White corridor (4 page)

That, she supposed ruefully, was the trouble with the Peculiar Crimes Unit; you never knew what you were about to get. Recently they had spent an unnerving week clambering about on the city’s rooftops looking for a man who called himself the Highwayman, only to discover that the unusual nature of his identity probably meant the guilty would never be properly punished. If anything, the Highwayman had become even more popular with teenagers in the weeks that followed his arrest. You still saw T-shirts bearing his logo on the market stalls of Camden Town. When ordinary people started glorifying cruelty and throwing rocks at the police, maybe it was time to find another job. Except that Longbright’s mother had worked at the unit before her, and had charged her with its protection. Janice felt possessive about the place, and knew that as long as she was needed here, she would face any challenge the detectives set her.

Sorting through the morning’s mail, she turned on the lights and began the day.

5

OUBLIETTE

The winter sun seared the back of Madeline Gilby’s bare neck.

Only in the café’s shade were the chill tendrils of the season felt. She closed her book, pushed the blond fringe from her eyes and slid Euros across the palm of her hand, tipping them to the light in order to count them; the denominations were still confusing. The boy looked up at her anxiously from across the tiny wrought-iron table. Above them, swallows dropped to the eaves of the building, then looped out across the dark sea. Placing the money for the bill in the little white dish, she returned to her novel.

‘Put the book down,’ said Ryan. ‘You’re always reading.’

‘You’ve got nothing to worry about, all right?’ she said for the third time, setting the paperback aside. ‘We’ve enough to get by. I’ve told you, let me take care of the cash. You’re ten. You can start worrying properly in about eight years’ time, when we have to stump up for your student loan.’

‘I’m not going to university,’ said Ryan. ‘I’m going to get a job and help you.’

‘Over my dead body. Finish your croissant.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘You wanted an ice cream half an hour ago.’

‘That’s different.’ Ryan stared dolefully at the picked-apart croissant. ‘Only the French could invent bread that explodes when you try to eat it.’

Madeline looked into the sky. ‘I wanted a child, I got Noel Coward,’ she complained.

‘Who’s Noel Coward?’ Ryan asked.

‘A very funny man who lived a long time ago, to you anyway.’ She reached across the table and stole the remains of the croissant. ‘If you’re not going to eat it, I will.’

‘How long do we have to stay here?’

‘It’s a holiday, Ryan, you’re meant to be having fun.’ She tore off a buttery flake and chewed it, watching him. The blue bruise over her right eye was fading. The grapevines in the trellis above them patched their shoulders in green and yellow light.

‘I don’t know anyone.’

‘Then go out and make a friend.’

‘There’s no-one here my age. They’re all in school.’

‘Yeah, it’s not exactly high season. You’ll be at a new school as soon as we’ve found a place.’ She squinted up at the deceiving sun, then resettled her sunglasses. ‘Meanwhile we have to make the best of it. Besides, we’ll only stay for a few more days, until the cheque comes through.’

‘What if it doesn’t?’

Madeline sighed. ‘It will. Your father is required by law to pay up. It’s called a divorce settlement, and it should have been cleared by now. So we just sit tight until it arrives.’

‘If you hadn’t left Dad—’

‘If I hadn’t left him I’d be in A and E with my arm in a sling or worse, so drop it, okay?’ She softened, aware of his growing alarm. Her lies about the origins of her cuts and bruises had made him realise the truth. ‘I’m sorry, baby, I don’t mean to shout at you, it’s just—everything at the moment. Look, I can pay the bill without managing to get us thrown in jail, and if the sea’s too cold to go swimming we’ll take a walk, all right?’

They descended to the steep pebbled beach and strolled across banks of rank-smelling olivine seaweed, passing through pools of shadow cast by the cypress trees that grew behind the walls of secretive villas. Out of the sunlight, the air was chill.

‘Who do you think lives there?’ asked Ryan, jumping in an impossible attempt to see through the railings.

‘Rich people, honey, no-one we’re ever likely to meet. They hide behind their high walls and don’t talk to people like us. Actually, I don’t think they’re here out of season. All the windows are shuttered, see?’

‘Then where are they?’

‘At other houses, in other countries.’

‘What do they need more than one house for?’

‘Good question. To get away from each other, I guess.’

She thought about the world she had left behind. Back at the Elephant & Castle, Madeline’s days were split between her supermarket shifts, working afternoons in East Street Laundromat and evenings in The Seven Stars, a deafening bar popular with the area’s young professionals. Jack, her husband, changed oil and tyres at the local MOT centre, answering to a boy ten years younger than himself. The marriage had failed years earlier, largely because Jack could never control his drinking or his unfocussed anger, and after one remorseful fight too many she had pushed for a legal separation. Things had soured between them when her promised support payments failed to materialise.

When Jack’s brother turned up in the bar to tell her that she was a headcase, and accused her of trying to destroy their family, the escalation of hostility was so unnerving that she had grabbed Ryan from school, borrowed some cash from her mother and booked an easy Jet flight from the nearest Internet café. They had ended up in the South of France because a flight to Nice was affordable and available, but living here was almost as expensive as in London, and she was running low on funds.

All she could do was wait for the cheque to clear in her bank account, knowing that Jack would try to cancel it when he realised where she had taken Ryan. They had caught a train east, along the coast, looking for somewhere cheap to stay, and disembarked from the first tiny station they reached, the village of Eze-sur-Mer.

High above them—an hour’s walk into the Savaric cliffs—was the other Eze, an ancient
village perché
consisting of shops selling tasselled velvet cushions and Provence tablecloths in the colours of sea and sunshine. Low-ceilinged galleries were filled with lurid daubs of boats at rest, postcards and fridge magnets. Far below, away from tourists searching for a taste of the old country, there was barely anything to indicate a town; a single restaurant called La Vieille Ville, a closed bar, a modest little hotel without stars, commendations or any other guests, and stepped parades of shuttered villas built on the forested scree beneath the cliffs. At the only café, the passing of a car was enough to make the proprietor step out and watch with his dishtowel over his shoulder.

It was the perfect place to hide away, a town as lost from recollection as any oubliette.

Mme Funes, the sticklike proprietor of L’Auberge des Anges, had a permanently puckered look on her face that might have been due to excessive sunlight or general disapproval of the world. She wore a dead auburn wig that made her resemble the corpse of Shirley Bassey, and was always to be found lurking behind the bar within clawing distance of the cash register. Whenever Madeline addressed her, Mme Funes headed off any attempt to speak French with a barrage of tangled English that was presumably less offensive to her ears. Her grey-skinned husband possessed a similar air of resurrection, and had the habit of peering through the hatch of the kitchen like a surprised puppeteer whenever Madeline passed. His presence in the kitchen obviously had nothing to do with cooking, as
daube de boeuf
and
salade niçoise
were the only specials to appear on the blackboard.

Before dinner, Madeline and her son risked further disapproving looks by venturing out to the little village park, where they sat watching distant cruise ships pass between San Remo and Nice like floating fairgrounds. The temperature, so long as you stayed in sunlight, remained at eighteen degrees centigrade. The flower beds were immaculately trimmed, banks of pink and saffron petals ruffled around the stems of attenuated palms in a colour combination that seemed to exist only in France. As distant church bells rang, a solemn procession passed their bench, something to do with the patron saint of bees. Fat paper statues were solemnly held aloft in displays of orange and yellow artificial flowers, a reminder that the customs of other countries would forever remain mysterious to outsiders.

Ryan watched in amazement as purple bougainvillea petals were scattered by a troop of surpliced choristers following a giant paper bee perched on a honeypot, in a blessing ceremony that appeared to dovetail artisanship and religion. Moments after the priests and children had been lost from view, Madeline realised that her handbag had been taken from beside her feet.

‘It’s got everything in it,’ she said, scanning the surrounding grass, ‘my passport, my paperback, all our remaining money.’

‘Why would you do that?’ Ryan accused.

‘I didn’t trust the hotel, I thought it would be better with me. Help me look.’

They were still searching the ground when she raised her eyes and saw the bag held in his tanned fist. He gave a tentative smile, and despite his white teeth, she had an impression of darkness. She thought perhaps he was a delivery man, because he wore a scuffed brown leather satchel across his chest.

‘You are looking for this?’ he asked in good English. He was younger than she, but only by a year or two, perhaps twenty-eight. Mediterranean colouring, black cropped hair, black eyebrows almost touching green eyes, curiously baby-faced. He was slender, dressed in jeans, a navy blue bomber jacket and pristine white sneakers, entirely unthreatening, yet there was something studied in the way he regarded her.

‘Thank you, I thought I’d lost it.’ She took back the bag and instinctively drew Ryan to her side. The park had emptied now, and the evening felt suddenly cooler.

‘It looks very nice here, very safe, but you must still be careful,’ he told her. ‘Thieves come over the border from Italy, and there are Gypsies. They will take anything, especially during a saint’s parade.’

‘I’ll remember that—’

‘Johann. My name is Johann Bellocq.’ His smile faded, and he turned, walking away as abruptly as he had appeared.

‘Let’s go and eat.’ She patted Ryan on the head, but looked back at Johann Bellocq as they crossed the deserted main road.

6

LAST DAY TOGETHER

The sky above the unit glowed with an eerie sulphurous light. Behind the cardinal tiles of Mornington Crescent station, the detectives had arrived for the start of a dark, miserable week.

‘We’re a public service; you can’t just shut us down willy-nilly,’ complained Bryant, cracking his briar pipe down on the mantelpiece in an effort to unbung it.

‘I’m not doing this out of caprice,’ Land told him. ‘Your IT chap, Mr Banbury, wants to upgrade the PCU’s computer system and link it to the Met’s area-investigation files. Apparently it’s not going to cost anything because he’s downloading some dubious piece of software to do so.’ He eyed the mountainous stacks of books bending Bryant’s shelves. ‘It all sounds very dodgy, but I harbour a fantasy about you running a paper-free office.’

Bryant blew hard into his pipe bowl, scattering bits of burnt tobacco onto Land’s head. ‘Come off it, Raymondo, you know there’s no such thing. Be honest, you just fancy a few days off with your feet up. I need another decent case for my biography. Just think how disappointed my readers would be to find an entry saying February nineteenth, all murder investigations stopped due to Acting Head Raymond Land’s need for a lie-down.’

‘That’s another thing I’ve been meaning to speak to you about,’ said Land. ‘Your biography. I read your account of the business you’ve chosen to call
Seventy-Seven Clocks
—’

‘What were you doing reading my notes?’ asked Bryant, appalled. ‘That’s a work in progress.’

‘Too right it is. Murderous barbers and starving tigers? You’ve made most of it up. You can’t go around doing that.’

‘I may have ameliorated some parts for dramatic effect,’ Bryant admitted, ‘a bit of creative licence. It would have been a rather boring case history otherwise.’

‘But you’re passing it off as fact, man! All right, it’s true that a painting at the National Gallery was vandalised, and that an upper-class family was ultimately to blame, but the whole thing reads like some cod-Victorian potboiler, and to paint yourself as the hero of the hour is an outrageous falsification. We’ll become a laughingstock if anyone reads about this. What were you thinking of?’

‘The royalties, obviously. You really shouldn’t take these things so seriously. The public likes a good story.’

‘That’s all very well, but such fevered imaginings could destroy the credibility of the unit,’ snapped Land. ‘You’d be lost without the PCU. You’ve nowhere else to go.’

‘I say, that’s a bit below the belt. Actually, I have got somewhere to go, and I’m thinking of taking John with me.’ Removing a packet from his pocket, he stuffed his pipe with a mix of eucalyptus leaves, Old Navy Rough Cut Shag and something that looked like carpet fibres from an Indian restaurant before waving Land from his office. ‘Off you toddle, play some golf, enjoy yourself, the place won’t burn down without you.’

‘It did before,’ Land reminded him as the door was shut in his face.

Moments later, John May arrived, flicking off his elegant black raincoat and dropping into the opposite chair. ‘What did Land want?’ he asked.

‘Oh, some rot about shutting down the unit for computer work, I wasn’t really listening,’ Bryant replied nonchalantly. ‘You know how he’s been ever since he found out about his wife having an affair with the ball-washer at his golf club.’

‘I don’t think you should make so many off-colour jokes about him becoming a cuckold. You’re only getting away with it because he doesn’t know what it means.’

‘That’s the beauty of the English language. One can wrap insults inside elegance, like popping anchovies into pastry. You’re right, I shouldn’t mock, but it is such fun. Are you feeling all right? You’re as pale as the moon. I think you need a bit of a holiday.’ Bryant tried to contain a mischievous smile.

‘Oh, no, not me, I’m happy here.’ May usually felt much younger than his partner, but today he was tired and out of sorts. He had always prided himself on his ability to embrace change, and had at least retained a walking pace beside the growth of modern police technology, adopting new techniques as they arrived. Bryant, on the other hand, loitered several metres behind each development, and occasionally drifted off in the opposite direction. As a consequence, his knowledge of the Victorians was greater than that of the present Second Elizabethan era. He knew about Bazalgette and the development of drains, the last night of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens and the cracking of Big Ben, the cholera epidemic of 1832, the fixing of the first London plaque (to Lord Byron, in 1867), the great globe of Leicester Square and the roaring lion that had once topped Northumberland House, but could not remember his computer password, the names of any present-day cabinet ministers or where he had left his dry cleaning.

‘You haven’t had a holiday in years,’ Bryant persisted. ‘Unless you count accompanying your ghastly sister and her husband to traction-engine rallies. Raymond seems intent on closing the unit down for a few days, and Janice can run a skeleton staff for us, so how would you like to come on a jaunt with me, all expenses paid?’

May regarded his notoriously cheap partner with suspicion. ‘What do you have in mind?’ he asked. ‘I still have hideous memories of that clairvoyants’ dinner-dance in Walsall where all the toilets overflowed. They didn’t see that coming, did they?’

‘This will be more fun, I promise. A trip to the country. It will do you good to breathe something you can’t see for a change. Down to the Devon coast.’

‘You detest the countryside. And it’s February,’ May reminded him. ‘It’ll be freezing, and there’s supposed to be bad weather on the way. What do you want to go there for?’

‘The International Spiritualists’ Convention at Plymouth Civic Centre. It should be more fun than it sounds. There’ll be talks, dinners, and demonstrations, not to mention the odd punch-up when the neo-Wiccans get plastered on porter at the free bar and pick a fight with the Druids. We have trade stalls and parties, an awards ceremony, and we always put on a spectacular show for the closing night.’

‘Next you’ll be trying to convince me that the people who attend aren’t utterly barking.’

‘At least they’re never boring, and they’re from all walks of life. We get judges, shopkeepers, call girls, all sorts. I’m conducting a panel on the incorporation of spiritualism in investigative techniques.’

‘For God’s sake don’t let Faraday or Kasavian find out about that,’ warned May. He knew how eagerly the Home Office ministers were looking for reasons to shut the unit down. ‘How are you intending to get there? Your old Mini Cooper’s not up to the journey, for a start.’

‘I’m taking down the stage props for the closing show, so I’m borrowing Alma’s van. She uses it to ferry the North London Evangelical Ladies’ Choir around, and seeing as most of them tip the scales at eighteen stone, it should be up to the job. Janice and Dan can keep an eye on things here, just to make sure that Land doesn’t get up to anything underhand. We’d only be gone for a couple of days, you know.’ He attempted to look pathetic. ‘It’s a long journey for a lonely old man. I could really do with someone to share the driving, or at least handle the map-reading.’

‘There’s no need to pull the homeless-puppy routine with me, Arthur; it doesn’t wash anymore. I don’t mind coming with you. If Banbury’s going to be pulling up floorboards and relaying server cables I wouldn’t want to be here anyway. Besides, you’re not allowed to drive alone on motorways since that business with the travelling circus.’ Seven years earlier, Bryant had accidentally rear-ended a Chessington Zoo truck and released a startled lion into the slow lane of the M2. ‘When are you planning to leave?’

‘First thing in the morning.’ Bryant dragged out a much-folded map and pinned it on the crowded wall behind him. ‘I’ve already plotted our route, although this ordnance survey map was published before the war, so it may contain inaccuracies.’

‘Good God, it won’t have motorways marked if it was published in the forties.’

‘I meant before the Great War. 1907, actually.’

‘That’s no good,’ said May, ‘I’ll print something from the Internet.’

‘No, you won’t, the system’s down.’ Dan Banbury sauntered in, eating an iced bun. He always seemed to be eating or drinking. ‘Raymond told me the unit would be empty this week.’

‘He didn’t think to warn any of us,’ Bryant complained. ‘Anyone else here?’

‘Full complement,’ said Dan through a mouthful of sugared dough. ‘They’re milling around in the hall, waiting to be told what to do.’

DC Colin Bimsley came from a long line of spatially challenged law enforcers. Like his father and grandfather before him, it was enthusiasm rather than expertise that kept him in the field. Despite perforated eardrums, flat feet and an inner ear imbalance that found him periodically lying on his back, he was determined to bring honour to his family. On the plus side he had a heart of oak, being humane, decent and fair-minded, as strong as concrete and, barring the effects of an occasional self-inflicted head wound, quick to react. True, his brain sometimes lagged a little behind his body and his hand-eye coordination was virtually nonexistent, but to any woman who valued fidelity and reliability over smart-arse remarks, he was a godsend.

All of which made it even more unfathomable that DC Meera Mangeshkar could remain so stubbornly resistant to his charms. His compliments were greeted with sarcasm, and his attempts to lure her out for a drink were met with unforgiving dismissal. The diminutive Indian officer was ambitious and determined, hard in mind and body, and following a career path as preordained as a logic board. Bimsley’s shambling heroism impressed her no more than his offers to take her down Brick Lane for a curry with his mates. But they were shackled together now, sharing an office at the unit, and there was no alternative but to make the best of things. John May had planned it this way; he drew the best from staff by placing them in the proximity of opposites.

Wary of her threat to stick him with a harassment charge, Colin Bimsley entered the office quietly and began leafing through the week’s activity folders. Meera raised her head from her paperwork, regarding him suspiciously. ‘What?’ she asked finally.

‘I didn’t say anything.’ Bimsley looked startled. His fellow DC rarely instigated any conversation.

‘Exactly; you’re being too quiet. You’re up to something.’

‘I can’t win with you, can I?’ He sighed. ‘If I speak, you always tell me to shut up.’

‘Yeah, well, I don’t trust you.’

‘You don’t trust anyone, Meera.’ He knew she had spent time on some of the capital’s poorest estates, in Peckham, Dagenham, Deptford, and Kilburn. It would be hard not to become cynical after a daily diet of gunshot wounds and stabbings committed in chip shops and at bus stops, where drug feuds were as liable to be settled at family weddings and christenings as on the street. Even so, there were days when she seemed barely able to contain her anger. ‘But if you did decide to trust someone,’ he said, ‘you could tell me anything.’

‘Thanks, Colin, but if it’s all the same to you I’d prefer to eat my own colon first.’ Her head lowered almost to the page as she returned to studying witness statements.

Be as nasty as you like,
he thought.
My back is broad. And I’ll persevere until the day I find out what makes you tick.

Next door, April rose from her dead computer screen and walked to the window of her office. The sky was animated with roiling clouds, dark and volatile, filled with glimpses of amber and emerald. The streets around the tube station were almost deserted. Camden was one of the most crowded, dangerous and interesting boroughs in London; the rush hour lasted around the clock and the pavements were never free of life, but there was something different about today. Raymond Land had come around telling everyone they were on paid leave for a week, but she could not trust herself to go home. Having conquered her agoraphobia with her grandfather’s help, she was loath to allow it the opportunity of returning within the confines of her safe, small flat.

‘Are you okay?’ John May stuck his head around the door. ‘May I come in?’

‘Of course.’ April still felt like an interloper at the unit, despite her involvement in an investigation that had finally closed a decades-old cold case. She knew there had been suggestions of nepotism, that she had only secured the job because she was the granddaughter of the unit’s cofounder, but she was already winning the trust of her colleagues, and the work was fascinating.

In the filing cabinets opposite were secret details of cases no other unit in the country had the ability to unravel. The PCU had earned the right to handle the kind of investigations no-one in the Metropolitan Police force had the faintest interest in solving. They had captured demons and devils, phantoms and monsters; not real ones, of course, mostly deluded loners who believed themselves invulnerable to the law. Individuals who had stolen, blackmailed and killed for tenebrous, private purposes, to protect themselves, to hide truths, to destroy enemies. Murder, Arthur Bryant insisted, was invariably a squalid, sad business driven by poverty and desperation, yet the cases passed to the Peculiar Crimes Unit had often been marked by paradox and absurdity. Sometimes they were the dream cases other detectives fantasised about resolving, but Bryant and May chose their staff with care, employing novices who were knowledgeable social misfits, in the same way that computer companies sometimes hired the very hackers who had attacked their clients from behind bedroom doors.