Bryant & May 06 - The Victoria Vanishes

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Please, Raymond. Don’t open it and I’ll do a deal with you.’ He thought fast. ‘Leave it sealed until the weekend. Arthur didn’t know what he was doing.’

  ‘Another note criticizing my ability to manage the unit, I suppose.’

  ‘Something like that. He wasn’t thinking clearly. He’d just had one of his blue pills. If I can’t get him to retract the contents, you can open it at this time on Saturday afternoon, how about that?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Land, who so rarely did. ‘I don’t like it when he insults me. Why should I hold off? What’s in it for me?’

  ‘Actually it’s a secret, but I’ll cut you in on the deal,’ said May, thinking on his feet and lying through his teeth. ‘Arthur insisted that your impatience would always get the better of you, and bet me fifty pounds that you couldn’t keep your hands off that envelope until Saturday. So if you prove him wrong and leave it unopened until then, I’ll split the winnings with you.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Land thought for a minute. ‘Why do I feel there’s something fishy going on here?’ He reexamined the envelope suspiciously, but finally returned it to his pocket undisturbed.

  I can’t believe I got away with that, thought May as he headed back over towards Bryant. I’ve bought myself a little time, now all I have to do is convince Arthur to rescind his offer. I’m such a hypocrite, telling him off about his envelope when I can’t bring myself to show him the contents of mine. It’s no good, I’ll have to get it off my chest. My God, I need a drink.

  He ordered himself a fresh pint, then prepared for the worst.

  5

  * * *

  MORTALITY

  ‘Arthur, I passed the statue of Edith Cavell the other evening.’ It was an opening gambit in his bid to explain his fears about the forthcoming operation. May had just told his partner about the clinic’s letter.

  ‘Did you know there are memorials to her all around the world?’ Bryant interrupted, sipping his London Pride bitter. ‘There’s even a mountain on Venus bearing her name, and of course Edith Piaf was named after her. Cavell said she was proud to die for her country. You don’t hear that very often nowadays, which is probably a good thing.’

  ‘Arthur, did you hear what I said? I’m rather afraid I’m going to die.’

  ‘Rubbish! A blur on an X-ray. They’ll get you in and whip it out like a rogue tonsil. It’s a bit late to be having intimations of mortality. Hatch, match, dispatch; there’s no dignity in life. We wet the bed when we’re born and when we leave. You’ll be fine so long as they don’t leave a swab inside you or accidentally dose you with MRSA.’

  ‘This thing growing inside me is the size of a conker. It’s going to be a dangerous operation.’

  ‘Oh, doctors always say that. It’s a way of covering themselves. Nobody likes to admit their job is easier than it looks. Patients think heart attacks are caused by stress because the first thing doctors ask them is, “Have you been working hard?” Nobody in their right mind is going to say, “No, I’ve been winging it for quite a while now, but the boss hasn’t noticed.” Stop worrying so much.’

  ‘Arthur, just for once try and take something seriously. I want you to be prepared for the worst.’

  ‘If you go I won’t stay around. It stands to reason. Wouldn’t be much fun here without you.’ He attempted to smooth his fringe of unruly white hair down. ‘Anyway, we can’t bow out yet. I need a few juicy final cases with which to conclude my memoirs. There’s still the matter of the Deptford Demon – ’

  ‘You’re the one who just handed in his resignation.’

  ‘Yes, but I thought I’d get a bit more work under my belt before they pack me off with a pitifully small cheque and an engraved carriage clock. It’ll take them months just to sort out the paperwork.’

  ‘It feels like the end of times,’ said May with a weary sigh. ‘There are so many things to be put in order. If anything happens to me, someone has to take care of April. And who’ll look after Crippen?’

  ‘Oh, this is sheer morbidity. When are they taking you in?’

  ‘I’m booked into University College Hospital at the beginning of next month.’

  ‘You see? They can’t be worried or they’d have strapped you on to a trolley the moment they saw the X-rays. I’ll come in with you, even though it means standing outside with all the dressing-gown people every time I want a snout.’

  ‘It’s a quarter past ten,’ said Raymond Land to Giles Kershaw. ‘Bryant and May are still over there in the corner conspiring about something. What on earth have they been talking about for the last five and three-quarter hours?’

  ‘You’re being paranoid, old sausage,’ said the plum-voiced forensic scientist who was taking over from their ill-fated coroner. ‘They’re not talking about you, they’re discussing old cases.’

  ‘You can show me a little more respect, young man,’ warned Land. ‘I know how you landed your new job.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Kershaw, genuinely surprised.

  ‘Come off it, sunshine. You’re married to the Home Secretary’s sister-in-law, or something like that. Bryant told me ages ago.’

  ‘I once went out with a girl who worked in PR at the Home Office, but I certainly never married her. I’m afraid Mr Bryant was playing a trick on you.’

  Land wearily passed a hand over his sweating face. ‘Well, there’ll be no more tricks now that Renfield is joining them. We’ll finally get a little order around here.’

  The wake was starting to break up. Two of the duty officers from the Albany Street cop shop were bombarding each other with the remains of a party-sized Swiss roll, and even Finch’s farewell cake had been reduced to a controlled explosion of icing and sultanas.

  Bryant set his glass down on the beer-stained paper tablecloth and buttoned his overcoat. ‘I have to go home, my head is swimming,’ he told his partner.

  ‘We haven’t finished discussing your resignation yet.’

  ‘Don’t be angry with me, John. Leave it to sink in for a few days. You’ll see I was right in the end.’ Bryant settled a squashed navy homburg on to his head so that the hat pressed down on the tips of his ears, knotted his mauve scarf under his chin so that his neck disappeared, and turned up the collar of his voluminous overcoat. He looked like a music hall comic preparing for an Arctic trek.

  ‘Do you want to share a cab?’ May called as the elderly detective tapped his walking stick to his hat brim in a farewell gesture and stumped off towards the exit.

  ‘No thanks, the walk will do me good. I need a blast of whatever passes for clean air around here.’

  ‘All the way to Mornington Crescent? It’s uphill, you know.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I have my good shoes on and I’m quite capable of finding a taxi when I get tired. You have to learn to stop worrying about me.’ Bryant pushed out of the door and was gone.

  I’ve got one week to make him change his mind, May told himself. It’s not an unfeasible task. But he knew it was almost impossible to alter Bryant’s course once it was set.

  6

  * * *

  OBSERVATION

  Arthur Bryant cursed himself. I should have handled the matter of my resignation better, he thought. After all these years of working with John, I should at least have taken him into my confidence first.

  But John May had always been able to talk him out of making sudden foolhardy decisions. His was the healing voice of reason, a counterbalance to the maddening pandemonium of Bryant’s mind. John might protest, but he could survive perfectly well on his own. People enjoyed his company and opened up to him, because he didn’t do anything that made them nervous. Right from the outset of their partnership, when the pair had launched a murder investigation at the Palace Theatre and solved the Shepherd’s Market diamond robbery, Bryant had been upsetting applecarts and overturning the status quo while his partner followed behind, smoothing raised hackles and restoring order. Across the years, from the tracking of the Deptford Demon to the
final unmasking of the Leicester Square Vampire, this out-of-kilter relationship had allowed them to resolve a thousand cases great and small. But everything came to an end, and knowing when to leave was crucial.

  Now Oswald Finch was gone, and soon they too would pass into oblivion, to be faintly recalled as members of the old school of police work, a pair of characters, representatives of a classic style of investigation that had since become obsolete. Would anything about them be remembered, other than a few oft-told anecdotes, funny stories to be trotted out wherever old men gathered in pubs? Had they really achieved anything at all, changed any laws, improved the lot of Londoners? Or would they soon be as forgotten as old music-hall stars, the pair of them described as the Flanagan and Allen of the Met?

  Bryant raised his head from his scarf and looked about. He was passing along the cream stucco edge of Coram Fields, the seven-acre park on the site of the old Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury which no adult could enter unless in the company of a child. The wind was rising, clattering the leaves of the high oaks and plane trees above him. At ten forty p.m. Bloomsbury was almost deserted, but even during the day there was hardly anyone around. The area between Gower Street and Gray’s Inn Road remained reticent and dignified, seemingly trapped in an earlier era between world wars. There were still a few indifferent second-hand bookshops housed in its mansion buildings, barber shops and fish bars left over from the 1930s, corner pubs that faded back from the street in a deliberate attempt to shun passing trade.

  He crossed the top of Marchmont Street into Tavistock Place, feeling his legs twinge in protest as he climbed the kerb. There would be plenty of cabs on Euston Road. Cutting across the pavement in the direction of Judd Street, he found himself in a road he did not know, little more than an alley that opened out into a dog-leg. The sound of traffic had all but disappeared. There was only the wind in the trees, and the distant twitter of birds who had mistaken the perpetually sulphurous skies for dawn.

  The effect of the alcohol in his system was starting to evaporate. Untangling his distance spectacles from the other pairs that rattled loose in his pocket, he wrapped the flexible metal arms around his ears and examined the street ahead.

  So Raymond Land thought he had failing powers of observation, did he? He squinted at the narrow pavement with its high red-brick wall, the rustling cherry trees, the old-fashioned gas lamps that had been wired to hold electric bulbs. The jaundiced lighting gave the street an air of melancholy neglect, like a yellowing newspaper photograph found beneath the floorboards of a derelict house.

  Note what you see, he told himself. Remember how you used to do it when you were a young man.

  OK, the street had been severed at the far end by a grim granite office building, the other side of which presumably faced the hellish traffic of Euston Road. Several houses had been pulled down – they had probably survived wartime bomb damage to last for another two or three decades – and replaced with council flats. Their windows clumsily referenced the design of the surrounding Victorian terraces, but everything about the newer properties was cheaper and smaller.

  A single original house, number 6A, had been left behind. Tall and narrow, gapped on either side, it had been stranded alone in the present day like an elderly aunt at a funeral.

  A slender street to the left: Argyle Walk. An alleyway leading off to the right, with black bollards raised through its centre, copies of a traditional design; once, the city had found new lives for its naval gun barrels, upending them in the streets and inserting red cannonballs in the mouths to form bollards.

  Above and behind the buildings, the sallow, ghostly clock on the gothic tower of St Pancras station floated like a second moon.

  What else could he discern?

  A pale keystone over a door, initials entwined in a county badge, a concave shell-hood above another entrance, a feature used by early Georgians to provide protection from inclement weather, although this one was an Edwardian copy.

  A carved blind window, created to provide balance for other openings in the side wall of the terrace. Or perhaps it had been bricked in because of William III’s window tax.

  A black-painted fresh-air inlet with a grating on its top, like a ship’s periscope, designed to prevent vacuums occurring in the sewage system below the street.

  The fragile lacework of a wrought-iron ornamental balcony, complete with a curving zinc hood.

  A square iron lid recessed into the flagstones that read PATENT AIR-TIGHT FLAP, the cover plate for a coal-hole which would have been converted into a basement after the arrival of central Heating.

  A cast-iron railing of daisies and ivy leaves, one which had survived the mass removal of ironwork during the Second World War. Britons had been told that their railings, along with their saucepans, would be melted down ‘for the war effort’ in what was largely a propaganda exercise.

  What else?

  A door knocker consisting of a hand holding a wreath, painted over so many times that the form had been all but lost. Carpenters, metal-workers and battalions of servants would have ensured that these domestic items remained in perfect condition. Now no one had the skills, and so they were scoured into oblivion by successive tenants.

  A pair of small stone lions stood on a balustrade. Once, the lion could have been regarded as the architectural symbol of London, the leonine essence distorted into decorative devices throughout the metropolis, sprawled in sunlight on the Embankment side of Somerset House, winged and majestic at Holborn Viaduct.

  A corner pub, The Victoria Cross, with a sign above it depicting its namesake, the highest recognition for bravery in the face of the enemy that could be awarded to any member of the British and Commonwealth armed forces. The decoration took the form of a cross pattée, bearing a crown surmounted by a lion and the inscription ‘FOR VALOUR’. Beneath the sign were opaque lower windows, gold letters in a spotted mirror panel establishing the types of beers served and the foundation date. A deserted bar unit, mirrored and shelved, where bottles of whisky and gin remained in places they had doubtless occupied for decades. Above, an old clock was set at the wrong time, two minutes past eleven.

  One expected to find untouched areas like this in Kensington and Chelsea, where old money had preserved past features that the poor were resigned to lose, but Bryant was surprised to see that parts of Bloomsbury, the West End’s shabbily genteel cousin, were still so complete. That’s my trouble, he thought. I always see things, not people.

  A single pedestrian coasted the corner ahead of him. Bryant narrowed his eyes and conducted the same observational survey on her. She was between forty-five and fifty, and would once have seemed old, branded invisible and treated brusquely by the inhabitants of the Victorian buildings around them. ‘She could very well pass for forty-three in the dusk with the light behind her,’ W. S. Gilbert had written of an attorney’s daughter in Trial by Jury. An unmemorable face, rounded and fattened by time, lined a little by care, or what was now termed stress. Mousy hair cropped close to her jaw-line, make-up a little too thick, small eyes downcast, head lost in thought. Her raincoat had seen better days, but her shoes were polished and of good quality. The heels suggested that she was conscious of her height, for she was small and broad-hipped. She looked like a council official. A bag on her shoulder, brown and shapeless, bulging with – what did women take with them these days? Documents, most likely, if she was returning from working late in an office. A drink after work, or rather drinks, for she appeared a little unsteady on those heels. Somebody’s leaving party, a birthday celebration. A mother, a wife, going home late and alone after a hard week, heading in the wrong direction for King’s Cross station.

  Bryant watched as she stopped and looked up at the pub sign, then negotiated the kerb to the entrance. He slowed to watch through the window as she headed to the counter and a barman emerged to greet her, appearing like an actor taking his cue on a stage set.

  There was nothing more to be noted here. Could it be that he was becoming less obs
ervant because there was less of interest to see in London these days? He needed the lights and noise of the station, where one could witness meetings and farewells, the discovered, the lost and the confounded. That was the best way to check whether his powers were truly waning. But he was tired, and as he passed into the covered alley that led out on to Euston Road, he decided to find a cab. It had been a long exhausting day, one that marked an end, and a new beginning that would not involve him. Appointments, resignations, speeches and arguments. And on top of all this, he had been entrusted with the ashes of his old colleague.

  The ashes. Only now did he realize that he had no idea what had happened to the aluminium urn containing the remains of Oswald Finch.

  7

  * * *

  RELIQUARY

  ‘Christ’s blood,’ said Dr Harold Masters testily, making the phrase sound like an oath. ‘Be honest with me, that’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it? You’re after information on some new pet hobby of yours. What was it last time – the whereabouts of some Egyptian sacrificial urn you thought was still floating about in the London canal system?’

  Arthur Bryant had not expected the doctor to discern his purpose quite so quickly. ‘Could you slow down a bit? I’m not a marathon runner,’ he begged, hopping along beside the impossibly tall academic as they climbed the steps of the British Museum.

  ‘I lecture on ancient mythologies these days, Arthur, I’m not in haematology any more, unless you count the Athenian. Christ’s blood is one of those things like the Ark of the Covenant. It’s largely a Judeo-Christian habit, you know, venerating bits of wood and stains on cloths. Henry VIII supposedly owned the left leg of St George. I don’t suppose you’d catch Buddhists flogging each other bits of Gautama Buddha’s sandals in order to assuage their suffering.’