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

by Christopher Fowler

  Bryant stabbed a finger at the page. “November 18, 1987, was the date of the King’s Cross fire.”

  “The boy’s name was Jonas Ketch. The bench – ”

  “The place where he last sat and talked to his father. I asked Dan to print up the shots of Mr Fox’s room. What did I do with them?” Bryant found the sheaf of photographs and laid them out. “There it is.”

  The photograph showed the missing picture of the red metal bench. “It looks like the boy saw his old man commit suicide right in front of him. Just an ordinary metal tube station bench, but the background of tiles – that has to be King’s Cross before it was redecorated.”

  “So he took his son there,” said Longbright, “sat him down and talked to him. Then he rose, walked to the edge of the platform and dropped under the wheels of the incoming train.”

  “Jonas Ketch’s father died on November 18, 1987, just three and a half hours before the King’s Cross fire. Hang on.”

  Bryant turned the page of his reference book and read. “No-one was ever able to discover exactly how the fire began, but they think someone dropped a lit match down the side of the escalator. It was one of the old wooden ones, and was covered in grease embedded with bits of paper and human hair that caught alight almost instantly. Thirty-one people died, and another sixty were seriously injured. There had been a number of small fires at the site before, but this one spread in a completely new way. The escalator had steel sides and the flames rose at an angle that created the perfect conditions for something called the Trench Effect. An intense blast of flame that turned the ticket hall into an incinerator.”

  “You think it was the boy.” Longbright was appalled.

  “After seeing his father killed, he burned the station down in an act of fury.”

  “My God.”

  “It fits with everything we know, and would explain why death means so little to him.” Bryant returned to the laptop. “Show me how to do this.”

  “Don’t touch that, let me do it. What are you after?”

  “The names of all the fire victims.”

  The list of those who died that day was public knowledge, and it took no time to locate a memorial site. “That’s why he wants to silence Tony McCarthy,” said Bryant, sitting back. “It has nothing to do with the time they spent together at Pentonville. There’s a Jim McCarthy listed as one of the victims of the King’s Cross fire. Tony McCarthy’s prison file lists his parents as James and Sharon McCarthy. Suppose when they first met, Mr Fox – ”

  “Real name, Jonas Ketch.”

  “Ketch accidentally revealed a little too much of himself. Suppose Mac realised that as a boy Ketch had committed an act of arson.”

  “Killing McCarthy’s father in the process.”

  “It puts the case on an entirely different footing. You’d better make sure Renfield’s there when Tony McCarthy comes out of UCH, and stays by him wherever he goes.”

  “This is my case, Arthur,” Longbright pleaded. “Let me do it. For Liberty’s sake.”

  “No, it’s too dangerous. I want you to switch with Renfield and take one of the students.”

  “That’s not fair, and you know it. You owe me this.”

  “Janice, your mother died trying to lure a criminal out into the open. Do you honestly think I’m going to let you risk your life as well? Put Renfield on it. I want you to stay right here, where I can keep an eye on you.”

  Longbright stormed out of the detectives’ room. Back in the corridor, she walked past Jack Renfield’s office, stopping only to grab her jacket.

  ∨ Off the Rails ∧

  42

  Sleight of Hand

  “Hillingdon’s overcoat,” said Bryant, wandering into the Crime Scene Manager’s room, “the oily patches are tobacco spray.” He looked very pleased with himself.

  “How did you know?” Banbury asked. “The results only just came back. I was about to come and see you.”

  “The killer didn’t forget the coat, he planted it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Someone in that house has been a bit too clever for their own good. The principles of magic; if you see the impossible happen, it isn’t impossible. You’ve been tricked.”

  “Sorry, Mr Bryant, I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You can only disappear from a moving train carriage if you were never on it in the first place.”

  “Do you want me to get John before I go?” Banbury made it sound as if he was offering to fetch a nurse for a rambling patient.

  “No, go and keep an eye on – who did you draw this time?”

  “The girl – Ruby Cates. Giles is covering for me until I get there. I’m going to make her take that cast off.”

  “Go on, relieve him.” Bryant waited for the door to shut, then turned back to Professor Hoffman’s book of card tricks. Holding it open with his left hand, he attempted to shuffle a fresh pack with his right, and sprayed cards all over the floor.

  ♦

  Outside in the corridor, John May saw a ghost. The sight brought him up short and chilled the blood in his veins. Fearful of seeing the sight again, he slowly walked back and turned around.

  Liberty DuCaine was sitting on an orange plastic chair in the hall, reading a copy of Hard News. Except that was impossible; Liberty’s corporeal form had been sifted into a City of London Crematorium urn on Monday morning.

  May looked at DuCaine, and DuCaine gave him a friendly smile back. “I’m here to see Janice Longbright,” he said cheerfully.

  “Is she…expecting you?” asked May.

  “Yeah, I’m Fraternity – Liberty’s brother?”

  Now May saw the differences between the pair. Fraternity’s eyes were a little more deep-set and thoughtful. He was bulkier, with a dense neck and arms like heavy copper pipes. The black gym shirt under his tracksuit said Full Contact Fighter.

  “Sorry, I’m a little late. Some kind of problem with the Northern Line.” When he rose, Fraternity stood a full head above May.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll take you to her office.” May wondered why Henley had turned him down, if DuCaine had achieved good grades. Despite the guidelines set by the Equal Opportunity Commission, physically imposing males were always useful on the street.

  May pushed open the door to Longbright’s office and found it empty, her coat gone. “It looks like she’s nipped out,” he said. “Do you mind waiting?”

  “No problem.” Fraternity walked around the room, taking it in. “She said she had some information about my case. I appreciate the help.”

  “I’ll have to leave you here until she gets back. We’re having a very difficult day.” May headed to his own office, and found Bryant on his hands and knees, picking up playing cards.

  “I see you’re hard at work on the investigation, then,” he said.

  “I am, actually. I know how Matthew Hillingdon was able to vanish from a moving train. Obviously, I had a rough idea fairly early on in the investigation, but it only became crystal clear to me a few minutes ago. Would you like to hear?”

  May waited at his desk while Bryant picked up the cards and clumsily attempted to shuffle them. “On Tuesday night, Hillingdon boarded a train at Liverpool Street station, went west on the District & Circle Line to King’s Cross and was supposed to catch the last southbound Piccadilly Line train. It arrived on time in King’s Cross at 12:24 A.M., yes? He texted Ruby Cates from the King’s Cross interchange at 12:20, telling her he was heading for Russell Square tube, a two-minute journey. The CCTV showed him getting onto the train. The next shot we’ve got is of the train pulling out. But there was another event.”

  “What?”

  “Hillingdon shut his coat in the door, so they had to re-open the carriage doors. We don’t know how soon after this the driver shut them again, but it was probably no more than a few seconds. Suppose Hillingdon ducked and ran down the carriage, getting off at the other end before the train left?”

  “To g
o where? The cameras would have picked him up.”

  “If you remember, there was one more train that night, leaving from the Northern Line platform three minutes later. The tunnel connecting the two lines was being retiled, and that camera wasn’t working – Dutta told us that. So he hops onto the train, deliberately shuts his coat in the door, waits until the doors re-open, hops back off through the next set of doors, beyond sight of the working camera, and catches the northbound train.”

  “Matthew Hillingdon’s body was found in King’s Cross, not at the far end of the Northern Line.”

  “I didn’t say it was Matthew who caught the other train, did I? Hillingdon was sprayed with tobacco somewhere in the station and left to die. The killer switched clothes with him. He put on Hillingdon’s woolly hat and his ridiculous candy-striped overcoat, and ran for the train. The cameras picked up the hat and the coat. I mean, they could hardly miss, could they?”

  “I know we only saw the figure from the back, but it looked like Hillingdon.”

  “No, it moved like Hillingdon. Not a very hard motion to imitate, typical drunken student pimp-roll, feet at ten to two and arms swinging. And he was running, so the frames were blurred.”

  “Then what happened to Hillingdon? If he’d been anywhere in the station, we would have seen him – Oh, my God.”

  “Precisely. We did see him. He was caught by the cameras, and in the process he became his own urban myth.”

  “The Night Crawler.”

  “Exactly. Not the ghost of a dead man, not a giant walking bat, and not a homeless person, either. A dying student in a black leather long-coat several sizes too large for him. He was pouring with sweat, so his long black hair was plastered around his head, and he was dying – crawling along the floor in the only direction he could manage – downwards. Disoriented and confused, barely able to breathe, he falls from the unused platform and lands in the cool darkness – but he somehow manages to get the coat off and loosen his shirt collar before losing consciousness.”

  “You think even that part was planned? That the black leather coat was chosen – ”

  “ – by the killer to hide the victim. Probably. But what if it was somebody who actually knew about the myth of the Night Crawler?”

  “That’s something only the guards gossipped about,” said May. “Isn’t it?”

  “No.” Bryant offered his partner a card. “It’s in a book called Mind the Ghosts. You brought back the paperback from the house in Mecklenburgh Square. It belonged to either Ruby Cates or Toby Brooke.”

  “Or both of them. No, it can’t be her. She’s in a plastic cast. She’s got a broken leg.”

  “Except that Renfield never did check to see if it was really broken. Tell me which card you picked.”

  May turned over the card and studied it.

  “It’s the nine of clubs, yes?” said Bryant triumphantly.

  “No. Mrs Bun the Baker’s Wife.”

  “Bugger,” said Bryant, “I’ve mixed up the decks again.”

  ∨ Off the Rails ∧

  43

  The Lure

  DS Janice Longbright arrived at University College Hospital just as Tony McCarthy was emerging, limping through the swing doors. He waved her away as soon as he spotted her. “I just want to be left alone, okay? Don’t come near me. I don’t want no cops following me around all the time.”

  “You’d rather have Mr Fox find you again?” asked Longbright, falling into step with him. “Next time he’s going to push that skewer through the soft underside of your jaw and up into your brain, assuming you have one. Is that what you want?”

  “I can handle it.”

  “How? Going to grow a moustache and dye your hair? Or have you got a gun at home? You’ll need it, because he’ll come after you again if you hang around his manor. Got somewhere else to go?”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “You couldn’t take care of a spider-plant, Mac. Don’t you think the medical services are strained enough without them having to look after you?” She placed a strong hand on his skinny arm. “I think you and I had better go for a little talk.”

  “I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

  “You already admitted you know Mr Fox’s real identity.”

  “No, I did not.”

  Longbright looked into his bloodshot eyes. “Oh, you don’t remember, do you? Did they give you a bronchoscopy?”

  McCarthy looked blankly at her.

  “Did they stick a bloody great tube down your throat?”

  “Yeah.”

  She knew they had; she had seen the equipment being prepared on the day she visited the hospital. “It means you were dosed with a retro-amnesiac drug. You don’t remember anything, do you? You were whacked out on meds, Mac, that’s why you don’t recall shooting your mouth off about Mr Fox. Or should we call him Jonas Ketch? Thought you were being clever, did you, giving us a few clues about a prison teacher, when all the time you knew who he really was?”

  That brought McCarthy to a halt. “You’re doing my head in, I don’t remember – ” he pleaded.

  “I think you should be asking yourself why I’d even bother to save the life of a grubby little junkie like you.”

  “I’m not using anymore – ”

  “Pull the other one, Pinocchio. The worst part about being you must be waking up every morning and remembering who you are. Not that you’ll be waking up for much longer, with Ketch waiting to stick you.”

  “What the hell do you want from me?” whined McCarthy, exasperated.

  “Help me catch him and I’ll save your miserable, wasted little life,” answered Longbright.

  ♦

  It was 2:14 on Saturday afternoon, a relatively busy time at the King’s Cross intersection, but today the Northern Line was seriously overloaded with passengers. Anjam Dutta set down his coffee and shifted his attention from screen to screen.

  “We’ll have to shut Staircase C ahead of the rush hour,” he instructed. “And reroute the incoming Blacks across to Navy.” The safety-and-security team referred to the tube lines by their colours when they were working full-throttle. “What’s happening out there today?”

  He studied the two cameras trained on the main ticket hall. “We’ve accounted for the Arsenal charity match and the Trafalgar Square rally – remind me what that’s for?”

  “Something to do with global warming,” said Sandwich. “There’s an anti-fur demo in Oxford Street, but West End Central’s advice is that it’ll be pretty small.”

  “The traffic’s still way up for a Saturday. You haven’t picked up anything on the net? Anyone running RSS feeds?”

  “Local news, Sky, BBC, London Talk Radio, nothing unusual I can see,” said Marianne, “but you’re right, there’s definitely something going on.”

  “Keep your eyes open. If it gets any worse, we’ll have to partially shut the station. This is really weird.” Dutta mopped his forehead and watched as a fresh surge of passengers descended the staircase to the ticket hall.

  ♦

  Janice Longbright wanted to get McCarthy off the street, so she dragged him into the New Delhi Indian Restaurant on Drummond Street, behind Euston Station, chucked him into the chair opposite and ordered spicy Thalis for both of them.

  “I like this place because it’s fast,” she explained. “In fifteen minutes, when you get up from this table, you’ll have told me everything you know about Jonas Ketch, or I’m going to take you into the kitchen and shove your face into the tandoori oven, d’you understand?”

  “I don’t know why you’re so aggressive,” McCarthy wheedled, trying for sympathy.

  “It’s your choice, mate. Talk, or this’ll be the worst Ruby Murray* you’ve ever had.”

  ≡ Rhyming slang: “Curry”.

  “I’ll give you what I know about him, all right? I could tell he was bang out of order, soon as I met him.” McCarthy fidgeted around on his chair like a child at Sunday school. “All sensible talk and that, but craz
y behind the eyes. Damage, see? You can’t trust damaged people.”

  Longbright figured it took one to know one. “How did you meet him?” she asked.

  “I was doing eighteen months for receiving stolen goods; he came in to teach English. A lot of the inmates ain’t got English as a first language. I got volunteered to help him. He never said much, but there was this one day, he was showing the class how to write a resumé for a job. When the lesson ended he got off sharpish and left some stuff behind, just papers in a plastic folder an’ that. I was going to put our answer sheets back inside and leave it on the table, honest.”

  “But you had a look through instead.”

  “Well, I had to, didn’t I? And I saw this letter he was writing to his old man. About a dozen different versions of the same thing, all a little different, written months apart from each other, like he kept starting it and changing his mind about what he was going to say. So I nicked one; I figured he wouldn’t notice. When I got back to my cell, I read it. So get this: It’s a kind of history of his life, all the stuff that made him angry. His parents was always trying to kill each other. Finally his old man, this bloke Al Ketch, took the kid out of the house one morning after some big bust-up with his missus, and dragged him down the tube at King’s Cross, saying they was going away on holiday.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “Jonas really hated his mother, right, so he reckoned the old man was taking him off somewhere where he’d never have to see the old cow again. He was all excited about going away with his dad. So he sits down with his dad on a platform bench and they talk about their plans, how they’re going to go to Spain and get a fresh start, how it’s going to be really great for both of them. Then his old man gets all excited, striding about, ranting, and when he’s finished, he calms down and tells the boy he’s leaving. Not they’re leaving, he’s leaving. He’s had enough of them both, and he’s dumping the kid. And Jonas worships his old man, right, he can’t do no wrong in the boy’s eyes. He thought his dad was taking them off some place where they’d be happy, and it turns out the bastard is abandoning him. And while the kid is watching, the old man turns away, goes to the edge of the platform and walks – just walks – under the train that’s coming in. The kid is halfway there, heading toward his father just as he goes under, and he gets covered in his old man’s blood. So he runs off in a right state, and when he gets home, he finds his mum has killed herself. She’s taken an overdose of sleeping tablets and choked to death on her own vomit. How messed up is that?”