Bryant & May - The Burning Man (7 page)

As it turned out, Bryant and Longbright nailed the victim an hour before the full official identification came in. Late on Monday afternoon, a member of staff at Bloomsbury’s Sustainable Market remembered the lad with the damaged foot who had worked there for five months. Judith Merrill was one of the managers, and as she was shown into the interview room at the PCU, she carefully skirted the hole in the floorboards filled with uprooted plumbing, seating herself behind the rickety desk Longbright had salvaged from the school over the road.

‘His name was Freddie Weeks, but everybody called him Lucky,’ she said. ‘I mean, they meant it sarcastically. He left the store back at the end of June. He was a very private person, didn’t make friends easily. I think he had a lot of problems.’

‘What kind of problems?’ asked Longbright.

‘You know, money difficulties, getting chucked out of his flat. He used to miss shifts all the time. He came in with the most terrible hangovers and seemed angry or frustrated or something. He was very moody. I wondered if there were drugs involved. Sorry, I’m not sure if this is very helpful.’

‘Do you know if there was anyone close to him, a girlfriend or best friend?’ asked Longbright.

Judith thought for a moment and shook her head. ‘No. He was a bit of a loner. Don’t get me wrong, he was friendly enough but only in a distant way. I think he’d had some trouble in the past. I remember there was something on his employment record but we don’t seem to have stored his CV. We’re a bit disorganized on that front. Mostly people just fill in the forms we keep in the shop. Maybe he had trouble with the police?’

‘Did he have a place to sleep when he was working at the store?’

‘He always wore the same clothes, and I have a feeling he was staying on someone’s sofa. But I don’t think he ever stopped in one place for long. He kept himself very neat and tidy.’

‘Do you know what happened to his right foot?’

‘He smashed the bone in a skateboarding accident three years ago. He had some kind of operation to replace the damaged part with an implant. He limped a bit and said it bothered him in cold weather.’

It seemed clear to Longbright that the manager had a soft spot for her old employee. She thanked her for coming in and promised to be in touch if she discovered anything of further interest. The Criminal Records Database turned up a couple of minor run-ins for Weeks, one disturbance of the peace, one drunk and disorderly. A few minutes later, Giles Kershaw came back with a match for the serial number on the allogenic implant and confirmed the ID.

‘Apparently he was very angry about the accident,’ said Kershaw. ‘He tried to sue the Euston Square shopping precinct where it happened, without success. He refused therapy.’

Longbright sent a constable to the boy’s parents, who lived in Bayswater and had not seen their son in several months. A little later, she made a follow-up call.

‘Freddie didn’t have much to say to us,’ said the father, his voice thickened by anger and grief.

‘Did you know he was sleeping rough?’ Janice asked. She waited patiently for her answers, knowing it was tough handling questions so quickly after losing a loved one.

‘How could we know?’ came the indignant reply. ‘He hardly ever called.’

‘Had you had a disagreement?’

‘We’d never had an
agreement
. Freddie wouldn’t even use a mobile phone because he said the parts were manufactured in China by people working below minimum wage. I told him, “If you’re going to worry about every last thing, you won’t be able to eat or clothe yourself,” but he was determined to follow his ethical guidelines. Well, this is where his high-minded ethics got him.’

‘Do you know the names of anyone he hung out with?’

‘No, he had no close friends.’

‘Enemies, then. Someone he’d fallen out with.’

‘No, he was kind. He didn’t make enemies. If you’d known him—’

‘Did he have any history of health problems?’

‘You mean mental health? No, but he was – what do they call it now? ADD. He could never concentrate on anything for long. Freddie was a very clever boy, too clever for his own good, very highly strung. Always near the top of his class, but he’d get angry over nothing. He got in with the wrong crowd and there was nothing we could do. He was never in trouble at school, he passed all his exams, but he couldn’t settle. We tried to lend him money but he wouldn’t take it. We both feared for him, but what could we do? You can’t tell your children how to live their lives.’

Longbright had heard the story of a good son growing apart from his family and losing his way in the world too many times to count. Everyone agreed it was a tragedy and felt guilty for not having done more, but, all things considered, the outcome had probably been predetermined by the boy’s nature.

The case was closed by the end of Monday. Arthur Bryant, who usually took half a day to return a library book, was amazed by the speed of the operation. Having dithered about cancelling his holiday, Raymond Land now found that it was too late to get his deposit back, and decided to head off first thing on Tuesday morning.

At least, that was the plan before John May went to see Anjam Dutta in the new City of London Surveillance Centre, a nondescript black glass stump planted next to the old Billingsgate Fish Market on Lower Thames Street.

The dapper, precise Indian security expert led the way through the dimly lit concrete bunker that ran underneath the building. Here, two dozen operatives monitored feeds from the thousands of cameras placed throughout the Square Mile.

‘I’m just tying up loose ends,’ May explained as they walked. ‘The CoL didn’t specifically ask for a sign-off on the CCTV footage but I thought we should at least view it. Last time I came here you seemed to have a lot more staff.’

‘The presence of warm bodies isn’t really necessary any more,’ Dutta explained. ‘Motion sensors and face-recognition software track most of the suspicious movement in the area, but sometimes it’s a good idea to use a more intuitive identification system. For example, right now, during the riots, we have fresh anti-capitalist support groups arriving from Germany, France, Norway and Canada, with more expected. There are twenty-five individual wards to cover.’

‘What happens if anyone moves outside the Square Mile?’ asked May. ‘Do you lose jurisdiction over them?’

‘We liaise with the Met, but we can only step in when the Counter Terrorism Command flags get triggered. And there are anomalies within the zone. For example, it’s hard to track what’s going on in the Middle and Inner Temple areas.’ The City’s old legal quarter was a maze of chambers and passageways built on private land, and were largely free of intrusive cameras. ‘The idea was to design out terrorism, and to a large extent we’ve succeeded, but only around the new buildings. Riots are a different matter, though, because they’re more spontaneous and unpredictable.’

‘I guess in a crowded news week Dexter Cornell might have got away with his insider-trading deal,’ said May.

‘That’s right,’ said Dutta, heading for a particular bank of monitors. ‘The directors didn’t handle that one very well. They should have made sure that Cornell left immediately. Instead, he’s still going in to work for the bank’s final week, trying to prove a point and tough it out, as are most of the others. Not all of them, though – some are hiding out in their Buckinghamshire mansions. As far as I can tell Cornell has no defence. He got caught tipping off his pals and is still pretending that he didn’t. The
Mail
ran a six-page spread on his cars and country houses this morning. No wonder people get upset.’

He pulled out a chair for May, then instructed one of the surveillance operators to run some footage. ‘We were monitoring the streets around the main march route and came across this,’ said Dutta. ‘I thought you’d be interested.’

The sequence was monochrome and without sound. It showed a view of Crutched Friars from a camera mounted beneath the railway bridge. May watched as a figure walked towards the entrance of the bank, where a dark shape lay in the doorway.

‘This was taken at five fifty-seven a.m.,’ Dutta explained, tracing the figure on the screen with the end of his pen. ‘We should have got a clearer shot but the streetlight timers are wrongly set. He goes to the entrance, stops, watches for a minute, then walks back to the bridge. Unfortunately he’s got his back to us.’

‘Looks like our arsonist though,’ said May. ‘Same clothes, same build. Can you put it up against the later sequence?’

Dutta’s operator searched the footage numbers and loaded a second monitor. Now May saw the firebomb-thrower taking the exact same path twenty minutes later. ‘That’s him all right,’ he said. ‘He checked out the building to make sure it was the right one. Look at the way he leans forward there, at the entrance.’ The screen showed a rectangle of dark pixilations in the doorway. ‘There’s no way he could have missed Weeks lying against the wall. The guy was right at his feet, sleeping in the doorway. Run it again?’

They watched as the hooded figure swaggered up to the entrance and bent slightly. ‘He’s checking him out,’ said May. ‘Damn.’

‘What are you thinking?’ Dutta asked.

May checked his watch. ‘I have to stop the report from being filed. I must get back. Send me a copy of this, will you?’

‘Sure. What’s next?’

‘We launch a murder investigation,’ May replied. ‘It was a premeditated act. Our arsonist knew Weeks was lying there.’

The young man stood beneath the red and white awning of the corner store with the tool bag resting at his feet. He watched the workmen digging fat sepia clods of London clay from the hole in the road. The wind was rising. He looked up and saw seagulls dragged and rolled across the sky like sheets of newspaper. After another ten minutes had passed the rain started, becoming so heavy that the workmen climbed out of the hole and took off for Camden’s Rio Café, just as he had hoped they would.

The moment they were out of sight, he headed over to the galvanized drum that stood on the flat bed of their truck and disconnected the burner from its cylinder. No one was watching him; he had the street to himself. Coiling the orange rubber pipe around his shoulder, he dragged the grime-coated apparatus towards him. It weighed a ton, but he was strong. His van was parked around the corner, but he also had the canvas tool bag to carry. He couldn’t afford to risk making two trips.

Lifting the burner and hooking it into his belt, he raised the bag and tried to prevent the coiled pipe from slipping. When he turned the corner, he saw that there was just one old West Indian woman making her way towards him with loaded shopping bags and eyes downcast.

In one of those coincidences that only ever seem to happen in London, the woman in question was Alma Sorrowbridge, Arthur Bryant’s former landlady, who now shared a flat with him in Bloomsbury. She regularly came over to Camden to buy the fresh Caribbean fruits and vegetables she couldn’t get near her home, and had no idea that she was walking past a murderer.

He loaded the unmarked van and set off, trying to remember if he’d thought of everything. It was a learning curve; every time he thought he was fully prepared for all eventualities, some surprise came along that threatened to undermine everything. He would have to watch for that in future.

He estimated that the entire process would take one week. After all, if God could make the world in seven days, he could surely unmake London in the same time. The trick, as he saw it, was to keep up his strike rate before the police could figure out what they were dealing with. He had to keep them off balance. He already saw that he had failed to wipe his tracks as thoroughly as he’d thought.

As he crossed the river, heading south to Brixton, he ran over the checklist for the thirtieth time. Once he was satisfied that he had covered everything he needed to do today, he returned to the bigger question, the one people would ask themselves for years to come. Why?
Why would anyone do such terrible things?
Politicians would argue about the lessons that should have been learned, the warning signs ignored, the safety measures not taken. Would things be different? Nobody knew. He wasn’t responsible for what might happen in the future. The present, though: that was another matter. The start of the riots provided perfect cover. Revenge could only be enjoyed if the revenger could witness its full effect, and he planned to be there every step of the way.