Free Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler Page B

wouldn’t divulge to some ox in a police uniform.’
    ‘Shouldn’t we see where that chap left his chestnut stand first?’
    ‘Good idea.’ Bryant was still dangling the cloth bag containing the pair of feet. ‘I wouldn’t mind getting rid of these as soon as possible. I don’t want anyone thinking I’ve nobbled a couple of black market pig’s trotters.’
    They slipped back through the early morning traffic, crossing Cambridge Circus, and passed under the side canopy of the Palace Theatre. May bent down and checked the gutter. He touched his index finger to the cobbles. ‘Look at this. Someone has tipped coals out. I’m surprised they haven’t been nicked. There’s quite a bit of dust around. No footprints, which is odd.’
    ‘The coals could have come from any one of the houses over there.’
    ‘You’re right.’ He rose, brushing his hand on his coat. ‘But this is where the Turk must have parked while he went for a Jimmy. It’s a very short street.’
    Bryant cricked his knees to take a closer look at the coal dust in the gutter. ‘It’s like hunting in reverse, isn’t it?’
    ‘How do you mean?’
    ‘Finding the spoor from an act of cruelty, and trying to perceive the fading traces that lead away from it, following the dispersal of the participants rather than their convergence.’ He thought for a moment, then leaned on May’s shoulder to raise himself up. ‘There’s something out of joint here. What’s that German word?
Unheimlich?
’ He pulled his scarf protectively about his protuberant red ears. ‘A cold wind. And a rather forbidding building. Definitely sinister.’
    They stepped back into the road and looked up at the theatre. The exterior of the Palace was one of the most impressive examples of late Victorian architecture left in London. Standing alone on the west side of Cambridge Circus, finished in soft orange brick with peach-coloured stone trims, it sported four domed pinnacles, matching sets of stone cherubs, complex frescoes and decorative panels, with a peaked central pediment topped by the delicately carved figure of a god (miraculously intact, given the bombing that had taken place in Shaftesbury Avenue), and below it, nearly fifty arched front windows, currently boarded up to protect its patrons against flying glass.
    ‘A suitably Gothic building in which to begin a murder investigation,’ said Bryant, relishing the thought. ‘But our duty is to the innocent. For that reason we must enter the realm of darkness.’

11
    FORGOTTEN PEOPLE
    . . .
A duty to the innocent,
thought John May, as he paid the miserable landlord of the Seventh Engineer and made his way back to rainswept London, the London of the new millennium, a place that bore only a superficial resemblance to the dark city of the Blitz. He felt old and tired, because Bryant was no longer alive to keep him young. Throughout his career he had been treated like the junior member of the team, even though there was only a three-year age gap between them. Now he was finally alone, and so bitterly miserable that there seemed little point in going on. But he had to, he decided, at least until he knew how his partner had died.
    He stared through the train window at the cumuliform dullness blurring the horizon of the city, and tried to imagine what had been going through his partner’s mind. Second-guessing Arthur Bryant had never been easy. A few days before his death, Bryant had returned to the site of their first case. The memoir’s addendum suggested that he had been hoping to shed further light on the events of the past. Could he have upset someone so badly that he had placed his life in danger? Surely there was no one left to upset. The case had been solved and sealed. The characters it involved were as deeply buried as London’s bomb rubble, and just as forgotten.
    In 1940 the pair of them had been little more than precocious children. They had stumbled through their first investigation, and had somehow