vermilion daisies around its roof. Its noxious colour-scheme was enough to make it stand out from the other vehicles in the police car park at Mornington Crescent. Bryant unwedged the driver’s door with the pronged end of a cheese-knife, which he kept about him for the purpose.
‘That’s an offensive weapon, you know.’
‘What am I going to do with it?’ asked Bryant. ‘Threaten someone with a slice of dolcelatte?’ He held open the car door. ‘Come on, it’s quite safe.’
‘No thanks. You nearly killed us the other day, going around Vauxhall roundabout.’
‘They’d changed the one-way system without telling anyone.’
‘I seem to recall that you were on the pavement.’
‘Sometimes it’s hard to tell where the pavement begins these days.’
‘It’s usually the bit with the shoppers on. No, Arthur. Today we’re taking my car.’ May bipped his graphite-sleek BMW.
‘Wonderful, now we’ll look like Camden drug-dealers. I didn’t think you ever used your car.’
‘Well, I am today. And you’re not smoking that inside my vehicle.’ He pulled the unlit pipe from Bryant’s mouth and reinserted it into his jacket. ‘Where are we going this time?’
‘Beverly Brook.’ Bryant made a theatrical fuss about getting himself settled in the passenger seat.
‘Wasn’t she a forties singer?’
‘It’s another underground river. Runs from Cheam and Richmond to Barnes, goes through Raynes Park and around the edge of Wimbledon Common.’
‘That’s miles away.’
‘Spoken like a true townie.’
The detectives hardly ever left London. May’s under-furnished modern flat in St John’s Wood had the melancholy air of an airport at midnight. Only his computer room showed signs of habitation. In this respect, he lived like a teenager.
After the tumult of the city, Raynes Park seemed not so much depopulated as derelict. The neighbourhood appeared to have been stunned into silence, as if someone had thrown a bucket of dirty water over it. There were only becalmed avenues of redbrick houses, graffiti-covered shops and mangy green verges.
They hadn’t intended to drive out this far, but Bryant had misread the road signs. ‘Someone’s been busy with their lawn-mower,’ he observed. ‘Look at these gardens. There aren’t any neat box hedges like this near me. All we have are scabby old plane trees with plastic bags in their upper branches and front yards full of McDonald’s containers.’
‘You’ve never owned a garden.’
‘My mother had one in Bethnal Green. We used to keep chickens in the Anderson shelter. We had nasturtiums and a tortoise. That was a proper garden, a place where your dad could take his motorbike to bits. This is different.’
Bryant was right. Even the air felt thinner; for a start, it wasn’t vibrating with fluorocarbons. At Wimbledon they found themselves surrounded by jeeps, 4x4s and truck-sized people-carriers, vehicles taken on school runs by high-income nesting families who never travelled further than Tesco or a Devonshire bolthole. Neighbourhood Watch stickers in front windows, no street life away from the superstore, nothing but the odd dog-walker, invariably an elderly lady in a Liquorice-Allsort hat and matching gloves.
‘Longbright says people who spend their whole lives in the suburbs have no social graces because they never talk to strangers,’ Bryant pointed out.
‘That’s a bit harsh.’
‘I don’t know. The Balaklava Street residents clearly have trouble talking to me.’
‘Arthur, everyone has trouble talking to you. You scare them.’
‘Rubbish. I’m much more charming these days. I hardly ever get annoyed with the officers Stanley assigns to us, even slack-jawed drooling neanderthals like Bimsley.’
Detective Chief Superintendent Stanley Marsden acted as a liaison officer between the detectives and the government. He was meant to operate with impartiality, but the Home Office paid his salary. He was known to play billiards with Raymond Land, but he also attended Arsenal matches with Sergeant Carfax, an astonishingly unpleasant Met officer who had been passed over for promotion four times, and who had decided to blame Bryant for his failure to rise through the ranks. There was still some bad feeling about the special status accorded to the PCU, but most situations were calmed by May’s tact and inexhaustible patience. Even his enemies liked him. Bryant, on the other hand, had only to raise a telephone receiver to upset everyone within hearing distance.
Bryant map-read under sufferance because he said it hurt his eyes, and they had to keep stopping while May checked their coordinates.
‘I’ve been rewriting your notes.’ Bryant dug out a small book bound in orange Venetian leather and passed it to his partner. ‘I thought if we have to submit something to Raymond, it should at least be entertaining.’
May waited until they reached red traffic lights,