘backroom boffins,’ men and women who came up with original ideas out of necessity. Napoleon’s nation of shopkeepers became a nation of entrepreneurs partly because there was no funding to be found, and because the twentieth-century wars demanded ingenuity.
Founded by Winston Churchill in 1939, the PCU was one of a number of new divisions designed to combat less tangible threats to the British way of life in wartime. In this hour of desperation, when most able-bodied men had been taken into the armed forces, seven experimental agencies were proposed by the government.
The first was the Central Therapy Unit, set up to help the bereaved and the newly homeless cope with the psychological stresses of bombardment. The unit closed after just eleven months because bombed-out residents continued turning to their neighbours for support rather than visiting qualified government specialists.
A propaganda unit called the Central Information Service (later to become the COI) was set up to provide positive, uplifting news items to national newspapers in order to combat hearsay and harmful disinformation spread about British overseas forces, and to fill the void left by the blanket news blackouts. It was based in Hercules Road, SE1, and was finally closed in 2011 due to government budget cuts.
A third unit based at the War Office employed a number of writers and artists, including novelists Ian Fleming and Dennis Wheatley, to project the possible outcome of a prolonged war with Germany, and to develop stratagems for deceiving the enemy. The most famous wartime deception created by this unit was Operation Mincemeat, in which the corpse of a dead Welsh tramp was disguised as a drowned Royal Marine officer, planted with false plans, and left for the Germans to find.
A subsidiary unit used members of the Royal Academy to develop new camouflage techniques for the British Navy after Churchill realized that the horizontal stripes painted on to warships made them more visible, not less. RA artists explained that the eye plays tricks, and that jagged verticals would be better for disguising fleets.
The most successful of the seven experimental units launched by Churchill in wartime was the cypher-breaking division based at Bletchley, where Alan Turing and his team cracked the Enigma Code, and in doing so laid the foundations for modern computer technology.
The Peculiar Crimes Unit is the only division that still survives. Its revised initiative was aimed at easing the burden on London’s overstretched Metropolitan Police Force. All of the units trained people of exceptional talent, employing most of them directly from school, some as young as fourteen. The PCU was created to tackle high-profile cases which had the capacity to compound social problems in urban areas, primarily in London. The affix ‘peculiar’ was originally meant in the sense of ‘particular.’ The government’s plan was that the new unit should handle those investigations deemed uniquely sensitive and a high risk to public morale. To head this division, several young and inexperienced students were recruited from across the capital.
The crimes that fell within the Unit’s remit were often of a politically sensitive nature, or were ones that could potentially cause social panics and public malaise. Its staff members were outsiders, radicals, academics and free-thinkers answerable only to the War Office, and later the Home Office. They had no social skills and no resources, but were free to solve problems in any manner that would work, no matter how unorthodox.
Which was how my father blew up our kitchen table.
He and his pals had developed an explosive paint that became unstable after it dried, and someone at the Unit had painted all the letters of the headline on his Evening News, so that when he threw it on to the table it exploded.
Needless to say, my long-suffering mother found our family life rather stressful.
The PCU remained in operation throughout the war and has continued in one form or another ever since that time. In the past two decades, reorganization of the national policing network has aimed at reducing the influence of individual units, and creating standardized practices operating from guidelines laid down for a national crime database, subject to performance league tables. Bryant and May made it known that they were not fans of this target-related system.
The PCU unofficially aided a number of high-ranking politicians in the past, and as a consequence has remained exempt from these measures. However, a series of high-profile embarrassments placed the Unit on a blacklist of Organizations of Potential Detriment, which means that the Unit is under surveillance by the Home Office and will be closed down if it fails to perform.
Bryant & May: Dramatis Personae
Raymond Land, Acting Temporary Unit Chief
The Unit chief kept his ‘Temporary’ title for years because he dreamed of escaping the PCU, but never quite managed to get away. Eventually he simply gave up and gave in. An obsessive, meticulous member of the General and Administrative Division, he graduated in Criminal Biology, but often missed the point of his investigations and was subsequently downgraded. This has detrimentally affected his pension. It’s said that Raymond ‘could identify a tree from its bark samples without comprehending the layout of the forest.’ He has the complaining gene, doesn’t understand his detectives (or why his wife, Leanne, left him) and ye
t occasionally shows some spine and comes through for his staff.
Arthur Bryant, Detective Chief Inspector
How old is Arthur? He’ll never tell, but then there’s not much about him that’s in any way reliable, least of all his memoirs. Elderly, bald, always cold, scarf-wrapped, a wearer of shapeless brown cardigans and overlarge Harris Tweed coats, Bryant is an enigma; a natural ignorer of rules, he’s well read, rude, bad-tempered, conveniently deaf and a smoker of disgusting pipe tobacco (and cannabis for his arthritis, so he says). He’s also a truly terrifying driver. He wears a hearing aid, has false teeth, uses a walking stick, and has to take a lot of pills. Once married (his wife fell from a bridge), he worked at various police stations and units around London, including Bow Street, Savile Row and North London Serious Crimes Division. He shares a flat with long-suffering Alma Sorrowbridge, his Antiguan landlady.
John May, Detective Chief Inspector
Born in Vauxhall, John is taller, fitter, more charming and personable than his partner. He’s technology-friendly, three years younger than Bryant, and drives a silver BMW. A melancholic craver of company, he leaves the TV on all the time when alone. He walks to Waterloo Bridge most nights with Bryant for ‘thinking time.’ A bit of a vain ladies’ man, he lives in a modernist, barely decorated flat in Shad Thames. He’s divorced; his daughter, Elizabeth, died in tragic circumstances and his estranged son, Alex, lives in Canada.
Janice Longbright, Operations Director
Janice is a career copper; her mother, Gladys, worked for the Unit. She models herself on 1950s and 1960s film stars, and long ago adopted a perversely glamorous appearance to counteract her lack of confidence. She’s smart and a lot tougher these days, but hates to show her true feelings. Dedicated to Arthur and John, she always puts work before her personal affairs. She lives a solitary life in her flat in Highgate, and keeps a house brick in her handbag for dealing with unwanted attention.
Dan Banbury, Crime Scene Manager/InfoTech
The Unit’s crime scene manager and IT expert is almost normal compared to his colleagues. He’s a sturdy, decent sort, married with a son, although he gets a little overenthusiastic when it comes to discussing crime scenes and can bore for England on the subject of inefficient Internet service providers and broadband speeds. Bryant exasperates him more than he can say.
Jack Renfield, Operations Director
This sturdy former Albany Street desk sergeant is a brisket-faced by-the-book sort of chap who used to be unpleasant and dismissive of the PCU. Blunt but honest, he tends to think with his fists, and had an ill-fated relationship with Janice Longbright. He blotted his copybook so badly in The Lonely Hour that he will never be the same.
Meera Mangeshkar, Detective Sergeant
The stroppy, argumentative, Kawasaki-driving DS comes from a poor South London Indian family, but beneath her cynical shell she has a decent heart. After years of resisting Colin Bimsley, her coworker, she is showing signs of giving in, not in an inappropriately creepy succumbing-to-a-stalker way but because he’s shown real loyalty and kindness to her.
Colin Bimsley, Detective Sergeant
The fit, fair-haired, clumsy cop is hopelessly in love with Meera, and suffers from Diminished Spatial Awareness, which can make him a liability on rooftops. His father was also a former PCU member. Colin trained at Repton Amateur Boxing Club for three years, and has an old-fashioned London temper useful for dealing with villains.
Giles Kershaw, Forensic Pathology
The Forensics/Social Sciences Liaison Officer is naturally curious, winning, well-spoken, Eton- and Oxford-educated. Promoted to the position of Chief Coroner at the St Pancras Mortuary, he has relatives in high places who can occasionally help the Unit out of tight spots.
Crippen, staff cat
Everyone thought he was male until he had kittens. Named after the first murderer to be caught by telegraph, she sadly used up the last of her nine lives in a recent adventure.
The Two Daves
A pair of Turkish builders who came to make the Peculiar Crimes Unit at King’s Cross habitable and stayed on as the 120-year-old building started falling to bits. They occasionally interfere in cases, much to Raymond Land’s annoyance.
Maggie Armitage
Good-natured Maggie runs the Coven of St James the Elder in Kentish Town, North London. The Grand Order Grade IV White Witch is permanently broke but lives to help others in need of her dubious services. She’s part of a network of oddballs, eccentrics and outsiders who help out the Unit from time to time.
* * *
—
Surrounding these main characters are what could loosely be described as Arthur Bryant’s ‘alternatives,’ consisting mainly of fringe activists, shamans, spiritualists, astronomers, astrologers, witches both black and white, artists of every hue from watercolour to con, banned scientists, barred medics, socially inept academics, Bedlamites, barkers, dowsers, duckers, divers and drunks, many of them happy to help the Unit for the price of a beer or a bed for the night.
Private & Confidential Memo From: Raymond Land, Peculiar Crimes Unit To: All Readers
Hullo there. As the chief of a London police unit that’s so often in the press these days (usually for the worst possible reasons), I’ve been asked by Arthur Bryant if I would pen a foreword for this, his second volume of missing cases. They were missing because he left the files on the floor where the two Daves had decided to stand their mini cement mixer, and it was only my quick thinking that saved the day, but Mr Bryant won’t tell you that because I never get credit for anything around here unless it goes wrong.
I consider myself a reasonable man. I always give my foreign coins to the homeless. I’ll put a lost glove on the railings. I pick up litter. I listen carefully to my bosses before ignoring them. When my wife, Leanne, asked for a divorce I gave up with good grace, although I did pop something through her flamenco instructor’s letter box. I agreed to her terms. I even threw in the Bang & Olufsen (it didn’t work but she could have got it fixed). But when Mr Bryant informed me that he was having another set of our investigations transcribed for the amusement of people who read popular fiction I took umbrage. We are a serious police unit, not a branch of WH Smith. People come to us for help, not a copy of Barely Legal and a Galaxy.
It wouldn’t be so bad if Mr Bryant just stuck to the facts, but he always embellishes. What starts out as a straightforward smash and grab usually ends up as some kind of baroque fairy tale. I suppose there’s not much mileage in simply describing a spotty nonce in Tommy Hilfiger setting fire to an ATM, but that’s real life for you: It’s boring. Furthermore, Mr Bryant casts himself in a good light and makes me look more stupid than I am. I only wish I had his partner’s patience. John May just sits there and smiles indulgently. I must find out what medication he’s on.
These days most of our work is sitting behind desks studying statistics. I prefer to deal with facts and figures. There’s nothing to break the monotony except Dan launching into one of his periodic rants about broadband speed, Janice coming round with chocolate digestives and one of the Daves going through a mains cable. Jack Ryan wouldn’t last five minutes.
That’s not the way old Bryant tells it, though. According to him it’s all last-minute escapes and surprise culprits. He describes his job the way he thinks it should be, or perhaps the way it is in his mind. He’s been ill lately and it’s not always possible to tell if he’s in King’s Cross or Narnia. His thought processes are peculiar. I once got up the nerve to ask him how old he was, and he said, ‘I’m all the ages I’ve ever been, so you could say I’m twenty, just several times over.’
He has a very flexible attitude towards time. He remembers things as if they were yesterday. Unfortunately, he doesn’t remember yesterday. Don’t get me wrong, he knows a hawk from a handshake when he wants to, but there’s a whole team helping him, it’s not a one-man show. I tell him there’s no ‘i’ in ‘Unit�
�; we all deserve a fair share of the blame.
Bryant wouldn’t be told, though, and hired some mad academic to write up twelve more cases that must have occurred in an alternative space/time continuum for all I recognize them. Of course, I know what’s happened. The success of the first collection has turned his head. He thought it would only sell about six copies but by my reckoning he shifted at least ten. I said to him: ‘There’s no need to embellish, just put them down as they actually happened so people can see how pointless our lives are.’
Anyway, here’s the result. Being an officer of the law answerable only to Her Majesty’s Government I could never advocate breaking the law, but I wouldn’t pay full price for this volume if you know what I mean.
A Note from Mr Bryant’s Biographer
Authenticity, that’s the key word. When I was writing my biography of Lord Nelson I spent the entire time at my desk dressed as Lady Hamilton. It’s important to capture the authenticity of the subject. Unfortunately, I had apparently walked out of the theatrical costumiers without paying again and was forced to earn some fast money to avoid social embarrassment, so I accepted the task of transcribing Mr Arthur Bryant’s memories of the cases he and his partner John May had tackled in their long careers.
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