Full Dark House (34 page)

‘Which is what?’

‘To take revenge on his brother for the death of his wife. Revenge, John—that most classic of all motives in mythology. He can’t do it so long as he thinks the Muses guard him. So he’s showing them who’s boss. He’s humiliated them and now he’s sacrificing them. The whole play has been set up just to do that.’

‘And the Muses will let him without striking him dead with a thunderbolt? What about the creature? The terrible face? Others have seen it at night in the theatre.’

‘Masks and make-up. The prop room is filled with disguises. They’re used in virtually every scene of the production. They must be lying around all over the place. A Greek tragedy mask? Bit of an obvious touch, that.’

‘Do you know what I think?’ said May, his voice cracking with anger. ‘You’re deranged. In a week of utter lunacies, you’ve finally lost your mind. Do you have any idea how insane all of this sounds?’

Bryant’s eyes widened even further. ‘That’s why I didn’t want to tell you, not until I was sure my theory was watertight.’

‘I think
you’re
tight.’

‘No, no. I have you to thank for seeing clearly. You’re part of the maieutic process.’

‘The
what
?’

‘Socratic midwifery.’ He shook out his fingers in frustration. ‘You know, the easing out of ideas. You help things out of my head, things that were already there but unformed. It’s because you’re so sensible, you’re like the control part of an experiment.’

‘All right, let’s confront Andreas Renalda and you’ll see how crazy this—delusion of yours is.’

At the top of the drive, the magnate’s housekeeper had heard the car doors slamming and now stood in the doorway to the entrance hall. ‘Mr Renalda is getting ready for bed,’ she warned as they approached. ‘He won’t want to see anyone.’

‘We’ll wait downstairs while he dresses,’ said Bryant, loosening his scarf and walking into the hall. ‘Can we get some strong tea? It’s been a long night.’

After a few minutes Andreas Renalda entered the lounge. He was dressed in a blue silk dressing gown, and was drying his neck with a towel. The steel calipers were still fitted to his legs, and May saw now that they were bolted through the flesh of his shins, deep into the twisted bones.

‘It’s late and I’m very tired,’ he warned. ‘I thought we had finished speaking.’ Renalda’s housekeeper helped him into a seat opposite the detectives. He looked thunderously from one face to the other. ‘Good Jesus in Hell. What has happened now?’

‘Public Opinion. The stage revolve jammed and she was hit in the head.’

‘Is she hurt?’

‘Um, actually she’s dead.’

Renalda swore in Greek. It sounded as though he said ‘God in a gondola’. ‘Did anybody see her die?’

‘Quite a few people. The stage was full—’

‘I mean in the audience. Did the audience see anything wrong?’

‘No, the cancan number covered it.’

He thought for a moment. ‘I am not without heart, you understand, but I must think of the show.’

‘I think I understand very well,’ said Bryant.

‘There have been mechanical problems with the traps and flies ever since my company moved into the theatre. The equipment had not been touched in half a century. We cannot get any new parts. The company that made them is now making armaments. Every spare scrap of metal is going to the war effort.’

‘Whatever caused Miss Marchmont’s death, the theatre is closed as of this moment,’ Bryant warned.

Renalda’s face set. ‘I think not.’ He hurled his towel aside. ‘Until you come up with proof that these misfortunes are the result of negligence, I can promise you that I have the necessary paperwork to keep the show open.’

‘You’re insured, so what difference does it make?’ asked Bryant. ‘I’ll let the press in and turn the case over to Westminster Council. At that point, your personal involvement in this will surface.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Renalda, his anger growing. ‘You know I have nothing to do with these tragedies.’

‘Arthur, are you sure you want to do this?’ asked May, wincing.

‘I’m fine, John.’ Bryant drew a deep breath. ‘Andreas Ares Renalda, I am arresting you for the murders of Tanya Capistrania, Charles Senechal, Zachary Darvell and Valerie Marchmont, and for the abduction of Jan Petrovic.’

Renalda’s face transformed from anger to amazement. A nerve in his neck blew some kind of synaptic fuse and started making his mouth twitch.

Breathing ever more deeply, Bryant explained his hypothesis. It took him a quarter of an hour to do so, and when he finished he sat back, exhausted from the effort. He waited for Renalda to explode.

‘All right,’ said the tycoon, in a suspiciously affable tone. ‘This is most amusing.’ He wagged tanned fingers at Bryant as though he was pointing a loaded revolver. ‘The true part of your—what shall we call it?—fable is how my mother protected me from my brother. He was not a bright man, Mr Bryant, no sharper than the average police detective. He believed he could not touch me for fear of something terrible happening to him.’

‘And that’s why you’re taking revenge on him now.’ Bryant was sticking to his guns, May had to give him that. It took guts for a twenty-two-year-old detective to accuse a middle-aged millionaire of multiple murder and abduction.

‘No.’ Renalda laughed politely. ‘Of course not.’

‘Can you prove that?’

‘I do not have to prove it.’ He stared defiantly at Bryant, and a slow, terrible smile spread across his gaunt face. ‘Even if I wanted to take revenge on Minos, I have no way of carrying it out.’

‘Oh, why not?’ asked Bryant.

‘It is common knowledge. Even the most stupid Greek policeman knows about it.’ Andreas Renalda shrugged theatrically. ‘Minos, my brother, is dead. I buried him myself.’

51

THE END OF THE ROAD

‘You honestly thought I would destroy the
Orpheus
production and ruin my company’s reputation to take some kind of warped revenge against my dead brother?’ said Renalda. ‘British police. Too much Agatha Christie, no?’

Bryant wasn’t about to give up without a fight. ‘Can you tell me how you know that Minos is dead?’

‘Well, I saw his eyelids and mouth stitched shut with catgut, and I saw him nailed into a coffin and placed in the ground, then the earth put over the top of him, and the shovels flattening down the earth, if you think that’s proof enough.’

‘How did he die?’

‘He was killed in a car accident near Athens two months before the war started. He had been drinking all day. He lost control of the car and went off the road into a canal. He drowned, and so my wife, in some strange way, is avenged. I saw his body pulled from the wreck and buried in the family cemetery.’

‘It doesn’t make sense that Minos is dead,’ said Bryant, staring down at the floor in confusion.

‘I’m sorry it doesn’t fit your theories. I suppose you can arrange to have his grave reopened if you like—you wouldn’t be able to make yourself any more foolish. My brother’s death is well documented.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Why should I? If you had any connection with your police friends in Europe instead of keeping to yourselves on your funny little island, you would know how many times the press has told the story.’

‘I thought you said you sued them all.’

‘All the ones I knew about, but there were plenty of others. “The cursed family, the child protected by ancient gods.” Journalists scaled the walls of the house to take my picture, they tried to bribe me, harassed me so much that I moved here, where I thought things would be different. The English, so private, so aloof, so secretive. They would leave the memory of my family alone. But no, along come you two, the music-hall comedians. Yes, I am sure that Minos killed my wife, but I am not glad that he suffocated in the filthy waters of a drainage ditch. He was blood of my blood. And I will not allow his memory to be defiled by young men who think too much about the wrong things.’

‘I didn’t mean to imply—’

‘I know exactly what you meant. In your own clumsy way you suggest we are nothing but ignorant pagans. Our private beliefs have been raked over in your
News of the World
. You think I would slaughter my own cast and wreck my production, you arrogant little boy?’ The veins were pulsing in his temples, and he began to shout. ‘You pious English Christians, always so right, what do you know of the world that you have not read from your precious books? Do you know how many times I have heard these idiocies since my wife died? Her death was a godsend to your journalists, another tragedy in a rich family, and you believe it just because you read some news clippings? Get out of this house now, before I have you thrown out. Get out!’

‘Well, that went well,’ said May, stepping out into the pouring rain.

‘I thought I’d discovered something new. I was sure Renalda was setting himself free from his past.’

‘No, Arthur, you believed what you wanted to believe, no matter how demented the notion was. You squeezed the facts to fit your theory.’

Bryant was indignant. ‘I did not!’

‘Of course you did. That thing about the high note warning Miles Stone’s mother. The flautist was late that day, remember? There was no high note from a flute, just somebody scraping a violin in the orchestra. And another thing. Edna bloody Wagstaff and her chatty cat. She couldn’t have heard Dan Leno in the Palace, because he never came to the Palace. He died in 1904 without once performing there. She’s just a crazy, lonely old woman. Andreas Renalda’s story appealed to your romantic notions of classical literature and myths, that’s all. Maybe Biddle was right when he asked to leave. You don’t share information and you don’t listen to reason. I’m not sure I’m cut out for the unit any more than he is.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You, Arthur. I’ll never get used to working like this. Just sitting in your room is enough, all those volumes on clairvoyants, astrologers, white witches, spiritualism, covens. While everyone else is reading the
Daily Mail,
you’re studying the
Apocryphal Books of the Dead
. All the stories they laugh about over at Bow Street while you look for a vampire that preys on foreigners in Leicester Square. Running down alleyways in the dead of night, trying to catch some kind of shapeshifting wraith that sucks the blood out of Norwegians. How do you talk people into believing stuff like that? Why did DS Forthright spend her New Year’s Eve in a King’s Cross goods yard waiting for a priest to mark out crucifix patterns in holy water? And did you ever catch him? According to her, you’re the only one who saw him dash into that cul-de-sac. He must have run up the wall, you told her, they can do that in moments of stress. You have us all mesmerized under the spell of your insanity.

‘Well, no more. I’ve just not got that turn of mind. It’s the effect you have on people, you mean well but you get everyone caught up in these ridiculous fantasies. Why can’t you just face the truth and admit you’ve not got the right experience for the job? You should be curating in a museum or something, lecturing on ghosts and goblins, digging out Egyptian tombs. It was good enough for Howard Carter, he didn’t decide to be a policeman, did he?’

‘May I remind you,’ said Bryant, trying to muster some dignity, ‘that this is called the Peculiar Crimes Unit?’

‘The day we met, you told me that their definition of peculiar and yours were different. You just didn’t warn me how different. I know you’re a bit older than me, but I’d like a chance to handle things another way, before Davenport hears what you’ve done and nails boards across the entrance to the office. I should have put my foot down when you brought in the clairvoyant, then perhaps none of this would have happened. Why don’t you take a break, go and give the ARP boys a hand, make use of yourself, and try not to think so much?’

‘I’ll admit that as a team we’ve been having a few teething troubles.’

‘
Teething troubles?
You just accused a man who has the ear of the Home Office of practising witchcraft! Christ on a bike.’

‘John, at least let’s leave it until the morning,’ Bryant pleaded. ‘You might feel differently then.’

John raised his hands defiantly. ‘No, because in the morning you’ll try to convince me that Renalda is part of a satanic sect, or that the theatre is built on an ancient Saxon burial ground. Besides, it has nothing to do with me. Renalda—and Biddle, come to think of it—will be on the phone to Davenport right now, and he’ll have taken you off the case before dawn. I’m prepared to go a long way with you, Arthur. I even see some demented sense in what you say. The killer is a psychopath driven by desperation, fine, yes, I agree with that. But Muses, curses, protective spells? That’s where we part company.’

He stopped when he realized that his partner was no longer following him. Looking back, he saw Bryant standing in the rain, his head dropped forward onto his chest. He looked close to tears, but May knew he couldn’t be because nothing ever seemed to upset him.

‘Where are you going now?’ asked May.

‘I promised my mother I’d look in on her,’ Bryant replied miserably.

‘I’ll drive you. There won’t be any buses running at this hour. Then you must try to get some sleep. At least it’s a quiet night. I’ll go back to the theatre and make sure Forthright has everything she needs.’

‘You’re right,’ Bryant said softly. ‘I thought it was—I don’t know what I thought. I’m so sorry.’

‘Don’t be, just get some rest. Leave it to me. You won’t have to do anything. I’ll sort everything out with Davenport. Just accept that things didn’t work out with us, that’s all.’

Bryant suddenly looked so pale and fragile that May felt a rush of pity for him.

He drove his distraught partner slowly back through the smouldering ruins of Hackney and Bow, past a makeshift hospital set up on the broken pavements. There were patients lying on brass beds outside McFisheries and Woolworths. A woman was sitting on the steps of a church with her head in her hands. When a nurse tried to comfort her, she pushed her away.

As they drove on, the devastation grew. The house where Bryant asked to be dropped was in a bomb-scarred terrace of slum dwellings long due for demolition. May was shocked to find that his partner hailed from such a rough neighbourhood.

Embarrassed by the events of the night and by his own impoverished circumstances, Bryant stood awkwardly in the entrance to the alley beside his mother’s house and waited until the Wolseley had pulled out into the deserted road, its tail-lights fading in the thickening drizzle.

As he watched John May drive away, he knew that the unit’s last chance for survival was leaving with him.

52

TAKING LEAVE

Early on Sunday morning Londoners once more awoke to the drone of the bombers, but the drizzle had persisted through the night, and only a few aircraft had managed to drop their loads. Several fires were started, and their smoke added to the city’s dawning pallor of eye-watering gloom. After the RAF released two thousand bombs on Hamburg as a reprisal for Coventry, Germany turned its attention to the Southampton docks, steadily bombing them for the rest of the day. Attack, reprisal; the process continued in a depressing rhythm of retaliation.

Sidney Biddle sat on the bench near the tea stall with his hands stuffed deep in his overcoat, watching the oily water surge back and forth around the barricaded pillars of Waterloo Bridge like the action of some vast diseased lung. Daylight had begun to creep across the sky, and now he could see the silver barrage balloons following the shoreline. One of them was tied to the top of Bank power station’s chimney. Another had partially deflated, and hung amorphously over the river like a creature in a Salvador Dalí painting. Biddle’s foot was throbbing, but it was strapped up with splints and bandages and he was able to walk with the aid of a crutch.

‘Your char’s getting cold, love,’ said Gladys Forthright, churning the contents of her mug with the end of a pencil. ‘They never leave enough chain on the teaspoon to give you a good stir, do they?’

Neither of them had slept. Biddle was angry and confused, but invigorated by the action of the night before, newly hooked on the case and on the unit. ‘I mean, you outrank him,’ he said finally. ‘Can’t you do something?’

‘It may have escaped your notice, Sidney, but although I have the rank, I’m still a woman. Davenport won’t even talk to me. He acts as if I’m not there. My appointment was approved because women have to be drafted into the force. We’re fine for driving fire engines and ambulances, tracking aircraft and manning switchboards, but they don’t want to give us jobs that involve strategic decisions. You won’t find policewomen in positions of power. The men want to keep those for themselves.’

Biddle took a sip of his tea. ‘Why does Bryant always come here? PC Crowhurst told me he sits at this spot nearly every day at sunset.’

So that’s it, thought Forthright, he wants to understand.

‘You don’t know the story?’ she asked, surprised. ‘I thought someone would have told you by now. I know it’s hard to believe, but our Mr Bryant was once a man in love. Back then he was still training out of Bramshill on a one-year intensive. So many were pushed through the courses because of the approaching war. He was very young, of course. Boys leave school at fourteen in the East End, and they marry early. By the time I came up from Hendon as a DC he had met the love of his life and become engaged to her.’

‘Bryant had a fiancée?’

‘Nathalie was from France, Marseille, I think. She was dark and rather beautiful. Not easy, mind you—very independent. When they met, she was working in ground command, co-ordinating air-support units. There were so many rehearsals for war that I was relieved when it finally happened.’

Forthright warmed her hands round her enamel mug. ‘This is where she died, on the evening of her eighteenth birthday, May nineteen thirty-seven. She fell from the bridge, just in front of us. She’d climbed up onto the balustrade and was walking along it. They’d been out drinking, celebrating, and were both a bit tipsy. He’d asked her to marry him. She would probably have been fine, but at that moment a bus horn sounded behind them, and it made her start. She lost her balance, and when he turned round to grab her, she’d gone. Arthur jumped into the water and tried to save her, but the tide was going out, and the current was too strong. He was wearing his overcoat and hobnailed police boots. He nearly drowned as well. Underwater search teams dragged the river for weeks, but they never did find her body. The river widens here. There’s nothing between us and the sea.’

She rested the mug on her strong, shapely knees and sighed. ‘He was taken very bad for a while, tried to enlist when war was declared, but the War Office looked at his mental health record and wouldn’t take him. They marked him down as unstable. He was training to spend his life helping others but hadn’t found a way to save the girl he loved. She was the point of his life, the one he felt fated to be with for ever.

‘That was three years ago, and although he never talks about her, he never looks at anyone else either, not in a serious way. Oh, he thought he’d fallen in love with me for a while, but I could see it was just a crush, and put him straight. As far as he’s concerned, he was given his chance for happiness and buggered it up. It’s something he’ll never find a way to make amends for. That’s why none of this touches him.’

‘I wish someone had told me.’

‘We all have our private tragedies. You can’t change the past. You keep going.’

Biddle swallowed from his mug. ‘I’m not part of your past. You all seem suited to each other. I don’t think I’m the right person for your kind of operation.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong. We’re all so different. They say all the good men have gone to war, that only the unemployables are left. That’s why we were lucky to find Mr May. He’s practical, he’ll give Arthur the grounding he needs. We’ve no permanent staff over the age of twenty-five. I’m the oldest person in the unit. The Home Office will close us down as soon as the war ends. Davenport hates us, thinks we’re a bunch of academic pansies. Now he’s got all the ammunition he needs.’