Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection) (26 page)

May stopped staring at the telephone. ‘What do you mean?’

‘What if it was an instruction?
It’s time to ring the Belles of Westminster
.’

‘You mean—’

‘They had their own club. They were a call-girl ring, John. And if Montfleury wanted them rung, it meant that both he and Stuart-Holmesby had access to them. What if the girls no longer wanted to be controlled by a pair of sleazy old politicians – wouldn’t they do something about it?’

The phone rang, making them both jump.

‘John, is that you?’ said Algie Forshaw. ‘I’ve got a bit of bad news for you. The gun that young lady dropped on the floor of the Howard Hotel, it has her fingerprints on it.’

‘Well, that’s good, surely,’ said May.

‘It would be, except that the bullet we dug out of the wall behind Stuart-Holmesby didn’t come from it. It’s a completely different gauge. She fired a blank.’

May put his hand over the receiver. ‘You’re not going to like this,’ he told Arthur.

They arrived at the Howard Hotel to find that a sleepy concierge had finally been posted at the reception desk. Bryant paced across the green marble floor. The armchair in which Stuart-Holmesby had been sitting when he was shot had been replaced, but it sat at the exact same angle as before. Bryant paced backwards from it, stopping at the approximate point where Mia Waleska had stood.

He nimbly turned on one foot and stared out of the door. ‘The bullet had lost more power than Algie expected it to,’ he told May. ‘I think I know why. Somebody else fired from the street. The Belles of Westminster. They’d have looked out for one another, wouldn’t they?’

‘If they’d formed a club, as you suggested,’ said May, ‘I imagine they would.’

‘One of the other girls,’ said Bryant, pointing. ‘She stood there and fired at exactly the same time. That’s why Mia looked at her watch. They’d synchronized watches. They were all in it together.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ said May. ‘It’s far too elaborate.’

‘Is it any more absurd and elaborate than using a chandelier pendant to stab a man?’ asked Bryant. ‘Unless we find the other gun and girl, we’ll have nothing again.’

The detectives didn’t find either. All four girls had seemingly vanished from the face of the earth. All John May had left was the memory of Mia’s emerald-green eyes, lingering for one all-too-brief moment on his.

Five years later, Bryant and May’s paths once more crossed with the Belles of Westminster – but that’s another story with a very different outcome.

This was the first short case history I wrote up, and it must have showed that I had a lot of fun with it, because my publishers asked if they could release it as a single e-mystery. So to anyone who finds they already have this story, may I just say that I added it to the finished book as an extra for those who hadn’t read it, therefore you’re still getting your money’s worth! It’s another ‘precinct’ tale – this time set on that most iconic of London landmarks: a double-decker bus.

Early on Christmas Eve the Home Office called Arthur Bryant of London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit with an urgent request to attend the scene of a crime in King’s Cross. Bryant did so, then called his partner John May with instructions to meet him at 10.15 a.m. beside a bus stop in Marble Arch, but with no explanation as to why. It was muggy, grey and wet, not at all appropriate to the festive season, and May resented being dragged away from the PCU’s offices.

‘Ah, you got my message, good.’ The elderly detective hailed his partner with a wild whip of his walking stick, and nearly pruned a passing tourist. Bryant resembled a beady-eyed tramp more than an officer of the law. He had misbuttoned his shapeless brown cardigan and dragged a moth-eaten Harris tweed coat over the top of it. A sprig of holly protruded from his battered trilby, looking less like seasonal decoration than a sign that he had lately been trapped in a bush. ‘I got here ahead of time and had a potter through the German Christmas market in Hyde Park. Four pounds fifty for a knockwurst. They’re getting their own back for the war.’

‘You had your mobile with you?’ asked May, surprised. Arthur was three years his senior but several decades behind the rest of the world when it came to technology.

‘I did have, yes,’ Bryant admitted, tugging his trilby further on to his head. ‘Here’s our bus.’ He indicated the old open-topped Routemaster that was pulling up beside them.

May was suspicious. ‘Then where is it now?’

‘I think I dropped it in the Princess Diana Memorial Drain. Don’t worry, it’ll just keep going around. I’ll get it when I come back. Well’ – he threw out a hand so that May could haul him on board – ‘you’re probably wondering what this is all about.’

‘And why we need to meet on a sightseeing bus, yes,’ said May, leading his partner inside the idling vehicle. The portly driver looked back over his shoulder, watching them through the glass. ‘I’ve seen the Regent Street lights already.’

‘It won’t do you any harm to see them again. I think Christmas gets better as you get older,’ Bryant remarked somewhat unexpectedly.

‘Do you?’

‘Oh yes. You have to buy fewer presents because most of your friends are dead. Let’s go inside; I can’t face the stairs. Let me fill you in. There was a rather sad little murder in King’s Cross during the night. A fifty-four-year-old cleaning lady named Joan McKay was strangled to death in her third-floor flat in Hastings Street. The HO felt the case warranted our involvement.’

‘But this bus doesn’t go anywhere near King’s Cross.’ May checked the route on the wall and saw that it tacked through central London on a loop.

‘Oh, we’re not going to the murder site. I’ve already been there.’ Bryant seated himself on the arrow-patterned seat at the front of the bus, next to a gingery young man who was standing in the aisle with a microphone. His badge read: ‘Hi! I’m Martin!’ ‘I wanted you here so that you could help me apprehend the murderer.’

The Routemaster pulled away from the stop at Speakers’ Corner, heading into Oxford Street. Shoppers were out early, but many had already left the city to spend Christmas with their families. ‘My Uncle Jack used to get up on his soapbox over there, just after the war,’ said Bryant, tapping the rain-spattered window. ‘He was used to telling people what they shouldn’t do, like that man who used to wander the length of Oxford Street with the board that said ‘Less Passion From Less Protein’. Uncle Jack would pick a different subject every week: ban licentious theatre, hang Sir Anthony Eden, shoot the Welsh; he’d rant about anything so long as it involved getting rid of something or someone. Not a terribly positive attitude, I suppose, but at least Speakers’ Corner still gives us some semblance of free speech.’

‘Now, does anyone know the name of the great b-i-i-i-g department store on our right?’ Martin the tour guide was as proud and patronizing as a first-time father. There were no takers. ‘Anyone?’

Bryant listlessly raised his hand. ‘Selfridges, opened in 1909 by Harry Gordon Selfridge. He coined the phrase “The customer is always right”, and was the first salesman to put products out on display where they could be touched.’

‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ said Martin.

‘No, but luckily I do,’ Bryant countered.

‘We’re catching a murderer on a bus?’ whispered May in disbelief.

‘We are now heading towards Oxford Circus, which was once described by Noël Coward as the Hub of the Universe,’ announced the guide.

‘This boy’s a dunderhead.’ Bryant jerked a wrinkled thumb at Martin, who overheard him. ‘It was John Wyndham, and he was describing Piccadilly Circus.’

Bryant occasionally worked as a tour guide in his spare time, but his revolutionary methods of involving the general public in his talks tended to frighten off casual tourists. He forgot most things, but never the facts he had painstakingly gathered about his city.

‘I don’t understand,’ May persisted. ‘It sounds very straightforward. Why did we get the case?’ The PCU only handled investigations the Home Office found detrimental to government policy. A death of the kind his partner had described would usually fall under the local jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police.

‘There are three oddities.’ Bryant ticked them off on his fingers. ‘One, after strangling Mrs McKay the murderer ordered two pizzas and calmly ate both of them. B, he slept overnight in the apartment. And three, his victim was killed after he left.’

May considered the matter as the bus turned into Regent Street. ‘I’m sorry, Arthur, you’ve utterly lost me.’

‘Do try to pay attention. The murderer left the flat at seven fifteen this morning, not realizing that his victim was still alive. Mrs McKay struggled to the window to raise the alarm, but the effort of opening it was too much for her. She lost consciousness while sitting on the sill and fell out into the street, landing on a gentleman called Sir Ian Lowry—’

‘The MoD bigwig?’

‘The very same. Sir Ian was leaving a call girl’s flat on the ground floor, where he had apparently stayed the night. Mrs McKay broke her neck and his leg. And that’s why the HO called us in. Obviously, it’s a serious security breach because Sir Ian is privy to all kinds of military secrets. It doesn’t help that he was putting the call girl’s services down on his expenses. Private secretary, if you please. The girl has already been brought in, the coroner has certified that Mrs McKay bore the bruises of strangulation around her neck, and all that’s left is the apprehension of her killer.’

‘So I’m here to help you identify him,’ said May, still a little confused.

‘Oh, I know who the murderer is.’ Bryant cheerily flashed his oversized false teeth. ‘You were complaining about getting old the other day, so I thought this would be a chance for you to test your fading faculties.’

The old-fashioned Routemaster bus stopped outside Hamleys toy store and the driver stared impassively ahead as a single Japanese tourist came on board. May looked around. There were now eight passengers seated downstairs. The rain was falling too heavily for anyone to remain on the upper open deck. Bryant checked his ancient Timex. It was 10.44 a.m.

‘You already know the murderer’s identity?’ asked May.

‘Better than that,’ replied Bryant smugly, ‘I can tell you the precise time he’ll be arrested. At 11.26 a.m.’

‘Are you saying we’re looking for somebody on board this bus?’

The tour guide was attempting to deliver a potted history of the Haymarket, and was not happy about being distracted by these chatting elderly men. ‘There are seats further back,’ he pointed out.

‘We’re quite happy here,’ insisted Bryant. He withdrew his pipe from his top pocket and absently struck a match to it. A hefty woman in an LA Dodgers baseball cap, an oversized sweatshirt and huge baggy shorts reacted with horror behind him. ‘Oh-my-Gahd, that’s disgusting,’ she complained. ‘Hey, it’s illegal to smoke that thing.’

‘Yet it’s apparently not illegal to dress like a gigantic toddler, madam, which I find most curious.’

‘Listen, buddy, if you’d take my advice—’

‘I’m not your buddy, and if I took your advice I’d be enormous.’ Bryant turned back to his partner. ‘So take a look around and tell me who you suspect. Give me the benefit of your observational skills.’

The ancient bus was now chuntering towards the rainswept plain of Trafalgar Square. ‘On your left, Nelson’s Column, finished in 1843, with four bronze panels at the base depicting his naval victories,’ said Martin the guide.

‘His left arm was struck by lightning in the 1880s and he only just got it X-rayed a couple of years ago,’ said Bryant. ‘That’s the NHS for you.’

‘So you know exactly where the murderer will get on this bus, how long he’ll stay on and where he’ll get off?’ asked May.

‘Indeed I do.’ Bryant could be supremely annoying when he was the only one holding privileged information.

At 11.02 a.m., the bus stopped near the corner of Craig’s Court. ‘Pall Mall derives its name from a seventeenth-century mallet and ball game played here by, er, members of royalty,’ Martin the tour guide stated with a hint of uncertainty.

‘Everyone knows that,’ said Bryant, fidgeting in his seat. ‘Tell them something new. Alleys of shops are called malls because they’re shaped like the game’s playing sites. Did you know that Pall Mall is only worth £140 on the Monopoly board?’

‘I don’t think he cares too much for your interruptions, accurate though they may be,’ whispered May. ‘You’re unsettling him.’

‘Some people deserve to be unsettled,’ Bryant replied. ‘When a man is tired of London he should clear off. Oh dear, he’s wearing a clip-on tie.’ Coming from a man as sartorially challenged as Bryant, this was a bit rich.

When the bus stopped halfway along Whitehall, May surveyed the new arrivals. One of them was a murderer, but which one? There were now eleven passengers on the lower deck: two Americans, two Italians, two Chinese, one Japanese boy in a mad hat and two couples of indeterminate origins. He decided that the murderer had yet to put in an appearance.

‘Was this woman McKay in her own apartment?’ he asked.

‘Correct.’

May thought of the call girl living on the ground floor. ‘Did she look after the other girls? Was her killer a client?’

‘No, she had nothing to do with them.’ Bryant sat back, trying not to listen to the tour guide’s incorrect description of the Cabinet War Rooms.

‘But the killer left behind a clue to his identity.’

‘No, it was something he took away with him that gave me the lead.’

‘Well, I don’t see how you could possibly know what he took.’

The bus continued along Whitehall, picking up three more passengers, and lumbered towards Parliament Square through thickening traffic. May eyed the newcomers with suspicion. A German couple – he overheard their conversation – were taking pictures behind a fiftyish man with unmistakably Russian features and anxious, flitting eyes. May studied the Russian’s loud Italian jacket, his unshaven chin. A sad little murder, Bryant had said. This man had dressed in a hurry, without stopping to shave, and looked around every time the bus came to a halt. But if he was the killer, why would he make his escape aboard a slow-moving tour bus, on a trip that ended back where it began?