Bryant & May on the Loose: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery Page 0,26
damage and government indecision. With a nation to rebuild, cash for housing was in short supply. After the rubble from fractured terraces had been cleared away, the scarred earth remained as a slow-healing memory of the wounds inflicted by war. Children turned the chaotic rockeries of brick and plaster into fantasy lands, exploring for buried treasure. Rocket and dandelions sprang up between chunks of brickwork and rusting iron. If they were lucky, children might gleefully discover a live, undetonated bomb. Occasionally someone was blown sky-high. Those were the days, thought Bryant.
‘I don’t understand,’ May admitted. ‘You’re not interested in a mutilated corpse found in a derelict chip shop, but a drunk with antlers in fancy dress annoying a couple of girls immediately gets your attention.’
‘That’s the difference between us,’ said Bryant, tapping the side of his head. ‘I always see the bigger picture.’
‘What bigger picture? What do you see that I’ve missed?’
‘Let’s find out if he’s left any tracks first. Meera, you lead the way. My energy’s coming back, but my legs don’t seem to have got the message yet.’ They picked a path through the geometry of scaffolding that had sprouted from the walls of King’s Cross station. The signs of construction and renewal were everywhere. Roads were closed; pipes were being lowered into trenches; a hundred canary-jacketed labourers crossed the roofs of half-renovated warehouses, bellowing to each other.
‘I remember when there were only fields and factories behind the station.’ Bryant waved his walking stick at a vast wall of blue-tinted wavy glass, the first of the new buildings to be completed. ‘Wild horses, bargees and gypsies. The ladies of the night brought so many punters to the grassy area beside the canal basin that it was nicknamed Pleasure Field.’
‘Must have been a long time ago,’ grunted Meera.
‘Not at all. Ten, maybe twelve years at the most. It’s changing fast now. Nearly all of the traditional gasholders have been dismantled, the old tenement buildings torn down. It was never pretty around here in my lifetime, but it had a rugged, dirty charm. My old man had many professions; one of them was as a street photographer. He showed me the pictures he took. There was a garden of rose bushes in front of the station. A licorice factory. An old theatre called the Regent, pulled down to make way for the town hall. And there was a wooden roller-coaster.’
‘It’s got a Starbucks now.’
Bryant gave a shrug. ‘It won’t be there for long. Nothing ever stays around here. To my mind the symbol of King’s Cross is a sturdy drain-fed weed sticking out of a sheer brick archway, something that can survive in the most inhospitable circumstances. An honest area, in the sense of being without hypocrisy, and a true test for the urbanite. The buildings will rise and crumble to dust, but the people won’t change.’
From the corner of Wharf Road they could see a group of low brown buildings, Victorian warehouses that had somehow been spared the wrath of bombs and town planners. The structures huddled alone in a field of tractor-churned mud, bordered by railway embankments, the canal and the bare brick wall of the road that passed between them and the Eurostar railway terminal. The area roughly formed a great triangle, upon which was soon to rise a new town of glass and steel. The project was vast in scope and barely possible to imagine completed, even with the help of the computer-rendered images in its publicity brochures. Colleges and offices, shopping malls, public housing and luxury apartment blocks were to appear on a blighted site that had been alternately ignored and fought over for decades.
‘I wonder what they’ll find under all this soil.’ Bryant stopped to get his breath and tapped the muddy road with his walking stick. ‘In the Middle Ages this was part of the Great Forest of Middlesex, although it was inhabited in prehistoric times, of course. The first Paleolithic axe ever recognised in England was discovered near King’s Cross Road—in 1680, if memory serves.’
‘You were there, I suppose,’ said Meera. ‘The club’s this way.’
The Keys club was living on borrowed time. Having survived the death of the super-clubs and the return of acoustic music, it had remained true to its hard-house and electro roots, only to face annihilation at the hands of property developers. It had received a stay of execution when Camden Council rejected a plan which would have required the demolition of the listed building it inhabited, but construction