‘What are you looking for?’ asked Condright.
‘I think somebody stayed behind after the tours finished and infiltrated your company. If the show began at seven he would have had less than an hour to wait. Then, after the performance, he could have made his way downstairs to the raven cage, picked the lock and gathered up the birds somehow. Which means there should be a hidden compartment here … Blast.’ Bryant turned the cloak inside out. ‘I was sure there’d be one.’
‘He’d never have got seven ravens into that thing, even if he’d found a way to drug them first,’ said Condright.
‘You’re right,’ Bryant reluctantly agreed. ‘But perhaps over seven nights …’
‘No. I know some of the men who played the Headsman. There are different ones on different nights.’
‘But he was here, I’m sure of it,’ Bryant insisted. ‘The theatricality – it has his touch. He came and disguised himself as the Headsman to get the lay of the land. Then he left by hiding himself among the guests. And at some point later, he must have returned.’
‘I don’t understand why anyone would go to so much trouble,’ said Condright.
‘I think I do. Oh, he was here, all right.’ Bryant zipped up the bag, but the necromancer’s distinctive aroma lingered. ‘To nail him, I have to know how he did it.’
24
ALTRUISM
Arthur Bryant arrived at St Magnus the Martyr’s Church by bus because he knew it was the last thing anyone would expect him to do. Looking down from the top deck he had seen the dark surface of the Thames buffeted by rain-squalled winds, and felt the cold hand of Mr Merry guiding him into a trap.
The necromancer was anxious not to be derailed from his purpose. But what was that? To set in motion the fall of the kingdom through apotropaic magic and the burial of live birds on some hallowed site? Even for Bryant, it was too absurd to contemplate. And, surely, Mr Merry would not wish to be entirely rid of him. Fellow travellers on London’s arcane byways were increasingly rare, and their presence was to be valued. Merry would only act against him if he contravened his instructions. Of course, he had already done that by secretly continuing to investigate the theft of the ravens. The main thing now was to make sure that his nemesis did not find out.
He took shelter beneath the tree and waited, wondering where Meera had got to. Looking from the back of the bus he had failed to spot her motorbike following behind. She was usually ridiculously punctual. He surveyed the traffic waiting at the crossroads and failed to see her Kawasaki.
‘Mr Bryant,’ said a deep, accented voice. ‘Don’t turn around, please.’
Bryant froze and waited. He needed to hear more. ‘I wasn’t sure if this was the right place,’ he said. ‘Do we have to go far?’
‘Not very far. I’m afraid I will need to cover your eyes.’
‘Won’t that look a bit suspicious to anyone passing by?’ He’s Italian, he thought, but there’s something else. It’s a Resian dialect. He’s Italian-Slovenian.
‘We’ve thought of that. Please put these on.’ A hand passed him a pair of wraparound sunglasses that had been blacked out. They fitted awkwardly on his broad nose, but did the job; he could see nothing. He took the proffered hand and placed himself at the mercy of his contact.
There were a dozen steps to a car – he had not seen a vehicle pull up and had certainly not heard it; perhaps it was electric? No, just quiet; a small model, cramped in the back. Once within, the outside world was muffled.
‘Can you crack the window slightly? I suffer from asthma,’ Bryant lied. His driver seemed willing to comply. A hand reached over and buzzed the window down a little. The sounds of the street returned.
Bryant decided he could learn more by not speaking. Instead, he listened. There was an opening out of sound – sudden crosswinds and the squawk of seagulls: they were crossing the river. That meant they were heading over London Bridge. Depending on which way the vehicle turned, they would go right to Southwark, left towards Bermondsey or straight on to Borough.
They continued straight. The sound of traffic built up around the vehicle, trucks and buses mostly. That meant they were sticking to the main arterial road leading to the Elephant & Castle.
There were lots of halts at traffic lights. He counted them, judging the distance between each set. The driver seemed disinclined to speak. They would have to follow the one-way system around, but then it got tricky to separate out the direction; so many roads spread out from the great roundabout.
For a while he was lost. There was nothing outside to give him a purchase on their geography. Then, a sharp left turn, a quieter road but a faster one, with a drop in sound on one side, and cooler, fresher air; it had to be Burgess Park, a wide, flat field bordered by greenery, with a new cycling track and a lake. None of the other turnings had this many trees on one side. They continued in a direct line for a few minutes, then made a turn on to a much quieter road, a left, a right, another right and a halt. They had stopped somewhere in the heart of Peckham.
Although he hadn’t quite been around long enough to witness the birth of the area, it was a place he knew all too well. First mentioned in the Domesday Book as Pecheha, or ‘village among the hills’, Peckham was as far from an English village as one could imagine. Once it had provided a grazing pasture for farmers driving cattle to London, then it had been colonized by wealthy families in grand houses. Its greatest fame came as a breeding ground for academics and nonconformists, as colleges and meeting houses proliferated.
The Grand Surrey Canal turned the village into a town, bringing gas companies, railways and speculative builders. Soon the remaining fields were paved over. Victorian terraces were replaced by massive housing estates and gang rule. In 2000, the murder of ten-year-old Damilola Taylor led to Old Bailey trials and criticism of the criminal justice system. There were the glimmerings of regeneration in this most deprived and neglected part of the city, but some of the more unorthodox students and teachers had stayed on through the social upheavals, working in a place where few would notice them. It was likely that the New Resurrectionists would find a welcome here.
Hands reached in and lifted him out. He was led on to the pavement, up three steps, and heard a key scrabble for a lock. The street at his back was silent; where had Meera got to?
A hand pressed against his back. The air grew cooler and mustier, the smell of mouldy plaster and damp floorboards. More steps, then the murmur of voices. Light around the edges of the sunglasses now. He caught the ends of hushed sentences:
‘—shouldn’t be here.’
‘—no choice. Someone has to—’
‘—risk to ourselves.’
The glasses came off and he was given a chair. It was so cool in the stone-walled hall that he half expected to see his breath.
He found himself in a long white chapel with peeling paintwork and a half-demolished minstrels’ gallery at one end. A white plastic curtain separated off the rear section on a makeshift rail. There were three young men and one woman in black cloth eye-masks watching him. Two of the males were in lab coats. The others wore jeans and sweaters and looked like students. Two were non-Caucasian. All were in their mid-twenties. The man who had driven him here indicated the others. ‘You don’t need to know who we are.’
‘Why did you agree to meet with me at all?’ Bryant asked.
‘We need your help.’
‘I don’t see how I’ll be able to help you if there’s going to be all this secrecy.’
‘Our identities aren’t important. It’s our work that counts. You are the detective who set up the Peculiar Crimes Unit, aren’t you?’
Bryant shrugged. ‘It was a government initiative, but yes.’
‘What does it do exactly?’
‘It deals with cases that represent a risk to public order and morale.’
‘Kind of an old-fashioned idea in this day and age.’
‘Not really. You have spin doctors now, but they can’t actually solve problems, merely fi
nesse them. If someone gets attacked in a park, we don’t tell everyone parks are safe, we catch the attacker.’
‘You’ve been doing this for a long time?’
‘My partner and I were young, inexperienced students. We were employed because we were free of preconceptions and eager to learn. It was a challenge.’
‘So you were free thinkers. The methods you chose to employ contravened the orthodoxy of the times.’
‘Yes, and they’re the methods we continue to use, despite all attempts to stop us,’ said Bryant. ‘Over the years we’ve been able to keep a handful of friends in positions of influence.’
‘Then you’ll appreciate our dilemma.’ The speaker indicated his friends. ‘We all trained in medical colleges, but our ideas were considered too advanced, too radical—’
‘You mean you were all thrown out.’ He looked from one masked face to the next. ‘Weren’t you?’
‘What the medical establishment thinks of us is unimportant. Our work is what matters.’
‘And what work might that be?’
‘You’re no stranger to the application of alternative therapies, Mr Bryant. We’re taking them further, into a practical realm.’
‘I don’t know what that involves,’ said Bryant.
‘It means we’re required to take steps that our paranoid nanny state finds unacceptable.’
‘I assume you mean that you disinter bodies and conduct experiments on them directly, unlike your forebears, who sold them on for money.’
‘We don’t believe in Burking the dead, Mr Bryant,’ said another of the males. ‘We’ve tried other methods – virtual anatomy has its uses, but even if you create an online application that factors in random flaws it still doesn’t provide a realistic experience. There’s the weight, mass and deterioration of organs to take into account, for a start. In a computer program you can set levels to which organs degrade according to the health of the individual, but in many major respects it’s still unsatisfactory, except as a teaching tool. The human body is not a matrix of logarithms you can endlessly download and reprogram. It’s a thing of meat and humours and spirit. So as educated activists, we returned to earlier methods with a proven success rate.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Bryant, his sense of caution overtaken by the need to involve himself in the argument. ‘Burke and Hare were corpse-robbers who sold half-rotted cadavers of no use to any real medical practitioners.’ He had a sudden thought. What if these people murdered to fulfil their quota of bodies, just like their ill-fated forebears?
‘Our work is real and important,’ said the girl, who he now realized was Spanish. ‘Show him.’
The others parted and pulled back the white plastic curtain. Behind it, splayed on a long wooden bench, was the naked body of an elderly man at an advanced stage of his autopsy. ‘We’ve already found new uses for tissue to accelerate apoptosis – programmed cell death – and to encourage wound debridement,’ said one of the masked boys.
‘You think you can find something generations of experienced doctors overlooked?’
‘Their hands are tied by the BMA.’
‘Were you involved in the death of Thomas Wallace?’ asked Bryant.
‘Not his death. But he was disinterred by one of the group.’
‘What could you have wanted with him?’ Bryant demanded to know. The students’ naivety was dangerous. ‘Wallace committed suicide by ligature hanging. As I’m sure you know, his deoxygenated blood would have permeated his brain tissue. He’d been in the ground for over sixty hours. He wouldn’t have been of much use to you.’
‘We didn’t want him for studies. One of our number agreed to carry out the work.’
‘Why? Did he try to dig up Elspeth Duncannon as well?’
‘Listen, old man, we brought you here,’ said the girl. ‘It’s our turn to ask questions. One of the members of our group is missing.’
‘The one who dug up Wallace. He did it for money, didn’t he?’
‘We were about to be thrown out of the building. We needed to find some cash fast. He was approached with an extremely lucrative offer. We talked it over. We weren’t happy with the arrangement, but we were in a difficult position.’
‘Did he know that he was being hired to disinter Wallace?’
‘Yes, but he wasn’t informed of the project’s purpose, and he wasn’t allowed to talk to any of us about it. That was part of the deal. Since then, no one’s been able to get hold of him.’
‘I can’t find him for you unless you can assure me that you have never committed murder in order to get – material – for your research.’ Bryant studied each of them in turn, demanding a promise.
They spoke together for a moment and agreed. ‘We can give you our word on that.’
‘But we would kill,’ said the girl angrily. ‘If a handful of people had to die to make an advance that could save thousands, wouldn’t you do it? We don’t seek to make money from what we do. The world needs cures, and somebody has to find them even though it means violating a few sensitivities.’
‘Murder is more than just a violation of sensitivities, young lady. It’s a boundary that cannot be crossed. If you do, you take the path that led to Josef Mengele injecting dye into children’s eyes.’
The girl looked horrified. ‘Such behaviour is anathema to us.’
‘Then I’ll do what I can for you, but I make no promises – you’re operating outside the law, and I won’t be able to protect you.’
‘If you thought that you could change the way organ degeneration was diagnosed, and it meant bending the rules to do so, wouldn’t you do it?’
‘In theory, yes,’ Bryant admitted. ‘But in practice? What will you do without clinical trials, long-term research, published papers? You’re as powerless as any homeopathy quack or scientologist peddling miracle cures to the credulous. You’ll have no peer approval to back up your findings.’
‘Our work will provide all the evidence we need.’
‘Then you’re more naive than I thought. You will never find a more willing champion for your cause than me, but I know what will happen. Every part of the establishment will unite to close its doors against you. They’ll scapegoat you, and you’ll go to jail. I understand how the system works. I’ve been an outsider all my life.’
‘But things are changing. You think we’re the only privately run medical society in the country? We’re linked online in deep network sites, sharing our research in ways you could never imagine.’
‘You still have to get it accepted, and that can’t happen without social change.’
‘There’s not enough time to wait for that. The world is less than twenty years away from depleting food and water stocks and losing most of the species that contain the genetic make-up to save us,’ said the oldest of the group. ‘The only way left is to force change on to people whether they agree or not.’
‘Perhaps we can argue about your altruism another time and get to the point here,’ said Bryant, anxious to remind them that they were holding a police officer. ‘You want me to find your chap, I need to know why he “resurrected” Wallace, and we’re both running out of time. If I agree to do it, I’ll have to at least know his name.’
The students discussed the matter and reached an agreement. ‘Very well,’ said the one who had driven him. ‘We’ll give you his details on the condition that you don’t use him to trace a path back to us. The rest of us have to be able to keep our identities secret.’
‘If I find out that he was directly involved in murder, our deal is off.’
After a moment’s discussion among themselves, they folded the details into his hand. Bryant allowed himself to be blindfolded once more and was taken back out into the night streets.
25
DEATH AMONG THE GRAVESTONES
He kept the shovel wrapped in a black bin liner. It was tightly laced with brown parcel tape, but it still looked like a shovel. There were some objects you couldn’t hide.
Walking along Bayswater Road towards the Victoria Gate Lodge, he felt self-conscious and stupid, like an undertaker going to work. The only people who passed him were Chinese tourists who were stopping every few yards to excitedly take photographs of lamp-posts and tobacconists’. It was raining lightly, and droplets fell from the beech leaves overhanging the railings on to his bare head. He flicked open his mobile and checked the directions once more.
It was later than he thought. He peered through the fortifying iron staves of the park’s perimeter, but it was dark beneath the trees and he could not identify the site. There were supposed to be over three hundred graves in this forgotten corner of Hyde Park, but he could not see them. Worse still, he could not even find a way inside. He was nearing Lancaster Gate tube station now, but there was no break in the railing. There was only one thing for it; waiting until the pavement was clear on both sides, he scaled the spikes and dropped down into the wet grass.
He had brought a key-ring torch and flicked it on to search behind the lodge walls. His beam picked them up, rows of headstones, many of them half buried by grassy earth. Once they had been neatly ordered, but now most had been twisted by movements in the soil and were covered in moss, their ironwork inscriptions barely readable. He was looking for a grave-marker bearing the name ‘Prince’, with a burial date of a week ago.
He realized that finding it would take him longer than he’d expected. Crouching low among the first line of headstones, he began to decipher their dedications.
A green Jeep cruised slowly through the parklands, its lone occupant checking beneath the surrounding trees. He dropped to his stomach and lay between the plots, hoping that the branches would provide enough cover. Once he was sure that he had not been seen, he rose and continued his search. He found himself walking over stone plaques – they were everywhere.
It was a hell of a way to pay off the rent, he decided, but the money had been too good to turn down. After this they wouldn’t have to worry about getting kicked out, and he could use the rest to make a dent in his student loan. The torch beam caught a name picked out in black iron: ‘Ruby Heart’. Beneath ran an inscription: ‘You Will Never Be Forgotten Or Replaced’. He had been told to look for fresh earth near the border of the cemetery, but the borders were unclear. Some graves had been added so that their plots thrust into and under the surrounding greenery.
Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart Page 18
