Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection)

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘I’m a copper, not a plane,’ said Bryant, waving him aside.

  ‘There are already enough tracks out there. I don’t want to have to eliminate any more.’

  Making a sound like a displeased tapir, Bryant diverted to the narrow trodden channel, and the detectives made their way up the snow-covered slope to the tent, with Banbury anxiously darting ahead. ‘She was found just after six twenty a.m. by a man out walking his dog,’ he told them.

  ‘Why did it take so long to get to us?’ asked May. ‘It’s after two.’

  ‘There was a bit of a dispute about jurisdiction. They were going to handle it locally but all fatal incidents in Central North get flagged, and we put in a claim that was challenged.’

  ‘Meanwhile the victim’s been lying there like an ice lolly,’ said Bryant. ‘So much for the dignity of death. Show me what you’ve got.’

  They reached the tent and Banbury went in ahead of them. The woman lay on her back on the frozen ground, her beige overcoat dusted with snow. From the alabaster sheen of her skin she might have been a marble church effigy reclining on a bier. A single battery lamp illuminated the wound on her upper throat. Blood had coagulated around the parted flesh and had formed a hard black puddle beneath her left shoulder. Her eyes were still open but had lost their lustre as they froze.

  ‘You’ve moved her,’ said Bryant, noting the snow on the front of her clothes.

  ‘That was the dog-walker,’ said Banbury. ‘All he could see as he got closer was a woman’s body lying in the middle of the common. There was a bit of a mist earlier. He thought maybe she had collapsed until he turned her over and saw she’d been stabbed.’

  ‘Looks like a very sharp kitchen knife or a cut-throat razor,’ said May. ‘The wound’s very clean, straight across the carotid artery. A real vicious sweep.’ He checked her palms and fingers and found them crimson. ‘No defence marks. Maybe she raised her hands to the wound and tried to stem the bleeding. Any other cuts to the body?’

  ‘Not that I can see, but bodies aren’t my field of expertise,’ Banbury admitted. ‘I’m more interested in where she fell.’

  ‘Why?’ May asked.

  ‘She’s in the exact centre of the common, for one thing, about a hundred and fifty metres in every direction. The dog-walker was met by a DS from Hampstead who called in his team. We took a full statement from him. I picked up the initial report and established the corridor to the site.’

  ‘Why did you do that before anything else?’

  ‘Because there are no footprints,’ Bryant cut in, waving his gloved hand across the virgin expanse of the hill.

  ‘That’s right, Mr Bryant. We’ve got hers, out to the middle but not back, the dog and his owner’s, also there and back, and the DS’s. Nothing else at all. Six is a bit early for the Primrose Hill crowd. Victim was last seen around eleven p.m. last night by one of her tenants. She was coming out of a restaurant. No more snow fell after about five a.m. According to the dog-walker, there were just her footprints leading out to the middle of the hillslope and nothing else. Not a mark in any direction that he could see.’

  ‘He must have been mistaken.’

  Banbury blew on his hands. ‘Nope – he’s adamant, reckons he’s got twenty-twenty vision and there were no other prints at all.’

  ‘Then it’s simple – she must have taken her own life.’

  ‘What with? There’s no weapon.’

  ‘You haven’t had her clothes off yet; you can’t be sure of that,’ Bryant said. ‘Can we take the body or do we have to use the local resource?’

  ‘They’re happy for her to go to St Pancras if you sign it off.’

  Bryant didn’t answer. He was peering at the victim, trying to conjure her last moments.

  ‘Could someone have swept away their footprints?’ asked May.

  Bryant pulled a sour face. ‘Look at this snow – it’s crusted solid. Besides, why would anybody try to do such a thing? This is an urban neighbourhood, not Miss Marple country. There has to be a more obvious explanation. Got her mobile, have you?’

  ‘She received a call from a nearby phone box just after six this morning.’

  ‘A phone box,’ said May.

  ‘Yes, you might want to check last night’s – No!’ Banbury snatched the plastic bag back from Bryant, who had begun to open it. ‘Can you not take it out until I’ve finished with it?’

  ‘Just send us the call list, then.’ May was always keen to keep the peace. His partner was like a baby, reaching out to grab the things he wanted without thinking. Except that he was always thinking. ‘Come on, Arthur,’ he said, ‘we’ve enough to be getting on with.’

  ‘Where did she live?’ Bryant asked as he was being led away. Below him the skyline of London formed an elaborate ice sculpture that shone pink and silver in the gelid afternoon air.

  ‘Canonbury, I believe,’ Banbury said.

  ‘What was she doing over here so early on a Tuesday morning? Get those lads on it.’ He indicated the members of the Hampstead constabulary who were standing around in the car park. ‘She might have stayed somewhere nearby; maybe she has family here. Have them check taxis running from Canonbury to Chalk Farm early this morning.’

  ‘Why Chalk Farm?’ asked May.

  ‘To get here from there you either have to drop off your fare by the footbridge near Chalk Farm station or go all the way around,’ Bryant explained. ‘This place is a peninsula that’s a pain in the arse to reach because of the railway lines. That’s why the rich love it. They don’t have to rub shoulders with us plebs. Get someone to walk all the way around the perimeter, check for any kind of break in the snow. There must be something.’

  After a brief stop at the PCU, the pair headed across to the gaudy offices of North One Developments Ltd, the property company Marsha Kastopolis had owned with her husband. Bypassing the confused staffers at their computer terminals, they found Phantasos Kastopolis in the building’s basement, sweating on an exercycle. The beetroot-faced property tycoon was leaking from the top of his dyed combover to the bulging waistband of his electric-blue nylon tracksuit. He grabbed a towel and mopped at his chain-festooned chest, annoyed at having his journey towards a coronary thrombosis interrupted.

  ‘If this is about burst pipes, there’s nothing I can do,’ he said. ‘It’s bloody freezing, innit, and them students haven’t paid their rent this month so they got no bloody complaining to do.’

  ‘It’s about your wife,’ said May, and he proceeded to explain the circumstances of Mrs Kastopolis’s death while Bryant wandered around examining the Californian gym equipment with ill-disguised distaste.

  ‘What was she doing out at that time?’ Kastopolis asked after he had demonstrably absorbed the news, a process that involved a fair amount of ranting but not much grief. ‘She never goes for a bloody walk.’

  ‘We were hoping you could tell us. Does she know anyone in Primrose Hill?’

  ‘I don’t know where her bloody friends live.’

  ‘Do you know if she had any enemies?’

  ‘She had enemies because I have enemies!’ Kastopolis exploded, throwing his towel on the floor. ‘They all got it in for us, ’cause they don’t like Cypriots owning their streets.’

  ‘I thought your wife was English.’

  ‘Yeah but she was married to me. I came here with nothing but the clothes I stood up in and bought the shops one by one. My father was a farmer, his fingers in the dirt, and look at me now. Thirty years of bloody hard work.’ He raised his spatulate fingers before them in an attempt to prove the point. ‘Of course I have enemies. They’re jealous of me. They try to ruin me. But I tell you what, my friend, I do a lot of good in this community.’

  ‘You infringe a lot of building regulations, too,’ said Bryant, unimpressed. He pulled a plastic folder from his overcoat. ‘Fire hazards, illegally blocked-off hallways, substandard materials, contractor lawsuits, environmental-health injunctions, it’s all here.’

  ‘Listen, if I waited for
council approval before starting to build, I’d never get anything done.’

  ‘Let’s get back to your wife,’ said May. ‘You think someone was trying to get at you through her?’ He thought: If that was the plan, they didn’t succeed. He’s not upset or even surprised.

  ‘Why else would anyone bother with her?’ Kastopolis pushed past them and began slicking down his hair before an elaborate gilt mirror. ‘She didn’t know nobody important.’

  ‘But she worked for you.’

  ‘Secretary stuff – posting the mail, making coffee, that sort of thing. I made her come to work just to keep her out of the shops, spending my bloody money. And to stop her eating. She was getting as fat as a pig.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw her?’

  ‘When she left the office yesterday evening. She was going out with her mates to some cocktail bar maybe. I don’t know what she does no more.’

  ‘She didn’t come home?’

  ‘We got a lot of places, and she’s got keys to them all. She stays in different ones when she’s had a few drinks.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Of course alone! She belongs to me! What are you bloody saying?’

  ‘And you, do you stay in these flats without her?’

  ‘That’s got nothing to bloody do with it.’

  ‘It has if you can’t vouch for your whereabouts between last night and today.’

  Kastopolis nearly ruptured a vein. ‘Ask my boys upstairs where I was. They was with me all evening. We left here at eight and went to the Rajasthan Palace until midnight. They was all with me again from six o’clock this morning. We work long hours here. Why you think we make so much money? Are you sure she’s dead?’

  ‘Very sure. She was stabbed.’

  ‘Primrose Hill, eh? No blacks around there – don’t know how she got stabbed. I can’t bloody believe this! I gave her everything. She didn’t have nothing when she met me, came down from Liverpool without a penny to her name. She owed me big time, and this is how I get paid for my kindness.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Stands to reason, innit? She was seeing someone behind my back.’ Kastopolis checked his hair in the mirror and turned to them. ‘Where do I pick up her body?’

  ‘What a revolting man,’ said Bryant as they headed back along the Caledonian Road. ‘All that grey chest hair poking out between his chains, it made me feel quite ill. Surely no one would speak about his wife like that if he’d killed her.’

  ‘Obviously it’s a long time since he cared anything for her,’ said May. ‘It sounds to me as if the arrangement of staying in empty apartments was more for his benefit than hers.’

  ‘I think we should talk to someone she counted as a friend,’ Bryant replied, ‘rather than a husband.’

  They found Kaylie Neville seated alone in the Lion & Unicorn. The dishevelled forty-year-old was nursing an extremely large gin and tonic. Judging by her swollen red eyes and the number of lemon wedges in her drink, she had already been informed of her friend’s death. The pub was so still and quiet that the detectives stirred the dust motes in the late-afternoon sunlight as they sat down beside her at the copper-topped table.

  ‘Phantasos called me and just started having a go, yelling and carrying on like I’m to blame,’ she said, anxiously searching their faces. ‘You mustn’t believe anything he says about her. Nothing true or kind has ever come out of his mouth. He cheats, he steals, he has affairs. There’s not a decent bone in him. The things he gets up to in those flats, you don’t want to know.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Bryant, ‘but if Mr Kastopolis is such a terrible man, why did Marsha marry him?’

  ‘She’d had a rough time of it. She came to London to escape a bloke in Liverpool who said he would kill her.’

  ‘Why did he say that?’

  Kaylie tapped nervously at her glass with bitten purple nails. ‘He was staunch Irish Catholic, and she had an abortion. He threatened to come down and cut her up. She was a lousy judge of men. But a kind heart, a good heart. I did what I could for her. You do what you can, don’t you? She met Phantasos and he offered to look after her. Then she found out what that involved.’

  ‘What did it involve?’

  ‘Keeping the clients sweet. Doing anything they wanted. I mean, anything.’

  ‘You’re saying he prostituted her out to them?’ said Bryant, always one to title a gardening implement accurately.

  ‘She said no, of course. But he found plenty of other ways to compromise her.’ Kaylie took a sudden alarming gulp from her gin, nearly finishing it. ‘She told me he started using her identity to hide cash in different accounts, all kinds of dodgy goings-on. I keep away from him. If he knew half the things I know, I wouldn’t fancy my chances.’

  ‘Do you think he had something to do with his wife’s death?’ asked May.

  ‘He must have done,’ Kaylie replied, prodding the table-top. ‘See, she was smart. She kept everything written down in a little notebook, just in case there was ever any trouble.’

  ‘What sort of things did she write down?’

  ‘Account numbers, deposit dates, details of all the rental contracts he faked, the councillors he bribed, everything.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you know where she kept this book?’

  ‘She never told me. Not at home. Maybe in one of the rented properties, but there’s forty or fifty of those. He’s got people everywhere. They’re always on the lookout for trouble, that lot.’

  ‘And you think that’s why she died? Because she was keeping track of him?’

  ‘You have to understand, he goes on about arriving in London without a penny, how he built up an empire, how no one can stop him. Then she started standing up to him. She told me she’d had enough. She was going to take the notebook to the police.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘She said it again last night. She’d said it loads of times before, but this time I think she was really going to do it.’

  ‘We’re going to find out who killed her,’ said May.

  ‘If we can find out how he did it,’ said Bryant.

  The temperature was dropping again, and the froth of brown pavement ice had become treacherous once more. May kept a tight hold of his partner’s arm as the pair made their way around the corner to their unit. Central London in the snow was never picturesque for more than the first hour.

  ‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ said Bryant. ‘You can see the kind of a man Kastopolis is, a feral throwback, something out of the 1970s, crafty but not too bright. His wife was lured out into the middle of that park and killed – that’s why somebody called her from a phone box just before her death, to make sure that she was keeping her appointment. You heard what Miss Neville said: Kastopolis has men everywhere. Central North is his turf. Everybody knows the local villain, and that’s the way he likes it. He needed this to happen off his patch. What I don’t understand is how he did it, and he knows that we don’t know.’

  ‘Maybe he’s smarter than you think he is,’ said May. ‘Perhaps he wants to divert our attention into trying to work out how it happened.’

  ‘Let’s talk to Giles,’ Bryant decided. ‘He might have had a chance to examine her properly by now. Perhaps he’s turned up something.’

  They found Giles Kershaw in the darkened forensic pathology office at Camley Street, where he had recently taken up the position of coroner for St Pancras. ‘You’ve caught us at a bad time,’ warned Giles, ushering them in. ‘The power’s out. Ice pulled down the lines. The fridges are on a separate grid but we’re working by torchlight until tomorrow morning. I don’t know how Canada manages. A few millimetres of snow here and the whole of London grinds to a halt.’

  ‘What did you get from Mrs Kastopolis?’ asked Bryant. ‘Is there any tea going? I’m perished.’

  ‘I didn’t get much from her, and it’s probably not what you’re after,’ said Giles, leading the way. ‘I don’t think she stayed overnight in Primrose Hill. Went there
first thing this morning, I imagine, but you’ll know that once you’ve checked her Oyster card.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘What, that she went by tube or that she’d been in Islington?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘She had no purse and no cash unless it was taken, just the travel card. No make-up, and she’d dressed in a hurry. She was wearing boots that had some fragments of French gravel in the grooves. They hadn’t been there long because there was ice underneath them. Islington uses different tarmac surfacing to Camden, so it looks to me as if she crossed boroughs this morning. I’ve got a home address for her in Canonbury, Islington.’

  ‘Her husband says she didn’t come home last night, but she had several empty flats she could have gone to in the Canonbury area. Anything else?’

  ‘We have a time of death because of the phone call. She fell face down and died quickly. There was no weapon of any kind on her, or anything that could conceivably be used as one. It looks like there were two wounds, one opening the carotid artery and the other grazing the trachea.’

  ‘Grazing – you mean cutting it?’

  ‘Yes, just lightly.’

  ‘So the air escaped from her lungs and she couldn’t breathe in,’ said May.

  ‘Exactly. Slashes rather than stabs – they’re not very deep. She’s five six, which would make her killer six feet at least, because the cuts are downward.’

  ‘Except that he couldn’t have been standing in front of her because he left no footprints,’ added Bryant. ‘How do you account for that?’

  Kershaw flicked back his blond fringe. ‘Well, I can’t. Most seemingly impossible situations are the fault of poor information-gathering. Are you sure Dan’s got his facts straight? The obvious answer is that the dog-walker killed her and threw the weapon away.’

  ‘That won’t fly,’ said May. ‘He walks his dog at the same time every day, along the same route. He was searched at the site and came up clean, and he has no connection with the deceased. The officer said he was badly shaken. There’s no reason to suspect him.’