Christopher Fowler - The Water Room

Longbright knew better than to argue with Arthur’s working methods. The inability of the Peculiar Crimes Unit to conduct its affairs in a conventional manner was embarrassingly well documented. Having abandoned attempts to make it properly accountable, the Home Office had now separated the unit from Metropolitan Police jurisdiction and placed it under the nebulous security services of MI7. There would be certain advantages: the detectives would no longer have to pay exorbitant charges for equipment usage or fight the Met for their annual budget, and the old demarcation lines would finally be resolved, but they would now be accountable to passing governments, where personal resentments ran deep. Bryant and his partner John May had been given six months to make the revised unit successful or train up their own replacements, for they were-as everyone seemed so keen to point out-both far beyond the statutory retirement age. There had been talk of closing the place down altogether, and yet it seemed a guardian angel existed in the labyrinth of Whitehall, because eleventh-hour reprieves continued to appear with the regularity of rainbows.

‘I didn’t have time to change.’ Benjamin Singh indicated his clothes, clearly feeling disrespectful for wearing a stripy tank-top, brown trousers and a purple shirt. ‘I visit my sister Ruth every Monday morning to clean the house for her,’ he explained. ‘She’s very old and can’t lift the vacuum cleaner. The moment I opened the front door, I knew something was wrong. She was sitting on a chair in the basement, dressed for the shops, which was strange because she knows I always go for her. Ruth just makes out the list. She was cold to the touch.’

‘Forgive me, but I don’t understand why you didn’t immediately call for an ambulance.’ Bryant remembered that the new office had a smoking ban, and tamped out his pipe before Longbright had a chance to complain.

‘She was dead, Arthur, not sick. Kentish Town police station is only three streets away from her house, so I walked around there and saw the duty sergeant, but I didn’t like his attitude- he told me to call an ambulance as well-so I came here.’

‘You know we don’t take cases off the street any more, Ben,’ Bryant explained. ‘They have to come to us through proper channels now.’

‘But when I found her, my first thought was to-’

‘You’re supposed to be recording this conversation, Arthur,’ Longbright interrupted. ‘From now on we have to stick to the rulebook.’

Bryant poked about in the cardboard box at his feet and pulled out a battered dictaphone. ‘Here,’ he offered, ‘you have a go. It doesn’t seem to let me record, for some reason. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong.’ The patented helpless look suggested innocence but didn’t wash with Longbright, who was familiar with her boss’s ability to cause malfunctions in the simplest equipment. Bryant was no longer allowed to touch the computers owing to the odd demagnetizing effect he had on delicate technology. His application to attend an IT course had been turned down six times by those who feared he would cause a national meltdown if let loose near PITO, the Police Information Technology Organization. His facility for picking up old broadcasts of Sunday Night at the London Palladium on his Sky dish had been documented with fascination but no hope of explanation by the Fortean Times .

‘All right, let’s go and have a look at your sister.’ Bryant clambered wearily to his feet. Tortoise-like, scarf-wrapped, argumentative to the point of rudeness, myopic and decrepit, Bryant appeared even more dishevelled than usual, owing to the current upheavals in his life. A waft of white hair rose in a horseshoe above his ears, as if he’d been touching static globes at the Science Museum. Behind his watery sapphire eyes, though, was a spirit as robust and spiky as winter earth. He had been described as ‘independent to the point of vexation and individual to the level of eccentricity’, which seemed accurate enough. John May, his dapper partner, was younger by three years, an attractive senior of considerable charisma, modern in outlook and gregarious by nature. Bryant was a loner, literate and secretive, with a sidelong, crafty mind that operated in opposition to May’s level-headed thinking.

‘Janice, when John finally deigns to turn up, would you send him around to join us? Where are we going?’

‘Number 5, Balaklava Street,’ said Mr Singh. ‘It’s between Inkerman Road and Alma Street.’

‘Ah, your sister’s house was built in the 1850s, then. The roads are all named after battles of the Crimean War. Victorian town councils were fond of such gestures.’ Bryant knew historical facts like that. It was a pity he couldn’t remember anything that had happened in the last twenty years. Recent events were his partner’s speciality. John May remembered everyone’s birthdays. Bryant barely recalled anyone’s names. May exhibited a natural charm that disarmed the toughest opponents. Bryant could make a nun bristle. May had girlfriends and relatives, parties and friends. Bryant had his work. May would smile in blossoming sunlight. Bryant would frown and step back into darkness. Each corresponding jag and trough in their characters was a further indication of the symbiosis they had developed over the years. They fitted together like old jigsaw pieces.

Longbright waited for Bryant to leave the office, then opened all the windows to clear the overpowering smell of paint. She set about unpacking the new computers, thankful that the old man could occupy his mind with the unit’s activities once more; he had been driving everyone mad for the past month, acting like a housebound child on a rainy day.

Arthur’s sudden decision to move house had been uncharacteristic. Furthermore, he had chosen to leave behind his landlady, the woman who had tolerated his dreadful behaviour for more than forty years. Alma Sorrowbridge had been shocked and hurt by her tenant’s determination to abandon her in Battersea as he moved alone to the workshop of a converted false-teeth factory in Chalk Farm. As she unbattened boxes and uncoiled cables, Longbright wondered at his motive. Perhaps Arthur felt that time was running short, and was preparing to distance himself from those closest to him. Perversely, his morbidity always increased when he was removed from death. Proximity to a fresh tragedy concentrated his mind wonderfully. Truly ghastly events took years off him.

Longbright caught herself humming as she worked, and realized that she was happy again.

‘So you and Mr May still have the Peculiar Crimes Unit.’ Mr Singh made conversation as he drove his little blue Nissan from Mornington Crescent to Kentish Town. Bryant had given the unit his Mini Cooper, a sixties relic with a history of rust and electrical faults, and as it was away being repaired he was forced to rely on getting lifts, which at least allowed the pedestrian population of north London to breathe a collective sigh of relief.

‘Yes, but we’ve had a change of brief since the days when you worked with us,’ said Bryant. ‘Now it’s problem homicides, low-profile investigations, cases with the potential to spark social panic, general unrest and malaise. We get the jobs that don’t lead anywhere and don’t suit Met’s wide-boys. They’re too busy number-crunching; the last thing they want is the kind of investigation that hangs around for months without producing quantifiable results. They have league tables now.’

‘So you’re meant to free up the regular police.’

‘I suppose that’s how they see it. We’ve had a few successes, but of course the cases that pay off are never the ones you expect.’ He wasn’t complaining. While everyone else was streamlining operations to board the law-enforcement superhighway, the PCU remained an unreliable but essential branch line no one dared to close down, and that was how he liked it. ‘I’m sorry you were the one who had to find your sister.’