Free Bryant & May and the Secret Santa by Christopher Fowler Page A

himself to be anywhere but where he was. ‘I say, you there.’ Bryant tapped an epaulette with his stick. ‘Where’s Father Christmas?’
    ‘Under-twelves only,’ said the guide.
    ‘We’re here about Sebastian Carroll-Williams,’ said May, holding up his PCU card.
    The guide apologized and sent them down to the basement, where ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ was playing on a loop along with ‘I Saw Three Ships’ and ‘Ding Dong Merrily on High.’ The Christmas department was a riot of fake trees, plastic snow, glitter, sledges, wassail cups, cards, robotic Santas, dancing reindeer, singing penguins, North Poles, Christmas logs, candles, cake holders, cushions, jumpers and chinaware printed with pictures of puddings, holly, mistletoe and fairies. ‘It’s been this jolly since October,’ said the gloomy salesgirl, directing them. In her right hand she held some china goblins on a toboggan. ‘It makes you dead morbid after a while.’
    Beyond this accretion of Yuletidiana, a large area had been turned into something called ‘The Santa’s Wonderland Sleigh-ride Experience.’ ‘Why do they have to call everything an “experience”?’ asked Bryant irritably. ‘It’s tautological and clumsy. It’s like
Strictly Come Dancing
. The BBC obviously couldn’t decide whether to name it after the old show
Come Dancing
or the film
Strictly Ballroom
so they ended up with gibberish. Two verbs and an adverb? How is that supposed to work? Does nobody study grammar anymore?’
    ‘It’s hard to learn that stuff,’ said May. ‘English is the only language I can think of where two negatives can mean a positive, and yet conversely there are no two positives that can mean a negative.’
    ‘Yeah, right.’ Bryant turned around. ‘Look out, floor manager.’
    Mr Carraway was a man so neatly arranged as to appear polished and stencilled, from the moisturized glow of his forehead and his carefully threaded eyebrows to his shining thumbnails and toecaps. ‘Thank you so much for coming,’ he said, pumping each of their hands in turn. ‘We didn’t know if this was a matter for the proper police or for someone like you, and then one of our ladies said you dealt with the sort of things they couldn’t be bothered with.’
    ‘Oh yes, we were just sitting around knitting and doing jigsaws, waiting for your call,’ said Bryant. ‘You’d better tell us what happened before I’m tempted to bite you.’
    The floor manager eyed him uncertainly. ‘Er, yes, well, perhaps we should go into Santa’s Wonderland,’ he said, leading the way.
    ‘I thought it was Alice who had a Wonderland,’ said Bryant as they walked.
    ‘No, this is Santa’s Wonderland,’ said Mr Carraway.
    ‘Yes, but, you know—Alice in
Wonderland
.’
    ‘We narrowed it down to Wonderland or Christmasville. It could have gone either way.’
    A tunnel of black light illuminated Bryant’s dentures, turning him into a Mexican Day of the Dead doll. They emerged from the other end to find an immense cyclorama of the North Pole as imagined by a very gay man who had seen too many Disney films, complete with geographically misplaced polar bears and a variety of non-reality-based fauna including elves, goblins and little people in pointed hats and dirndls, some of whom were real and presumably taking time out from their busy performance schedules as gold-mining dwarves or Oompa-Loompas.
    ‘Mickey,’ called Mr Carraway, ‘where’s Father Christmas?’
    ‘He’s gone to the toilet,’ said Mickey, one of the dwarves. He looked up at the two detectives, studying each of them in turn. ‘Are you here about the lad who died?’
    ‘Yes,’ said May. ‘Were you here when it happened?’
    ‘Yeah, we’re here for the full season,’ said Mickey. ‘We were supposed to be in panto at the Fairfields Hall, Croydon, but we got laid off after Snow White put in a sexual harassment claim against us. She said we touched her bum but we were just trying to get her into the