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

by Christopher Fowler

  “A cup of tea and a Garibaldi biscuit would hit the spot.” Bryant looked around the monitoring station, a small bare room with just two monochrome monitors on a desk, one focussed on each of the platforms. “You don’t have a camera over the entrance door?”

  “No, someone’s always here keeping an eye out. It’s an old-fashioned system, but I find it works well enough. LU head office wasn’t happy but I told them not everything has to be high-tech. That’s an original Victorian canopy. I don’t want dirty great holes drilled through it.”

  “A man after my own heart,” Bryant agreed, finding a place to sit.

  “A Mr Dutta from King’s Cross called and told me you were on your way. He said you wanted to see the arrival of yesterday’s 12:26 A.M. It’ll take me a few minutes to cue up the footage. Our regular security bloke isn’t here today; he’s up before Haringey Magistrates’ Court for gross indecency outside the headquarters of the Dagenham Girl Pipers.”

  “So you’re not fond of fresh air, then.” May changed the subject with less fluidity than he’d hoped.

  “Not really, no,” Mr Gregory sniffed. “My lungs can’t cope.”

  “Only people usually complain about the poor air quality down there.”

  Mr Gregory looked aghast. “That’s rubbish. Travelling on the tube for forty minutes is the equivalent to smoking two cigarettes, so I save a bit on fags. Plus it’s about ten degrees warmer on the platforms in winter. I’ve worked for London Transport for over twenty years, and I’ve got a lot of mates down the tunnels. There’s the casual workers, your economic migrants who’re just doing it for a job, like, and then there’s your tubeheads. It’s a place where you can forget the rest of the world.”

  “So is the Foreign Legion, but that doesn’t make it a good thing,” Bryant pointed out.

  “I hold the world record for visiting all two hundred and eighty-seven stations in one go, you know,” Mr Gregory told them. As a conversational gambit it was chancey at best. “I did the entire network in eighteen hours, twenty minutes.”

  “Is that a popular sport?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “You do surprise me.” Bryant pantomimed stifling a yawn.

  “People have been beating the time since 1960. There’s a set of rules laid down by the Guinness World Records, but that’s just the start – we also hold the annual Tube Olympics, and there are all sorts of challenge versions.”

  “Really,” said Bryant flatly.

  “Oh, yes, like the ABC Challenge – that’s where we have to visit twenty-six tube stations in alphabetical order – the current record for that is five hours twenty minutes – and the Bottle Challenge.”

  “What’s that?” asked May, trying to show an interest while they watched for the footage.

  “Look at the centre of the underground map,” Mr Gregory instructed him. “The lines form the shape of a bottle on its side. That’s the circuit. My aim is to beat the record of two hours thirteen minutes.”

  “This is all very riveting,” said Bryant, “but might we get back to the matter in hand?”

  “Here we go. The train came in just under a minute late.” The stationmaster clicked out the lights, and the trio watched the screen.

  The monitor display revealed an angled shot of the silver carriages pulling into the platform. “Can you home in on a specific carriage?” May asked.

  “Which one do you want?”

  “The third from the end.”

  “Which end?”

  May decided not to point out that there was only one end to a train arriving at a station, for fear of sounding pedantic. The stationmaster expertly panned along the train and settled the screen on the correct carriage. The shot was just wide enough to include all three exit doors, which now slid open. Inside, all was bright and bare.

  “I don’t believe it,” Bryant exclaimed. “The damned thing’s empty!”

  “There must be some mistake,” May told the stationmaster. “This can’t be the right train.”

  Mr Gregory tapped the numerals at the bottom of the screen with his forefinger. “That’s the time code, 12:27 A.M., right there. There’s no tampering with that.”

  “You’re sure this is yesterday?”

  “Definitely. And it’s the last train through. The journey took two minutes fifty seconds.”

  “We saw him get on,” said Bryant. “Could the train have stopped anywhere on the way?”

  “No, there’s no junction at Russell Square; it’s a straight line without any branch-offs. Even if it halted for some reason, the doors wouldn’t open. Nobody could have got out. You can interview the train driver if you want, but he’ll tell you the same thing.”

  “What about between the carriages? The connecting doors are kept unlocked, aren’t they?”

  “That’s right, but they only open into other carriages, so no-one could get off. Let’s see who alighted here.” Mr Gregory panned along the entire length of the train. “There you are, only two passengers.” He zoomed in on them. One was a small elderly man laden with plastic shopping bags, barely over five feet tall. The other was an overweight middle-aged Nigerian woman.

  “I don’t suppose he could have disguised himself?” asked Bryant. “In order to give his girlfriend the slip?”

  Mr Gregory zoomed the camera in, first on the old man, then on the Nigerian woman. Even a master of disguise would have been unable to transform himself into either of these characters.

  “Could he have let himself into the driver’s cockpit somehow?”

  “Not a chance, it’s dead-bolted.”

  “Then he must simply have stayed on board the train.”

  Mr Gregory reversed the footage and panned along each of the carriages while the train stood with its doors open. They zoomed into all of the few remaining passengers, but there was no-one in a striped coat and woollen cap. “See for yourself. I don’t know where you think he could have gone, unless he found a way of tearing the seats up and hiding inside them.”

  “You’re telling me a six-foot-tall student vanished into thin air on board a moving train,” Bryant complained.

  “No,” said Mr Gregory, “you’re telling me.” He shoved the inhaler back up his nose and snorted hard.

  On their way back out of the station, the detectives passed a neat row of K stickers that had been stuck on the tiled walls. “Oh, those,” said Mr Gregory, when they were pointed out. “Bloody anarchists.”

  “It’s advertising a local bar, isn’t it?”

  “It might be now, but those stickers have been around for donkey’s years. They’re a bugger to get off.”

  Bryant picked at one with a fingernail. “How do you know they’re anarchists?”

  Mr Gregory shook his head in puzzlement. “Actually, now I come to think of it, I don’t know. Somebody must have mentioned them before. It’s a local symbol, like. Been up on the walls since I was a nipper. My old man used to bring me up here. I’m sure it’s something to do with wanting to bring down the government. Someone here must have told me. Hang on.” He called across the station forecourt to a guard. “Oi, Aram, them stickers along the wall, what are they for?”

  “Anarchists, innit,” Aram confirmed. “Bash the Rich an’ that.”

  “Ah, a psychogeographical connection.” Bryant perked up. “Leave this to me.”

  “No,” May mouthed back. “There’s no time left for your pottering.”

  “I’ll have you remember that my ‘pottering’, as you call it, caught the Fulham Road Strangler.” Bryant had discovered that their suspect was a collector of Persian tapestries, and had matched a fibre left on one of his victims. Tracking him to an antique shop, May had wrestled him to the ground while Bryant crowned him with the nearest object to hand, which unfortunately proved to be a rare seventeenth-century ormolu clock. The killer’s sister had sued the Unit.

  “It was a horrible clock anyway,” mused Bryant. “Let me potter for a few hours and I might surprise you.”

  May wearily pres
sed a thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. “We’re already looking for an invisible passenger and an anarchist,” he told his partner. “Let’s not have any more surprises today.”

  ∨ Off the Rails ∧

  25

  Late Night Conversation

  Bryant spent the next few hours in a dim basement library you could only access with the possession of a special pass and a private knock. For the other members of the PCU, Wednesday dragged past in a grim trudge of paperwork, legwork, statements and interviews. Colin Bimsley and Meera Mangeshkar were now resigned to being yoked together, but the paucity of leads made it feel as if there was barely a case to resolve. Meera felt guilty for thinking so, but it was certainly not the kind of investigation upon which reputations were built, not unless there was a racial or political motive for the attack. What did they really have to go on, other than a couple of hunches and the vague sensation that something was wrong?

  Just after noon, one of the Daves took the curl out of his hair by slicing through a power cable, which darkened the offices instantly and killed the computers.

  At 2:15 Crippen managed to locate the packet of butter that had been used on his paws and ate the whole thing, regurgitating his lunch into Raymond Land’s duffle bag.

  At 4:45 the other Dave, now differentiated from his colleague by the lack of singeing in his extremities, removed some plaster from a wall in order to locate a pipe, and in doing so, uncovered an amateurish but alarmingly provocative fresco of naked, overweight witches cavorting in a devil’s circle. It was further proof, if any more was needed, that the warehouse had once been used for something damnably odd. Land had immediately demanded to know what the witches were doing there, and was not satisfied with Bryant’s suggestion that it might be the foxtrot.

  By 8:30 that evening having satisfied all existing avenues of enquiry, the exhausted investigators reached a dead end and were sent home, leaving only Bryant and his favourite detective sergeant at King’s Cross headquarters.

  DS Janice Longbright pulled the cork from a bottle of Mexican burgundy with her teeth and filled two tumblers. “The trouble with you, Arthur,” she began, with the cork still in her mouth.

  “Any sentence that starts like that is bound to end with something I don’t want to hear,” Bryant interrupted. “Take a card.” He held out the pack in a hopeful fan.

  “The trouble with you is that once you get the bit between your teeth you can’t be shifted. Two of diamonds. Like this thing with Mr Fox. Take a look.” She spat out the cork and threw a page across his desk. “It’s a screen grab from your security-wallah, Mr Dutta.”

  “You weren’t supposed to tell me what the card was.” Bryant fumbled for his spectacles and held the page an inch from his nose. The blurred photograph showed Mr Fox and his victim walking outside King’s Cross station. “Just what I told you. He followed McCarthy into the tube and stabbed him.”

  “Come on, even I noticed this.” She threw him another sheet, the same scene a few frames later, as the pair moved into clearer view.

  “Oh, I see what you mean,” said Bryant. “That looks like Mr Fox in his earlier incarnation, before he shaved his hair closer to his head.”

  “Because it was taken ten days ago. Concrete evidence that they knew each other. You were right. Mr Fox was taking care of business, getting rid of an unreliable junkie who had something on him.”

  “Any news from the patient?”

  “Nope, he’s still unconscious. There’s a staff nurse on duty outside his room, making sure nobody tries to get in. She’ll call us if and when he comes around.”

  “Has anyone tried to see him?”

  “He’s had no visitors at all.”

  “I wonder if Mr Fox thinks he’s dead. You’d better check and see if anyone’s been talking to the ambulance crew. Take another card.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Humour the meagre amusements of a frail old man.”

  Janice gave him an old-fashioned look and withdrew a card.

  “Remember it and put it back.” After she had done so, he threw the pack at the wall. One card stuck. Grunting, he reached across and turned it over. “Nine of clubs.”

  “No, it was the queen of spades.”

  “Bugger. You know those television detectives who put themselves in the minds of killers? I’ve never been able to do that. I never have the faintest idea what killers might be thinking. But I would imagine Mr Fox would like to make sure Mac never opens his mouth again. He’ll be watching the hospital, or asking around.” Bryant sipped his wine. “This tastes like that bottle of Château Gumshrinker I meant to throw out when we moved.”

  “There was nothing else in the kitchen. Try not to let it touch your teeth.”

  “It doesn’t matter, they’re made of plastic. Did you get a chance to look into Mrs DuCaine’s claim that her other son was turned down for the force?”

  “I put in a couple of calls to Hendon, but Fraternity’s file appears to have gone missing.”

  “You think there’s been some funny business?”

  “Not sure,” said Longbright. “I spoke to a guy called Nicholson, who’d been one of his examiners. He says Fraternity was a good bloke, fully expected him to pass with flying colours, doesn’t know what happened.”

  “A bit odd. Not like them to be evasive. Who was his supervisor?”

  “That’s the funny thing – nobody could tell me. If I can find out the name of the team leader, I might get somewhere. Nicholson remembered that the regular officer had been taken sick, so they had a replacement for a few days.”

  “Sounds like someone took a dislike to Fraternity and put the boot in. Keep trying, will you? It’s the least we can do for his mother.”

  Longbright sipped some wine, then winced. “I heard Raymond was upset about one of the Daves uncovering another creepy painting in his room.”

  “The waltzing witches?” Bryant released a hoot of laughter. “Poor old Raymondo is spooked because he thinks there was some kind of Satanic secret society operating out of this place. He says he keeps hearing strange noises at night. Doesn’t fancy being left alone on the premises.”

  “Was there really a secret society here?”

  “Oh, absolutely. That’s why the estate agent had trouble renting it. The Occult Society of Great Britain conducted a series of legendary experiments in this very building in the 1960s. The society was closed down after one of their rituals resulted in a death.”

  “How do you know about this?”

  “Maggie Armitage still has the press clippings. She never throws anything away.” Bryant’s old friend was the white witch who ran the ailing North London branch of the Coven of St James the Elder. “She reckons the occultists chose the property because it was built on one of London’s strongest ley lines, which runs from the Pentonville Mound to Sadler’s Wells, passing right through the centre of this building. Of course, John thinks I chose the premises just to torment Raymond.”

  “Do you think he’s fully recovered from his operation? John seems a bit…”

  “He’s fine,” said Bryant, dismissing the idea that anything might be wrong with his partner. “He’s had heart problems before. His doctor has started bleating about retirement again, but we both know where that will lead. I just finished reading John’s notes on the Mr Fox investigation, and I’m starting to think he’s right after all. The deaths can’t be connected. Perhaps it’s wrong of me to try and forge a link between them.”

  “So our priority is still to find Gloria Taylor’s attacker.”

  “You’d better copy Mr Fox’s updated file, the one with the new photos, get it over to Islington and Camden, and let’s hope the plods at the Met manage to pick him up on their rounds. You know how they think; if he gets rid of a few thieving junkies, it might be better to let him continue clearing the streets.”

  Longbright sat back and allowed herself to relax. “I’ve reached a dead end with the witness statements. Nobody remembers who was wa
lking behind Taylor on the stairs. If it had happened on the escalator they’d have been standing still, not concentrating on where to place their feet, and someone might have noticed who was there.”

  “Maybe Giles is wrong and it was just an accident. But the man has good instincts. I keep asking myself, how could it have been murder? There are simply too many variables. First, there was the risk of being seen and blamed. Then, the chance that someone else would catch her or merely get in the way and break her fall. Even pushing an old lady down her stairs at home doesn’t guarantee that she’s going to die. It’s best to test these things out with physical experiments. I tried it once before with a pig.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was very upset, jumped over the banisters and landed rather heavily on our hall table. Alma was furious. I should have used a dead one, but I was minding it for a friend.”

  “I notice Taylor’s death didn’t warrant a mention in the press. It’s been written off as an accident. And Janet Ramsey didn’t pick up on Mac’s vampire wound.”

  “I’d probably be inclined to think it was accidental if I didn’t share John’s puzzlement over these students,” said Bryant. “If you were going to attempt to take someone’s life in such a damned awkward manner, you wouldn’t risk drawing attention to yourself by whacking a label on the victim’s back. Why leave a clue at all? And once you’ve pushed her, then what do you do? You can’t fight your way up the staircase when everyone’s coming down, so you have to carry on walking to the bottom. Too much of a risk.” Bryant wiped his lips and set down his tumbler. “It’s no good, I can’t drink any more of that. Is there really nothing else?” He tipped the remains into Crippen’s bullet-punctured litter tray.

  Longbright poked about in one of the crates. “There’s half a bottle of Merlot here. You try it.” She unscrewed the top and tipped some in his glass.

  The bouquet forced his eyes shut. “Well, it’s got a bit of a bite. It would probably burn quite well.” He examined the label. “Produce of Morocco. Why was it in the crate?”