The Victoria Vanishes(11)

‘It’s a quarter past ten,’ said Raymond Land to Giles Kershaw. ‘Bryant and May are still over there in the corner conspiring about something. What on earth have they been talking about for the last five and three-quarter hours?’

‘You’re being paranoid, old sausage,’ said the plum-voiced forensic scientist who was taking over from their ill-fated coroner. ‘They’re not talking about you, they’re discussing old cases.’

‘You can show me a little more respect, young man,’ warned Land. ‘I know how you landed your new job.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Kershaw, genuinely surprised.

‘Come off it, sunshine. You’re married to the Home Secretary’s sister-in-law, or something like that. Bryant told me ages ago.’

‘I once went out with a girl who worked in PR at the Home Office, but I certainly never married her. I’m afraid Mr Bryant was playing a trick on you.’

Land wearily passed a hand over his sweating face. ‘Well, there’ll be no more tricks now that Renfield is joining them. We’ll finally get a little order around here.’

The wake was starting to break up. Two of the duty officers from the Albany Street cop shop were bombarding each other with the remains of a party-sized Swiss roll, and even Finch’s farewell cake had been reduced to a controlled explosion of icing and sultanas.

Bryant set his glass down on the beer-stained paper tablecloth and buttoned his overcoat. ‘I have to go home, my head is swimming,’ he told his partner.

‘We haven’t finished discussing your resignation yet.’

‘Don’t be angry with me, John. Leave it to sink in for a few days. You’ll see I was right in the end.’ Bryant settled a squashed navy homburg on to his head so that the hat pressed down on the tips of his ears, knotted his mauve scarf under his chin so that his neck disappeared, and turned up the collar of his voluminous overcoat. He looked like a music hall comic preparing for an Arctic trek.

‘Do you want to share a cab?’ May called as the elderly detective tapped his walking stick to his hat brim in a farewell gesture and stumped off towards the exit.

‘No thanks, the walk will do me good. I need a blast of whatever passes for clean air around here.’

‘All the way to Mornington Crescent? It’s uphill, you know.’

‘Don’t worry, I have my good shoes on and I’m quite capable of finding a taxi when I get tired. You have to learn to stop worrying about me.’ Bryant pushed out of the door and was gone.

I’ve got one week to make him change his mind, May told himself. It’s not an unfeasible task. But he knew it was almost impossible to alter Bryant’s course once it was set.





6





* * *





OBSERVATION

Arthur Bryant cursed himself. I should have handled the matter of my resignation better, he thought. After all these years of working with John, I should at least have taken him into my confidence first.

But John May had always been able to talk him out of making sudden foolhardy decisions. His was the healing voice of reason, a counterbalance to the maddening pandemonium of Bryant’s mind. John might protest, but he could survive perfectly well on his own. People enjoyed his company and opened up to him, because he didn’t do anything that made them nervous. Right from the outset of their partnership, when the pair had launched a murder investigation at the Palace Theatre and solved the Shepherd’s Market diamond robbery, Bryant had been upsetting applecarts and overturning the status quo while his partner followed behind, smoothing raised hackles and restoring order. Across the years, from the tracking of the Deptford Demon to the final unmasking of the Leicester Square Vampire, this out-of-kilter relationship had allowed them to resolve a thousand cases great and small. But everything came to an end, and knowing when to leave was crucial.

Now Oswald Finch was gone, and soon they too would pass into oblivion, to be faintly recalled as members of the old school of police work, a pair of characters, representatives of a classic style of investigation that had since become obsolete. Would anything about them be remembered, other than a few oft-told anecdotes, funny stories to be trotted out wherever old men gathered in pubs? Had they really achieved anything at all, changed any laws, improved the lot of Londoners? Or would they soon be as forgotten as old music-hall stars, the pair of them described as the Flanagan and Allen of the Met?

Bryant raised his head from his scarf and looked about. He was passing along the cream stucco edge of Coram Fields, the seven-acre park on the site of the old Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury which no adult could enter unless in the company of a child. The wind was rising, clattering the leaves of the high oaks and plane trees above him. At ten forty p.m. Bloomsbury was almost deserted, but even during the day there was hardly anyone around. The area between Gower Street and Gray’s Inn Road remained reticent and dignified, seemingly trapped in an earlier era between world wars. There were still a few indifferent second-hand bookshops housed in its mansion buildings, barber shops and fish bars left over from the 1930s, corner pubs that faded back from the street in a deliberate attempt to shun passing trade.