Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart

by Christopher Fowler - Bryant

  ‘And this matters—?’

  ‘Certainly it does, because in 1977, on the two-hundredth anniversary of the disinterment, it happened again to one Anthony Dickenson, but this time no one was ever arrested.’

  ‘You see,’ said May, exasperated, ‘this is what you always do, Arthur, you try to connect entirely separate events to form a pattern where none exists.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was a pattern. It’s a precedent.’ Bryant sucked noisily at the pipe, then peered into the barrel.

  Banbury had had enough. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘that’s it. I’m trying to work here. I need to …’ But he found himself at a sudden loss, not quite sure what he needed to do at all.

  ‘I said there were a couple of peculiarities,’ said Bryant. ‘Far be it from me to belabour the obvious, but did neither of you notice that he had no headstone? Somebody pulled up the temporary one and threw it over there.’ He waved his pipe at a small wood marker lying almost hidden in the longer grass. ‘I imagine it had been placed on top of the grave in readiness for the headstone setting. Thomas Edward Wallace, aged forty-seven, buried three days ago. And another thing: there were no flowers. You’d think someone buried that recently would have had tributes stacked around his plot, but there’s nothing. Let’s put out a call for witnesses while we find out who buried him here and why.’

  ‘Mr Bryant, this isn’t really our sort of thing,’ Banbury began.

  Bryant had donned his bottle-thick glasses to read the marker. He stared down crossly like a tortoise with indigestion. ‘Oh, I think it is,’ he replied. ‘This is a public sanctuary, a place provided for peaceful reflection. If people can’t feel safe here, it’s our job to find out why not.’

  3

  THE HANGED MAN

  Rosa Lysandrou was a virtuous, decent woman who knew that the world was a wicked place and that life was short, ugly and disappointing. Most of the time sin and ill fortune surrounded her, seeping into her bones like damp and dragging at her limbs until she sometimes longed for the release that eternal sleep would bring. On other days she cheered up a bit and went to bingo.

  Today a vaporous sun was glinting through the crimson and emerald stained-glass windows of the chapel in the Camley Street Coroner’s Office, and there were even a few sickly-looking birds singing in the trees that lined the Victorian graveyard of St Pancras Old Church. Her sister was coming to visit, and would bring a number of large, heavy cakes. Her favourite soap serial was on. The only thing that could possibly spoil her day was a visit from—

  There was a sharp knock at the front door. When she opened it, she found him standing there.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ said Arthur Bryant, lowering his walking stick. ‘I thought I could see you lurking behind the glass.’ He took in her shapeless black dress and Birkenstocks. ‘You’re looking particularly pious today.’

  ‘I’ve been praying for your soul,’ Rosa replied.

  ‘Oh, I think it’s a bit late for that. I’ve never been one for a single religion. I don’t care for anything that narrows the outlook.’ Bryant removed his beaten-up Dorfman Pacific homburg and entered the foyer. ‘I prefer the words of William Blake: “The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”’

  ‘It leads to the Devil.’

  ‘Ah yes, the Devil. Satan, a corruption of Saturn, the Destroyer. A creation of the Church, and so often a resident within it, one finds.’

  ‘You are English. You find it easy to doubt and mock.’ Rosa stepped aside with resignation.

  ‘Doubt, yes; mock, never. My parents were both raised Church of England. But my line of descent has no call upon me. My beliefs were established by what I read and absorbed as a child.

  ‘Kind hearts are more than coronets,

  And simple faith than Norman blood.

  ‘Tennyson. Can Giles come out to play?’

  Rosa knew when she was defeated. She led the way to the mortuary, where Giles Kershaw was one-finger typing his notes into an electronic tablet. ‘I thought I might get a visit from you this morning,’ he said, rising to find another stool. ‘The body’s only been here half an hour. I should have known when I saw your name on the report that this wouldn’t be straightforward.’

  Dan Banbury had apparently suggested that his colleague should examine the body before having it re-interred. ‘Why does he want me to look at it?’ Kershaw asked. ‘A cause of death must have already been decided.’

  ‘Oh, we thought nobody would mind,’ said Bryant, picking up a resin model of a human head and tilting it until its brain fell out.

  ‘You mean you thought nobody would find out. Can you put that down?’

  ‘We haven’t got permission from the next of kin for a re-examination because we haven’t located them yet.’

  ‘What’s the story then?’ asked Giles. ‘Somebody just dug him up and dumped him when they were disturbed?’

  ‘The kids in the park thought he’d come out of the grave to get them. The boy’s positive he saw the corpse walk, although he’d been smoking a little weed. I don’t know what we’ve got here. We’re checking the local undertakers to find out how and why he was buried there, but who knows what evidence might be lost in the meantime?’

  ‘There isn’t a need to find any evidence, is there?’ Kershaw pointed out. ‘There’s no case. Evidence of what? What are you going to look for?’

  ‘That’s what I thought you could tell me. I’m intrigued, aren’t you? The blue world turns, empires rise and fall, we live and die and nobody really knows anything. Wouldn’t you like a few answers before heading off into eternal darkness?’

  ‘You really are the most obtuse man.’ Kershaw ran his fingers through his glamorous blond hair and looked down at the detective, relenting a little. Bryant looked as if he was on a planet with a heavier gravity than anyone else. He appeared to be squashed and shrinking. It was hard to stay annoyed with him for long. ‘Well, I suppose in the light of my initial examination there might be something.’

  ‘Oh, so you’ve already taken a look?’ Bryant was triumphant, knowing that Kershaw’s curiosity would get the better of him.

  ‘I thought it would make a nice change to have the unit send me a death from natural causes. Myocardial infarction perhaps, probably brought on by stress, trans-fatty acids, alcohol and cigarettes, the usual depressing urban workaholic scenario.’

  ‘How long has he been dead?’

  ‘Skin marbling has only just started. The veins appear closer to the surface after about five days, so less than that. Not much gaseous inflation either, which at first seems surprising, except that Dan tells me the temperature of the earth in the gardens is low because the site is in almost permanent shadow, as well as being affected by the local water table. Water keeps the clay cold. He did a soil test.’

  ‘Of course he did.’

  ‘Besides, bodies don’t decay at the same rate because of any number of factors. I was going to take a peep inside him and check out the state of his heart, but as it seems you hadn’t cleared permission I’m rather glad I didn’t do so. There’s supposed to be a full post-mortem carried out by the local hospital mortuary and an NHS pathologist in cases of sudden death, but this doesn’t appear to have been the case.’

  ‘What do you mean, sudden death? Why not?’

  ‘Incompetence on behalf of the doctor, I should imagine. Because there was something rather special.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, take a look at this.’ Kershaw headed for one of the steel drawers that held his pending workload and pulled it out, sliding down the grey metallic covering that hooded the body’s facial features. ‘It would help if I knew something about his family. All I’ve been given so far is his age and name.’

  ‘Sorry about that,’ said Bryant. ‘We got it off his marker. John will find out where he came from.’

  ‘There’s this crescent-shaped contusion, here. It’s hard to see even in this light but if you look very carefully …’ Kershaw shone a pencil torch across Wal
lace’s pale forehead. ‘Just on the crown, there.’

  ‘It looks like a tiny dent.’

  ‘Yes, the blood’s been raised to the surface but it didn’t bruise.’

  ‘So it was done before he died, perhaps when he collapsed.’

  ‘That’s the obvious supposition. Except that according to Dan the mark could correspond with something on the lid of the casket. I asked him to take some shots of the interior. Beneath the satin layer there are a couple of small bolts holding the brass nameplate to the outside of the lid, and the dent is a possible match.’

  ‘You’re saying he tried to sit up suddenly inside the coffin and banged his head?’

  ‘Don’t put words in my mouth. That’s just one scenario. I’m merely pointing out the coincidence.’

  ‘It would mean he was buried alive.’

  ‘Not necessarily. He could have been violently jostled in the casket, although funeral homes are very careful about such things. Resurrections have occurred in the past, although with far less frequency than most people imagine, maybe once or twice in a decade. But he wasn’t buried deeply, and the earth wasn’t tamped down …’

  ‘His grave-marker had been thrown into the bushes, Giles. That suggests someone removed it to disinter him.’

  ‘How do you know when that occurred? Perhaps the marker hadn’t been set in place yet. I need more information before I can give you an accurate verdict – not that I actually need to make one, because presumably he already has a death certificate.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Bryant. ‘We don’t know who buried him, or how it was even possible.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Nobody’s been interred in St George’s Gardens for centuries. How did Thomas Wallace end up in there? Come on, you’ve had the body for a full half-hour, didn’t you get anything else?’

  ‘He was kitted out in a very nice Gieves and Hawkes suit and I didn’t want to mess up the stitching – it had been sewn on to him – so I just unbuttoned his jacket and opened his shirt. I didn’t have to go into his heart to see the likelihood of adipose tissue, but I did open his shirt a bit further.’ He leaned forward and carefully loosened the collar. A slender grey line ran around Wallace’s neck, a whipmark of a bruise.

  ‘He’s been strangled,’ said Bryant.

  ‘No, not strangled, hanged. There’s no disruption of the cervical vertebrae, but these diagonal markings don’t run around the full circumference of the neck, suggesting that the method of suspension pulled up and away from the body at the back. That’s how you can tell the difference between a hanging and strangulation. The marks of the ligature are too narrow for a rope. I’d say some kind of fine-woven fabric.’

  ‘So he killed himself. What with?’

  ‘A necktie would do the job nicely.’ He sounded like a chef suggesting the addition of an egg to a recipe.

  ‘You don’t think he went into a coma, and somehow came back to life due to medical misdiagnosis?’

  ‘It doesn’t seem very likely. I’ve never heard of such a thing, but I suppose you could consult an expert on the appearance and diagnosis of death. All I know is that you’ve got a hanged man.’

  ‘Who killed himself and therefore wasn’t eligible for a Christian burial.’

  ‘I think you’ll find the Church has softened on that ruling, especially if anyone in the family was active in the parish.’

  ‘But it could explain why he was granted interment rights within the former cemetery, and why no one left flowers.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be quicker to ask someone rather than trying to work it out for yourself?’

  ‘Obviously, but I need the mental exercise.’ Bryant sucked at his false teeth, thinking. ‘It still doesn’t help us determine what happened. Dan thinks he might have some shovel-marks in the extruded clay around the coffin but it’s impossible to tell whether they were made putting him in or digging him up. A hanged man comes back to life and frightens off the people who were trying to resurrect him? It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘I see what you mean,’ Kershaw agreed. ‘It sounds like something you’d find in a pack of tarot cards. Or a Robert Louis Stevenson novel. Certainly not London in the twenty-first century.’

  ‘That’s the thing about the backstreets of Bloomsbury. They’ve barely changed in hundreds of years. They’ll probably be the same long after …’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Kershaw. ‘You’ve gone quite pale. You’d better sit down for a minute.’

  Bryant looked as if he’d swallowed a bar of soap. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. A most peculiar feeling had swept over him. It was as if he’d just looked down into the ground and seen himself. ‘I think somebody just walked over my grave.’

  While Detective Sergeant Janice Longbright was waiting to hear back from the four funeral homes listed as operational in the Bloomsbury and Holborn areas, she dug sultanas out of Arthur Bryant’s optical drive with a pastry fork. She had no idea how they had managed to get in there but they had wrecked the damned thing, and now she was unable to eject her disk. She had been forced to upload CCTV footage to DVDs and run them the old-fashioned way, because whenever she tried running files on Dan’s trial shareware they kept vanishing: an OS update glitch, according to May; a ghost in the machine, according to Bryant. On his computer screen a dead wasp was stuck in a smear of blackcurrant jam, and she could barely bring herself to touch the keyboard, as it had been serving as a table mat for the last few years. There were peas all over the desk. Who had peas for lunch?

  She looked around the room jointly shared by her bosses and couldn’t help noticing how appropriately it reflected the occupants. John May’s half was gracefully arranged with an ergonomic seat and a tasteful modern Spanish armchair finished in grey felt. His desk was orderly to the point of OCD. Those few files he had not yet been able to digitally transfer were priority-coded and alphabetized. There was no paperwork; he used Cloud storage. A stylish red table lamp with an exposed filament painted a warm ellipse across his pale ash shelves, where a few treasured paperbacks shared space with some blue Venetian wine glasses and a set of white china coffee cups.

  She glanced over at Bryant’s side.

  To start with, there was half a cow’s head lying on his desk. Its skull had been split lengthwise and placed inside a torn Primark shopping bag. A pool of black blood had hardened over a 1973 copy of Exchange & Mart and dripped into his top drawer, which appeared to be full of soil and bits of mushrooms. There was a cricket bat with a lot of nails hammered into it, his beloved Tibetan skull, which still reeked after all these years, an empty ant farm filled with murky water and dead frogs, a pen-holder containing a stick of crimson sealing wax, a length of what appeared to be dynamite fuse, several lethal-looking scalpels with their blades left unsheathed and pointing up and a Pelham Puppet of a skeleton from circa 1959. On the opposite corner was a tottering pile of battered books that included Cross-Stitching in the Time of Edward the Confessor, Hungarian–British Trade Fairs of the 1950s, The International Handbook of Underwater Acoustics, Across Europe with a Kangaroo, The Complete Works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton in Braille, Churchill’s Favourite Engineering Problems, Recreating Renaissance Masterpieces with Cheese and Bombproofing for Beginners. There was also a sock. Half a mildewed sardine and tomato sandwich lay on the windowsill, being nibbled by a small black kitten with wild yellow eyes. To Bryant these were the liminal accompaniments to his thoughts. To everyone else they were a health hazard.

  Longbright lifted the kitten off and put it in a paper-filled cardboard box with the others, only to find that several had managed to climb out. Sighing, she went off to answer the door buzzer, but was beaten to it by Banbury. The new intern had probably arrived. That was all she needed today, a sleepy-faced youth to follow her around tweeting sarcastic comments while she was trying to get on with her work.

  The good news was that she had been able to get all charges dropped against the upset teenagers from St George’s Gardens. She felt s
orry for the boy, Romain Curtis, because he seemed sensitive and shaken, while the girl had shrugged off the entire incident and asked if she could get compensation for missing school in the form of some lunch money.

  Longbright checked her phone and saw that Raymond Land had summoned everyone to the common room at 12.00 p.m. He only ever did that when he was upset about something.

  ‘Isn’t the old man back yet?’ asked Banbury, sticking his head around the door. ‘What do you want done with your intern?’

  ‘Arthur went to see Giles,’ replied Longbright. Apart from May and Land, she was the only other member of the unit who ever dared to refer to Bryant by his first name. It was a right she had earned. ‘As for your intern, you might as well give him to me.’

  ‘It’s not a he.’ Banbury opened the door wider. ‘This is Amanda Roseberry.’

  Longbright was far from dowdy. In the summer months she switched to a tight black T-shirt and the occasional low-cut summer dress that could make passers-by walk into oncoming traffic. But in walked a self-assured and absurdly opulent blonde with upswept tresses, keen grey eyes, a relaxed smile and a miniscule waistline. Amanda Roseberry held out her hand like a princess.

  ‘I’ve just finished a twenty-three-day intensive at the Peel Centre,’ she explained in clear received pronunciation. ‘Radio Operation and Driving Skills. I’m waiting to be placed somewhere in serious crime. I wanted to intern here for absolutely ages but was told you weren’t taking anyone.’

  ‘No,’ Longbright admitted. Bryant hated the idea of having trainees running around under his feet while he was trying to think. ‘How did you even find us?’ News of their operations was generally disallowed at the Met, although certain officers tagged their movements, waiting for them to slip up.