Bryant & May on the Loose: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery Page 0,92

over the land, but that wasn’t successful, so finally they turned the extension into a pub—for a while it was called the Stag’s Head. I moved here, but I still went back, of course, ’cause all my old mates were around there. They hung on waiting to be bought out, ’cause there was talk of the railways buying the land.’

‘Then it was finally sold to the ADAPT Group.’

‘I figured that’s why you’re here, because of Terry Delaney.’ Bryant was brought up short. ‘You know him?’

‘He came to see me, ’cause ADAPT decided to go ahead and clear the site completely, and they brought him in, ’cause he knew the area. They brought the bulldozers in but there was a question over who owned the land. Terry was hired to tear down the remains of the Stag’s Head. He told me he was a bit of an amateur historian, and knew a lot about the street. He tore up the foundations and found the well, but of course it had been filled in with bricks and then concrete had been poured over it, so there was nothing much left to see.’

‘So how did he end up coming to you?’

‘He found the deed. See, old Mr Porter never got around to putting his house deeds in the bank. A lot of people didn’t, in them days. He kept his important documents in a tin box in the basement. Nobody ever went down there much ’cause it was too wet, and bad for the chest. I suppose when the house was bombed the box fell into the well. It couldn’t have fallen very far, though, or Terry would never have found it. They’ve been turning up all sorts of things on those old properties, but apparently you only get a short time to dig up the site before they’re covered by the new buildings.’

Bryant thought of the remains of London’s Roman basilica, now only viewable from the basement of the hairdresser’s off Gracechurch Street that had been built over it, and the sportswear shop that had housed the ancient and venerable London Stone for so many years. Notoriously, archaeologists had been given just six weeks to uncover treasures beneath a part of the London Wall before it was concreted into an office car park.

‘You’re telling me that Mr Delaney found the original freehold property deeds to number eleven Camley Lane and traced them to you?’

‘He used a pile driver to break the well open, and there was the box. Terry thought it was a bomb at first. He told me there’s over five thousand unexploded bombs still buried in London soil. He said he wanted to return the deeds to their rightful owner. Thought that way they’d have a chance to claim the land before the registration date passed, ’cause it was due soon.’

The deed expires on the day of the greatest sacrifice, thought Bryant. I knew it. The city has plans for us all.

‘I explained that I wasn’t the owner, that Mrs Porter had just lived with us until she died.’

‘So who is the actual owner?’ Bryant asked.

‘I told him,’ said Mr Barker, ‘that would now be her granddaughter. But I didn’t have her address.’

After Dan Banbury had visited her at Yield to the Night, Janice Longbright had reached a decision. She would no longer wear the obscure lingerie brands from the 1950s that were both uncomfortable and inappropriate for work. She would stop dressing like a post-war movie starlet. She had kept her signature look for many years, but you couldn’t be young forever, and it was time to start dressing like a woman in the full bloom of her middle years. Away would go the bleaches and lipsticks worn by Diana Dors and Jayne Mansfield. No more cleavage-revealing sweaters or strappy heels. She had not dressed for men, but to make herself feel good.

So she had bought herself jeans, sneakers and a shirt, and started to look like everyone else.

Bad timing, Janice, she decided now. Because she was lying on Liberty DuCaine’s sofa bed in his flat in Vauxhall, wishing she wasn’t wearing her sensible Marks & Spencer underwear.

When you haven’t touched anyone else’s lips for a long time, Long-bright thought, it’s a really weird sensation. Her ex-boyfriend’s kisses had lacked subtlety, consisting of either pecks or tongues. Liberty, however, had explored her mouth with gentle languor. For a brief moment she realised what she had been missing for so long.

He was a physically imposing man, and now he seemed