Bryant & May - The Burning Man (31 page)

Bryant looked straight ahead, buried deep inside what he called his ‘summer scarf’, his usual implacable self. ‘Fine, thank you.’

‘You never told me the rest about your visit to Dr Gillespie.’

‘Didn’t I? I’ve forgotten all about him, actually. He needs to give up the oily rags. He’s on forty a day by my calculations. His lungs must be like the bottom of a sink trap.’

‘Well, what else happened?’

‘He showed me some ink blots and asked me what they meant. I told him they were a sign that he should switch to a Biro. Then he asked me to name a current television star.’

‘Who did you say?’

‘Bruce Forsyth. To my knowledge he hasn’t been off our screens for the last sixty years, so I couldn’t go wrong. We went back and forth like this for a while and I could tell I was having my usual effect on him.’

‘He was getting annoyed.’

‘The veins were standing out on his forehead. So I told him to cut to the chase and give me a prognosis.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Alzheimer’s. Trust me to get something German. I’m not nuts, which is a relief. It’s a physical disease, it just happens to affect the brain.’

‘Yes, I know what Alzheimer’s is.’

They stopped at the corner before Bryant’s street, beside a lamp-post that threw their shadows across the opposite wall like a shadow play.

‘I looked it up in a few of my books,’ Bryant said. ‘Quite fascinating, really. Protein plaque builds up in the structure of the old brain-box, leading to the death of a few cells. Big deal. One in fourteen over the age of sixty-five gets it. We all eat too many carbs. Some also get a shortage of important chemicals, so the nerves no longer transmit messages, and that makes the process much faster.’

‘Do you think that’s what’s happening? Are you scared?’

Bryant blew a raspberry. ‘So you end up a few clowns short of a circus. All feathers, not much chicken. I can get by.’

‘I’m not stupid, Arthur. I know you.’

Bryant turned his watery blue eyes to May. ‘The honest truth?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘It’s a little more complicated than that. It seems I’m developing an unusual form of cognitive impairment.’ Ever the showman, he waited for the effect of the announcement to sink in. ‘Gillespie thinks my blank moments might be due to mini-strokes, transient ischaemic attacks that are caused by blockages in the blood supply to the brain. It’s irreversible and developing fast. I’m definitely becoming confused. I may have been hiding some of it from you. I write it all down, you know, and I have every one of the symptoms. Loss of memory, mood changes, problems with communication and reasoning. I can’t remember where I’ve been, why I’ve gone somewhere, how to count out change in shops or how to work the TV remote. Although I’ve never been able to do that. I enter into fugue states and can’t remember anything afterwards. Oh, look at you now, all very serious. Are you sure you want to know about this? It’s extremely boring.’

‘Of course I want to know.’

‘Then can you kindly uncrease your face?’

‘What do you want to do?’

Bryant caught sight of himself in a window and adjusted his hat to a nattier setting. ‘I want to go on, of course. That’s what anybody with more than two brain cells wants to do, isn’t it?’

‘OK. What else do you want?’

Bryant did not need to think about it. ‘I want to get good value out of my free travel card, and the rest of my senior-citizen concessions. God knows I’ve paid my taxes long enough. I want to arrest people and make suspects squirm. I want to protect those who can’t look after themselves. I want to be a thorn in the side of the establishment, and a pain in the arse of the status quo. I want to finish
Tristram Shandy
and
Middlemarch
. I want to see if they’re able to milk any more films out of
The Lord of the Rings
. I want a mohawk. I want to train as a French pastry chef, a Spanish matador and an Italian opera singer. I want my clothes to wear out before I do. I want to see a decent production of
Measure for Measure
. I want the unconditional love of a beautiful woman and to sit with her on a beach in Thailand. I want my wife back. I want unfeasible cocktails. I want to get a tattoo and hang-glide from the Shard. I want to eat fusion food, whatever that is. I want to live long enough to see the look of smugness wiped off the faces of everyone who works for Google. I can give you a much fuller list if you’d like.’

‘No,’ said May, ‘that’s enough to be going on with.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘Yes, you can lend me five thousand pounds.’

‘I haven’t got five thousand pounds.’

‘Then don’t ask if there’s anything you can do.’

With that, the subject was closed. May waited until Bryant had turned the corner, then walked back to the tube.

Thursday night was not quite over and done with.

Janice Longbright pushed her chair away from the desk and rose, stretching her aching back. ‘How can you still be eating?’ she asked Jack Renfield, who was chewing a bright-orange chicken leg, taken from a pirate-brand KFC box.

‘I need the carbs,’ replied Jack. ‘I’m a big bloke, I burn off a lot. Ask Colin.’

‘Virginia Fried Chicken? What, they just picked the next state over for the name? Chuck us a piece.’

Renfield flipped her a chunk of breast. ‘How are you getting on?’

‘Frank Leach ran an online company with offices in Whitechapel. Diamond of the East Financial Services. Sound dodgy enough?’

‘Diamond of the East? Leach was lending money to the Bangladeshi community?’

‘Looks like it. High interest rates, high-risk clients. Right on Whitechapel Road. The screen-cap makes it look like a dump. Leach’s the owner, with a couple of flunkeys doing the churn and burn. His site leads to two other businesses, another moneylending dealership with hilarious interest rates and a pawnbroker service.’

‘So Hall, De Vere and Leach were all involved in finance.’

‘At different levels, yes,’ Longbright agreed.

‘Diamond of the East. Doesn’t sound like much of a target for an anarchist. I’d have thought there were better targets out there. Why not go after employees of the big five banks?’

‘You’re right, it doesn’t make sense.’ She spat a piece of bone into a tissue. ‘Maybe the victims really are being picked at random.’

‘Not according to the Old Man. You’re looking very fetching tonight, by the way.’

‘Yes?’ Longbright looked down at herself. ‘I’m not sure what I’d fetch. I mean, I agree about the anarchist angle and I can see why Arthur wants to pursue it. But I’ve been through the Disobey membership lists, and these people … some have genuine grievances, some are troublemakers, some are just weird outsiders. Add communist and fascist infiltrators, police informers and special-interest groups drafted in from other EU countries: it’s an incendiary mix. Darren Link’s lads keep finding so-called protestors employed to shoot chunks of footage from the front line so that marketing firms can sell them on as viral GIFs to ad agencies; how pathetic is that?’ She set aside some chicken gristle and wiped her hands. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever had a case like this.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We’re meant to talk about opportunity, means, motive, yes? And in cases of premeditated murder it’s the last one that dominates. But this is murder as opportunism. I ask myself: Would he have acted if there hadn’t been a riot? You commit a crime and drop into the raging mob outside your door. Where’s the best place for an outsider to hide?’

‘Inside a much bigger group of outsiders,’ answered Arthur Bryant. He was leaning against the door jamb, and looked exhausted.

Longbright sat up in surprise. ‘Hey, we thought you’d gone home.’

‘John saw me back but somehow I got lost on the final stretch. I can’t seem to remember where home is.’ He shuffled in and took off his hat. ‘I know it’s in Bloomsbury somewhere. The streets turned themselves around when I wasn’t looking.’ His words tore at Longbright’s heart. He pulled ineffectually at his scarf and coat until she came over to disentangle him. ‘I don’t know Alma’s number, otherwise I would have called her. And anyway, I’m not sure where my phone is. But somehow I remembered the unit. I thought, if I just came back here and sat for a while—’

‘Of course,’ said Longbright, concerned. ‘Why don’t you put your feet up? There’s some fresh tea in the pot. Do you want me to call John?’

‘No, it was bad enough that I made him walk me most of the way home.’

‘I’ll get you a cab when you’re ready,’ said Longbright, pouring mugs of tea.

‘The Rookery,’ said Bryant, looking back at her with gratitude. ‘Henry Mayhew. One sugar.’

Renfield caught Janice’s eye. ‘Sorry, Mr B.?’

‘Mayhew catalogued the lives of those who survived outside of London society.’ Bryant’s eyes had a faraway look. ‘The Rookery was in St Giles, an ancient Plantagenet village that started at the corner of Tottenham Court Road, going down to Seven Dials and Covent Garden. It must have been quite nice once, with cottages and garden plots and an old hospital. Then the impoverished French came in, bringing violence in their wake. And pubs like the Bowl and the Angel acted as halfway houses – you know, halfway to execution, where prisoners were given a free final pint of beer.’

Longbright and Renfield sat back and listened. Bryant seemed quite normal when he was able to lose himself in London’s history.

‘The Angel’s still there, of course. Not a bad boozer. And Seven Dials – well, you know how that came about. There were seven roads that made a star, and at their centre sat a single white stone pillar with just six clock faces on top of it, because two of the roads were angled into one. It was torn down when they searched for the buried treasure underneath—’

‘Who searched?’ asked Janice, sipping her tea. Bryant continued without seeming to hear her.

‘There’s a new pillar there now, of course. But the Rookery – Mayhew wrote about it, a tangle of narrow streets where all of the outsiders lived. Wretched houses with broken windows patched with rags and paper. Every room let out to several families. A honeycomb of courts and blind alleys, naked children playing in street sewage.’ He raised his palms, imagining the scene, his eyes bright. ‘A policeman enters and the call goes up across the rooftops, travelling faster than any officer can walk, so that escaped prisoners, thieves and deserters have time to get out.’

He lowered his hands, then cupped them around the hot mug and took a sip. The slogan on the mug read ‘Keep Calm and Lock Someone Up’. ‘We have traditions about dealing with outsiders that survive to the present day. We lump them all together, the ones who don’t fit in. We don’t harm them, we’re too civilized for that, but we put them where we can keep an eye on them. First they were kept in slums, then on run-down council estates. Then there was Margaret Thatcher’s plan to abandon parts of the north and cut off all support for Liverpool. “Managed decline”, she called it. We do the same thing now. Oh, we don’t keep the dispossessed in a physical place any more; they’re in virtual space where they can be monitored electronically. So the State still looks … not liberal, exactly, but at least as if it’s full of good old-fashioned common sense. While of course the exact opposite is true. London is corrupted. It always has been, always will be. Good cup of cha, this.’

Longbright sat back and studied her boss. His faculties seemed perfect when it came to recalling the events of the distant past, but he couldn’t remember where he lived. ‘Do you think we should look somewhere else, then? And not bother with the protest groups?’

Bryant seemed diminished once more. ‘I didn’t say that. He’s hiding among them, a modern-day rook, and we have no way of luring him out. No description, no hint of identity, no idea of a motive beyond anger and hatred. But I think it’s someone we’ve met.’

‘Why do you say that?’ Renfield asked.

‘Because he’s working to a very specific master plan. One death a day for the period between Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night, from mischief to full-blown insurrection. Any strategist will tell you that when you plan a war campaign you first make sure you know your enemy.’

‘Do you have any ideas?’ asked Longbright.

‘I do, as it happens, but there’s a problem,’ Bryant admitted. ‘I’m going to have to pull the Hamlet Tactic.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Someone will die tomorrow, and the day after that, and we can’t stop it. Six deaths, in all probability – then he’ll vanish forever, leaving behind chaos and despair. The protestors have yoked themselves to a cause that can’t be resolved. There’s no available option they can choose. In its present form capitalism doesn’t work – well, we can all see that. But it’s not a shirt that no longer fits. You can’t simply replace it with another off-the-peg design. There will be six visible victims and thousands of invisible ones. You understand, don’t you?’

‘When you put it like that, yes,’ Renfield admitted.

‘Therefore – the Hamlet Tactic. The PCU is an accountable body, but I need to take steps that the CoL would never approve of. So I’m going to use my “cognitive impairment” to cover my actions. I may misdirect others, or lie, or simply vanish for short periods. It means that while I’m doing this, none of you can help me.’