On the Loose by Christopher Fowler

now.’
    Bryant gave a shrug. ‘It won’t be there for long. Nothing everstays around here. To my mind the symbol of King’s Cross is a sturdy drain-fed weed sticking out of a sheer brick archway, something that can survive in the most inhospitable circumstances. An honest area, in the sense of being without hypocrisy, and a true test for the urbanite. The buildings will rise and crumble to dust, but the people won’t change.’
    From the corner of Wharf Road they could see a group of low brown buildings, Victorian warehouses that had somehow been spared the wrath of bombs and town planners. The structures huddled alone in a field of tractor-churned mud, bordered by railway embankments, the canal and the bare brick wall of the road that passed between them and the Eurostar railway terminal. The area roughly formed a great triangle, upon which was soon to rise a new town of glass and steel. The project was vast in scope and barely possible to imagine completed, even with the help of the computer-rendered images in its publicity brochures. Colleges and offices, shopping malls, public housing and luxury apartment blocks were to appear on a blighted site that had been alternately ignored and fought over for decades.
    ‘I wonder what they’ll find under all this soil.’ Bryant stopped to get his breath and tapped the muddy road with his walking stick. ‘In the Middle Ages this was part of the Great Forest of Middlesex, although it was inhabited in prehistoric times, of course. The first Paleolithic axe ever recognised in England was discovered near King’s Cross Road—in 1680, if memory serves.’
    ‘You were there, I suppose,’ said Meera. ‘The club’s this way.’
    The Keys club was living on borrowed time. Having survived the death of the super-clubs and the return of acoustic music, it had remained true to its hard-house and electro roots, only to face annihilation at the hands of property developers. It had received a stay of execution when Camden Council rejected a plan which would have required the demolition of the listedbuilding it inhabited, but construction had started all around. Each day, the earthmovers came a little closer. The new town would spread out from its nexus at the shoreline of the Regent Canal. The first building, a shopping mall, was nearing completion. The site even had its own concrete plant; such was the quantity required to pave over so many acres of earth and landfill.
    ‘Meera, you were walking between the club and the road when you saw him, is that right?’ May was forced to shout above the roar of the industrial equipment as they approached.
    ‘See the tall spotlight, over there? I borrowed Dan’s fingerprint kit and came up here first thing this morning, before it started raining. I tried to lift prints from the pole but they were too badly damaged. He’d swung around and smudged them.’ She pointed to one of a dozen tall steel lampposts that kept the landscape illuminated at night.
    The slippery mud made walking treacherous. May and Mangeshkar were forced to take Bryant’s arms to keep him upright.
    ‘I shouldn’t have worn Prada shoes,’ said May, watching as liquefied clay closed over his toe caps.
    ‘Not at your age, no,’ agreed Bryant. ‘You’ve always been a bit of a clotheshorse, haven’t you? Heaven knows how many people tramped across here on their way home after your scare, Meera.’
    ‘I wasn’t scared. The odd thing is I don’t think he meant to slash my arm. He sort of fell into me because I kicked him.’
    ‘You said he was wearing knives on his head. He’d already broken the law, albeit in a preposterous way.’
    ‘Yeah, but I was thinking… . It takes a certain type of mind to come up with antlers made out of knife blades. It was right here.’ She pointed to the chewed-up earth around the base of the anodised post.
    ‘Help me down,’ said May.
    ‘Ha!’ Bryant was triumphant. ‘It’s usually me who needs a hand down.’
    ‘I’ve only