Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart

by Christopher Fowler - Bryant

  ‘Why would you want that?’

  ‘Because I like you. I thought you’d like me more—’

  ‘If you called me a murderer?’ There was a click as he loaded the shaft into the crossbow. ‘That’s an interesting seduction technique.’

  ‘They wanted me to find out about your mother. The police think she knows more than she told them.’

  ‘My mother and I don’t talk to each other,’ he called back, carefully taking aim. ‘Nobody in our family ever talked to anyone else. I’m going to be completely honest with you, Sennen. Seeing as you’ve been honest with me.’

  ‘Martin,’ she pleaded. ‘No. Don’t say it. Let me leave and we’ll pretend this never happened.’

  ‘No, I think you need to know.’

  ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘I managed to kill Krishna Jhadav eventually. The first time, I hit the man who was helping him. I didn’t mean to. But I got Jhadav in the end. He died as he lived, drowning in shit.’

  ‘I won’t tell anyone, Martin. I promise. I’d never tell.’

  Martin lowered his eyeline along the shaft and prepared to fire.

  ‘I may not look it, but I am a policeman,’ said Bryant vehemently. He held his place on the steps of the Ministry of Defence as the rain pelted down, wishing he didn’t have to justify his position so often.

  ‘The MoD is a separate jurisdiction,’ the security guard explained. ‘I can’t let you inside, Mr Bryant. We know all about the Peculiar Crimes Unit. A right bloody thorn in the side, you’ve been.’

  ‘Then I have to inform you that you’re obstructing the course of an ongoing City of London Police investigation. I just need access to the wine vault for a few minutes.’

  ‘The vault’s run by a separate private company, but I still can’t let you in. We have no spare personnel at the moment, and the rules say that all visitors must apply in advance and be accompanied by one MoD official. Private individuals are all issued with their own personal security codes.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Bryant. ‘Private individuals? Why are they using the vault?’

  ‘Because as soon as the bloody Tories got back in, they flogged off the cellar and let their rich pals store wine there,’ the guard confided. ‘It’s all prestige and privilege.’

  ‘I thought you civil servants were supposed to remain impartial,’ said Bryant.

  ‘You believe that and you work in the public-service sector?’ scoffed the guard. ‘Are you sure you’re a copper?’

  ‘No,’ said Bryant, brandishing his code. ‘I’m just an incredibly wealthy and well-connected man with a private security number for the vault. And I need to get access to what’s mine.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said the guard, stepping aside. ‘You could have said that in the first place. It would help if you didn’t dress like a tramp.’

  Bryant was taken to an immense brushed-steel lift that looked as if it was used to move bullion, and the guard swiped him in. ‘I can’t take you down,’ he said, reaching in and punching the –3 button. ‘The vault’s on a timer. You’ve got exactly ten minutes from when you input your code, then the area shuts down again. So you’d better get a move on.’

  ‘A bit restrictive, isn’t it?’ said Bryant as the doors slid shut.

  ‘This is the Ministry of Defence, not a bingo hall,’ muttered the guard, returning to his post. ‘My shift’s just about to change over, pal. You’ll have to sign out with my relief.’

  Bryant found himself in a concrete corridor lined on one side with clear plastic panels, behind which was broken brickwork belonging to a much more venerable building. The far end opened out into the wine cellars. The entrances to the original individual vaults were lined in Portland stone and stood four feet off the ground at ten-foot intervals along the floor. At this depth the walls were stained with black streaks of damp, a reminder that the Thames ran like an artery through the heart of the city, and always found its way through the cracks.

  The floor had been raised and replaced with polished red bricks. Iron-framed lamps hung at intervals, releasing a warm, low light. At the farthest end, near a dozen old wine barrels laid on their sides, was a blank steel door. Narrow and coffin-shaped, it had been set deep in the thick wall. Beside it was a small metal box, its plastic lid covering a code panel of letters and numbers.

  Bryant consulted his slip of paper and, praying silently, punched in DSQ45106. There was a faint hiss of pressurized air escaping, and the door popped open by two or three centimetres.

  Welcome to the world of the super-rich, Bryant thought. No fuss, no noise, no questions asked. He opened the door and stepped inside. Motion-sensor light panels were already flickering on overhead. The room was tiny, barely higher than the top of his hat, and narrow. It was lined with small square glass panels. An electronic gauge set in the brickwork told him that it was 10 degrees centigrade. It clicked into life, rebalancing the temperature to allow for the fact that he had opened the door.

  This time he needed a four-digit code, 1536.

  Entering it, he was just able to open the door by standing to one side. Carefully, he eased out a polished black wooden box, vaguely recalling that you had to store vintage wine horizontally to keep the cork moist. The cold air was already starting to dig into his bones. When his mobile suddenly started barking out ‘Come Friends and Plough the Seas’ he jumped and almost dropped his cargo. Cradling the case in the crook of his left arm, he dug out his mobile with his right.

  ‘Where are you?’ asked Land. ‘I really need to know what you’re up to. Why did you go and visit a retired codebreaker? Jack and Janice aren’t answering their phones. Colin and Dan are taking the Wallace house apart without authorization and your partner has simply gone missing. And some beardy-weirdie called Mr Merry has just been brought here in handcuffs.’

  ‘So what’s the problem?’

  ‘The problem?’ Land all but shrieked. ‘The problem is that none of this was approved by Orion Banks. She’s threatening to—’

  ‘Let her threaten,’ said Bryant. ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes to close the case.’

  He could hear Land still complaining as he turned off his mobile, noting its miniscule red bar of power. Un-clipping the wooden lid of the case, he examined the final green bottle of Romanée-Conti DRC 1990, nestled in thick straw.

  So this was how Krishna Jhadav and his co-conspirators had spirited away their bribe money. They had not been prepared to entrust the details of its location to any one director. Instead, in an act of chutzpah, Jhadav had handed it to his legal representative along with all of his other sensitive documents, simply because he knew that Thomas Wallace was too honest to ever plug in the flash drive and see what they were up to.

  But in a twist Jhadav could not have foreseen, the depressed executive had killed himself and the flash drive had gone missing.

  Bryant wondered if Mrs Wallace had openly blamed Jhadav for Thomas’s suicide when she called him. Certainly she had taken her revenge, throwing the flash drive into her husband’s burial plot. And when she’d heard that his body had been dug up, how quickly did she realize what must have happened? Bryant knew that if you had two facts, A and C, say, but no B, it was fairly easy to build a bridge between the ones you were absolutely sure of.

  He stood with the bottle balanced in his hand, thinking quietly.

  Krishna Jhadav had received his files back from Mrs Wallace, but there had been no envelope containing a flash drive. Mrs Wallace had hinted that it had been buried. Jhadav had gone to see Ron Rummage to ask if anything could have been placed with the corpse. Rummage wouldn’t have known the answer, but he hadn’t been able to guarantee that it hadn’t, either.

  Jhadav had enlisted Stephen Emes to help him dig up the casket, but had not thought of looking underneath it. He had returned to Rummage – or possibly Orton – and bullied the only other possibility out of one of them; that perhaps the flash drive had accidentally gone into one of the other two caskets buried that week, those of E
lspeth Duncannon and the terrier, Prince.

  But he didn’t find it.

  Worse, someone shot his helper. Jhadav was trapped. The police had visited him. He couldn’t go to the wine vault and make a fuss without drawing attention to himself and giving the game away.

  Bryant was angry. Everyone had kept something from him. Rummage had missed out the detail of his visits from Jhadav because, as he put it, ‘We’ve been entrusted with the final state secrets.’ There was no way that he was ever going to fully disclose what happened in his chapel of rest.

  Mrs Wallace knew all too well why her husband’s coffin had been broken open, but had refused to explain because she wanted to keep her revenge intact. The only power she had over the man she held responsible for the death of her husband was knowing that she had literally buried his lifeline to the future.

  But, of course, Jhadav knew that she knew, and threatened her. She avoided admitting that she was being intimidated by cleverly reversing what everyone thought, and making it look as if she was stalking him. She hadn’t meant to kill him with a falling plant pot, she had simply done it to draw attention to her behaviour. So long as she appeared to be the aggrieved party, her secret remained safe.

  Only one part of the story made no sense. What had happened to Romain Curtis on the night he’d gone to the club? And why did he change his shirt?

  Bryant was still pondering the question when the lights snapped off and the steel door swung shut, sealing him inside the chill walls of the vault.

  46

  SEALED FATES

  Sennen Renfield’s tears were making her face itch. She wanted to raise a hand to her cheek, but was frightened that Martin would release the trigger of the crossbow. His right arm was out of the shadows and quivering, as if he was fighting to control his own nervous system. She knew he was too good a shot to miss.

  ‘You can’t do this, Martin. You can’t hurt anyone else.’

  ‘I only meant to take out Jhadav,’ he replied. ‘Romain told me he’d seen two of them. I didn’t know they were the same height. I just saw an outline against the trees. I should have waited until I was sure.’

  ‘You have to tell the police exactly what happened. You have to tell them about your father. They’ll listen to you.’ She was shaking so violently now that she could feel the orange starting to roll from her head.

  ‘If I give myself up, my life will be over,’ Martin called back. ‘How old will I be when I get out of prison? How will I get a job? Stephen Emes had a wife and a kid before he joined the New Resurrectionists. I found his family on Facebook. They changed their names to avoid being associated with him. People will do the same thing to me. I was always the stupid indie kid you all made fun of.’

  ‘Not me, Martin, I would never—’

  ‘I have to finish it, Sennen. You know—’

  ‘No, my father—’

  ‘Your father doesn’t know anything.’

  ‘All right,’ she cried. ‘You’re right. I made it up.’

  ‘Why would you do that?’

  ‘Because …’ She could hardly say, Because I think about you every waking second of the day and I’d do anything for you, anything, because he barely knew she existed. It was so cruel; she wanted Martin but he wanted Shirone, and Shirone had only ever wanted Romain. ‘… I like you,’ she finished lamely. She wished he would fire and end the agony.

  ‘You’re the only one who knows what really happened, the only one who’ll ever know,’ Martin said slowly. She knew then that she would not leave the basement alive.

  She felt the shot lift strands of her hair. The arrow skimmed her skull and knocked the orange aside, but didn’t pierce it. She screamed and dropped to the floor, scuttling across the room as he came running after her.

  Outside, Renfield and Longbright were looking for the entrance, but the building’s basement was unmarked.

  Longbright held up her hand. ‘Wait, I heard someone. They’ve got to be in the old car park.’ A ramp curved below, but the shutters at its base were closed. ‘We must be able to go down from inside the building.’

  They ran back to the main entrance and headed for the lobby.

  If he hadn’t been so very cold, Bryant might have laughed at the circumstances which had resulted in him being shut inside a glass tomb beneath the Ministry of Defence.

  And now, for some unfathomable reason, he had no signal on his mobile. He’d had one a minute ago. Where had it gone? That was the trouble with technology, it was just so random. There had definitely been a tiny red bar. Red was good, wasn’t it?

  Overhead, a thin emergency light flickered on, buzzing faintly.

  Nobody at the PCU knew he was down here. Even the MoD security guards had switched shifts. The temperature was not so low that it could kill him, although at his age one never knew. But the tiny corridor of cabinets was sealed at tightly as any coffin, and the air would not last long.

  It’s not fair, he thought, Thomas Wallace gets disinterred on a regular basis, and I have to get buried alive. He fancied that it was already getting hard to breathe.

  Running his free hand along the wall, he searched for a release catch or an emergency button that would bring help. The smooth concrete yielded nothing. He tried the edges of the door to see if there was any way he could prise it open, but had no fingernails to speak of. He could discern the narrow lip of an orange rubber seal around the steel frame, but had nothing to cut it with. Usually his coat pockets were filled with sharp and potentially dangerous objects, but not today; Alma had made him empty out everything that was pointed and incendiary when she went to the dry cleaner’s, and he had yet to put it all back.

  He turned about in the narrow space, feeling the walls close in on him. He was determined not to panic. Maggie had cured him of his past terrors. He would not allow them to come rushing back.

  All the wine cabinets were sealed tight and locked with codes, except for the one that Jhadav had rented.

  He set the box containing the rare vintage down on the concrete floor and studied it thoughtfully. He tried his phone again. Nothing. Now even the fine red bar wasn’t showing.

  With a heavy heart, he realized he had no other choice. Lifting out the bottle, he swung it experimentally by the neck. He decided to take one final proper look at one of the rarest red wines in the world before smashing it.

  His brow creased. Instead of it reading ‘Romanée-Conti DRC 1990’ on a neat white countersigned label, he found that it said ‘Tesco Blossom Hill Merlot Blend California 2014’. The bottle had a screw top, and there was even a price sticker: £4.99.

  ‘What the bloody hell?’ For a moment he stared at the thing, wondering if he could have made a mistake. Then he began to laugh. Of course. He almost felt like congratulating Jhadav.

  Unscrewing the lid, he allowed the wine to pour out through his fingers. Then he dropped the bottle on to the stone floor. The first time, it bounced. He tried again from a greater height, and this time it split into lethal shards. Picking up the longest sliver, he set about cutting the door seal.

  Longbright found the stairs to the diamond merchant’s basement first and called Renfield over, heading down. The main fire door operated from a London bolt, and was quickly kicked open by Renfield’s mighty nailed boot.

  They heard Sennen cry out from somewhere deep inside. There was no point in trying to be quiet now. Renfield also kicked open the inner red metal door and allowed it to slam back against the wall. It was best that they made as much noise as possible.

  The great grey concrete bunker that stretched before them was in virtual darkness, except for a spotlit archery run at its far side. The corridor was lined with chicken wire. Longbright quickly took in the scene: the target, the crying girl, the boy with the crossbow raised, the distance between them. Everybody froze.

  ‘Put it down, son,’ said Renfield. ‘Let her go. I’m her father. You can still stop this.’

  Martin turned fractionally to study them. It was the split second Sennen
needed. She screamed and ran for cover. Martin released a second bolt from the crossbow. From this distance it was hard to tell if he had meant to or not.

  Cleaving the air, the arrow buried itself into the breeze-block wall beside the schoolgirl’s head, spraying dust and granules of brick.

  Renfield was a beast unleashed. He threw himself at the boy before he had a chance to reload, slamming him on to his back.

  Sennen ran to Longbright and buried her head in the DS’s shoulder. Their apologies cancelled each other’s out.

  47

  COOL

  At a little after eight thirty that evening, Orion Banks sat at the head table in the PCU common room and checked her Cartier watch, waiting for everyone to settle down.

  ‘Well,’ she said finally, ‘as Mr Bryant has seen fit not to grace us with his presence, I think we should press on. First item, this business of the ravens appears to have settled itself without any help from us and we now have someone in custody, although there’s no accompanying documentation – why is that?’

  ‘This was Mr Bryant’s initiative,’ Land explained. ‘He doesn’t do paperwork.’

  ‘Then there is no case,’ said Banks loudly and clearly. ‘Do you understand? It has no value stream. Do you understand what I mean when I talk about malicious obedience? It’s the process of following a superior’s instructions while hoping for failure, and I think it’s something you’re all guilty of.’

  ‘We get results,’ said May hotly. ‘We’ve just brought in the killer of Krishna Jhadav and Stephen Emes.’

  ‘You cannot say that sort of thing out loud,’ warned Banks. ‘This is simply not how you are meant to operate. And the case is unfinished. Your organizational hierarchy entirely prevents risk closure.’ She looked up to the ceiling and blew at her fringe. ‘How can I explain this any more exactly? There is no causal through-line.’

  Bryant appeared in the doorway and made his way wearily to the only spare seat. He looked even more dishevelled than usual, and reeked of alcohol. There were red wine stains down the front of his shirt.