Hall of Mirrors

by Christopher Fowler

  The case against Chamberlain began to unravel.

  The prosecution attempted to introduce new evidence but was overruled, as it did not pertain to the case under review. As the old boys’ network sprang into action, a phenomenal number of highly respectable character witnesses were introduced. Two days later the trial was halted. What shocked Bryant most was that nobody at court appeared angry or even surprised. Everyone seemed to have forgotten the young Hackney family whose lives had been snuffed out when their dream home collapsed about their ears, except for a handful of exhausted-looking people who sat outside the law courts with placards demanding justice. One of them was Arthur Bryant’s mother, Mary.

  The trial’s collapse allowed for a new, entirely separate case to be prepared concerning the hiring of Cedric Powles by Sir Charles Chamberlain. Consistent with the topsy-turveydom of the legal process, Monty Hatton-Jones now found himself portrayed as the slighted plaintiff.

  During the preparation of the trial, Cedric Powles hanged himself in prison over an entirely unrelated incident, and the second case collapsed. However, in a private suit brought by the families of the deceased (including Ernest ‘Parchment’ Prabhakar’s stepbrother in Kenya), Chamberlain was disbarred from practice and left the country to work in South Africa.

  It was the case that hardened the detectives’ antagonistic attitude towards the legal process, and the year that changed the way they saw their future. They decided to concentrate on developing a singular set of skills that would make the Peculiar Crimes Unit truly unique, and leave the parts they could not control to others.

  Swinging London evaporated so completely that it seemed to have never existed. It became a wonderful, dazzling mirage, fondly remembered but impossible to pin down. For a brief shining moment it really had felt as if singers, inventors, designers and models would set trends around the world. The term ‘youthquake’ summed it up; students were invited to sit on college boards, and careers began early – photographer Gered Mankowitz was just twenty-one when he took his celebrated shots of Jimi Hendrix – but the novelty of youth slipped quietly away as the old guard fought its way back. In Sheffield, Manchester and Nottingham there were still children without shoes and slums with no running water. A campaign to encourage everyone to buy British products, ‘I’m Backing Britain’, failed abysmally, its Union Jack T-shirts having been manufactured in China.

  And the country continued to change. By the end of the decade abortion was legalized, the rules governing divorce were remodelled and the Equal Pay Act was ratified so that women like Norma Burke got a fairer deal. Things were better than before; they just didn’t feel quite as exciting any more.

  John May dated Vanessa Harrow for five months, until she grew tired of the demands made upon his time by the unit and married a professional gambler more than twice her age in Monte Carlo. She persevered with her singing career, and her single, ‘Riviera Romeo’, reached number 82 in the UK Top 100.

  Monty Hatton-Jones gave up his company and became a property developer, selling homes to wealthy clients in Knightsbridge. In 1979 he went to jail for defrauding patients in the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital and trying to bribe the judge in the case. Upon his release he founded Brit-Out!, an organization dedicated to removing the country from Europe, which he ran from his cottage in Somerset.

  Roger Trapp resigned from the PCU at the end of 1969, complaining of nervous exhaustion. He took over a fruit and vegetable smallholding in Broadstairs, where he was much happier.

  Gladys Forthright’s daughter, Janice Longbright, eventually joined the London Metropolitan Police and became the PCU’s longest-serving member of staff.

  Pamela Claxon wrote a series of romantic thrillers featuring a codebreaking alcoholic martial arts instructor called Leticia Goodbody. Critics unanimously declared them awful. She moved to Hollywood and became a successful scriptwriter.

  Norma Burke gave nearly all her money away to children’s charities, and was subsequently awarded an OBE.

  Reverend Trevor Patethric was caught trying to steal the 1530 petition from the English clergy asking Pope Clement VII to annul Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, housed in the Vatican archives. How a lowly Kent vicar managed to inveigle his way in there was never fully explained. He was defrocked and subsequently moved to India with one of the girls from Lord Banks-Marion’s ashram.

  In 1973 Toby Stafford had gender reassignment surgery and became an air hostess for Qantas.

  Slade Wilson did not care for the muted shades of the seventies. He gave up his career as an interior designer after meeting a samba instructor in Rio de Janeiro. They set up a school teaching colour coordination to carnival dancers.

  Captain Debney was hospitalized after being attacked by a traumatized ostrich, and left the army to run an animal sanctuary in Sussex.

  The Burke Better Business School went bankrupt. Plans to turn Tavistock Hall into a National Trust property fell through, and it was sold to developers who transformed it into flats. The paintings, statues and other fittings all went to overseas collectors. The stained-glass window of Herne the Hunter was bought by an American hamburger chain for its flagship outlet in the King’s Road.

  Alberman and Mrs Janverley were paid the wages they were owed in full, and retired. Mrs Bessel became a successful television chef.

  Lady Banks-Marion and Harry moved to Knightsbridge, where they bought one of Monty’s apartments, and in 1972 Harry died of a heroin overdose. Three years later Lady Banks-Marion passed away. Some said that leaving Tavistock Hall was a tragedy from which she never recovered, and that she died of a broken heart. Among the few belongings she took with her were some photographs showing Tavistock Hall in its heyday, faded sepia images of shooting days, costumed nights, picnics and fayres – and snapshots of the young lord with whom she had fallen in love.

  Celeste made headlines when she became the first female manager of the Hong Kong National Basketball Team.

  It took four years for the families who lived in sub-standard accommodation constructed by Sir Charles Chamberlain’s company to be rehoused.

  Maggie Armitage remained a lifelong friend of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, where she was sometimes employed as a kind of spiritual drainage expert.

  Arthur Bryant looked back to the night he sat with Donovan the hippy, and wondered what would have happened if he had not tried marijuana in a Mongolian yurt covered in tie-dyed sheets in the back garden of a Kentish country house. He should really have told his partner the truth: that it eased the pain in his joints, and it sometimes helped him to follow a different mental path. Although explaining why he had a marijuana plant growing underneath his office desk never got any easier.

  The long-buried memory of Lord Banks-Marion fishing a false moustache from a bowl of porridge gave Bryant fresh ideas about the transference of DNA. He began to plot a new future for the unit that would keep them safe from closure. The offices of the PCU were shunted from Bow Street to Savile Row before ending up in Mornington Crescent, and then King’s Cross. Bryant rented a second-floor flat in a run-down house in Notting Hill from an Antiguan landlady called Alma Sorrowbridge, and kept Celeste’s custard-yellow Mini Cooper, Victor (187 TWR). He wore Mr Parchment’s knitted scarf until the day he died.

  John May married and had a son, Alex, and a daughter, Elizabeth. His wife Jane developed mental health problems and was taken into care. His granddaughter, April, worked at the unit before moving to Canada. May continued at the PCU for many, many years, working with his oldest and greatest friend. His life was often painful but never boring.

  One further incident warrants a mention. It had been a fine, fresh night, that Sunday in September 1969, when the detectives drove Monty Hatton-Jones back from Tavistock Hall to London in Celeste’s old Mini Cooper, Victor.

  They passed great crowds leaving an anti-nuclear march, waving brightly painted banners as they dispersed from their gathering point in Greenwich Park. As they crested the hill at Blackheath they co
uld see the lights of the city glowing before them. They pushed on into London, heading for Waterloo Bridge. So many women had worked on the new concrete crossing over the Thames that for a time it had become known as ‘the Ladies’ Bridge’. A soft grey mist lay on the olivine waters, and in places had curled itself over the road.

  As he reached the centre of the bridge, Bryant looked out and saw two elderly men, one tall and upright, the other shorter and more rotund, dressed in a hat and scarf, leaning on a walking stick.

  For a moment he thought they looked familiar. They were standing at the balustrade on the bridge’s eastern side, calmly surveying the city, somehow looking as if they owned it and were simply checking that everyone was being taken care of.

  Then the van behind him hooted and the moment passed. Bryant looked in his mirror to try and catch another glimpse of them, but they had dissipated, ghosts of a London yet to come.

  50

  * * *

  ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE

  ‘I’ve never had a jellied eel,’ said Simon Sartorius, looking apprehensive. ‘What do they taste like?’

  ‘I can get you some if you want, my shout,’ offered Bryant as they entered Manzes’ pie and eel shop, purveyors of fine working-class fare, on London Bridge Road. The black and white tiled interior of the café was crowded with office workers and children from a nearby school.

  Simon peered over the counter, looking at a steel pot filled with green bubbling liquid. ‘Ah, I think I’ll stay with a pie, thanks. What is that?’

  ‘It’s liquor.’

  ‘Not – alcohol?’

  ‘No, parsley sauce. It slips down a treat with pie and mash.’ Bryant waved aside a small boy in a backward baseball cap and lowered jeans. ‘Let me through, I’m a pensioner.’

  ‘Sod off, Granddad,’ said the child, standing his ground.

  ‘How would you like a broken nose?’ Bryant offered, raising the steel-studded handle of his walking stick.

  ‘That’s an offensive weapon,’ said the boy.

  ‘You’re an offensive child,’ said Bryant.

  ‘I’ll report you.’

  ‘I’m a copper, I’ll report myself. Pull your trousers up.’

  ‘Arthur!’ called John May, pushing open the door. ‘You only gave me half the address. This is the third pie shop I’ve visited. You must be Mr Sartorius, I’m Arthur’s partner, John.’ He shook the publisher’s hand. ‘I’m sorry I’m late.’

  ‘Oh, that’s quite all right,’ said Simon magnanimously, ‘we were late too. Mr Bryant got trapped in an escalator.’

  ‘It tore off the front of my boot.’ Bryant pointed at his big toe, which was peeking from the toecap of his right shoe. ‘Is it pies all round?’

  They squeezed into a table beneath an art deco mirror and tucked into their plates of mash. ‘I take it this was Arthur’s idea,’ said May.

  ‘Mr Bryant thought it would do me good to have a change from French cuisine.’ Simon raised his mash-coated fork uncertainly. ‘He probably told you that we’re hoping to publish some more of the unit’s memoirs.’

  ‘That reminds me,’ said Bryant, digging into his briefcase, a hard trick to pull off as they were bunched so tightly together on a narrow bench. ‘Here you go.’ He whacked down 330 pages of typed paper. ‘There’s your memoir. I’d have got it to you earlier but I thought I’d wait until we had lunch together again.’

  ‘But I only saw you last week,’ marvelled Simon as he picked up the manuscript and turned it over. ‘I thought you were joking when you said you had a book for me.’

  ‘There’s a cover note,’ said Bryant with a sparkle in his eye. ‘John, why don’t you take a look?’

  May removed the folded sheet clipped to the front of the manuscript and opened it out. He read aloud:

  Dear Mr Bryant,

  I believe I once told you that after my son died I could not countenance the thought of bringing back my fictional detective, dear old Inspector Trench. I never did return him to print, and after the failure of the Leticia Goodbody, Martial Arts Codebreaker series, I set up a cats’ sanctuary instead.

  I’m not sure why I decided to write about our experiences at Tavistock Hall over that very strange weekend in September 1969, but I thought I would make you and Mr May the protagonists, rather than relaying events from my point of view. As I understand you are planning to embark upon a series of memoirs, I thought you might find it useful to have this account, to do with as you please. I have entitled it Hall of Mirrors. It’s the only way I can say thank you for the kindness you showed us. Norma and I did not mean anyone any harm. The last thing we had ever expected was to stumble across a real-life murderer, or to meet you and Mr May.

  I tried to find a way of squeezing Leticia Goodbody into the story but there were quite enough larger-than-life characters in there already. I hope you will not think I took too many liberties. I spiced it up a bit.

  Pamela Claxon

  PS Perhaps it would be best to do a few rewrites and use your own name on the book’s title page. After the critical reception of Leticia’s Ghastly Surprise I’d rather not draw any more attention to myself.

  ‘I’ve read it through,’ said Bryant, ‘and I can promise you, every single word of it is the absolute truth.’

  He caught John May’s eye across the table, and it was all his partner could do to keep from bursting out laughing.

  Bryant and May will return.

  A Q & A WITH THE AUTHOR

  Q: What attracted you to setting a mystery novel in the 1960s?

  A: The mid-1960s in Great Britain had no name until America defined it. To Vogue and Time magazine, London became ‘the most swinging city in the world’, signified by political activism, sexual liberation, youth and spending power. Unfortunately I was at school and managed to completely miss it.

  Q: So how did you learn about it?

  A: I had osmotically absorbed all the details – how could you not when it was all anyone talked about at school? You look to older role models. By the time I left school and was ready to hit the town the sixties had been replaced by the gruesome horrors of the strike-ridden, impoverished seventies. And disco.

  Q: How did you do the research?

  A: That part was easy; everything was already in my head although mostly unusable, otherwise the whole book would have been peppered with Monty Python jokes about fascists and philosophers, and lurid scenes from Ken Russell films. I talked to some of the people who were there and read around a dozen volumes dissecting the era, many quite contradictory. They all agreed on certain points: that it was easy to get a job if you showed initiative, and good fortune was on the side of youth. It was by all accounts a great time to be young.

  Q: Wasn’t it a little perverse, having the whole of this period to draw on and then marooning your detectives in a country house?

  A: I knew I could get bogged down in too much period detail if I just had them rattling around in Swinging London for the entire book, partly because Swinging London was a mindset as much as a movement. Any one element, like the political agitation of the time, could have filled a whole volume and would have been more a history lesson than a crime novel. Besides, I’ve read most of the country house crime novels and wanted to tackle one myself. I wasn’t interested in their heyday so much as their demise.

  Q: Did it feel strange writing about your elderly detectives as young men?

  A: It made a pleasant change. They needed to behave in an immature fashion, so I could have them excitedly bounding about, playing silly games, making mistakes and being athletic. They also realize that most of their suspects are older than them, and are therefore more daunting to deal with. They feel disrespectful but need to obey the behavioural codes of the time.

  Q: Does the reader require any knowledge of the previous books to read this one?

  A: Not at all. The Bryant & May novels are not one long serialized adventure; they are really all the crime stories I ever wanted to write, and they can be read pretty much in a
ny order. This is the third period novel I’ve tackled in the series.

  Q: Did you miss not having the usual team of PCU officers and misfits to fall back on?

  A: No, because in order to be true to the country house murder mystery I needed a good range of suspects, and there’s only so much room for characters in one fifty-chapter story.

  Q: Speaking of which, why does every Bryant & May have fifty chapters?

  A: It seems to me the ideal length for this kind of novel. I like a bit of structure to my writing; writers love rules. Crime novels shouldn’t outstay their welcome.

  Q: Looking back at the 1960s, what makes it so important to you?

  A: It was out of reach to a schoolkid in suburban London, and therefore still has a talismanic effect on me. It took me years to appreciate the influence the era exerted on us; it may not have been as widespread as we like to imagine, but one thing was clear: it profoundly changed the country and had an effect on the whole of Europe. Most crucially, it gave the young a voice. It’s a lesson we would do well to relearn. The sixties was when our modern tolerance for others was born. This particular element was the one that most fitted with the Bryant & May ethic.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  As ever I owe a debt of gratitude to my agents Mandy Little and James Wills, who exhibit the kind of calm patience I can never find in myself, and to my valiant editor Simon Taylor, whose good nature I have tested in the opening pages of this volume.

  Kate Samano and Richenda Todd inject some well-needed common sense into the proceedings (I have a particular problem with timelines that they always help me unravel) and Sophie Christopher gets the word out. Thanks of course to Pete, without whom I could not keep up the pace. A hug to Jan, Porl, Maggie, Martin, Jo, Joanna, Darrell, Lesley, Sally and everyone who accepts my friendship in the understanding that books come first.