Bryant & May - The Burning Man (8 page)

He parked the van as close as he could to Brixton Market and shifted the gear inside the store. Then he made his second run, to collect the movie posters from a lock-up he had rented in Stockwell. When he returned to the half-empty market, he let himself into the shop and scraped just enough whitewash from the windows to let in decent light, making sure that none of the nearby store owners got a proper look at his face. It took him the rest of the afternoon to clear out the rubbish, install Chinese paper blinds and hang the posters. Then he made the call that would set the next stage in motion.

He knew that there was no going back now. If he made a mistake, every police officer in the city would be looking for him. If he succeeded, he would leave London burning.

In Threadneedle Street, Queen Victoria Street and Cornhill, London was already burning, if somewhat damply. Earlier in the afternoon, sodden crowds had held their vigil for the death of capitalism in Trafalgar Square. They wore smiling Guy Fawkes masks, but represented every age and nationality. After an hour they moved to the Queen Victoria Memorial, their next station on the way to a political Calvary.

The evening march route, a candlelit parade of masked drummers, heading from Mansion House to the other side of the Bank of England, quickly went wrong. Violence broke out as the police tried to move the protestors off the pavements and keep them contained within the planned route. An MP from the Green Party met the leaders and called for calm, but was shouted down and forced to retreat behind the barricades.

A Facebook page promoting the idea of a single amalgamated protest called for all campaigners to ‘defend humanity’. It said: ‘
Remember who your enemies are: billionaires who own banks and corporations who corrupt politicians and enslave the people in injustice.
’ The rhetoric had hardly changed in a century. It was the language of Poland and Latvia, of Jarrow and Aldermaston. The marchers were opposed by an assortment of ragtag groups ranging from UKIP to a pro-capitalist organization of rogue brokers calling itself Capital Offence.

The police feared a concatenation of protest groups, especially when Ayo Onatade succeeded in preventing them from banning face coverings at the rally, after arguing for the right to anonymous protest. For a few minutes the gatherings existed in uneasy symbiosis. Then someone decided it was a good idea to launch fireworks at the police. The rockets and bangers quickly turned to rocks and burning chair legs, and as all leave was cancelled in the capital, members of various press organizations began calling their families to warn them that they would not be coming home tonight. Hot-dog sellers appeared at the key points of the marching route, until the police managed to move them on.

The City’s merchants saw that they were likely to lose another day’s business tomorrow, and kept their boards up overnight. As the protestors spread out from the epicentre and the crowds thickened, the police closed Leadenhall Market and roads around the Monument. For the first time, the question of closing bridges arose.

From their vantage points in the cocktail bars of the Shard and the Gherkin, the bank directors watched as ominous patches of orange fire appeared in the streets below – a sight that those who knew London’s history of blitzes and riots had hoped never to see in their own lifetimes.

‘Insurrection!’ exclaimed Arthur Bryant, rubbing his hands together gleefully as the flames lit up his face. ‘Finally!’

‘I’ll turn it off if you don’t stop saying that,’ warned May. Raymond Land had installed a plasma TV on the wall of the briefing room, not in the spirit of improving facilities at the PCU, but to get it out of his house so that his wife Leanne couldn’t claim it in their divorce settlement. The detectives were watching live BBC coverage of the protestors lobbing petrol bombs at police riot shields.

Bryant had plonked himself on one of the desks and was swinging his legs like a superannuated schoolboy, crunching mint humbugs against his dentures as he watched aerial views of the city fires shot from the newsroom’s helicopter. ‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘King Mob. It’s 1780 all over again.’

‘I don’t have your grasp of British history—’ May began forlornly.

‘The Gordon Riots,’ said Bryant, sticking a match in his pipe.

‘The Daves put a smoke detector in here,’ May warned.

‘Don’t worry, I already disconnected it.’ He pointed up at the white plastic disc, which appeared to have been shot out. ‘The most destructive protest of the eighteenth century, Protestants fighting against the Papists’ Act, which had protected Roman Catholics. You have to remember that the world was in a state of unrest. America was fighting the War of Independence. The Frogs were about to invade England. In London, anti-Catholic fever was at its pitch. Ordinary people invaded the streets and tore down entire houses with their bare hands. They smashed all the windows and burned all the furniture within reach.’ From the way Bryant’s eyes shone, May could have been forgiven for thinking that his partner had been there. ‘The inmates of Newgate prison were freed according to a proclamation painted on its gates, by the authority of “His Majesty King Mob”. That’s why, ever since, the term has denoted an uprising of the masses. And this is most certainly an uprising, wouldn’t you agree?’ He sucked ferociously on his pipe.

‘But this isn’t about religion, Arthur. It’s orchestrated chaos. And it could just be the start – did you think about that? When any system breaks, people suffer. London isn’t alone in this; it’s happening all around the globe right now. I don’t know how you can eat mints and smoke at the same time.’

‘I’m mentholating the tobacco.’ Bryant blasted a stream of smoke at the shattered detector as if deliberately to offend it. ‘Anyway, this time it’s different. As a city we have always rioted against symbols. Our insurrections are brutal but celebratory, intended as signals for change. A banker is let off for insider trading because he cut a deal with his directors – that’s corruption, pure and simple, and the facts are easy enough for the average twit in the street to grasp. The act represents a far greater malaise. The public plans a peaceful march, but thanks to rapid communications technology the protest is hijacked by special-interest groups and anarchists. Remember the torching of buildings in Oxford Street a few years ago? This is like that, but on steroids. People are sick of being treated as if they’re invisible, fit only to be used up and cast aside like any other exhausted commodity. The uprising is coming from something deep inside us, all of us.’ It had always suited Bryant to take a transpontine view on lawbreaking, a thought that wasn’t wasted on his partner.

‘Funny how upset you got when someone knifed the tyres on your Mini,’ May pointed out.

‘That’s different. One should never confuse legitimate protest with vandalism. There’s nothing personal in all of this. Cornell is just the catalyst.’

‘What about Freddie Weeks?’ May asked. ‘A man died, Arthur. Somebody deliberately set fire to him. How does that help to end injustice, burning a homeless man alive?’

‘You’re right, of course,’ Bryant conceded, turning from the television and settling himself in an orange bendy chair situated in close proximity to a fresh pot of tea. For one horrible moment it looked as if he might simultaneously smoke and drink. ‘Either the arsonist didn’t care who was sleeping in the doorway and went ahead anyway, or he knew Weeks and used the riot as an opportunity to get rid of him. Fire is a cleanser. We can’t rely on forensics to explain the culprit’s intentions.’

‘I wasn’t thinking about his attacker,’ said May. ‘You heard what Weeks’s father said. He was a bright kid, a good kid who lost his way. The system failed him. And the anarchists made it worse.’

‘They didn’t make it worse, they just provided the opportunity,’ corrected Bryant. ‘Someone used the protest to commit a crime. How are we getting on with the hostels?’

‘No record of him on any At Risk registers so far,’ said May. ‘But we’re only doing central London at the moment. Without an account of his movements we can’t narrow down the possibilities.’

‘What about the footage showing him bedding down at the bank? Can’t you follow the cameras back?’

‘How?’ asked May, exasperated. ‘Every reverse step branches off into another set of possibilities. Away from the backstreets are vast crowds of people who all look the same. It’s these bloody masks. They’re too good at hiding identities, and even if Darren Link still manages to stop everyone from wearing them – which is frankly unlikely – they’ve already successfully hidden the killer’s identity.’

‘I saw this thing on the television,’ said Bryant, setting aside his pipe to fill two mugs and reach about for the sugar. ‘Something about a Los Angeles crime unit, all moody lighting and urgent young people staring at computers, and when they wanted to find someone in a crowd they just zeroed in on one of his ears, analysed it and instantly found a match on the other side of the country. Why can’t we do that?’

‘It was a TV show,’ said May. ‘Even if we had the technology it would be an outsourced expense and we’d have to get budget approval first.’

‘You see, that’s the trouble!’ Bryant slapped the table with passion, spilling tea. ‘We’re in the wrong country. We should be in America. They value free enterprise over there. They have such a refreshingly positive attitude. Our headlines say “More misery on the way”. Know what theirs say? “Bring it on, we can handle it”. All right, they eat at an absurdly early hour and think jogging’s a good idea, but they’re stout-hearted and wonderfully unembarrassable. That’s just the East Coast; imagine what it’s like in the Midwest. We’d get a lot more done if we were allowed to wave guns about.’

‘All right, Wyatt Earp,’ said May, ‘let’s concentrate on finding this chap the old-fashioned way.’

At nine forty-five on Monday evening Colin Bimsley and Meera Mangeshkar were still out on the street, checking the last of the hostels near the Square Mile. The Transformer was situated off Gray’s Inn Road, one of a new generation of hostels catering to the more economically mobile, demanding backpackers. It seemed unlikely that Freddie Weeks had checked in here, but they had drawn a blank at the council-run overnight-stay dives, and were running out of options.

Linda Kzsowolski, the manager, was far from happy about uniformed officers turning up in her tastefully appointed reception area of painted surf and mountain scenes, and quickly ushered them into a tiny side room filled with vending machines and leaflets about faster broadband speeds.

Flipping open her laptop, she checked through the recent stays and failed to turn up Weeks’s name. The boy’s father had scanned and sent the most recent photograph he had of his son, which showed a slender, short, acne-ridden boy with straggly shoulder-length blond hair and intense blue eyes, aged twenty-three. The picture was two years old, and Weeks’s father had confirmed his birth date.

‘Wait, he was here a week ago,’ said Linda. ‘He stayed for three nights. I remember him clearly because on the last night he got into a fight with one of the other lads.’

‘Why is there no record?’ asked Bimsley.

‘Human error, I imagine. We’ve had trouble with reception staff.’

‘Do you know what the fight was about?’

‘No, but Jamel, the guy he argued with, is still with us. He just came in.’

‘Can we go and talk to him?’ asked Mangeshkar.

‘I’ll bring him down,’ said Kzsowolski.

‘Of course she doesn’t want us wandering around the corridors,’ said Meera while they awaited the manager’s return. ‘She’s worried about what we’d find up there. The testosterone comes off these places like steam. They’re little better than knocking shops.’

‘I don’t know where you get your ideas from,’ said Colin, digging out a pound coin and feeding a vending machine for crisps. ‘You’ve got a really puritanical streak, you know that?’

‘I can’t help it,’ said Meera. ‘Blame my folks. They’re always telling me what to avoid and what not to do.’

‘Don’t you ever feel like rebelling?’

‘Of course I do, all the time. Over the last few days I’ve felt like being out there with the rioters. A chance to tear it up and start again – who wouldn’t want to try that? But then I realize that nothing’s going to change.’ After the protests and the arrests, the insurance claims and the damage repairs, she felt sure that things would just be the same as before.

‘I don’t know, it feels different this time,’ said Colin, pushing a fistful of crisps into his mouth, then remembering to offer her the pack. ‘The presenters on Sky News keep getting all flustered, like they can’t believe what’s going on. There’s a real sense of excitement in the air. Me, I love a good punch-up.’

She watched him brushing oily crumbs from his uniform. ‘Were you raised by animals, by any chance?’

‘Hey, Romulus and Remus founded a city, so don’t knock it.’

‘I wasn’t thinking about wolves. Baboons, perhaps.’

Kzsowolski reappeared at the door with a fashionably dressed young Arab in his mid-twenties. He wore the Hoxton young-granddad uniform of a trimmed, slender beard, tight cardigan and a narrow-brimmed hat pushed back on the crown of his head. His trousers were too fitted to have useable pockets, so he was forced to stand awkwardly with his mobile in one hand.