Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart

by Christopher Fowler - Bryant

  Land couldn’t have looked more confused if he’d been blindfolded and turned around three times. ‘Then why were the building plans there?’

  ‘The obvious answer is that Merry knew Emes. He never seems to do his own dirty work, so he put someone else on to it. When you operate in a particular field, you soon get to know who else is around. We know that Emes was available for hire.’

  ‘Could somebody draw me a diagram showing how all these people are connected?’ Land pleaded. ‘I’m lost.’

  ‘You do understand the nature of our work, don’t you?’ asked Bryant. ‘It’s wool-carding. Kept apart, people are fundamentally decent and mean well, but when they’re put together they get themselves into terrible knots. Our job is to disentangle, clean and re-weave the fibres of social life to produce a continuous cord suitable for processing.’ He slapped the chaotic paperwork he had abandoned on Land’s desk. ‘Just assume for now that all the suspects in this case know each other, and that one of them is a murderer.’

  ‘Star Building Maintenance,’ May told his partner back in their office. ‘The other Dave was arrested over in Essex for transporting stolen televisions. He was replaced by a Latvian builder called Pavils who is currently being sought by the authorities in Riga for failing to report to his probation officer.’

  ‘And they sent him to a unit that requires security clearance?’ asked Bryant, incredulous. ‘How did he get through the system?’

  ‘That’s what I asked. Recommendations, apparently.’

  ‘From whom?’

  ‘Have a look at this.’ He chucked a page across the joined desks while Bryant fumbled for his bifocals. ‘He was cleared for maintenance work in the new rare-documents gallery at the Museum of London. There’s a sign-off on the bottom.’

  Bryant found himself looking at the signature of one of the museum’s assistant heads of department, Dr S. Emes. ‘It’s a forgery,’ he said. ‘Emes was kicked out of King’s College and went to work with the New Resurrectionists. Look at the name of the department head at the foot of the letter. Prof. P. W. Merry, PhD, DMS. You realize what this is,’ he added excitedly. ‘It’s proof.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘That Merry’s a charlatan and perhaps something much worse. Now we have links in a chain of command. Merry uses his New Resurrectionist pal Emes, and gets a workman replaced here. He provides clearance so that Pavils can bug the building. And while he’s here, Pavils is under instruction to paint the Bleeding Heart in the attic. Merry’s not clairvoyant. He sent me to the New Resurrectionists in exchange for a promise that I wouldn’t pursue the Tower of London thefts, so we know he has a connection with them. What we need to find out now is who else was connected with Emes. One of these people hired him.’ He stabbed his finger at the names on the board behind him. ‘And after he did their dirty work, they got rid of him. Who’s going to hate a resurrectionist most? How about a funeral director?’

  ‘You have absolutely no empirical data that would allow you to assume that,’ May complained.

  ‘No,’ Bryant agreed, pointing out of the window. ‘It’s called blue-sky thinking. I learned it from the online manual Orion Banks sent everyone. I was going to bin it but then I decided to print it out as there was nothing to read in the staff toilet.’ He grinned. ‘So you see, it turns out I’ve always been ahead of my time. I was just waiting for everyone else to catch up.’

  ‘We’re raiding a funeral parlour?’ Dan Banbury repeated. ‘That’s nice, isn’t it? Perhaps we should follow it with a spot of go-karting round the local crematorium. Talk about no respect for the dead. Bloody hell.’

  ‘I don’t like it any more than you,’ said May, ‘but Arthur seems convinced of their involvement in the death of Stephen Emes, so we now have a search warrant. Let’s get cracking.’

  Ron Rummage was waiting outside when they arrived. His jolliness had dissipated with the news that his premises were to be searched. ‘This is really too much,’ he complained, anxiously wiping his spectacles. ‘This company buried William Gladstone in 1898 and Stanley Baldwin in 1947. We’ve earned the good faith of monarchies and governments, we’ve been entrusted with the final state secrets, and now we’re being treated as common criminals. We have a reputation to maintain. What do you expect to find?’

  ‘We’re hoping to eliminate you from the investigation,’ said Bryant truthfully. ‘You have to look at it from our point of view: a man who attempts to bodysnatch your clients must be regarded as an enemy, no? A respected lawyer, a much-loved local figure and even a dog, all of whom had been planted by you …’

  Rummage winced. ‘Must you say “planted”? We are funeral arrangers, morticians, mourning specialists—’

  ‘I’m sorry, but at some point you do put people who are brown bread into boxes and shovel wet dirt on them,’ said Bryant maliciously. ‘If we could get started?’

  ‘Do you have a faith, Mr Bryant?’ asked Rummage as he unlocked the front door.

  ‘No, Mr Rummage, I decided to forgo that particular emotional crutch a very long time ago.’

  ‘But perhaps you could still find it in your heart to have a little respect for those who still need religion in their lives, and prefer not to think of their departed loved ones as “brown bread”, as you so distastefully put it. And nor are they “pushing up daisies”, “dropping off perches” or “hitting room temperature”, as I’ve also heard you policeman say behind my back. It’s utterly indecent. We try to provide the emotionally traumatized with a little inner peace, not upset them further by conjuring up the image of a corpse with a faceful of mud. Your abrasive attitude is very far from helpful.’

  May fought to suppress a smile. It was a long time since he had heard someone put Arthur in his place. ‘We’ll try to keep this as brief and undisruptive as possible,’ he promised, allowing Banbury to take over. Rummage sat and watched in dismay as the rooms were systematically searched. Bryant stayed silent and thoughtful until his mobile produced an alarming chorus of ‘When the Buds Are Blossoming’ from Ruddigore. After taking the call, he appeared to have lost interest in the search he had initiated.

  He rose, suddenly eager to be away. ‘You two can handle this. I’m going to bring in Mrs Wallace.’ He raised his hat. ‘Mr Rummage.’

  May found himself frowning as he watched Bryant take his leave. Something in his partner’s manner unsettled him. Instead of being relieved that Mr Merry was not about to rain down plagues of frogs on his head, he seemed keen to put the entire matter behind him. Reading Bryant’s motives required, at the very least, expertise and prescience, but this time May felt himself being firmly deflected.

  He always does this before he announces a breakthrough, he thought hopefully.

  34

  A DEAL

  During mid-morning break, Sennen Renfield went looking for Martin Wallace. She found the boy disconsolately kicking a plastic football against the playground wall in the sifting rain. She hadn’t figured him for the football type, being an indie, or whichever tribe it was that he belonged to now. None of the pupils came here any more – on days like today most stayed inside playing online games of escalating complexity.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, concentrating on the ball. ‘What are you doing out here?’

  ‘It’s too hot inside. There’s a fight going on over game controllers. The new Call of Duty maps are out – like I care. I can’t be doing with all that testosterone. How are you?’

  ‘Getting there. It’ll all be over soon.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He kicked the ball harder. ‘I’ll soon be out of school and away from here. Far away, like South-East Asia or something.’

  ‘You don’t mean yet – you mean after your exam results?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ he said sulkily.

  ‘I guess I’ll have to go to any college that will take me,’ she said. ‘I don’t think my grades are going to be that great.’

  ‘I’m not going to college.’ Another, angrier kick. ‘My old man
spent half his life studying. What was the point of that? He ended up hanging from his own school tie off the back of a bedroom door. What a pussy.’

  ‘Are you getting counselling?’

  ‘No. Why would I want to do that?’

  Sennen remembered Longbright’s request. ‘Well, what with everything your mother’s going through—’

  Martin gave her a sharp look. ‘What about my mother?’

  ‘I heard she was outside Shirone Estanza’s flat, just hanging around watching her.’

  ‘Not true. She was hanging around outside the flat of the guy who killed my father. They had a fight in the street; like that could have been any more embarrassing. My mother did something really stupid and the guy ended up in hospital.’

  ‘What did she do?’

  He slammed the ball again. ‘Only tried to strangle him with his tie. Just like my old man.’

  ‘Wow. You really think he killed your dad?’

  ‘He didn’t hold a gun to his head, but yeah, I’d say he killed him.’

  ‘How did he do that?’

  ‘He works for some sleazy waste-disposal company that sells dead animals to the Third World. He dumped all the details of his scummy working practices on my old man, and when Dad told him he was having moral issues with them, he made him go broke.’ Martin stopped the ball at his foot.

  ‘Why didn’t your dad talk it over with your mum?’

  ‘He didn’t tell her anything about his work. All she cared about was how much money he was making. He told me.’

  ‘But your mum was upset enough to—’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about her any more, OK?’

  ‘I was just interested, that’s all.’

  Martin eyed her suspiciously. ‘You’re good friends with Shirone, right?’

  ‘Yeah, we hang out together.’

  ‘I’ll do a deal with you. You can ask me anything you want if you arrange for me to talk to her.’

  ‘I can try. But she’s not looking for a boyfriend.’

  ‘I didn’t say I wanted to go on a date.’ He used the grandma-word with heavy irony.

  ‘You don’t say much at all, do you? Anyway, why would she go out with someone she’s never going to see again? You’re going to South-East Asia.’

  ‘I didn’t say I was going alone.’ He dismissed her, returning his concentration to the ball. ‘So, is it a deal?’

  Sennen sighed. She liked Martin, but Martin was interested in someone else; it was the story of her life so far. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘it’s a deal.’

  35

  MR BRYANT EXPATIATES

  If there was one thing Raymond Land liked more than a tidy office it was a bar graph showing that crime statistics were down, preferably one in nice bright primary colours, clearly labelled in a neat sans-serif typeface, inserted into a congratulatory email from the Home Office.

  Instead he found himself reading a barely comprehensible barrage of invective from Orion Banks and her department of language-manglers, complaining about the sheer pointlessness of attempting any communication with him. His face fell as his eyes skimmed the screen – disincentivized macromanaging – public/private paradigm loss – unleveraged core competency – skill ecosystem malfunction – market-facing personnel deficits … He couldn’t bear to read any further.

  Right, he thought, it’s time somebody put their foot down around here. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. It was five o’clock on Monday evening, over a week since the investigations at the Tower of London and St George’s Gardens had started, and what had they to show for it? Bugger all. He called Longbright, who summoned the rest of the team to the common room, including Giles Kershaw, who was over at St Pancras Mortuary, in the middle of autopsying a workman who had fallen under an earth-mover.

  Last autumn, Land had watched Orion Banks give a presentation at an awayday entitled ‘Pathfinder Projects In Policing’. He particularly recalled her intuitive use of body language, the nape of her bare neck and the way in which her tight blue skirt stretched fetchingly across her thighs. People listened to her, not just because she was attractive but because she was in command. He felt sure that if he could just prove he was cut from the same executive cloth, someone would finally notice him and would have him moved to a department where his talents could be better used. It was time to start being a little more ambitious rather than just hoping for a transfer to the kind of town where a lottery win made local headlines.

  Today’s email was a setback, certainly, but he felt sure he could turn the situation around. He wasn’t the most decisive executive officer, but he was a thorough communicator – there had been many occasions when Bryant and May had announced he was giving them ‘way too much information’, for example – and he felt sure he still had much to offer the force. Although part of him still thought it would be quite nice if his next unit was situated somewhere like the Scilly Isles.

  He peered out of his office, listening to make sure that everyone was assembled. Then he took a deep breath and went into the room.

  He immediately stumbled over, his right foot entangled in a length of purple wool that led around Bryant’s chair leg and up to the detective’s partially unravelled scarf, which had been knotted around the coat-stand.

  Dusting himself down, Land found himself looking at more cats than members of staff. He had a team of eight, PC Fraternity DuCaine currently being on secondment to a Met unit, and ten cats, or strictly speaking one overweight mother cat and nine kittens. Bryant was smoking a pipe and reading an old copy of Fortean Times. Mangeshkar was texting. Bimsley and Banbury were comparing phone apps. Renfield and Longbright were having some kind of domestic, and Kershaw appeared to be holding a dead mouse. May quickly rose, hushed everyone and sat back down again, turning to face him. By doing so, he unconsciously established where the real authority lay in the room.

  ‘Eight officers working on two simple cases,’ Land began, ‘over a period of one week consisting of twelve-hour days, and where are we?’

  ‘Technically there’re nine staff,’ said Bryant, looking over the top of his newspaper, ‘if you count yourself.’

  ‘And there’s the intern,’ said Bimsley.

  ‘And most of us worked over the weekend,’ said Renfield.

  ‘So saying that it’s sixty hours, or thirty per case, you’d be wrong because you’d need to factor in another, what, fourteen or sixteen weekend hours,’ added Banbury. ‘That’s assuming the cases were equally weighted, which they’re not.’

  ‘Just shut up, all of you, you’re all bloody useless,’ yelled Land, breaking his own personal record for losing the room.

  ‘I don’t think that’s fair,’ snapped Mangeshkar. ‘We’ve carried out CCTV checks, phone checks, surveillances and door-to-doors and we’ve conducted over two hundred personal interviews so far. I’ve got plasters all over my feet.’

  ‘We moved the case further on than it would ever have gone under the Met,’ said Bimsley. ‘It’s not our fault if it doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘You still don’t get it, do you?’ said Land, searching the confused faces before him. ‘Even after all this time. It doesn’t have to make sense. You can’t make sense of human nature. A loving husband and wife share a house together for ten years, then one day he batters her to death with a golf club. Moments after he’s arrested, he bursts into tears and says he loves her. Does that make any sense? A selfish woman leaves a kind, caring husband for a smarmy little creep who teaches flamenco to pensioners and has been living in a converted railway carriage in Wales for the last decade. Does that make any sense? Don’t talk to me about sense. I’ve been alive for forty-seven years and I have absolutely no understanding of human nature whatsoever. I might as well be living with a completely different species, giant squids or perhaps some kind of insect colony.’

  ‘I thought you were older,’ said Bryant.

  ‘What I need is a result,’ said Land. ‘I don’t give a fiddler’s fart whether a thief broke into the Tower o
f London and stole a bunch of pets or whether he machine-gunned all the Warders and blew up the armoury. In fact I’d prefer that because then the case would fall under the Prevention of Terrorism Act and would be taken away from us, and I’d be able to tear up the paperwork. And if someone wants to go around digging up the city’s corpses and then decides to tie rockets to them and fire them across the street at oncoming vehicles I really wouldn’t give a tinker’s toss, so long as there was something I could write in the blank section of the form that’s currently sitting on my desk. But no, I have nothing at all except a chain of events that couldn’t be more random if you painted them on ping-pong balls and dropped them into a bingo machine.’

  Land was surprised to find himself sweating, and sat down with a thump on an orange bendy chair.

  Bryant gave May one of his meaningful looks. ‘Thank you for that,’ he said, removing his pipe and folding his paper into his lap in the silence that followed. ‘If you’ve quite got everything out of your system, I’ll endeavour to link together some of your bingo balls.’

  He rose to his feet, digging painfully about in his waistcoat for his bifocals and then a minuscule scrap of paper. Land could not help but notice that everyone in the room had turned to look at him.

  ‘Let’s start with ravens, shall we? Native to these isles, birds of great mystical significance, harbingers of death, progenitors of superstitious power. They disappear from their most famous, most ancient home and we’re asked to investigate not because of any real belief in the idea that when they vanish England falls, but because it will keep us occupied with a piece of pointless PR while the City of London gets on with the serious business of keeping the Square Mile banks secure during a massive fraud cyber-attack.’

  There was a murmur around the room.

  ‘We’re palmed off with some guff about placating the English Tourist Board and preventing the confidence of overseas visitors from being dented, despite the fact that this ridiculous fable has been repeatedly discredited and laid at the feet of late-Victorian fantasists. In other words, my dear Raymondo, the case is there to keep us out of the way.