talking.”
“I would have thought it was obvious,” said Bryant. “Brilliant Kingsmere was being saved for last.”
“But why?” May was mystified. “He’s a well-intentioned liberal who’s spent a lot of time trying to understand their generation.”
“Exactly,” Bryant replied. “But it’s not his prerogative to do so. Nor is it ours. Perhaps we must be content in our seniority, and stop trying to manipulate the young. We should enjoy being our age and appreciate the benefits of experience. It’s like a favoured old jumper, something one can relax in. Besides, Kingsmere was more likely than anyone to discover the truth. He was the connection between the past and the future.”
May gave in. “I’m not going back to the unit tonight. Let’s finish the bottle. I keep thinking of Luke Tripp sitting there, impassively watching while his classmates drowned Saralla White in her own installation. In a way, he was the worst of them all, lying with such wide innocent eyes. What will he be like when he grows up?”
“Gosling, Parfitt, Billings, and Jezzard may find themselves confronted with a younger, altogether darker nemesis. Each generation fears the one coming next. But on we go, dancing merrily towards the grave.”
“It’s strange,” said May, watching the translucent evening mist curl up against the embankment railings in ghost tentacles. “I thought this case would be the end of us, but somehow it feels like a new beginning.”
“If that’s so, I’m getting rid of these. They’re supposed to improve my balance. Instead, I nearly fell off a roof.” He pulled the boxes of red and blue pills from his pocket and threw them as far as he could from the balcony, which wasn’t very far at all, but at least the point was made. A pair of young women were peppered with tablets, and looked up at him in annoyance. “And now that we’ve regained respect for the unit, I want a raise. And bigger bookcases. And new hips. And the return of everything we’ve lost. Kindness, grace, taste, politeness, self-restraint, dress sense,
May’s gentle, melancholic smile was lost in advancing shadows. “I want, more than anything – ” But he stopped himself from speaking, and allowed himself to be engulfed in the encroaching darkness.
“I know what you want,” said Bryant. “I was just thinking of the city in the most recent quarter of its life. All the dark and bloody history that’s being forgotten so quickly out there. London, the site of the Guy Fawkes plot, home of Newgate and Bedlam. The tarred heads of Jacobites on spikes at Temple Bar, the Cato Street conspiracy, the Sidney Street siege, the Gordon Riots, and the Lollards. Thomas Blood and the stolen Crown Jewels; the highway robbers John Cottington, Dick Turpin, and Moll Cutpurse; John Sayer stabbed in the Mint; Elizabeth Brownrigg torturing her maids; Jack the Ripper; the Krays; Ruth Ellis; Jonathan Wild; Jack Sheppard; the Fenian outrage of 1867; the Dynamite Plot of 1883; the Battle of Stepney; the death of the bomber Bourdin; Charley Peace; the Mannings; Franz Muller the Railway Murderer; Crippen; Christie and Nilsen; the Tichbourne Claimant; the Smithfield burnings; the crowds at Tyburn Tree; Execution Dock at Wapping; the Ratcliffe Highway murders; the Shooter’s Hill executions; the scaffolds and gaols at Southwark, Bridewell, Clerkenwell, Wandsworth, Coldbath Fields, Ludgate, Millbank, Brixton, Holloway, Pentonville, Wormwood Scrubs, Fleet, St George’s Fields; and the floating prison hulks at Woolwich – an overwhelmingly populous timeline of death, desperation, and the damned. You want to be here, amongst it all.”
“Until the very day I die,” said May, his smile first shy, but slowly broadening.
“Then we must drink to your continued health,” said Bryant, raising his glass.
“And to yours,” replied May. “And to the dark lady who always stands between us. To London.”
They drank and watched in contented silence as an iridescent sun sent shivers of golden light across the water of the Thames, lighting the serpentine channel of the radiant river, opening a path to the heart of the city.
