11
TREMORS
You know, I always felt that the Peculiar Crimes Unit might finally find its spiritual home in a railway terminus district like King’s Cross,’ said Bryant as the trio marched along York Way in blustery squalls of rain. He spoke above the ever-present bourdon of taxi engines, a low thrum that underscored life in the area from every dawn to every midnight.
The road behind the railway yards turned into the kind of strange no-man’s-land Bryant had often seen in London after the war. These urban limbos had been created by bomb 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 had started all around. Each day, the earthmovers came a little closer. The new town would spread out from its nexus at the shoreline of the Regent Canal. The first building, a shopping mall, was nearing completion. The site even had its own concrete plant; such was the quantity required to pave over so many acres of earth and landfill.
‘Meera, you were walking between the club and the road when you saw him, is that right?’ May was forced to shout above the roar of the industrial equipment as they approached.
‘See the tall spotlight, over there? I borrowed Dan’s fingerprint kit and came up here first thing this morning, before it started raining. I tried to lift prints from the pole but they were too badly damaged. He’d swung around and smudged them.’ She pointed to one of a dozen tall steel lampposts that kept the landscape illuminated at night.
The slippery mud made walking treacherous. May and Mangeshkar were forced to take Bryant’s arms to keep him upright.
‘I shouldn’t have worn Prada shoes,’ said May, watching as liquefied clay closed over his toe caps.
‘Not at your age, no,’ agreed Bryant. ‘You’ve always been a bit of a clotheshorse, haven’t you? Heaven knows how many people tramped across here on their way home after your scare, Meera.’
‘I wasn’t scared. The odd thing is I don’t think he meant to slash my arm. He sort of fell into me because I kicked him.’
‘You said he was wearing knives on his head. He’d already broken the law, albeit in a preposterous way.’
‘Yeah, but I was thinking… . It takes a certain type of mind to come up with antlers made out of knife blades. It was right here.’ She pointed to the chewed-up earth around the base of the anodised post.
‘Help me down,’ said May.
‘Ha!’ Bryant was triumphant. ‘It’s usually me who needs a hand down.’
‘I’ve only just recovered from an operation.’ May was indignant. ‘What’s that?’ He pointed to some matted strands of brown fur embedded in the mud. ‘Something from your stag-man?’
‘Probably hair from a passing rat,’ answered Bryant gloomily. ‘The canal system is besieged with them. They live off discarded chicken bones and grow to the size of Alsatians.’ He dug a small clear plastic bag from his overcoat pocket and passed it to his partner before creeping off in search of footprints.
The wind was sweeping across the great churned field, thumping against pallets and stacks of steel plate. Meera squinted at the dark tumble of the sky. ‘There’s something weird about this place,’ she muttered. ‘I don’t like it here.’
Bryant was interested. ‘Oh, why not?’
‘I don’t know. It doesn’t look right. Too bare.’
‘You don’t have the comfort of surrounding buildings. That’s because we’re on a hill. You don’t notice the gradient as you walk here. King’s Cross has a strange and convoluted history. There are spirits, of course—there always are near water and the poor. But there’s something else besides.’ He sniffed noisily. ‘An unrest. A disquietude. Even on a day of clear skies there’s something turbulent here that comes up through the soil. You can smell it in the stormy air, can’t you?’
Meera found herself nodding in agreement, against her better judgement. She gave an involuntary shiver.
Bryant patted her arm in understanding. ‘Someone just walked over your grave. I’ll have to tell you all about the area sometime and I guarantee you’ll feel even stranger. Every act of kindness or violence, every deed of benevolence or cruelty, leaves its mark on the land. Those marks resurface in tiny tremors. And the ground here holds a great many dark secrets.’ A sheet of corrugated metal blew over, making Meera jump. Bryant smiled suddenly. ‘I wonder, can you get Dan Banbury up here? We could use his plastic-mould kit for this—look.’ He pointed to a pair of semi-circular shapes embedded deeply in the mud. ‘They look like hoofprints to me.’
‘They’re very big.’
‘Presumably they had to be large enough to fit over regular shoes, like pattens. This gentleman took his outfit seriously. There are a couple of costume shops near here. You’d better check them out.’
‘Are you going to explain why you’re so interested?’ asked May.
Bryant cupped his hands, blew into them and thought for a moment. ‘No, I’m not. Let’s see your freezer body now.’
‘We can’t,’ said May. ‘It went to the Upper Street Morgue, which is under Islington’s jurisdiction.’
‘You’re telling me we can’t get at it?’ Bryant’s watery blue eyes widened in surprise.
‘Ah, you finally understand! No, Arthur, we’re not allowed.’
‘You mean we’re persona au gratin?’
‘Yes. Perhaps now you could go and see your pals at the Home Office and try to pull a few strings for us.’
‘Indeed. I exerted a great influence over the last Senior Commissioner. He still owes me a huge favour because I saved his son’s reputation.’
‘How?’
‘Well, you know the sauna on the corner of Camden Road—’
‘No, I mean how did you exert influence over him?’
‘Oh, well, basically I told him what to do. Except I can’t anymore.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, for a start he’s dead. Coronary embolism, about two months ago. A damned nuisance. I never liked him much, but I felt sorry for the passengers in his car.’
‘Now what do we do?’
‘I suppose we’ll have to break the law again. I mean, there’s something wrong here and the Met won’t be able to do anything, so it’s down to us. Meanwhile, strong tea, lots of it. There’s a café on York Way that does bacon sandwiches you’ll be pulling out of your teeth for days. I won’t be, of course, because I take mine out and give them a rinse. If you can’t get hold of Dan, put in a call to Jack Renfield and tell him to meet us there; we’re going to need his help. But first let’s get out of this mud.’
As they headed toward the café, the trio tried to stamp the dark earth from their shoes but it remained stuck fast, as if the very ground was determined to leave its mark upon them.