Free Off the Rails by Christopher Fowler

same time. A single accident can be easily dealt with. Fatalities only take about an hour to clear away, so long as they’re handled by LU staff and not the fire brigade—firefighters like toplay trains. We only call them in when we’ve got an Inspector Sands.’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘Loudspeaker code for a fire alert. It’s an old theatrical term, a call for the sand buckets they always kept in theatres to put out fires.’
    ‘But I don’t understand why you rang us,’ Bryant admitted.
    ‘We called Headquarters in Camden but they didn’t seem too interested. They’ve got a lot on their hands at the moment, with the pub.’ One of Camden’s best-known public houses had burned down at the weekend, forcing the closure of a major road and the rerouting of all traffic. Camden police were being blamed for overreaction by angry shopkeepers, who were staging a protest. ‘One of your former staff members is the new St Pancras coroner, and he suggested giving you a call. It sounded like your kind of thing—a problem of social disorder.’
    ‘Do you get many actual attacks in the system?’ May asked.
    ‘Hardly ever. If gang members want to pick fights with each other they generally do it away from bright lights and other people. Besides, this lady doesn’t fit the victim pattern, which is usually male and teenaged. But if she was shoved down that flight of stairs by a complete stranger, it’s a pretty nasty thing to do. And if he’s done it once, he could do it again, couldn’t he?’
    Bryant looked back at the suspended image of the flailing woman, and wondered if Mr Fox’s anger had risen to the surface once more. A murderer in the tube. He had to be dragged away from the screens when Anjam Dutta finished his report.

TEN

Descending
    W hat do you know about the London Underground?’ asked Bryant, who loved the tube as much as May loathed it. He felt entirely at home in the musty sunless air beneath the streets. He could scurry through the system like a rat in a maze, connecting between lines and locating exits with an ease that defeated his partner. If Mr Fox had gone to ground here, he had found himself a worthy adversary.
    ‘It’s the oldest in the world, the Northern Line is crap and I hate the way it makes my clothes dirty,’ May replied. ‘I know you seem to find it romantic.’
    ‘You have to think of it as a mesh of steel capillaries spreading across more than six hundred and thirty square miles.’ Bryant shook his head in boyish wonder. ‘Of course, it was built to alleviate London’s hellish traffic problem. Imagine the streets back then: a rowdy, smelly collision of horses, carriages, carts, buses and people. But they only dug beneath the city streetswhen every other method of surface control had failed. They’d tried roadside semaphores, flashing lights and warning bells, but the horses still kept crashing into each other and trampling pedestrians to death. It was a frightful mess. Thank God for Charles Pearson.’
    ‘Who’s he?’
    ‘The creator of the Metropolitan Railway line. Pearson dedicated his entire life to its construction, and turned down every reward he was offered. He dreamed of replacing grey slums with green gardens, linking all the main-line stations from Paddington to Euston, and on to the city. In the process he wiped out most of London’s worst slums, but he also had to move every underground river, gas pipe, water main and sewer that stood in the way. And London is built on shifting marshlands of sand and gravel. An engineering nightmare. Can you imagine?’
    ‘No, not really.’
    ‘An engineer called Fowler came up with the cut-and-cover system that allowed tunnels to be built under busy streets.’
    ‘Fowler, eh? Sounds dodgy.’
    ‘The tube displaced a huge number of the city’s poorest citizens. Naturally, the rich successfully convinced the railway to pass around them. In the three years it took to build, there were endless floods and explosions. Steel