Bryant & May on the Loose: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery Page 0,47

our furry friend before the end of the day. Raymond has been asked to provide the Home Office with an update tonight.’ He gave Bryant a look of gentle concern. ‘Are you up to all this?’

‘I’m as fit as a fiddle if you don’t count my knees,’ Bryant snapped. ‘They packed up shortly after my legendary tango performance at the Queen’s silver jubilee. Nobody told me that Princess Margaret’s table wouldn’t take my weight.’ May gave his partner a sceptical look. Lately he had become convinced that Bryant was manufacturing his memories. ‘Besides, you’re the one who’s had the operation. You should be resting up and taking it easy.’

‘How could I, with everyone so worried about you?’

‘Well, you did a good thing, taking me out of myself. I only hope I can do the case justice. It’s difficult understanding the mind of a man who is prepared to dress as a stag to issue an ecological warning to the world.’

‘You think he trotted out in fancy dress trying to scare the natives, didn’t see much of a result and upped his game to include kidnap and murder?’

‘Even I wouldn’t be that presumptive, John. Besides, it doesn’t give us a feasible MO. Think about it.’

‘Seems perfectly straightforward to me.’ May spoke with more than a hint of sarcasm. ‘He puts on an outfit that must radically restrict his movement, hunts down his victims in another part of town, kills them, drags them back to his place and dismembers them before driving here, through the most heavily policed part of the entire city.’

‘He dumps them at this spot because it’s his hallowed ground,’ said Bryant. ‘Then he dresses up and appears immediately afterwards. It’s a pagan ritual of appeasement and celebration. Meera said she was reminded of the Highwayman, but he was driven by indifference, a blankness of character. This man is in the vanguard of Europe’s oldest religion. I’ll be a little presumptive and suggest that we’re looking for a neo-hippie, a tree-hugger, a modern-day shaman who probably smokes too much weed and believes he can impede the onward trundle of progress. He sees the big bad corporations moving into King’s Cross and wants to show them that the old ways still prevail. We should find out who’s been attending the local protest groups, who’s been taking pagan volumes out of the local library and attending alternative-religion societies, check the notice boards in Camden’s head shops.’

‘But these are your kind of people, Arthur, the ones you usually regard as allies.’

‘Murder makes enemies of us all,’ said Bryant, fixing on his hat and staggering back to the dry firmness of the road.

21

THE QUIET ONES

The following morning, Raymond Land sat down tentatively on the leather swivel chair Longbright had found for him and looked out of the filthy window. Below, traffic on the Caledonian Road had choked itself to a standstill. He should have been at home in bed, reading the papers.

He turned back to study the dingy brown room and realised with a sinking sensation that he was now worse off than he had been before. His fate was once more tied to the unit, his dreams of retirement had retreated even further, and his new surroundings were positively Dickensian. Creaking forward in his chair, he peered into a cobwebbed corner of the room, then rose to examine it. A patch of stained wallpaper had divorced itself from the grey plaster, as if the room had died and was sloughing its skin. Something was revealed underneath, part of a design. Reaching on tiptoe, he brushed aside the spiders and seized the edge, gently pulling. A metre of damp paper rolled slowly down, tore and fell on the floor in a cloud of mildew spores.

Land found himself looking at a drawing of a naked man poised between two tall iron braziers. He appeared to be having intimate congress with a goat that was standing on its hind legs and wearing black leather thigh-boots. Shocked, Land attempted to cover over the drawing, but the paper would no longer stick to the wall.

In his own room, Arthur Bryant was seated on top of some packing boxes, nonchalantly swinging his legs back and forth as he thumbed through a reference book.

‘What the hell was this place?’ Land demanded to know, storming into the detective’s office. ‘There’s something really unpleasant and unwholesome about it. There’s a very bad feeling here. You told me it was a warehouse.’

‘No, mon vieux fromage, I said it was a whorehouse,’ replied