Off the Rails

∨ Off the Rails ∧

9

Push

“One bleeding, sodding week,” said Renfield, watching the Daves as they attempted to thread electric cable through a baseboard with a bent coat hanger. “They’re having a laugh over at the Home Office.”

“They won’t be if we pull it off,” Longbright replied.

“Oi, you’re doing that wrong,” Renfield told one of the Daves. “You’ll need to earth it.”

“You leave the wiring to us,” the Dave answered, “and you can get on with what you’re good at, framing innocent bystanders and knocking protestors unconscious.”

Renfield’s bull head sank between his shoulders as he strode over and snatched away the Daves’ nail gun.

“Blimey, look at this.” Longbright pulled a water-stained book from beneath Bryant’s desk. “Put him down, Jack.”

Renfield finished nailing the Dave to the wall and came over. “What have you got?”

She turned the page around to show him a photograph of a sooty old building surrounded by a howling mob waving burning sticks. “This place, taken in 1908. The locals were trying to burn it down. Listen to the caption: ‘Police were called in to disperse an angry crowd of residents attempting to incinerate the home of the Occult Revivalists’ Society. According to unconfirmed reports, society members had succeeded in their attempt to invoke the Devil. Evidence of Satanic worship was found on the building’s first floor (third window from right)’. That’s Raymond’s office.”

“Can you get me down?” the Dave called plaintively. “You’ve ruined my jacket.”

Renfield ignored him. He moved in for a better look at the photograph, although he was also enjoying standing close to Janice Longbright. “They summoned the Devil from Land’s office?”

“That’s what it says here.”

“That would explain a lot. The pentagram on the floor, for a start.”

“Maybe they succeeded,” said Longbright. “Maybe that’s where Mr Fox came from.”

♦

A fine rain was falling with the kind of wet sootiness that stained the colours from the cityscape. Looking along Euston Road was like watching old monochrome television, thought Bryant, like the original opening credits of Coronation Street, grey and grainy and out of focus.

He and May were taking the note back to the Unit so that Banbury could analyse it, but Bryant was already convinced of its sender’s identity. The few civilians who knew about Mr Fox had been interviewed, but their knowledge added nothing. Despite the vigilance of the anti-terrorist police and the ubiquity of the capital’s camera network, it seemed he could appear and vanish at will.

“But he’s shown us his greatest personality flaw,” Bryant shouted to his partner across traffic, wind and rain. “An anger so intense that it uncouples his senses and wrecks his plans. And we know exactly where he operates.”

“Look where you’re walking, Arthur, you nearly got hit by that van.”

“I have to be patient. I’ve stung his pride. He’ll nurse the grudge until it forces him to show himself.”

“Then don’t turn it into something personal, not while we need to lock down our unit status. Let’s get the note examined first.”

Bryant almost got squashed between two buses, and was about to bellow a reply when the call came in and changed everything.

♦

The new King’s Cross Surveillance Centre was one of London’s best-kept secrets. The underground room was accessed by an inconspicuous grey metal door, and its personnel monitored all activity above and below the surrounding streets. The local coppers referred to it colloquially as the North One Watch. Over eighty CCTV screens filled the dimly lit control room, and most of the monitors could be manually operated to provide other views in the event of an emergency. The afternoon’s surveillance team was headed by Anjam Dutta, a security expert with almost twenty years’ experience of studying the streets. He welcomed the detectives and led them into the monitor hub.

“One of my boys spotted something on Cam 16 at 15.47. 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.