Bryant & May on the Loose: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery Page 0,2

and carry on, ’til the lights of London shine again.’

‘I’m just here in front of you,’ said Harold.

‘And now Sid Lypton and the Grosvenor House Dance Band play ‘Blacking Out the Moon’ for every—’ The radio spat an electrical pulse and went dead. All that could be heard was the soft suffering of the injured, the chink and tumble of dislodging bricks.

Harold stretched out his hand. ‘You can do it, love. Don’t look down. Just reach toward me.’

Mrs Porter remained frozen, staring past him to where the wall had been. To where her husband had been sitting, waiting for his dinner.

‘He’s not there,’ Harold explained carefully. ‘He’s gone, love, and the house has gone.’ He had passed the old man’s body as he approached the house, crushed beneath a collapsed chimney stack. Nearby, a grandfather clock had landed facedown on the pavement, like a felled parade soldier.

She noticed him for the first time, and fluttered her eyelids as though coming to her senses. For a moment he thought she might faint and fall into darkness. Then she held out her arm, just far enough for him to grab at her and haul her back from the edge. ‘My name’s Irene,’ she murmured, and passed out in his arms.

2

MR FOX

What the bombs could not accomplish, the town planners finished off. Any building deemed a danger to public safety could be pulled down, and soon this was used to rid the city of anything staid and dull. So the classic portico of Euston station was torn apart, and the Gothic cathedral of St Pancras would have followed it into the dust but for the protestations of campaigners like Sir John Betjeman. The grand edifice remained intact but derelict, a home to rats and pigeons, awaiting rebirth in the next century.

Now that it was open once more, the cobwebs and pigeons had been banished from its environs, but vermin remained… .

Mr Fox was the master of his territory, as sly and adaptable as his namesake. He could vanish and reappear at will. The cheap grey hoodie, chain store leather jacket and tracksuit bottoms he wore rendered him virtually invisible. He gave the impression of being small and pale, so light that he might not leave footprints in snow, but this was not the case. His limbs were thickly muscled, and his strength could startle.

He plotted a route through the great vaulted station of St Pancras, instinctively looking out for the lost ones. Ridges and furrows of glass rose above him in a matrix of pale blue ironwork, allowing an immensity of light to fall across the concourse. It was the end of April, and Mr Fox was one day away from becoming a murderer.

As he insinuated himself through the crowds, he imagined his appearance as witnesses might remember it, unfocussed, silvery and opaque, a blur on a photograph. He was feral, instinctive, always on the move, always wary of being cornered. If his image could be captured (and it certainly could, given that there were over four million cameras watching London, an astonishing proportion of which were hidden in its stations) he made sure it would only appear as lost pixels on a screen, a time-lapsed smudge without a face. True subversives, he knew, were unnoticeable. Fake subversives (suburban kids and people in dull jobs) dressed to stand out from the crowd. Mr Fox was like the King’s Cross lighthouse, the strange tumbledown Victorian monument above the street that went unnoticed because it was always somewhere in the background.

In and out of the stores and bars that occupied the glassed-in areas behind the exposed-brick arches—Foyles bookshop, Neal’s Yard, Le Pain Quotidien, Marks & Spencer—he searched for the lonely and the weak. He was drawn toward the lame straggler, the vulnerable visitor, the indecisive commuter. He could not afford to take long because too many watchful lenses were assembled in clusters on the surrounding arches. One pass through the main concourse of St Pancras was usually enough. The beauty of operating in a place like this was the sheer number of potential victims.

There were plenty of police strolling about, but the location gave them a disadvantage. So many civilians approached with questions in the course of a shift that their differences were dissolved by sheer weight of numbers. The officers were like keepers in charge of an ever-expanding anthill.

Mr Fox never made contact inside the railway station. He followed his targets at a distance, out to the cab ranks and crammed pavements where they