lifted her up, placing her under one arm, and seemed to drop beneath the bridge.
By the time Izabella reached the spot with Piotr, there was no sign of either of them. No ripple on the petrol- iridescent surface of the canal, only the cold breeze from the tunnel and a fading sigh in the trees, as if the pair had evaporated into the thickening mist like a pair of exorcised ghosts.
? Bryant & May on the Loose ?
16
First Day
“I spent two hours at something called the King’s Cross Police Shop in the early hours of this morning, waiting to be seen, and after I got to make a report they made a phone call and finally sent me to you, only you weren’t open,” Izabella told DS Janice Longbright. “All I wanted to do was explain what I saw, okay?” She took a look around the room and wrinkled her nose, trying to make sense of it. “This isn’t a police station. What is this place?”
“We’re in the process of moving in,” said Longbright. “We’re a specialist unit.”
“What do you specialise in, pest control? I just saw something in the hall that looked like a rat.”
“I was with my – ” She stopped herself. “A friend. He saw it, too. The dressed-up guy, he was pretty big – ”
“How big?”
“I don’t know – he had to reach down to her, he put her under his arm, actually under his arm, she was a skinny little thing, then when I looked back they were gone.”
“You think they went down onto the canal?”
“No idea. The path to the waterside is further back along the road. I’d have seen them if they’d used it, but I suppose they might have ducked into the tunnel. They disappeared so quickly I thought I must have imagined it.”
“Did you?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“This girl, she didn’t fight back?”
“I don’t know. I guess so – I mean I saw her hands go up in the air and I think I heard her scream.”
“What do you mean, you
“At first I thought it was a laugh, like maybe she thought he was joking, but it turned into something that sounded like a scream.”
“What did she look like? If I was trying to recognise her in the street, how would you describe her to me?”
“Skinny, very pale, wearing a short pink skirt with little black ruffles, black high heels, dark hair. Maybe there was more colour – you can’t really tell under those yellow streetlights. She was kind of invisible, like everyone else who comes out of a club. I didn’t see her face.”
“No, it gets really quiet around there before the Keys shuts down. I couldn’t do anything because they were too far away and it happened so fast, but you hear about bad things happening to girls by themselves, and I hate the idea that she might have been abducted without anyone coming forward.”
“You did the right thing. I’m sorry they made it difficult for you. The problem I have is that your description of this girl doesn’t give us much to go on. We can get some leaflets posted around the club, ask around, see if anyone’s failed to check in at home, but we can’t do much more unless she’s reported missing.”
“This guy was handing out flyers, so he’s not trying to hide himself away, is he? I thought he was advertising a club but it was some kind of poem.” She dug in her pocket and produced a crumpled ball of saffron paper.
As Izabella left, she passed Constantin waiting in the corridor. His right leg and ankle were heavily bandaged and he was on painkillers that were sending him to sleep, but he still took a great interest in her backside.
“The guy out there saw him too,” said April, dropping a report on the arrangement of tea chests that served as Longbright’s desk. “He was so shocked that he fell down the unlit stairwell behind him and broke his ankle.”
“What was he doing there?” asked Longbright, digging out a pair of mad rhinestone-winged glasses with which to skim the statement.
“He’s an electrician working on the site’s new mall,” April explained. “There’s a hypermarket going in, and they’re running behind schedule. He was terrified. He could have been killed. Luckily they hadn’t started pouring concrete, so he landed in dirt. This might have started as someone’s idea of a joke, but it’s going beyond that.”
“You don’t need me to re-interview him, do you?” Longbright asked. “Nothing’s working here, and I could really use some time to get straightened out.”
“Well, he has an interesting twist on what he saw.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s Romanian and very superstitious. He insists he saw – Hang on.” She checked her notes. “Veles, the Slavic god of sacred animals. According to this guy, it’s a forest creature that has horns like a ram or a stag, and protects hallowed land from enemies. He’s refusing to go back to work on the site, and he’s told his friends not to go back, either. He insists it’s an indication that something evil has been disturbed. That the land wasn’t meant to be built on.”
“Hm. Is he cute?”
“I’d go to a boxing match with him if he promised to let me touch his chest afterwards.”
“Fair enough,” said Longbright. “Send him in.”
¦
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” said May, narrowing his eyes at his old partner. “Look at you, sitting there surrounded by dirt and chaos, eating your Licorice Allsorts and reading witness statements about a character from Eastern European mythology. You think you’re back on track. This is not an office, Arthur, it’s a chamber of horrors. We’ve got bare bulbs in the ceiling, no phones, no computer network, no authorisation, no legal existence at all, a broken toilet and hardly any floorboards. By comparison, Mornington Crescent was Silicon Valley. I should never have let you pick a rented property without consulting me.”
“It was cheap,” said Bryant, happily patting the arms of his new chair, a studded green leather number on broken castors that exuded horsehair stuffing like a disembowelled corpse. “Besides, I knew you had your hands full getting the team back together. We’ll manage somehow.”
May looked up at the blackened ceiling and wrinkled his nose. “I’m wondering what was here before; I keep finding joss sticks and pots of strange-smelling incense behind the doors. Poor Raymond nearly had a conniption fit when he saw the place. I think he actually started pining for his old office.”
“Raymond’s only happy when he’s got something to complain about.”
“Chief, how’s your knowledge of local poetry?” asked Longbright, sticking her head around the place where the door should have been. “Message from the stag-man.” She threw the balled-up flyer onto the arrangement of crates that constituted a pair of makeshift desks.
Bryant hooked up his reading glasses and unfurled the page. The silence that followed was broken by a piece of ceiling falling down.
“I know this; it’s part of a long chunk of doggerel written when Battlebridge was still a spa town of royal patronage. It’s always quoted in books about the actress Nell Gwynne. The last line has been altered:…
“Amazing,” May exclaimed. “When I went to pick him up this morning, I had to wait twenty minutes while he remembered where he’d left his shoes, but he can recall a one-word mistake in a two-and-a-half-century-old poem.”
