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Bryant & May and the Memory of Blood
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5

    THE ENEMY
     
    ‘ YOU’RE NOT GOING to be happy about this,’ warned John May. ‘Home Office Security has backed up the City of London. They won’t let you have the O’Connor case.’
    ‘Why not? What’s it to them?’ Bryant asked, as he and May made their way across Bloomsbury’s sunlit garden squares towards the Marchmont Street Bookshop.
    ‘Your pal Fenchurch has already tipped someone off about his likely verdict, although he seems to be holding back the full official report. Once that’s been filed, the case is technically closed unless you get Home Office dispensation, and they won’t grant it.’
    ‘That’s odd. I was with him this morning and he said he’d delay the process by forty-eight hours. Why would he have told someone?’
    ‘You weren’t supposed to go there. Maybe he’s being pressured.’
    ‘That makes no sense unless someone at the Home Office thinks the case is more important than it looks. Amy O’Connor was a low-paid bar manager. Apparently she studied biology at Bristol University, but dropped out. She’s not connected to anyone important. Unlessthere’s something in her past. I could take a look at her employment records and see if—’
    ‘Arthur, maybe she really did just black out and fall.’
    ‘Without a cause of death? Next you’re going to tell me she was struck down by the hand of God. Nobody dies without a reason, and no reason has been found. If I can just go back through her history …’
    ‘But it’s not your—’
    ‘Don’t say it again, all right? Here we are.’ Bryant stopped in front of the bookshop and pointed proudly at the window. ‘Sally’s given me pride of place.’ Bryant’s wrinkled features peered up from the cover of a slim volume entitled
The Casebook of Bryant & May
, by Arthur Bryant, as told to Anna Marquand. Beside it, a joss stick protruded from the head of a green jade Buddha, as if in funereal remembrance.
    ‘It’s just the first volume, as you know, but it covers quite a few of our odder investigations, from the Leicester Square Vampire and the Belles of Westminster, to the Billingsgate Kipper Scandal and the hunt for the Odeon Strangler.’
    ‘And you honestly think the public wants to read this stuff? People aren’t interested in the past any more. The young want to get on and make something of their lives. They don’t want to wallow about in ancient history.’
    ‘I didn’t write it for the ambitious young,’ said Bryant primly. ‘I wrote it for the mature and interested. And, if you don’t mind, it isn’t ancient history, it’s my life. Yours, too.’ Privately, though, Bryant had to admit that the events of his life were receding into history. Last Christmas the milkman had come in for a warm-up and had asked his landlady if she collected art deco. ‘No,’ Alma had replied, ‘this happens to be Mr Bryant’s furniture.’ Yesterday’s fashions were today’s antiques.
    The owner of the small bookshop greeted Arthur.Now in her early fifties, Sally Talbot was an attractive blue-eyed blonde with the natural freshness of someone raised on a warm coastline. John May was a great appreciator of beautiful women, and his pride required him to smooth his hair and pull in his stomach.
    ‘Nice to see me in the window,’ Bryant commented. ‘I’m not sure about the incense, though. It looks as if I’ve died.’
    ‘Oh, we’ve got damp,’ said Sally. ‘It’s better than the smell of mildew. Thank you for coming by to sign the stock. You only went on sale this morning but we’ve already sold a few copies.’
    ‘One of them wasn’t to a man who looks like a vampire bat, was it?’ asked Bryant. Oskar Kasavian, the cadaverous Home Office Security Supervisor, had made it publicly known that he objected to Bryant writing his memoirs, and had been trying to get hold of the manuscript so that he could vet it for infringements. The Peculiar Crimes Unit was