by Max Manning
The screech of steel wheels braking on steel rails drowned out his scream as he fell forward, arms flailing.
The Detective
Day had given up eating breakfast at home. He’d discovered that sitting at his kitchen table, staring at empty chairs, was a great appetite suppressor. It wasn’t just the fact that Tom and Amy weren’t there to laugh at his jokes or affectionately mock his attempts at creating the perfect poached egg. He’d never had a problem being alone, but being lonely in your own home was a different thing altogether. A strange, disturbing feeling, he didn’t like it at all. It felt dangerous.
The smell of grease hit Day the moment he walked through the doors of the police canteen. The place echoed with the clang of cheap cutlery and the boisterous chatter of a group of uniformed officers sitting at two tables in the center of the room.
He resisted the fried breakfast option, ordering poached haddock with baked beans on toast, along with a coffee to wash it down. He carried the tray to an unoccupied table next to the canteen’s only window, sat down, and tucked in.
The Golding case was going nowhere fast. The newspapers were already bored with the story and didn’t appear to be interested in helping generate fresh leads. Apparently, an attack in which a woman was threatened and injured and her car stolen wasn’t considered “sexy” enough to warrant more than token coverage.
Day took a sip of coffee and made a face. It smelled great but tasted like donkey piss. One more day, then he’d have to pull his officers off the carjacking. They had a backlog of muggings, stabbings, and sexual assaults to keep them busy.
Picking up his drink again, he lifted it to his lips before remembering how bad it had tasted and put it down. He was considering a trip to the nearest decent coffee shop when he spotted Shields heading for his table like a woman on a mission.
Watching her approach, he realized, for the first time, how she moved like an athlete, her stride balanced and rhythmic. As she neared Day’s table, she almost broke into a run.
He raised a hand. “Hey, Cat,” he said with a half smile. “Can’t a man finish his breakfast in peace?”
Shields rested her hands on the back of the chair opposite her boss, and he could hear her breathing hard. “I thought you’d want to know as soon as possible,” she said.
Day pushed his plate away, curious now. “Know what?”
“It’s Drew Bentley.”
Day paused to let the name register. “Gem Golding’s boyfriend? The lawyer?”
Shields nodded.
“Come on then. Tell me. What about him?”
“He’s dead. Jumped in front of a Tube train this morning apparently.”
Day slid his chair back, stood up, and started walking toward the door. Shields followed. Leaving the canteen, they turned left, heading for Day’s office. “It’s being reported as suicide, you say?”
Shields lengthened her stride to keep up with her boss. “Seems so. By all accounts, he turned to look the train driver in the eye before diving onto the track.”
Day stopped outside his office door, turning to face Shields. “Has Gem Golding been informed?”
“We’ve got people there right now,” Shields said.
Day didn’t usually get excited about suicides. Normally, a detective would be assigned to establish the facts and then pass the evidence to the coroner. That wasn’t going to happen here, no way. There had to be a link between the carjacking and Bentley’s death. Day didn’t believe in coincidences.
“I want all witnesses to the incidence questioned and detailed statements from them about what they saw, including the driver of the train.”
Shields nodded. “I’ll get someone on it right away.”
Day’s mind raced. “I also want copies of all the CCTV footage of the platform where it happened and Bentley’s route to that platform, and I want it quickly.”
“I’m on it,” Shields said as she headed for the Golding incident room. She’d taken a few steps when Day called out to her.
“We’re also going to need to talk to Gem Golding,” he said. “I know we’ve got to be sensitive about this and that she’s going to need some time, but I don’t want to wait more than a day or two at the most.”
19
Fight
The Mastermind
Con Norton sat at his favorite table in his favorite café and sipped his mug of tea. Cath’s Cafe, in Stratford, served the biggest, best, and cheapest all-day cooked breakfast in east London, but he wasn’t there to fill his belly.
He looked down at the copy of the Daily News spread out on the table in front of him. He’d read the article so many times, he could recite it from memory. Warrior for Women, Coward, Pervert. The words jumped out at him, each one stinging like a slap in the face.
A cold rage filled his chest. He welcomed its power like an old friend and smiled. Lifting a hand, he rubbed at his beard. It needed a trim. Instead of being a barrier to hide behind, it was starting to attract attention.
He read the interview with Gem Golding again. Slowly this time, taking in every word, every nuance. True, he hated everything the woman said, how the reporter chose phrases designed to humiliate, but at the same time, the media interest stirred something deep inside him.
They were writing about him in the newspapers, talking about him on the television. For once, the world was taking notice of him. It felt good. He’d always known that his time would come. At last, he’d rippled the pond, and he had no intention of stopping now. He wanted to turn those ripples into waves. Someone needs to teach that woman that she’d be better off if she keeps her mouth shut, he thought. She’d gotten lucky, that’s all. If she had any sense, she’d thank God, the devil, and the universe that she survived, show some humility, and keep her accusations to herself.
The reporter would have encouraged her to twist the truth, Norton knew, but she should have refused. She was a deceiver, dissembler, faker, pretender. Her lies rattled around in his head. The things she had said about him could never be forgotten, would never be forgiven. What a liar, a shameless liar, that woman had turned out to be.
Norton switched his attention to the reports spread across pages four and five of the newspaper. He had to admit that the headline had a certain ring to it. Stand Up and Fight, or Surrender to Survive?
Beside the byline, at the top of the lead story, was a headshot of the reporter. He had a youthful, smug face. The sort of face Norton truly believed deserved to be punched on sight. This Matt Revell thinks he’s smart, he thought, but he’s missing the point completely. Victims are born, not made. They’re destined to become fodder for predators.
Norton’s eyes flicked back to the main headline, darting from the word Fight to Surrender and back again. Fight…Surrender…Fight…Surrender…Fight…Surrender.
His upper lip developed a twitch that turned into a smirk. The smirk quickly became a smile. If only they knew, he thought. Do they know? Of course not. They couldn’t possibly. The truth was simple. He was setting the agenda. He led the way and even the media followed blindly. It’s undeniable, he thought. I am in control.
The newspaper coverage would probably achieve what it was designed to do: spark off a debate and attract hundreds if not thousands of readers to the paper’s website, where they would be asked to take part in a totally pointless vote on how victims should react when threatened with violence.
Norton read the Fight or Surrender headline one more time. The power of the words made him smile. Sometimes plain crazy equaled sheer genius.
He loved playing games. Especially those he was destined to win.
20
Surrender
The Detective
The Fighting Dogs pub wasn’t a police haunt. That’s why Day liked it. He could enjoy an end of shift pint in relative peace. In his experience, most off-duty detectives didn’t believe in moderation when it cam
e to beer. Things got rowdy. Quickly.
He bought himself a pint and sat in one of the three unoccupied high-backed booths set against the wall opposite the bar. The pub oozed character, elegantly decked out with chandeliers and bookcases and what appeared to be genuine Victorian mahogany wall paneling. Day counted five other customers, all men drinking on their own. It was early, and he knew the place would liven up as the night wore on.
Shields had accepted his suggestion that they meet up, with a warning that she had a pile of paperwork to sort out first. Day took a sip of beer and began thinking through the Bentley case. The guy had been a successful employment lawyer, a high earner living in a big house with his girlfriend. Why on earth would he dive under a Tube train? It didn’t add up.
He’d been in good health, with no history of mental health issues. Maybe it was only a matter of time before they uncovered a good reason someone like Bentley might decide to off himself. Secret gambling debts? An affair gone wrong? Day thought it possible but highly unlikely.
Officially, the death was still being treated as either suicide or an accident, and Day was happy to keep it that way. For now. The last thing he wanted was to have to hand the case to the murder investigation team. He was more than qualified to deal with it.
Bentley’s mangled body had been scraped off the track two weeks after his wife had been viciously assaulted by a carjacker. Day’s gut instinct told him there had to be a connection. He didn’t believe in good luck or bad luck. No, in his opinion, it was simpler than that. He believed in good people and bad people.
If asked to take a guess, he’d say Gem Golding was probably a good person. He didn’t know her well enough to be sure, but he’d no reason to think otherwise. Bad people were his specialty. Bentley had been harder to read, and Day would withhold judgment on the lawyer’s character until the investigation into his death was complete.
He wasn’t looking forward to interviewing Golding tomorrow. Over the years, he’d knocked on the doors of dozens of people who’d lost loved ones in the worst of circumstances. If you stuck with the job long enough, you got used to dealing with grief.
Everybody had their own way of handling the negative emotions surrounding violence and murder. Day had no idea how other detectives did it, and he didn’t want to know. He guessed that some eventually developed an immunity to tragedy and suffering, a hardening of the heart that enabled them to shrug it off.
For him, it was different. It was all still there, inside his head, hidden away in a little mental filing cabinet. As long as he kept the drawer shut and locked, then everything would be fine.
Day took a gulp of his pint. It tasted good, so he took a bigger one. He put the glass back on the table and pushed it away. Better slow down, he told himself. This was meant to be an after-work drink and get-to-know-you-better chat with a new colleague, not a drinking spree with an old mate.
He needed to keep a clear head. His team was no nearer to getting a breakthrough on the Golding case. The suspect had abandoned a valuable vehicle and set it alight. That didn’t add up. If the only point of the carjacking was to terrorize a lone woman, then he was an impulsive, twisted predator who needed to be locked up. Day had a feeling that the case would turn out to be more complicated than that. On the security camera footage, the suspect appeared confident and calculating rather than impulsive. That was worrying.
People like that rarely emerged fully formed from a law-abiding existence into a life of crime. They didn’t suddenly turn bad. They were rotten to the core. If they could identify the suspect, he’d probably turn up on the national police databases as a past offender.
Day knew from experience that the alternative was worse. If the man they were hunting had never been caught before, it would suggest he was intelligent, a meticulous planner. That would make him more difficult to find and extremely dangerous to know.
His cell phone rang, the birdlike trilling drawing disapproving glances from drinkers seated at the bar. Day checked the caller ID, his heart sinking when he saw the name. He’d been looking forward to a bit of female company before having to face going home. He liked Shields. She was a straight talker and had even started to crack the odd smile at his jokes. In fact, she was the only detective at the station who understood that they were jokes.
“Don’t tell me,” he said. “You’re standing me up. You’d rather shuffle bits of paper around your desk.”
“It’s not that, Boss. Something has come up. You’re needed back here right now.”
Day jumped to his feet and headed for the door, his phone still clamped to his ear. The tone of his sergeant’s voice had set alarm bells ringing. “What is it? What’s happened?”
“It’s the CCTV footage from Liverpool Street Tube station. The Bentley accident.”
Day stepped out onto the street. He had an idea where the conversation was going, but he didn’t want to jump the gun.
“Don’t keep me in suspense,” Day said, dodging smartly to his left to avoid a collision with a rotund woman carrying bags of food shopping. “What are we looking at?”
Shields didn’t answer immediately, causing Day to check his phone’s screen to see if they’d been cut off. “Well, that’s not exactly clear,” she said. “But there is definitely something going on. Something weird.”
Day arrived back at the station to find Shields at her desk, her eyes firmly fixed on her computer screen.
Seeing Day approach, she stood and gestured impatiently for him to take her seat. “I’ve been going through footage from the London Underground CCTV center and have come up with some interesting images.”
Day looked up at his detective sergeant. “Come on then. Get on with it. Let’s have a look at what you’ve got.”
Shields leaned across the desk and clicked on the editing menu along the bottom. Day found himself looking at a crowd of commuters crammed together like sardines in a tin. The camera angle showed clearly that the front row of commuters had shuffled past the yellow safety line until they were standing right on the edge of the platform.
Shields clicked again and jabbed a finger at the screen.
“That’s Bentley right there. Can you see?”
“There’s nothing wrong with my eyesight,” Day said. “If you can see him, I can see him. Now, what am I looking for?”
“Just keep watching and you’ll see.”
The footage started running again. The crowd on the platform swayed forward, and panic flashed across the faces of most of those teetering on the edge of the platform, including Bentley. They seemed to steady themselves for a second before the crowd surged again.
It appeared to Day that all the people standing at the front were in danger of toppling onto the track. He glanced up at Shields. “That looks pretty unsafe. Are we looking at an accident here?”
“Keep watching, Boss. There’s more to come.”
Day turned back to the screen in time to see Bentley twist his head and look back over the crowd. His eyes widened, and his body stiffened. He seemed to be struggling to turn and move away from the edge of the platform, but the pressure from the bodies behind made it impossible for him to move.
Day could see the lights of the train shuddering at speed along the track. At the last minute, Bentley stopped trying to turn back, appeared to look directly into the cab of the train, and plunged forward.
Day looked at Shields, then back at the screen. He wasn’t sure what he’d seen, but his sergeant had been right. Something was off.
“Run that clip again, would you?” he said. When it reached the point where Bentley turned to look back, he told Shields to pause the footage and leaned closer to study the expression on his face.
“He looks scared. Really terrified. It’s a shame we’re not able to see what he’s seeing.”
Shields touched Day lightly on the shoulder, and he could feel her excitement. “Keep watching,” s
he said. “There’s more.”
The scene on the screen was replaced by footage from a camera looking down on the platform. The angle meant no faces could be seen, just the top of hundreds of heads. Day easily picked out Bentley as he strained to look back. A figure wearing what looked like a dark baseball cap appeared to be pushing his way quickly through the crowd, heading toward Bentley. Day realized that was the explanation for the swaying. The figure stopped behind Bentley. A few seconds later, the man in the cap clearly lunged forward and Bentley plunged to his death.
“What do you reckon then, Boss?” Shields said.
Day frowned. “You can’t see an arm reaching out to Bentley. There’s no clear contact, but it looks like a push to me. The shape of Bentley’s body as he falls and his flailing arms suggest that too. It certainly appears as if Bentley recognizes the person moving through the crowd toward him. More than that, he seems frightened by what he’s seeing. Maybe it’s just that the crowd is unsteady and he’s scared of falling off the platform.”
Shields shook her head. “I don’t think that someone who was planning to kill themselves by diving in front of a train would be worried about falling off the platform in front of a train.”
Day paused to think about what he’d just seen. To him, Bentley’s death looked extremely suspicious. This was no suicide.
“There is one more bit of footage I want to show you,” Shields said.
The excitement in her voice told Day this was going to be good. He looked back at the screen at a side view of passengers standing on an escalator taking them up to the station’s exit gates.
Shields pointed at a tall figure in a black cap. He had a dark beard and wore a brown leather jacket. “We’re pretty sure this is our man,” she said. “The man who seemed to terrify Bentley and who was standing behind him before he fell in front of the train.”
