Bryant & May 01; Full Dark House

stall. “Mercifully not scorched. Our vendor here had the good sense to leave everything just as he found it. He should really be taken in for questioning, but he hardly speaks any English. I think he’s an Ottoman, and rather frightened of losing his work permit, if indeed he has one. I should make a friend of him. I’ve always wanted to sail up the Bosphorus.”

Bryant produced a cloth bag from his pocket with all the flair of a magician, opened the zip that ran along one side and dropped the feet in. He offered May another chance to study its contents.

“So what’s this chap’s routine?” asked May. “I imagine the vendors store their braziers in a lock-up overnight.”

“Just off Soho Square near the Henry Heath hat factory. They don’t bother to clean them out very often, although they’re supposed to, they just lock the lids. He hasn’t let the brazier out of his sight since he wheeled it from the lock-up this morning. The holding bay was shut by the last man to leave, and remained sealed until this morning.”

“So the feet must have already been in the brazier last night. How could he not have noticed?”

“He was in a very nervous state when he closed up. The air raid, remember?”

“Did he leave the stand unattended at any time?”

“He went for a wee in Moor Street earlier, but didn’t want me to know. I spoke to a couple of the other sellers before you got here. It’s a sackable offence, leaving your stall unattended. They’re meant to get another stall runner to cover for them but obviously they can’t during the raids. He’d just got back when the sirens started up, so he had to leave the cart and head for a shelter. That time, he was gone for about an hour.”

“Do you need someone to translate for him?”

“He’s proved to be a pretty good mime so far. I think he’s told us all he knows. Besides, we can’t get any decent translators. They’re all working for the War Office.”

“I wonder if the rest of the body will turn up. Let’s see if anything’s been reported overnight, and check with the river police.”

“God, it’s cold,” complained Bryant, who had hands like ice even in midsummer. “Good idea. There’s a box in Charing Cross Road, save us going back to the unit. Take this chap’s name and address.”

“Aren’t you worried he might do a bunk?”

“I’m not going to drag him back to Bow Street for questioning. The bully Carfax will simply frighten the life out of him, and then he’ll tell them nothing.”

The pair made their way along Charing Cross Road, past bookshops that stacked salvaged paperbacks on tables outside their shops, and chemists advertising a peculiarly furtive mixture of products for gentlemen: trusses, contraceptives and nudist health magazines. They passed the old match-seller who stood on the corner of Newport Street, his blindness and missing leg testifying to an earlier conflict. Finally they reached the blue police box, and Bryant used his key to unlock it. He talked to a woman on the switchboard, and after a few minutes she called him back.

“Seems they’ve already got the rest of her,” he told May cheerfully. “At least, they’ve found a body without feet. They’re waiting for formal confirmation, but she’s already been identified informally. A dancer named – hang on, I’ve got to write this down somewhere – Tanya Capistrania. Rather exotic. Being taken out of the Palace Theatre right now, sans pieds. The cleaners found her with her legs wedged into the trellis of the goods lift. Suggestive, isn’t it, when you consider that the chestnut man left his stall in Moor Street, which runs alongside the theatre? Come on, let’s go over and take a look. There’s a woman who works in the box office who’s waiting to show us around. Smile nicely and she might give us the kind of tidbits she wouldn’t divulge to some ox in a police uniform.”

“Shouldn’t we see where that chap left his chestnut stand first?”

“Good idea.” Bryant was still dangling the cloth bag containing the pair of feet. “I wouldn’t mind getting rid of these as soon as possible. I don’t want anyone thinking I’ve nobbled a couple of black market pig’s trotters.”

They slipped back through the early morning traffic, crossing Cambridge Circus, and passed under the side canopy of the Palace Theatre. May bent down and checked the gutter. He touched his index finger to the cobbles. “Look at this. Someone has tipped coals out. I’m surprised they haven’t been nicked. There’s quite a bit of dust around. No footprints, which is odd.”

“The coals could have come from any one of the houses over there.”

“You’re right.” He rose, brushing his hand on his coat. “But this is where the Turk must have parked while he went for a Jimmy. It’s a very short street.”

Bryant cricked his knees to take a closer look at the coal dust in the gutter. “It’s like hunting in reverse, isn’t it?”

“How do you mean?”

“Finding the spoor from an act of cruelty, and trying to perceive the fading traces that lead away from it, following the dispersal of the participants rather than their convergence.” He thought for a moment, then leaned on May’s shoulder to raise himself up. “There’s something out of joint here. What’s that German word? Unheimlich?” He pulled his scarf protectively about his protuberant red ears. “A cold wind. And a rather forbidding building. Definitely sinister.”

They stepped back into the road and looked up at the theatre. The exterior of the Palace was one of the most impressive examples of late Victorian architecture left in London. Standing alone on the west side of Cambridge Circus, finished in soft orange brick with peach-coloured stone trims, it sported four domed pinnacles, matching sets of stone cherubs, complex frescoes and decorative panels, with a peaked central pediment topped by the delicately carved figure of a god (miraculously intact, given the bombing that had taken place in Shaftesbury Avenue), and below it, nearly fifty arched front windows, currently boarded up to protect its patrons against flying glass.

“A suitably Gothic building in which to begin a murder investigation,” said Bryant, relishing the thought. “But our duty is to the innocent. For that reason we must enter the realm of darkness.”

? Full Dark House ?

11

FORGOTTEN PEOPLE

…A duty to the innocent, thought John May, as he paid the miserable landlord of the Seventh Engineer and made his way back to rainswept London, the London of the new millennium, a place that bore only a superficial resemblance to the dark city of the Blitz. He felt old and tired, because Bryant was no longer alive to keep him young. Throughout his career he had been treated like the junior member of the team, even though there was only a three-year age gap between them. Now he was finally alone, and so bitterly miserable that there seemed little point in going on. But he had to, he decided, at least until he knew how his partner had died.

He stared through the train window at the cumuliform dullness blurring the horizon of the city, and tried to imagine what had been going through his partner’s mind. Second-guessing Arthur Bryant had never been easy. A few days before his death, Bryant had returned to the site of their first case. The memoir’s addendum suggested that he had been hoping to shed further light on the events of the past. Could he have upset someone so badly that he had placed his life in danger? Surely there was no one left to upset. The case had been solved and sealed. The characters it involved were as deeply buried as London’s bomb rubble, and just as forgotten.

In 1940 the pair of them had been little more than precocious children. They had stumbled through their first investigation, and had somehow discovered a murderer. It had been a very different world then, more private, more certain. Nearly everyone they knew from that time was dead. Who was there left to question? Who would even remember? He knew he could expect no help from the unit; they were too busy confiscating Chinese-made assault rifles from the hands of drug-addled teenagers.

May’s taxi pulled up outside his flat in a spray of effervescent drizzle. He had recently sold his house and moved to St John’s Wood, to a small apartment with bare cream walls and a marble balcony that very nearly overlooked Regent’s Park, if you stood on a chair. The old house had become hard for him to manage. Now he had a lift and a porter, and invisible neighbours who arrived and left without so much as a shoe squeak or latch click. Here he could sit and dream, and wait for death. Without Bryant, there seemed to be no alternative. It was as if the future had suddenly been walled off. He had always known that his partner would die first. Dreams of loss had