On the Loose (9 page)

‘There’s been a murder in King’s Cross,’ said May, duly prompted.

‘Hardly headline news.’ Bryant slouched further into his dressing gown. ‘I’d be more surprised if there hadn’t been.’

‘It’s a professional job.’

‘One for the Met, then. They have all the right contacts in that area. There are eleven recognised gangs in the borough of Camden alone.’

‘Except that in this case no-one has a clue who’s behind it. The victim’s remains haven’t been identified because his head was cut off and we don’t yet know if his fingerprints are on file. He’s been dead for a few days. I thought it might pique your interest.’

‘Well, you thought wrong,’ snapped Bryant. ‘You think every time someone dies my heart quickens? It doesn’t.’

‘You’re being so unfair, Mr Bryant,’ said Meera. ‘Why don’t you just get dressed and come and visit the crime scene?’

‘You come any nearer, young lady, and you shall get the benefit of my toasting fork where you least expect it.’ He turned back to his old partner. ‘I was looking through my casebook over the weekend, and realised that once you get beneath the unique circumstances of a crime, the perpetrators are depressingly similar. They’re selfish, blind, unpleasant people, and worst of all, they no longer have the ability to surprise me in any way.’

‘Perhaps not,’ said May, ‘but there’s a very good reason why you should be interested. It’s a case that could bring down the government.’

‘This kind of crime creates a potentially disastrous situation in the area,’ said Leslie Faraday. ‘King’s Cross—of all places—
the PM’s flagship development—you understand the implications.’

Faraday had taken to coming in on Saturday mornings because his supervisor did, and he was anxious to have his diligence noted. He ventured into Kasavian’s office with the trepidation of Van Helsing entering the lair of the undead. The room of casket-coloured oak had absorbed a hundred years of tobacco smoke before the banning of cigarettes, and somehow the very air seemed to be stained sepia. There were patches on the carpet where no light had ever fallen.

Oskar Kasavian winced at the watery morning sunlight and turned away from the window, slipping back into shadow. With his sharply hooked nose and pale, elongated features he reminded Faraday of
Nosferatu
in the 1922 German film version he had seen on a drizzly evening in November 1979 at the East Finchley Rex, an event he had never forgotten, because he never forgot anything. He had been on a date with a girl called Deirdre Fairburn who went out for a choc-ice halfway through the film and never came back. Faraday had remained in his seat to watch the end of the film because it was not the first time a girl had given him the slip.

‘Of course I understand. Do you know how much money the government is spending on security resources to convince investors that the area has been cleaned up? The return of organised crime is unthinkable. Have you spoken to Islington? I heard they had a suspect in custody.’

‘They seem to think the crime didn’t occur on their turf, but yes, they were holding a man called Rafi Abd al-Qaadir. They had no evidence and were forced to let him go, thanks to our Mr Bimsley, who brought in a lawyer to argue on his behalf. Now they’re trying to track down the Nigerian businessman who
sold the lease of the shop where the body was found. Trouble is, the place was open and empty for a month. They’re checking their usual contacts, but I can tell they don’t know what to make of the death. I’m waiting for a pathology report.’

‘Have you at least managed to keep this away from the press?’

‘For the moment, but there’s no way of stopping information from getting out so long as it’s a publicly registered CID case. I’ve already warned APPRO not to issue any kind of statement.’

‘St Pancras International is right next door, and it’s the terminal for the next Olympics. They’re about to open a luxury hotel that will house senior members of the Olympic Committee not five hundred yards from where this corpse was found. If anyone at the PM’s office gets wind of this we will be crucified.’ Kasavian looked like a man who was no stranger to crucifixion, or subsequent resurrection.

‘There may be one solution,’ Faraday ventured, ‘but I don’t think you’re going to like it.’

Back in Chalk Farm it was like old times, insofar as the detectives were arguing. ‘All you have to do is talk to Leslie Faraday,’ said John May. ‘He owes you several favours. If he can be persuaded—’

‘You’re forgetting one thing.’ Bryant leaned forward, his blue eyes widening. ‘I am not interested.’

‘Come on, we’re wasting our time here,’ said Meera, grabbing May’s arm. ‘I’m disappointed in you, Mr Bryant, after all your lectures about looking for the unexpected in everyday crimes.’

‘That’s because I finally realise there’s nothing unexpected anymore,’ Bryant replied, slumping back.

‘That’s not true and you know it. Unexpected things happen all the time. I was coming out of a nightclub on Friday night
when some bloke dressed as a bloody stag attacked me in the street, slashed my arm and ran off.’

Bryant was brought up short. ‘A stag?’ he repeated.

‘Yeah, you know, big animal, they have them in the countryside or in zoos or something. Furry coat, antlers, the lot.’

‘Where was this?’

‘Right in the middle of King’s Cross, the bit behind the cross-channel railway line that’s a dug-up field.’

‘You’re talking about the triangular piece of land between the Battlebridge Basin and the Eurostar terminal?’

‘Yeah, I suppose so.’ Meera looked puzzled.

‘You have to show me exactly where this happened, right now. Find my shoes, someone.’ Moments later Bryant had shucked his dressing gown and was scrabbling to get into a grubby old herringbone overcoat, still clutching his walking stick, which became accidentally threaded through one of the sleeves, so that as he floundered about he resembled a particularly disreputable scarecrow coming to life.

‘For God’s sake don’t just stand there, woman, help me get this blasted thing on properly!’ he shouted. Then he fell over.

‘Oh, Mr Bryant, you’re back!’ cried Alma Sorrowbridge, pulling him out of the fireplace and patting him down before anything could burst into flames.

¹
Person who betrays his or her own country by aiding the invading enemy, after Vidkun Quisling, the pro-Nazi Norwegian leader.

11
TREMORS

Y
ou know, I always felt that the Peculiar Crimes Unit might finally find its spiritual home in a railway terminus district like King’s Cross,’ said Bryant as the trio marched along York Way in blustery squalls of rain. He spoke above the ever-present
bourdon
of taxi engines, a low thrum that underscored life in the area from every dawn to every midnight.

The road behind the railway yards turned into the kind of strange no-man’s-land Bryant had often seen in London after the war. These urban limbos had been created by bomb damage and government indecision. With a nation to rebuild, cash for housing was in short supply. After the rubble from fractured terraces had been cleared away, the scarred earth remained as a slow-healing memory of the wounds inflicted by war. Children turned the chaotic rockeries of brick and plaster into fantasy lands, exploring for buried treasure. Rocket and dandelions sprang up between chunks of brickwork and rusting iron. If they were lucky, children might gleefully discover a live, undetonated bomb. Occasionally someone was blown sky-high.
Those were the days
, thought Bryant.

‘I don’t understand,’ May admitted. ‘You’re not interested in a mutilated corpse found in a derelict chip shop, but a drunk with
antlers in fancy dress annoying a couple of girls immediately gets your attention.’

‘That’s the difference between us,’ said Bryant, tapping the side of his head. ‘I always see the bigger picture.’

‘What bigger picture? What do you see that I’ve missed?’

‘Let’s find out if he’s left any tracks first. Meera, you lead the way. My energy’s coming back, but my legs don’t seem to have got the message yet.’ They picked a path through the geometry of scaffolding that had sprouted from the walls of King’s Cross station. The signs of construction and renewal were everywhere. Roads were closed; pipes were being lowered into trenches; a hundred canary-jacketed labourers crossed the roofs of half-renovated warehouses, bellowing to each other.

‘I remember when there were only fields and factories behind the station.’ Bryant waved his walking stick at a vast wall of blue-tinted wavy glass, the first of the new buildings to be completed. ‘Wild horses, bargees and gypsies. The ladies of the night brought so many punters to the grassy area beside the canal basin that it was nicknamed Pleasure Field.’

‘Must have been a long time ago,’ grunted Meera.

‘Not at all. Ten, maybe twelve years at the most. It’s changing fast now. Nearly all of the traditional gasholders have been dismantled, the old tenement buildings torn down. It was never pretty around here in my lifetime, but it had a rugged, dirty charm. My old man had many professions; one of them was as a street photographer. He showed me the pictures he took. There was a garden of rose bushes in front of the station. A licorice factory. An old theatre called the Regent, pulled down to make way for the town hall. And there was a wooden roller-coaster.’

‘It’s got a Starbucks now.’

Bryant gave a shrug. ‘It won’t be there for long. Nothing ever
stays around here. To my mind the symbol of King’s Cross is a sturdy drain-fed weed sticking out of a sheer brick archway, something that can survive in the most inhospitable circumstances. An honest area, in the sense of being without hypocrisy, and a true test for the urbanite. The buildings will rise and crumble to dust, but the people won’t change.’

From the corner of Wharf Road they could see a group of low brown buildings, Victorian warehouses that had somehow been spared the wrath of bombs and town planners. The structures huddled alone in a field of tractor-churned mud, bordered by railway embankments, the canal and the bare brick wall of the road that passed between them and the Eurostar railway terminal. The area roughly formed a great triangle, upon which was soon to rise a new town of glass and steel. The project was vast in scope and barely possible to imagine completed, even with the help of the computer-rendered images in its publicity brochures. Colleges and offices, shopping malls, public housing and luxury apartment blocks were to appear on a blighted site that had been alternately ignored and fought over for decades.

‘I wonder what they’ll find under all this soil.’ Bryant stopped to get his breath and tapped the muddy road with his walking stick. ‘In the Middle Ages this was part of the Great Forest of Middlesex, although it was inhabited in prehistoric times, of course. The first Paleolithic axe ever recognised in England was discovered near King’s Cross Road—in 1680, if memory serves.’

‘You were there, I suppose,’ said Meera. ‘The club’s this way.’

The Keys club was living on borrowed time. Having survived the death of the super-clubs and the return of acoustic music, it had remained true to its hard-house and electro roots, only to face annihilation at the hands of property developers. It had received a stay of execution when Camden Council rejected a plan which would have required the demolition of the listed
building it inhabited, but construction had started all around. Each day, the earthmovers came a little closer. The new town would spread out from its nexus at the shoreline of the Regent Canal. The first building, a shopping mall, was nearing completion. The site even had its own concrete plant; such was the quantity required to pave over so many acres of earth and landfill.

‘Meera, you were walking between the club and the road when you saw him, is that right?’ May was forced to shout above the roar of the industrial equipment as they approached.

‘See the tall spotlight, over there? I borrowed Dan’s fingerprint kit and came up here first thing this morning, before it started raining. I tried to lift prints from the pole but they were too badly damaged. He’d swung around and smudged them.’ She pointed to one of a dozen tall steel lampposts that kept the landscape illuminated at night.

The slippery mud made walking treacherous. May and Mangeshkar were forced to take Bryant’s arms to keep him upright.

‘I shouldn’t have worn Prada shoes,’ said May, watching as liquefied clay closed over his toe caps.

‘Not at your age, no,’ agreed Bryant. ‘You’ve always been a bit of a clotheshorse, haven’t you? Heaven knows how many people tramped across here on their way home after your scare, Meera.’

‘I wasn’t scared. The odd thing is I don’t think he meant to slash my arm. He sort of fell into me because I kicked him.’

‘You said he was wearing knives on his head. He’d already broken the law, albeit in a preposterous way.’

‘Yeah, but I was thinking… . It takes a certain type of mind to come up with antlers made out of knife blades. It was right here.’ She pointed to the chewed-up earth around the base of the anodised post.

‘Help me down,’ said May.

‘Ha!’ Bryant was triumphant. ‘It’s usually me who needs a hand down.’

‘I’ve only just recovered from an operation.’ May was indignant. ‘What’s that?’ He pointed to some matted strands of brown fur embedded in the mud. ‘Something from your stag-man?’

‘Probably hair from a passing rat,’ answered Bryant gloomily. ‘The canal system is besieged with them. They live off discarded chicken bones and grow to the size of Alsatians.’ He dug a small clear plastic bag from his overcoat pocket and passed it to his partner before creeping off in search of footprints.

The wind was sweeping across the great churned field, thumping against pallets and stacks of steel plate. Meera squinted at the dark tumble of the sky. ‘There’s something weird about this place,’ she muttered. ‘I don’t like it here.’

Bryant was interested. ‘Oh, why not?’

‘I don’t know. It doesn’t look right. Too bare.’

‘You don’t have the comfort of surrounding buildings. That’s because we’re on a hill. You don’t notice the gradient as you walk here. King’s Cross has a strange and convoluted history. There are spirits, of course—there always are near water and the poor. But there’s something else besides.’ He sniffed noisily. ‘An unrest. A disquietude. Even on a day of clear skies there’s something turbulent here that comes up through the soil. You can smell it in the stormy air, can’t you?’