Bryant & May - The Burning Man (5 page)

A brilliantined young man in a dinner jacket entered stage right and was astounded to find his place taken by this wizened interloper. However, in keeping with the maxim that The Show Must Go On, he persevered with his cue.

‘Don’t be so awfully cross with me, Lavinia. You know how you hate wrinkles so. When I saw you outside the casino, standing there in the moonlight, I simply couldn’t help myself. You really are the most frightfully lovely creature, you know.’ He tried to close in on his mark beside the actress but the tramp was in his way, blinking out at the audience like a befuddled tortoise.

‘What the hell is he doing out there?’ asked the stage manager in a panicked whisper.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the unnerved ASM. ‘I tried to get him off before the curtain went up.’

‘Oh, Roger, if only you hadn’t been such a frightful cad,’ trilled Lavinia. ‘Now there’ll always be something utterly ghastly between us.’ She eyed the tramp disdainfully as the audience collapsed in laughter and the curtain came down.

‘I wasn’t going to leave until I had an answer,’ Arthur Bryant insisted stubbornly, pulling his coat free of the ASM’s hands.

‘What are you talking about?’ the stage manager asked. ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘I’m a police officer.’ Arthur Bryant handed over what he hoped was his PCU calling card and not an ad for a shoe shop. ‘I’ve been following your stagehand.’ He pointed to a ferret-faced young man seated in the corner of the flies, attached to an iron post with a plastic cable tag. ‘I tailed him all the way from Piccadilly Circus because of these.’ Digging deep into his tweed overcoat he produced two fistfuls of wallets. ‘He was dipping tourists. I saw him duck in to the stage door and tried to stop him, but he ran up the steps into the dark.’

‘Weren’t me, Granddad,’ grunted the tethered felon.

Bryant regarded his captive. ‘And they say the art of conversation is dead. Well, I’ll be on my way, then.’

‘Now look here,’ said the stage manager, ‘you can’t just go swanning off like that after ruining our leading lady’s opening speech—’

‘I’m not swanning off,’ Bryant pointed out as he reknotted his scarf. ‘I’m exiting stage left.’

‘Is that all you can say?’ asked the stage manager, aghast.

‘Well, your leading lady could try to sound her aitches,’ said Bryant, squinting back at the stage. ‘It’s Noël Coward. She’s meant to be from Westminster, not Wapping. Someone will be along to pick up Mr Chatterbox here shortly. Cheerio.’

At the unit, Arthur Bryant had always been affectionately known as ‘the Old Man’, even though his partner John May was just three years his junior. Set beside each other, the pair might have been born two decades apart. Bryant had lost his hair in his thirties, and his short, stocky frame seemed to have been predesigned for senior status. He had never lifted anything heavier than a book, and had regarded a flight of stairs as a challenge since his mid-forties. When he spoke it was because his peculiar passions required him to impart information, as he was insensible to the etiquette of small talk. He was a mobile time capsule, insulated from the world by private obsessions. Paradoxically, it was one of the things that made him so valuable to the PCU. In a city that was rapidly forgetting the past, he was an inconvenient reminder of all that had gone before.

Arthur Bryant
remembered
.

‘I don’t know where to begin,’ said John May, shaking his head. ‘Even after all these years, your every action remains a mystery to me. You’re a detective, you’re not meant to behave like some teenaged PC fresh out of Hendon. And why you had to follow him into a theatre of all places—’

‘He was a junkie doing some speed-acquisition of tourists’ wallets, John. I took one look at him and knew he would test positive for stupidity.’ Bryant threw himself down into his old leather armchair. ‘Of course I could have alerted a beat copper, but there was less chance of finding one in the area than locating the Nécessaire egg.’

‘The what?’

Bryant waved a hand vaguely. ‘Oh, one of the eight Fabergé eggs that vanished from the vaults of the Kremlin Armoury. Anyway, I saved some poor spotty rookie from two days of interviews and form-filling. And besides, I’d heard good things about that particular theatrical production. Wrongly, as it turned out.’

‘So you cuffed him, then thought you’d have a nose around and got caught by the curtain-up.’ May checked his desk and carefully cornered off the few sheets of A4 that he found there. On Bryant’s side stood a Himalayan range of screwed-up paper. ‘Meanwhile, they’re still rioting on our patch, all over the Square Mile, are you even aware of that?’

‘Of course I’m aware, but there’s nothing I can do about it, is there?’

‘On that point I’m afraid you’re right,’ May agreed. ‘Early this morning Raymond was called to a bank in the City by a superintendent called Darren Link. Ring any bells?’

‘Oh, yes, ex-Whitechapel mob, fancies himself a real hard nut. To paraphrase J. B. Priestley, what he doesn’t know about policing isn’t worth knowing, but what he
does
know isn’t worth knowing either, because of the bad effect it’s had on him. We all used to call him “Missing” Link. He didn’t like that much. You know how coppers sniff out weaknesses and play on them. After we went a bit too far with the teasing, he set fire to two of our vehicles in the Whitechapel car pool and disappeared. He surfaced a few weeks later in West End Central, transferred to vice.’

‘Not someone to mess with, then.’

‘Oh, it’s the ones you can’t get a handle on who are trouble,’ said Bryant, scratching his pug nose as he pondered the matter. ‘I can see through Darren Link. He’s an evangelist. That’s why he joined the force: to clean up the streets. He can’t, of course – nobody can truly control people, they’re too wilful, and it drives him crazy. I suppose he’s not a bad bloke, really. If he called Raymond, it means he can’t spare his own men for a clean-up job.’

‘It’s exactly that, I’m afraid. Raymond wasn’t going to tell us but I called him on it. There’s a body.’

‘Oh?’ Bryant’s furry little ears perked up. Death was his stimulant of choice.

‘A homeless guy was asleep on the steps of one of the banks the protestors attacked.’

‘That hasn’t made the news, has it?’

‘No. I was wondering whose decision it was to keep it out of the press. The BBC is trying hard not to demonize the protestors but I’m betting they weren’t given the story.’

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ said Bryant thoughtfully. ‘There are usually so many reporters on the ground that you’d think someone would have picked it up. I smell a rat.’

‘You don’t smell anything,’ warned May, sitting up, ‘because it’s got nothing to do with you. Or with me, for that matter. Dan just has to sign off on the crime scene.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Bryant with suspicious nonchalance. ‘That means he’ll ask Giles to ID the cause of death, doesn’t it?’

‘Very possibly.’

‘Hm. I might just pop along and take a look.’

‘No, you won’t. Raymond will go bananas if you do.’

‘Yes, but I have to pass the mortuary later, anyway.’

‘You don’t. It’s not on your way home. Why can’t you just go to the pub like normal people?’

‘I could just stick my head around the door …’

‘You know, it wouldn’t hurt to let someone else take the credit,’ said May tactfully. ‘Leave them alone for a while and let’s see what they come up with.’

Bryant enjoyed handling cases that required a bit of showmanship. Identifying the corpse of a rough sleeper accidentally caught in the crossfire between capitalists and rioters was the sort of chore that usually fell to Met officers, and in all likelihood it would never be fully cleared up; wherever there was conflict there would always be innocent victims.

But he thought he might look in anyway. And if he was going, it seemed silly to wait until the end of the day, when Giles had finished and was about to leave, so why not go right now?

Bryant headed around the corner to Camley Street, past St Pancras Old Church, one of the most ancient sites of Christian worship in England, to the bizarre Victorian gingerbread house that sat beside it. The squat ivy-covered building was home to the Camley Street Coroner’s Office, and as Bryant stumped up the winding path to the front door, he caught a glimpse of Rosa Lysandrou’s pale face peering out of a lead-light window at him.

‘Thank goodness that was you,’ said Bryant cheerfully as the housekeeper opened the door. ‘For a horrible moment I thought it was Miss Jessel from
The Turn of the Screw
.’

‘I don’t know what that means,’ said Rosa flatly, ‘but I suppose you are being rude as usual.’ She stood aside to allow him entrance.

Bryant tentatively extended his walking stick into the hall as if checking for landmines. ‘It’s a book. And a film. And an opera. Do you enjoy reading?’

‘I enjoyed
Fifty Shades of Grey
.’

Bryant quailed at the thought. ‘That’s not really reading, is it? More like staring at an assortment of words.’

‘It is very popular.’

‘So is taking photographs of your dinner for Facebook, but that doesn’t mean it adds to the total sum of human knowledge.’

‘You can’t see him,’ Rosa pointed out. ‘He knows you’re not supposed to be here.’

‘Who said I came to see him?’ Bryant’s aqueous-blue eyes were as innocent as a kitten’s. ‘I find myself inexplicably drawn to you. Every time I imagine you in that shapeless black whatever-it-is you’re wearing I get quite—’

‘Mr Bryant, will you please stop antagonizing my assistant?’ said Giles Kershaw, striding into the hall. Out of his lab coat and tucked into faded jeans, a crisp white shirt and a black waistcoat, he looked like a waiter for a once-fashionable restaurant rather than the guardian of the borough’s main mortuary.

‘We were just chatting about literature.’ Bryant produced a battered but extravagantly beribboned box of chocolates from his overcoat. ‘These are for you, Rosa.’

She hesitated before accepting them, perhaps wondering whether they were poisoned, then wrinkled her nose.

‘Ah, yes. The cat peed in my pocket, but they should be all right,’ Bryant explained. ‘They’re your favourite, I imagine: hard centres. And you’re absolutely correct, of course. We avoid matters of importance and concentrate on the trivial. If we didn’t, the burden of life would simply prove too much for us.’

‘Spoken’, replied Rosa, ‘like a man without a god.’ She pointedly set the chocolates aside.

‘I think I know what you came for,’ said Kershaw hastily, flicking back his blond fringe and marching along the hall towards the main autopsy room with Bryant in his wake.

‘Oh, I’m not here for anything,’ Bryant explained. ‘I was just in the neighbourhood.’

‘So you didn’t know that Dan was here as well?’

‘Is he back from the Findersbury Bank already? Well, that’s a stroke of luck.’

‘I knew you wouldn’t be able to stay away,’ called Banbury, who was poking through the contents of an opaque green plastic bag on Kershaw’s counter. ‘There’s nothing more to see than this. He’s in a terrible state.’

‘I’ve probably seen worse,’ said Bryant.

‘I tell my students to detach themselves from the fact that this is a human body. If you really start thinking about it, you’ll realize that after all your years in the job you’ve looked at too many corpses, and there’s a lot of nightmare potential in that. Just don’t—’

‘I know – touch anything.’ He let Kershaw cut open the bag. ‘Well, that’s pretty disgusting. His viscera look cooked. How will you get anything out of them?’

‘In this job you need to have good visual acuity for pattern recognition. The ability to put together what’s been going on. Take a look at that.’ Without glancing up, Kershaw brandished a pair of tweezers in the direction of the steel tray further along the counter.

Bryant went over to it and peered in. He saw a small metal rod with blackened ends. ‘What is it?’

‘An implant,’ said Kershaw. ‘Probably from his right foot.’

‘What kind of implant?’ He picked up the rod and sniffed it.

Kershaw took it out of his hands. ‘What did I just ask you not to do? It looks like a titanium allogenic graft for segmental lengthening, to replace a part that was damaged. From the upper part of the foot. It’s likely he crushed a bone and had it replaced. These things are pretty common, but I thought it would help to narrow down the search field. Then I discovered that the newer models are etched with a unique serial number so that each one is registered to its owner. We’ll run a check tonight.’

‘Why can’t you do it now?’

‘The medical database requires search clearance. If that doesn’t work out, we’ll get him on dental records. If there’s time, that is. I’d rather not have to start trawling around the hostels. Link has slapped a limit on our billable hours. He wants this closed as quickly as possible.’

‘What about cameras? Don’t tell me you can’t track his movements?’

‘In and out of the street, certainly,’ said Banbury, ‘but it’ll take a while sifting through the hard drives covering the main thoroughfares, unless he went into a shop, somewhere we’d get a close-up.’