“Right.”
“And you got these seat patterns. Why would anyone take pictures of those?”
“To track something – somebody – from line to line.”
“That’s what I see. There are twelve underground lines, right?”
“Yes.”
“But you’ve got thirteen shots. This one isn’t a line. Okay, it’s a bit out of focus but it looks like red polka dots to me.”
Bryant mentally slapped himself. “That’s a close-up of the dress Gloria Taylor was wearing when she died.”
“Man, that’s a hell of a dress. She must have been the most noticeable woman on the tube that day.”
“Of course – it made her easy to follow. She got on at Bond Street and changed at Oxford Circus. Maybe the killer was with her all the way. It’s like tracking a playing card through the deck. He chose her because of the dress.”
“A sexual obsessive?” Fraternity suggested.
“Then why not simply touch her or try to strike up a conversation? Why push her down the stairs?” Bryant realised he could answer his own question. “She almost left the station, then turned around and went back. She’d forgotten her daughter’s birthday present. And then she was pushed because someone was angry with her. Angry that she didn’t go through the barrier and leave. You track the card through the pack. But the card lets you down, and you lose your temper and knock the cards over. Everything else that has happened is because of that one moment of anger.”
“It’s a game,” said Fraternity, looking at the fallen cards. “And someone didn’t like to lose.”
“What kind of stakes could be so high in a game that you’d actually shove a stranger down a flight of stairs?” He looked back at the pack of cards, and the upturned nine of clubs. “I marked that one so I could trace it through the pack.”
“Sorry, Mr Bryant, not with you.”
“You don’t mark a card the second before you turn it over. You mark it right at the beginning, so you can keep an eye on it through the shuffle. The killer didn’t put the sticker on Gloria Taylor’s back just before he killed her. He did it so that he could prove that she was the marked card. She wasn’t hard to keep track of in the tube crowds, because of the way she was dressed. But he had to show someone else that she was the victim. Matt Hillingdon’s phone was taken because it revealed the marked card. But the killer didn’t think to check his laptop.”
“I’m still not getting a clear signal from you, Mr Bryant,” said Fraternity. Getting used to Bryant’s way of thinking sometimes took decades.
“I need to run the security camera footage from Monday evening at Bond Street tube.” Bryant indicated that Fraternity DuCaine should grab the nearest phone. “Then I’ll know who killed Gloria Taylor.”
∨ Off the Rails ∧
47
Roll
Here we go, thought Nikos Nicolau, counting down the seconds in the corner of his screen. This is going to be so damned cool. From team player to team leader at the touch of a button. The screen counter had stopped at 11,353, but if even a fraction of that number turned up he’d have proven his point. The bait-and-switch site had worked like a dream, setting up a flash mob that would last for four minutes, the duration of the song.
He waited until exactly 3:00 P.M. then hit Play. A video of the band opened onscreen, and the first power chord sounded. The band was called Shark Monkey (feat. Aisho DC Crew) and the song ‘Practically Perfect People’ had become a club anthem two years earlier, because the band members had taught the movements of their supremely vacuous song to the inmates of a South Korean prison. Since then it had replaced Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ as being the most imitated dance song ever to hit the Web. Even tiny kids in nursery schools knew the steps, which were a damned sight cooler than anything Michael Jackson ever recorded. And the best part was that he could get them to Rickroll* in the station without ever noticing the irony in the song’s lyrics.
≡ Named after the singer Rick Astley, whose fans turned up at stations to perform his greatest hit.
Nobody can be controlled.
Nobody can be patrolled.
What we do is what we love.
Nobody orders from above.
Where we are is where we stand.
The hottest lovers in the land.
And here he would be, controlling them through a broadcast to 11,353 iPods, BlackBerrys and assorted PDAs, beamed into the grand concourse of St Pancras International station. He remembered the Kissroll staged there a couple of years back, two hundred lovers smooching beneath the disproportionately vast, tacky statue called ‘The Kiss’ that dominated the station atrium, but this was on a different scale entirely.
More importantly, it would bring an end to the argument he’d been having with Rajan and the others about pedestrian flow in public areas. Rajan had argued that the public could be persuaded to walk in non-instinctive directions if properly directed. Groups generally moved in broad clockwise circles, Nikos had told him, because the nation drove on the left and people were used to driving clockwise around roundabouts. Customers entering shops usually headed left, circling the store and exiting from the right; it was the natural thing to do. But in countries where they drove on the other side of the road, the system was reversed.
The webcam feeds sent back by his viewers a few minutes earlier showed that the group in the station was automatically following a clockwise route. Social engineering only worked if the instructions didn’t contravene human instinct. Certain rules held true whatever the circumstances; build a block of flats with elevators opening onto the street, Nikos had argued, and they’d be avoided by residents because the lift-space became the property of the street rather than the tenants. Design a public lavatory where the urinals could be seen from the pavement, and the British public would be reluctant to use them. Deep-rooted beliefs in what constituted public and private spaces were hard-wired into the human psyche.
Except that something was wrong. The café’s broadband speed was pitifully slow, but as he checked the incoming feeds he could see that no-one was dancing. The song was already up to its first verse. What had gone awry? The chorus was coming up.
Gonna live like practically perfect people.
Gonna love like practically perfect people.
Live and love like practically perfect people.
Live and love like practically perfect people.
It wasn’t exactly Rimbaud, but it felt about right for the duped drones down on the concourse. He studied the feeds again. Nothing. They weren’t dancing. Why wasn’t anything happening? The video was playing perfectly. He could see it on the site. He opened the site’s admin page and checked the stats. He ran through the set-up and hit Log but found nothing unusual.
Then he saw it.
Although the destination was correct in the body of the site instructions, the Flashbox he had created to run as a site banner was wrong. Where he had typed in the location of the event, a pre-logged template had set the destination to King’s Cross station instead of St Pancras.
He had forgotten that although the two stations shared the same complex, they were entirely separate termini. He had lost concentration for a moment and clicked through to the wrong place.
Breaking into a sweat, he toggled back to one of the video feeds and zoomed out to take in the whole scene. Instead of the great vaulted ceiling of the Eurostar terminal, he found himself looking at a cramped, tiled hall. He had sent his flash mob to the wrong station.