The Water Room

51. GEZELLIG

‘Alma told me I’d find you up here,’ said May, seating himself beside his partner on the bench at the top of Primrose Hill. Bryant was muffled up in the patched brown scarf and squashed trilby he had worn for over fifty years. The frost on the grass looked as artificial as Christmas-card snow. The distant city was soft and blue in the autumnal morning haze, the shade of ceanothus blossoms. It hummed softly, powered by batteries of working men and women.

‘I thought you’d join me. Here.’ He handed May a polystyrene cup filled with tea. ‘I was saving you a jam doughnut, but I ate it.’

May raised the lid and took a tentative sip. ‘I can’t believe you’re making your landlady move house, just to come and look after you.’

‘I thought that was what you wanted me to do. Everyone was going on about how upset she was. John, her great pleasure in life has always been to cater to my every whim. The lease on her house in Battersea is running out, and there’s enough room in the new place. Perhaps it’s a bit bigger than I thought. It makes sense for her to move where she can keep an eye on me. I’ve been very nice to her, I bought her a new iron.’

The converted workshop behind Chalk Farm Tube station had proven too much for him to keep clean, and although Bryant would have been the last person to admit that he hated the idea of living alone, he did, and Alma was one of the few women left in the world who would put up with him.

‘I meant to tell you, Raymond Land is talking of expanding the unit after our success in Balaklava Street. He wants us to take on cases for the whole of the south of England, with another unit set up in Manchester to handle the north. He’s really upbeat about the idea.’

‘Typical. The one case we’re forbidden from pursuing provides a partially fruitful outcome, and suddenly he wants to franchise the policing equivalent of Starbucks.’

‘Just think of it, Arthur. With a decent infrastructure in place we could finally retire.’ The second he spoke, May realized it was the wrong thing to say.

‘Does he really think we were successful?’ Bryant gave a disdainful grunt. ‘What about Ruth Singh, and the others who died on Balaklava Street? With all the resources at our disposal, we still couldn’t save them. How is that possible?’

‘We saved Kallie Owen’s life,’ said May. ‘And we restored two masterpieces to grateful nations.’

‘I suppose those beautiful tiles in St Pancras Basin will be drilled out to carry computer cables. On cold nights I wonder about our homeless men. I checked with Betty; nobody has yet called the Birmingham coven. Do you think we did the right thing?’

May thrust his hands into his pockets and admired the view. ‘I know you, Arthur. You like the idea of them taking their chances, being masters of their fate, rather than being stranded at the mercy of bloody-minded immigration officers.’

Heather Allen was awaiting trial for murder, but although the detectives had uncovered motive and opportunity, their evidence hinged on the word of an unreliable witness, who was himself still under suspicion of arson. Perhaps the immigrants could have vouched for Tate, but they had disappeared. It was as Bryant had predicted: everyone of real importance had promptly vanished into the urban labyrinth.

‘Did you hear that Kallie’s boyfriend finally came back? Picked up a nice tan, apparently. She chucked him out on the street-for the time being, at least.’

‘He wanted his independence.’ May smiled. ‘Our first duty is to protect those at risk. Homeless people arrive every day in the capital, and instead of making them welcome, we shut our doors in their faces. Where will they go, now that the St Pancras Basin is being dug out?’ He settled on the bench and studied the bitter blue sky. Unlike his partner, May had always been attracted to light and space.

‘I like my cases with fewer loose ends,’ Bryant complained. ‘I want to know what Ubeda’s up to right now, whether he’s hatching some new way of filching relics in Egypt. And I want a full signed confession from Heather Allen, preferably acknowledging that I was totally correct in my assumptions. There are no open-and-shut jobs any more. Too many extenuating circumstances to take into consideration. It’s a crowded and complicated world.’

‘I know what you mean, Arthur. Did I ever tell you why I first became interested in crime?’

‘If you did, I’ve forgotten.’

‘I was a sickly child and spent a lot of time in bed, so my parents used to give me Agatha Christie books to read. I became addicted to unusual crimes. At the end of each book, someone would always stand up and announce, “It’s very simple, Major Carruthers rewound the vicar’s clock and replaced Lady Home-Counties’ mackintosh in the belfry before hiding the boathook under a tin of caramelized peaches in the fête’s jam tent.” Christie thought she was writing about ordinary people, but the lives of her characters were filled with these arcane rituals, and they had servants, for God’s sake. To me, a poor kid growing up in south London, they all seemed impossibly exotic, and the world was a simple place full of solvable crimes.’

Bryant nodded in recognition of the memory. ‘I grew up reading about Fu Manchu, Raffles and the Black Sapper. They were even worse, all Limehouse opium dens, fifth columnists, stolen diamond tiaras and “the grateful thanks of a nation”. Of course, we’re virtually the only members of the British police force to have actually read a novel, which places us at a disadvantage. If you’re in public service, it never pays to reveal a sense of imagination.’

May drained his cup and set it down. ‘I suppose that’s a good enough reason for staying with the unit. Where else are we going to find cases that aren’t just about drunken brawls outside pubs or crackheads stealing from each other? God knows I covered enough of those during the two years we were separated and returned to regular duty. How I hated it.’ The unit had once been disbanded on the orders of Margaret Thatcher until it could provide ways of turning a profit. Nobody wanted to remember those times. ‘What have we got on today?’

‘Ah yes, Raymond’s caseload. A couple of Iranian guys found an anaconda in a Bankside fried-chicken outlet-looks like a war between business rivals; a priest set fire to a number of cars at the Elephant and Castle, because Satanists have been causing trouble in a fetish nightclub that’s opened in the precinct of his church-Longbright’s sorting out that one; the King’s Cross Prostitutes’ Collective is complaining that the new one-way system is ruining their trade, and they’re threatening to reveal a client list that includes several MPs-could we look into it? There’s that thing with the deaf circus midget. And of course, your granddaughter April is starting as our researcher at the unit tomorrow.’

‘Perhaps we should take her for a pie at the Nun and Broken Compass. What deaf circus midget?’

‘He was a pimp for some Russian dancers who were caught doping greyhounds with tainted cough mixture at Catford Stadium. They hung him inside the bell of St Mary’s church until the noise ruptured his eardrums. He’s demanding compensation from the bell-ringers, who were bribed to leave the belfry door unlocked.’

‘Oh. Business as usual, then.’

‘Funny how we’ve always attracted peculiar cases. Do you remember that fighter pilot during the War who couldn’t be placed at a murder site because he’d been found tied to the back of a cow in Regent’s Park?’

‘My goodness, I’d forgotten about him. Hell of an alibi.’

‘Hell of an alibi.’

‘Yes.’ May accepted a length of liquorice from Bryant and chewed it ruminatively. ‘I suppose it hasn’t been all bad.’

‘When we were in the St Pancras Basin, I saw something scratched on to the wall of an arch. It showed up in my torchlight. Do you know what Gezellig means? It’s a Dutch word, one of those words that has no exact equivalent in the English language. It means “the comfort of being with friends”. They made their bonheur there, their happiness, even in such a depressing place. Everyone has to find peace somewhere. They have to find home.’

‘Gezellig. I like that. That’s like us.’

The pair remained side by side, sitting in silence as the golden sunlight of the morning grew around them.