Off the Rails (8 page)

‘One of my boys spotted something on Cam 16 at 1547. That’s the down escalator you can see here.’ He swung out a chair and tapped a pen on his desk screen. From this monitor he
could flip to any camera in the station complex. ‘A young black woman fell down the entire flight of stairs. She died instantly. The steps are very steep, but we rarely have accidents because there’s a crowd management system in place here. Problems usually only occur late at night after lads have had a few. Most people are pretty careful.’

Dutta adjusted his glasses and peered at the monitors, pointing to each in turn. The detectives watched as passengers pulsed through the station, passing from one screen to the next.

‘We switch the escalator directions according to traffic flow. At this time of the day we have more passengers coming up than going down, so there are four platform-to-surface escalators for every two descending, and over the next three hours they operate at their highest speed. If one of the escalators is out of order, customers spill over to the central fixed staircase. When that becomes heavily trafficked, we position a member of station staff at the base, where any accidents are most likely to happen.’

‘What went wrong?’ asked May. ‘She didn’t just miss her footing?’

‘I don’t think so. Watch this.’ Dutta began playback on the disc that had recorded the event from the top of the concourse looking down. ‘She’s there on the right of the screen.’ The detectives hunched forward and stared at the monitor, but the image was blurred. ‘What you can’t see on a monochrome monitor is that she’s wearing an outfit in a startling colour.’

‘So plenty of people noticed her.’

‘My lads certainly did. They can recognise strong tones just from the greys. The monitors are supposed to be in colour, but there’s still another two months’ work to do on the Victoria Line.’

‘Meaning?’

‘The Victoria tunnel crosses one of the station’s main electrical conduits, and the power outages kick the monitors into black and white. We’ve completely lost some of the non-essential cameras.’

Dutta twisted a dial and forwarded the picture until it matched his disc reference. ‘We can follow one person through the thickest crowd without losing sight of him. Or her. There she goes.’

They watched as the woman tumbled, vanished, reappeared and was lost. ‘I can’t tell what’s going on from that,’ Bryant admitted. ‘Who’s standing immediately behind her?’

‘We don’t know. There’s a focal problem. The system isn’t perfect,’ said Dutta. ‘The best cameras are stationed in all the busiest key areas. Resolution remains lower in the connecting tunnels, basically the non-essential spots. This is a good camera, but it’s due for an upgrade. Plus, you still get lens smears, dust buildup, focus shifts. Escalator cameras are key anti-terrorist tools because it’s easier to identify someone when they’re standing still on a step. The problem with the central fixed staircase is that it’s not as well covered as the main escalators. And there’s another issue, which is the recording speed. We primarily use the system to control flow and identify passengers, but sudden movements can be problematic. We’re trained to read images and interpret what we can’t make out, so I knew at once it was a fall, but here’s the interesting bit.’ He reran the footage to the seconds before the woman lost her balance. The detectives saw her shoulders drop and rise. Dutta ran it again, frame by frame. A ghost image fluttered by, little more than a dark blur at her back.

‘There’s the push,’ said Dutta. ‘Right there.’

‘You can tell that?’ May was surprised.

‘I know a stumble, and I don’t think that’s one.’

‘But we can’t see who’s moving behind her.’ The screen showed a soft dark shape with the head cut off.

‘It’s unfortunate. A few feet further down, and we’d have got everything. The image was blocked by the people walking past to the left. By the time we get to the bottom and the rest of the commuters have bunched around the fallen woman, the suspect’s already gone.’

‘But you have witnesses.’

‘Not really.’

‘How could you not?’

‘Commuting is a chore, something most people do without really engaging their faculties. When something unusual happens they only begin noticing their surroundings after the start of the event. Their attention and concern were focussed on the injured woman. And there was a train arriving. Most commuters were more worried about getting home than waiting around to help us. We’ve put up information request boards.’

‘Was she travelling alone?’

‘Looks like it. We got a name and address from the contents of her bag. They’re sending someone to her flat right now.’

‘So do you have more footage taken from the bottom? Can you get any sort of a fix on who was directly behind her? Anything at all?’

‘No. As she fell she knocked over two other passengers, so by the time she reached the base there was utter chaos. It’s impossible to clearly see who was walking at the back.’

‘Presumably you don’t evacuate the station for something like this?’

‘No, that would take the setting-off of two or more alarms at the same time. A single accident can be easily dealt with. Fatalities only take about an hour to clear away, so long as they’re handled by LU staff and not the fire brigade—firefighters like to
play trains. We only call them in when we’ve got an Inspector Sands.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Loudspeaker code for a fire alert. It’s an old theatrical term, a call for the sand buckets they always kept in theatres to put out fires.’

‘But I don’t understand why you rang us,’ Bryant admitted.

‘We called Headquarters in Camden but they didn’t seem too interested. They’ve got a lot on their hands at the moment, with the pub.’ One of Camden’s best-known public houses had burned down at the weekend, forcing the closure of a major road and the rerouting of all traffic. Camden police were being blamed for overreaction by angry shopkeepers, who were staging a protest. ‘One of your former staff members is the new St Pancras coroner, and he suggested giving you a call. It sounded like your kind of thing—a problem of social disorder.’

‘Do you get many actual attacks in the system?’ May asked.

‘Hardly ever. If gang members want to pick fights with each other they generally do it away from bright lights and other people. Besides, this lady doesn’t fit the victim pattern, which is usually male and teenaged. But if she was shoved down that flight of stairs by a complete stranger, it’s a pretty nasty thing to do. And if he’s done it once, he could do it again, couldn’t he?’

Bryant looked back at the suspended image of the flailing woman, and wondered if Mr Fox’s anger had risen to the surface once more. A murderer in the tube. He had to be dragged away from the screens when Anjam Dutta finished his report.

W
hat do you know about the London Underground?’ asked Bryant, who loved the tube as much as May loathed it. He felt entirely at home in the musty sunless air beneath the streets. He could scurry through the system like a rat in a maze, connecting between lines and locating exits with an ease that defeated his partner. If Mr Fox had gone to ground here, he had found himself a worthy adversary.

‘It’s the oldest in the world, the Northern Line is crap and I hate the way it makes my clothes dirty,’ May replied. ‘I know you seem to find it romantic.’

‘You have to think of it as a mesh of steel capillaries spreading across more than six hundred and thirty square miles.’ Bryant shook his head in boyish wonder. ‘Of course, it was built to alleviate London’s hellish traffic problem. Imagine the streets back then: a rowdy, smelly collision of horses, carriages, carts, buses and people. But they only dug beneath the city streets
when every other method of surface control had failed. They’d tried roadside semaphores, flashing lights and warning bells, but the horses still kept crashing into each other and trampling pedestrians to death. It was a frightful mess. Thank God for Charles Pearson.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘The creator of the Metropolitan Railway line. Pearson dedicated his entire life to its construction, and turned down every reward he was offered. He dreamed of replacing grey slums with green gardens, linking all the main-line stations from Paddington to Euston, and on to the city. In the process he wiped out most of London’s worst slums, but he also had to move every underground river, gas pipe, water main and sewer that stood in the way. And London is built on shifting marshlands of sand and gravel. An engineering nightmare. Can you imagine?’

‘No, not really.’

‘An engineer called Fowler came up with the cut-and-cover system that allowed tunnels to be built under busy streets.’

‘Fowler, eh? Sounds dodgy.’

‘The tube displaced a huge number of the city’s poorest citizens. Naturally, the rich successfully convinced the railway to pass around them. In the three years it took to build, there were endless floods and explosions. Steel split, scaffolds were smashed to matchwood, suffocating mud poured in. At one point the Fleet Sewer burst open, drowning the diggings and burying everyone alive. The line finally opened in 1863, a year after Pearson’s death. They tried a pneumatic train driven on pipes filled with pressurised air, but the pipes leaked and rats made nests inside them, so they built steam locomotives instead.’

When May stopped to buy some chewing gum and a newspaper, Bryant began to sense that he was losing his audience.

The tube’s history fascinated him because of the way it transformed London. The directors of the world’s first tube lines were old enemies with an abiding hatred of one another, and when the captains of industry clashed, all London felt the fallout. Streets were dug in and houses ripped out like rotten teeth, without the approval of parliament or public. The despoilation of the city provided visible proof of the monstrous capitalism that was consuming the streets. While ruthless tycoons fought over land and lines, the project caught the national imagination and threw up moments of peculiar charm; when a baby girl was supposedly born in a carriage on the Bakerloo Line, she was christened Thelma Ursula Beatrice Eleanor, so that her initials would always serve as a reminder of her birthplace. Typically for London, the story turned out to be untrue.

The underground was Bryant’s second home. He had always felt warm and safe in its sooty embrace, and loved the strange separateness of this sealed and secret world. A century of exhaust fans, ozonisers and asbestos sweepers had improved the air quality below, but the atmosphere was still as dry as Africa on platforms for reasons that no-one was quite able to fathom. Strange whorls of turbulence appeared before the arrival of a train, and tangles of tunnels could lead you back to where you started, or abruptly came to dead ends. The system’s idiosyncrasies arose from its convoluted construction.

‘You know, there are all sorts of intriguing stories about the tube, or “the train in the drain,” as I believe it was once called,’ said Bryant, swinging his stick with a jauntiness that came from sensing that murder was once more on the agenda. ‘There’s a story that an Egyptian sarcophagus in the British Museum opened into a secret passage leading to the disused station at Bloomsbury. I don’t give it much credence myself.’

‘Really,’ said May, steering his partner away from the station. They headed along York Way in the direction of the St Pancras coroner’s office.

‘Oh, yes. The straightening of the Northern Line almost caused the demolition of a Hawksmoor church, St Mary Woolnoth, but the public outcry was so great that the railway company had to underpin it while they built Bank station underneath. That’s why the station entrance is marked by the head of an angel.’

‘Well, I’m sure this is all very fascinating,’ said May, ‘but we’ve a young dead woman who’s being taken to Giles Kershaw’s morgue right now, and it would be a good idea if you could help me find out what happened to her.’

‘You see, that’s your trouble right there. You can’t do two things at once. I’ve got a dozen different things going on in my mind.’

‘Yes, and none of them make any sense.’ Cutting away from the crowded thoroughfare of Euston Road, the detectives found themselves alone in Camley Street, which angled north beside the railway line. ‘Do you honestly think Faraday will allow us to remain operational? We allowed a suspect to escape.’

‘He’s not a
suspect,
John, he’s a
murderer,
and his continued freedom provides us with a reason for staying open. We’re the only team likely to catch him. If anything, his arrest will trigger our closure. A cruel paradox. Let’s see what Giles has got for us.’

The desolate redbrick building behind the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church was situated in one of central London’s emptiest spots. It might have been built on the edge of Dartmoor, for the number of guests it received.

‘I wonder what the staff do for lunch?’ Bryant asked, looking around. ‘I suppose they must bring sandwiches and sit among the gravestones.’

‘You realise that every time we’ve been here in the last month, Mr Fox was probably watching us?’ May pointed to the rowan tree where the murderer had waited for them. Mr Fox had been employed as a caretaker by the church. He had befriended both the vicar and Professor Marshall, the previous coroner of St Pancras, in order to steal secret knowledge from them.

‘I know, and it gives me the creeps. You can never be quite sure what’s lurking below the waterline around here.’ Bryant rang the bell and stepped back. ‘Look out, here comes old Miseryguts.’ He waited while Rosa Lysandrou, the coroner’s daunting assistant, came to the door.

‘Mr Bryant. Mr May. He’s expecting you.’ Rosa stepped back and held the door wide, her face as grim as a gargoyle. Dressed in her customary uniform of black knitwear, she never expressed any emotion beyond vague disapproval. Bryant wondered what Sergeant Renfield had seen in her. He couldn’t imagine them dating. Rosa looked like a Greek widow with an upset stomach.

‘How very lovely to see you again, Rosa,’ he effused. ‘You’re looking particularly fetching in that—smock-thing.’

Rosa’s lips grew thinner as she allowed them to pass. ‘She has hairy moles,’ Bryant whispered a trifle too loudly.