Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart

by Christopher Fowler - Bryant

  Only Longbright and Land stayed behind. The remaining Dave offered to come along, but it was decided that he would be more useful mending the lavatory. Bryant drove in Victor, his bashed-up primrose-yellow Mini Minor, despite the protestations of Banbury and Bimsley, while Mangeshkar followed behind on her Kawasaki.

  ‘My brake lights aren’t working, so you might go into the back of me a few times,’ Bryant warned as they set off.

  Meanwhile, May drove the others to the headquarters of CaroFrend Processing, where Krishna Jhadav’s body had been found.

  ‘Apparently he was there running an assessment of their waste-disposal requirements for his brokerage report,’ he told the others. ‘He didn’t take an assistant and didn’t put it in his diary, and only the guard signed him in. Sounds like it might have been a dodgy deal.’

  They crossed the Thames, passed under a railway bridge and into the grey hinterlands of Battersea. ‘After all those grand plans for the power station they’re ending up with six hundred million quid’s worth of absentee-owner flats,’ said May disgustedly, ‘just like all the other apartment blocks around here. London’s going to be a millionaires’ wasteland soon. Keep an eye out on your left, we should be coming up to the place.’

  They halted before a windowless building of dull grey steel, set back behind a row of run-down betting shops and discount housewares stores. ‘Couldn’t be more invisible if it tried,’ said May, looking up. ‘This is the sort of place where the stench of rendered fat would once have turned the surrounding area into rookeries. The reaches of the city beyond Chelsea, Albert and Battersea Bridges still have these invisible industries. I guess new technology has rendered them safe.’

  ‘Not for Jhadav,’ said Renfield. They were checked at the gate and admitted to a small car park, where two men were waiting for them.

  ‘Thank God,’ said the older of the pair, a robustly overweight man in his late fifties. ‘We were starting to think you weren’t coming.’

  ‘Traffic,’ said May, making the introductions. David Callow was the site manager. Nobody caught his sidekick’s name, or needed it. They were led into an office so devoid of features that it might have belonged to an MOT centre or a chartered accountancy firm. There they were issued with swipe cards and led along a series of down-sloping corridors.

  ‘Ninety-eight per cent of the system is automated,’ Callow explained. ‘There are just four full-time employees. Everything else is operated remotely, either preset or programmed from another unit.’

  ‘What was Mr Jhadav doing here by himself?’ asked May.

  ‘It was just a formality, required by law before he could sign off on our contract,’ said Callow dismissively. ‘We have a security guard who checks the monitors every two hours. It’s not strictly necessary as they’re regulated elsewhere, but it’s good to have, you know, actual visual registration.’ He said this as if the idea of using one’s eyes was a faint absurdity. ‘What we don’t understand is why he went down into one of the tanks. It’s not difficult but you do have to climb a ladder. There’s no way you could wander into one by mistake. We had to drain the tank, which meant pulling his body out and hosing it down.’

  ‘You realize you’ve probably destroyed any forensic evidence by doing so,’ said Kershaw.

  ‘We had no choice – health-and-safety emergency regulations. We had to store him somewhere until you arrived, and the only vented areas are in the basin rooms. There’s no real biohazard risk because the effluent is partially treated, but the methane …’ He let that sentence hang in the air, aware of how unappealing it was starting to sound. ‘The room next door was empty so we took him there. Here’s where he was found. The guard realized that someone had opened the outlet discharging effluent into the tank. In that kind of situation the tank has to be immediately blown and its contents annulled.’

  ‘Do you have any idea who opened the outlet?’

  ‘To our knowledge there was only Mr Jhadav in the building. The guard was meant to be up here but – well, he wasn’t at his post at that point.’

  ‘Where was he?’

  Callow looked embarrassed. ‘He’d gone for breakfast. We don’t have an on-site canteen so he went to the café over the road.’

  ‘Leaving Jhadav here by himself.’

  ‘Yes, but nothing could have gone wrong because Mr Jhadav was not in the control area.’

  ‘Clearly something did go wrong because someone came in with Jhadav and killed him,’ said Renfield sharply. ‘So you’ve got a security breach, for a start.’

  ‘How easy would it be for an outsider to gain entry?’ asked May.

  ‘They’d need a registered swipe card.’

  ‘And apart from that?’

  Callow looked blankly at him. ‘Well, nothing. Most people wouldn’t know what to do unless they were pretty good with computers.’

  ‘How good?’ asked Renfield.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not very good with them myself.’

  He pushed open a grey steel door and stepped into the dimly lit monitor room. ‘You see, three screens for the basins. There’s very little that can be controlled from here beyond shifting the CCTV cameras and filling and clearing the tanks, and those controls are purely included here as a safety measure.’

  May examined the primary-coloured touch screen. ‘You mean you just have to swipe these two panels? If I can work it out, anyone can.’

  ‘There’s a bit more to it than that,’ Callow assured him, unable to conceal his uneasiness. ‘We conform to all national safety standards.’

  ‘The barest minimum, I imagine. At least you have footage of this on your hard drive.’

  ‘Well, yes, we’ll have footage of the tanks filling, but not the platforms above them. The primary purpose of recording the basin area is to make sure that the grilles are functioning correctly.’

  ‘So in the event of a terrorist attack, say, you’d have no footage of the culprits?’

  Callow halted in his tracks. ‘Mr May, you have to understand that there would be absolutely no danger to anyone outside. Even if all three tanks were filled and blown, their contents would remain contained on site in dampers beneath the building. There’s no physical connection between the internal pipework and the outside water and sewer systems. Waste is reduced and removed in solid form.’

  May sighed. ‘Let’s go and see the body.’

  Jhadav was in a room next to the walkway, lying sprawled on a pair of bath-towels, as if arranged for sunbathing. Although his skin and clothes had been hosed clean, he reeked. A stump of steel protruded from the right side of his collarbone. Only Kershaw didn’t seem to notice the smell. He crouched close to Jhadav’s neck. ‘It looks like the same type of arrow to me. See the crosscut end? Deeper than the other one, probably knocked further in when he fell.’

  Kershaw dug out a pair of plastic gloves and felt in Jhadav’s jacket pockets. He carefully lifted some wet pages and unfolded them. Raising his eyebrows at May, he indicated the type.

  ‘I hope this isn’t going to take very long,’ said Callow. ‘We need to get back on schedule.’

  ‘You left Jhadav here unsupervised, and you let someone else into the building,’ May pointed out. ‘That’s just the start of your problems, because the attention this attracts is going to bring down an incredibly rigorous inspection of your work practices. So right now you probably want to return to your office, lock your door and hide until we’ve gone.’

  ‘This isn’t going to get out,’ Callow warned. ‘I’ve already briefed our PR department.’

  ‘Of course you have,’ said May, ‘but guess what? Your publicity agent has no power against the weight of the British legal system when it decides you’re in the wrong, despite what you may think.’

  ‘Then you’ll be dealing with our lawyers.’

  ‘No,’ said May, ‘we’ll be dealing with you. Your lawyers will be dealing with the court.’

  ‘I hate people like that,’ said May as they walked away from CaroFrend. �
�There’s something very shady going on there. Jhadav turns up for an inspection with nobody present and the tanks cleaned out so there’s nothing to see, and his certification document is already filled out in his pocket with yesterday’s date? Let’s have a look at his company accounts and see if there are any large amounts going in the wrong direction.’

  ‘What are you looking for?’ asked Kershaw.

  ‘Payments in the form of incentives or bonuses, made from the company that’s supposed to be doing the paying out. I’m willing to bet that Jhadav was cutting deals with his clients, bending the H and S regs for a fee on the side. That in itself may have nothing to do with his death, but it’ll give us leverage to investigate.’

  ‘You don’t suspect that guy Callow of being involved?’ Renfield asked.

  ‘I think there are easier ways of ending a difficult business relationship than firing a crossbow bolt through your client’s neck,’ said May.

  38

  RUNNER

  ‘This is the right street,’ said Bryant. ‘I heard the brushes operating in the car wash on the corner. My hearing aid always picks up sounds like that. I just have trouble following conversations sometimes. Particularly if they’re with people I don’t like. We turn here.’

  He pointed through the car windscreen at the small cream-painted chapel set back from the road. ‘There you go,’ he said. ‘The New Resurrectionists.’ Swinging Victor into the drive without indicating, he almost caused Mangeshkar to shoot straight past. As Meera guided her Kawasaki in, Bimsley jumped out and pulled the iron gates shut as a precaution.

  The four of them headed up the chapel steps and rang the bell. ‘I didn’t have high hopes for anyone being here during daylight hours,’ said Bryant. ‘Colin, you and Meera go and see if there’s another way in. Dan and I will be here.’

  ‘Surely the uses of dead tissue must be fairly limited?’ said Banbury while they waited.

  ‘Giles thinks not, especially if they’re looking at bacterial DNA. There are more base pairs making up the genes, and you can use them as templates for proteins and enzymes. The problem is, any findings made from bodies that weren’t registered on the national database wouldn’t be medically permissible, and would leave them liable to public prosecution. That’s why they couldn’t simply make arrangements with relatives to take away the dead. They had to disinter them after registration with a funeral home.’

  Bimsley opened the door. ‘It’s the right place but there’s no one here,’ he said, stepping aside. ‘Nobody living, anyway. There’s a cadaver in a chiller cabinet in the back room.’

  The chapel was much as Bryant remembered it, except that there were signs that the society had moved out in a hurry. In the main hall beyond the vestry the floor was covered in fistfuls of white packing pellets that drifted about like fat maggots, as well as rolls of brown plastic tape and staple guns. A blackened biscuit tin showed evidence of having held burned paperwork.

  ‘They probably disappeared over the weekend,’ said Banbury, crouching down and rubbing the ashes in between his fingers. ‘There are no open windows, and the smell of burning is hard to get rid of.’

  ‘Dan, can you come here?’ called Bimsley. They all went. Propped up outside the back door, beneath the overhanging eaves, was a state-of-the-art Predator Elite crossbow, matt black, elegant and lethal. ‘Looks like our murder weapon.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have done a runner if they weren’t as guilty as hell,’ said Meera.

  ‘No,’ said Bryant, waving his stick about. ‘This just proves they ran from someone, not us. They wanted my help in finding Stephen Emes, remember?’

  ‘Did you call them after we found his body?’ asked Banbury.

  ‘No. I didn’t want to set off any alarm bells.’ He looked down at the crossbow as Banbury unwrapped a clear plastic bag, preparing to move it. ‘This doesn’t look right, leaving it outside, even under the eaves where it wouldn’t get wet.’

  ‘Maybe they put it out here and forgot it in the rush to go.’

  ‘They had no motive, Dan. As far as we know, Stephen Emes was one of them.’

  ‘Who knows what was going on between them? They probably lied to you,’ said Banbury. ‘It seems to me everyone in this whole case is lying.’

  ‘Take this place apart, will you, and find out where they got the cadaver. Meera, you stay here and give Dan a hand. I can take the crossbow back for you.’

  ‘Oh no you don’t,’ said Banbury. ‘You’ll get dinner all over it or shoot yourself in the foot or something. It stays with me. Go on, I’ll see you back at the unit.’

  Bryant and Bimsley left just as the rain started again. ‘The way I see it,’ said Bimsley, ‘this lot already chose to operate beyond the law. It’s a small step from digging up corpses to committing murder.’

  ‘They were doctors, Colin. They were trying to do something for the betterment of mankind, even if they were going about it the wrong way. Jhadav was running deals with waste-disposal managers – it makes me wonder if he was dealing in something more than animal by-products and crossed their path in that capacity. But killing Emes and hiring me to find him doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘OK, but whether the crossbow is theirs or somebody left it there, it’s pretty incriminating.’

  Bryant climbed behind the wheel of Victor and dug around for his keys as rain began to lash the windscreen. ‘I agree,’ he said, ‘but we’re being sidetracked. That’s what’s been happening all through this investigation. Every time I start to pursue a through-line, it diverts. Or rather, someone deliberately diverts me. Here’s a trick you can try. Take any single participant in the case, dead or alive, and assume they’re guilty, then follow their story back to its roots and try to work out what happened.’

  ‘Does it work?’ Bimsley asked, folding himself up into the car.

  ‘Very often. But not in this case.’

  ‘Isn’t it too late now?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Of all the things they could have taken, they left the crossbow behind, Whatever plan they had, it’s finished. They won. It’s over.’

  ‘No, Colin. Anyone who’s found it possible to commit at least two murders in the same week will think they can get away with it again. They’re lost and dangerous, and may not be able to stop.’

  Back in the shadowed chapel, Banbury was measuring muddy bootprints and lifting tracks, narrating his findings while Meera kicked about, bored, listening to the rain on the roof. It sounded as if some of the slates were missing. She looked up, trying to trace the sound of falling water, and found a young man staring back at her halfway through the open skylight. Caucasian, long-haired and scrubbily bearded, he looked like a surprised student.

  ‘Dan!’ she called, running for the back door. Outside, she tried to understand how anyone could have climbed up to the edge of the roof, then saw the scaffolding stack in the corner. Sliding down the tiles, the boy dropped hard on to the scaffold boards and scrambled down as Meera threw herself at the poles above her head and tried to pull herself up. He stamped hard on her left hand, causing her to yell out and fall back. She landed badly on the gravel below.

  Banbury appeared at the door just as the student dropped from the scaffold frame. ‘Stop him!’ Meera called.

  ‘I don’t – apprehend – people, Meera,’ said Banbury. ‘Isn’t that your, um—’

  ‘Ankle,’ Meera gasped. ‘Don’t lose him.’

  Banbury sized up his opponent, around twenty-three and fit, easily identifiable in a red Carhartt hooded sweatshirt and black jeans, making for the drive. John May had always said they should be ready to cover each other’s jobs, but surely this wasn’t what he’d had in mind?

  His target had already opened the gate and gone into the street, so Banbury followed. He kept a steady pace behind the student, but had trouble gaining ground. He had quite short legs, that was the trouble, and—

  A moment’s loss of concentration and the young man had gone. He could only have swung into
the nearest side street. Banbury reached the corner and looked in. Just great, he thought, a farmers’ market, I might as well be in a Bruce Willis film. There, ahead, the red hooded sweatshirt was pushing between the shoppers.

  Banbury ran into the crowd with more force than he intended, but had underestimated the stopping power of large African ladies armed with shopping bags. They blocked him in a solid wall. He found it easier to get ahead of the red hood by running behind the stalls.

  He had to judge the moment carefully, waiting until he was drawing parallel, then dived between two stalls, barrelling into the young man hard from the side. They fell together on to a fruit stall, splattering peaches and scattering apples as the crowd fell back around them.

  The lad’s recovery time was impressive; he was back on his feet while Banbury was still scrabbling around in the smashed fruit, being berated by a fearsome-looking stallholder waving a large pair of scissors.

  Banbury managed to throw out a fist and grab a handful of the red sweatshirt, which was enough to lever him upright. The student pulled free and dropped back behind the stalls, into the draper’s at their rear, with Banbury following, now seized with a determination to bring him in.

  Through the linen shop – very good prices on poly-cotton sheets, pink candlewick bedspreads and baby-blue pedestal mats – up the darkened back stairs to its first-floor showroom, valences and pelmets, then through a fire door leading to a hallway, with the lad remaining tantalizingly beyond reach.

  Banging through the door ahead into a blazingly bright room, Banbury realized they were now on the top floor of the lighting shop next door. The properties were connected.

  The student was a deft mover, manoeuvring himself between the glass pendant lights and standard lamps without breaking a thing. Banbury stopped a low-slung chandelier with his head, scattering crystals in every direction, but retained enough balance to continue forward propulsion across the room. They headed through another linking doorway.