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

by Christopher Fowler

  “How could passengers tell where to get off?” asked the kitten hammerer.

  “The nets had little holes cut in them so they could still read the station names,” Bryant explained. “The service ran normally despite the fact that many of the stations were modified to provide shelter. They had libraries and bunk beds, medical posts, play centres and even classrooms.”

  “And racketeers,” said the Canadian lady. “I heard ticket touts illegally sold sleeping spaces on the platforms.”

  “The unscrupulous are always ready to profit from war, madam,” said Bryant patiently. “When the fighting ended, the tube’s defences were dismantled at an astonishing speed, and life returned to normal very quickly.” He had one eye on a Chinese man who was more interested in the wall tiles. Perhaps he had been expecting a ceramics tour.

  “What about the floodgates?” asked the Canadian lady. “They weren’t dismantled after the war.”

  “No, you’re right. There was a worry that an unexploded bomb might breach one of the tunnels under the Thames, so the floodgates stayed in place.”

  “But didn’t they also – ”

  “Perhaps you’d like to take over the tour while I go and get some shopping in,” Bryant snapped. “I’m out of milk and you obviously know more than me.”

  “You’ve no need to be rude.”

  “No, but it helps to pass the time.”

  Bryant struggled on for several minutes before noticing that some members of the group had lagged behind. Now one of them came running back.

  “Mr Bryant, I think you’d better come, someone’s been hurt.” The young man, one of the group’s more invisible members, was pointing back into the branch of the closed-off tunnel. Bryant pushed through the gathering and followed the speaker into the disused passageway. He could see the boy sprawled on the ground, facedown, a dark pool forming around his neck.

  He knew at once what he was seeing: the aftermath of a stabbing, without question. Turning the boy over, he was reminded of the one who had come into the café with the note; he had the facial wasting of a long-term heroin addict. Blood circled his throat like a red silk bandanna. Pulling back his collar, Bryant released an abundance of gore. His fingers could not undo the shirt buttons. Remembering that his Swiss Army knife was in his top pocket, he pulled open a blade and sawed through the buttons. The boy’s carotid artery had been pierced at two points just centimetres apart. It looked like a vampire had attacked him, but the wound was too sharp and deep to be a bite.

  Blood was running across the sloping tunnel floor in a thin, persistent stream. Bryant tore off his scarf and applied pressure to the boy’s neck. “Did you see who was he with?” he asked.

  “I heard a noise behind me. I turned around and saw this guy arguing with someone. There was a scuffle – I don’t know – then this one fell and the other ran off.”

  “Get a good look at him?”

  “No, man. It’s dark down there. Look at it.” Bryant got the point. The end of the tunnel was lost in shadow. The ceiling lights were out.

  “Wait here.” He called to the rest of the group, “I just need one of you. You, ma’am? Could you come over here?” He led the Canadian lady to the victim. “I want you to take over from me, just press on his neck, if you’d be so kind.”

  “I know what to do. I trained as a nurse.”

  “Excellent. The rest of you, stay exactly where you are.” He flicked open his phone but it showed no reception. “Has anybody got a signal?” He raised the phone, pointing, but saw only a sea of shaking heads. “Nobody is to move, understand?”

  Bryant headed for the nearest CCTV point, a dusty camera wall-mounted at the cross-path to the Piccadilly Line. He waved his arms in front of it, hoping that Dutta’s crew was paying attention. The stairs would take him to ground level, where he could call an ambulance.

  ♦

  Pinpoints of sound sparkled in Mac’s brain. His senses seemed to be shorting out. He was lying on his back, with something warm and wet around his neck. The dirt-streaked tiles of the tube tunnel drifted into his vision. Dumped out with the rubbish, he thought without rancour. Well, this is pretty much how I expected to die.

  ♦

  Bryant got through to the London Ambulance Service. The emergency crews were always stretched on Mondays. Fewer patients were discharged by hospitals at weekends because it was harder to find staff who could assess them, so they stacked up in the wards, meaning that A&E trolleys could not be found for incoming patients, and medics were forced to slow down. Luckily, University College Hospital was close by, and their EMTs came charging down the stairs in under six minutes.

  Years of heroin addiction had damaged Mac’s lungs. He developed breathing difficulties in the ambulance, and started to undergo respiratory collapse just as the vehicle was pulling into the A&E bay at UCH.

  When Bryant arrived at the hospital to give his report, the staff nurse told him they weren’t sure whether their patient would survive the night.

  ∨ Off the Rails ∧

  13

  Memento

  “I don’t understand.” Raymond Land stalked back and forth past Bryant’s desk. The floorboards nearest the metre-wide hole creaked dangerously as he did so. “How did you manage to lose the witness?”

  “I was forced to leave him with the others while I called the ambulance.” The detective had a conjuring manual open on his desk, and was attempting to shuffle a pack of cards.

  “Couldn’t someone else have gone?”

  “I knew the EMT codes, I knew the equipment we needed, it was faster for me to go. Time was of the essence.”

  “This late display of efficiency isn’t like you, Bryant, but I’d be more impressed if you hadn’t lost him. Any of the others in your group know this bloke?”

  “They’d all just met for the first time. Most of them pay in advance, so the company has their booking details. Don’t worry, Janice will find him. She’s on his case right now.”

  “What about an ID on the victim? Can you put those things down for a minute?”

  “We’re working on it, but there was nothing in his jacket or jeans.” Bryant attempted to shake out the nine of clubs. “By the way, there was a journalist in the station when it happened. Followed the ambulance to the hospital. Got a good look at the victim even before they bandaged him, I’m afraid.”

  “So what? Stabbings aren’t news anymore.”

  “There was something unusual about the attack. The boy was hit twice in the neck. The attacker knew exactly what he was doing and punctured the carotid artery, but unfortunately the wound looked a bit like a bite-mark.”

  Land was even more confused than usual. “You’ve lost me.”

  “You do remember, I suppose, that we investigated the Leicester Square Vampire?”

  “Oh, no.” Land rubbed a hand over his sagging features. “Tell me this hack’s not going to run a ‘vampire running amuck on the London Underground’ story. He’s not, is he?”

  “It’s not a he,” Bryant replied. “It’s our old friend Janet Ramsey, the editor of Hard News. That awful Botox-faced woman who could put a frost on a cappuccino from twenty paces.” He lost control of the shuffle. One card pinged off the vase on his mantelpiece. Crippen ran for cover.

  “She’s on the story? What was she doing at the station?”

  “Catching a train, I imagine.”

  “You’ll have to stop her. Wait, I’ll do it.” Land punched through to Ramsey’s desk on his phone.

  “I can’t prevent her from reporting the facts, Raymond, you know that,” Bryant told him cheerfully. “I’ve warned her that if she tries to foster an atmosphere of panic, we’ll have her under the Public Order Act. Where’s John?”

  “He’s gone to St Pancras station, said you’d understand what he was up to. Really, why must there always an air of mystery about everything you two do? I’m surprised you don’t leave each other messages in code.”

  “We do sometimes. Well, I do, just to annoy y
ou.”

  “Hello? Janet Ramsey, please.” Land covered the phone. “Could you put down those bloody cards for a second?”

  Bryant set the pack aside and dug in his pocket for the parts of his pipe. Land was about to protest, but thought better of it. “All right, you can have a smoke just this once. After all, we’ve got the Unit back and a chance to put things right. I suppose that’s something for you to celebrate.” He turned back to the phone. “Well, when will she be out of the meeting?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake give me that,” said Bryant, waggling his fingers at the phone until Land reluctantly handed it over. “Put Miss Ramsey on right now,” he bellowed into the receiver. “Tell her it’s Arthur Bryant and if she doesn’t pick up at once I’ll send someone around to have her arrested for obstruction. And you, too, while we’re at it. Janet, hello, next time you get your assistant to lie for you, try not to be heard in the background. You think you’re speaking softly but it sounds like someone mooing through a traffic cone. Possibly you’re going deaf. Listen, if you publish one single reference to vampires or madmen running loose in the underground I’ll bring you in for questioning and keep you here for so long that by the time you get home all your houseplants will be dead. Yes, I know I’m a horrible old man but at least I’m attractive on the inside, which is more than you’ll ever be, unless you become a nun.” He threw the phone back to Land. “So, they’ve officially given us Gloria Taylor, the woman who was pushed down the escalator?”

  “Camden Met found nothing to go on, so they’ve turned the case over to us. It clearly falls under our jurisdiction. Risk of causing panic at London tube stations, etc., etc.”

  “Good news for once. You could break open that bottle of Greek brandy you keep under your desk.”

  “I haven’t got a desk. I have two packing crates held together with bits of duct tape. But all right, yes.”

  “Excellent. It will kill some time while I’m waiting for Meera to come back with the X-rays.”

  “What X-rays?”

  “Sorry, vieille chaussette, I forgot to mention. The stab victim, we’re getting X-rays ahead of the post-mortem, not that he’s quite dead yet, but he’s on a respirator, and I don’t suppose he’s long for this world. The entry wound suggests he was stabbed with a skewer, and they should tell us if he was, which would mean that Mr Fox has resurfaced, just as he said he would.” Bryant lit his pipe and sucked pensively. The smell of burning leaves filled the room. On the desk before him lay the note. “Take a look at that,” he said.

  “So this is the famous warning? Not very informative, is it?”

  “It’s suggestive. Foxes live underground. Hell is underground. And the misspelling of chaos, there’s a sense of timeless tragedy.”

  “A sense of illiteracy, more like.” Land gave a harrumph. “Wishful thinking on your part.”

  “Not at all. Mr Fox’s growing in confidence, but perhaps he also wants to be stopped. Something torments him. Why else would he bother to send a message like that? There’s another thing. May thinks the sticker on Gloria Taylor’s back is a letter K. Suppose it stands for Kaos?”

  “Are you seriously suggesting he attacked two different people in the same tube station a little more than two hours apart? Why didn’t he use the same method for both?”

  “I don’t know. Do me a favour, will you, and pick a card.”

  Land was so used to Bryant’s odd behaviour that he finally accepted the card, looked at it and put it back in the pack. “Why would he leave a sticker on one victim but not the other? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “For once I agree with you. Nine of clubs.”

  Raymond smoothed his straggling hair across his bald patch, a sure sign that he was attempting to think. “I mean,” he persisted, “what possible connection could exist between a single mum working at a cosmetics counter and a King’s Cross junkie?” He gave a weary sigh. “It was the four of diamonds. Let’s hope you’re a better detective than you are a magician.”

  ♦

  “I don’t know how you can eat that,” said Meera Mangeshkar. She watched as Colin Bimsley stuffed a forkful of dripping orange noodles into his mouth. He was sitting on top of a green plastic recycling bin, grazing from a yellow polystyrene box, and didn’t seem to mind the smell of rotting garbage that permeated the brick yard.

  The pair were staking out the Margery Street flat from the rubbish disposal area. It was the only place on the ground floor of the housing estate that could not be seen from the windows of the apartment. Half past nine on a murky, saturated Monday night. Meera was wet, cold and impatient for results. She was also annoyed that Bimsley appeared to be enjoying himself.

  “I can eat anything if I’m hungry,” he told her, thrusting his plastic fork into the glutinous contents of the box. “Chicken korma, pad thai, shawarma, fish cakes, spag bog, whelks.” He chewed ruminatively on a piece of stir-fried pork. “Sushi, cod and chips, saveloy, döner kebab, pasties.” A tiny old woman came to throw some leaking bin bags into a container and pretended not to notice him. “Sauerkraut, pickled eggs, curried goat, fried bananas.” He air-ticked the items with his fork.

  Meera grimaced. “You’re a genuinely disgusting person, do you know that?”

  “No, I just come from a big family of coppers, that’s all. None of them ever came home and cooked after being on duty, they were all too knackered. We lived on take-out food. The difference between you and me is that you saw being a cop as a way out, whereas it never occurred to me to do anything else.”

  “So you want to spend your life sifting through rotting crap and doing surveillance? You don’t want to better yourself?”

  Bimsley spat a piece of gristle back into the box, then looked at her with blank blue eyes.

  “I give up with you,” she said. “We’ve got nothing in common.”

  “That’s why it’d be a good idea for you to go out with me. I never trust those online dating questionnaires where you list all the things you like and find someone who likes exactly the same stuff. I mean, what’s the point of having someone who agrees with you all the time?”

  “And that’s your entire philosophy for dating, is it?”

  “Yeah, I ask out the least likely women. It worked until I met you.”

  “If you know we’ve got nothing in common, why do you keep asking?”

  “I figured you’d eventually crack. I thought one day I’d be talking to you and there would be this tiny noise, like – ” There was a tinkle of breaking glass. “Yeah, like that.”

  “No. Someone’s broken in,” said Meera.

  Bimsley threw his dinner carton behind him and vaulted down from the bin. The pair ran around the corner in time to see a leg vanishing through Mr Fox’s kitchen window.

  “There’s a back way,” said Mangeshkar. “You take it. I can get through the front.” They splattered through the flooded forecourt to the flat. Meera reached the kitchen window and lifted herself to the sill, carefully climbing through. The apartment’s interior was in darkness, but she could hear footsteps in the room beyond. Dropping to the floor, she entered the hall and saw a far door closing. She padded along the hall and cautiously pushed it open.

  A familiar figure was framed outside the window. “He’s already gone,” Bimsley called. “Go back out the front.”

  ♦

  They met outside the block, but there was no sign of anyone. A small park backed onto the estate. Beyond that was a maze of misted side streets. “How could he have gone through the flat so quickly?” Meera demanded.

  “He came back for something and knew exactly where to look,” answered Colin. “Call it in.”

  ♦

  Dan Banbury was halfway home when the message came through. Bryant wanted him to return to Margery Street and see if anything was missing. Banbury had taken photographs, but did not need to rely on them. He could always tell when something had been moved at a crime scene. As a kid he had conducted memory tests as bets. A favourite party trick had been
to divine the contents of other kids’ pockets, a pastime he was now teaching to his own son. He arrived back at the housing block half an hour later, and found Bimsley waiting for him. It only took a few seconds of looking around in the living room to spot what had been removed.

  “A framed photograph. There.” Banbury pointed to a small space on the wall. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “What do you mean?” Bimsley cocked his head at the rectangle of pale wallpaper.

  “It was a photograph of a metal bench,” Banbury replied.

  “And that’s all he’s taken?”

  “Nothing else has been touched.”

  “What kind of frame?”

  “Aluminium, with a cardboard back.”

  “Blimey,” said Bimsley. “There must have been something pretty valuable hidden inside it to risk getting caught like that.”

  ∨ Off the Rails ∧

  14

  The Letter K

  John May checked his vintage Rolex for the fifth time. He was seated at the bar of the St Pancras Grand, a restaurant on the upper level of the vast, airy St Pancras station. He was waiting for Rufus Abu. Like a pixilated image on a TV screen, Rufus was infernally difficult to keep in focus. He left a ghost track across the city’s security network, and never stayed longer than a few minutes in any public place. May tried contacting him on every electronic device he owned, but there had been no answer. All he could ever do was send a call-sign into the ether and wait for him to appear at a pre-arranged spot.

  The police remained unconvinced that the teenaged hacker was working on their side. Rufus was still wanted for extradition by an American intelligence agency operating in London, because he had slipped under the tracking defences of a U.S. insurance company and exposed their vulnerability to cyber-attack. The fact that Rufus was merely intending to highlight the firm’s security issues revealed his greatest weakness; the hacker was driven to try and change the world for the better, without realising that he would always make the wrong people angry.