Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart

by Christopher Fowler - Bryant

  The rain started falling harder. It was suddenly noisy beneath the trees. A summer night in London; he was chilled to the bone. It took him another twenty minutes to locate the plot, so small and insignificant that he realized he had passed it several times.

  Unwrapping the shovel, he began to dig. Every now and again the headlamps of a bus strobed through from the other side of the park railing, striping him in yellow light. Each time, he froze and waited for it to pass. Once he heard a noise in the bushes nearby, but decided it was just a squirrel or a fox foraging for food.

  The earth came up easily beneath his spade. It had not been tamped down, and the rain had made it malleable. After he had lifted out most of the soil at the foot of the marker, he knelt in the mud and dug his hands down, feeling for the edge of the coffin. It was so small that once his fingers found purchase under the edge he was able to work it loose and easily lift it from the hole. He had brought a Swiss Army knife and a screwdriver, and set to work on the lid.

  Another rustle in the bushes made him stop and listen.

  He waited for a moment to see if whatever it was in the shadowed branches would move again, but now all he could hear was the rain falling hard on the leaves. Opening the knife and searching among its tools, he found a serrated blade and worked it into the seal.

  The coffin burst open, releasing an appalling smell. Covering his mouth with a handkerchief he searched his pockets with his free hand, looking for his rubber gloves. That was when he became aware that there was something or someone in the bushes ahead of him. It was too big to be a fox, and appeared to be off the ground, resting on a fork in the branches.

  As he set down the casket and tried to rise, there was an odd clicking sound. Moments later the air cleaved and something passed just inches from his left cheek. At first he thought someone had thrown a stick, but the object had moved too fast. Turning, he saw a silver arrow angled out of the ground a few feet behind him.

  His boot slipped in the mud and he fell awkwardly as he heard the quarrel released from the crossbow stock once more. A second later he felt a searing pain more terrible than anything he could imagine. Hurled backward by the impact, his head hit the tree root behind him with a crack. He felt as if he had been pinned to it like a moth on a board.

  As he began to lose consciousness, his attacker reached his side. Even as he tried to understand what was happening, he started praying that no one would come to disinter him if he died.

  ‘Nasty,’ said Dan Banbury. ‘Not an accident.’

  ‘Bloody hell, I can see that,’ said May, walking around the sheeted body. It was 6.10 a.m. on Friday and already light, although the roads beyond the park were still quiet and empty.

  ‘Just thought I should rule it out.’ Banbury crouched low in the wet grass, trying to loosen the first arrow without cutting his plastic gloves. ‘Lightweight steel shaft, razor-sharp tip. No wonder it did so much damage. The assailant took two shots. Didn’t take the arrows away because he couldn’t get them back out. The only light would have been from those street lamps back there, and given the shifting shadows from the branches overhead it couldn’t have been an easy target.’

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ said Bryant, attempting to disentangle his coat from a nearby bush. ‘I’ve been looking for you for ages.’

  ‘Where have you been?’ May asked.

  ‘Round the back of the lodge. Very enlightening: miniature tombstones everywhere. Like a cemetery for dwarves. Where’s our victim?’

  Banbury lifted a corner of the green plastic sheet. Bryant winced. ‘Ooh, that’s nasty. Right through the left eye.’

  ‘And almost out of the back of the skull, incredibly,’ said Banbury. ‘I don’t suppose he suffered much. Not the sort of thing you expect to find in a London park, though.’

  ‘You know, before the familiar image of the Grim Reaper appeared with his scythe, ready to harvest souls, he used to appear in illustrations armed with a crossbow and an arrow. Suggestive, don’t you think?’

  ‘Suggestive of your morbid imagination,’ said Banbury, unimpressed.

  ‘Who is he?’ The corpse was that of a young man in a cheap dark blue anorak and jeans, his face shockingly white against the dark jade grass.

  ‘We thought you’d know.’

  Bryant added his spectacles just to make sure, but shook his head. ‘I’ve never seen him before.’

  Banbury looked around. ‘What are all these little graves?’

  ‘It’s the Hyde Park pet cemetery,’ Bryant explained. ‘Hardly anybody is aware that it’s here. It was started by accident by a Maltese terrier called Cherry. The lodge keeper had befriended his owners. When Cherry died, he allowed the creature to be buried here.’

  ‘Why would animals be buried here of all places?’

  ‘Dogs often got crushed under the hooves of the carriage-horses on Bayswater Road. Soon everyone was asking him if they could plant their pets here. There ended up being hundreds.’

  ‘This is all very riveting, but right now we have a young man virtually nailed to a tree through his eye socket,’ said May testily. ‘And either he was one of your resurrectionists, or it’s a very strange coincidence. He’d just finished digging up a dog. A Jack Russell.’

  ‘New Resurrectionists,’ Bryant corrected, ‘and I think it’s likely he was my man. He fits the description I was given.’

  ‘The name Stephen Emes ring a bell?’ asked Banbury. ‘Barclaycard, back pocket.’

  ‘That’s him. Dan, get some tests run on the shovel, will you? Dabs, traces from other sites, anything you can pull off.’ He squinted into the distance. ‘The arrow had to come from somewhere over there, yes?’

  Banbury followed Bryant’s pointing finger to a gap where the bushes met the lime trees. ‘I imagine so, but don’t go stamping all over the earth, let me mark up a grid and do a search before this rain takes everything out.’

  ‘And you’ll need to bag up Prince here, and his little coffin,’ said Bryant. ‘John and I can find out who his owner is.’

  ‘I suppose you know what he was doing here,’ said May, looking down at the body skewered by the steel shaft in its skull.

  ‘Not really, no. I just got hired to find him. I had a bit of a run-in with the rest of his crowd last night. The Bleeding Heart is pierced by five arrows. A sign of life, but not in this case, apparently.’

  ‘I don’t pretend to know what you’re talking about,’ said May irritably. Bryant proceeded to explain what had happened in the Peckham chapel.

  ‘And just when were you going to inform us about this?’ May asked. ‘I am supposed to be your partner.’

  ‘I hadn’t seen you, had I? I got home, went to bed and was woken up to come here.’

  ‘According to the emails on his phone, it looks like he disappeared from King’s College a few months ago,’ said Banbury. ‘His friends have been worried about him. I’ll let you have the call log.’

  ‘You already had time to go through them?’ asked Bryant, amazed. The PCU had no access to Metropolitan Police databanks without first acquiring permission.

  ‘It only took me ten minutes.’ Banbury tapped his jacket. ‘Portable tech.’

  Bryant was disgusted. ‘I can’t even open my emails in that time.’

  May took the sheet off the body for one more look. With his head at the overgrown base of the tree and one foot curled beneath the other leg, the corpse had a distinctly Pre-Raphaelite air.

  ‘Are you sure you want this?’ Banbury lifted up the bloated body of the dead Jack Russell and lowered it into a plastic bag.

  ‘What the hell was he doing here, digging up the corpse of a dog?’ May wondered. ‘This raises more questions than it answers. If he’s our serial unburier, who killed him?’

  ‘We should be able to place him at St George’s Gardens,’ said Bryant. ‘There’s one person who might be able to help us. Shirone Estanza.’

  ‘She already signed a statement saying that Romain Curtis went back into the park by himself,’
May reminded him.

  ‘Yes, but now we have an ID, she might recognize Mr Emes as someone she’d seen hanging around outside the place on another occasion. She lives just over the road, remember?’

  ‘I suppose it’s worth a try.’ May indicated the body. ‘I’ll get the rest of the team working on King Harold here, find out where he went, who his friends were.’

  ‘I could tell you a little about some of those,’ said Bryant, ‘except that I’m sworn to secrecy.’

  ‘Whose side are you on, exactly?’

  ‘I sometimes wonder that myself,’ Bryant muttered, looking down at the promising, wayward student now lying dead in the grass.

  Shirone Estanza stood in the doorway examining the photograph for a long time, but finally shook her head.

  ‘Hanging around outside, sitting in the gardens during the day, anything at all that might provide us with a link,’ said Longbright. ‘Have a think, there’s no rush.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Shirone said finally. ‘There are a lot of students around here because of the colleges. They all look like him, sort of ordinary. Invisible. You only notice the ones who stick out.’

  ‘It was worth a try,’ said Longbright, gathering up Banbury’s photographs and putting them back in her handbag.

  ‘Why have you got a house brick in there?’ asked Shirone, peering over.

  ‘Under British law you can’t stop a suspect with a weapon but you might be allowed to hit him with something that would naturally be in your hand at the time,’ Longbright explained. ‘So I always carry my handbag.’

  Shirone gave her something approaching a smile.

  ‘There you go, you’ve got a nice smile. You should try using it more often.’

  ‘I keep thinking what would have happened if I hadn’t suggested going to the club. I could tell he wasn’t really keen. I made Romain go and he got drunk. If only I hadn’t …’

  Longbright placed a placating hand on hers. ‘I’ve heard this line of thought a million times before,’ she said gently. ‘It doesn’t lead anywhere. You have to put it behind you and think about your own future now.’

  ‘But it’s my fault.’

  ‘Don’t think about the path you didn’t take. I never do.’ A sudden thought struck her. ‘Do you know if Romain’s funeral service was handled by a company called Wells and Sons in Lamb’s Conduit Street?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Shirone slowly. ‘It was a Co-op funeral, done on the cheap. I know because Romain’s mum told my mum that some bloke came around to see her about giving him an expensive send-off. She sent him away.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you know his name?’

  ‘Yeah, because it was a funny one, like something you’d get in an old card game. It was Gummage – no, Rummage.’

  26

  AFTERLIFE

  By mid-morning on Friday, Arthur Bryant had violet bags under his eyes but a look of triumph on his face. ‘Stephen Emes’s last phone call was to the barman of the tavern at Bleeding Heart Yard,’ he told May, thumping into the office and dropping papers all over the desk.

  ‘What am I supposed to make of that? Your shirt’s on inside out, by the way.’

  ‘According to the landlord, it’s where the New Resurrectionists hold their meetings. Raymond wanted us to provide physical links. If we can connect this organization with the three bodies being dug up, we’re on our way to proving their involvement in the death of Romain Curtis.’ He looked down at his shirt. ‘I wondered why the buttons were on the inside.’

  ‘Arthur, one of those bodies belongs to a dog. And why would they meet at a public house if they want to keep their identities hidden?’

  ‘Like most pubs built on street corners, the tavern has an upstairs room with its own private entrance. And you’ll love this part; historically, it’s where the resurrectionists of old used to meet. These people wanted me to find Emes. It wasn’t my fault that we got there too late.’

  ‘They might have killed him themselves – did you think of that?’

  ‘Then why would they have risked exposure by agreeing to meet with me, and asking me to find him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ May pushed an avalanche of notes back on to his partner’s side of the joined desks. ‘None of this makes any sense to me. God knows what Raymond will make of it.’

  ‘There’s something else. Mr Merry is an academic at the Museum of London, where he’s making a study of apotropaic magic. To do so, he needs living creatures; specifically, birds. Even more specifically, ravens.’

  ‘So you’ve got your thief.’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that, and he knows it. Both of these cases hinge on proof, and I have no evidence of what he’s up to. I can’t imagine how the theft was accomplished, and he knows it. Which is why he forced me to make a deal with him.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to hear this part,’ groaned May.

  ‘As I said, I agreed to drop the Tower investigation in return for a lead in the Romain Curtis case, but it was only for one week.’ Bryant fished about in his pockets for the card. ‘He gave me the contact for the New Resurrectionists, remember.’

  ‘Why would he know they were involved?’

  ‘He didn’t. But he knew that in this great wide city they were by far the most likely candidates. Who else on the wrong side of the law knows how to dig up a body? They led me to Stephen Emes.’

  May struggled to take all this in. ‘Then your Mr Merry is a suspect. For all you know, he could have killed both Curtis and Emes.’

  ‘I suppose so, but it doesn’t seem likely, does it?’ Bryant counted on his stubby fingers. ‘Point One, he had no motive for killing them that we’re aware of.’

  ‘Romain Curtis – he saw Emes at work in St George’s Gardens, yes? So Emes reported back to Merry and Merry killed him.’

  ‘No, because Point B, the methods were entirely different. A hit-and-run and a crossbow? From the same killer? That would be a first.’

  ‘Then Emes killed Curtis because he saw him digging up the body, and Merry killed Emes because he was exposing them all to risk.’ He stopped for a moment and counted on his fingers. ‘Emes. Curtis. Merry. Yes. That’s what I meant.’

  ‘Rubbish! That doesn’t even make any sense to me, and I love things that make no sense. We’ve got five corpses, John. All right, three of them were dead to begin with and one belongs to a Jack Russell, and I don’t think the ravens are connected because neat connections between two entirely separate investigations only ever happen in dreadful old detective novels. And another thing. Merry might have put me on to the New Resurrectionists to keep them in line, but why would he bother with someone like Emes?’

  ‘I really have no idea, Arthur. I was hoping you’d tell me. I suddenly feel incredibly old and tired.’ May pressed his hands against the wads of clippings and yellowed pages that were still fluttering from Bryant’s desk. ‘Are you going to present all this to Raymond?’

  ‘I thought you might. He’d take it better from you.’ Bryant suddenly looked contrite. ‘There is something else. As you know, we’ve continued to investigate the thefts from the Tower, even though we were specifically warned not to.’

  ‘We? I didn’t agree to anything.’

  ‘Well, I sort of agreed for you. If Merry finds out, I could be in trouble. This isn’t exactly the safest building in London. The security system hasn’t worked since I fixed it. I tested out that electronic face-recognition thingy by coming in with a false beard and comedy glasses, and it still let me in. Almost anyone can get through the front door. There are only the two Daves between us and oblivion.’

  May was going to suggest that his partner was exaggerating the risk, then remembered that he had once succeeded in getting their old offices in Mornington Crescent blown up. ‘All right,’ he agreed, ‘I’ll have someone posted downstairs until this whole thing is over. It seems to me that we’re missing the most obvious connection. Graverobbing. These “New Resurrectionists” could be digging up bodies and retu
rning valuables to the funeral parlour. Rummage visited both Mrs Wallace and Romain Curtis’s mother.’

  ‘Rather a risky business, don’t you think, graverobbing in Central London just to swipe a bit of jewellery from a suicidal man and a destitute old lady? And what about the dog? I called the owners of poor little Prince. No prizes for guessing that he was also buried by Wells and Sons, so if there’s any more digging up to be done, it’s there, in the funeral home.’ He raised the phone and punched out an internal extension. ‘Janice, I’ve got a job for you.’

  ‘Miss Longbright, it’s nice to see you again,’ said Ron Rummage, smiling as he held out a pudgy hand. ‘You remember Andy Orton, our embalmer?’

  She had not spoken to Rummage’s assistant on her last visit. Now Orton rose to his full height of six feet four inches to welcome her. He seemed pleasant enough until he smiled, revealing a disturbing oblong rictus of long yellow wolf-teeth.

  ‘Andy will look after you today, as I’ve got some newly bereaved waiting to see me,’ Rummage explained with an air of gossipy confidentiality. ‘People have a tendency to die at the most inconvenient times, and I was called out last night at three a.m., so I’m not at my sharpest right now. If you have any questions specifically for me, Andy will relay them.’ With a flourish of the maroon velour curtain at his back, he was gone. Longbright was reminded of a Victorian magician’s set, where the mechanics were hidden behind vases of dusty fake flowers and plaster statues.

  ‘Did you handle the burials of Mr Wallace and Mrs Duncannon?’ Longbright asked, checking the notes Bryant had written out for her. He had specifically requested that she should go through the complete burial-preparation process, although he had not told her why, or why he would not attend in person. When she asked him if he wanted to partner her for the interview, he reacted strongly against the idea. It was almost as if he was becoming phobic about bereavement. She had known coppers who’d become sickened by the sight of death and had been driven to leave the force.