Off the Rails (38 page)

Perhaps that was the answer; perhaps the entire interchange needed to burn again, to sear itself clean in a rising tide of flame. But no, that wouldn’t work now. Steel had replaced wood, smoke sensors and cameras lined the walls. And what would another conflagration resolve? The horror of the past could not be erased with a second atrocity. The memory of that terrible day could never be burned away.

Mr Fox allowed the silver skewer to slide down into his palm. He felt its cool heft in his hand, demanding to be used. Killing would calm him.

But now the doors of the Victoria Line train stood open, and Mac was free to board. If he did, Mr Fox knew he could lose the
opportunity presented by the crush of the anonymous crowd. He stamped hard on a woman’s foot and shoved her aside, moving in to commit the act that would provide him with a temporary respite from the ever-present pain of remembering.

Just as he reached toward Mac, however, a tall student stumbled into his path. The student was grabbing at his girlfriend’s hand, trying to twist a ring from her finger, and the girlfriend had turned to slap him in the face. The crowd—mostly made up of old ladies, it seemed—pushed back with force, and suddenly they seemed to have linked arms so that there was a solid barrier of them across his path. It was absurd, but he could not pass between them to reach his target. He watched, stalled, as Mac jumped to safety, moving nimbly between the closing doors of the carriage.

Now the tall student was twisting the girl’s hand and even Mr Fox heard the snap of her finger, saw her scream, knew that some other drama was unfolding before him, but all he could see was Mac escaping, getting away to some place where he could talk to the police, and then he knew he had lost, lost it all, because of the old ladies and this damned student and his stupid lovers’ tiff, and the needle-sharp point of the skewer had risen in his hand as if moving of its own accord.

He slammed it down into the student’s arm and pushed, shoved it through the artery above his wrist until the point emerged from the other side. But he couldn’t get the skewer back out, no matter how hard he pulled.

The student released the girl and collapsed with a roar of pain. The old farts before him were suddenly replaced with familiar faces, and he saw that he was surrounded by members of the Peculiar Crimes Unit.

The centre of the group slowly opened to reveal the crumpled face of Arthur Bryant, closely followed by John May. The
most humiliating moment came when a woman, the big blond detective sergeant they called Longbright, twisted the silver skewer from his grip and removed it from the victim, confiscating his beloved weapon.

From the day he watched the burning match tumble down the side of the escalator, a part of him had always prayed for this moment to arrive. With delicious anticipation, he waited to hear the words that would finally seal his fate.

Instead he saw Arthur Bryant look past him and announce, ‘Theodore Samuel Fontvieille, I am arresting you for the murders of Gloria Taylor, Matthew Hillingdon and Cassandra Field.’

T
wo arrests before six o’clock,’ Raymond Land was excitedly telling Leslie Faraday over the phone. ‘They’ve done it! No, I’ve no idea how. Nobody ever tells me anything. Oh, really? Oh, I thought you’d be pleased.’ Land found himself looking into the receiver, a dead line burring in his ear.

This time, Mr Fox found himself locked in a cell at Albany Street police headquarters, and there was no way for him to escape—not that he wanted to. On the contrary, he seemed almost relieved to be behind bars, as if somehow the memory of those painful years between his destruction of the tube station and his return to killing had finally been laid to rest.

He refused to speak to anyone, and flinched when his features were recorded, fearful that his true face might be placed on display for all to gawp at. And gawp they would, for even as he lay curled in the corner of his cell, his jacket thrown over his
eyes to shield them from the overhead cell lights that were never dimmed, the Home Office was leaking the story to the press.

Having been so protective of his true identity, Jonas Ketch, alias Lloyd Lutine, alias Mr Fox and a dozen other names, would now face his greatest fear—exposure of his most horrific, shameful secret. Thinking back to the moment when he ran sobbing up the escalator with the burning match in his hand, he buried his face ever more deeply within the cloth of his jacket, savouring these last few moments of darkness, knowing that the blaze of publicity would soon obliterate him, as the braying clamour of morons began.

The PCU had dragged all the members of the Mecklenburgh Square household back to the Unit’s headquarters for a final showdown, and this time batteries of police recorders and cameras were there to cover the event. Theo Fontvieille had been stitched and bandaged, and was seated with plastic ties binding his wrists. The others found chairs or spaces on the floor where they could sit. The two Daves had been sent away, despite their protestations that they hadn’t had time to repair the hole in Bryant’s floor, but everyone else was in attendance, and it was Arthur Bryant, of course, who chose to take the centre stage.

‘Well, it’s been quite a week for all of us,’ he said, looking around, his blue eyes shining, ‘but tougher for some than others. Now that we’re all together, I think we should dispense with formalities for a while and talk about what happened.’

‘We should be taking separate statements from each of them, sir,’ said Renfield, ‘to prevent corroboration.’

‘No, I think the only way to put this together is to hear everyone out,’ Bryant contradicted. ‘They’re not in the mood to
provide alibis for each other anymore.’ He turned to the students. ‘So, let’s imagine we’re playing a game. I’ll be the Bank. Although strictly speaking, Mr Nicolau, you should be the Bank, shouldn’t you?’

Nikos stared awkwardly at the others, wondering how much he should say.

‘Come, come, Mr Nicolau, this is no time to be shy. I imagine you were very excited when you came up with the idea for the game, weren’t you? All those nights spent online could finally be put to some use.’

Nikos cleared his throat and edged forward in his seat, conscious of the police cameras recording him. ‘Yeah, it was me who came up with it, but it was never meant to end up like this. I don’t know what Theo’s been up to because I had no part—’

‘Let’s just stick to the facts for now. We’ll have plenty of time later to ascertain everyone’s levels of involvement. Why did you come up with the game? When did you first think of it?’

‘It began in the Karma Bar,’ he mumbled. ‘A bunch of us were sitting around, and we were all complaining that we were broke.’

‘We were talking about our student loans, and the rent and all the bills,’ said Ruby. ‘I was always having to lend the others—’

‘Please, let’s stick to the point,’ warned Bryant. ‘We’ll get to you in due course, Miss Cates. Go on, Mr Nicolau.’

‘I said I thought we should try to make some money with online gambling. I knew a lot about statistics and had a few ideas for beating the odds. What I didn’t know was that
he
—’ here Nikos pointed angrily at Theo ‘—had been gambling online for quite a long time. I explained to the others that the main problem was the number of players. You’re more likely to die in a plane crash than win most lotteries, because there are too many punters participating. I said if we could just keep the number of players
limited, we stood a chance of making some real money. So we tried out the game for a few weeks, just accumulating small sums. Matt—Matthew Hillingdon—was the overall winner. But we realised that in order to make any decent amount of cash, everyone would have to put a lot more in the pot.’

‘Who came in on the game?’ asked May.

‘There were seven of us at first. But Cassie dropped out because she didn’t want anything more to do with Theo. He had started sleeping with Ruby.’

‘That’s not why she dropped out,’ said Theo quietly. ‘She couldn’t raise her share of the stake.’

‘So there were six players,’ Bryant prompted.

‘Yeah. We each put five grand in, but it still didn’t seem like enough if we were going for one winner.’

‘You were all broke, yet you managed to raise five thousand apiece,’ said May. ‘Obviously the definition of “broke” has changed a little since my day.’

‘My dad’s brother owns a chain of Greek restaurants,’ Nikos said. ‘He’s a complete idiot. On the same day of every month he takes a suitcase containing around sixty thousand pounds to his bank in Paris, all cash. He goes on the Eurostar. So on Monday morning I set up a flash mob in St Pancras station to create a diversion, and while that was happening Theo robbed him.’

‘It was like taking sweets from a very stupid child,’ said Theo. ‘He kept the bag attached to his wrist with plastic binders.’ He held up his own tethered wrist: ‘I just cut them with kitchen scissors while he was standing there watching everyone dance.’ He sniggered, looking to the others for approval.

‘So then we had a decent stake to work with,’ Nicolau continued. ‘Ninety grand in all. I wanted to find two more players to make it an even hundred thousand, but Theo wouldn’t let me. He really wanted to keep his odds of winning high.’

‘Yes, this image you perpetuate of the bored rich kid isn’t quite accurate, is it?’ said Bryant. ‘You’d run up some serious gambling debts, your last business venture—property, wasn’t it?—had failed spectacularly, your car was repossessed—not stolen—and your family had cut you off without a penny.’

‘You have no idea,’ said Theo. ‘I’d surrendered my savings, I sold my watch, my pen, everything I owned, and replaced them with fakes. You have to keep up appearances. Some thugs in Shoreditch were going to come round and break my arms if I didn’t pay them by the end of the week.’

‘Tell us what happened next.’

‘Well, now that we’d raised a decent stake, we started playing in earnest,’ said Nicolau. ‘Toby had been the previous week’s winner—six players, six days of the week—we drew straws to see who would get which day.’

‘And it was my turn to play again on Monday,’ said Theo.

‘How long had you been playing?’

‘This was week three. It’s an elimination game. We decided that each player should have three lives. If you were knocked out three times, you’d lose your stake and be out of the game. And I had two strikes against me. The winner of each week got what we called living expenses, until the final overall winner was decided.’

‘Of course, Toby had to flash his cash about,’ Sangeeta complained.

‘I think at this point you should tell us what the game involved.’ Bryant was striding about with his thumbs in his waistcoat like an old-time prosecutor. The image would have been more appealing if the waistcoat had not been held together with safety pins.

‘We wanted to come up with something that wasn’t just based on luck,’ said Nicolau. ‘We thought it should require some skill,
bravado even. I was talking to a guy who worked for London Underground, and he told me about a game he’d heard of, a gambling dare you could play on the tube. You pick a stranger, text the amount of your placed bet, then follow the stranger on their journey, and whatever they do scores you points.’ Nicolau was warming to his subject, forgetful of the fact that the game had ended in a series of brutal murders.

‘I laid down the ground rules. First, you send a photograph of the line you’re going to play on—we’d taken shots of the seat livery in all the different carriages—then you photograph your mark—the person you’ve picked to bet on. To make sure there’s no switching, you also put a sticker on their back to tag them in your pictures. Then you film the different things they do, like reading a book or listening to an iPod—all of the activities score points—and you send the results to the next player’s mobile to verify it. Then you score more points for how many stops they travel, and if they get off at the station you’ve pre-designated, you win that day’s pot.’

‘We weren’t allowed to talk to outsiders about the game,’ said Toby, his head in his hands. ‘I had to borrow the stake money from my uncle. I don’t know why I got involved.’

‘And with the aid of the robbery, you were able to up the ante,’ said Bryant.

‘It wasn’t a robbery.’ Theo was utterly dismissive of the idea. ‘It was taking money away from a total creep who would have only spent the profits from his shitty little restaurants on gold bath taps and plasma screens for his stupid villa in Cyprus. And it was my turn to play. I went to Bond Street tube and saw this woman in a bright red polka dot dress, and knew at once that I’d be able to track her through the system without losing her, because she looked so different from everyone else. Man, it was a total winning streak—everything I suggested she would do, she
did. I sent the photos and texts to Matt’s phone—he was going to be the next player—and told him that I staked her destination as King’s Cross. I’m good at reading people. I was sure she would get off there, and she did. I followed her up the escalator to the ticket barrier, and just as she got to it, the bitch turned around and went back down.