Bryant & May Read online

  Bryant & May: Oranges and Lemons is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Christopher Fowler

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, London, in 2020.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Fowler, Christopher, author.

  Title: Bryant & May : oranges and lemons / Christopher Fowler.

  Other titles: Bryant and May

  Description: New York : Bantam, [2021] | Series: Peculiar crimes unit ;

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020012950 (print) | LCCN 2020012951 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525485926 (hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780525485971 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6056.O846 B723 2020 (print) | LCC PR6056.O846 (ebook) | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020012950

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020012951

  Ebook ISBN 9780525485971

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for eboook

  Cover art: Max Schindler

  ep_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One: The Bells of St Clement’s

  Chapter 1: Old White Males

  Chapter 2: Cooking the Books

  Chapter 3: Fallen Angel

  Chapter 4: Existential

  Chapter 5: Down the Strand

  Chapter 6: A Spying Job

  Chapter 7: Golden Buddha

  Chapter 8: A Living Paradox

  Chapter 9: Welcome Back

  Chapter 10: New Blood

  Chapter 11: Two Women

  Chapter 12: May in Absentia

  Chapter 13: One Big Trick

  Chapter 14: Invisible

  Chapter 15: Generationally Challenged

  Chapter 16: Faking It

  Part Two: The Bells of St Martin’s

  Chapter 17: Overture

  Chapter 18: On the Steps

  Chapter 19: Oranges & Lemons

  Chapter 20: Welcome Back

  Chapter 21: Candle, Chopper

  Chapter 22: Radical Alf

  Chapter 23: Making a Murderer

  Part Three: The Bells of Old Bailey

  Chapter 24: Lifesaver

  Chapter 25: Old Stuff

  Chapter 26: Becalmed

  Chapter 27: The Shout

  Chapter 28: Democracy in Action

  Chapter 29: Rattling the Cage

  Chapter 30: Misinformation

  Chapter 31: Making a Murderer

  Part Four: The Bells of Shoreditch

  Chapter 32: Chasing Ghosts

  Chapter 33: Bad Luck

  Chapter 34: Burning Pages

  Chapter 35: The Boundaries of Normality

  Chapter 36: Competency

  Chapter 37: Equal to the Law

  Chapter 38: Insoluble

  Chapter 39: Devil’s Breath

  Chapter 40: The Idea of London

  Chapter 41: Making a Murderer

  Part Five: The Bells of Stepney

  Chapter 42: Trickery

  Chapter 43: Upside Down

  Chapter 44: Press Privilege

  Chapter 45: The Epitome of London

  Chapter 46: Crown Estate

  Chapter 47: Mythical Friends

  Chapter 48: Making a Murderer

  Part Six: The Great Bell at Bow

  Chapter 49: Question Everything

  Chapter 50: The Great Bell

  Chapter 51: Bait and Switch

  Chapter 52: Here Comes a Candle

  Chapter 53: Erasing the Ghost

  Chapter 54: Missing a Trick

  Chapter 55: Making a Murderer

  Chapter 56: Remembrance

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  By Christopher Fowler

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  | | |

  The Bells of St Clement’s

  Clement Danes stands all forlorn and destitute;

  Bells that rang out yestermorn today lie mute.

  I hear children in my mind all singing there;

  But oranges are hard to find and lemons rare.

  —HAROLD ADSHEAD

  ‘Everything I tell you is a lie.’

  The old man had a face like a cheap cushion. It had retained every crease, wrinkle and furrow imprinted upon it by the tumultuous cavalcade of London’s history. It might have staved off the worst effects had it been treated to regular use of moisturizer from about 1955 onwards. Instead it was ‘lived in’ and ‘full of character,’ appealing phrases used to describe old men’s faces for which there was no similar vocabulary about women.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s a bit on the nose for the first line of a memoir,’ said Simon Sartorius. ‘It might put readers off.’ He tried to rebalance himself on his galvanized stool but the café’s tiled floor was uneven. He should never have let Arthur Bryant pick the venue for their meeting. The café was tiny, loud, overcrowded and steamier than a Turkish bath.

  ‘I think my readers should know what they’re getting into,’ said Bryant, tucking a paper napkin into his shirt collar as he attempted to read the 8-point Futura type on the menu, which was printed on a brown paper bag. ‘You’re always complaining that I misremember the past so I thought I’d be honest. Every act of recollection alters a narrative. Stories are strange fruits that ripen and mutate.’

  ‘Yours are meant to be based on fact.’ Bryant’s long-suffering editor waved at the waiter, but it might have been faster and easier to contact life on other planets. ‘You’re an officer of the law presenting his police unit’s true cases to the general reading public. It’s not Lord of the Rings.’

  ‘A fair point,’ said Bryant, ‘but in this case it’s appropriate to question everything you read.’ He dug what appeared to be a sherbet lemon from his top pocket and managed to hit the waiter on the back of the head. ‘We’d like your second cheapest bottle of red,’ he called.

  ‘You still haven’t told me anything about the investigation,’ Simon reminded him.

  ‘Oh, it has all the ingredients you’re looking for, minus the sex, obvs,’ said Bryant cheerfully. ‘I’ve given Cynthia, my ghostwriter, all the case notes.’

  ‘That’s another thing,’ said Simon. ‘I understand that the lady in question recently spent some time in prison for counterfeiting.’

  ‘That was a political act, FFS.’ Bryant had lately discovered online abbreviations and insisted on
using them in everyday conversation, even though he had no idea what they stood for. ‘Cynthia is an extremely skilled forger. I used her dud fivers for weeks before noticing that Churchill had a moustache. She’s a numismatist and IMHO a fine prose stylist, but apart from that she is first, most passionately and above all a terrible kleptomaniac.’

  The waiter slid between them and unscrewed the top from a bottle of red, sloshing it into the editor’s glass with ill grace and poor aim.

  ‘Are you sure she’s right for the job?’ Simon asked. ‘You haven’t had much luck with your biographers.’ As Bryant’s first biographer had been murdered, he realized that this was something of an understatement. ‘Can she be relied upon?’

  ‘She isn’t likely to wander off,’ Bryant reassured him. ‘She’s currently under house arrest. She stays cheerful. She has attractively customized her ankle bracelet.’

  Simon tried to steer the conversation back to the book. ‘Tell me about the case you want to cover.’

  ‘Sometimes I look back and wonder if I didn’t dream it.’

  ‘Let’s hope your readers don’t.’

  ‘The writer H. H. Munro said that the young have aspirations that never come to pass and the old have reminiscences of what never happened,’ Bryant replied unhelpfully.

  Simon winced, not at the aperçu but upon examination of the wine label. ‘Chateau’ was spelled wrong. ‘How did you find this place?’ he asked.

  ‘The ABC Café poisonings,’ said Bryant. ‘I wouldn’t have the mackerel.’

  That was the problem with Mr Bryant, his long-suffering editor decided. One never knew if he was joking. Looking across the plastic counter at this twinkle-eyed trickster, ancient yet somehow forever stuck in those teenaged years that could make any parent commit murder, Simon weighed up the risks of publishing something that might prove to be a farrago of nonsense. Volumes One and Two had no pending lawsuits and were modestly in profit. So long as it’s entertaining, he decided. ‘When do you think we’d be able to take delivery?’

  Bryant’s innocent blue eyes swam up at him. ‘Do I get more dosh if Cynthia bangs it out in a fortnight?’

  Simon began to doubt the wisdom of recommissioning the series of memoirs that the Sunday Times had called ‘the very definition of unreliability,’ but London’s oldest detective was already raising his glass in a toast.

  INTRODUCTION TO THE FORTHCOMING BOOK THE NICK OF TIME: MEMORABLE CASES OF THE PECULIAR CRIMES UNIT, VOL. 3, AS TOLD TO CYNTHIA BIRDHANGER, RANDOM HOUSE, HARDBACK, £18.99

  My name is Arthur Bryant, and I’m one of two senior detectives at a specialist London crime unit. Perhaps you’ve read my earlier memoirs. Working in homicide really takes it out of you. If you thought I was an old man in those days, you should see me now. My face looks like an apple someone left on a warm windowsill for a year. A list of my ailments would run to the size of a telephone directory, assuming there’s anyone left alive who remembers what directories were. Strongmen tore them in half on television.

  I admit I haven’t taken care of myself. I’m in better condition than Naples, but that’s about it. I’m still alive, though, still working with my partner, John May, at the PCU in King’s Cross, London, determined to soldier on even if I occasionally lose my keys, mentally speaking.

  The investigation I’m about to describe occurred in strange days. It felt like the time of the Phoney War, that drifting period between Neville Chamberlain’s announcement and the start of the Second World War when everyone was anxious but nothing much happened, except of course it wasn’t wartime. It was somewhere around 2019, I forget exactly when, but a period of such global uncertainty that we couldn’t discuss our fears without rancour.

  Abnormal was fast becoming the new normal, and it was an abnormally warm spring. I was forced to shed one of my vests in March. Normally they see me through to 21 June, a time when Londoners ask themselves how it can possibly be Midsummer’s Day when they’re still wearing cardigans.

  Strange days…did I say that already? Ranted politics in hoppy pubs, high-street shops posting closure notices, acrimony and ineptitude, a skittering spirit in the air. Where once there would have been torchlit riots to set the heads of the guilty upon the poles of London Bridge, instead there was only muddle, mess and moaning.

  Nor were the law enforcement units exempt. After a decade of fighting budget cuts, the PCU had hit the buffers and could go no further. At our lowest point we were embroiled in our strangest case.

  In order to present this account unambiguously, I must explain what the killer did, the how and why of it all, but that will not be enough. I still feel I failed and that justice was not served. I ask myself: What was it really about?

  The majority of crimes are senseless. The few which are premeditated end up on our desks, but this nearly became another unsolved London mystery. Some of you may think that my career as a police officer sounds far-fetched, but what you consider shocking I regard as routine. We are daily steeped in the banality of violent death.

  OK, Cynthia, over to you. You can work at my desk as soon as your anklet comes off but don’t ‘liberate’ anything. I’ve counted my pens.

  Cynthia’s my ghostwriter. She’s a lovely woman but a bit of a career tea leaf, and tends to go on the nick when she’s got the itch for it. She’s just returned from another little holiday at Her Majesty’s pleasure after covering a CCTV camera with tin foil and whipping an Asprey’s tiara into her bottomless handbag. I’m giving her my notes on the case so she can check them against the facts and tell me I got everything wrong, then write it up in a form that has ‘reader appeal,’ whatever that means. I tell her all facts are adjustable. It wouldn’t kill her to make me a bit younger. The trouble is, when you leave it to a biographer to fill in the blanks they get carried away. Cynthia’s prose has a purple tendency and you can’t always tell if what you’re reading is real or a Jeffrey Archer, but apart from that she seems up to the job.

  I’ll be reading over your shoulder, Cynthia, so go easy on the adjectives, and if you leave the office after me remember there’s nothing valuable here unless you can find a buyer for my ‘I’m Backing Britain’ tea mugs.

  PECULIAR CRIMES UNIT

  A specialized London police division with a remit to prevent or cause to cease any acts of public affright or violent disorder committed in the municipal or communal areas of the city.

  The Old Warehouse

  231 Caledonian Road

  London N1 9RB

  STAFF ROSTER, MONDAY 11 MARCH

  Raymond Land, Unit Chief

  Arthur Bryant, Detective Chief Inspector

  John May, Detective Chief Inspector

  Janice Longbright, Detective Inspector

  Dan Banbury, Crime Scene/Forensic

  Meera Mangeshkar, Detective Sergeant

  Colin Bimsley, Detective Sergeant

  Sidney Hargreaves, Intern

  Giles Kershaw, Forensic Pathologist (off-site)

  PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL MEMO

  FROM: RAYMOND LAND

  TO: ALL PCU STAFF

  Right, you lot, pay attention.

  This will be my last email to you all. I know you’ve always relied on these bulletins to keep you up-to-date with law enforcement guidelines, so if you still need a bedtime story I could tell you about the latest promise to put more PCs on the streets by plucking them from the Magic Police Tree, i.e., shifting inexperienced officers from one dire crisis to another and giving us back some of the money the last PM snatched away. Whichever Old Etonian is in charge of our country these days would rather blame the current knife-crime tsunami on sunspots than admit they’ve been draining our budget coffers. ‘Austerity measures’ means we’re twenty thousand front-line officers down with no support and no backroom staff. Thank God we’re cops and not doctors. I don’t want to know how they’re stit
ching patients up with parcel string and rubber bands in the corridors of the NHS. So let’s skip all that and address the big issue of the day.

  What did I specifically ask you not to do?

  Don’t get us closed down, I said.

  It wasn’t asking much. I just wanted you to keep a low profile, look busy and not turn us into social lepers. What happened? We’ve gone from a local embarrassment to a national disgrace. We have the smell of death about us, and this time it’s not just coming from Mr Bryant. I keep looking to see if we’ve got a cross painted on the Unit’s front door. I know what you’re going to say: We’ve been closed down before. This time it’s for good. We’ve made it to number one on the government’s blacklist of ‘Organizations of Potential Detriment.’

  Our commendation for catching the Lonely Hour Killer came with the kind of bill that’s usually only seen by our commissioner after one of his dinners at the Dorchester. I’ll happily itemize the cost for you. So far it’s for the partial demolition of a Tudorbethan mansion in Hampstead, the destruction of an extremely rare Daimler motor vehicle, damage to various high-street shops, lampposts and statuary, several pending lawsuits from frightened pensioners who suffered gusset accidents after being forced to jump into hedges to escape your pursuit vehicle and of course, the pièce de résistance, costs arising from a multiple pileup near St Paul’s Cathedral, including an assault on a vicar and the wholesale looting of a doughnut van. So if anyone has some loose cash knocking about, feel free to put it in the reparations kitty.