Bryant & May - The Burning Man (43 page)

‘This bonfire, is it already built?’ asked Bryant.

‘Looks like it. There’s live coverage on Sky News. The chief officer of the City of London Special Constabulary is on TV right now praising his negotiators for reaching an agreement.’

‘When is it due to be lit?’

‘In about an hour and three-quarters,’ said Land.

Bryant put a finger in one ear. ‘We’ll never make it in time. You’ll have to get over there by yourselves.’

‘Tell him there’s no point in rushing,’ DuCaine told Land, concerned about Bryant’s health. ‘Even if they make it to Victoria, they won’t be able to get much further. There are no District and Circle or Central lines running into the Square Mile, and the traffic barriers are all up.’

‘We’re on our way,’ said Land. ‘Just get back here as quickly as possible.’

May looked up and saw thousands of people coming towards them in a solid wall. ‘Damn, they’ve opened the gates to let the public in. We’ll be stuck here for hours if we get caught up in that.’

‘The others will have to fend for themselves. You and I have to find a fast train back.’ The field was hemmed by a deep water-filled ditch that kept everyone penned. The detectives skirted the edge of the crowd but found their route cut off by the trough.

Bryant was starting to slow down. ‘You go ahead, John,’ he wheezed, clearly in difficulty. ‘I’ll catch you up later.’

‘No, I’ll wait for you. We do this together. We’ve half an hour until the next train.’ He held out his hand.

As they reached the smoke-filled high street once more, May waited for Bryant to catch his breath and they set off towards the station.

Back in London, Raymond Land ended his call to Bryant and turned to DuCaine. ‘You and I will have to face Darren Link,’ he said. ‘He’s probably over at the bank right now, getting ready for his final push.’

‘No,’ said Link, eyeing them from the doorway. ‘I’m here. And neither of you are going anywhere.’

Banbury and Renfield climbed inside, under and on top of the gas board van, but found nothing. The rear section was full of empty cardboard boxes and tools. There was no sign that anyone had used it to transport a body.

‘If this is the vehicle, it’s been cleaned out,’ said Banbury. ‘I could have sworn it was the same van. What do we do now?’

‘Give Colin a hand,’ Renfield said. ‘He looks like he’s stuck.’

Together they helped the spatially challenged DC down from his perch on the statue, just as Meera joined them. ‘John and Mr Bryant have gone to try to catch the fast train back,’ she said. ‘Where’s Janice?’

They looked about, but Longbright was nowhere to be found. ‘I thought she was with you,’ said Banbury. ‘When did you last see her?’

‘About twenty minutes ago,’ Meera replied. They heard the crowds before they saw them, an ants’ nest of bodies swarming into the field as the marshals opened the gates. ‘We’ll never be able to find her in amongst this lot. Anybody got a signal?’

They all checked their phones. ‘The network’s overloaded,’ said Dan. ‘There must be fifty thousand people trying to call each other around here.’

‘Right, two teams,’ decided Renfield. ‘Colin and I will take the bonfires, you two get over to the pyrotechnic station and find out if anyone there has seen her.’
If anything happens to her
, Renfield thought,
I’ll never forgive myself.

As he and Colin pushed their way across the treacherously dark field, a blast of warmth pulsed through the air.

The first of the great bonfires had been lit.

Longbright felt something sharp digging into her shoulder blades. She tried to pull herself upright, but was caught on a branch. The noise of the crowd was punctuated by jolting blasts, the shrieks of rockets, the pockety-pop of crackers, the crackle of Roman candles. At first she could see nothing. As her eyes adjusted, she saw her night terrors coalesce.

A cage of branches and sticks, planks, chair legs, floorboards and bric-a-brac, tied in place with rolls of baling wire. In the vertical gaps between the wooden slats that surrounded her she glimpsed distant figures, a treeline, a passing train, fires.

Her wrists were tied with rusty wire around the wooden stave at her back. She tried to understand what had happened. Her head was pounding. She could taste something metallic and medicinal at the back of her throat, and knew at once that she had been drugged with a liquid poured into a rag and closed over her nostrils and mouth. She had felt him pressing against her and thought of Dexter Cornell, someone with powerful upper body strength. She had knocked plenty of big men flat in her time, but this one had surprised her, catching her off-balance in the mud.

I’m inside my nightmare
, she thought.
How?
One realization followed another.
He saw us arrive. We played right into his hands.
She pulled at the stave but it was central to the pyre and would not move a centimetre. The wire was cutting into her wrists. Her feet were unbound, so she kicked out as hard as she could. That was when she discovered that he had removed her shoes. The wood at her feet was splintered and sharp. She shouted, but the great cone of wood deadened her cries.

She tried to fight her fear and think logically. She was between fifteen and twenty feet off the ground. When the pyre was lit, the interior space would create an updraught that would allow it to burn fast, but the flames would have to start at the outer edge. She needed it to catch the central pole that held her, so that she could break it at the base. It would mean holding her breath and saving her strength until the very last moment. She was strong. She could see the weakest parts of the bonfire’s construction. If she kept her wits about her, she might just be able to tear herself free and escape.

But then she heard a roar go up from the crowd, and glimpsed several men moving in around the pyre with lit torches, and smelled petrol, and heard the soft explosion of flame underneath her, and felt its warmth increasing by the second, and realized they were lighting it from every side at once.

For God’s sake
, she thought,
somebody find me fast.

‘We don’t even know if she’s inside one of the bonfires,’ said Banbury. ‘She could have nipped off for a pee.’

‘She was right with us; she would never have gone without saying something,’ Meera disagreed. ‘She told me she’d been having dreams about being stuck inside one of those things.’

‘What, we’re going to start basing searches on people’s dreams now, are we?’

Meera glared at him. ‘Have you got any better ideas about where she might be?’

They caught one of the senior marshals as he was heading towards a bonfire with his team. ‘We need you to stop the fires from being lit,’ Dan told him. ‘Are you in contact with each other?’

‘Why, what’s the problem? Have you seen how many people we’ve got out there waiting to see some papists go up in smoke?’ The marshal thought they were joking.

‘They’re going to get more than they bargained for if you don’t call the fires off,’ Meera snarled. ‘One of our officers may be inside one of your statues.’

‘This is a joke, right? Who sent you over?’

‘You’ll have the chance to think about whether it was a joke in a cell if you don’t halt them all right now,’ said Banbury.

The marshal relayed the message, but all Meera could hear was static. ‘Atmospheric conditions,’ he said apologetically. ‘Two of them are already lit.’ He pointed to the glowing pyres across the field.

‘Then we’ll need your marshals to check every fire as fast as they can,’ Banbury yelled. They ran towards the nearest crowd of yellow-jackets and began to round them up.

Bimsley and Renfield tore at the first of the burning stacks and tried to see inside. ‘Janice!’ Renfield shouted, but there was no answer. ‘She could already be suffering from smoke inhalation,’ he warned, tearing at the staves.

‘She’s not in that one, Jack, I can see right through it from here,’ Colin shouted. ‘The furthest one has to be nearly a quarter of a mile away. We’ll never get to it in time.’

‘Then I hope to God Meera and Dan are nearer,’ yelled Renfield as they ran over the treacherous furrows towards the next flame-engulfed effigy.

One side of the second bonfire was trailing intestines of choking smoke from the old varnished tables and chairs that had been axed and piled on to it. The air was filled with dancing red devils that stuck to their jackets and melted holes in the neoprene of their sleeves. Renfield’s eyes were watering so badly that he could barely see. Marshals who had yet to be warned about the search were shouting at him, trying to force him back from the fire’s heat radius.

He knew it was too late to break into this one; the flames were roaring within its conical updraught, tornado-whirling, sucking crimson fire into the sky. He threw his arm in the direction of the next bonfire, the largest of the six. At its peak the governor of the Bank of England sat on a golden throne.

Bimsley saw Renfield’s signal and veered off towards the pyre, but the churned-up field made it impossible to run. The bonfires had been spaced far apart so that there was no danger of the wind carrying sparks from one to the other before the marshals were ready to ignite them. The muddy ditches made the going hard, and they did not reach the central bonfire until it was just being lit.

Renfield tried to push the marshals away but one of them took a swing at him. Bad idea; Colin came forward and floored him with one well-placed punch. Throwing himself at the unlit side of the stack, Colin started to scramble up it, but the wood kept sliding down beneath his boots.

Renfield was frantically climbing too, clambering over the rough-hewn ladders of broken furniture with surprising agility. He shone his torch through the staves, but could see nothing.

All he could do was continue to climb, but now the flames were spreading out below him, and he could feel the heat on his legs. He knew that a point would come when he would have to abandon his search or risk being trapped on the pyre himself.

As he pressed his face to the slats, he saw something dark moving inside. ‘Janice!’ he shouted. This time he received a faint response. The detective sergeant’s soot-smeared face came into view. ‘My God, hang in there.’ He shouted down to the marshals: ‘Don’t just stand there! She’s inside!’

Now the fire was spreading swiftly around the circumference of the pyre, igniting the petrol-soaked planks below him, and a deafening roar filled his ears. Renfield could feel his hair singeing as he clawed at the wooden structure, which remained solid and immovable.

By the time Bryant and May had managed to get across town from Victoria Station to Holborn, the only tube station still open, the protest rally was reaching its climax at the Bank of England. The bonfire was already ablaze, washing the bank’s double columns with bloodstained light.

High Holborn was impassable. Most of the street lights had been smashed. The mob was torch-lit and orderly, and there was no way of passing through it. A rhythm of drums, trumpets and reed pipes echoed from the canyon of buildings. The centuries had rolled back to reveal the city at an earlier time. Tracksuits had replaced tunics, but the stoic faces had barely changed.

‘Can you feel it?’ asked Bryant. ‘They know that by the end of the night they’ll be in charge. What will happen after that?’

Some running youths slammed into Bryant, lifting him off his feet and spinning him around. May was just able to grab him before he hit the pavement. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘it’s not safe for you here.’

The detectives were owed a stroke of luck, and now one finally came. May spotted an ARV being loaded by an old friend from Snow Hill nick. He ran over and arranged for them to get a lift inside the perimeter.

‘We’re too late to do anything,’ May said as the ARV pulled up behind a wall of burning debris in Queen Victoria Street. ‘We’ll never get across the crowds.’

The protestors were hemmed in by makeshift barriers, some of which had been shoved aside and stood across the road like rows of angry teeth. Ahead was a vast ocean of chalk-white Guy Fawkes masks, moving with the instinctive patterns of shoaling fish. Rain swept over the blank-featured mob in great grey drifts. Many of the protestors were carrying sputtering flambeaux in an urban version of the anti-papist parades in Lewes. The banners which read ‘NO MORE GANGSTER BANKERS’ and ‘INSIDERS OUT’ had been professionally printed, but now they had been joined by a new ubiquitous slogan: ‘TAKE BACK LONDON’.

Police and newsroom helicopters droned overhead, spotlighting the rally for their cameras. Bryant saw a hundred thousand moving bodies outlined against a painterly frieze of fire. The march was no longer the province of anarchists. There were whole families here, children and pensioners. Some had even brought baby buggies. And yet it felt that at any instant the mood might suddenly change, and the streets would run with blood.

In front of the bank’s neoclassical façade the mood was uglier. Here rose a great funnel of fire, its flames fleeing up into the sulphurous furnace of the night. Explosions of glass occurred with metronomic precision; the few shop windows that had not been boarded up were being kicked in. Indistinct instructions were being barked through megaphones, adding to the sense of Orwellian oppression.