Bryant & May 08; Off the Rails

∨ Off the Rails ∧

39

Flying

By the time Dan Banbury and Giles Kershaw arrived, Greenwich police had cordoned off the platform and covered the body with a yellow plastic tent. “Ghastly mess,” said Kershaw, checking under the tent flap. “Her name’s Cassie Field. She had John May’s card in her wallet, so I take it she’s involved with the case. Massive head injuries, so at least it was quick. What did the driver see?”

“He just caught a glimpse of her flying through the air, doesn’t really know what happened,” said Banbury. “He’s in the waiting room. He’s pretty shaken up.”

“The officer over there told me she jumped.”

“He only got here a few minutes ago; he’s going by what the guard told him.”

“Where was the guard?”

“On the opposite platform, texting his girlfriend, useless plonker. I’ll try and get some more lights rigged up. They need some decent overheads on this platform. What a miserable bloody place to die.”

“She reeks of wine, and there are red wine stains on her shirt. Very high heels. I know it’s the fashion, but they can’t be easy to wear. She could have been drunk and wandered too close to the edge. The platform’s somewhat on the narrow side.”

“The driver said she was ‘flying’. Ask him yourself. Like a trapeze artiste, he reckons, as in she either jumped or was pushed. He certainly doesn’t think she slipped.”

“A couple of fresh bruises on her back,” said Kershaw, carefully turning the body over and raising her jacket. “Are you getting this?” Banbury was operating the Unit’s camcorder, from which he would later pull stills. “Neat little crescents. They look like heelmarks, but they can’t be. Too high up her back, as if she was kicked onto the line. Mind you, if they were, we might get a boot match from them.”

“Flying,” repeated Banbury. He climbed back up onto the platform and looked around, thinking.

“Sorry, Dan, what did you say?”

“I said flying. As in propelled. Like Gloria Taylor.” Banbury headed for the waiting room, where he stopped to examine the doorway. “Giles, come and take a look at this.”

Kershaw left the police team and clambered back up, joining the CSM. Banbury was standing on tiptoe, running a penlight along the top edge of the waiting room doorway. The room was a freestanding box constructed of steel struts and scratched Plexiglas. The CSM pointed upward. “Eight little channels in the dirt up there, four and four, a couple of feet apart. Any ideas?”

“I might have,” said Kershaw cagily. “Have you?”

“Yes.”

“Go on, then, you first.”

“Fingers. The killer climbed up onto that row of seats, stood on their backs, swung on the metal lintel to get momentum, then just let go. She wouldn’t have seen or heard a thing, with the train approaching. The boots smacked hard into her back, the killer dropped down and ran off. How insane is that?”

“It’d take some nerve.” Giles flicked wet blond hair out of his eyes. “Can you get prints from them?”

“I’ll try but it looks like the dust got pulled off in the process, leaving unmarked bare metal underneath. The whole thing probably only took three or four seconds. No cameras to pick up her final moments. No-one else on the platform. They’re going to hold a couple of the passengers for witness statements, but my guess is that the windows of the train would have obscured their vision – it’s been chucking it down for the last couple of hours, and the platform’s shockingly underlit. If the killer was wearing something dark to blend in, no-one would have even seen them.”

“Two deaths in the same group of friends. Your old man’s going to go crazy.”

“He’s not ‘my old man’,” said Banbury with a grim laugh. “You’re still attached to the Unit, matey. Don’t worry, though, from what I hear we’ve got the whole of tomorrow to work out what happened before we’re kicked back out on the streets. At least you’ve got somewhere to go. I’ll be down the Job Centre again.”

♦

For the next half hour they worked quietly beside each other in the falling rain, while the local police had loud arguments with each other about infringement of jurisdiction.

“Always the same with the Met,” Banbury muttered, searching the wet ground for evidence. “They’re more worried about who gets the case than that poor girl on the tracks. Hang on a minute.” He took his Maglite to the waiting room, crouched down and carefully picked up something he had glimpsed on the floor, bagging it. “What does that look like to you?” he asked Kershaw. Raising the bag into the light, he displayed an inch-long sliver of curved grey plastic.

“No idea. There’s a fragment of raised lettering on the inside, very small,” said the coroner. “Let me see?” He took out Bryant’s old magnifying glass and read: rty UC.

“Pretty clear to me,” he decided. “Property of University College Hospital. Standard NHS typeface. Looks like a piece from a plastic leg cast. Keep looking around.”

Banbury climbed over the platform fence and conducted a search of the gorse bushes behind the waiting room. A few minutes later he re-emerged covered in mud and brambles, carrying a dark bundle. “You’re going to love this,” he told Kershaw. “I think the overcoat got discarded before the killer carried out that little trapeze stunt.”

“Can you identify it?”

Banbury unfurled the rainbow-striped material before the coroner. “It looks like the one Matthew Hillingdon was wearing the night he was killed.”

“You’re telling me Miss Field was pushed under a train by a girl with a broken leg and a dead man,” said Kershaw. “Bryant’s going to love this.”