England's Finest

by Christopher Fowler - Bryant

  ‘If anyone comes in asking for this, give them our number.’ Colin handed Bill his PCU card.

  ‘We know you guys,’ he said, showing his brother the card. ‘We own the antiques shop next door. I sold Mr Bryant some bits and pieces just the other day.’

  ‘What sorts of bits and pieces?’

  ‘A rifle-range target, a ventriloquist’s dummy and a grate.’

  ‘Why am I not surprised?’ muttered Meera.

  ‘Has this girl done something wrong?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Why?’ Colin countered. ‘Did she look the type?’

  ‘Frankly,’ replied Bill as his brother nodded vigorously, ‘yes.’

  ‘Let’s get back.’ Colin held the door open for Meera. ‘We can’t go any further without some help.’

  PCU Debrief—Unedited Transcript

  Dan Banbury The CCTV above the bus stop on Pancras Road recorded the girlfriend leaving the framers on July the sixteenth, heading in the direction of Market Road. We’re trying to trace her whereabouts but we don’t have much to go on.

  Meera Mangeshkar You have her full name.

  Banbury I’ve had no luck so far so I’m trying other spellings. We’ve got one receipt signature that’s open to interpretation. There are five postcodes around here: N7, N19, NW5, N1 and now N1C. Do you know how many residents aren’t on the electoral register?

  John May And there’s no one left at Market Road who might recall seeing her.

  Colin Bimsley The cops cleared them all away, and there are no residential properties on that stretch, just football pitches. Meera and I figured they had to eat, so we took the screen grab and the poster to the nearest supermarkets on Camden Road. There are five minimarts on that stretch. One guy recalled seeing her around the same time she collected the picture.

  May Really? Why would he remember her?

  Bimsley She used to come in regularly. He had to write the customer’s name on the coffee cup, and saw that she had a red rose tattooed on her upper arm. It’s a kind of vegan-organic place called Butterfly, the only place like it in the area—a lot of the musicians go there.

  Arthur Bryant So much for rock ’n’ roll. Have they all gone gluten-free now?

  Mangeshkar We’re running a check on ink parlours but it’ll take some time. There are dozens, and a red rose is one of the most common tats.

  Bryant Anything else?

  Mangeshkar That’s all we have at the moment.

  Bryant Because you’re going about it backwards.

  Banbury Sorry, Mr B.?

  Bryant Are there any biscuits? Something I can dunk. Not Lincolns, they fall apart. Something a little more robust, Bourbons, perhaps. Oh, wait, I have these.

  Janice Longbright paused her recorder while the Unit’s most senior detective emptied a bag of Barratt’s Shrimps, Love Hearts and Milk Gums all over the table.

  May Perhaps we could steer you back onto the conversational highway, Arthur?

  Bryant Jack, how did the US consul seem to you?

  Jack Renfield Angry. Impatient. We only saw him for a moment.

  Janice Longbright He didn’t want anything to do with us.

  Bryant So how would you proceed?

  Renfield What, me? I’d take a good look at how Jericho Flint spent his time. Maybe he found himself caught up in something he couldn’t get out of.

  Bryant I’m sure that was the first thought to pass through his father’s mind. But there’s nothing on record about Jericho Flint, is there? No online profile, no political affiliations?

  Longbright Not that we’ve found so far. Of course, they could easily have been removed.

  Bryant During the time Howard Flint’s team had the case they filed a coroner’s report plus all their findings on us, the victim and the circumstances surrounding his death. The consul’s wife told you their investigation is not subject to UK jurisdiction. So what do you do? You immediately follow in their footsteps.

  Longbright You’re saying we should start somewhere else?

  Bryant I’m saying you should do what this Unit does best. Go with the gut instead of the brain. They used deductive logic, technology and common sense.

  May Not weapons that usually exist in our arsenal.

  Bryant I assume they studied the boy’s movements and got to his friends. They may even have tracked his final hours. Yet they still came up with nothing.

  Renfield We don’t know that.

  Longbright We wouldn’t have been given the case otherwise, Jack. They’d have informed the Home Office that the investigation was satisfactorily concluded.

  Bryant Exactly. So there’s no point in trying to reproduce their investigation without the same resources. You need to start at the other end. What’s the key thing we know about the consul and his son?

  Longbright They fell out.

  Bryant Why?

  Longbright Personal differences, I imagine.

  Bryant Opposing ideologies, really? I had nothing in common with my parents but we stayed close.

  Renfield But a Republican consul and an artistic dropout? The old man must have been disappointed. Maybe he didn’t approve of the girlfriend.

  Bryant Forget the friends. Forget the politics. Start with the girl. She’s the only one we may be able to find.

  May You won’t get very far. I already ran some online searches. Every single piece of information on the case can be traced back to a central government source. Neither the consul nor his wife have a Facebook page or a Twitter account. The son had both for a while when he first arrived but they were deactivated long ago.

  Bryant The government only wants an official version out there. That’s why we need a new approach. I appreciate that this is your baby. John and I won’t interfere in any way. I don’t want to influence you. Cherchez la femme.

  Longbright How?

  Bryant An attractive young girl always has friends. Find them.

  * * *

  —

  Bryant stood on the staircase leading to the basement of the Ladykillers Café. The entrance to the cocktail bar was lit with crimson neon handwriting: ‘The Wilberforce.’

  He wandered in, sucking at his unlit pipe, and took a look around. There were red leather bar stools, framed 1950s posters of Ealing comedies and a still of Mrs Wilberforce herself, Katie Johnson, posing with her parrot, General Gordon.

  A scenario was forming in his head. Soon after midnight on 10 August, Jericho Flint had left his van on Market Road. Perhaps he had arranged to meet Rose Clavi. If they were looking for somewhere to drink, their best option would have been to head south towards King’s Cross. Here they would have had the choice of at least six bars and two private members’ clubs.

  Bryant seated himself on a bar stool and swung it around. The posters and photographs of King’s Cross in 1955 passed him again and again. The years fell away. King’s Cross had had hidden bars and clubs in the basements of its buildings for as long as he could remember. Bottled beers, cheap gins, the spoor of perfume and tobacco, Matt Monro and Kathy Kirby on the jukebox, the smell of urine and Dettol wafting in from tiled toilets.

  The decades drifted. The stools became vacant as barflies died off, décor changed, the jukebox vanished. The bumble of banter was etched into the walls: Macmillan, Wilson, Heath and Thatcher; Man U, Arsenal, Chelsea and Spurs; the Maltese, the Krays, the Great Train Robbery; Tommy Steele, Alma Cogan, Frank Ifield and Dusty Springfield. He was cursed with a memory for ephemera: the times and places, the characters and their conversations. So vivid was the past that the present seemed insubstantial and ghostly by comparison.

  He helped himself to a shot of rum and downed it in one. He tried to imagine a young man with shaggy blond hair perched on the next bar stool.

  Jericho Flint, estranged from his wealthy, powerfu
l parents, painting surreal scenes of a London that never was, in love with the dark-eyed retro-hippy Rose, who collected his frames and stayed over in his cramped VW van until one night—what?

  What brought you here? he wondered.

  He slid from the stool and walked out into the corridor. There were three doors: two for the toilets and a third which led to the basement that connected to the PCU.

  The basement floor was wet with river water. Between the stacks of yellow plastic crates was a cleared path leading to the door that opened to the Unit’s stairs. There before him stood the stone casket.

  He thought about the contours and patterns of the water-riven neighbourhood. The Canal Museum was just two streets away, situated further along the course of an underground stream. In its basement was a circular stone ice cave, built in the mid-nineteenth century. Everyone who visited the basement commented on the lowered temperature. Barges had come from Norway to deliver vast slabs of ice via the canal system to Carlo Gatti, the Swiss-Italian who first brought ice cream to London. The wharf in the next street was named in his honour.

  The stone box that stood before him was not a sarcophagus but an ice holder, unusual anywhere else but once ubiquitous in this part of North London, the first place in the city to have fresh ice delivered.

  To reach the box required passing through three doors: the main entrance to the Ladykillers Café, the door to the Wilberforce cocktail bar and the downstairs basement door. But it was still a more likely route than getting past the locked entrance and video identification system of the PCU.

  Someone knew about the ice box. They had drawn Flint down here, killed him and shoved him inside it, knowing that there was little chance of anyone finding him. The cold would delay the body’s decomposition.

  The café and club were part of the new sleaze-free, upmarket King’s Cross. The days of protection rackets, bent coppers and working girls had passed. The cocktail bar held ironically hip knitting parties, for God’s sake. He had met the owners and spoken with them. Their lease for the premises had been paid from the Bank of Mum and Dad. They rarely visited their own property. But what about the managers? They were there every evening.

  There were only two ways to lure a man into the dark: by force or deception. Suddenly it became obvious that he needed to find the girlfriend, Rose. A scenario came into focus: a betrayal, a smile in the shadows, a desperate girl using a gullible dropout to get herself out of trouble, a situation that resulted in Jericho Flint losing his life.

  The Wilberforce’s bar manager would live by night and know all the regulars. Rose Clavi was a regular; she had to be in order to know about the ice box in the basement. Everything depended on finding her.

  * * *

  —

  As the wet streets cleared in King’s Cross, the lights of the PCU burned on beyond midnight. Raymond Land was wandering from room to room stifling yawns, a habit that spread like measles.

  In the common room Meera Mangeshkar had made vast amounts of chai and Turkish coffee to keep everyone awake. Bimsley was doing stretches at the window to try and stop his back from seizing up. Renfield and Longbright were staring at laptop screens that had now switched to night mode. The others were hourly adding to the progress boards that stood against the rear wall of the common room. Only the two Daves were missing.

  ‘Where is she?’ asked Jack Renfield, scrolling through onscreen pages of missing persons. ‘Rose Clavi. It’s not a common name.’

  ‘There’s a mid-length haircut called a Clavi-Cut online, but that’s about all,’ said Janice, sitting back and repinning her hair. ‘We shouldn’t be relying on Google searches. We should have the same resources as the Met’s MIT.’

  ‘Bees,’ said Bryant, looking for somewhere to bash out his pipe bowl. ‘That’s all I’ve got. Hoplitis claviventris. They’re known to nest in rose bushes. Common to the North of England and some of the Midlands. They’re univoltine. Rather like my downstairs neighbour.’ He spotted blank looks. ‘They produce offspring every year.’

  ‘You think she’s named after an insect?’ Banbury scoffed. ‘Sorry, Mr B., think you’re barking up the wrong tree.’

  ‘Barking is right,’ muttered Raymond Land, sticking a tube of Vicks up his left nostril. ‘There must be something else on Jericho Flint. Good God, the Yanks can’t have buried everything. Any luck with the bar manager?’

  ‘He left in October,’ Longbright replied. ‘Kharmel Hunter. He was there for seven months. Paid off the books, cash in hand. He’s dodgy.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked May.

  Longbright ran a nail down the screen. ‘A history of small-scale trouble, some odd gaps in his timeline, a couple of suspect associates. Jobs include debt collection, bouncer, security.’ She added him to the list as a Person of Interest.

  * * *

  —

  The night was mild despite the drifting rain that glossed the neon-crazed pavements. They sat beneath the red and green striped awning of Simmons Bar on the Cally Road as Meera came outside with three bottles of pale ale.

  ‘Colin was telling me that when you first turned up you were meant to be undercover, but he forgot to keep it a secret,’ said Abi, the engineer from the Vinyl Café.

  ‘Yeah, he has the honesty gene.’ Meera shot him a look. ‘We have another lead on Jericho Flint and wondered if it might trigger any more memories. We hear he had a girlfriend called Rose. Young, hippyish, long dark hair. She probably stayed in the camper van with him. Did you ever see someone like that?’

  Abi thought for a minute. ‘She came into the Vinyl Café with him a couple of times. Very pretty. They had matching tattoos. I remember thinking they must be in love. They were very attentive towards each other.’

  ‘What about after August the tenth, when Jericho was last seen? Did you see her again?’

  ‘She came in alone once or twice, just for lunch. She kept pretty much to herself.’

  ‘Can you remember exactly when?’

  ‘I don’t know, late autumn, November maybe. She was in winter clothes but it was still mild out.’

  ‘Can you think back and try to remember any conversation at all that passed between you?’ Colin asked. ‘What did she order?’

  Abi took a slug of ale. ‘A beer. Maybe a salad. I don’t remember anything else.’

  ‘Hey, Abi.’ A slender Japanese boy with tied-back dreadlocks was standing beside their table. Unable to stay still, he shifted constantly as if responding to the music in his head.

  ‘Hey.’ Abi didn’t seem pleased to see him. She turned to the others. ‘This is Finchley. He works in the Vinyl Café.’

  ‘Finchley?’ Colin repeated.

  ‘People call me Finch.’

  ‘Where’d you get that from?’

  ‘My mother went into labour on the platform of Finchley Central tube station.’

  ‘Blimey, it’s a good job she didn’t drop you at Cockfosters.’

  ‘I remember the girl. The one you’re talking about.’ Finchley hopped from one foot to the other, drumming his fingers on the edge of the table. ‘She had a rose on her upper arm, yeah?’

  ‘You don’t know what we’re talking about, Finch,’ said Abi.

  ‘Yeah I do.’ Finchley smiled at the memory. ‘She was outside the café when I closed up one night. You’d gone home, Abi.’ He turned to Colin and Meera. ‘She was upset about something. I thought she might need someone to talk to.’

  ‘What was the problem?’ asked Colin.

  ‘She’d just had a big bust-up with her boyfriend. I guess it must have been a really big fight ’cause there were drops of blood on her dress. She said they were his.’

  ‘Do you know what the fight was about?’

  ‘She said she was leaving him. Something about some pictures.’

  ‘He was an artist,’ said Colin.

 
The bar door swung open, releasing a gale of laughter from within. ‘I walked with her a little way, trying to be sympathetic and that,’ said Finchley. ‘I asked her if she wanted to go for a drink and she said no.’

  ‘That was sensitive of you, Finch, trying to pull her while she was distraught. I guess she was lucky you didn’t pour chloroform into a Kleenex.’ Abi folded her arms in annoyance.

  ‘She didn’t say where this fight had taken place?’ asked Meera.

  ‘No, but it must have happened somewhere near because she pointed back, over her shoulder.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘I guess it was August because I remember a lot of the studio engineers who use the café were away on holiday.’

  ‘Is there anything else you can recall about her?’

  Finchley shook his head. ‘Do you know how many customers we get in there? There’s no time to stop and hold a conversation. She seemed kind of paranoid. It put me off her a bit. You know when girls—’

  ‘Careful,’ warned Abi.

  ‘Yeah, well, I left her at the corner on York Way.’

  ‘And was that the last you saw of her?’ Meera asked.

  ‘No, there was one more time. It must have been just before Christmas. She was in that organic place, Butterfly. She looked great, very together.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Dressed like a grown-up, like she was in a career as opposed to a job? I said hi but she left. I guess she had to be somewhere.’ Finchley slapped at the table, beating out a rhythm.

  ‘So her boyfriend vanishes off the face of the earth and she looks radiant,’ said Meera, catching Colin’s eye.

  ‘She couldn’t have done it,’ said Colin. ‘Getting a body into a stone coffin—a strong bloke could barely manage it.’

  ‘Then maybe she had an accomplice,’ said Meera.

  * * *

  —

  Back at the Unit, Renfield and Longbright were having no luck. All they had on the Flint family were a couple of suspiciously tidy CVs, a handful of inconsequential criticisms from political journalists, nothing remotely libellous. ‘They’re holding the party line,’ said Janice. ‘The whole thing feels stage-managed. Have you ever googled Madonna? You get exactly the same thing. Most of the results have been removed under European data protection law. How can we find out anything about their relationship with their son?’