Although the tribunal was reasonably satisfied that no member of the Peculiar Crimes Unit could be held responsible for the unforeseen events occurring on your premises, we do not feel that full autonomy can be returned to the Unit until a series of regulatory safeguards have been put in place to ensure that the impossibility of such an incident –
“Oh, for God’s sake get on with it!” Arthur Bryant complained at the page, balling it up and disdainfully throwing it over his shoulder as he skipped to the final sheet. He had filched the report from Raymond Land’s mailbox and was vetting it before the acting chief arrived for work. “Let’s see – ‘inadequate safeguards’ yadda yadda yadda ‘irregular procedures’ yadda yadda ‘unnecessary risk factors’, all predictable stuff. Ah, here’s the bit I was expecting – ‘because the perpetrator of these crimes was allowed to escape and is still at large, he remains a potential menace to society. Therefore we cannot consider fully reinstating the PCU until he is apprehended’. In other words, catch him but don’t expect us to help you with additional resources. Bloody typical. Oh, listen, you’ll like this bit. ‘Due to the financial reorganisation of the Home Office’s outsourced operations units, you have until the end of the week (Saturday at six P.M.) to conclude this and any other unfinished investigations in order to qualify for annual funding’. So he wants us to achieve the impossible in less than one week or he and his ghastly boss Oskar Kasavian will cut us off without a penny. ‘Your Obedient Servant, Leslie Faraday’. Who signs their letters like that anymore? Anyway, he’s not our Obedient Servant, but I suppose he couldn’t sign it Sad Porky Timeserver or Snivelling Little Rodent.”
With increasing age, the grace notes of temperance, balance, harmony and gentility are supposed to appear in the human heart. This was not entirely true, however, in Arthur Bryant’s case. He remained acidulous, stubborn, insensitive and opinionated. In addition, he was getting ruder by the day, as the byzantine workings of the British Home Office sucked away his enthusiasm for collaring killers.
Bryant started to crumple up the rest of the memo, then remembered he wasn’t supposed to have seen it, and flattened it out imperfectly. He fished the other pages out of the bin, but now they were smeared with the remains of last night’s fish and chips.
“I don’t know why you get so het up, Arthur. What did you honestly expect?” John May carefully pinched his smart pin-striped trousers at the knee and bent to give him a hand picking up the pages. “A man kills three times, is arrested by us, breaks out of a locked cell, stabs a police officer in the neck and vanishes. We were hardly going to be rewarded for our efforts.”
“What about the innocent people we protected? The deaths we prevented?” Bryant demanded, appalled.
“I think they’re happier counting the millions of pounds we saved them.” May rose, twisted his chair and flopped down, stretching himself into a six-foot line. “Just think of all the companies that would have pulled out if we hadn’t been able to secure the area.”
“What a case for my memoirs,” Bryant muttered. “Three mutilated bodies found on the mean streets of King’s Cross. Murders committed solely for financial gain by a slippery, adaptable thief who’s grown up in the area around the terminus, a small-time crook propelled to the status of murderer when a robbery went wrong. You know what’s happened, don’t you? For the first time in his life this Mr Fox has been made to feel important. The escalation of his criminal status, from burglar to hired killer, has increased his determination to stay free.”
There was a darkness at the heart of this chameleon-like killer that the members of the Peculiar Crimes Unit had underestimated. For a while it had felt as if gang war was breaking out in the area, but by getting to the root of the crimes, the detectives had managed to soothe public fears and reassure investors that the newly developing region was still open for business. In the process, however, they had lost an officer, and had been unable to stop their quarry from escaping back into the faceless crowds.
Bryant pottered over to the sooty, rain-streaked window and tapped it. “He’s still out there somewhere,” he warned, “and now he’ll do one of two things. Having had his fingers badly burned, he’ll either vanish completely, never to be seen again, or he’ll returneth like a dog to vomit, just to taunt me further. Proverbs chapter twenty-six, verse eleven.”
“I don’t understand,” said May. “Why are you taking this so personally?”
“Because I’m the one he’s after. DuCaine just got in the way.” Bryant had never exhibited much empathy with his co-workers, but this struck May as callous even by his standards.
“Liberty DuCaine’s parents have just lost a son, Arthur, so perhaps you could keep such thoughts to yourself. Don’t turn this into a private feud. It concerns all of us.” May rose and left the room in annoyance.
Bryant was sorry that the lad had died – of course he was upset – but nothing could bring DuCaine back now, and the only way they could truly restore order was by catching the man responsible for his murder. With a sigh he popped open his tobacco tin and stuffed a pipe with ‘Old Arabia’ Navy Rough-Cut Aromatic Shag. His gut told him that Mr Fox would quickly resurface, not because the killer had any romantic longing to be stopped, but because his rage would make him careless. His sense of respect had been compromised, and he was determined to make the police pay for cornering him.
I’ll get you, sonny, Bryant thought, because I owe it not just to DuCaine, but to every innocent man, woman and child out there who could become another of your statistics. You’ll turn up again, soon enough. You’ve tasted blood now. The need to let others see how big you’ve grown will drive you back out into the light. When that happens, I’ll have you.
Unfortunately, Bryant tried to avoid reminding himself, it would need to happen this week.
∨ Off the Rails ∧
2
Choreography
DC Colin Bimsley and DC Meera Mangeshkar were watching the train station. They had no idea what their suspect might look like, or any reason to assume he would appear suddenly before them on the concourse. But Mr Fox knew his terrain well and rarely left it, so there was a chance that even now he might be wandering through the Monday morning commuters. And as the St Pancras International surveillance team was more concerned with watching for terrorist suspects after a weekend of worrying intelligence, it fell to the two detective constables to keep an eye out for their man. At least it was warm and dry under the great glass canopy.
Each circuit of the huge double-tiered terminus took half an hour. Bimsley and Mangeshkar wore jeans and matching black nylon jackets with badges, the closest anyone at the PCU could come to an official uniform, but Bimsley was a foot taller than his partner, and they made an incongruous pair.
“Down there.” Meera pointed, leaning over the balustrade. “That’s the third time he’s crossed between the bookshop and the florist.”
“You can’t arrest someone for browsing,” Bimsley replied. “Do you want to go and look?”
“It’s worth checking out.” Meera led the way to the stairs. Colin checked his watch: 8:55 A.M. The Eurostar was offloading passengers from Brussels and Paris, the national rail services brought hordes of commuters from the Midlands and the north, the tubes were disgorging suburbanites and reconnecting them to overland services. Charity workers were stopping passers-by; others were handing out free newspapers, packets of tissues and bottles of water; a sales team was attempting to sell credit services; the shops on the ground-floor concourse were all open for business – and there was a French cheese fair; tricolour stalls had been set out down the centre of the covered walkway. Travellers seemed adept at negotiating these obstacles while furling their wet umbrellas and manhandling their cases through the crowds. Was a murderer moving among them?