Off the Rails (3 page)

The recent change in King’s Cross had been startling, but even with buildings scrubbed and whores scattered, the area had retained enough of its ruffian character not to feel like everywhere else. Bryant belonged here. He basked in the neighbourhood’s sublime indifference to the passing of time and people.

Less than a week to solve a case. Well, they had risen to such challenges before. Carefully skirting the alarming hole in his office floor, Bryant donned his brown trilby, his serpentine green scarf and his frayed gabardine mackintosh, and headed out into the morning murk. At least it felt good to be back in harness. As he left the warehouse that currently housed the Peculiar Crimes Unit he almost skipped across the road, although to be fair he had to, as a bus was bearing down on him.

Arthur Bryant: Have you met him before? If not, imagine a tortoise minus its shell, thrust upright and stuffed into a dreadful suit. Give it glasses, false teeth and a hearing aid, and a wispy band of white hair arranged in a straggling tonsure. Fill its pockets with rubbish: old pennies and scribbled notes, boiled sweets and leaky pens, a glass model of a Ford Prefect filled with Isle of Wight sand, yards of string, a stuffed mouse, some dried peas. And fill its head with a mad scramble of ideas: the height of the steeple at St Clement Danes, the tide table of the Thames, the dimensions of Waterloo Station, and the MOs of murderers.
On top of all this, add the enquiring wonder of a ten-year-old boy. Now you have some measure of the man.

Bryant jammed the ancient trilby harder on his bald pate and fought the rain on the Caledonian Road. Typically, he was moving in the wrong direction to the elements. He seemed to spend his life on an opposite path, a disreputable old salmon always determined to head upstream.

As he marched, he tabulated life’s annoyances in escalating order of gravity. He was sleeping badly again. He had forgotten to take his blue pills. His left leg hurt like hell. He had six days in which to close the Unit’s cases, and no money to pay his staff. He was likely to be thrown out of his home any day now. A good officer had died in the line of duty. And he had a murderer on the loose who was likely to return and commit further acts of violence. Not bad for a Monday morning. With a gargoyle grimace, he looked up at the rain-stained clouds above and muttered a very old and entirely unprintable curse.

Everyone talks about the unpredictable weather in London, but it actually has a faintly discernible pattern. At this time of the year, the second week in May, caught between the dissipation of winter and the failed nerve of spring, the days were drab, damp and undecided, the evenings clear and graceful, swimming pool blue melting to heliotrope, banded altostratus clouds forming with the setting of the sun. You can forgive a lot when a dim day has a happy ending.

On this Monday morning, though, there was no hint of the fine finish yet to come. Bryant made his way to the threadbare ground-floor flat in Margery Street where their escaped assassin, Mr Fox, had been living.

The building was a pebble-dashed two-storey block set at an angle to the road, possessing all the glamour of an abandoned army barracks. Dan Banbury, the Unit’s Crime Scene Manager,
had already been at work here over the weekend, tying off the apartment into squares for forensic analysis. Bryant stepped over the red cords in his disposable shoe covers, but managed to lose one and dislodge a stack of magazines on the way.

‘Just sit over there on the sofa, can you?’ Banbury snapped irritably. ‘Stay somewhere I can see you. You’re supposed to wear a disposable suit.’

‘I am. Got it from a secondhand stall on Brick Lane.’

‘At least put your hands in your pockets. There’s supposed to be a constable on guard to log visits but Islington wouldn’t provide one. Some stupid dispute over jurisdiction.’

‘You’re an SCO, you can let in who you want. Have you had your ears lowered?’

‘Oh, my nipper came back from school with nits and wanted his hair cut off, but he wouldn’t let me do it until I’d tested the electric shaver on myself. I went a bit too short.’

‘Wise lad.’ Bryant stuck his hands in his coat and found a boiled sweet under the pocket fluff. He sucked at it ruminatively, looking about. ‘Still using pins and bits of string? I thought you could do it with a special camera now.’

‘That’s right. Buy me the equipment and I’ll mark out the grid electronically. I think it only costs seven grand.’

‘Point taken. Bagged much up?’

Banbury sat on his heels and massaged his back. He had been staring at biscuit crumbs and dead flies for the last half hour. ‘There’s no physical evidence to take.’

‘Don’t be daft. There’s always evidence.’ Bryant sucked a bit of fluff off his barley sugar sweet and flicked it onto the floor.

‘Not in this case.’

‘Have you started on the bedroom?’

‘Not yet. But if you’re going to poke around in there, please don’t—you know—just
don’t.
’

Bryant was infamous for his habit of traipsing through crime scenes and fingering the evidence. He had begun his career at a time when detectives had been trained to merely observe with their eyes rather than to illuminate body fluids with blue lights and Luminol reagents. These days, specialist equipment came with specialists who charged by the hour. Many routine cases of criminal damage and assault were dumped simply because it was too slow and expensive to send away samples.

Bryant stood at the head of Mr Fox’s narrow bed and studied the room. No books on display. Hardly any furniture. A framed photograph of a girl with long blond hair and blue eyes, vacuous to the point of derangement. It was the photograph that had come with the frame. Mr Fox was a human sponge, a magnet for the knowledge of others, but he had no interest in real human beings, and therefore possessed no real friends. He couldn’t trust himself in any relationship that demanded honesty.

According to the rental records, their murderer had lived here for almost ten years under the name of Mr Fox. Yet there was no character to be found in these rooms, nothing that would reveal his personality traits or give any clue to his real identity. Most people’s hotel rooms offered up more than this. To Mr Fox, the flat was a place to sleep and visit periodically for a change of clothes, but even here he had been careful not to leave spoor.

‘Fox,’ said Bryant aloud. ‘Dictionary definition: a wary, solitary, opportunistic feeder that hunts live prey. Good choice of a name. No sign of who he really is, I suppose.’

‘Nothing,’ Banbury called back. ‘It’s really odd. You and John met the man. You interviewed him for hours. You didn’t get anything at all?’

‘We did, but it was all lies. Our mistake was taking what we
saw at face value. The man played us beautifully. I don’t understand how he disarmed me. I’m usually so suspicious.’

Bryant felt that he understood very little about serial killers. Demonstrable motivation was the keystone of criminology, and just as altruists made the best benefactors, murderers were at their most comprehensible when it was possible to see what they gained from their actions. This chap was a total cipher.

Mr Fox should have been easy to find. After all, he had initially killed for gain, not because he derived pleasure from it. But, Bryant wondered, would he
have
to continue killing, now that he had discovered the taste?

A parasite,
he thought.
He takes and takes without giving anything back, and remains in place until the host is dead.
He studied the lair of his quarry, and felt an ominous settling in his stomach that warned him of imminent danger, although it might have been the germs on the brittle candy in his mouth.

A
serial killer,’ said Banbury, standing up to stretch his aching calves. ‘That’s what I reckon we’ve got here. We’ve not had many of them at the PCU, have we?’

‘Not proper saw-off-the-arms-and-legs-boil-the-innards-put-the-head-in-a-handbag-and-throw-it-from-a-bridge jobs, no.’ When it came to fathoming the private passions of serial killers, Bryant felt lost. What were their most notable attributes? Solitude and self-interest. The rest must surely be conjecture. Novels and films were filled with the abstruse motivations of intellectual murderers—fictional killers carved designs into corpses according to biblical prophecies and hid body parts in patterns that corresponded to Flemish paintings—but the reality was that the act of murder remained as squalid and desperate as it had always been. It was the province of the spiritually impoverished.

Bryant dug out a none-too-clean handkerchief and blew his nose noisily. ‘Why do you think he’s a serial killer?’

‘Well, here’s the thing, Mr Bryant. It’s very hard to completely hide your personality. I always know when my son’s been in my room, no matter how hard he tries to cover his tracks.’

‘The poor little bugger’s got a forensic scientist for a father. How can he ever hope to pull the wool over your eyes?’

‘And we always know where you’ve been—we follow the smell of your pipe, the mud and the sweets wrappers. It’s easier if you’ve no personality there to begin with. And serial killers suffer from a sort of moral blankness. There was a case in America, a young couple, Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo. They were known as the Ken and Barbie Killers because they were middle-class WASPs. In the trial notes, the prosecution asked Karla how she could sit downstairs reading while her husband murdered a young girl upstairs. Do you know what she replied? “I’m quite capable of doing two things at once.” Blankness, see? And they go about things in the wrong way. Karla was worried that she’d leave behind evidence, so she shaved a victim’s head. That really confused the profilers, who thought it must be a psychosexual signature, but she’d done it so she wouldn’t have to throw away the rug that the corpse was lying on. She was more concerned about the rug than the murdered girl.’

‘And you can see something like that here, can you?’ Bryant could not appreciate the silence of empty souls; his passions were too rich and various. They included Arthurian history, anthropology, architecture, alchemy and abstract art, and those were just the A’s. He let his partner handle the messy human stuff. While he appreciated the biological intricacies of the heart, for him its spirit remained forever encrypted.

An absence of personality. Banbury’s right. Mr Fox takes alienation to a new level. He examines others as if they’re circuitry diagrams.
Bryant studied the murderer’s cold, bare little bedroom
in wonder.
Mr Fox sees this weakness as a skill, but we have to make it the cause of his downfall.

The room was as dead as an unlit stage set.
Ten years,
he thought.
That’s how long you’ve been hiding your true nature. When did you come to realise you were different, Mr Fox? What happened to make you like this? Do you even remember who you once were?

Bryant knew that the man they were looking for had befriended several local residents. They had visited him, and Mr Fox had socialised with them in order to use their knowledge of the area. Had he let them inside the flat? Why not—he had nothing to hide here. He was an actor who adopted personalities and characteristics that he thought might prove useful. Actors were good at doing that. How many books had been written about Sir Alec Guinness without ever revealing what he was truly like?

‘When you report in to Janice,’ he told Banbury, ‘get her to circulate Mr Fox’s description to acting schools, would you? There are several in the immediate area.’ The CSM threw Bryant a intrigued look as he repacked his kit. ‘This ability to deceive might be rooted in some kind of formal training.’

Bryant could only dimly sense his quarry. There were people out there who were touched by nothing. The damaged ones were the most dangerous of all. He needed some concrete facts. But even the people who had been befriended by Mr Fox seemed to recall nothing about him. In a world of streaming data, how could one man leave behind so little?

‘Dan, can I borrow you for a minute?’ Banbury was good at repopulating empty rooms; he could put flesh back on the faintest ghosts. Everyone at the unit knew that Banbury had been a lonely child, overweight and socially lost, locked in his bedroom with his flickering computer screens. Perfect PCU material in training, as it turned out.

Banbury dusted powder from his plastic gloves with an air of expectation. ‘Mr Bryant?’

‘What can you tell me about Mr Fox from this room? I don’t mean on a microscopic level, just in general. There must be something. I can’t read much at all.’ Bryant looked around at the IKEA shelves, the cheaply built bed, the bare cupboards.

‘You met him, Mr Bryant. You know what he looks like.’

‘That didn’t tell me a lot. He stuck to answering questions, gave us facts without opinions, avoided bringing himself into the conversation. He’s extremely clever at not sticking in the memory, especially a memory like mine.’

‘Well, give me your impression.’

‘I don’t do impressions. Let me think. Slight but muscular. About five ten. Smooth, unmemorable face, like a young actor without makeup. Fair complexion. Grey eyes. Not much hair, although I have a feeling he shaved his hairline. I wish we’d had a chance to photograph him. I got one interrogation in before going to brief the others—entirely my fault; I was anxious to get down the details of the case. We should photograph them on arrest, the way they do in America. John took a picture on his mobile phone, but the room was dark and it didn’t come out very well.’

‘Okay, so we don’t have an ID for him, but there’s a piece of face recognition software that might pick up his main features from Mr May’s shot. Maybe we can find a match. That’s assuming he has a record.’ Banbury took a few steps forward, pinched his nose, leaned, peered, scratched at his stubbly head. ‘I’ve already had a good look around, of course—’

Of course you have,
thought Bryant.
Natural curiosity got the better of you. We all want to know about the kind of man who can kill without thinking twice.

‘I think he’s probably lived here since his late teens, which makes him just under thirty. A loner from a broken home. Very closed off about the past. Something bad happened there that he doesn’t want to remember—there’s usually some kind of family trouble in the background. We know that his friendships are cultivated for their usefulness, and any emotions he expresses are meticulously faked. The habit of never presenting his true self to anyone is probably so ingrained that he wouldn’t be able to reveal himself now if he tried. A classic user, unemotional and unrepentant. You tell ’em they’ve done wrong and they look at you as if you’re speaking French. This really does place him in the serial killer category. Clever planning, no witnesses, no evidence; it’s a pattern. I bet he hasn’t used his real name for so long that he’s almost forgotten it. Probably OCD. A fantasist, a re-inventor, but it has all come out of necessity.’