Bryant & May - Oranges and Lemons

by Christopher Fowler - Bryant

  Gradually she described more and more. But even after she had explained everything I still didn’t understand, because she hadn’t told me how sex worked. I couldn’t connect it all, the boys, the baby, it made no sense. So I started asking questions.

  And then she never stopped explaining. The details never ceased. They grew ever more elaborate, ever more appalling. I was outwardly a normal child. I thought of myself as having a normal life, but it wasn’t at all. She made me memorize their names. I went back to the church but it had become a pine merchant’s, then the grounds were torn up and the site was filled with offices.

  After she died I thought things would be better, but I woke every night to find her at the end of my bed reciting their names. There was only one way to rid myself of her ghost.

  ‘She remembered wrongly,’ said Land. He was not in a position to lie right now. ‘I suppose I might have seen one or two of them in the street from time to time but I didn’t know their names and I was never invited to their stupid bloody clubhouse. They wouldn’t have had me, a kid whose parents lived above a newsagent’s. Perhaps I saw them at the football fields on Blackheath or at the shops, how do I know? Boys often look nothing like the adults they become. I hated being a kid. My life was hell. I spent years trying to forget about it.’

  ‘In these times of over-educated police chiefs you’re a refreshing change,’ said Floris. Land tried to remain motionless but Floris had brought down the edge of the sword blade until it touched the back of his neck.

  There was a sharp sting as it cut the skin. Land cried out. He felt blood pooling inside his shirt collar. If anyone was coming to rescue him they were leaving it a bit bloody late.

  ‘Your mother was wrong,’ Land said again. ‘I don’t suppose she meant to lie to you but she made a mistake. She couldn’t have remembered my name.’

  The blade cut a touch deeper. ‘Why not?’ asked Floris.

  Land forced himself to remain calm and coherent. It was crucial that he explained. ‘Because after we moved away my mum remarried,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘She married a man called Roger Land. When I was a teenager my name was Raymond Codd. I hated it because my classmates all made fish jokes, so I had it legally changed when I was in my early twenties. Your mother mixed me up with someone else. There was a posh kid about my age called Graham Land who used to hang out near the church. Sounds like she meant him.’

  He felt the blade turning his neck to bloody ice.

  ‘My mother would never have lied to me,’ Floris replied, raising the sword high above Land’s exposed neck.

  Some years were bad, others bearable, but my mother always reappeared to me at twilight. She never left the end of my bed, and as long as she stayed there my luck followed hers downward.

  I knew that in order to take a full and fair revenge I had much to learn.

  While I was studying the structure of police divisions I came across the Peculiar Crimes Unit. I met an officer in the Met who told me that they only handled a very specific type of case, and noticed it was run by a man called Raymond Land.

  I knew the police would soon be following my every move, so I used the ‘Oranges & Lemons’ rhyme to ensure that only the PCU could be appointed. I knew I would have to work from the inside, and that I needed them to trust me. I couldn’t take the place of any unit member but I could be mistaken for someone from the outside.

  The best solution was to pick a real person, someone close but slightly out of the frame, someone who would naturally stay away from the unit. Land visited the Home Office, so I chose someone in his liaison team. It was easy to find them online. I watched them all and listened to everything they said to each other in public. Lunchtimes were best; they always discussed the morning’s work as they walked to their salad bar.

  I set off the fire alarm at the Home Office so that we would meet outside the building in a street overcrowded with workers. Keeping a watchful eye out for the man I was planning to impersonate, I introduced myself to Land as Tim Floris. I wasn’t sure if Land had met him, but if he had it would only have been once, and briefly. Floris and I were both slim-built but I didn’t look like him. The beard was a godsend, the sort of thing people focus on. They make many men look similar. It took a while to get right, but I learned to apply and remove it in less than a minute.

  I needed to keep the real Floris away, so I cut all contact between Land and the Home Office and relayed Land’s emails. Wherever I could, I added layers of confusion and mayhem. The devil was in the detail. I planted false memories, ‘reminding’ Land of when we had met at the Home Office, and he was happy to agree with me. I told lies, created suspicions, sowed doubts.

  I mastered the art of misleading observers into making false assumptions. Even when they tried to get me drunk I managed to stay in character.

  I made a few mistakes. I failed to ensure that Michael Claremont was dead, although I planned to finish him off after he left his clinic. I changed Land’s email homepage but forgot to change the date, not that he noticed. When I found the photograph of the Home Office department at an awards dinner in a staff magazine I decided not to doctor it. I have never been able to look at my own face. Others say they find me attractive but I look in the glass and see a horrified Caliban reflected back.

  I needed everyone to be more than just confused; I had to find someone innocent they could target. As soon as I realized that Peter English was being singled out, I shifted all the signs of blame to him.

  I tried to fake camera footage of English on the steps of St Martin’s but couldn’t manage it. Finally I paid a girl who works in a comic shop to do it for me. I paid lots of people to get information, to perform little tasks, to obscure me, cover me, take the blame for me. I made everyone doubt what they had seen. My studies of magic paid off. But still the most satisfying part was the killing. I liked the killing best.

  ‘She didn’t lie to you. The mistake is with your memory,’ said a figure in the doorway.

  Arthur Bryant stepped into the room and turned electric yellow. He threw a book down on the floor between them. ‘I checked. Raymond wasn’t one of the boys who attacked your mother. His name was Graham Land. You probably misheard it the first time she told you.’

  ‘If you come any closer I will kill him,’ said Floris, aligning the blade.

  ‘Then you will have failed.’ Bryant stepped closer, never removing his gaze from Floris. ‘Raymond isn’t the one you want. He’s nothing like the others. Think about it. The rest all had one thing in common: presence. Even Gavin Spencer was said to have charm. Girls were drawn to them. Raymond doesn’t even have a clean tie. Look at him, he’s a charisma-free zone.’ He took off his hat and turned it in his hands.

  May joined his partner. ‘Let us have the sword,’ he said, his tone calm and patient. ‘You can’t complete the rhyme. Your list has to remain incomplete. It’s time to put your demons to rest.’

  ‘You can do it,’ said Bryant. ‘We don’t even know who you are.’

  The hand with the sword remained perfectly steady. ‘I was never really named, not officially. I wanted a magician’s name. I thought I might call myself Nemo, and take my mother’s surname, Nixon.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that, there used to be a terrible magician called Nixon,’ said Bryant, choosing the wrong time to start recalling old British television programmes.

  The lights suddenly flared back on and everything happened at once.

  Bryant’s stick smacked at the sword blade, which very nearly removed Raymond’s ear, while his partner stepped forward without a thought of the danger he was in. Floris – they never did bring themselves to use another name – stared at the detectives in astonishment. The idea that an elderly man might attack him with a walking stick while his friend simply waved his arms about had never crossed his mind.

  When he made a grab for Bryant, he found himself gripping the old man’s fishing hat. He cried out in pain, because even though he didn’t fish Bryant kept a set of lethally sharp hook
s sewn all around the brim.

  ‘It was the bleeding junction box,’ said Dave Two, wandering into the room with a screwdriver in one hand. ‘Take a look at this. Chinese rubbish.’

  Everyone froze in position and stared at Dave Two’s junction box. He stared back. ‘Blimey, don’t all say thank you at once,’ he complained.

  Meera came in behind him, and while everyone was reassessing the situation Colin came charging into the operations room and planted a fistful of signet rings on Land’s personal executioner. Everyone yelled, the cat shrieked so as not to be left out and Raymond Land fainted. By the time Peter English walked in with his lawyer, Bryant could see it would be a long night.

  There was one thing at least that they could all agree on. Floris had been brought low not by the ruthless efficiency of the capital’s law enforcement machine but by his own faulty memory.

  54

  Missing a Trick

  The PCU staff should have celebrated, but it felt as if they were on shifting sands. The events of the last few days had shattered everyone.

  Bryant had put his back out attempting to help disarm ‘Floris’ and May had strained a muscle in his chest.

  Raymond Land got stitches in the back of his neck. Whenever he complained after this (and he complained a lot) the others would remind him that he might have had his head separated from his shoulders.

  Everyone argued about who would call Leslie Faraday. Eventually names were put into Bryant’s deactivated hat, and Sidney found herself granted the honour. She went into the detectives’ office to do it, closing the door behind her. For some time after she refused to speak of what transpired between them.

  Meanwhile, Dan Banbury removed the phantom router Floris had planted in the basement and dismantled it for spare parts. He kept the micro-cameras for himself. The sheer amount of disinformation involved in the case meant that the exact wording for the highly complex charge sheet was drafted more times than the Magna Carta.

  Raymond Land was fully exonerated when a prisoner called Graham Land was discovered in Wormwood Scrubs. He had repeatedly confessed to assaulting a girl in his teens, but no one had listened to him.

  Back in their office, the detectives found themselves staring at the framed photograph of the real Floris and his Home Office colleagues. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t notice that,’ said May, studying it, ‘even after you told me about the experiment with the student. They do look a little alike, especially with the beards.’

  ‘I think he kept it there out of hubris,’ said Bryant. ‘He wanted to see if we would notice. He had a lot of nerve. What do you suppose will happen to Michael Claremont now?’

  ‘His past will surface and his reputation will be shredded,’ said May, as sanguine as ever.

  ‘The inquiry is going to be a nightmare,’ Bryant complained. ‘Poor old Raymondo can’t handle the paperwork, he’s far too shaken up.’

  May shot his partner a look. ‘Arthur, how did you know what was happening?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have known,’ Bryant admitted, ‘if it hadn’t been for the smell of oranges. Citrus fruits contain a group of compounds called terpenes that give them a powerfully characteristic scent. I couldn’t think of Claremont’s accident without smelling them.’

  ‘That couldn’t have been the only thing.’

  Bryant tipped back in his chair and unwrapped a chocolate, giving the matter some thought. ‘The accidental triggering of the fire alarm when Raymond visited the Home Office struck me as overly convenient. I was thinking about it when I set English’s sprinklers off at his office. I didn’t see how it could be Floris and I had no idea that his victim might be Raymond. But the smell of oranges turned up again and again, and lingered everywhere, especially in here. It seemed to be leaving a trail.

  ‘I thought that if we were being tricked by one thing – the supposed accident that Michael Claremont suffered – then what if we were being tricked by everything? But I also thought of Cristian Albu. Something was off right from the start. Why did he go for a drink with Floris? He could have just sold him the book and sent him on his way. Then I realized – he went because Floris turned on the charm. He wanted to go. Magicians are naturally charismatic. They practise being magisterial. Did you know there are virtually no female magicians? They only get to be the assistants to males.’

  ‘Someone’s missing a trick,’ said May. ‘I wonder how many times Floris came in here and searched through our notes. What was the book you threw down in front of him?’

  ‘Oh, didn’t I tell you?’ Bryant’s eyes twinkled annoyingly. He brought May over to his bookcase. ‘Stand here and look straight ahead.’

  When May checked the spot on the bookshelves being pointed out by his partner, he saw that between two of the volumes, Enamelling For Beginners and Ring Any Bells? Memory & Cognizance in the Novels of Victor Hugo, there was a third volume with a red leather spine.

  Taking it down, he read the cover: Making a Murderer.

  He glanced back up at the gap. How long had it been sitting there? ‘I sit looking at that bloody bookcase all day. Where did you find it?’

  ‘In a job lot I bought from the King’s Cross book barge last month,’ Bryant explained. ‘I don’t know how it got there from Bloomsbury but books do tend to migrate. I didn’t get around to reading it, but I think it’s going to prove very useful now.’

  The following morning May’s list of prisoner questions was rendered obsolete when the nameless man was found dead in Room 158 of the Happy Hotel, King’s Cross. He had curled up in bed and with grim determination cut his throat, leaving behind the handwritten postscript to his memoir, which had been arranged at the bottom corner of the duvet, where he had always seen his mother telling her story.

  Bryant was handed the memoir’s addendum. To the printed volume he could now add the final chapter. He sent copies of both to Elise Albu.

  55

  Making a Murderer

  I’ll never know the truth about what happened in the church that night.

  Their crime was possible because they instinctively chose the right girl to attack. She did not tell a soul who they were, and they did not get caught. Their lives were, for the most part, a series of escalating successes, inversions of her downward path.

  I was finally betrayed by my own memory. If I had not been driven to find Raymond Land I would not have diverted the investigation to the PCU, and would not now be in the basement of this poky little hotel in King’s Cross.

  Some people will point to a moment in their lives when everything began to go wrong. Mine occurred before I was born. I had no control over it, but I will have control over the end.

  Tomorrow I am due to be charged with a long list of improbable-sounding crimes. Happily I will not be there for the farrago of lies they’ll parade before me. I wish there was time to describe the incredible pleasure I felt when I claimed each life for her.

  I have sharpened the plastic cutlery the waiter stupidly left with my evening meal by running it along the fashionably rough concrete bathroom wall. In the morning they will find me with an ugly but effectively cut throat. The rhyme will finally be complete, if in a different way from how I intended. It will have symbolic meaning.

  I believe some people are cursed. Not just by poverty, although that will be the easy answer affixed to my story by the nation’s hand-wringers. We are cursed by its by-product, a debilitating lack of confidence. It is why we stay silent, why we are controlled, why we apologize, why we are afraid. We are overruled by the ones who expect to be heard, and as they destroy our lives we thank them for it.

  I see her here of course, my mother, still sitting at the end of the bed even in this overlit little room, but I know that by daylight she will be gone for ever. The only way to banish her is to take her with me. Finally we will no longer need to be afraid.

  So, Mr Bryant and Mr May, as I’m sure you will both read this, let me leave you with a final thought.

  There are no female magicians.

&n
bsp; When they take out my cold body and ask themselves why I planned so long and hard for justice, they will discover my last secret.

  I have always been my mother’s daughter.

  56

  Remembrance

  The following week involved grudging congratulations from an embarrassed Home Office, especially when Leslie Faraday discovered that the real Tim Floris had managed to misplace his swipe card for a couple of hours so that it could be duplicated by an energetic imposter. The public mood was briefly disturbed when it became known that the heroic victims the press had championed shared a sordid secret in their past. The topic trended on Twitter, then vanished.

  It was not until the following Saturday that the PCU team got together to discuss what would happen next. In the evening Longbright hired a riverboat from the Thames Police at no cost (they owed her a favour for dealing with a long-immersed corpse; best not to go into the details). Longbright thought it would do them all good to get some moderately fresh air instead of sitting in the basement of a pub, even though their nostrils were filled with the reek of the river’s dark recesses.

  As Dan Banbury had his navigation licence and couldn’t enjoy a drink because he was driving his wife back from her mindfulness workshop in Sevenoaks later that night, it seemed a good idea to let him pilot so that everyone else could get smashed.

  ‘I say, Raymondo, do you have to keep that huge plaster on your neck?’ Bryant asked, jouncing along in the stern. ‘You look like you’ve just got a tattoo.’

  ‘It’s not a Gillette nick, I was attacked with a sword,’ Land complained.

  ‘It’s a good job I saw the light moving in the window. I thought if there was a candle there could be a chopper. He managed to finish the rhyme.’ Bryant knotted his scarf even higher around his throat and sat back, accepting a hefty gin and tonic in a plastic cup. London slid past, its illuminated bridges adding an oddly unreal sheen to the Thames, as if it had been photographically treated. The clouded sky reflected its gaudy new colours, yellow, purple and green.