White corridor (2 page)

2

THE SHAPING OF MEN

Johann Bellocq stretched up on the staircase to the sea, and pulled another of the ripe orange loquats from the overhanging branches of the tree. Biting into them was like biting flesh. The juice ran down his chin, staining his blue nylon shirt, dripping darkly onto the hot steps. His stolen bounty held the sweet taste of sin. He spat the large stone at the landing below, watching it skitter and bounce into the storm drain, then loaded his pockets with all the sticky fruit he could touch on tiptoe. He was a tall, slim boy, and could reach into the dusty leaves for the most tender crop hidden from the flies and the harsh glare of the sun.

Summer had come early to
la petite Afrique
that year, encouraging his mother to keep the shutters closed, not that she needed much persuasion. She rarely allowed sunlight into the villa, so the rooms remained cold and damp-smelling deep into summer. Even when the mistral came, drawing dry northeasterly winds across the hills, she would not air the house. Thick yellow dust silted beneath the doors and across the window ledges, but she stubbornly refused to unseal the rooms. To allow nature in was to admit pagan forces, a blasphemous act of elemental obeisance that would disturb the pious sanctity of her home and unleash the powers of godlessness upon the three of them.

His mother was entirely mad.

Johann skipped up the steep staircase, noting the lowness of the sun in the cliffs above. He had no watch, but knew instinctively that his mother would be waiting to cruelly punish him. Today, though, he did not care.

He had just passed his twelfth birthday and was growing fast, already handsome, with a maturity beyond his age. Soon his grandfather would die, and he would be bigger than she. He could afford to bide his time.

He had stolen a transistor radio from one of the girls on the beach, and tuned it to a station that only played songs by the old French singers: Michel Delpech, Mireille Mathieu and Johnny Hallyday. He hated English bands, despised Culture Club and Queen, the arrogant
regardez-moi
prancing and posturing. He’d hidden the radio in the exhausted little orchard behind the house, where his mother would never find it. Pop was the Devil’s music, and led to licentiousness, which was an old-fashioned word meaning sex. She would allow nothing in their home that might run the risk of destroying his innocence, because when boys discovered sex it turned their heads from God.

His stroke-afflicted grandfather, who lived with them, had ceased voicing his opinions, and spent his days drifting in dreams. Marcel’s wife was dead, and he was not far behind. She had suffered cruelly with stomach cancer. If God was so merciful, why would he take two years to destroy a woman who had visited the little village church three times every Sunday and never uttered an unkind word in her life? Doubtless the old man would have liked to have asked his daughter this question, but knew all too well what she would say: God had tested her faith and found it wanting.

The house was tucked beneath umbrella pines and surrounded by twisted pale olive trees, their tortured roots thrust above the dry ground like ancient knees. Here the plants seeped pungent oils as a protection from the heat, as well as sharp-scented nectars that formed the bases for the area’s perfume factories. No wooded aromas permeated the house, however. Perfume was the smell of sin, and was worn by the painted whores who paraded along the Avenue de la Californie after dark. His mother washed the edges of the doors and windows with disinfectant to keep the smell from entering.

Inside the little single-floored house, all was bare and white and pious. The rooms were scoured with bleach, the floors and steps with cleaning alcohol, the windows with paper and vinegar. In every room was a large pine crucifix, no other adornment. In the kitchen, a wooden table and three chairs, in the bedrooms iron bedsteads, narrow and rickety, topped with dented copper knobs, and above each bolster, a lurid picture of Our Lady, beatific and tortured, eyes rolled to Heaven. In his room, his mother had placed a faded Victorian sampler on the dresser, picked out in brown and white. Its stitched letters were a warning: ‘
Dieu Voit Tout
.’ God sees everything.

He hated the house, and longed to burn it to the ground. Soon the fierce cyanic blue of the Alpine skies would turn to grey, and winter would settle across the region, sealing them away from the world until spring. He would be left at the mercy of his mother. During the rare times when his grandfather was awake he protected the boy, but he was sleeping more and more, and could no longer be relied upon as a guardian.

Once, when Johann was seven years old, they had taken a holiday at Lac de l’Ascension, and his mother had pointed up into the dark sky, where rolling clouds had parted to release a shaft of sunlight down to the surface of the lake. ‘That,’ she told him, ‘is the pathway which leads directly to God. It is His way of watching all life on earth. He looks for those who flagrantly commit sin beneath His gaze, and punishes them.’

‘How does he do that, Mother?’ asked Johann.

‘By poisoning their lives, so that everything they touch sickens and dies,’ she replied, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. His mother saw signs, symbols and portents in everything. When she recognised some secret harm in him, she called him to the shadowed passage where she waited with the slender leather whip that striped the backs of his knees, branding his guilt into place until the marks remained through the suntan of summer. He had come to recognise that her religious fervour was a form of illness, a disease of the brain that infected her every action. While his classmates met after school to play football, he was sent to the priest for further teaching. He spent his weekends in church, or at the seminary helping in the vegetable garden. He was never allowed to mix with the children from the village. To be left with others was to encourage the Devil, who gleefully made work for idle young hands. The Devil, like the dirt, the dust and the sun, was the enemy outside, and had to be kept beyond the door.

How he longed to let the Devil in, just to see what he would do. He wanted to talk to his grandfather, to understand why the old man’s daughter was so much stricter than any of the mothers in the village, but the yellow-faced old man in the wicker chair was growing feebleminded, and the time was fast approaching when he would have no remaining power of speech.

One Saturday morning in early October, just before the weather turned, Johann slipped the great iron latch and ran off down the hill towards the village. His mother allowed him no money, but he had already planned to do without; he would hitch a lift with one of the lorry drivers who drove vegetables down to the city. Once aboard, he knew he would be safe, for she would have no way of finding him. He hung around the dusty grocery store waiting for a delivery, and his patience was rewarded when a truck pulled into the depot.

One look told him that the driver would never allow him on board. He waited until the lorry had been loaded, and was still trying to climb into the back when his mother arrived at the store on her bicycle, and spotted him.

This time, his mother whipped him with the oiled birch she kept in the shed, in order to impress the fullness of her love upon him. After that he was kept at home, where he could be watched by God and his family. Her intention was to keep him pure and untouched by evil, but her prescription had the opposite effect. The boy became sly and dark. Subterfuge came naturally to him.

He remained in the little house for five more years, waiting for an opportunity to free himself, and when the chance finally came, he seized upon it with the full violence of his trapped spirit.

It was a storm-ravaged morning in late autumn, soon after his grandfather had been placed in the gravelled cemetery behind the dry-stone wall shared by the village’s only
petanque
pitch. He stood in the middle of his mother’s bedroom, knowing exactly what had to be done. Raising the ceramic pitcher she kept on her dresser, he hurled it with all his might onto the floorboards, and when he heard the approaching thump of her stick, went to wait for her in the corridor, where she kept the leather strap.

Beating an old lady should be easy if you have the stomach to do so,
he thought,
if she has done everything within her power to deserve it, but it’s not if God can see you. If He witnesses your fall from grace, you are damned for eternity
. His mother stood before him, her small sharp teeth bared, the whip raised, about to strike him down—and then a miracle occurred.

Earlier that morning the first snowstorm of the season had ridden over the mountain peaks and across the
haute route
above the village, whitening the tarmac. In seconds the sky had grown dark, as if someone had thrown a sheet over the sun, and God was blinded from His view of mortals. The silent blizzard dropped over the house and all around them. Now, he thought, he could do whatever he needed to survive. Hidden inside the caul of falling snow, protected by the purity of nature, he snatched back the whip and beat his unrepentant mother to her knees.

He did not stop when the sky suddenly cleared and he could once more be seen by the Almighty, because he decided that God should see what he had done.
If I am to be damned, it is how I will live,
he decided. He looked up into the pin-sharp panel of azure that had appeared inside the banks of clouds, and openly defied his Maker.
See what I have done, I defy you to save me
. God saw all, and once He did there could only follow judgement, trial, repentance and suffering.

He walked to the front door, kicked it back, and stepped out into the front garden. In the sky above, the white corridor that had opened through the vaporous mountains shone all the way up to the heart of the sun.

3

GOOD MORNING, ARTHUR

‘The urge has come on me to speak to you about carpet slippers, Mr Bryant,’ Alma Sorrowbridge told her former lodger. ‘You wander in from the garden with half of London on your boots, all over my spotless kitchen floor, and it does my head in.’

‘I thought you wanted me to get into the great outdoors,’ grumbled Arthur Bryant, lowering his library book with reluctance. He wore his tweed overcoat and pyjama bottoms to the table, in protest over Alma’s restrictions on the bar heater, which had been faulty ever since he had tried to fix it with a fork.

‘Yes, but I didn’t expect you to bring it back in with you. I thought you might come to Regent’s Park with me, instead of digging holes in the garden looking for—whatever old rubbish you expect to find out there.’

‘Old rubbish? Relics, madam!’ Bryant peered over his pages and scowled. ‘You have no idea of the history upon which you stand, do you? I don’t suppose you know that near this site, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey was slaughtered in most vexing circumstances.’

‘I read the papers,’ Alma bridled.

‘I doubt you’d have been reading them in 1678, when his body was discovered among the primroses near Lower Chalcot Farm. He had been strangled until his neck broke, and a sword run through him, yet spatters of candle wax placed him miles away at Somerset House. His three murderers eventually confessed to having brought him to this lonely spot by horse and sedan chair. We live in Chalk Farm, a corruption of Chalcot Farm, within the cursed circle of Mother Shipton, the area’s most famous witch, who said that once the farmland was hemmed in on all sides by London houses, the streets of the metropolis would run with blood. She proved correct, for the area became famous for its fatal duels. And so I dig through London clay, the most recalcitrant material imaginable, in the hopes of finding evidence of those deaths. And once I find it, as I surely will, it will end another chapter of my biography.’

‘Here, am I in this book you’re writing?’ asked Alma, suddenly suspicious.

‘You most certainly are. So I should watch your step, especially when it comes to forcing me on route marches and making me eat your bread-and-butter pudding.’

‘You’re a stubborn old man,’ Alma decided, folding her arms. ‘A proper walk would do you the world of good.’

‘I am not being dragged around a park to feed ducks and admire crocuses while you hand out evangelical leaflets to disinterested passersby,’ snapped Bryant. ‘Besides, I’m already planning a trip of my own this week which will require the commandeering of your decrepit Bedford van, and I intend to drive with the windows closed specifically to avoid breathing in the odours of the so-called countryside.’

‘But your lungs is filled with London soot. When you cough it’s like a death rattle. You’ve got clogged phlegm in your tubes.’

‘I am trying to eat a boiled egg, if you don’t mind,’ Arthur Bryant complained. ‘I can’t imagine how long you cooked it. The yolk isn’t meant to be this colour, surely.’ He shut one eye and peered into the eggcup as if half expecting to find baby chicks nesting inside. ‘And your toasted soldiers are rudimentary, to say the least. You’re meant to use fresh bread.’

‘You can’t make proper toast with fresh bread. You’ve never complained before, and you’ve been eating it for over forty years.’ Alma bristled.

‘That’s because I used to be your tenant, and was scared of you. We all lived in fear of making the place untidy, only to have you come charging forward with your squeegee and your lavender polish. Well, now you’re my tenant, and I can finally take revenge.’

Arthur Bryant had conveniently forgotten that it was he who had persuaded his long-suffering landlady to part with her beautiful Battersea apartment, in order to live with him in a converted false-teeth factory set back from North London’s Chalk Farm Road. The area was peppered with warehouses, sheds, huts and light industrial manufacturing plants that had now been transformed into expensive loft-style homes. The difference was that Bryant’s place was the only one not to have been converted, for it still looked like a factory. He was too old and twinge-prone to start renovations himself, and as Alma could no longer be tempted up a ladder with a claw hammer and a mouthful of tacks, they were forced to make the best of things, carrying out odd bodge-jobs as the need arose. If the situation became desperate (as it had last month, when part of the kitchen ceiling fell, mostly into Alma’s casserole), Bryant would then head for the Peculiar Crimes Unit to make sad kitten-in-a-boot eyes at his colleagues, who could be relied upon to rally around at the weekend armed with tools and planks and electrical tape to aid a poor helpless old man. It was shameless, but a perk of being officially classed as elderly, and he knew he was sufficiently loved to be able to get away with it.

‘It would be nice if you could put the book down long enough to eat,’ Alma suggested.

Bryant’s great watery eyes swam up from his copy of
The 1919 Arctic Explorer’s Handbook Volume II: Iceberg Partition
. ‘This is fascinating stuff,’ he told her. ‘Maggie Armitage sent it to me.’

Alma harrumphed and made a face. Bryant’s theatricality was catching. ‘That woman is godless,’ she complained.

‘Quite the reverse. As a practising white witch she’s more aware of true religion than most Christians, whose experience usually only extends to miming “O God Our Help in Ages Past” during weddings and christenings.’

‘Well, I hope you’re going into work today, and not just sitting around reading.’ Alma disapproved of such pointless activities. ‘I’m planning on a spot of hoovering.’ She shifted him to clear away the breakfast things.

‘Just in time, I’d imagine. There was a rumour the BBC was coming around to film an insect documentary inside your hall rug.’

‘Are you insinuating I don’t keep a clean house?’ asked Alma, mortified. ‘All these years I’ve been looking after you, with your spilled chemicals and your disgusting experiments. Who fed rotting pork to carnivorous plants on top of his wardrobe during the heat wave of 1974?’

‘That helped me catch the Kew Gardens Strangler, if you recall.’

‘You boiled my tropical fish in 1968, and filled my bedroom with mustard gas.’

‘In order to track the Deptford Demon, as well you know. I didn’t realise your aunt was sleeping in the house at the time.’

She could have mentioned that the ancient detective also grew plague germs in her baking trays and ruined her best kitchen knives putting stab wounds in sides of beef to determine methods of death. He had also rewired the toaster to see if it could be made to electrocute anyone walking across a wet kitchen floor in bare feet, and had been able to answer in the affirmative after nearly setting fire to a Jehovah’s Witness. ‘You filled my sink with sulphuric acid last Christmas, and if I hadn’t been wearing rubber gloves to do the washing up, I’d have ended up in hospital. Took the finish right off my plug, but did I complain?’

‘You most certainly did, madam, and the fact that you bring it up at the drop of a hat reminds me how long you bear the grudge.’ He rose and collected his battered brown trilby from the table.

‘I wish you wouldn’t leave that thing over the teapot; it’s unsanitary.’

‘Most probably, but it keeps my head warm. When you’ve as little hair as I have, such small comforts are appreciated.’ He smoothed the pale nimbus of his fringe back in place. ‘I might remind you that I am still the breadwinner in this household, attending to police work for six decades with an unbroken record, despite your regular attempts to poison me. I could have taken holidays but was too conscientious.’

‘Too scared of missing out on a good murder, more like.’ Alma sniffed. ‘It’s not natural, all this morbidity, especially at your age.’

‘It’s not morbidity, it’s my job. In my field there’s no substitute for firsthand experience. You knew what to expect when you took me in.’

‘I knew you was on the side of law and order; I didn’t expect you to experiment in my lodgings with meat and germs and explosives.’

They bickered to such an extent each morning that they might as well have been married. The plump Antiguan landlady (she still thought of Bryant as her tenant) attempted to reform Bryant by tricking him into church attendance, goodwill whist drives and assorted charity events, but he invariably saw through the subterfuge and reminded her that his adherence to paganism precluded any chance of a late conversion.

‘Will you be home in time for dinner tonight?’ Alma asked, waggling a cake slice between thick brown fingers.

‘That depends on the form of culinary witchcraft you’re intending to inflict upon me.’

‘I’m baking a mutton pie with sweet potatoes, callaloo and cornbread.’

‘If I’m back in time, I’ll join you at supper. I don’t suppose another hour in the oven will adversely affect the texture of your concoctions.’

Alma folded her arms against him. ‘You’re a very rude man, Mr Bryant. I don’t know why I put up with you.’

‘Because you know the quality of your life would be immeasurably poorer in my absence,’ said Bryant, pushing his luck. Still, Alma could hardly disagree. The old detective had always brightened her days with surprises, even if many of them had proven disagreeable. If he appeared with a bunch of daffodils, there was a good chance that a neighbour would call to indignantly demand their return to the front garden from which they had been torn. The thing about Bryant was that he always meant well. She was filled with a patient and loyal adoration for him that defied sense or logic.

‘I thought you said the unit was quiet at the moment. Do you have to go in?’

‘Raymond Land is thinking of holding a retirement party for our medical examiner, and wants me to help him arrange it,’ he explained. ‘It could take a while, as I have to plot out a number of unpleasant practical jokes for the evening’s festivities.’ Oswald Finch, the only member of London’s Metropolitan Police Force who was older than Bryant and still gainfully employed, had finally made good his promise to leave the Peculiar Crimes Unit, although why he thought he would be happier in Hastings than in a mortuary mystified Bryant. Everyone assumed that the irascible pathologist was to be replaced by Giles Kershaw, the Eton-educated junior staff member whom Finch had trained to take over unit operations at the Bayham Street Morgue.

Bryant buttoned the shapeless brown cardigan he had worn for the past twenty years, dragged his horribly moth-eaten Harris tweed coat over the top of it and finished the ensemble with a partially unravelled scarf in an odd shade of plasticinemauve. The February weather had been unseasonably warm, but he was taking no chances. As he left the house, he hoped the week ahead would prove to be a busy one, for although he tired more easily these days, hard work made him feel alive. Retirement was an option only suitable for people who hated their jobs. Arthur loved working with his partner John May, and revelled in the fact that they performed a service no-one else in the city could offer. No-one had their arcane depth of knowledge, or was able to use it in the cause of crime prevention. Across the decades they had continued to close the cases few could understand, let alone solve. The Peculiar Crimes Unit was less of a secret now than it had been, but few really appreciated how it operated, or even what it did. It had been founded in a spirit of invention and experimentation, along with Bletchley Park and the Cabinet War Rooms, and would hopefully survive as long as London remained confounded by impossible crimes.

He tightened his scarf around his throat and, whistling an off-kilter air from
The Pirates of Penzance,
set off towards the tube station.