Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection) (27 page)

‘Who can tell me the name of this building?’ asked Martin the tour guide.

‘Houses of Parliament,’ the assembly muttered faintly, as if being asked to recite a prayer in church.

‘Now, many people think Big Ben is the name of the tower …’

‘Dear God no.’ Bryant sighed loudly. ‘Can’t he come up with anything more original than that?’

Martin shot him a filthy look. ‘But it is actually the name of the single bell housed inside—’

‘Absolute rubbish.’ Bryant thumped the guide on the arm with his walking stick. ‘There are five bells in the Elizabeth Tower, young man. The other four play the Westminster Quarters, variations of “I know that my Redeemer liveth” from Handel’s
Messiah
.’

‘Your information is not correct?’ the German husband asked the guide, puzzled.

‘Look, who’s giving this bloody tour?’ Martin’s cheeks were turning as red as his hair.

‘It could be him,’ said May, pointing to the Russian. ‘He’s got a shifty look about him. Oh – that doesn’t sound very scientific, does it?’

‘I’ll take over if you like,’ Bryant snapped back at the guide. ‘These people aren’t getting their money’s worth.’

‘But, Arthur, how do you know when he was due on the bus? That just leaves—’

‘Listen, mate, I don’t have to put up with this. My shift ends here, anyway.’ As the bus stopped in the corner of the square, Martin threw down his microphone and tapped on the glass, signalling to the driver.

As he made his way along the aisle, May said, ‘The guide, it’s the guide. And he’s getting away!’

Bryant did not move a muscle as a moon-faced young woman with scraped-back hair and a ponytail took over from the departing Martin.

‘Hello, my name is Debbie, and I’m your guide on the last part of this tour,’ she told them. The bus pulled into the traffic and made its way around the square.

‘Why didn’t you stop him?’ asked May with growing incredulity. The ginger-headed tour guide was walking quickly away along the crowded pavement with his hands in his pockets.

Bryant pulled back his sleeve and held up his watch so that his partner could read it: 11.19 a.m. There were still another seven minutes to go.

‘Who can tell me the name of this building?’ asked Debbie, pointing to Westminster Abbey and cupping her hand around her ear.

‘Is there some special nursery school where they’re trained to speak in this fashion, I wonder?’ said Bryant. The bus headed back on to Victoria Embankment.

‘Where does the tour go from here?’ asked May, keeping an eye on the Russian, who seemed to be sweating.

‘Around Covent Garden, where the lovely Debbie will probably regale us with selections from
My Fair Lady
, then back towards Oxford Street,’ said Bryant.

‘You said it was something he took with him that gave you a clue,’ May repeated, checking out the Japanese boy’s strange headgear.

Bryant rested his chin on his knuckles and regarded the stippled thread of the Thames that could be glimpsed between buildings. ‘The lovely Debbie will ask them to name the river next,’ he muttered.

‘He was so unfazed by the thought of murdering Mrs McKay that he stayed all night …’ mused May.

‘I wonder if anyone knows where the lion on Westminster Bridge comes from?’ asked Debbie.

‘Because he was used to her …’ May followed the thought.

‘Good Lord, an intelligent question,’ Bryant beamed delightedly at the new guide.

‘It stood on the parapet of the Lion Brewery until 1966, near Hungerford Bridge …’ said Debbie.

‘… Because he was married to her,’ said May.

‘Yet we have come to regard it as a symbol of London …’

‘… And he stuck to his routine, ordering pizza for them both, sleeping beside her and getting up the next morning …’

‘… So when we photograph the lion standing proudly beside Big Ben, we recreate the traditional link between Members of Parliament – and alcohol.’ Debbie flourished a smile.

‘Oh, bravo!’ exclaimed Bryant. ‘I like her!’

‘… And he came to work just as he always did, because he couldn’t think of what else to do. He had to stick to the schedule. Not the tour guide at all, but the bus driver,’ said May as the truth dawned.

‘Correct. His timetable was still on the kitchen counter, but his jacket, cap and badge were all missing from the flat.’ Bryant rose unsteadily to his feet and pressed the stop bell. ‘That took you long enough,’ he sniffed. ‘I’m sorry, Debbie. I’m afraid the tour will have to terminate here.’

May looked out of the window. The bus stop faced New Scotland Yard. It was exactly 11. 26 a.m.

‘He won’t run off,’ said Bryant. ‘He wants to be taken in for the murder of his wife. He loved her. But the neighbours said she never stopped nagging him about his weight.’

The Japanese tourist and the Russian took some very nice photographs of the two detectives leading the devastated driver down from his cabin. ‘Arrest ye merry gentlemen,’ said Bryant with a grin as the flashes went off.

‘You’ve got holly in your hat,’ May pointed out.

‘Yes,’ said Bryant, ‘I like the smell.’

‘Holly hasn’t got a smell.’

‘It does, actually. The bright, spiky appearance is all bravado. If you gently break the stem, you’ll smell it – there’s a bitter tang inside,’ he explained. ‘Like some people.’

New readers start here: Arthur Bryant and John May head up the Peculiar Crimes Unit, London’s most venerable specialist police team, now based in King’s Cross. It’s a division that was founded during the Second World War to investigate cases that could cause national scandal or public unrest.

Previously based above Mornington Crescent tube station, the technophobic, irascible and vaguely revolting Bryant and his smooth-talking modernist partner John May head a team of equally unusual misfits who are just as likely to commit crimes as solve them.

Arthur Bryant has been writing up his strangest cases as memoirs, but they’re as unreliable as he is, because he couldn’t possibly have tackled his first case during the Second World War – could he? The memoirs were turned into novels by a hack writer employed by Mr Bryant’s publishers to present them to the world. Here are the twelve cases covered so far.

When Arthur Bryant got blown up in his office and all that was left of him were his false teeth, his partner John May looked for clues to his death. The hunt took him back through the decades to the unit’s foundation, the worst day of the Blitz and a murder investigation in the Palace Theatre, where an outrageous production of
Orpheus in the Underworld
was being staged, and where the principal dancer was found without her feet.

Everyone in the Palace Theatre became a suspect. Soon there were more bizarre deaths, including a gruesome on-stage spearing from a lightning bolt, and as the argumentative young detectives tracked their elusive quarry through the blackouts, the fog and the falling bombs, they found themselves unwittingly following the pattern of the play, chasing Orpheus down to Hades. It seemed that the killer they sought was ‘some kind of giant dwarf’, which made about as much sense as anything else in the investigation.

BRYANT
You must be Mr May. What should I call you?

MAY
John, sir.

BRYANT
Don’t call me ‘sir’, I’ve not been knighted yet. And at this rate I never will be.

My father was a scientist who worked in an experimental wartime communications unit. He and his colleagues were very young, and could not have realized that they were working towards a discovery that later changed the world. The full story is told in my memoir
Paperboy
, which he sadly didn’t live long enough to read. This series starter was created in the memory of the stories he told me about his job, one of which was about the way he and his colleagues used to blow each other up with exploding paint as a joke.

Bryant and May’s investigation of a secret world beneath London began when a woman was found dead in a dry basement with her throat full of river-water. In the quiet London street where she lived, the residents were unsettled by the ghostly sound of rushing water and some particularly unpleasant spiders. Further impossible deaths, including a man suffocated by soil, revealed a connection to the lost underground rivers of London and a disgraced academic who hunted an ancient secret that might soon be lost within the forgotten canals.

Meanwhile it refused to stop raining, the weatherman warned of a coming flood, and nobody’s house was safe as Bryant and May headed beneath the city to stop a murderer from striking again. What was the connection between the victims, an old lady, a builder, a TV producer and a homeless alcoholic? And what did forgotten artworks and the four elements have to do with it?

MAY
You cannot act against the law, Arthur!

BRYANT
You can when the law is an ass.

Bryant and May’s investigation of the world beneath the London streets came from the fact that the North London house in which I used to live had a room exactly like this, built with a break-panel in the floor over an underground river. For years I had trouble with crayfish jumping out of my drains, which overflowed from the Fleet during storms. I sent one to the Natural History Museum, whose experts told me that Turkish crayfish were forcing British crayfish out of the sewage systems. Who knew there was a war going on beneath our feet? The map in the front of the book was an exact copy of my street.

Arthur Bryant, writing his memoirs, recalled a case from 1973. As strikes and blackouts ravaged the country, a rare painting in the National Gallery had acid thrown over it by a man in a stovepipe hat. Soon, the members of a high-born Whitstable family were being knocked off in a variety of lunatic ways – by escaped tiger, by clockwork bomb and by demon barber … Bryant and May set out to investigate the family.

As the hours of daylight started to diminish towards winter’s shortest day, the detectives discovered that a forgotten Victorian legacy held the key to the strange deaths. It was a mystery that would lead behind the sealed doors of London’s most ancient and secret guilds – and to the murderous legacy of British imperialism. Time was running out for the detectives, unless they could find seventy-seven clocks. It was when Bryant uncovered the mystery of ‘Chandler’s Wobble’ and had to babysit a horribly rich family that all hell broke loose …

PC
How long have you been a policeman, Mr Bryant?

BRYANT
Longer than you’ve been alive, mate.

PC
That must make you the oldest team on the force.

BRYANT
Not if we keep lying about our ages.

This book came about because I stumbled upon an amazing snippet of London history, an event that occurred in the late nineteenth century. It was a moment well documented at the time, a source of great wonder and excitement, but then utterly forgotten. Obviously, it would make the basis of a great B&M adventure. Also, Robert Louis Stevenson’s
The Wrong Box
had a bit to do with it. This is by far the most outrageous of all the cases, yet there really is a nugget of truth at its heart.

When a controversial artist was found dead, floating face down in her own art installation inside a riverside gallery with locked doors and windows, the only witness turned out to be a small boy who insisted that the murderer was a masked man in a tricorn hat riding a stallion.

Then a television presenter was struck by lightning while indoors, and another victim was immolated in a public swimming bath … clearly, they were the kind of impossible crimes that only Bryant and May could solve. But Bryant had lost his nerve following a disastrous public appearance, and May was busy fighting to keep the unit from closure.

With a sinister modern-day highwayman bringing terror to the London streets, the detectives tracked their suspects to an exclusive school and a deprived housing estate. But then the highwayman started to become a national hero, and the public turned against the policemen.

Exploring the dark side of celebrity, the conflicts of youth and class, and the peculiar myths of old London and its cut-throat highwaymen, Bryant and May dived into the case with a vengeance …

BRYANT
That’s what happens when you get older. You become irritated by the views of others for the simple reason that you know better, and they’re being ridiculous … Some silly man will start complaining about police brutality until I want to beat him to death with my stick.

It was a time when the public started to venerate vacuous celebrity over anything controversial or demanding to think about. I wanted to write about the subject in the context of an enjoyable novel, and this was the result. Celebrity fever has waned to a point where we can understand its implications and be a little more wary of its effect on the young.

The opening murder occurred at an event equivalent to that of Charles Saatchi’s innovative ‘Sensation’ exhibition in London. A number of statements made by the killer came from actual press reports, but the novel is still preposterous in places. After this, the more outlandish elements in the series were toned down.