Bryant & May - Oranges and Lemons Read online

  Christopher Fowler

  * * *

  BRYANT & MAY ORANGES AND LEMONS

  Contents

  PART ONE: The Bells of St Clement’s 1: OLD WHITE MALES

  2: COOKING THE BOOKS

  3: FALLEN ANGEL

  4: EXISTENTIAL

  5: DOWN THE STRAND

  6: A SPYING JOB

  7: GOLDEN BUDDHA

  8: A LIVING PARADOX

  9: WELCOME BACK

  10: NEW BLOOD

  11: TWO WOMEN

  12: MAY IN ABSENTIA

  13: ONE BIG TRICK

  14: INVISIBLE

  15: GENERATIONALLY CHALLENGED

  16: FAKING IT

  PART TWO: The Bells of St Martin’s 17: OVERTURE

  18: ON THE STEPS

  19: ORANGES & LEMONS

  20: OBSERVERS

  21: CANDLE, CHOPPER

  22: RADICAL ALF

  23: MAKING A MURDERER

  PART THREE: The Bells of Old Bailey 24: LIFESAVER

  25: OLD STUFF

  26: BECALMED

  27: THE SHOUT

  28: DEMOCRACY IN ACTION

  29: RATTLING THE CAGE

  30: MISINFORMATION

  31: MAKING A MURDERER

  PART FOUR: The Bells of Shoreditch 32: CHASING GHOSTS

  33: BAD LUCK

  34: BURNING PAGES

  35: THE BOUNDARIES OF NORMALITY

  36: COMPETENCY

  37: EQUAL TO THE LAW

  38: INSOLUBLE

  39: DEVIL’S BREATH

  40: THE IDEA OF LONDON

  41: MAKING A MURDERER

  PART FIVE: The Bells of Stepney 42: TRICKERY

  43: UPSIDE DOWN

  44: PRESS PRIVILEGE

  45: THE EPITOME OF LONDON

  46: CROWN ESTATE

  47: MYTHICAL FRIENDS

  48: MAKING A MURDERER

  PART SIX: The Great Bell at Bow 49: QUESTION EVERYTHING

  50: THE GREAT BELL

  51: BAIT AND SWITCH

  52: HERE COMES A CANDLE

  53: ERASING THE GHOST

  54: MISSING A TRICK

  55: MAKING A MURDERER

  56: REMEMBRANCE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  About the Author

  Christopher Fowler is the author of more than forty novels (including the universally adored Bryant & May mysteries) and short-story collections. A winner of multiple awards, including the coveted CWA ‘Dagger in the Library’, Chris has also written screenplays, video games, graphic novels, audio plays and two acclaimed memoirs, Paperboy and Film Freak, and The Book of Forgotten Authors. He divides his time between London’s King’s Cross and Barcelona. You can find out more by visiting his website – www.christopherfowler.co.uk – and following him on Twitter @Peculiar.

  Also by Christopher Fowler,

  featuring Bryant & May

  FULL DARK HOUSE

  THE WATER ROOM

  SEVENTY-SEVEN CLOCKS

  TEN-SECOND STAIRCASE

  WHITE CORRIDOR

  THE VICTORIA VANISHES

  BRYANT & MAY ON THE LOOSE

  BRYANT & MAY OFF THE RAILS

  BRYANT & MAY AND THE MEMORY OF BLOOD

  BRYANT & MAY AND THE INVISIBLE CODE

  BRYANT & MAY – THE BLEEDING HEART

  BRYANT & MAY – THE BURNING MAN

  BRYANT & MAY – STRANGE TIDE

  BRYANT & MAY – WILD CHAMBER

  BRYANT & MAY – HALL OF MIRRORS

  BRYANT & MAY – THE LONELY HOUR

  BRYANT & MAY – ENGLAND’S FINEST

  Short Stories

  BRYANT & MAY – LONDON’S GLORY

  Memoir

  PAPERBOY

  FILM FREAK

  www.christopherfowler.co.uk

  Twitter: @Peculiar

  For Peter Chapman

  And Sophie Christopher

  6/9/90 – 3/6/19

  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

  1

  Old White Males

  ‘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 fruit 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 was trying them out 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. ‘Château’ 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, he 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 2020, 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 in 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 back-room staff. Thank God we’re cops and not doctors. I don’t want to know how they’re stitching 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, lamp-posts and statuary, several pending law suits 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 pile-up 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.

  The London murder rate is still a fraction of New York’s but it isn’t helped by gunfire taking place inside our own building. At least the perpetrator was apprehended and charged with attempted murder.

  You probably want an update on John May’s condition. I have his University College Hospital Patient Report:

  ‘The patient was admitted with a gunshot wound to the upper right side of the chest wall, and suffered haemothorax and respiratory compromise, but it was not necessary to intubate as the small calibre of the round prevented significant bronchial injury.

  ‘There were initially signs of neurological deficit (patient complained of loss of sensation in right arm), but these soon subsided. There is likely to be long-term cardiac and oesophageal damage. Formal echocardiography and bronchoscopy will be performed after patient has reached a significant level of stabilization.’

  Short version: he’s going to live.

  Unfortunately he’s facing a number of charges arising from the investigation. Sadly naivety is no alibi and I’ve been told that his prosecution is going to be aggressively pursued. Although he’s expected to make a full recovery from his injury, he says he has no intention of returning to the unit. As for his partner, if anyone knows where he is

  Here Raymond Land stopped typing. There was no easy way of explaining that his best detectives would never again work with each other. Arthur Bryant and John May were finished. Their unbroken record of successful murder prosecutions was undermined by their inability to follow even the simplest rules. The PCU was like a flatulent elderly relative in a roomful of silent millennials, a source of profound embarrassment to the newly streamlined Home Office, and John May’s stupid error of judgement had given them the perfect reason to sell off the unit. Arthur Bryant was a stubborn, annoying old man who had refused to forgive his partner. Well, someone else could sort out the mess. After years of ridicule and dismissal he felt disinclined to get involved. His index fingers hovered over the keyboard.