On the Loose (6 page)

‘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.’

‘I don’t know why you should want to read this particular letter,’ she huffed. ‘Look at that great pile of mail sitting over there. You haven’t opened anything in weeks. If I hadn’t fished out the electricity bill and paid it, you’d be sitting in complete darkness right now.’

‘Just give it to me.’

She knew he would worry at her until he had discovered the truth. Reluctantly, she pulled out the letter and passed it to him. ‘You won’t like it,’ she warned. ‘We’re going to be made homeless.’

Bryant extracted a pair of smeary reading glasses and found himself looking at a compulsory purchase order for their house. ‘Public meeting?’ he exclaimed. ‘What public meeting?’

‘It was last night, at the town hall. The letter only arrived this morning.’

‘The law says there has to be a notice posted on a public highway for at least a month. I didn’t see one.’

‘They stuck it on a section of pavement that’s been closed to pedestrians,’ Alma explained. ‘Nobody saw it. Besides, you haven’t been out the front door.’

‘Why, this is absurd.’ He read on. ‘New retail development, adequate compensation at market rates, a lot of old blather about shops and offices. Property developers, a bunch of sleazy sybarites with the morals of praying mantises—how dare they try to sell the ground from right under our feet?’

‘You put the property in my name, remember, so it’s my responsibility to sort it out. You’ll help me fight it, won’t you?’ Alma’s determined tone was a call to action, but the brief flare of energy was already fading from Bryant’s eyes.

‘Oh, I can try, but frankly what’s the use,’ he said, lowering himself back into his chair with a grimace. ‘First the unit, and now our home. Nowhere to go and nothing to live for. I’ve not
got the energy to fight anymore. Let them do their worst. I’m sure they can find us a flat you hate just as much as this place.’

Alma had never expected to find herself living in a semi-derelict toothbrush factory at her time in life. The tumbledown building gave the rest of the neighbourhood a bad name. Last weekend several slates had come loose in high winds, and an upper corner of Alma’s bedroom now boasted a water feature, but neither she nor Bryant was in any fit state to get up a ladder and repair the damage. Perhaps a modern flat with easy access would be better after all.

With the ironing balanced in one broad hand, she took stock of her old friend. He looked smaller somehow, as if he had started shrinking on the day the unit closed down. His world was diminishing, too. She wanted to take his hand and softly stroke it, to tell him that everything would be all right, but found herself wondering if he had reached that part of his life beyond which there was no going back. Bryant had always been a noisy fidget, pulling down books, setting up experiments, fiddling and whistling and interfering with things that didn’t concern him, but this new placidity was the most disturbing change of all.

‘Why won’t you let John come and see you?’ she asked gently. ‘You know he wants to.’

‘He’ll try to convince me to go to Whitehall with a begging bowl,’ Bryant complained. ‘He’s an eternal optimist; he thinks we’ll survive by calling in a few old debts, but we’ve used up all our favours. Our work together is over and there’s no point in pretending it isn’t. I don’t want to end my days arguing with my oldest friend.’

For once, Alma was stumped for an answer. Her mouth opened, then shut again.

‘I think I’ll have a sleep now if you don’t mind,’ he said,
lowering his head onto a cushion and closing his eyes. ‘Leave me alone. I feel tremendously weary.’

He had taken the news that they were to be thrown out on the street with alarming equanimity. She needed to shock him out of his complacent attitude, but could not imagine anything working, short of attaching her van’s jumper cables to him. His fire was fading, like a setting sun. She resolved to summon John May against his partner’s wishes, even though Bryant had expressly forbidden her to invite him over.

‘Suit yourself,’ she told him finally. ‘Do as you wish. But you can get rid of that skull on the mantelpiece. It stinks.’

‘That, Madame, is a religious artefact. It was smuggled out of Tibet.’

‘Yes, and it’s going to be smuggled into the dustbin. If you need me, I shall be upstairs. I have some urgent ironing to attend to.’ Slipping the telephone into her pocket, she beat a hasty retreat to the kitchen, wondering what on earth she could do to save her old friend from himself.

8
STALEMATE

C
olin Bimsley was smudged with thick white dust. It was matted in his cropped fair hair and even falling out of his ears as he hopped about on the kerb outside the derelict takeaway at the end of the Caledonian Road. He seemed inordinately excited about something.

‘I wasn’t sure if you’d got my message,’ he called to the approaching detective. ‘I tried Mr Bryant but his phone was switched off.’

‘Yes, it would be,’ agreed John May. ‘The last time we spoke, Arthur told me he was getting too many phone calls from the dead. Apparently he subscribed to a psychics’ hotline and is now being pestered by people wanting him to avenge their murders. It’s a scam to make him use premium phone lines, but he doesn’t realise that. What are you doing around here?’

‘This is Rafi.’ Bimsley introduced his new friend. ‘I called you first. Rafi’s got a serious problem, and I thought he’d be better off talking to you.’

‘Let’s go inside.’ The dark flat-bottomed clouds above their heads were threatening a deluge. Bimsley led the way through the store to the cluttered rear room and opened the lid of the freezer. May peered in. The body was virtually hairless, Caucasian, ordinary, mid-thirties at a guess.

‘Rafi bought himself a lease on a shop and found he’d already got his first customer. The freezer had been hidden behind some boxes.’

‘You didn’t know this was here?’ May asked Rafi.

‘I swear. I don’t want no trouble. I just want to get my shop open.’

‘Who had the place before you?’

‘An African guy—’

‘—But Rafi got it through an agent,’ Bimsley explained. He felt the need to protect this man, who had given him a job without knowing anything about him. ‘He didn’t meet the former owner, and the place was left empty for a month with the door unlocked, so anyone could have come in. We’ve got a white male with his head removed; the only noticeable identifying mark is a tattoo around the left upper arm. And you’re going to find my dabs all over the lid.’

‘Let’s have a look at the tattoo,’ said May, gingerly raising a swollen limb to examine the wreath of entwined ivy branches. ‘It goes all the way around.’

‘Armbands were popular in the 1990s: Buddhist mantras, twisted ivy, roses and thorns—a lot of clubbers had them, and this is a big clubbing area.’

‘It doesn’t make sense. If someone’s gone to the trouble of cutting off the head, they’d also remove the tattoo and the hands to prevent the body from being easily recognised. He’s done a lot of manual labour; the fingers are pretty calloused.’ May examined the edges of the freezer. ‘No blood? Seen any on the floor?’

‘Look at the state of this place, John. Builder’s rubble everywhere. We’ll have to strip it.’

We won’t have to strip it, they will
, thought John May, knowing
that the case would go to either Camden or Islington Met, depending on whose jurisdiction the store fell under. The dividing line between the boroughs ran somewhere around here. He dropped to his haunches and looked about. ‘You’re right. I’m dying to have a look, but we’d create problems moving anything right now.’

‘The front of the shop is all glass, so the counter and eating area are exposed to the street.’

‘No.’ May pointed up at several pairs of hooks in the corner of the ceiling. ‘They’ve taken blinds down. A lot of the shops and pubs around here have wooden shutters.’

‘There’s a pile of strong plastic sacks in the back that look like they might have been used for something.’

‘What makes you think that?’

Bimsley scratched his snub nose. ‘Dunno. They’re in the wrong place. Like someone’s shifted them around to kneel on.’

‘It would have made a mess, taking off the body identification.’

‘You reckon he was murdered off-site, and this place was convenient?’

‘I didn’t say he was murdered. He could have died, and it’s in the interest of someone to keep his identity a secret, at least for a few days. I’d have thought he died here. You don’t drag a body to a place like this in a busy high street when there’s a huge deserted industrial site just up the road.’

‘The Met won’t give us this, will they?’ asked Colin.

‘No, why should they? We’re nobody anymore. You’d better take your friend outside, he doesn’t look very well.’

May was itching to disturb the site and make a careful examination of the space, but he no longer had authority to call in a forensic team. Besides, who would he be able to summon? As
soon as they found out he was interfering on their patch, the Met would kick him out and take Mr Abd al-Qaadir into custody.

He looked back at the freezer. The lid had provided a partial seal, so the decay would have been created largely by internal bacteria. How would that affect pinpointing an accurate time of death? The previous tenants of the store had known there was a freezer sitting here. Either it was empty when they left, or they had hoped that the discovery of its contents would occur long after they had gone. At least he had a starting point.

May swung the front door back and forth, trying out the lock. It looked shut from outside, but you could pop it with a little pressure. If it was someone who knew the area, they’d know that the shop was vacant, even if it had its blinds down—except …

Except it wasn’t his case. In fact, if Bimsley had stumbled across a pile of corpses thirty feet high, it would have nothing to do with any of them. He opened the lid once more and studied the blue-red-grey neck, the stump so neatly cut around the bone that he could have been looking at a surgical amputation. Finding a body in an area like this was not exactly a rare event: King’s Cross was a confluence of five railway stations and as many major roads, where thousands of commuters, students and tourists daily crossed paths. There was always something bad happening nearby…

Slowly, a plan began to form in May’s mind. He called Bimsley back in. ‘Colin, I need you to hang on here,’ he explained. ‘Keep the doors shut and don’t admit anyone until I return. And don’t let Mr Abd al-Qaadir out of your sight.’

‘Do you want me to start searching for the head? I could have a look around—’

‘—and fall over something. No, don’t disturb anything. Try
to get hold of Dan Banbury; have him come over if you can. You’d better stress that this is entirely unofficial—make sure he doesn’t say anything to anyone about where he’s going. I doubt you’ll find the head on the premises. There wouldn’t be much point in removing the victim’s most visible feature then leaving his face in a cupboard.’

‘Maybe he was wearing an unusual hat,’ said Bimsley. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I have to take someone to afternoon tea,’ May replied.

Leslie Faraday enjoyed the rituals of his working day, starting with a cup of Earl Grey and some biscuits, preferably Lincolns, Garibaldis or Ginger Nuts, as he thumbed through his correspondence; café au lait mid-morning as he broke down his departmental expenditure into the kind of detail that could make the collected works of Anthony Trollope look like a fast read; then a nice carb-heavy luncheon in the office canteen, preferably the kind of pudding or pie that would take him back to his days at boarding school; and a nice mug of builder’s tea mid-afternoon, served with a slice of Battenberg cake or Black Forest Gateau. He was pear-shaped by habit, physically and mentally. His brain operated like a traction engine, slowly but with an inexorable progress that flattened everything in its path. No detail, however small, escaped his attention, and as the budget overseer of London’s specialist police units he was fully entitled to poke his nose into everything.

After questioning costs, trimming sails and cutting corners, he would annotate and parenthesise his documents, aware of every grammatical nuance, never stopping to consider the bigger ethical and moral dilemmas posed by his job. He kept his pens tidy and his head below the parapet and worked all the
hours God sent, never thinking that one day someone might fire him just to wipe the look of smugness from his face. In this sense Faraday was the perfect civil servant, remembering everything and understanding nothing. He toiled on the accumulation and expedition of data, not in the hope of advancement, but in the resigned expectation that one day it would require him to betray his superiors.

Faraday would not be drawn into a meeting with Raymond Land, the ineffectual temporary acting head of the PCU, because he knew that Land would want to complain about his retirement package. He was quite happy to return John May’s call, however, because the detective had always treated him with equanimity, no matter how petty the official’s requests sometimes seemed. So it was that he made himself available at short notice and appeared at Fortnum & Mason for afternoon tea on the dot of four, to be met by a phalanx of sycophantic waiters armed with very tiny, very expensive sandwiches. Faraday appeared to be unaware that this kind of afternoon tea was an elaborate ritualistic parody provided for tourists who wanted to believe that the London of 1880 still existed. The froufrou pink-and-cream décor, the tea-strainers and doilies and cake stands, were the trappings of a cheap seaside boardinghouse elevated to absurdist theatre props, but all that shot over his balding head.