Off the Rails (31 page)

Banbury was furious at being tricked. He called Longbright. ‘Has anyone else made a run for it?’

‘Toby Brooke’s done a bunk; the others all seem to be accounted for,’ the DS replied. ‘There aren’t enough of us to go around the clock. Go home, Dan. Get some sleep. Nothing’s going to change tonight. I’ll see you in the morning.’

Banbury took one last walk around the pulsating bar, then wearily abandoned his search.

Cassie Field was waiting for her train on Westcombe Park station. She shivered and stared at the truculent downpour as it sluiced and slopped from the roof, and told herself once more that she had thrown away the evening. She had sought advice from an old schoolfriend, but had arrived at Sophie’s Greenwich apartment to find her drunk and weepy. Sophie had been dumped by her creepy real-estate agent boyfriend and was consoling herself with her second bottle of bad Burgundy. Cassie
had been hoping for some prudent advice about her own love life, but instead had spent the evening listening to Sophie’s increasingly slurred complaints about men, before having to hold her head over the sink. Feeling alone and friendless, she headed back through the downpour to the station and just missed a Charing Cross–bound train.

Cassie retied her acid pink jacket and watched the yellow carriage lights recede into the distance, as the train swayed and sparked toward the city. There was nothing to hear now but the sound of falling rain.

She wanted to talk to someone, but most of her friends regularly visited the Karma Bar, and there was a good chance that her confessions would reach the residents of Mecklenburgh Square. Her best bet was to try Sophie again, once she had sobered up and cleared her hangover. What a mess. Cassie’s jacket was stained with rain and red wine, and the high heels she had chosen to wear had blistered her feet. The station platform was deserted; the overland line was used less frequently now that the underground reached down into South London.

There was a grey shadow behind the steamed-up, graffitied glass of the waiting room. Cassie couldn’t see who it was, but the figure’s body language was vaguely familiar. She wondered if she should go and look, but the pinging of the rails told her that there was a train approaching.

She walked to the edge of the rain-pocked platform and wondered how long it would take to get back indoors, where it was warm and dry. There was a sound behind her as the waiting room door opened. She glanced back, but there was nobody there now.

She looked for the train, and saw that it was coming in fast. Typically, she had chosen to wait at the wrong end of the
platform. Beyond the tracks, the ice-blue lights of the city glimmered in melancholy relief. She had never felt so alone and in need of a friend.

Cassie was still wondering if there was anyone else in whom she could confide when a pair of boots slammed onto her shoulder blades, barrelling her forward onto the tracks, right in front of the arriving train.

B
y the time Dan Banbury and Giles Kershaw arrived, Greenwich police had cordoned off the platform and covered the body with a yellow plastic tent. ‘Ghastly mess,’ said Kershaw, checking under the tent flap. ‘Her name’s Cassie Field. She had John May’s card in her wallet, so I take it she’s involved with the case. Massive head injuries, so at least it was quick. What did the driver see?’

‘He just caught a glimpse of her flying through the air, doesn’t really know what happened,’ said Banbury. ‘He’s in the waiting room. He’s pretty shaken up.’

‘The officer over there told me she jumped.’

‘He only got here a few minutes ago; he’s going by what the guard told him.’

‘Where was the guard?’

‘On the opposite platform, texting his girlfriend, useless plonker. I’ll try and get some more lights rigged up. They need
some decent overheads on this platform. What a miserable bloody place to die.’

‘She reeks of wine, and there are red wine stains on her shirt. Very high heels. I know it’s the fashion, but they can’t be easy to wear. She could have been drunk and wandered too close to the edge. The platform’s somewhat on the narrow side.’

‘The driver said she was “flying.” Ask him yourself. Like a trapeze artiste, he reckons, as in she either jumped or was pushed. He certainly doesn’t think she slipped.’

‘A couple of fresh bruises on her back,’ said Kershaw, carefully turning the body over and raising her jacket. ‘Are you getting this?’ Banbury was operating the Unit’s camcorder, from which he would later pull stills. ‘Neat little crescents. They look like heelmarks, but they can’t be. Too high up her back, as if she was kicked onto the line. Mind you, if they were, we might get a boot match from them.’

‘Flying,’ repeated Banbury. He climbed back up onto the platform and looked around, thinking.

‘Sorry, Dan, what did you say?’

‘I said
flying
. As in propelled. Like Gloria Taylor.’ Banbury headed for the waiting room, where he stopped to examine the doorway. ‘Giles, come and take a look at this.’

Kershaw left the police team and clambered back up, joining the CSM. Banbury was standing on tiptoe, running a penlight along the top edge of the waiting room doorway. The room was a freestanding box constructed of steel struts and scratched Plexiglas. The CSM pointed upward. ‘Eight little channels in the dirt up there, four and four, a couple of feet apart. Any ideas?’

‘I might have,’ said Kershaw cagily. ‘Have you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Go on, then, you first.’

‘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.’

T
he 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.’