On the Loose (3 page)

Although the PCU’s two most senior detectives were never formally charged with misconduct, their reputations were irreparably tarnished by behaviour which many in government circles considered to be anti-establishment and subversive. Police chiefs had long been concerned about the unit’s repeated failure to conform to government guidelines. It is understood that the Home Office is considering pursuing a number of allegations against Arthur Bryant and John May, including:

• * The unauthorised release of fourteen illegal immigrants, who subsequently evaded detention and deportation from the UK.
  

• * The destruction of government property, including the PCU’s own offices in Mornington Crescent.
  

• * The contamination and misuse of evidence in criminal investigations.
  

• * Illegal hiring practices, including the commissioning of freelancers specialising in ‘alternative’ practices such as psychic investigation, dowsing and (on more than one occasion) witchcraft.
  

• * Blackmailing an unnamed senior employee at the Home Office.
  

• * Interfering with a member of the royal family.
  

• * The premeditated release of potentially hazardous chemicals inside a Ministry of Defence outsource agency, in order to discredit it.
  

Both senior detectives are to face a disciplinary panel. Meanwhile, the remaining members of the PCU staff have
been placed on permanent gardening leave, and their old offices at Mornington Crescent have been turned over to the government’s newly formed Electronic Fraud Agency.

‘The Home Office seems determined that our unit should not be rehoused,’ says the temporary acting chief of the PCU, Raymond Land. ‘I have asked for the matter to be urgently resolved, but it seems that no-one is willing to discuss the possibility with me, or can even be bothered to return my phone calls.’

When asked to comment on the charge, the HO’s Security Supervisor Oskar Kasavian explained, ‘The Peculiar Crimes Unit proved useful during its post-war heyday but now it is largely redundant to modern policing needs, which are performance-and data-driven and no longer built on public hearsay and personal opinion. The PCU clearly considers itself to be above the law, and has consistently refused to meet our targets. I hope this sends out a clear message to some of the other divisions which are currently underperforming in the league tables.’

But the message is far from clear. Is the PCU officially disbanded or not? HO officials appear unwilling to admit outright that they have closed the unit permanently, but have been accused of enforcing a hidden agenda. Mr Kasavian clashed with the PCU on several occasions, most notably when the unit revealed that his personal relationship with Janet Ramsey, the editor of the daily magazine
Hard News
, constituted a conflict of interest during an ongoing investigation.

Home Office Police Liaison Officer Leslie Faraday concurred with his department’s findings. He told us, ‘The PCU was a great British achievement of which we should all be justly proud. It’s high time we closed it down.’

Despite their unorthodox methods, the Peculiar Crimes Unit enjoyed an unusually high success rate on murder cases originating in the Greater London area. Many of their investigations encouraged the press to create colourful personas for the killers they sought, including

• * The Leicester Square Vampire
  

• * The Shoreditch Strangler
  

• * The Water Room Killer
  

• * The Highwayman
  

• * The Deptford Demon
  

• * The Belles of Westminster
  

• * The Palace Theatre Phantom
  

Arthur Bryant and John May, the capital’s most highly experienced detective team, helmed the PCU through its most productive decades, but both are now beyond the official retirement age. Neither was available for comment.

Detective Sergeant Janice Longbright confirmed that the unit was closed down effective immediately after the staff resigned in solidarity with Mr Bryant and Mr May, who may have their pensions revoked pending investigation into issues of alleged misconduct. Despite the fact that a record number of retired detectives posted messages of support for the PCU and have set up a legal fund, the Home Office today issued a statement suggesting that the unit would not be reopened under any circumstances.

As the officers of the Peculiar Crimes Unit now search for new jobs in the private security sector, it seems that a piece of London police history has been lost forever.

4
MOVING ON

T
he alarm clock’s mechanism pinged inside its tin case. He listened to the spring slowly unwinding, waiting for the catch to be released and the bell to ring. He was always awake before the clock went off. There was a pause, a dull click and the ticking continued as before. There was no jarring call to force him from his bed.

Of course. He had unscrewed the clapper and thrown it out of the window.

He settled his weight more deeply into the mattress, sinking into the feather pillows, pulling the eiderdown over his cold ears, ready to return to his dreams. Except that now his brain was awake and he hated just lying here, because memories would rise in his unclouding mind like road markers appearing out of fog, guiding his way back to vivid moments of triumph and regret. Back to times when he wished he had done things differently.

It was better to get up than to lie here remembering. There was nothing in the past that could be put right from the confines of a bed. Still, there was no reason now to rise.
Better to let tepid sleep fold itself over you
, he thought,
a little more each day, like calibrations of death
. He turned over, fidgeted, tried to settle, but finally pulled back the covers and slowly forced his aged, aching bones to an upright position.

Catching sight of himself in the dressing table mirror, he was repelled by the scrofulous old hermit he found staring back.
If I get any wrinklier I’ll be mistaken for a shar-pei
, he thought. His eyes were red on the outside, worse on the inside. His white tonsure stuck up around his ears. He looked like a frightened monk.

He peered out at the rough planked floor, the dust meandering in beams of watery sunlight, a petal divorcing itself from the dehydrated roses on the wonky little bedside table. The bare grey day stretched ahead with nothing to mark it from the ones before or after. Inertia drifted onto his numb shoulders like a gathering weight of snow.

There really was nothing to get up for.

‘Oh, sod it.’ Surrendering to his body’s apathy, Arthur Bryant allowed himself to fall back into the enveloping warmth of his bed.

The morning was so sharp with winter sun that the yellow streets were striped with black shadows that looked as if they had been painted into place. Light like this belonged in Paris, not London, John May decided. The masts to Chelsea harbour glittered and rattled, pretending they were in Monaco, but no amount of money could replace sluggish brown Thames water with the raunchy azure of the Mediterranean. The old wharf that had once housed coal for the railway industry had been redeveloped into lofts for the conspicuously wealthy, clinquant shops and blind-eyed offices. On weekends there was more life on the surface of the moon.

May walked through the dock with his granddaughter. April was so translucently pale that she always looked cold. The winds that ruffled the surface of the river caught at their coats as if anxious to detain them. This stroll was a test of April’s agoraphobia;
it had shown signs of returning in the weeks that had passed since the unit was disbanded. The spaces between walls pressed a sense of panic upon her that she fought to ignore.

‘It’s going to rain later,’ she said. ‘You need a haircut.’ Her grandfather’s elegant silver mane was over his collar, but he appeared well. He always knew how to look after himself. John May was private and organised. He filed away his emotions as neatly as he kept his apartment, and considered a bad temper to be a sign of weakness. While this level of control was generally thought to be a good thing, it also meant that you could never have a really good fight with him, and sometimes April longed to clear the air between them.

‘Property,’ he said, pointing at the deserted arcades housing empty shop fronts. ‘It’s all about who owns the land. I read that London has become the most expensive city in the world. Apparently, even during the economic downturn an apartment in Knightsbridge has still managed to sell for ninety million pounds. Dear God, Knightsbridge, the most dreadful place in the entire city. All those ersatz English houses filled with dodgy millionaires pretending they’re in some kind of Edwardian time bubble, assuaging their guilt with bling and bad restaurants. And it’s not even near town!’

‘You sound just like Uncle Arthur sometimes, you know.’

Whether it was criticism or a compliment, May ignored the remark. ‘I suppose the land was simply too valuable to be left in our hands any longer.’

‘It wasn’t your fault, John.’

‘Oh, it was. We extended the lease on Mornington Crescent until 2017 but I didn’t check that all the documents had been properly notarised.’

‘That was just a technicality. You were tricked by the Home Office. I went through the paperwork myself. The mistake was
a small one, little more than a tick in a box and a date stamp. They wanted you out.’

The Peculiar Crimes Unit had been made homeless. The detectives who ran it were the leaseholders of the maroon-tiled building that rose above Mornington Crescent tube station, but their agreement with the owners, the Crown Estate, had been declared void. Despite pleas and threats the Home Office stood firm, and the unthinkable had begun to happen: The staff had started to disperse to other forms of employment.

‘You knew the HO would put the unit on ice the moment they moved it under their jurisdiction,’ said April. ‘You embarrassed them. You showed them up at every turn, instead of making them look good. Every case you solved was another slap in the face.’

‘I suppose I thought we could eventually win them over. We had public opinion on our side.’

It was true that the PCU had breached behavioural codes of conduct in the course of their duty, but it had always got the job done, and there had been very few complaints from the public registered with the IPCC. For most of its life the unit had operated perhaps not in secrecy, but in an absence of information that had granted it an extraordinary amount of freedom. When civilians finally became aware of the unit they had wholeheartedly endorsed it, but the publicity had brought condemnation from naturally secretive government officials. A new generation of number-crunchers had come forward to insist on regulations being followed to the letter. For them the concept of an agency run on principles of instinct and experience seemed anathematic.

‘I know how much professional jealousy you’ve had to put up with over the years. I saw the files, John. The pair of you managed to upset just about everyone.’

‘We resolved most of the major cases we handled. Okay, a few got away from us, but our success rate was higher than anyone else’s in the force. We’re not being judged by our success, but by our failure to conform. Well, you know Arthur—what chance did I have of ever changing his ways? Now Raymond Land can’t even get his calls answered.’

‘He’s the wrong person to change their minds. Only you would be able to do that. They like you, John; they’ll hear what you have to say. They won’t listen to Uncle Arthur because they think he’s completely loopy.’

‘April, we have no equipment, no money, no offices, no status, no technical backup, nothing. How the hell are we supposed to proceed?’

She twisted out of the breeze, pushing back her bangs of ash hair. The sharp methylene blue of her eyes always came as a surprise to him. ‘Why don’t you suggest we continue operating from rented accommodation? You can’t give up now. Half the staff have relatives who worked in the unit before them. It’s a family business.’

May appeared not to hear. ‘The Home Office knew it would be better to weaken the unit step by step. I’ve been to see Raymond four times since the day we were thrown out of our offices, but he can’t get an appointment with anyone. Leslie Faraday keeps making the most pathetic excuses not to see him. Any day now our temporary leave will end and our resignations will be officially accepted. There’s nothing that anyone can do.’

As part of the closure deal, the staff of the PCU had resigned en masse in order to prevent the blemish of prosecution from appearing on their employment records. The unit was in a limbo created by process and paperwork; neither officially disbanded nor reinstated, but suspended in a state of non-operation. In this fashion, the Home Office could disarm its critics by denying
that they had entirely abandoned one of London’s most prestigious departments. The official line was that the staff was on temporary hiatus pending investigation, but everyone knew that Faraday and his security supervisor Oskar Kasavian had no intention of allowing them back into the field. Faraday and Kasavian could afford to bide their time and wait while the ties of friendship and loyalty within the team loosened and staff members drifted apart, driven by the need to earn a living wage.

‘Why did you bring me here, John?’ asked April. ‘We already had a farewell drink at the pub. If you’re not going to fight for us, what more is there to say? I know we’ll always be family but right now I’m still angry, not about the way you’ve been treated, but by the fact that you’re not going to do anything about it.’

‘I think growing older affects you in one of two ways,’ said May. ‘Either you sink into a state of perpetual fury, or you cease to get angry about anyone or anything. You make your peace with the world, and I want some peace. We came here so I could show you this.’ He pointed to an empty office unit tucked behind the redbrick arches, all neon panels and lowered ceilings. ‘This may become my new home. I’ve been offered the opportunity of setting up a small private detective agency. Apparently they’re really starting to take off again in London. A couple of old colleagues from the Met have bought the lease on the ground floor. It’s a wealthy area. There are a lot of divorce cases to be had, lawsuits involving private businesses, civil actions worth a lot of money.’