Bryant & May - The Burning Man Read Online Free PDF

chin. Now it’s too late.’
    ‘Oh, it’s never too late,’ said May, catching a glimpse of his handsome profile in the window.
    ‘Well, I don’t understand it,’ Land said with a sigh. ‘You’re decades older than me and women can’t keep away from you. The effect you have on them is positively creepy.’
    ‘Did someone say we have to knock on a door that isn’t there?’ asked Meera Mangeshkar, who was passing Land’s office and felt like being annoying because she had nothing to do.
    ‘Apparently we have to pretend that it’s there,’ May explained. ‘Think of it as a portal to a mystical sanctum.’
    ‘All due respect, sir, Mr Land’s as mystical as a sausage sandwich.’
    ‘Are there sausages?’ asked Colin Bimsley, who was passing too.
    ‘There are no sausages, there is no door, now will you all get out?’ yelled Land.
    ‘I thought you said there
was
a door,’ May concluded.
    Welcome to the offices of London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit. For the sake of succinctness this account will be trimmed like fat from pork, leaving only the lean facts of the case, but in truth modern British police departments are rather like insurance offices. People stand around and chat, attend unnecessary meetings about performance targets and sit through seminars outlining initiatives that achieve nothing. They argue, drink too much tea and spend hours filling out forms. But in the matter of this inquiry the staff of the PCU won’t be doing that. In the space of one week there will be death and destruction for the most mysterious of motives, and it will end in a terrible loss.
    All that’s missing to start this particular fireball rolling is the detective who always causes the most trouble in any unit investigation: Mr Arthur St John Aloysius Bryant.

6

CURTAIN UP
     
    The spotlight thumped on and the crimson velvet curtains swept open to reveal, downstage centre, what appeared to be a tramp, possibly someone auditioning for
Waiting for Godot
.
    The tramp looked around in confusion, spotted the audience, then began to edge his way offstage. Unfortunately he found his exit blocked, and as he was standing in a 1930s art deco lounge beside a woman in a long dress of silvered silk arranging daffodils in a bowl, he was immediately assumed to be some kind of comedy gardener. The more he bumped and shuffled his way around the furniture, the more the audience laughed.
    A brilliantined young man in a dinner jacket entered stage right and was astounded to find his place taken by this wizened interloper. However, in keeping with the maxim that The Show Must Go On, he persevered with his cue.
    ‘Don’t be so awfully cross with me, Lavinia. You know how you hate wrinkles so. When I saw you outside the casino, standing there in the moonlight, I simply couldn’t help myself. You really are the most frightfully lovely creature, you know.’ He tried to close in on his mark beside the actress but the tramp was in his way, blinking out at the audience like a befuddled tortoise.
    ‘What the hell is he doing out there?’ asked the stage manager in a panicked whisper.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ said the unnerved ASM. ‘I tried to get him off before the curtain went up.’
    ‘Oh, Roger, if only you hadn’t been such a frightful cad,’ trilled Lavinia. ‘Now there’ll always be something utterly ghastly between us.’ She eyed the tramp disdainfully as the audience collapsed in laughter and the curtain came down.
    ‘I wasn’t going to leave until I had an answer,’ Arthur Bryant insisted stubbornly, pulling his coat free of the ASM’s hands.
    ‘What are you talking about?’ the stage manager asked. ‘Who the hell are you?’
    ‘I’m a police officer.’ Arthur Bryant handed over what he hoped was his PCU calling card and not an ad for a shoe shop. ‘I’ve been following your stagehand.’ He pointed to a ferret-faced young man seated in the corner of the flies, attached to an iron post with a plastic cable tag. ‘I tailed him