Bryant and May Off the Rails (2010) by Fowler Christopher

Author:Fowler, Christopher [Christopher, Fowler,]
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-01-14T19:17:55.296000+00:00

TWENTY-FIVE

Late Night Conversation

Bryant spent the next few hours in a dim basement library you could only access with the possession of a special pass and a private knock. For the other members of the PCU, Wednesday dragged past in a grim trudge of paperwork, legwork, statements and interviews. Colin Bimsley and Meera Mangeshkar were now resigned to being yoked together, but the paucity of leads made it feel as if there was barely a case to resolve. Meera felt guilty for thinking so, but it was certainly not the kind of investigation upon which reputations were built, not unless there was a racial or political motive for the attack. What did they really have to go on, other than a couple of hunches and the vague sensation that something was wrong?

Just after noon, one of the Daves took the curl out of his hair by slicing through a power cable, which darkened the offices instantly and killed the computers.

At 2:15 Crippen managed to locate the packet of butter that had been used on his paws and ate the whole thing, regurgitating his lunch into Raymond Land’s duffle bag.

At 4:45 the other Dave, now differentiated from his colleague by the lack of singeing in his extremities, removed some plaster from a wall in order to locate a pipe, and in doing so, uncovered an amateurish but alarmingly provocative fresco of naked, overweight witches cavorting in a devil’s circle. It was further proof, if any more was needed, that the warehouse had once been used for something damnably odd. Land had immediately demanded to know what the witches were doing there, and was not satisfied with Bryant’s suggestion that it might be the foxtrot.

By 8:30 that evening having satisfied all existing avenues of enquiry, the exhausted investigators reached a dead end and were sent home, leaving only Bryant and his favourite detective sergeant at King’s Cross headquarters.

DS Janice Longbright pulled the cork from a bottle of Mexican burgundy with her teeth and filled two tumblers. ‘The trouble with you, Arthur,’ she began, with the cork still in her mouth.

‘Any sentence that starts like that is bound to end with something I don’t want to hear,’ Bryant interrupted. ‘Take a card.’ He held out the pack in a hopeful fan.

‘The trouble with you is that once you get the bit between your teeth you can’t be shifted. Two of diamonds. Like this thing with Mr Fox. Take a look.’ She spat out the cork and threw a page across his desk. ‘It’s a screen grab from your security-wallah, Mr Dutta.’

‘You weren’t supposed to tell me what the card was.’ Bryant fumbled for his spectacles and held the page an inch from his nose. The blurred photograph showed Mr Fox and his victim walking outside King’s Cross station. ‘Just what I told you. He followed McCarthy into the tube and stabbed him.’

‘Come on, even I noticed this.’ She threw him another sheet, the same scene a few frames later, as the pair moved into clearer view.

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