an accident on a Thames barge. He had never remarried after his wife’s death. He was a rebel and a nuisance, but not someone to be dismissed lightly.
Mr Fox made it his business to know everything about everyone. The price of freedom was eternal vigilance. This was his area. He had learned the history of the Bagnigge Wells, with its lake of swans, peacocks and seashell grottos. He had been to the British Library and studied an on-line copy of the Domesday Book in order to learn about the four ancient prebendal manors in his parish – Pancras, Cantlowes, Tothill and Ruggemure. He knew how the bucolic village of Battle Bridge had become the sprawling chaos of King’s Cross, how the vast piles of ashes from Harrison’s Brickworks that had accumulated in Battle Bridge Field were eventually sold to the Russians, to help rebuild Moscow after Napoleon’s invasion.
He had discovered that the name King’s Cross came from the unpopular octagonal monument to George IV that once stood at the junction of four roads, less than half a kilometre from where he now stood. The building had been used as a police station and then a tavern before being torn down. Every time he walked through the station, he was aware that he was walking upon the site of a smallpox hospital, and that the Centre for Tropical Diseases still stood nearby. So much had been demolished around here in the last three years, so many road names changed, that it was already becoming hard to recall the streets of his childhood. He had watched the old buildings fall. Only the Coal and Fish Offices and the Granary had been spared the rapacious bulldozers. The Grade II-listed Stanley Buildings had been torn down, and all but one of the famous gasholders had been dismantled. But he knew that no matter how hard you tried to change a place, it would find a way of reverting to its historical character.
The only way he could stay here was by recording people and events even more carefully than the CCTV lenses that covered the stations.
? Bryant & May on the Loose ?
19
Unburied
“I’m only coming along to make sure you don’t say anything inflammatory,” warned John May as he and Arthur Bryant picked their way across the torn landscape of the building site. Around them, Caterpillar trucks burrowed and strained beneath a mean-spirited sky. “But it’s as far as I’m prepared to go on your stag-man. After this I’ll be helping the others, so you’ll be on your own. Okay, what are we looking at?”
“This is the head office of the Albert Dock Architectural Partnership Trust,” Bryant explained, checking the brochure April had given him. “ADAPT is in charge of planning the entire area. The contract was awarded to a single company so that the new town would ‘observe a single cohesive vision of design’, it says here. I imagine they want to avoid any more ghastly balls-ups like the Paddington Basin.” Paddington, another derelict area bordered by canals and railways, had been filled with a mixture of offices, retail outlets and community housing, but the resulting confusion of styles had ended up satisfying no-one.
Bryant leaned back and looked up, holding onto his hat. “Nice building,” he said. “It’s a pity they pulled down all the others like this.”
They had reached the doors of a huge two-floor warehouse restored in reclaimed yellow brick. The former jam factory was one of the few surviving industrial units left in an area that had once been filled with foundries, flour and timber mills, varnishers, laundries, hat manufacturers and beer-bottle washing plants. Cobbled courtyards had been sandblasted, interior walls removed, roofs renovated and steel walkways added to create a modern version of Victorian architecture, lighter and airier than anything imagined by their ancestral counterparts.
“Who are we seeing?” May asked.
“A woman called Marianne Waters. She’s one of the senior partners, certainly the one with the highest visibility. She made a fortune in the city during the eighties, set up this company, the ADAPT Group, with her two former bosses, and became one of the biggest property developers in the city. She’s leading the way toward more ecologically responsible building, and has the ear of the environment minister. Their children go to the same school. She wrote a self-help book about running companies while being a single mother.”
“Now give me the bad stuff.”
“Well, ecologically sound architecture comes at a price, and Marianne Waters has a habit of running behind on her projects. This one is no different. They’ve been slipping back their deadlines; the new shopping mall in the centre of the development was supposed to be finished by now. Before she saw the green light Waters was a great pal of Maggie Thatcher’s, and unfortunately, London’s arch-villainess, Lady Porter. There are stories about her that she doesn’t enjoy seeing repeated in print. They mostly involve persistent rumours about her involvement in the ‘Building Stable Communities’ scheme.”
Councillor Dame Shirley Porter’s infamous secret policy was the stuff of London legend. She sold off Westminster council properties and shifted homeless voters from marginal wards because they were less likely to vote Conservative. Despite being described as the most corrupt British political figure in living memory, the disgraced council leader still protested her innocence. “There’s also been talk about the strong-arm tactics being used by property developers like ADAPT to seize the leases of buildings that stand in their way. Critics say that Madame Waters’s concern for the environment is just PR spin. This is ADAPT’s biggest project, and any negative reaction to the company’s plans, mainly posted by community groups, is usually met with a barrage of lawsuits. So if you’re asking me whether she belongs to the forces of good or the powers of darkness, I’d have to say that the jury is still out.”
“It’s not our job to make a judgement call,” said May, “but a little background material is always helpful.”
The detectives were greeted by two security guards, a receptionist, a personal assistant, a group organiser and finally the lady herself. Marianne Waters was in her late forties, with the strong features of a county-bred woman and a cropped coiffure in a thoroughbred shade of chestnut. She looked as though she had what it took to survive in the modern business world. Encased in an open-collared black dress that reset her body to a younger age, she wore surprisingly tall heels for a woman who regularly crossed muddy cobblestones.
“Mr May.” She greeted him with a stern voice and a firm, dry handshake. She looked puzzled by Bryant’s presence, as if Harold Steptoe had brought his father along to the meeting.
“Arthur Bryant, John’s partner,” said Bryant, unhappy with having to explain who he was. She shook his hand with noted reluctance. It didn’t help that Bryant had massaged Vicks Vapo-Rub into his neck earlier and now smelled pungent.
“You work together at the local crime unit?”
“The PCU handles specialist cases,” May pointed out. “We deal with particular issues not covered by the local police or the CID.” He was determined not to go into the details of their situation.
“We could do with more community officers,” Marianne Waters said crisply. “We’ve had some security issues with undesirable types hanging around the compound at night.”
“That’s a matter of local policing policy. Technically speaking, I’m a civil servant and therefore required to be non-partisan,” Bryant assured her, pulling a face at May that said
“Fine. Shall we walk?” Waters led the way between the renovated buildings. Trestles had been laid through the vast steel framework of the shopping mall. It felt like walking through a three-dimensional blueprint of the new town. Waters navigated the duckboards which lay across the final few metres of mud with an ease that suggested she spent much of her time on-site. “We’ve had over a dozen sightings, reliable accounts posted by two or more members of our workforce, but there are supposed to have been countless others. Unfounded rumours have a habit of running around building sites. The men gossip much more than the women. We do what we can to limit the rumours.”
“When did the sightings start?” asked May.
“The first verified sighting we had was about a month ago.”
“Always the same figure, doing the same thing?”
