Bryant & May 06; The Victoria Vanishes b&m-6 Page 4
I’ve got one week to make him change his mind, May told himself. It’s not an unfeasible task. But he knew it was almost impossible to alter Bryant’s course once it was set.
∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧
6
Observation
Arthur Bryant cursed himself. I should have handled the matter of my resignation better, he thought. After all these years of working with John, I should at least have taken him into my confidence first.
But John May had always been able to talk him out of making sudden foolhardy decisions. His was the healing voice of reason, a counterbalance to the maddening pandemonium of Bryant’s mind. John might protest, but he could survive perfectly well on his own. People enjoyed his company and opened up to him because he didn’t do anything that made them nervous. Right from the outset of their partnership, when the pair had launched a murder investigation at the Palace Theatre and solved the Shepherd’s Market diamond robbery, Bryant had been upsetting applecarts and overturning the status quo while his partner followed behind, smoothing raised hackles and restoring order. Across the years, from the tracking of the Deptford Demon to the final unmasking of the Leicester Square Vampire, this out-of-kilter relationship had allowed them to resolve a thousand cases great and small. But everything came to an end, and knowing when to leave was crucial.
Now Oswald Finch was gone, and soon they too would pass into oblivion, to be faintly recalled as members of the old school of police work, a pair of characters, representatives of a classic style of investigation that had since passed into obsolescence. Would anything about them be remembered, other than a few oft-told anecdotes, funny stories to be trotted out wherever old men gathered in pubs? Had they really achieved anything at all, changed any laws, improved the lot of Londoners? Or would they soon be as forgotten as old music hall stars, the pair of them described as the Flanagan & Allan of the Met?
Bryant raised his head from his scarf and looked about. He was passing along the cream stucco edge of Coram’s Fields, the seven-acre park on the site of the old Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury which no adult could enter unless in the company of a child. The wind was rising, to clatter the leaves of the high oaks and plane trees above him. At 10:40 p.m. Bloomsbury was almost deserted, but even during the day there was hardly anyone around. The area between Gower Street and Gray’s Inn Road remained reticent and dignified, seemingly trapped in an earlier era between world wars. There were still a few indifferent secondhand bookshops housed in its mansion buildings, barber shops and fish bars left over from the 1930s, corner pubs that faded back from the street in a deliberate attempt to shun passing trade.
He crossed the top of Marchmont Street into Tavistock Place, feeling his legs twinge in protest as he climbed the kerb. There would be plenty of cabs on Euston Road. Cutting across the pavement in the direction of Judd Street, he found himself in a road he did not know, little more than an alley that opened out into a dog-leg. The sound of traffic had all but disappeared. There was only the wind in the trees, and the distant twitter of birds who had mistaken the perpetually sulphurous skies for dawn.
The effect of the alcohol in his system was starting to evaporate. Untangling his distance spectacles from the other pairs that rattled loose in his pocket, he wrapped the flexible metal arms around his ears and examined the street ahead.
So Raymond Land thought he had failing powers of observation, did he? He squinted at the narrow pavement with its high redbrick wall, the rustling cherry trees, the old-fashioned gas lamps that had been wired to hold electric bulbs. The jaundiced lighting gave the street an air of melancholy neglect, like a yellowing newspaper photograph found beneath the floorboards of a derelict house.
Note what you see, he told himself. Remember how you used to do it when you were a young man.
Okay, the street had been severed at the far end by a grim granite office building, the other side of which presumably faced the hellish traffic of Euston Road. Several houses had been torn down – they had probably survived wartime bomb damage to last for another two or three decades – and replaced with council flats. Their windows clumsily referenced the design of the surrounding Victorian terraces, but everything about the newer properties was cheaper and smaller.
A single original house, number 6A, had been left behind. Tall and narrow, gapped on either side, it had been stranded alone in the present day like an elderly aunt at a funeral.
A slender street to the left: Argyle Walk. An alleyway leading off to the right, with black traffic barriers raised through its centre, copies of a traditional design; once, the city had found new lives for its naval gun barrels, upending them in the streets and inserting red cannonballs in the mouths to form bollards.
Above and behind the buildings, the sallow, ghostly clock on the Gothic tower of St Pancras Station floated like a second moon.
What else could he discern?
A pale keystone over a door, initials entwined in a county badge, a concave shell-hood above another entrance, a feature used by early Georgians to provide protection from inclement weather, although this one was an Edwardian copy.
A carved blind window, created to provide balance for other openings in the side wall of the terrace. Or perhaps it had been bricked in because of William III’s window tax.
A black-painted fresh air inlet with a grating on its top, like a ship’s periscope, designed to prevent vacuums occurring in the sewage system below the street.
The fragile lacework of a wrought-iron ornamental balcony, complete with a curving zinc hood.
A square iron lid recessed into the flagstones that read Patent Air-Tight-Flap, the cover plate for a coal-hole which would have been converted into a basement after the arrival of central heating.
A cast-iron railing of daisies and ivy leaves, one which had survived the mass removal of ironwork during the Second World War. Britons had been told that their railings, along with their saucepans, would be melted down ‘for the war effort’ in what was largely a propaganda exercise.
What else?
A door-knocker consisting of a hand holding a wreath, painted over so many times that the form had been all but lost. Carpenters, metalworkers and battalions of servants would have ensured that these domestic items remained in perfect restoration. Now no-one had the skills, and so they were scoured into oblivion by successive tenants.
A pair of small stone lions stood on a balustrade. Once, the lion could have been regarded as the architectural symbol of London, the leonine essence distorted into decorative devices throughout the metropolis, sprawled in sunlight on the Embankment side of Somerset House, winged and majestic at Holborn Viaduct.
A corner pub, The Victoria Cross, with a sign above it depicting its namesake, the highest recognition for bravery in the face of the enemy that could be awarded to any member of the British and Commonwealth armed forces. The decoration took the form of a cross pattée, bearing a crown surmounted by a lion, and the inscription ‘FOR VALOUR’. Beneath the sign were opaque lower windows, gold letters in a spotted mirror panel establishing the types of beers served and the foundation date. A deserted bar unit, mirrored and shelved, where bottles of whisky and gin remained in places they had doubtless occupied for decades. Above, an old clock was set at the wrong time, seven-fifteen.
One expected to find untouched areas like this in Kensington and Chelsea, where old money had preserved past features that the poor were resigned to lose, but Bryant was surprised to see that parts of Bloomsbury, the West End’s shabbily genteel cousin, were still so complete. That’s my trouble, he thought. I always see things, not people.
A single pedestrian coasted the corner ahead of him. Bryant narrowed his eyes and conducted the same observational survey on her. She was between forty-five and fifty, and would once have seemed old, branded invisible and treated brusquely by the inhabitants of the Victorian buildings around them. “She could very well pass for forty-three in the dusk with the light behind her,” W.S. Gilbert had written of an attor
ney’s daughter in Trial by Jury. An unmemorable face, rounded and fattened by time, lined a little by care, or what was now termed stress. Mousey hair cropped close to her jaw-line, makeup a little too thick, small eyes downcast, head lost in thought. Her raincoat had seen better days, but her shoes were polished and of good quality. The heels suggested that she was conscious of her height, for she was small and broad-hipped. She looked like a council official. A bag on her shoulder, brown and shapeless, bulging with – what did women take with them these days? Documents, most likely, if she was returning from working late in an office. A drink after work, or rather drinks, for she appeared a little unsteady on those heels. Somebody’s going-away party, a birthday celebration. A mother, a wife, going home late and alone after a hard day, heading in the wrong direction for King’s Cross station.
Bryant watched as she stopped and looked up at the pub sign, then negotiated the kerb to the entrance. He slowed to watch through the window as she headed to the counter, and a barman emerged to greet her, appearing like an actor catching his cue on a stage set.
There was nothing more to be noted here. It crossed his mind that he was becoming less observant because there was less of interest to see in London these days. He needed the lights and noise of the station, where one could witness meetings and farewells, the discovered, the lost and the confounded. That was the best way to check whether his powers were truly waning. But he was tired, and as he passed into the covered alley that led out onto Euston Road, he decided to find a cab. It had been a long, exhausting day, one that marked an end, and a new beginning that would not involve him. Appointments, resignations, speeches and arguments. And on top of all this, he had been entrusted with the ashes of his old colleague.
The ashes. Only now did he realise that he had no idea what had happened to the aluminium urn containing the remains of Oswald Finch.
∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧
7
Reliquary
“Christ’s blood,” said Dr Harold Masters testily, making the phrase sound like an oath. “Be honest with me, that’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it? You’re after information on some new pet hobby of yours. What was it last time – the whereabouts of some Egyptian sacrificial urn you thought was still floating about in the London canal system – ”
Arthur Bryant had not expected the doctor to discern his purpose quite so quickly. “Could you slow down a bit? I’m not a marathon runner,” he begged, hopping along beside the impossibly tall academic as they climbed the steps of the British Museum.
“I lecture on ancient mythologies these days, Arthur; I’m not in haematology anymore, unless you count the Athenian. Christ’s blood is one of those things like the Ark of the Covenant. It’s largely a Judeo-Christian habit, you know, venerating bits of wood and stains on cloths. Henry the Eighth supposedly owned the left leg of St George. I don’t suppose you’d catch Buddhists flogging each other bits of Gautama Buddha’s sandals in order to assuage their suffering.”
“I have a good reason for asking,” said Bryant. “I thought if anybody knew, you would. Your arcane knowledge is more farreaching than any other academic’s. We’ve known each other for so long, and yet I never really get to sound out your knowledge.”
“That’s because you don’t pay me.”
The grease-grey, soaking Tuesday morning prevented students from sitting on the staircase, and the forecourt had the forlorn air of an abandoned temple. Only the man turning hot dogs on a griddle outside the museum gates seemed unfazed by the lousy weather. Masters was about to give a lecture on early London household gods, and was running late. He lowered his great emerald-panelled golfing umbrella to encompass Bryant.
“It’s nothing new, you know, the attempt to trace the Scarlet Thread, the idea that man can only be brought into a covenant with God through the shedding of blood. My knowledge of haematology is of little help in such endeavours,” he said hotly, as if defending himself. “Ever since all those books about the Knights Templars came out, I’ve been besieged by students with crackpot theories.” The lanky lecturer tore off his tortoiseshell glasses with his free hand and wagged them at Bryant. “I tell them, you think you’re the first person to go searching for hidden treasures in London? Why, you’re just the latest in a long line of would-be plunderers armed with an ordnance survey map and a few scraps of historically inaccurate data. Really, Arthur, I would have expected something better from you.” He stopped so suddenly that Bryant ran into him. “Do you know, I still have Bunthorne?”
“Bunthorne?” repeated Bryant, taken aback.
“Don’t you remember, you came around to my house with a ginger kitten in your overcoat pocket, said you’d found it on Battersea Bridge and that its name was Bunthorne. You left it with me and never returned to pick it up. Popping in for half an hour, you said.”
“My dear chap, I’m so frightfully sorry, I forgot all about – ”
“Oh, don’t worry.” Masters waved the thought away with long pale fingers. “He’s been a great comfort to me since my wife died.”
“Oh, I didn’t know – ”
“Well, how could you? Honestly, this rain, hold on.” He flapped the great umbrella as he closed it, drenching them both. “I’m incredibly late. Want to sit in on my talk about Mithras and the Romans? Oh.” He stopped abruptly again. This time he had been brought up short by a mounted sign at the top of the steps that read Today’s Lectures Have Been Cancelled. Apparently a burst water pipe in the gents’ toilets had caused Camden’s Health & Safety Department to close the public speaking room until further notice. “Well, it looks as though you have me all to yourself,” said Masters. “What is it you want to know about the blood of Christ?”
They queued for tea beneath the astonishing glass canopy of the Great Courtyard and seated themselves in a quiet, shadowed corner. Bryant dug into his overcoat and produced a sheaf of wrinkled paperwork.
Dr Masters was the one man he knew who might be able to answer his questions. The ambitious academic belonged to a group of intellectual misfits who went by the nickname of the Insomnia Squad. They regularly stayed up all night arguing about everything from Arthurian fellowships and Islamic mythology to the semiotics of old Superman comics. Most of them were barely able to hold down regular jobs, and tended to drift away from their target research like wisps of autumn smoke, but Masters was driven by obsessive curiosity and the desire to improve and repair the world, even if it killed everyone in the process. Academics could be so blind sometimes.
“I was recently researching the city’s social panics and outbreaks of mass hysteria,” he told Bryant. “I’m surprised you didn’t come to me when you were searching for the Highwayman. I’d have been able to give you some pointers.” A few months earlier, the Peculiar Crimes Unit had conducted a search for a killer dressed in a tricorn hat and riding boots who had caught the public’s imagination.
“Actually, it was while we were conducting that investigation that I came across references to a local street gang known as the Saladins,” Bryant explained, sipping his tea. “Extraordinary that a bunch of uneducated kids could name themselves after a nine-hundred-year-old legend.” Over the years, Bryant had become an accidental expert on the arcane history of London.
“So you know that after Saladin retook Jerusalem in 1187, his Knights Hospitallers survived in the district of Clerkenwell?”
“I’ve been reading about it, yes. I presume the kids we interviewed had accidentally stumbled across some local history.”
“I don’t know how you find the time to study this sort of thing when you’ve got a full-time job in the police. Well, the knights were stripped of their properties and income by Henry the Eighth, during the dissolution of the monasteries. But they stayed in the area. They based themselves near the Gothic arch of St John’s Gate, a place of profound religious mystery. At the hospital and priory church of St John of Jerusalem, to be precise, where injured Crusaders were cared for. You still find cafés and bars in Clerkenwell b
earing their name.”
Bryant unfurled his paperwork with a flourish. “I did a little research. Listen to this. On October the third, 1247, the leader of the Knights Templars presented King Henry the Third with a six-inch-long lead-crystal pot marked with the symbol of the knights, a red-and-white cross-hilt, said to contain the blood of Christ, the ultimate relic of the Crucifixion. Its authenticity was confirmed by a separate scroll holding the seals of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, signed by all the prelates of the Holy Land. The vial was held in a box carved with the chevron of the arms of the Prior Robert De Manneby, an ancient pattern taken from the priory window of Saint John, the first baron of England.”
“Yes, yes.” Masters coloured with impatience.
“And all of the other tantalising snippets, like the letters xpisk marked on the container, and the supposed decanting of the vial that resulted in the deaths of five prelates. Who’d have thought that the true heart of the Crusades would lie in Clerkenwell, just up the road? Would you like a biscuit?” Bryant produced a squashed packet of lemon puffs from his coat pocket and set it down between them.
“I didn’t know they still made these,” Masters remarked, pulling one from the packet. “It’s all unverifiable stuff, you know. I’ve heard the story many times before. Some students came to me insisting that the vial was lodged beneath the floorboards of the Jerusalem Tavern, Farringdon, which would be all very well if the pub hadn’t been built on the site of an eighteenth-century clockmaker’s shop. I told them then that even if it did exist, it would probably contain germs that would be potentially fatal to the city’s present-day citizens. I mean good God, they had the Black Death back then. I’m not disputing the existence of a vial of blood, even if one ignores current thinking that suggests Jesus was most likely an invention of the Romans. Why are you so interested, anyway?”
“Oh, I hate loose ends.” It wasn’t much of an explanation, but it was the best Bryant could muster. “Sorry, I have a bit of a hangover. We laid our pathologist to rest yesterday. It’s funny that so many of the cases we’ve been involved with lately have involved historical artefacts.”