Full Dark House (35 page)

‘I don’t see what I can do.’

‘You’ve got Davenport’s ear. You can protect us if you stay.’

‘I already told Bryant I was going.’

‘Then eat your words. No one will think less of you. Tell him you’ll stay.’ Forthright followed his gaze to the river beyond the railing. ‘I came back, didn’t I? Swallowed my pride. I was supposed to get married. I could have kept away, but I didn’t.’

Biddle looked at her. ‘Why not?’

‘Mr Bryant needs me.’ She checked her watch. ‘God, I can’t remember the last time I ate. You must be starving.’

‘There’s a decent workman’s café near Coin Street.’

‘I need sausages. You’re allowed a hearty breakfast on the morning of your execution, aren’t you? I’m in charge of the unit’s petty cash, and you won’t shop me, will you? You can tell me more about this monster you saw in the rafters.’

They passed a skinny brown nag drinking noisily from a corporation horse trough. Forthright paused to give its milkman a cigarette. The poor man looked on his uppers, as thin as his horse and the empty wire crates on his cart. It was the first animal she had seen in days; she wondered if they were being taken out of the city.

Biddle waited for her, then they resumed walking in comfortable silence through the miasmic mist that ebbed over the Embankment, down to the roads where daylight and life were returning to the city.

Arthur Bryant gently placed the framed photograph of Nathalie, the one he had taken by the river that terrible afternoon, into a cardboard box, added his carved Tibetan skull, tossed in some incense sticks, some mystical diagrams of Solomon’s Temple, several beeswax candles, a gramophone record of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s
Te Deum,
two volumes of criminal records from Newgate Gaol, a three-dimensional bronze model of the Kabalistic Pentagram of the Absolute, a rare limited edition of Seymour’s
British Witchcraft and Demonology
and a paperback copy of
RAF Slang Made Easy,
then closed the lid and bound it with thick brown tape. Set beside each other, the three crates contained almost everything he owned. It’s not a lot to show for my life so far, he thought gloomily.

He propped the letter of resignation, addressed to Davenport, against May’s desk lamp. He wanted to leave before his partner arrived. He felt that he had passed the point beyond which no amount of apology and retraction could return him, and he did not wish to place John in the embarrassing situation of having to defend him to their superior.

Perhaps it was for the best. He wasn’t cut out to be a politician. It was clear now that the unit was little more than a public relations exercise. For a while he had believed that the old-money occupants of the HO could be superseded by a new breed of experimentalists for whom the past held no loyalties, that brave new rules would operate throughout British government, from the lowliest town council to the offices of Whitehall. Now he doubted that the war would make any difference to government at all.

Bryant loved London. He had been born in Whitechapel, in the lowliest of circumstances, and had grown up on the streets of Wapping and Borough and Mile End. He was proud of having got this far. But now the city was changing. Its sense of good cheer was being chipped away by bombardment in a war that Neville Chamberlain had insisted would never happen.

He was going to load the boxes into a cab if he could find one, but remembered that he had packed some hefty mementos, including a paving stone that held the burned-in handprint of Jack the Ripper, and decided to have them delivered instead.

There was no place for his arcane studies in the police force of the future. He thought of his friends in the Camden Town Coven, and their arch-rivals, the Southwark Supernaturals. He gathered together the scrawled addresses of the Mystic Savoyards and the Prometheus League, the emergency numbers of the Insomnia Squad’s sleepless academics, the diary that contained lists of assorted primitives, paranormalists, idiot savants, mind-readers and madmen, all available to the unit if someone only trusted him enough to use them wisely.

All for the best, he told himself. John was young and bright. He might be able to modernize the unit and bring fresh technology into their casework once Bryant himself was out of the way. They were clearly doing something wrong if they couldn’t keep lads like Sidney Biddle interested enough to stay on.

He unclipped a small glass case of poisonous caterpillars from the wall behind his desk and emptied it into the bin. There was a time when he would have taken them out of their case and dropped them in Oswald Finch’s teapot, but the spirit had gone out of him.

Bryant saw now that he had willed a culprit into existence because he wanted to be challenged. The real solution would doubtless prove to be rather ordinary, not peculiar or paradoxical at all, a disgruntled employee, a youth filled with such directionless anger that he could equally have decided to attack the staff of a bus depot or an insurance office. Grey crimes for a grey nation.

It was the second time he had failed. Overcoming his guilt about Nathalie’s death had been tough, and just when the world was starting to make sense again he saw that he hadn’t made sense of it at all. He knew he would have to write a formal apology to Renalda.

He looked about the desktop to see if there was anything he had forgotten, and saw that the drawing of the statue he had deciphered as the key to a mythological conundrum was just another memento. He carefully folded it into a square, tucked it into his tattered briefcase and snapped the lock shut.

Pausing in the doorway, he took one last look around the room he and May had shared for the past few days, and wondered about the cases they might have solved together.

Then he quietly pulled the door shut behind him.

53

TOUCHING THE TORTOISE

Mementos and conundrums, all the cases we solved together, thought May. It was always Bryant who had set the puzzles. He himself had just been the faithful sidekick, an anchor of reason to his partner’s flights of fancy. We solved our first case together. I’ll solve our last one if it kills me.

His bandaged leg was swollen and sore. He looked along the crowded platform of the tube station, unpleasantly sweaty even though the day was cold, and waited for the approaching train. He felt his coat pockets. The tortoise; he had left the damned shell in Maggie’s flat, but he wasn’t going back for it now. I’m old, I’m tired and I’ve been stabbed by a ghost, he thought angrily.

Not that he remotely believed in such things. The breadboard had fallen, hitting the handle of the knife. More accidents happened at home than anywhere else. Besides, even if he was a believer it would have made no sense. Why would his best friend return from the grave to hurt him? The only person who could do that now was very much alive.

Except that it wasn’t him . . . unless he had grown fangs . . .

And then he saw the error he had made. He saw how badly he had misread the situation, just as Arthur had all those years before. How guilty he had been of jumping to the same mistaken conclusion.

May pushed his way back up the stairs of Camden Town tube station, fighting the onrushing flow of travellers. He needed to obtain a signal for his mobile. Outside, wedged into a litter-strewn corner, he punched out Alma Sorrowbridge’s number. He waited for fourteen rings, but there was no answer. The shadow of the buildings opposite had begun to reach this side of the street. He looked at the keypad of his mobile, and was about to try her again when it rang.

‘Grandad, is that you?’

‘April?’

His granddaughter couldn’t have picked a worse time to call, but it was good to hear her voice.

‘I’ve been meaning to ring you for days. I was so sorry to hear about Mr Bryant. He was always nice to me. You must be—’

‘Listen,’ May cut across her, ‘I’m more sorry than you could ever be. Arthur asked me to call you and I didn’t. I’ve been too wrapped up in my own problems. How are you? Have you been able to get out at all?’

‘A little. It’s tough. Open spaces still do my head in, but I’m handling it.’

‘Remember what the doctor said, one step at a time.’

‘I know, but I want to go back to work,’ April complained. ‘I’ve seen enough of these walls to last a lifetime. I could do with some advice.’

‘Sure. I’ll come and see you.’

He wanted to tell her he was ashamed, that he would make up the time they had lost. Instead he could only promise to ring her again in a day or so. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

‘It’s funny speaking to you at this hour. It’s the time I always think of you.’

May was puzzled. ‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Oh, you know. You always took a walk with Mr Bryant at sunset. It was the only real ritual you had.’

‘I suppose it was a ritual, wasn’t it?’ May was amazed he hadn’t thought of it earlier. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow, sweetheart. There’s something I have to put right.’

And he was off along the pavement, moving around the crowds and into the road, the pain in his leg forgotten, breaking into a run as he speed-dialled Janice Longbright’s number, praying that she would pick up the phone.

54

FULL DARK HOUSE

‘There’s nothing to report that a layman can’t see with a cursory examination of the body,’ said young Oswald Finch, rinsing his hands at the deep ceramic sink. The remains of Valerie Marchmont, Public Opinion, lay under an ordinary bedsheet; the army had requisitioned the pathology unit’s entire supply of rubberized covers.

‘It’s the same as the others. There are no second-agent marks on the skin or clothing, just a few fragments of corroded metal at the contact point. I presume the iron rod that passed through her head was slightly rusted. Some of the rust was scraped off by the edges of the skull. Not much point in making a toxicological examination, but I’ll do one if you want. The damage is consistent with what you’d expect to find in an accident of this kind. You see wounds like this all over London these days.’

‘Dr Runcorn has been over the stage equipment but he’s come up with nothing,’ said May, leaning against the sink with his hands thrust into his pockets. ‘The skycloth came down a fraction later and slightly further over to centre stage than it was supposed to, and the revolve stuck for a moment. The stagehands reckon they oiled the revolve before the performance but say it still judders occasionally.’

‘An unfortunate combination of factors. Although I daresay young Mr Bryant would have us believe something different if he was here.’ Finch rubbed a lotion into his fingers that was supposed to remove the smell of chemicals. ‘To be honest, it surprises me that Bryant could be so
completely
wrong. I mean, we’ve had our disagreements, and he’s certainly going to make mistakes during a time like this when you can’t get your hands on basic equipment, but there’s usually something vaguely right about his thinking. Are we having a farewell party?’

‘I don’t think any of us could stand it,’ said May despondently. ‘His landlady hasn’t seen him, only his boxes. He’s not been home for a change of clothes. It’s been two days now. I wondered if he might have gone to stay with relatives.’

‘He could be at his mother’s in Bethnal Green Road. Forthright tells me the house next door to Mrs Bryant’s got bombed out and she’s worried about her walls falling in. I know he wanted to help her move somewhere safer. She’s not on the telephone but I daresay someone in the local nick could run round.’ Finch leaned back on a stool and administered drops to his right pupil. The atmosphere of formaldehyde left him with perpetually red-rimmed eyelids.

‘Do you think Davenport will keep us open with Bryant gone?’ asked May.

‘That’s a tough one, seeing as he set you chaps up in the first place. It could be construed as failure on his part. He’ll probably merge you with one of the other divisions: fraud or this special squad that’s been set up to deal with looters. At least it’ll keep you afloat. Did Forthright mention that your Mr Biddle has had a change of heart? He’s decided to stay on after all.’

‘That’s good,’ May said. ‘Arthur thought he might come round. What happened to the tree he gave you?’

‘Bit of a sore point, that. It was too big for the bureau so I took it home, and now the wife won’t talk to me.’

‘Why?’

‘Her cat ate one of the leaves and died. She tried to chop it down with a kitchen knife and it leaked some kind of poisonous sap on her. The doctor reckons her arm should stay bandaged for at least a week, which is inconvenient because she plays the organ. I have a suspicion,’ he said, blinking the drops from his left eye, ‘that it was one of Bryant’s pranks. He really was the most impossible man.’

‘He’s not dead,’ said May.

‘Well, he is missing,’ responded Finch, dabbing his eyes on a flannel and blinking.

May was surprised by the way his partner had responded to failure, but his first duty was to the case. ‘He’ll turn up,’ he said unsurely. ‘You might try liaising a little more with Dr Runcorn rather than telling me you can’t find anything. Four dead, one vanished, a few near misses. I need physical proof fast, or we’ll all be out of a job. A couple of heel marks, no fingerprints, no real murder weapons to speak of, it’s not much to go on. You’d think we were dealing with someone who doesn’t exist in the real world.’

The annoying thing was that, although he had not believed Bryant’s explanation, his partner was still the only one to come up with any suggestions at all.

He looked in on Forthright and Biddle, who were continuing to check customs information from air, sea and freight terminals for the whereabouts of Jan Petrovic. At dusk he walked through brown smoke billowing across Lincoln’s Inn Fields, searching the darkness of the unsettled trees as he tried to work out how they had gone so wrong. Crows called loudly from the lower branches as he passed beneath them, their old eyes glittering between the leaves. An elderly man was hoeing a muddy trough through an allotment, one of many that had been dug across the once-perfect lawns.

Just when he was free to follow traditional procedures, May tried to imagine how Bryant would consider the evidence. Minos Renalda was dead, and with him died a motive for revenge. Forthright had confirmed that Andreas was a witness to his brother’s burial. The body had also been identified by close friends and relatives.