The Water Room (43 page)

It was only when no answer came that she realized she would never again find home.

‘What has he been painting?’ asked Alma Sorrowbridge, peering over Sergeant Longbright’s shoulder. The pair of them had decided to tackle the daunting task of clearing up Bryant’s study while he was out, and had discovered the half-finished canvas set on an easel beneath a south-facing window in his cavernous new apartment.

‘It appears to be an allegorical depiction of the end of the world,’ Longbright suggested, stepping back to decipher the chaotic muddle of purples and greens. ‘What do you think?’

Alma sniffed with vague disapproval before wielding her J-cloth on his work surface. ‘That big naked lady in the middle is a very odd shape.’

‘I think he painted her from memory,’ said Longbright, tilting her head.

‘Then he must be getting Alzheimer’s,’ Alma told her, spitting on the cloth and settling down to a good scrub.

‘John’s putting him on a refresher course. They’re double-dating tonight. Monica Greenwood and Jackie Quinten.’

‘The only toy boys in town with bus passes. Mr Bryant has never been very successful with the ladies. His idea of a chat-up line used to be asking a girl if she’d like to see where he had his operation.’

‘What did he show them?’

‘The Royal Free Hospital.’

Their laughter could be heard in the street, where the lamps glowed into life, lighting all paths to home.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

C
HRISTOPHER
F
OWLER
is the acclaimed author of twelve previous novels, including the Bryant & May novels
Full Dark House
and
Seventy-Seven Clocks
. He lives in London, where he is at work on his next novel featuring Arthur Bryant and John May,
Ten Second Staircase
. Visit him on the web at
www.christopherfowler.co.uk
.

ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

FULL DARK HOUSE

SEVENTY-SEVEN CLOCKS

And coming soon in hardcover from Bantam:

TEN SECOND STAIRCASE

“Invulnerable, genial, and crafty,” raved the
Los Angeles Times
of the superb—and utterly unique—sleuthing duo of Bryant and May. Now the odd couple of London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit returns in a tantalizing new mystery guaranteed to keep you reading late into the night.

Read on for a special early look into Christopher Fowler’s
Ten Second Staircase
, coming soon in hardcover from Bantam Books. And don’t miss any of the Bryant and May mysteries—look for them at your favorite booksellers!

A Bryant & May Mystery

CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

On sale summer 2006

Ten Second Staircase

On sale summer 2006

SMALL PROVOCATIONS

‘I hope you’re not going to be rude and upset everyone again.’

Detective Sergeant Janice Longbright examined her boss for signs of disarray. She scraped some egg from his creased green tie with a crimson nail, then grudgingly granted her approval.

Arthur Bryant took a deep breath and folded his notes back into his jacket. ‘I see nothing wrong with speaking my mind. After all, it is a special occasion.’ He fixed his DS with a beady, unforgiving eye. ‘I rarely get invited to make speeches. People always think I’m going to be insulting. I’ve never upset anyone before.’

‘Perhaps I could remind you of the Mayor’s banquet at Mansion House? You told the assembly he had herpes.’

‘I said he had a hairpiece. It was a misquote.’

‘Well, just remember how overwrought you can get at these events. Did you remember to take your blue pills?’ Longbright suspected he had forgotten them because the tablet box was still poking out of his top pocket. ‘The doctor warned you it would be easy to muddle them up—’

‘I don’t need a nurse, thank you. I’ll take them afterwards. I haven’t quite drifted into senility yet.’ Unlike most men, Bryant did not look smarter in a suit. His outfit was several decades out of date and too long in the leg. His shirt collar was far wider than his neck, and the white nimbus of his hair floated up around his prominent ears as though he had been conducting experiments in electricity. Overall, he looked like a soon-to-be-pulped Tussaud’s waxwork.

Peering out though a gap in the curtains at the sea of gold-trimmed navy blazers, Sergeant Longbright saw that the auditorium was now entirely filled with pupils. ‘It’s a very well-heeled audience, Arthur,’ she reported back. ‘Boys only, that can’t be very healthy. All between the ages of fifteen and seventeen. I don’t imagine they’ll be much interested in crime prevention. You’ll have to find a way of reaching them.’

‘Teenagers are suspicious of anyone over twenty,’ Bryant admitted, brushing tobacco strands from his lapel, ‘so how will they feel about me? I thought there were going to be more adults here. Teenagers can smell lies, you know. Their warning flags unfurl at the slightest provocation. A hint of condescension and they bob up like meerkats. Contrary to popular belief, they’re more naturally astute than so-called grown-ups. The whole of one’s adult life is a gradual process of dulling the sense, Janice. Look how young we all were when we started at the PCU, little more than children ourselves. But we were firing on all synapses, awake to the world.’

Longbright brushed his shoulders with maternal propriety. ‘Raymond Land says the sensitive are incapable of action. He reckons we need more thick-skinned recruits.’

‘Which is why our acting chief would be better employed in parking control, or some public service which you could train a moderately attentive bottle-nosed dolphin to perform.’ Bryant had little patience with those who frowned on his abstract methods. Critics offered him nothing. They made the most senior detective of London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit as irritable as a wasp in a bottle and as stubborn as a doorstop.

‘The school magazine is out there waiting to take your picture. They’ve seen you on TV, don’t forget. You’re a bit of a celebrity these days. Show me how you look.’ Longbright jerked his tie a little straighter and pulled his sleeves to length. ‘Good enough, I suppose, I need photographic evidence of you in a suit, even though it’s thirty years old. Make sure you stick to Raymond’s brief and talk about the specifics of crime prevention. Don’t forget the CAPO initiative—we have to reach them while they’re in the highest risk category.’ Seventeen-year-olds were more likely to become victims of street crime than any other population segment. Their complex pattern of allegiance to different urban tribes was more confusing than French court etiquette—territorial invasion, lack of respect, the wrong clothes, the wrong ethnicity, attitudes exaggerated by hormones, chemistry, geography and simple bad timing.

‘My notes are a little more abstract than Raymond might wish,’ Bryant warned.

Longbright threw him a hopeless look. ‘I thought he vetted your script.’

‘I meant to run it by him last night, but I’d promised to drive Alma to her sister’s in Tooting. She fell off her doorstep while she was red-leading it, and needed a bread poultice for her knee.’

‘Surely the head of the department ranks above your landlady.’

‘Not in terms of intelligence, I assure you.’

‘You should have shown Raymond what you’re planning to say, Arthur. You know how concerned he is about the media attention we’ve been receiving.’

The PCU had recently been the subject of a television documentary, and not all of the press articles following in its wake had been complimentary.

‘I couldn’t stick to Raymond’s guidelines on the history of crime-fighting because I don’t want to talk down to my audience. They’re supposed to be smart kids, the top five percent of the education system. I don’t want them to get fidgety.’

‘Just fix them with the angry stare of yours. Go on—everyone’s waiting for you.’

The elderly detective took an unsteady step forward, then balked. He could feel a cold wall of expectancy emanating from the crowded auditorium. The hum of audience conversation parried his determination, stranding him at the edge of the stage.

‘What’s the matter now?’ demanded Longbright, exasperated.

‘No one in our family was good with the young,’ Bryant wavered. ‘When I was little, my father tried to light a cigarette while holding me and a pint of bitter, and burned the top of my head. All of our childhood problems were sorted out with a clout round the ear. It’s a wonder I can name the kings of England.’

‘Don’t view them as youngsters, Arthur, they’re at the age when they think they know everything, so talk to them as if they do. The head teacher has already introduced you. They’ll start slow handclapping if you don’t get out there.’ It occurred to her that because Bryant had attended a lowly state school in Whitechapel, he might actually be intimidated by appearing before an exclusive group of private pupils from upper-middle-class homes.

Bryant dragged out his dogeared notes and smoothed them nervously. ‘I thought at least John could have been here to support me.’

‘You know he had a hospital appointment, now stop making a fuss.’ She placed a broad hand in the small of his back and firmly propelled him onto the stage.

Bryant stepped unsteadily into the spotlight, encouraged by a line of welcoming teachers. Having recently achieved a level of public fame for his capture of the Water Room killer, he knew it was time for him to enjoy his moment of recognition, but today he felt exposed and vulnerable.

The detective wiped his watery blue eyes and surveyed the hall of pale varnished oak from the podium. Absurdly youthful faces lifted to study him, and he saw the great age gulf that lay between lectern and audience. How could he ever expect to reach them? He remembered the war; they would have trouble remembering the nineteen-eighties. The sea of blue and gold, the expensive haircuts, the low susurrus of well-educated voices, teachers standing at the end of every third row like benign prison guards. It was surprisingly intimidating.

Most of the students had broken off their conversation to acknowledge his arrival, but some were still chatting. He fired a rattling cough in the microphone, a magnified explosion that echoed into a squeal of feedback. Now they ceased talking and looked up in a single battalion, assessing him.

He could feel the surf of confidence radiating from these bored young men, and knew he would have to work for their attention. The boys of St Crispins were not here to offer him respect; he was in the employ, and they would choose to listen, or ignore him. For one terrifying second, the power of the young was made palpable. Bryant was an outsider, an interloper. He rustled his notes and began to speak.

‘My name is Arthur Bryant,’ he told them unsteadily, ‘and together with my partner John May, I run a small detective division known as the Peculiar Crimes Unit.’ He settled his gaze in the centre of the audience, focussing on the most insolent and jaded faces. ‘Time moves fast. When the unit was first founded, much detection work was still based on Victorian principles. Anything else was untried and experimental. We were one of several divisions created in a new spirit of innovation. Because we’re mainly academics, we don’t use traditional law enforcement methods. We are not a part of the Met; they are hard-working, sensible men and women who handle the daily fallout of poverty and hardship. The PCU doesn’t deal with life’s failures. The criminals we hunt have already proven successful.’ His attention locked on a group of four boys who seemed on the verge of tuning out his lecture. He found himself departing from the script in order to speak directly to them. He raised his voice.

‘Let’s take an example. Say one of you lads in the middle there gets burgled at home. The police handle cases in order of priority, just like doctors. They send a beat constable or a mobile uniformed officer around to ask you for details of the break-in and a list of what’s missing. They are not trained as investigative detectives, so you have to wait for a specialist to take fingerprints, which they’ll try to match with those of a registered felon. If no one is discovered, your loss is merely noted and set against the chance of the future recovery of your goods—a possibility that shrinks with each passing hour. The system only works for its best exemplars. But at the Peculiar Crimes Unit, we adopt a radically different approach.’ As he still seemed to have their attention, Bryant decided to forge ahead with his explication.

‘We ask ourselves a fundamental question: What is a crime? How far does its moral dimension extend? Is it simply an act that works against the common good? If you are starving and steal from a rich man’s larder, should you be punished less than if you were not hungry? All crime is driven by some kind of need. Once, those needs were simple—food, shelter, warmth, the basic assurances of survival. But as soon as our needs are taken care of, new crimes appear within society. As we become more sophisticated, so do the reasons for our misdeeds. Now that we are warm and fed, we covet something more complex: power. Spending power, power over others, the power to be noticed. And sometimes that power can be achieved by violating the accepted laws of the land. So criminal sophistication requires sophisticated methods of detection. That’s where specialist units like the Peculiar Crimes Unit come in. Think of internet fraud, and you’ll find it is being matched by equally subtle methods of detection that require as much knowledge as the criminal’s. I’m sure you boys know far more about the internet than your parents, but does that place you at less of a risk?’

He’s off to a decent start,
thought Longbright from the wings.
A bit all over the place, but no doubt he’ll draw it all together and make his point.

‘Fraud, robbery, assault and murder are all cause-and-effect crimes requiring carefully targeted treatment. But all modern lawlessness carries the seeds of a strange paradox within it, for just as ancient crimes appear in cunning new versions, others appear entirely unmotivated. One thinks of vandalism. Some will have you believe it was invented in the postwar period, but not so. Acts of vandalism have been recorded in every sophisticated civilization; the defacing of statues was quite common in ancient Rome. Now, though, we are reaching a new peak of motiveless transgression. Criminality has once more assumed the kind of dark edge that existed in London during the eighteenth century. London was always the home of mob rule. The public voiced their opinions about whether it was right for a man to hang just as much as the judge. The joyous assembly would jeer or cheer a prisoner’s final speech at Tyburn’s triple tree. They would choose to condemn a wrongdoer or venerate him. Pamphlets filled with prints and poems would be produced in a criminal’s honour. He would achieve lasting fame as a noble champion, his exploits retold as brave deeds, and there was nothing that governments could do to prevent it. Criminals became celebrities because they were seen to be fighting the old order, kicking back at an oppressive system.’ Bryant eyed his audience like a pirate frightening cabin boys with tales of dancing skeletons. ‘Often, thieves’ necks would fail to break when they were dropped from the Tyburn gallows, and the crowd would cut down a half-hanged man to set him free, because they felt he had paid for his crimes. They rioted against the practice of passing bodies over to the anatomists, and pelted bungling hangmen with bricks. If a murderer conducted himself nobly as he ascended the gallows stairs, he would become more respected than his accusers. But time has robbed us of these gracious renegades. Last week, less than a quarter of a mile from here, in Smithfield, a schoolboy was stabbed through the heart for his mobile phone. An elderly man on a tube platform in Holborn was kicked to death for bumping into someone. These criminals are not to be venerated.’