Bryant & May - The Burning Man (24 page)

‘Arthur, you cannot take the side of a murderer.’

‘I’m just trying to understand his mindset. He destroys all those who have hurt him. But he didn’t start out like that. I think there’s a pattern. Look.’ He rose and thumped his fist on the blackboard, causing a fog of chalk dust to settle over himself. ‘Our killer is angered by something Freddie Weeks does. He goes away, stews about the perceived slight, returns and sets fire to the lad. Perhaps he thinks that Weeks will react fast, that he’ll leap to his feet to put the flames out, and that will be enough to show him who’s boss. Half the murders in London involve issues of respect.’

He thumped the board again. ‘Next, he shames Glen Hall by tarring and feathering him, but this also results in a death. The tar gets into Hall’s nasal passages and chokes him – Giles has confirmed this.’

Another thump raised more chalk dust. ‘Then Jonathan De Vere is branded by a red-hot Vulcan mask, and he also dies. Don’t you see? Burning, tarring and feathering, branding, he’s
dishonouring
his enemies, and if they don’t survive it’s their bad luck. The tarring is for betrayal, the branding symbolizes duplicity. The victim has been two-faced, so now he’ll be given two faces! He’s convinced himself he’s giving them what they deserve. There will be others to come. There
must
be others. But the pattern is artless enough to show that there is no pattern. And these acts are actually not very elaborate at all. They’re … What’s that expression you use when you’re trying to sound young—’

‘Lo-fi.’

‘That’s it. These acts of revenge are thrown together with the tools at hand. The victims dragged him down somehow, and now he has nothing, so he’s resorted to stealing the instruments of their deaths. The verger of St Mary’s Church in Camden reported lead being nicked from his roof. Some road-menders in Kentish Town had their tar bucket and burner stolen. These are not very classy acts, John. At least they give us a radius of operation.’

‘Then how would his path have crossed with that of a banker and a dot-com millionaire? It doesn’t make sense, Arthur. Have you thought that he might just be a mad anti-capitalist taking potshots wherever the opportunity arises?’

‘Yes, of course, but it’s my job to think beyond that. There are plenty of officers infiltrating the protestors and making lists of contacts, but we have to see things differently.’

‘So you’ve assembled your own psychological profile.’

Bryant rooted around among the papers on his desk. ‘It’s an unusual one. He started out with a sense of indignity and anger, but now he’s enjoying himself. It’s a good job he’s still being kept out of the press, otherwise he’d be on his way to becoming a martyr. I think we’ll find he has a history of arson, but I still lack data.’

‘I can run a search for priors, cross-reference with protest histories and see if we get any matches.’

‘Matches.’ Bryant nodded. ‘Very good. What’s happening in the Square Mile? I haven’t seen the morning papers yet.’

May pulled a copy of
Hard News
from his pocket and threw it on the desk. ‘Have a look at that. Some idiot MP from the shires is championing Cornell and his fellow bankers, trying to make a case for them being misunderstood heroes. The effect of that speech has been to send raging lynch mobs heading towards London. By the end of the day almost every part of the country will be represented in the capital. Link tried to close all of the central stations this morning, but I think it’s already too late for that. The mob will find a way in.’

‘You’re right,’ agreed Bryant, ‘the gates are being forced open. This could be just the start. How do you get the genie of rebellion back in the bottle without breaking it?’

‘You realize this no longer falls under our remit,’ May pointed out.

Bryant was indignant. ‘It’s public unrest!’

‘Yes, but we’re not equipped to deal with a citywide riot. We can’t control what’s happening.’

‘Of course, there’s an obvious solution to ending the crisis. They could throw Cornell to the lions.’

‘They could, but it’s not happening, is it? Why not? He must have something the government needs.’

Bryant tapped his skull. ‘Now you’re using your head. What could that be?’

‘I don’t know, money, power …’ May thought for a moment. ‘The Chinese.’

‘I think it’s the most likely possibility, don’t you?’

May rose and studied the blackboard again. A roll of thunder was loud enough to rattle the windows above his desk. ‘If that’s the case and we try to intervene,’ he remarked, ‘we’ll get crushed flat from all sides.’

‘And if we don’t, we’d be failing to do our job,’ retorted Bryant. ‘Either way, we’re damned.’

Raymond Land was gobsmacked. He read the email once more.

After their recent run-ins with the Home Office, he thought he’d seen the last of his old superiors, unless they happened to bump into each other at their Masonic temple. Oskar Kasavian, their vampiric Home Office security supervisor, had been shunted off to some godforsaken, hellish outpost somewhere in what was left of the British Empire, Baffin Island, perhaps, or Cardiff, but Leslie Faraday, the staggeringly incompetent Home Office liaison officer and the ultimate budget overseer of London’s specialist police units, had been kicked upstairs so that he now also had many of the City of London’s divisions – except the two largest ones, cybercrime and terrorism – on his books.

Land couldn’t believe his eyes. How could someone as stupid as Faraday actually get promoted? This was the man who force-fed his children tainted pork on national television to prove that there was nothing wrong with supermarket meat; the man who complained in Parliament about the lack of decent immigration controls while employing a Filipina nanny and a Vietnamese gardener, both of whom he paid in cash because they weren’t registered for tax; the man who once caused a riot in Brixton Prison for insisting that ‘the brains of black offenders are less developed than ours’. And here he was back again, demanding to know why the unit was interfering in matters which didn’t concern them.

This is my lot
, Land thought,
writing bad-tempered emails to bosses I don’t respect in games of territorial ping-pong. No wife, no life, no hope of promotion, just ticking over until the ever-receding date of my retirement. At least my father got given a clock when he left the service, even if it did break down the moment he got it home.

Like so many others of his generation, Land was the son of a policeman, and had started out in a time before initiatives and protocols, before ‘community support’ and ‘response’ and ‘early intervention’, before the era of overpaid consultants and unpaid interns, before think tanks and policy exchange and all of the other career-nurturing enterprises that merely placed more layers of paper between a caring copper and a panicked kid waving a knife. He knew in his heart that he should have been like Bryant and May and stuck to his guns, refusing promotion and working out there on the London streets. At least there was still a grimy exhilaration to be found in the resolution of those tragic and often depressingly familiar stories. It was a satisfaction borne from direct contact with life, something he hadn’t had in years.

Direct contact.

He went in to see the detectives. The room was so dark that May was blanched by the light from his computer terminal. His nose was almost touching the screen because he was too vain to wear glasses. Bryant had his eyes shut and was listening to some horrible caterwauling woman on his ancient record player. He held up an index finger, indicating that Land should not move until the aria had ended.

‘Ivanhoe,’
Bryant explained, eyes still closed. ‘Gilbert and Sullivan’s least successful opera, utterly dreadful.’ He removed the disc and dropped it into his wastepaper basket, slotting another in place. ‘I’m switching to these.
Ultimate Hard House Anthems
. Did you get your theoretical door fixed yet?’

‘Direct contact,’ said Land. ‘That’s what he wants, isn’t it? He’s not doing a Goldfinger.’

‘I’m sorry, Raymondo, but for once I can’t see exactly what you’re thinking.’

‘You know: “Do you expect me to talk?” “No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die.” Goldfinger didn’t stick around to see 007 get lasered in half, did he? This bloke’s right there, chucking petrol bombs, pouring tar, hammering red-hot masks on to people, for God’s sake! He’s strong, maybe works with his hands. He’s taking direct action and making a point. Have you tried the hostels?’

‘Yes, but it’s almost impossible to narrow down the numbers,’ Bryant explained as his stereo speakers bellowed a noise that sounded like a busload of pensioners going into a ravine. ‘There’s big money to be had in hostels these days. They’re not subject to regular planning laws so they’re cash cows for councils, and their booking systems are hopelessly porous.’

‘Then try foundries, workshops, anywhere people work with their hands. Can you turn that down a bit?’

‘We’ve already done that.’ May slapped his hand on a quire of papers. ‘Names and addresses. My colleague here likes everything printed out, so if you really want to help us you can wade through them for us.’

‘Absolutely. More than happy to. I’ve got another idea—’

‘What’s going on?’ asked Bryant suspiciously. ‘Raymondo, are you actually trying to
help
?’

‘Yes, that’s the general plan.’

‘Wonders will never cease.’ Bryant fired his most probing stare at the unit chief. ‘What are you up to?’

‘I’m fed up with sitting in the other room stringing paper clips together while you two actually get to work things out,’ Land admitted.

‘If you really want to do something, then I think I have a job for you. Hang on.’ Bryant scrawled something on the contents page of
Neuter Your Own Pet
and ripped it out. ‘Oh, and you’ll need my list of questions. I hope you can read my writing.’ He was about to give Land the page, then withheld it. ‘Promise me one thing. That you won’t question what I’m asking you to do.’

‘OK, I promise,’ said Land, accepting the grubby page and folding it into his pocket, even as he wondered what he had just committed himself to.

Land looked at the address again and decided that there must have been some kind of mistake. After alighting from the tube at Finsbury Park, he had watched in horror as a man urinated against the window of a bread shop in broad daylight. Following Bryant’s directions, Land turned off the main road into some kind of fenced-off truck park where grass struggled up between broken cobbles, making his way between dog turds and iridescent puddles of oily water, towards a row of penumbral railway arches. He found himself standing beneath the one that had been marked on his page, and looked about for signs of life. From the shadows, a bedraggled rat watched him uncertainly.

Bryant had assured him that someone would appear, but all Land could see were petrol drums, leaking ten-litre cans of ghee, piles of wood, shattered yellow house bricks and several sawn-off green lamp-posts knotted together with baling wire, looking like outsized sticks of asparagus. He leaned against the remains of an old blue Nissan lying on its roof and waited. From somewhere nearby came the sound of a cat having a fit.

The door of the Nissan suddenly opened and caught Land on the backs of his legs. Out crawled what appeared to be a spherical ball of grey rags. A reek of ammonia filled the air. Land looked down in horror as the ball unravelled and stood upright, revealing something that could possibly be a turnip four hundred years past its sell-by date or a very small, very wide woman. ‘You’re late,’ she said. ‘Where is he?’

Land looked around, panicked. ‘Where is who?’

‘Arthur.’ The turnip-woman looked around to see what he was looking for. ‘He’s supposed to be with you.’

‘He sent me along by myself.’

‘That’s cheating.’

‘He’s a busy man.’

‘He’s my husband.’

Land was beginning to feel an uncomfortable prickling on the back of his neck that warned him he was out of his depth. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Esmeralda.’

‘What do you mean, he’s your husband?’

She spelled out the words slowly and loudly, baring blackened teeth. ‘Try. To. Follow. What. I’m. Saying. He. Is. My. Husband. I. Married. Him.’

This was all too much for Land, especially as it had now started to rain hard. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was just told to come here and— How could you be married to him?’

‘It was a citizen’s marriage.’ She rubbed one filthy finger over the other in a peculiarly witchlike gesture. ‘He doesn’t know we’re betrothed, obviously. I don’t want to make him over-emotionable. But it’s legally blinding. Not here, just in an obscure part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the matrimblial laws are very different. That’s where I met him, during the reign of the Emperor Franz Joseph. I was a Hapsburger. With onion rings. Of course, that was before I fell on hard times. Arthur had the most beautiful eyes, like goldfish bowls filled with Toilet Duck. And his teeth were like stars. They came out at night.’

She’s a raving loony
, realized Land.
Bryant’s done it just to wind me up.
He consulted the piece of paper with his detective’s questions. ‘Mr Bryant told me to ask you about fire mythology.’