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

by Christopher Fowler

  The problem with the students of Mecklenburgh Square was not one of culpability but motive. Without that, the investigation could never be resolved. It seemed to May that the suspects, the victims and the investigators had created a perfect deadlock. As the minutes ticked away, May patted the rain from his jacket, stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned against the tiled wall, watching and waiting as the human whirlpool swirled aimlessly around its axis. There was nothing else he could do.

  ♦

  Arthur Bryant’s office had started to resemble a magician’s display room. In addition to the books of magic, there were now a model guillotine which worked and a full set of Chinese linking rings on his desk. Packs of cards were strewn over the floor, along with random items of evidence, including a number of volumes on the London Underground, the paperback edition of Mind the Ghosts, the students’ opened laptops, Hillingdon’s rainbow raincoat and a series of enlarged frame grabs of tube train seats from a phone.

  At times like this, Bryant found it helpful to break confidence and discuss the case with a complete outsider, although he took the risk that Fraternity DuCaine might simply think him unhinged.

  “You see, I keep coming back to the cards,” he said, spreading a pack across his desk. “I can’t explain my thinking to you because I can’t entirely explain it to myself.”

  “Let me get this right,” said Fraternity. “You see a connection between the playing cards and the death of a woman on a staircase?”

  “Believe me, I know how that sounds. But the colours and shapes keep repeating themselves in my head.”

  Fraternity looked more confused than ever. “No, I’m still not getting it,” he said, shaking off the idea.

  “Let me see if I can explain.” Bryant opened Professor Hoffman’s manual of card conjuring. “I’ve been trying to learn the system of finding marked cards that’s recommended in this book, but I don’t have a mathematical mind. One way of doing it is to locate imaginary points on the backs of the cards. Hoffman teaches you to superimpose patterns over seemingly random choices. If you’re careful, you can divide the back of a card up into thirty different points. I look from the diamonds and hearts on the faces to the photos taken of the tube station seat covers, and every illogical cell in my brain starts to vibrate. But what exactly am I looking at?”

  “I have no idea,” Fraternity admitted. “We didn’t do anything like this at Henley.”

  “What happened to you there? Do you have any idea why you failed?”

  “It couldn’t have been anything that occurred during the training period. My course-work was good and I got on just great with everyone.”

  “Then it must have been somewhere else. Where did they put you out in the field?”

  “I did two weeks at Albany Street station. That seemed to go okay.”

  “Just okay?”

  “Well, until the end at least. I was reporting to some uptight dude who seemed like he’d skipped a few stages of his diversity training.”

  “He had a race problem?”

  “No, not that. The inner city boroughs would collapse without a heavy proportion of ethnic staff. Besides, I got the feeling that if you really have issues you can get posted to an area where you only have to deal with your white brothers.”

  “So what was it?”

  “I was supposed to go for a drink with the team at the end of my last day, and my ex-partner came by unannounced. I was kind of embarrassed about that.”

  “Why?”

  “At the time, he was one of the principal dancers in Matthew Bourne’s production of Swan Lake.”

  “Ah. Yes. I can see how that would do it.”

  “Look, he was between performances and wanted to wish me well. You wouldn’t know – ”

  “You don’t need to explain. Officers always know. Your mentor had championed you to the others and suddenly felt he’d lost face.”

  “I guess that’s a possibility.”

  “And he was in charge of your field report. Why didn’t you say something?”

  “It would only have made matters worse. I didn’t feel comfortable talking about it. And I had no real proof.”

  “I can look into this for you. Do you remember the name of your senior officer?”

  “Sure. He was a sergeant. A guy called Jack Renfield. I tried to get in touch with him one time, but they told me he’d moved on. They wouldn’t say where.”

  “I won’t be able to retroactively change your report,” said Bryant, “but if we survive beyond the end of the afternoon, I may be able to recommend you for a position here.”

  Fraternity’s smile was sunlight after rain. “You really think that’s a possibility?”

  “It would mean confronting Renfield. He’s at the Unit, you see. I’m surprised you didn’t bump into him. Albany Street was angry about losing Renfield to us; that’s why they refused to tell you where he went. You think the two of you could discuss the matter civilly, without any bloodshed?”

  “Could I hit him once, maybe?”

  “All right, but first help me with the cards. What am I missing here?”

  “Okay.” Fraternity narrowed his eyes at the card backs, then glanced across at Professor Hoffman’s manual. “You’re learning how to mentally mark cards so you can track them through the pack, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And you got these seat patterns. Why would anyone take pictures of those?”

  “To track something – somebody – from line to line.”

  “That’s what I see. There are twelve underground lines, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’ve got thirteen shots. This one isn’t a line. Okay, it’s a bit out of focus but it looks like red polka dots to me.”

  Bryant mentally slapped himself. “That’s a close-up of the dress Gloria Taylor was wearing when she died.”

  “Man, that’s a hell of a dress. She must have been the most noticeable woman on the tube that day.”

  “Of course – it made her easy to follow. She got on at Bond Street and changed at Oxford Circus. Maybe the killer was with her all the way. It’s like tracking a playing card through the deck. He chose her because of the dress.”

  “A sexual obsessive?” Fraternity suggested.

  “Then why not simply touch her or try to strike up a conversation? Why push her down the stairs?” Bryant realised he could answer his own question. “She almost left the station, then turned around and went back. She’d forgotten her daughter’s birthday present. And then she was pushed because someone was angry with her. Angry that she didn’t go through the barrier and leave. You track the card through the pack. But the card lets you down, and you lose your temper and knock the cards over. Everything else that has happened is because of that one moment of anger.”

  “It’s a game,” said Fraternity, looking at the fallen cards. “And someone didn’t like to lose.”

  “What kind of stakes could be so high in a game that you’d actually shove a stranger down a flight of stairs?” He looked back at the pack of cards, and the upturned nine of clubs. “I marked that one so I could trace it through the pack.”

  “Sorry, Mr Bryant, not with you.”

  “You don’t mark a card the second before you turn it over. You mark it right at the beginning, so you can keep an eye on it through the shuffle. The killer didn’t put the sticker on Gloria Taylor’s back just before he killed her. He did it so that he could prove that she was the marked card. She wasn’t hard to keep track of in the tube crowds, because of the way she was dressed. But he had to show someone else that she was the victim. Matt Hillingdon’s phone was taken because it revealed the marked card. But the killer didn’t think to check his laptop.”

  “I’m still not getting a clear signal from you, Mr Bryant,” said Fraternity. Getting used to Bryant’s way of thinking sometimes took decades.

  “I need to run the security camera footage from Monday evening at Bond Street tube.” Bryant indicated that Fraternity Du
Caine should grab the nearest phone. “Then I’ll know who killed Gloria Taylor.”

  ∨ Off the Rails ∧

  47

  Roll

  H ere we go, thought Nikos Nicolau, counting down the seconds in the corner of his screen. This is going to be so damned cool. From team player to team leader at the touch of a button. The screen counter had stopped at 11,353, but if even a fraction of that number turned up he’d have proven his point. The bait-and-switch site had worked like a dream, setting up a flash mob that would last for four minutes, the duration of the song.

  He waited until exactly 3:00 P.M. then hit Play. A video of the band opened onscreen, and the first power chord sounded. The band was called Shark Monkey (feat. Aisho DC Crew) and the song ‘Practically Perfect People’ had become a club anthem two years earlier, because the band members had taught the movements of their supremely vacuous song to the inmates of a South Korean prison. Since then it had replaced Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ as being the most imitated dance song ever to hit the Web. Even tiny kids in nursery schools knew the steps, which were a damned sight cooler than anything Michael Jackson ever recorded. And the best part was that he could get them to Rickroll* in the station without ever noticing the irony in the song’s lyrics.

  ≡ Named after the singer Rick Astley, whose fans turned up at stations to perform his greatest hit.

  Nobody can be controlled.

  Nobody can be patrolled.

  What we do is what we love.

  Nobody orders from above.

  Where we are is where we stand.

  The hottest lovers in the land.

  And here he would be, controlling them through a broadcast to 11,353 iPods, BlackBerrys and assorted PDAs, beamed into the grand concourse of St Pancras International station. He remembered the Kissroll staged there a couple of years back, two hundred lovers smooching beneath the disproportionately vast, tacky statue called ‘The Kiss’ that dominated the station atrium, but this was on a different scale entirely.

  More importantly, it would bring an end to the argument he’d been having with Rajan and the others about pedestrian flow in public areas. Rajan had argued that the public could be persuaded to walk in non-instinctive directions if properly directed. Groups generally moved in broad clockwise circles, Nikos had told him, because the nation drove on the left and people were used to driving clockwise around roundabouts. Customers entering shops usually headed left, circling the store and exiting from the right; it was the natural thing to do. But in countries where they drove on the other side of the road, the system was reversed.

  The webcam feeds sent back by his viewers a few minutes earlier showed that the group in the station was automatically following a clockwise route. Social engineering only worked if the instructions didn’t contravene human instinct. Certain rules held true whatever the circumstances; build a block of flats with elevators opening onto the street, Nikos had argued, and they’d be avoided by residents because the lift-space became the property of the street rather than the tenants. Design a public lavatory where the urinals could be seen from the pavement, and the British public would be reluctant to use them. Deep-rooted beliefs in what constituted public and private spaces were hard-wired into the human psyche.

  Except that something was wrong. The café’s broadband speed was pitifully slow, but as he checked the incoming feeds he could see that no-one was dancing. The song was already up to its first verse. What had gone awry? The chorus was coming up.

  Gonna live like practically perfect people.

  Gonna love like practically perfect people.

  Live and love like practically perfect people.

  Live and love like practically perfect people.

  It wasn’t exactly Rimbaud, but it felt about right for the duped drones down on the concourse. He studied the feeds again. Nothing. They weren’t dancing. Why wasn’t anything happening? The video was playing perfectly. He could see it on the site. He opened the site’s admin page and checked the stats. He ran through the set-up and hit Log but found nothing unusual.

  Then he saw it.

  Although the destination was correct in the body of the site instructions, the Flashbox he had created to run as a site banner was wrong. Where he had typed in the location of the event, a pre-logged template had set the destination to King’s Cross station instead of St Pancras.

  He had forgotten that although the two stations shared the same complex, they were entirely separate termini. He had lost concentration for a moment and clicked through to the wrong place.

  Breaking into a sweat, he toggled back to one of the video feeds and zoomed out to take in the whole scene. Instead of the great vaulted ceiling of the Eurostar terminal, he found himself looking at a cramped, tiled hall. He had sent his flash mob to the wrong station.

  Christ. The concourse at King’s Cross underground was minuscule compared to the one at St Pancras. A sinking sickness invaded Nikos’s stomach. He had instructed 11,353 people to meet there. Maybe some of them had figured it out and had made their way to the right meeting point, but what if the rest were trying to cram themselves into the small underground ticket hall beneath the main station? The result could be a massacre, like the ones that occurred at Mecca or the Heisel football stadium; people could be crushed to death in the ensuing chaos.

  Sweating violently now, he killed the video and wiped his trail, removing the online instructions, shutting down the website, clearing the computer’s history. He was using his backup laptop, the one he had stored in his UCH locker, the one the police didn’t know existed. If there was any comeback, at least he had bought himself some time – until someone ran a trace from the host.

  He knew that he would have to go and see for himself. It would be like rubbernecking at a traffic accident, but he had to make sure that his conscience was clear. Slipping the laptop into his rucksack, he zipped up his jacket and ran out into the rain.

  ∨ Off the Rails ∧

  48

  Maelstrom

  The scene in the station was becoming nightmarish. The crowd had started dancing but there was no space to move, and their synchronised movements had quickly fallen apart. A party of schoolchildren was disgorging from the Victoria Line escalator, but the hall was so crowded that they could not pass through the barriers, and had become trapped halfway. Children were screaming and crying. The staircases were clogged with passengers unable to move in any direction. A sense of barely controlled hysteria was breaking out in the claustrophobic hell of the ticket hall.

  John May could do nothing but watch. Longbright and McCarthy were nearest the barriers, and he could still see Ruby Cates fighting her way toward the tube escalators. Had she seen Theo Fontvieille nearby? And had either of them identified Meera or Colin? We’re all in trouble here if anything bad happens, he realised. He called Bimsley.

  “There’s no way of getting anyone out, Colin, so they’ll have to force people down onto the platforms and get them to board outbound trains. Try to connect with the others. I want you all on this floor. If you go to a lower level I’ll lose radio contact with you.”

  “Okay, boss.”

  Arthur Bryant and Fraternity DuCaine made their entrance into the station via a staff elevator that delivered them into the ticket office. Anjam Dutta was there to meet them. The security officer looked stressed but in control.

  “We’ve got crowds backed around the exterior of the station,” he explained, ushering them through an unmarked door and walking them to the surveillance room. “I’m trying to clear the exits but I can’t close them, because I need to get people up first. We’ve never had a situation like this before. Usually only a tenth of the population should be travelling at one time. But we think we found the source.”

  “What is it?”

  “Somebody arranged the staging of a flash mob in the station, but the induction site was pulled a few minutes ago.” He got a sweetly blank look from Bryant. “It was a passing fad some while back. People click on a si
te that reroutes them to a different destination, and that destination sends instructions to laptops, mobiles and PDAs, telling them to meet in a certain public place and dance to music played out as MP3s. The craze died out after companies copied it to use as sales tools. We’ve got all our staff and the LTP trying to move the crowd. In general people have lived through enough terrorist alerts not to panic, but they’re getting pretty close to the edge right now.”

  “We have PCU members out there tracking suspects,” Bryant explained. “Our leads may be connected with the situation you’ve got on your hands here.”

  “You’re telling me there’s a murderer crowded in there with the general public? You’re supposed to be helping us, Mr Bryant, not making matters worse.”

  Bryant looked up at the staff roster of security guards. Photographs of Anjam, Rasheed, Sandwich, Marianne, Bitter and Stone were arranged in a row on corkboard, their weekly duty roster marked beneath them in black felt-tip pen. “They’re all out on the floor right now?”

  “Yeah, you can see Marianne near the District & Circle tunnel, and there’s Sandwich, by the lift. Stone’s over at the barrier.”

  Bryant glanced back at the ID of the man the others had nicknamed Stone. He found himself looking at an earlier incarnation of Mr Fox. “When was that taken?”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  Bryant checked the fine print beneath the photobooth shot. Jonas Ketch. “He sat in on my briefing session with the security staff,” said Bryant. “Inattentional blindness. You have got to be kidding. He’s been here under our noses all the time?”

  “And now he’s out there,” said May, who had caught the conversation. “Come on.”

  The detectives pushed themselves into the crushing chaos of the crowd. “Janice,” May called on his radio, “brown leather jacket and glasses, to your right; Mr Fox is less than three metres away from McCarthy. You have to move that boy out of there.”

  “I can’t, John, we’re stuck here.”

  “Then we’ll come to you.”

  ♦

  The flash mob song had come to a rowdy, ragged end, and the disappointed crowd was looking lost, not yet ready to disperse. Loudspeaker announcements were proving ineffectual in easing the constrictions.