Bryant & May - The Burning Man (21 page)

Bryant harrumphed and sat back in his seat, looking like a Brueghelian peasant with gout.

It was late afternoon by the time they arrived at the edge of the ash-tree-lined estate, with its grand gardens laid out after the style of Inigo Jones, dotted with statues of Greek deities that could be glimpsed like ghosts palely loitering between the luxuriant hedgerows.

‘So this is where his punters’ money went,’ said Bryant. ‘It’s not his family home. I looked this gaff up in my country-house bible. Cornell’s only had it for about three years. He bought it from a Russian who tried to turn the Regency master bedroom into a pole-dancing parlour.’

‘Pull your tie straight and smarten yourself up a bit,’ said May. ‘I don’t want him thinking you’ve come here to apply for the position of wrinkled old retainer.’

‘What do we do now?’ Bryant stepped out on to the gravelled path and looked around as the taxi drove off. ‘There’s no bell.’

‘No, but there’s
that
.’ May pointed up at the black glass hemisphere suspended from the stone newel that divided the steel gates. Even as he spoke, the barriers swung silently back, allowing them on to the drive. At its centre was a vast cherub-bedecked fountain and a pond filled with lurid goldfish.

They were met at the door by a severe young woman in a black business suit. ‘Please wait in the library. Mr Cornell will join you shortly,’ she said, clearly expecting them to follow her without a word. They found themselves in an ornamentally plastered room of double height, lined with glass bookcases containing the kind of calfskin volumes no one had opened in a century.

‘Keep an eye on the door,’ said Bryant, pulling out various desk drawers and checking the contents.

‘Don’t touch anything,’ May warned. ‘And let me do the talking.’

‘What do you think these are?’ Arthur raised a handful of blank white swipe cards. ‘Does the bank have an electronic key entry system? I can’t remember.’

‘Yes, it does; now put those back. He’s coming.’

Bryant hastily pocketed the cards as their host arrived.

Dexter Cornell was younger than either of them had expected. Indeed, the banker looked to Bryant’s aged orbs as if he had been newly displaced from the womb: pink, unlined and balding, with a thin blond thatch that barely bothered to be hair, and the slightly protuberant eyes one usually found in paintings of eighteenth-century duchesses. His handshake, however, proved surprisingly powerful and was clearly driven by thick arm muscles.

‘Please, have a seat.’ Cornell indicated an awkward arrangement of red leather chairs and a tiny, unstable-looking octagonal table that had been laid for afternoon tea. As a mantelpiece clock pecked out the passing seconds, an elaborate, parodic ritual began involving silverware and slender pairings of white bread and orange salmon.
He’s overplaying the English gentleman a bit
, thought Bryant.
Well, it won’t wash with me
.

‘Quite a nifty little hideaway,’ he remarked. ‘We thought it would be quicker to come and find you.’

‘It’s an investment.’ Cornell smiled. ‘The upkeep is fairly horrific, but one has to keep these grand old homes going.’

‘Did you put the security system in yourself?’ asked Bryant. May knew that his partner had logged Cornell as a potential suspect. In May’s mind there was an element of psychosis in all powerful men, even if it remained dormant.

‘The place is empty most of the time, so you can’t be too careful,’ said Cornell with impatience. ‘I assume you didn’t come to discuss the house.’

‘Indeed not,’ said May, taking over. ‘I understand that one of my colleagues explained the purpose of our visit. In the wake of the unfortunate events surrounding your departure from the Findersbury Bank, three men have died, so it seems you may be indirectly connected to the tragedies.’

‘There’s very little connection, from what I’ve been told,’ said Cornell, allowing them to see that he had knowledge of the investigation. ‘I fail to see how you reach the conclusion that it involves me.’

‘Nevertheless, in order to eliminate you from our inquiries we’ll need a detailed breakdown of your movements at the times in question.’ May handed him a folded sheet of paper.

Cornell pocketed the page without examining it. ‘What if I’m unable to account for any absences?’

‘I’m sure a man with your busy work schedule can account for every second of his time,’ said May. ‘If you could email that back by tomorrow morning?’

‘According to my friend Superintendent Darren Link, two of these men might have simply suffered accidents.’

‘We don’t believe that to be the case, although we have no proof to the contrary,’ said Bryant, unfazed by Cornell’s pointed reference. ‘It may be that an anti-capitalist organization or one of its splinter cells has also placed you in its firing line.’

‘Well, am I a potential victim or a suspect?’

‘That’s not for us to say at the moment.’

Cornell had started to breathe noisily through his nose, as if trying to let steam escape before something blew up. ‘So I’m the one being judged here, not the terrorists who are launching attacks on the banking system.’

‘The right to legitimate protest is a keystone of the democratic process,’ May reminded him mildly. ‘The moment it oversteps its guidelines and endangers life it becomes a police matter. Your – situation – with the bank’s directors is of no concern to us. You’re entitled to protection just as any other citizen would be in circumstances like this.’

‘We’re approaching a date that’s traditionally associated with anarchy,’ Bryant pointed out. ‘You may need protection.’

‘So – what do you expect from me?’ Cornell glared at each of them in turn.

‘You can start by giving us an assurance that you’ll remain here for the rest of the week.’

‘You want to put me under house arrest!’

‘It would be for your own good.’

‘That’s not going to happen,’ Cornell warned. ‘You have no idea of what’s at stake right now.’

‘I know that your Shanghai deal in East Africa is still going to make you a lot of money even though it collapsed,’ said Bryant casually.

‘Let me show you something.’ Cornell’s features set hard in an effort to contain his fury. Rising to indicate that the meeting was terminated, he tapped his phone and summoned two men to the room.

Although they were dressed casually in jeans and black sweatshirts, the pair wore quasi-military badges and were obviously more used to wearing uniforms. Both had ex-army SLR Blackout rifles slung across their chests, and seemed unable to place their broad arms at their sides.

‘I have my own private security team on this,’ Cornell told the detectives. ‘The bank is off-limits to you, do you understand? As is this house. You think you can just wander down here, spy on me and report back? I don’t need your protection, although
you
might if you decide to make something out of this. Go back to your care home and stay out of my business. I’ll go wherever I damn well please, whenever I please, without your permission. You really have no idea who you’re dealing with.’

‘You know what puzzles me?’ said Bryant, nonchalantly turning to the disgraced CEO. ‘It’s not a matter of whether or even how you did it. The insider deal, I mean. I keep asking myself how anyone else knew. If you’d all just kept quiet you would have got away with it. Your building has sprung a leak, Cornell. You don’t know where it is and you don’t know how to stop it. That’s why you’ve run away here.’

Cornell turned to one of his men. ‘Get these two a cab back to the station before I really lose my temper. I don’t want to see them again.’

The guards escorted the detectives to the front door and shut it firmly behind them. While they waited on the steps for the taxi, Bryant kicked at a boot-scraper until he managed to break it. ‘Well, I thought that went quite well,’ he said.

‘What part of it went well?’ asked May, amazed.

‘He revealed his true colours. I’ve a good mind to stamp all over his flowerbeds. I think we should put him on the suspects list just for being unpleasant. The first thing I’m going to do is check out the licences on those weapons. A banker with an armed-response team? That’s a new one on me.’

‘Why did he get so angry when you mentioned the Shanghai thing?’

‘Cornell set up this huge development project with a corporation in Shanghai to co-finance the building of hotels in East Africa, but they pulled out over the construction of a port and because of increased instability in the region,’ said Bryant. ‘That’s the root of the insider deal. But Cornell knows a lot more than he’s telling.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because according to Dan, Cornell is still in contact with the Chinese. Dan’s tracking a ton of email traffic to and from Oakley Manor House.’

‘How is he doing that?’ May was fairly certain they didn’t have clearance for such an action.

‘It’s probably best that you don’t know. He tried to explain to me about service-provider protocols but I lost the will to live. I’m certain Cornell is double-crossing his own directors.’ Bryant swung the handle of his walking stick at a stone and heard it land in the ornamental pond with a satisfying smack.

‘You think he told the directors to dump their shares, and he’ll then do a private deal with the Chinese?’

‘I’d bet my string vest on it.’

‘How did he do it? Tell the directors, I mean? Because everyone says they didn’t meet or speak to each other.’

‘I don’t have the details yet, but I know someone who might be able to provide us with an answer.’

‘If your contact knows something we don’t, I imagine the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau will already have got to him.’

‘Not this gentleman,’ said Bryant as their taxi drew up. ‘He’s mentally unstable and living in a secure care home. I think you and I should go and visit him.’

The Manderfield Healthcare Centre was an anonymous new-build on East Finchley High Road, but one detail differentiated it from other apartment blocks in the area: if you looked carefully, you could see slender steel bars behind each of the windows.

‘He’s quite harmless,’ Bryant said as they waited to be buzzed in at the discreet side entrance. ‘He trained as a psychologist but then switched careers, and ended up managing one of the local banks that went down in the Barings collapse. He didn’t handle it very well.’

‘Why?’ asked May, shaking the rain out of his coat. ‘What did he do?’

‘He burned his branch down. Knotted invoices all over the counters like kindling, doused them in petrol he’d siphoned from his car and set the whole lot on fire. It turned out he had a history of arson. It rather put paid to his hopes of promotion.’

The home had made great efforts to disguise its true identity, but the lingering odour of municipal cabbage gave it away. A nurse led them to the day room in a manner that suggested she might be showing them where they were to live from now on.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a lighter on you?’ asked Henry Steppe, reaching out a hand in greeting but unable to conceal the excited grasp of his curled fingers. Skeletal and stooped, with the overhanging posture of a man too aware of his own awkward height, he looked to be in his early fifties but illness had aged him. His tartan dressing gown had singed patches around the sleeves, and there was an absurdly large bandage over the top of his head, like a child’s drawing of a hospital patient. He was lured to an armchair by the wary nurse, who then stood at a discreet distance until she could be sure that no one was going to attack anyone else.

‘I’m afraid not, Henry,’ replied Bryant.

‘But you’re a pipe-smoker. Not even a throwaway?’

‘You know I can’t do that. You’re looking … What happened to you?’

‘Nothing, why?’ Steppe seemed puzzled by the question.

‘Oh, it’s just …’ Bryant pointed tentatively to Steppe’s head.

‘Oh,
this
. I don’t like Morecambe and Wise.’

‘Er, not quite with you there, old sausage.’

‘I had a bit of a fight with the common-room television.’

‘He put his head inside it while it was on,’ piped up the nurse very loudly, as if speaking to an incredibly stupid child. ‘We’re getting a nice new flat-screen now, aren’t we? I’ll leave you to talk to your chums, Henry, is that all right?’

‘I don’t like Morecambe and Wise!’ he told the nurse.

‘Try to keep him nice and calm,’ said the nurse, reproachfully pursing her lips at Steppe before scuttling off.

‘Thank suffering Christ she’s gone,’ said Steppe, glancing back to make sure the coast was clear. ‘You have to let them think you’re a moron, otherwise they never leave you alone. I was trying to take the inverter board out of the TV and electrocuted myself. I have to carry out my own laptop repairs, so I nick bits from wherever I can. I assume this is concerning Findersbury?’

‘How did you know that?’ asked May.

‘I picked up some intel from your building. You really need to have a word with Raymond Land about his passwords. He used to use
Leanne
for everything, but lately he’s switched to
Crippen
. It’s a bit sad when you can only come up with the name of a cat that’s not even yours.’