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

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘That isn’t what she’d get, though. Your lawyers would tear her to shreds.’

  ‘Well, that’s business.’

  ‘Your wife trusts me.’ She leaned forward, resting a cool hand on his shoulder. ‘In my own small way I’m a negotiator too. We’re both looking for the seller’s break point.’

  He glowered at her. ‘If you don’t let me go in the next ten seconds you’ll be in so much trouble—’

  ‘Ah, threats and consequences,’ she said, as if remembering a section from a negotiation handbook. ‘I can tell I’m dealing with a professional. Let’s not waste any more time. I’ll make you an offer. If you can remember my name, I’ll advise your wife to meet with your lawyers. If you don’t …’ She reached forward and pulled the plastic cable tie one notch tighter on his wrist.

  For the first time he felt a twitch of panic. What the hell was her name? Lisa? Hannah? Sarah? Usually when he asked a woman her name he didn’t bother listening to the answer, and called them darling or sweetie. His mind rushed back to the restaurant … Nothing, a total blank. What about when they came face-to-face in the department store? He tried to recall the exact conversation between them.

  He suddenly remembered the earrings his wife had casually added to the bill. He remembered the look on her face, the glance she gave the woman in front of him. She hadn’t been buying them for herself.

  ‘Amethysts,’ he said aloud, triumphant. ‘I knew I’d get it. You’re Amy.’

  She turned her back to him, and for one joyous moment he thought she was crumpling in defeat. But she was trying to lift the grating from its place in the trough. That was the thing about an old-fashioned club like this. Their builders had no love of lightweight modern materials. They had opted to use solid steel grids around their pool. She turned to him with the grating hoisted in her hands, forcing him to move his wrist with it.

  ‘Amy,’ she said.

  He nodded frantically.

  ‘You’re quite sure of that.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘What colour are amethysts?’ She sounded almost regretful as she asked.

  John May leaned forward, looking into his suspect’s eyes. ‘Who are you?’ he asked. She was wearing a strong perfume but he had never been any good at identifying scent.

  ‘I’m someone you’ll never have to see again,’ said the young woman. She checked her watch. It was the first time she had betrayed any anxiety, and was a mistake.

  ‘I think we need to go over this from the top in much more detail,’ said May with a friendly smile that said, I have all the time in the world.

  ‘What colour are amethysts?’ she asked again.

  When no answer was forthcoming she released the heavy steel block, which toppled into the pool with a bass splash, setting the surface in motion once more as it swiftly dragged Joel Madden down to the bottom of the pool.

  His ears popped as he sank. The breath burned in his lungs. He fought against the weight of the water but in his panic he accidentally sucked the stinging chlorine into his throat. He coughed, choked and breathed in again, and now his fate was sealed. Something burst behind his eyes. Crimson floated through aquamarine to become—

  Violet, he thought. Oh God, Violet.

  ‘Goodbye, Joel Madden,’ said Violet.

  May listened, of course, but he watched her more carefully than ever. In all the time she had been in the unit’s interview room she had barely moved a muscle. Her self-control was superb. He found himself grudgingly admiring her.

  The file on Joel Madden didn’t make for very pleasant reading; he negotiated deals for a living and specialized in mercilessly crushing his competitors. He treated his wife and girlfriends the same way. Three A4 pages held the bare facts; it wasn’t much of a total for a man’s life.

  But if this young lady had killed him, she deserved to be punished. He thought about the mark on the dead man’s wrist. The longer he studied the photograph, the more convinced he became that the bracelet hadn’t caused it. But what else could it have been? There was nothing else in the evidence envelope, only a brochure from the sports club which was proud to point out the attractive specifications of its amenities. In particular it mentioned the swimming pool, and the fact that its deep end was a full ten feet. Joel Madden was five feet ten inches tall. It was almost as if she had managed to drag him down to the pool’s floor and hold him there until he drowned, but she didn’t appear capable of such a feat …

  Violet stood by the edge of the pool’s light-cracked surface, staring into the glaucous corner where Madden’s body slowly thrashed, his brown limbs waving hopelessly beyond reach. He released a blast of bubbles that rose to the top like silvered jellyfish, but it took another minute for him to stop plucking at the grate and grow still, and for the pool to glaze over once more.

  Violet climbed the ladder and executed a perfect dive into the water, swimming down to him and snipping the plastic tie free with a pair of nail scissors. It was hard work dragging the drainage block back to the shallow end, then hoisting it out and replacing it in the floor, but she had trained for it, so it didn’t take very long.

  As she changed from her bikini into a little black dress and heels, she started to think about treating herself to a dozen oysters.

  John May looked up at the interview room’s clock, sensing that it would make no difference how long he kept her here; she would never crack. A woman who could walk into a police unit and calmly announce she was going to kill a man in a week’s time would have thought of every last detail.

  If he could just find out how she did it, how she might have done it, he would have a reason to keep her here until the wife could be brought in and further connections surfaced.

  The pair of them sat facing each other, a staring contest in which nobody cracked, as the time ticked slowly past.

  Suddenly the door banged open and Arthur Bryant wandered in carrying a large cardboard box. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said, unfurling his scarf. ‘I just ran over the neighbour’s cat. He made an incredible fuss about it. I offered to buy him a new one as the old one looked worn out anyway but he threatened to punch me in the face.’ He turned to face the young woman in the chair. ‘Sorry, miss, I hope I’m not interrupting anything.’ He waved his snub nose above her hair. ‘What a lovely smell. Violets, isn’t it?’

  May saw a faint shift in her features.

  Bryant turned his attention back to his partner. ‘Anyway, here’s the rest of your mail. Janice just threw a strop about having to lug it upstairs.’ He dropped the box on the desk.

  May looked at the box. It was held together with two white plastic ties.

  ‘And good luck getting that open,’ Bryant said as he left. ‘Janice just split her thumbnail on it. You’ll need a pair of nail scissors.’

  May looked back at the nameless woman and smiled. ‘Violet,’ he said.

  The circuses and freak shows of the past always had a sinister side to them. A few years ago I went to a display of period sideshows, and they confirmed my worst fears – that the old displays of headless women, two-headed creatures and lizard babies were far creepier than anything you could see today. I have a painting that shows a carnival barker calling to the crowds while, partially hidden by his sideshow curtain, an unconscious man is being dragged offstage, and I always remember Tobe Hooper’s underrated monster movie The Funhouse, so pitting Bryant and May against a criminal in one of these travelling shows was a no-brainer.

  BRYANT & MAY AND THE SEVEN POINTS

  ‘I’ve reached the age,’ said Arthur Bryant with the weariness of a man who has just realized that his library card’s expiry date is later than his own, ‘when my back has started to go out more often than I do.’

  ‘That’s because you have no social life,’ his Antiguan landlady Alma Sorrowbridge pointed out as she passed him a fresh slice of buttered lavender cake sprinkled with hemp seeds. ‘You spend all your time in that filthy old office of yours. And you do go out. You went to see your old friend Si
dney Biddle the other day.’

  ‘Alma, I went to his funeral,’ said Bryant testily. ‘I don’t call that much of a day out. He was as adamantine in death as he was when he was alive.’

  ‘I don’t know what that word means.’

  ‘Unyielding, like your sausage rolls. Mind you, the ones at the wake were better than yours. I swiped some and ran chemical tests on them. Caramelized onions, apparently. You may wish to take note.’

  ‘Those who are taken from us don’t always leave the earthly realm,’ said Alma, who had been following a more spiritual line of thought.

  ‘You may be right,’ Bryant admitted. ‘I imagine most of them end up working for the post office. Has this cake got nuts in it?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Alma. ‘I know how they get under your dental plate.’

  Bryant examined his slice with suspicion. ‘Everything comes with a warning about containing nuts these days. Except the general population. Do you know there’s no common consensus on what constitutes insanity in society?’

  ‘Really,’ said Alma flatly. Bryant had been poring over a tattered volume entitled An Analysis of Uncommon Psychoses all morning. She didn’t hold with too much reading.

  ‘Benjamin Franklin said that insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. But psychosis suggests a spectrum of behavioural patterns defined by abnormal thought processes and violations of societal norms, a flagrant disregard for accepted moral codes.’

  ‘I’ll remember that when I’m doing your ironing. Do you always have to harp on about murderers? You know what I think about all that sort of thing – it’s unwholesome.’ Alma rose and tidied away the tea things. ‘Why don’t you get your mind off all this morbidity? Come to church with me this evening.’

  ‘You never give up, do you? I’m not that desperate for something to do,’ Bryant replied, dusting crumbs from his stained waistcoat. ‘Besides, I remember what happened the last time I went. The vicar told me off for praying too loudly.’

  ‘You made God jump,’ said Alma. ‘And your singing nearly deafened us. It would have helped if you’d known the tune. Or the words.’

  ‘I couldn’t read the hymn sheet because I’d forgotten my spectacles, so I had to make up the lyrics. I think I did a better job than all that rubbish about winged chariots and spears of fire.’ Bryant sighed and looked about himself impatiently. ‘I suppose I could make myself useful, plant the window boxes, scrape the oven out, clear the guttering, put some dubbin on my boots. It’s just that I’ve got no cases on at the moment.’

  ‘Then Mr May is probably at a loose end, too. Why don’t you give him a call?’

  As Alma rose and prepared to wrap herself up against the grim deluges of a blustery February morning, Bryant rang his partner, John May.

  Don’t think too harshly of Mr Bryant; since Christmas, London had been alternately drenched and frozen by squalls heading down from Iceland, until its massed buildings looked like something one would find at the bottom of a stagnant pond. Everyone who ventured out soon became cold, wet and bad-tempered, and Arthur, who took the chill in his aged bones for a sign as ominous as the appearance of Elsinore’s ghost, suffered more than most. It is a testimony to John May’s persuasive skills that the most senior detective in London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit was soon following his partner across the rainswept upper reaches of Charlton Park, looking for a closed funfair.

  ‘He’s been missing for three weeks,’ said May as they made their way through the wet grass. ‘Left work at seven p.m. on the last Friday in January, detoured here for reasons we don’t know, and never reached home.’

  ‘And it took him all this time to be flagged as missing?’ asked Bryant, incredulous. ‘Slow down a bit. My walking stick’s sinking into the mud.’

  ‘It’s a little more complicated than that. As far as we know, Michael Portheim is an MI5 officer and mathematician specializing in codes. He was seconded to MI5 from Porton Down for reasons no one will tell us, although an inside contact of mine suggested he was involved in certain aspects of counter-terrorism being jointly covered by the agency and the military facility. As soon as he vanished, both groups began investigating.’

  ‘How soon after?’

  ‘He was reported missing on Friday night after failing to turn up at a Russian supper club in Mayfair. One of his colleagues made the call that night.’

  ‘So it was a business dinner.’

  ‘It always is with that mob. Most of them have no friends and very little social life. Confidences aren’t encouraged. MI5 sent their bods in to turn over his apartment in Muswell Hill, half expecting to find him zipped into a holdall, but they found nothing disturbed or out of the ordinary. It looks like he never reached home. They traced him here from phone records, CCTV and his travel card. There are no cameras in the park, on the common or in the woods – too many trees – but there’s footage of him entering from the street and none of him coming back out the same way.’

  ‘So the assumption is that he went missing inside the park,’ said Bryant, fighting the ground with his stick.

  ‘It looks that way. A team searched the entire area, but short of turning over every inch of turf with a spade there’s no way of knowing what happened. Can a body be buried without leaving a mark? The agencies’ internal investigators have no leads to speak of, but the biggest fear is that he was either murdered or kidnapped.’

  ‘So what are we hoping to achieve in a rainy field in near-zero temperatures?’ Bryant demanded to know.

  ‘They’ve called us in. It’s rather clutching at straws, but I went through Portheim’s file this morning and found that he came from a military background. He’d been a keen sportsman at college, a free-runner, hiker, canoeist, skydiver, good athletic all-rounder. He studied medicine for a while, then joined the army – straight in at officer level – but as part of his training he also learned circus skills. And the only unusual contact anyone has been able to come up with is this.’

  May pointed ahead through the sleeting gloom at what appeared to be a half-built stage set. As the pair approached, Bryant saw that it was a semi-circle of boarded-up sideshows, the old-fashioned kind consisting of tents fronted by tall painted flats, inset with strings of coloured light bulbs.

  ‘Back when he was learning to tightrope-walk and swing from a trapeze, Portheim knew a man called Harry Mills. The chap was his mentor in competitive athletics, taught him a lot about physical prowess and showmanship. There’s no evidence to suggest they had any further contact with each other after Portheim was headhunted by MI5. But here’s the funny thing. This set-up appeared in the park the week Portheim went missing.’

  He looked up at a rain-streaked board that read: ‘Harry Mills’ Incredible Arcade of Abnormalities!’ Beneath the red and yellow lettering, set in a traditional circus typeface known as ‘Coffee Tin’, were posters painted on to linen and sealed beneath discoloured varnish, vignettes that had probably been produced in the 1930s, when such delights were popular at coastal resorts.

  One painting showed a voluptuous young woman riveted into a steel bathing suit, holding a pair of terminals from which arced jagged streaks of blue lightning. Scrolled across the base of the picture was the legend: ‘You’ll Be Jolted by Electra the 30,000-Volt Girl!’

  Another board showed a painfully thin young man, his ribcage visible under his pale translucent skin like the bars of a xylophone, a dozen lethal-looking steel rods piercing his chest: ‘Nothing Can Prepare You for Lucio the Human Pin-Cushion!’

  Beside him was an ethereally beautiful depiction of a woman clad in a diaphanous pink silk gown, with large furry wings sprouting from her shoulder blades. She was balanced on a perch, staring wistfully up at the sky through the bars of her cage. The picture was captioned: ‘Witness the Heartbreaking Tragedy of Martitia the Moth Woman!’

  The final vignette showed a green man with an elongated torso and no limbs, green antennae waving from his misshapen, beaked and bug-eyed head
. The unfurled lettering beneath him read: ‘Prepare to Be Horrified by Marvo the Caterpillar Boy!’

  Bryant sniffed. ‘Looks like he was painted by Francis Bacon.’

  ‘I suppose it’s what people did before television,’ said May. ‘Not much different from going to Bedlam to laugh at the insane.’

  The sideshows themselves were surrounded by a six-foot-high steel-staved fence, which the detectives now circled, searching for an entrance. The rest of the funfair – the waltzers, rifle ranges and coconut shies – stood further back on open ground. Only the Arcade of Abnormalities was sealed.

  ‘I remember these exhibits from when I was a nipper,’ said Bryant. ‘I knew they had to be illusions but they always gave me the creeps. Let’s see if we can find anyone.’

  ‘I guess they closed off this part to stop anyone from sneaking in.’

  ‘Or out. Look over there.’ Bryant pointed with his stick. They glimpsed a malformed figure hopping and running between the sideshows on the far side of the circle, and went after it.

  Behind the show tents, the performers’ caravans were arranged like a wagon train. ‘Hey!’ called May. ‘You there!’ But nobody came. Finally he rang his contact and the pair waited for someone to come and open the main gate.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ said a stooped elderly man with a shock of wild grey hair, unbolting the mesh gate and pulling it aside. He wore leather knee-boots, and the sides of a crimson-embroidered gypsy waistcoat struggled to meet over his stomach. ‘I’m Harry, the owner of this place. Come on in.’

  He clasped their hands with nervous gratitude and led them to one of the caravans. ‘We keep the gate locked tight to prevent the dogs from getting out,’ he explained, ushering them in. ‘There’s been trouble in the past. One of the Alsatians bit a child after being teased.’

  The trailer’s streamlined exterior of blue and white steel was misleading; inside it was as cosy and overcrowded as a nineteenth-century Romany caravan, hung about with copper pots, vases, painted jugs and rugs. Mills made thick, dark Turkish coffee and served it in tiny steel cups. ‘There, that’ll keep the chill out,’ he said. ‘You said you want to know about Michael Portheim?’