Mostly they’re just students. Quite a few Japanese kids. All they do is talk about work. The idea was to get people to customise the stickers and put them on their bags. The bar owners told me to make sure they didn’t end up on walls. It’s illegal to flypost around here.”
“Since when were students worried about legalities?” May asked.
“Since their education could be cancelled,” Cassie replied tartly.
“Could you do me a favour? Keep a lookout for any stickers shaded in this fashion? I have a number you can call if you see anything.”
“Sure. Why do you need to know?”
“One of them has been found in connection with a murder in the underground.” He handed her his PCU card, then thought for a moment. “Actually, don’t just call if you see the sticker. Call if you see anything unusual, anything at all. It might seem insignificant to you at the time, but make a note and ring me.”
“There’s a group that comes in…” She tapped a frosted white nail against her teeth. “They’re here most nights of the week. Something funny about them. I don’t know…”
“Funny in what way?”
“I guess they’re just really focussed. They don’t like to mix with anyone else. I think I’ve seen the orange- coloured stickers on their bags. They huddle together in the corner at night, working on their PDAs.”
“So what makes them funny?”
“I guess it’s just that they’re too intense, working as if…”
“What?”
She gave a shrug. “As if their lives depended on it. Hang on – there’s someone here who knows them.” A tall, smartly suited young man stood at the bar rummaging in a black leather briefcase. “Theo!” Cassie called out. “Over here.”
“Hey, Cassie.”
“Don’t you ever pick up your voicemail?”
“I was away visiting my folks. What’s up?”
“Mr May, this is Theo. He may be able to help you.”
John May shook Theo’s hand, taking note of a tanned wrist and an expensive-looking Cartier watch.
“Theo, those guys with the red sports bags are your flatmates, aren’t they?”
“Geek Central, yeah. The loser patrol. Have they been causing you any trouble?”
“No, but Mr May is trying to track down these.” She showed him the sticker. “They have them on their bags, don’t they?”
“Yeah, I think so. Don’t you give them out here in the bar?”
“Not coloured in like this.” She turned to May. “Can I say who you are?” she asked politely.
“I’m a detective,” said May. “Maybe I could talk to these friends of yours?”
“I think ‘friends’ is overdoing it. We share a house. Actually, it’s my house and they pay me rent. I can give you the phone number there.” Theo flipped out a pen – another Cartier – and scribbled on a card. “I don’t think they’ll be too thrilled to hear from the police, though.”
“It’s a long shot,” May confided. “Right now I’m ready to try anything.”
Cassie had a killer smile. “I’d get you a drink,” she suggested, “if you weren’t on duty.”
“I’m not,” May replied promptly, “and make it a whisky.” He wondered how much he should tell her, but figured it wouldn’t do any harm to mention the case. The PCU had fewer restrictions on information than the CID. “We have a dead woman with one of these stickers on her back.”
“And you suspect my flatmates?” asked Theo, incredulous. “That’s brilliant. Oh, that’s genius.” He started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” May asked.
Theo’s smile broadened to match Cassie’s. “You’ll find out when you meet them,” he answered.
? Off the Rails ?
15
Tube Tales
“North End.”
“City Road.”
“Down Street.”
“British Museum.”
“Lords.”
“Trafalgar Square.”
“Strand.”
“That became the Aldwych.”
It was, Arthur Bryant conceded, an unusual way to end a Monday.
Seated in the gloomy, cluttered staff room of King’s Cross underground station at midnight, sharing bottles of warm beer and listening to the guards who had just come off duty, he wondered about the kind of person who would be attracted by such a lightless, closed-off world. He looked around at Rasheed, Sandwich, Marianne, Bitter and Stone. The others were naming underground stations that had been closed down over the years.
Rasheed was so impossibly thin that his uniform seemed virtually uninhabited, but he had just eaten an enormous curried beef pie in under five minutes. “I never heard of no station at Trafalgar Square,” he told the assembly, unwrapping a Kit Kat for dessert.
“It was on the Bakerloo Line,” said Sandwich, who was as broad as Rasheed was slender. When he tipped back on his plastic bendy chair, Bryant half expected the legs to buckle. Sandwich’s real name was Lando – he had been named after a character in a Star Wars film, and hated it – and now he was called Sandwich, because no-one had ever seen him eat. “They got rid of it ‘cause it wasn’t used enough, and anyway, it’s only a two-minute train ride from Leicester Square to Charing Cross.”
“Covent Garden to Leicester Square is only two hundred fifty metres,” added Rasheed. Stone nodded in agreement, but rarely spoke. Small, opaque and nondescript, he looked like an exhausted lifer who had spent too many years underground, away from sun and fresh air. Bitter – so called because that was all she drank – was heavier and healthier, but didn’t seem to like joining in with the others. Everyone agreed that she had communication issues. Apparently she liked working alone at nights, coordinating tunnel maintenance.
“Most of the central London stations are only couple of minutes apart,” said Sandwich. “A strange line, though, the Bakerloo. Brown and gloomy, and all them twisting tunnels, loads of them derelict and closed off. The Bakerloo stations all seem underlit to me, even Piccadilly Circus. Sort of yellowy at night, but friendly.”
“I was posted at Camden Town for a while,” piped up Marianne, a West Indian ticket clerk, the only one who was dressed for the world above. “They used to change the listing on the central destination board from Bank to Charing Cross branch, just to make the commuters run backwards and forwards between the platforms.”
“I don’t believe that,” said Rasheed, finishing the Kit Kat.
“No word of a lie,” Marianne told him. “And we used to get them commuter pigeons.”
“I beg your pardon?” asked Bryant, intrigued.
“Yeah, they live outside the West End and come in for the food. We used to see ‘em all the time on the Northern Line, but we couldn’t work out how they knew which station to get off.”
“You’re having a laugh, man,” said Sandwich. “All right, then, here’s a good one. Which is the only tube station with a
“Belsize Park,” said Marianne. “Easy. Which station is the only one that doesn’t have any letters in the word
“St John’s Wood,” said Stone.
“I suppose there are a lot of games you can play with the tube map,” said Bryant.
“Oh yeah, loads. Like the one where you have to make a journey that passes through one station on each of the thirteen lines. I can tell you something weird about the District Line,” said Stone, who looked like he hadn’t visited the city’s surface since the death of Winston Churchill. “I know why the trains run quieter when they pass under the Inns of Court and the Houses of Parliament.”
