Bryant & May - The Burning Man (12 page)

‘By which I assume you mean that the idea of children taking money from strangers on the street somehow risks turning them into rent boys,’ said Bryant, ‘a logic which surpasses even my notoriously flimsy mind.’

‘No, mate,’ said the cabbie, ‘it’s the God’s honest truth.’

‘I think you’ll find that the truth is somewhat more prosaic,’ said Bryant, ever the enemy of misinformation. ‘With the retail ascendency of Halloween, children’s spending power is used up before Guy Fawkes Night, which falls just five days later. It doesn’t help that sometimes Diwali also lands in the same time period.’

‘You lot think you know everything,’ grumbled the cabbie, turning off his speaker and bringing the conversation to an end.

Bryant hated being stopped in mid-flow. ‘Obviously the events are utterly different,’ he explained. ‘Guido Fawkes was from York. The name was adopted while he was fighting for Catholic Spain against the Protestant Dutch. The night named after him was intended to celebrate the
prevention
of insurrection, but it’s become the reverse. Halloween is actually a Christian remembrance of the dead. The term means “Saint’s Night”. And it has nothing to do with dressing up as a zombie.’

‘So perhaps Guy Fawkes Night was on course to die out anyway, at least until the anti-capitalist movement began.’ May finished his empanada and balled the paper bag. ‘You know that comic book
V for Vendetta
?’

‘The last comic I bought was
The Beano
.’

‘You missed something special. It was back in the early eighties. I don’t think even the artist and writer realized what they’d done by creating it.’

‘The early eighties hasn’t come on my radar yet,’ said Bryant. ‘Far too recent.’

‘Well, the book is about a modern-day Guy Fawkes setting out to destroy Parliament. The traditional Guy Fawkes mask was streamlined and became a modern protest symbol. So, although your “penny for the Guy” disappeared, his face re-emerged as the spirit of insurrection, and now it has spread right across the planet.’

‘You’re telling me that a celebration of rebellion that survived for over four centuries owes its revival to a
comic book
?’ said Bryant, amazed.

‘It was also a film,’ said May.

Bryant was sorting it out in his head. ‘Let me see if I’ve got this right. The protestors wear masks which were created by a studio to sell their film and were probably made somewhere cheap, like Brazil or China. So it’s the first worldwide anti-capitalist revolution to be funded by a capitalist franchise.’

‘Yes, well, there is that aspect of it,’ May agreed. ‘There’s paradox at the heart of every protest.’

‘This is incredibly depressing news.’ Bryant shook his head sadly. ‘The revolution is not only being televised, it’s being licensed.’

‘Things have become more complicated since you and I were kids.’ May sighed. ‘These are conservative times. Everyone’s constantly being told to tighten their belts and find work. Our prime minister made another Orwellian speech last month, warning the young that austerity’s going to last forever.’

The cabbie, who had either the ability to lip-read or poor soundproofing, clicked his speaker on once more. ‘Yeah, he made it in a white bow-tie and waistcoat, standing in front of a golden throne at some bloody business dinner,’ he said. ‘Now there’s riots all over the place and where is he? In Barbados on some kind of fact-finding mission. There’s a demonstration going on in Parliament Square.’

‘Is it connected with the banking scandal?’ Bryant asked, leaning forward.

‘No, I mean there’s a demonstration going on in Parliament Square so I’m going via Birdcage Walk,’ said the driver. ‘I don’t know why the Queen lives in Victoria; it’s a bloody rough neighbourhood.’

‘You’d think there would be raging mobs burning down Parliament by now,’ Bryant said as they alighted in King’s Cross. ‘And you wonder why I’m glad that people are at last doing something.’

‘But what exactly are they doing?’ asked May, swiping their way into the PCU. ‘Chucking a few petrol bombs? Burning an innocent kid alive and pouring hot tar on a banker? When you set out to topple a system, you’d better make sure you have something to replace it with. And another thing: what if the connection between Weeks and Hall is just coincidental?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. The method links them. That’s why we were summoned.’

‘No, you and Fraternity made the connection, nobody else. It’s what you always do.’

‘Then why are they letting us take it on?’ asked Bryant.

‘Because they obviously don’t want the case! A murder in Brixton? If it’s fumbled, there’ll be attacks from both sides and it’ll take down anyone associated with it.’

Bryant girded himself for the climb to the first floor. ‘You see, that’s the problem,’ he told May. ‘I’m not as devious-minded as you. I didn’t consider the area. In 1873 Vincent van Gogh was living in Brixton, did you know that? One of those odd London facts that seems so unlikely, like Lenin and Marx in Soho, Poe in Stoke Newington or Rimbaud and Verlaine sharing a flat in Camden. Hard to imagine, isn’t it? Van Gogh might have painted
Electric Avenue at Dusk
. There’s something quite Jamaican about his use of colour. Wouldn’t that have been wonderful?’

May felt as if he was going mad. Then he realized,
No, it’s not me, it’s Arthur
. ‘By the way,’ he asked, ‘where did you go last night?’

‘When last night?’ Bryant paused halfway up to catch his breath until May gave him a gentle push.

‘After you left the unit. I called you and there was no answer.’

‘What did you want?’

‘To ask you a question, but that’s not important. Alma didn’t know where you were, either.’

‘I wasn’t anywhere.’

‘You walked home?’ May knew that it was no more than a fifteen-minute stroll from the PCU to Bryant’s flat, but according to Alma he had not arrived for another two hours.

Bryant carried on up the stairs. ‘I remember now, I stopped for a bag of chips.’

‘Where exactly?’

‘Hang on, let me get to my office and I’ll tell you.’ Entering the room, he turned the pockets of his overcoat out on to his desk and revealed an old threepenny bit, a pencil with a 1970s troll on top, a conker, a sherbet lemon out of its wrapper, a flick-knife, three pairs of glasses, two hearing-aid batteries, a third-class train ticket for Windsor dated 9 June 1953 and a membership card for the Pentonville Model Battleship Society. ‘I must have lost the receipt,’ he said, surprised.

‘Only there was a report of somebody fitting your exact description sitting on the kerb outside the St Pancras Grand Hotel last night. The doorman called me. When he went back to check, he couldn’t find anyone.’

‘Well, that was hardly likely to have been me, was it?’ said Bryant indignantly.

May meant to ask his partner why he had been planning a trip to Windsor one week after the coronation, but another thought assailed him. The doorman saw them pass the hotel nearly every day, and was unlikely to have made a mistake. Bryant was concealing something.

On Tuesday afternoon, Giles Kershaw found himself with two scorched corpses in his mortuary. ‘We’re not a burns unit,’ he complained, leading Dan Banbury back to the autopsy room. ‘I’m not really equipped to deal with this. Fire examination’s a pretty intricate discipline.’

‘I know a bit about it,’ said Banbury. ‘There was a fire officer named Carter at the Weeks site. She’s offered to provide us with advice.’

‘I think we’ll need her,’ said Kershaw. ‘I’ve spared you the sight of Mr Hall. A lot of his skin came off with the tar. It had set like concrete.’ Even with the extraction fan on and the bodies hidden from sight, the place reeked with the smell of road-surfacing material. As there were only two small high windows at the ends of the room, the overhead LED panels were always illuminated, and their light gave the living a ghastly anaemic pallor.

‘It’s funny, a bloke like you doing this.’ Banbury sniffed, looking around at the laden anatomy station and the scrubbed steel cadaver tables.

‘What do you mean?’ Kershaw pulled off his hairnet and flicked blond curls out of his eyes.

‘Well, you being so posh, friends in high places, shooting grouse, dining on larks’ tongues and all that. Seems like an unlikely place for you to have ended up.’

‘I always loved biology.’ Kershaw shrugged. ‘The girlfriend’s parents aren’t keen, of course. Nor is she, much, especially when I have to meet her from work and she can smell chemicals on me. Did you find any presence of unburned fuels or solvents at the Brixton site?’

‘I didn’t really know what I was looking for,’ Banbury admitted.

‘Liquid stains, irregular pooling marks, anything like that?’

‘Giles, it was fairly obvious how he died. He was covered in flaming tar. He didn’t exactly need a fistful of firelighters chucked on him.’ Banbury picked up a steel instrument, realized that it was for hooking something out of cavities and quickly set it down. ‘I could see that some of the bitumen had dripped through the floorboards, but I didn’t think it could reignite. We should have used hydrocarbon detectors to trace any concentrations of agents used to speed up the fire.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Kershaw.

‘The shop caught fire again right after the body was removed.’

‘No fire officer?’

‘No one at the local nick considered it worth dousing the site. It didn’t burn for long because the bloke in the café opposite raised the alarm, but the smoke messed up the interior, making our job a lot harder. The tar had already set and the arsonist had cleared out his stuff apart from the heavy equipment in the upper storage area.’

‘Surely the main purpose wasn’t to commit arson,’ said Kershaw. ‘It was to kill someone.’

‘We don’t know that. I mean, it’s not exactly a bullet to the head, is it? Standing someone underneath a hole in the ceiling and pouring hot tar on them? It’s a bit random.’

‘Maybe not as much as you think, old chum.’ Kershaw checked the screen on his desk, which listed the contents of the victim’s wallet. ‘Hall worked in Dexter Cornell’s bank. He couldn’t be attacked at his office so I guess he had to be lured outside. He lived on the City Road, so he was hardly likely to be caught hanging around any dark alleys. That means the killer knew a bit about his tastes.’

‘Good point,’ Banbury agreed. ‘Collectors will go anywhere. You should see how my lad is with video games. A rare one comes available and he’ll travel miles to get his mitts on it quicker.’

‘Quite so. You got a good look at the shop, though?’

‘Yeah. A single white-painted room with half a dozen posters on hooks. Typically arty and minimalist. Probably took less than half an hour to set up. I’m trying to find out where our killer got the posters from. He didn’t leave them behind, but passers-by saw them on the walls. The tar scorched the hardwood floor, it was that hot.’

‘I’ve run prelims,’ Kershaw said, ‘and it’s pretty clear that Mr Hall suffocated. His burns are horrific. The stuff got into his throat and nasal passages. Can you get chromatography on the burned particles?’

‘I can put in a request for an outsource budget. I’m not sure we’ll find anything more than I already know.’

‘Which is?’

‘Tar is obtained from organic materials, through what we call destructive distillation.’ Banbury picked up a small black chunk and turned it over in his hand. It was one of many that had been removed from the body. ‘It’s a mixture of hydrocarbons and free carbon. This one is the type used by road-menders. It’s a viscous form of petroleum mixed with aggregate particles. We’d have to wait for spectromatic results to be sure. I tested its solubility with carbon disulfide and compared it to standard road-asphalt emulsion, which has a lower boiling point than traditional tar.’

‘You can do that at the unit?’ Kershaw sounded surprised.

‘Mr Bryant’s got his old equipment set up on the top floor. Raymond doesn’t know it’s there, which is just as well as we don’t have any safety certificates for it. I reheated a sample of the tar and it got pretty runny, which meant that our man was able to heat it quickly and pour it with relative ease. It was capable of igniting anything with a similarly low burn-point, and stuck like buggery to everything it touched, including Hall’s hair and flesh. But I guess it also sealed his nose. I’ll send you copies of the splash patterns. In liquid form it’s also dense, and turns back into a solid very quickly. I guess once he started pouring it kept on coming down, and knocked the victim to his knees. His attacker was able to direct the flow, and poured it over the whole of his upper body until he was stuck to the boards.’

‘That would explain the bruising on the kneecaps,’ said Kershaw. ‘Which brings us to the topping. Why would his assailant cut open a pillow and scatter its contents into the room afterwards? That’s the act of someone who’s not in control of their mental faculties.’

‘I’d say it was quite the reverse,’ said Banbury. ‘Your killer was totally in control. He tarred and feathered his victim, and did a bloody good job of it.’ He smiled. ‘I’m sure Mr Bryant will have a field day with that.’