Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection) (16 page)

‘Because of the Seven Points. Give me a hand here.’ Bryant found his Swiss Army knife and used the blade to sever the single strap. Then they set about removing the rest of his facial tapes. ‘I knew there had to be a reason why Andrei Federov was released by the Russian Security Service. They wouldn’t set a psychopath free and then allow him to leave the country without purpose. He was dangerous but knew exactly what he was doing, and he needed cover to operate as an agent. Portheim has a headful of counter-terrorist information that Federov needed to unearth and deliver, so he used a technique from the old country to get it. The immobilization of the prisoner by the removal of his limbs. He had to be kept alive until he’d been drained of information. He had everything taken away from him except the Seven Points.’ Bryant indicated his ears, eyes, mouth and nostrils. ‘Only one of the exhibits was reduced to relying on them.’

‘My God, the poor devil,’ exclaimed May.

‘I imagine Mills is the only other person who knows the truth about what’s been going on here since the night he arrived. I’m willing to bet that Federov perfected his interrogatory technique in Russia. The difference was that there his victims died before anyone could get to them. Technically you could argue that he didn’t kill anyone – his countrymen let them die from their surgery.’

‘All right, the FSB want information, but I can’t imagine that they’d have asked Federov to put his victim on display in a sideshow, for God’s sake,’ said May.

‘Well, that was a bit of an own goal on their behalf, I’m afraid.’ Bryant looked back at the sutured man with sadness. ‘They branded him a psychopath when it suited them, but he became one.’

The last of the plastic strips came away from Portheim’s desiccated mouth, and he was able to croak a cry for help.

‘He needs water,’ said May. ‘He’s suffering from dehydration.’ He handcuffed the dwarf to a tent pole with Portheim’s strap, then called for an ambulance.

‘They can do miracles with prosthetic limbs these days,’ said Bryant, not very reassuringly. ‘Of course, that will deprive the Caterpillar Boy of his career in show business.’

‘Let’s not use the term “Caterpillar Boy” in Mr Portheim’s presence any more, Arthur,’ May whispered.

‘Tricky, isn’t it?’ mused Bryant. ‘To define the exact point where sanity ends and madness begins.’

‘In this job, yes,’ agreed May, feeding the limbless spy from a water tumbler as his partner wondered how he could ever write up the case of a psychotic devil-headed dwarf found in a small South London park.

This tale began life as a challenge to write a short story that would allow readers to choose what happened next. Writers hate to throw anything away, and afterwards I thought it would make a perfect investigation for Bryant and May. The core idea came from the fact that I was sent a very glamorous credit card with a private concierge number on it – accidentally, as it turns out. The bank quickly took it back when they realized I wasn’t a CEO, just a writer …

One of the lunchtime customers at the Over Easy Diner in Dalston High Street was driving Ian McFarland crazy. His beer was too warm, his burger too raw, his apple pie too chilled, his coffee too weak. It wasn’t the Ritz; they sold battered saveloys, for God’s sake.

Ian tried to maintain his cheerful demeanour through the increasingly fractious demands. He smiled, apologized, replaced the meal, served a free beer, to no effect. The customer, a raw-faced, stubble-headed bully with small dull eyes, a Liverpudlian accent and an unpleasantly suggestive T-shirt, eventually informed Ian that he would not pay for the meal at all.

That was when Ian lost his cool and tried to throw the customer out of the door. Not acceptable behaviour, even in a dump like the Over Easy. Not only was it
not
the Ritz, it was one of the least classy dining spots in Dalston, an area which defied description in terms of class at all, accommodating a profusion of dubious social strata too numerous to name. Elsewhere in London you could see drunks fighting on the street at nine in the morning or desperately bartering their last few belongings at the edge of the kerb, but Dalston had that plus everything from artisanal bakeries to Turkish lap-dancing clubs. It was supposed to be up and coming, but never did.

The Over Easy had windows so greasy it was like looking out into a perpetual fog. One had been caved in and was covered in plywood. Inside, the pervasive fatty smell meant that you had to change your shirt after every shift, but it was a job. After his stint in prison Ian had needed something that paid him a bit of cash in hand to supplement the rubbish career opportunity his assistance officer had found for him: planting trees in an area where the kids tore them out of the ground before they’d had a chance to take root and stuffed them through their enemies’ letter boxes.

Ian had handled two tours of duty in Afghanistan, only to return and find his wife and his home gone. Depressed, he’d started drinking a little hard, and had made the one small slip-up that had blotted his record and dumped him at the back of the queue. Before Afghanistan he had always considered himself a sanguine, balanced individual; he knew that life wasn’t fair, and that you had to face its depredations with resigned good humour, but losing his job on that Monday morning was the last straw, for the customer had called the manager over to complain about his waiter and demand that he be fired. Even in a dump like the Over Easy, the last thing the manager wanted was some Merseyside bruiser overturning tables and coming back to smash more windows, so he’d taken the cheaper option and let Ian go.

Now the lad found himself walking the mean, trash-filled streets with anger eating his heart and no prospects of any kind in sight. Worse, the Liverpudlian was waiting for him in the alley around the corner. In the fight that followed, Ian loosened one of his front teeth but retained his dignity, repeatedly slamming his antagonist into a dustbin until he was unconscious. It was a lousy way to start the week.

As he limped from the passageway, trying to see if his torn jacket could be repaired, he realized that the day ahead held absolutely nothing for him. It was a terrible thing to feel that you were no longer wanted or even noticed by the city in which you had grown up. He had always thought he would amount to something here. London was a tough climb, but if you could make it into a decent job you were set up for almost anywhere else.

He thought back to the moment when he realized that Mandy was seeing someone behind his back. He’d known it was serious, and that he’d lost her. The memory made him chew at the inside of his mouth until it was filled with blood. The worst part was, she hadn’t even bothered to hide her infidelity. She had siphoned out their joint account, leaving him with nothing but debts and a note filled with such cruelty and venom that he had torn it to shreds before his eyes could finish blurring. No one had the right to call anyone else a loser. He was not a man of hatreds, but he hated his wife for that. The letter didn’t feel as if it was written by her. He wondered if her new man had put her up to it.

Sooty rain had begun to sift down across the glistening grey streets. Checking his pockets, he found that he didn’t even have enough for the bus fare. At the end of the high street he crossed the road to a graffiti-spattered ATM and inserted his debit card, already knowing what it was going to tell him: that he was nearly a thousand pounds overdrawn. The machine did exactly that and ate the card in the process, confiscating it as though he was a schoolboy caught with a stolen Batman comic.

That was it, then. His life, over at the ripe old age of twenty-nine. No skills, no future, no point in going on. He returned to his basement flat, to try and get his belongings out before the old cow who owned the house confiscated the lot in lieu of back-rent.

On the mat behind the door was another handful of bills that he resolved to put straight into the bin. Except that he felt the tell-tale rectangle of a credit card inside one slender white envelope bearing his name. Ripping it open, he found a letter which began:

Dear Valued Customer,

As a Priority Account holder your continued custom means a great deal to us. Please remember to sign the back of your new credit card before using it. Our 24-hour concierge service can be accessed by quoting the last four digits of your account number, and may be used for any service at all. Your new credit limit is:

£250,000.00

The card was black and silver, faintly sinister, attached to the letter with two tiny blobs of transparent rubber cement. Ian checked the name: ‘Ian Charles McFarland’.

His name, his address, but clearly not his card. Unusually, there was no name of a holding company or financial institution attached. It was either a dodgy advertising tactic or a mistake, a ludicrous, wonderful error made by an outsourced computer in his favour.

What if he tried to use it? Would a fraud flag go up somewhere? Would he find the manager of the shop appearing with a pair of police officers, ready to charge him with theft?

He finished reading the letter.

To activate your card, call your concierge now and provide him with your account digits and the passcode we have sent you (mailed separately).

He dropped to his knees and tore open the rest of the envelopes – damn it all to hell! There was nothing. He’d been offered a final chance only to have it snatched away again.

But wait – there was one more envelope wedged between the mat and the door, behind the circus-coloured flyers for takeaway pizzas. The packet was so light that there seemed to be nothing in it at all. But as he tore it open, he saw the grey patch on one side that always came with pin-codes and passwords to prevent thieves from reading them.

There it was, a six-digit figure to be quoted to the concierge. Digging out his phone, he rang the number on the back of the card.

‘Mr McFarland,’ said an oddly accented voice. ‘How can I help you today?’

‘I’d like to activate my card.’

‘Please give me the last four digits on the front of the card.’

‘6823,’ said Ian without hesitation.

‘And now, your passcode.’

‘908773.’

‘That’s fine. Would you like to change your code to something more memorable?’

‘No.’

‘Very well. How can I help you today?’

‘I don’t know what kind of service you offer,’ he admitted hesitantly. ‘I’ve not used this … particular service before.’

‘I fully understand,’ said the concierge. ‘Well, there are the usual services, of course. Car hire, theatre and concert tickets, sporting events, dinner reservations, nightclub tables. We can book flights for you, or hire a yacht. I see you have the highest priority limit, which entitles you to use our special Platinum Service.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘It’s an exclusive private arrangement with our selected partners offering you a range of the more restricted personal needs.’

‘Can you give me an example of something I would be able to buy?’

‘Well, perhaps you are visiting a city you don’t know and require companionship.’

‘You mean a woman.’

‘The gender is of course up to you.’

‘And what do I get for £250,000?’ he asked.

There was a pause at the other end of the line. He fancied he could hear the wind ticking in the wires but that was absurd; there were no wires any more. What he heard was the beating of his own heart.

‘We could kill your wife,’ came the reply.

The restaurant was filled to its stripped-oak rafters, as it had been every night since the glowing reviews first broke in the Sunday papers. Of course it helped that a Hollywood legend had been seen dining there with someone other than his wife, and had returned several times while he was filming in the city. Now the bookings were full until January, four months away, and those same Sunday papers were running articles containing instructions on how to beat the restaurant’s obstructive booking system.

The Water House was an old converted municipal swimming pool in Marylebone which Jake Finnegan and his business partner had bought for an absurdly low figure from the town council on the condition that they restored its interior. Having done so, they hired a celebrity chef fresh out of rehab and set about turning it into one of the most exclusive restaurants in London. Almost too exclusive, it turned out, for the quiet backstreet which Jake and his team had colonized was now the subject of much furore in the press, as the residents were kept awake every night except Sunday by drunken soap stars and Russians revving gold Ferraris and swearing paparazzi.

Mandy loved every second of her new life. It was the one she had always dreamed of, but somehow she had been sidetracked into marrying a loser. Ian had survived his army years only to end up with a bad case of PTSD and a stint in jail for fencing stolen goods right across the road from a police surveillance spot. She had dumped him by text, and when that message bounced back, with a good old-fashioned letter. She had applied for the job of greeter long before Jake’s restaurant hit the headlines, and was firmly installed behind her low-lit mahogany counter by the time the journalists arrived. She was good at her work, but found she had more respect from the staff now that they knew she also occupied Jake’s art-filled bedroom overlooking the Thames, a few minutes’ drive from the restaurant.

Tonight had been typically demanding. Nicole Kidman had lost her coat, and her minders were blocking the restaurant’s entrance so that photographers couldn’t get a direct shot of her waiting while Mandy searched the racks. She found the coat and handed it over, but not before the other diners had got a good look at the celebrity in their midst. Mandy brushed a long curl of blonde hair back behind her ear and gave Kidman the biggest, most sincere smile she could fake before the actress swept out to her waiting limo, every inch a star.

It was raining hard again, but nothing kept the paps at bay. They huddled in the doorway of the building opposite, grabbing shots as the vehicle sped past, yelling and following on foot, hoping to catch it at the traffic lights.