Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection) (28 page)

One day the unthinkable happened at London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit. A key member of staff, the coroner Oswald Finch, was found brutally murdered in his own mortuary, and everyone who worked there was suddenly a suspect. But Arthur Bryant and John May weren’t on hand to solve the crime. They had become stranded on a desolate snowbound section of country road. As the blizzard grew more severe, they attempted to solve the crime long distance using only their mobile phones.

Unfortunately, their situation quickly worsened. Unknown to the stranded detectives, an obsessed killer had travelled from the French Riviera to Dartmoor, and was stalking the stranded vehicles, searching for one particular victim, coming closer to them with each passing minute.

As if it didn’t have enough trouble, the Peculiar Crimes Unit received a demanding royal visitor, and the Home Office prepared to shut the PCU down when the visit inevitably started to go wrong.

Two murderers, two incapacitated detectives, just six hours to solve two crimes and save the unit. Armed only with their wits, woolly coats and a stack of dubious veal and ham pies, Bryant and May braced themselves for a day trapped inside the white corridor …

BRYANT
Look at the snow falling in the trees. It’s so postcard-pretty out there. I’d forgotten how much I hate the countryside.

MAY
That’s because you never spend any time there.

BRYANT
Why would I? Rural folk think they’re so superior just because they have a village pub and a duck pond.

This was my take on the traditional Christie-style whodunnit. I wanted to limit my detectives’ abilities by imprisoning them somewhere without their staff. Then I recalled the snowdrifts that had often cut off drivers in Devon (people die; it seems surprisingly extreme considering the English countryside is thought of as tame and safe) and the traffic jam seemed like the perfect place in which to hide a killer.

One of the biggest problems I had was finding a legitimate way to introduce other characters, when most of them wouldn’t want to get out of their vehicles and risk the elements. I had a lot of fun with the concluding royal visit, and based the visiting dignitary on a well-known and famously disliked minor regal personality.

It began with a life lost on a London street; an ordinary woman collapsed outside a public house called the Victoria Cross in Bloomsbury. Yet it became one of the most disturbing cases the Peculiar Crimes Unit ever undertook …

Arthur Bryant passed the woman on the way back from his coroner’s wake just before she died. But when he returned to the scene a few hours later, nothing was how he remembered it. For a start, the busy nineteenth-century pub had turned into an Indian supermarket. The elderly detective’s greatest fear was that he might be suddenly losing his mind. After all, he had already managed to mislay the coroner’s funeral urn on the same night.

While Bryant faced some home truths about perception and memory, his partner John May investigated a similar death occurring in another busy London pub. It seemed that a killer was taking lives in the city’s safest and most convivial places, but how was he doing it, and why?

The detectives’ search came to involve arcane mysteries, secret societies, line-dancing, speed-dating, hidden insanity, and the solution to a forgotten London conundrum.

BRYANT
I wish I remember what I did with Oswald’s ashes, because that was really where it all began – oh my God.

MAY
What’s the matter?

BRYANT
I just remembered what I did with them!

This was the sixth book, and in it were planted the seeds of the next six. One of my favourite Golden Age mystery writers was Edmund Crispin, whose academic-detective Gervase Fen solved crimes in Oxford, and I wanted to make this book a direct homage to his novel
The Moving Toyshop
, one of his best. ‘Homage’ would just be a polite word for stealing if you didn’t bring something else to the tribute. In this case I wanted to take the idea further and explore the strange world of pub societies. Many London pubs have private rooms in which all sorts of odd clubs meet. I quickly came to the realization that many of the quirkiest pubs were vanishing, falling victim to rapacious property developers by nature of their sheer size, so the book turned into a testament and the title became ironic. A list of all the pubs I visited for research (drinking) went into the back, and became a sort of requiem as they vanished in real life.

In rush-hour King’s Cross, one of the busiest crossing points in Britain, finding a murderer would have been a nightmare for any force. But when a decapitated body was discovered in a kebab-shop freezer, London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit was
not
summoned – because the unit had just been disbanded, and elderly detectives Bryant and May had no access to evidence that could help them find a killer.

With the team dispersed and Arthur Bryant retiring to his bed, depressed and determined never to work again, it seemed like the end of the line for the PCU. But then something began disturbing the area’s property developers. Half-man, half-beast, a terrifying figure with a head of knives appeared at night on building sites, his pagan horns the mystical image of a forgotten legend.

It was time to gather the gang once more, even though they had no resources and could not be paid. With the appearance of a second headless body, the detectives uncovered the pre-Christian secrets of the historic streets and found a pattern to the deaths. But the sinister solution led them back to the heart of the city’s oldest mystery: who really owns the London landscape? As they got closer to the truth, Bryant and May made a very bad enemy. A man known only as Mr Fox, who could seemingly change his identity and vanish at will …

RAYMOND LAND
You can’t tell me what to do. I’m your superior officer.

BRYANT
Oh, that’s just a title, like labelling a tin of peaches ‘Superior Quality’. It doesn’t mean anything.

This book was born from two ideas. First, I moved to King’s Cross, an inner-city spot I’d hung around as a child, now one of the most manic areas in London, and I’d watched as public housing developments were torn down and replaced with luxury private apartments for overseas investors, just as the neighbourhood’s slums and child-labour factories had been torn down before them.

Also, I wondered, who really owns the London landscape? Extraordinary stories emerged from various archives about lost deeds, stolen properties and outrageous government dishonesty. In fact some of the cases proved too upsetting to be added to the book, and with so much ground to cover I was in danger of packing too much research material into the novel. Even after trimming it back, I realized that some of it would spill over into a sequel.

London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit was given a week to clear its backlog of investigations. But the only mystery on their books looked like a mundane accident: a young mother had fallen down the escalator in a rush-hour tube station, in full view of commuters and cameras. Still, Arthur Bryant and John May were nagged by the suspicion that a wicked deed had occurred. There was something strange about the way she fell …

When a young student went missing on the last train home one night – impossibly vanishing between stops on the train – the detectives headed into the London Underground. Bryant needed no excuse to start investigating the strange history of forgotten stations, ghosts and suicides, as a seemingly trivial clue sent him searching for a clever killer who always covered his tracks. With the suspect list spreading to include an entire household of students, it seemed that everyone had secrets to hide. And who was the sinister Night Crawler spotted in the tunnels after the last train had pulled out?

With the Peculiar Crimes Unit roaring back into business in new premises, the detectives headed down on to the darkened platforms of the world’s oldest underground railway to hunt the murderer. To solve the puzzle they explored an unseen world, uncovering hidden histories in order to stop the ruthless, invisible Mr Fox from striking again. But the biggest surprise was discovering that nothing is ever quite as it appears …

BANBURY
A serial killer. That’s what I reckon we’ve got here. We’ve not had many of them at the PCU, have we?

BRYANT
Not proper saw-off-the-arms-and-legs-boil-the-innards-put-the-head-in-a-handbag-and-throw-it-from-a-bridge jobs, no.

I’d long wanted to write in detail about the London Underground system, and this picked up on themes that were explored in the previous book, but now I decided to take my detectives below the level of the streets, into the strange new world.

It was also a chance to confront the urban crime writer’s greatest problem: how do you hide a criminal in the world’s most spied-upon city? Saying that mobiles and CCTV aren’t working is a cop-out. I decided to confront the problem head-on and create an impossible crime occurring in plain sight, dependent on your point of view and the assumptions you make.

The ending was a risky challenge. It even took me by surprise, and I grew quite upset writing it because so much of it was true, culled from news reports and my own experience.

On a rainswept London night, the wealthy unscrupulous theatre impresario Robert Kramer hosted a party in his penthouse just off Trafalgar Square. But something was wrong. The atmosphere was uncomfortable; the guests were on edge. And when Kramer’s new young wife went to check on their baby boy, she found the nursery door locked from the inside.

Breaking in, the Kramers were faced with an open window, an empty cot, and a grotesque antique puppet of Mr Punch lying on the floor. It seemed that the baby had been thrown from the building, but it had been strangled, and the marks of the puppet’s hands were clearly on his throat … What’s more, there was a witness to tell them that the puppet killed the baby.

As Bryant and May’s team interrogated the guests, Arthur investigated the secret world of automata and stagecraft, illusions and effects. His suspicions fell on the staff of Kramer’s company, who had been employed to stage a gruesome new thriller in the West End. As a second impossible death occurred, the detectives uncovered forgotten museums and London eccentrics, and took a trip to a seaside Punch and Judy show.

Then Bryant’s biographer suddenly died. Was it a tragic accident, or could the circumstances of her death be related to the case? With just one hour left to solve the crime, Bryant buried himself away with his esoteric books. The stage was set for a race against time with a murderous twist …

RAYMOND LAND
This office is starting to look like your old room in Mornington Crescent.

BRYANT
Of course. It’s the contents of my head.

RAYMOND LAND
It certainly contains the contents of
a
head, unless you’ve had the brainpan of that stinking Tibetan skull cleaned out.

This book was born from my discovery that London had its own Grand Guignol theatre like the one in Paris – I located the scripts for the sinister plays that were performed there, and thought it would make a great basis for a novel. At the time of writing the book I was rehearsing a play on the same stage where the Grand Guignol scenes had been tried out.

The British versions of the plays were different from their French counterparts because the Lord Chamberlain wouldn’t allow explicit violence, so we did something typically British – we made the plays about mental cruelty, which was far worse than seeing a rubber hand chopped off.

Also, after the dark realities of the previous two books I needed to write something lighter and funnier, so this is one of Bryant and May’s ‘sorbet stories’ – something refreshing after a big meal.

As Arthur Bryant’s memoirs were published, he started to feel his age. But a case came in that changed his life. A young woman called Amy sat in the quiet London church of St Bride’s, off Fleet Street, and was found dead in her pew after the service. But no one had been near her. She had no marks on her body and the cause of death was unknown. The only odd thing was that she had a red cord tied around her left wrist.

Then, at a government dinner party to welcome heads of state, the wife of businessman Oskar Kasavian got drunk and insulted the gathering. She believed she had been made a social outcast by her husband’s friends because she was a foreigner from a lower class. Angered at being affected by the invisible code governing British behaviour, she continued to behave so badly that she was eventually locked up in a private clinic in Hampstead.

Her husband’s circle closed ranks against her. ‘Women of our social standing remain by our men,’ one politician’s wife reminded her. But Bryant suspected that the wife was being victimized. Especially when she told him that she was the victim of witchcraft. The detectives started investigating Hellfire clubs, secret codes and the history of London’s oldest madhouse.