Off the Rails (19 page)

‘That’s only a two-minute journey.’

‘I know, but he never made it. I need to find out whether he
got on the train. If he didn’t, perhaps we can see which exit he used from the station and collect witnesses from that point.’

‘Okay, give us a couple of minutes. Everything’s digitally backed up 24/7, so it shouldn’t be hard to nail. Most of the cameras are recording constantly. As you pointed out, a couple of tunnels are being retiled, so they’re not fully covered, but we can pick up action on the platform overheads.’

The detectives seated themselves in the darkened room and studied the screens around them. ‘Look at all these passengers. Why do people have to move about so much?’ asked Bryant irritably. ‘Everyone would get a lot more done if they just stayed in one place.’

‘You’re a fine one to talk,’ May replied. ‘You can’t sit still for a minute.’ He looked back at the screens. ‘They’re like blood cells pulsing through an artery.’

‘That’s what they are. They’re feeding the city with energy. There’s no pushing or shoving; it’s so orderly and purposeful. Rather beautiful to watch.’

‘Okay, we have this now.’ Dutta punched a series of illuminated keys on what looked like a studio mixing board, and footage speckled through one of the monitors. ‘I’m starting it from 12:17
A.M.
The left screen is the camera footage covering the interchange tunnels from the District & Circle to the Piccadilly. I’ve got another one covering the main entrance, but from what you’re saying there was no reason for him to leave the station. There are two ways of switching lines, depending on which end of the platform you’re coming from. The main problem is that one of the tunnel cameras was out, and one currently has restricted vision.’

‘That’s not very efficient, is it?’

‘Not our fault. Health & Safety carried out a junction install
that’s affected some of the camera sight lines. We’re waiting to get the mountings resited. That’s not public knowledge, though, so we’re pretty well covered. The cameras are still up there. As long as people think they’re being watched, they behave themselves. What does your man look like?’

May passed over a photograph showing Matthew Hillingdon in a brown woollen hat and a long grey overcoat sewn with thin rainbow stripes. ‘He was hardly ever seen wearing anything else,’ he explained.

‘Well, it’s distinctive.’ Dutta’s nimble fingers tapped at the speed controls as he checked the images. ‘The tube is still busy up to the minutes just before the last train, then it empties fast. Most Londoners have a pretty good idea how late they can leave it to get home. Is that him?’

‘Too short,’ said May.

‘How about this one?’

The images in front of them fractured into blurred squares, then slowed and restored themselves as a man in a dark raincoat entered from the right of the camera field.

‘Similar—but no, I don’t think so.’

Dutta tried again. ‘How about this one?’

‘That looks like him.’ May tapped at the rainbow coat. He checked the screen’s time readout, which had ticked to 12:21
A.M.
The boy wavered at the far side of the screen. He was putting his mobile away, but appeared to be having trouble finding his pocket. Now they could clearly see the top of his brown woollen cap. Hillingdon had trouble staying upright as he staggered toward the stairs. There was a brief dark blur to his left.

‘Wait—is there somebody with him?’

Dutta dialled the speed down to single frames. The blur vanished. ‘If there was, they knew how to stay out of the shot.’

‘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.

S
hiny 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 that 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.