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

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘She told me. She told everyone.’

  ‘Who left who?’

  ‘She left him. She said he was very angry when he came out.’

  ‘Of prison or the army?’ May looked around. ‘Big man, running with the A-listers, you’d think the lover would have been the one to get shot.’

  ‘You can’t assume it was her ex,’ said Longbright.

  ‘I’m not assuming anything. Bring him in, will you?’

  ‘Nice shoes,’ said Longbright. She looked down at Mandy McFarland’s feet, then up at her hands. ‘Amazing nails, too. You can’t blame her for trading up, although I imagine it came with a price.’

  May frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Jake Finnegan’s business partner is a chap called Alessandro Ribisi. Ring any bells?’

  ‘The commercial-property developer?’ May asked. Ribisi was well known to the PCU. His opponents had a mysterious way of dropping their objections when confronted. A couple of them had disappeared altogether. Nothing they could ever get on him would stick. ‘We won’t have anything more on her physical state until forensics have finished, but I’d say it was professional.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ Longbright took a closer look at the body in the hallway.

  ‘See how the bullet’s placed?’ May pointed to the oddly neat hole in Mandy McFarland’s skull. ‘Right between the eyes. It would have been perfect if she hadn’t turned her head. The light’s not good in here. Can you see what we’ve got in the way of CCTV?’

  ‘I already looked,’ said Longbright. ‘Not a lot, as you’ll see when you go outside.’

  It was starting to snow. The only camera in the street was hanging off the wall, looking as if it had been shot as well. ‘Bloody hell, what happened here?’ May asked, staring up in annoyance.

  ‘I don’t know – maybe one of the paps climbed up there trying to get some snaps. They had a couple of celebs in tonight.’

  ‘And maybe it was disabled before the attack.’ May looked around. ‘There’s another one over that off-licence. Find me some decent footage, would you? Maybe there were fans waiting outside and someone put pictures on Instagram. You know how easily that can happen.’ Long-bright’s ex-boyfriend had ‘accidentally’ posted a saucy picture of her to a friend, not realizing it was linked to his Facebook account; they’d all had a good laugh about that one.

  May stepped out into the street, thinking. To walk into a restaurant with a gun took some nerve. The obvious choice was to go after the husband, but first he ran a check. ‘Wait,’ he called to Longbright, ‘before you do that, get Colin to go through her husband’s charge sheet and find out what he was inside for.’

  While May was waiting he talked to Keith Wallace, a cadaverous forensics expert who had been drafted in for handgun incidents while Dan Banbury was on holiday. Wallace was folded over the shattered decanter like a crane checking for fish.

  ‘Mr May, always a pleasure,’ he said, glancing up briefly before returning to the hole in the panelling where he had wedged his tweezers. ‘Not interrupting your Christmas, I hope?’

  ‘At least it’s keeping me away from Morecambe and Wise reruns.’

  ‘Get a good look at the lady, did you?’ Wallace’s knees cracked as he rose.

  ‘Enough to stay with me for a couple of nights, thanks. She turned her head.’

  ‘Oh, you noticed that? Yes, the bullet wouldn’t have exited if she’d stayed still.’

  ‘Maybe something distracted her at the last moment.’ May turned his own head to the right of the reception desk. There was only a vase on a pedestal, a squiggly painting of a man on a diving board and a long Japanese sword mounted on a red wooden wall bracket. ‘Or maybe she was already expecting something bad to happen.’

  ‘Well, this is one for the books.’ Wallace grunted and twisted and pulled at the splintered wood, finally removing a squashed piece of metal, raising it before him with a sigh of contentment. ‘Feast your eyes on that – not many others will.’

  May couldn’t see anything to get excited about. ‘What’s so special?’

  Wallace dropped it into a clear bag and twirled it before May’s eyes. ‘You get togged up for a posh restaurant, don’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘I can’t remember the last time I went to a posh restaurant,’ May said pointedly. ‘Why?’

  ‘The shooter had a sense of occasion. This is fancy. A .45 ACP cartridge, one of the most successful cartridges ever, designed by John Browning. It doesn’t over-penetrate.’

  ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘That means if it enters head-on it’s unlikely to injure anyone standing behind the original target. But she moved and it came out from behind her right ear with enough force to smash that decanter. It’s one of the most powerful pistol calibres you can use with a suppressor. Subsonic, in fact. For that reason it’s associated with a very particular weapon.’ Wallace raised an eyebrow. ‘Would you care to hazard a guess?’

  ‘This isn’t a quiz show, Keith, just tell me.’

  ‘The .45 ACP Luger, the queen of handguns. Of the originals, only one, marked serial number 2, is known to have survived. Serial number 1 was scrapped after the initial trial. At least three more .45 ACP Lugers were made, one a carbine bearing serial number 21.’

  May blew out a noisy breath. ‘It’s late, I’m knackered, just give me the bottom line.’

  Wallace would not be rushed. ‘The Luger is more correctly known as the Parabellum-Pistole, a semiautomatic patented in 1898. Originally designed for 7.65- by 22-mm Parabellum cartridges, but the army wanted a larger calibre.’

  ‘Army.’

  ‘That’s right. It’s an expert’s field, this.’

  ‘So it’s rare, which makes it valuable.’

  ‘You’d be hard-pressed to find one for under a million pounds,’ said Wallace. ‘Whoever shot Mrs McFarland was using the most expensive handgun in the world.’

  ‘This wasn’t somebody pissed off about being overcharged for the bread rolls, then.’

  ‘Not very likely.’

  ‘A bit over the top for the choice of target, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say,’ said Wallace, still admiring the turning bullet. ‘That’s your department.’

  Colin Bimsley was hopping about outside in the rain, waiting to talk to him. ‘McFarland has a couple of strikes against him, Mr May, most recently serving eighteen months for a Section 18,’ he said. ‘Wounding with intent. See if you can guess who he shanked up.’

  ‘To whom he took a knife,’ said May. ‘I thought you were a grammar-school boy. It wouldn’t be a Mr Finnegan by any chance, would it?’

  ‘Got it in one.’

  ‘OK, don’t bring him in, let’s go and get him out of bed. Got an address for me?’

  ‘Dalston,’ said Gilmore.

  ‘Ah, an area of intense ethnic diversity, as the social workers like to say.’

  ‘That’s not what my granddad calls it,’ said Bimsley.

  ‘I suppose we’ll have to take my car. I’d like to come back with a full set of tyres.’

  ‘Nearly half the area’s total population is under the age of thirty,’ Bimsley remarked.

  May narrowed his eyes. ‘Have you been reading books again?’

  ‘It means the local lads either grow up with gang affiliations or get the hell out. I wonder which category McFarland falls into.’

  ‘Army. Prison. I guess he knows how to look after himself,’ said May. ‘I just can’t see him using the world’s most expensive gun.’ They set off towards May’s BMW.

  ‘Where’s Mr Bryant?’ Colin asked. ‘He can’t be on holiday, he never takes any time off.’

  ‘He’s on tidying-up duty,’ said May. ‘Apparently he found something in his old paperwork that needed investigating, and he’s pursuing it on his own. Anyway, something like this calls for my specific skill-set, which includes a low sympathy threshold and the ability to appreciate that it’s not
1963.’

  ‘Mr Bryant has a different way of looking at things,’ Colin agreed, dodging a sputtering downpipe. ‘Couldn’t that be useful?’

  ‘Yes, if we were looking for a secret organization of devil-worshipping Zeppelin pilots,’ said May, ‘but in this case all that’s needed is the copper’s best tool: an incredibly suspicious nature. If a chap came over to me and said, “I was walking down Oxford Street just after midnight and some fellow came running up and snatched my phone,” my instinct would be to ask, “What were you doing in Oxford Street after midnight?” Arthur’s always happier when he’s poking about in the basement of the British Museum uncovering the history of cursed Egyptian scarabs.’

  Bimsley raised his eyebrows. ‘You want to get backup?’

  May bipped the door of the BMW and slid behind the wheel. ‘What, for arrest on suspicion of murder with the world’s rarest gun? And let someone else get that glory?’

  May put his foot down hard and made the tarmac shriek before Bimsley had a chance to buckle up his safety belt.

  Ian McFarland was having a nightmare. He was trapped on a fairground waltzer, and every time he tried to get off the damned thing sped up again, until he finally jumped. Moments later he was awake and standing at the bedroom window with sweat on his spine, looking down at the empty wet pavements, and right ahead of him was a patrol car with its lights turned off, creeping forward in silence to block the entrance to the flats.

  He was naked. Grabbing a black T-shirt, his jeans and trainers, he tried to dress while hopping across the room, something no man has ever satisfactorily managed. With the car already outside, he knew there were only seconds to spare before they arrived at the first-floor door.

  Ian had one advantage over the police. He knew about the new alleyway at the rear of the building; the builders had only opened it a couple of days ago as part of the block’s renovation. He legged it out into the corridor, avoiding the main stairwell, staying back in the shadows. His clothes and trainers were still wrapped in a bundle under his arm. He needed to put some distance between them and himself, to give him time to think.

  There was still rubble lying around on the darkened staircase. Darting between the scaffolding poles, he tried not to stub his toes or at least not cry out when he did, but on the way he dislodged a stack of tiles that crashed down the stairs, causing the footsteps behind him to suddenly change direction. As he fled into the narrow alleyway he found himself confronted by an elegantly suited man who looked nothing at all like an officer of the law.

  ‘What, you think we didn’t know about the alley?’ May said, blocking the way. ‘Do me a favour, pop your pants on before you get in my car. I don’t want the lads thinking I’ve run in a strippergram.’

  After they arrived at the King’s Cross headquarters of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, John May headed down to the solitary holding cell that had been constructed in the basement and spent some more time with Ian McFarland. When he had finished, he went back upstairs and found Bimsley eating muesli from a plastic pot on the ground-floor terrace.

  ‘I know you’re on a diet but I can’t adjust to not seeing you with a dripping fried-egg sandwich in one hand,’ he said. ‘Put down the bird-seed for a minute; I need to talk to you.’

  Bimsley obediently followed his boss inside to the bank of computer terminals they were currently being forced to share in Raymond Land’s misguided attempt to switch the staff to hot-desking. ‘We’re not going to keep him,’ May warned.

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘We can keep an eye on him easily enough. He’s no money, no job, where’s he going to go?’

  ‘It’s a murder investigation and he’s the only—’

  ‘He’s not the only suspect and his story is solid,’ May pointed out.

  ‘You don’t believe that guff about the concierge service, do you? Of all the rubbish I’ve heard from suspects that has to be the dumbest—’

  ‘He was naked when we picked him up, Colin. What kind of guilty party is so confident that they sleep with no clothes on right after doing something like that?’

  ‘Mr Bryant said he knew an axe murderer who cooked a pineapple soufflé in his victim’s house right after killing him.’

  ‘What you have to remember is that Mr Bryant sometimes confuses real-life investigations with what he’s read in old horror comics. I can’t believe that McFarland shot his wife in the face, went home, stripped off and went to sleep. Admittedly he might have changed if he thought there was residue on his clothes, but the clothes he had in a bundle were the ones he was wearing earlier.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘You mean apart from the fact that he told me? There were no other bloody clothes in or around the flat! And who’d make up a story as mad as his? Have you ever heard the like? A credit card? Why not come up with a normal alibi, or any alibi at all? At home, asleep? Really?’

  ‘I know, but—’

  ‘He says they offered to kill his wife for him, so does he tell us he said, “Are you crazy, don’t do that?” No, he asks how they know about his wife, gets no answer and then agrees with them that yes, right now he’d pretty much like to strangle her with his own bare hands. And they ring off before he can say anything else. Now, if you think he was lying in bed waiting for us to call – knowing that he’d be first in line to get picked up – and plotting out that scenario as a foolproof alibi, then you’re as daft as he is. And there’s the bullet. Keith Wallace reckons it was specifically made for the most expensive gun in the world, which sort of fits with the concierge thing, don’t you think? A high-end operation? Something a bit out of Ian McFarland’s league?’

  ‘What, are you going to tell me there’s some kind of new company offering this as a regular service?’ Bimsley asked. ‘I must have missed that episode of Dragon’s Den.’

  ‘I’m saying it’s a set-up. You’re not very thorough. Did you not read his charge sheet properly? Mr McFarland’s first conviction was for fraud. He was caught selling fake antiques in Portobello Market, said he was trying to raise money for the kids of wounded soldiers.’

  ‘That just proves he’s an accomplished liar, doesn’t it?’

  ‘No, because he really was trying to raise money for them. What he didn’t do was bother to check where the antiques were coming from. I think somebody sent him the card because they heard he was a bit of a mug. And where could they have found that out?’

  ‘From the people he fenced the antiques for?’

  ‘From his wife,’ said May wearily. ‘He was out of the country for two tours of duty, and she hooked up with this fellow Finnegan.’

  ‘Then he had all the more reason to want her dead.’

  ‘Let me guess, when you were at school you were the one at the back of the class mucking around with his mates instead of paying attention, weren’t you?’

  Bimsley picked a lump of muesli off his shirt. ‘It’s funny you should say that because—’

  ‘It was a rhetorical question.’ May sighed. ‘McFarland has a gullible nature. He didn’t realize he was being used to fence smuggled goods, he didn’t notice that his wife was having an affair, and when he did find out, he was daft enough to walk into a pub and take a slice out of her lover’s arm.’

  ‘And that’s why you think it was a set-up?’ asked Colin, frowning again.

  May rolled his eyes to the heavens. ‘What more do you need?’

  ‘The credit card,’ Bimsley said.

  ‘He says it freaked him out and he threw it away.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘I can see I’m going to have to play my ace,’ said May. ‘I’ve got the phone call. It’s true it might sound to an untutored ear – yours, for example – like an agreement to let someone kill his wife, but it proves he was talking to a third party.’

  ‘They traced it?’

  ‘To a chuckaway.’

  ‘So what do we do now?’

  May peered out of the dirty window and checked the sky. ‘We pay a
visit to the boyfriend, Jake Finnegan. A Jake, in the common underworld parlance of Glasgow, whence our Mr Finnegan hails, is a person addicted to class A substances who has a poor quality of life as a consequence. Mr Finnegan has a spectacular history of prosecution for drugs offences, yet he managed to raise the capital for one of London’s most expensive restaurants, presumably by teaming up with Ribisi. Besides, when you’ve interviewed the cuckold, you owe it to them to do the same with the cuckolder.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand—’ Colin began.

  ‘I think the Water House started out as a money laundry. And now its owners are expanding, offering hitmen for hire. It’s Ribisi. He’s bringing the Mafia to London.’ May pointed at the nearest keyboard. ‘See if you can get your fat little fingers working on that and tell me how many unsolved gun crimes we’ve had this year. It’d be interesting if it turned out that Mr McFarland wasn’t the only one enjoying the privileges of club membership.’

  ‘Don’t leave the city without telling us or I’ll be chasing you naked down the street again,’ John May had told him, but Ian knew they would be back as soon as their other leads failed. He had been conned again, and the possibility of going back to jail, this time for a much longer stretch, was starting to look like a probability. Unless he could find the card.

  The whole thing was a mess. As he trudged miserably through the sodden Metro newspapers discarded on the Euston Road, he tried to recall the exact words of the phone call.

  ‘We could kill your wife.’

  An incredulous pause. And then him joking: ‘I think I’ll take you up on that, mate. I feel like strangling her myself.’ And the line going dead.

  The call had unsettled him. He’d have written it off as a prank set up by his army mates if it hadn’t been for the fact that the service being offered chimed uncomfortably with his darkest thoughts. Mandy had ruined his life. He had trusted her implicitly, and she had taken advantage of him. And now she was dead.

  He’d been set up. But unexpectedly, the set-up had failed. He’d been taken to some weird dump of a place that looked nothing like a regular police station, and they had decided, against all odds, to let him go. He knew he should have kept the credit card instead of chucking it into the river, but the damned thing had messed with his head. Now it was all that could prove his innocence.