Bryant & May 06 - The Victoria Vanishes

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘I really don’t want another drink. In fact I think I have to – ’ Was she raising her voice to him? If so, no one had noticed.

  ‘This is a good place. Nice and busy. I think you should stay. I want you to stay.’

  ‘Then you have to let go – ’ But his grip tightened. She reached out with her left hand to attract the attention of the barman but he was moving further away.

  ‘You have to let go – ’

  It was ridiculous, she was surrounded by people but the noise of laughter and conversation was drowning her out. The crush of customers made her even more invisible. He was hurting her now. She tried to squirm out of his grip.

  Something stung her face hard. She brought her free hand to her cheek, but there was nothing. It felt like an angry wasp, trapped and maddened in the crowded room. Wasn’t it too early in the year for such insects?

  And then he released her arm, and she was dropping, through the beery friendship of the bar, away from the laughter and yeasty warmth of life, into a place of icy, infinite starlight.

  Into death.

  2

  * * *

  THE FIRST FAREWELL

  Early Monday in Leicester Square. On a blue-grey morning like this the buildings looked heavier, more real somehow in rain than in sunlight. Drizzle drifted on a chill breeze from the north-east. The sky that smudged the rooftops looked so low you felt you could reach up and touch it.

  John May, Senior Detective at the Peculiar Crimes Unit, looked around as he walked. He saw cloud fragments in lakes on broken pavements. Shop shutters rolling up. Squirrels lurking like ticket touts. Pigeons eating pasta. Office workers picking paths through roadworks as carefully as cats crossing cobblestones.

  The doorways that once held homeless kids in sleeping bags now contained plastic sacks of empty champagne bottles, a sign of the city’s spiralling wealth. Piccadilly Circus was once the hub of the universe, but today only tourists loitered beside Eros, trying to figure out how to cross the Haymarket without being run over.

  Every city has its main attraction, May thought as he negotiated a route through the dining gutter-parrots in the square. Rome has the Coliseum, Paris the Eiffel Tower, but for Londoners, Leicester Square is now the king. It seems to have wrested the capital’s crown from Piccadilly Circus to become our new focal point.

  He skirted a great puddle, avoided a blank-faced boy handing out free newspapers, another offering samples of chocolate cake.

  This is the only time of the day that Leicester Square is bearable, he thought. I hate it at night. The sheer number of people standing around, what do they all wait here for? They come simply because it’s Leicester Square. There’s not even a chance they’ll spot Tom Cruise and take his photo on their mobile phones, because everyone knows film premieres only take place on week nights. There’s nothing to see other than a giant picture of – who is it this week? – Johnny Depp outside the Odeon cinema, plus a very small park, the cheap-ticket kiosk and those parlours selling carpet-tile pizzas that you could dry-stone a wall with. At least Trafalgar Square has Nelson.

  The scene before him was almost devoid of people, and could not reveal the diegesis of so many overlapping lives. The city was shaped by assembly, proximity and the need for companionship. Lone wolves can live in the hills, but London is for the terminally sociable.

  May caught sight of himself in a shop window. On any other day, he would have been pleased to note how neatly he fitted his elegant suit. He had remained fit and attractive despite his advancing years. His hair had greyed, but his jaw and waist were impressively firm, his colouring healthy, his energy level consistently high. All the more reason to be angry, he thought. Today he had good reason to be ill-tempered. He had just come to the realization that he might very well be dying.

  He tried not to think about the sinister manila envelope in his briefcase, about the X-rays, the Leicester Square Clinic’s referral letter, and what this meant to his future. For once he just wanted to enjoy London and think of nothing in particular, but the city wasn’t letting him.

  I remember when the square was different. Bigger and leafier, with cars slowly circling it and thousands of starlings fluttering darkly in the trees, that busker in a fez doing a sand-dance for coins outside the Empire. Look at the state of the place now. Kids need a purpose for coming here other than getting their iPods nicked. What will the next tawdry attraction be, I wonder? Celebrity mud-wrestling or the National Museum of Porn? At least I won’t be here to witness the indignities thrust upon it. I’ll be long gone. I used to drink mild and bitter in the Hand and Racquet with Arthur, then take a Guinness in the Green Man and French Horn over in St Martin’s Lane. I wonder if we’ll ever do that again? I always thought he would go first, but what if it’s me? What on earth will Arthur do then?

  Bryant and May. Their names went together like Hector and Lysander, like Burke and Hare, unimaginable in separation. May still felt young, although he was far from it. He still looked good and felt fit, but his companion in crime detection, Arthur Bryant, was growing old before his eyes. He had all his critical faculties, far more than most, but the physical demands of the job were wearing him down. May wondered whether to hide his news from his partner for fear of upsetting him.

  Despite his dark thoughts, May was still at his happiest here, walking to work through the city on a rainy February morning. Being near the idealistic young was enough to provide him with the energy to survive. He tried to imagine how visitors felt, seeing these sights for the first time. Every year there were more nationalities, more languages, and the people who stayed on became Londoners. It was an appealingly egalitarian notion. More than anything, he would miss all of this. Culinary terms were appropriate for the metropolis; it was a steaming stew, a broth, a great melting pot, momentarily levelling the richest and poorest as they rubbed shoulders on the streets.

  Striding between the National Portrait Gallery and St Martin-in-the-Fields, he briefly stopped to reread the wording beneath the white stone statue of Dame Edith Cavell, the British nurse who faced a German firing squad for helping hundreds of soldiers escape from Belgium to the Netherlands. The inscription said: ‘Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone.’ If there’s a more respectful creed by which to live, he thought, I can’t imagine what it is.

  He put the blame squarely on London and the strange effect it had on people. If he hadn’t come here as a young man and met Bryant, he would never have been infected with his partner’s passion for the place. He wouldn’t have stayed here all these years, unravelling the crimes deemed too abstract and bizarre to occupy the time of regular police forces. And even now, knowing that it might all come to an end, he could not entertain the thought of leaving.

  Curiosity finally got the better of him, and he stopped in the middle of the pavement to take out the envelope and tear it open. He could feel the letter inside, but did he have the nerve to read it?

  A good innings, some would say. Let the young have a go now. Time to turn the world over to them. To hell with it. With a catch in his heart, he pulled out the single sheet of paper, unfolded it and scanned the two short paragraphs.

  A tumour attached to the wall of his heart . . . a recommendation for immediate surgery . . . a serious risk owing to past cardiovascular problems that had created a weakness possibly leading to embolism.

  He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Worse than he had expected, or better? Did he need to start planning for the inevitable? Should he tell anyone at the unit, or would it get back to Arthur?

  You can’t go, old bean, Bryant would say when he found out, and find out he would because he always did. Not without me. I’m coming with you. You’re not going off to have the biggest adventure of all on your own. He’d mean it, too. For all his appearance of frailty he was an extremely tough old man; he’d just recovered from wrestling a killer in a snowdrift, and all he’d suffered was a slight chest cold. But he wouldn’t want to be left behind. You couldn’t
have one without the other, two old friends as comfortable as cardigans.

  I’m not going without a fight, May thought, shoving the letter into his pocket and striding off through the blustering rain towards the Charing Cross Road.

  3

  * * *

  END TIMES

  Arthur Bryant blotted the single sheet of blue Basildon Bond paper, carefully folded it into three sections and slid it into a white business envelope. He pressed the adhesive edges together and turned it over, uncapping his marbled green Waterman fountain pen. Then, in spidery script, he wrote on the front:

  For the attention of:

  Raymond Land

  Acting Temporary Chief

  Peculiar Crimes Unit

  Well, he said to himself, you’ve really done it this time. You can still change your mind. It’s not too late.

  Fanning the envelope until the ink was thoroughly dry, he slipped it into the top pocket of his ratty tweed jacket, checked that his desk was clear of work files and quietly left the office.

  Passing along the gloomy corridor outside, he paused before Raymond Land’s room and listened. The sound of light snoring told him that the unit’s acting chief was at home. Usually Bryant would throw open the door with a bang, just to startle him, but today he entered on gentle tiptoe, creeping across the threadbare carpet to stand silently before his superior. Land was tipped back in his leather desk-chair with his mouth hanging open and his tongue half out, faintly gargling. The temptation to drop a Mint Imperial down his throat was overpowering, but instead, Bryant simply transferred his envelope to Land’s top pocket and crept back out of the room.

  The die is cast, he told himself. There’ll be fireworks after the funeral this afternoon, that’s for sure. Bryant was feeling fat, old and tired, and he was convinced he had started shrinking. Either that or John was getting taller. With each passing day he was becoming less like a man and more like a tortoise. At this rate he would soon be hibernating for half the year in a box full of straw. He needed to take more and more stuff with him wherever he went: walking stick, pills, hearing-aid batteries, pairs of glasses, teeth. Only his wide blue eyes remained youthful. I’m doing the right thing, he reminded himself. It’s time.

  ‘Do you think he ought to be standing on a table at his age?’ asked the voluptuous tanned woman in the tight black dress, as she helped herself to another ladleful of lurid vermilion punch. ‘He needs a haircut. Funny, considering he has hardly any hair.’

  ‘I have a horrible feeling he’s planning to make some kind of speech,’ Raymond Land told Leanne Land, for the woman with the bleached straw tresses and cobalt eye make-up who stood beside him in the somewhat risqué outfit was indeed his wife.

  ‘You’ve warned me about Mr Bryant’s speeches before,’ said Leanne. ‘They tend to upset people, don’t they?’

  ‘He had members of the audience throwing plastic chairs at each other during the last “Meet the Public” relationship-improving police initiative we conducted.’

  They were discussing the uncanny ability of Land’s colleague to stir up trouble whenever he appeared before a group of more than six people. Arthur Bryant, the most senior detective in residence at London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit, was balanced unsteadily on a circular table in front of them, calling for silence.

  As the room hushed, Raymond Land nudged his wife. ‘I don’t think your dress is entirely appropriate for the occasion,’ he whispered. ‘You’re almost falling out of it.’

  ‘My life-coach says I should be very proud of my breasts,’ she countered. ‘So why shouldn’t I look good at a party?’

  ‘Because it’s a wake,’ hissed Raymond. ‘The host is dead.’

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Bryant bellowed so loudly that his hearing aid squealed with feedback. ‘This was intended to be a celebration of our esteemed coroner’s retirement, but instead it has become a night of sad farewells.’

  The table wobbled alarmingly, and several hands shot out to steady the elderly detective. Bryant unfolded his spectacles, consulted a scrap of paper, then balled it and threw it over his shoulder. He had decided to speak from the heart, which was always dangerous.

  ‘Oswald Finch worked with the Peculiar Crimes Unit from its inception, and planned to retire on this very night. Everyone had been looking forward to the bash. I had personally filled the morgue refrigerator with beer and sausage rolls, and we were planning a big send-off. Luckily, I was able to alter the icing inscription on his retirement cake, so it hasn’t gone to waste. “The funeral baked meats did aptly furnish forth the marriage tables”, only the other way around, and with retirement substituted for marriage.’

  ‘What’s he on about?’ whispered Leanne.

  ‘Hamlet,’ said Land. ‘I think.’

  ‘Because instead of retiring, Oswald Finch died in tragic circumstances under his own examination table, and now he’ll never get to enjoy his twilight years in that freezing, smelly fisherman’s hut he’d bought for himself on the beach in Hastings. Now I know some of you will be thinking, “And bloody good riddance, you miserable old sod,” because he could be a horrible old man, but I like to believe that Oswald was only bad-tempered because nobody liked him. He had dedicated his life to dead people, and now he’s joined them.’

  One of the stationhouse girls burst into tears. Bryant held up his hands for quiet. ‘This afternoon, in a reflective mood, I sat at my desk and tried to remember all the good things about him. I couldn’t come up with anything, I’m afraid, but the intention was there. I even tried phoning Oswald’s oldest schoolfriend to ask him for amusing stories, but sadly he went mad some while back and now lives in a mental home in Wales.’

  Bryant paused for a moment of contemplation. A mood of despondency settled over the room like a damp flannel. ‘Oswald was a true professional. He was determined not to let his total lack of sociability get in the way of his career. True, he was depressing to be around, and everyone complained that he smelled funny, but that was because of the chemicals he used. And the flatulence. People said that he didn’t enjoy a laugh, but it went deeper than that. In all the years I worked with him, I never once saw him crack a smile, even when we secretly attached electrodes to his dissecting tray and made his hair stand on end.’ Bryant counted on his fingers. ‘So, just to recap, Oswald Finch: no sense of humour, no charm, friendless, embittered, stone-faced and bloody miserable, on top of which he stank. Some folk can fill a room with joy just by entering it. Whereas being in Oswald’s presence for a few minutes could make you long for the release that death might bring.’

  He paused before the aghast, silenced crowd.

  ‘But – and this is the most important thing – he was the most ingenious, humane and talented medical examiner I have ever had the great pleasure of working with. And because of his ability to absorb and adapt, to think instead of merely responding, Oswald’s work will live on even though he doesn’t, because it will provide a template for all those who come after. His fundamental understanding of the human condition taught us more about the lives and deaths of murder victims than any amount of computerized DNA testing. Oswald’s intuitive genius will continue to shine a beacon of light into the darkest corners of the human soul. In short, his radiance will not dim, and can only illuminate us when we think of him, or study his methods, and for that I raise a glass to him tonight.’

  ‘Blimey, he’s finally learning to be gracious,’ said Dan Banbury, the unit’s stubby crime-scene manager. ‘I’ve never heard him be nice about anyone before.’

  ‘He must be pissed,’ sniffed Raymond Land, jealously turning aside as the others helped Bryant from his wobbly table. He glanced down at the white-and-blue-iced fruit cake that stood in the middle of the pub’s canapé display. The inscription had read: Wishing You the Best of Luck in Hastings, but Hastings had been partially picked off and replaced with a shakily mismatched Heaven. The iced fisherman’s hut now had pearly gates around it, and the stick figure at its door had sprouted wings and a halo, pick
ed out in hundreds and thousands.

  ‘I hope the cake has more taste than the inscription,’ muttered Land, shaking his head in despair.

  Nobody had expected the retirement party for the Peculiar Crime Unit’s chief coroner to become a wake, but then life at the unit rarely turned out according to anyone’s expectations. Oswald Finch had died, sadly and suddenly, in his own morgue, in what could only be described as extraordinary circumstances. Yet his death seemed entirely appropriate for someone who daily dealt with the deceased.

  Raymond Land had never expected to stay on this long at the PCU. After all, he had joined the unit for a three-month tour in 1973, and was horrified to find himself still here.

  Arthur Bryant and John May, the unit’s longest-serving detectives, had been expected to rise through the ranks to senior-division desk jobs before quietly fading away, but were still out on the street beyond their retirement ages.

  Detective Sergeant Janice Longbright had been expected to marry and leave the force, perhaps to eventually resume her old job as a night-club manager, but instead she had chosen her career over her husband and had stayed on.

  The PCU itself should have been disbanded by now, but had successfully skated over every trap laid for it by the Home Office. Even Land had argued for the unit’s closure behind his colleagues’ backs, but had then surprised himself by fighting in order to preserve it.

  Life, it seemed, was every bit as confusing and disorderly as the PCU’s investigations.