Christopher Fowler

by Bryant; May 08 - Off the Rails (v5)

  ‘He’s very drunk. Can you get him from another camera?’

  ‘No, that’s the one that’s out.’

  Hillingdon had passed beyond the camera’s range now. The scene showed the shadowed empty arch of the half-tiled tunnel.

  ‘There are two more cameras between the boy and the train,’ Dutta explained. ‘One is situated in the short stairway leading to the platform; the other is on the platform itself.’

  The detectives watched the deserted staircase, waiting for Hillingdon to appear. The time readout said 12:23 A.M. Suddenly a drunken figure burst into frame, striped coattails flying. He virtually fell down the steps in his rush to get to the platform.

  ‘Hillingdon’s got less than a minute before the train is due, so can we assume he heard it approaching through the tunnel?’ asked May. ‘Do your guards stop people boarding trains when they’re plastered?’

  ‘If they look like they’re a danger to themselves,’ said Dutta. ‘Hillingdon’s borderline. We get much worse. I don’t think there was anyone in the immediate area. More crucially, he probably wasn’t picked up by anyone viewing the monitors. It’ll be easy to check and see who was on duty.’

  The screen was empty now. The stairwell’s fixed camera could only catch a figure passing through. Dutta switched screens, searching the tiled labyrinth.

  ‘Now, this last camera is moveable and has a large wide-angle lens. It’s in the centre of the roof above the platform, and we can see everything that’s going on. It slowly pans back and forth to build a picture of the level as a whole. Plus, we can zoom in and pull off detailed shots, but they’re quite distorted. It’s really for general surveillance. Our clearest ID shots all come from the barriers rather than the platforms.’

  He twisted a dial back and forth, and the image of the platform shifted from one end to the other. The time readout was now at 12:24. There were four other passengers waiting for the train, a middle-aged Chinese couple and two young black girls.

  ‘Would it be hard to get witness traces on them?’

  ‘Not if they used travel cards. They can’t be tracked if they just bought tickets, although we might get general descriptions from the counter staff.’

  ‘Here it comes, right on schedule.’

  They watched as the silvered carriages slid sleekly into the station. The camera had lost Hillingdon. The doors opened. Dutta panned the device back along the platform. At the last moment Matt Hillingdon’s striped overcoat and woollen hat shot into view. He was moving with dangerous speed. It clearly required a superhuman effort to jump the gap into the carriage, but he made it just before the doors closed. In fact, the door shut on the tail of Hillingdon’s coat, trapping it.

  ‘I’m annoyed about this,’ said Dutta. ‘Somebody really should have cautioned him.’

  They watched as the student pulled at the tail of his coat, which remained trapped in the door. A moment later, the carriage doors opened again while he was still pulling, so that he fell over, vanishing from view.

  ‘If you ever see me that drunk,’ said May, ‘shoot me.’

  ‘The train remained here a little longer than usual. The last one of the night often does that, to pick up the last few stragglers,’ said Dutta, accelerating the footage. He slowed it down once more as the tube doors opened and closed, and the train started to move out.

  ‘If Hillingdon got on the 12:24, it means your Miss Cates lied,’ said Bryant. ‘She’s been playing you for a fool.’

  ‘She seemed sincere enough.’ May frowned, puzzling. ‘I don’t see what she would have to gain by making up the episode.’

  ‘To throw you off the track of something else?’ Bryant suggested. ‘You said she’d been reading about vanishing passengers. It looks to me like they’re in it together.’

  ‘Then where did he go?’ asked May.

  Bryant pulled his sagging trilby back onto the crown of his head. ‘Next stop, Russell Square station,’ he replied.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Phantom Passenger

  Shiny red arches, leaf green corridors; the tube stations of London had once sported a uniform look, just as the roads had been matched in neat black-and-white stripes. In the 1980s they received a disastrous cosmetic makeover. Ignoring the fact that the system was coming apart at the seams, lavish artworks were commissioned and left unfinished, stations were closed instead of being repaired, and only a handful of the oldest remained unspoiled. Russell Square was one of the few that survived. Similar in style to the tube at Mornington Crescent, the frontage of crimson tiles, the blue glass canopy and the arched first-floor windows remained intact. The station was largely used by tourists and students staying in the nearby hotels and hostels, so the entrance was always crowded with visitors consulting maps.

  Mr Gregory, the stationmaster, was a thin, peppery man with a face that, even in repose, made him look like he was about to sneeze. He greeted the two detectives with a decongestion stick wedged up his right nostril. ‘I’m sorry,’ he apologised. ‘My passages get bunged up in dusty atmospheres.’

  ‘You picked the wrong job, then, didn’t you?’ said Bryant with a mean laugh.

  ‘It’s not the station, it’s pollen from over there.’ Mr Gregory pointed to the tree-filled square that stood diagonally across from them. ‘Too much bloody fresh air coming in.’ He led the way behind the barriers, ushering them through. ‘Can I get you anything?’

  ‘A cup of tea and a Garibaldi biscuit would hit the spot.’ Bryant looked around the monitoring station, a small bare room with just two monochrome monitors on a desk, one focussed on each of the platforms. ‘You don’t have a camera over the entrance door?’

  ‘No, someone’s always here keeping an eye out. It’s an old-fashioned system, but I find it works well enough. LU head office wasn’t happy but I told them not everything has to be high-tech. That’s an original Victorian canopy. I don’t want dirty great holes drilled through it.’

  ‘A man after my own heart,’ Bryant agreed, finding a place to sit.

  ‘A Mr Dutta from King’s Cross called and told me you were on your way. He said you wanted to see the arrival of yesterday’s 12:26 A.M. It’ll take me a few minutes to cue up the footage. Our regular security bloke isn’t here today; he’s up before Haringey Magistrates’ Court for gross indecency outside the headquarters of the Dagenham Girl Pipers.’

  ‘So you’re not fond of fresh air, then.’ May changed the subject with less fluidity than he’d hoped.

  ‘Not really, no,’ Mr Gregory sniffed. ‘My lungs can’t cope.’

  ‘Only people usually complain about the poor air quality down there.’

  Mr Gregory looked aghast. ‘That’s rubbish. Travelling on the tube for forty minutes is the equivalent to smoking two cigarettes, so I save a bit on fags. Plus it’s about ten degrees warmer on the platforms in winter. I’ve worked for London Transport for over twenty years, and I’ve got a lot of mates down the tunnels. There’s the casual workers, your economic migrants who’re just doing it for a job, like, and then there’s your tubeheads. It’s a place where you can forget the rest of the world.’

  ‘So is the Foreign Legion, but that doesn’t make it a good thing,’ Bryant pointed out.

  ‘I hold the world record for visiting all two hundred and eighty-seven stations in one go, you know,’ Mr Gregory told them. As a conversational gambit it was chancey at best. ‘I did the entire network in eighteen hours, twenty minutes.’

  ‘Is that a popular sport?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘You do surprise me.’ Bryant pantomimed stifling a yawn.

  ‘People have been beating the time since 1960. There’s a set of rules laid down by the Guinness World Records, but that’s just the start—we also hold the annual Tube Olympics, and there are all sorts of challenge versions.’

  ‘Really,’ said Bryant flatly.

  ‘Oh, yes, like the ABC Challenge—that’s where we have to visit twenty-six tube stations in alphabetical order—the current record for th
at is five hours twenty minutes—and the Bottle Challenge.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked May, trying to show an interest while they watched for the footage.

  ‘Look at the centre of the underground map,’ Mr Gregory instructed him. ‘The lines form the shape of a bottle on its side. That’s the circuit. My aim is to beat the record of two hours thirteen minutes.’

  ‘This is all very riveting,’ said Bryant, ‘but might we get back to the matter in hand?’

  ‘Here we go. The train came in just under a minute late.’ The stationmaster clicked out the lights, and the trio watched the screen.

  The monitor display revealed an angled shot of the silver carriages pulling into the platform. ‘Can you home in on a specific carriage?’ May asked.

  ‘Which one do you want?’

  ‘The third from the end.’

  ‘Which end?’

  May decided not to point out that there was only one end to a train arriving at a station, for fear of sounding pedantic. The stationmaster expertly panned along the train and settled the screen on the correct carriage. The shot was just wide enough to include all three exit doors, which now slid open. Inside, all was bright and bare.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Bryant exclaimed. ‘The damned thing’s empty!’

  ‘There must be some mistake,’ May told the stationmaster. ‘This can’t be the right train.’

  Mr Gregory tapped the numerals at the bottom of the screen with his forefinger. ‘That’s the time code, 12:27 A.M., right there. There’s no tampering with that.’

  ‘You’re sure this is yesterday?’

  ‘Definitely. And it’s the last train through. The journey took two minutes fifty seconds.’

  ‘We saw him get on,’ said Bryant. ‘Could the train have stopped anywhere on the way?’

  ‘No, there’s no junction at Russell Square; it’s a straight line without any branch-offs. Even if it halted for some reason, the doors wouldn’t open. Nobody could have got out. You can interview the train driver if you want, but he’ll tell you the same thing.’

  ‘What about between the carriages? The connecting doors are kept unlocked, aren’t they?’

  ‘That’s right, but they only open into other carriages, so no-one could get off. Let’s see who alighted here.’ Mr Gregory panned along the entire length of the train. ‘There you are, only two passengers.’ He zoomed in on them. One was a small elderly man laden with plastic shopping bags, barely over five feet tall. The other was an overweight middle-aged Nigerian woman.

  ‘I don’t suppose he could have disguised himself?’ asked Bryant. ‘In order to give his girlfriend the slip?’

  Mr Gregory zoomed the camera in, first on the old man, then on the Nigerian woman. Even a master of disguise would have been unable to transform himself into either of these characters.

  ‘Could he have let himself into the driver’s cockpit somehow?’

  ‘Not a chance, it’s dead-bolted.’

  ‘Then he must simply have stayed on board the train.’

  Mr Gregory reversed the footage and panned along each of the carriages while the train stood with its doors open. They zoomed into all of the few remaining passengers, but there was no-one in a striped coat and woollen cap. ‘See for yourself. I don’t know where you think he could have gone, unless he found a way of tearing the seats up and hiding inside them.’

  ‘You’re telling me a six-foot-tall student vanished into thin air on board a moving train,’ Bryant complained.

  ‘No,’ said Mr Gregory, ‘you’re telling me.’ He shoved the inhaler back up his nose and snorted hard.

  On their way back out of the station, the detectives passed a neat row of K stickers that had been stuck on the tiled walls. ‘Oh, those,’ said Mr Gregory, when they were pointed out. ‘Bloody anarchists.’

  ‘It’s advertising a local bar, isn’t it?’

  ‘It might be now, but those stickers have been around for donkey’s years. They’re a bugger to get off.’

  Bryant picked at one with a fingernail. ‘How do you know they’re anarchists?’

  Mr Gregory shook his head in puzzlement. ‘Actually, now I come to think of it, I don’t know. Somebody must have mentioned them before. It’s a local symbol, like. Been up on the walls since I was a nipper. My old man used to bring me up here. I’m sure it’s something to do with wanting to bring down the government. Someone here must have told me. Hang on.’ He called across the station forecourt to a guard. ‘Oi, Aram, them stickers along the wall, what are they for?’

  ‘Anarchists, innit,’ Aram confirmed. ‘Bash the Rich an’ that.’

  ‘Ah, a psychogeographical connection.’ Bryant perked up. ‘Leave this to me.’

  ‘No,’ May mouthed back. ‘There’s no time left for your pottering.’

  ‘I’ll have you remember that my “pottering,” as you call it, caught the Fulham Road Strangler.’ Bryant had discovered that their suspect was a collector of Persian tapestries, and had matched a fibre left on one of his victims. Tracking him to an antique shop, May had wrestled him to the ground while Bryant crowned him with the nearest object to hand, which unfortunately proved to be a rare seventeenth-century ormolu clock. The killer’s sister had sued the Unit.

  ‘It was a horrible clock anyway,’ mused Bryant. ‘Let me potter for a few hours and I might surprise you.’

  May wearily pressed a thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. ‘We’re already looking for an invisible passenger and an anarchist,’ he told his partner. ‘Let’s not have any more surprises today.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Late Night Conversation

  Bryant spent the next few hours in a dim basement library you could only access with the possession of a special pass and a private knock. For the other members of the PCU, Wednesday dragged past in a grim trudge of paperwork, legwork, statements and interviews. Colin Bimsley and Meera Mangeshkar were now resigned to being yoked together, but the paucity of leads made it feel as if there was barely a case to resolve. Meera felt guilty for thinking so, but it was certainly not the kind of investigation upon which reputations were built, not unless there was a racial or political motive for the attack. What did they really have to go on, other than a couple of hunches and the vague sensation that something was wrong?

  Just after noon, one of the Daves took the curl out of his hair by slicing through a power cable, which darkened the offices instantly and killed the computers.

  At 2:15 Crippen managed to locate the packet of butter that had been used on his paws and ate the whole thing, regurgitating his lunch into Raymond Land’s duffle bag.

  At 4:45 the other Dave, now differentiated from his colleague by the lack of singeing in his extremities, removed some plaster from a wall in order to locate a pipe, and in doing so, uncovered an amateurish but alarmingly provocative fresco of naked, overweight witches cavorting in a devil’s circle. It was further proof, if any more was needed, that the warehouse had once been used for something damnably odd. Land had immediately demanded to know what the witches were doing there, and was not satisfied with Bryant’s suggestion that it might be the foxtrot.

  By 8:30 that evening having satisfied all existing avenues of enquiry, the exhausted investigators reached a dead end and were sent home, leaving only Bryant and his favourite detective sergeant at King’s Cross headquarters.

  DS Janice Longbright pulled the cork from a bottle of Mexican burgundy with her teeth and filled two tumblers. ‘The trouble with you, Arthur,’ she began, with the cork still in her mouth.

  ‘Any sentence that starts like that is bound to end with something I don’t want to hear,’ Bryant interrupted. ‘Take a card.’ He held out the pack in a hopeful fan.

  ‘The trouble with you is that once you get the bit between your teeth you can’t be shifted. Two of diamonds. Like this thing with Mr Fox. Take a look.’ She spat out the cork and threw a page across his desk. ‘It’s a screen grab from your security-wallah, Mr Dutta.’

 
‘You weren’t supposed to tell me what the card was.’ Bryant fumbled for his spectacles and held the page an inch from his nose. The blurred photograph showed Mr Fox and his victim walking outside King’s Cross station. ‘Just what I told you. He followed McCarthy into the tube and stabbed him.’

  ‘Come on, even I noticed this.’ She threw him another sheet, the same scene a few frames later, as the pair moved into clearer view.

  ‘Oh, I see what you mean,’ said Bryant. ‘That looks like Mr Fox in his earlier incarnation, before he shaved his hair closer to his head.’

  ‘Because it was taken ten days ago. Concrete evidence that they knew each other. You were right. Mr Fox was taking care of business, getting rid of an unreliable junkie who had something on him.’

  ‘Any news from the patient?’

  ‘Nope, he’s still unconscious. There’s a staff nurse on duty outside his room, making sure nobody tries to get in. She’ll call us if and when he comes around.’

  ‘Has anyone tried to see him?’

  ‘He’s had no visitors at all.’

  ‘I wonder if Mr Fox thinks he’s dead. You’d better check and see if anyone’s been talking to the ambulance crew. Take another card.’

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘Humour the meagre amusements of a frail old man.’

  Janice gave him an old-fashioned look and withdrew a card.

  ‘Remember it and put it back.’ After she had done so, he threw the pack at the wall. One card stuck. Grunting, he reached across and turned it over. ‘Nine of clubs.’

  ‘No, it was the queen of spades.’

  ‘Bugger. You know those television detectives who put themselves in the minds of killers? I’ve never been able to do that. I never have the faintest idea what killers might be thinking. But I would imagine Mr Fox would like to make sure Mac never opens his mouth again. He’ll be watching the hospital, or asking around.’ Bryant sipped his wine. ‘This tastes like that bottle of Château Gumshrinker I meant to throw out when we moved.’