Free Off the Rails by Christopher Fowler Page A

split, scaffolds were smashed to matchwood, suffocating mud poured in. At one point the Fleet Sewer burst open, drowning the diggings and burying everyone alive. The line finally opened in 1863, a year after Pearson’s death. They tried a pneumatic train driven on pipes filled with pressurised air, but the pipes leaked and rats made nests inside them, so they built steam locomotives instead.’
    When May stopped to buy some chewing gum and a newspaper, Bryant began to sense that he was losing his audience.
    The tube’s history fascinated him because of the way it transformed London. The directors of the world’s first tube lines were old enemies with an abiding hatred of one another, and when the captains of industry clashed, all London felt the fallout. Streets were dug in and houses ripped out like rotten teeth, without the approval of parliament or public. The despoilation of the city provided visible proof of the monstrous capitalism that was consuming the streets. While ruthless tycoons fought over land and lines, the project caught the national imagination and threw up moments of peculiar charm; when a baby girl was supposedly born in a carriage on the Bakerloo Line, she was christened Thelma Ursula Beatrice Eleanor, so that her initials would always serve as a reminder of her birthplace. Typically for London, the story turned out to be untrue.
    The underground was Bryant’s second home. He had always felt warm and safe in its sooty embrace, and loved the strange separateness of this sealed and secret world. A century of exhaust fans, ozonisers and asbestos sweepers had improved the air quality below, but the atmosphere was still as dry as Africa on platforms for reasons that no-one was quite able to fathom. Strange whorls of turbulence appeared before the arrival of a train, and tangles of tunnels could lead you back to where you started, or abruptly came to dead ends. The system’s idiosyncrasies arose from its convoluted construction.
    ‘You know, there are all sorts of intriguing stories about the tube, or “the train in the drain,” as I believe it was once called,’ said Bryant, swinging his stick with a jauntiness that came from sensing that murder was once more on the agenda. ‘There’s a story that an Egyptian sarcophagus in the British Museum opened into a secret passage leading to the disused station at Bloomsbury. I don’t give it much credence myself.’
    ‘Really,’ said May, steering his partner away from the station. They headed along York Way in the direction of the St Pancras coroner’s office.
    ‘Oh, yes. The straightening of the Northern Line almost caused the demolition of a Hawksmoor church, St Mary Woolnoth, but the public outcry was so great that the railway company had to underpin it while they built Bank station underneath. That’s why the station entrance is marked by the head of an angel.’
    ‘Well, I’m sure this is all very fascinating,’ said May, ‘but we’ve a young dead woman who’s being taken to Giles Kershaw’s morgue right now, and it would be a good idea if you could help me find out what happened to her.’
    ‘You see, that’s your trouble right there. You can’t do two things at once. I’ve got a dozen different things going on in my mind.’
    ‘Yes, and none of them make any sense.’ Cutting away from the crowded thoroughfare of Euston Road, the detectives found themselves alone in Camley Street, which angled north beside the railway line. ‘Do you honestly think Faraday will allow us to remain operational? We allowed a suspect to escape.’
    ‘He’s not a
suspect,
John, he’s a
murderer,
and his continued freedom provides us with a reason for staying open. We’re the only team likely to catch him. If anything, his arrest will trigger our closure. A cruel paradox. Let’s see what Giles has got for us.’
    The desolate redbrick building behind the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church was situated in one of central London’s emptiest spots. It