The Invisible Code (5 page)

‘Now she’s talking about divorce and he’s suddenly realized he’ll be back on the dating scene, hence his recent purchase of several appallingly unsuitable shirts. Oh, and that horrible aftershave he’s starting pouring over himself. You must have noticed that he’s smelling like a perfumed drain. And before you ask, he’s started to believe in the supernatural because I can see that he’s borrowed some books from my top shelf, notably
Psychogeographical London, Great British Hauntings
and my 1923 copy of
Mortar and Mortality: Who Died in Your House?
He’s been upset ever since he discovered that Aleister Crowley ran a spiritualism club in our attic. Nearly every London house has been lived in by somebody else, and Crowley was all over this town like a cheap suit. It’s hardly anything to get upset about.’

‘You could try being nice to him for a change,’ said May. ‘He’s been very supportive lately. I feel sorry for him, stuck in a job he hates, having to look after us lot. He can’t understand how you think.’

‘I should hope not,’ said Bryant indignantly. ‘I would be most offended if he could. But perhaps you’re right. I’ll make it up to him.’

‘No.’ May hastily held up his hand. ‘Don’t do anything unusual. Just do what he says for a while.’

‘You mean don’t push for the Amy O’Connor case.’

‘Exactly.’

‘All right,’ said Bryant, ‘but don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this
way comes.”’ He sauntered to the door. ‘I’m going to the terrace for a pipe of St Barnabas Old Navy Rough Cut Shag. But I’m telling you, there’s more to Amy O’Connor’s death than meets the eye.’

‘Because of what you saw in a Roman excavation?’ asked May.

‘That, and because of the string that was tied around her wrist.’

¹
Bryant used his newly rediscovered ventriloquism skills to inform Land of Leanne’s affair with her flamenco instructor. See
Bryant & May and the Memory of Blood
.

5

THE ENEMY

‘
YOU’RE NOT GOING
to be happy about this,’ warned John May. ‘Home Office Security has backed up the City of London. They won’t let you have the O’Connor case.’

‘Why not? What’s it to them?’ Bryant asked, as he and May made their way across Bloomsbury’s sunlit garden squares towards the Marchmont Street Bookshop.

‘Your pal Fenchurch has already tipped someone off about his likely verdict, although he seems to be holding back the full official report. Once that’s been filed, the case is technically closed unless you get Home Office dispensation, and they won’t grant it.’

‘That’s odd. I was with him this morning and he said he’d delay the process by forty-eight hours. Why would he have told someone?’

‘You weren’t supposed to go there. Maybe he’s being pressured.’

‘That makes no sense unless someone at the Home Office thinks the case is more important than it looks. Amy O’Connor was a low-paid bar manager. Apparently she studied biology at Bristol University, but dropped out. She’s not connected to anyone important. Unless
there’s something in her past. I could take a look at her employment records and see if—’

‘Arthur, maybe she really did just black out and fall.’

‘Without a cause of death? Next you’re going to tell me she was struck down by the hand of God. Nobody dies without a reason, and no reason has been found. If I can just go back through her history …’

‘But it’s not your—’

‘Don’t say it again, all right? Here we are.’ Bryant stopped in front of the bookshop and pointed proudly at the window. ‘Sally’s given me pride of place.’ Bryant’s wrinkled features peered up from the cover of a slim volume entitled
The Casebook of Bryant & May
, by Arthur Bryant, as told to Anna Marquand. Beside it, a joss stick protruded from the head of a green jade Buddha, as if in funereal remembrance.

‘It’s just the first volume, as you know, but it covers quite a few of our odder investigations, from the Leicester Square Vampire and the Belles of Westminster, to the Billingsgate Kipper Scandal and the hunt for the Odeon Strangler.’

‘And you honestly think the public wants to read this stuff? People aren’t interested in the past any more. The young want to get on and make something of their lives. They don’t want to wallow about in ancient history.’

‘I didn’t write it for the ambitious young,’ said Bryant primly. ‘I wrote it for the mature and interested. And, if you don’t mind, it isn’t ancient history, it’s my life. Yours, too.’ Privately, though, Bryant had to admit that the events of his life were receding into history. Last Christmas the milkman had come in for a warm-up and had asked his landlady if she collected art deco. ‘No,’ Alma had replied, ‘this happens to be Mr Bryant’s furniture.’ Yesterday’s fashions were today’s antiques.

The owner of the small bookshop greeted Arthur.
Now in her early fifties, Sally Talbot was an attractive blue-eyed blonde with the natural freshness of someone raised on a warm coastline. John May was a great appreciator of beautiful women, and his pride required him to smooth his hair and pull in his stomach.

‘Nice to see me in the window,’ Bryant commented. ‘I’m not sure about the incense, though. It looks as if I’ve died.’

‘Oh, we’ve got damp,’ said Sally. ‘It’s better than the smell of mildew. Thank you for coming by to sign the stock. You only went on sale this morning but we’ve already sold a few copies.’

‘One of them wasn’t to a man who looks like a vampire bat, was it?’ asked Bryant. Oskar Kasavian, the cadaverous Home Office Security Supervisor, had made it publicly known that he objected to Bryant writing his memoirs, and had been trying to get hold of the manuscript so that he could vet it for infringements. The Peculiar Crimes Unit was the flea in his ear, the pea under his mattress, the ground glass in his gin, but at least he had lately abandoned his attempts to have it closed down. So long as the unit’s strike rate remained high, there was little he could do to end its tenure. He was not against the idea of the place so much as its method of operation, which defied all attempts at rational explanation, beyond a vague sense of
modus vivendi
among its staff.

‘No, they went mostly to sweet little old ladies who love murder mysteries,’ said Sally.

Bryant dug out his old Waterman’s fountain pen, uncapped it and shook it, splodging ink about. ‘How many do I have to sign?’ he asked.

‘Well, five if you don’t mind.’

‘Is that all you have left?’ Bryant beamed at the bookseller. ‘How many did you sell?’

‘Three.’

‘Oh. What’s your bestselling biography?’

‘
Topless
by Katia Shaw,’ said Sally. ‘She’s a glamour model.’

Bryant turned to his partner in irritation. ‘You see? This is what’s wrong with the world. A young lady with bleached hair, an estuarine accent and unfeasible breasts can outsell a respected expert with decades of wisdom and experience.’

‘She’s human interest,’ replied May. ‘You’re not. People reading her story will feel that if she can make it without talent, maybe they can.’

‘Well, I find that phenomenally depressing.’ Bryant’s theremin call sign sounded once more. ’Well, speak of the Devil,’ he said, checking the number, ‘it’s Mr Kasavian himself. I bet I know what this is about. I’d better take it outside.’

Ten minutes later, the detectives had hailed a taxi and were heading south towards Victoria. ‘My guess is he wants an explanation about the memoir,’ said Bryant.

‘Then why would he ask to see me as well?’

‘You’re mentioned in the title of the book, John. You’re as involved in this as I am. I think he might have found something unpalatable in one of the chapters and taken objection.’

‘I wonder if it’s the part where you refer to MI7 as a secure ward for the mentally disenfranchised, or the bit where you describe his department as a hotbed of paranoid conspiracy theorists with a looser grip on reality than a stroke victim’s hold on a bedpan handle?’

‘I’m impressed you remembered that,’ said Bryant, pleased. ‘There’s nothing in the book that breaches the Official Secrets Act, and that’s the only thing he can get me on. Anna triple-checked it.’

‘Yes, but Anna Marquand is dead.’ Bryant’s biographer had supposedly died of septicaemia in the South London home she shared with her mother, but she had passed away
shortly after being mugged by an unknown assailant. The case remained unsolved.

‘You know my feelings about that,’ said Bryant. ‘I’m sure Kasavian’s department is implicated somehow. He might not have been directly involved, but I bet he knows who was.’

‘I’m not so convinced any more,’ said May. ‘You honestly think the Home Office found something in your memoirs that was so damaging they would commit murder to cover it up? They’re part of the British government, not the Vatican.’

‘I think they might have gone as far as condoning an unlawful killing, if it involved the Porton Down case.’ Bryant sucked his boiled sweet ruefully.

Porton Down was a military science park in Wiltshire, the home of the Ministry of Defence’s Science & Technology Laboratory, DSTL. The executive agency had been set up and financed by the MOD to house Britain’s most secretive military research institute. Three years ago there had been a rash of suicides at a biochemical company outsourced by the DSTL. The project leader at the laboratory had turned whistle-blower, and had been found drowned. At the time, Oskar Kasavian had been employed as the head of security in the same company. It might have been coincidence – government defence officials moved within a series of tightly overlapping circles – but the absence of information made Bryant suspicious.

‘Why do something so dramatic?’ asked May. ‘Why not simply slap an injunction on the book?’

‘That would be the best way to draw attention to it, don’t you think? Do you honestly imagine governments can’t make people disappear when they want to? Looks like we’re here.’

The taxi was pulling up in Marsham Street, the new Home Office headquarters. The building had won architectural awards, but to Bryant’s mind its
interior possessed the kind of anonymous corporate style favoured by corrupt dictators who enjoyed picture windows in the boardroom and soundproofed walls in the basement.

‘A word of advice, Arthur,’ May volunteered. ‘The less you say, the better. Don’t give him anything he can use as ammunition.’

‘Oh, you know me, I’m the soul of discretion.’

May’s firm hand on his shoulder held him back. ‘I mean it. This could go very badly for us.’

‘That’s fine, John, so long as you remember that he is our enemy. Anna Marquand was more than just my biographer, she was fast on her way to becoming a good friend; someone I trusted with the secrets of my life. And she may have paid for it with her own.’

In the immense open atrium, the detectives appeared as diminished as the figures in a Lowry painting. A blank-faced receptionist asked for their signatures and handed them plastic swipe cards.

Three central Home Office buildings were connected from the first to the fourth floors by a single walkway. This formed part of a central corridor running the length of the site, commonly known as the Bridge. Kasavian’s new third-floor office was in the only part of the building that had no direct access to sunlight. As the detectives entered his waiting room, they felt the temperature fall by several degrees.

Kasavian’s assistant looked as if she hadn’t slept for months. ‘Perhaps he drains her blood,’ Bryant whispered from the side of his mouth. She beckoned them into an even dimmer room. Kasavian was standing at the internal window with his back to them, his hands locked together, a tall black outline against a penumbra of dusty afternoon light. In this corner of the new century’s high-tech building it was forever 1945.

May glanced across at his partner. Arthur Bryant had
no interest in what others thought of his appearance. His sartorial style could most easily be described as ‘Post-war Care Home Jumble Sale’. It was usually possible to see what he had been eating just by glancing at his front. John May prided himself on a certain level of elegance, although his police salary did not run to handmade suits. When Kasavian turned, May instantly recognized the Savile Row cut of charcoal-grey cloth, the lustrous gleam of Church’s shoes, the dark glitter of Cartier cufflinks, and felt a twinge of jealousy.