Bryant & May - The Burning Man (10 page)

‘In what way?’

‘He was very politicized. He felt that all information should be liberated.’ She looked out at the TV, which was displaying footage of Julian Assange running a gauntlet of photographers. ‘He was a big supporter of that guy. Then he got involved in the Occupy movement. Which would have been fine, but Freddie never knew when to stay quiet. I thought he’d have difficulty finding employment. I paid his rent a couple of times, but eventually I’d had enough of it and broke up with him.’ She gave a shrug of apology. ‘A couple of weeks later I saw one of the guys he used to come in with, and heard he was sleeping on their floors. I think by that time he’d pretty much run out of options.’

‘Given his outspoken views, do you think he made enemies?’ asked Bryant.

‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’ She absently touched the neckline of her T-shirt, remembering. ‘Freddie was so gentle that it was hard to be angry with him for long. He had a kind of …
innocence
. He was thin and had a slight limp, and always looked so downcast. Like the kind of man who would always end up getting hurt. I had a feeling that one day he would suffer some terrible tragedy. I know it sounds selfish, but I didn’t want to be around him when it happened. This is my time to build a career and get my life together. We have to make our own futures, and I couldn’t understand the choices he made.’

‘He was asleep in a doorway when he died, Miss Papis,’ Bryant pointed out with a touch of severity. ‘He was hardly the engineer of his fate. Some of us need more protection than others. When was the last time you saw him?’

Papis sighed. ‘Look, I wasn’t perfect, OK? There was never a right time to tell him.’

‘Tell him what?’ prompted Bryant.

‘That I needed to put myself first for a while and that I couldn’t see him any more. I’m only working here temporarily while I finish my training in accountancy. I already took an AAT foundation course. I didn’t have time to be a mother to him. Freddie was very upset about it. And I probably said things I shouldn’t have.’

‘When was this?’

‘More than six weeks ago. I heard he left his job at the market just after that and started sleeping rough. You don’t think it was my fault, do you?’

‘I can’t absolve you of that,’ said Bryant, creaking to his feet. ‘When you’re out on the street you become an easy target.’

Afterwards, as he walked back up Red Lion Street towards the unit, Bryant felt uneasy. The arsonist had not torched Weeks in an act of mindless cruelty; he’d deliberately launched an attack. Someone who could do that might be capable of doing it again. For all he knew, Weeks’s death was a practice run for something much worse.

As he cut through King’s Cross Station, he glanced up at the television monitors and saw a blue phalanx of officers being driven back by dozens of hurtling masked figures. The red ribbon running beneath the footage read ‘Police cut off by protestors’. Men and women were helping to carry debris, bins, bollards and furniture, laying them across the roads to form a flaming boundary line. By the look of it, the skirmishes had now crossed Ludgate Circus, spreading to the far end of Fleet Street. It meant that the chaos was breaking free of the Square Mile.

Link’s men had lost the battle to contain the war. Anything could happen now.

The young man checked his watch and peered over the filthy parapet of the roof, looking down at the canopy. When Glen Hall suddenly appeared, pausing inside the market entrance to check the directions on his phone, he spotted him at once. Hall always wore expensive dark suits and had a distinctive walk born of easy confidence and a sense of entitlement. You half expected him to stroll with his hands folded behind his back, like the Duke of Edinburgh.

Slipping down from his perch, he dropped back inside the attic. The brazier had been on for hours and was so hot that he could hardly get near it. The tar glowed dully in the cauldron, popping and churning like a miniature volcano. The loudness of the electronic door buzzer made him jump. Hall had found the shop and was pressing the entry button repeatedly. The moment for action had arrived. As he checked the preparations, he realized his hands were shaking. Getting rid of Freddie Weeks had been the trial run. This was where it really started.

The shop had no sign, but Glen Hall could see around the paper blinds to the posters on the unlit walls, including a rare one-sheet for the original Japanese release of
Firestarter
and a version of
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
that he had been trying to buy for years. The latter showed Harrison Ford suspended over a pit of lava. Was it a reprint or an original? If it was genuine, did the shop owner have any idea of its real worth? Hell, it was a pop-up gallery in Brixton Market, so probably not. Then again, the way he’d been contacted by the owner suggested that there was something underhand about the whole enterprise. Maybe he was selling stolen goods or copyright-infringing forgeries. When it came to collecting, Hall wasn’t averse to bending the rules, but he wasn’t about to pay for a fake.

He thumped the buzzer again, but nothing appeared to be happening. Cupping his hands around his eyes, he peered inside and tried to see if there was anyone in the shop. Just then the catch was electronically released and the door popped open by itself.

He stepped inside and looked around. Against the wall was the 1968 poster for
You Only Live Twice
, the quad in which Sean Connery was depicted strolling at a 45-degree angle across the roof of a volcano in a tuxedo. What made the poster so unusual was that Connery had cloven hooves instead of shoes. The artist had read in the script that Bond would scale a sheer wall, but as he hadn’t seen the film he’d used his own imagination to work out how the superspy might manage such a feat. His solution made the artwork unique.

Hall could see the price tag from here: £160, an insanely low figure that instantly suggested it was a forgery.

He was starting to feel as if he had been tricked. Why was there no one here? What had he been set up for? God knew there were plenty of people who’d enjoy sending him on a wild-goose chase.

Above Hall, he watched and waited, telling himself to hold on for just a little longer. The heat from the cauldron was starting to sear his bare arms. His thighs were trembling from the strain of steadying it.

Just a little further …

Hall was clearly unhappy with the non-appearance of the gallery owner. He stepped closer to the Bond artwork and peered at it, realizing now that it was a cheap photocopy.

He heard a movement overhead, smelled something as pungent as hot liquorice in the air and looked up.

The young man shifted his legs, bracing against the heavy pot, watching through the hole in the ceiling. Just one more step forward and his target would be in place. He had configured the layout of the tiny shop so that his victim would be forced to stand immediately below the hole. Now he slammed all of his weight against the cauldron and swung it over. The bubbling tar lolloped out, decanting more slowly than he’d expected. It dropped into the aluminium funnel he had made for it and fell through the ceiling, down into the shop.

Hall sensed the movement above his head but couldn’t see anything at first. He peered up into the hole. What he discerned made no sense: a kind of wide metal tube with something dark and fiery falling out of it.

The heavy liquid hit him with its full weight, searing and sticking, catching him by surprise and hammering him down to the floor. As it made contact with skin and the material of his shirt it burst into flame, exploding in crusted splashes of orange and black, scattering droplets of fire everywhere.

It poured and poured, spattering all over the shop, catching alight wherever it fell. Satisfied with his work, the man above released the white blizzard from the second bucket.

The gallery had no lights on, and at first the paper blinds stopped any of the early-morning shoppers from looking inside. By the time one of them noticed and stepped forward to see, the fallen tar had already started to cool and harden, sealing Hall to the floor like a king trapped within his own treasure house. The swansdown settled like a sudden snowfall and stuck. The little shop was transformed into an art installation of Icelandic fire as the walls scorched and the paper blinds caught alight, smoke drifting through the fluttering flurry of feathers.

From outside, what people saw made no sense. A fiery maelstrom had been released inside the building. And at the centre of the apocalypse was a fallen golem.

Fraternity DuCaine was the first to arrive at the PCU on Tuesday morning, and caught the incoming message. He had been transferred to the North London Met for the last couple of months, and was anxious to get back to the unit where his older brother had died in the line of duty. As soon as he found out what had happened, he called the detectives and set the day’s events in motion.

‘They don’t want us here,’ Bryant told his partner, trying to stay upright as their taxi roared into Brixton High Street. ‘It’s not our jurisdiction. I told them we had a connection to the Freddie Weeks case.’

‘We do?’ It was news to May. They all leaned as the cab swung a hard right. ‘How?’

‘Method of death,’ answered Bryant cheerfully. ‘You took the call, Fraternity – tell John.’

‘He was burned alive, Mr May.’

The railway bridge that crosses Brixton Road was just ahead. There was a truck pulling out of a bay in front of Marks & Spencer, and it didn’t look as if the taxi was going to brake. ‘Hang on, guv,’ warned the driver, sashaying into the space. May noticed that he was on the phone, drinking a coffee and possibly scanning the headlines of the
Daily Mirror
at the same time.

‘Burned? How common is that in London?’ May asked as he alighted. ‘I mean outside of house fires?’

‘This doesn’t look like a house fire,’ said Fraternity. ‘They’re treating it as suspicious.’

‘Then why isn’t Brixton CID handling it?’

Fraternity pointed to his black face. ‘What do you think?’

‘Oh.’ May got the message. The last thing Brixton wanted to deal with was the murder of a white outsider in a predominantly West Indian community. The area had been gentrified, but a lot of people still suspected that Brixton stood on a racial fault line. With some parts of the press happy to play on the community’s worst fears, it was easier for the CID to pass the ball.

They were barely out of the cab before it launched back into the traffic with a screech. The canopied front avenue of the market had been cordoned off, and as the shop owners argued with local officers, Bryant and May, together with DuCaine, slipped between the barriers.

The market had changed out of all recognition since Bryant was last here. Once it had been filled with counters of dazzling fruits, bejewelled fish and forests of vegetables. Now the shops had largely been replaced by hipster cafés serving Brazilian, Spanish, Mexican and Italian food.

‘Apparently the corner premises have been empty for a few months,’ DuCaine explained as they made their way between the shabby-chic bars. ‘The owner rents it out to pop-up stores. A week ago he got a request for a one-week rental, and agreed so long as he was paid cash-in-hand. The next morning he received an envelope containing money. The renter left no name and his address checked out false. He made the call from a chuckaway.’

They were greeted by a local officer who led them to the corner shop. ‘Where’s the rest of your team?’ asked May, looking around.

‘We were told to send them away,’ the officer replied.

‘By whom?’

‘A superintendent over at the City of London, sir.’

‘Darren Link,’ said Bryant. ‘He’ll be anxious to stay out of this. A busy market, officers running all over it, press sniffing around, all the things he doesn’t want to deal with right now.’

‘What about witnesses?’

‘We’ve been told to leave that to you, sir. I don’t think even your team has seen something like this before.’ The officer ushered them inside the acrid, smoking shop. Curious shoppers tried to peer in but were swiftly moved away.