Bryant & May - Oranges and Lemons

by Christopher Fowler - Bryant

  ‘It’s not you, Colin, it’s everything.’ She turned about on herself in frustration. ‘The system doesn’t work any more, does it? Us, this place, this “radical alternative unit” no longer functions because someone has figured out a way around it.’ Unable to sit still for a second longer, she angrily stormed out.

  Sidney watched her go without a flicker of emotion.

  Colin’s phone rang again. ‘Wait, slow down, repeat that.’ He headed off to Raymond Land’s office.

  Tim Floris was in there with him, studying spreadsheets. The pair were becoming as thick as thieves. Knowing that Land was unable to keep his mouth shut, Colin wondered how much information he was passing through Floris to the ears of the Home Office. They looked up in unison when they saw him. Colin felt his face glowing with anger.

  ‘John just called,’ he said. ‘It’s happened again, inside St Dunstan’s Church. Some kind of lightweight explosive device. Mr Bryant got blown up but he’s all right.’

  ‘Blown up?’ Land stared at him in stupefaction. ‘Again?’

  ‘There’s a man dead. We don’t have an ID yet.’

  ‘I tried to stop him from going,’ said Land. ‘You all heard me.’

  As the calls poured in, the information they imparted grew stranger. While they were waiting for an ambulance, the boy Janice had arrested was attacked by another local teenager and was stabbed again. He had been taken to Mile End Hospital. John May was attempting to identify the victim and Bryant – well, as far as anyone could understand, it seemed he was heading for Warwick Avenue tube station. He called in to say that his ears were hurting but he was all right and had something very important to do.

  ‘It’s always like this around here these days,’ said Land with a shrug, failing to notice the cynicism in Floris’s eyes. ‘I remember when work used to tail off around six o’clock and we all went to the pub.’ He rolled his eyes in a what-can-you-do gesture, but found himself without an ally.

  ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t come to you this evening, I know how busy you are,’ said Maggie Armitage, giving him a tight hug that left him covered with dog hairs and bits of something that looked like cake icing. She had toned down her usual funfair wardrobe to a graceful coordination of purple and black. ‘I’ve just been at a Wiccan baking fundraiser at East Greenwich Library. Where were you?’

  ‘I was blown up.’

  ‘What, again?’ She could smell smoke on him.

  Bryant looked around. ‘What are you doing here?’

  She pointed to a nearby board announcing tonight’s event: ‘Hell’s Spells, an evening of urban magic with Maggie Armitage, Grand Order Grade IV White Witch of the Coven of St James the Elder, Kentish Town’. ‘I’ve got a few minutes before I’m on. Dame Maude Hackshaw gave a talk on owl-grooming last week and nobody showed up. Tip your head to the left. No, your other left.’

  Bryant was puzzled but did as he was told. Some pieces of gravel fell out of his ear.

  ‘Oh, that’s much better.’ He stuck in his little finger and wiggled it around. ‘I think that was a bit of church.’

  ‘You’d better have a glass of vermouth; I seem to have two.’

  ‘It feels like I’m hallucinating. What is this place?’ Bryant looked about the grand saloon at the ashlared stonework inset with chandeliers. Corinthian pilasters supported the encrusted gilt-beamed ceiling. There were too many cherubs. ‘I think I need to sit down,’ he said, and fell into the gold-legged red velvet chair behind him.

  ‘It’s a Lebanese restaurant. It used to be known as Crocker’s Folly,’ Maggie told him. ‘A man called Frank Crocker built it to be ready for the Great Central Railway Terminus, but the officials moved the railway line to Marylebone, leaving him stranded. They say when he heard the news he threw himself out of a window and now his ghost haunts the place. Are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘Not at all.’ Bryant knocked back the vermouth in one gulp.

  ‘What did you need to see me about?’

  ‘Maggie, you’re the only person who might understand. I’m having absolutely the worst week of my life. Death after death, and I can’t stop them because I’m going the wrong way.’

  Her kohl-rimmed eyes stared into his. ‘Which way should you be going?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to understand. Could I have another vermouth? My ears hurt.’

  Maggie passed him another immense drink from the hospitality tray.

  ‘You know I went missing for a while? I was trying to understand something about myself.’

  ‘Do you want me to read your mind?’

  ‘No, it’s simpler if I just tell you. The Grand Lama said I lack empathy but actually I don’t care about people.’

  ‘Well … that’s what a lack of empathy is.’ Maggie looked even more confused than usual.

  He seemed pained for a moment, then removed a piece of rubble from inside his shirt. ‘I rely on empirical truths because facts don’t lie and human beings do.’

  ‘A Wiccan would argue for the reverse,’ said Maggie. ‘Mr Crocker needed to believe in something untrue and built this place. That’s what drew you to me today.’

  ‘I can’t change who I am, Maggie. I know I frighten people. I don’t fit into the modern world. I don’t want to share everything with everyone all the time.’ He downed his drink.

  ‘You’re going to tell me something’s changed.’

  ‘I suppose I am. At the start of the investigation I talked to Elise Albu, the wife of the man I believe to be the first victim. What she told me made me care about her, so I left all the Oranges & Lemons interviews to John and the others. I didn’t want to feel any more of those painful emotions. Instead I concentrated on understanding the killer’s methods, but I found nothing.’

  ‘Arthur, your murderer is a chameleon, a liar, a shell. Damaged people are dangerous, you know that.’

  ‘Is there any more vermouth?’ Now that he had started to unburden himself, he felt like a deflating balloon. ‘It’s as if the world is half an inch from chaos and is about to collapse in on us, so why not just let it? Why keep trying to make sense of things? Why be the one who tries to hang on to the last little bit of irrefutable truth? Why should I be Winston Smith? Remembering the rest of “Oranges & Lemons” didn’t do him any good, did it?’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, you dear old thing.’ Maggie’s smile held a strange sadness. ‘It’s in our nature to believe that truth will bring order to chaos. People always hope.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because the last person left alive will still want to set a dinner table.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that.’

  ‘I mean it. She runs a restaurant in Norway, a terribly nice lady. She hasn’t been born yet, of course. She’ll be the sole survivor of our planet’s catastrophe. We had a lovely chat last week.’ She batted away Bryant’s look of incredulity. ‘Oh, it was a space-time continuum thing. It was raining and there was nothing on the telly. I suppose you’d call it lucid dreaming.’

  ‘I’d call it avoiding reality,’ Bryant muttered.

  ‘To answer the question you came here with: your disconnection from “normal people” as you call them is your blind spot. It prevents you from seeing the truth. What terrible thing could make you cease to value life?’

  Bryant thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps if I felt my own life had been damaged somehow—’

  ‘Keep going.’

  ‘Or even – taken away.’

  ‘By whom?’

  Bryant’s eyes widened. ‘Oh.’

  ‘You see?’ said Maggie. ‘You put so much faith in facts that you’ve been blinded by them.’

  He clutched at Maggie’s arm. ‘I need to think of it the other way up.’

  ‘And if you do so, what does it tell you?’

  ‘That the churches and rhymes are nothing, and the victims aren’t as innocent as they appear. It’s the villain who’s had his life wiped away.’

  ‘I’m just the fa
cilitator,’ Maggie reminded him. ‘Whatever conclusion you reach is your own.’

  ‘No, you’re right. He’s planned this carefully because it’s the only thing that’s important to him, so of course he’s hard to find. He believes in his cause. And you have to keep believing in yours.’

  She touched his arm. ‘I must go on. By the way, Mr Crocker didn’t jump out of a window. People just said he did. His memorial is all around you. Life is a trick played on the unsuspecting.’

  He watched as she walked up to the microphone and tapped it, looking around the room. Only five of the chairs were filled, but she spoke as if there were a thousand.

  44

  Press Privilege

  They had put the boy on the worst ward, with the disturbed yammerers and detoxing junkies. He was another stab victim, treated fairly and equally by amazing nurses working in a system that had stopped functioning efficiently years ago. Slipped into a pale-blue hospital gown and tucked up in bed without his hoodie and tracksuit bottoms, Clarke looked like a schoolboy again.

  When Janice had finished the paperwork she came to find him. There were no parents beside Jemaine’s bed, only an elderly Antiguan lady in a pleated floral dress.

  ‘Alma?’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Alma Sorrowbridge pointed to the church badge on her cardigan. ‘We visit all the victims of knife crime, Janice. I was here seeing another boy. The nurse was just telling me that Jemaine lives with his granddad but he’s in another hospital having a heart bypass. What happened?’

  She hardly knew where to start. ‘I arrested him. I had his hands behind his back to stop him from running. I was on the phone to the ambulance and a kid he knew came up. I told him to stay back but the EMT leader thought I was talking to her, and the next thing I knew the boys were shouting at each other and the other one stuck him.’

  Jemaine had now been bandaged on the other arm. He lay staring at the ceiling, half-conscious and clearly hating his life.

  Alma straightened the sheet under Jemaine’s hand. ‘What happened to the other boy?’

  ‘He’s in custody, something that seems to have come as a total surprise to him. He says he’s going to sue me for wrongful arrest even though me and my little shoulder-cam saw the whole thing.’

  ‘You can’t help some of them. Look at the way they live.’ Janice found it touching that the old lady was prepared to sit with an angry young stranger, expecting nothing. ‘We find out what the boys need and try to stop them from stressing about the little things. Half a dozen this week and they can’t be put on the same ward because sometimes they carry the fights into the hospital. The nurse said he was lucky, and I suppose she’s right.’

  ‘Has he spoken at all?’

  ‘He was awake earlier but got a bit wound up, so the nurse gave him something to help him sleep. She’s keeping him in overnight because of the medication.’

  ‘He’s had some pretty bad luck today.’

  ‘That’s what he told me, but it’s hard to know if they’re telling the truth or just giving their side of the story.’

  ‘I wanted to ask him about the man who gave him this.’ She showed Alma the money from Jemaine’s pocket. ‘He uses other people. He used this kid.’ She handed Alma the money. ‘Put it in his locker.’

  Alma smiled up at her, calm and imperturbable. ‘Healing needs privacy. I can’t stay with him. There are others to see. When you’ve sorted all this out, come to dinner. I remember you like pork with sour cherries. Spend a little time with Arthur. He’s been a bit lost lately.’

  He’s not the only one, Janice thought. Aloud she said, ‘Dinner would be very nice.’

  A man paid him to stand there, she remembered as she headed down the hospital steps. He tricks them, he tricks us and we just don’t see it.

  A dozen photographers were waiting outside the unit, ready to pounce on anyone who stepped outside. These were not the kind who made appointments, they were the ones who hung around the Ivy restaurant hoping to catch soap stars leaving in tears.

  ‘I’m not sure you want to go out there,’ said Meera, stopping in the shadow of the PCU’s ground-floor entrance. ‘Perhaps you should wait until they disperse. They’re in every doorway. They won’t just take photos of you, they’ll try to wind you up.’

  ‘And I want to get something to eat, so stand aside,’ said Colin. ‘Never get between a man and his food.’

  ‘She’s right,’ said Tim Floris. ‘We can keep you off the radar so long as you’re in here, but not once you’re outside.’

  ‘Who’s we?’ Colin asked. ‘You and your new best pal Raymond? Oh, wait a minute, you mean the Home Office is protecting us? That’s a turnaround. Faraday has a history of trying to shag us over a hostess trolley. Don’t make poor old Raymond think he’s got an ally, because in a few days you’ll be back in your uncle’s office and we’ll be stuck here with the mops and buckets. Open the door.’

  Floris pushed it back and hastily stepped aside. Colin peered out. Where had the press been earlier, when Bryant was nearly killed in St Dunstan’s?

  The PCU building only had one exit, so the news teams and camera crews fought each other for space. They knew the names of every unit member, and the second Bimsley appeared they began shouting.

  ‘Hey, Colin, how do you feel about letting another innocent victim die? What’s your guilt on a scale of one to ten? Why are you all hiding away in there?’

  ‘Oi, Colin, mate, over here! Who’s dead this time? Anyone else been shot up there?’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be out on the streets looking for this nutter? Why aren’t you telling us anything?’

  One fat little photographer in a backward-facing Kangol cap kept shouting louder than the rest. ‘Colin, where’s your girlfriend? Can I get one of the two of you having a bit of facetime? My paper just needs one decent shot. You’d be helping me out of a hole.’

  ‘I’ll be helping you into one in a minute,’ warned Colin.

  He turned to see Meera storming out of the entrance with thunder in her eyes. ‘Get away from the building or we’ll arrest the lot of you,’ she shouted.

  The men all laughed. ‘Like to see you try, love!’

  ‘Press privilege! The public need to know, don’t they?’

  ‘Are you putting on weight?’

  ‘Where’s the young girl with the legs? Can we get the pretty one out here?’

  ‘Oi, Colin, where’s old Bryant?’ called the annoying little one. ‘Did we miss his funeral?’

  Colin tore across the road. Picking up the photographer by his coat, he slammed him against the shop window at his back, cracking the glass from corner to corner. The gentlemen of the press yelled like geese and flapped about ineffectually.

  Colin thought better of his action and set the snapper back on his feet, but the cameras had been ready and the shot of the day was captured. A few more were taken of the PCU members gathered in confusion and anger at the unit entrance, then the street cleared once more as word reached the photographers that a minor royal had been seen shopping in Oxford Street’s Primark.

  45

  The Epitome of London

  Eight o’ clock on Sunday morning the press siege returned to the building on Caledonian Road, and John May arrived to find his partner already seated in their office. ‘How did you get in?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t see you outside.’

  ‘I waited in the Ladykillers Café until everyone was distracted by the sound of a broken window.’

  ‘That was a lucky chance.’

  ‘That was Janice’s brick.’ Bryant popped two white pills from a blister pack and swallowed them with his tea.

  ‘How do you feel after yesterday?’

  ‘My ears are still ringing but I have tinnitus anyway.’

  ‘You could have been killed,’ said May with some vehemence.

  ‘And I could have died years ago like a great many of my contemporaries,’ Bryant replied. ‘I have not done so. We need some way of getting officers station
ed at St Mary-le-Bow. Who was the victim at St Dunstan’s?’

  May held up a page. ‘Gavin Spencer, part-time shop fitter, fifty-six. He doesn’t fit the profile at all. He’s done time, six years for aggravated assault, by first accounts a nasty piece of work. The bomb was locked around his neck with a plastic cable tie. They’re still looking for his ears. Dan says the device was small but concentrated, very simple, home-made. He says he sometimes knocks them up in his kitchen, which must thrill his wife.’

  ‘Does Spencer have any connection to the others?’

  ‘None that I can see. He grew up in South London, dropped out of university and fell into the usual tiresome pattern: DJ, club promoter, small-time drug-dealer. Soon got a couple of convictions under his belt. Met a girl at a party and knocked her about. Families complained about the lightness of his jail sentence, et cetera. I looked for connections to the others but only have the vaguest trace of one.’

  ‘Even that will do,’ said Bryant. ‘The killer can’t have hidden every single thing about his victims. He doesn’t leave a hair behind. What does he do, carry a tiny vacuum cleaner around with him?’

  ‘So there’s this.’ May handed him a photocopy of a note. ‘Sidney spotted it in his Met file. Some bright spark thought to file it as proof of his home address.’

  ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘Not itemized. Receipt for goods.’

  ‘How did she even get to see it?’

  ‘She seems to have electronic access to everything. When I asked her how, she looked at me as if I was mad.’

  ‘She thinks we’re not terribly au fait with technology here. She might have seen me trying to remove my SIM card with the end of a kebab stick. Go on.’

  ‘Sidney checked for juvenile offences. When Gavin Spencer was seventeen he had his collar felt by some local cops. They came around his parents’ house and asked him a few questions. There are no details of the suspected offence. The prison records base him at his mother’s home in Essex but on this delivery receipt, which is older, they’re in East Greenwich. The note has to be right because it bears a time stamp. We’re aware that Michael Claremont was living somewhere nearby in Greenwich around that time, so there’s a faint chance that they knew each other.’