Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection) (17 page)

Mandy checked her watch: 11.45 p.m.
Thank God.
The kitchen had shut at eleven, and now all she had to do was divorce the diners from their credit cards and then ease them out into the storm-swept night.

The man in the hall must have slipped in after Kidman and her companions had departed. He was wearing a black suit and raincoat – virtually a uniform among the Water House’s male diners – but it was topped with a black satin Venetian carnival mask. For a moment she wondered incredulously if he was part of a stag party looking for a late drink, but surely not – his shoes were far too expensive, and his left hand held a glove shucked from the right. He had removed it because it was hard to pull a pistol trigger with his fingers clad in leather.

The bullet passed through Mandy’s brain and exited behind her left ear, smashing a crystal decanter presented by Ewan McGregor’s PR team after a memorable night at the restaurant last month. As she fell, her Lucy Choi high heels slipped on the floor tiles, ensuring that her split skull connected with the floor before they did.

As the horrified waiting staff dropped to their knees around her, Mandy’s grand dreams flashed away into darkness and the hallway of the Water House was empty once more. The entrance door swung closed, so that even the sound of falling rain faded to a respectful silence.

John May rested his chin on his fist as he watched his partner working. ‘How much longer are you going to be with that thing?’ he asked finally.

‘I need two more flat bits with sky in them and a sailor’s nose,’ said Arthur Bryant without looking up. All of the files on his desk had been moved to make room for the jigsaw. May examined the picture on the lid and compared it to the partially finished article. Bits of it seemed entirely wrong. ‘It’s Hans Holbein’s
The Ambassadors
,’ he pointed out. ‘It’s an interior. You shouldn’t have any bits of sky. Or a sailor’s nose.’

‘Well, that’s the problem, you see,’ said Bryant. ‘I thought there was only one jigsaw in the box but there seem to be two. I think the other one is Géricault’s
The Raft of the Medusa
but this sky is bright blue and Géricault’s was a sort of orange. It might be from a Matisse.’

The Peculiar Crimes Unit had been quiet over Christmases past, but never this quiet. May had filed all of his outstanding reports (he was more meticulous than his partner), and had called the attractive blonde he had met in the Shoreditch Hotel on Christmas Eve to arrange dinner the following week. Now he had nothing to do, and watching Bryant fiddle with mismatched jigsaw pieces was as much fun, and weirdly similar to, a severe migraine.

Usually when Raymond Land stuck his head around the door, May inwardly groaned, expecting a sermon about excessive use of kitchen roll or tampering with stored evidence. What was it he had wanted to know last time? Ah yes, someone had broken into the confiscated packets of Old Mariners’ Wartime Naval Rough-Cut Shag Bimsley had taken away from an illegal newsagent on the Caledonian Road. Looking over at Bryant’s pipe on the mantelpiece, it wasn’t hard to work out where the tobacco had gone.

‘Blimey, is this what you get up to when there’s a lull?’ Land exclaimed, horrified. ‘Why not hold a bloody cribbage tournament?’

‘We did that. I won,’ said Bryant, clipping the nodule off a piece of jigsaw and hammering it into place.

‘Well, here’s another game you can try your hand at,’ said Land, checking the page in his hand. ‘A young lady who used to work in a sandwich shop in High Holborn. I want you to go and see her.’

‘If you’re after a cheese and tomato bap, I’m sure we can send someone down to the shop on the corner,’ said May.

‘This person won’t be serving you anything,’ said Land. ‘She’s been shot through the head.’

Bryant immediately rose and reached for his hat.

‘Not you,’ said Land. ‘I’ve got another job for you.’

‘But we always work together,’ pleaded Bryant, looking pitiful.

‘Not this time,’ Land warned. ‘Let John handle it without your help. I need you to clean out all your rubbish. There’s a stuffed moose blocking the fire door. We could be shut down.’

‘Sorry, Arthur,’ said May, heading for the door. ‘I’ll take Janice and keep you in the picture, I promise.’

It was the no man’s land between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve, when London emptied out and even the Peculiar Crimes Unit was running a skeleton crew. Less than a fortnight after the Met had been forced to hold a placatory press conference about London’s unexpected and unwelcome rise in seasonal crime, a shooting in its most ambitious new restaurant was not what anyone needed. John May had only seen its interior in magazines, all gilt columns and mosaics. Now, with the lights up and the revellers gone, you could see it had once been a municipal swimming baths. It was very different from the King’s Cross trattoria where the unit’s staff could be found carb-loading on spag-bogs after a long shift. The inside of the Water House was ‘ironic’, apparently, so it had kept its changing booths and shower cubicles as a reminder of its origins. But from the corpse near the entrance it appeared that someone had high-dived without checking the water level.

‘Amanda McFarland,’ he repeated, checking his notes and looking around. ‘Either of the owners on their way?’

‘Trying to get hold of them now,’ Janice Longbright pointed out, studying the celebrity photographs lining the walls.

‘The smarmy one who’s always in the photos – remind me of his name?’

‘Jake Finnegan,’ Longbright said. ‘The deceased was living with him.’

‘I’ve got her down here as married. You, skinny lad, who’s the husband?’

One of the waiters came forward. He looked very badly shaken.
As you would be
, thought May,
to find your boss gunned down at her reception desk.
‘I believe Mrs McFarland is separated,’ he explained in an accent that confirmed his Eastern European origins.

May’s interest was piqued. ‘Ever seen the ex?’

‘He came around once, making trouble.’

‘What was he like?’

‘An army type, and a – what you say? –
convict
. He’d been in jail.’

‘How do you know?’

‘She told me. She told everyone.’

‘Who left who?’

‘She left him. She said he was very angry when he came out.’

‘Of prison or the army?’ May looked around. ‘Big man, running with the A-listers, you’d think the lover would have been the one to get shot.’

‘You can’t assume it was her ex,’ said Longbright.

‘I’m not assuming anything. Bring him in, will you?’

‘Nice shoes,’ said Longbright. She looked down at Mandy McFarland’s feet, then up at her hands. ‘Amazing nails, too. You can’t blame her for trading up, although I imagine it came with a price.’

May frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Jake Finnegan’s business partner is a chap called Alessandro Ribisi. Ring any bells?’

‘The commercial-property developer?’ May asked. Ribisi was well known to the PCU. His opponents had a mysterious way of dropping their objections when confronted. A couple of them had disappeared altogether. Nothing they could ever get on him would stick. ‘We won’t have anything more on her physical state until forensics have finished, but I’d say it was professional.’

‘What makes you think that?’ Longbright took a closer look at the body in the hallway.

‘See how the bullet’s placed?’ May pointed to the oddly neat hole in Mandy McFarland’s skull. ‘Right between the eyes. It would have been perfect if she hadn’t turned her head. The light’s not good in here. Can you see what we’ve got in the way of CCTV?’

‘I already looked,’ said Longbright. ‘Not a lot, as you’ll see when you go outside.’

It was starting to snow. The only camera in the street was hanging off the wall, looking as if it had been shot as well. ‘Bloody hell, what happened here?’ May asked, staring up in annoyance.

‘I don’t know – maybe one of the paps climbed up there trying to get some snaps. They had a couple of celebs in tonight.’

‘And maybe it was disabled before the attack.’ May looked around. ‘There’s another one over that off-licence. Find me some decent footage, would you? Maybe there were fans waiting outside and someone put pictures on Instagram. You know how easily that can happen.’ Long-bright’s ex-boyfriend had ‘accidentally’ posted a saucy picture of her to a friend, not realizing it was linked to his Facebook account; they’d all had a good laugh about that one.

May stepped out into the street, thinking. To walk into a restaurant with a gun took some nerve. The obvious choice was to go after the husband, but first he ran a check. ‘Wait,’ he called to Longbright, ‘before you do that, get Colin to go through her husband’s charge sheet and find out what he was inside for.’

While May was waiting he talked to Keith Wallace, a cadaverous forensics expert who had been drafted in for handgun incidents while Dan Banbury was on holiday. Wallace was folded over the shattered decanter like a crane checking for fish.

‘Mr May, always a pleasure,’ he said, glancing up briefly before returning to the hole in the panelling where he had wedged his tweezers. ‘Not interrupting your Christmas, I hope?’

‘At least it’s keeping me away from Morecambe and Wise reruns.’

‘Get a good look at the lady, did you?’ Wallace’s knees cracked as he rose.

‘Enough to stay with me for a couple of nights, thanks. She turned her head.’

‘Oh, you noticed that? Yes, the bullet wouldn’t have exited if she’d stayed still.’

‘Maybe something distracted her at the last moment.’ May turned his own head to the right of the reception desk. There was only a vase on a pedestal, a squiggly painting of a man on a diving board and a long Japanese sword mounted on a red wooden wall bracket. ‘Or maybe she was already expecting something bad to happen.’

‘Well, this is one for the books.’ Wallace grunted and twisted and pulled at the splintered wood, finally removing a squashed piece of metal, raising it before him with a sigh of contentment. ‘Feast your eyes on that – not many others will.’

May couldn’t see anything to get excited about. ‘What’s so special?’

Wallace dropped it into a clear bag and twirled it before May’s eyes. ‘You get togged up for a posh restaurant, don’t you?’ he asked.

‘I can’t remember the last time I went to a posh restaurant,’ May said pointedly. ‘Why?’

‘The shooter had a sense of occasion. This is fancy. A .45 ACP cartridge, one of the most successful cartridges ever, designed by John Browning. It doesn’t over-penetrate.’

‘What’s your point?’

‘That means if it enters head-on it’s unlikely to injure anyone standing behind the original target. But she moved and it came out from behind her right ear with enough force to smash that decanter. It’s one of the most powerful pistol calibres you can use with a suppressor. Subsonic, in fact. For that reason it’s associated with a very particular weapon.’ Wallace raised an eyebrow. ‘Would you care to hazard a guess?’

‘This isn’t a quiz show, Keith, just tell me.’

‘The .45 ACP Luger, the queen of handguns. Of the originals, only one, marked serial number 2, is known to have survived. Serial number 1 was scrapped after the initial trial. At least three more .45 ACP Lugers were made, one a carbine bearing serial number 21.’

May blew out a noisy breath. ‘It’s late, I’m knackered, just give me the bottom line.’

Wallace would not be rushed. ‘The Luger is more correctly known as the Parabellum-Pistole, a semiautomatic patented in 1898. Originally designed for 7.65- by 22-mm Parabellum cartridges, but the army wanted a larger calibre.’

‘Army.’

‘That’s right. It’s an expert’s field, this.’

‘So it’s rare, which makes it valuable.’

‘You’d be hard-pressed to find one for under a million pounds,’ said Wallace. ‘Whoever shot Mrs McFarland was using the most expensive handgun in the world.’

‘This wasn’t somebody pissed off about being overcharged for the bread rolls, then.’

‘Not very likely.’

‘A bit over the top for the choice of target, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I wouldn’t say,’ said Wallace, still admiring the turning bullet. ‘That’s your department.’

Colin Bimsley was hopping about outside in the rain, waiting to talk to him. ‘McFarland has a couple of strikes against him, Mr May, most recently serving eighteen months for a Section 18,’ he said. ‘Wounding with intent. See if you can guess who he shanked up.’

‘To whom he took a knife,’ said May. ‘I thought you were a grammar-school boy. It wouldn’t be a Mr Finnegan by any chance, would it?’

‘Got it in one.’

‘OK, don’t bring him in, let’s go and get him out of bed. Got an address for me?’

‘Dalston,’ said Gilmore.

‘Ah, an area of intense ethnic diversity, as the social workers like to say.’

‘That’s not what my granddad calls it,’ said Bimsley.

‘I suppose we’ll have to take my car. I’d like to come back with a full set of tyres.’

‘Nearly half the area’s total population is under the age of thirty,’ Bimsley remarked.

May narrowed his eyes. ‘Have you been reading books again?’

‘It means the local lads either grow up with gang affiliations or get the hell out. I wonder which category McFarland falls into.’

‘Army. Prison. I guess he knows how to look after himself,’ said May. ‘I just can’t see him using the world’s most expensive gun.’ They set off towards May’s BMW.

‘Where’s Mr Bryant?’ Colin asked. ‘He can’t be on holiday, he never takes any time off.’

‘He’s on tidying-up duty,’ said May. ‘Apparently he found something in his old paperwork that needed investigating, and he’s pursuing it on his own. Anyway, something like this calls for my specific skill-set, which includes a low sympathy threshold and the ability to appreciate that it’s not 1963.’

‘Mr Bryant has a different way of looking at things,’ Colin agreed, dodging a sputtering downpipe. ‘Couldn’t that be useful?’

‘Yes, if we were looking for a secret organization of devil-worshipping Zeppelin pilots,’ said May, ‘but in this case all that’s needed is the copper’s best tool: an incredibly suspicious nature. If a chap came over to me and said, “I was walking down Oxford Street just after midnight and some fellow came running up and snatched my phone,” my instinct would be to ask, “What were you doing in Oxford Street after midnight?” Arthur’s always happier when he’s poking about in the basement of the British Museum uncovering the history of cursed Egyptian scarabs.’