Bryant & May and the Secret Santa (3 page)

‘By the back door, still wet. I thought you'd only just made it back. It's not normally the first thing you'd do when you come in, is it? Feed the birds?'

Gormley checked his watch. ‘Well, I may have been in a little longer.'

‘An unusual colour for Wellington boots,' said Bryant. His partner shot him a where-are-you-going-with-this look. ‘Red, I mean. What did you do with the rest of the outfit?'

Gormley held his eyes again with the same unnerving stare. ‘I don't know what you mean.'

‘I think you do, Father Christmas.'

This time the stare could not hold. The boots were hard evidence. ‘They don't supply the outfits,' he said, his voice thinning in pain. ‘You have to buy your own.'

‘Didn't they think it was strange, someone like you applying for a temporary job as a department store Santa?'

‘You'd be surprised who takes a job as a Santa. People you'd never expect. Anyway, I didn't actually apply.'

‘And you didn't know that the boy went under a bus.' Bryant took out the tie tag and placed it on the coffee table between them. ‘I made a mistake,' he admitted, ‘thinking this tie label belonged to your son. It didn't, did it?'

‘No,' said Gormley softly.

‘Tell me how it worked,' said Bryant.

‘I never had the chance to go to a good school,' Gormley said. ‘Our divorce was tough on Andrew. He was a bit of a crybaby about the whole thing. I could afford to give him a decent education. I thought it would toughen him up. Instead he got picked on. They called him “Gormless”—not much of an imaginative leap there. It only takes one boy to poison the rest.'

‘And that boy was Sebastian Carroll-Williams.'

‘I complained about him, but my complaints were ignored. “It's what happens,” they told me. “It'll pass. Strong metal must be forged in flames.” But it didn't pass. The bullying got worse. I take it you know about the ties.'

‘Why don't you tell us?' said May.

‘The only time they ever come off is when you go to bed. They're a mark of respect and honour. Schools like St Crispin's have strange old customs. If someone cuts the tag off your tie, your life at the school is over. You lose any respect you might have won. You become an object of ridicule. Sebastian cut off Andrew's tag while he was in the showers, so after that it wasn't a case of my son being picked on by one kid; they all did it. They sent him to Coventry, took away his pocket money, ate his lunches, tore up his schoolwork, defaced his books. And there was nothing I could do to stop it.'

A look of devastation crossed Gormley's face. ‘I was busy trying to sort out the end of my marriage and keep the business afloat. I should have done something about it earlier. After Andrew died, I kept an eye on that little thug. I talked to some of the other parents and found out that his mother was bringing him up to London to do some Christmas shopping. One parent told me that Mrs Carroll-Williams had a tradition of forcing her child to visit Santa, to have his picture taken. It was the perfect opportunity. I paid one of the Santas to get lost for the afternoon and took his place. You can't tell who's who behind those beards. As Sebastian was struggling to get into his polar-bear outfit I moved his tie over his shoulder so that he could get the suit on. I cut off the tag and slipped it into a gift box. I wanted him to suffer the same punishment my son suffered. I guess when he realized what had happened he fled.' He looked even more haunted now. ‘I didn't kill him, I just made him feel the same way Andrew felt. There's nothing you can arrest me for, except perhaps impersonating Father Christmas.'

‘If you hadn't panicked the child he'd be alive today,' said May. ‘The prosecution will play on that.'

‘I lost my wife and son, and I'm losing my business,' said Gormley. ‘For God's sake, isn't that enough?'

‘You created another grieving parent,' said May angrily. ‘No one should lose their child, at Christmas or at any other time.'

It was a conclusion that satisfied no one. As they trudged back up the hill in the snow, Bryant was silent and thoughtful. Finally, just before the pair reached Hampstead Heath, he spoke. ‘You think about them a lot, don't you?'

May looked up. ‘Who, my son and granddaughter? Of course I do. He won't speak to me, and she's so terrified of turning into her mother that she had to leave the country to feel at peace. Of course I think of them, especially around this time of the year.'

‘Christmas is hard on people like us,' said Bryant, poking at a frozen pigeon with his walking stick.

‘One tends to think of what might have been,' said May sadly.

‘Well, you've always got me,' said Bryant. ‘Come on, I'll buy you a pint in the Flask.'

They made their way past an amateur theatrical group in Victorian dress loudly performing
A Christmas Carol
outside a supermarket. It was a very Hampstead scene.

‘I suppose Christmas serves its purpose, if only in reviving memories of happy times,' Bryant conceded as he eyed the declaiming theatricals. ‘But if that Tiny Tim comes anywhere near me with his collection bucket I'll break his other leg.'

Full Dark House

The Water Room

Seventy-Seven Clocks

Ten Second Staircase

White Corridor

The Victoria Vanishes

Bryant & May on the Loose

Bryant & May off the Rails

The Memory of Blood

The Invisible Code

Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart

Paperboy: A Memoir

Film Freak

C
HRISTOPHER
F
OWLER
is the award-winning author of more than forty novels—including twelve featuring the detectives Bryant and May and the Peculiar Crimes Unit—and short-story collections. The recipient of the coveted CWA ‘Dagger in the Library' Award for 2015, his most recent book is the Ballard-esque thriller
The Sand Men
. Other works include screenplays, video games, graphic novels and audio plays. His weekly column ‘Invisible Ink' runs in the
Independent on Sunday
. He lives in King's Cross, London, and Barcelona.

christopherfowler.co.uk

Facebook.com/​chrisfowlerauthor

@Peculiar

‘Before I start, can I ask you to look around you at this beautiful building? After eight hundred years it's still the home of the City of London Corporation, the powerhouse at the heart of the world's leading financial centre.

‘I search the room and see a great many youthful faces. At my age, everyone is youthful. Some of you look positively prepubescent. So, as the most senior detective at London's Peculiar Crimes Unit, may I be indulged for a moment and give you a brief history lesson about the city you've been entrusted to look after?

‘In Tudor times London was still a box. It was tightly contained by walls on three sides, the fourth being the river Thames. This walled city was stitched into the pattern of its ancient Roman boundaries and could be entered by only seven gates. London's main road was Cheapside, which ran out to the Shambles in the west and Cornhill in the east.

‘It was a city bristling with church spires, the greatest of which was St Paul's, which collapsed after being struck by lightning in 1561. It had two royal palaces, Baynard and Bridewell, built for Henry the Eighth. It had colleges and law courts, bowling alleys and tennis courts, cockpits and theatres. And this is how it would have stayed without the conflagration that transformed it, the Great Fire of 1666.

‘The city recovered with incredible speed. Just five years later, over nine thousand new houses and public buildings had been completed. The new middle-class residents wanted a separate residential district and moved west, and so London rolled like treacle across the land, leaving the financiers stuck in the old squared-off section, which became known as the Square Mile, the original City of London. Now most of the walls have gone and fewer than seven thousand people live here, but nearly half a million of us commute to it each day. You have eight hundred and fifty officers taking care of this tiny plot of land. That's a massively disproportionate ratio compared to anywhere else in the country. Why?

‘Because the City of London is still what it has always been: a money factory. A 24/7/365 financial dynamo. And that's why most of you aren't strolling the streets with truncheons but working in offices to prevent money-laundering, fraud and corruption. There's only a handful of private owners in the Square Mile, and most of them don't even live here. They don't need you looking after them. So, why do you need the Peculiar Crimes Unit?

‘Because we perform a unique, invisible service. In many ways, we operate more than half a century behind the rest of you, because that's when our sphere of operations was first decided. We're not constrained by your rules. We use our own judgement. Our task is to prevent public disorder. That includes investigating any serious crimes that take place in public spaces. Because if we don't find fast solutions, the city loses that most quicksilver of all intangibles, confidence. And without the light of confidence we plunge into the darkness of uncertainty, which leads to financial ruin. There's nothing more frightening than watching what people do when they start to lose money.

‘Which is why I'm asking you to increase the PCU's funding in this coming year. Because our Unit is buying you something which no-one else can provide in London: stability and peace of mind in increasingly unpredictable times.'

Every great mystery needs an Alibi

eOriginal mystery and suspense from Random House

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