Land shot him a filthy look. ‘Start again.’
Steffi didn’t move.
‘Now what’s wrong?’ Land asked.
‘Sorry, I was waiting for you to call “Action”,’ said Vesta.
‘Oh, for God’s sake. Action.’
She let herself into the garden. Renfield crouched down with his camera and Bimsley peered out of the bushes. Ritchie Jackson stayed low beside Renfield, offering advice. ‘That can’t be right,’ he said. ‘I can see Colin from here.’
‘Oi,’ called Bimsley, ‘you don’t get to be on first-name terms with us while you’re a suspect.’
‘I thought I wasn’t a suspect any more,’ Jackson called back.
‘Can everyone be quiet?’ Land called through a rolled-up magazine. ‘Steffi, where are you?’
‘I am sorry,’ called Vesta. ‘The little dog has stopped to do his business.’
‘Well, can you hurry him up?’
‘Has anybody got a plastic bag?’ Vesta tried to untangle the dog’s new leash and inadvertently released it. Beauchamp took off into the foliage like a prisoner of war timing an escape. There was a yelp and a crash as Bimsley fell backward into a holly bush.
‘Keep going, everyone!’ Land shouted. ‘This is a take. Steffi, where are you?’
‘I have trodden in something,’ called Vesta. ‘I’ve lost my shoe.’
‘Am I supposed to be filming this part or would you like me to start when everyone behaves professionally?’ asked Banbury unhelpfully.
Jackson tapped Renfield on the shoulder. ‘This is when I took the photos.’
‘Yes, but she’s not here yet, is she?’ said Renfield. They both looked around.
‘You’re supposed to come out now,’ Land told Bimsley.
‘I can’t,’ called Colin, ‘the dog’s on my leg.’
‘Well, get him off.’
‘I think he’s getting himself off.’
Vesta hobbled into the shot on one heel. ‘I am sorry, I had to leave the shoe there,’ she apologized. ‘Where do I go now?’
‘You missed your entrance, you have to go back,’ said Land. ‘Colin, you’re supposed to have made yourself scarce by this time.’
‘Hang on. Bollocks.’ There was a yelp and the dog shot out. ‘I can’t stand up, I’ve got cramp.’
Margo Farrier wandered into Banbury’s sightline. ‘Have you finished your little film show yet?’ she asked. ‘I need to take Beauchamp to the vet, he’s got an upset tummy.’
‘For God’s sake,’ cried Land. ‘This is where Mrs Forester’s killer is meant to enter.’
‘You didn’t cast anyone to be the killer,’ said Banbury wearily.
‘Bugger.’ Land thought for a moment. ‘Can you stand in for him?’
Banbury was affronted. ‘Who’s going to shoot the scene? I don’t want anyone else touching my equipment.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Colin, hopping out of the bush, ‘if it was Forester or Jackson – no offence, mate – one of us should play the killer, otherwise we end up with three blokes at the scene.’
‘Well, I’m not going to play him, am I?’ said Jackson. ‘How would that look? Can I just say that this is a really rubbish way to conduct a murder investigation?’
‘I’ll bloody do it,’ said Bimsley, massaging his calf. ‘Where’s the murder weapon?’
‘We don’t know what it is, do we?’ cried Land, exasperated. ‘You’ll have to improvise.’
‘What with?’
‘I don’t know, use your initiative.’
Colin looked about just as the terrier raced past. Flinging himself on it, he grabbed the leash and released it from Beauchamp’s collar, threw it around Vesta’s neck and pulled. Caught by surprise, Vesta screamed and they both toppled back into the bushes.
‘He’s very good, isn’t he?’ said Renfield admiringly.
‘Don’t ask me,’ said Jackson. ‘I’m a suspect, apparently. Show some respect.’
‘And cut, and print,’ shouted Land.
‘It’s digital, you berk,’ said Banbury.
‘He’s not exactly Steven Spielberg, is he?’ Jackson decided.
‘You’ve squashed the poor little thing!’ cried Mrs Farrier, horrified. Unhappy at being left out, Beauchamp darted into the bushes to join the others.
‘I don’t want any members of the public to see this until we’re ready to air the piece,’ said Land, looking around.
‘Perhaps you’d like to take it to the Cannes Film Festival first,’ Banbury muttered.
Beyond the railings half a dozen Chinese tourists were watching them and taking photographs.
Steffi crawled out on her hands and knees, covered in mud, minus a shoe. ‘A little overenthusiastic, Colin, I am thinking,’ she said, trying to rise and collapsing. The Chinese tourists laughed and applauded.
‘There’s no point putting emotion into it now that I’ve stopped filming,’ said Land, bending over her. ‘Good God.’
Imprinted around Vesta’s neck were the braided markings of the dog leash.
Back at the PCU, Arthur Bryant wandered into Longbright’s office eating a Thunderbirds ice lolly. When he wasn’t directly engaged in investigation, he had a tendency to drift about disrupting everyone else.
‘I wonder how it’s going in Clement Crescent?’ Longbright asked. ‘Your tongue’s blue.’
‘I don’t know why Raymondo had to do it,’ Bryant said. ‘A re-enactment involving a suspect?’
May ducked in, reading his phone. ‘Dan just texted. He says: “Raymond shouldn’t give up his day job but we may have an idea about the murder weapon.”’
‘How is that possible? I thought Dan conducted a finger-search of the area.’ Bryant flicked his lolly stick into the bin and missed. ‘Raymondo’s not going to try to get the reenactment televised, is he?’
The DS pointed over her shoulder with a pen. ‘Ask him yourself. He wants to hold a meeting with at least six members of staff to discuss it in detail.’
‘I’ll leave that one to you,’ said Bryant. ‘I’m seeing steamed prawns with chilli.’
‘You can’t be thinking about lunch already.’ She checked her watch.
‘Sun Dark owns one of the largest restaurants in Chinatown,’ Bryant explained. ‘He’s celebrating there right now. In case you haven’t noticed, preparations are already under way for the Chinese New Year. I think John and I should pop down, grab some dim sum and surprise him. That way he won’t have time to bring his lawyers in.’
The detectives arrived at the Lucky Dragon before the lunchtime rush had started, and found themselves in an overlit barn of a restaurant hung with gold and red tinsel. A carp stream cut across the ground floor, crossed by a humped wooden bridge finished in fierce red lacquer. Four very thin waiters who looked as if they hadn’t slept since Bruce Lee’s death listlessly folded napkins behind the counter.
‘Two of you?’ asked the maître d’, already turning to walk them to a table.
‘We’re joining Sun Dark, over there,’ said Bryant, pointing to a booth at the rear. At the mention of Dark’s name the waiters evaporated.
‘Try to rid your mind of any preconceptions,’ Bryant told his partner as they headed for the table. ‘We don’t know what we’re dealing with yet.’
‘You’re late. We’ve nearly finished. I’d offer you some but it’s cold now.’ The man who spoke waved away his three companions and waited for the detectives to seat themselves.
Sun Dark was small and neat, in his mid-forties, smoothly handsome, his hair brilliantined and shaved at the sides. He wore a black Turnbull & Asser suit and rimless glasses, and looked as if he might eat your heart raw from a silver tray. He pointed to a partially demolished plate of Quattro Stagioni in the middle of the table. ‘I hate Chinese food,’ he said. ‘Give me a pizza any day. My family is horrified by my unsophisticated tastes. I suppose you want to know why one of my employees chased your suspect across a North London street brandishing a knife.’
‘I’m glad you have the
grace not to deny it.’ Bryant seated himself and flicked open a menu.
‘Why would I do that? You have the evidence. By now you must know where the knives came from.’
‘Were they thrown by one of the gentlemen who just left?’ asked May.
‘No, they don’t stab people in the back, Mr May, they’re lawyers.’ Sun Dark called one of the waiters over. ‘Let me order for you, at least. That menu is for lao wai. Tell me, what do you call a man who takes a lot of money from you and does not return it?’
‘The Chancellor of the Exchequer,’ said Bryant.
‘How about someone who makes a promise in a contract, then breaks it? Mr Forester leased some very valuable land from us via a third-party company which he then deliberately bankrupted.’
‘This is all fascinating, really, and you simply must tell me more sometime,’ said Bryant, ‘but my job is to keep your hired thugs from sending British citizens plummeting off bridges. You have no jurisdiction here.’
‘I appreciate the implication,’ said Sun Dark. ‘I don’t understand your laws, or worse, I understand them and deliberately flout them. If you’d done your homework you’d have discovered that Mr Forester’s companies are registered to his home address here.’ He sat back with a sigh, resting his hands on his flat stomach. ‘What do you see when you look at me, Mr Bryant? A Chinese movie villain? I didn’t grow up in the street. I was schooled in Geneva and graduated from King’s College, Cambridge. I speak seven languages. My family funds some of the biggest arts festivals in Germany and Austria. My wife is a Veronese opera singer. My daughter runs a sanctuary for marshland fowl in Norfolk, and my sons, in the time-honoured western tradition of wealthy families, are quite useless. I now amuse myself by selling land to developers. Do you honestly think I would hire a knife-thrower to take care of my debtors?’
‘So when you seek justice, you operate through purely legal channels.’ May was unable to keep the scepticism from his voice.
‘There are other ways.’ Dark removed a silky black cigarette from his case and lit it. ‘Where I come from, the survival of the family is the only thing that’s important. Breaking the law would bring members of my family into contact with your draconian immigration laws, and would also ensure that I’d never see a return on my investment.’
‘Then you didn’t arrange for Mr Forester to be attacked?’
‘Attacked, no – persuaded, within reason. I asked one of my employees to negotiate the return of our investment, nothing more.’
‘And you trusted him to do your bidding,’ said May.
‘A good businessman knows who to promote and who to cut loose. We have a saying: If you want one year of prosperity, grow grain. If you want ten years of prosperity, grow trees. If you want one hundred years of prosperity, grow people.’
A plate of steaming tangerine beef arrived, along with two halves of a crisped golden duck, severed with expertise. ‘If you think I would jeopardize my family’s future affluence for the sake of one debtor, you are less experienced than you appear.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Bryant. ‘I’ll have to take your word for it when you say you only ordered your man to threaten Mr Forester. I’m always over-ordering Chinese myself.’
Dark looked at Bryant pityingly. ‘It’s so hard for you seniors to let go of those old empire stereotypes, isn’t it? Funny foreigners, we’re still good for a laugh, aren’t we? Do you ever stop and look at where you are in the world these days? The South Koreans are better educated than the English. The Swedish are happier. The Germans are more compassionate. The Azerbaijanis are more literate. Brunei has cleaner air. Latvia has faster broadband. Everywhere has a better climate. And yet for some astonishing reason you still act as if you matter. Why is that, do you suppose? Ah, yes, empire. You lost yours over a century ago. The Americans are only just losing theirs and that’s not going down so well, either.’
‘We have a saying, too,’ said Bryant. ‘It’s safer to live in a country that doesn’t want to be a world power. Your employee threw knives at a man who owed you money.’
‘Do you think they would have missed their target if my employee had intended to kill him?’ Dark pulled a Mont Blanc pen from his top pocket and scribbled on a napkin. ‘These are the contact details of the man I hired to deal with Forester. Arrest him, deport him, hang him upside down and beat the soles of his feet for all I care. He’s a monkey who disobeyed orders. I’ve already terminated his contract. I’m sorry we didn’t get to eat together. Perhaps I can arrange a doggy bag before you go.’
‘I thought that went rather well,’ said Bryant, leaving the restaurant with a large carrier bag in one hand. ‘We got a free lunch out of it. And I managed to get right up his nose.’
‘Yes, but you manage to get up everyone’s—’ May began, and thought better of it.
‘When you upset someone they speak with honesty,’ Bryant explained. ‘Dark commissioned Forester’s shakedown, that’s all, but we can’t rule him out of the investigation. Let’s keep an eye on him.’
‘He’s handed his debt collector over to us,’ said May. ‘If he’d really wanted to hurt Forester I can see why he would send someone after his wife – but the nanny?’
‘This is about the death of little Charlie Forester, not his father’s debts.’ Bryant held up a hand and stepped out in front of a startled taxi driver. ‘So where are we? Dan’s already had a look at Lauren Posner’s suicide note and says it backs up what Aston told us. She’d been drinking and was over the limit, which is why she left the scene. Her reactions were off; the boy’s death could have been avoided. She apologizes for her life. No parent should have to read that.’
When the detectives arrived back at the unit, Dan Banbury caught up with them. ‘Listen to this,’ he said anxiously. ‘Back in February the traffic detail found a snippet of blurry camera footage that they thought might show Posner’s car weaving across the central divide in heavy rain, just south of Bermondsey Street. She didn’t have a driving licence – she’d never passed her test. They were meant to follow up the case but for some reason never got around to it. While it was going back and forth between the Met and the Transport Operational Command Unit, the coroner filed a verdict of accidental death.’
‘Then there are no unanswered questions left,’ said May. ‘I still don’t see how the events of almost a year ago can be connected to those of this week.’
‘What do you get if you let your imagination run a little wilder?’ Bryant wondered. ‘Sharyn Buckland used the accident to stab her charge in the eye and leave the way open for Jeremy Forester to divorce his wife. You’d have to admit that as a dating stratagem it leaves something to be desired. Forester divorces but doesn’t get together with the nanny after all. He loses his job and goes broke, so he decides to kill the women who brought him low. It’s trying a bit too hard, don’t you think?’
‘Stranger things have happened,’ said May.
33
‘A SYLVAN SETTING THAT’S POISONED SOMEHOW’
‘I say, will you indulge me a little tonight?’ asked Bryant. ‘I need to explore one last avenue before conceding to you. I’ll buy you a pint after.’
‘What did you have in mind?’ asked May, who was by now willing to try almost anything that could unblock the investigation.
‘You’ll see.’ Bryant rewound his scarf around his throat and filled his pockets with peppermints. ‘As much as I hate to expose my lungs to the King’s Cross traffic, we’ll never solve anything at our desks. Get your coat on.’
Bryant had noticed that the eight o’clock performance at Leicester Square’s Prince Charles Cinema that evening was Antonioni’s Blow-Up, and knew that his contact would be there. The cinema had discovered the popularity of interactive film events, from Singalong-a-Grease to The Wicker Man, where the audience were handed, with their admission tickets, party bags containing fox-shaped masks, sparklers, song sheets and maypole streamers.
Like Ray Kirkpatrick, Nathan Buff had a portfolio career. Durin
g weekdays he was on call, freelancing for the Metropolitan Police Film Unit, London’s fifteen-strong team that provided police services for filming. At the weekends he worked at the Cinema Museum in the Elephant and Castle, running the projectors for silent film shows. He was also the resident film critic for the Saturday arts magazine at Hard News.
He often wished his love life was as busy. As most of the girls he knew were not prepared to have in-depth conversations about the pros and cons of Peter Jackson’s extended cuts for the Lord of the Rings films (he was generally in favour of them all with two exceptions, the farewell scene from The Return of the King and the opening scenes of An Unexpected Journey), he was attending tonight’s screening unaccompanied.
Buff ritualized his cinema-going because the experience always left him with a profound sense of security and stability. Cinemas were palaces of promise, wherein he was offered everything the world might deny. He was always the first to arrive in an auditorium for the next show because he enjoyed the pristine calm of an empty cinema, and always sat in the same seat, B12, because it afforded him the correct amount of peripheral vision and let him rest his knees in the curved indentation between seats A12 and A13. He knew tonight’s film by heart, and was excited by the prospect of watching a version that incorporated newly discovered footage. He was so excited that as he lowered his ample rump on to the velour dome of his fold-down seat, he failed to spot the detectives entering the auditorium.
May pushed aside the red door curtain and took a look around. ‘I assume that’s the man we’re looking for,’ he said from the side of his mouth.
‘Where?’ Bryant peered into the gloom of the auditorium. In half-light he had the eyesight of a mole with cataracts.
‘Over there. The one who looks like a character from a fruity Victorian novel. You can’t miss him – in the middle of the second row with the handlebar moustache, cravat and waistcoat.’
‘Yup, that’s him all right,’ said Bryant. ‘He’s the greatest film expert in the country. When he was a child he became obsessed with James Bond movies. Got into terrible trouble for shaving his cat and painting it gold.’
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