Bryant & May and the Invisible Code (Bryant & May 10)

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Good Lord, I’d forgotten you were moving at the weekend. How is it?’

  ‘I don’t know, I haven’t been there yet.’

  ‘But you must have seen the place.’

  ‘No, I left it all to Alma.’ Alma Sorrowbridge had been Bryant’s long-suffering landlady for over thirty years, and had arranged to find a new flat for them after their old home had received a compulsory purchase order. ‘That’s not important right now. The important thing is … I’ve forgotten the important thing.’

  ‘Anna Marquand.’

  ‘Anna, yes. Her attacker had been to Oskar Kasavian’s office. There was a Home Office slip in his pocket with Kasavian’s department named on it.’

  ‘But their new premises doesn’t use entrance slips any more – it operates on a swipe-card system.’

  ‘You’re right. I hadn’t thought of that,’ said Bryant. ‘A swipe card wouldn’t have led us to Kasavian.’

  ‘Exactly – so maybe somebody was trying to implicate him.’

  Bryant groaned. ‘This is dreadful. Not only do I lose my only suspect, I gain Dracula as a client.’

  ‘I thought it would be right up your street – his wife thinking she’s being hunted down by a satanic cult.’

  ‘Well, it is actually. Except that Kasavian should turn out to be the culprit, not the client. He looks like the sort of man who’d try to drive his wife mad, doesn’t he? He’s a cold-blooded bureaucrat. He can make children cry just by staring at them.’

  ‘But he’d gain nothing by coming to us. His career is about to come under the microscope, and the last thing he’d want is to draw attention to his marital problems. He’s giving us the power to wreck his career, Arthur. That’s not the action of a man who wants his own complicity uncovered. It’s the act of someone who’s desperate and has been forced to turn to his enemies for help.’

  ‘Fair enough, but it’s Occam’s razor, if you ask me. When a man looks like Christopher Lee with irritable bowel syndrome, it’s hard to suddenly imagine him buying flowers and patting puppies. Never mind, I shall set aside my personal antipathy while we figure out what’s behind it all. Just don’t ask me to be friends with him afterwards.’

  The detectives descended into the muggy tunnels of Victoria tube station.

  7

  THE ENGLISH DISEASE

  LIKE MOST OF the venerable institutions in London, the Guildhall was more impressive than beautiful. It had been the corporate home of the City of London for eight hundred years, and tonight was illuminated to welcome six European heads of state, from Finland, the Czech Republic, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland and Italy.

  The chevrons and monograms of previous reigning monarchs and Lord Mayors shone down on the Great Hall’s assembled guests, who were seated beneath monuments to Nelson, Wellington, Chatham, Pitt and Churchill. It was in this room that Dick Whittington had entertained Henry V, paying the delicate compliment of burning His Majesty’s bonds on a fire of sandalwood. Gog and Magog, the short-legged, flame-helmeted giants who founded London before the time of Christ, glowered over the oblivious diners, who were finishing their desserts and moving on to coffee.

  Sabira Kasavian was growing more upset by the minute. Sandwiched between a moth-eaten City alderman and a twitchy, crow-faced woman named Emma Hereward, she tried to spot her husband. Oskar was seated on the top table between the Deputy Prime Minister and the Chief of the Metropolitan Police. The intense conversation did not allow him time to look up and offer her a complicit smile. She had been relegated to an unimportant table because regulations prevented her from being within earshot of private ministerial conversations.

  After almost four years of marriage she should have become used to such snubs, but each one still came as a shock. Her security clearance for visiting her husband at his place of work was one of the department’s lower grades, because other wives had longer-serving spouses. She was not permitted to call him between certain hours, nor ask Oskar any questions about his work. There were rooms in the house she was forbidden from entering because they contained sensitive documents; she was not allowed access to any of his electronic devices. In times of a security crisis her friends, family members and correspondents were vetted, and sometimes, during those periods when the city was on the highest level of security alert, a guard was posted outside their flat.

  She had thought she was freeing herself from her lunatic ex-boyfriend and her own impossible family, from the endless financial worries and the painful peculiarities of Albanian life, but instead she had stepped into a secretive gilded prison.

  So she drank. Downing the dregs of her red wine, she snatched the brandy bottle away from the alderman, filling her water glass from it. She looked around at the other guests: the florid businessmen and their badly dressed wives; the desiccated accountants and corporate lawyers; the frumpy horse set; the charmless couples who couldn’t wait to get back to their dogs and their mock-Tudor Thames Valley houses; the so-called cream of the nouveaux riches. They all treated her as if she was a fool and a foreigner, as if those states were synonymous. None of them had bothered to get to know her. If they had, they would have found out that she was well read and intelligent, and spoke flawless, if accented, English. The other wives could speak only their own language plus a smattering of restaurant French.

  She knew the real reasons for their enmity. She was young and attractive, and liked to dress glamorously. She was wearing a red dress edged with silver bugle-beads, a look none of the other wives would have dared to try and pull off, and she simply wasn’t apologetic enough about not being English.

  ‘Of course, we’ve largely stopped going to Capri because these days it’s full of the most ghastly people.’ Emma Hereward was talking across her. ‘The budget airlines all fly into the region now.’ As usual, Emma was seated with Anastasia Lang and Cathy Almon. The three of them were hardly ever apart and were as poisonous as scorpions. Cathy was the plainest and therefore the most picked on. All were married to men in Oskar’s department.

  ‘We go to a marvellous little island off Sicily—’

  ‘Isn’t that where Giorgio Armani has his villa?’ asked Ana Lang, also talking across Sabira. ‘The Greek islands are ruined, of course. Do you still have the place in Tuscany?’

  ‘We gave it to the children. Better for the tax man.’ Emma noticed Sabira listening. ‘Does your husband have a bolt-hole?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ She didn’t understand the question. What was bolt-hole?

  ‘A second home – you know …’ She walked her fingers. ‘Somewhere you can whizz off to in the school holidays.’

  ‘He has a house in Provence,’ Sabira replied, ‘but I have never been there.’

  ‘Why ever not? I mean, the French are frightful, obviously, but you must get so bored being stuck in London.’

  ‘I go home to see my family in Albania, but Oskar is usually too busy to accompany me.’

  ‘Of course it’s different for you, not having any children,’ said Ana. ‘But what would Oskar do in Albania?’

  ‘We go to the beach there.’

  ‘You have beaches?’ Ana exclaimed. ‘How extraordinary.’

  ‘Yes, we have very nice ones.’

  ‘That’s a surprise. I always assumed the country was mainly industrial. We have a Polish chap – you must have met him, Emma. He built our patio. A terrible one for the vodka, but then all Eastern Europeans drink like fish.’

  Sabira dropped out of the conversation and refilled her glass.

  The speeches dragged on. Someone from the Animal Procedures Committee was talking about a new initiative, but he had a habit of moving his face away from the microphone, and whole sentences dropped out of earshot. The Deputy Prime Minister, a fair, faded little man who might easily have been mistaken for the manager of a discount software firm, was whispering in her husband’s ear. She was so far away from the speaker’s table that she could barely see who was talking.

  ‘These initiatives are a waste of time,’ Cat
hy Almon was saying. ‘Democratic governmental procedures are hopeless. People respond better to a benign dictatorship; it saves them having to take responsibility.’

  ‘I don’t agree,’ said Sabira, jumping in. ‘Surely the key to any democratic process is representation.’

  Cathy stared at her as if she expected frogs to start falling from her mouth. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Remind me who you are again?’

  ‘I’m Sabira Kasavian. We have met a dozen times.’

  ‘Goodness, of course, you must forgive me. I have absolutely no memory for faces. You must be very proud of your father.’

  ‘I am, but Oskar Kasavian is my husband.’

  ‘Then you must be more mature than you look.’ She meant it as a compliment, Sabira decided, a very English kind of compliment, the sort that offended as it flattered.

  ‘No, I am not,’ she said in a louder voice than she intended. ‘He is forty-five and I am twenty-seven. There is an eighteen-year age difference between us.’

  Ana Lang laid a beringed claw on her arm. ‘There’s no need to take offence, dear. You mustn’t be so sensitive.’

  ‘But I do take offence,’ said Sabira hotly. ‘You know where Giorgio Armani has his holiday villa but seem unaware that Albania has a coastline. That one, Mrs Almon, likes to pretend we’ve never met, and makes me introduce myself again. And you just accused my countrymen of being alcoholics. You’ve been patronizing and condescending to me ever since we sat down.’

  ‘I think you’re overreacting,’ said Ana, who could only cope with indirect criticism. ‘There’s no need to get so overwrought. This is simply dinner conversation. How long have you been married to Oskar?’

  ‘Nearly four years,’ Sabira replied.

  ‘Then I’m sure you must be familiar with at least some of our social customs by now, just as we are with yours. For example, your drinking habit could hardly go unnoticed, and while you might consider it part of a noble heritage there are others who could misconstrue it as intemperance.’ Ana bared her teeth in a mirthless smile, daring her to answer back.

  ‘Then you’ll know that, according to my noble heritage, when someone is insulted custom requires them to take revenge,’ said Sabira.

  She felt her hand going towards her full water glass. She intended to take a sip of brandy to steady her frayed nerves.

  ‘The girl has some spirit, Ana. I think Oskar’s done rather well for himself.’ Emma Hereward laughed.

  ‘I think you should stop picking on her,’ said Cathy Almon, who knew what it was like to be constantly bullied.

  ‘If you think I’m beneath him, you should say so to my face,’ said Sabira. ‘Hypocrisy is the English disease, isn’t it?’

  ‘I imagine dear Oskar probably woke up on an Albanian fact-finding mission and found you beneath him,’ said Ana Lang, chuckling softly with the others.

  Sabira’s grip on the brandy-filled glass tightened.

  8

  SABIRA

  ‘YOU’VE GOT TO admit it’s a great photo.’ Detective Sergeant Janice Longbright threw the newspaper at Jack Renfield. ‘Look at her, she’s a real wildcat.’

  ‘Blimey, that’ll sell a few copies.’ Sergeant Renfield grinned approvingly. ‘I wonder why they stuck a blurry box over the top of her thighs.’

  ‘According to the Daily Mail she didn’t have any knickers on,’ said Longbright. ‘She said she took them off before the dinner began because it was too hot in the room. It looks like a very tight dress. She probably didn’t want a VPL.’

  ‘Typical of a woman to think it was about fashion. Perhaps she was just feeling horny.’

  ‘She was attending a dinner to welcome heads of state at the Guildhall, not hitting on guys in a Nottingham nightclub, Jack. It says there that she threw a glass of brandy in some old bag’s face.’

  ‘That “old bag” is Lady Anastasia Lang,’ said John May, snatching up the paper as he entered on Tuesday morning. ‘“Sabira Kasavian was arrested for being drunk and disorderly last night, and was taken to Wood Street Police Station.” The arresting officer told me that Oskar tried to get her off the hook, but they had no choice but to run her in. Ana Lang was ready to press charges.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Longbright, ‘it’s “Oskar” now? Since when did you switch to first-name terms?’

  ‘Since he hired us to investigate his wife,’ said May. Everyone in the common room turned to look at him. ‘What can I say? I know. He’s always been the enemy, and now he’s the client.’

  ‘After all the terrible things he’s done in the past, I’m amazed he would trust us with something so personal.’

  ‘Kasavian didn’t have anyone else he could turn to. He managed to get his wife released from Wood Street a short while later, but by that time the damage had been done.’

  ‘I wonder what upset her so much?’ Longbright asked. ‘It says here the Finnish Minister for Finance was forced to stop his speech.’

  ‘This is a big deal,’ said May. ‘Three months ago our Deputy PM made a speech in Finland that was halted by hecklers halfway through, so now everyone’s saying this was payback. But Sabira Kasavian says it wasn’t planned; she’d been insulted all evening and finally had enough of it.’

  ‘OK, she was drunk, but she must have known it would reflect badly on her husband. Kasavian’s in line for one of Europe’s top security posts, isn’t he?’

  ‘He may not be after this. Check the rest of the online press; see if there are any more details. I bet they’re having a field day. Then fix up an appointment with the wife this morning. If she refuses to meet with us, I’ll get Oskar to call her.’

  ‘He’s on the line right now,’ said their detective constable, Meera Mangeshkar, covering the phone. May took the call with a certain amount of trepidation.

  ‘I suppose you’ve seen the news this morning,’ said Kasavian.

  ‘I could hardly have missed it.’

  ‘My wife was carried from the Guildhall kicking and screaming last night. The Guildhall. She smashed a tray of glasses and threw a shoe at one of my colleagues’ wives, then swore at the arresting officer and tried to run off down the street.’ He sounded exhausted.

  ‘But you got the charges dropped.’

  ‘Yes, but I can’t keep her locked up at home. I’m not putting her under house arrest: I’m her husband, not her jailer. I don’t know what to do. In an ideal world I’d take her away for a holiday, but this border-control thing is taking up all my time. And I can’t send her home to Albania. Imagine how that would look just ahead of the talks.’

  ‘Then I suggest you concentrate on your work and allow us to take care of her,’ said May. ‘You know our methods are unorthodox, but you’ll simply have to trust us. We’re going to need a level of access that may cause problems for you.’

  ‘I’ve a stack of reports on your past activities from Leslie Faraday. I’m fully aware of the lines you cross to get results, Mr May. But in this case, I need you to do whatever you can for my wife. Go and see her, and I’ll get you any other access you need. I have half a dozen important social occasions this month, and Sabira is expected to accompany me to them. If she suddenly stops turning up, my opposite numbers will be quick to make capital of it. The trouble is, I no longer know what she’s likely to do.’

  ‘First we’ll look at your calendar and take her out of the more sensitive events.’

  May prided himself on his understanding of women, but he felt uncomfortable knowing that if he failed to get to the cause of Sabira Kasavian’s problem, her husband would have good reason to come down hard on the unit. Her behaviour could derail his career and wreck a European-wide initiative. The Americans would be watching, and would step in fast.

  He swung into the office he shared with Bryant. ‘Get your hat and scarf on, Arthur,’ May instructed. ‘Kasavian’s granted us clearance. Let’s catch his wife by surprise and find out what she’s up to.’

  ‘They have a house in Henley, but his London apartment is in Smith
Square,’ said May, opening the badly rusted door of Victor, Bryant’s leprous yellow Mini. ‘I’ll drive.’

  ‘You’ll need this,’ said Bryant, handing him an apostle spoon.

  ‘What am I supposed to do with it?’

  ‘Stick it down the side of the gear stick. It seems to hold it in place.’

  May gave up trying to move the seat back, and set off into the traffic, heading towards the river. There was something wrong with Victor’s gears. ‘I’m surprised this thing passed its MOT,’ he said as the car leapfrogged across the Euston Road.

  ‘It passed under certain conditions,’ replied Bryant vaguely. ‘I think one of them was that I must never drive it anywhere.’

  ‘Then it’s an illegal vehicle.’

  ‘No – I’m not driving, am I?’

  Smith Square, just south of the Palace of Westminster, was dominated by the immense white frontage of St John’s, a baroque church now used as a concert hall. Surrounding it were the offices of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Local Government Association and the headquarters of the European Parliament. Sandwiched between these grandly appointed workspaces were a number of elegant flats.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to live here,’ sniffed Bryant, pulling his scarf tighter as he gazed up at the grand buildings.

  ‘Why not?’ asked May.

  ‘The noise.’

  ‘There isn’t any.’

  ‘Not now, but whenever there’s a government crisis the BBC sends its outside-broadcast vans over here, and they’re so full of electronic equipment that the technicians have to leave their air-conditioning units running all night, and they keep everyone awake.’

  ‘You’re a mine of useless information, do you know that? Come on.’ May trotted up the stairs and rang the doorbell.

  A porter admitted them into a hallway chequered with black and white diamond tiles. ‘Janice texted me to say that she’d cleared the way, but leave the talking to me for once, OK?’ May instructed.