effort to jump the gap into the carriage, but he made it just before the doors closed. In fact, the door shut on the tail of Hillingdon’s coat, trapping it.
“I’m annoyed about this,” said Dutta. “Somebody really should have cautioned him.”
They watched as the student pulled at the tail of his coat, which remained trapped in the door. A moment later, the carriage doors opened again while he was still pulling, so that he fell over, vanishing from view.
“If you ever see me that drunk,” said May, “shoot me.”
“The train remained here a little longer than usual. The last one of the night often does that, to pick up the last few stragglers,” said Dutta, accelerating the footage. He slowed it down once more as the tube doors opened and closed, and the train started to move out.
“If Hillingdon got on the 12:24, it means your Miss Cates lied,” said Bryant. “She’s been playing you for a fool.”
“She seemed sincere enough.” May frowned, puzzling. “I don’t see what she would have to gain by making up the episode.”
“To throw you off the track of something else?” Bryant suggested. “You said she’d been reading about vanishing passengers. It looks to me like they’re in it together.”
“Then where did he go?” asked May.
Bryant pulled his sagging trilby back onto the crown of his head. “Next stop, Russell Square station,” he replied.
? Off the Rails ?
24
Phantom Passenger
Shiny red arches, leaf green corridors; the tube stations of London had once sported a uniform look, just as the roads had been matched in neat black-and-white stripes. In the 1980s they received a disastrous cosmetic makeover. Ignoring the fact that the system was coming apart at the seams, lavish artworks were commissioned and left unfinished, stations were closed instead of being repaired, and only a handful of the oldest remained unspoiled. Russell Square was one of the few that survived. Similar in style to the tube at Mornington Crescent, the frontage of crimson tiles, the blue glass canopy and the arched first-floor windows remained intact. The station was largely used by tourists and students staying in the nearby hotels and hostels, so the entrance was always crowded with visitors consulting maps.
Mr Gregory, the stationmaster, was a thin, peppery man with a face that, even in repose, made him look like he was about to sneeze. He greeted the two detectives with a decongestion stick wedged up his right nostril. “I’m sorry,” he apologised. “My passages get bunged up in dusty atmospheres.”
“You picked the wrong job, then, didn’t you?” said Bryant with a mean laugh.
“It’s not the station, it’s pollen from over there.” Mr Gregory pointed to the tree-filled square that stood diagonally across from them. “Too much bloody fresh air coming in.” He led the way behind the barriers, ushering them through. “Can I get you anything?”
“A cup of tea and a Garibaldi biscuit would hit the spot.” Bryant looked around the monitoring station, a small bare room with just two monochrome monitors on a desk, one focussed on each of the platforms. “You don’t have a camera over the entrance door?”
“No, someone’s always here keeping an eye out. It’s an old-fashioned system, but I find it works well enough. LU head office wasn’t happy but I told them not everything has to be high-tech. That’s an original Victorian canopy. I don’t want dirty great holes drilled through it.”
“A man after my own heart,” Bryant agreed, finding a place to sit.
“A Mr Dutta from King’s Cross called and told me you were on your way. He said you wanted to see the arrival of yesterday’s 12:26 A.M. It’ll take me a few minutes to cue up the footage. Our regular security bloke isn’t here today; he’s up before Haringey Magistrates’ Court for gross indecency outside the headquarters of the Dagenham Girl Pipers.”
“So you’re not fond of fresh air, then.” May changed the subject with less fluidity than he’d hoped.
“Not really, no,” Mr Gregory sniffed. “My lungs can’t cope.”
“Only people usually complain about the poor air quality down there.”
Mr Gregory looked aghast. “That’s rubbish. Travelling on the tube for forty minutes is the equivalent to smoking two cigarettes, so I save a bit on fags. Plus it’s about ten degrees warmer on the platforms in winter. I’ve worked for London Transport for over twenty years, and I’ve got a lot of mates down the tunnels. There’s the casual workers, your economic migrants who’re just doing it for a job, like, and then there’s your tubeheads. It’s a place where you can forget the rest of the world.”
“So is the Foreign Legion, but that doesn’t make it a good thing,” Bryant pointed out.
“I hold the world record for visiting all two hundred and eighty-seven stations in one go, you know,” Mr Gregory told them. As a conversational gambit it was chancey at best. “I did the entire network in eighteen hours, twenty minutes.”
“Is that a popular sport?”
“Oh, yes.”
“You do surprise me.” Bryant pantomimed stifling a yawn.
“People have been beating the time since 1960. There’s a set of rules laid down by the Guinness World Records, but that’s just the start – we also hold the annual Tube Olympics, and there are all sorts of challenge versions.”
“Really,” said Bryant flatly.
“Oh, yes, like the ABC Challenge – that’s where we have to visit twenty-six tube stations in alphabetical order – the current record for that is five hours twenty minutes – and the Bottle Challenge.”
“What’s that?” asked May, trying to show an interest while they watched for the footage.
“Look at the centre of the underground map,” Mr Gregory instructed him. “The lines form the shape of a bottle on its side. That’s the circuit. My aim is to beat the record of two hours thirteen minutes.”
“This is all very riveting,” said Bryant, “but might we get back to the matter in hand?”
“Here we go. The train came in just under a minute late.” The stationmaster clicked out the lights, and the trio watched the screen.
The monitor display revealed an angled shot of the silver carriages pulling into the platform. “Can you home in on a specific carriage?” May asked.
“Which one do you want?”
“The third from the end.”
“Which end?”
May decided not to point out that there was only one end to a train arriving at a station, for fear of sounding pedantic. The stationmaster expertly panned along the train and settled the screen on the correct carriage. The shot was just wide enough to include all three exit doors, which now slid open. Inside, all was bright and bare.
“I don’t believe it,” Bryant exclaimed. “The damned thing’s empty!”
“There must be some mistake,” May told the stationmaster. “This can’t be the right train.”
Mr Gregory tapped the numerals at the bottom of the screen with his forefinger. “That’s the time code, 12:27 A.M., right there. There’s no tampering with that.”
“You’re sure this is yesterday?”
“Definitely. And it’s the last train through. The journey took two minutes fifty seconds.”
“We saw him get on,” said Bryant. “Could the train have stopped anywhere on the way?”
“No, there’s no junction at Russell Square; it’s a straight line without any branch-offs. Even if it halted for some reason, the doors wouldn’t open. Nobody could have got out. You can interview the train driver if you want, but he’ll tell you the same thing.”
“What about between the carriages? The connecting doors are kept unlocked, aren’t they?”
“That’s right, but they only open into other carriages, so no-one could get off. Let’s see who alighted here.” Mr Gregory panned along the entire length of the train. “There you are, only two passengers.” He zoomed in on them. One was a small elderly man laden with plastic shopping bags, barely over five feet tall. The other was an
