Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart

by Christopher Fowler - Bryant

  ‘But then an entirely unwarranted intrusion occurs: a bizarre event that actually fits our remit and gets passed to us too quickly for the City of London to do anything about it – you remember it was put on the incident log by a local PC who contacted this unit because we were the only ones in the vicinity who were still open. The event – an interrupted exhumation – is compounded almost immediately by the death of its only witness.’ He addressed the others like a lawyer during his summing-up. ‘Now, one would think that’s something to get your teeth into. First directive: to decide whether Romain Curtis was killed as the result of what he had seen or heard. Well, we knew he’d heard something – a phrase that turned out to be “He’s a minor”. The culprits are saying, “Ignore him, he doesn’t matter.” Corpses don’t talk, so the person who’s holding Wallace up is talking to – who? Two people, then, not one. Which explains Wallace’s right arm. Curtis stated that he saw it rise. What he saw, I imagine, is a pair of idiots trying to stop a corpse from falling over by holding it under the arms. Wallace had been in the ground since Friday morning. Rigor mortis had worn off.

  ‘Curtis doesn’t see that the corpse is being held up. He’s been smoking dope, for a start, it’s very dark beneath the trees by the rear wall of the gardens, and if the act was premeditated, his graverobbers are presumably wearing dark clothes. What he gets is a nice little puppet-show, rather like the Black Theatre of Prague. And what he sees makes such an impact on him that he leaves his girlfriend on the street and goes back for another look. Whatever happens then is what decides his fate.’

  Bryant played the room, hooking a thumb into his waistcoat. ‘Does Curtis take a photo? We don’t know, because there’s nothing on his phone, so if he did, he deleted it. The next evening he is followed to a local club by one of the perpetrators, who spikes his drink. Curtis collapses in a backstreet and is dispatched. The question remains, did he go back to take a photograph in the gardens? He’s a teenager; that and texting is virtually all they do. Of course he did. But at this point a new mystery surfaces: during the course of the evening Curtis’s shirt mysteriously changes colour. Why? What happened to it?

  ‘Now our so-called bingo balls of fate start to line up in quick succession. Other bodies are disinterred, and it transpires that all were buried by the same undertaker. Yet despite this, the senior funeral services director of Wells and Sons comes up clean. But there has to be a link, no matter how unlikely: a suicide, a sickly old lady, a dog, none of whom knew each other. What were they buried with?’ He checked his notes. ‘A pair of silver cufflinks, a paste brooch, a diamanté collar, nothing to get excited about there. I thought perhaps there was something else in one of the coffins, but Prince’s little casket didn’t even have a lining, so no luck on that front.

  ‘Now we turn our attention to a group of disgruntled medical students frustrated by the limitations of the pharmaceutical industry – the New Resurrectionists. They’ve followed the path of their forebears and taken to supplying themselves with cadavers. I’m sent there by my only real suspect in the raven-theft case. Why do I say he’s a suspect? Because Mr Merry, a so-called “academic necromancer”, is in fact a gargantuan fraud in a pirate hat whom I have been convinced to take seriously. He, however, takes himself very seriously indeed, which makes him dangerous, especially after he sends me into the clutches of a paramedical splinter group with an illegal agenda.

  ‘The obvious question is, why would he do such a thing?’ Bryant looked about the room. ‘Let’s go back to the reason why I suspect him of being a birdnapper in the first place. He’s a believer in apotropaic magic: the power of animals to bring about great psychic change. Ravens are right up there among the most powerful mythological fauna of all, and ravens from the Bloody Tower are enfolded into the very fabric of England’s mythology. OK, we know that to be a load of old cobblers, but Merry’s clients don’t and will doubtless pay top dollar to see him conduct a ceremony that is intended to initiate the fall of the nation. When does a man stop being a harmless crank? When others are prepared to believe in him and back it up with cash.

  ‘Merry may be a charlatan but he’s an astute reader of human nature, what we might call a sensitive. After our interview he instinctively knows that I suspect him. So he sends me into the lions’ den. Even if he doesn’t know the specifics of the New Resurrectionists’ involvement in my case, he’s pretty sure of two things: one, that they were involved somehow; and two, that they’ll want to see their enemy up close.’

  He raised a finger at them. ‘But … Mr Merry has made a mistake. It transpires that one of his employees was hired to conduct the exhumations, because they’re all but impossible to manage alone. This, then, is the crossing point between the two cases. But we still come back to the fundamental question: why remove the bodies from the coffins at all? And why dig up a dog?’

  Land thought he had finished and stood up, but Bryant continued. ‘Meanwhile, there are other undercurrents. Mrs Wallace starts attacking her husband’s client, first verbally, then physically, blaming him for the death of her husband. Her son Martin confirms that his father became privy to information that he found morally compromising, and did not know what to do about it. Wallace’s performance at work suffered, so his client Krishna Jhadav removed the account and ruined his livelihood, which arguably led to his depression and suicide. By the way, it was Janice here who discovered that Thomas Wallace had a history of treatment for depression.

  ‘During the third exhumation, which, as it’s a very small canine, we can assume only takes one person this time, the resurrectionist is shot dead with an arrow from a crossbow. Even though the choice of weapon is bizarre, we do have a suspect. Unfortunately Mrs Wallace turns out to have been at home with her son that night, and we even have confirmation from our own team, because she goes out to the local corner shop, walking past the front terrace where Shirone Estanza lives. We know someone was keeping a watchful eye on the girl, and presumed it was Mrs Wallace because she thinks Estanza knows more than she’s letting on.

  ‘Which leaves one other main suspect in the frame for the death of Stephen Emes, and that would be someone in the New Resurrectionists who knew what he was up to and felt that his actions compromised the safety of the group, which is why I want their headquarters turned over with an electron microscope and mint surgical tweezers until we get some hard forensic evidence. And if that isn’t an advance on a random collection of bingo balls I’m Shirley Bassey.’

  Having completely run out of breath, Bryant seated himself and looked about for his smouldering pipe while a kitten peed on Raymond Land’s shoe.

  36

  WASTE MANAGEMENT

  Krishna Jhadav’s left arm and hip still ached on Tuesday morning. As he walked down to the service corridor in the building’s basement, he shrugged his shoulders and twisted his head from side to side, trying to loosen his tender muscles. He cursed himself for having made the appointment today.

  He was still angry with Wallace’s crazy bitch wife for trying to drag him off down the street, but what hurt more was seeing how upset Irina had become after he’d returned from the hospital. He had carefully avoided any detailed explanation of what he did for a living, knowing that she would not be able to handle some of the hard realities of his job. They were virtually living together these days. If the relationship got any more serious he knew he would have to find a way of broaching the subject with her, and he had a bad feeling about how she would react.

  His swipe card got him into the restricted area, but there was no one to meet him on the other side. This was not unusual; most of the system was automated now. He was heading to the back of the building, where he followed the directions marked ‘Primary Basin’.

  He had not wanted to come here this morning, but he was desperate. The factory was owned by one of his most loyal clients, but it had been fined half a dozen times in the last five years for Health and Safety infractions. This time it was more than likely that there would be a government inv
estigation, but he couldn’t afford to turn down the money. Inspect the consignment, approve the paperwork, ship it out; he had been through the procedure a hundred times before. This was his third trip, and the last, but three was the minimum he could get away with. After tonight he could sign and deliver, paid up front.

  Reaching the last of the signs warning that all non-site personnel needed to be accompanied, he pushed open the brushed-metal door to the primary sedimentation treatment tanks.

  The grey concrete bowls set in the basement floor were dry and empty. Galvanized-steel walkways criss-crossed them, and at the far side a bank of digital monitors recorded the system’s activity. The tanks were used to settle sludge, allowing grease and oil to float to the surface. This was skimmed off by rotating mechanical scrapers that drove the collected scum towards a hopper in the base of the tank, whence it could be pumped to sludge-treatment facilities. Fats and oils from the floating material could then be recovered for a rendering process called saponification.

  Jhadav looked around for a technician, but found no one. As the factory was largely unoccupied today the tanks were still unused, although the sewage lines were open for clearing waste. Usually, all active areas of the site were required to be manned throughout the working day, but his client had managed to reduce on-site personnel to just two managers.

  Jhadav crossed the diamond-patterned walkway to the monitors and checked the back office. Neon striplights were on everywhere, the equipment was functioning, but there were no members of staff on duty.

  He stared impatiently at the monitors, the diagrammatic mazes of pipes and tanks, most of them blank, a couple marked in red to indicate that they held waste in containment. Four empty office swivel chairs stood in a row. He wondered why people got so squeamish about waste. Everyone produced it but nobody wanted to know where it went. He was always surprised by the level of hysteria that accompanied the siting of factories: neighbourhoods up in arms, local petitions, council protests; if there was one thing in which Britain led the world it was overreaction. So there was a little horseflesh in supermarket beefburgers: wasn’t that a small price to pay for cheap convenient food? Waste was the same. You were prepared to produce it, but you didn’t want it anywhere near you.

  Jhadav had seen enough. Everything seemed to be in order. He was glad the managers had received instructions to make themselves scarce for the final visit. He was about to leave when he heard movement somewhere below him. Looking over into the nearest basin he saw something come to rest near the shallow indentation at the centre of the basin.

  The object looked familiar. There in the centre, sliding to a stop over the drainage grille, was a black leather Bulgari wallet. It was definitely his, because several credit cards had come loose and lay scattered on the basin floor. Irina had talked him into choosing the damned thing but it fitted euros, not pounds, and he had regretted buying it ever since. It had been in one of his pockets when he had arrived – he’d taken it out to get at his entry card – but the pockets were too shallow and it had a habit of falling out.

  The basin was around four metres deep, but a short retractable steel ladder was fitted over the side. Jhadav slipped through the railing and climbed quickly down, retrieving the wallet and repacking it with his cards. He couldn’t quite see how it had ended up here.

  He was about to climb back up when he heard a noise in the vent set in the side of the basin, about one and a half metres up from the angled base. Bringing his ear closer to the outlet, he heard it more clearly. A mechanical calibration, dividing off the seconds.

  He did not see the arrow until it was right in front of his face. A tintinnabulation filled his head as he reeled back under its impact, trying to understand what had happened. He raised his right hand to his cheek and brought it away wet. His fingers looked as if they had been dipped in red wine. His neck started to burn.

  Jhadav turned and was horrified to see the smooth steel shaft jutting out of his collarbone. He tried to maintain his balance but dropped to his knees in shock.

  The ringing continued, driving out his ability to think clearly. He looked up at the blackened opening of the outlet, watching in horror as an explosion of dense brown effluent lolloped from the gaping vent.

  The smell was unbelievable, something solid and overwhelming that blinded his senses. It spattered from the unsealed pipe, blasting in every direction, spraying his eyes, removing the grip from the soles of his shoes. He slid heavily on to his back, scrabbling at the floor.

  The pipe was in full flow now, discharging the backed-up waste of the tank above in a great arc, which was forced out by pressure alone. It had already covered the base of the tank. The effluent comprised a lethal combination of liquids, solids and gases. The reek of methane burned his sinuses. Jhadav felt himself losing consciousness, and knew that if he did not reach the ladder he was doomed to die in here.

  He had seen enough accidents on silage projects – workers were frequently overcome by the fumes and hardly ever managed to get out alive. Slipping and sliding in the raw waste, he fought to reach the bottom rung of the ladder, but a fresh blast of sewage hit him in the middle of his chest, throwing him from his feet. He twisted as he fell, punching the arrow deeper into his shoulder. His skull cracked against the base of the steel ladder, and he landed face down in the untreated sewage that was flooding into the basin.

  Held in place by the run-off, he floundered weakly, but now his arm was caught behind the conduit ladder and he was unable to move in any direction.

  Flopping like a seabird trapped in tar, Jhadav’s movements grew fainter, finally stilling as his body was subsumed within the cloacal deluge.

  37

  SHAFTED

  On Tuesday morning at 9.35 a.m. all hell broke loose. News of Krishna Jhadav’s death reached the PCU. Orion Banks immediately called Raymond Land with a torrent of furious questions. Land deflected her call with a rare demonstration of spine, and the unit was divided into two work-teams. Meanwhile, yet another request for a search warrant was entered against the premises of the New Resurrectionists, although this was only in principle, as Banks had still not approved Bryant’s earlier written argument for locating it.

  ‘Jhadav was found in a factory called CaroFrend Processing,’ Bryant pointed out. ‘Interesting derivation, abbreviated Latin for “to crush meat”. Funny how companies always think that it’ll sound better if they translate their purpose into something vaguely classical.’

  ‘Banks is having a meltdown,’ Land warned. ‘She’s blocking all of our documentation, refusing to process anything. I don’t think the CoL has any idea what she’s up to. I asked her why and she told me, and I quote, “This isn’t an investigation, it’s a David Lynch cheese dream.” I don’t even know what that means.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about her, old sock,’ said Bryant. ‘Her phone call to you was more an act of self-preservation than genuine concern. Banks is arse-covering against a future inquiry. I’ve seen the type before. Her eye’s more on the clock than the mantelpiece, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘No, I don’t know what you mean,’ Land admitted. ‘I never know what you mean. If you knew all of that – what you said in the meeting last night – why on earth didn’t you foresee what was going to happen to this fellow Jugdish?’

  ‘Jhadav,’ Bryant corrected. ‘If I’d have foreseen that I’d have been a clairvoyant, not a copper. It doesn’t fit the pattern. I had him down as an outsider. This puts him at the centre now, where I should have kept him all along.’

  ‘It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it, considering he’s dead?’

  Bryant shot him a jaundiced look. ‘You don’t have to remind me. Make sure someone’s with his girlfriend at all times until this is over. Is Banks going to approve the bloody search warrant or not?’

  ‘I told you, she won’t commit until she’s been through your paperwork,’ Land explained. ‘You don’t even know where this building is.’

  ‘Then we go ahead without her.’
Bryant turned to the immense London map book on his desk.

  ‘You can’t do that!’

  ‘No? Watch me.’

  ‘Anyway, why didn’t Meera follow you?’ Land asked. ‘I thought she was going to keep tabs on your movements.’

  ‘She ran out of petrol,’ said Bryant. ‘You hadn’t signed off on her petty cash. Now, we’re looking for a small chapel set back from the road, disused, probably Wesleyan.’

  ‘How could you possibly tell it was Wesleyan from beneath a blindfold?’ asked May.

  ‘I imagine the Wesleyans formed a reasonable fit with our students’ beliefs. Evangelical, anti-slavery, pro-women’s rights, believers in free will and moral responsibility – OK, some dreadful stuff too – but more importantly, there were a lot of chapels in South London that were closed down after the war. They’re generally Grade II listed and leased out for private use on the condition that the building fabric isn’t tampered with. They’re simply constructed and quite bare inside, and don’t have the huge windows you associate with Anglican churches. I’ve pinpointed the three most likely properties.’ Bryant tapped the page with the end of a rubber fish containing a biro, the only pen he’d been able to find.

  ‘Here, you’ll be able to see the actual buildings,’ said May, reaching across to his computer and opening Google Maps. He typed in the co-ordinates and went to Street View. ‘Tell me if you think any of these is right.’

  ‘Wait, go back a bit,’ Bryant commanded. ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Gravel drive, Griselinia littoralis. London privet. I found a bit stuck to my sleeve. That’s the place.’

  ‘Good enough for me,’ said May. ‘You’ll have to lead a team there. I’m heading over to Battersea with Giles and Jack, to check out Jhadav’s body. I can’t say I’m looking forward to it.’