Bryant & May - The Burning Man (11 page)

A figure lay on its back in the centre of the bare-boarded floor, one leg folded under the other. The molten tar had set over his head and shoulders in an accretion of glossy black lava. It had sealed itself to the ground wherever it had splashed. Glen Hall’s suit had burned and stuck to him, but with the dying of the fire the liquid had turned to rock, cementing him in place. The room smelled of bitumen, scorched wood, feathers and roasted flesh.

‘Good heavens, I thought I’d seen everything,’ said May. ‘Did the fire just burn itself out?’

Bryant leaned back and studied the walls. ‘No air,’ he said. ‘Look.’ The hole in the ceiling had been covered by a metal panel.

May kept to the unscorched edges of the room. The smell was eye-watering. ‘Two men dying by fire,’ he said. ‘What are the odds?’

‘Not fire exactly. More like brimstone. It’ll take a crowbar to get him off the ground.’ Bryant was shocked but there was no disguising the excitement in his blue eyes. ‘So, was he scalded or suffocated?’ He peered at the ceiling. ‘What’s up there?’

‘No one’s been upstairs yet,’ the officer replied.

‘Well, what if he’s still in the attic or out on the roof? Didn’t you think to check?’

‘We’re not allowed upstairs in case of contamination, sir. No forensics.’

The shop door opened and Dan Banbury skirted around the body. ‘You’ve got somebody now,’ he said. ‘Blimey, that’s a bit Dr Phibes, isn’t it? Rather a lot of effort. Why not just shoot him in the head?’

‘You don’t understand the nature of revenge,’ said Bryant.

‘So you’ve already decided it’s a case of revenge, then?’

‘Of course. Our perpetrator would have stayed up there to watch. Will somebody go or do I have to, with my knees?’

Banbury and DuCaine headed up the stairs. DuCaine glanced back, wondering what his boss was thinking. Bryant was standing over the obliterated body, staring hard at its head. ‘So we get to ID another victim without a face. Interesting. You must be able to see something,’ he called upwards.

‘Perhaps you should come up here, Mr Bryant.’

When the elderly detective made it to the top, he found Banbury on his knees examining the iron plate over the hole. ‘He left the big stuff behind, but I don’t suppose we’ll find any prints,’ Banbury warned. ‘Looks like it was thoroughly planned. He melted the tar in a workman’s brazier powered by that gas cylinder over there, so if he was working alone he must be pretty strong.’

‘What’s that?’ Bryant pointed to a white plastic remote lying on the floor.

‘Probably the buzzer for the front door,’ said Banbury, ‘a couple of quid at B&Q. There’s no specialist equipment here, but it still took some serious effort to pull off a stunt like this.’

‘So what’s our best shot at an ID from the evidence?’ asked May.

‘Do you mean the victim or the perpetrator?’

‘Either. Both.’

‘For the victim, the suit jacket. If we can get the tar off it he might still have a wallet in there,’ said Banbury. ‘For the perp, probably the shop surround. The door handle’s stiff. He might have touched something to steady himself as he tried to get it open. The poster racks too, if he dressed the place himself. Boot prints; there’s a hatch to the roof and a lot of dirt in the roof gullies. He must have passed along them to get out. I can’t imagine he came back past his victim. We need to know how he got down.’

‘Maybe he didn’t get down,’ said Bryant. ‘How many hiding places are there in a long terrace like this? What’s the CCTV situation like?’

‘In the market? Virtually non-existent,’ said Banbury, who had the sort of brain that stored the location of every camera in London. ‘It was meant to have gone in but … I don’t know, budget cuts, probably.’

‘Typical,’ said Bryant, ‘the whole blasted country’s up to its earlobes in government security cameras and he hits one of the few London streets that doesn’t have any. Of course, that’s probably why he chose the site in the first place. It’s not actually a street at all.’

He carefully made his way back down. The stairs were steep and he could no longer fully trust his legs. ‘Do we have any idea what this fellow looks like?’ he asked his partner, who caught him at the bottom.

May brandished a black Bulgari credit-card holder in plastic-clad hands. ‘
Voilà
. I got this out from under the tar. Let’s have a look.’ He removed a laminated driving licence and several cards. ‘ID for one Glen David Hall, domiciled in the Onyx – it’s one of those new loft buildings on the City Road residential corridor, so he’s well out of his territory. Oh, and a business card. A bank, no less. Oh ho. Guess which one?’

‘Not the Findersbury?’ Bryant’s fingers were twitching.

‘Keep your grubby hands off. Yes, the very one. And you know what that means.’

Bryant knew all too well. It meant pressure from the CoL to get the case closed within hours. If it had been a young black male lying dead in Brixton, the public perception would be different. ‘Drugs and gangs,’ ran the popular mantra, ‘no smoke without fire, he probably deserved it.’ But a wealthy white businessman in a black neighbourhood? It was more about class than race, and therefore at the heart of London’s most divisive issue. ‘We have to keep the press away,’ he said. ‘It’s taken this area fifty years to shake off prejudice. I’m not going to have the clock turned back now.’

‘We don’t have much luck with embargoes, but the CoL has clout,’ said May. ‘I know how much you love dealing with them.’

While Banbury went to work, Bryant slipped out into the covered avenue between the shops and cafés, and stuffed a meditative pipe with Seven Veils Stone Pipe Balkan Ribbon tobacco, which he’d found for sale in an old Mason jar in the Burj Kalifah Shish Shop, halfway up the Edgware Road. As he puffed, the smoke mingling with the scent of
shawarma
s and
albondiga
s from nearby cafés, he decided that it was the murderer’s methodology that vexed him most. Who, he wondered, would be so insane as to do something like this? Arsonists enjoyed watching buildings burn. Killing with fire was something new and suggested an aberrant psychology, unless there was a deeper meaning, some other strange purpose.

Bryant’s thoughtful attitude was unpopular with many of his more worldly colleagues. For them it was a binary matter: criminals broke the law and got caught; then they acted outraged when they were dropped into a court system that barely acknowledged them. Nothing was black and white in Bryant’s world. He saw an infinity of degrees. Urban life was rapidly evolving, reconfiguring social behaviour until it became as unpredictable as climate change. He saw the knock-on effects of bad government, policies corrupted through incompetence and indecision. He saw himself going to the bad at the age of fifteen on the grey litter-strewn streets of Whitechapel, rescued by the kindness of a lone street constable, something that he feared could never happen now. But he also saw the resilience of ordinary people.

In every decade and generation
, he thought as the aromatic blue smoke trailed behind his head,
one thing unites us: obstinacy. We’re a paradoxical mix of conformity and rebellion, privacy and bravado. We will not do what we are told. That’s how it always was. But there’s something else going on here today. This man has no fear. When people lose respect, they’re capable of anything.

Drifting in his thoughts, he discovered that he had circled the market and returned to the Brazilian café opposite the burned-out shop. The aproned owner stepped out and came over to him.

‘Oi. You can’t smoke that thing in here,’ he said, pointing to the pipe.

‘I’m not
in here
, I’m outside,’ said Bryant.

‘This is under cover. That thing above us is a canopy. How much longer they gonna be in there anyway?’ He pointed at the shop. ‘I’m losing business.’

‘Probably most of the day, I imagine,’ Bryant replied. ‘How do you know I’m a cop?’

‘You’re joking, aren’t you? With feet like that? Things are always crazy round here, but ’specially today.’ The café owner had actually taken Bryant for a strolling pensioner until the crackle of a radio had given him away. Ruminatively smoking in a ratty tweed coat and mismatched gloves, he certainly didn’t look like a policeman.

‘Oh. Crazy how?’ Bryant asked.

‘Crazy crazy,’ the Brazilian repeated. ‘First some guy running around on the roof, then Metish next door saying there was a body, and police scaring off the customers—’

‘You saw someone on the roof?’

‘I didn’t get a good look, but I see him, sure. That glass ain’t safe, he coulda fallen right through.’

‘What time was this?’

‘This morning, sometime before nine. I was opening up a bit later than usual. My wife’s been up with gallstones. They wanted her to have the operation on a Saturday, but she says more patients die in hospitals at the weekend so she wouldn’t go, then she changed her mind and now she’s gone back to the end of the waiting list.’

‘I’m not really interested in your wife’s gallstones. Could you identify the man on the roof?’

‘No, he was wearing one of them Guy Fawkes masks like you see on the news. Bloke’s got no right to go around doing stuff like that.’

‘How do you know it was a man?’

‘I don’t know – he moved like one. He something to do with what’s goin’ on in there?’

‘Maybe,’ said Bryant.

‘Well, I hope they get these cordons down,’ said the owner, carefully straightening the chairs outside his café bar. ‘We got a big Halloween party booked in tonight, and I can’t afford to cancel.’

‘Halloween was last night,’ said Bryant.

‘For kids, yeah. This one’s for the parents.’

‘What’s your name?’ Bryant asked.

‘Alejandro Figueroa.’

Bryant peered dubiously at the pastries in the window. ‘Is your food any good?’

Figueroa puffed out his chest. ‘Best damned empanadas in London.’

‘Good. Stick four in a bag for me.’

‘What, you gonna pay for ’em?’

‘Of course not, and I won’t check out your fire certificate, either. I’ll be back for them in a minute.’
Halloween
, he thought, tamping out his pipe and heading back into the shuttered shop.

‘No,’ said May on the cab ride back. ‘Absolutely not. Don’t even think about it.’

‘Hear me out,’ said Bryant, tearing open his brown paper bag and breaking out the empanadas. ‘Samhain is associated with mayhem. This was an act of madness. It wasn’t carried out in the heat of the moment with a weapon that readily came to hand; it was a cold-blooded atrocity planned to cause pain. The café owner over the road, Mr Figueroa, saw someone run across the canopy wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. Guy Fawkes Night is just five days away. The two events are so close that they’ve virtually become fused together.’

‘People aren’t rioting because of Halloween,’ objected May vehemently. ‘They’re doing it because a banker behaved badly. This cake’s got meat in it.’

‘Oh,
bankers
.’ Bryant spat the word. ‘They act badly all the time and the public knows it, and nobody does anything. Halloween has another name – Mischief Night. It started in St John’s College, Oxford, during the May Day celebrations of 1790. But when families moved into cities during the Industrial Revolution, the date was changed to November the fourth, the night before Guy Fawkes Night.’

‘Why did it change?’ May found himself being reluctantly drawn in.

‘Because May Day celebrations meant nothing to urban children. But Guy Fawkes: that was a reason to have fun and raise some hell. So they settled on the night before the bonfires were lit.’

‘You see what you’ve done?’ cried May, annoyed with himself. ‘You’ve managed to switch my attention away from the case at hand to some pointless piece of forgotten history.’

‘Yes, that is what I do,’ said Bryant, sucking bits of empanada through his freshly bleached dentures.

‘Well, can you kindly not do so. Right now we’ve more practical concerns. Where did he get the posters from? And the tar? Somebody must have met this guy. And we need to talk to the directors at the Findersbury.’

‘It’s only been twenty-four hours, John. There’s a lot we haven’t found yet.’ Bryant unglued some stubborn pastry with a digit. ‘When I was a nipper, I would spend the whole week building a Guy. He was made of old clothes cadged from parents and neighbours, stuffed with newspapers and topped with a hat and a mask made from pressed grey cardboard – they were sold in all tobacconists’ shops. Then I trundled him down to the street corner and collected “a penny for the Guy”. I know it sounds Victorian and a bit like begging, but it was fun. Kids have always done such things. On July the twenty-fifth, St James’s Day, children used to build little grottoes for the saint and take money from passers-by. It’s always about religion.’

‘But not Guy Fawkes—’

‘Of course it is! Burning the Guy is anti-Catholic. In 1677 Londoners burned an effigy of the Pope filled with live cats.’

‘It’s all gone now, mate.’ The cabbie was taking an interest in their conversation. ‘You know why they don’t do it no more?’ He glanced over his shoulder at them. ‘European Parliament. Health and Safety. Political correctness gone mad.’ He thought for a moment, adding, ‘And them paedophiles.’