Bryant & May - The Burning Man (19 page)

‘Well, you’re just in time. I’m about to open the box.’ The coroner gently tucked the grey Mylar coverlet more tightly around De Vere’s body. ‘I’m not sure what we’re going to find underneath, but I imagine it’s not going to be very nice.’

‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ said Bryant, dragging over a stool. ‘What are you going to use?’

‘I already tried a bone knife, but I’m afraid it’ll need this.’ Kershaw hefted something that looked like a sculptor’s chisel in his hands. ‘I’ve used one of these on a ribcage but never on a face before. If you start to feel ill, low-level lighting will guide you to an exit.’ He inserted the tip of the instrument into the seam of the mask at the edge of the jawline, and began to tap the end lightly with a hammer. He continued for two or three minutes as fragments of burned skin flaked off from beneath the mask on to the steel table. ‘What do you know about the attack?’

‘Not much yet,’ Bryant admitted, fascinated by the operation. ‘He’d been at work all night. We think he’d gone home to have a shower and a quick kip before changing his clothes and heading back to the office. We found something in the kitchen – metal flakes on the stove – and a knocked-over cup of tea, possibly drugged.’

‘That should have come off by now,’ said Kershaw, peering under the lip of the mask.

‘I think there’s something else holding it in place,’ said Bryant.

‘You could be right. I have a feeling—’ He bent down and shone a penlight beneath the edge. ‘Yes, it’s spiked on either side, in the cavities just below the cheekbones. I think your attacker probably hammered it into place. Makes you wonder what kind of man could do such a thing.’ He wedged his fingers under the mask and gave an experimental tug.

‘Would it have to be a man?’

‘I don’t suppose so, but metalwork? It’s not the sort of MO you’d expect from a woman – or anyone, for that matter.’ He strained at the mask. ‘Sorry about this.’ There was a tearing, splintering sound, and one side of the mask came up. Kershaw took a closer look and winced. ‘Yup, a pair of short prongs, right into the tops of the gums. The epidermal layer is stuck to the metal. He heated it up and hammered it on while it was red-hot. That’ll be what your flakes are in the kitchen. He put the mask over the burner and probably lifted it off with tongs.’

Kershaw raised the other side and carefully removed the mask in its entirety, leaving behind a grinning crimson-faced skull with livid pink gums, very white teeth, and no lips or eyelids.

Bryant examined the mask. ‘I found a copy of the design. It’s the face of Vulcan, the god of fire. He’s usually depicted holding a blacksmith’s hammer. I think we can assume that’s how our man got the mask into place. He’s used to working with metals. We’ll have to check out workshops and factories, colleges, garages, anywhere with access to tools. There are markings on the interior. Looks like some kind of pattern.’

‘I’ll get the skin off and clean it up so you can have a look.’

‘I usually expect to unmask the killer, not the victim,’ said Bryant. ‘Our man is getting closer.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘This time he had direct contact with his target. He’s gained confidence. I wish we had more to go on.’

‘What, you mean you don’t already have some kind of crackpot theory on this one?’ Kershaw examined a scrap of burned flesh in his tweezers.

‘Rather unlike me, isn’t it?’ Bryant admitted. ‘We’ve got no consistencies, no pattern. The victims are a down-and-out, a bank manager and a start-up wizard; two of them are linked by an attractive woman and in all three cases the method of death involves fire. None of it makes any logical sense.’

‘It’s probably the woman, then,’ said Kershaw amiably, setting the mask beside De Vere’s skinless skull. ‘Females are unknowable to us because their brains are hardwired differently. The connections in your typical male brain run between the front and back of the same hemisphere, whereas in women the connections run laterally between the left and right sides.’

‘How do you know that?’ Bryant watched in disgust as Kershaw peered up the remains of the corpse’s nostrils.

‘Diffusion tensor imaging. It’s probably why they know us males better than we know ourselves. You don’t suppose he’s just selecting archetypes to make some kind of a point? You know, homelessness, corruption, reliance on technology?’

‘I can’t see how. Surely he’d go after bad role models, not Weeks, who had no power and nothing to give, or this chap, who was carrying out charitable works. Hall was in finance but we’ve turned up nothing untoward on him so far.’

‘Here, take a look at this. God, it’s heavy. He’s a strong lad, your killer. Take your glove off that.’ Giles lifted the mask over to his Anglepoise and spotlit its interior.

The lead was still crusted in patches of burned skin, but Bryant could see what he meant. ‘It’s a mould,’ he said, amazed, studying the inverted nose, eyes and jawline. ‘A letter M on either cheek. Why on earth would he make a mould and brand it on to De Vere’s face?’

‘You’re not dealing with a rational mind,’ said Kershaw, setting the mask aside and covering it. He removed his cap and shook out his blond curls.

‘Perhaps not,’ said Bryant. ‘You know what I think this is? An old English punishment, like the tar-and-feathering. Branding was used until well into the eighteenth century in London. The M stood for “Malefactor”.’

DS Longbright preferred conducting interviews in people’s homes, where they were comfortable and more likely to remember details. Consequently she had booked everyone out for the afternoon, sending them off to talk to the friends and relatives of the three victims.

‘I can’t have you all disappearing,’ Raymond Land complained. ‘We’ve a perfectly good interview room on the floor above, apart from the dodgy floor and that bloody moose.’

‘It’s a stag,’ Longbright pointed out. Bryant had been given the stuffed animal by a grateful neighbourhood resident after he had solved the mystery of the King’s Cross stag-man, and rather than refuse the gift he had installed it in the offices.

‘It’s a health hazard. And it’s got alopecia,’ Land said. ‘There’s something moving about inside it.’

Land always felt uncomfortable when the rest of the staff were deployed beyond the confines of the building, mainly because it exposed his own uselessness. Longbright usually tried to cheer him up by reminding him that only he could keep higher authorities off their backs, but Land knew she was just being kind. Everyone had been kind to him since Leanne had left him for her Welsh flamenco instructor. Now his home life was as moribund as his career; the neighbours had stopped coming round, the washing machine had died, the matching halves of his socks had all disappeared and he’d finished the last of the emergency freezer meals. There was only some Quorn left, and he wasn’t sure what to do with that. He wasn’t one of those independent, self-sufficient men who could replace fuses and do his own plumbing. He needed something more than the love of a good, kind woman – he needed a maid.

It didn’t help coming to work and finding that he had no faith in the investigation at hand. He certainly didn’t agree that these deaths were in any way connected. A tramp fight, a business vendetta and a lone nutcase, or possibly some kind of weird sex game that had gone wrong. Bryant’s trouble was that the old man wanted to join up every inexplicable London occurrence into some kind of vast citywide conspiracy. Land knew it was heresy to suggest such a thing, but sometimes deaths just happened, like that MI5 bloke who climbed inside his own sports bag and suffocated. You couldn’t explain away the world, so what was the point in trying?

‘I mean, what is the point?’ he said aloud.

‘Mr Bryant doesn’t have anywhere else to store it,’ said Longbright.

‘Fine, whatever, conduct your interviews on the top of the London Eye for all I care, just get that bloody thing out of there.’ He stormed back to his office and even slammed the invisible door, much to Longbright’s mystification.

They split up into pairs, as was their habit. Bimsley and Mangeshkar caught a tube to Bayswater to meet Freddie Weeks’s parents. Renfield and DuCaine made their way to the Findersbury Bank to interview Glen Hall’s colleagues. Longbright headed for the Palmeira Hampton to meet with Jonathan De Vere’s wife. Bryant and May sequestered themselves in their room, and Raymond Land went online to find a cleaning lady who’d be prepared to tackle six weeks’ worth of laundry.

Sue and Gerry Weeks lived in a 1960s maisonette behind Bayswater tube station. If not for its window boxes of struggling geraniums, the concrete block could have been mistaken for an insurance office. Mrs Weeks had further overcome the severity of the façade by hanging valanced nets at every window and brightening the dark rooms by placing glass puppies, china windmills, fragile galleons, cheery mottoes, smiling dolls and happy angels at six-inch intervals on every available surface around the flat. The cumulative effect had almost hospitalized her husband with depression on a number of occasions. Now he had reconciled himself to the fact that he would end his days as a bull in a china shop, and slumped on his puffy sofa with his huge meaty hands folded between his knees, waiting for Colin Bimsley’s questions.

‘You say he didn’t respond well to medication,’ said Bimsley, checking his notes. ‘Do you remember what he’d been prescribed?’

‘Not really.’ Mr Weeks shook his head sadly. ‘My wife should be back from the shops soon. She’ll remember. She remembers everything.’ He made it sound like an affliction. ‘He stopped taking the stuff because he said it prevented him from thinking clearly, but he never really thought clearly. He could never hold a job down longer than five minutes. He always got into arguments with his bosses.’

‘What kind of work was he doing at this point?’ asked Meera.

‘Mostly shelf-stacking in depots. He worked for a delivery company in Mile End for a while. When he said he had a girlfriend we thought he might settle down, but she didn’t stick around.’

‘This would have been Joanna Papis?’

‘That’s the one. He put a picture of her on Facebook; otherwise we would never have seen her. He didn’t like coming home because he was never close to his mother. My wife discovered religion late in life. Joanna looked very nice. I couldn’t help wondering what she saw in Freddie.’

‘Is that him?’ Meera asked, pointing to a small framed photograph on the mantelpiece.

‘Yeah, he must have been about eighteen or nineteen when that was taken.’

The photograph showed a boy in a Glastonbury T-shirt, smiling on a sunny day at the coast. Freddie Weeks had a kind, soft face and shoulder-length dark curly hair. He looked happy. Clearly his parents thought enough of him to keep his picture on display.

‘When was the last time you spoke to Freddie?’

‘I told one of your officers all about this—’

‘I’m not the officer you spoke to.’

‘But surely—’

‘When did you speak to him?’

‘Six weeks ago. He called up late one night—’

‘What night?’

‘Late September, a Sunday I think. He was in tears, sounded as if he’d been drinking. He didn’t make much sense but I knew straight away what he was after.’

‘Which was?’

‘Money.’

‘Was he in debt?’

‘He needed to pay his rent. I told him he was on the dole, that should have been enough, and that he should get himself housing benefit.’

‘So you didn’t give him anything?’

‘No, of course not.’ He made the idea sound ludicrous.

‘He was your son.’

‘My son! Going on about how my generation had screwed up the world, leaving his lot with nothing but debt. I wanted my son to be a boxer. He’d been named after Freddie Mills.’

‘The world light-heavyweight champ? He shot himself at the age of forty-six, didn’t he?’ At the gym where Bimsley occasionally boxed, there were still a few faded photographs of Freddie Mills.

‘He was a hero round here after the war,’ Mr Weeks explained, ‘a role model for my old man and my uncles. I used to box. I won trophies. My wife makes me keep them in the garage. And my son grew up to be a pacifist, always going on marches.’

‘Do you know if he was registered with any pacifist organizations?’

‘Probably.’ He sighed. ‘He moved about a lot so he used this as his mailing address. We were always getting brochures through. One came just last week. Hang on a minute.’ Pulling himself free of the sofa’s grip, he fished about underneath the television and handed over a pile of letters. Meera caught Colin’s eye and held it. The top leaflet showed a young man in a Guy Fawkes mask tapping the watch on his wrist, beneath the headline ‘It’s Time to Break the Banks’.

‘I’m pretty certain that’s my lad,’ said Mr Weeks, touching the shot. ‘That’s the watch I bought him for his eighteenth birthday, back when I thought he might turn out all right.’

The burned remnants of the watch were now in the PCU’s evidence room, but Bimsley thought that returning them would only make Freddie’s father even more upset. He had failed to produce a son in his own image, and that was enough.