The Invisible Code (4 page)

Bryant cleared his throat.

‘I know you’re there, Arthur. You don’t have to make that absurd noise. I know the sound of your shoes.’ Even after all these years, Fenchurch had retained his powerful Jamaican accent. He removed his glasses and raised a huge head of grizzled grey hair.

Bryant was surprised. ‘Really? My Oxford toecaps?’

‘Nobody else I know still wears Blakey’s.’ He was referring to the crescents of steel affixed to Bryant’s toes and heels that saved leather and ruined parquet floors. ‘I haven’t seen you since that disgusting business with the Limehouse Ratboy.’

‘Yes, that was rather nasty, wasn’t it?’ Bryant looked around. ‘All by yourself today?’

‘Do you see anyone else? My assistant’s off having a baby. I mean it’s his wife who’s having the baby. Why he has to be there as well is a mystery to me. It’s a simple enough procedure. So, what have I done to deserve a visit?’

‘Amy O’Connor.’

‘Oh yes. Thought you might be sniffing that one out. Very interesting.’

‘That’s just what I thought.’

‘Pity it’s not your jurisdiction.’

‘It should have been. She died in a church. Part of our remit is to ensure that members of the general public aren’t placed in positions of danger. If people can’t trust the sanctuary of a church, what can they trust? But I’m not here in an official capacity. I thought you might like some company. Here, I brought you some sherbet lemons.’

Bryant rustled the corner of a paper bag. Fenchurch sniffed. ‘Not much of a bribe, is it?’ He fished inside and took one anyway.

‘We’re playing the Dagenham Stranglers at the Hollywood Lanes Saturday week. I’ll put you on our team.’ For some peculiar reason, bookish Bloomsbury was the home of two decent central London bowling alleys.

‘I thought you’d been banned after that incident with the nutcases.’

‘New ownership. Don’t think you should call them nutcases.’ Bryant sucked ruminatively on a sherbet lemon, clattering it loudly against his false teeth. Last year he had fielded a team of anger-management outpatients to play in a bowling tournament against a group of Metropolitan Police psychotherapists. The outpatients had proven to be sore losers. One of them had tried to make a psychotherapist eat his shoes before knocking him unconscious with a bowling pin. ‘Have you carried out a post-mortem yet?’

‘Last night. I’m afraid it’s going to be an open verdict.’

‘Why so?’

‘You know I’m not allowed to tell you.’

‘Oh come on, Ben, who am I going to tell? I’m old. Most of my friends are either dead, mad or on the way out.’

‘How’s John?’

‘Well, he’s fine, obviously. And he’s not a friend; he’s the other half of my brain. I’d discuss it with him, I admit, but it would go no further.’

‘Promise?’

‘Cross my hardened heart.’

‘To be honest it’s a bit of a puzzler, and I could do with some feedback. She had a slight contusion to the orbital frontal region, but was otherwise clean of any marks.’

‘You mean falling from the chair and banging her head wasn’t enough to kill her?’

‘Our bodies are a little tougher than that, Mr Bryant. Otherwise we’d be smashing ourselves to bits like bone-china teacups.’

‘Then what else could it have been?’

‘With the heightened body temperature it
feels
like toxicosis – systemic poisoning of some kind – but there’s no agent present that I could trace. No oesophageal trauma, so she hadn’t ingested anything severe. Stomach’s fine. That’s the thing with City of London workers – you always find the same gut contents, courtesy of our friends at Pret A Manger. The City workers tend to favour the crayfish and rocket sandwiches.’

‘She wasn’t a City worker. She had a job in a bar in Hoxton. No other marks on the body at all?’

‘None that I could see. The admitting officer says they checked the CCTV and she’d been alone outside the church and inside it. There was a boy working in the shop, but he was in and out – a smoker – and went nowhere near her. There’s a witness report from him that’s the blankest document I’ve ever seen. She was completely alone except for a couple of kids.’

Bryant’s ears pricked up. ‘What kids?’

‘The officer said it looked like she had an argument with two small children a few minutes before going into
the church. She was trying to read. They were playing ball near her, annoying her apparently. Not hoodies – well dressed.’

‘Has anyone tried to track the children down?’

‘I wouldn’t have thought so. What would be the point? What could a small child do?’

‘You never know these days. Nothing else unusual at all? Clothes, personal belongings, mobile, handbag?’

‘You’d have to ask someone else about that. I’m only dealing with the physical remains. Wait a minute – there was one thing.’ He rose and went over to a stack of steel drawers labelled alphabetically. ‘Hang on, it’s gone.’

‘Not “C”,’ said Bryant. ‘Try “O” for “O’Connor”.’

‘Don’t know my own filing system.’ Opening the lower drawer, Fenchurch pulled out a clear plastic bag and held it up. ‘I hung on to this because I had to cut it off her body. She had a piece of red string knotted around her left wrist.’ He threw it over to Bryant. ‘My first thought was Kabbalah.’

‘No,’ said Bryant. ‘A Kabbalah string is usually a single strand of red woollen thread, and it’s associated with Judaism. It’s called a
roite bindele
in Yiddish. With a name like O’Connor she certainly wasn’t Jewish, and it wasn’t her married name because she’d never had a husband. St Bride’s is the church of St Bridget of Ireland, so I daresay it attracts Irish worshippers.’

‘Then maybe it was just decoration.’

Bryant turned it in the light, thinking. ‘St Bride’s. An interesting place to die. It’s one of the oldest churches in London, at least the seventh to have stood on that site. Wedding cakes.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘A baker called William Rich saw the spire from his window and had the idea for the shape of his daughter’s wedding cake. Oh, and journalists always used it. A few old ones still do. Suggestive, don’t you think?’

‘No, I don’t, Arthur. My mind doesn’t store things up for later use like yours does. I prefer to have a brain, not a shed.’

‘A couple of things,’ said Bryant. ‘You had to cut the string off, yes?’

‘Yes, the knot—’

‘Precisely. Not the sort of knot you could do up by yourself. So someone else tied it on for her.’

‘What’s the other thing?’

Bryant had second thoughts. ‘Well, the colour is indicative – but I’ll have to do some research on it.’

‘Except that it’s not your case.’

‘I know, everybody keeps saying that.’ Bryant jammed his hat back on and walked to the door. ‘Ben, will you do me one favour for old times’ sake? Don’t file your conclusions for a couple of days. Say the printer ran out of paper or something. I want to try and get the investigation transferred to the unit.’

‘All right,’ said Fenchurch. ‘There’s no one pressuring me, and we’re short-staffed. I suppose I can sit on it for forty-eight hours without too much trouble.’

‘You’re a pal. Saturday night, weekend after next, bowling, you’re playing for us. Eight p.m. sharp for warm-up drinks at the Nun and Broken Compass.’

‘I won’t do it,’ said Raymond Land, shaking his head angrily.

‘I don’t see why not,’ said John May. ‘The City of London’s on a high alert because of the banking protests, their resources are overstretched and I’m sure they’d appreciate the offer of help.’

‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ Land hissed. ‘They hate us. All of them, from the Commissioner downwards. Not just us. They especially hate Arthur. He makes them look bad. He swans in and nicks all the high-profile work, solves the cases and gets the column inches, and
accidentally forces up their targets. Why should they give him a case that’s already been assigned? He’s been in to see me about it and I said no. Absolutely not. We have to keep our noses clean for a while.’

‘Fair enough,’ said May, raising his hands. ‘The others wanted me to ask.’

‘Wait, what others?’

‘Everyone. Janice, Jack, Meera, Colin, all of them.’

‘Are you telling me you’ve been going around canvassing support behind my back?’

‘Of course not. But you know when Arthur gets a hunch it usually turns out to be right.’

Land caught sight of himself in the mirror and saw the usual mix of puzzlement, frustration and anger stirred together like a pudding in a bowl. The little hair he had left was turning grey. He wanted to show authority, but how could he when his detectives defied him at every turn? ‘Look, it’s bad enough having to fight everyone else in the police service without internal divisions as well. Bryant is a detective, not a mystic. He chases these cases because he fancies having a crack at them, not because he has some strange psychic ability to know exactly when—’

Land’s office door opened and Bryant shambled in, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of a shapeless, patched corduroy jacket, his unlit pipe jutting from the side of his mouth. ‘Wind’s changed direction. It’s in the east,’ he said meaningfully. ‘Looks like there’s a storm coming.’

‘Where have you been?’ asked Land, annoyed.

‘Ah. I was on my veranda having a quiet smoke and a think.’

‘You haven’t got a veranda. This is King’s Cross, not New Orleans. It’s a rickety old loading platform and it’s unsafe. Please don’t stand on it.’

Bryant gave a derisive snort. ‘It doesn’t matter at my age. These days I’m amazed if I just wake up in the
morning. Senior citizens should take more chances, not less. Teenagers sleep all the time and us oldies manage four hours a night. Life is upside down. I have a hypothesis about how Amy O’Connor died.’

‘You can’t possibly know anything about her,’ Land protested as a faint but ominous roll of thunder rattled the windows. He glanced out at the seething grey skies above the station, unnerved.

‘The old insurance office,’ said Bryant, removing his pipe. ‘They were tearing down a Victorian building in Salisbury Court, right behind the bench where O’Connor was sitting, but work stopped while they excavated a Roman floor in the basement. Some very nice mosaics. I’ve just been over there. I looked down into the ruined brickwork and saw something lying in the shadows. It might have been the reason for her death.’ The raising of his eyebrow was a study in Stanislavskian method acting.

Land was dumbfounded. His attempts to show leadership were always undermined by his utter amazement at the abilities of others. As a student of human nature he would have made a fine pastry chef. ‘Are you telling me that she was murdered?’

‘I didn’t say that. But I can see how she might have died. I need to find the children who were playing ball in the courtyard.’

‘Well you can’t, it’s not your case.’

‘No,’ said Bryant, ‘but it soon will be.’

‘So you’re some kind of clairvoyant now?’ said Land, exasperated.

‘Answer the phone,’ said Bryant, pointing to the desk. ‘It’s your wife.’

The phone suddenly rang, making Land jump. He gingerly raised the receiver. ‘Raymond Land. Oh, Leanne, it’s you. Yes, I know. I won’t be late. All right.’ He put the phone down. ‘How did you …?’

‘The same way I know that you’ve developed a fear of
rats, that you think you’re undergoing a mid-life crisis and you’ve recently started to believe in the supernatural,’ said Bryant.

‘You can’t possibly – who have you been speaking to?’

Bryant rolled his eyes knowingly and grinned, exposing an amount of white ceramic not seen since the reduction of the East Midlands Electrification Programme had resulted in a surfeit of semi-conductors on the London black market.

‘I know everything about you, Raymondo, even things you don’t know yourself.’ Bryant gave a lewd wink as Land stared at him in ill-disguised horror.

Suddenly, the eerie sound of a theremin started up, the
oooo-weee-oooo
call sign of a hundred old monochrome science-fiction films. ‘That’s my mobile,’ said Bryant, ‘I must take this call. If anyone wants me, I shall be in my boudoir.’

‘You haven’t got a boudoir,’ Land called after him helplessly, ‘you’ve got an office!’

‘All right, what’s with the Sherlock Holmes stuff?’ asked May, closing the door behind him. ‘You’re really getting up Raymond’s nose.’

‘Oh, it was a dreadfully cheesy trick, I know,’ said Bryant airily, ‘but I couldn’t resist getting him back for refusing to let me try for the case. He’s so adorable when his mouth is hanging open, like a spaniel trying to understand house-training instructions.’

‘How did you know all that stuff about him? Or did you just make it up?’

‘It’s easy. His wife just called me by mistake and I rerouted it. He left a card from a rodent exterminator on his desk. We had rats at the old headquarters in Mornington Crescent and they never bothered him, but ever since Janice mentioned she’s heard noises in the walls in this building late at night, he’s been on edge.’

‘The mid-life crisis?’

‘He found out about his wife’s affair, yes?’

‘Only because you told him.’
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