Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection) (22 page)

‘He would have had no reason to go after the mother,’ said May.

‘I suppose not.’ Bryant took a ruminative sip of his coffee. ‘Unless this wasn’t about motive.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What if it was about opportunity?’

‘
What
opportunity? We’re on a boat, Arthur. We’re miles from anywhere and anyone.’

‘The ladies went ashore yesterday.’

‘Yes, to a town that consisted of five shops, a general store, a bar run by a man with industrial-strength body odour, and several unattractive donkeys.’

‘Exactly. Don’t you see?’ Even in the moonlight, May could catch the gleam in his partner’s eye.

‘Have you got something in mind?’

‘Yes, but it involves a conversation with someone down there.’ He pointed his finger at the deck as he rose to his feet and headed off.

‘Why do you have to make a mystery out of everything?’ May shouted in his loudest whisper. ‘Just for once, couldn’t you confide in me?’

‘I will, as soon as Ymir has answered one simple question,’ Bryant called back. ‘It’s just a precaution in case I’m wrong. Wait here for me.’

A few minutes later he returned not just with Ymir but with everyone following him on to the deck in various hasty states of dress. The vicar, somewhat surprisingly, was in a heavy metal T-shirt.

‘They were all awake,’ said Bryant apologetically. ‘I hated to disturb them but perhaps it’s for the best.’

Oh sure
, thought May, knowing how dearly his partner loved an audience.

Bryant turned to Nevriye. ‘What did you do when you went ashore, Nevriye?’

‘I walked with my mother and Mrs Beaumont for a while,’ the girl replied, yawning. ‘Then I saw a T-shirt I liked in a shop window and went in to see if I could try it on, but they didn’t have my size.’

‘And meanwhile, your mother and Mrs Beaumont looked at antiques?’

‘That’s right,’ said Jane Beaumont, unhappy to be roused from her bed but curious all the same. ‘They were mostly locally produced bits of junk. There was nothing worth buying.’

‘And Ymir, you went to the general store, is that correct?’

‘Yes, sir,’ replied the Kahramans’ assistant.

‘Would you say it’s an old-fashioned place?’

‘Yes, sir, it’s a simple country store.’

‘Why did you go there?’

‘To collect the mail.’

‘Why would you have mail waiting there? Doesn’t it just go to the post office in Bodrum?’

‘Mrs Kahraman knows she has fans all over the country, and likes to keep in touch with them,’ said Ymir. ‘There’s a bedridden lady who always sends letters to a
poste restante
here.’

‘Does Mrs Kahraman keep all her fan mail?’

‘Yes. I look after the correspondence for her.’

Bryant turned to the captain. ‘You keep a guest book on the bridge, don’t you?’

‘You know I do, Mr Bryant, you asked to see it five minutes ago and tore a page out of it.’

‘So, if I lay down
these
signatures …’ Bryant set the torn page on the deck table with a theatrical flourish. ‘And add this one from Mrs Kahraman’s fan letter, you can see—’

‘I’m glad,’ said Jane Beaumont loudly and suddenly, pointing at Nevriye. ‘You deserve to lose your mother, just as I lost my son! You deserve to suffer as I suffered!’

‘Mrs Beaumont is the mother of the boy we jailed on your evidence,’ Bryant explained. ‘He was running drugs out of a counterfeit carpet shop. Unfortunately, it appears that while he was in jail, he got into a fight and died of a knife wound.’

‘He was a good boy,’ Mrs Beaumont cried. ‘But he went to London and kept bad company. He probably met his friends through
you
!’ She stabbed an accusing finger at Nevriye.

‘Mrs Beaumont concocted a very simple plan,’ said Bryant. ‘She decided to poison your mother using a completely undetectable method. She started writing to her over the course of a year, telling her what a big fan she was, making sure that Mrs Kahraman regularly received a flattering note or gift from her. It got so that your mother looked forward to the letters, and got Ymir to pick them up for her. The latest one was filled with all the usual flattery, and Mrs Beaumont asked for one thing back: an autograph. She even included a stamped addressed envelope, but not one of the new kind that stick themselves, an old-fashioned one you have to lick to seal. You see the beauty of her method? She not only got Mrs Kahraman to poison herself; she mailed the sole piece of evidence back to the killer!’

In the silence that followed, you could have heard a sea anemone flowering on the ocean bed.

‘Except that Ymir hasn’t had time to post the letter yet.’ Bryant produced it from his pocket with the flair of a master magician. ‘Captain, can you make sure this is taken to Mrs Kahraman’s doctor at once for analysis? Unless you’d care to do the decent thing, Mrs Beaumont, and tell us what you used?’

‘It’s wheatear,’ said Mrs Beaumont, deflated and defeated. ‘It grows in my garden. The stems contain oenanthotoxin. Hemlock. It’s lethal if it goes untreated.’

‘I didn’t know he was your son, Jane,’ said Nevriye. ‘We never stayed in contact with each other. I hadn’t heard—’

‘The fact remains,’ Bryant interrupted, ‘that he would not have died if he hadn’t first broken the law. It’s a tragedy, but another death doesn’t make it right. Mrs Beaumont, thank you for telling us the truth. Captain, can you radio the hospital at once?’

Mrs Beaumont fell to her knees and cried, her rigid county demeanour finally shattered.

The next morning, after a conversation with the doctor, who said that they had been able to successfully administer an antidote to Mrs Kahraman, the detectives discussed the matter with Demir Kahraman and his daughter, and it was decided that Mrs Beaumont should escape prosecution.

When John May went to her cabin to tell her the news, he discovered that tragedy had not been averted. Mrs Beaumont was lying half out of her bed, staring blankly at the ceiling. In her right hand was an empty plastic bottle of sleeping pills. On her chest was a photograph of her dead son. Unlike her victim, she could not be saved.

‘And that was the end of my holiday,’ Bryant told the staff at the PCU, when asked to explain his early return. ‘I thought I’d get some nice grub and a suntan, instead of which I got attempted murder, revenge and suicide. You won’t catch me mucking about on boats again. Things are quieter here in King’s Cross. Here.’ He threw Janice Longbright a bottle of mosquito repellent. ‘I won’t be needing this again.’

I thought it would be nice to include a tale told from a different perspective, so here’s a first-person account from the old boys’ detective sergeant and long-time friend, Janice Longbright. I’d already touched on her years as a nightclub hostess in the graphic novel
The Casebook of Bryant & May
, but here she is on secondment to another unit. I worked out everyone’s backstories many years ago, and now I’m getting to reveal them little by little. If this book of cases goes well I hope to produce another volume in the future.

‘No fuss,’ I’d told them. ‘Don’t make it obvious.’ Instead, the whole street was a sea of red and white plastic ribbons.

They were all over the road, coming loose from orange traffic cones, sagging and snapping in the rain, wrapping themselves around people’s legs, tangling and trailing across the wet pavements. The cordon sealed off the entire centre section of Oxford Street. Shoppers tried to climb over them but were turned back by uniformed cops. There was a sale at Selfridges department store but nobody could reach the main entrance.

This was in November, on the sort of miserable, barely visible London day where you think it won’t bother to get light at all. I had taken a break from the Peculiar Crimes Unit and was working on a public-security detail, which wasn’t what I’d planned to be doing at all.

What had happened was this: I’d been dating a married DS on and off and he’d finally decided to go back to his wife, which was the last straw, and when John May found me clearing up my office in a sort of frenzy at nearly midnight, he had told me to take some time off. ‘I’ve been looking at the files,’ he said. ‘You haven’t had a holiday in years.’

‘I’m fine,’ I told him, emptying more redundant paperwork into a bin bag. ‘I don’t need to take time off. I had a full medical earlier this year. I’m in perfect health. Good BMI, low heart rate.’ I didn’t tell him that my optometrist had failed me on several counts and wanted me to start wearing reading glasses. After all, Colin Bimsley was still working on the street despite suffering from DSA.
^fn1

‘I agree there’s nothing actually wrong with you,’ John said. ‘But you should take a month off. Go and lie by a pool in a Moroccan riad, and come back refreshed.’

I’d explained that I couldn’t just sit frying in the sun without some kind of work, and I’d prefer to remain in the UK in case I was required for active duty, so he let it be known that I was available for a one-month secondment to another unit. Which is how a man called Adrian Dunwoody found me and suggested I start working in his security detail.

‘He’s a control freak and a miserable excuse for a human being,’ John told me, ‘but it’ll be easy, well-paid work, which should prove a novelty for you, plus you’ll be able to run rings around him if he gets difficult.’ So that was what I did.

The first thing Dunwoody had told me on my third morning was that I shouldn’t have joined his detail at all. He said, ‘You don’t need to be here. You’ve already helped us enough by going over the scenarios for today’s visit. There’s nothing else to do. Wait a minute. Turn around.’

‘What?’

‘What are you – Are you wearing a Kevlar vest?’ He flicked a hand at my untucked shirt.

‘I got it out of stores,’ I explained. ‘I thought I might have to, you know, go down there into the street at some point. In case of trouble.’ I liked to be prepared. I decided not to tell him I still keep a house brick in my handbag for bouncing off difficult customers.

The first task of the week should have been easy. The French Ambassador’s wife had decided to do a little shopping in London. She travelled over on the 1.30 p.m. Eurostar from Paris to St Pancras International, and was on her way to Selfridges without her entourage. With the exception of the American Embassy, which always makes its own arrangements, most embassies use security logistics provided by the Home Office, working with the Met. The cost of covering Madame’s little retail expedition was charged to the taxpayer.

‘She’s going shopping,’ said Dunwoody. ‘There’s not going to be a firefight. You won’t need to dive behind a bollard and bang off a few rounds.’

‘I was told to be ready for anything,’ I said, sensing that nothing would induce Dunwoody to leave his surveillance post. ‘I enjoy field work.’

Dunwoody snorted, then was forced to blow his nose. He always seemed to have a cold. He said, ‘
Field work?
This isn’t the CIA, Longbright, it’s one step above being a shopping-mall guard. It’s easy money. That’s why your boss was happy to let you come here – it’s a paid holiday.’

It had already become clear that Dunwoody was a natural moaner. Weather, staff, transport, workload, I’d already learned to screen out most of his conversation. Apart from the fuss and mess, I saw something down on the pavement that bothered me.

‘Why have the Met got so involved?’ I asked him. ‘They’ve made the area look like a murder scene. I thought the point was not to draw anyone’s attention to the visit.’

He said the instruction came from their side, not ours. Dunwoody’s official title was Senior Security Liaison Officer, which basically meant that he passed his problems over to the techs and took all the credit. The surveillance room had no heat but he was sweating. It seemed he could produce sweat in a meat locker. I told him they shouldn’t have closed the street.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘one day when you’ve given up playing silly buggers at the PCU and you’re in charge of operations at the Met, you’ll be able to tell everyone what to do. Meanwhile you sit here and do as you’re told.’ He looked around for something to wipe his forehead with, and for one horrible moment I thought he was going to use the end of his tie. ‘I don’t know why there are so many people milling around down there. She’s the wife of the personal envoy of the President of the Republic to the Court of St James, not some footballer’s tart.’

Protecting London is a complicated business. The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Security and Counter-Terrorism reviews public places, working out how they can be better protected from attack. Coordinating everything means analysing the routes of all state visits and reducing risk without disrupting normal services. I’d attended a seminar on the subject and it amounted to a single rule:
Don’t let the great unwashed disturb the privileged.

I told Dunwoody that the new wife was a liability. Her political opinions had turned her into a target for extremist groups. Madame Natalie Desmarais had a habit of opening her mouth in public without thinking and had received death threats from a number of officially recognized organizations. During the briefing, I’d suggested that the best way to protect her would be to downgrade the visibility of her visit. Instead we turned it into a circus.

People are like dogs before earthquakes; they always know when something’s about to happen. Shoppers were hanging around on the off chance of seeing Tom Cruise turn up. Foot traffic had slowed to a crawl around the store. A much bigger risk. I complained about it.

Dunwoody stood at the window, wiping his forehead with a tissue and starting on his pet subject: bombs. He said, ‘You could drop an IED from any one of those buildings and catch her between the car door and the store entrance.’

I dismissed the idea. Improvised explosive devices range in size from pedestrian-borne rucksacks to large goods vehicles. I know what explosions can do. There are six main effects: the blast wave, the fireball, the
brisance
or shattering effect, the primary and secondary fragments, and ground shock. But no amount of scientific analysis could account for the sheer sense of chaos, disorientation and confusion created by a bomb.