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

by Christopher Fowler

  He thought about Mandy. She had behaved appallingly, but he would never hurt a woman. What had she done to get herself killed? She’d always had a mouth on her. He’d heard rumours about the boyfriend’s business partner, but he couldn’t afford to get involved. Actually, right now he couldn’t afford anything. He had no job and no savings, he owed back-rent and didn’t have a penny left over for the utilities. He headed back to the Over Easy Diner to pick up his last day’s wages.

  Golden wasn’t her real name, but nobody could pronounce that because she came from Vietnam and, in a moment of spectacular misjudgement, had married the café’s owner after meeting him on his holiday in Hanoi. When she wasn’t working as a manicurist she waitressed at the Over Easy, and made good tips from men who felt guilty about making a play for her.

  ‘Ian, what are you doing back here?’ she hissed as he walked in, looking alarmed.

  ‘Came to collect my pay is all,’ he said, taking a stack of dirty plates and setting them down behind the counter from force of habit.

  ‘Someone’s been looking for you. A man in expensive clothes. Kind of creepy-looking.’ For Golden to think a man was creepy in this neighbourhood, he had to be very unpleasant indeed. ‘You’re not in any trouble, are you?’

  Ian looked at her. She was as beautiful as her name, and the less she got involved, the better. She seemed so innocent that he couldn’t help but worry. ‘Why, did he say something?’

  ‘He left a card. Hold on.’ Wiping her hands on her apron, she ducked into the kitchen and came back with it.

  ‘Alessandro Ribisi – LondonLink Direct Holdings’.

  The card was black and silver, and exactly matched the credit card he had been sent. He knew at once it was Ribisi who had set him up, making him trot out a tall tale to incriminate himself. He knew a couple of other things about Ribisi, things his wife had told him: one, that he was a barely functioning crazy on anti-psychotic medication, two, that he was Mafia, over from Naples.

  With nothing to lose now, he headed to the address on the card.

  LondonLink Direct was up by Drayton Park and the new Arsenal football ground, in an anonymous two-floor 1970s office building that looked like the kind of place contractors pulled down after finding asbestos in the ceilings. He didn’t call first; on this occasion, he decided that the element of surprise would work in his favour.

  Except that it was lunchtime, and Ribisi was out. He wasn’t expected back today.

  Brilliant, Ian thought. You should get a job as a private detective.

  There was one other place to try.

  ‘Four unsolved deaths in the Dalston area this year,’ said John May, tapping at the map on his screen with the end of a breadstick. Colin’s diet required him to get through boxes of the things. ‘Five if you count McFarland. Makes for quite interesting reading, this. Don’t show it around; they’ll all want to jump aboard.’

  ‘Not if it turns out to be a complete waste of time,’ said Bimsley gloomily.

  ‘It won’t. He’s offering a proper bespoke service. There’s been talk around town for a while now about something being set up called the Elimination Bureau. The Met treated it as a joke.’ May scratched the back of his hand thoughtfully. ‘What do you do when you want to set up a new business? Try to kill the competition. You can see the possibilities.’

  ‘Finnegan’s running a gold mine in that restaurant. What would he want to jeopardize something like that for?’

  ‘Who said anything about Finnegan?’ he countered. ‘I’m talking about Ribisi. Finnegan’s no Stephen Hawking. He’ll be doing the heavy lifting. Ribisi’s the ideas man. Let’s find out where they are. It’s time we paid them a visit.’

  Although the police had finished with the Water House, it was still shut for business. The gate was locked and a police sign read: ‘Closed until further notice’. Already, a pile of flyers and newspapers had blown behind the grille across the entrance, giving the darkened building a derelict air.

  Inside, the reservations hotline had been overloaded with unanswered complaints all morning, so Jake Finnegan had summoned his partner to discuss what to do. He was always wary of meeting up with Alessandro because you could never tell what might happen, but right now he needed the Italian. As he entered the cocktail-bar section of the ground floor, he flicked on the battery of lights behind the onyx-tiled serving counter and poured himself a rich Islay malt, leaving the bottle out.

  He didn’t realize that Ribisi had been sitting in the dark behind him, and jumped.

  ‘You shouldn’t be nervous,’ said Ribisi, raising his glass. ‘You should be worried.’

  ‘What about?’ Finnegan asked, waiting for his pulse to return to normal.

  ‘Losing money every day this place is shut. Get it open tomorrow.’ Even in the shadows of the lounge, his crocodile smile glowed.

  ‘I have no control over that,’ Finnegan replied.

  ‘You know your problem? You worry too much. Let me take care of business.’ Ribisi shook his head, tutting. ‘This unit, the one that arrested McFarland. A couple of old men hanging on for their pensions and a bunch of misfits. They’re not Met, they’re not City of London, they’re an outsource. They can be compromised. They can probably be bought. I’ve got an idea.’

  ‘No,’ said Finnegan, feeling the ever-present acid in his stomach starting to bubble. ‘If you do anything like that, you’re going to start a war.’

  ‘I’m not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.’ He released an explosion of laughter that made Finnegan jump again. Ribisi’s eyes radiated madness.

  There was a peculiar scraping sound behind them.

  ‘Did you leave the back door open?’ Ribisi asked, slowly rising.

  ‘For you. I didn’t know you were already here,’ said Finnegan.

  Ian McFarland walked forward into the light and stood before them. The source of the noise became apparent. He was dragging the forty-inch hand-forged Shirasaya sword that should have been on the wall in the hallway. A shadow moved behind him. ‘What did my wife do?’ he asked.

  Finnegan stared at him in amazement. Ribisi started laughing again.

  ‘What did she do?’ Ian asked again, cocking his head on one side.

  ‘You were married to her,’ said Finnegan. ‘You should know what she was like.’

  ‘I know that if Mandy had found out something bad about you, she would have told someone else. What, are you going to kill them as well?’

  ‘That’s the easy part,’ said Ribisi. ‘Expanding our operations base, that’s harder. You’ve tried the service, you know it works. I thought you might like to help us.’

  Ian stood there with the sword trailing on the concrete floor, staring at them. ‘What’s in it for me?’

  Ribisi flicked a finger between himself and his partner. ‘We get you off the hook.’

  Ian thought it over. It was the first decent job offer he’d had all year.

  ‘Of course, there would have to be a trial period,’ Ribisi continued. ‘You could do something for us, to prove your worth.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘We’ve sent a new credit card to the person your wife talked to. As soon as she calls us, she’ll need to be taken care of.’

  Finnegan proffered a glass of whisky, but Ian shook his head. ‘She? Who is it?’

  Finnegan’s reply proved a step too far. A moment later the sword was hoisted high, and a slender scarlet arc appeared on one of the walls. There was the noise like a football filled with sand thudding to the floor and lolloping to a stop …

  May and Bimsley were on the threshold of the curtained area leading to the Water House’s cocktail bar when they heard something that sounded like a melon being chopped open. Colin wanted to haul May back and warn him, but before he could May flicked aside the curtain and stepped in.

  As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he began to pick out details. ‘Colin,’ he called finally. ‘Come in here. We’ve got a situation.’

&nbs
p; The DC stepped into the room and looked down, dreading what he’d find.

  ‘So,’ said May, ‘Jake Finnegan won’t be buying any more hats. His head’s over there by the ice machine, staring at you. On the counter, two whisky glasses. Ribisi can’t be far away. You’d better call this in.’

  The search for Ribisi was unsuccessful.

  May stood on his balcony watching the snow sifting over the black waters of the Thames. He hated operating without his partner, but Arthur had specifically asked to be left alone for a couple of days. He finished his glass of amontillado and went back inside.

  He heard the man in the corridor outside his Shad Thames apartment and held his breath as the envelope was slipped underneath the front door. As the man walked off, May picked it up from the mat and turned it over in his hand. Inside the envelope was a brand-new black and gold credit card.

  He stared at the name on it.

  ‘John Hougham May’.

  ‘That’s not possible,’ he said aloud, tilting it to the light and reading the name again. He told no one about his hated middle name, which was pronounced ‘Huffam’. The only other person who knew about it was Arthur Bryant, with whom he had struck a deal: If you ever tell anyone about my middle name, I’ll tell them about you and Princess Margaret.

  It was the sheer effrontery of the Elimination Bureau that shook him; the fact that they thought he was for sale. The courier had driven up by motorbike. There was no sign of it now, of course. It could have gone anywhere.

  He took stock of the situation. He tried to put the events in order. If Mandy McFarland had discovered the truth about the Water House it meant she had become a liability, and there she was meeting and greeting journalists and celebrities at a high-profile restaurant where she could keep shooting her mouth off to all and sundry. She had to be silenced, so Ian McFarland had received the card from the Elimination Bureau which would frame him.

  Jake Finnegan was no longer needed either, because his role in setting up the restaurant was over and done with. Which just left whomever Mrs McFarland had talked to, and as soon as that person had been taken care of things could return to normal. The police investigation would be buried once the Met realized that the streets were suddenly quieter. It was too bad that a few innocents had got caught in the crossfire, but nobody wanted to start a war with Ribisi. Why risk drafting in more foot soldiers from the Camorra? So a few nondescript civilians would have disappeared, and officers would shake their heads and mutter about moths getting too close to flames, and all would be right with the world once more.

  Except, thought May, that if the cops allow scum like Ribisi to strut about with guns and swords treating the city as their killing grounds, they’ll think they’ve become invincible.

  Taking out his phone, he balanced it in his hand.

  He decided to call his partner.

  As the line opened he heard a gurgling sound like a bath being emptied out. ‘Arthur?’ he said. ‘What on earth is that? Are you there?’

  ‘I’m making punch,’ Bryant bellowed back. ‘I’m at the British Museum Egyptology department’s Christmas party. We couldn’t find a punch bowl big enough so I’m using a burial tank. I thought you promised to keep me in the picture.’

  ‘I did, but – Listen, I’ve got a problem and I need your help,’ May began, swallowing his pride.

  ‘Yes, I thought you might,’ said Bryant annoyingly.

  May outlined the situation, adding all the details he could recall.

  ‘I’ve already had quite a bit to drink but let me see if I can get this right,’ Bryant answered. There was the sound of an Egyptian sistrum jangling in the background, and someone shrieking with laughter. ‘Let me ask you something. How do you know it was McFarland who chopped off his wife’s lover’s head?’

  May sighed. As usual, Bryant was asking the wrong question. ‘Well, who else could it be?’

  ‘I would have thought that was fairly clear,’ he replied. ‘You saw Wallace’s photos of Mrs McFarland—’

  ‘And you saw them too? I thought you were sticking to your own case this week.’

  ‘Yes, but I like to know what’s going on, obviously. I asked him to keep me in the loop, and I noticed something straight away.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘The wife’s nails.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A very specific design. Only the Vietnamese do them like that. Mrs McFarland wouldn’t have talked to anyone in the restaurant, but she’d have talked to her manicurist. There’s a girl everyone calls Golden. She was close to the wife and works with the husband.’

  ‘Wait a minute, you’ve formed a theory about this case and it isn’t even your case?’

  ‘I made a couple of phone calls, just to keep my hand in. Now, this girl Golden is tougher than she looks. If she cared for Ian McFarland she’d watch out for him and stop him from making any further stupid mistakes. She’d have gone to the restaurant.’

  ‘My God – you think she killed Finnegan?’

  ‘If she was a horse I’d put twenty nicker on her. And now she’s gone on the run with McFarland. Either that or Ribisi has taken her. McFarland’s no killer. Whatever the situation is now, he’s not the one you have to worry about. Ribisi will want to know if the girl talked to anyone else before he gets rid of her,’ said Bryant.

  ‘I don’t know where to start looking for them,’ May admitted.

  ‘He owns a lot of commercial buildings, doesn’t he? He’ll have a place that would drown out the noise of anyone screaming.’

  ‘Ribisi owns a printing plant on the old Lee Valley Industrial Estate,’ said May.

  ‘I think you’d better head over there,’ said Bryant. ‘I have to go, I’m being asked to join a conga line through the Byzantine reliquaries.’

  The road to the east was quiet in the evening’s sudden squall of rain, and the slick tarmac forced him to keep his speed down. May knew he was running out of time, but decided to run no more reds after he’d done it three times and nearly ended up beneath the wheels of an artic.

  It was dark by the time he pulled into the rear of the car park beside the factory, but lights showed in the great paper sheds. As May climbed gratefully out of his BMW he could feel the hammer of machinery vibrating through the soles of his shoes.

  ‘I’d be a lot happier if we had a nice show of blues and twos sliding around in the gravel here,’ said Meera Mangeshkar, joining him as he walked.

  ‘How did you get here before me?’ May asked. Meera pointed back to her Kawasaki, cooling near the main gate.

  She looked up at the plant. ‘You seriously want us to go in there alone?’

  ‘We’ll take a side entrance, talk to the workers, keep it all as safe as we can,’ said May, heading towards the entrance.

  ‘If this is about you not wanting to split credit with the Met—’

  ‘It has nothing to do with credit,’ May called back. ‘I don’t want to call it in because I don’t know whom to trust.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that Ribisi might have sent more cards out. If he sent one to me, he’s probably targeted others.’

  He reached the steel entrance door and tried the handle. It swung open on a vast, brightly lit chamber filled with the smell of hot newsprint. He walked further in, beckoning to Meera. The place was big enough to induce a sense of agoraphobia when they looked up. On either side rose towering steel struts from which were suspended three floors of printing equipment. The machinery took up the entire length of the factory. Newspapers wound around and down through the system on curving steel ramps like a hellish roller coaster.

  The noise was tremendous. At the base a great swathe of paper roared beneath the rollers, under a row of red and yellow lights.

  The pair looked about for signs of human life.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ Meera asked.

  ‘It’s fully automated,’ May replied. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. The offices. They must be upstairs. Those stairs. One way u
p – easier to monitor who’s coming in. They’ve probably already seen us.’

  ‘So how are we going to get to them?’

  ‘I don’t suppose we’ll have the element of surprise, whatever we do. But even they might not act up with a couple of officers on the premises. Are you wearing a camera?’

  ‘Yeah, but I never use it.’

  ‘Leave it on. We’ll need proof of this.’ He began to climb the steel staircase to the first level office.

  At the top of the staircase, a broad metal landing led to offices that looked like steel Portakabins, their blinds drawn across their lit windows. May turned to his DC and shrugged, an in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound gesture as he tried the door handle and pushed in.

  As he feared, they were expected.

  The opening door placed the room’s two occupants in an awkward tableau. McFarland was attached to his chair with thick plastic ties. He looked like he’d had a few teeth knocked out. Opposite him, under the strip lighting, Ribisi appeared paler and more gaunt than ever. For a moment, nobody moved. Ribisi’s men were nowhere in sight. Something was off with the whole scene, which was as stiff and unnatural as a set of Madame Tussaud’s waxworks.

  ‘We were beginning to wonder when you’d get here,’ said Ribisi. ‘Did you have a good journey?’ He might have been a hotelier speaking to an arriving guest.

  ‘You know we’re not leaving here without you,’ said May, trying to sound confident. ‘We’re looking for the Vietnamese girl.’

  Ribisi ignored him. ‘Do you still have the credit card, Mr May?’ He rolled one finger over the other. ‘Turn it over and call the number.’

  ‘I think we’ve had enough of your games, sir,’ said May. ‘What have you done with Golden?’

  ‘Call the number and you’ll find out,’ said Ribisi.

  ‘What is it with gangsters and melodrama?’ May asked. Pulling the card from his pocket, he held it high between thumb and forefinger.