Bryant & May - The Burning Man (14 page)

At first glance James Burnham fitted the ideal image of a young captain of industry, tanned and well groomed, but there were shadowed hollows in his eyes and early flecks of grey in his hair. As he shook their hands, May noticed the sore, bitten quicks around his nails. Ushering them into a pallid meeting room, he made sure the door was tightly closed behind him before speaking.

‘I shouldn’t be seeing you in here at all,’ he said anxiously, his Manhattan inflection overlaid with received pronunciation, the tone of a high-level English education. ‘As you can imagine, we’re in crisis-management mode, trying to save what’s left of this place. Mr Cornell seems to have gone into hiding. He tried to get into the building for a meeting this morning and some protestors jumped on his vehicle and threw red paint over the windscreen. The police stood by and watched. The city’s becoming dangerous. This kind of thing wouldn’t happen in New York.’

‘Why did he have to come in at all, given the situation outside?’ asked Longbright.

Burnham turned to her. ‘The bank’s going into receivership and the recovery specialists are looking for a buyer. He needs to be here. But you want to know about Glen Hall, is that right? Can you tell me what he’s supposed to have done?’

‘No one’s spoken to you yet?’

‘No, but the last thing we need right now is another scandal. What are we looking at?’

May did not like the way in which Burnham had assumed control of the interview. ‘He was found dead early this morning. The circumstances were unusual.’

‘Oh, Christ.’ Burnham pulled out a chair and sat down with the delicacy of a man lowering himself on to broken glass. ‘What the hell happened?’

‘We’re not able to release details until the forensic examination has been concluded,’ May explained. ‘I can tell you that he was murdered.’

‘
Oh, Christ
—’

‘The press has received no information about the case, and we plan to keep them out of it for as long as possible. What we need from you are the details of Mr Hall’s personal life and business activities.’

Burnham looked like a man at the end of a rope as the stool was about to be kicked away. ‘Hell, what can I say?’

‘Whatever comes to mind.’

‘I’m not the right man to ask about his personal situation, but I can tell you what he was like to work with. A lot of people come into a place like this full of bullshit and big ideas, and never manage to close a deal. That wasn’t Hall. He was strictly old school, a real wolf. There’s a story about a New York corporate M-and-A guy who arrived to check out the facilities of a private London bank – this was back in 1985, the year before the abolition of fixed commission charges and the switch to screen-based trading. He walked into the bank and looked around, and none of the managers were there to greet him. He asked where everyone was and the counter clerk told him he’d arrived on the wrong day. It was August twelfth – the Glorious Twelfth – the start of the grouse-shooting season. The financier smiled and knew he could take the place apart. That sums up the old world of British private banks. Not any more. Remember “Greed Is Good”? Well, greed is back, and Hall was damned good at it.’

‘So he didn’t let feelings get in the way?’

‘Never. He was an iceman; nothing touched him.’

‘Do you think he made enemies?’ asked May.

Burnham pressed his long fingers flat on the table, then thought better of it. ‘This is private opinion, right?’

‘Off the record.’

‘Hall’s area of expertise was in nurturing start-ups, creaming off profit and dumping them when they failed to perform. You can’t pull the plug on companies and not make enemies. And don’t ask me to give you a list, because that would be physically impossible. We’d only have records of the companies to whom he’d already made loans – he was dealing with dozens of others in different stages of development.’

‘Would he have kept details of those somewhere?’

‘Yeah.’ Burnham tapped his forehead. ‘In here.’

‘Did he seem stressed at work lately? Did he mention any clients in particular?’

‘Not that I know of. If he had problems, he kept them to himself.’

‘He was found in a shop selling rare movie posters. Do you have any idea why he would have gone there?’

‘I heard he collected them, the rarer the better. In this business it’s better to put your money into art that you’re sure will rise in value.’

‘How do you do that?’

‘Basic economics. You don’t buy fashionable artists, because they fall from grace when they try to monetize their work and start overproducing. Exclusivity counts; you need to invest in something with a finite supply. Glen told me that old British movie posters were printed in strictly limited runs, which keeps their value climbing. He loved the damned things, couldn’t get enough of them.’

‘And you know nothing of his life outside of work?’ May asked.

‘I don’t think he had such a thing. Part of the trade-off when you rise to the top here is surrendering your privacy. This is a career with a built-in shelf life. Theoretically, there’s plenty of time to create family ties later.’

‘What do you mean, theoretically?’

‘The dropout rate is high due to stress-related illnesses. And after a few years of fat bonuses there’s a tendency to assume you’re invincible. That’s when miscalculations occur.’

‘You mean like Dexter Cornell?’

Burnham gave a bitter little laugh. ‘Let’s just say he really picked the wrong day to bury bad news.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re joking, right? With stories about bankers’ record bonuses all over the broadsheets?’

‘Do you think Cornell—’

‘Cornell’s not your concern,’ said Burnham. ‘Whatever I think of him should be of no relevance to you. When the music stops here I aim to be one of the guys who still has a seat.’

‘Did Cornell and Hall know each other?’ May persisted, checking his notes.

‘Of course. They were two of a kind.’

‘So they got on well?’

‘They hated each other’s guts. When you’re the alpha male you don’t make friends with the troop’s new lieutenant. You want to keep the whole jungle for yourself.’

‘Do you know where Mr Cornell has gone?’

‘No, nobody does. I don’t suppose we’ll see anything of him until all this blows over.’

‘Do you think it will?’ May asked. ‘What’s going on out there – it’s getting bigger every day.’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Burnham dismissively. ‘What are they going to do? I mean, really? You heard any ideas other than Break the Banks? No, because they don’t have any.’

‘Is there anyone here who was close to Mr Hall?’

‘There was an accountant. They spent a lot of time together.’

‘Can we talk to him?’

‘He doesn’t work in the building, and I have no contact details.’

‘We’ll need to take Mr Hall’s hard drive with us,’ said Longbright.

Burnham’s affability vanished. ‘That won’t be possible. There’ll be a lot of sensitive information on it that has nothing to do with you guys.’

‘We’re not interested in the bank’s business,’ said May. ‘We need to find your employee’s murderer before he decides to do it again.’ He looked Burnham in the eye. ‘Tell me something I don’t understand. How can you still respect the chair? It looks to me like the directors of this company sold you out. What makes you so loyal?’

‘Loyalty is the most important commodity they bought from us,’ Burnham replied.

‘I think we need to talk to Cornell.’ May peered out cautiously as they left the building for the wild city pavements.

‘But if he’s not directly connected to the case—’

‘He’s the one who started all of this.’ He pointed up at a contrail of sooty smoke looping lazily over the rooftops. The sound of helicopters sliced the air.

‘You don’t think it was Hall who leaked the news about Cornell warning his directors, do you?’ Longbright wondered. ‘It would give Cornell a reason to take revenge.’

‘It crossed my mind,’ said May. ‘The question is how to get to him. The rich are very good at hiding themselves.’

‘Someone must know where he is. Dan will be able to find him. Everyone leaves footprints.’

They turned the corner into Fenchurch Street, where the air was filled with burning specks of paper, a snowstorm of stationery. Longbright looked up into the sky, grabbing at a burning scrap. ‘Legal records,’ she said, reading. ‘Looks like they’ve broken into one of the banks.’ She turned the page around to show him. ‘Barclays. I’m surprised they still keep paperwork.’

‘People prefer to write on documents. I need to talk to Arthur. Maybe he was right after all.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Anarchy in the city.’ He raised his hands and turned about in the blizzard. Shreds of paperwork were drifting across the Palladian doorways and windows of the surrounding buildings. From the next street came a massed chorus of rising anger. They stopped and listened, shocked.

The chanting grew until it vibrated the very air. ‘The sound of revolution,’ said May. ‘Who knows where it will end?’

Arthur Bryant was utterly lost.

Having failed to master the use of Google Maps, he was reduced to consulting the crumpled page of a London
A–Z
that he kept in his overcoat pocket, but he also needed a magnifying glass to read it. He knew these streets like the back of his hand, but had somehow become turned around and could no longer find his way home. Standing beside the pink neon fascia of a Japanese bubble tea shop, he could not have looked more out of place. He had always been proud of his anatopism, but now it had become a liability.

Think
, he told himself,
work it out.

He had passed the old Rising Sun pub in Cloth Fair, and then found himself – with no memory of how he had got there – beneath the baroque glass atrium of Leadenhall Market. It was as if the last half-hour had been wiped clean from his brain. He had come here for a reason, but what on earth was it?

Revolution
. The word popped back into his head and glowed there in letters of fire. It ignited other incendiary states:
Sedition. Anarchy. Riot
.

And then he remembered.
Eleanor Hamilton.
Looking about, he found his bearings once more and dug her address from his pocket. The historical novelist wrote rumbustious adventures set in eighteenth-century London, but was also a specialist on the subject of the London Mob, and, as an old friend of Maggie Armitage, was aware of her city’s spiritual connections.

Locating the brown-painted door at the edge of the market, he pressed the buzzer and was admitted into a pitch-black hallway barely wider than his shoulders.

‘Wait! Sorry! Lights!’ called an impossibly refined voice, and suddenly the corridor was flooded with brightness. Eleanor could barely be seen over the balustrade. The novelist was tiny, disarrayed, sparrowlike. ‘No lift – can you manage?’

‘I think so,’ Bryant called back. ‘If I’m not there in half an hour, call an ambulance.’

‘I’ve been here forever and haven’t the heart to leave,’ she explained, ushering the panting detective in and showing him to a sofa. ‘You must be gasping. I’ll get the kettle on.’ Checking that her white hair was still coiled on top of her head like whipped cream, she headed to the hotplate.

The rooms were doll’s-house tiny and cluttered with so many ancient books that Bryant instinctively fought the urge to sneeze out dust. ‘Everything around here is just
awful
now,’ Hamilton told him. ‘Even ten years ago it was still bearable, but all my neighbours have gone, and the little pubs and shops have been gutted into offices and something called “luxury loft living” for these revolting bankers you seem to find everywhere.’ She shuddered violently. It seemed to Bryant that he knew an abnormal number of ladies who were prone to theatricality. ‘The Marxist bookshop is now a flogging estate agency, can you believe it? Utterly sickening. There’s nothing left for the struggling artist in this flogging city, thanks to those Bullingdon Club thugs and their pocket-lining cronies in the flogging financial institutions.’ She had a habit of substituting the chastisement in place of its more Anglo-Saxon counterpart, which she found far too ubiquitous and banal on the swaggering, swearing streets of London.

‘I’m very well, thank you, Eleanor, and how are you?’ said Bryant pointedly.

‘Oh. Ah, yes. Sorry. You know how I get. We’re supposed to mellow as we get older, aren’t we, but I find myself becoming increasingly furious with the way in which things have turned out.’ She threw sugar cubes into mugs like a desperate gambler hurling his final dice. ‘I hate what I see around me, Arthur. The urban middle class destroyed, the working poor exploited, the vulgar rich elevated to eminence, the underclass demonized, the wasteland of celebrity held in veneration.’ She slammed a cupboard door shut. Presumably the neighbours were used to it, or possibly deaf. ‘What are we supposed to tell the young? Oh, you’ve got to pay for your own education now, and you won’t get a job at the end of it, and sorry, did we forget to mention that the world is on the brink of total catastrophe?’