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INTRODUCTIONS
Time Out Guide to London’s Secret Buildings: Number 34
Peculiar Crimes Unit
Camden Road, North London
Housed behind the arched, scarlet-tiled windows above Mornington Crescent Tube station, this specialist murder investigation unit has been instrumental in solving many of the capital’s most notorious crimes. Founded during the Second World War to handle cases that could prove embarrassing to the government, it has continued operation right up to the present day. The unit now falls under the jurisdiction of the Home Office, which is attempting to make it more publicly accountable, and so its days are probably numbered. The PCU’s unorthodox operating methods were highlighted in a recent BBC documentary that criticized the conduct of its eccentric senior detectives for their willingness to use illegal information-gathering procedures in the preparation of their cases.
Detective Sergeant Janice Longbright threw the magazine on to her kitchen table. More unwarranted publicity, she thought. At least this time the journalist had not gone into detail about the kind of informants Mr Bryant sporadically pressed into service at the PCU. No mention of the pollen-readers and water-diviners, the necromancers and psychics, the conspiracy theorists and eco-warriors, the mentally estranged, socially disenfranchised, delusional, disturbed and merely very odd people he asked to help out on pet cases, which was a blessing. How many times had they been threatened with closure before? She realized now that instead of the axe suddenly falling, they were to be slowly strangled to death with red tape.
She tapped the keyboard wedged on the corner of her sunflower-laminate-topped breakfast table and stared gloomily at her computer’s empty mailbox. A month ago, she had posted her profile on an internet dating website, but so far there had not been a single taker. She wondered if she had been too honest, her tastes too quirky. Surely there were others whose interests coincided with hers, men who liked criminology, burlesque and film stars of the 1950s? She bent down and scuffed Crippen behind his nicked, floppy ear. The little black-and-white cat purred, coughed, then hacked up a hairball. Great, Longbright thought, everyone’s a critic. She only brought the unit’s cat home when she was feeling particularly lonely, but this morning even Crippen’s presence had not helped.
Going into the hall, she found her doormat similarly bare of letters. She thought someone might have remembered that it was her birthday, but it was half past ten, and the postman had been and gone. This is the world I’ve created for myself, she thought, looking about the patchily painted Highgate flat. Three rented rooms above a charity shop, overlooking a roundabout. No partner, no family still on speaking terms, hardly any friends, only a manky old cat that no one else wants to look after. Her former boyfriend was about to get married to someone else, but for her there was no love interest even remotely on the horizon.
She knew what the trouble was: she had given her best years to the Peculiar Crimes Unit. While other women of her age were presumably still enjoying romantic dinners and illicit weekends, she was usually to be found working late at the offices above Mornington Crescent Tube station, correlating the case histories of violent killers. It wasn’t very appealing to have to tell a date you’d meet him at the restaurant because you were waiting for fingerprints to come in from a severed hand. She sighed, pushing back a thick coil of bleached hair, and was heading for the kitchen to wash up her single breakfast dish when the doorbell rang.
The courier looked far too young to be allowed near a motorcycle, but he was holding the largest bunch of yellow roses she had ever seen. A silver-edged card read:
Happy birthday from your greatest admirers
– Arthur Bryant & John May
It was the first time the detectives had ever sent her something on her birthday. Her colleagues remained her oldest and closest friends. She smiled at the thought, but as she unwrapped the roses and placed them in water, a green thorn plucked at the flesh of her thumb, and a single crimson droplet fell on to a silky yellow petal.
Raymond Land had assembled them all in the unit’s main briefing room. His staff were gathered before him in two untidy rows. Nobody wanted to sit on the garish orange Ikea sofa because Crippen had been sick on it, and the velour was still damp. Renfield stood beside his new boss like a Christian missionary waiting to deliver a sermon before a tribe of delinquent heathens.
‘I thought we could take this opportunity of introducing ourselves to Sergeant Renfield,’ said Land jovially. ‘Perhaps each of us would like to say something in turn about who we are and what we do, just to break the ice.’