Bryant & May 04; Ten Second Staircase b&m-4 Read online

  “Teenagers are suspicious of anyone over twenty,” Bryant admitted, brushing tobacco strands from his lapel, “so how will they feel about me? I thought there were going to be more adults here. Young people can smell lies, you know. Their warning flags unfurl at the slightest provocation. A hint of condescension and they bob up like meerkats. Contrary to popular belief, they’re more naturally astute than so-called grown-ups. The whole of one’s adult life is a gradual process of dulling the senses, Janice. Look how young we all were when we started at the PCU, little more than children ourselves. But we were firing on all synapses, awake to the world.”

  Longbright brushed his shoulders with maternal propriety. “Raymond Land says the sensitive are incapable of action. He reckons we need more thick-skinned recruits.”

  “Which is why our acting chief would be better employed in parking control, or some public service which you could train a moderately attentive bottle-nosed dolphin to perform.” Bryant had little patience with those who frowned on his abstract methods. Critics offered him nothing. They made the most senior detective of London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit as irritable as a wasp in a bottle and as stubborn as a doorstop.

  “The school magazine is out there waiting to take your picture. They’ve seen you on TV, don’t forget. You’re a bit of a celebrity these days. Show me how you look.” Longbright jerked his tie a little straighter and pulled his sleeves to length. “Good enough, I suppose. I need photographic evidence of you in a suit, even though it’s thirty years old. Make sure you stick to Raymond’s brief and talk about the specifics of crime prevention. Don’t forget the CAPO initiative – we have to reach them while they’re in the highest-risk category.” Seventeen-year-olds were more likely to become victims of street crime than any other population segment. Their complex pattern of allegiance to different urban tribes was more confusing than French court etiquette – territorial invasion, lack of respect, the wrong clothes, the wrong ethnicity, attitudes exaggerated by hormones, chemistry, geography, and simple bad timing.

  “My notes are a little more abstract than Raymond might wish,” Bryant warned.

  Longbright threw him a hopeless look. “I thought he vetted your script.”

  “I meant to run it by him last night, but I’d promised to drive Alma to her sister’s in Tooting. She fell off her doorstep while she was red-leading it, and needed a bread poultice for her knee.”

  “Surely the head of the department ranks above your landlady.”

  “Not in terms of intelligence, I assure you.”

  “You should have shown him what you’re planning to say, Arthur. You know how concerned he is about the media attention we’ve been receiving.”

  The unit had lately been the subject of a television documentary, and not all of the press articles following in its wake had been complimentary.

  “I couldn’t stick to Raymond’s guidelines on the history of crime fighting because I don’t want to talk down to my audience. They’re supposed to be smart kids, the top five percent of the education system. I don’t want them to get fidgety.”

  “Just fix them with that angry stare of yours. Go on – everyone’s waiting for you.”

  The elderly detective took an unsteady step forward and balked. He could feel a cold wall of expectancy emanating from the crowded auditorium. The hum of audience conversation parried his determination, stranding him at the edge of the stage.

  “What’s the matter now?” asked Longbright, exasperated.

  “No-one in our family was good with the young,” Bryant wavered. “When I was little, my father tried to light a cigarette while holding me and a pint of bitter, and burned the top of my head. All of our childhood problems were sorted out with a clout round the ear. It’s a wonder I can name the kings of England.”

  “Don’t view them as youngsters, Arthur; they’re at the age when they think they know everything, so talk to them as if they do. The head teacher has already introduced you. They’ll start slow handclapping if you don’t get out there.” It occurred to her that because Bryant had attended a lowly state school in Whitechapel, he might actually be intimidated by appearing before an exclusive group of private pupils from upper-middle-class homes.

  Bryant dragged out his dog-eared notes and smoothed them nervously. “I thought at least John could have been here to support me.”

  “You know he had a hospital appointment. Now stop making a fuss.” She placed a broad hand in the small of his back and gently propelled him onto the stage.

  Bryant stepped unsteadily into the spotlight, encouraged by a line of welcoming teachers. Having recently achieved a level of public fame for his capture of the Water Room killer, he knew it was time for him to enjoy his moment of recognition, but today he felt exposed and vulnerable.

  The detective wiped his watery blue eyes and surveyed the hall of pale varnished oak from the podium. Absurdly youthful faces lifted to study him, and he saw the great age gulf that lay between lectern and audience. How could he ever expect to reach them? He remembered the war; they would have trouble remembering the 1980s. The sea of blue and gold, the expensive haircuts, the low sussurance of well-educated voices, teachers standing at the end of every third row like benign prison guards. It was surprisingly intimidating.

  Most of the students had broken off their conversation to acknowledge his arrival, but some were still chatting. He fired a rattling cough into the microphone, a magnified explosion that echoed into a squeal of feedback. Now they ceased talking and looked up in a single battalion, assessing him.

  He could feel the surf of confidence radiating from these bored young men, and knew he would have to work for their attention. The boys of St Crispin’s were not here to offer him respect; he was in their employ, and they would choose to listen, or ignore him. For one terrifying second, the power of the young was made palpable. Bryant was an outsider, an interloper. He rustled his notes and began to speak.

  “My name is Arthur Bryant,” he told them unsteadily, “and together with my partner John May, I run a small detective division known as the Peculiar Crimes Unit.” He settled his gaze in the centre of the audience, focussing on the most insolent and jaded faces. “Time moves fast. When the unit was first founded, much detective work was still based on Victorian principles. Anything else was untried and experimental. We were one of several divisions created in a new spirit of innovation. Because we’re mainly academics, we don’t use traditional law enforcement methods. We are not a part of the Met; they are hardworking, sensible men and women who handle the daily fallout of poverty and hardship. The PCU doesn’t deal with life’s failures. The criminals we hunt have already proven successful.” His attention locked on a group of four boys who seemed on the verge of tuning out from his lecture. He found himself departing from the script in order to speak directly to them. He raised his voice.

  “Let’s take an example. Say one of you lads in the middle there gets burgled at home. The police handle cases in order of priority, just like doctors. Then they send a beat constable or a mobile uniformed officer around to ask you for details of the break-in and a list of what’s missing. They are not trained as investigative detectives, so you have to wait for a specialist to take fingerprints, which they’ll try to match with those of a registered felon. If no-one is discovered, your loss is merely noted and set against the chance of the future recovery of your goods – a possibility that shrinks with each passing day. The system only works for its best exemplars. But at the Peculiar Crimes Unit, we adopt a radically different approach.” As he still seemed to have their attention, Bryant decided to forge ahead with his explication.

  “We ask ourselves a fundamental question. What is a crime? How far does its moral dimension extend? Is it simply an act that works against the common good? If you are starving and steal from a rich man’s larder, should you be punished less than if you were not hungry? All crime is driven by some kind of need. Once those needs were simple: food, shelter, warmth, the basic assurances of survival
. We can predict the sad lives of many criminals as surely as if they were specimens in a petri dish. Let’s imagine a boy like any one of you, but born on a run-down estate. His family is poor, he never knows his real father and is beaten up by his stepfather, he’s trouble at school, a nuisance on the streets, put into care, abused, arrested by the time he’s ten, doing custody at the age of fifteen. He’ll be lucky if he makes it to thirty. Our prisons are full of such people. But as soon as our needs are taken care of, new crimes appear within society. As we become more sophisticated, so do the reasons for our misdeeds. Once we are warm and fed and properly raised, we covet something more complex: power. Spending power, power over others, the power to be noticed. And sometimes that power can be achieved by violating the accepted laws of the land. So criminal sophistication requires sophisticated methods of detection. That’s where specialist units like ours come in. Think of Internet fraud, and you’ll find it is being matched by equally subtle methods of detection that require as much knowledge as the criminals’. I’m sure you boys know far more about the Internet than your parents, but does that place you at less of a risk?”

  He’s off to a decent start, thought Longbright from the wings. A bit all over the place, but no doubt he’ll draw it all together and make his point.

  “Fraud, robbery, assault, and murder are all cause-and-effect crimes requiring carefully targeted treatment. But all modern lawlessness carries the seeds of a strange paradox within it, for just as ancient crimes appear in cunning new versions, others appear entirely unmotivated. One thinks of vandalism. Some will have you believe it was invented in the postwar period, but not so. Acts of vandalism have been recorded in every sophisticated civilisation; the defacing of statues was common in ancient Rome. Now, though, we are reaching a new peak of motiveless transgression. Criminality has once more assumed the kind of dark edge that existed in London during the eighteenth century. London was always the home of mob rule. The public voiced their opinions about whether it was right for a man to hang just as much as the judge. The joyous assembly would jeer or cheer a prisoner’s final speech at Tyburn’s triple tree. They would choose to condemn a wrongdoer – or venerate him. Pamphlets filled with prints and poems would be produced in his honour. He would achieve lasting fame as a noble champion, his exploits retold as brave deeds, and there was nothing that governments could do to prevent it. Criminals became celebrities because they were seen to be fighting the old order, kicking back at an oppressive system.” Bryant eyed his audience like a pirate frightening cabin boys with tales of dancing skeletons. “Often, thieves’ necks would fail to break when they were dropped from the Tyburn gallows, and the crowd would cut down a half-hanged man to set him free, because they felt he had paid for his crimes. They rioted against the practise of passing bodies over to the anatomists, and pelted bungling hangmen with bricks. If a murderer conducted himself nobly as he ascended the gallows stairs, he would become more respected than his accusers. But time has robbed us of these gracious renegades. Last week, less than a quarter of a mile from here, in Smithfield, a schoolboy was stabbed through the heart for his mobile phone. An elderly man on a tube platform in Holborn was kicked to death for bumping into someone. These criminals are not to be venerated.”

  A murmur of recollection rippled through the auditorium.

  “Statistics show that the nature of English crime is reverting to its oldest habits. In a country where so many desire status and wealth, petty annoyances can spark disproportionately violent behaviour. We become frustrated because we feel powerless, invisible, unheard. We crave celebrity, but that’s not easy to come by, so we settle for notoriety. Envy and bitterness drive a new breed of lawbreakers, replacing the old motives of poverty and the need for escape. But how do you solve crimes which no longer have traditional motives?”

  He’s warming the audience up nicely, and he’s still got their attention, thought Longbright, feeling for a chair at the side of the stage. Let’s hope he remembers to talk about Raymond’s initiatives and can get all the way through without saying anything offensive. She knew how volatile her boss could be, but now was the time for him to exercise restraint. For once, the fortunes of the Peculiar Crimes Unit were on the rise. Indeed, they had been ever since a remarkable murder in a quiet North London street had placed them all in the public eye. Arthur’s partner, John May, had appeared on a late-night programme discussing the importance of the case with several bad-tempered social commentators; a number of articles in the Guardian and The Times had examined the case in detail; government funding for the coming year had miraculously appeared; and mercifully no-one outside the unit knew the reality of the case’s conclusion. If they did, Longbright doubted that any of them would have survived with their career intact. Arthur Bryant’s decision to break the law in order to close the investigation had been so contentious that Longbright had turned down the BBC’s offer to feature her in their film, in case she accidentally let slip the truth.

  Basking in the glow of the publicity, Bryant had been asked to deliver a lecture to St Crispin’s Boys’ School, the exclusive private academy founded by a devout Christian group in 1653 in St John Street, Clerkenwell, and had shyly accepted.

  Longbright turned her attention back to the stage.

  “What we have here is a fundamental alteration in the definition of morality,” Bryant argued. “What does it now mean to have a moral conscience? Do we need to develop different values from those of our parents? Most of you think you can distinguish right from wrong, but morality requires information to feed it, so you build your own internal moral system from the intelligence you receive, probably the hardest thing anyone ever has to do, judging by the number of times the system fails.

  “In London’s rural suburbs, not far from here, middle-class Thames Valley towns like Weybridge and Henley are awash with a new kind of malicious cruelty. Here the system appears to be failing. The criminals are not suffering inner-city deprivation, nor are they gang members protecting their turf through internecine wars based on divisions in ethnicity. They are wealthy white males facing futures filled with opportunities. So why are they turning to unprovoked violence and murder? Part of a generation has somehow become unmoored from its foundations, and no-one knows how to draw it back from the harmful shallows. You all face complex pressures, problems that gentlemen of my advanced age are scarcely able to imagine. From the day you were born, someone has been targeting you as a potential market. Your attention has become fragmented. You are offered no solitude, no peace, no time for reflection. You are forced to create your own methods of escape. Some choose alcohol and narcotics, others form social cliques that combat the status quo. All of you in this hall are in danger. Many people of my age would suggest that you desire to break the law not because you’ve had a hard time growing up, but because you haven’t. You’ve been spoiled with everything you ever wanted, but you still want more.”

  He’s forgotten the script, Longbright worried, and he’s stabbing his finger at them. At this rate he’ll have them throwing things at him. Some of the pupils were fidgeting in annoyance. They were clearly uncomfortable with the hectoring tenor of Bryant’s sermon. The old detective hadn’t given a lecture in years, and had forgotten the importance of keeping the audience on his side. Keep it light in tone but heavy on factual data, Land had warned. Be positive but don’t say anything controversial. Remember their parents are fee-paying voters with a lot of clout.

  Bryant’s raised voice brought her back to attention. “Well, I don’t believe that,” he was saying. “Children today have a far more complicated time growing up than I ever did. At the Peculiar Crimes Unit, we have the time and capability to see beyond stock answers and standard procedures. We claw our way to the roots of the crime, and by understanding its cause, we hope to provide solutions.”

  As the audience halfheartedly pattered their hands, Longbright rose and made her way from the stage, back to the stand at the rear of the hall, where she accepted a polystyrene cup of coffee
. Only the question-and-answer session was left now. Longbright had tried to talk her superior out of holding one, bearing in mind his capacity for argument, but half a dozen teenagers had already raised their hands. There was a palpable attitude of aggression and defiance in the pupils’ body language.

  “You say it’s a question of morals,” said a pale, elongated boy with expensively layered blond hair.

  “Stand up and give your surname,” barked the teacher at the end of the row.

  The boy unfolded himself from his seat with difficulty and faced the audience. “Sorry, sir. Gosling.” He turned to Bryant. “Are you saying we’re the ones who commit crimes because we lack a moral code?”

  “Of course not,” Bryant replied. “I’m just saying that it’s understandable you’re confused. You know that trainers are made in Korea for starvation wages, so you buy a pair from a company promising to make their product locally for a fair price. Then you discover that the company you chose destroyed ancient farmland to build their factory. How do you feel about your purchase now? You’ve been lied to, so why shouldn’t you commit a victimless crime and steal the shoes? You’re given horrible role models, your divorced parents are having sex with people you hate and have given up caring what you do, you’re expected to take an interest in the lifestyles of singers who’ll make more money than you will ever see, so it’s no wonder you start taking drugs and behaving like animals.”

  The hall erupted. Longbright covered her face with her hands. Bryant had never been much of a diplomat.

  A small lad with a pustular complexion rose sharply. “Parfitt. You just don’t like the fact that we’re young, and still have a chance to change the world your contemporaries wrecked for us.”

  A heavyset boy with shiny red cheeks, cropped black hair, and bat ears jumped angrily to attention. “That’s right. We’re the ones – ”

  “Surname,” barked his master, leaning angrily forward.