Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection) (23 page)

An official group would send a coded call first. The worry was that a lone nutcase might decide to try his luck.

When I looked across the street I saw a misshapen grey lump near the top of the opposite building. I pointed up at it. Whatever it was, it made the frontage look wrong.

‘That’s a curtain,’ Dunwoody said. ‘Someone didn’t shut a window.’

I hate untidiness. I prefer everything to be neat and square. Ideally I’d place London in a grid and rearrange it borough by borough until all the roads had right angles and the buildings were correctly aligned. Straighten the river out, drop in the offices like Tetris blocks. And get rid of all the litter. How hard can it be to keep the streets clean? They manage in other European countries. John May and I are similar in that respect. We’d like to rearrange the world. The difference is that I’m naturally untidy. I spill nail polish on my keyboard and leave tights in my office drawers. But I looked at Dunwoody and knew he was
sloppy
. He couldn’t even keep his sideburns level.

I went back to my laptop and studied the plan. Actually I’m not great with technology, just the planning. I knew I could highlight all the key risk points between Oxford Circus and Marble Arch tube stations, and check the street closures via their CCTVs. Red dots pinpointed the police positions. The Met was handling the job with minimal personnel, trying to meet their seasonal budget figures. Which would have been fine if they’d been in the right places. The surveillance team had a couple of their own people in place, identifiable to us by a discreet stripe on their hooded jackets.

We were stationed in a storage room above a Miss Sixty clothes shop opposite the department store, so we could remain in visual contact with the ground crew. I’d requested an observation post at ground level near the store entrance, but the Met refused to let us come any closer. I had every reason to be angry. I don’t like opportunities for error. I didn’t care about Desmarais – it was the fact that Dunwoody hadn’t taken into account all the families in the street that bothered me.

Dunwoody dug a handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose again. ‘You’re wasting your time even bothering to look.’

I told him it never hurt to double-check. Before coming here I’d read Dunwoody’s profile; his military years had left him with a disconnect from civilian life. By contrast, I’d spent my spare time away from the PCU at endless evening classes, taking courses in everything from crowd control to first aid.

Madame Desmarais had changed her itinerary three hours earlier. It didn’t give an extremist group enough time to react. I thought if there was any kind of situation it would definitely come from a lone operative, and that meant close contact.

I checked my watch, then looked at Dunwoody’s monitor. The French Embassy’s chauffeured vehicle was turning from Wigmore Street into Duke Street, prior to entering Oxford Street. It meant that Desmarais was going to step on to the pavement in less than three minutes. Dunwoody had allowed the French Embassy to arrange for a black stretch Mercedes 450SL with diplomatic flags, the kind of vehicle that was only used at state funerals and coronations. It would have drawn attention to itself in a Pride parade.

I rose and looked down from the window, then checked my laptop map again. A red flarepath flashed along the street grid, marking the route.

How easy is it to say now that something felt wrong? But it did. When I looked at a street plan it was like studying a video game. Dimension, flow, bottlenecks, exposures, at-risk players, potential threats, the GIS tech neatly tagged and flagged in my head.

Geographic Information Systems. I had checked the Met’s positioning plan. Each officer operated in a triangle of observation that could be overlapped with the position of a team-mate. There was nothing immediately obvious, not the usual sense of disparity that pointed to a breach in the line, but something was still amiss.

I’m an old-fashioned policewoman through to the marrow of my bones, as my mother had been before me. We were all the same in our family. If you wanted to convince us of your innocence, you had to work at it. I think if you know your rights you should also know your responsibilities. I don’t want to hear lies from members of the public. I looked down at the street and studied each person I saw in turn.

My private life, such as it was, hadn’t been good for a while, which was why John had wanted me to take a break. When I was young I had looked after my little brother, so I’d had to grow up fast. He was killed on his motorbike when he was seventeen. Life became very precious to me. I always felt like an outsider until I followed my mother’s path and joined the PCU.

Some nights I’d be the last one left in the office – this was when we were still based in Mornington Crescent, before Mr Bryant managed to blow it up – and I’d sit there fantasizing about a big plate of fish and chips with vinegar and pickled onions. I’d look out of the window and see a single tall, icy lamplight on a blue-grey street, lifeless and melancholy, hardly a soul around. All the lads and lasses up at Camden Lock would be tipping out of bars and getting into fights, not venturing as far as the residential streets around our office, where there was only the scuttle of rats in the bins and frightened thoughts in cold bedrooms. And I remember feeling so alone. Which was why when Ian Hargreave announced he was leaving me and returning to his missus, not because he loved her but for the sake of the kids, I just lost it a bit.

John had been right. Working for Dunwoody and his team was like working with idiots. It was rather relaxing.

I studied the real-time footage on Dunwoody’s monitor, then went to the window and watched the scene below again. It was like one of those ‘Spot the Difference’ competitions that showed two photographs with mismatched elements. Except that everything was as it should be. Too much so.

‘The kiosk at the edge of the pavement,’ I said. ‘Is it still open?’

‘Shouldn’t be.’ Dunwoody checked the image. The green wooden stall sold tourist crap: Union Jacks, teddy bears, pillar boxes and plastic police helmets.

But it didn’t look shut. It should have had flaps that closed over it and were padlocked. He said, ‘You can’t have everything looking shut. Things are meant to look normal.’

‘Why has he still got a customer?’

Dunwoody looked again. ‘I don’t know. He’s beyond the cordon, he’s just looking at stuff.’

‘It’s three fifteen p.m. now,’ I said. ‘Rewind to three oh five p.m.’ Dunwoody sped the footage back. He slowed the image at 3.05 p.m. The same skinny young man was standing in exactly the same place.

There were children milling around, grandmothers, pregnant women, a huge family of tall Somalians, their kids playing on the concrete bus benches. I saw the skinny guy turn to face the diplomatic vehicle as it drew into Oxford Street, and knew he was cupping the palm of his right hand over something in his jacket pocket. He was counting the number of police officers inside the cordon. I could see him actually counting, moving his lips.

I got a lock on his face and to my amazement a database profile came up, courtesy of the system Dan Banbury had installed on my phone. The guy’s name was Carlo ‘Loco’ Fabrizi. Three lines of text appeared beneath his mug shot. Later I got the rest of the details. Four years ago Fabrizi had emerged from Poggioreale Prison in Naples where he’d finished a three-year sentence for stabbing a student in the leg at a climate change protest rally. He’d been released into psychiatric care, but I guessed the Italian system was so disorganized that he was easily able to leave and make his way here. The last time I’d seen someone like him hanging around near a police cordon, he’d turned out to be a crazed fan of Kristen Stewart, who’d gone to the Odeon Leicester Square, where she was attending a film premiere. He tried to threaten her with a knife, and later told interrogators that he had been instructed to kill her by a secret society of vampires. Elated by the thought that he was carrying out Satan’s work, he was pronounced unfit to stand trial. I couldn’t take any chances with this one, in case he was cut from the same cloth.

I looked back at Fabrizi and saw him duck his head, staring intently at Desmarais in the back of her car. He made a movement that I instantly recognized; his left hand was cradling the underside of a gun while he used his right to slip the safety catch off. Dunwoody hadn’t noticed a thing. Before he could stop me, I went for it. I had no choice.

I took the stairs three at a time and slammed open the shop’s side entrance door. A knot of rubbernecking tourists blocked my path. Everyone was trying to see who was getting out of the car.

I was slipping and sliding on the rain-slick pavement, trying to tear my way through the cordon of plastic tape, but a beat copper stuck his arm across my chest. I suddenly realized that he thought I was a member of the public. At the PCU we wear black jackets with unit logos, but today I was in civvies. There was no time to explain. I backed around him and ran straight through the cordon.

The ambassador’s wife made most English politicians’ partners look like sacks of potatoes. She waited for the chauffeur to open the door before stepping out of the Mercedes in a low-cut fawn trouser suit and huge Sophia Loren sunglasses, despite the fact that it was dark and raining. Very 1960s. I liked her style.

By this time, the skinny guy at the tourist stand was on the move. His eyes were locked on the movement of the vehicle.

I watched the distance closing between them and knew I wasn’t going to make it in time. The crowds had been alerted by the cordon and the car. They stopped to watch and take pictures on their mobiles. There were umbrellas up everywhere, obscuring the scene. The police were looking in the wrong direction; I followed their attention and saw a cluster of teenagers drifting about, just being young and annoying and in the way.

The assailant was closing in. The ambassador’s wife slowly looked around. It felt as if the moment was stretched out to breaking point. Everything got slower and slower.

There are times when I change gear without first engaging my brain. This was one of those moments.

Without even being aware of what I was about to do, I stepped up on to the black metal bollard beside the kiosk and used the leverage to throw myself forward. I’m a strong woman, and it was a big leap. I hit the would-be attacker in the small of his back and brought him down. Heard his knees hit the pavement with a crack. His gun clattered to the pavement undischarged, and the screaming began.

What a mess. The surveillance team went bananas. There was me thinking I’d saved a life.

Later that day Dunwoody asked me if I was expecting a commendation. This was when we were alone in his ugly office with photos of his fat kids funereally arranged around his laptop. I’d twisted my left ankle and torn a thigh ligament performing my flying leap, and wasn’t in the mood for a fight.

It turned out that when I intervened, the Italian’s arm had struck Desmarais in the face, knocking her against the car. She suffered a wardrobe malfunction that made the front pages and brought a spectacular loss of dignity down on her, which was far worse than being shot, from a diplomatic point of view. She had been humiliated – and on British soil.

To my horror, it turned out that Carlo Fabrizi was one of the surveillance team’s own undercover men. He announced that he would be trying to sue me because I’d fractured his collarbone. The Met internal investigator lodged a formal complaint against me for failing to communicate my plan of action. Dunwoody was furious and told me he’d got it in the neck for not keeping me under control.

The Met team said they would testify against me. I complained about Dunwoody’s inappropriate handling of the event, including his request for the ambassadorial limo. I was immediately removed from active duty. That was when I knew I wasn’t going to last out the month. Dunwoody said, ‘We can put you on gardening leave, with one difference. You’ll be expected to go and bury yourself in the garden.’

I explained that my brief had been to see things others couldn’t. I asked him: ‘You didn’t recognize one of your own team. I couldn’t take the risk. Do you honestly think what I did was wrong?’ I was hoping, just this once, for a straight answer.

‘That’s not for me to say,’ Dunwoody replied primly.

‘Did you know Fabrizi had done time in jail?’

‘It wasn’t my job to know.’

There’s a lot in our business that goes unsaid. I knew I should never have acted on impulse. I left Dunwoody’s depressing office, returned to my own and even though I was only on temporary secondment it felt like I’d been fired from the force. I put my stuff in one of those cardboard boxes the company specifically kept to give dumped personnel, and was out on the street without an office key fob or a job, having earned Dunwoody’s ridicule and hatred.

I went back to the PCU with my tail between my legs, a miserable failure. I bumped into Mr Bryant, bumbling along the hall with his hands in his pockets, looking as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

‘Do I smell amber oil?’ he asked, sniffing the air. I must have looked confused because he said, ‘I thought you went to Marrakech.’

‘No,’ I told him, ‘that was John’s suggestion. I just got chucked out of Adrian Dunwoody’s security detail.’ I explained the circumstances.

‘Oh dear, that doesn’t sound right,’ he said, fishing in his top pocket for his pipe stem, which he’d lately taken to noisily chewing as Raymond wasn’t allowing him to smoke it. ‘He’ll try to mark your record, and it could affect your career. Luckily you don’t have much of a career as you’re with the PCU. I’ll have to sort this out. Something isn’t right. Give me a minute, will you?’ He wandered off in the direction of his office, then stopped and came back. ‘Dunwoody approached you, yes?’ I nodded and he left.

I wondered what he meant. A few minutes later I found out when Mr Bryant appeared in my doorway. ‘Can you spare a moment?’ he asked vaguely. I ushered him in.

He unfolded a creased sheet of paper and held it up before me. ‘Tell me, what can you see?’ he asked.

It looked like a child’s art class scribble. ‘Just some grey crayon strokes,’ I told him.