“There he goes again,” said Meera.
“You’re right, he just bought a newspaper and a doughnut, let’s nick him. Uh-oh, look out, he’s stopped by the florist. I’ll make a note of that; considering the purchase of carnations. Definitely dodgy.”
“Suppose it’s Mr Fox and you just let him walk away?”
“You want to call it? I mean, if we’re going to start stop-and-search procedures down here, we’d better have some clearly defined criteria.”
“You can come up with something later – let’s take him.” Meera paced up through the crowd, then stopped by the French market, puzzled, looking back. “Colin?”
“What’s the matter?”
“Something weird.” She pointed to the far side of the concourse. There half a dozen teenagers had suddenly stopped and spaced themselves six feet apart from each other. Bimsley shrugged and pointed to the other wall, where the same thing was happening. “What’s going on?” Meera asked.
All around them, people were freezing in their tracks and slowly turning.
“They’re all wearing phone earpieces,” Meera pointed out.
Now almost everyone in the centre of the station was standing still and facing front. Beneath the station clock, two young men in grey hooded sweatshirts set an old-fashioned ghetto blaster on a café table and hit Play.
As the first notes of ‘Rehab’ by Amy Winehouse blasted out, the two young men raised their right arms and spun in tight circles. Everyone on the concourse copied them. The choreography had been rehearsed online until it was perfect. The station had suddenly become a dance floor.
“It’s a flash mob,” Meera called wearily. The Internet phenomenon had popularised the craze for virally organised mass dancing in public places, but she had assumed it had fallen out of fashion a couple of years ago.
“I took part in a flash-freeze in Victoria Station once,” Bimsley told her, watching happily. “Four hundred of us pretending to be statues. It’s just a bit of harmless fun.”
“Well, our man’s using it to cover his escape.”
“Meera, he’s not our man, he’s just a guy buying a newspaper and catching a train.”
But the diminutive DC did not hear. She was already running across the concourse, weaving a path between the performers. The song could be heard bleeding from hundreds of earpieces as the entire station danced. The tune hit its chorus – they tried to make me go to rehab, but I said no, no, no – and the choreography grew more complex. Colin could no longer see who Meera was chasing. Even the transport police were standing back and watching the dancers with smiles on their faces.
As the song reached its conclusion there was a concerted burst of leaping and twirling. Then, just as if the music had never played, everyone went back to the business of the day, catching trains and heading to the office. Meera was glaring at Colin through the crowds, furious to find that her target had disappeared. But just as Meera started walking toward Colin, someone grabbed at his shoulder.
Colin turned to find himself facing a portly, florid-faced businessman who was slapping the pockets of his jacket and shouting incoherently. “Hey, calm down, tell me the problem,” Bimsley advised.
“You are police, yes?” screeched the man. “I have been robbed. Just now. I was crossing station and this stupid dancing begins, and I stop to watch because I cannot cross, you know, and my bag is taken right from my hand.”
“Do we look like the police?” Colin asked Meera via his headset.
Her derisive snort crackled back. “What else could you be?”
“Did you see who took it?” Bimsley asked the businessman. “What was the bag like?”
“Of course I did not see! You think I talk to you if I see? I would stop him! Is bag, black leather bag, is all. I am Turkish Cypriot, on my way to Paris. The receipts are in my bag.”
“What receipts?”
“My restaurants! Six restaurants! All the money is in cash.”
“How much?”
“You think I have time to count it? This is not my job. Maybe sixty thousand, maybe seventy thousand pounds.”
“Wait a minute,” said Bimsley, “you’re telling me you were carrying over sixty thousand on you – in cash?”
“Of course is cash. I always do this on same Monday every month.”
“Always the same day?” Bimsley was incredulous. How could anyone be so stupid?
“Yes, and is perfectly safe because no-one knows I carry this money, how could they?”
“Well, what about somebody from one of your restaurants?”
“You tell me I should not trust my own countrymen? My own flesh and blood? Is always safe and I have no trouble, is routine, is what I always do. But today the music start up and everybody dance and someone snatch the bag from me. Look.” The irate businessman held up his left wrist. Dangling from it was a length of plastic cable, snipped neatly through. “I want to know what you will do about this,” the man shouted, waving his hairy wrist in Bimsley’s perplexed face. “You must get me back my money!”
Meera came back to his side. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Colin said, sighing. “Just another bloody Monday morning in King’s Cross.”
∨ Off the Rails ∧
3
Parasitical
Bryant stared down into the sodden streets. It was hard to detect any sign of spring on such a shabby day. At least the doxies and dealers had been swept out of the area as the fashionable bars moved in. Eventually the raucous beckoning of hookers would be recalled only by the few remaining long-term residents. Such was life in London, where a year of fads and fancies could race past in a week. Who had time to remind themselves of the past anymore?
Maybe it’s just me, thought Bryant, but I can see everything, stretching back through time like stepping-stones, just as if I’d been there.
No-one now remembered Handel playing above the coal-shop in Clerkenwell’s Jerusalem Passage, or Captain Kidd being hanged from the gibbet in Wapping until the Thames had immersed him three times. Thousands of histories were scrubbed from the city’s face each year. Once you could feel entire buildings lurch when the printing presses of Fleet Street began to roll. Once the wet cobbles of Snow Hill impeded funeral corteges with such frequency that it became a London tradition for servicemen to haul hearses with ropes. For every riot there was a romance, for every slaying, a birth; the ancient city had a way of smoothing out the rumples of the passing years.
The elderly detective tossed the remains of his tea over the filthy window and cleared a clean spot with his sleeve. He saw coffee shops and tofu bars where once prophets and anarchists had held court.
The recent change in King’s Cross had been startling, but even with buildings scrubbed and whores scattered, the area had retained enough of its ruffian character not to feel like everywhere else. Bryant belonged here. He basked in the neighbourhood’s sublime indifference to the passing of time and people.
Less than a week to solve a case. Well, they had risen to such challenges before. Carefully skirting the alarming hole in his office floor, Bryant donned his brown trilby, his serpentine green scarf and his frayed gabardine mackintosh, and headed out into the morning murk. At least it felt good to be back in harness. As he left the warehouse that currently housed the Peculiar Crimes Unit he almost skipped across the road, although to be fair he had to, as a bus was bearing down on him.