Bryant & May - The Burning Man Read online

  About the Book

  London is under siege. A financial scandal has prompted violent protests. As the anger in the streets detonates, a young homeless man burns to death after being caught in the crossfire between rioters and the police.

  But things are not quite as they seem. An opportunistic killer appears to be using the chaos to exact revenge, and yet the intended victims seem to be selected in such a mysterious manner that the Peculiar Crimes Unit is called in to find a way of stopping him.

  Using their network of eccentric contacts, detectives Arthur Bryant and John May must hunt down a murderer who is adopting some decidedly incendiary methods of execution. And the investigation takes an apocalyptic turn when it becomes embroiled in the history of mob rule, corruption, rebellion, punishment . . . and the legend of Guy Fawkes.

  As the race to catch a cunning killer reaches its climax, the most personal tragedy is yet to come with a devastating day of reckoning. As Arthur Bryant observes: ‘I always said we’d go out with a hell of a bang . . .’

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1 Riot!

  2 Cocktail

  3 Pyrophobia

  4 Charcoal

  5 Portal

  6 Curtain Up

  7 Abyss

  8 Masks

  9 Murderous

  10 Incendiary

  11 King Mob

  12 Breaking Free

  13 Fire and Snow

  14 Brimstone

  15 Guy Fawkes

  16 Tar and Feather

  17 Jungle

  18 Essence of Rebellion

  19 Burning Bridges

  20 Fugues

  21 Disorientation

  22 Unmasked

  23 The Three Interviews

  24 Secure

  25 Firepower

  26 Insider

  27 Profile

  28 Esmeralda

  29 Trespass

  30 Fugue States

  31 Call to Arms

  32 Insurrection

  33 Tense Nervous Headache

  34 The Girl and the Boy

  35 The List

  36 The Hamlet Tactic

  37 X Marks the Spot

  38 Ophelia on the Shore

  39 Gross

  40 Sparrow with a Broken Wing

  41 Untouchable

  42 Rabble-Rousers

  43 Lost

  44 Abducted

  45 Pagan Fire

  46 High Stakes

  47 A Tour of the East End

  48 Heading South

  49 Rural Inferno

  50 Cage of Fire

  51 Bad Timing

  52 Skyfire

  53 Wired

  54 A Face in the Crowd

  55 Taking Action

  56 Into the Unknown

  About the Author

  Also by Christopher Fowler

  Copyright

  For my mother, Kath

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I’ve always felt that the Bryant & May series was about outsiders who, in their own way, are actually at the freethinking heart of London. We live in a complex city often described as a collection of unique villages, which is probably why so many of its residents behave with the quiddity of innocents seeing off predators.

  Among those inside-outsiders are the people who help and inspire me to keep delving further, from Simon Taylor and Kate Miciak, my brilliant editors, to Mandy Little, James Wills, Howard Morhaim and Meg Davis, my perspicacious agents, Kate Samano and Richenda Todd on copy, and PRs Lynsey Dalladay and Sally Wray.

  Thanks also to Mike and Lou, who every year head to Lewes for a night of devilry, and helped to provide the idea for this book. The character of Joanna Papis is real – beware of befriending an author!

  Thanks go out also to the book clubs, booksellers and readers who have kept this series going from strength to strength; I simply could not do it without you.

  For more on the Bryant & May novels, visit www.christopherfowler.co.uk

  ‘If you do not want to dwell with evil-livers, do not live in London’

  Richard of Devizes, 1177

  ‘I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot’

  Traditional

  Peculiar Crimes Unit

  The Old Warehouse

  231 Caledonian Road

  London N1 9RB

  STAFF ROSTER FOR MONDAY 31 OCTOBER

  Raymond Land, Unit Chief

  Arthur Bryant, Senior Detective

  John May, Senior Detective

  Janice Longbright, Detective Sergeant

  Dan Banbury, Crime Scene Manager/InfoTech

  Jack Renfield, Sergeant

  Fraternity DuCaine, Detective Constable

  Meera Mangeshkar, Detective Constable

  Colin Bimsley, Detective Constable

  Giles Kershaw, Forensic Pathologist (off-site)

  Crippen, staff cat

  EXCERPT FROM A SPEECH GIVEN BY MR ARTHUR BRYANT TO THE CITY OF LONDON POLICE CRIME DIRECTORATE AT THE GUILDHALL

  ‘Before I start, can I ask you to look around you at this beautiful building? After eight hundred years it’s still the home of the City of London Corporation, the powerhouse at the heart of the world’s leading financial centre.

  ‘I search the room and see a great many youthful faces. At my age, everyone is youthful. Some of you look positively prepubescent. So, as the most senior detective at London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit, may I be indulged for a moment, and give you a brief history lesson about the city you’ve been entrusted to look after?

  ‘In Tudor times London was still a box. It was tightly contained by walls on three sides, the fourth being the River Thames. This walled city was stitched into the pattern of its ancient Roman boundaries, and could be entered by only seven gates. London’s main road was Cheapside, which ran out to the Shambles in the west and Cornhill in the east.

  ‘It was a city bristling with church spires, the greatest of which was St Paul’s, which collapsed after being struck by lightning in 1561. It had two royal palaces, Baynard and Bridewell, built for Henry the Eighth. It had colleges and law courts, bowling alleys and tennis courts, cockpits and theatres. And this is how it would have stayed without the conflagration that transformed it, the Great Fire of 1666.

  ‘The city recovered with incredible speed. Just five years later, over nine thousand new houses and public buildings had been completed. The new middle-class residents wanted a separate residential district and moved west, and so London rolled like treacle across the land, leaving the financiers stuck in the old squared-off section, which became known as the Square Mile, the original City of London. Now most of the walls have gone and fewer than seven thousand people live here, but nearly half a million of us commute to it each day. You have eight hundred and fifty officers taking care of this tiny plot of land. That’s a massively disproportionate ratio compared to anywhere else in the country. Why?

  ‘Because the City of London is still what it has always been: a money factory. A 24/7/365 financial dynamo. And that’s why most of you aren’t strolling the streets with truncheons but working in offices to prevent money laundering, fraud and corruption. There’s only a handful of private owners in the Square Mile, and most of them don’t even live here. They don’t need you looking after them. So, why do you need the Peculiar Crimes Unit?

  ‘Because we perform a unique, invisible service. In many ways, we operate more than half a century behind the rest of you, because that’s when our sphere of operations was first decided. We’re not con
strained by your rules. We use our own judgement. Our task is to prevent public disorder. That includes investigating any serious crimes that take place in public spaces. Because if we don’t find fast solutions, the city loses that most quicksilver of all intangibles: confidence. And without the light of confidence we plunge into the darkness of uncertainty, which leads to financial ruin. There’s nothing more frightening than watching what people do when they start to lose money.

  ‘Which is why I’m asking you to increase the PCU’s funding in this coming year. Because our unit is buying you something which no one else can provide in London: stability and peace of mind in increasingly unpredictable times.’

  MEMO FROM RAYMOND LAND TO ALL STAFF

  (See attached.) Well, we all know how well that speech went down. Like a French kiss at a family reunion. Our budget got slashed by nearly a third. I had no idea Bryant was going to bring out the begging bowl. It’s just not done. It didn’t help that he forgot the rest of his speech and then sat in the mayor’s wife’s lap.

  Serious crimes in and around the Square Mile are down because the residential population is falling. This might have something to do with the fact that every half-decent flat in the area has been snapped up by war criminals shovelling their loose change into safe havens. Nobody lives here any more. The lights are going off in the Square Mile, so the thinking goes that we can get by on less.

  What does this mean to you lot?

  It means there’ll be cutbacks on our outsourced services, effective immediately. A wage freeze, and no more talk of performance-related bonuses. No more sending your clothes over to forensics to be dry-cleaned, no more running up kebab tabs on stakeouts and no more pawning items from the Evidence Room until payday. It’s the end of transport allowances, petty-cash chits and any other salary-enhancing initiatives your crafty little minds can come up with. In fact, I distrust the word ‘initiative’ altogether; it only leads to trouble. I don’t want anyone here thinking for themselves.

  But remember this: we are in charge of London.

  The Metropolitan Police Service may get to play with helicopters, but they also do all the paperwork and hold all the management meetings, which is why it takes them six hours to log a simple case of abusive texting. The City of London Police fanny about with PowerPoint presentations outlining initiatives that don’t work, and get to shift decimal points around sorting out cybercrime with our dopey European cousins. But it’s the Peculiar Crimes Unit that prevents panic on the streets. We handle the cases that have the capacity to bring this city down. Never forget that. When it comes to preventing public disorder and stopping our polluted, litter-strewn metropolis from falling apart at the seams, we’re on the bloody front line. It’s not our public-school twit of a mayor or his cronies who carry the can, it’s us. This isn’t a job, it’s a vocation, and nuns don’t get paid so we should count ourselves lucky. I’m sorry, but being underappreciated really gets my goat.

  Right, time for a bit of housekeeping:

  Halloween is not a pagan festival that entitles you to a day off, despite what Mr Bryant may tell you. It’s a retail opportunity created by the Yanks to flog orange plastic buckets to children. You’ll have to settle for proper holidays like Boxing Day. If this country had stayed Catholic we’d be taking every other day of the year off like the Frogs, and look at the bloody mess they’re in.

  Now that we’re under City of London jurisdiction may I remind you that we are once more a covert division, which means no more Facebook, Twitter or blogging about how wretched your lives are, no selfies at crime scenes and absolutely no more privately published volumes of candid memoirs. I’m not mentioning any names, but you know who I mean. The less the public know about us, the less stick we’ll get. Try not to draw attention to yourselves. When you head off to the pub together in your matching black unit jackets you look like an out-of-shape version of the Reservoir Dogs poster, and given the public’s current antipathy towards us I’d rather not encourage them to stick burning bags of shit through our letter box again, if you don’t mind.

  If any of you are wondering why the general public hates us so much at the moment, may I refer you to last week’s article in Hard News, which appeared under the headline ‘Why We Call Them Pigs’, in which we were described as ‘a textbook example of wasted taxpayers’ money’. The tabloid hack behind this hatchet job was transferred to the opinion page from the fashion section, and was upset because we banned her from our press conferences. She had the nerve to describe me as ‘vindictive’. Unfortunately it’s illegal to slap her in prison without a motive, but if anyone feels like running a check on her vehicle registration we might be able to get her on expired tax and make her life utterly miserable.

  The entrance hall’s visual-recognition system has been removed after Mr Bryant proved it could be cheated by the addition of a hat. For now it’s back to using a secure code. I’ve taped it on to the wall above the machine.

  Our workmen, the two Daves, are staying on after discovering that the first-floor interview room has no central support joists, so make sure you keep fat witnesses away from the middle of the building. They’re also trying to open up the basement area, so watch it as you come through the front door, particularly if you’ve been drinking. Longbright buzzed in the Pizza Hut delivery boy the other night and lost her Napoletana.

  The Police Federation’s outing to the Museum of London’s exhibition ‘Living History: Senior Citizens Recall London in the 1950s’ will take place on 25 October, although I understand that Mr Bryant will not be coming as he does not yet regard the 1950s as history.

  Heaven knows I’m no intellectual but I enjoy an Agatha Christie, and I know some of the ‘eggheads’ among us attended the British Library’s ‘Criminal Minds’ dinner last week. They want their napkin rings back. I don’t care who it was.

  The good news is, the city is really quiet at the moment and we can put our feet up for once. Apparently some bloke called Samuel Johnson said something about being tired of London. Well, I couldn’t agree with him more; I’m sick to death of it, so I’m going on holiday next week. I’m taking a watercolour course on the Isle of Wight, and if anyone else fancies using up their outstanding leave I suggest you get your request forms in double-quick. There’s nothing happening out there. Make the most of it.

  1

  RIOT!

  London. The protracted summer lately over, and the bankers sitting in Threadneedle Street, returned from their villas in Provence and Tuscany. Relentless October weather. As much water in the streets as if the tide had newly swelled from the Thames, and it would not be wonderful to find a whale beached beneath Holborn Viaduct, the traffic parting around it like an ocean current. Umbrellas up in the soft grey drizzle, and insurrection in the air.

  Riots everywhere. Riots outside the Bank of England and around St Paul’s Cathedral. Protestors swelling on Cheapside and Poultry and Lombard Street. Marchers roaring on Cornhill and Eastcheap and Fenchurch Street. Barricades on Cannon Street and across London Bridge. Police armoured and battened down in black and yellow like phalanxes of tensed wasps. Chants and megaphones and the drone of choppers overhead.

  Hurled fire, catapulted bricks, shattering glass and the blast of water hoses. It was as if, after a drowsy, sluggish summer, the streets had undergone spontaneous combustion.

  It had taken just one match to ignite this inferno, going by the name of Mr Dexter Cornell. A gentleman first fattened by fine living, then driven to flesh and bone by fear and failure. A partner in the Findersbury Private Bank of Crutched Friars until he bankrupted it. A banker, then, that bogeyman of the early twenty-first century, a Thug of Threadneedle Street, purportedly the very worst of his kind, for he arrogantly gambled with other people’s money and lost. And because his board of elderly directors got wind of his dealings they were able to protect themselves, and so Mr Cornell was parting company with the bank to the grudging approval of both sides, taking away a tidy fortune of several millions and leaving behind th
e acrid stink of insider trading.

  At which point the public, in one of its periodic fits of outrage, discovered his misdeeds and took against him, and the City of London erupted. Fingers were pointed in the press, questions were asked in the House, but nothing at all was done, and so the populace abandoned its frog-chorus of complaint and got up off its collective arse to make its feelings known by burning down a few buildings and looting some computer showrooms.

  As the banners were hoisted the police arrived, barriers were erected and the kettling began. The incandescent crowds spilled into the roads like champagne from an uncorked bottle, and the TV pundits immediately started their newsroom analyses. And once more, as had happened so many times in the past, the City of London found itself on fire.

  He had been walking in the drizzle all evening.

  After slipping off the kerb crossing Farringdon Road, it became obvious that he would not be able to walk much further. By the time he arrived at the hostel behind Clerkenwell Green he was hobbling badly, and his ankle was turning black.

  Earlier in the week, a rough sleeper he’d spoken to a couple of times before had told him that he might find a short-notice bed here, but as the girl behind the scratched Plexiglas counter shield searched her monitor, he knew he would have no luck. She looked harassed and empathetic, as if she was the one who might end up in a shop doorway tonight, not him. She was wearing a pink plastic Hello Kitty brooch on her sweater.

  ‘You’ve left it a bit too late, love,’ she said, still searching her spreadsheet. The colour was turned up too high on the monitor, bathing her features in an odd shade of mauve, but as she studied the columns, trying to juggle the spaces in her head, he could tell she was genuinely anxious to help him. ‘We always fill up earlier at the end of the weekend. There aren’t so many shops open on Sundays so people are forced outside more, and they tend to get worn out just wandering around. The last bed went a few minutes ago.’