Bryant & May 01; Full Dark House

∨ Full Dark House ∧

21

FREEDOM FROM MEMORY

He was searching for something in the files. John May sat in the archive room of the Palace Theatre and rested his aching, aged bones.

He was perched on a canvas stool with a mildewed cardboard box on his lap. Many of the photographs, plans and notes beneath his fingers were stuck together with time. They bore marks of damp, tea, candle grease. He wished he knew what he was looking for. He knew only that Bryant had been here before him, just days before he died.

In the years following the investigation, more photographs had been added to the files of the Palace: Jimmy Cagney, tap-dancing in a USO camp show; Betty Grable singing; Laurence Olivier grinning gap-toothed in Osborne’s The Entertainer; John Tiller’s Girls, highkicking their way through the 1958 season; a thousand forgotten variety acts armed only with funny walks and silly catchphrases; the cast of Les Misérables, changing yet changeless across the years. And a grey police file on the Palace Phantom, dated November 1940, left to be rediscovered over sixty years later.

Here were the typed interviews they had conducted with the cast and production crew of Orpheus at the onset of that terrible season. The last pages of the file were missing. Only the interviews remained. But there had clearly been other pages here. The freshly torn staples at the top of the file attested to that. He looked through the interview list again. Corinne Betts, Miles Stone, Eve Noriac, Geoffrey Whittaker…he could barely put faces to the names. Elspeth Wynter, Arthur had fallen for her, but had it been out of love or pity? Who knew now, and what did it matter? He imagined the faces of Londoners, photographs pinned to an immense police board stretching hundreds of miles back into the past, across two thousand years of continued inhabitancy. So many dead, so many yet to come…

The ring of his mobile phone startled him. He pulled the Nokia from his pocket and answered it.

“John? It’s me, Alma. I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

“Me? No, how are you?”

“My legs are wicked, no change there, just getting old. Janice said you were back, and I was worried because someone’s been in Mr Bryant’s flat.” She called him John; she always referred to Arthur as Mr Bryant.

“How do you know someone’s been in there?”

“There was some stuff left out and now it’s gone. I know because I did the dusting. I told you I didn’t like to throw anything away. I don’t want to let the rooms out no more.”

“Was the door forced?” asked May. “Did they break in?”

“No, nothing’s damaged, the front lock’s in one piece. They must have got them skeleton keys.”

“I don’t think that’s very likely, Alma. But it’s a standard lock, it isn’t too hard to open. I’ve done it before now. What did they take?”

“Just some pieces of paper from the table.”

“You don’t happen to remember what they were, do you?”

“I know because I typed them out for him myself,” explained Alma. “They were Mr Bryant’s dental records.”

♦

May walked down Charing Cross Road and cut through to the back of the National Portrait Gallery, carefully avoiding the junkfood swill of Leicester Square. He detested the swirling scrum of the pedestrianized zone, the latent danger, the shoving, dislocated crowds that filled a once-beautiful space. It was hard to imagine, but the area had been pleasanter to stroll through when traffic had traversed it. Now, the tourist hot spots of the city were the very parts that made it like everywhere else. Was it possible to imagine those buildings without inhaling the animal-fat stink of McDonald’s or KFC? He never thought London would cease to appeal to him, but the little faded glory it still possessed was being scuffed away by the dead hand of globalization. On his down days he saw London as a crumbling ancient house, slowly collapsing under the weight of its own past.

As he pushed his way through a herd of name-tagged visitors in matching baseball caps, he wondered if he had left it too late to retire to the continent. France seemed a good bet, more at ease with its history. Crucially, he had never visited the place with his old partner. Perhaps he could be freed from memories there. He thought of his embittered son, recovering from years of addiction in a French commune, of his wife and daughter, and how he had survived them both, but even then he remembered Nathalie, how Bryant had loved her and lost her…

Damn you, Arthur, he thought, let me go.

He knew there was only one way he could stop himself from subsiding into the silent past: he needed to settle the murder of his alter ego. Without the truth, there would be no rest. Not now, not ever.