“This has nothing to do with me, I swear – ”
“All right, calm down, nobody’s saying it does, okay? Who had the place?”
“I don’t know, some Nigerian guy. I didn’t deal with him, just the agent. Then it was empty for a while.”
“So when did you first see it?”
“About a month ago. I came here with my brother a few times, but I couldn’t always lock it up behind me. There’s something wrong with the door. I figured there wasn’t anything worth stealing.”
“Does the agent know about the problem with the door?”
“I don’t know – I just said I’d rent it, it was cheap, I don’t know anything about the building or who had it before.” Rafi’s cheerful confidence had vanished. Now he was sweating and fearful.
“This is going to put back the opening of your store a little,” said Bimsley, digging for his mobile and punching out John May’s number. “It looks like you’ve got yourself a murder site.”
“Oh, no.” Rafi covered his eyes with his hands. “I’ll lose all my money. Couldn’t we just get rid of him? Who would know? I could call my brothers – ”
“No, mate, we can’t do that. I’m a copper. I have to call it in.”
“I thought you were a casual labourer. You’re with the
“Well, I was until recently. I’m sorry.”
“What will happen now?”
“Someone from the Coroner’s Office will come and take the body away. Then I think the investigation team will want to find out what happened to the most important part of him.”
? Bryant & May on the Loose ?
7
Shrinkage
Alma Sorrowbridge longed for the clear skies, white beaches and warm salty sea breezes of her homeland, Antigua. Instead, all she saw when she looked out of the window in Chalk Farm on Thursday afternoon was a man trying to shove a sodden mattress into a van. In her garden, sooty rain pattered on a sprawling bush of half-dead rhododendrons, underneath which a stray ginger cat sat with trembling haunches, trying to pass a stool. Alma pulled her cardigan over her immense bosom and sighed. If there was one thing more depressing than waiting for spring to arrive in London, it lay in the other direction of her view, sitting by the gas fire in a ridiculously long scarf and a ratty quilted crimson dressing gown, moaning about everything and everyone. And when he wasn’t complaining, he was extrapolating on subjects of no interest to anyone but himself.
“ – Looking for a lost Roman city full of treasure somewhere under Watling Street,” Arthur Bryant was explaining to no-one in particular. “There’s still a place called Caesar’s Pond on Stanmore Common where Boudicca’s final defeat took place. It seems absurd to celebrate Boudicca as a rebel leader, considering she lost most of her battles, her troops were barbarians, she slaughtered her own people and she burned down half of London.” When Alma next tuned in, Bryant’s topic had changed. “The Shoreditch Strangler took his last victim home in a taxi, and was almost caught by passing constables because the bollards in Boot Street prevented him from parking near the disposal site. Traditional street bollards were fashioned from French cannons captured at Trafalgar, but now – do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Bollards,” said Alma, who was only listening to one word in ten. Living with Mr Bryant, you soon learned to tune out most of his rambling diatribes and concentrate on something more important, like unclogging the sink. She turned to him in annoyance. “Why don’t you get out of the house for a while? Go on, go for a walk or something. It would do you good.”
“I can be just as miserable here as in a park, thank you.”
“For Heaven’s sake, will you just go
Bryant set aside his copy of
“It’s you, stuck here at home with no office to go to, just plonked in front of the fire feeling sorry for yourself, reading out loud from all those dusty old books. Look at these things.” She picked up several at random from the sideboard. “
“Oh, please spare me the sanctimony. The Christian legend is an embarrassingly childish reiteration of hoary old vegetation myths, the simple impregnation-and-resurrection
“Shame on you, you wicked old man! Every time you blaspheme, an angel is stripped of its wings.”
“A good job, too. Sanctimonious bloody things drifting about with their harps, ticking people off all the time like feathered traffic wardens.”
“I don’t think you’ll ever get into Heaven.”
“The only reason why people need to believe in an afterlife is because they’re fed up with this one.”
Alma tried to deflect his remarks by busying herself with the pile of washing stacked on the dining room table. She loved her old friend dearly but he was an affront to her sense of order. Bryant was not a private person. The details of his life were not kept under lock and key, but messily spread about him for everyone to see. Any door he passed through was left open, any chair he inhabited slowly filled with books, magazines, scraps of paper, pens and envelopes containing everything from seeds to microscope slides. He invited everyone into his world, the better to embroil them. “I don’t know why I should have to spend my day repairing your pants while you sit there having a go at me,” she told him. “I’m not a wife. I tried that with Mr Sorrowbridge and look where it got me. Go on, sling your hook and give me some room to breathe.”
“And where would you have me go, pray tell? My unit has been turned into some kind of electronic fraud investigation agency and I have been put out to pasture, sent off to the knacker’s yard to await execution.”
“There’s no need to talk like that. What about your guided walking tours? I thought you were going to introduce a new one.”
“I was planning to cover London’s forgotten burial grounds in a walk entitled ‘Whose Head Are You Standing On?’, but the response was so abysmal that I decided not to bother. You’d think people would be interested in what they’re walking over, but no, they’re too busy messing about on the interweb, indulging their infantile preoccupation with bosoms by perusing photographs of actresses falling out of nightclubs.”
“Well, you could still go for a walk. I’ll get your hat and coat; just a half hour will do you the world of good.”
“I am not creeping about Primrose Hill in the pouring rain, peering into shop windows and frightening small children. Or am I supposed to take myself off to the pictures and sit through some appalling Hollywood adventure about people who can turn themselves into giant ants?”
“I just think a change of scenery – ”
“What are you up to?” asked Bryant suspiciously. “And what have you got in your pocket? Not that one, the other one. Come on, I can see a letter poking out.”
“You don’t want to hear about this right now,” said Alma, suddenly solicitous. “It can wait until later.”
Bryant attempted to lever himself out of his cracked leather armchair, but had trouble getting upright. Since the PCU closed down and he had nothing to do anymore, he seemed to be ageing with undignified celerity. In the last few days he had even taken to staying in bed mornings, and Alma could do nothing to make him get up. She had heard of people who simply lost the will to live, and was beginning to fear for him. Mr Bryant had no faith with which to protect himself.
“I’m not a child, Alma. If it’s bad news I might as well have it now. Come on, hand it over.”
