Bryant & May on the Loose

∨ Bryant & May on the Loose ∧

18

The Watcher

It was safe to say that things had not gone according to plan. Standing beside the green park bench beneath the rustling beech trees, Mr Fox tried to understand how it had gone so badly wrong. He had painstakingly followed his own rules. He should have been prepared for anything. Instead, his anger had resurfaced at the wrong time, unfolding like a malignant bloom, spreading poison and panic across the situation. No matter how hard he tried to behave like a machine, the dark devil inside him returned to make him human.

In a way, Mr Fox had got his wish. He had moved up, because there was no going back. He had been suddenly thrust into the big league. Now that he was a murderer, the word defined who he had become, and who he would always be. It was the ultimate description of a human being, how the rest of the world would see him if they ever found out. The term overrode any other that could be applied. What he needed to do was stay calm and find a way to turn the situation to his advantage.

Murderer. He actually felt different. The word freed him. He had nothing more to lose. If he could guarantee that no trace of his path was left behind, the way ahead was clear. He could kill again, and again. His new life required no great change in the patterns of his behaviour. It was merely an adjustment. He had always known how to make himself invisible. His unique skill had always been to absorb the talents and knowledge of others, use what he needed and discard the rest. He never allowed anyone to get too close. He kept the world at arm’s length in order to look down on it.

Checking across the road he saw three women standing beside their prams in the forecourt of a block of flats. Jasmine Wincott, whose husband had left her for a girl half his age; Paula Trainer, whose teenage son was now mainlining heroin; and Sylvia Crane, whose oldest boy had been stabbed to death in a territorial fight between two gangs that had been disbanded by the time the case went to trial. In the road, working on his van, was Casey Potter, who’d done time for B&E, and was now studying chemistry at UCL. Mr Fox looked at the rows of boxy windows above them and knew who stood in every room. He had made it his business to know.

He watched as the shabby old detective marched past on the other side of the road, his walking stick held jauntily at his shoulder. That was Arthur St John Bryant; the middle name was not pronounced ‘sinjon’ in the traditional way. He had been given the name because his mother had been delivered to hospital in a St John’s ambulance. Not even his partner knew of this, but Mr Fox had been determined to find out as much as possible. Bryant was formerly of Bow Street, Savile Row, and the North London Serious Crimes Division. Although he had been born in the East End, the old man had lived in Hampstead and Battersea, and was now residing in Chalk Farm. His parents came from Bethnal Green, and his brother had died after suffering an accident on a Thames barge. He had never remarried after his wife’s death. He was a rebel and a nuisance, but not someone to be dismissed lightly.

Mr Fox made it his business to know everything about everyone. The price of freedom was eternal vigilance. This was his area. He had learned the history of the Bagnigge Wells, with its lake of swans, peacocks and seashell grottos. He had been to the British Library and studied an on-line copy of the Domesday Book in order to learn about the four ancient prebendal manors in his parish – Pancras, Cantlowes, Tothill and Ruggemure. He knew how the bucolic village of Battle Bridge had become the sprawling chaos of King’s Cross, how the vast piles of ashes from Harrison’s Brickworks that had accumulated in Battle Bridge Field were eventually sold to the Russians, to help rebuild Moscow after Napoleon’s invasion.

He had discovered that the name King’s Cross came from the unpopular octagonal monument to George IV that once stood at the junction of four roads, less than half a kilometre from where he now stood. The building had been used as a police station and then a tavern before being torn down. Every time he walked through the station, he was aware that he was walking upon the site of a smallpox hospital, and that the Centre for Tropical Diseases still stood nearby. So much had been demolished around here in the last three years, so many road names changed, that it was already becoming hard to recall the streets of his childhood. He had watched the old buildings fall. Only the Coal and Fish Offices and the Granary had been spared the rapacious bulldozers. The Grade II-listed Stanley Buildings had been torn down, and all but one of the famous gasholders had been dismantled. But he knew that no matter how hard you tried to change a place, it would find a way of reverting to its historical character.

The only way he could stay here was by recording people and events even more carefully than the CCTV lenses that covered the stations. I am the future, he thought. One day all people will be like me. Not because they want to, but because it will be the only way they can prove they are still free.

And I will be free, thought Mr Fox as he watched the elderly detective head off in the distance. No matter how many I have to kill to remain so.