Off the Rails Read Free Page B

elements. He seemed to spend his life on an opposite path, a disreputable old salmon always determined to head upstream.
    As he marched, he tabulated life’s annoyances in escalating order of gravity. He was sleeping badly again. He had forgotten to take his blue pills. His left leg hurt like hell. He had six days in which to close the Unit’s cases, and no money to pay his staff. He was likely to be thrown out of his home any day now. A good officer had died in the line of duty. And he had a murderer on the loose who was likely to return and commit further acts of violence. Not bad for a Monday morning. With a gargoyle grimace, he looked up at the rain-stained clouds above and muttered a very old and entirely unprintable curse.
    Everyone talks about the unpredictable weather in London, but it actually has a faintly discernible pattern. At this time of the year, the second week in May, caught between the dissipation of winter and the failed nerve of spring, the days were drab, damp and undecided, the evenings clear and graceful, swimming pool blue melting to heliotrope, banded altostratus clouds forming with the setting of the sun. You can forgive a lot when a dim day has a happy ending.
    On this Monday morning, though, there was no hint of the fine finish yet to come. Bryant made his way to the threadbare ground-floor flat in Margery Street where their escaped assassin, Mr Fox, had been living.
    The building was a pebble-dashed two-storey block set at an angle to the road, possessing all the glamour of an abandoned army barracks. Dan Banbury, the Unit’s Crime Scene Manager,had already been at work here over the weekend, tying off the apartment into squares for forensic analysis. Bryant stepped over the red cords in his disposable shoe covers, but managed to lose one and dislodge a stack of magazines on the way.
    ‘Just sit over there on the sofa, can you?’ Banbury snapped irritably. ‘Stay somewhere I can see you. You’re supposed to wear a disposable suit.’
    ‘I am. Got it from a secondhand stall on Brick Lane.’
    ‘At least put your hands in your pockets. There’s supposed to be a constable on guard to log visits but Islington wouldn’t provide one. Some stupid dispute over jurisdiction.’
    ‘You’re an SCO, you can let in who you want. Have you had your ears lowered?’
    ‘Oh, my nipper came back from school with nits and wanted his hair cut off, but he wouldn’t let me do it until I’d tested the electric shaver on myself. I went a bit too short.’
    ‘Wise lad.’ Bryant stuck his hands in his coat and found a boiled sweet under the pocket fluff. He sucked at it ruminatively, looking about. ‘Still using pins and bits of string? I thought you could do it with a special camera now.’
    ‘That’s right. Buy me the equipment and I’ll mark out the grid electronically. I think it only costs seven grand.’
    ‘Point taken. Bagged much up?’
    Banbury sat on his heels and massaged his back. He had been staring at biscuit crumbs and dead flies for the last half hour. ‘There’s no physical evidence to take.’
    ‘Don’t be daft. There’s always evidence.’ Bryant sucked a bit of fluff off his barley sugar sweet and flicked it onto the floor.
    ‘Not in this case.’
    ‘Have you started on the bedroom?’
    ‘Not yet. But if you’re going to poke around in there, please don’t—you know—just
don’t.
’
    Bryant was infamous for his habit of traipsing through crime scenes and fingering the evidence. He had begun his career at a time when detectives had been trained to merely observe with their eyes rather than to illuminate body fluids with blue lights and Luminol reagents. These days, specialist equipment came with specialists who charged by the hour. Many routine cases of criminal damage and assault were dumped simply because it was too slow and expensive to send away samples.
    Bryant stood at the head of Mr Fox’s narrow bed and studied the room. No books on display. Hardly any