Off the Rails (16 page)

‘And the girl? Does she come with you?’

‘Sure. She’s Matt’s girlfriend. He’s one of the housemates, too. I don’t really know Ruby well; she kind of keeps to herself. I think it may have been her idea to colour the stickers.’ Nicolau settled his glasses further back on the bridge of his nose. He was sweating heavily. ‘Can I ask why you’re so interested?’

‘This one was found on a dead body.’ May waited for the idea to sink in. ‘In an investigation of this kind, you check anything that’s unusual, or even just a little bit different.’

‘If I can give you a suggestion? People often chuck their coats on top of the bags—maybe it got transferred?’

‘You’re probably right.’ There didn’t seem to be anything more May could glean that might be of use. ‘Well, it was a point worth covering. Thanks for your time.’ He rose to leave. ‘Tell you what, though. In case I need to check any further I don’t
want to disturb you. Perhaps you’d give me contact details for this girl—Ruby?’

‘Sure.’ Nicolau seemed relieved. He scribbled something on a scrap of paper. ‘Ruby Cates. Here’s her email address.’

May left, but somewhere an alarm had been triggered. The harder he tried to focus on what was wrong, the less sure he became.
Leave the thought,
he told himself,
it will surface when it’s ready.
The uneasy feeling stayed with him all the way back to the Unit.

Then he remembered. It was something Cassie Field had said.
Too intense.
Nicolau had been trying hard to convince. The look of relief on his face when May had switched his attention to the girl had been palpable.

P
anic was setting in now. What if it was too late? But there was no point in thinking about what might already have happened, and anyway, here was Matt in his crazy old rainbow-striped coat and brown woolly hat, raising a hand in greeting from the other side of the bar.

‘I’m really sorry I’m so late; I don’t know where the time went.’

‘That’s okay.’

‘I bumped into an old pal from Nottingham, and we had some catching up to do. Hit a few bars together—I’d forgotten how much he could drink. Then I spent ages on the phone, and you know how that goes, right? It’s like I can’t do anything to please her. I’m like, “If you don’t want to come out with me, just say so,” right? Can I get you a drink?’

‘No, let me get you one.’ The smile must have looked painfully forced. The barman was summoned and a drink was poured. ‘Did you have a lecture this afternoon?’

‘Yeah, the architect from Bartlett, the one with the stoop. The lecture was meant to be about traffic restructuring in the late 1960s, but it was so data-driven that he lost most of us about halfway through. And I still have a hangover from last night. Then I got the nagging phone call and wasn’t allowed off the hook until she’d described everything that’s wrong with me in huge detail.’

‘Did you tell her you were coming to meet me?’ The obviousness of the question caused an inward cringe.

‘No, you know I didn’t; you told me not to. Anyway, if she thought I was meeting up with you she’d accuse us of conspiring against her. A toast to my good fortune.’

‘To winners.’

‘Damn right. We’ve got the skills that pay the bills. Just in time, because I’m seriously broke. Here’s to money, the root of all evil.’ Matt downed his vodka cocktail in one. He was drinking something that was a spin on a Smith & Wesson, vodka and coffee liqueur with a dash of soda. His version added an oily Sambuca to the mix. Matt looked even messier than usual. His tumbleweed hair needed a wash and there were violet crescents beneath his eyes. Everybody knew he was on his way to becoming a serious alcoholic, but tonight it was important that Matt drank at least another two or three doubles, otherwise the plan wouldn’t work.

‘You’re always good with advice. I don’t know what I’m going to do about her. I just think I’m a little too wild for her. Right? She always wants to do the kind of things her parents do, go to Suffolk and see the rest of her family, go hiking, stuff like that. I don’t know what she’s going to do with a degree in urban planning. I don’t think she knows, either. She says she wants to become a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute like her old man, but she’s doing it for his sake.’

‘You have to stop worrying about it so much, Matt. Take things as they come.’

‘I can’t this week, you know that. There’s too much at stake now. Look at me, I’m shaking.’

‘Let me get you another cocktail.’

They drank until the bar became too noisy and crowded. When Matt slithered down from his stool to weave his way toward the restroom, it was obvious that he was trashed. The rising temperature and the accelerating beats had conspired to increase the pace of their drinking.

Okay, while Matt’s gone you’ve got less than a minute to dig into his backpack and see what’s there. Evidence, evidence—phone, laptop, what else has he got? Now put everything back before he reappears. Done it—did he notice anything? No, he looks out of it.

‘It’s getting late, let’s get out of here.’ Matt jammed his hat back on his head.

The cold air outside was a sobering shock. It was important to get Matt into the warmth of the station before he sharpened up. They tumbled down the steps into Liverpool Street tube and made their way to the District & Circle Line.

There were no empty seats, so they sat on the platform floor to wait for the train.

Matt tried to focus. ‘I’ve got to stop drinking Smith & Wessons, nobody knows how to mix them properly. They’re supposed to taste like a liquidised Cuban cigar.’

‘Yes, you told me that before.’

Matt massaged his forehead. ‘My brain’s banging against the sides of my skull. If I still feel like this in the morning I’m going to cut my first lecture.’

‘It’s your call, I suppose, but you seem to be missing an awful lot of them lately.’

The train arrived and they lurched to their feet. Inside, unable
to sit, they stood jammed against the curving doors of the carriage. Racing through the uphill tunnels toward the King’s Cross interchange it was necessary to keep a surreptitious eye on Matt. The thought came unbidden.
Why did you ever put up with him?
The amazing thing was that everyone seemed to idolise the guy. He was a walking disaster, yet the scruffier he looked and the more chaotic his life became, the more they hung on his every word. Especially other girls, the ones from outside the group, they couldn’t get enough—

—A buzz emanated from Matt’s backpack.

‘Damn, that’s my phone.’ Matt swung the bag from his shoulder and started rooting about inside it.

‘You’ve got a signal down here?’

‘God, where have you been for the last two years? There’s phone reception everywhere west and south of here now. Hampstead and—’ a long pause while he tried to frame the thought ‘—Old Street, still a problem because of the tunnel depth or something. I dunno. Where the hell—’ The contents of his bag were tumbling over people’s feet, a dirty ball of stained T-shirts, some books with loose pages, half a dozen plastic pens, his phone—

‘Here, let me give you a hand.’ Together they started shovelling everything back into the bag. Matt helplessly attempted to pick up the fluttering pages. Then the train was slowing and they were arriving at King’s Cross.

‘Come on, we have to change here. Zip up your bag.’ Matt followed, lurching from the carriage, out and along the platform.

The scabrous half-retiled tunnel led to stairs, but Matt baulked before climbing them. ‘Give me a minute,’ he protested, holding back in an attempt to steady himself, like a sailor in a storm. His chest was wheezing. Three teenaged girls passed them, heading
toward the exit. A few tourists were dragging cases, a smartly dressed young couple and a drunk middle-aged man passed; after a few more seconds, there was no-one else.

‘Hang on, I have to tell Ruby—’

‘You don’t, you’re fine.’

‘No, have to do it, always letting her down, promised to say when I was on my way.’ He poked hopelessly in his bag but still managed to find the phone and fire off a text in record time. The effort of concentrating so hard nearly made him fall over.

‘It’s okay, I’ve got you. Wait, wait.’ It was time to produce the atomiser. ‘You left it in the bar. You should be more careful, Matt. You know how Ruby gets when you’ve been smoking and drinking.’

‘Yeah, she can be a pain,’ said Matt, compliantly opening his mouth and sticking out a furry tongue.

‘Put your tongue in. Come on, Matt, you know how to do this.’

‘Okay.’ He was finally ready. ‘God, it tastes like—’

‘That’s because you’ve been hammering the cocktails tonight.’ Anyone coming? No, the coast was clear. ‘Look, I have to get you home.’

‘I’m meeting—’

‘I know, I heard. Don’t worry, I can fix that.’

‘The train—’

‘Come on, concentrate on the stairs, you can do it.’

There was the depth-charge rumble of a train arriving, the last southbound Piccadilly Line trip of the night. A plug of warm air pulsed in the tunnel and lifted a newspaper. Pages drifted past as if brought to life.

Something was happening to Matthew Hillingdon. He felt himself rising, moving.
Everyone likes me,
thought Matt,
it’s so great that everyone wants me to succeed, but they don’t know my
secret. The secret is that I can’t help myself.
Everything he ever did was because others told him to. Even when he could sense that their advice was hopelessly misguided, he followed it. He was like a stick in a drain, swirling around and heading for the gutter, but someone was always there to pull him out in time.
She’s always there for me,
he thought.
Girls are great, they’ll give you, like, six or seven chances at least, if they really like you.
Lately though, events had been shifting beyond his comprehension. You had to trust your friends, though, didn’t you? Otherwise you had nothing.

He was having trouble lifting his legs. Now his right arm was tingling. He’d drunk more than this before without losing control of his limbs. Weird.

The feeling got worse. Was this what dying felt like?
My neurons are being deprived of oxygen,
he decided.
This will lead to the cessation of electrical activity in my brain—the modern definition of biological death. But it just feels like I’m falling very gently. Swirling around and around, toward the gutter.

I’m one of life’s naturally lucky guys,
he told himself.
What a charmed life I lead; there’s always someone there to catch me when I fall. I think I’m falling faster now. And there’s someone right here to catch me again. How perfect is that?

W
ednesday’s dawn was fierce and raw, low crimson light splashing the glass offices in Canary Wharf. A turbulent sky of sharp blue cloud unfurled over the frothing reaches of the river, threatening rain. John May leaned at the railing of his steel balcony on the fourth floor of Shad Thames, and breathed in the brackish smell of the tide. As a child, he had played on the shore below these windows.
I haven’t strayed very far from home in my life,
he thought.
How we love to tether ourselves.

Leaning over the rail, he looked down at the pebbles stained with patches of verdigris, wondering if the sand beneath held the memory of his footprints. His mother had once lost a bracelet while chasing him along the shore. Was it still buried in the mud, another layer of London’s history? Although the embankments had been transformed, the cranes and wharves giving way to boxy river-view apartments, the shoreline had hardly changed at all. It seemed strange that he and the other kids had
once swum here. Surely the water was cleaner now, free of tires and shopping trolleys and iridescent lumps of tar? His sister Gwen had never joined them. Fastidious and superior, she had always sat on the river wall to wait, smoothing her patterned dress, ignoring their yells, biding her time.

He smiled sadly at the thought. Gwen, happily living in Brighton with her extended family, was the only one to have survived unscarred. A strong sense of self-preservation had protected her, but the rest had all suffered in some way. His wife, Jane, fragile and mentally lost, in Broadhampton clinic, his daughter, Elizabeth, dead, his grandchildren at war with their own devils, and now a new woman in his world, the beautiful, haunted Brigitte, who had called him a few hours ago, drunk again. If he had not been able to help his own family, how would he ever be able to help her?

He listened to the city. A few minutes earlier it had been virtually silent, but almost on the stroke of seven o’clock a low, steady roar began and grew, like the sound of factory machinery starting up. It was the hum of engines, the turning of pistons, of voices and vans and coffee machines, of peristaltic traffic and disgorging trains. The sound of London coming to life.

He used the last of his cold coffee to wash down a statin designed to tackle his high cholesterol. As he stood above the water, his thoughts turned to Gloria Taylor’s uncomprehending daughter, and his fingers brushed the cotton of his shirt, over the ridged scar on his heart. A five-year-old girl left without a mother. The wound opened by the loss of a life could never be fully healed, but it was the PCU’s duty to find a way of restoring balance. He had not been able to save those closest to him, but perhaps he could make a difference in the life of a stranger.

He knew it was what his partner would be trying to do, in his own mad way. Tonight, long after the others had gone home,
the top floor lights in their King’s Cross warehouse would be burning as Arthur worked on, driven less by a sense of injustice than the need to solve a puzzle. At least they would work toward the same end. The city was a blind, uneven place where injustices could never be fully righted, just smoothed out a little. With its funding returned, the PCU stood a chance of making a difference. If it failed in its first case, however, the fragile faith it had newly engendered would be destroyed.

He took the circular sticker from his pocket and traced the outline of the figure with his forefinger. It wasn’t much to go on, but anything with a connection to the case, no matter how tangential, was worth exploring.