Off the Rails Read Free Page A

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.’

THREE

Parasitical
    B ryant 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.
    Arthur Bryant: Have you met him before? If not, imagine a tortoise minus its shell, thrust upright and stuffed into a dreadful suit. Give it glasses, false teeth and a hearing aid, and a wispy band of white hair arranged in a straggling tonsure. Fill its pockets with rubbish: old pennies and scribbled notes, boiled sweets and leaky pens, a glass model of a Ford Prefect filled with Isle of Wight sand, yards of string, a stuffed mouse, some dried peas. And fill its head with a mad scramble of ideas: the height of the steeple at St Clement Danes, the tide table of the Thames, the dimensions of Waterloo Station, and the MOs of murderers.On top of all this, add the enquiring wonder of a ten-year-old boy. Now you have some measure of the man.
    Bryant jammed the ancient trilby harder on his bald pate and fought the rain on the Caledonian Road. Typically, he was moving in the wrong direction to the