Bryant & May - The Burning Man (28 page)

‘But they’re doing that banker, the tar-and-feather guy who suffocated.’ Miles and Janet had been sitting on that story for twenty-four hours at the request of the Fraud Squad and the effort was killing them. ‘Which has got to mean—’

‘Sometimes I look at you and can actually see your brain working,’ said Ramsey. ‘They’re connecting the deaths.’ She knew that if the PCU were involved in cases with locations outside City of London jurisdiction it was because they’d found a causal link. She’d been crossing swords with Bryant and May’s unit for the past twelve years, and knew how they operated.

‘What do you want to do?’ asked Miles.

‘Is the piece on Hall still ready to go?’

‘Yeah, it’s been filed and subbed.’

Ramsey thought through the options.
Hard News
had a killer story on the UK’s new saint of IT. De Vere was thought to be untouchable, a saviour of British industry right up there with Richard Branson and James Dyson. He had yet to be knighted, but barring any unforeseen bad press it was only a matter of time.

Well,
Hard News
had the bad press in hand. It turned out that De Vere wasn’t quite as gilt-edged as everyone supposed. His pregnant wife was having an affair and his company was about to file for bankruptcy, leaving a string of smashed charities in its wake. They had been building their case against him for the past few days, knowing that an early release might swing public opinion against them, but now it appeared that De Vere had been murdered and the information was being withheld.

‘Who sent you that?’ Miles asked as he turned over the unmarked brown packet.

‘It’ll take you thirty seconds to verify,’ replied Ramsey. ‘I can smell the civil service all over this. Go with “an anonymous source” for now.’

As Miles ran an advance-guard warning that a new front page was going in, Ramsey called her old frenemy John May for a confirm-or-deny. It was possible that the photographs had been sent to other nationals, but if the sender was using an old-school delivery system, then presumably the Web press didn’t have it as their offices were rarely central – and no one else had the secondary story about De Vere’s fall from grace.

She studied the envelope, knowing that what she had on her desk was the perfect lead for their new online service. Judging by the photographs, which revealed the damage to De Vere’s face in grisly detail, the killer was someone who was used to getting his hands dirty. The homeless boy burned, Hall tarred and feathered, De Vere branded: it looked like one of the protestors was taking direct action. And there it was, her link to Cornell. Resentment, revenge, a call to arms: it was like
Les Misérables
, and it could syndicate worldwide.

‘John,’ she said as her call was answered, ‘I’ve got the story. Before I run with it, we need to talk.’

Leicester Square had always been slightly disreputable, from the days of the Alhambra Theatre, where the leading ladies were not those on the stage but the ones plying their trade in the balcony, to the private beer parlours that could be found above, below and behind the square’s more salubrious buildings.

After years of gentrification, sanitization and pedestrianization only a few remnants of the square’s raffish past were still on their original sites. The Cork & Bottle wine bar was a seventies time warp, the Talk of the Town had reopened as a Chinese casino, and a couple of small walk-up private members’ bars struggled on with watered gin and ageing clientele.

In Leicester Place, just a few paces from the neon-lit square, nothing much had changed in decades. Joan Collins was currently appearing in its underground theatre, and the luxuriously shabby Prince Charles Cinema was still running a repertory programme that was likely to pair
The Wizard of Oz
with
Flesh for Frankenstein
. It was as if the last forty years had never happened.

The club was called Insurrection, and had once been part of the undercroft of the Église Notre Dame de France, a beaux arts church built on the old war-damaged site of an older minster, constructed in turn to replace the Panorama, which had opened in 1793 to display a circular view of all London. The club had returned the site to its sensation-seeking root, and was hung about with inverted golden crosses, apocalyptical vistas and images of uprisings.

‘Blimey, how did he get over there?’ asked DS Jack Renfield. ‘And why hasn’t he got any trousers on?’ The crimson-painted auditorium smelled of fireworks. It had been evacuated but not made safe, so the PCU staff had been warned that they were there under their own cognisance.

The room had been hosed down. One of the bar alcoves was a smouldering, blackened ruin, but the rest of the place was untouched apart from a single patch of soot on the ceiling that might have already been there. The body had been blasted across the recess and lay twisted in an impossible position, one grubby trainer slightly off the ground. The EMTs had been first on the scene and had ascertained that the blast’s sole victim was dead, but on instructions from the PCU they had left the corpse
in situ
. The alcove’s central unit had been neatly eviscerated, leaving the ones on either side completely undamaged.

‘A detonation will do that.’ Dan Banbury stepped over a puddle. ‘During the Blitz, people were blown out of bathtubs without sustaining injury, and their mantelpiece ornaments ended up a quarter of a mile away. You never know what you’re going to get.’

Renfield leaned forward and squinted, trying to see more clearly through the still-thick air. ‘He looks like he’s in one piece, even though his head’s not the right way round. What’s that horrible smell?’

‘I think his bowels were caught by surprise.’

‘Nice.’ Renfield wrinkled his broad nose. ‘Pity he didn’t live. It would have been interesting seeing him use a chair now, what with his legs bending the wrong way.’

‘Severed spinal cord, I imagine,’ said Banbury. ‘Looks like the blast threw him forward and turned him over, twisting his back.’

‘No one else injured?’

‘Apparently not. It was a very neat job. I’m interested in the seat.’

Shards of metal were embedded in the rear wall with pieces of cream foam rubber hanging from them, like some kind of avant-garde Christmas decoration. Banbury had slipped on his shoe covers and padded over to the twisted remains of the banquette.

The first thing he found when he looked under it was the base of a slender tin box, blackened and warped by the explosion. When he picked out several fragments of a plastic cover, followed by the spring from a tiny clockwork motor, he knew exactly how the blast had occurred. An unstable primary explosive and a primitive ignition system, in this case a mechanical joy buzzer, placed inside a container on a bed of granules, probably nitrocellulose or fulminate of mercury. Pressing down on the lid in the right spot would have depressed the button on the buzzer, which vibrated in the unstable chemical compound, and because the whole thing was tightly encased it packed a hell of a wallop. It was something a really perverse child could have knocked together in less than ten minutes, although the trickiest part would have been getting it into the seat.

He headed back to the other side of the cordons and went upstairs to the entry booth, followed by Renfield.

‘Was he alone in the place?’ he asked the shocked Goth cashier whose lacquered upright hair made her look even more surprised.

‘He was the first one in,’ she managed. ‘We’d been shut for cleaning. We had a big stag party in here last night and the lavs were bunged up with vomit.’

‘I need details of your clean-up crew,’ said Banbury. ‘Names and contacts of everyone who was allowed inside.’

‘I don’t think we can get that,’ protested the cashier. ‘Most of them can’t speak English. They come and go. It’s a dive bar, not the Bank of England.’

‘Did you see anything odd going on last night?’ Banbury persisted.

‘You mean odder than forty blokes in grass skirts and Viking helmets? I only looked in once, but no, not really.’

‘So someone was able to cut open one of the seats without being noticed.’

‘Most of the seats have been repaired dozens of times.’ She tapped the sign above her head. ‘It’s called Insurrection. Our customers get boisterous.’

‘Do you have credit-card receipts for the entry system?’ asked Renfield.

‘It’s cash only, mostly students.’

‘Why did he take that seat?’

‘It’s where he always sits,’ she explained. ‘He’s the last out and the first in.’

‘So you know who he is.’

‘Yeah. His name’s Frank Leach.’

‘What else do you know about him?’

From the look on the cashier’s face, you would have thought someone combusted in the club every night. ‘Piss artist,’ she said. ‘Downs a skinful, makes a nuisance of himself with the bar staff, wobbles off to any other place that’ll take him.’ She indicated the stairs to the street.

A few minutes later, with the victim’s identity confirmed and the names of the cleaning crew placed on request, Renfield left Banbury sifting through bits of burned rubber and metal, and headed back to report to Bryant and May.

Raymond Land was the last to arrive in the unit’s common room. Everyone was in their usual places; in that respect they were like schoolchildren, with the troublemakers (Arthur Bryant and Meera Mangeshkar) at the back and the ones with the smart answers (in this case, Dan Banbury and Jack Renfield) at the front.

‘I have a lot of coloured chalks here,’ said Land, ‘and my pointing stick and Bryant’s blackboard. We’re not leaving this room until it’s all scribbled over.’

Colin tried to stifle a laugh and failed. Albert Camus had once said that there was nothing more despicable than respect based on fear, but Land had the opposite problem. His team failed to respect him precisely because he gave them nothing to be afraid of.

‘Four deaths,’ he said, holding up the correct number of fingers in an effort to drive the point home. ‘And no single line of inquiry providing us with a decent lead. We’ve got nothing. It’s like he doesn’t exist. What have you lot got to say for yourselves?’

Bryant raised his hand.

‘Not you, someone else,’ snapped Land, exasperated. ‘And who was the bloke who got his trousers blown off in the club?’

‘Frank Leach, online loan shark,’ Longbright told the room. ‘We’re trying to find out about that. No friends, no enemies to speak of, but like De Vere, Leach was heavily linked to social-networking sites. There are a lot of threads to sort through. It’s going to take a while.’

Land waved his hand at Dan and Jack. ‘You two, you were there. Are you sure this … incident is connected?’

‘I think you should let Mr Bryant speak,’ said Renfield loyally.

‘There’s no question in my mind at all,’ said Bryant, shifting his gobstopper. ‘There are the repeated motifs, for a start. The use of fire and cheap low-tech equipment. Then there are the masks. Freddie Weeks was covered with cardboard, Glen Hall’s face was smothered with tar, Jonathan De Vere had a mask hammered on to his face, and this chap, Leach, was sitting in this alcove.’ He held up a photograph that showed a curving red wall painted with naked men and women wearing fox masks. ‘It seems obvious to me that the killer is now referencing the masks of the protest movement.’

‘I’m interested in forensic evidence, Mr Bryant, not your whimsical conjectures,’ said Land.

‘That’s not so easy,’ said Banbury. ‘The incendiary element has prevented us from getting much from the victims, so I’ve been looking at the secondary sites, the floor above the shop where Hall was killed, De Vere’s kitchen and the club auditorium.’

‘Please spare me threads and fibres,’ Land complained. ‘How the hell did anyone manage to
plant
a
bomb
in a
bloody bar seat
?’

‘The cleaning team,’ suggested May. ‘It seems likely one of them was bogus. They’re hired piecemeal and given cash by a dodgy company paying below minimum wage, so they’re going to be tricky to track down. There’s something else you should know: Janet Ramsey was sent a photographic record of the case lifted from our files, together with a list of names. Someone wanted her to know that the deaths were connected, and that we were in charge of the case.’