On the Loose (8 page)

Slowly he raised his head and studied them. He was wearing a black mask like a bandanna across his eyes. Long metallic branches sprouted from above his ears, catching the light. ‘Oh, I get it,’ said Meera. ‘He’s dressed as a stag. It’s his stag night. He looks really drunk.’

‘Well, he’s creeping me out. Come on.’ Sashi grabbed at her arm and paced faster, but the path took them further toward him, and the two young women were not prepared to scrabble up the muddy bank that now rose at the sides.

He turned his head to watch them. His muscular arms were bare, his chest and thighs covered in some kind of coarse fur. They had almost passed him when he abruptly dropped from the ridge and loped toward them. Sashi screamed.

Meera turned as the stag-man came alongside, reaching down and looping his arm around Sashi’s waist to lift her easily off the ground. The detective constable was about to kick out at his knees when she saw that he was playing with Sashi, swinging her from side to side. Sashi’s shrieks were fearful but flirtatious, like those of a girl at a funfair.

The stag-man swung her onto his hip and Sashi started to laugh. His shining eyes were deep-set above a short-haired snout. In the lamplight Meera could see that the brown-and-white fur on his chest and shoulders rose seamlessly to his thick neck and headpiece, on top of which was a magnificent pair of glittering steel antlers.
They must be heavy
, Meera thought vaguely as she stood by, miserable in the rain. ‘Come on, Sashi, stop—’

But then the stag-man swung his captive high above his right
shoulder and let her go, so that she tipped and fell into the surrounding vale of mud, landing heavily on her side. Sashi’s yelp of laughter turned to anger and confusion as Meera ran forward, first pulling her friend up to her feet, then slamming into the stag-man.
He’s stoned, he’ll go down
, she thought as she struck out, kicking him in the stomach, but it was like hitting rock. As that didn’t work her next kick aimed lower. This time he cried out. As he dropped his head at her, she saw that the steel horns were not made of sticks and tinfoil, but comprised the blades of dozens of kitchen knives bolted together.
That’s why the headpiece is so light
, she remembered thinking,
that’s how he can keep his head up
, but by that time he had slashed at her, slicing open the material of her leather sleeve and cutting through to the skin of her right arm.

By the time she looked back he had disappeared over the ridge, and Sashi was left kneeling in the mud, crying.

Meera sat on an orange plastic chair in a cubicle of the A&E department at University College Hospital, watching dispassionately as a nurse placed sutures across the cleaned wound.

‘You were lucky,’ said the nurse, tapping her forearm. ‘He just missed the artery here.’ She had a strong Irish lilt in her voice that most patients would have found comforting.

‘Yeah, right, lucky me,’ said Meera, who was not comforted. She had sent her mud-spattered friend outside for a smoke. Sashi was probably on the phone by now, telling everyone what had happened. Meera was surprised she hadn’t managed to film the attack for her Web page.

‘Why did you have a go at him, love?’ asked the constable who had accompanied her to UCH.

‘You mean apart from the fact that he was assaulting my friend?’ She found it hard to keep the sarcasm from her voice.

‘You said he was on his stag night, so he was probably a bit drunk.’

‘No, I said he was dressed as a stag—there’s a difference.’

‘So why did you have a go at him?’

‘Because I’m trained to react like that,’ she told him, reaching across into her jacket with her free hand and flipping open her badge wallet.

‘Bloody hell,’ complained the constable. ‘Peculiar Crimes Unit? You lot have given us some grief in the past, you know.’

‘Don’t start with me, PC—what’s your name?’

‘Purviance, Darren.’

‘You’re from Camden nick, Purviance Darren.’

He wasn’t wearing his jacket, which had identifying epaulettes. ‘How d’you know?’ he asked.

‘You’ve got the look.’ She didn’t mean it nicely.

‘Hasn’t your unit just been disbanded?’

‘Placed on hiatus,’ Meera corrected. ‘Don’t you want a description of the bloke who attacked me?’

‘I thought you attacked him. You didn’t go after him, then.’

‘It was dark and muddy, I couldn’t see where he went. There’ll be plenty of prints, though. He was holding onto the spotlight pole.’

PC Purviance seemed less interested in the culprit than the victim. He’d heard a lot of wild stuff about the PCU, how they looked down on the Met and behaved like a law to themselves. ‘So, what’s your official status, then?’ he asked.

‘I was off duty, okay?’

‘What’s happened to old Bryant and May? Finally been made to retire, have they? They were a right pain in the arse, both of
them. Drove the lads down at the station mad. We always said they should leave police work to the professionals.’

‘That’d be you then, would it?’ Meera winced as the last suture was put in place. ‘So what are you going to do about catching this guy?’

‘Come on, Mangeshkar, be realistic. You know how it works. The bloke was obviously out of order, but look at the situation. You were outside a nightclub in a dodgy neighbourhood, he was on the sauce and having a bit of fun before the old ball and chain gets clamped on him, you two overreacted, that’s all.’

‘I thought attempting to stab someone might fall under your initiative to prevent knife crimes in the area.’

‘He wasn’t carrying a knife, he was wearing them on his head, according to you.’

‘What do you mean, according to me? Sashi saw him too—she was right there.’

‘Yeah, well, your mate’s dropped a couple of pills by the look of it, so who knows what she saw? Don’t get smart with me, love. Just file your report and leave it alone, okay?’ Purviance took a call on his radio and rose to leave.

‘Don’t take no notice of him,’ said the nurse wearily. ‘It’s already been a long night.’

‘Do you get a lot of trouble in this area?’ asked Meera, rolling down her sleeve.

‘You’re joking, aren’t you? We’ve had a dozen Cat A’s in since my shift started and God knows how many Ambers—mostly hypervents, overheats and panic attacks. Not bad for a Friday, considering the EOC’s main computer is playing up again.’ The Emergency Operations Centre dispatched London’s ambulances, assigning each job a number. Yesterday, there had been over 3,600 calls logged to the emergency service; a fairly typical figure.

The nurse threw away the tetanus needle and snapped opaque white gloves into the disposal bin. ‘There are at least a couple of dozen nightclubs within a quarter mile of here and we’re not even in the West End. Half the kids in them seem incapable of enjoying themselves without ingesting some kind of stimulant. There are fifteen-year-olds out there tonight sucking low-coke wraps up their nostrils without the faintest idea of what they’re ingesting.’

‘Low-coke? What’s that?’

‘Oh, haven’t you heard? The dealers are expanding their markets by creating a two-tier price structure for their drugs, thirty-pound rubbish quality for the kids, purer fifty-pound stuff for the white-collar workers. Thoughtful of them. Low-coke is cut with anything the dealer can find in the cupboard under his sink. Funny, when you think kids are so picky about what they eat.’

‘And I thought I had a tough job. Why do you do it?’

‘Honestly? I heard doctors were really good kissers.’

Meera found herself laughing.

The nurse rose. ‘Go on, off with yourself. You’re good to go, but don’t put any pressure on that arm for a few days. The sutures will get itchy before they dissolve, but don’t pick them off. And don’t forget to do us all a favour and file a report on the gentleman who did this. Bollocks to what your man over there says.’

Meera had already decided that it was pointless going back to PC Purviance. Instead she decided on more direct action.

10
CONVINCING ARTHUR

I
really don’t think this is a good idea,’ said John May as he and Meera stood on the doorstep of Bryant’s chaotic home. ‘You two always end up arguing, and he can be—well, difficult—when he’s feeling down.’

‘You should have brought DS Longbright along for company, then.’

‘I tried, but I couldn’t get hold of her. She’s working in some kind of women’s undergarment shop. You’re here by default, so watch it, all right?’

‘I’ll behave myself, I promise.’ Meera pressed the doorbell. Somewhere deep inside the converted toothbrush factory there was a noise like someone dropping a stone into a bucket. After about a minute, they heard the door being unlocked.

Alma Sorrowbridge’s features were inclined toward a receptive smile on most days, but she was clearly alarmed to find visitors on her doorstep this early. Saturday was her morning for spraying everything in lavender polish and baking, and she didn’t like to have her routine disturbed, but more to the point she did not wish to referee a fight between her oldest friend and his partner. ‘He’s still in his room,’ she informed May, ‘and with all due respect I don’t think he’ll be wanting you here.’

‘I’m not his enemy, Alma. Anyway, who said I came to see him? Are you making cornbread today?’

‘Cassava and ginger bake, and cinnamon buns. And I’m doing a pineapple cherry cake.’ She wiped her hands on her apron and widened the door. ‘I suppose you can come in, but I have to be at the church before nine. You know I do my rounds on Saturday. The first batch is just cooling.’ Alma was capable of single-handedly supplying the British Army with all of its pastry requirements. She cooked with evangelical zeal, arranging vast batches of cakes and filling her van with trays that she would take around to old people who couldn’t get to the shops.

The old industrial unit in which Arthur Bryant had made his home was so bizarrely arranged that the contrast between the inside and the outside required mental adjustment. May and Mangeshkar made their way into a huge room that looked like a cross between a seventy-year-old furniture repository and a Moroccan rubbish dump. Around the walls were tottering piles of encyclopaedias; a moulting championship perch in a glass case; a great many post-war lampshades; sextants, telescopes and outdated opticians’ equipment; several late-Victorian seaside dioramas, including one scene of drunken Jack Tars swinging from lampposts and another featuring a family of dancing weasels; some large drippy brown canvasses that provided more clues to the artist’s disturbed frame of mind than any pleasure to the viewer; and a miniature model of the port at Gdansk made entirely out of painted bread.

‘I try to get the place clean but he keeps bringing back more of these things,’ Alma complained. ‘What am I supposed to do? I have no idea where he finds them all. It’s not like they’re even antiques.’

May eyed an ancient bear’s head that someone had seen fit to
make into a lamp. One of its eyes had fallen out and was lying on the table. ‘Obviously,’ he said.

‘At least he’s stopped doing that now.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s stopped going out at all.’

‘Oh, that’s a bad sign.’

‘You should see his bedroom; it’s a thousand times worse than this. If I wasn’t a good Christian, I would walk right out of here and never come back.’

‘So that’s what you think of me, you gargantuan quisling.’
¹
Arthur Bryant stood propped in the doorway in a Victorian nightcap and a purple quilted dressing gown. His snowy hair stuck up around the cap like a row of alfalfa sprouts. He appeared smaller and more wrinkled than ever. ‘I gave strict instructions that I was to receive no visitors until further notice.’

‘We’re not visitors, we’re your friends,’ said May indignantly.

‘We’ve all been worried about you, sir,’ interposed Meera, who was determined to sound less blunt than usual and show the caring side she was fairly sure she must possess. ‘You can’t just hide away like this.’

‘I’m hardly hiding away, am I?’ As Bryant made his way over to the armchair by the fireplace, the others noted how slowly he was moving but kept the thought to themselves. ‘I’m at home, that’s all. I feel tired and ancient. My back is playing up. I need new knees. All I ask is that I am left alone. And now this—this Antiguan termagant has denied me even that basic right.’

‘Hmm. You’ve become a stranger to the badger’s brush.’ May indicated the bristles on his partner’s cheeks.

‘I have no good reason to shave. Men only shave for other people. If left to themselves they’d all grow beards like Robinson Crusoe. And they probably wouldn’t wash, either. I choose not to go out. I’ve seen all the world I need to see.’ His voice grew softer. ‘I don’t want you to see me like this.’

‘So you’ve elected to become the God of this reduced realm,’ said May, displeased.

‘I have all the home comforts I need, my books, my notes, Alma to cook for me.’

‘I’ve seen this sort of behaviour before. When great teachers retire they lose the will to live. Soon you’ll start regressing into another childhood. You’ll be asking Alma to leave your bedroom door ajar at night, and telling her you don’t eat sprouts.’

‘I don’t eat her sprouts now.’

‘So this is what it’s come to, has it? Our friendship means nothing to you. I always knew you were selfish, Arthur, but your behaviour is beyond even my expectations. I should have known. Right from the moment I first met you, when you had me deciphering naval flag codes before I’d even got my coat off, all you ever cared about was yourself.’

‘That’s not entirely true,’ retorted Bryant indignantly. ‘There have been times—not lately, perhaps—when my generosity has known no bounds. I gave you all the credit when my efforts brought about the capture of the Little Italy Whelk Smugglers.’

‘An action which resulted in me having to hide several dozen drums of black-market treacle from the police, I remember. You always give me the credit when you’re about to get caught for something.’

‘Excuse me?’ intervened Meera, whose brief attempt at patience had already evaporated. ‘This is, like, an ancient history lesson or something. Can we get back to the real world? Tell him, Mr May.’