Bryant & May 08; Off the Rails

“Come on, we have to change here. Zip up your bag.” Matt followed, lurching from the carriage, out and along the platform.

The scabrous half-retiled tunnel led to stairs, but Matt baulked before climbing them. “Give me a minute,” he protested, holding back in an attempt to steady himself, like a sailor in a storm. His chest was wheezing. Three teenaged girls passed them, heading toward the exit. A few tourists were dragging cases, a smartly dressed young couple and a drunk middle-aged man passed; after a few more seconds, there was no-one else.

“Hang on, I have to tell Ruby – ”

“You don’t, you’re fine.”

“No, have to do it, always letting her down, promised to say when I was on my way.” He poked hopelessly in his bag but still managed to find the phone and fire off a text in record time. The effort of concentrating so hard nearly made him fall over.

“It’s okay, I’ve got you. Wait, wait.” It was time to produce the atomiser. “You left it in the bar. You should be more careful, Matt. You know how Ruby gets when you’ve been smoking and drinking.”

“Yeah, she can be a pain,” said Matt, compliantly opening his mouth and sticking out a furry tongue.

“Put your tongue in. Come on, Matt, you know how to do this.”

“Okay.” He was finally ready. “God, it tastes like – ”

“That’s because you’ve been hammering the cocktails tonight.” Anyone coming? No, the coast was clear. “Look, I have to get you home.”

“I’m meeting – ”

“I know, I heard. Don’t worry, I can fix that.”

“The train – ”

“Come on, concentrate on the stairs, you can do it.”

There was the depth-charge rumble of a train arriving, the last southbound Piccadilly Line trip of the night. A plug of warm air pulsed in the tunnel and lifted a newspaper. Pages drifted past as if brought to life.

Something was happening to Matthew Hillingdon. He felt himself rising, moving. Everyone likes me, thought Matt, it’s so great that everyone wants me to succeed, but they don’t know my secret. The secret is that I can’t help myself. Everything he ever did was because others told him to. Even when he could sense that their advice was hopelessly misguided, he followed it. He was like a stick in a drain, swirling around and heading for the gutter, but someone was always there to pull him out in time. She’s always there for me, he thought. Girls are great, they’ll give you, like, six or seven chances at least, if they really like you. Lately though, events had been shifting beyond his comprehension. You had to trust your friends, though, didn’t you? Otherwise you had nothing.

He was having trouble lifting his legs. Now his right arm was tingling. He’d drunk more than this before without losing control of his limbs. Weird.

The feeling got worse. Was this what dying felt like? My neurons are being deprived of oxygen, he decided. This will lead to the cessation of electrical activity in my brain – the modern definition of biological death. But it just feels like I’m falling very gently. Swirling around and around, toward the gutter.

I’m one of life’s naturally lucky guys, he told himself. What a charmed life I lead; there’s always someone there to catch me when I fall. I think I’m falling faster now. And there’s someone right here to catch me again. How perfect is that?

? Off the Rails ?

21

Alpha Males

Wednesday’s dawn was fierce and raw, low crimson light splashing the glass offices in Canary Wharf. A turbulent sky of sharp blue cloud unfurled over the frothing reaches of the river, threatening rain. John May leaned at the railing of his steel balcony on the fourth floor of Shad Thames, and breathed in the brackish smell of the tide. As a child, he had played on the shore below these windows. I haven’t strayed very far from home in my life, he thought. How we love to tether ourselves.

Leaning over the rail, he looked down at the pebbles stained with patches of verdigris, wondering if the sand beneath held the memory of his footprints. His mother had once lost a bracelet while chasing him along the shore. Was it still buried in the mud, another layer of London’s history? Although the embankments had been transformed, the cranes and wharves giving way to boxy river-view apartments, the shoreline had hardly changed at all. It seemed strange that he and the other kids had once swum here. Surely the water was cleaner now, free of tires and shopping trolleys and iridescent lumps of tar? His sister Gwen had never joined them. Fastidious and superior, she had always sat on the river wall to wait, smoothing her patterned dress, ignoring their yells, biding her time.

He smiled sadly at the thought. Gwen, happily living in Brighton with her extended family, was the only one to have survived unscarred. A strong sense of self-preservation had protected her, but the rest had all suffered in some way. His wife, Jane, fragile and mentally lost, in Broadhampton clinic, his daughter, Elizabeth, dead, his grandchildren at war with their own devils, and now a new woman in his world, the beautiful, haunted Brigitte, who had called him a few hours ago, drunk again. If he had not been able to help his own family, how would he ever be able to help her?

He listened to the city. A few minutes earlier it had been virtually silent, but almost on the stroke of seven o’clock a low, steady roar began and grew, like the sound of factory machinery starting up. It was the hum of engines, the turning of pistons, of voices and vans and coffee machines, of peristaltic traffic and disgorging trains. The sound of London coming to life.

He used the last of his cold coffee to wash down a statin designed to tackle his high cholesterol. As he stood above the water, his thoughts turned to Gloria Taylor’s uncomprehending daughter, and his fingers brushed the cotton of his shirt, over the ridged scar on his heart. A five-year-old girl left without a mother. The wound opened by the loss of a life could never be fully healed, but it was the PCU’s duty to find a way of restoring balance. He had not been able to save those closest to him, but perhaps he could make a difference in the life of a stranger.

He knew it was what his partner would be trying to do, in his own mad way. Tonight, long after the others had gone home, the top floor lights in their King’s Cross warehouse would be burning as Arthur worked on, driven less by a sense of injustice than the need to solve a puzzle. At least they would work toward the same end. The city was a blind, uneven place where injustices could never be fully righted, just smoothed out a little. With its funding returned, the PCU stood a chance of making a difference. If it failed in its first case, however, the fragile faith it had newly engendered would be destroyed.

He took the circular sticker from his pocket and traced the outline of the figure with his forefinger. It wasn’t much to go on, but anything with a connection to the case, no matter how tangential, was worth exploring.

¦

Ruby Cates lived on the second floor of a house in Mecklenburgh Square, in the back of Bloomsbury. The square had been named in honour of Queen Charlotte, on the grounds of the Foundling Hospital. The damage it had sustained in World War II had been tidily repaired, but the grand square and its spacious roads were little-used and overlooked. At the centre was a high-railed garden filled with mature elms and plane trees, shadowy and vaguely mournful, in the way that empty London squares could feel damp even in high summer.

Ruby answered the door in a sweat-stained red Mets T-shirt, with a white towel knotted around her neck. She was pleasant-faced, but too thin and fiercely blond, with an intensity in her deep-set eyes that put May instantly on his guard. Having emailed her first thing, he had received an instant reply providing the address and the time she would be at home. She held open the door and started explaining the moment he stepped inside. May saw that the lower half of her left leg was locked in a grey plastic cast.

“I went up to Camden police station but they said I have to wait until tomorrow. I told them there couldn’t be any mistake but they weren’t interested in listening to me, so I went down to the tube to check for myself.” Her voice had a soft country burr, Dorset perhaps.

“Come through. This is my kitchen but the others tend to turn up here for coffee. It’s not really fair because they have bigger bedrooms. There’s another kitchen upstairs but they use it as a storeroom. There’s a mountain