Off the Rails (2 page)

‘Oh, for God’s sake get on with it!’ Arthur Bryant complained at the page, balling it up and disdainfully throwing it over his shoulder as he skipped to the final sheet. He had filched the report from Raymond Land’s mailbox and was vetting it before the acting chief arrived for work. ‘Let’s see—“inadequate safeguards”
yadda yadda yadda
“irregular procedures”
yadda yadda
“unnecessary risk factors,” all predictable stuff. Ah, here’s the bit I was expecting—“because the perpetrator of these crimes was allowed to escape and is still at large, he remains a potential menace to society. Therefore we cannot consider fully reinstating the PCU until he is apprehended.” In other words, catch him but don’t expect us to help you with additional resources. Bloody typical. Oh, listen, you’ll like this bit. “Due to the financial reorganisation of the Home Office’s outsourced operations units, you have until the end of the week (Saturday at six
P.M.
) to conclude this and any other unfinished investigations in order to qualify for annual funding.” So he wants us to achieve the impossible in less than one week or he and his ghastly boss Oskar Kasavian will cut us off without a penny. “Your Obedient Servant, Leslie Faraday.” Who signs their letters like that anymore? Anyway, he’s not our Obedient Servant, but I suppose he couldn’t sign it Sad Porky Timeserver or Snivelling Little Rodent.’

With increasing age, the grace notes of temperance, balance, harmony and gentility are supposed to appear in the human heart. This was not entirely true, however, in Arthur Bryant’s case. He remained acidulous, stubborn, insensitive and opinionated. In addition, he was getting ruder by the day, as the byzantine
workings of the British Home Office sucked away his enthusiasm for collaring killers.

Bryant started to crumple up the rest of the memo, then remembered he wasn’t supposed to have seen it, and flattened it out imperfectly. He fished the other pages out of the bin, but now they were smeared with the remains of last night’s fish and chips.

‘I don’t know why you get so het up, Arthur. What did you honestly expect?’ John May carefully pinched his smart pin-striped trousers at the knee and bent to give him a hand picking up the pages. ‘A man kills three times, is arrested by us, breaks out of a locked cell, stabs a police officer in the neck and vanishes. We were hardly going to be rewarded for our efforts.’

‘What about the innocent people we protected? The deaths we prevented?’ Bryant demanded, appalled.

‘I think they’re happier counting the millions of pounds we saved them.’ May rose, twisted his chair and flopped down, stretching himself into a six-foot line. ‘Just think of all the companies that would have pulled out if we hadn’t been able to secure the area.’

‘What a case for my memoirs,’ Bryant muttered. ‘Three mutilated bodies found on the mean streets of King’s Cross. Murders committed solely for financial gain by a slippery, adaptable thief who’s grown up in the area around the terminus, a small-time crook propelled to the status of murderer when a robbery went wrong. You know what’s happened, don’t you? For the first time in his life this Mr Fox has been made to feel important. The escalation of his criminal status, from burglar to hired killer, has increased his determination to stay free.’

There was a darkness at the heart of this chameleon-like killer that the members of the Peculiar Crimes Unit had underestimated. For a while it had felt as if gang war was breaking out
in the area, but by getting to the root of the crimes, the detectives had managed to soothe public fears and reassure investors that the newly developing region was still open for business. In the process, however, they had lost an officer, and had been unable to stop their quarry from escaping back into the faceless crowds.

Bryant pottered over to the sooty, rain-streaked window and tapped it. ‘He’s still out there somewhere,’ he warned, ‘and now he’ll do one of two things. Having had his fingers badly burned, he’ll either vanish completely, never to be seen again, or he’ll returneth like a dog to vomit, just to taunt me further. Proverbs chapter twenty-six, verse eleven.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said May. ‘Why are you taking this so personally?’

‘Because I’m the one he’s after. DuCaine just got in the way.’ Bryant had never exhibited much empathy with his co-workers, but this struck May as callous even by his standards.

‘Liberty DuCaine’s parents have just lost a son, Arthur, so perhaps you could keep such thoughts to yourself. Don’t turn this into a private feud. It concerns all of us.’ May rose and left the room in annoyance.

Bryant was sorry that the lad had died—of course he was upset—but nothing could bring DuCaine back now, and the only way they could truly restore order was by catching the man responsible for his murder. With a sigh he popped open his tobacco tin and stuffed a pipe with ‘Old Arabia’ Navy Rough-Cut Aromatic Shag. His gut told him that Mr Fox would quickly resurface, not because the killer had any romantic longing to be stopped, but because his rage would make him careless. His sense of respect had been compromised, and he was determined to make the police pay for cornering him.

I’ll get you, sonny,
Bryant thought,
because I owe it not just to
DuCaine, but to every innocent man, woman and child out there who could become another of your statistics. You’ll turn up again, soon enough. You’ve tasted blood now. The need to let others see how big you’ve grown will drive you back out into the light. When that happens, I’ll have you.

Unfortunately, Bryant tried to avoid reminding himself, it would need to happen this week.

D
C Colin Bimsley and DC Meera Mangeshkar were watching the train station. They had no idea what their suspect might look like, or any reason to assume he would appear suddenly before them on the concourse. But Mr Fox knew his terrain well and rarely left it, so there was a chance that even now he might be wandering through the Monday morning commuters. And as the St Pancras International surveillance team was more concerned with watching for terrorist suspects after a weekend of worrying intelligence, it fell to the two detective constables to keep an eye out for their man. At least it was warm and dry under the great glass canopy.

Each circuit of the huge double-tiered terminus took half an hour. Bimsley and Mangeshkar wore jeans and matching black nylon jackets with badges, the closest anyone at the PCU could come to an official uniform, but Bimsley was a foot taller than his partner, and they made an incongruous pair.

‘Down there.’ Meera pointed, leaning over the balustrade. ‘That’s the third time he’s crossed between the bookshop and the florist.’

‘You can’t arrest someone for browsing,’ Bimsley replied. ‘Do you want to go and look?’

‘It’s worth checking out.’ Meera led the way to the stairs. Colin checked his watch: 8:55
A.M.
The Eurostar was offloading passengers from Brussels and Paris, the national rail services brought hordes of commuters from the Midlands and the north, the tubes were disgorging suburbanites and reconnecting them to overland services. Charity workers were stopping passers-by; others were handing out free newspapers, packets of tissues and bottles of water; a sales team was attempting to sell credit services; the shops on the ground-floor concourse were all open for business—and there was a French cheese fair; tricolour stalls had been set out down the centre of the covered walkway. Travellers seemed adept at negotiating these obstacles while furling their wet umbrellas and manhandling their cases through the crowds. Was a murderer moving among them?

‘There he goes again,’ said Meera.

‘You’re right, he just bought a newspaper and a doughnut, let’s nick him. Uh-oh, look out, he’s stopped by the florist. I’ll make a note of that; considering the purchase of carnations. Definitely dodgy.’

‘Suppose it’s Mr Fox and you just let him walk away?’

‘You want to call it? I mean, if we’re going to start stop-and-search procedures down here, we’d better have some clearly defined criteria.’

‘You can come up with something later—let’s take him.’ Meera paced up through the crowd, then stopped by the French market, puzzled, looking back. ‘Colin?’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Something weird.’ She pointed to the far side of the concourse. There half a dozen teenagers had suddenly stopped and spaced themselves six feet apart from each other. Bimsley shrugged and pointed to the other wall, where the same thing was happening. ‘What’s going on?’ Meera asked.

All around them, people were freezing in their tracks and slowly turning.

‘They’re all wearing phone earpieces,’ Meera pointed out.

Now almost everyone in the centre of the station was standing still and facing front. Beneath the station clock, two young men in grey hooded sweatshirts set an old-fashioned ghetto blaster on a café table and hit Play.

As the first notes of ‘Rehab’ by Amy Winehouse blasted out, the two young men raised their right arms and spun in tight circles. Everyone on the concourse copied them. The choreography had been rehearsed online until it was perfect. The station had suddenly become a dance floor.

‘It’s a flash mob,’ Meera called wearily. The Internet phenomenon had popularised the craze for virally organised mass dancing in public places, but she had assumed it had fallen out of fashion a couple of years ago.

‘I took part in a flash-freeze in Victoria Station once,’ Bimsley told her, watching happily. ‘Four hundred of us pretending to be statues. It’s just a bit of harmless fun.’

‘Well, our man’s using it to cover his escape.’

‘Meera, he’s not
our man,
he’s just a guy buying a newspaper and catching a train.’

But the diminutive DC did not hear. She was already running across the concourse, weaving a path between the performers. The song could be heard bleeding from hundreds of earpieces as the entire station danced. The tune hit its chorus—
they tried to make me go to rehab, but I said no, no, no
—and the choreography
grew more complex. Colin could no longer see who Meera was chasing. Even the transport police were standing back and watching the dancers with smiles on their faces.

As the song reached its conclusion there was a concerted burst of leaping and twirling. Then, just as if the music had never played, everyone went back to the business of the day, catching trains and heading to the office. Meera was glaring at Colin through the crowds, furious to find that her target had disappeared. But just as Meera started walking toward Colin, someone grabbed at his shoulder.

Colin turned to find himself facing a portly, florid-faced businessman who was slapping the pockets of his jacket and shouting incoherently. ‘Hey, calm down, tell me the problem,’ Bimsley advised.

‘You are police, yes?’ screeched the man. ‘I have been robbed. Just now. I was crossing station and this stupid dancing begins, and I stop to watch because I cannot cross, you know, and my bag is taken right from my hand.’

‘Do we look like the police?’ Colin asked Meera via his headset.

Her derisive snort crackled back. ‘What else could you be?’

‘Did you see who took it?’ Bimsley asked the businessman. ‘What was the bag like?’

‘Of course I did not see! You think I talk to you if I see? I would stop him! Is bag, black leather bag, is all. I am Turkish Cypriot, on my way to Paris. The receipts are in my bag.’

‘What receipts?’

‘My restaurants! Six restaurants! All the money is in cash.’

‘How much?’

‘You think I have time to count it? This is not my job. Maybe sixty thousand, maybe seventy thousand pounds.’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Bimsley, ‘you’re telling me you were carrying over sixty thousand on you—in cash?’

‘Of course is cash. I always do this on same Monday every month.’

‘Always the same day?’ Bimsley was incredulous. How could anyone be so stupid?

‘Yes, and is perfectly safe because no-one knows I carry this money, how could they?’

‘Well, what about somebody from one of your restaurants?’

‘You tell me I should not trust my own countrymen? My own flesh and blood? Is always safe and I have no trouble, is routine, is what I always do. But today the music start up and everybody dance and someone snatch the bag from me. Look.’ The irate businessman held up his left wrist. Dangling from it was a length of plastic cable, snipped neatly through. ‘I want to know what you will do about this,’ the man shouted, waving his hairy wrist in Bimsley’s perplexed face. ‘You must get me back my money!’

Meera came back to his side. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ Colin said, sighing. ‘Just another bloody Monday morning in King’s Cross.’

B
ryant stared down into the sodden streets. It was hard to detect any sign of spring on such a shabby day. At least the doxies and dealers had been swept out of the area as the fashionable bars moved in. Eventually the raucous beckoning of hookers would be recalled only by the few remaining long-term residents. Such was life in London, where a year of fads and fancies could race past in a week. Who had time to remind themselves of the past anymore?

Maybe it’s just me,
thought Bryant,
but I can see everything, stretching back through time like stepping-stones, just as if I’d been there.

No-one now remembered Handel playing above the coal-shop in Clerkenwell’s Jerusalem Passage, or Captain Kidd being hanged from the gibbet in Wapping until the Thames had immersed him three times. Thousands of histories were scrubbed from the city’s face each year. Once you could feel entire buildings lurch when the printing presses of Fleet Street began to roll.
Once the wet cobbles of Snow Hill impeded funeral corteges with such frequency that it became a London tradition for servicemen to haul hearses with ropes. For every riot there was a romance, for every slaying, a birth; the ancient city had a way of smoothing out the rumples of the passing years.

The elderly detective tossed the remains of his tea over the filthy window and cleared a clean spot with his sleeve. He saw coffee shops and tofu bars where once prophets and anarchists had held court.