Bryant & May on the Loose: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery Page 0,67

him?’ Longbright asked.

‘Not at all,’ Casey replied, at a loss. ‘As I said, everyone liked him. Terry was the sort of man you would go to if you were in trouble. A good man.’

‘You don’t murder someone because of their goodness,’ said Bryant, disappointed.

Colin Bimsley’s doctor said that his lack of spatial awareness had been exacerbated by the misalignment of his spine and the differing optical fields in his left and right eyes. None of which was any consolation when the detective constable fell over the edge of the fire escape at the rear of the Paradise Chip Shop.

‘Are you all right?’ called Banbury, who heard the crash.

‘I’m fine; I landed on my head. The railing was rotten. Give me a hand up, will you?’ Scrambling to his feet amidst bags of builders’ rubble and shards of shredded timber, Bimsley tried to find a way to climb back out of the stairwell.

He was rubbing his sore, stubbled pate when Banbury came out onto the fire escape. ‘I can’t lift you, you’re too big,’ he called down to the DC. Banbury was trying to work out a method of levering Bimsley up when his nostrils detected a familiar but highly unpleasant smell. He was instantly reminded of the odour that lingered on the lab coat of the PCU’s late medical examiner, Oswald Finch.

The dark space between the buildings housed the ventilation shaft of the takeaway, but had been used by builders as a dumping ground for the shop’s old interior.

‘Can you smell something?’ Banbury sniffed and followed his nose, sifting out the musky odours of mildew, moss and London dirt.

‘Rotten food,’ replied Bimsley.

‘Have a poke around down there, would you?’ Banbury indicated a wet, dark corner filled with plastic sacks.

‘I’ve got my good shoes on, Dan. I’m going out tonight.’

‘Just do it, would you?’

Pulling aside half a dozen bags stuffed with mortar and plaster, Bimsley dug down into the waste, listening to the scuttle of fleeing rodents.

In a cement bag, he came to the source of the smell. Gingerly opening the top of the sack, he shone his pencil torch inside.

A single blue eye glittered back at him.

Bimsley yelped in alarm, but was drawn back to the thing in the sack. The skull had been so badly battered that only the eye was left intact. ‘Oh, man.’ He covered his nose and instinctively released the bag.

‘What is it?’

‘I think we’ve located the missing part of the first Mr Delaney.’ He took another look. The head was surrounded by pale mounds of spaghetti, giving it the appearance of the Medusa. He realised that he was looking at the remaining piece of the body from the freezer, buried here where only someone with an acute sense of smell and a predilection for digging in trash would ever think of looking for it. ‘Maybe now we’ll find out who he really is. And how many of him there are.’

28

THE LAND DECIDES

Raymond Land shifted about in his chair and rearranged the few items on his desk, then looked for something useful to do. Everyone else was busy, and he had no-one to talk to. He wasn’t needed here at the office, and he certainly wasn’t needed at home. The only person who had come to see him this morning was Crippen, and that was because the cat wanted to be fed.

Life wasn’t fair. At least retirement would have allowed him regular games of golf. He had a little money saved, and might have taken a holiday somewhere far away, South America perhaps. Leanne could have put her rhumba lessons to use. Heaven knows she’d taken enough of them. Instead, he was stuck in this crumbling warehouse, where chill winds crept in through the cracks in the walls, wondering if he would ever get warm again and how on earth he could be of help to anyone other than the cat.

Outside it was just starting to rain again. May in London, a month when nobody talked about anything but the weather. He sharpened a pencil. The bulb on his desk light flickered and went out. His chair had a wobbly leg. Folding a beer mat into quarters he bent down to use it as a makeshift prop, and found himself looking at a painted white line, about an inch wide. The line came to a point under his foot, then set off again beneath his desk.

Puzzled, Land rose and pushed back his chair.

Another point, further to the left, went under the ancient, moth-eaten Persian rug Bryant