Off the Rails

∨ Off the Rails ∧

41

The Trench Effect

DS Longbright was taken by surprise when Georgia Conroy called; she had not been expecting to hear from Pentonville Prison’s former history teacher again. “You told me to call if I remembered anything else,” Conroy explained. “It’s only a little thing…”

“That’s fine,” replied Longbright, searching for a pen. “Right now I’ll be grateful for anything.”

“Well, you know I said Lloyd Lutine wanted me to go with him to visit Abney Park Cemetery?”

“Yes.”

“I thought it was odd at the time, because he’d given me the impression that he’d hated his father. He asked me to accompany him because he’d just discovered where he was buried.”

“How did he find out?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he checked the council records. As I said, I turned him down because it seemed a bit creepy. Then he mentioned something odd. That his father wasn’t supposed to have been buried there. It wasn’t allowed, there had been a mistake, something like that. I’m sorry, it’s not much…”

“No, I’m glad you called.”

Longbright thought it through. If Mr Fox’s father had also been raised in King’s Cross, Abney Park would not have been his local cemetery. But people could be buried more or less wherever they wanted, so why should it not have been allowed? Thanking Georgia Conroy, she rang off and took her notes into Arthur Bryant’s office.

“I know we’re supposed to be concentrating on the Mecklenburgh Square case, but can you spare a minute?”

Arthur peered up at her over the tops of his bifocals. “Is it urgent?”

“You’re doing a jigsaw, Arthur.”

“It helps me to think.” He gave up trying to fit a piece and sat back, turning it over in his fingers. “Queen Victoria’s funeral procession. Two thousand pieces. I wonder how many mourners in the crowd travelled by tube that day to watch it pass? Dan Banbury thinks someone chose to murder Gloria Taylor in the underground system because of the sheer volume of people passing through it. He says it’s difficult to solve a crime in a public place because the site always gets contaminated.”

“He’s got a point.”

“I thought the killer might be re-enacting some kind of historical event connected with the tunnels – after all, they’ve been there for a century and a half. All three deaths are connected to the railway. Even Tony McCarthy was attacked underground. Despite my insistence that everything has been premeditated, John has a theory that we’re looking for someone who’s acting out of sheer panic. I can’t see the sense in that myself. Meera thinks it’s a man who hates women, and Matthew Hillingdon just got in the way. Bimsley and Renfield think we should be looking for an escaped lunatic. Raymond’s right – in all my days with this Unit, I’ve never had such a disagreeably confused investigation on my hands – and yet I know there’s an absurdly simple answer we’ve all overlooked. It tantalises and terrifies me to think that someone else may die because I can’t see something that’s right in front of me.” He threw the jigsaw piece down in annoyance. “What’s your opinion?”

“I need to talk to you about Mr Fox.” She told him about Georgia Conroy’s phone call.

“Perhaps it wasn’t about the location of the cemetery, but the grave itself,” said Bryant, rolling up the jigsaw and sliding it into his desk drawer.

“What do you mean?”

“The only people who aren’t allowed to be buried on Christian sites are those of different faiths, and suicides. Could Mr Fox père have been a suicide, do you think, accidentally buried in a Christian spot?”

“I suppose it’s possible.”

“Suicides happen all the time in the underground system. Mr Fox had a photograph of a London Underground bench on the wall of his bedroom.”

“Some kind of sentimental souvenir?”

“One way to find out. Give Anjam Dutta a call at North One Watch.”

♦

Longbright eventually got through to the King’s Cross security headquarters. “Can you do me a favour?” she asked. “I need a list of all the one-unders you’ve had at King’s Cross, going back as far as records allow.”

“That would be about thirty years,” Dutta told her. “We never transferred anything older than that to the new data system.”

“How difficult would it be to get me those?”

“Not difficult at all. Every suicide has been logged in. Give me a few minutes.”

While they waited for the email, Longbright and Bryant followed the theory. “Mr Fox asked a virtual stranger to accompany him to his father’s grave, and he still visits the site,” said Janice.

“So the death of his father could have been the turning point in his life.”

Bryant’s laptop pinged. Longbright didn’t have the patience to wait for Bryant to fiddle about trying to open his emails, so she leaned across him and opened the document, quickly running down the list of names. Most of the suicides were marked with ancillary files containing brief police statements. It didn’t take her long to find what she was looking for.

“There you go.” She tapped the screen with a glossy crimson nail. “Albert Thomas Edward Ketch went under a train on November eighteenth at four P.M., on the Piccadilly Line platform of King’s Cross station, the third suicide that year. Hang on, there’s a witness statement.” She clicked through to the attached page. “Witness told attending police she had spoken to a boy who she thinks was named Jonas. She insisted he had been sitting with Albert Ketch, waiting for a train, but the child was never traced.”

“No child traced,” mused Bryant. “A key witness. It shouldn’t have been that difficult.”

“It looks like they didn’t even try to find him.”

“No. No, they didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“They didn’t have time to look.” Bryant clambered to his feet and searched the stacks of books balanced on crates around the edges of his desk. “They couldn’t conduct a proper search, because later that day – ” He pulled out a volume on the history of the London Underground and threw it open. “You see what I’m getting at?”

“Oh, no,” said Longbright softly.

Bryant stabbed a finger at the page. “November 18, 1987, was the date of the King’s Cross fire.”

“The boy’s name was Jonas Ketch. The bench – ”

“The place where he last sat and talked to his father. I asked Dan to print up the shots of Mr Fox’s room. What did I do with them?” Bryant found the sheaf of photographs and laid them out. “There it is.”

The photograph showed the missing picture of the red metal bench. “It looks like the boy saw his old man commit suicide right in front of him. Just an ordinary metal tube station bench, but the background of tiles – that has to be King’s Cross before it was redecorated.”

“So he took his son there,” said Longbright, “sat him down and talked to him. Then he rose, walked to the edge of the platform and dropped under the wheels of the incoming train.”

“Jonas Ketch’s father died on November 18, 1987, just three and a half hours before the King’s Cross fire. Hang on.”

Bryant turned the page of his reference book and read. “No-one was ever able to discover exactly how the fire began, but they think someone dropped a lit match down the side of the escalator. It was one of the old wooden ones, and was covered in grease embedded with bits of paper and human hair that caught alight almost instantly. Thirty-one people died, and another sixty were seriously injured. There had been a number of small fires at the site before, but this one spread in a completely new way. The escalator had steel sides and the flames rose at an angle that created the perfect conditions for something called the Trench Effect. An intense blast of flame that turned the ticket hall into an incinerator.”

“You think it was the boy.” Longbright was appalled.

“After seeing his father killed, he burned the station down in an act of fury.”

“My God.”

“It fits with everything we know, and would explain why death means so little to him.” Bryant returned to the laptop. “Show me how to do this.”

“Don’t touch that, let me do it. What are you after?”

“The names of all the fire victims.”

The list of those who died that day was public knowledge, and it took no time to locate a memorial site. “That’s why he wants to silence Tony McCarthy,” said Bryant, sitting back. “It has nothing to do with the time they spent together at Pentonville. There’s a Jim McCarthy listed as one of the victims of the King’s Cross fire. Tony McCarthy’s prison file lists his parents as James and Sharon McCarthy. Suppose when they first met, Mr Fox – ”

“Real name, Jonas Ketch.”

“Ketch accidentally revealed a little too much of himself. Suppose Mac realised that as a boy Ketch had committed an act of arson.”

“Killing McCarthy’s father in the process.”

“It puts the case on an entirely different footing. You’d better make sure Renfield’s there when Tony McCarthy comes out of UCH, and stays by him wherever he goes.”

“This is my case, Arthur,” Longbright pleaded. “Let me do it. For Liberty’s sake.”

“No, it’s too dangerous. I want you to switch with Renfield and take one of the students.”

“That’s not fair, and you know it. You owe me this.”

“Janice, your mother died trying to lure a criminal out into the open. Do you honestly think I’m going to let you risk your life as well? Put Renfield on it. I want you to stay right here, where I can keep an eye on you.”

Longbright stormed out of the detectives’ room. Back in the corridor, she walked past Jack Renfield’s office, stopping only to grab her jacket.