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in the Whitechapel car pool and disappeared. He surfaced a few weeks later in West End Central, transferred to vice.’
    ‘Not someone to mess with, then.’
    ‘Oh, it’s the ones you can’t get a handle on who are trouble,’ said Bryant, scratching his pug nose as he pondered the matter. ‘I can see through Darren Link. He’s an evangelist. That’s why he joined the force: to clean up the streets. He can’t, of course – nobody can truly control people, they’re too wilful, and it drives him crazy. I suppose he’s not a bad bloke, really. If he called Raymond, it means he can’t spare his own men for a clean-up job.’
    ‘It’s exactly that, I’m afraid. Raymond wasn’t going to tell us but I called him on it. There’s a body.’
    ‘Oh?’ Bryant’s furry little ears perked up. Death was his stimulant of choice.
    ‘A homeless guy was asleep on the steps of one of the banks the protestors attacked.’
    ‘That hasn’t made the news, has it?’
    ‘No. I was wondering whose decision it was to keep it out of the press. The BBC is trying hard not to demonize the protestors but I’m betting they weren’t given the story.’
    ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ said Bryant thoughtfully. ‘There are usually so many reporters on the ground that you’d think someone would have picked it up. I smell a rat.’
    ‘You don’t smell anything,’ warned May, sitting up, ‘because it’s got nothing to do with you. Or with me, for that matter. Dan just has to sign off on the crime scene.’
    ‘Fair enough,’ said Bryant with suspicious nonchalance. ‘That means he’ll ask Giles to ID the cause of death, doesn’t it?’
    ‘Very possibly.’
    ‘Hm. I might just pop along and take a look.’
    ‘No, you won’t. Raymond will go bananas if you do.’
    ‘Yes, but I have to pass the mortuary later, anyway.’
    ‘You don’t. It’s not on your way home. Why can’t you just go to the pub like normal people?’
    ‘I could just stick my head around the door …’
    ‘You know, it wouldn’t hurt to let someone else take the credit,’ said May tactfully. ‘Leave them alone for a while and let’s see what they come up with.’
    Bryant enjoyed handling cases that required a bit of showmanship. Identifying the corpse of a rough sleeper accidentally caught in the crossfire between capitalists and rioters was the sort of chore that usually fell to Met officers, and in all likelihood it would never be fully cleared up; wherever there was conflict there would always be innocent victims.
    But he thought he might look in anyway. And if he was going, it seemed silly to wait until the end of the day, when Giles had finished and was about to leave, so why not go right now?

7

ABYSS
     
    Bryant headed around the corner to Camley Street, past St Pancras Old Church, one of the most ancient sites of Christian worship in England, to the bizarre Victorian gingerbread house that sat beside it. The squat ivy-covered building was home to the Camley Street Coroner’s Office, and as Bryant stumped up the winding path to the front door, he caught a glimpse of Rosa Lysandrou’s pale face peering out of a lead-light window at him.
    ‘Thank goodness that was you,’ said Bryant cheerfully as the housekeeper opened the door. ‘For a horrible moment I thought it was Miss Jessel from
The Turn of the Screw
.’
    ‘I don’t know what that means,’ said Rosa flatly, ‘but I suppose you are being rude as usual.’ She stood aside to allow him entrance.
    Bryant tentatively extended his walking stick into the hall as if checking for landmines. ‘It’s a book. And a film. And an opera. Do you enjoy reading?’
    ‘I enjoyed
Fifty Shades of Grey
.’
    Bryant quailed at the thought. ‘That’s not really reading, is it? More like staring at an assortment of words.’
    ‘It is very popular.’
    ‘So is taking photographs of your dinner for Facebook, but that doesn’t mean it adds to the total sum of human knowledge.’
    ‘You can’t