26
REPAIRING THE PAST
What did the moonlight bring? John May walked to the centre of Waterloo Bridge and stopped. Behind him, the suspended wheel of the London Eye stared out along the line of the Thames. May adjusted the nylon Nike backpack strapped between his broad shoulders. He liked modern clothes; they had freed an older generation from constricting suits and ties and tight-fitting toe-capped shoes. He wore trainers and jeans without embarrassment. He was too old to be concerned with the strictures of fashion.
The river had the flat grey dullness of a plastic groundsheet. There were hardly any boats to be seen in either direction. If he closed his eyes he could see the wartime fire barges. The sound of traffic faded from his ears, and the city fell silent. Those Blitz mornings were so quiet and still that one could slip further back in time, to an age of cart-tracks and wooden slums. Now, the past and the silence were gone for ever. The city survived in fragments, as though it had been painted on glass and the glass had shattered.
He was on his way to meet Janice Longbright. He had found a yellowed picture of her mother in the archive at the Palace Theatre. It had been taken by PC Atherton in 1940, clowning around in the cell at Bow Street, just before she had supposedly gone off to marry Harris. Their wedding had finally taken place at the end of the war, in disastrous circumstances – but that was another story. He wanted to be with Longbright, even if there was nothing to say. She was his only remaining connection to the past.
He had to find out who was stalking them, and why Bryant’s dental records had been stolen. Could someone have wanted a souvenir of the dead detective? It was the first thing he asked her when they met.
Longbright was sitting in the corner of a black-and-white-tiled fish restaurant in Covent Garden, tearing the claws from the sockets of a crab shell. She had a cigarette sticking from the corner of her mouth, and was squinting through the smoke at the eviscerated crustacean. “I’m sorry, John, I was starving and started without you,” she apologized. “You’ve lost a bit of weight.”
“They say bereavement does that to you.”
“Well, don’t lose any more. You’re half an hour late.”
“Am I? I didn’t mean to be.” May slid onto the bench seat opposite and poured himself a glass of wine from her carafe.
“I suppose you were standing in the middle of Waterloo Bridge, staring into the filthy water and thinking bad thoughts.”
“You know me too well.”
“You can’t bring him back that way.” She wielded a vicious-looking pair of pliers, cracked open a claw and dug out its flesh.
“I realize that. I was wondering if someone else is trying to bring him back.”
“By nicking his dental records? I hardly think so. I called the dentist, by the way, but it’s a new bloke. Bryant’s regular man has gone on holiday, nobody seems to know where. They’re going to call me back. Did it cross your mind that the bomber might have been trying to get the both of you?”
“I don’t think so. If he’d figured out how to get into the unit, and knew about Arthur’s habit of working on a Sunday night, he must also have known that I rarely stay late at the weekends.”
“I’ve got people checking the station CCTVs, but there’s a lot of coming and going around that place because of the club next door, and they’re nearly all wearing hooded jackets. You can’t see a bloody thing.”
May watched Longbright disembowel the crab. “My neighbour told me someone tried to break into my apartment. She said something about teeth. The man had huge fangs.”
He studied the former detective sergeant. Her make-up looked thick in the pale morning light. She reminded him of her mother, not least because she styled herself on the forgotten film star Ava Gardner.
Janice dropped the crab claw and stabbed her cigarette into a tin ashtray. “God, I miss him, don’t you? Stupid question. I’ve been trying to find out too, you know. One hundred and forty-two major cases between nineteen forty and two thousand and three, not counting the thousands of small unsolved dramas the pair of you waded through. It could have been anyone.”
“But it wasn’t,” said May. “I’m sure it’s connected with the Palace.”
“You can’t know that. There’s no one left. Stone, Whittaker, Wynter, Noriac, Parole, that poor creature who committed the murders, even Mouse, the stage door boy, they’re all dead. I’ve checked all the records and made all the calls.”
“Then we’ve overlooked someone,” said May simply. “Just as Arthur did all those years ago. Here, this is for you.” He took out the photograph and handed it to her.
“My God.” Janice touched the edges of the faded monochrome picture. “I could be her.”
“You are.” May touched her hand. It was hard to believe that Gladys Forthright’s daughter was in her fifties. Looking at her he felt the present shift into the past. He was forced to shut his eyes and wipe them clear. “Tell me, do you think we wasted our lives?”
Janice looked shocked. “What do you mean? Of course not. All the people you helped, all the – ”
“I’m not talking about work, I know what we did. I mean us, Arthur and me. He loved Nathalie and lost her. He was infatuated with your mother, but she didn’t want him. He waited years for Gladys. I married the wrong woman, lost her and my baby girl. My son has a daughter who can’t even leave her house any more. What was it all for? Sometimes I think Arthur and I worked so hard because there was nothing else for us to do.”
Longbright picked up the photograph and dropped it into her shoulder bag with an air of finality. “Well, there’s something for you to do now,” she said, taking up the crab once more and splintering its legs into pieces. “If you want to save the future, you have to repair the past.”
“And how am I supposed to do that?”
“I may have found a way. Alma remembered another sheet of paper lying on Bryant’s dining-room table, beside the dental records. She thinks it was from a hospital. It also went missing. I’m assuming it was his list of patients released from the Wetherby. The nurse who compiled it for him says there were over fifty names on it. But he might have made a mark against one of them.”
“I don’t see how we’ll find that out now.”
“It took me years to get him to keep copies of everything.”
“You think it was a copy?”
“Yes. And I imagine he would have left the original at the office.”
“Then it’s gone. The unit was obliterated.”
“Your partner was an untidy man. He never put anything back in its rightful place.”
“You don’t think it would still be in the photocopier?”
“If it is, it’s between a sheet of glass and a layer of heavy heatproof plastic. I can’t think of anything that would preserve it better.”
May dug for his mobile phone.
“Relax,” said Longbright, biting into the soft flesh of the claw. “I’ve already called Finch. We’re going through the remains after lunch. Bash in a crab first, I promise you’ll feel a lot better for it.”
? Full Dark House ?
27
THE MASK OF TRAGEDY
“I’ve never seen anyone die before,” said Corinne Betts distantly, twisting a curl of hair at her ear, “not actually go from living and talking to suddenly lying on the ground covered in blood, like a stage prop. You’d think you’d see something leave, a wisp of air.” The little performer was being interviewed by John May. They were seated in the tiny white-tiled dressing room that Mercury had been sharing with Jupiter.
“We have someone who can talk to you about the psychological aspects of witnessing death, if you’d like,” May offered. “It’s something they’ve set up for people who’ve been bombed out. It hasn’t proven very popular so far, but it’s supposed to help.”
Corinne dug out a bottle of Scotch and a pair of enamel mugs. “I’m not bothered. Call me cynical, but I suspect institutional comforting is designed to give nosy people something to do. My sister was killed during the first week of the Blitz. She was working in a maternity hospital near the Guildhall. We weren’t close; she didn’t
