The Lonely Hour by Christopher Fowler

Author:Christopher Fowler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2019-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

25

LATE

Arthur Bryant removed the apostle teaspoon he had been using to wedge open his office window, and mopped rain from the sill with the only handkerchief he owned that was not covered in sulphuric acid burns. The building was quiet. The pipes ticked as the heating went off.

London became a more extreme version of itself after midnight, but the street scene below felt even stranger tonight. A young woman was standing outside a closed tobacconist’s with her fists held at her sides, screaming incomprehensibly. The homeless boy cocooned inside shards of cardboard in the doorway tried to ignore her. A few yards away, two furtive young men were swapping something suspicious from their coat pockets. There was harm in the air.

He was waiting for the kettle to boil when John May appeared in the doorway, slapping water from his trousers. He looked around for somewhere to leave his umbrella. ‘Dickinson was seeing one of the girls on Market Street. She reckons he was in trouble. He’d done something bad, but she doesn’t know what.’

‘Market Street. I can’t believe there are still girls working up here.’ Bryant dropped bags into two mugs. ‘The sale of sexual services on that spot goes back several hundred years. So do some of the ladies, if memory serves. Anything else?’

‘She says Dickinson saw his father die. He never told her what happened. It shouldn’t be too hard to find out. How come you’re not with the others in the operations room?’

Bryant stirred the mugs with his apostle spoon. ‘They’ve all been assigned tasks. I’ve been trying to think through some ideas.’

‘If you have any thoughts about who we’re looking for, you need to start sharing them with me,’ said May, lowering himself into his armchair.

‘I’m not sure night shifts were such a good idea. I can’t talk to anyone out there because they’re all asleep.’ When his laptop pinged he opened the message and read it.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked May, looking over.

‘An old acquaintance of mine.’ Bryant looked up with wide blue eyes. ‘A combat photographer, Larry Duggan. He’s shot himself. I was just with him.’

May’s brow furrowed. ‘How? Where?’

‘We met up in the Lamb & Flag. He’d lost his job and was suffering from depression. Apart from extracting his thoughts on the case I barely listened to him. I was too busy thinking about my own needs. He took a train to Devon, sat on the clifftops and blew his head off with a shotgun.’

‘How awful. Who sent that?’

‘Regional news. He wanted to talk to me. I cut him off.’ Bryant felt a rare pang of shame. Why had he not seen the risk and done something?

‘You weren’t to know that he might kill himself.’

‘That’s the point, John. I could have known if I’d paid more attention. I’m not an idiot, I’ve read Thucydides and Pope and Proust, but I’m lost with people.’ He tapped at the window frame with his spoon. ‘Dying alone. It doesn’t bear thinking about, but I suppose some people think about nothing else.

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