The Invisible Code Read Free Page A

church.
    Bryant ambled. In Paris he would have been a
boulevardier
, a
flâneur
, but in London, a city that no longer had time for anything but making money, he was just slow and in the way. Accountants, bankers, market analysts and PR girls hustled around him, cemented to their phones. The engineers and artists, bootmakers,signwriters and watch-menders had long fled the centre. Who worked with their hands in the City any more? The ability to make something from nothing had once been regarded with the greatest respect, but now the Square Mile dealt in units, its captains of industry preferring to place their trust in flickering strings of electronic figures.
    Bryant would not be hurried though. He was as much a part of London as a hobbled Tower raven, a Piccadilly barber, a gunman in the Blind Beggar, and he would not be moved from his determined path. He was, everyone agreed, an annoying, impossible and indispensible fellow who had long ago decided that it was better to be disliked than forgotten.
    And over the coming week, he would find himself annoying some very dangerous people.

4

    STRING
     
    ‘ WHY DID I have to hear about this from my doctor, of all people?’ asked Bryant petulantly.
    ‘It’s not our jurisdiction,’ replied John May, unfolding his long legs beneath the desk where he sat opposite his partner. ‘The case went straight to the City of London Police. They’re a law unto themselves. You can’t just cherry-pick cases that take your fancy, they’ll come around here with cricket bats.’
    Bryant was aware that the City of London’s impact extended far beyond its Square Mile inhabitants. Marked out by black bollards bearing the City’s emblem and elegant silver dragons that guarded the major entrances, it contained within its boundaries more than 450 international banks, their glass towers wedged into Palladian alleyways and crookbacked Tudor passages. As the global axis of countless multi-national corporations, it demanded a bespoke police force equipped to protect this unique environment with special policies and separate uniforms.
    ‘If there’s a reason why we should take over the investigation we can put in a formal request,’ he suggested.
    ‘True, but I can’t think of one.’
    ‘How did you know about it?’
    ‘I picked up the details as they came in,’ said May. ‘It was kept away from us because Faraday wanted it to be handled by the City of London.’
    Leslie Faraday, the Home Office liaison officer charged with keeping the Peculiar Crimes Unit in line, was under instruction from his boss to reduce the unit’s visibility, and therefore decrease their likelihood of embarrassing the government. His latest tactic was to starve them of new cases.
    ‘But you made some notes, I see.’
    ‘Yes, I did, just out of interest.’
    ‘Well?’ asked Bryant, peering over a stack of old
Punch
annuals at May’s papers like an ancient goblin eyeing a stack of gold coins.
    ‘Well what?’ May looked innocently back across the desk, knowing exactly what Bryant was after.
    ‘The details. What are the details of the case?’ He waved his ballpoint pen about. ‘There, man, what have you got?’
    ‘Look at you, you’re virtually salivating.’
    ‘I have nothing else to concern myself with this morning, unless you happen to know where my copy of
The Thirteen Signs of Satanism
has got to.’
    ‘All right.’ May pulled up a page and held it at a distance. Vanity prevented him from wearing his newly prescribed glasses. ‘It says here that at approximately two twenty p.m. on Saturday, a twenty-eight-year-old woman identified as Amy O’Connor was found dead in St Bride’s Church, just off Fleet Street. Cause of death unknown, but at the moment it’s being treated as suspicious. No marks on the body other than a contusion on the front of the skull, assumed by the EMT to have been incurred when she slipped off her chair and brained herself on the marble floor.’
    ‘So what did she die