The Memory of Blood
Read The Memory of Blood Online
Authors: Christopher Fowler
The Memory of Blood
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Christopher Fowler
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain as
Bryant & May and the Memory of Blood
by Doubleday, an imprint of The Random House Group Ltd., London, in 2011.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fowler, Christopher.
The memory of blood: a Peculiar Crimes Unit mystery / Christopher Fowler.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-53213-8
1. May, John (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Bryant, Arthur (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 3. Police—England—London—Fiction. 4. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6056.O846M46 2012
823′.914—dc22 2011017511
Jacket design: Jamie S. Warren
Jacket illustration: Sarah Coleman
v3.1
Contents
A Guide to the Peculiar Crimes Unit, Its Staff and Aims
PUNCH: I shall be feared. I shall be the Bogey-Man that frightens children in the dark.
BLIND MAN: Children will love you. And the more people you kill, the more they will laugh.
(To audience)
Now you have seen our little puppet play, here is a moral you may take away: Suppose tomorrow’s sun should rise for
you
, give you the power for a single day, how would you use it? Would our tale come true?
The following undated document appeared on Wikileaks and is now the subject of a government investigation. It may be read before the case which follows, skipped or used for reference
.
EYES ONLY—THIS COMMISSIONED OBSERVATION REPORT (COR) BG298/10–14 WATERMARKED TO H.O. WHITEHALL INTERNAL SECURITY POLICY UNIT—EYES ONLY—
A GUIDE TO THE PECULIAR CRIMES UNIT, ITS STAFF AND AIMS
This is a restricted communication. No part of the following personnel report is intended for public release. No reference copies may be reproduced from this document, and reading may only take place within the Records Office upon the receipt of signed approval
.
A
N
E
XPLANATORY
N
OTE ON THE
O
RIGIN OF THE
P
ECULIAR
C
RIMES
U
NIT
, 231 C
ALEDONIAN
R
OAD
, K
ING’S
C
ROSS
, L
ONDON
N1 9RB
The Peculiar Crimes Unit is not like other police divisions.
It was founded soon after the outbreak of World War II, as part of a government initiative to ease the burden on London’s overstretched Metropolitan Police Force. In this time of desperation most able-bodied men had been taken into the armed forces, and seven experimental agencies were proposed by the Churchill government. The Peculiar Crimes Unit was one of them.
Its aim was to tackle high-profile cases which had the capacity to
compound social problems in urban areas. The affix ‘peculiar’ was originally meant in the sense of ‘particular.’ The government’s plan was that the new unit should handle those cases deemed uniquely sensitive and a high risk to public morale. To head this division, several young and inexperienced students were recruited from across the capital.
The crimes that fell within the Unit’s remit were often of a politically sensitive nature, or were ones that could potentially cause social panics and general public malaise. Its staff members were outsiders, radicals and freethinkers answerable only to the War Office, and later the Home Office.
T
HE
O
THER
L
ONDON
U
NITS
One of the other experimental units created at that time was the Central Therapy Unit, set up to help the bereaved and the newly homeless cope with the psychological stresses of war. This unit closed after just eleven months because bombed-out residents continued turning to their neighbours for support rather than visiting qualified government specialists.
A propaganda unit called the Central Information Service (later to become the COI) was set up to provide positive, uplifting news items to national newspapers in order to combat hearsay and harmful disinformation spread about our overseas forces, and to fill the void left by the blanket news blackouts.
A further unit based at the War Office employed a number of writers and artists, including members of the Royal Academy and novelists Ian Fleming and Dennis Wheatley, to project the possible outcome of a prolonged war with Germany, and to develop stratagems for deceiving the enemy. The most famous wartime deception created by this unit was Operation Mincemeat, in which the corpse of a dead Welsh tramp was disguised as a drowned naval officer, planted with false plans and left for the Germans to find.
The most successful of the seven experimental units launched by
the Churchill government in wartime was the cypher-breaking division based at Bletchley, where Alan Turing and his team cracked the Enigma Code, and in doing so, laid the foundations for modern computer technology.
T
HE
PCU S
INCE
1945
The PCU remained in operation through the war and has continued in one form or another ever since that time. In the past two decades, reorganisation of the national policing network has aimed at reducing the influence of individual units and creating standardised practices operating from guidelines laid down for a national crime database, subject to performance statistics.
The PCU unofficially aided a number of high-ranking politicians in the past, and as a consequence has remained exempt from these measures. Subsequently, a series of high-profile embarrassments has placed the Unit on a cross-governmental blacklist of Organisations of Potential Detriment, which is the reason for this ongoing internal surveillance.
The following notes are supplemental to official PCU personnel career details (see attached D/SC12–649). They are not intended to be comprehensive and represent public observations made by various co-workers. As such, they are provided to act as guideline opinions only
.
RAYMOND LAND
Temporary Acting Head of the PCU
Raymond Land’s original PCU contract was intended to last for eighteen months but was extended indefinitely after no other applicants could be recruited. He has applied for a transfer from the PCU on no fewer than seventeen separate occasions, which gives some indication of his dissatisfaction with the Unit.
Land comes from Luton, which says it all. He’s never really lost his suburban temperament. He finds it hard to work with his detectives,
who appear to pay no attention to his directives and treat him with amusement and disdain. His attempts at discipline go unheeded.
As a former graduate of the Central London Criminal Biology Unit, Land has on occasion proven himself to be intelligent, driven and meticulous, but I once heard it said about him that ‘he could identify a tree from its bark samples without comprehending the layout of the forest.’ Most members of the PCU seem to share this flaw.
In the past he has shown himself to be a strong government ally, but he can’t be trusted to toe the party line, and has switched sides on more than one occasion. He could probably be easily manipulated with a promise of relocation/early retirement.
ARTHUR ST JOHN BRYANT
Senior Detective
Where do I start with Arthur Bryant?
Bryant is the original thorn in the side of the establishment. I could point out that he managed to blow up his old headquarters, that he released illegal immigrants into the underground system, infected a Ministry of Defence outsource unit and offended a member of royalty, but let’s stick to the more salubrious facts.
Bryant was born in Whitechapel, East London. Formerly of Bow Street, Savile Row and the North London Serious Crimes Division. In policing terms, Arthur Bryant has really covered the waterfront. He’s handled just about every type of case, including multiple murder, kidnap, vice, burglary, public affright, terrorism, the disappearance of a pub and the theft of forty cats. Typically, it was the solving of this last case that most endeared him to the general public.
Formerly of Hampstead and Battersea, he’s currently sharing habitation in Chalk Farm with his landlady, one Alma Sorrowbridge. His brother died on a Thames barge, parents lived in Bethnal Green. Father was a street photographer and a drunk. Bryant had a French wife, Nathalie, who died after falling from a bridge. He was devastated
and never remarried. A loner by nature, he’s rumoured to sleep no more than four hours a night. Has numerous driving offences, incurred in an ancient Mini Cooper apparently called Victor (187 TWR).