Bryant & May - The Burning Man (32 page)

‘What about John?’ asked Longbright.

Bryant sat up with a start. ‘No, especially not John. John mustn’t know, do you understand? I have to protect him. I have to protect all of you.’

‘You’re saying that you’re going to go rogue without any unit support?’ Renfield rubbed at the bridge of his nose. ‘How will that work?’

‘If I need something I’ll call you on your private mobiles.’

Longbright raised a tentative hand. ‘How will we know if—’

‘If I’m acting strangely for the case or actually going bananas? You won’t. That’s why it’s called the Hamlet Tactic. This is my swan song, Janice. If you don’t think you can do this, you have to tell me
now
.’

‘We can do it,’ said Longbright, looking to Renfield for confirmation.

‘Our job is to protect the public from danger,’ insisted Bryant. ‘This time I have to protect the public from themselves.’

‘I don’t know how you even start doing that,’ said Renfield.

‘No, but I do.’ Bryant knocked back the remains of his tea. ‘Now if you’ll kindly inform me where I live, I’ll head home and get some sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a big day.’

‘OK,’ said Longbright. ‘I’ll call a cab.’

‘Are you the only two left here tonight?’ Bryant asked.

‘Yes, why?’ Longbright glanced at Renfield.

‘There’s something I need you to do before you knock off.’

‘What?’ asked Renfield.

‘It’s a boring job,’ Bryant warned. ‘Colin and Meera usually handle it.’

‘Not bin duty,’ moaned Longbright, sinking down into her chair with a groan. ‘Or worse, data searches.’

Bryant pointed at the computers. ‘I can tell you what you’re looking for.’

‘And there I was feeling all warm and motherly towards you,’ complained Longbright.

The building that houses the City of London Police Headquarters, on the corner of Love Lane and Wood Street, is so blandly innocuous that it encourages suspicion. Are there currency-laundering Swiss financiers operating behind this blank fascia? Do its tinted windows shield a cabal of disgraced politicians plotting their revenge on Westminster? Is this where deposed dictators and expunged Russian oligarchs plan their secret return to power? Or is there an overweight civil servant wedged behind an absurdly large desk trying to get the plastic wrapper off a bacon sandwich?

‘It’s very simple; we have no evidence of insider trading on behalf of Mr Cornell,’ said Leslie Faraday, searching for a paper knife. ‘He seems a bastion of respectability to me. I’ve always admired anyone who could juggle figures, never my strong point. Cornell knew the bank was sailing close to the wind – apparently their cash flow was rocky for a long time – and he acknowledges he’s at least partly to blame. But you can’t send someone to jail for incompetence, otherwise we’d all be inside, wouldn’t we?’ He tore ineffectually at the wrapper, mangling the sandwich in the process. Arthur Bryant gave his partner a weary look. ‘So unless you can prove that the news transmitted itself from Mr Cornell to the directors while they were all locked in a meeting room for the day, you have nothing. And that’s what I’ll have to report back to the Home Office.’

‘If I take you there and show you how it was done, and give you the evidence to indict Cornell, would you be prepared to overlook how I came by the information?’ asked Bryant, knowing that DuCaine’s illicitly shot footage would not be admissible in court.

‘That depends. You see, it’s not really up to me.’ Faraday eyed his mutilated breakfast with the longing of a dog for its lead. ‘But I suppose if I had a look at what you’ve got, I might be able to—’ His speech decelerated so suddenly that the detectives could actually watch his thoughts backing up. ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘If you can prove that Mr Cornell contacted the directors, we may have a deal.’ Bryant had deliberately allowed Faraday to see a way of claiming credit for the arrest.

‘Then let’s go.’ May had the false keenness of a man who had been given no indication of what to expect in the next few minutes. At times like this he felt like an actor, wondering what his motivation was while waiting for words to be placed in his mouth.

They took a car from the CoL pool even though the bank was just a few streets away and Friday morning had dawned dry, a miracle in November.

‘What are you up to?’ May hissed at his partner as Faraday went off to find a driver.

‘I consider myself something of a locked-room buff, as you know,’ replied Bryant, speaking as a man who regularly entered his car by rotating a bent pastry fork in the door jamb, ‘and it occurred to me that what we had here was a classic locked-room puzzle.’

May thought for a moment, but nothing came. ‘Kindly explain.’

‘Last week the three directors went up to the fourth-floor boardroom. They remained locked in there from ten a.m. until four p.m. What was so important that these three had to be sequestered in such a fashion for so long? According to Janice, they were planning a staff restructure. The minuted documents they took from the boardroom at the end of the afternoon attest to this. Fraternity noticed a closed-circuit camera in the ceiling and Dan tracked down the footage.’ Bryant’s eyes narrowed. ‘Guess what it shows?’

‘How can I guess?’

‘
Nothing
. Not a flicker of anything interesting, just three middle-aged businessmen in expensive suits sitting around a table, two on one side, one on the other, talking business and making notes. During the whole time they were in the room, nobody made or received any phone calls, and the door to the hall was never opened. They just talked and wrote. Nobody did anything unusual at all.’

‘Where was Cornell during this?’

‘On the ground floor at the front of the building, entirely surrounded by other members of staff. He was told about the collapse of the Shanghai deal by his Kenyan law team at eleven fifty-five a.m., and we have that call logged. So I worked on the supposition that between noon and four p.m. Cornell somehow managed to alert the directors to the fact that the deal had gone sour. But how? He wasn’t left alone during all that time. He and his team even went to lunch together. Look out, Lardy’s back.’

Faraday had returned with a set of keys. ‘There’s no driver available,’ he reported, ‘so can one of you drive? I can’t, I’m afraid – lost my licence. Some bell-tinkling twerp of a cyclist got himself tangled under my bumper on Wimbledon Common.’

May snatched up the keys before his partner could volunteer his special brand of vehicle operation, which involved mysterious hand signals, acoustic parking, refuting traffic lights, baiting wardens, scraping other vehicles and conducting arguments with pedestrians, signposts, kerbs, lorry drivers and, on one all-too-memorable occasion, a man carrying a crate of frozen ducks.

The logical route to their destination would have been to pass Bank and Monument stations, then Fenchurch Street, but with the police barricades fast becoming a permanent addition to the financial district, they were forced to tack back and forth around London Wall on the only available route left.

May made sure that his partner was sitting beside him. ‘Are you certain you know what you’re doing?’ he whispered. Bryant tapped the side of his snub nose and said nothing.

The entrance to the Findersbury Bank still showed evidence of the petrol-bomb attack, and although a half-hearted attempt had been made to clean the surround, it had since been daubed with skulls and crossbones and splashes of red paint. Instead of a venerable and trusted financial institution, the bank looked like a derelict ghost train. Bryant had told no one but DuCaine that he had stolen Dexter Cornell’s swipe cards, so he waited while a young woman met them and arranged admittance.

‘Are you honestly suggesting that Cornell got word to the directors through four concrete floors?’ asked Faraday, pacing about.

‘I thought it was impossible at first,’ Bryant answered. ‘All those details about the Chinese shares and Kenya and them pulling out of the proposed merger and leaving the stocks exposed and the likelihood of a collapse in the cash flow and heaven knows what else. But then I remembered that the directors knew all this. They had everything they needed to know. The only single piece of information they were missing was: Would the deal happen before the deadline or would it fall through? And as soon as I realized that, it became like the election of the new Pope. Would there be white smoke or black smoke?’ He rooted about in his pocket, pulled something sticky off his mobile and thumped out a number. ‘Hello, Fraternity, are you ready? Be so kind as to do it now, would you?’

Faraday went over to the window, frowning. ‘Are we supposed to see something happen?’

‘They never went over to the windows,’ May pointed out.

‘That’s right,’ Bryant agreed. ‘You can sit down over here and you’ll still be able to see. Remember, Cornell knew that the room was covered by CCTV, so he couldn’t do anything that would show up on camera or arouse any kind of suspicion.’

Faraday stretched his bulk on tiptoe and examined the glass globe in the ceiling. ‘That thing films a 360-degree picture. Are you telling me he sent them a message that couldn’t be picked up by a high-definition camera lens? What was it, some kind of audio signal?’

‘No,’ said Bryant, easing himself into a seat and raising his eyes with a smile. ‘Look.’

There on the ceiling was a bright rectangle with a broad X at its centre. ‘X as in no entry, not happening, no go,’ said Bryant unnecessarily. ‘If the deal had been approved, the X would probably have been halved to a single downstroke, a tick for yes. It’s funny, you never know what’s in a London street. Take the headquarters of the City of London Police in Love Lane. You know what’s underneath that building opposite you, Mr Faraday, the tower of St Alban’s?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Faraday distractedly, staring up at the cross.

‘There’s a white-tiled stable full of horses. Once a month, London’s only remaining farrier comes along and fits the police mounts with new horseshoes. He has a mobile furnace and a portable anvil.’ Bryant rose and waved a hand at the view. ‘And on the ground floor of
that
building opposite is a venerable old wine bar, scruffy and stuffy, with real-ale casks and barrel tables in a basement. Cornell popped out for a quick lunch on the day in question, just as the sun came overhead and into the street at noon. He went across the road with two of his mates, and angled the upper window pane so that it reflected on to the boardroom ceiling, leaving it in place while he had a sandwich and a glass of wine. I imagine he’d been in there the night before and had stuck two strips of tape on the glass. That’s the great thing about city pubs. Nobody ever notices what you do in them. He must have spotted the light on the boardroom ceiling before and it gave him the idea. And the best part was, the CCTV couldn’t pick it up because it was mounted into the same surface as the projection.’

‘But there’s no sunlight out there right now,’ objected Faraday.

‘You’re right, it’s too early,’ Bryant agreed. ‘Which is why my lad is down there shining a torch at the window to replicate the sunlight.’

‘All right, you’ve proved your point,’ Faraday conceded, ‘but where’s the proof?’

‘We have a witness,’ said Bryant. ‘One of the barmaids saw Cornell open the window. She’s already given us a statement.’

‘It’ll never hold up in court,’ warned May.

‘Maybe not, but it’ll pin him down for a while.’

‘What do you mean, pin him down?’ asked Faraday, his face a picture of apprehension.

‘I’d say that right now Cornell is our main suspect.’

‘Are you insane?’ Faraday exploded. ‘He’s at the centre of one of the most intense media spotlights ever turned on a human being in this city. How would he ever think that this was a good time to get away with
murder
?’

‘If he could pull it off,’ said Bryant placidly, ‘I’d say it was the perfect time. Look down there. What does that say?’ He pointed to the street sign on the wall beside the bank.

‘Crutched Friars,’ said May. ‘I always wondered about the name. Something to do with a monastery?’

‘Exactly so. Over there’ – he waved his walking stick at the other side of the road – ‘was the House of Crutched Friars, the Order of the Holy Cross, founded in 1298. Underneath that building in 1842 they discovered a group of Roman goddesses bearing baskets of fruit, which is why the site became holy.’

‘Where are we going with this, Bryant?’ begged Faraday impatiently.

The detective was not to be hurried. ‘During the dissolution of the monasteries, Cromwell’s emissaries caught the Prior of Crutched Friars
in flagrante delicto
, and down came the hammer on that corrupt little brotherhood. The church was turned into a carpenter’s yard, and the friars’ hall became a glasshouse. In 1575 a suspicious fire broke out and destroyed everything but the stone walls. Many said that it was arson, an act of Catholic revenge after the Marian Persecutions, when Mary Tudor had burned two hundred and eighty-eight Protestants alive.’

‘Are you saying
that
was somehow connected with
this
?’