Bryant And May On The Loose - A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery Part 5

'You should see his bedroom; it's a thousand times worse than this. If I wasn't a good Christian, I would walk right out of here and never come back.'

'So that's what you think of me, you gargantuan quisling.'1 Arthur Bryant stood propped in the doorway in a Victorian nightcap and a purple quilted dressing gown. His snowy hair stuck up around the cap like a row of alfalfa sprouts. He appeared smaller and more wrinkled than ever. 'I gave strict instructions that I was to receive no visitors until further notice.' Arthur Bryant stood propped in the doorway in a Victorian nightcap and a purple quilted dressing gown. His snowy hair stuck up around the cap like a row of alfalfa sprouts. He appeared smaller and more wrinkled than ever. 'I gave strict instructions that I was to receive no visitors until further notice.'

'We're not visitors, we're your friends,' said May indignantly.

'We've all been worried about you, sir,' interposed Meera, who was determined to sound less blunt than usual and show the caring side she was fairly sure she must possess. 'You can't just hide away like this.'

'I'm hardly hiding away, am I?' As Bryant made his way over to the armchair by the fireplace, the others noted how slowly he was moving but kept the thought to themselves. 'I'm at home, that's all. I feel tired and ancient. My back is playing up. I need new knees. All I ask is that I am left alone. And now this-this Antiguan termagant has denied me even that basic right.'

'Hmm. You've become a stranger to the badger's brush.' May indicated the bristles on his partner's cheeks.

'I have no good reason to shave. Men only shave for other people. If left to themselves they'd all grow beards like Robinson Crusoe. And they probably wouldn't wash, either. I choose not to go out. I've seen all the world I need to see.' His voice grew softer. 'I don't want you to see me like this.'

'So you've elected to become the G.o.d of this reduced realm,' said May, displeased.

'I have all the home comforts I need, my books, my notes, Alma to cook for me.'

'I've seen this sort of behaviour before. When great teachers retire they lose the will to live. Soon you'll start regressing into another childhood. You'll be asking Alma to leave your bedroom door ajar at night, and telling her you don't eat sprouts.'

'I don't eat her sprouts now.'

'So this is what it's come to, has it? Our friends.h.i.+p means nothing to you. I always knew you were selfish, Arthur, but your behaviour is beyond even my expectations. I should have known. Right from the moment I first met you, when you had me deciphering naval flag codes before I'd even got my coat off, all you ever cared about was yourself.'

'That's not entirely true,' retorted Bryant indignantly. 'There have been times-not lately, perhaps-when my generosity has known no bounds. I gave you all the credit when my efforts brought about the capture of the Little Italy Whelk Smugglers.'

'An action which resulted in me having to hide several dozen drums of black-market treacle from the police, I remember. You always give me the credit when you're about to get caught for something.'

'Excuse me?' intervened Meera, whose brief attempt at patience had already evaporated. 'This is, like, an ancient history lesson or something. Can we get back to the real world? Tell him, Mr May.'

'There's been a murder in King's Cross,' said May, duly prompted.

'Hardly headline news.' Bryant slouched further into his dressing gown. 'I'd be more surprised if there hadn't been.'

'It's a professional job.'

'One for the Met, then. They have all the right contacts in that area. There are eleven recognised gangs in the borough of Camden alone.'

'Except that in this case no-one has a clue who's behind it. The victim's remains haven't been identified because his head was cut off and we don't yet know if his fingerprints are on file. He's been dead for a few days. I thought it might pique your interest.'

'Well, you thought wrong,' snapped Bryant. 'You think every time someone dies my heart quickens? It doesn't.'

'You're being so unfair, Mr Bryant,' said Meera. 'Why don't you just get dressed and come and visit the crime scene?'

'You come any nearer, young lady, and you shall get the benefit of my toasting fork where you least expect it.' He turned back to his old partner. 'I was looking through my casebook over the weekend, and realised that once you get beneath the unique circ.u.mstances of a crime, the perpetrators are depressingly similar. They're selfish, blind, unpleasant people, and worst of all, they no longer have the ability to surprise me in any way.'

'Perhaps not,' said May, 'but there's a very good reason why you should be interested. It's a case that could bring down the government.'

'This kind of crime creates a potentially disastrous situation in the area,' said Leslie Faraday. 'King's Cross-of all places-the PM's flags.h.i.+p development-you understand the implications.'

Faraday had taken to coming in on Sat.u.r.day mornings because his supervisor did, and he was anxious to have his diligence noted. He ventured into Kasavian's office with the trepidation of Van Helsing entering the lair of the undead. The room of casket-coloured oak had absorbed a hundred years of tobacco smoke before the banning of cigarettes, and somehow the very air seemed to be stained sepia. There were patches on the carpet where no light had ever fallen.

Oskar Kasavian winced at the watery morning sunlight and turned away from the window, slipping back into shadow. With his sharply hooked nose and pale, elongated features he reminded Faraday of Nosferatu Nosferatu in the 1922 German film version he had seen on a drizzly evening in November 1979 at the East Finchley Rex, an event he had never forgotten, because he never forgot anything. He had been on a date with a girl called Deirdre Fairburn who went out for a choc-ice halfway through the film and never came back. Faraday had remained in his seat to watch the end of the film because it was not the first time a girl had given him the slip. in the 1922 German film version he had seen on a drizzly evening in November 1979 at the East Finchley Rex, an event he had never forgotten, because he never forgot anything. He had been on a date with a girl called Deirdre Fairburn who went out for a choc-ice halfway through the film and never came back. Faraday had remained in his seat to watch the end of the film because it was not the first time a girl had given him the slip.

'Of course I understand. Do you know how much money the government is spending on security resources to convince investors that the area has been cleaned up? The return of organised crime is unthinkable. Have you spoken to Islington? I heard they had a suspect in custody.'

'They seem to think the crime didn't occur on their turf, but yes, they were holding a man called Rafi Abd al-Qaadir. They had no evidence and were forced to let him go, thanks to our Mr Bimsley, who brought in a lawyer to argue on his behalf. Now they're trying to track down the Nigerian businessman who sold the lease of the shop where the body was found. Trouble is, the place was open and empty for a month. They're checking their usual contacts, but I can tell they don't know what to make of the death. I'm waiting for a pathology report.'

'Have you at least managed to keep this away from the press?'

'For the moment, but there's no way of stopping information from getting out so long as it's a publicly registered CID case. I've already warned APPRO not to issue any kind of statement.'

'St Pancras International is right next door, and it's the terminal for the next Olympics. They're about to open a luxury hotel that will house senior members of the Olympic Committee not five hundred yards from where this corpse was found. If anyone at the PM's office gets wind of this we will be crucified.' Kasavian looked like a man who was no stranger to crucifixion, or subsequent resurrection.

'There may be one solution,' Faraday ventured, 'but I don't think you're going to like it.'

Back in Chalk Farm it was like old times, insofar as the detectives were arguing. 'All you have to do is talk to Leslie Faraday,' said John May. 'He owes you several favours. If he can be persuaded-'

'You're forgetting one thing.' Bryant leaned forward, his blue eyes widening. 'I am not interested.'

'Come on, we're wasting our time here,' said Meera, grabbing May's arm. 'I'm disappointed in you, Mr Bryant, after all your lectures about looking for the unexpected in everyday crimes.'

'That's because I finally realise there's nothing unexpected anymore,' Bryant replied, slumping back.

'That's not true and you know it. Unexpected things happen all the time. I was coming out of a nightclub on Friday night when some bloke dressed as a b.l.o.o.d.y stag attacked me in the street, slashed my arm and ran off.'

Bryant was brought up short. 'A stag?' he repeated.

'Yeah, you know, big animal, they have them in the countryside or in zoos or something. Furry coat, antlers, the lot.'

'Where was this?'

'Right in the middle of King's Cross, the bit behind the cross-channel railway line that's a dug-up field.'

'You're talking about the triangular piece of land between the Battlebridge Basin and the Eurostar terminal?'

'Yeah, I suppose so.' Meera looked puzzled.

'You have to show me exactly where this happened, right now. Find my shoes, someone.' Moments later Bryant had shucked his dressing gown and was scrabbling to get into a grubby old herringbone overcoat, still clutching his walking stick, which became accidentally threaded through one of the sleeves, so that as he floundered about he resembled a particularly disreputable scarecrow coming to life.

'For G.o.d's sake don't just stand there, woman, help me get this blasted thing on properly!' he shouted. Then he fell over.

'Oh, Mr Bryant, you're back!' cried Alma Sorrowbridge, pulling him out of the fireplace and patting him down before anything could burst into flames.

1 Person who betrays his or her own country by aiding the invading enemy, after Vidkun Quisling, the pro-n.a.z.i Norwegian leader. Person who betrays his or her own country by aiding the invading enemy, after Vidkun Quisling, the pro-n.a.z.i Norwegian leader.

11

TREMORS

You know, I always felt that the Peculiar Crimes Unit might finally find its spiritual home in a railway terminus district like King's Cross,' said Bryant as the trio marched along York Way in bl.u.s.tery squalls of rain. He spoke above the ever-present bourdon bourdon of taxi engines, a low thrum that underscored life in the area from every dawn to every midnight. of taxi engines, a low thrum that underscored life in the area from every dawn to every midnight.

The road behind the railway yards turned into the kind of strange no-man's-land Bryant had often seen in London after the war. These urban limbos had been created by bomb damage and government indecision. With a nation to rebuild, cash for housing was in short supply. After the rubble from fractured terraces had been cleared away, the scarred earth remained as a slow-healing memory of the wounds inflicted by war. Children turned the chaotic rockeries of brick and plaster into fantasy lands, exploring for buried treasure. Rocket and dandelions sprang up between chunks of brickwork and rusting iron. If they were lucky, children might gleefully discover a live, undetonated bomb. Occasionally someone was blown sky-high. Those were the days Those were the days, thought Bryant.

'I don't understand,' May admitted. 'You're not interested in a mutilated corpse found in a derelict chip shop, but a drunk with antlers in fancy dress annoying a couple of girls immediately gets your attention.'

'That's the difference between us,' said Bryant, tapping the side of his head. 'I always see the bigger picture.'

'What bigger picture? What do you see that I've missed?'

'Let's find out if he's left any tracks first. Meera, you lead the way. My energy's coming back, but my legs don't seem to have got the message yet.' They picked a path through the geometry of scaffolding that had sprouted from the walls of King's Cross station. The signs of construction and renewal were everywhere. Roads were closed; pipes were being lowered into trenches; a hundred canary-jacketed labourers crossed the roofs of half-renovated warehouses, bellowing to each other.

'I remember when there were only fields and factories behind the station.' Bryant waved his walking stick at a vast wall of blue-tinted wavy gla.s.s, the first of the new buildings to be completed. 'Wild horses, bargees and gypsies. The ladies of the night brought so many punters to the gra.s.sy area beside the ca.n.a.l basin that it was nicknamed Pleasure Field.'

'Must have been a long time ago,' grunted Meera.

'Not at all. Ten, maybe twelve years at the most. It's changing fast now. Nearly all of the traditional gasholders have been dismantled, the old tenement buildings torn down. It was never pretty around here in my lifetime, but it had a rugged, dirty charm. My old man had many professions; one of them was as a street photographer. He showed me the pictures he took. There was a garden of rose bushes in front of the station. A licorice factory. An old theatre called the Regent, pulled down to make way for the town hall. And there was a wooden roller-coaster.'

'It's got a Starbucks now.'

Bryant gave a shrug. 'It won't be there for long. Nothing ever stays around here. To my mind the symbol of King's Cross is a st.u.r.dy drain-fed weed sticking out of a sheer brick archway, something that can survive in the most inhospitable circ.u.mstances. An honest area, in the sense of being without hypocrisy, and a true test for the urbanite. The buildings will rise and crumble to dust, but the people won't change.'

From the corner of Wharf Road they could see a group of low brown buildings, Victorian warehouses that had somehow been spared the wrath of bombs and town planners. The structures huddled alone in a field of tractor-churned mud, bordered by railway embankments, the ca.n.a.l and the bare brick wall of the road that pa.s.sed between them and the Eurostar railway terminal. The area roughly formed a great triangle, upon which was soon to rise a new town of gla.s.s and steel. The project was vast in scope and barely possible to imagine completed, even with the help of the computer-rendered images in its publicity brochures. Colleges and offices, shopping malls, public housing and luxury apartment blocks were to appear on a blighted site that had been alternately ignored and fought over for decades.

'I wonder what they'll find under all this soil.' Bryant stopped to get his breath and tapped the muddy road with his walking stick. 'In the Middle Ages this was part of the Great Forest of Middles.e.x, although it was inhabited in prehistoric times, of course. The first Paleolithic axe ever recognised in England was discovered near King's Cross Road-in 1680, if memory serves.'

'You were there, I suppose,' said Meera. 'The club's this way.'

The Keys club was living on borrowed time. Having survived the death of the super-clubs and the return of acoustic music, it had remained true to its hard-house and electro roots, only to face annihilation at the hands of property developers. It had received a stay of execution when Camden Council rejected a plan which would have required the demolition of the listed building it inhabited, but construction had started all around. Each day, the earthmovers came a little closer. The new town would spread out from its nexus at the sh.o.r.eline of the Regent Ca.n.a.l. The first building, a shopping mall, was nearing completion. The site even had its own concrete plant; such was the quant.i.ty required to pave over so many acres of earth and landfill.

'Meera, you were walking between the club and the road when you saw him, is that right?' May was forced to shout above the roar of the industrial equipment as they approached.

'See the tall spotlight, over there? I borrowed Dan's fingerprint kit and came up here first thing this morning, before it started raining. I tried to lift prints from the pole but they were too badly damaged. He'd swung around and smudged them.' She pointed to one of a dozen tall steel lampposts that kept the landscape illuminated at night.

The slippery mud made walking treacherous. May and Mangeshkar were forced to take Bryant's arms to keep him upright.

'I shouldn't have worn Prada shoes,' said May, watching as liquefied clay closed over his toe caps.

'Not at your age, no,' agreed Bryant. 'You've always been a bit of a clotheshorse, haven't you? Heaven knows how many people tramped across here on their way home after your scare, Meera.'

'I wasn't scared. The odd thing is I don't think he meant to slash my arm. He sort of fell into me because I kicked him.'

'You said he was wearing knives on his head. He'd already broken the law, albeit in a preposterous way.'

'Yeah, but I was thinking.... It takes a certain type of mind to come up with antlers made out of knife blades. It was right here.' She pointed to the chewed-up earth around the base of the anodised post.

'Help me down,' said May.

'Ha!' Bryant was triumphant. 'It's usually me who needs a hand down.'

'I've only just recovered from an operation.' May was indignant. 'What's that?' He pointed to some matted strands of brown fur embedded in the mud. 'Something from your stag-man?'

'Probably hair from a pa.s.sing rat,' answered Bryant gloomily. 'The ca.n.a.l system is besieged with them. They live off discarded chicken bones and grow to the size of Alsatians.' He dug a small clear plastic bag from his overcoat pocket and pa.s.sed it to his partner before creeping off in search of footprints.

The wind was sweeping across the great churned field, thumping against pallets and stacks of steel plate. Meera squinted at the dark tumble of the sky. 'There's something weird about this place,' she muttered. 'I don't like it here.'

Bryant was interested. 'Oh, why not?'

'I don't know. It doesn't look right. Too bare.'

'You don't have the comfort of surrounding buildings. That's because we're on a hill. You don't notice the gradient as you walk here. King's Cross has a strange and convoluted history. There are spirits, of course-there always are near water and the poor. But there's something else besides.' He sniffed noisily. 'An unrest. A disquietude. Even on a day of clear skies there's something turbulent here that comes up through the soil. You can smell it in the stormy air, can't you?'

Meera found herself nodding in agreement, against her better judgement. She gave an involuntary s.h.i.+ver.

Bryant patted her arm in understanding. 'Someone just walked over your grave. I'll have to tell you all about the area sometime and I guarantee you'll feel even stranger. Every act of kindness or violence, every deed of benevolence or cruelty, leaves its mark on the land. Those marks resurface in tiny tremors. And the ground here holds a great many dark secrets.' A sheet of corrugated metal blew over, making Meera jump. Bryant smiled suddenly. 'I wonder, can you get Dan Banbury up here? We could use his plastic-mould kit for this-look.' He pointed to a pair of semi-circular shapes embedded deeply in the mud. 'They look like hoofprints to me.'

'They're very big.'

'Presumably they had to be large enough to fit over regular shoes, like pattens. This gentleman took his outfit seriously. There are a couple of costume shops near here. You'd better check them out.'

'Are you going to explain why you're so interested?' asked May.

Bryant cupped his hands, blew into them and thought for a moment. 'No, I'm not. Let's see your freezer body now.'

'We can't,' said May. 'It went to the Upper Street Morgue, which is under Islington's jurisdiction.'

'You're telling me we can't get at it?' Bryant's watery blue eyes widened in surprise.

'Ah, you finally understand! No, Arthur, we're not allowed.'

'You mean we're persona au gratin?' we're persona au gratin?'

'Yes. Perhaps now you could go and see your pals at the Home Office and try to pull a few strings for us.'

'Indeed. I exerted a great influence over the last Senior Commissioner. He still owes me a huge favour because I saved his son's reputation.'

'How?'

'Well, you know the sauna on the corner of Camden Road-'

'No, I mean how did you exert influence over him?'