Bryant & May 08; Off the Rails b&m-8

by Christopher Fowler

  “We’re running lab tests on his flat and re-interviewing witnesses, but no, we’ve nothing new apart from a cryptic little warning note,” May admitted.

  “Your Eller grew up in these streets, didn’t he? I’m keeping an eye out for him and will bring him down with a well-timed rugby tackle if spotted, rest assured.”

  “You’re very cheerful,” remarked Bryant with vague disapproval. “What’s wrong?”

  “What’s right, more like.” Grinning broadly, Kershaw dug his fist into his lab coat and pulled out a letter, passing it over. “Have a read of that, chummy.”

  May snatched the envelope away from his partner. He couldn’t bear having to wait for the protracted disentangling of spectacles that preceded any study of writing less than two feet high. A Home Office letterhead, two handwritten paragraphs and a familiar signature. “I don’t believe it,” he muttered, genuinely awed.

  “What? Show me,” barked Bryant, who hated not knowing things first.

  “Giles, you are a genius. He’s pulled it off, Arthur. He’s done something neither you nor I could achieve.”

  “Let me guess. He’s worked out why people who don’t drive always slam car doors.”

  “No, he’s got the Unit re-instated.” May waved the paper excitedly.

  “How did he do that? Give me that.” Bryant swiped at the page.

  “You’re not the only ones with friends in high places,” Kershaw told them, obviously pleased with himself. “But I did owe you a favour. It cost me a couple of expensive lunches at Le Gavroche.”

  Although he had been told often enough, Bryant had forgotten that Kershaw had once dated the former Home Secretary’s sister-in-law. “So you pulled a few strings for us.”

  “Less string-pulling than back-scratching,” Kershaw replied. “He’s pleased that you recommended me for the position. The old St Pancras coroner, Professor Marshall, was a scandalous old Tory of the More-Than-Slightly-Mad school. Got caught charging the construction of a duck pond on his expenses. They’d wanted him out for years.”

  “We recommended you because you were the best person for the job, Giles. You deserved the chance of advancement.”

  “Well, you’re to be officially recognised once more, effective from next Monday. And you’re to be allocated an annual budget. It’s conditional on your clearing up this business with Mr Fox by then, but I’m sure you’ll be able to do it, won’t you? You might even get some new equipment out of it.”

  “That’s wonderful news,” said May. “Giles, you’re a star.”

  Bryant slapped his hands together gleefully. “Don’t tell Raymond Land; I’ll do it. I want to watch his face drop. All we have to do now is recapture London’s most elusive killer by Saturday.” His irony fell on deaf ears.

  “I know why you’re here today. Come and meet Gloria Taylor.” Kershaw ushered them through to the morgue’s autopsy tables.

  Gently unfolding the Mylar wrapping around the badly bruised face of a black woman in her mid-twenties, he pulled out the retractable car antenna Bryant had given him as a going-away present and tapped the corpse with it. “Identifying marks, well, the teeth would have given us her name if the contents of her bag hadn’t. Unusual bridgework. Ms Taylor is single, lives in Boleyn Road, Islington, has a kid, a little girl of five, no current partner. That’s all I know about her life so far, but I can tell you a little more about her body.”

  “Why do coroners always refer to their clients as if they were still alive?” Bryant wondered.

  “Well, they are alive to us, just not functioning. Her hair and nails are still growing. There’s all kinds of activity in her gut – ”

  “Thank you, you can stop there. You’ll end up giving everyone the creeps, just like your predecessor.”

  “She was in pretty good shape, but she’d had an operation on her right leg below the knee. It had left this muscle, the tibialis anterior, severely weakened. It’s why she wasn’t able to stop herself when she fell; she knew it would hurt to throw sudden weight on it. Instinctively, she tried to protect her head but still fell badly, breaking her neck. It was all over in seconds. It didn’t help that she was wearing ridiculously high heels. A terribly dangerous fashion, but women won’t be told. There are the usual surface injuries you’d expect from this kind of fall, damage to the knees, hips and wrists. She slipped, went headfirst, velocity kept her going all the way to the bottom. It’s a pity nobody thought to grab her dress as she passed. The English stand on the right and walk down on the left. In the case of a fixed staircase like this, there are still unspoken right and left rules. Those on the right walk slowly, the ones on the left walk faster.”

  “I imagine the weight imbalance on the treads of moving escalators is the reason why they’re constantly being replaced,” Bryant remarked, inadvertently reminding the others that he was more concerned with the mechanics of death than the tragedy of its victims.

  “The slow-walking people probably thought she was being rude, trying to barge past, and got out of the way. Certainly no-one stopped her. I understand there weren’t many on the staircase – the rush hour hadn’t properly started. In any event there was nothing to impede her fall. She hit the ground with a wallop. The impact was enough to tear her dress, which, according to Janice, is an original Balenciaga outfit from the 1950s.”

  “Trust Janice to know that. So you think it was an accident.”

  “From a forensic point of view, yes. If you fall off a tall building, you reach terminal velocity at around two hundred kilometres an hour and death is most likely to be instantaneous. Fallers instinctively try to land the right way up, so they fracture the pelvis, lower spine and feet. The impact travels through the body, and can burst the valves and chambers of the heart. Survivors say that time passes more slowly during a fall. This is because the brain is speeding up, trying to find ways of correcting the balance. Gloria didn’t actually travel that far, but she went headfirst. You can survive a considerable fall if you’ve got something soft to land on, or if you’re drunk, because your limbs are relaxed. You’re more likely to land on your head in a short, angled fall from, say, under ten metres, which is the case here.” Kershaw scratched the tip of his nose with the antenna. “Now ask me what I think from a personal perspective.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, say you stumble and try to right yourself. It’s harder to fall downstairs – I mean properly fall – than most people think. It feels like she was pushed. It’s a matter of momentum. She didn’t land on her knees and slide the rest of the way, as most people would – she went out and down, like a high diver.”

  “How do you know? It’s not on the CCTV.”

  Giles ran a hand through his blond hair. “Well, the heaviness with which she landed. The angle of injuries. Mind you, I’m not sure the evidence would stand up in court. There’s nothing I can directly point to. Something just feels wrong about it. Then there’s this. Her doctor’s records show she suffered from Ménière’s disease. She was deaf in her right ear and was supposed to wear a small hearing aid, but her colleagues say she hated having to use it. So if somebody stumbled behind her or made a warning noise, she may not have heard it.” He opened a drawer beneath his examination table and produced a plastic packet of clothes. “Her outfit was very distinctive. Where is it? Ah, here. She was wearing this over her dress.” He held up a small red cardigan. In the middle of the back panel was a plastic sticker.

  “Wait, I need my glasses.” Bryant dug out one of several pairs of spectacles that had become interlaced in his pocket. The lenses were so scratched that it was a miracle he could see anything at all. He examined the orange sticker. A line drawing showed the right half of a shaggy-haired male, standing with his arm raised and his legs apart. “It’s da Vinci’s figure of a man, surely, seen from the back?”

  “Either somebody stuck it there or it came from the tube seat,” said Kershaw.

  “Seems a bit unlikely, doesn’t it?”

  “All sorts of
odd things happen on tube trains. I’ve been going through my predecessor’s online logbook. Fascinating reading. Professor Marshall had a fellow in here, found dead on a Victoria Line tube. His trousers were burned, and there were skin blisters on the backs of his thighs. Turned out a workman had set a plastic canister filled with a corrosive chemical on the seat before him, and it had leaked into the cushion. This chap sat down, the caustic fluid went through his trousers and gave him the skin rash. The reaction raised his body temperature and caused a seizure.” He peered at the sticker, flicking a flop of hair from his eyes. “I don’t know, maybe it was put there by the person who pushed her. But I’m pretty certain she was pushed.”

  “It’s not much of a start point, Giles, but I don’t think we’re going to get anything more from the CCTV. Can I take this?”

  “Of course. I got a partial thumbprint from it. I ran it through IDENT1’s online database but drew a blank.” Kershaw carefully divorced the sticker from the cardigan and slipped it into a sample bag.

  “It looks to me like a sticky-backed advert that got transferred from someone else during her journey,” said May.

  “I don’t think so. The only fibres on the glue are from her coat and the train seat.”

  “Then we concentrate on the logo itself.” Bryant was squinting at the symbol. “It might stand for something.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” he replied, adjusting his spectacles, “if it’s Leonardo da Vinci, perhaps she’d visited a place where you might be likely to find such a sticker, a museum shop perhaps.”

  “The figure’s cut in half,” May pointed out. “You look at this and see da Vinci. I just see the letter K. As in Kaos.”

  ∨ Off the Rails ∧

  11

  Visibility

  Mac was jittery. His old employer, Mr Fox, was out there somewhere, and was probably looking for him. He regretted ever having met the guy. He should have known from the start that it would end in trouble.

  Mac had allowed himself to be picked up in St Pancras station, and had agreed to perform a few simple, entirely legal services – driving a van, acting as a contact for a client, nothing that would undermine his probation record. He had fulfilled his tasks and been paid well for them, but then something had gone wrong. The deal had ended in disaster. Mr Fox had screwed up, and Mac knew about it.

  He chose not to look too deeply into what had happened; he suspected there had been a beating, possibly even a death. It was nothing to do with him. He didn’t want to know.

  He had assumed that Mr Fox was a small-time crook of the kind you could find all over King’s Cross, the ones studying their phones in snack bars and stations, who made themselves available at short notice whenever middle-class urbanites decided their dinner parties should end with a few lines of coke. But Mr Fox was more than that. There were shadows in him that made Mac deathly afraid. The job had ended badly, as these things sometimes did, but Mac was fearful that Mr Fox would somehow blame him and come looking to take his pound of flesh. There was a terrifying irrationality about the man, and now Mac was peering around every corner with trepidation.

  But Mac couldn’t get out of town, because he was working right outside the station. He’d needed to make money fast, so he’d borrowed some from a dealer in Farringdon and put it on an outsider running at Aintree because the tip was sweet as a nut, only somehow he got the wrong horse and it had run like a fat girl, coming in last. And now he needed to make some down payments before he got his head kicked off his shoulders. So he had taken a couple of legit jobs, one of which was handing out copies of the Metro to commuters. It meant making himself visible to as many people as possible. He knew it was the last thing he should be doing right now, but the need for cash had made him desperate.

  On Monday evening, in what was already shaping up to be the wettest spring on record, he was standing on the pavement thrusting copies of the freesheet at pedestrians who would take three minutes to skim it before abandoning it on the tube, adding to the tons of rubbish and clutter no-one really wanted or needed.

  As he passed out the papers, he flinched whenever anyone brushed against him, fearing an unseen tap on his shoulder. Then, by the station entrance, he thought he saw Mr Fox watching him from beneath the brim of a red Nike baseball cap.

  But he looked different. A tanned face, a black soul patch, trendy glasses, thick upper-arm mass in his short sleeves – and now Mac had doubts, because if it really was him, Mr Fox had radically changed his appearance in a matter of days. When the shades came off, though, there was no hiding from those dead eyes. Mac would have known them anywhere.

  He tried to ignore the motionless figure and kept on handing out papers. He wanted to run, but couldn’t move far from his station because two other vendors were staking out the other tube entrances, and his team leader would send him back if he tried to leave.

  He stared at the great stack of freesheets on his cart, panic dancing in his brain. When he glanced back, the figure had vanished, and he wondered if his fearful mind was playing tricks. He needed to get away right now.

  Mac dropped the papers back in his cart and took off. He was thinking fast – or at least, as fast as he could – about how to escape into the crowds.

  He sent himself bouncing down the stairs into the station, Northern, Victoria and Piccadilly lines to the right, Metropolitan, District & Circle lines straight ahead. Office workers, tourists and students were milling about with bags and cases. People were walking so slowly, stopping to examine maps, just getting in the way. He pushed through the ascending travellers, down the next flight of steps, and was quickly caught up in a contraflow of commuters heading for the escalator.

  So many people. A distressed woman trying to manoeuvre a double-width baby carriage, a crowd of arguing Spanish teenagers, a smiling old man carrying a cocker spaniel, a couple just standing there in the busiest section of the tunnel, bewildered and lost. Mac looked around, trying to sort through the oncoming faces. Some part of him had known all along that Mr Fox was a killer. Mr Fox knew that Mac knew, and perhaps nobody else at all knew because the man pushing through the ticket barrier toward him had taken care of them all.

  He was coming up behind Mac on the descending escalator.

  Now he stopped and was standing on the right, in no hurry, looking straight ahead. When Mac looked back, Mr Fox failed to catch his eye. There was nothing to guarantee it was the same person, but Mac was surer than he’d ever been in his life, just as he knew that Mr Fox would somehow manage to kill him in public view and get away with it.

  At the bottom of the escalator he swung right and headed to another, lower, escalator. At the base he stepped beneath a cream-tiled arch that opened out onto the platform. A train was in, and the crowds were pushing forward to board it. He skirted the passengers and continued along the platform, turning off and running up the stairs toward the Piccadilly Line.

  Mac’s stomach was an acid bath. He glanced back and saw Mr Fox closing in, and felt sure he was being forced in the wrong direction. He knew the station as well as anyone and remembered that the foot tunnel they had entered was now out of use. It led to the long uphill passage connecting the station to the former Thameslink line, which had been closed down. Christ, I’m going into a dead end, he realised. He tried to keep things calm in his head, but he knew that Mr Fox intended to kill him.

  There was one hope; the tunnel had a cross-branch from the Piccadilly Line that was still in use. Maybe he could turn off into the crowds once more.

  He felt Mr Fox tacking closer, seeking ways to move ahead, from left to right and back. He didn’t know how it happened, but when they reached the junction the crowd was too dense and Mac was forced to continue straight across. Into the section where the tiles were already crusting with grey dust, and the CCTV cameras had been dismantled, and litter from the other tunnels had blown, into the corridor that no longer led anywhere.

  On, toward his death.

  ∨ Off the Rail
s ∧

  12

  In the Tunnel

  On top of everything else, Arthur Bryant was supposed to be conducting a walking tour around the King’s Cross underground system at seven P.M.

  He had all but given up his little sideline lately. The anglophile tourists irrationally annoyed him with their endless questions, and were always trying to trip him up. If they knew so much about the subject, why did they bother coming along? The only other people who attended Bryant’s admittedly esoteric tours were retired archivists, bored housewives or socially awkward loners filling their days with museum trips and cookery courses. His pastime required him to talk to strangers, something he had little interest in doing if it didn’t involve arresting them.

  When the tour company telephoned Bryant to remind him of his obligation, he tried to wriggle out of it, but it was too late to cancel. Now he looked around at the group assembled before him and conducted a head-count, studying them for the first time, and found the usual suspects:

  A pair of attentive Canadians in matching fawn raincoats and pristine white sneakers who were looking as English as possible, and consequently stood out from the surrounding grubbiness like priests at a party. A Japanese couple, neat and insular, in straight-from-the-suitcase walking outfits, who oozed so much respect that Bryant avoided catching their eye in case they started bowing. A handsome young man of indeterminate Arabic extraction, the kind who could freeze an entire railway carriage just by reaching into his backpack. A handful of sturdy older ladies squeezing the walk in between a Whistler exhibition and a display of traditional dancing at the English Folk Society. A sour-faced man with an annoying sniff and a hiking stick who looked like he harboured thoughts of attacking kittens with a hammer. And a smattering of invisibles there because they wished to get out of the rain, or because they had found themselves tagging along by accident.

  “We now find ourselves standing in a passage that passes beneath Pentonville Road,” Bryant told the group, not all of whom appeared to be following his words. “During the war, anti-blast walls were placed over station entrances, floodgates were erected in tunnels and trains had nets fixed over their windows to reduce injury from flying glass.”