“You can’t make proper toast with fresh bread. You’ve never complained before, and you’ve been eating it for over forty years.” Alma bristled.
“That’s because I used to be your tenant, and was scared of you. We all lived in fear of making the place untidy, only to have you come charging forward with your squeegee and your lavender polish. Well, now you’re my tenant, and I can finally take revenge.”
Arthur Bryant had conveniently forgotten that it was he who had persuaded his long-suffering landlady to part with her beautiful Battersea apartment, in order to live with him in a converted false-teeth factory set back from North London ’s Chalk Farm Road. The area was peppered with warehouses, sheds, huts and light industrial manufacturing plants that had now been transformed into expensive loft-style homes. The difference was that Bryant’s place was the only one not to have been converted, for it still looked like a factory. He was too old and twinge-prone to start renovations himself, and as Alma could no longer be tempted up a ladder with a claw hammer and a mouthful of tacks, they were forced to make the best of things, carrying out odd bodge-jobs as the need arose. If the situation became desperate (as it had last month, when part of the kitchen ceiling fell, mostly into Alma’s casserole), Bryant would then head for the Peculiar Crimes Unit to make sad kitten-in-a-boot eyes at his colleagues, who could be relied upon to rally around at the weekend armed with tools and planks and electrical tape to aid a poor helpless old man. It was shameless, but a perk of being officially classed as elderly, and he knew he was sufficiently loved to be able to get away with it.
“It would be nice if you could put the book down long enough to eat,” Alma suggested.
Bryant’s great watery eyes swam up from his copy of The 1919 Arctic Explorer’s Handbook Volume II: Iceberg Partition. ‘This is fascinating stuff,“ he told her. ”Maggie Armitage sent it to me.“
Alma harrumphed and made a face. Bryant’s theatricality was catching. “That woman is godless,” she complained.
“Quite the reverse. As a practising white witch she’s more aware of true religion than most Christians, whose experience usually only extends to miming ”O God Our Help in Ages Past“ during weddings and christenings.”
“Well, I hope you’re going into work today, and not just sitting around reading.” Alma disapproved of such pointless activities. “I’m planning on a spot of hoovering.” She shifted him to clear away the breakfast things.
“Just in time, I’d imagine. There was a rumour the BBC was coming around to film an insect documentary inside your hall rug.”
“Are you insinuating I don’t keep a clean house?” asked Alma, mortified. “All these years I’ve been looking after you, with your spilled chemicals and your disgusting experiments. Who fed rotting pork to carnivorous plants on top of his wardrobe during the heat wave of 1974?”
“That helped me catch the Kew Gardens Strangler, if you recall.”
“You boiled my tropical fish in 1968, and filled my bedroom with mustard gas.”
“In order to track the Deptford Demon, as well you know. I didn’t realise your aunt was sleeping in the house at the time.”
She could have mentioned that the ancient detective also grew plague germs in her baking trays and ruined her best kitchen knives putting stab wounds in sides of beef to determine methods of death. He had also rewired the toaster to see if it could be made to electrocute anyone walking across a wet kitchen floor in bare feet, and had been able to answer in the affirmative after nearly setting fire to a Jehovah’s Witness. “You filled my sink with sulphuric acid last Christmas, and if I hadn’t been wearing rubber gloves to do the washing up, I’d have ended up in hospital. Took the finish right off my plug, but did I complain?”
“You most certainly did, madam, and the fact that you bring it up at the drop of a hat reminds me how long you bear the grudge.” He rose and collected his battered brown trilby from the table.
“I wish you wouldn’t leave that thing over the teapot; it’s unsanitary.”
“Most probably, but it keeps my head warm. When you’ve as little hair as I have, such small comforts are appreciated.” He smoothed the pale nimbus of his fringe back in place. “I might remind you that I am still the breadwinner in this household, attending to police work for six decades with an unbroken record, despite your regular attempts to poison me. I could have taken holidays but was too conscientious.”
“Too scared of missing out on a good murder, more like.”
Alma sniffed. “It’s not natural, all this morbidity, especially at your age.”
“It’s not morbidity, it’s my job. In my field there’s no substitute for firsthand experience. You knew what to expect when you took me in.”
“I knew you was on the side of law and order; I didn’t expect you to experiment in my lodgings with meat and germs and explosives.”
They bickered to such an extent each morning that they might as well have been married. The plump Antiguan landlady (she still thought of Bryant as her tenant) attempted to reform Bryant by tricking him into church attendance, goodwill whist drives and assorted charity events, but he invariably saw through the subterfuge and reminded her that his adherence to paganism precluded any chance of a late conversion.
“Will you be home in time for dinner tonight?” Alma asked, waggling a cake slice between thick brown fingers.
“That depends on the form of culinary witchcraft you’re intending to inflict upon me.”
“I’m baking a mutton pie with sweet potatoes, callaloo and cornbread.”
“If I’m back in time, I’ll join you at supper. I don’t suppose another hour in the oven will adversely affect the texture of your concoctions.”
Alma folded her arms against him. “You’re a very rude man, Mr. Bryant. I don’t know why I put up with you.”
“Because you know the quality of your life would be immeasurably poorer in my absence,” said Bryant, pushing his luck. Still, Alma could hardly disagree. The old detective had always brightened her days with surprises, even if many of them had proven disagreeable. If he appeared with a bunch of daffodils, there was a good chance that a neighbour would call to indignantly demand their return to the front garden from which they had been torn. The thing about Bryant was that he always meant well. She was filled with a patient and loyal adoration for him that defied sense or logic.
“I thought you said the unit was quiet at the moment. Do you have to go in?”
“Raymond Land is thinking of holding a retirement party for our medical examiner, and wants me to help him arrange it,” he explained. “It could take a while, as I have to plot out a number of unpleasant practical jokes for the evening’s festivities.” Oswald Finch, the only member of London’s Metropolitan Police Force who was older than Bryant and still gainfully employed, had finally made good his promise to leave the Peculiar Crimes Unit, although why he thought he would be happier in Hastings than in a mortuary mystified Bryant. Everyone assumed that the irascible pathologist was to be replaced by Giles Kershaw, the Eton-educated junior staff member whom Finch had trained to take over unit operations at the Bayham Street Morgue.
Bryant buttoned the shapeless brown cardigan he had worn for the past twenty years, dragged his horribly moth-eaten Harris tweed coat over the top of it and finished the ensemble with a partially unravelled scarf in an odd shade of plasticine-mauve. The February weather had been unseasonably warm, but he was taking no chances. As he left the house, he hoped the week ahead would prove to be a busy one, for although he tired more easily these days, hard work made him feel alive. Retirement was an option only suitable for people who hated their jobs. Arthur loved working with his partner John May, and revelled in the fact that they performed a service no-one else in the city could offer. No-one had their arcane depth of knowledge, or was able to use it in the cause of crime prevention. Across the decades they had continued to close the cases few could understand, let alone solve. The Peculiar Crimes Unit was less of a secret now than it had been, but few really appreciated how it operated, or even what it did. It had been founded in a spirit of invention and experimentation, along with Bletchley Park and the Cabinet War Rooms, and would hopefully survive as long as London remained confounded by impossible crimes.