Bryant & May - Oranges and Lemons

by Christopher Fowler - Bryant

  He wondered whether to tell the truth, but recent experience had made him wary. ‘I had an operation on a torn ligament,’ he said. ‘Working on games must be fun.’

  ‘Everyone thinks that. It probably is if you’re a member of the design team. I’m a QA tester.’ She didn’t bother to wait for his quizzical glance. ‘I look for fixes and improvements in gameplay. It means rerunning sections hundreds of times. You have to be very patient and detail-oriented. Sometimes I close my eyes and all I can see is a space trooper trying to climb over a wall. Leg up, leg down, over and over. I remember playing Tomb Raider as a kid and wondering why half of Lara Croft was stuck in a rock. I didn’t know I’d end up stopping it from happening. How about you?’

  ‘I’m in law—’ He was about to say ‘enforcement’ but swerved to ‘legal’. ‘—a legal unit. How long have you been here?’

  ‘Just moved in. I was way out in the sticks before.’

  ‘It must have been a shock moving here.’

  ‘Whenever I see the subway at Old Street tube it makes me glad to be working in a nice clean virtual world. That’s something designers don’t factor in, just how scuzzy real cities can be. They always call Shoreditch edgy, never dirty.’ When she reached into her back pocket he flinched. She drew out her door keys. Muscle memory, he thought.

  He kept things brisk and distant. ‘You’ve probably noticed there’s nothing much open around here. I keep a list of places where you can buy essentials. I can send it to you if you like.’ He knew he sounded as skittish as Norman Bates describing the motel facilities.

  ‘I’m sure I can find everything I need.’ She went to the window, in no hurry. ‘You have a great view. I’m jealous. I’m at the back of the building. My bedroom is right over the electric motor that raises the garage door. My little boy hasn’t been here yet – he’s with his father at the moment – but I know he’s going to love it.’

  As they chatted May lowered his guard a little. The stress of the shooting had affected him more than he’d realized. Neighbourly conversations rarely involved him. Most of the other tenants worked in the City and were in too much of a rush to pass the time of day.

  Listening to Jenny talk about her son produced a fleeting moment of jealousy. Occasionally he glimpsed a life he might have had.

  ‘I should probably let you rest.’ She looked at him, trying to understand more. ‘You don’t need me chattering away.’

  He gave no answer. After she left he went back to work, looking for clues to Michael Claremont’s state of mind, but drew a blank. He had never worked well alone, and, after struggling through the Speaker’s notes on the month’s parliamentary meetings, he drifted off into uneasy dreams.

  ‘I need John on this,’ said Bryant. ‘I can’t think clearly without him. Do we really have to have new people working with us? I don’t like change.’

  Longbright dragged Bryant across the busy Strand. ‘Floris doesn’t like it any more than we do. We can’t pretend he’s not there.’

  ‘The Home Office clearly wants us to issue a statement refuting Claremont’s credibility.’ Bryant sought out her hand as they crossed, as a child would with a parent. ‘We can deal with Floris but this other one, the girl with the attitude, we can’t put an intern on a murder case.’

  ‘No,’ Longbright agreed. ‘She can handle some of the paperwork I shouldn’t be doing at my age.’

  ‘I suppose some new blood will do us old ’uns good.’ Bryant removed an orange from the voluminous pocket of his overcoat and bit into it, spraying juice everywhere.

  Longbright was not thrilled at being lumped in with the seniors. ‘You didn’t take that from Claremont’s flat?’

  Bryant peered at her over the orange, his dentures buried in its skin.

  ‘Are you sure they’re all right to eat?’

  He dragged a chunk of peel from beneath his dental plate. ‘Let’s see what the church has to say.’

  St Clement Danes might have been marooned in the middle of the Strand but its magnolia trees were blossoming with fat pink petals that shielded the passing traffic and gave the churchyard an air of becalmed grace, like a ship stuck on a sandbank. Bryant climbed the flagstone steps and wandered inside for a nose around. The interior smelled of candle wax, damp and … yes, a definite tang of citrus fruit.

  ‘“‘Oranges and lemons,’ say the bells of St Clement’s”,’ he murmured, running a hand along the back of a pew. ‘Ah, here’s someone who can help us.’

  As the Reverend Sarah Boscastle came forward to meet them, Longbright realized that the meeting had been prearranged. That was a rare thing for Arthur, who usually preferred to capitalize on the element of surprise by simply barging in. He only made appointments with people he respected.

  ‘I hope I haven’t kept you.’ She beamed at them both. ‘I was catching up with my music director. We had a piano recital last night.’

  Longbright introduced herself. The Reverend Boscastle shook their hands warmly. Bryant’s hand appeared to make hers sticky; the Reverend surreptitiously wiped her fingers on her surplice.

  ‘We did know him,’ she said. ‘Mr Claremont and his wife came to the Christmas service last year, and have attended recitals in the past. Such an odd thing to have happened. He was always in such high spirits.’

  ‘Well, his spirit was almost a lot higher,’ Bryant pointed out.

  ‘Is he going to be all right?’

  ‘As far as we know, but you can put in a word for him.’ He pointed at the ceiling.

  ‘Was the van delivering to you?’ Longbright asked.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘What do you do with all the fruit?’

  ‘It’s placed around the church for the day of celebration, and is given away at the end of the service, and again after the recital. The leftovers go to the schoolchildren of St Clement Danes.’

  ‘I’m surprised there are any schoolchildren left in the West End,’ said Bryant. ‘Why do you celebrate?’

  ‘Well, we’re the oranges and lemons church, Mr Bryant. Our bells ring out the nursery rhyme. The Reverend Pennington-Bickford instigated the service exactly one hundred years ago, so this year’s celebration was a special one.’

  ‘Did you also send a box of fruit to Mr Claremont?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I can check.’

  ‘Would you please.’ He looked up at the vaulted ceiling. ‘I’ve always liked this church. One can be an atheist and still appreciate the architecturally divine. What’s its history?’

  Oh, don’t ask her that, thought Longbright.

  ‘Before the Great Fire there were a hundred such churches packed into this single square mile,’ said Reverend Boscastle. ‘This little corner of Holborn was once Danish, hence the name. Several royal Danes were buried here. The ones who married Englishwomen had places of worship on this site consecrated at the end of the tenth century. The church burned down in the Great Fire but Christopher Wren rebuilt it. Samuel Johnson worshipped here with Boswell, and one of our rectors invented the game of rugby.’

  ‘So why is it known as the RAF church?’ Bryant tapped his boot on the squadron badges set in the church floor.

  ‘The Blitz bombs shattered the coffins in the crypt and all ten bells in the tower came down. The air force paid for it to be rebuilt after the war.’ Reverend Boscastle stepped back to reveal more emblems. ‘All the squadrons are represented. We have their names inscribed in our book of remembrance.’

  Longbright was getting fidgety. Bryant had never been able to keep his interviewees on topic for long, especially when it came to the history of his city. It seemed to clarify his thoughts, as if by veering off course he could consult forgotten figures from the past and obtain their help. Even so, she felt the pressure of time upon them even if he didn’t.

  ‘Well, Reverend, they’re charming stories even if they’re not all true.’ Bryant dug in his pocket and produced a paper bag of boiled sweets.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You�
�re not the oranges and lemons church, are you?’ He popped a sherbet lemon into his mouth and offered them around. ‘There are other St Clements. One in Eastcheap holds a better claim because freighters docked there with crates of oranges. And nearby St Clement’s Inn charged toll fees for allowing fruit through to Clare Market.’

  ‘I suspect what happened was that one of our rectors claimed the right to it, true or not,’ Reverend Boscastle admitted. ‘The Victorians embellished every old London tradition. We can’t trust the past, Mr Bryant.’

  ‘Perhaps a little more than the present,’ Bryant countered.

  Longbright needed to steer the conversation back on track. ‘How did you book the delivery?’

  ‘We always use the same company. They’re very reliable.’

  ‘And the same driver?’

  ‘I doubt that, seeing as we only need them once a year.’

  ‘Did anyone meet him?’

  ‘No, because we heard he left after the accident. Someone else came and unloaded the van.’ The Reverend checked the time and began to bring the meeting to a close, manoeuvring them back up the aisle. ‘Please send my best wishes to Mr Claremont’s wife.’

  ‘What did you think of that?’ asked Bryant as they left through the blossoming churchyard.

  ‘I think the bells of St Clement’s aren’t saying much,’ replied Longbright, checking her phone. ‘Dan got a match on the driver; Mohammed Alkesh. Looks like he used his real name. Why would he have done that if he was planning to attack Claremont?’

  As they walked back to the tube station, Longbright called the delivery company. While she waited for her questions to be answered Bryant hopped about, now contrarily impatient. ‘Well, what’s happening?’ he snapped.

  She put a hand over the phone. ‘They’re not going to admit liability. They’re consulting lawyers. To prove negligence it’ll be necessary to show that the crates were incorrectly tethered and that the normal safety procedure for unlocking the doors wasn’t followed.’

  ‘I don’t care about their culpability case, I want to trace the driver.’

  Tired of waiting for further snippets of information, Bryant decided to conduct his own online search. He had seen enough people staring at their phones in the street to know it was possible to do this while walking, but at his age he didn’t trust himself to google anything without vanishing under a bus.

  There were more than 7,200 matches for Mohammed Alkesh. ‘The stupid thing is broken,’ he complained. ‘Why doesn’t it match his name to his facial features and give me an address?’

  While she was on hold Longbright looked over his shoulder. ‘That’s not how it works,’ she told him gently. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got someone on it.’

  ‘Did you get anything out of Mrs Claremont?’

  ‘She said that if her husband had one real enemy it was a man named Peter English, but she thinks none of us will be able to get near him.’

  ‘Oh she does, does she?’ Bryant continued to stab his phone until it emitted a sound like a baby trapped in a drainpipe. ‘That’s it, I’ve broken my phone now. John’s good at dealing with people who think they’re above the law. Let’s put him on it.’

  Longbright took the phone from him and rebooted it. ‘Good idea,’ she said. ‘We need to get him working again. He’s not good alone.’ And you’re not good without him, she thought.

  13

  One Big Trick

  Four weeks had passed since his surgery. John May had reduced his painkillers and begun light exercises to strengthen the muscles in his chest, but he missed the stimulus of having other people around. As the sun sank behind a palisade of fiery glass he read back over his notes on Michael Claremont. Parliament housed rat-kings of ambitious power-seekers – where did he start looking for someone who would be prepared to kill for revenge or advancement?

  On Bryant’s instruction he ran a background check on Peter English. The tycoon’s Wikipedia page felt as if it had been written by committee, so May applied for an MI5 file and received it within minutes.

  There were few details on English’s early life. He had attended art college before taking over his family’s newspaper, where he gained a reputation for editorial meddling. After several bankruptcies he started investing in data retrieval. The MI5 file suggested he had skirted the international laws surrounding the sale of arms.

  May followed a number of websites used by journalists whose articles had been spiked due to legal infringements. Here he hit pay dirt: English sat on the boards of acronymic organizations with buried agendas and twilight lobbyists fighting progressive policies. His detractors hardly knew where to start, but English was litigious and vengeful. His public objection to Claremont read like the eruption of a long-fermenting hatred, and was reason enough to interview him.

  By now May had begun to realize that arranging a meeting would not be easy. He came up against a brick wall of polite deflection. First he called English’s official numbers, but was told that English preferred not to have direct contact with the general public. When May explained that he was calling on official police business, the responses became colder. Enquiries could be directed via the Metropolitan Commissioner only. A personal assistant suggested submitting a formal request for an email interview which would then be subject to legal vetting. He was being set on a course designed to wear him down, but it had the opposite effect.

  Still, there was a problem; since the preliminary inquiry on Claremont had been held in camera, interviewing English could not be made mandatory. May called every number suggested to him, then many that weren’t. In desperation he rang the new editor of the online magazine Hard News, Paula ‘The Mauler’ Lambert.

  ‘Good luck with that one,’ she said, shouting over the noise of a bar. ‘Peter English works through a handful of official communication lines. His lawyers got him security protection under the Terrorism Act.’

  ‘Why would he have that?’

  ‘Someone posted bombs to his data company. One of them detonated, injuring a post-room assistant. It’s never been established where they came from. One of our journalists suggested he sent them to himself to get the protection. She was sued. I had to bail her out. Hang on.’ She broke off to shout at someone. ‘John? Don’t underestimate who you’re dealing with. He has a forensic knowledge of the law.’

  ‘So he’s smart,’ said May. ‘What’s he like as a person?’

  ‘Streetwise, manipulative. We once described him as a “Machiavellian jokester” and he sued us. We won the case but it was a Pyrrhic victory because he continued to sue over every article in which he was mentioned for months after.’

  ‘And he won them?’

  ‘No, he lost them all. But by keeping us tied up in litigation he drained our coffers and very nearly bankrupted us. He enjoys rough sports.’

  ‘His falling out with Michael Claremont – how did that end?’

  ‘Oh, you’re on that, are you?’ He could hear her thinking through the possibilities. ‘English told Claremont to mind his own business and made an unspecified threat that Claremont took seriously – then it all went quiet.’

  ‘And now Claremont has been badly injured,’ said May.

  ‘Well, now you have our problem.’ A cheer went up in the background. ‘Sorry, somebody’s birthday. Listen, the average household wealth for Britain’s richest decile is now three hundred and fifteen times that of the poorest, which means access across the divide has declined. The walls have gone up. It’s almost impossible to hold anyone at the top accountable these days. Trust me, you will never speak to Peter English in person, only through a battery of lawyers who will blue-pencil, edit and rewrite every word that’s exchanged between you.’

  ‘You’re telling me he’s above the law.’

  ‘No, John,’ said Lambert. ‘I’m telling you he’s making the law.’

  Arthur Bryant was trying a different way into the case. While the rest of the PCU were interviewing Claremont’s colleagues and trying to trace the van driver
, he went to speak to a magician.

  Everyone in entertainment called Dudley Salterton a trouper, which was a polite way of saying he should have retired thirty-five years ago.

  Salterton was sitting on the steps of the London Palladium with a Starbucks coffee cup. A woman dropped twenty pence into it as she passed.

  ‘Oi,’ he shouted, ‘I’m not homeless, I’m an international cabaret artiste.’ He pulled a withered roll-up from his lips and coughed hard, spitting a green globule into the cup before remembering the money and fishing it out.

  ‘You all right, Dudley?’ asked Bryant, arriving beside him. ‘You got a piece of cigarette paper stuck on your lip.’

  ‘Piss off, Arthur, I’m on in a minute.’

  ‘Yes, I thought you might be. I wanted to catch you first.’

  Bryant looked up at a lurid poster for the Old-Time Music Hall Variety Show. ‘I didn’t know they still did evenings like this.’

  ‘They don’t. It’s a seat-warmer, keeps the theatre from going dark between musicals. I bloody hate ’em. We get bewildered pensioners wandering on to the stage looking for the lavs, no offence to you.’

  Dudley was ancient and sepia with nicotine, but vanity required him to take sunbeds, wear an orange wig and dye his eyebrows chestnut. Since his wife had died his features had grown baggy with alcohol and he had stopped shaving properly. He was still living in one of the last truly disreputable bed and breakfast joints off the Euston Road. He smelled of sweat, rolling tobacco and Old Spice aftershave, and performed the same banter-laced magic tricks he had made popular in the 1970s. Not that the audience cared; they came to catch up with each other, to wave and eat and chat. They came because the seats were cheap and they wanted to live in a distantly remembered past populated by familiar faces, when you could make mother-in-law jokes without getting into trouble.

  ‘I’m doing a guest spot in the second act because their magician, Lo Fun, got pissed and took his finger off in rehearsals,’ said Dudley. ‘His wife used his magical chopper on her carrots and forgot to change the setting back. I told them I don’t mind stepping in but I’m not doing it Chinese, I’ll play it straight, thank you. We’re modern now, it’s nineteen – twenty – something, there’s Chinese in the audience, they’ll take offence. I do “The Birdie Song” while producing doves from unlikely places and let Barnacle Bill tell a couple of off-colour jokes, then I’m off over the Argyll Arms for a pint.’