Full Dark House (42 page)

‘You shouldn’t move about,’ warned May. ‘The nurse says you have to lie still for a few days. What happened after you saw Todd standing there at the unit?’

‘What do you think? He hit me, and there was an explosion. I’d just nipped out in my shirt sleeves, I had no ID on me, no wallet. I woke up in a hostel off the Charing Cross Road. A very nice lady kept feeding me mushroom soup. I went back home but my teeth were hurting, so I picked up my dental records.’

‘You also took the blueprints covered with your notes from the Palace.’

‘Yes, but I couldn’t remember why I’d taken them. I went to see you but I couldn’t get in, so I thought I’d wait. Some hideous monkey-like woman appeared from nowhere and started screaming at me.’

‘You missed your own funeral.’

‘Was it a good turnout?’

‘Excellent, lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth, really miserable. You’d have loved it.’

‘How did you figure out what had happened?’

‘I must admit you had me going for a while. Maggie suggested we try to get in touch with you on the other side—’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve become a believer,’ interrupted Bryant.

‘—and she needed something you’d touched, so I took her Nijinsky’s shell. She reached the person who’d been killed in the explosion, just as she’d promised. But she’d made contact with Todd, not you. He’d touched the tortoise too. It had probably been his only childhood friend.’ May tucked the blanket around his partner’s pyjama’d chest. ‘I think you’d better come and stay with me for a while, just until you’re a hundred per cent.’

‘God, no, you have the television on all the time, it would drive me mad. This one’s bad enough.’ He pointed to the wall-mounted TV, tuned to a silent news broadcast.

‘We’ll discuss it later. What would you most like to do when you’re better?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, take tango lessons, do a bit of sky-diving, the usual stuff.’ He thought for a moment and smiled. ‘Or perhaps we could just go to the river and watch the tide going out.’

‘Why not?’ May agreed. ‘There aren’t too many of the old rituals left. It seems a pity to break this one. We’d better get your choppers sorted out as well.’ He looked at the bedside table, where Bryant’s gruesomely enormous false teeth sat grinning at him. ‘If it wasn’t for those horrible things I’d never have thought of searching for you.’

‘Then I’d like you to keep them.’ Bryant grinned toothlessly, then the smile faded. ‘He’d not had much of a life, you know, Elspeth’s son. In and out of institutions and halfway houses. He was registered under his mother’s name, Wynter. Yet he seemed not to remember her when we spoke.’

‘He remembered enough to follow you back to the unit and wait there until the next night. We were wondering where he got the incendiary device from.’

‘Ah, um, I’m rather afraid that was my fault.’ Bryant looked sheepish.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It was mine. I’d kept it as a souvenir from the war.’

‘Kept it, all this time? Where?’

‘On my desk.’

‘I don’t remember anything like that on your desk.’

‘The paperweight, the one I chucked at the lads from Holmes Road that night.’

‘You’re telling me that was a
bomb
?’

‘I thought it had been defused. I painted it yellow in the sixties—it was the sort of thing you did back then. I must have destabilized it when I threw it out of the window. I got back to the room and found Todd there. He threatened me.’

‘So this green metal cylinder he was carrying wasn’t a bomb?’

‘No, it was his thermos flask. He hit me over the head with it.’ Bryant gingerly touched his scar. ‘That’s how I got this. He was trying to kill me. I didn’t know what to do, but the paperweight was still in my hand so I chucked it at him. I didn’t expect it to explode.’

May buried his face in his hands. ‘I can’t believe you blew us up. We thought you were the victim, not the bomber.’

‘Try to look on the positive side,’ said Bryant brightly. ‘Maybe now they’ll give us some decent offices.’

‘We are in so much trouble,’ moaned May. ‘Do you realize we’ve buried someone else in your grave? Why can’t you be like regular old people and put irresponsibility behind you?’

‘I know there have been some inconsistencies in my past behaviour, John, but from now on I’ll try to be exactly the same.’ Bryant’s watery blue eyes looked hopefully towards a more certain future.

‘Oh, before I forget,’ said May, emptying the contents of his nylon backpack onto the end of the bed, ‘I know how much you hate staying in bed and I thought you might like something to occupy your mind while you’re lying here, so I brought you the job applications Sam Biddle forwarded to the unit. You can go through them and select a few of these “ordinary civilians” for interviews.’

Bryant eyed the pile of letters suspiciously. ‘Do I get paid for working overtime?’

‘You merely receive the thanks of a grateful nation.’

‘Huh.’ He lifted the letters up by their corners, examining them as though they were dead animals. When he reached one handwritten envelope, his brow furrowed even more deeply than usual. He opened its flap with a theatrical flourish.

‘Hmmp.’ He waved at his bifocals. ‘Pass me those, would you?’ He unfolded the letter. ‘Aha. Hmph.’

‘I assume you are making those cartoonish noises to attract my attention,’ said May wearily.

Bryant tossed the letter at him. ‘How about this one? We’ll give her an interview, shall we?’

May read for a moment, then raised his eyes. ‘This is a formal application to join the unit from April, my granddaughter.’

‘And you thought there wasn’t anyone in your family willing to carry on the tradition.’ Bryant smirked. ‘Shows how much you know about people.’

‘Wait, did you put her up to this?’ asked May.

Bryant’s eyes widened with indignant surprise.

‘No, of course you didn’t. You couldn’t have, because when I told you last week that the Chief Association of Police Officers was inviting non-professionals to train alongside detectives, you acted as though you didn’t know anything about it.’

‘Oh, well then, I don’t. You ought to see her, though.’ He licked his lips. ‘Blimey, I’m starving. It must be nearly time for them to bring the mince trolley round. You’d better be off before it arrives.’

As May slipped the note back in its envelope, he couldn’t keep himself from grinning. ‘Perhaps I should get Longbright to fix up an appointment.’

‘I think you’ll find she already has. Next Tuesday at eleven.’

He was going to ask how Bryant could possibly know, but his partner was already starting to feign sleep.

‘You missed your vocation, Arthur,’ he said softly. ‘You really should have been on the stage.’

‘The city is my theatre,’ murmured Bryant. ‘I never want to leave it.’ He closed his eyes and allowed himself to sink into vast white pillows. ‘The war.’ His voice became a faint whisper. ‘How little we knew about people then. How little we ever really learn.’

Above the foot of the bed, the silent television replayed footage of guns and men, and a distant battle that could never be won.

Appendix

NOTATIONS MADE BY MR ARTHUR BRYANT IN AN ACCOUNT OF HIS FIRST CASE WITH MR JOHN MAY

Abyssinians, uses of when stuffed

For purposes of ventriloquism

Possession of by squadron leaders

Actors, unreliable behaviour of

Agoraphobia, dangers of

Airships, German, poor performance of

Amateurs, abilities of encouraged by Home Office

Architect, incomprehensible explanation by

Armitage, Maggie

Psychic powers of

Price charges for ectoplasm clearance

Link between horseracing and women’s suffrage

Ability to use harpsichord as boiled-egg slicer

Astaire, Fred, appearance at Palace

Bananas, as weapon against Hitler

BBC, hilarity caused by bombing of

Bengal tiger, as shameless plug for other published Bryant and May cases

Betts, Corinne, as murder witness

As stand-up comic

Biddle, Sidney

Bovine addiction to law and order

Enjoyment of complicated paperwork

Pleasure derived from hitting geography teacher

Bombs, used in destruction of police stations

Falling on London like jellyfish

Exploding in tube stations

For use as stage props

Bridge, Waterloo, as conduit for rumination

Psychic phenomena on

Bryant, Arthur, displays of temperament against constables

Addiction to illegal narcotics

Insensitivity

Rudeness

Uselessness with opposite sex

Poor dress sense of

Comparison to tortoise

Inability to read flags

Love of tachygraphy

Hopelessness with technology

Association with tontine, Savoyards, butterfly-covered corpse etc.

Possibility of being mistaken for mental patient

Preference for wood carving to having sex

Unflattering description of

Capistrania, Tanya, thankless role in tale as unloved murder victim

Carfax, Sergeant, similarity of wife’s face to witch doctor’s rattle

Caterpillars, poisonous, use of in teapots

Cats, ginger, arrival through kebab shop windows of

Stuffed, as conduit for dead squadron leader

Cheese,
see
Skittles

Chorus girls, unlikeliness of wearing knickers

Davenport, Farley, highly unflattering description of

Emotional constipation of

Dental records, pertinence in murder investigations

Likelihood of use in identifying werewolves

Dwarves, gigantism amongst

Finch, Oswald, inflexibility in humorous situations

As butt of cruel practical jokes

Under attack by dangerous vegetation

Forthright, Gladys, desire for assonance of

Peculiar taste in role models

Unsuitability of choices where men are concerned

Ginger people, use of by Germans during blackouts

Greeks, shipbuilding and theatrical enterprises

Incendiary devices, inadvisability of using as paperweights

Mistaken for thermos flasks

Jack the Ripper, ability to melt pavement slabs

Landladies, unlikely swordsmanship abilities of

Lift, as device for removing feet

Lithuanian botanists, incidence of vampirism amongst

London, bus standing on end in

Matthews, Jesse, eerie power to drive men mad

May, John, predictability of female dinner dates

Peculiar ability to turn women’s knees to jelly

Last chance to have sex of

Stoic qualities of

Claustrophobia suffered by

Memory, lost

Memory, regained

Memory, revived

Muses, as template for murder spree

Norwegian painter, similarity to medical officer

Norwegians, anaemic condition of

Offenbach, Jacques

As progenitor of Gilbert and Sullivan

As inspiration for deranged serial killer

Opinion, Public, violent death of

Orpheus mythology, as motive for murder

Palace Theatre, resemblance of to Borley Rectory

Paperweight, use of for incendiary purposes

Parole, Helena

Heartlessness of

Alcoholism of

Medusa-like qualities of

Pepys, Samuel, talent for tachygraphy

Petri dishes, mysterious existence of under Bryant’s bed

Phantoms, ability of to walk through walls

Likelihood of picking a fight with Claude Rains

Planet, as symbol of Freemasonry

As murder weapon

Plants, tropical, propensity for sickening cats, wives etc.

Poltergeist, dangers of intrusions by while saying grace

Pope, violation of with roofing tiles

As condom spokesman

Pork, as substitute for human feet

Senechal, Charles, clouted by planet

Skittles, as a boring esoteric hobby for aged detectives

Statuary, as esoteric clue in criminal investigation

Stone, Miles, unfortunate choice of pseudonym by

Inability to be faithful with women

Technology, peculiar backfiring of when confronted by technophobes

Teeth, as clue in criminal investigations,
see
Dental records

Theatre critics, climbing abilities of

Thwaite, Olivia, floral solution to prominent nipples by

Tortoises, life-threatening habits of

Uses of in spiritualist rituals

Trammel, Betty, mysterious true identity of

Traps, grave

Traps, star

Turk, body parts found in chestnut brazier by

Varisich, Anton, orchestra conductor forced to work with buskers

Wagstaff, Edna, psychic sensitivity of with dead pets

Whittaker, Geoffrey, unorthodox sexual arrangements of

ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

Novels

ROOFWORLD

RUNE

RED BRIDE

DARKEST DAY

SPANKY

PSYCHOVILLE

DISTURBIA

SOHO BLACK

CALABASH

Graphic Novel

MENZ NSANA

Short Stories

CITY JITTERS

CITY JITTERS TWO

THE BUREAU OF LOST SOULS

SHARPER KNIVES

FLESH WOUNDS

PERSONAL DEMONS

UNCUT

THE DEVIL IN ME

DEMONIZED