Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection) (13 page)

‘Those who are taken from us don’t always leave the earthly realm,’ said Alma, who had been following a more spiritual line of thought.

‘You may be right,’ Bryant admitted. ‘I imagine most of them end up working for the post office. Has this cake got nuts in it?’

‘Of course not,’ said Alma. ‘I know how they get under your dental plate.’

Bryant examined his slice with suspicion. ‘Everything comes with a warning about containing nuts these days. Except the general population. Do you know there’s no common consensus on what constitutes insanity in society?’

‘Really,’ said Alma flatly. Bryant had been poring over a tattered volume entitled
An Analysis of Uncommon Psychoses
all morning. She didn’t hold with too much reading.

‘Benjamin Franklin said that insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. But psychosis suggests a spectrum of behavioural patterns defined by abnormal thought processes and violations of societal norms, a flagrant disregard for accepted moral codes.’

‘I’ll remember that when I’m doing your ironing. Do you always have to harp on about murderers? You know what I think about all that sort of thing – it’s unwholesome.’ Alma rose and tidied away the tea things. ‘Why don’t you get your mind off all this morbidity? Come to church with me this evening.’

‘You never give up, do you? I’m not that desperate for something to do,’ Bryant replied, dusting crumbs from his stained waistcoat. ‘Besides, I remember what happened the last time I went. The vicar told me off for praying too loudly.’

‘You made God jump,’ said Alma. ‘And your singing nearly deafened us. It would have helped if you’d known the tune. Or the words.’

‘I couldn’t read the hymn sheet because I’d forgotten my spectacles, so I had to make up the lyrics. I think I did a better job than all that rubbish about winged chariots and spears of fire.’ Bryant sighed and looked about himself impatiently. ‘I suppose I could make myself useful, plant the window boxes, scrape the oven out, clear the guttering, put some dubbin on my boots. It’s just that I’ve got no cases on at the moment.’

‘Then Mr May is probably at a loose end, too. Why don’t you give him a call?’

As Alma rose and prepared to wrap herself up against the grim deluges of a blustery February morning, Bryant rang his partner, John May.

Don’t think too harshly of Mr Bryant; since Christmas, London had been alternately drenched and frozen by squalls heading down from Iceland, until its massed buildings looked like something one would find at the bottom of a stagnant pond. Everyone who ventured out soon became cold, wet and bad-tempered, and Arthur, who took the chill in his aged bones for a sign as ominous as the appearance of Elsinore’s ghost, suffered more than most. It is a testimony to John May’s persuasive skills that the most senior detective in London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit was soon following his partner across the rainswept upper reaches of Charlton Park, looking for a closed funfair.

‘He’s been missing for three weeks,’ said May as they made their way through the wet grass. ‘Left work at seven p.m. on the last Friday in January, detoured here for reasons we don’t know, and never reached home.’

‘And it took him all this time to be flagged as missing?’ asked Bryant, incredulous. ‘Slow down a bit. My walking stick’s sinking into the mud.’

‘It’s a little more complicated than that. As far as we know, Michael Portheim is an MI5 officer and mathematician specializing in codes. He was seconded to MI5 from Porton Down for reasons no one will tell us, although an inside contact of mine suggested he was involved in certain aspects of counter-terrorism being jointly covered by the agency and the military facility. As soon as he vanished, both groups began investigating.’

‘How soon after?’

‘He was reported missing on Friday night after failing to turn up at a Russian supper club in Mayfair. One of his colleagues made the call that night.’

‘So it was a business dinner.’

‘It always is with that mob. Most of them have no friends and very little social life. Confidences aren’t encouraged. MI5 sent their bods in to turn over his apartment in Muswell Hill, half expecting to find him zipped into a holdall, but they found nothing disturbed or out of the ordinary. It looks like he never reached home. They traced him here from phone records, CCTV and his travel card. There are no cameras in the park, on the common or in the woods – too many trees – but there’s footage of him entering from the street and none of him coming back out the same way.’

‘So the assumption is that he went missing inside the park,’ said Bryant, fighting the ground with his stick.

‘It looks that way. A team searched the entire area, but short of turning over every inch of turf with a spade there’s no way of knowing what happened. Can a body be buried without leaving a mark? The agencies’ internal investigators have no leads to speak of, but the biggest fear is that he was either murdered or kidnapped.’

‘So what are
we
hoping to achieve in a rainy field in near-zero temperatures?’ Bryant demanded to know.

‘They’ve called us in. It’s rather clutching at straws, but I went through Portheim’s file this morning and found that he came from a military background. He’d been a keen sportsman at college, a free-runner, hiker, canoeist, skydiver, good athletic all-rounder. He studied medicine for a while, then joined the army – straight in at officer level – but as part of his training he also learned circus skills. And the only unusual contact anyone has been able to come up with is this.’

May pointed ahead through the sleeting gloom at what appeared to be a half-built stage set. As the pair approached, Bryant saw that it was a semi-circle of boarded-up sideshows, the old-fashioned kind consisting of tents fronted by tall painted flats, inset with strings of coloured light bulbs.

‘Back when he was learning to tightrope-walk and swing from a trapeze, Portheim knew a man called Harry Mills. The chap was his mentor in competitive athletics, taught him a lot about physical prowess and showmanship. There’s no evidence to suggest they had any further contact with each other after Portheim was headhunted by MI5. But here’s the funny thing. This set-up appeared in the park the week Portheim went missing.’

He looked up at a rain-streaked board that read: ‘Harry Mills’ Incredible Arcade of Abnormalities!’ Beneath the red and yellow lettering, set in a traditional circus typeface known as ‘Coffee Tin’, were posters painted on to linen and sealed beneath discoloured varnish, vignettes that had probably been produced in the 1930s, when such delights were popular at coastal resorts.

One painting showed a voluptuous young woman riveted into a steel bathing suit, holding a pair of terminals from which arced jagged streaks of blue lightning. Scrolled across the base of the picture was the legend: ‘You’ll Be Jolted by Electra the 30,000-Volt Girl!’

Another board showed a painfully thin young man, his ribcage visible under his pale translucent skin like the bars of a xylophone, a dozen lethal-looking steel rods piercing his chest: ‘Nothing Can Prepare You for Lucio the Human Pin-Cushion!’

Beside him was an ethereally beautiful depiction of a woman clad in a diaphanous pink silk gown, with large furry wings sprouting from her shoulder blades. She was balanced on a perch, staring wistfully up at the sky through the bars of her cage. The picture was captioned: ‘Witness the Heartbreaking Tragedy of Martitia the Moth Woman!’

The final vignette showed a green man with an elongated torso and no limbs, green antennae waving from his misshapen, beaked and bug-eyed head. The unfurled lettering beneath him read: ‘Prepare to Be Horrified by Marvo the Caterpillar Boy!’

Bryant sniffed. ‘Looks like he was painted by Francis Bacon.’

‘I suppose it’s what people did before television,’ said May. ‘Not much different from going to Bedlam to laugh at the insane.’

The sideshows themselves were surrounded by a six-foot-high steel-staved fence, which the detectives now circled, searching for an entrance. The rest of the funfair – the waltzers, rifle ranges and coconut shies – stood further back on open ground. Only the Arcade of Abnormalities was sealed.

‘I remember these exhibits from when I was a nipper,’ said Bryant. ‘I knew they had to be illusions but they always gave me the creeps. Let’s see if we can find anyone.’

‘I guess they closed off this part to stop anyone from sneaking in.’

‘Or out. Look over there.’ Bryant pointed with his stick. They glimpsed a malformed figure hopping and running between the sideshows on the far side of the circle, and went after it.

Behind the show tents, the performers’ caravans were arranged like a wagon train. ‘Hey!’ called May. ‘You there!’ But nobody came. Finally he rang his contact and the pair waited for someone to come and open the main gate.

‘Sorry about that,’ said a stooped elderly man with a shock of wild grey hair, unbolting the mesh gate and pulling it aside. He wore leather knee-boots, and the sides of a crimson-embroidered gypsy waistcoat struggled to meet over his stomach. ‘I’m Harry, the owner of this place. Come on in.’

He clasped their hands with nervous gratitude and led them to one of the caravans. ‘We keep the gate locked tight to prevent the dogs from getting out,’ he explained, ushering them in. ‘There’s been trouble in the past. One of the Alsatians bit a child after being teased.’

The trailer’s streamlined exterior of blue and white steel was misleading; inside it was as cosy and overcrowded as a nineteenth-century Romany caravan, hung about with copper pots, vases, painted jugs and rugs. Mills made thick, dark Turkish coffee and served it in tiny steel cups. ‘There, that’ll keep the chill out,’ he said. ‘You said you want to know about Michael Portheim?’

‘We’ll come to that,’ said Bryant, a luminosity in his eyes suggesting that, as usual, his primary interests lay elsewhere. ‘Tell me about the sideshows – from the paintings they look like they’re originals.’

‘They are indeed, Mr Bryant,’ said Mills, settling himself opposite them. A large man with mutton-chop whiskers and a bay-window belly, he seemed ill-suited to spending his life in such a cluttered interior. ‘Most of these illusions date back to the early 1930s. They used to tour the seaside towns, Blackpool in the north, Margate in the south. I’ve become something of a custodian, and over the years I managed to save a lot of the original props and scripts from bonfires and dustcarts. I try to make sure that each act is performed exactly as it would have been in its heyday.’

‘Do the illusions still hold up today?’

‘You’d be surprised. We can still make the kiddies scream. Once in a while you get a few smart-aleck teenagers in who think they know how it’s done, but we have ways of scaring them as well.’

‘I think I saw something called The Girl Without a Head in Margate’s Dreamland when I was about six,’ said Bryant. ‘I have a feeling I wet myself.’

‘Can we get to the subject of Mr Portheim?’ asked May, knowing that his partner would be quite capable of discussing the sideshows for hours if he didn’t interrupt. ‘When did you last speak to him?’

‘We’ve stayed in touch over the years,’ said Mills. ‘He said he was having some kind of difficulty in his job. He didn’t sound happy. Before he joined the agency he used to tell me everything, but of course that was no longer possible. I spoke to him about a month ago. He wanted to come and see the show.’

‘And did he?’ asked May.

‘I believe so, but you’ll have to speak to Andrei the Great about it,’ said Mills. ‘I was up north, arranging bookings. Andrei the Great is my general manager; he’s in charge of the performances and the staff.’

‘Could we see him?’

For the first time, Mills looked uncomfortable. ‘I’m not sure if he’s available.’

‘It’s very important,’ May insisted. ‘If we can’t see him today, we’ll have to keep coming back until we do. You understand.’

‘All right, I’ll see what I can work out. It’s just that he’s very, well … Wait here.’ Mills lumbered to his feet, narrowly avoiding a collision with a ceiling lamp, and let himself out.

‘Curious,’ said Bryant.

‘Why?’

‘Something put the wind up him all of a sudden. It’s almost as if—’

‘Don’t prejudge,’ warned May. ‘Let’s hear them out first.’

After a few minutes, Mills reappeared. ‘Come with me,’ he said. His earlier cheerful demeanour had vanished. The detectives followed him across the puddled grass, stepping between guy ropes, and found themselves in one of the sideshow tents. It comprised a series of battered wooden benches placed before a small blood-red stage that was framed in yellow satin curtains.

As Bryant and May seated themselves Mills stepped back into the shadows, as if he had been instructed to make himself scarce. The curtains opened to reveal a pastel-coloured 1960s Lambretta motor scooter with a slender girl seated side-saddle on it. She wore tight three-quarter-length jeans, rope espadrilles and a black halter top that exposed her pale neck and shoulders, but where her head should have been were half a dozen red rubber tubes. These extended up from the stump of her neck to four large glass jars set on the floor that appeared to contain her blood and organs. As they watched, the girl slowly unfolded her arms and waved to them.

From behind the scooter appeared a squat, broad-chested dwarf with a scarlet goatee and bright-red horns. This form of extreme body modification involved the insertion of cones under the skin on his forehead, and gave him the appearance of a miniature devil. His gypsy outfit of clashing indigo and violet silks was strung about with heavy silver chains, and made him appear even more garish and bizarre. Almost every inch of his exposed flesh was covered in piercings and dense black tattoos. He was carrying a black leather whip taller than himself.

But Andrei the Great was not dressed to amuse or entertain. He remained unsmiling and austere throughout the brief interview. ‘Do you like the lovely Headless Dolores?’ he asked in a thick Russian accent. ‘Her mortification intrigues you? You would not be human if she did not excite.’ He had a surprisingly rich and deep voice for a man of such diminutive stature.