The Lure
DS Janice Longbright arrived at University College Hospital just as Tony McCarthy was emerging, limping through the swing doors. He waved her away as soon as he spotted her. “I just want to be left alone, okay? Don’t come near me. I don’t want no cops following me around all the time.”
“You’d rather have Mr Fox find you again?” asked Longbright, falling into step with him. “Next time he’s going to push that skewer through the soft underside of your jaw and up into your brain, assuming you have one. Is that what you want?”
“I can handle it.”
“How? Going to grow a moustache and dye your hair? Or have you got a gun at home? You’ll need it, because he’ll come after you again if you hang around his manor. Got somewhere else to go?”
“I can take care of myself.”
“You couldn’t take care of a spider-plant, Mac. Don’t you think the medical services are strained enough without them having to look after you?” She placed a strong hand on his skinny arm. “I think you and I had better go for a little talk.”
“I’ve got nothing to say to you.”
“You already admitted you know Mr Fox’s real identity.”
“No, I did not.”
Longbright looked into his bloodshot eyes. “Oh, you don’t remember, do you? Did they give you a bronchoscopy?”
McCarthy looked blankly at her.
“Did they stick a bloody great tube down your throat?”
“Yeah.”
She knew they had; she had seen the equipment being prepared on the day she visited the hospital. “It means you were dosed with a retro-amnesiac drug. You don’t remember anything, do you? You were whacked out on meds, Mac, that’s why you don’t recall shooting your mouth off about Mr Fox. Or should we call him Jonas Ketch? Thought you were being clever, did you, giving us a few clues about a prison teacher, when all the time you knew who he really was?”
That brought McCarthy to a halt. “You’re doing my head in, I don’t remember – ” he pleaded.
“I think you should be asking yourself why I’d even bother to save the life of a grubby little junkie like you.”
“I’m not using anymore – ”
“Pull the other one, Pinocchio. The worst part about being you must be waking up every morning and remembering who you are. Not that you’ll be waking up for much longer, with Ketch waiting to stick you.”
“What the hell do you want from me?” whined McCarthy, exasperated.
“Help me catch him and I’ll save your miserable, wasted little life,” answered Longbright.
♦
It was 2:14 on Saturday afternoon, a relatively busy time at the King’s Cross intersection, but today the Northern Line was seriously overloaded with passengers. Anjam Dutta set down his coffee and shifted his attention from screen to screen.
“We’ll have to shut Staircase C ahead of the rush hour,” he instructed. “And reroute the incoming Blacks across to Navy.” The safety-and-security team referred to the tube lines by their colours when they were working full-throttle. “What’s happening out there today?”
He studied the two cameras trained on the main ticket hall. “We’ve accounted for the Arsenal charity match and the Trafalgar Square rally – remind me what that’s for?”
“Something to do with global warming,” said Sandwich. “There’s an anti-fur demo in Oxford Street, but West End Central’s advice is that it’ll be pretty small.”
“The traffic’s still way up for a Saturday. You haven’t picked up anything on the net? Anyone running RSS feeds?”
“Local news, Sky, BBC, London Talk Radio, nothing unusual I can see,” said Marianne, “but you’re right, there’s definitely something going on.”
“Keep your eyes open. If it gets any worse, we’ll have to partially shut the station. This is really weird.” Dutta mopped his forehead and watched as a fresh surge of passengers descended the staircase to the ticket hall.
♦
Janice Longbright wanted to get McCarthy off the street, so she dragged him into the New Delhi Indian Restaurant on Drummond Street, behind Euston Station, chucked him into the chair opposite and ordered spicy Thalis for both of them.
“I like this place because it’s fast,” she explained. “In fifteen minutes, when you get up from this table, you’ll have told me everything you know about Jonas Ketch, or I’m going to take you into the kitchen and shove your face into the tandoori oven, d’you understand?”
“I don’t know why you’re so aggressive,” McCarthy wheedled, trying for sympathy.
“It’s your choice, mate. Talk, or this’ll be the worst Ruby Murray* you’ve ever had.”
≡ Rhyming slang: “Curry”.
“I’ll give you what I know about him, all right? I could tell he was bang out of order, soon as I met him.” McCarthy fidgeted around on his chair like a child at Sunday school. “All sensible talk and that, but crazy behind the eyes. Damage, see? You can’t trust damaged people.”
Longbright figured it took one to know one. “How did you meet him?” she asked.
“I was doing eighteen months for receiving stolen goods; he came in to teach English. A lot of the inmates ain’t got English as a first language. I got volunteered to help him. He never said much, but there was this one day, he was showing the class how to write a resumé for a job. When the lesson ended he got off sharpish and left some stuff behind, just papers in a plastic folder an’ that. I was going to put our answer sheets back inside and leave it on the table, honest.”
“But you had a look through instead.”
“Well, I had to, didn’t I? And I saw this letter he was writing to his old man. About a dozen different versions of the same thing, all a little different, written months apart from each other, like he kept starting it and changing his mind about what he was going to say. So I nicked one; I figured he wouldn’t notice. When I got back to my cell, I read it. So get this: It’s a kind of history of his life, all the stuff that made him angry. His parents was always trying to kill each other. Finally his old man, this bloke Al Ketch, took the kid out of the house one morning after some big bust-up with his missus, and dragged him down the tube at King’s Cross, saying they was going away on holiday.”
“Keep talking.”
“Jonas really hated his mother, right, so he reckoned the old man was taking him off somewhere where he’d never have to see the old cow again. He was all excited about going away with his dad. So he sits down with his dad on a platform bench and they talk about their plans, how they’re going to go to Spain and get a fresh start, how it’s going to be really great for both of them. Then his old man gets all excited, striding about, ranting, and when he’s finished, he calms down and tells the boy he’s leaving. Not they’re leaving, he’s leaving. He’s had enough of them both, and he’s dumping the kid. And Jonas worships his old man, right, he can’t do no wrong in the boy’s eyes. He thought his dad was taking them off some place where they’d be happy, and it turns out the bastard is abandoning him. And while the kid is watching, the old man turns away, goes to the edge of the platform and walks – just walks – under the train that’s coming in. The kid is halfway there, heading toward his father just as he goes under, and he gets covered in his old man’s blood. So he runs off in a right state, and when he gets home, he finds his mum has killed herself. She’s taken an overdose of sleeping tablets and choked to death on her own vomit. How messed up is that?”
“And then you ran into Ketch again at St Pancras station.”
“That’s right, and he didn’t even recognise me, ‘cause it was two years later and I’d lost a lot of weight, being off prison food and on the smack, and he gave me a couple of jobs to do, just pocket-money stuff, and I couldn’t tell him that I’d still got the letter, and that night I went home and read it again. And it freaked me out.”