England's Finest

by Christopher Fowler - Bryant

  * * *

  —

  ‘She’s been bandaged up and sent home; he’s still out cold,’ said May, hanging up his jacket. The morning sunshine showed the detectives’ office at its worst; dust lay thick across Bryant’s collection of rare, abstruse and mouldering books. Spores floated in the sunlight. ‘How did you get on?’

  ‘Maggie made as much sense as a cat in a bin,’ said Bryant, ‘so as there are too many incidents for you and I to handle by ourselves, I’ve asked everyone else to help.’

  ‘Raymond won’t like that,’ May warned. ‘He wants us to clear our backlog. Something to do with end-of-month targets.’

  ‘I don’t know why he stays on here.’ Bryant went to the mantelpiece and knocked his pipe out on the beak of a stuffed owl. ‘He’d be much happier with a nice little job in a local council, launching endless unworkable health-and-safety initiatives.’

  ‘You do realize you’re not going to find a connection between cases of arson, assault, road rage and a dog attack?’ May was amused but sympathetic. Stranger things had made their way into the PCU’s case files.

  Bryant’s azure eye held the gleam of determination. ‘Care for a small wager?’

  ‘Not money, I’m broke this month.’

  ‘Heavens, nothing so vulgar.’ Bryant rolled his eyes. ‘If I find a common culprit, you can buy me a book I’ve wanted for a little while. If I fail, I’ll treat you to dinner at the restaurant of your choice.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ May agreed, ‘but let’s set a time limit on it.’ May checked his old Timex. ‘It’s coming up for noon, so how about twenty-four hours from now?’

  ‘Deal.’ They shook hands and May found he had Jelly Baby sugar all over his fingers.

  * * *

  —

  Meera Mangeshkar drummed her bitten nails on the counter of the Harley Boys motorcycle centre. She had been waiting in the bike shop for a while now. As the manager wandered past, still ignoring her, she thrust her hand in front of his face. ‘Oi, you’ve got a customer.’

  ‘Yeah—well, I’m a bit busy right now, my love.’ According to the stitched lettering on his blue overalls, his name was Gary.

  Meera had brought her Kawasaki here to be serviced in the past, only using the place under sufferance because of its proximity to the Unit. ‘I’m not your love,’ she said, ‘I’m a police officer. It’s a bit sexist, calling this place “Harley Boys.” ’

  ‘What do you want me to call it—“Girl on a Motorcycle”?’

  ‘It’d be a start. You’ve been upsetting the customers again, I hear.’

  ‘What you talkin’ about?’ Gary grabbed a paper towel and smeared oil from a doughy cheek.

  ‘I heard somebody set fire to your bikes,’ said Meera.

  ‘Blimey, you’re a bit out of date. That was two months ago.’

  ‘Know who it was?’

  ‘I’ve got a good idea. Your lot never caught him, though.’

  ‘It wasn’t my lot. Tell me instead.’

  Gary threw the towel into a bin and came to the counter. ‘Some geezer wanted a full service on a KTM 390 Duke. Didn’t like the way it handled after he got it back so he chucked a paving stone through the window. Two days later he firebombed the bikes we had chained up outside. We lost the lot.’

  ‘If you know who it was, why wasn’t he arrested?’ asked Meera. The case file was still open.

  Gary evaded the question. ‘I’m sure it was him.’

  ‘The police didn’t agree with you, did they?’

  His swagger kept its edge. ‘My neighbour says she saw him, but he told the police he was in Cornwall, and could prove it.’

  ‘They must have checked out his story.’

  ‘Eliminated him from their inquiries, that’s what they said. He’d bought petrol in Exeter around the time it happened. But I know,’ he said with the conviction of someone voting without quite knowing why. ‘We all know it was him.’

  * * *

  —

  Colin Bimsley was at Easton House, a 1950s council block in Finsbury, meeting with Shazeen Mirial, a middle-aged woman in a blue silk hijab. It took Colin a few moments to realize that she was blind.

  ‘Mrs Foster was very kind to me,’ she explained. ‘She collected me from the RNIB every other Friday afternoon.’

  The Royal National Institute for the Blind was situated in nearby Bloomsbury. The roads around it were busy day and night, so many of its visitors were collected by friends. ‘We usually went to the Ladykillers Café for tea afterwards,’ Shazeen explained. ‘Mrs Foster was always waiting for me. She was so reliable. I finished with my doctor and it was a lovely afternoon, so we decided to go to a different café with outside tables, where I could feel the sun on my face. We got to the end of Britannia Street and—I don’t know what happened.’ She lowered her head at the memory. ‘She should have stopped but she carried on, right into the busy road. I called out to her. I could feel the kerb and hear the bus coming, but she was a bit deaf and didn’t answer me. She went under the bus and was killed instantly.’ She wiped her eyes. ‘So awful. So unlike her.’

  * * *

  —

  The full PCU team gathered in the new operations room with the exception of Raymond Land, who was in his office reading Caravan Monthly, and the two Daves, who were in the basement doing something illegal with a universal flush valve.

  Arthur Bryant stood before them with his tea mug and a bourbon. ‘Thirteen separate incidents in just a few weeks,’ he said. ‘Do we have any common causal factors at all?’

  ‘All the incidents took place between eleven A.M. and three-thirty P.M.,’ said Dan Banbury, checking his notes.

  ‘So, daylight attacks. Any organized crime in the area?’

  ‘Quite a lot,’ Janice Longbright replied. ‘Two big male gangs, both Asian teens, one female gang, mixed-race, all associated with the two council blocks behind Britannia Street.’

  ‘Why’s that, do you think?’ asked Colin.

  ‘Purely sociological,’ said Longbright. ‘The flats were built to house young Asian couples back in the early nineties. The idea was that they’d start families and move out to larger properties, but they got caught in the economic downturn and couldn’t move. Their kids grew into teenagers, living in flats that were never designed to house four, five or six people, so they ended up hanging out in the communal areas to stop themselves from getting into arguments with their parents, and, as we all know, that leads to territorial disputes.’

  ‘Their wars are purely internecine, yes?’ asked May.

  ‘Looks like it,’ Colin replied.

  ‘So we rule them out. What else?’

  ‘The number of burglaries isn’t any higher than the city average,’ said Longbright, ‘but there have been a lot of street thefts lately, maybe four times that of the surrounding area, mostly mobiles taken by kids on bikes, but also quite a few lifted wallets. There haven’t been any arrests yet. The kids get rid of phones too quickly, but the Mount Pleasant police are on to it.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘Mr Bryant, why should they be connected at all?’ asked Colin, raising a hand.

  ‘Because of this,’ said Bryant, unfurling a sheet of graph paper and pinning it to the old school blackboard he had rescued from a rubbish dump. (He had binned the expensive whiteboard Raymond Land had purchased because he couldn’t stick drawing pins in it.)

  His staff stared at the mishmash of coloured lines in mystification. ‘What are we looking at, Mr B.?’ asked Banbury.

  ‘These are all of the unusual incidents that have been reported,’ Bryant explained. ‘Bear in mind there may be others we don’t know about. This spike here’—he tapped the blackboard with a pencil—‘shows when and where the highest number of incidents occur, and it’s quite specific: just after one P.M. on a weekday. But there
are significant gaps. Look, nothing on certain weeks, here, here and here.’

  ‘Yeah, but there’s probably a simple reason for that,’ said Colin.

  ‘Pray enlighten us, Mr Bimsley.’

  ‘There are a lot more office workers in this area than residents. Look at all the sandwich bars. They come out on the street at lunch hour. And maybe the gaps correspond to school holidays, when they take time off to be with their kids.’

  ‘An intriguing answer, but then why don’t attacks rise during the evening rush hour in winter, when it’s dark earlier?’

  ‘You’re right, it makes no sense,’ said May. ‘The RNIB is just up the road and yet none of the victims are blind. Surely a blind person is easier to rob than a sighted one? The woman who went under the bus was sighted, and her blind companion stopped on the kerb.’

  ‘As I’m sure you know,’ said Bryant, ‘chaos theory is about the butterfly effect. It’s the branch of mathematics that deals with complex systems whose behaviour is sensitive to small changes in conditions, so that something seemingly innocuous can have surprising consequences.’

  ‘Bryant, can I have a word with you?’ Raymond Land had been standing in the doorway and had, he decided, heard quite enough. ‘Would you kindly stop filling my employees’ heads with all this conspiracy-theory claptrap?’

  ‘They’re quite capable of thinking for themselves, Raymondo,’ said Bryant cheerily. ‘I’m not infecting them. These ideas were around five hundred years before Christ. Thales of Miletus theorized about why changes occur in things. Zeno elucidated the nature of paradox. Empedocles rejected the presence of a void. Socrates—’

  ‘I don’t care what a bunch of Italians got up to before telly was invented, I want you to stick to the bloody facts. There’s no connection between these crimes. London’s a crowded place and there are some sketchy geezers about.’

  ‘Is that it? The sum total of your understanding about the nature of causality in modern society? Some sketchy geezers? What about usually dependable people stepping under buses? Slashing their wrists on broken glass?’

  ‘Accidents,’ said Land dismissively. ‘How many people use Oyster cards on the London Underground? If they all turned up in King’s Cross Station at eight-fifteen on a Monday morning there’d be chaos, except that the law of averages prevents it from happening. OK, sometimes the station has to close because of overcrowding and then you get a spike in the graph, but there’s nothing woo-woo about it.’ He waved his hand at the street beyond the window. ‘What we have out there is managed chaos. It’s the best we can ever hope for.’

  ‘Hoping’s not good enough,’ said Bryant. ‘I want to do something about it. Isn’t that what we’re here for, to try and make a difference?’

  ‘We’re here to keep our jobs by shifting investigations off the books as fast as possible,’ Land replied. ‘You’ve got nothing, Bryant, so close it down. This is not an official investigation, do you understand? The Met’s bringing an important case in tonight and I want the decks clear.’

  * * *

  —

  Bryant and May were back at the junction of King’s Cross Road and Britannia Street. The traffic in London now moved more slowly than a Victorian horse and cart, despite the cash-raising congestion charge that had been imposed on drivers. It wasn’t a corner that pedestrians lingered on. There was nothing attractive to be seen, and the warm late-summer air was filled with exhaust fumes.

  ‘There’s a common cause, I’m sure of it,’ said Bryant, breathing through his scarf. ‘Statistics don’t just jump like this for no reason. Someone living here knows something. They must have seen something.’

  ‘I don’t know, Arthur. You hardly ever see the same people twice around here. It’s a transitory area.’ May looked up at the bare, blank windows of the newly built first and second floors. ‘I’m not saying there isn’t a link, just that it’s perhaps not as exotic as you’d like to imagine it is. I’ve been reading up on psychogeography, too. There are usually physical reasons why neighbourhoods retain certain characteristics. Hedgerows are replaced by paths and roads are filled in with houses, and if they’re in low-lying areas water gets in and damp rooms cause infant mortality, and the memories of dead babies give rise to the creation of ghost stories.’

  ‘My goodness, you’ve been paying attention to me after all,’ said Bryant, astonished. ‘I would never have guessed.’

  May gave a shrug. ‘I suppose if you hang around with a flat-earther for long enough you start thinking the horizon’s wrong.’

  ‘I’m not sure I care for your analogy. But the problem here is an odd one, isn’t it, because Britannia Street is at the top of a hill—a low-gradient one, but a hill nevertheless.’

  ‘There’s no mythology you can hang on this that will explain a string of unrelated incidents, Arthur. Perhaps you should just let this one go.’

  ‘I was going to say, before you so rudely interrupted me, that there is a reason why hills are special. They’re often sacred sites because you can see dawn from them, and the arrival of the sun is a sacred moment for pagans. Pentonville, just up the road from here, was one such site. A “penton” was once a head, by which I mean that it was a kind of rounded oval hill roughly in the shape of a human head, man-made and probably designed to point to the sunrise. At least, that’s the theory. And on such a hill you would have a sacrificial stone. Pen is a Celtic word meaning “high point.” We get the words “pinnacle” from it, and “penny,” named because the coin has a head on it.’

  ‘So pagans are sacrificing victims to the sun, only during their lunch hour, is that it? I have to say that of all the lunatic ideas you have ever come up with, this is by far the silliest. Look, we’ve no leads, no motives, no suspects. Your motorcyclist had an ironclad alibi, and there’s no one else to consider.’

  ‘Then we’ll do it the hard way,’ said Bryant stubbornly. ‘We’ll do door-to-doors.’

  ‘Raymond will go bananas if he finds out.’

  ‘Not if we start right now,’ said Bryant, checking his watch. ‘It’s lunchtime, peak activity hour. If we call the others this minute, we can still all get back to the Unit before the new case comes in.’

  The staff’s respect for Bryant was enough to encourage them to surrender their lunch breaks. Joining the detectives at the junction of Britannia Street and King’s Cross Road, they split up and recorded conversations with those who lived and worked in the four buildings. Few of the residents were at home, so they ended up talking mostly to shop workers.

  Later that afternoon Janice Longbright gathered their findings into a single spreadsheet. After Raymond Land had left the building (on the stroke of 6 P.M.) the detectives pinned a copy to the common-room blackboard and studied it. Bryant had brought along a box of old books, none of which seemed to have any relevance to the problem, and sat sifting through them, barely paying attention to the proceedings.

  ‘This theft is odd,’ said May. ‘Three weeks ago a young woman stopped an older man in the street and stole his laptop from under his arm. Two old dears in the building opposite saw it happen.’ He held up a photograph of the girl. ‘Paula Machin, a twenty-seven-year-old registered heroin user. She has a string of priors, mostly antisocial stuff, and a couple of attempted thefts. This time she was successful.’

  ‘Why is it odd?’ asked Bryant, looking up from his book and peering over the tops of his trifocals.

  ‘Well, look at her. Five foot nothing, arms like bits of wet string. The old ladies said that the fellow she stopped just stood there and let her take it from him.’

  ‘Perhaps she propositioned him and he was still considering his answer,’ said Meera.

  ‘Maybe. He never reported the theft.’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ Bryant raised a hand. When his forehead creased in thought you could wedge an envelope in the folds. ‘Do any of those buildings have air conditioning?�
��

  Now it was May’s turn to look puzzled. ‘I don’t know. I could find out.’

  ‘And while you’re at it, can you check for incidents on the same dates last year? Oh, and get me weather forecasts for every day with an incident?’

  ‘There’s something going on behind that wrinkly brow of yours, isn’t there?’ said May suspiciously.

  ‘Don’t blame me,’ said Bryant. ‘You’re the one who came up with the idea.’

  ‘What idea?’

  ‘Also, I was thinking of the Bermuda Triangle,’ Bryant replied obliquely as he packed away his books. ‘I have to go back there tomorrow at around one.’

  ‘OK, I’ll come with you,’ said May.

  ‘Not necessary, old thing. Someone has to be here for Raymond’s new case. I need to take someone else. I need an expert.’

  May was a little miffed. ‘Who?’ he asked.

  ‘One of the two Daves.’ Bryant put a lid on the box and stumped off to his bookshelves.

  * * *

  —

  ‘Well, this is a treat, Mr B.,’ said Dave Two, the Dave with the gigantic black moustache that made him look like a cross between Super Mario and a Ukrainian Cossack. ‘I tried to offer my advice on one of your investigations only last week, but Mr Land threatened to have me deported.’

  ‘It’s not that we don’t value your expertise,’ Bryant explained. ‘We’d just rather have it about U-bends. Better suited to your training, no?’

  ‘I used to be with the Turkish police,’ said Dave Two. ‘That was how I learned how to use copper wire and lead piping. It’s a joke,’ he added hastily. ‘I make joke.’

  ‘Forgive me if I use your expertise in a field other than crime-fighting,’ said Bryant. ‘Woodwork, perhaps. Come along with me.’