Bryant & May - The Burning Man (2 page)

If any of you are wondering why the general public hates us so much at the moment, may I refer you to last week’s article in
Hard News
, which appeared under the headline ‘Why We Call Them Pigs’, in which we were described as ‘a textbook example of wasted taxpayers’ money’. The tabloid hack behind this hatchet job was transferred to the opinion page from the fashion section, and was upset because we banned her from our press conferences. She had the nerve to describe me as ‘vindictive’. Unfortunately it’s illegal to slap her in prison without a motive, but if anyone feels like running a check on her vehicle registration we might be able to get her on expired tax and make her life utterly miserable.

The entrance hall’s visual-recognition system has been removed after Mr Bryant proved it could be cheated by the addition of a hat. For now it’s back to using a secure code. I’ve taped it on to the wall above the machine.

Our workmen, the two Daves, are staying on after discovering that the first-floor interview room has no central support joists, so make sure you keep fat witnesses away from the middle of the building. They’re also trying to open up the basement area, so watch it as you come through the front door, particularly if you’ve been drinking. Longbright buzzed in the Pizza Hut delivery boy the other night and lost her Napoletana.

The Police Federation’s outing to the Museum of London’s exhibition ‘Living History: Senior Citizens Recall London in the 1950s’ will take place on 25 October, although I understand that Mr Bryant will not be coming as he does not yet regard the 1950s as history.

Heaven knows I’m no intellectual but I enjoy an Agatha Christie, and I know some of the ‘eggheads’ among us attended the British Library’s ‘Criminal Minds’ dinner last week. They want their napkin rings back. I don’t care who it was.

The good news is, the city is really quiet at the moment and we can put our feet up for once. Apparently some bloke called Samuel Johnson said something about being tired of London. Well, I couldn’t agree with him more; I’m sick to death of it, so I’m going on holiday next week. I’m taking a watercolour course on the Isle of Wight, and if anyone else fancies using up their outstanding leave I suggest you get your request forms in double-quick. There’s nothing happening out there. Make the most of it.

London. The protracted summer lately over, and the bankers sitting in Threadneedle Street, returned from their villas in Provence and Tuscany. Relentless October weather. As much water in the streets as if the tide had newly swelled from the Thames, and it would not be wonderful to find a whale beached beneath Holborn Viaduct, the traffic parting around it like an ocean current. Umbrellas up in the soft grey drizzle, and insurrection in the air.

Riots everywhere. Riots outside the Bank of England and around St Paul’s Cathedral. Protestors swelling on Cheapside and Poultry and Lombard Street. Marchers roaring on Cornhill and Eastcheap and Fenchurch Street. Barricades on Cannon Street and across London Bridge. Police armoured and battened down in black and yellow like phalanxes of tensed wasps. Chants and megaphones and the drone of choppers overhead.

Hurled fire, catapulted bricks, shattering glass and the blast of water hoses. It was as if, after a drowsy, sluggish summer, the streets had undergone spontaneous combustion.

It had taken just one match to ignite this inferno, going by the name of Mr Dexter Cornell. A gentleman first fattened by fine living, then driven to flesh and bone by fear and failure. A partner in the Findersbury Private Bank of Crutched Friars until he bankrupted it. A banker, then, that bogeyman of the early twenty-first century, a Thug of Threadneedle Street, purportedly the very worst of his kind, for he arrogantly gambled with other people’s money and lost. And because his board of elderly directors got wind of his dealings they were able to protect themselves, and so Mr Cornell was parting company with the bank to the grudging approval of both sides, taking away a tidy fortune of several millions and leaving behind the acrid stink of insider trading.

At which point the public, in one of its periodic fits of outrage, discovered his misdeeds and took against him, and the City of London erupted. Fingers were pointed in the press, questions were asked in the House, but nothing at all was done, and so the populace abandoned its frog-chorus of complaint and got up off its collective arse to make its feelings known by burning down a few buildings and looting some computer showrooms.

As the banners were hoisted the police arrived, barriers were erected and the kettling began. The incandescent crowds spilled into the roads like champagne from an uncorked bottle, and the TV pundits immediately started their newsroom analyses. And once more, as had happened so many times in the past, the City of London found itself on fire.

He had been walking in the drizzle all evening.

After slipping off the kerb crossing Farringdon Road, it became obvious that he would not be able to walk much further. By the time he arrived at the hostel behind Clerkenwell Green he was hobbling badly, and his ankle was turning black.

Earlier in the week, a rough sleeper he’d spoken to a couple of times before had told him that he might find a short-notice bed here, but as the girl behind the scratched Plexiglas counter shield searched her monitor, he knew he would have no luck. She looked harassed and empathetic, as if she was the one who might end up in a shop doorway tonight, not him. She was wearing a pink plastic Hello Kitty brooch on her sweater.

‘You’ve left it a bit too late, love,’ she said, still searching her spreadsheet. The colour was turned up too high on the monitor, bathing her features in an odd shade of mauve, but as she studied the columns, trying to juggle the spaces in her head, he could tell she was genuinely anxious to help him. ‘We always fill up earlier at the end of the weekend. There aren’t so many shops open on Sundays so people are forced outside more, and they tend to get worn out just wandering around. The last bed went a few minutes ago.’

‘Are you sure you’ve got nothing?’ he asked. ‘I was told you usually find extra spaces.’

‘Was it the one I saw you talking to outside the other night?’

‘Yeah. I don’t know his name.’

‘Well, he’s a bit weird. I’ve seen him hanging around here, looking for someone to talk to. You shouldn’t trust him. There’s a lot of troubled lads like him about. We used to keep two or three beds spare for busy nights, but Health and Safety stopped us. I’m really sorry.’

‘Is there anywhere else around here?’

She sat back from the screen and checked her printed lists. ‘Normally I’d say the Barbican or St George’s up by Aldgate, but I know they’re full tonight because I had to call them earlier.’ She was new to the job, he could tell. For a moment he actually thought she was about to get upset. He knew he didn’t fit the usual profile. ‘Sorry, what are you going to do?’ she asked.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll find somewhere to shelter tonight and come back tomorrow.’

‘Please do.’ She pulled out a drawer and slipped a card under the Plexiglas. ‘Ask for me, Karin Scott. I’m part-time but I’ll be on tomorrow night. OK?’

‘Thanks, Karin.’ He didn’t volunteer his name.

‘Tell you what, if you write down your details I’ll try to make sure you get a place tomorrow.’ She pushed another card and a Biro under the window.

‘I don’t like to give out my details.’

‘Then how can I save you a bed, love?’

Reluctantly, he scrawled on the back of the card and returned it.

‘Is that all?’ she said. ‘“F. Weeks”?’

‘Well, I’m not exactly in a position to pick up my emails,’ he replied with a touch of bitterness.

‘Sorry,’ she said again. Judging by the rate at which she kept apologizing, he felt sure she wouldn’t last long at the front desk. The first crazy street-lifer who hammered on the counter shield would probably finish her off. ‘Is that F for Frank?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Freddie. Freddie Weeks.’ He limped away before she could detain him any longer. Karin was still in that early stage of her job when she thought she could befriend the homeless people she liked and maybe find some way around the rules to help them, but he knew that she would have to raise a barrier against him sooner or later. Getting involved would mean breaking council rules and losing her job.

The streets were wet and deserted. Tomorrow was Halloween, but it would be happening somewhere else, out in the suburbs, where mothers and fathers were preparing to shepherd their children around the neighbourhood in fancy dress, in imitation of the American custom of trick or treat. It seemed unlikely to take place anywhere around here; there were no children. Clerkenwell was the habitat of the single executive, and no lights showed in the minimalist apartments that had been newly carved from warehouses and factories. There was no one to whom he could turn, and nowhere he could go.

He was tired of walking around the city, tired of being forced to take a few pence wherever he could in order to survive another night. Passing another restaurant window where slender girls sat sipping white wine beneath coppery lampshades, he could no longer remember his old way of life. What was it like to go out for a drink and not check your change all the time? Friends vanished like dogs before thunderstorms the moment things went wrong and you stopped being flush.

Below and to the east lay the city’s financial district. The dense cloud base was the colour of bad milk, but something flickered gold closer to the rooftops. Drawn to the brightness, he limped in its direction.

It took him half an hour to reach the source of the light, and what he saw made him forget the pain.

Open fires were glowing and crackling in the middle of the road. A melted yellow ‘KEEP LEFT’ bollard drooped like a collapsed cake over a traffic island. The front of a Pret A Manger was boarded up, its walls blackened with soot. In the distance he glimpsed protestors in white plastic masks running and yelling between the buildings, then vanishing within the turbulent movement of the shadows. It was as if the threat of a truly anarchic Halloween had finally been realized. Everyone was on the move. Only the lemon-coloured Hi-Vis jackets of the police remained immobile, evenly spaced across the road, a human ring of steel.

Like an avatar in a video game he was forced from one route to another by the warning signs, the metal barriers, the plastic cordons. He knew that after two weeks on the street, rough sleepers developed a frayed grey look that repelled the public and attracted police attention, but there was one more thing he still had to do.

The filigreed canopies of Leadenhall Market were sectioned off by yellow police tape as if marked for demolition, so he cut down to Fenchurch Street, making his way east until he reached the slender avenue called Crutched Friars. Just ahead, beyond the low-slung railway bridge, was the entrance to the bank. Its wide grey marble doorway, stepped and recessed, was carpeted with flattened cardboard cartons. Pulling a black nylon pod from his backpack, he unfolded a thin sleeping bag and prepared to bed down for the night under London’s warrior skies.

Before the day dawned, the air around the Royal Exchange and the Bank of England still held the acid tang of burned varnish, rubber and charcoal, just as it had after the Blitz and the City of London IRA bomb of 1993.

The protestors had been dispersed for now, but the steel police barriers remained in place. The various groups eyed each other from a wary distance. One subset known as Make Capitalism History had attempted to pitch camp in Cannon Street, while members of the official Occupy movement were still amicably negotiating with City of London officers, standing around with cardboard cups of coffee like technicians on a film set. A newer, brasher protest outfit calling itself Break the Banks was attracting a younger membership, thanks to its tactic of planning flash-mob demos via social-networking sites. A smaller, more violent splinter group, Disobey, hung back in the shadows of the buildings. They had been denied official recognition and were now arguing among themselves about the best way to be effective. Unfortunately, they couldn’t agree on who was allowed to speak.