“How do you know? It’s not on the CCTV.”
Giles ran a hand through his blond hair. “Well, the heaviness with which she landed. The angle of injuries. Mind you, I’m not sure the evidence would stand up in court. There’s nothing I can directly point to. Something just feels wrong about it. Then there’s this. Her doctor’s records show she suffered from Ménière’s disease. She was deaf in her right ear and was supposed to wear a small hearing aid, but her colleagues say she hated having to use it. So if somebody stumbled behind her or made a warning noise, she may not have heard it.” He opened a drawer beneath his examination table and produced a plastic packet of clothes. “Her outfit was very distinctive. Where is it? Ah, here. She was wearing this over her dress.” He held up a small red cardigan. In the middle of the back panel was a plastic sticker.
“Wait, I need my glasses.” Bryant dug out one of several pairs of spectacles that had become interlaced in his pocket. The lenses were so scratched that it was a miracle he could see anything at all. He examined the orange sticker. A line drawing showed the right half of a shaggy-haired male, standing with his arm raised and his legs apart. “It’s da Vinci’s figure of a man, surely, seen from the back?”
“Either somebody stuck it there or it came from the tube seat,” said Kershaw.
“Seems a bit unlikely, doesn’t it?”
“All sorts of odd things happen on tube trains. I’ve been going through my predecessor’s online logbook. Fascinating reading. Professor Marshall had a fellow in here, found dead on a Victoria Line tube. His trousers were burned, and there were skin blisters on the backs of his thighs. Turned out a workman had set a plastic canister filled with a corrosive chemical on the seat before him, and it had leaked into the cushion. This chap sat down, the caustic fluid went through his trousers and gave him the skin rash. The reaction raised his body temperature and caused a seizure.” He peered at the sticker, flicking a flop of hair from his eyes. “I don’t know, maybe it was put there by the person who pushed her. But I’m pretty certain she was pushed.”
“It’s not much of a start point, Giles, but I don’t think we’re going to get anything more from the CCTV. Can I take this?”
“Of course. I got a partial thumbprint from it. I ran it through IDENT1’s online database but drew a blank.” Kershaw carefully divorced the sticker from the cardigan and slipped it into a sample bag.
“It looks to me like a sticky-backed advert that got transferred from someone else during her journey,” said May.
“I don’t think so. The only fibres on the glue are from her coat and the train seat.”
“Then we concentrate on the logo itself.” Bryant was squinting at the symbol. “It might stand for something.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” he replied, adjusting his spectacles, “if it’s Leonardo da Vinci, perhaps she’d visited a place where you might be likely to find such a sticker, a museum shop perhaps.”
“The figure’s cut in half,” May pointed out. “You look at this and see da Vinci. I just see the letter K. As in Kaos.”
∨ Off the Rails ∧
11
Visibility
Mac was jittery. His old employer, Mr Fox, was out there somewhere, and was probably looking for him. He regretted ever having met the guy. He should have known from the start that it would end in trouble.
Mac had allowed himself to be picked up in St Pancras station, and had agreed to perform a few simple, entirely legal services – driving a van, acting as a contact for a client, nothing that would undermine his probation record. He had fulfilled his tasks and been paid well for them, but then something had gone wrong. The deal had ended in disaster. Mr Fox had screwed up, and Mac knew about it.
He chose not to look too deeply into what had happened; he suspected there had been a beating, possibly even a death. It was nothing to do with him. He didn’t want to know.
He had assumed that Mr Fox was a small-time crook of the kind you could find all over King’s Cross, the ones studying their phones in snack bars and stations, who made themselves available at short notice whenever middle-class urbanites decided their dinner parties should end with a few lines of coke. But Mr Fox was more than that. There were shadows in him that made Mac deathly afraid. The job had ended badly, as these things sometimes did, but Mac was fearful that Mr Fox would somehow blame him and come looking to take his pound of flesh. There was a terrifying irrationality about the man, and now Mac was peering around every corner with trepidation.
But Mac couldn’t get out of town, because he was working right outside the station. He’d needed to make money fast, so he’d borrowed some from a dealer in Farringdon and put it on an outsider running at Aintree because the tip was sweet as a nut, only somehow he got the wrong horse and it had run like a fat girl, coming in last. And now he needed to make some down payments before he got his head kicked off his shoulders. So he had taken a couple of legit jobs, one of which was handing out copies of the Metro to commuters. It meant making himself visible to as many people as possible. He knew it was the last thing he should be doing right now, but the need for cash had made him desperate.
On Monday evening, in what was already shaping up to be the wettest spring on record, he was standing on the pavement thrusting copies of the freesheet at pedestrians who would take three minutes to skim it before abandoning it on the tube, adding to the tons of rubbish and clutter no-one really wanted or needed.
As he passed out the papers, he flinched whenever anyone brushed against him, fearing an unseen tap on his shoulder. Then, by the station entrance, he thought he saw Mr Fox watching him from beneath the brim of a red Nike baseball cap.
But he looked different. A tanned face, a black soul patch, trendy glasses, thick upper-arm mass in his short sleeves – and now Mac had doubts, because if it really was him, Mr Fox had radically changed his appearance in a matter of days. When the shades came off, though, there was no hiding from those dead eyes. Mac would have known them anywhere.
He tried to ignore the motionless figure and kept on handing out papers. He wanted to run, but couldn’t move far from his station because two other vendors were staking out the other tube entrances, and his team leader would send him back if he tried to leave.
He stared at the great stack of freesheets on his cart, panic dancing in his brain. When he glanced back, the figure had vanished, and he wondered if his fearful mind was playing tricks. He needed to get away right now.
Mac dropped the papers back in his cart and took off. He was thinking fast – or at least, as fast as he could – about how to escape into the crowds.
He sent himself bouncing down the stairs into the station, Northern, Victoria and Piccadilly lines to the right, Metropolitan, District & Circle lines straight ahead. Office workers, tourists and students were milling about with bags and cases. People were walking so slowly, stopping to examine maps, just getting in the way. He pushed through the ascending travellers, down the next flight of steps, and was quickly caught up in a contraflow of commuters heading for the escalator.
So many people. A distressed woman trying to manoeuvre a double-width baby carriage, a crowd of arguing Spanish teenagers, a smiling old man carrying a cocker spaniel, a couple just standing there in the busiest section of the tunnel, bewildered and lost. Mac looked around, trying to sort through the oncoming faces. Some part of him had known all along that Mr Fox was a killer. Mr Fox knew that Mac knew, and perhaps nobody else at all knew because the man pushing through the ticket barrier toward him had taken care of them all.