Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart

by Christopher Fowler - Bryant

  It was hard for Romain to recall the exact order of events after that. Shirone stumbled into the torn-up earth, twisting her ankle in the gap between the ground and the opened coffin. Romain tried to grab her and failed, knocked aside by the onlooker who had reached out an arm towards him. At some point he remembered seeing the raised lid, the muddy pit, a sliver of moonlight on the empty polished casket.

  He saw the man standing above him, middle-aged, with greying hair and occluded eyes, clearly and irrevocably dead, dressed in his best black business suit, his arm still rising, the claw of his right hand extended as if to clutch at the living. Then the moon was unveiled from the clouds, highlighting his silvered pupils, his distended marbling flesh. The arm had risen high to point into the night sky, as if to transmit some dire warning.

  Romain could not believe what he was seeing. It was as if all the horror films he had been allowed to stay up late for as a child had rolled into one and come suddenly true. There, in the pale patch of moonlight, a cadaver had risen from the grave and was lurching stiffly through the penumbral gloom. The only way it could be any cooler would be if—

  And then that happened too. The corpse spoke to him. He heard its grunted command and followed its pointing hand. And there in the night above him lay the answer.

  As a luxurious sense of panic began to burn through his stoned mellowness, Romain’s senses registered everything at once: the overpowering smell of decay; the body lurching towards him from the grave with its outstretched arm; the putrid sighing of breath. Shirone was still yelling loudly enough to wake the dead single-handedly, and now there was a bright square of bathroom light shining between the branches of the trees, high above the wall against which the row of ancient headstones leaned, in the little park where no one had stirred from beneath the ground in the last three hundred years.

  The body tottered forward and landed face down in the earth. Suddenly Romain’s excitement seemed absurd, and all he could think of now was that he had been tricked and had missed his best chance with Shirone, and that even if they remained friends after this she would never let him touch her again, because a stupid reanimated corpse had spoiled it all.

  He glanced back at the dead body, inelegantly sprawled in the dirt, and grabbed Shirone’s hand, which only made her scream more fiercely, so he let it go. She ran for the gate and virtually vaulted it. He followed her out on to the street, but then decided to go back, angered by his flight from something so strange and exciting.

  ‘Wait here a sec,’ he told her. He needed to take another look.

  2

  CEMETERIES AND GRAVEYARDS

  St George’s Gardens looked smaller and friendlier in the misted warm start to the following day. Euterpe, the Muse of Instrumental Music, stood with her arms folded in a small circular bed of vivid geraniums, her stonework a little the worse for wear. A granite obelisk rose between weathered tombstones, chill to the touch even after three days of warmth. Here, Anna, the favourite daughter of Richard Cromwell, the second Lord Protector of England, lay beneath a modest tomb of worn slabs, unloved and overlooked by all except the ladies of the Bloomsbury in Bloom Society, who tended the graves and freshened the flowers because they had time on their hands and preferred cultural tranquillity to the push and bellow of London streets.

  The burial ground was indeed three centuries old, and had exits into three different roads, yet it suffered from the peculiar indifference of Londoners towards their green spaces, remaining virtually invisible to those who passed it. An awkward shape and of no fixed purpose, it led nowhere and did nothing except provide a green lacuna in the grey-brown landscape. Luckily, even an oasis as forgotten as this had its guardian angels.

  One of them was at the graveside now. Jackie Quinten was a natural nurturer, a tender of graves and planter of daffodils who rode an orange hand-painted bicycle around Bloomsbury and always kept several packets of seeds and a trowel in her wicker basket. Unable to improve the temperament of her sour-spirited husband in the years before he expired, she had taken to ameliorating the city. But as she pushed her bicycle through St George’s Gardens at 8.15 a.m., she was surprised to find a green nylon tent erected between the pathway and the far wall. Surely homeless people weren’t living in the little park now?

  As she studied it in puzzlement, one flap of the tent opened and a sandy, cropped head poked out. ‘Sorry, love, this is off-limits to the public,’ it said in an accent Jackie nailed somewhere between South London and Kent.

  ‘Mr Banbury?’ she enquired. ‘We’ve met before, I think.’ She squinted, venturing a little closer. ‘I’m a friend of the gardens. I mean I work here as a volunteer. I know Mr Bryant, your boss.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Dan Banbury non-committally, his eyes darting about. ‘He’s not with you, is he?’

  ‘Why no, I haven’t seen him since – let me see, something to do with a disappearing pub. He was looking for a murderer.’

  ‘He’s always looking for a murderer. He’s supposed to be here. I told him eight o’clock. He only lives up the road in Harrison Street. You’d think he could manage that.’

  ‘Yes, I heard he’d moved into the neighbourhood,’ said Jackie, glancing about. ‘Has something happened?’ She indicated the tent.

  Banbury thought for a moment. If he lied, she would hear about it soon enough on the news, and he didn’t like to undermine public confidence. ‘We’re not really sure yet,’ he said finally. ‘I’m hoping it’s just some kind of a bad-taste joke. Are you here a lot?’

  ‘Most days. It’s a shortcut for me.’

  ‘When did you last come through?’

  ‘Last night, at about seven o’clock.’

  ‘Did you see anything unusual here?’

  ‘What do you mean by unusual? Sometimes there are some very thin students practising juggling and fire-eating, but that’s not unusual, is it? Not these days.’

  ‘Undesirables hanging about,’ said Banbury.

  ‘Oh no, this is a nice quiet neighbourhood.’ Jackie noticed that Banbury had pulled the tent-flap tightly shut behind him and closed the Velcro fastening.

  A crackle of static brought an absurdly young police constable out from the prickly clutches of a holly bush. He listened to his headset and called across. ‘He’s on his way, sir.’

  ‘There used to be junkies and drunks,’ she continued, ‘but they were moved away when the gardens were restored. Now the gates are locked at dusk, although the railings are low enough for anyone to climb over if they had a mind for it. It may not look like it has much to offer, but there’s a lot of history buried beneath this little patch of land.’ She looked up as an elegantly dressed man with neatly combed silver hair and an overcoat of navy wool marched towards them.

  ‘Ah,’ said Jackie, hastily turning her bicycle, ‘I think I’d better make myself scarce. That’s Mr Bryant’s partner, isn’t it? I’m sure he doesn’t like people getting in his way when he’s trying to work.’

  Mrs Quinten knew that whenever John May appeared, Arthur Bryant could not be far behind, and he would not appreciate finding her here. He sensed that she wanted to mother him and feed him up, and wriggled out of her clutches like a fractious cat whenever he could. Guiltily, she walked her bicycle away.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here at least, John,’ said Banbury, looking down at the tent. ‘But I’m afraid it’s a bit of a waste of time.’

  ‘No sign of Arthur?’ May checked that the grass was fine for his carefully polished black toecaps and stepped on to it.

  ‘No, and it’s probably for the best. He might be tempted to make more of this than is necessary.’ Banbury ushered May into the tent, where a small battery-operated LED lamp had been set up. A neat square of turf had been removed and placed in a clear plastic bag.

  May found himself looking down at a new cherry-wood casket with brass handles, spattered with nuggets of earth.

  ‘OK, take a look at this,’ said Banbury, kneeling down and pulling up its lid with a grunt. ‘You might want
to breathe through your mouth.’

  Inside was the corpse of a middle-aged white man in a black business suit and white shirt collar. The odd thing was that he was lying face down at the wrong end of his final resting place.

  ‘I already turned him over once and had a good look, but I wanted you to see how he was found,’ said Banbury.

  ‘Somebody dug him up and dropped him when they were disturbed. So it’s an act of vandalism?’

  ‘You would have thought so, wouldn’t you, but it’s not quite as clear-cut as it appears,’ Banbury replied. ‘A couple of teenagers found him last night. They’d come to the gardens after the pubs shut to get high and fool around, and saw movement over here. They were sitting about twenty yards away in that direction.’ He pointed back to the flattened grass. ‘When they came over, the boy swore he saw this bloke walk out of his grave. On the way out they bumped into a Community Support Officer coming off duty and told him what had happened. Quick as a flash he did the wrong thing: smelled dope, carried out a very officious stop and search and found a stubbed-out fatty in the boy’s pocket. Usually around here the beat cops let them go with a ticking-off, but this one was a by-the-book merchant. Eventually he took them back to the park to check out their story, saw the body and then ran them in under suspicion. He said he had misgivings because the lad was wearing some kind of satanic death-metal T-shirt, but this isn’t Arkansas, we don’t bang kids up for having lousy taste in clothes. I was in the office when the call came in and whipped over to take a look. Apparently I was the only bloke still working in the area at that time. I didn’t think there was much point in getting you up until daybreak.’

  ‘So they were stoned and dug him up. Did you find a shovel?’

  Banbury scratched his nose and left behind a dab of London clay. ‘That’s the thing. I’m pretty sure they didn’t do it. They had no dirt on their clothes and she was in high heels. We haven’t found any kind of digging implement. It hasn’t rained for three days and the rest of the ground’s pretty hard, but this plot is soft and fresh. British law requires thirty inches of soil between casket and surface, but this was buried shallower. The earth’s very loosely packed under the turf. Besides, if it was them, why would they own up to it? It’s bloody hard work getting one of these out of the ground.’

  ‘And getting it open, I imagine.’

  ‘Contrary to popular belief, caskets aren’t usually made airtight because of the cost.’ Banbury showed May the dark piping that ran around the edge of the wood. ‘You can have a gasket installed that provides an extra seal, but the normal practice is a compromise, a rubber lip around the top that makes it tough to open from the outside without a specialized tool. Not like the old days, when they used to add a double lining of nails to deter bodysnatchers. You don’t need nails any more. Imagine trying to get the lid off a sealed jam jar without any kind of a lever. And I really don’t think these teens would have had one.’

  Much as he was loath to, May knelt and studied the body. ‘His position is odd.’

  ‘Yes, I thought that. It’s as if he stood up in the casket and then fell forward.’

  ‘You don’t suppose …’ May was reluctant to voice his thoughts.

  ‘He was buried alive?’ Banbury laughed. ‘That’s the sort of thing Mr Bryant would come up with. I suppose he’s in the exact position he’d be if he climbed out, then collapsed forward. And the lid would have been easier to push off from the inside, because the two sides of the gasket aren’t of equal width, favouring a shove from within rather than an external pull. But no.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘First of all he’s been dead for a couple of days at least – Giles will be able to tell you more about that – and even if by some miracle he had still been alive he wouldn’t have had much room for leverage.’ Banbury rose and stretched. ‘This isn’t my area though. We need a body man. I left a message for Giles an hour ago. He was away for the weekend grouse-shooting with his wife’s nobby friends, but he’s supposed to be back mid-morning.’

  ‘It can’t have been grouse. That doesn’t start until August. The Glorious Twelfth and all that.’

  ‘All right, maybe polo then. Something upper-class-twittish.’

  ‘How are we on prints?’ May had noted the white dust on the coffin.

  ‘Interesting. Nothing at all on the lid. Doesn’t look to me like anyone touched it. There’s a mess of bootprints in the vicinity, but the grass has been trodden flat around here for a long time. The park gets a fair bit of foot traffic on a sunny day. People come in to eat their sandwiches. Something else, though. The boy seems to think they interrupted some kind of satanic ritual.’

  ‘Why would he think that?’

  ‘He didn’t explain himself very coherently, just said something about it looking like a scene from a horror film. I think he was quite taken with the idea. The Community Support geezer put it down to him being stoned, although he clearly doesn’t know the difference between dope and pills. You know how some kids are when they get a mind for such things, a fascination with the paranormal is almost a rite of passage for them.’

  ‘Arthur never grew out of his. Speaking of which …’ He cocked his head to one side and listened. Someone was whistling ‘Oh Happy the Lily’ from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore very badly indeed. May stuck his head out of the tent and saw a figure ambling towards them down the path, the steel-tipped heels of his scuffed brown Oxfords clicking on the gravel, their rhythm punctuated by the thump of an ancient Malacca walking stick. The remnants of Bryant’s hair had entered the new day without the benefit of a comb and thrust out horizontally from above his ears, lending him the appearance of a barn owl.

  At this point it might be worth pointing out that if you’re looking for the steely grip of deductive logic, you may wish to find some other narrative that doesn’t involve Mr Arthur Bryant. While it would be hard to find a gentleman more connected to the world, it isn’t the world of today. Rather, the world he inhabits is one largely filled with what could loosely be described as ‘alternatives’, consisting mainly of fringe activists, shamans, shams and spiritualists, astronomers and astrologers, witches both black and white, artists of every hue from watercolour to con, banned scientists, barred medics, socially inept academics, Bedlamites, barkers, fibbers, flâneurs, dowsers, duckers, divers and drunks. Many of the names in his grubby old Rolodex have gone on to greatness, although some have gone to jail and a few to pieces. Between them, they consistently provide a service not available to any other section of the British police network. They offer up their ideas without boundaries, guile, manners or any thought of payment. They want to help, and Mr Bryant is just the man to let them.

  ‘You’re not answering your phone,’ said May irritably.

  ‘No, I’ve put it somewhere and haven’t narrowed down the list of possibilities yet.’

  ‘Have you checked your pockets?’

  Bryant made a theatrical show of thrusting his hands into his ratty overcoat, and pulled out a small black kitten. ‘Another one,’ he said absently. ‘They seem to be everywhere.’ He gently tucked the mewling furball into his waistcoat.

  ‘I was about to give up on you. We’re almost finished here.’

  ‘Actually, I was here shortly after it happened.’

  ‘How did you even know about it?’ asked Banbury, nettled. He knew there was little likelihood of Bryant spotting the case registration online.

  ‘The old-fashioned way, Dan. I looked out of the window. I don’t sleep well, especially after I’ve had a slice of Alma’s cabinet pudding just before bedtime. I can just see that patch of pavement back there, and clocked that something odd was going on.’

  ‘What, all the way from your bedroom?’

  ‘I’ve got a view straight between the houses, if you stand on a stool. My long sight’s perfectly functional, although I can’t identify anything smaller than a battleship under five hundred yards. I came down and talked to the fake plod, then took a shufti while he ran them
in. I thought it was a good idea to get them off the street while I had a look around.’ He loosened his immense sea-green scarf a little in deference to the already warm morning. ‘I wouldn’t close this up just yet. I was struck by a couple of peculiarities.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked May, stepping back to allow him access to the tent. Bryant waved away the offer of another look.

  ‘The first thing that bothered me was the state of the body,’ he said. ‘It’s only recently been buried. The rest of the corpses in here have been underground for centuries, so what’s this one doing here? Do you know the difference between a graveyard and a cemetery?’

  ‘I didn’t know there was one.’

  ‘Oh yes, most definitely. It’s a matter of geography. Cemeteries aren’t attached to churches. Their plots can be sold to the general public. There are strict rules governing their upkeep. Graveyards belong to churches and most have hardly been used at all since the nineteenth century. But this space is rather special.’

  May had scanned a brief history of the site, helpfully printed on a board at the entrance, but knew that his partner would have a more idiosyncratic viewpoint. ‘In what way?’ he asked.

  ‘St George’s Gardens was the first burial place in London that didn’t have its own church. Founded during the reign of Queen Anne, it received the headless remains of ten martyred Jacobites who’d been hanged, drawn and quartered in 1745, one of whom was due to be married on the day of his execution. So it had a certain amount of notoriety. Somebody still leaves a floral tribute here every July the thirtieth in commemoration.’ Bryant poked about for his pipe and dug it out, lighting the remains of his last smoke.

  ‘This is all very interesting, Mr Bryant—’ Banbury began.

  ‘And that notoriety extended into a scandal,’ Bryant continued. ‘This is the birthplace of bodysnatchers.’

  ‘Oh dear Lord,’ Banbury muttered, mentally passing his hand over his face.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s true. The coffins were buried very close to the surface – as indeed was this chap’s, by the look of it – and in 1777 the gravedigger and his assistant were arraigned for stealing the corpse of one Jane Sainsbury. They tied her up and popped her into a sack, but were caught just up the road in King’s Cross. They served six months in jail after being whipped from Holborn to Seven Dials, about half a mile by my reckoning. That’s an awful lot of whipping.’