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

by Christopher Fowler

  “No idea. There’s a fragment of raised lettering on the inside, very small,” said the coroner. “Let me see?” He took out Bryant’s old magnifying glass and read: rty UC.

  “Pretty clear to me,” he decided. “Property of University College Hospital. Standard NHS typeface. Looks like a piece from a plastic leg cast. Keep looking around.”

  Banbury climbed over the platform fence and conducted a search of the gorse bushes behind the waiting room. A few minutes later he re-emerged covered in mud and brambles, carrying a dark bundle. “You’re going to love this,” he told Kershaw. “I think the overcoat got discarded before the killer carried out that little trapeze stunt.”

  “Can you identify it?”

  Banbury unfurled the rainbow-striped material before the coroner. “It looks like the one Matthew Hillingdon was wearing the night he was killed.”

  “You’re telling me Miss Field was pushed under a train by a girl with a broken leg and a dead man,” said Kershaw. “Bryant’s going to love this.”

  ∨ Off the Rails ∧

  40

  Conflicting Evidence

  The warehouse on the Caledonian Road was a good venue for a wake, which was just as well, as the PCU’s Saturday morning debriefing session had turned into one.

  It was 7:30 A.M., and the team looked beaten. No-one had enjoyed more than three hours’ sleep. The thought that Cassie Field’s death should have been preventable nagged at them all. Arthur Bryant had another worry. Each death brought a new level of confusion to the investigation. Especially as it seemed that the manager of the Karma Bar had been kicked under a train by Ruby Cates.

  “As soon as this meeting is over, you’re going back to the house in Mecklenburgh Square to make an arrest,” Raymond Land warned. “I want that woman brought in and held here until we can make the charge stick.”

  “We have to be sure first,” said Renfield, speaking for everyone. “I saw Ruby go into the house just after ten P.M., and she didn’t come back out.”

  “She could have left through the back door and climbed over the garden fences into the street behind,” said Land. “She’s an athlete, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, and her leg is in a cast.”

  “Did you look to see if her leg was really broken when you matched up the fragment?”

  “No, I didn’t have to take the cast off. I could see that the piece we found fitted perfectly.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “I’ve warned her not to leave the house until we return.”

  “I’m going to let you chair this, John.” Land rubbed his tired face. “I don’t know where we’re going anymore.”

  May rose to his feet. “Okay, let’s go through alibis and evidence again, taking into account what happened last night. We’re not here to lay blame or assess performance. We need to put everything else aside and crack this case.”

  He and Longbright read the statements from the Mecklenburgh Square housemates and the Greenwich witnesses, ploughing through the pathology reports and reconstructing what they knew about the deaths. Time lines were drawn across three whiteboards at the rear of the room. The low murmur of discussion sporadically burst into heated argument. The pipes ticked as the boiler struggled to warm the building. Meagre items of evidence were laid out and discussed, but after an hour they were no further on. Somewhere out in the surrounding streets, a killer watched and waited.

  “What I see is that you’re building a case against Toby Brooke here,” said Meera hotly. “Brooke has no proper alibi for the night Hillingdon was murdered. He went missing again last night at the time Field died. But just look at him; common sense should tell you he wouldn’t hurt a fly. And what if it’s not someone from the house at all? All you’ve got is a travel card swiped through at Liverpool Street station on the night he died. Hillingdon might not even have used it himself.”

  “They all deny returning it to his bedroom, but they swear no-one else has been in the house,” May remarked.

  “Well, of course they’d deny touching it,” said Bryant, “because it would implicate whoever claimed to have returned the damned thing. Dan, where are we on physical evidence?”

  Banbury consulted his notes. “The CCTV footage on Gloria Taylor and Matthew Hillingdon – completely unhelpful in Taylor’s case, but I’m trying some new frame-enhancement software on Hillingdon’s footage. There might be something before the end of the day on that. Nothing else new except the bootprints on Field’s back and the piece of plastic found in the waiting room, which we now know matches Cates’s leg cast. No prints from the door lintel, just smudges of dust. Giles and I carried out a re-enactment, and we’re pretty certain how Cassie’s bruises got there. No prints on the travel card or the rest of the stickers, but the initials on the card are definitely in Hillingdon’s handwriting. Mr Bryant and I knocked up a rudimentary tobacco spray. It was ridiculously easy to make.”

  “What about their technology?”

  “No surprises on any of the laptops, except that Toby Brooke has been buying a lot of expensive stuff on the Internet lately. We checked all the call logs on the phones, nothing untoward there. For all we know they might have had a few Pay As You Go handsets knocking about. We know there was a spare house phone for use in emergencies, but no-one can find it now. Theo Fontvieille remembers seeing a couple of others at the house, one with a Hello Kitty doll attached to it. Nobody will back him up on that.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, the books about haunted underground stations might have had Cates’s name inside, but she swears it’s not her handwriting, and it turns out they were taken out from UCL’s reference library by Toby Brooke. A set of photographs from Hillingdon’s laptop appear to be close-ups of the seats of different tube trains. Oh, and somebody stole Theo Fontvieille’s Porsche last night.”

  “Mr Fox,” murmured Banbury. The others looked at him. “Oh, it’s just that he had a photograph of a tube station bench on his wall, then it was gone.”

  “I thought we’d decided that the two cases weren’t linked,” said May.

  “We had,” Bryant reassured him. “Don’t worry. Let’s go on.”

  “Can we go back to the motives?” asked Longbright. “According to the interviews, Gloria Taylor’s workmates insist she had no enemies. But maybe she had something on her mind, because she forgot to take home her daughter’s birthday toy on the night she died. Hillingdon had no dodgy connections, either. He was dating the girl Cates, although it now appears she’s been having casual sex with Fontvieille for a while.”

  “Wait, how do you know that?” Renfield demanded to know.

  “Simple, Jack. I asked her. We still don’t know who Hillingdon drank with on Tuesday night, because most of the Spitalfields bars were rammed to the gills, and none of the staff recall seeing him. Plus, there are about a hundred of them. Cassie Field was positively adored. Nobody has a bad word to say about her.”

  “I hate to raise this again,” said Renfield, “but what if the deaths were random?” Everyone groaned. “No, listen to me. Suppose one of the housemates has psychotic episodes and just – lashes out? So, a stranger on the tube is attacked, and Field is literally kicked under a train.”

  “Doesn’t work,” said May. “Hillingdon’s death was premeditated, and if you’re assuming it was a housemate, following Cassie Field to Westcombe Park station in order to kill her means someone was waiting for an opportunity to get her alone.”

  “Can I just bring in Tony McCarthy?” asked Bryant, as another groan went around the room. “If you remember, the junkie is the only one who can identify Mr Fox. UCH is releasing him at noon today because they need the bed. I want to make sure it’s common knowledge that he’s back on the streets. There’s a strong likelihood that Mr Fox will try to take him out again, and given your spotty track record on surveillance I reckon he’s got a pretty slender chance of survival.”

  “Why don’t you just shake the details of Fox’s ID out of McCarthy?” ask
ed Renfield. “I can put the fear of God up him without leaving any marks. Leave me alone in a room with him. He’ll fall apart in minutes.”

  “Thank you, Jack, we’re British detectives, not the Stasi. I’ll let you know if we need the electrodes.”

  “Just offering, that’s all.”

  “Whoever killed Hillingdon took his overcoat and wore it to kill Cassie Field at the station,” said Longbright. “That doesn’t make sense. Dan, did you get anything off it yet?”

  “There were no hairs, a few skin flakes, a couple of small oily patches around the collar. I’m expecting the analysis back shortly.”

  “So,” said Bryant, “any questions?”

  “Yeah, plenty.” Meera folded her arms defiantly. “But are there any answers? I mean, do you think this is over now? That whoever’s been doing this has achieved his – or her – aim and finished?”

  “Have you actually been in the same room with us for the last hour?” Bryant snapped. “I’ve told you, these acts are premeditated, but we still don’t know to what end. Until we understand the killer’s psychology, we won’t be able to tell if it’s over. We have to assume it isn’t, and find a way of protecting all the potential victims.”

  “Can I remind you that we’ve less than ten hours to wrap everything up?” Meera shot back. “Everything. Your Mr bloody Fox, this subway vampire, the lot. I’ve already been out of a job once this year; I don’t want to be back in the same situation again.”

  “Then come up with something useful,” Bimsley suggested.

  “We break in,” said Renfield.

  “What?” It was Bryant’s turn to stare.

  “We break into the house in the square. Just smash a window and storm the place. Put the fear of God up them. We’ve got legal grounds. You reckon somebody there is arrogant enough to think they’ve got away with it – they won’t be expecting a surprise visit.”

  “Apart from the fact that Dan already took the house apart looking for evidence, ransacking the students’ rooms while they’re still asleep is not an option I want to consider. First you suggest torture, now burglary. Why don’t we just go out and shoot them all?”

  “You come up with a better idea,” muttered Renfield.

  “Mr Bryant, you’re sure it’s one of the housemates?” Bimsley asked.

  “I know it is.” Bryant smoothed his hand across his desk, which was still littered with playing cards. “The proof is shape-shifting right here in front of me. I can see it – I just can’t identify it.”

  “Then we stick to them like napalm for the rest of the morning, until one of them makes a mistake.” Bimsley looked to the others for confirmation. “What difference is it going to make? We can’t do any more here, and it’s our last day. There’s nothing else left to do.”

  “Can I just say that in the entire history of the Unit, this has been the most disastrous investigation you lot have ever attempted?” Raymond Land spoke up finally, adding his opinion in the most unhelpful way possible. “It’s like something out of The Muppet Show. I’ve seen better organised water balloon fights. Well, it’s over now. We’re no further on than when we started. We’re finished. Washed up. Dead. We might just as well all go home and do some gardening. On Monday morning we’re going to wake up with no jobs to go to, and this dump will be turned into a Starbucks. It’s the end of my career. Well, thanks a bunch for nothing.”

  Everyone booed and threw paper cups at him.

  ∨ Off the Rails ∧

  41

  The Trench Effect

  DS Longbright was taken by surprise when Georgia Conroy called; she had not been expecting to hear from Pentonville Prison’s former history teacher again. “You told me to call if I remembered anything else,” Conroy explained. “It’s only a little thing…”

  “That’s fine,” replied Longbright, searching for a pen. “Right now I’ll be grateful for anything.”

  “Well, you know I said Lloyd Lutine wanted me to go with him to visit Abney Park Cemetery?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought it was odd at the time, because he’d given me the impression that he’d hated his father. He asked me to accompany him because he’d just discovered where he was buried.”

  “How did he find out?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he checked the council records. As I said, I turned him down because it seemed a bit creepy. Then he mentioned something odd. That his father wasn’t supposed to have been buried there. It wasn’t allowed, there had been a mistake, something like that. I’m sorry, it’s not much…”

  “No, I’m glad you called.”

  Longbright thought it through. If Mr Fox’s father had also been raised in King’s Cross, Abney Park would not have been his local cemetery. But people could be buried more or less wherever they wanted, so why should it not have been allowed? Thanking Georgia Conroy, she rang off and took her notes into Arthur Bryant’s office.

  “I know we’re supposed to be concentrating on the Mecklenburgh Square case, but can you spare a minute?”

  Arthur peered up at her over the tops of his bifocals. “Is it urgent?”

  “You’re doing a jigsaw, Arthur.”

  “It helps me to think.” He gave up trying to fit a piece and sat back, turning it over in his fingers. “Queen Victoria’s funeral procession. Two thousand pieces. I wonder how many mourners in the crowd travelled by tube that day to watch it pass? Dan Banbury thinks someone chose to murder Gloria Taylor in the underground system because of the sheer volume of people passing through it. He says it’s difficult to solve a crime in a public place because the site always gets contaminated.”

  “He’s got a point.”

  “I thought the killer might be re-enacting some kind of historical event connected with the tunnels – after all, they’ve been there for a century and a half. All three deaths are connected to the railway. Even Tony McCarthy was attacked underground. Despite my insistence that everything has been premeditated, John has a theory that we’re looking for someone who’s acting out of sheer panic. I can’t see the sense in that myself. Meera thinks it’s a man who hates women, and Matthew Hillingdon just got in the way. Bimsley and Renfield think we should be looking for an escaped lunatic. Raymond’s right – in all my days with this Unit, I’ve never had such a disagreeably confused investigation on my hands – and yet I know there’s an absurdly simple answer we’ve all overlooked. It tantalises and terrifies me to think that someone else may die because I can’t see something that’s right in front of me.” He threw the jigsaw piece down in annoyance. “What’s your opinion?”

  “I need to talk to you about Mr Fox.” She told him about Georgia Conroy’s phone call.

  “Perhaps it wasn’t about the location of the cemetery, but the grave itself,” said Bryant, rolling up the jigsaw and sliding it into his desk drawer.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The only people who aren’t allowed to be buried on Christian sites are those of different faiths, and suicides. Could Mr Fox père have been a suicide, do you think, accidentally buried in a Christian spot?”

  “I suppose it’s possible.”

  “Suicides happen all the time in the underground system. Mr Fox had a photograph of a London Underground bench on the wall of his bedroom.”

  “Some kind of sentimental souvenir?”

  “One way to find out. Give Anjam Dutta a call at North One Watch.”

  ♦

  Longbright eventually got through to the King’s Cross security headquarters. “Can you do me a favour?” she asked. “I need a list of all the one-unders you’ve had at King’s Cross, going back as far as records allow.”

  “That would be about thirty years,” Dutta told her. “We never transferred anything older than that to the new data system.”

  “How difficult would it be to get me those?”

  “Not difficult at all. Every suicide has been logged in. Give me a few minutes.”

  While they waited for the email, Longbright and B
ryant followed the theory. “Mr Fox asked a virtual stranger to accompany him to his father’s grave, and he still visits the site,” said Janice.

  “So the death of his father could have been the turning point in his life.”

  Bryant’s laptop pinged. Longbright didn’t have the patience to wait for Bryant to fiddle about trying to open his emails, so she leaned across him and opened the document, quickly running down the list of names. Most of the suicides were marked with ancillary files containing brief police statements. It didn’t take her long to find what she was looking for.

  “There you go.” She tapped the screen with a glossy crimson nail. “Albert Thomas Edward Ketch went under a train on November eighteenth at four P.M., on the Piccadilly Line platform of King’s Cross station, the third suicide that year. Hang on, there’s a witness statement.” She clicked through to the attached page. “Witness told attending police she had spoken to a boy who she thinks was named Jonas. She insisted he had been sitting with Albert Ketch, waiting for a train, but the child was never traced.”

  “No child traced,” mused Bryant. “A key witness. It shouldn’t have been that difficult.”

  “It looks like they didn’t even try to find him.”

  “No. No, they didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “They didn’t have time to look.” Bryant clambered to his feet and searched the stacks of books balanced on crates around the edges of his desk. “They couldn’t conduct a proper search, because later that day – ” He pulled out a volume on the history of the London Underground and threw it open. “You see what I’m getting at?”

  “Oh, no,” said Longbright softly.