Free On the Loose by Christopher Fowler Page B

difficult—when he’s feeling down.’
    ‘You should have brought DS Longbright along for company, then.’
    ‘I tried, but I couldn’t get hold of her. She’s working in some kind of women’s undergarment shop. You’re here by default, so watch it, all right?’
    ‘I’ll behave myself, I promise.’ Meera pressed the doorbell. Somewhere deep inside the converted toothbrush factory there was a noise like someone dropping a stone into a bucket. After about a minute, they heard the door being unlocked.
    Alma Sorrowbridge’s features were inclined toward a receptive smile on most days, but she was clearly alarmed to find visitors on her doorstep this early. Saturday was her morning for spraying everything in lavender polish and baking, and she didn’t like to have her routine disturbed, but more to the point she did not wish to referee a fight between her oldest friend and his partner. ‘He’s still in his room,’ she informed May, ‘and with all due respect I don’t think he’ll be wanting you here.’
    ‘I’m not his enemy, Alma. Anyway, who said I came to see him? Are you making cornbread today?’
    ‘Cassava and ginger bake, and cinnamon buns. And I’m doing a pineapple cherry cake.’ She wiped her hands on her apron and widened the door. ‘I suppose you can come in, but I have to be at the church before nine. You know I do my rounds on Saturday. The first batch is just cooling.’ Alma was capable of single-handedly supplying the British Army with all of its pastry requirements. She cooked with evangelical zeal, arranging vast batches of cakes and filling her van with trays that she would take around to old people who couldn’t get to the shops.
    The old industrial unit in which Arthur Bryant had made his home was so bizarrely arranged that the contrast between the inside and the outside required mental adjustment. May and Mangeshkar made their way into a huge room that looked like a cross between a seventy-year-old furniture repository and a Moroccan rubbish dump. Around the walls were tottering piles of encyclopaedias; a moulting championship perch in a glass case; a great many post-war lampshades; sextants, telescopes and outdated opticians’ equipment; several late-Victorian seaside dioramas, including one scene of drunken Jack Tars swinging from lampposts and another featuring a family of dancing weasels; some large drippy brown canvasses that provided more clues to the artist’s disturbed frame of mind than any pleasure to the viewer; and a miniature model of the port at Gdansk made entirely out of painted bread.
    ‘I try to get the place clean but he keeps bringing back more of these things,’ Alma complained. ‘What am I supposed to do? I have no idea where he finds them all. It’s not like they’re even antiques.’
    May eyed an ancient bear’s head that someone had seen fit tomake into a lamp. One of its eyes had fallen out and was lying on the table. ‘Obviously,’ he said.
    ‘At least he’s stopped doing that now.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘He’s stopped going out at all.’
    ‘Oh, that’s a bad sign.’
    ‘You should see his bedroom; it’s a thousand times worse than this. If I wasn’t a good Christian, I would walk right out of here and never come back.’
    ‘So that’s what you think of me, you gargantuan quisling.’ 1 Arthur Bryant stood propped in the doorway in a Victorian nightcap and a purple quilted dressing gown. His snowy hair stuck up around the cap like a row of alfalfa sprouts. He appeared smaller and more wrinkled than ever. ‘I gave strict instructions that I was to receive no visitors until further notice.’
    ‘We’re not visitors, we’re your friends,’ said May indignantly.
    ‘We’ve all been worried about you, sir,’ interposed Meera, who was determined to sound less blunt than usual and show the caring side she was fairly sure she must possess. ‘You can’t just hide away like this.’
    ‘I’m hardly hiding away, am I?’ As