The Invisible Code (3 page)

‘My date of birth is right there in your file.’ Bryant reached forward and slapped an immense sheaf of yellowed paperwork.

Dr Gillespie donned his glasses and searched for it. ‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘Well, I suppose, all things considered, you’re doing all right. Mental health OK?’

‘What are you implying?’

‘I have to ask these things. No lapses of memory?’

‘Well of course there are, all the time. But I know if I’m at the park or the pictures, if that’s what you mean. It proves quite convenient sometimes. Birthdays, anniversaries and so on.’

‘Jolly good. Well, you should make sure you get adequate rest, take a snooze in the afternoons.’

Bryant was apoplectic. ‘I can’t suddenly go for forty winks in the middle of a case.’

‘Yes, but a man of your age …’

‘Do you mind? I am certainly not a man of my age! I’m running national murder investigations, not working for the council,’ Bryant bellowed.

‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with your voice.’ Dr Gillespie made a tick on his list. ‘You could always take up a hobby.’

‘What, run the local newsletter or work in a community puppet theatre? Have you met the kind of busybodies who do that sort of thing? I’m not interested.’

‘That’s not what I heard.’ Dr Gillespie coughed again and blew his nose. ‘I think I’m coming down with something. What was this about you thinking someone had been murdered by a Mr Punch puppet recently?’

‘Where did you hear about that?’

‘Your partner Mr May is one of my patients too. He’s in very good nick, you know. Takes care of himself. He’s got the body of a much younger man.’

‘Well, he should give it back.’

‘He’s wearing much better than you.’

‘Thank you very much. I’m so pleased to hear that. We solved the Mr Punch case, by the way. Beat people a quarter of our age.’

‘Well done. Good appetite? Bowels?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Are they open?’

‘Not right at this minute, no, but they will be if you keep me here much longer.’

‘I’m almost through. How’s your eyesight?’

‘It’s like I’m living in a thick fog.’

‘You should try cleaning your glasses occasionally.’ Dr Gillespie’s cough turned into a minute-long hack. ‘God, I’m dying for a cigarette.’

‘If you need one that badly, I’ll wait.’

‘Can’t,’ Dr Gillespie wheezed, ‘no balcony.’

Bryant absently patted him on the back, waiting for him to catch his breath. ‘You don’t sound too good. Ciggies just bung up your lungs. I bet your chest feels sore right now.’

‘You’re right, it does.’ The doctor hacked again.

‘Like a steel strap slowly tightening around your ribs. Hands and feet tingling as well, no doubt. You’re probably heading for a stroke.’

‘I’ve tried to give up.’

‘Lack of willpower, I expect.’

‘I know, it drives me mad.’

‘Perhaps you should think about retiring.’

The doctor bristled. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, I’m perfectly capable of doing my job.’

‘There, now you know how I feel.’ Bryant was triumphant. ‘Let’s call it quits.’

‘Fair enough. Put your – whatever that is – back on.’

‘It’s my under-vest. Then I have my vest, my shirt and my jumper.’

‘Aren’t you hot in that lot? It’s summer.’

‘Ah, I thought the rain was getting warmer. I need these layers. They keep my blood moving around.’

‘I saw a case that was right up your street the other day,’ said Dr Gillespie as Bryant dressed. ‘Young woman, Amy O’Connor, twenty-eight, pretty little thing, dropped dead in a church on Saturday.’

‘Where was this?’

‘St Bride’s, just off Fleet Street. It was in the
Evening Standard
.’

‘Why do you think that’s a case for us, then?’

‘You run the Peculiar Crimes Unit, don’t you?’ said Dr Gillespie. ‘Well, her death was bloody peculiar.’

After the doctor had outlined what he knew about the case, Arthur Bryant left the GP’s scruffy third-floor office situated behind the Coca-Cola sign in Piccadilly Circus and set off towards the Peculiar Crimes Unit in King’s Cross, to check out the case of a lonely death in a City of London church.

Bryant ambled. In Paris he would have been a
boulevardier
, a
flâneur
, but in London, a city that no longer had time for anything but making money, he was just slow and in the way. Accountants, bankers, market analysts and PR girls hustled around him, cemented to their phones. The engineers and artists, bootmakers,
signwriters and watch-menders had long fled the centre. Who worked with their hands in the City any more? The ability to make something from nothing had once been regarded with the greatest respect, but now the Square Mile dealt in units, its captains of industry preferring to place their trust in flickering strings of electronic figures.

Bryant would not be hurried though. He was as much a part of London as a hobbled Tower raven, a Piccadilly barber, a gunman in the Blind Beggar, and he would not be moved from his determined path. He was, everyone agreed, an annoying, impossible and indispensible fellow who had long ago decided that it was better to be disliked than forgotten.

And over the coming week, he would find himself annoying some very dangerous people.

4

STRING

‘
WHY DID I
have to hear about this from my doctor, of all people?’ asked Bryant petulantly.

‘It’s not our jurisdiction,’ replied John May, unfolding his long legs beneath the desk where he sat opposite his partner. ‘The case went straight to the City of London Police. They’re a law unto themselves. You can’t just cherry-pick cases that take your fancy, they’ll come around here with cricket bats.’

Bryant was aware that the City of London’s impact extended far beyond its Square Mile inhabitants. Marked out by black bollards bearing the City’s emblem and elegant silver dragons that guarded the major entrances, it contained within its boundaries more than 450 international banks, their glass towers wedged into Palladian alleyways and crookbacked Tudor passages. As the global axis of countless multi-national corporations, it demanded a bespoke police force equipped to protect this unique environment with special policies and separate uniforms.

‘If there’s a reason why we should take over the investigation we can put in a formal request,’ he suggested.

‘True, but I can’t think of one.’

‘How did you know about it?’

‘I picked up the details as they came in,’ said May. ‘It was kept away from us because Faraday wanted it to be handled by the City of London.’

Leslie Faraday, the Home Office liaison officer charged with keeping the Peculiar Crimes Unit in line, was under instruction from his boss to reduce the unit’s visibility, and therefore decrease their likelihood of embarrassing the government. His latest tactic was to starve them of new cases.

‘But you made some notes, I see.’

‘Yes, I did, just out of interest.’

‘Well?’ asked Bryant, peering over a stack of old
Punch
annuals at May’s papers like an ancient goblin eyeing a stack of gold coins.

‘Well what?’ May looked innocently back across the desk, knowing exactly what Bryant was after.

‘The details. What are the details of the case?’ He waved his ballpoint pen about. ‘There, man, what have you got?’

‘Look at you, you’re virtually salivating.’

‘I have nothing else to concern myself with this morning, unless you happen to know where my copy of
The Thirteen Signs of Satanism
has got to.’

‘All right.’ May pulled up a page and held it at a distance. Vanity prevented him from wearing his newly prescribed glasses. ‘It says here that at approximately two twenty p.m. on Saturday, a twenty-eight-year-old woman identified as Amy O’Connor was found dead in St Bride’s Church, just off Fleet Street. Cause of death unknown, but at the moment it’s being treated as suspicious. No marks on the body other than a contusion on the front of the skull, assumed by the EMT to have been incurred when she slipped off her chair and brained herself on the marble floor.’

‘So what did she die of?’

‘It looks like her heart simply stopped. There was a lad running the church shop, but he left his post to go for a cigarette a couple of times and didn’t even notice her sitting there. She was found by one of the wardens returning from lunch, who called a local med unit. The only note I have on the initial examination is an abnormally high body temperature. The building has CCTV, which the City of London team requisitioned and examined. They know she entered the building alone, and during the time that she was in there nobody else came in. That’s about all they have.’

‘Where was she before she entered St Bride’s?’

‘She was seen sitting on a bench in the courtyard outside the church. A lot of the area’s local workers go there at lunchtime. Quite a few work on Saturdays. O’Connor was alone and minding her own business, quietly reading a book.’

‘Was she working in the area?’

‘No. She had a part-time job as a bar manager at the Electricity Showroom in Hoxton.’

‘Why would an electricity showroom have a bar?’

‘They kept the name from the building’s old usage. It’s a popular local hostelry. There aren’t any electricity showrooms as such any more, Arthur, even you must have noticed that.’

‘What about her movements earlier in the morning?’

‘Nobody’s too sure about those. She was renting a flat in Spitalfields, had been there a couple of years. Her parents live on the south-west coast. She’d never been married, had no current partner, no close friends. There, now you know as much as anyone else.’

‘Where was her body taken?’

‘Over to the Robin Brook Centre at St Bart’s, I imagine. They handle all the cases from the Square Mile. But you can’t go near the place.’

‘Why not? I know the coroner there. We used to break into empty buildings together before my knees packed up.’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘Oh, just to have a look around. I think I’ll pop over.’

‘No, Arthur. I absolutely forbid it. You can’t just walk into someone else’s case and stir things up.’

‘I’m not going to, old sport. I’ll be visiting an old friend. There’s a big bowling tournament coming up. He’s a keen player. I think I should let him know about it.’ Bryant rose and jammed a mouldy-looking olive-green fedora so hard on his head that it squashed his ears. ‘Want me to bring you anything back?’

The hospital and the meat market occupied the same small corner of central London, the saviours and purveyors of flesh. In Queen Square, the doctors lurked like white-coated gang members, grabbing a quick cigarette before returning to their wards to administer health advice. Not far from them, in Smithfield, the last of London’s traditional butchers did the same thing. Both areas were at their most interesting before 7.00 a.m., when the doctors were intense and garrulous, the butchers noisome and amiably foul-mouthed.

Dr Benjamin Fenchurch’s parents had been among the first Caribbean passengers to dock in Britain from the SS
Empire Windrush
in 1948. He had spent his entire working life in the St Bartholomew’s Hospital Coroner’s Office. Over the decades, he had become so institutionalized that he hardly ever left the hospital grounds. He owned a small flat in an apartment building that was so close to his office he could see into it from his kitchen window. He ate in the St Bart’s canteen and always volunteered for the shifts that no one else wanted. Perfectly happy to cover every Christmas, Easter, Diwali and Yom Kippur, he actively avoided the living, who were loud and messy
and unreliable, and always let you down. Bodies yielded their secrets with far more grace.

It seemed to Arthur Bryant that this was not a healthy way to live, and yet in many ways he was just as bad, preferring the company of his staff to the world beyond the unit. Working for public-service institutions had a way of making conscientious people feel as if they were always running late. They spent their lives trying to catch up with themselves, and Fenchurch was no exception.

Threading his way through a maze of overlit basement corridors, Bryant reached the immense mortuary that served both the two nearby hospitals and the City of London Police. In the office at the farthest end, Fenchurch was at his lab desk, hunched over his notes, lost in a world of his own.