Off the Rails

∨ Off the Rails ∧

11

Visibility

Mac was jittery. His old employer, Mr Fox, was out there somewhere, and was probably looking for him. He regretted ever having met the guy. He should have known from the start that it would end in trouble.

Mac had allowed himself to be picked up in St Pancras station, and had agreed to perform a few simple, entirely legal services – driving a van, acting as a contact for a client, nothing that would undermine his probation record. He had fulfilled his tasks and been paid well for them, but then something had gone wrong. The deal had ended in disaster. Mr Fox had screwed up, and Mac knew about it.

He chose not to look too deeply into what had happened; he suspected there had been a beating, possibly even a death. It was nothing to do with him. He didn’t want to know.

He had assumed that Mr Fox was a small-time crook of the kind you could find all over King’s Cross, the ones studying their phones in snack bars and stations, who made themselves available at short notice whenever middle-class urbanites decided their dinner parties should end with a few lines of coke. But Mr Fox was more than that. There were shadows in him that made Mac deathly afraid. The job had ended badly, as these things sometimes did, but Mac was fearful that Mr Fox would somehow blame him and come looking to take his pound of flesh. There was a terrifying irrationality about the man, and now Mac was peering around every corner with trepidation.

But Mac couldn’t get out of town, because he was working right outside the station. He’d needed to make money fast, so he’d borrowed some from a dealer in Farringdon and put it on an outsider running at Aintree because the tip was sweet as a nut, only somehow he got the wrong horse and it had run like a fat girl, coming in last. And now he needed to make some down payments before he got his head kicked off his shoulders. So he had taken a couple of legit jobs, one of which was handing out copies of the Metro to commuters. It meant making himself visible to as many people as possible. He knew it was the last thing he should be doing right now, but the need for cash had made him desperate.

On Monday evening, in what was already shaping up to be the wettest spring on record, he was standing on the pavement thrusting copies of the freesheet at pedestrians who would take three minutes to skim it before abandoning it on the tube, adding to the tons of rubbish and clutter no-one really wanted or needed.

As he passed out the papers, he flinched whenever anyone brushed against him, fearing an unseen tap on his shoulder. Then, by the station entrance, he thought he saw Mr Fox watching him from beneath the brim of a red Nike baseball cap.

But he looked different. A tanned face, a black soul patch, trendy glasses, thick upper-arm mass in his short sleeves – and now Mac had doubts, because if it really was him, Mr Fox had radically changed his appearance in a matter of days. When the shades came off, though, there was no hiding from those dead eyes. Mac would have known them anywhere.

He tried to ignore the motionless figure and kept on handing out papers. He wanted to run, but couldn’t move far from his station because two other vendors were staking out the other tube entrances, and his team leader would send him back if he tried to leave.

He stared at the great stack of freesheets on his cart, panic dancing in his brain. When he glanced back, the figure had vanished, and he wondered if his fearful mind was playing tricks. He needed to get away right now.

Mac dropped the papers back in his cart and took off. He was thinking fast – or at least, as fast as he could – about how to escape into the crowds.

He sent himself bouncing down the stairs into the station, Northern, Victoria and Piccadilly lines to the right, Metropolitan, District & Circle lines straight ahead. Office workers, tourists and students were milling about with bags and cases. People were walking so slowly, stopping to examine maps, just getting in the way. He pushed through the ascending travellers, down the next flight of steps, and was quickly caught up in a contraflow of commuters heading for the escalator.

So many people. A distressed woman trying to manoeuvre a double-width baby carriage, a crowd of arguing Spanish teenagers, a smiling old man carrying a cocker spaniel, a couple just standing there in the busiest section of the tunnel, bewildered and lost. Mac looked around, trying to sort through the oncoming faces. Some part of him had known all along that Mr Fox was a killer. Mr Fox knew that Mac knew, and perhaps nobody else at all knew because the man pushing through the ticket barrier toward him had taken care of them all.

He was coming up behind Mac on the descending escalator.

Now he stopped and was standing on the right, in no hurry, looking straight ahead. When Mac looked back, Mr Fox failed to catch his eye. There was nothing to guarantee it was the same person, but Mac was surer than he’d ever been in his life, just as he knew that Mr Fox would somehow manage to kill him in public view and get away with it.

At the bottom of the escalator he swung right and headed to another, lower, escalator. At the base he stepped beneath a cream-tiled arch that opened out onto the platform. A train was in, and the crowds were pushing forward to board it. He skirted the passengers and continued along the platform, turning off and running up the stairs toward the Piccadilly Line.

Mac’s stomach was an acid bath. He glanced back and saw Mr Fox closing in, and felt sure he was being forced in the wrong direction. He knew the station as well as anyone and remembered that the foot tunnel they had entered was now out of use. It led to the long uphill passage connecting the station to the former Thameslink line, which had been closed down. Christ, I’m going into a dead end, he realised. He tried to keep things calm in his head, but he knew that Mr Fox intended to kill him.

There was one hope; the tunnel had a cross-branch from the Piccadilly Line that was still in use. Maybe he could turn off into the crowds once more.

He felt Mr Fox tacking closer, seeking ways to move ahead, from left to right and back. He didn’t know how it happened, but when they reached the junction the crowd was too dense and Mac was forced to continue straight across. Into the section where the tiles were already crusting with grey dust, and the CCTV cameras had been dismantled, and litter from the other tunnels had blown, into the corridor that no longer led anywhere.

On, toward his death.