Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection) (8 page)

‘You don’t know that,’ said May. ‘Kastopolis has spent the last thirty years finding ways to balance along the edges of the law. Men like that eventually make mistakes.’

‘I can’t wait for him to make a mistake. I’m too old.’

‘What do you want to do, then?’

‘Head back to the PCU,’ Bryant said with a sigh. ‘There’s something I need to check.’ May was glad they had brought the car. The iced-over pavements had become bobsleigh runs, and his partner was unstable at the best of times.

As the hours passed, May worked on with the rest of the PCU team while Bryant remained holed up in his office with the door firmly closed to visitors. Finally, when he could no longer bear the suspense of not knowing what his partner was doing, May went to check on him.

‘You should put the overhead lights on,’ he said. ‘You’ll strain your eyes.’

‘She’s here,’ Bryant said, looking up sadly. He had printed out everything he could find on Marsha Kastopolis, and had stacked it all in the centre of his desk. His hands were placed over the file, as if trying to conjure her presence. ‘I can sense her.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked May.

‘She was a bright girl. Then she was abused by her new stepfather. Her mother did nothing. The social services failed to protect her. She became withdrawn and lost. Her school grades dropped away. She was made pregnant by a junkie, came to London and started again. By this time she had grown a tough hide, and was determined to make something of herself. She must have been able to see through her husband, so why did she put up with him? What did she get from the relationship? Stability? Money? No, something else. That’s the key to this.’

‘Funny,’ said May.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. I thought you’d be in here trying to work out how he did it. You know, the mechanics. The nuts and bolts. More up your street than people.’

‘Don’t be so rude. I hate to see promising lives ruined. As it happens, I know how it was done.’

‘You do?’

‘Most certainly. And I think I want to handle the last part by myself.’

‘I don’t understand you, Arthur.’

‘I want to do the right thing for her. You can see that, can’t you? I don’t anticipate a problem, but it might be better if you stayed within reach of your mobile. I’m not going very far.’ With that he rose stiffly, jammed on his squashed trilby and burrowed into his old tweed overcoat. May watched him go, flummoxed.

‘What’s up with the old man?’ asked Banbury as he passed.

‘You know how possessive some people are with their books?’ said May. ‘Arthur’s like that with crimes. Sometimes I think I hardly know him at all.’

Bryant pushed open the wire-glass door of the Rajasthan Palace and seated himself by the window. An impossibly thin, hollow-eyed waiter who looked as though he’d not slept well since Gandhi’s death approached and placed a red plastic menu before him.

‘I’ll just have a hot, very sweet
chai
,’ said Bryant. ‘But you can send Mr Bhatnagar out to me. I know he’s there, I just saw him peep through the curtain.’

Moments later the portly little manager appeared from behind the counter and made his way over to the table, bouncing on the balls of his feet. ‘Mr Bryant,’ he said, ‘what a pleasure to see you again, so very soon.’

‘You may not think so in a minute.’ Bryant gestured at the seat opposite. Mr Bhatnagar’s smile showed sudden strain, and he remained standing. ‘Mrs Kastopolis,’ said Bryant. ‘She ate at the Bhaji Fort last night. Your boy Raj saw her, didn’t he? More to the point, he overheard her. Who did he tell you she was with?’

‘Raj is a good boy,’ said Mr Bhatnagar anxiously. ‘Mrs Kastopolis was with another lady, a friend, that’s all, not somebody my boy knew.’

‘Then why did he bother to call you?’ asked Bryant. ‘I’ll tell you why.’ And he proceeded to do so. By the time he had finished, Mr Bhatnagar had visibly diminished. His mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out. Finally, he sat and dropped his head in his hands, not caring about his staff, who were nervously peering out at him from their counter. Mr Bhatnagar realized that his eagerness to please had finally been the undoing of him, and wept.

‘I thought you didn’t like the fresh air,’ said May, slapping his leather-clad hands together in an effort to keep warm. His breath condensed in dragon-clouds as he looked down from the pinnacle of Primrose Hill over the frost-sheened rooftops of London.

‘I don’t,’ said Bryant, dislodging the snow from his trilby by violently beating it. ‘But it’s windy today, and I wanted you to see this. How it was done.’ He pointed to the far edge of the hill, where several young Indian men were standing. May followed his partner’s extended index finger up to the burnished winter sky. ‘Can you see them now?’ he asked.

Overhead, half a dozen diamonds of indigo and maroon silk soared and swooped around each other like exotic fish fighting for food. ‘Kite-flying is a very popular pastime in Rajasthan. But it’s far from a gentle sport. It’s a matter of kill or be killed, and sometimes huge bets ride on the outcome. The idea is to destroy your enemies by bringing them down. The only way to do that is by severing their strings. So the kite-warriors coat their cords with a paste of boiled rice mixed with glass dust. It makes them as sharp as any cut-throat razor. And they can control the lines to go exactly where they want. Our assassin only had to bring his kite down from the sky and touch it across her throat.’

May was incredulous. ‘You’re saying Mrs Kastopolis was killed by a
kite
?’

‘By the cord of a kite flown by an expert, yes,’ said Bryant. ‘Mr Bhatnagar looked out for his friend and protector, the landlord of all his properties. He made sure his waiters kept their eyes and ears open. When one of them overheard Marsha Kastopolis telling her friend that she was going to talk to the police about her husband, he stepped in to help. He called the man who had repeatedly asked him to stay vigilant.

‘Obviously, if anything bad happened to Marsha on her husband’s home turf suspicions would have been aroused. So one of the waiters was paid to draw her away. Mr Bhatnagar called her pretending to be an ally, and said he had important information for her. He lured her to the meeting on Primrose Hill. He thought he could get rid of her in a quiet place, and made his waiter, Raj, do the dirty work, using the one special skill he possessed. I don’t suppose the lack of footprints in the snow even crossed anyone’s mind. Unfortunately for him, it made the case unique enough to attract our attention.’

‘Why would this waiter Raj agree to do such a thing?’

‘He had no choice. He was in debt to Mr Bhatnagar.’

‘Have you sent someone around to arrest Kastopolis?’

‘No, you’ve misunderstood,’ said Bryant. ‘Kastopolis didn’t ask Mr Bhatnagar to keep an eye out for problems. It was the liaison officer, Anderson. Your first instinct was right: Kastopolis had bought someone on the committee. That was how he got away with breaking the law for so many years. Anderson got kickbacks and watched out for his client in return. Ultimately it was Anderson who forced the waiter, Raj, to commit murder.’

May was mystified. ‘But how did you know it was him?’

‘Anderson vehemently denied ever consorting with his client, remember? But when I rummaged about on his desk I saw a receipt for the Rajasthan Palace. He’d eaten there the night before. He couldn’t resist slipping the dinner through on his expenses.’

‘All these people, working to protect one corrupt man,’ said May, ‘and they’re the ones who’ll go down for him while Kastopolis walks away again. It’s not fair.’

‘You’re forgetting one thing,’ said Bryant. ‘The notebook is still out there somewhere. We just have to find it before he does.’

The elderly detective turned back to watch a shimmering turquoise kite as it looped down and slashed the string of its nearest rival. The other kite, a fluttering box of emerald satin, was caught in a tight spiral and plunged into a dive, collapsing on the frozen earth.

‘Alluring and dangerous,’ said Bryant. ‘The winners are raised up on the sacrifices of the fallen. That’s how it has always been in this city.’ He smiled ruefully at his partner and turned to watch the turquoise diamond weaving back and forth across the silvered clouds, savouring its brief moment of glory.

Here’s a short, simple tale hinging on something I found in an old book. There’s rarely enough time to pull off a whodunnit in a very short story, so you tend to concentrate on another mysterious aspect of a case. Those who know me well will recognize the influence of Norman Wisdom in the title.

‘I’m completely out of ideas.’

John May, senior detective at the Peculiar Crimes Unit, studied the living room of the chaotic tenth-floor apartment. Its contents were sealed beneath a cowl of clear plastic, designed to prevent contamination of evidence. ‘His body was found over there by his landlady and was taken straight to University College Hospital. The last time anyone saw him was Christmas Eve, four days ago. The doctors want to know if he was a farmer or had visited a farm in the past two weeks.’

‘Seems a bit unlikely,’ said Arthur Bryant, his partner, laboriously unwrapping a rhubarb and custard boiled sweet. ‘Living in the Barbican, hardly the most rural spot in London, although I suppose it does have a lake. Why farming?’

‘They think he died of anthrax. He had mouth ulcers, had complained of stomach cramps and feeling sick. Anthrax is a virus that’s more likely to be used for bioterrorist attacks.’

‘I remember. In 2001 it was sent through the American Postal Service and infected more than twenty people. Turned out to have been mailed by a US government scientist with a grudge, didn’t it? Maybe the same thing happened here.’ The boiled sweet rattled against Bryant’s ill-fitting false teeth as he turned the problem over. ‘What do we know about him?’

‘William Warren, forty-seven, part-time musician, played with a jazz band in pubs, ran a stall in Camden Market, no known affiliations with any political organization, moved here after he broke up with his wife last year. It seems an amicable enough split. He was still seeing his kids at the weekends. Nothing much else to go on.’

Bryant lifted a corner of the plastic seal, raised a piano lid and gave an impromptu, unrecognizable rendition of ‘Chopsticks’.

‘Don’t do that – the room hasn’t been dusted for dabs yet.’

‘Not my fault you have a tin ear. “Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast.”’

‘It’s too early in the morning to start quoting Shakespeare.’

‘It’s not Shakespeare, it’s William Congreve, the first line of his play
The Mourning Bride
. It’s there.’ He pointed to the wall, where the phrase had been neatly painted in gold script. ‘He must have loved his music.’ Bryant put the piano lid back down. ‘I suppose you checked his mailbox.’

‘The landlady says there was nothing out of the ordinary. She always opened his stuff for him.’

‘Why?’

‘He had a habit of avoiding his bills. Didn’t like paying “the man”. Bit of an old hippie, didn’t approve of financing fat cats.’

‘Bet he didn’t mind supporting the black economy, though.’ Bryant picked up a macramé mandala and grimaced. ‘Pub jazz sessions and market stalls: I don’t suppose he got around to paying tax on his earnings. Do we know his movements over Christmas?’

‘Same as always, apparently. He saw his kids, played his gigs, ran his stall, went drinking with his mates.’

‘Cherchez la femme?
’

‘Well, I think there’s something going on with the landlady. She’s a bit of an ex-rock chick.’

‘He doesn’t sound like the sort of person who gets targeted by an international terrorist gang. Selling anything dodgy on the side?’ Bryant loosened his moulting pea-green scarf and sniffed the air. ‘Doesn’t smell very fresh in here.’

‘Not that I know of. All we have to go on is what’s in this apartment.’ May carefully stepped over a pile of dirty laundry and surveyed the cluttered room. Some partially repaired musical instruments were arranged in one corner. The sofa and two armchairs were piled with sheet music, volumes of poetry, bits of home-made pottery, hand-woven woolly hats, a flute, bongo drums and various hand-painted ethnic bits of wood.

‘You can tell a lot about someone by looking at his home,’ said Bryant, raising an empty plastic pudding pot and peering into it. ‘It’s all a bit knit-your-own-muesli. I bet he was a vegetarian. Probably poisoned by a rogue sprout. The thing is’ – Bryant gingerly replaced the tub on the windowsill – ‘people like Mr Warren are colourful and vaguely tiresome but they don’t usually have any enemies. Why do you think he was murdered?’

‘Anthrax is hard to catch,’ said May. ‘You can get it from tainted meat, except, as you rightly surmise, he was a vegetarian. It’s one of the diseases that comes flagged with a red alert on the system because of its terrorist connotations, so we were asked to check it out.’

Bryant wasn’t listening. He had twisted himself under the window and was squinting up at the sills.

‘What are you doing?’

‘These locks have been painted over at least half a dozen times. People can’t be bothered to take the old paint off any more. What’s wrong with a blowlamp?’ He pottered over to the door and flicked experimentally at the hasp. ‘Was he a skinny man? Not much meat on his bones?’

‘Yes, I believe so. Why do you ask?’

‘Jumpers everywhere, rubber seals on the door, draught excluder. The flats in the Barbican are notoriously overheated, and yet he obviously felt cold. It’s suggestive.’

‘Of what?’ May wondered.

Bryant ignored the question. He withdrew a pair of old brown leather gloves and tightened his scarf, then produced an enormous pair of kitchen scissors from within his rumpled overcoat. Stabbing the plastic evidence seal, he knelt and rooted about in the cardboard boxes that stood behind the sofa.

‘You really shouldn’t …’ May began, then gave up.

‘He made those ghastly Tibetan hats and drums for his stall and sold them, along with ethnic musical bits and bobs, is that right?’ asked Bryant.