Christopher Fowler

by Bryant; May 08 - Off the Rails (v5)

  ‘But she is divorced.’

  ‘Why is it de rigueur to take a shot at anyone who tries to have a life outside of the Unit?’

  ‘I suppose you’ll be slipping more and more French phrases into your conversation from now on. Is that why you agreed to move the Unit to King’s Cross? So you’d be near the Eurostar?’ Bryant enjoyed teasing his partner because May took so much at face value.

  Bryant was wilier and meaner, but May knew how to deal with him. ‘I’ll bring Brigitte around to meet you next week,’ he suggested. ‘She works for the Paris tourist office. I’m sure she’d love to tell you all about her wonderful city, and how much nicer it is than London.’

  Bryant made a face and set the last of his tea aside. ‘I remember Paris, thank you, all garlic and accordions and waiters refusing to cook your meat properly. Parisians are the most argumentative people I’ve ever met.’ He unglued errant crumbs from his dentures with a fingernail. ‘The last time I was in Paris some ghastly woman threw soup over me just because I accidentally sat on her dog. They carry them around fully loaded like hairy shotguns and feed them chocolates. I don’t hold with animals in restaurants unless they’re being eaten. Why can’t you date a London woman for a change?’

  ‘They have a different mind-set. Frenchwomen argue, but Englishwomen complain. Frenchwomen are thin and think they’re fat, but Englishwomen are fat and pretend they’re thin. Frenchwomen—’

  ‘All right, you’ve made your point. Come on, Casanova, I’ve done with my tea, let’s get back.’

  They were just rising to leave when a skinny boy began moving toward them through the café tables. He looked as if he was on a methadone programme. There were scarlet spots around his thin lips, and his skin was the colour of fishmeat. When he spotted the detectives at the window, he made his way through the tangle of chair legs.

  ‘Is one of you Arthur Bryant?’

  ‘That’s him.’ May pointed.

  The boy dug in the back pocket of his jeans, produced a crumpled white envelope and handed it across.

  ‘Who gave you this?’ Bryant asked.

  ‘Some bloke outside.’

  ‘What bloke?’

  ‘Dunno. He’s gone now.’

  The boy was already racing away. ‘Wait, come back here,’ May called.

  ‘No,’ said Bryant. ‘Let him go. Look out of the window. There are about a thousand people out there.’ He tore open the envelope and pulled out a slip of paper. Reading it, he looked up with a grunt of annoyance. ‘The boy won’t be able to tell us anything.’

  ‘Let me see.’ May took the slip and read.

  Mr Fox was born below in Hell and now there will be Kaos.

  Beneath this was a small hand-drawn symbol, long red ears, a white snout; a fox’s head.

  ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ asked May. ‘Chaos with a K? Born in Hell? It’s like something Jack the Ripper might have come out with. There was no sign that he was religious, was there?’

  ‘None at all. This is all we need.’ Bryant’s frown deepened. ‘I humiliated him, so now we have to play cat and mouse. This is about respect. He has to re-establish his power over me.’

  ‘You can’t be sure it’s from him, Arthur. The press know about this now. It might be anyone.’

  ‘It’s his method. He uses other people, and always seems to know exactly where we are.’

  May rose and went to the window. ‘That means he’s within sight of us. It gives us a chance of catching him.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t, John, any more than you could run after a real fox and seize it. They say criminals who do this sort of thing want to be caught, but I’m not so sure. I think he’s arrogant enough to assume he’ll always be one step ahead of us. And coming right back here, into the station! The nerve of him.’

  ‘The message is a bit vague.’

  ‘Is it?’ Bryant studied the letters, thinking. ‘I wonder. Hell in St Pancras station? Torment and brimstone, down below, underground—underground? You don’t think he’s talking about the tube, do you?’

  ‘How can you tell? There’s not enough here to go on.’

  Bryant tightened the moulting scarf around his neck. ‘I haven’t got any better ideas.’ He pointed toward the underground entrance. ‘Perhaps that’s where we should start looking.’

  NINE

  Push

  One bleeding, sodding week,’ said Renfield, watching the Daves as they attempted to thread electric cable through a baseboard with a bent coat hanger. ‘They’re having a laugh over at the Home Office.’

  ‘They won’t be if we pull it off,’ Longbright replied.

  ‘Oi, you’re doing that wrong,’ Renfield told one of the Daves. ‘You’ll need to earth it.’

  ‘You leave the wiring to us,’ the Dave answered, ‘and you can get on with what you’re good at, framing innocent bystanders and knocking protestors unconscious.’

  Renfield’s bull head sank between his shoulders as he strode over and snatched away the Daves’ nail gun.

  ‘Blimey, look at this.’ Longbright pulled a water-stained book from beneath Bryant’s desk. ‘Put him down, Jack.’

  Renfield finished nailing the Dave to the wall and came over. ‘What have you got?’

  She turned the page around to show him a photograph of a sooty old building surrounded by a howling mob waving burning sticks. ‘This place, taken in 1908. The locals were trying to burn it down. Listen to the caption: “Police were called in to disperse an angry crowd of residents attempting to incinerate the home of the Occult Revivalists’ Society. According to unconfirmed reports, society members had succeeded in their attempt to invoke the Devil. Evidence of Satanic worship was found on the building’s first floor (third window from right).” That’s Raymond’s office.’

  ‘Can you get me down?’ the Dave called plaintively. ‘You’ve ruined my jacket.’

  Renfield ignored him. He moved in for a better look at the photograph, although he was also enjoying standing close to Janice Longbright. ‘They summoned the Devil from Land’s office?’

  ‘That’s what it says here.’

  ‘That would explain a lot. The pentagram on the floor, for a start.’

  ‘Maybe they succeeded,’ said Longbright. ‘Maybe that’s where Mr Fox came from.’

  A fine rain was falling with the kind of wet sootiness that stained the colours from the cityscape. Looking along Euston Road was like watching old monochrome television, thought Bryant, like the original opening credits of Coronation Street, grey and grainy and out of focus.

  He and May were taking the note back to the Unit so that Banbury could analyse it, but Bryant was already convinced of its sender’s identity. The few civilians who knew about Mr Fox had been interviewed, but their knowledge added nothing. Despite the vigilance of the anti-terrorist police and the ubiquity of the capital’s camera network, it seemed he could appear and vanish at will.

  ‘But he’s shown us his greatest personality flaw,’ Bryant shouted to his partner across traffic, wind and rain. ‘An anger so intense that it uncouples his senses and wrecks his plans. And we know exactly where he operates.’

  ‘Look where you’re walking, Arthur, you nearly got hit by that van.’

  ‘I have to be patient. I’ve stung his pride. He’ll nurse the grudge until it forces him to show himself.’

  ‘Then don’t turn it into something personal, not while we need to lock down our unit status. Let’s get the note examined first.’

  Bryant almost got squashed between two buses, and was about to bellow a reply when the call came in and changed everything.

  The new King’s Cross Surveillance Centre was one of London’s best-kept secrets. The underground room was accessed by an inconspicuous grey metal door, and its personnel monitored all activity above and below the surrounding streets. The local coppers referred to it colloquially as the North One Watch. Over eighty CCTV screens filled the dimly lit control room, and most of the monitors could be manually operated to provide
other views in the event of an emergency. The afternoon’s surveillance team was headed by Anjam Dutta, a security expert with almost twenty years’ experience of studying the streets. He welcomed the detectives and led them into the monitor hub.

  ‘One of my boys spotted something on Cam 16 at 1547. That’s the down escalator you can see here.’ He swung out a chair and tapped a pen on his desk screen. From this monitor he could flip to any camera in the station complex. ‘A young black woman fell down the entire flight of stairs. She died instantly. The steps are very steep, but we rarely have accidents because there’s a crowd management system in place here. Problems usually only occur late at night after lads have had a few. Most people are pretty careful.’

  Dutta adjusted his glasses and peered at the monitors, pointing to each in turn. The detectives watched as passengers pulsed through the station, passing from one screen to the next.

  ‘We switch the escalator directions according to traffic flow. At this time of the day we have more passengers coming up than going down, so there are four platform-to-surface escalators for every two descending, and over the next three hours they operate at their highest speed. If one of the escalators is out of order, customers spill over to the central fixed staircase. When that becomes heavily trafficked, we position a member of station staff at the base, where any accidents are most likely to happen.’

  ‘What went wrong?’ asked May. ‘She didn’t just miss her footing?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Watch this.’ Dutta began playback on the disc that had recorded the event from the top of the concourse looking down. ‘She’s there on the right of the screen.’ The detectives hunched forward and stared at the monitor, but the image was blurred. ‘What you can’t see on a monochrome monitor is that she’s wearing an outfit in a startling colour.’

  ‘So plenty of people noticed her.’

  ‘My lads certainly did. They can recognise strong tones just from the greys. The monitors are supposed to be in colour, but there’s still another two months’ work to do on the Victoria Line.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘The Victoria tunnel crosses one of the station’s main electrical conduits, and the power outages kick the monitors into black and white. We’ve completely lost some of the non-essential cameras.’

  Dutta twisted a dial and forwarded the picture until it matched his disc reference. ‘We can follow one person through the thickest crowd without losing sight of him. Or her. There she goes.’

  They watched as the woman tumbled, vanished, reappeared and was lost. ‘I can’t tell what’s going on from that,’ Bryant admitted. ‘Who’s standing immediately behind her?’

  ‘We don’t know. There’s a focal problem. The system isn’t perfect,’ said Dutta. ‘The best cameras are stationed in all the busiest key areas. Resolution remains lower in the connecting tunnels, basically the non-essential spots. This is a good camera, but it’s due for an upgrade. Plus, you still get lens smears, dust buildup, focus shifts. Escalator cameras are key anti-terrorist tools because it’s easier to identify someone when they’re standing still on a step. The problem with the central fixed staircase is that it’s not as well covered as the main escalators. And there’s another issue, which is the recording speed. We primarily use the system to control flow and identify passengers, but sudden movements can be problematic. We’re trained to read images and interpret what we can’t make out, so I knew at once it was a fall, but here’s the interesting bit.’ He reran the footage to the seconds before the woman lost her balance. The detectives saw her shoulders drop and rise. Dutta ran it again, frame by frame. A ghost image fluttered by, little more than a dark blur at her back.

  ‘There’s the push,’ said Dutta. ‘Right there.’

  ‘You can tell that?’ May was surprised.

  ‘I know a stumble, and I don’t think that’s one.’

  ‘But we can’t see who’s moving behind her.’ The screen showed a soft dark shape with the head cut off.

  ‘It’s unfortunate. A few feet further down, and we’d have got everything. The image was blocked by the people walking past to the left. By the time we get to the bottom and the rest of the commuters have bunched around the fallen woman, the suspect’s already gone.’

  ‘But you have witnesses.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘How could you not?’

  ‘Commuting is a chore, something most people do without really engaging their faculties. When something unusual happens they only begin noticing their surroundings after the start of the event. Their attention and concern were focussed on the injured woman. And there was a train arriving. Most commuters were more worried about getting home than waiting around to help us. We’ve put up information request boards.’

  ‘Was she travelling alone?’

  ‘Looks like it. We got a name and address from the contents of her bag. They’re sending someone to her flat right now.’

  ‘So do you have more footage taken from the bottom? Can you get any sort of a fix on who was directly behind her? Anything at all?’

  ‘No. As she fell she knocked over two other passengers, so by the time she reached the base there was utter chaos. It’s impossible to clearly see who was walking at the back.’

  ‘Presumably you don’t evacuate the station for something like this?’

  ‘No, that would take the setting-off of two or more alarms at the same time. A single accident can be easily dealt with. Fatalities only take about an hour to clear away, so long as they’re handled by LU staff and not the fire brigade—firefighters like to play trains. We only call them in when we’ve got an Inspector Sands.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Loudspeaker code for a fire alert. It’s an old theatrical term, a call for the sand buckets they always kept in theatres to put out fires.’

  ‘But I don’t understand why you rang us,’ Bryant admitted.

  ‘We called Headquarters in Camden but they didn’t seem too interested. They’ve got a lot on their hands at the moment, with the pub.’ One of Camden’s best-known public houses had burned down at the weekend, forcing the closure of a major road and the rerouting of all traffic. Camden police were being blamed for overreaction by angry shopkeepers, who were staging a protest. ‘One of your former staff members is the new St Pancras coroner, and he suggested giving you a call. It sounded like your kind of thing—a problem of social disorder.’

  ‘Do you get many actual attacks in the system?’ May asked.

  ‘Hardly ever. If gang members want to pick fights with each other they generally do it away from bright lights and other people. Besides, this lady doesn’t fit the victim pattern, which is usually male and teenaged. But if she was shoved down that flight of stairs by a complete stranger, it’s a pretty nasty thing to do. And if he’s done it once, he could do it again, couldn’t he?’

  Bryant looked back at the suspended image of the flailing woman, and wondered if Mr Fox’s anger had risen to the surface once more. A murderer in the tube. He had to be dragged away from the screens when Anjam Dutta finished his report.

  TEN

  Descending

  What do you know about the London Underground?’ asked Bryant, who loved the tube as much as May loathed it. He felt entirely at home in the musty sunless air beneath the streets. He could scurry through the system like a rat in a maze, connecting between lines and locating exits with an ease that defeated his partner. If Mr Fox had gone to ground here, he had found himself a worthy adversary.

  ‘It’s the oldest in the world, the Northern Line is crap and I hate the way it makes my clothes dirty,’ May replied. ‘I know you seem to find it romantic.’

  ‘You have to think of it as a mesh of steel capillaries spreading across more than six hundred and thirty square miles.’ Bryant shook his head in boyish wonder. ‘Of course, it was built to alleviate London’s hellish traffic problem. Imagine the streets back then: a rowdy, smelly collision of horses, carriages, carts, buses and people. But they only d
ug beneath the city streets when every other method of surface control had failed. They’d tried roadside semaphores, flashing lights and warning bells, but the horses still kept crashing into each other and trampling pedestrians to death. It was a frightful mess. Thank God for Charles Pearson.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘The creator of the Metropolitan Railway line. Pearson dedicated his entire life to its construction, and turned down every reward he was offered. He dreamed of replacing grey slums with green gardens, linking all the main-line stations from Paddington to Euston, and on to the city. In the process he wiped out most of London’s worst slums, but he also had to move every underground river, gas pipe, water main and sewer that stood in the way. And London is built on shifting marshlands of sand and gravel. An engineering nightmare. Can you imagine?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘An engineer called Fowler came up with the cut-and-cover system that allowed tunnels to be built under busy streets.’

  ‘Fowler, eh? Sounds dodgy.’

  ‘The tube displaced a huge number of the city’s poorest citizens. Naturally, the rich successfully convinced the railway to pass around them. In the three years it took to build, there were endless floods and explosions. Steel split, scaffolds were smashed to matchwood, suffocating mud poured in. At one point the Fleet Sewer burst open, drowning the diggings and burying everyone alive. The line finally opened in 1863, a year after Pearson’s death. They tried a pneumatic train driven on pipes filled with pressurised air, but the pipes leaked and rats made nests inside them, so they built steam locomotives instead.’

  When May stopped to buy some chewing gum and a newspaper, Bryant began to sense that he was losing his audience.

  The tube’s history fascinated him because of the way it transformed London. The directors of the world’s first tube lines were old enemies with an abiding hatred of one another, and when the captains of industry clashed, all London felt the fallout. Streets were dug in and houses ripped out like rotten teeth, without the approval of parliament or public. The despoilation of the city provided visible proof of the monstrous capitalism that was consuming the streets. While ruthless tycoons fought over land and lines, the project caught the national imagination and threw up moments of peculiar charm; when a baby girl was supposedly born in a carriage on the Bakerloo Line, she was christened Thelma Ursula Beatrice Eleanor, so that her initials would always serve as a reminder of her birthplace. Typically for London, the story turned out to be untrue.