Off the Rails

∨ Off the Rails ∧

10

Descending

“What 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.

“Dear fellows! So remiss of me not to have swung by.” Coattails flapping, Giles zoomed at them with his hands outstretched. Although he had achieved his ambition to become the new St Pancras coroner, he missed his old friends at the PCU more than he dared to admit. “Come in! We hardly ever seem to get visitors who are still breathing: there’s just me and Rosa here.”

The energetic, foppish young forensic scientist had brought life and urgency into the stale air of the Victorian mortuary. The building’s gloomy chapel and green-tiled walls encouraged reflection and repentance, but Kershaw’s lanky presence lifted the spirits.

“I heard about Liberty DuCaine, poor fellow, I thought it best to stay away from the funeral. There was something grand about that man; what an utterly rubbish way to die. Have you got any leads?”

“We’re running lab tests on his flat and re-interviewing witnesses, but no, we’ve nothing new apart from a cryptic little warning note,” May admitted.

“Your Eller grew up in these streets, didn’t he? I’m keeping an eye out for him and will bring him down with a well-timed rugby tackle if spotted, rest assured.”

“You’re very cheerful,” remarked Bryant with vague disapproval. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s right, more like.” Grinning broadly, Kershaw dug his fist into his lab coat and pulled out a letter, passing it over. “Have a read of that, chummy.”

May snatched the envelope away from his partner. He couldn’t bear having to wait for the protracted disentangling of spectacles that preceded any study of writing less than two feet high. A Home Office letterhead, two handwritten paragraphs and a familiar signature. “I don’t believe it,” he muttered, genuinely awed.

“What? Show me,” barked Bryant, who hated not knowing things first.

“Giles, you are a genius. He’s pulled it off, Arthur. He’s done something neither you nor I could achieve.”

“Let me guess. He’s worked out why people who don’t drive always slam car doors.”

“No, he’s got the Unit re-instated.” May waved the paper excitedly.

“How did he do that? Give me that.” Bryant swiped at the page.

“You’re not the only ones with friends in high places,” Kershaw told them, obviously pleased with himself. “But I did owe you a favour. It cost me a couple of expensive lunches at Le Gavroche.”

Although he had been told often enough, Bryant had forgotten that Kershaw had once dated the former Home Secretary’s sister-in-law. “So you pulled a few strings for us.”

“Less string-pulling than back-scratching,” Kershaw replied. “He’s pleased that you recommended me for the position. The old St Pancras coroner, Professor Marshall, was a scandalous old Tory of the More-Than-Slightly-Mad school. Got caught charging the construction of a duck pond on his expenses. They’d wanted him out for years.”

“We recommended you because you were the best person for the job, Giles. You deserved the chance of advancement.”

“Well, you’re to be officially recognised once more, effective from next Monday. And you’re to be allocated an annual budget. It’s conditional on your clearing up this business with Mr Fox by then, but I’m sure you’ll be able to do it, won’t you? You might even get some new equipment out of it.”

“That’s wonderful news,” said May. “Giles, you’re a star.”

Bryant slapped his hands together gleefully. “Don’t tell Raymond Land; I’ll do it. I want to watch his face drop. All we have to do now is recapture London’s most elusive killer by Saturday.” His irony fell on deaf ears.

“I know why you’re here today. Come and meet Gloria Taylor.” Kershaw ushered them through to the morgue’s autopsy tables.

Gently unfolding the Mylar wrapping around the badly bruised face of a black woman in her mid-twenties, he pulled out the retractable car antenna Bryant had given him as a going-away present and tapped the corpse with it. “Identifying marks, well, the teeth would have given us her name if the contents of her bag hadn’t. Unusual bridgework. Ms Taylor is single, lives in Boleyn Road, Islington, has a kid, a little girl of five, no current partner. That’s all I know about her life so far, but I can tell you a little more about her body.”

“Why do coroners always refer to their clients as if they were still alive?” Bryant wondered.

“Well, they are alive to us, just not functioning. Her hair and nails are still growing. There’s all kinds of activity in her gut – ”

“Thank you, you can stop there. You’ll end up giving everyone the creeps, just like your predecessor.”

“She was in pretty good shape, but she’d had an operation on her right leg below the knee. It had left this muscle, the tibialis anterior, severely weakened. It’s why she wasn’t able to stop herself when she fell; she knew it would hurt to throw sudden weight on it. Instinctively, she tried to protect her head but still fell badly, breaking her neck. It was all over in seconds. It didn’t help that she was wearing ridiculously high heels. A terribly dangerous fashion, but women won’t be told. There are the usual surface injuries you’d expect from this kind of fall, damage to the knees, hips and wrists. She slipped, went headfirst, velocity kept her going all the way to the bottom. It’s a pity nobody thought to grab her dress as she passed. The English stand on the right and walk down on the left. In the case of a fixed staircase like this, there are still unspoken right and left rules. Those on the right walk slowly, the ones on the left walk faster.”

“I imagine the weight imbalance on the treads of moving escalators is the reason why they’re constantly being replaced,” Bryant remarked, inadvertently reminding the others that he was more concerned with the mechanics of death than the tragedy of its victims.

“The slow-walking people probably thought she was being rude, trying to barge past, and got out of the way. Certainly no-one stopped her. I understand there weren’t many on the staircase – the rush hour hadn’t properly started. In any event there was nothing to impede her fall. She hit the ground with a wallop. The impact was enough to tear her dress, which, according to Janice, is an original Balenciaga outfit from the 1950^s.”

“Trust Janice to know that. So you think it was an accident.”

“From a forensic point of view, yes. If you fall off a tall building, you reach terminal velocity at around two hundred kilometres an hour and death is most likely to be instantaneous. Fallers instinctively try to land the right way up, so they fracture the pelvis, lower spine and feet. The impact travels through the body, and can burst the valves and chambers of the heart. Survivors say that time passes more slowly during a fall. This is because the brain is speeding up, trying to find ways of correcting the balance. Gloria didn’t actually travel that far, but she went headfirst. You can survive a considerable fall if you’ve got something soft to land on, or if you’re drunk, because your limbs are relaxed. You’re more likely to land on your head in a short, angled fall from, say, under ten metres, which is the case here.” Kershaw scratched the tip of his nose with the antenna. “Now ask me what I think from a personal perspective.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, say you stumble and try to right yourself. It’s harder to fall downstairs – I mean properly fall – than most people think. It feels like she was pushed. It’s a matter of momentum. She didn’t land on her knees and slide the rest of the way, as most people would – she went out and down, like a high diver.”

“How do you know? It’s not on the CCTV.”

Giles ran a hand through his blond hair. “Well, the heaviness with which she landed. The angle of injuries. Mind you, I’m not sure the evidence would stand up in court. There’s nothing I can directly point to. Something just feels wrong about it. Then there’s this. Her doctor’s records show she suffered from Ménière’s disease. She was deaf in her right ear and was supposed to wear a small hearing aid, but her colleagues say she hated having to use it. So if somebody stumbled behind her or made a warning noise, she may not have heard it.” He opened a drawer beneath his examination table and produced a plastic packet of clothes. “Her outfit was very distinctive. Where is it? Ah, here. She was wearing this over her dress.” He held up a small red cardigan. In the middle of the back panel was a plastic sticker.

“Wait, I need my glasses.” Bryant dug out one of several pairs of spectacles that had become interlaced in his pocket. The lenses were so scratched that it was a miracle he could see anything at all. He examined the orange sticker. A line drawing showed the right half of a shaggy-haired male, standing with his arm raised and his legs apart. “It’s da Vinci’s figure of a man, surely, seen from the back?”

“Either somebody stuck it there or it came from the tube seat,” said Kershaw.

“Seems a bit unlikely, doesn’t it?”

“All sorts of odd things happen on tube trains. I’ve been going through my predecessor’s online logbook. Fascinating reading. Professor Marshall had a fellow in here, found dead on a Victoria Line tube. His trousers were burned, and there were skin blisters on the backs of his thighs. Turned out a workman had set a plastic canister filled with a corrosive chemical on the seat before him, and it had leaked into the cushion. This chap sat down, the caustic fluid went through his trousers and gave him the skin rash. The reaction raised his body temperature and caused a seizure.” He peered at the sticker, flicking a flop of hair from his eyes. “I don’t know, maybe it was put there by the person who pushed her. But I’m pretty certain she was pushed.”

“It’s not much of a start point, Giles, but I don’t think we’re going to get anything more from the CCTV. Can I take this?”

“Of course. I got a partial thumbprint from it. I ran it through IDENT1’s online database but drew a blank.” Kershaw carefully divorced the sticker from the cardigan and slipped it into a sample bag.

“It looks to me like a sticky-backed advert that got transferred from someone else during her journey,” said May.

“I don’t think so. The only fibres on the glue are from her coat and the train seat.”

“Then we concentrate on the logo itself.” Bryant was squinting at the symbol. “It might stand for something.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” he replied, adjusting his spectacles, “if it’s Leonardo da Vinci, perhaps she’d visited a place where you might be likely to find such a sticker, a museum shop perhaps.”

“The figure’s cut in half,” May pointed out. “You look at this and see da Vinci. I just see the letter K. As in Kaos.”