“Fingers. The killer climbed up onto that row of seats, stood on their backs, swung on the metal lintel to get momentum, then just let go. She wouldn’t have seen or heard a thing, with the train approaching. The boots smacked hard into her back, the killer dropped down and ran off. How insane is that?”
“It’d take some nerve.” Giles flicked wet blond hair out of his eyes. “Can you get prints from them?”
“I’ll try but it looks like the dust got pulled off in the process, leaving unmarked bare metal underneath. The whole thing probably only took three or four seconds. No cameras to pick up her final moments. No-one else on the platform. They’re going to hold a couple of the passengers for witness statements, but my guess is that the windows of the train would have obscured their vision – it’s been chucking it down for the last couple of hours, and the platform’s shockingly underlit. If the killer was wearing something dark to blend in, no-one would have even seen them.”
“Two deaths in the same group of friends. Your old man’s going to go crazy.”
“He’s not ‘my old man’,” said Banbury with a grim laugh. “You’re still attached to the Unit, matey. Don’t worry, though, from what I hear we’ve got the whole of tomorrow to work out what happened before we’re kicked back out on the streets. At least you’ve got somewhere to go. I’ll be down the Job Centre again.”
♦
For the next half hour they worked quietly beside each other in the falling rain, while the local police had loud arguments with each other about infringement of jurisdiction.
“Always the same with the Met,” Banbury muttered, searching the wet ground for evidence. “They’re more worried about who gets the case than that poor girl on the tracks. Hang on a minute.” He took his Maglite to the waiting room, crouched down and carefully picked up something he had glimpsed on the floor, bagging it. “What does that look like to you?” he asked Kershaw. Raising the bag into the light, he displayed an inch-long sliver of curved grey plastic.
“No idea. There’s a fragment of raised lettering on the inside, very small,” said the coroner. “Let me see?” He took out Bryant’s old magnifying glass and read: rty UC.
“Pretty clear to me,” he decided. “Property of University College Hospital. Standard NHS typeface. Looks like a piece from a plastic leg cast. Keep looking around.”
Banbury climbed over the platform fence and conducted a search of the gorse bushes behind the waiting room. A few minutes later he re-emerged covered in mud and brambles, carrying a dark bundle. “You’re going to love this,” he told Kershaw. “I think the overcoat got discarded before the killer carried out that little trapeze stunt.”
“Can you identify it?”
Banbury unfurled the rainbow-striped material before the coroner. “It looks like the one Matthew Hillingdon was wearing the night he was killed.”
“You’re telling me Miss Field was pushed under a train by a girl with a broken leg and a dead man,” said Kershaw. “Bryant’s going to love this.”
∨ Off the Rails ∧
40
Conflicting Evidence
The warehouse on the Caledonian Road was a good venue for a wake, which was just as well, as the PCU’s Saturday morning debriefing session had turned into one.
It was 7:30 A.M., and the team looked beaten. No-one had enjoyed more than three hours’ sleep. The thought that Cassie Field’s death should have been preventable nagged at them all. Arthur Bryant had another worry. Each death brought a new level of confusion to the investigation. Especially as it seemed that the manager of the Karma Bar had been kicked under a train by Ruby Cates.
“As soon as this meeting is over, you’re going back to the house in Mecklenburgh Square to make an arrest,” Raymond Land warned. “I want that woman brought in and held here until we can make the charge stick.”
“We have to be sure first,” said Renfield, speaking for everyone. “I saw Ruby go into the house just after ten P.M., and she didn’t come back out.”
“She could have left through the back door and climbed over the garden fences into the street behind,” said Land. “She’s an athlete, isn’t she?”
“Yes, and her leg is in a cast.”
“Did you look to see if her leg was really broken when you matched up the fragment?”
“No, I didn’t have to take the cast off. I could see that the piece we found fitted perfectly.”
“That’s not the point.”
“I’ve warned her not to leave the house until we return.”
“I’m going to let you chair this, John.” Land rubbed his tired face. “I don’t know where we’re going anymore.”
May rose to his feet. “Okay, let’s go through alibis and evidence again, taking into account what happened last night. We’re not here to lay blame or assess performance. We need to put everything else aside and crack this case.”
He and Longbright read the statements from the Mecklenburgh Square housemates and the Greenwich witnesses, ploughing through the pathology reports and reconstructing what they knew about the deaths. Time lines were drawn across three whiteboards at the rear of the room. The low murmur of discussion sporadically burst into heated argument. The pipes ticked as the boiler struggled to warm the building. Meagre items of evidence were laid out and discussed, but after an hour they were no further on. Somewhere out in the surrounding streets, a killer watched and waited.
“What I see is that you’re building a case against Toby Brooke here,” said Meera hotly. “Brooke has no proper alibi for the night Hillingdon was murdered. He went missing again last night at the time Field died. But just look at him; common sense should tell you he wouldn’t hurt a fly. And what if it’s not someone from the house at all? All you’ve got is a travel card swiped through at Liverpool Street station on the night he died. Hillingdon might not even have used it himself.”
“They all deny returning it to his bedroom, but they swear no-one else has been in the house,” May remarked.
“Well, of course they’d deny touching it,” said Bryant, “because it would implicate whoever claimed to have returned the damned thing. Dan, where are we on physical evidence?”
Banbury consulted his notes. “The CCTV footage on Gloria Taylor and Matthew Hillingdon – completely unhelpful in Taylor’s case, but I’m trying some new frame-enhancement software on Hillingdon’s footage. There might be something before the end of the day on that. Nothing else new except the bootprints on Field’s back and the piece of plastic found in the waiting room, which we now know matches Cates’s leg cast. No prints from the door lintel, just smudges of dust. Giles and I carried out a re-enactment, and we’re pretty certain how Cassie’s bruises got there. No prints on the travel card or the rest of the stickers, but the initials on the card are definitely in Hillingdon’s handwriting. Mr Bryant and I knocked up a rudimentary tobacco spray. It was ridiculously easy to make.”
“What about their technology?”
“No surprises on any of the laptops, except that Toby Brooke has been buying a lot of expensive stuff on the Internet lately. We checked all the call logs on the phones, nothing untoward there. For all we know they might have had a few Pay As You Go handsets knocking about. We know there was a spare house phone for use in emergencies, but no-one can find it now. Theo Fontvieille remembers seeing a couple of others at the house, one with a Hello Kitty doll attached to it. Nobody will back him up on that.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah, the books about haunted underground stations might have had Cates’s name inside, but she swears it’s not her handwriting, and it turns out they were taken out from UCL’s reference library by Toby Brooke. A set of photographs from Hillingdon’s laptop appear to be close-ups of the seats of different tube trains. Oh, and somebody stole Theo Fontvieille’s Porsche last night.”