“Let’s take an example. Say one of you lads in the middle there gets burgled at home. The police handle cases in order of priority, just like doctors. Then they send a beat constable or a mobile uniformed officer around to ask you for details of the break-in and a list of what’s missing. They are not trained as investigative detectives, so you have to wait for a specialist to take fingerprints, which they’ll try to match with those of a registered felon. If no-one is discovered, your loss is merely noted and set against the chance of the future recovery of your goods – a possibility that shrinks with each passing day. The system only works for its best exemplars. But at the Peculiar Crimes Unit, we adopt a radically different approach.” As he still seemed to have their attention, Bryant decided to forge ahead with his explication.
“We ask ourselves a fundamental question. What is a crime? How far does its moral dimension extend? Is it simply an act that works against the common good? If you are starving and steal from a rich man’s larder, should you be punished less than if you were not hungry? All crime is driven by some kind of need. Once those needs were simple: food, shelter, warmth, the basic assurances of survival. We can predict the sad lives of many criminals as surely as if they were specimens in a petri dish. Let’s imagine a boy like any one of you, but born on a run-down estate. His family is poor, he never knows his real father and is beaten up by his stepfather, he’s trouble at school, a nuisance on the streets, put into care, abused, arrested by the time he’s ten, doing custody at the age of fifteen. He’ll be lucky if he makes it to thirty. Our prisons are full of such people. But as soon as our needs are taken care of, new crimes appear within society. As we become more sophisticated, so do the reasons for our misdeeds. Once we are warm and fed and properly raised, we covet something more complex: power. Spending power, power over others, the power to be noticed. And sometimes that power can be achieved by violating the accepted laws of the land. So criminal sophistication requires sophisticated methods of detection. That’s where specialist units like ours come in. Think of Internet fraud, and you’ll find it is being matched by equally subtle methods of detection that require as much knowledge as the criminals’. I’m sure you boys know far more about the Internet than your parents, but does that place you at less of a risk?”
He’s off to a decent start, thought Longbright from the wings. A bit all over the place, but no doubt he’ll draw it all together and make his point.
“Fraud, robbery, assault, and murder are all cause-and-effect crimes requiring carefully targeted treatment. But all modern lawlessness carries the seeds of a strange paradox within it, for just as ancient crimes appear in cunning new versions, others appear entirely unmotivated. One thinks of vandalism. Some will have you believe it was invented in the postwar period, but not so. Acts of vandalism have been recorded in every sophisticated civilisation; the defacing of statues was common in ancient Rome. Now, though, we are reaching a new peak of motiveless transgression. Criminality has once more assumed the kind of dark edge that existed in London during the eighteenth century. London was always the home of mob rule. The public voiced their opinions about whether it was right for a man to hang just as much as the judge. The joyous assembly would jeer or cheer a prisoner’s final speech at Tyburn’s triple tree. They would choose to condemn a wrongdoer – or venerate him. Pamphlets filled with prints and poems would be produced in his honour. He would achieve lasting fame as a noble champion, his exploits retold as brave deeds, and there was nothing that governments could do to prevent it. Criminals became celebrities because they were seen to be fighting the old order, kicking back at an oppressive system.” Bryant eyed his audience like a pirate frightening cabin boys with tales of dancing skeletons. “Often, thieves’ necks would fail to break when they were dropped from the Tyburn gallows, and the crowd would cut down a half-hanged man to set him free, because they felt he had paid for his crimes. They rioted against the practise of passing bodies over to the anatomists, and pelted bungling hangmen with bricks. If a murderer conducted himself nobly as he ascended the gallows stairs, he would become more respected than his accusers. But time has robbed us of these gracious renegades. Last week, less than a quarter of a mile from here, in Smithfield, a schoolboy was stabbed through the heart for his mobile phone. An elderly man on a tube platform in Holborn was kicked to death for bumping into someone. These criminals are not to be venerated.”
A murmur of recollection rippled through the auditorium.
“Statistics show that the nature of English crime is reverting to its oldest habits. In a country where so many desire status and wealth, petty annoyances can spark disproportionately violent behaviour. We become frustrated because we feel powerless, invisible, unheard. We crave celebrity, but that’s not easy to come by, so we settle for notoriety. Envy and bitterness drive a new breed of lawbreakers, replacing the old motives of poverty and the need for escape. But how do you solve crimes which no longer have traditional motives?”
He’s warming the audience up nicely, and he’s still got their attention, thought Longbright, feeling for a chair at the side of the stage. Let’s hope he remembers to talk about Raymond’s initiatives and can get all the way through without saying anything offensive. She knew how volatile her boss could be, but now was the time for him to exercise restraint. For once, the fortunes of the Peculiar Crimes Unit were on the rise. Indeed, they had been ever since a remarkable murder in a quiet North London street had placed them all in the public eye. Arthur’s partner, John May, had appeared on a late-night programme discussing the importance of the case with several bad-tempered social commentators; a number of articles in the Guardian and The Times had examined the case in detail; government funding for the coming year had miraculously appeared; and mercifully no-one outside the unit knew the reality of the case’s conclusion. If they did, Longbright doubted that any of them would have survived with their career intact. Arthur Bryant’s decision to break the law in order to close the investigation had been so contentious that Longbright had turned down the BBC’s offer to feature her in their film, in case she accidentally let slip the truth.
Basking in the glow of the publicity, Bryant had been asked to deliver a lecture to St Crispin’s Boys’ School, the exclusive private academy founded by a devout Christian group in 1653 in St John Street, Clerkenwell, and had shyly accepted.
Longbright turned her attention back to the stage.
“What we have here is a fundamental alteration in the definition of morality,” Bryant argued. “What does it now mean to have a moral conscience? Do we need to develop different values from those of our parents? Most of you think you can distinguish right from wrong, but morality requires information to feed it, so you build your own internal moral system from the intelligence you receive, probably the hardest thing anyone ever has to do, judging by the number of times the system fails.
“In London’s rural suburbs, not far from here, middle-class Thames Valley towns like Weybridge and Henley are awash with a new kind of malicious cruelty. Here the system appears to be failing. The criminals are not suffering inner-city deprivation, nor are they gang members protecting their turf through internecine wars based on divisions in ethnicity. They are wealthy white males facing futures filled with opportunities. So why are they turning to unprovoked violence and murder? Part of a generation has somehow become unmoored from its foundations, and no-one knows how to draw it back from the harmful shallows. You all face complex pressures, problems that gentlemen of my advanced age are scarcely able to imagine. From the day you were born, someone has been targeting you as a potential market. Your attention has become fragmented. You are offered no solitude, no peace, no time for reflection. You are forced to create your own methods of escape. Some choose alcohol and narcotics, others form social cliques that combat the status quo. All of you in this hall are in danger. Many people of my age would suggest that you desire to break the law not because you’ve had a hard time growing up, but because you haven’t. You’ve been spoiled with everything you ever wanted, but you still want more.”