leakage, find out what stage they’ve reached. If the body was moved, we might be lucky enough to get different bug sets.”
“Could you give me a very rough PMI?”
Banbury sucked his teeth in thought. “I’d guess about seven or eight days ago, something like that. Giles will be able to give us a more accurate time of death.”
“What’s the chance of getting an ID on him quickly?”
“You mean without going through AMIP or any officially sanctioned database? I’ll have to pull in a favour. We could really use a fast-track.”
“Raymond can’t get us authorisation, you know that.” Bryant shoved his hands deep in his pockets, pacing around the site.
“Any contact you use will have to be kept off the record. I want every inch of this ground photographed within a twenty-metre radius. You’re looking for a large shoe-print in the shape of a deer hoof.” Kershaw and Banbury tried not to look surprised.
May made his way over to join his partner. “Come out of there, Arthur. You’re sinking into the mud.”
Gripping his hand, he pulled Bryant up onto the duckboards. “The Lagos police couldn’t be bothered to search for our store owner, but lucky for us he got into a fight a couple of days ago and the cops were called. They say he has all the papers for the sale of the shop lease and everything’s legit. The freezer and other bits of equipment came with the property. He’s been out of the country since April seventh, before Rafi Abd al-Qaadir took over the lease, and the estate agent says that he remembers the freezer being empty then.”
“So it looks like he’s in the clear.”
“I know what you’re thinking,” said May. “The only other suspect is your stag-man because he’s carrying knives, and Waters says he cut open the perimeter fence.”
“Something like that, yes.”
“Which would mean you were right to trust your instincts and go after the stag-man. It also suggests we can reasonably expect the girl he abducted to turn up next without her head.”
“It’s possible.” Bryant unwrapped a boiled sweet and popped it in his mouth.
“Now you don’t sound convinced.”
“I think it’s odd she hasn’t been reported missing. A phantom girl, no real description beyond ‘short skirt’, and no-one who cares enough about her to go to the police.”
“Suppose gangs have decided to use the area as a dumping ground? They could be coming in from Essex or even the coast.”
“No, no. There’s something far stranger than just the dumping of bodies going on here.” Bryant had a discomfiting look in his eye. “This is an area where death is used to walking among the living.”
May clapped his hands together, dispelling the sinister mood. “Okay, let’s fix this chap with an ID and we might start to discover a motive. Giles, get the body over to your place, and we’ll have the rest of the shops on both sides of the Caledonian Road searched. I’m going to try to interview everyone who’s seen our furry friend before the end of the day. Raymond has been asked to provide the Home Office with an update tonight.” He gave Bryant a look of gentle concern. “Are you up to all this?”
“I’m as fit as a fiddle if you don’t count my knees,” Bryant snapped. “They packed up shortly after my legendary tango performance at the Queen’s silver jubilee. Nobody told me that Princess Margaret’s table wouldn’t take my weight.” May gave his partner a sceptical look. Lately he had become convinced that Bryant was manufacturing his memories. “Besides, you’re the one who’s had the operation. You should be resting up and taking it easy.”
“How could I, with everyone so worried about you?”
“Well, you did a good thing, taking me out of myself. I only hope I can do the case justice. It’s difficult understanding the mind of a man who is prepared to dress as a stag to issue an ecological warning to the world.”
“You think he trotted out in fancy dress trying to scare the natives, didn’t see much of a result and upped his game to include kidnap and murder?”
“Even I wouldn’t be that presumptive, John. Besides, it doesn’t give us a feasible MO. Think about it.”
“Seems perfectly straightforward to me.” May spoke with more than a hint of sarcasm. “He puts on an outfit that must radically restrict his movement, hunts down his victims in another part of town, kills them, drags them back to his place and dismembers them before driving here, through the most heavily policed part of the entire city.”
“He dumps them at this spot because it’s his hallowed ground,” said Bryant. “Then he dresses up and appears immediately afterwards. It’s a pagan ritual of appeasement and celebration. Meera said she was reminded of the Highwayman, but he was driven by indifference, a blankness of character. This man is in the vanguard of Europe’s oldest religion. I’ll be a little presumptive and suggest that we’re looking for a neo-hippie, a tree-hugger, a modern-day shaman who probably smokes too much weed and believes he can impede the onward trundle of progress. He sees the big bad corporations moving into King’s Cross and wants to show them that the old ways still prevail. We should find out who’s been attending the local protest groups, who’s been taking pagan volumes out of the local library and attending alternative-religion societies, check the notice boards in Camden’s head shops.”
“But these are your kind of people, Arthur, the ones you usually regard as allies.”
“Murder makes enemies of us all,” said Bryant, fixing on his hat and staggering back to the dry firmness of the road.
? Bryant & May on the Loose ?
21
The Quiet Ones
The following morning, Raymond Land sat down tentatively on the leather swivel chair Longbright had found for him and looked out of the filthy window. Below, traffic on the Caledonian Road had choked itself to a standstill. He should have been at home in bed, reading the papers.
He turned back to study the dingy brown room and realised with a sinking sensation that he was now worse off than he had been before. His fate was once more tied to the unit, his dreams of retirement had retreated even further, and his new surroundings were positively Dickensian. Creaking forward in his chair, he peered into a cobwebbed corner of the room, then rose to examine it. A patch of stained wallpaper had divorced itself from the grey plaster, as if the room had died and was sloughing its skin. Something was revealed underneath, part of a design. Reaching on tiptoe, he brushed aside the spiders and seized the edge, gently pulling. A metre of damp paper rolled slowly down, tore and fell on the floor in a cloud of mildew spores.
Land found himself looking at a drawing of a naked man poised between two tall iron braziers. He appeared to be having intimate congress with a goat that was standing on its hind legs and wearing black leather thigh-boots. Shocked, Land attempted to cover over the drawing, but the paper would no longer stick to the wall.
In his own room, Arthur Bryant was seated on top of some packing boxes, nonchalantly swinging his legs back and forth as he thumbed through a reference book.
“What the hell was this place?” Land demanded to know, storming into the detective’s office. “There’s something really unpleasant and unwholesome about it. There’s a very bad feeling here. You told me it was a warehouse.”
“No,
“That doesn’t entirely explain why there is a picture of a man passionately embracing a farmyard animal on my wall.”
“Show me.” Bryant climbed down from his packing crate and led the way.
They examined the picture together. “That’s a puzzler,” Bryant agreed. “It’s rather too well sketched to be the work of a bored workman. Look at those flesh tones. And the perspective is most convincing. Don’t you think?”
“I don’t give a stuff about its artistic merit, I want to know what it’s doing here. Look.” Land pointed across to the corners of the room, to where the two blackened iron braziers stood. “They’re the ones in the drawing. Does
