The Last Train

  A DCI BOYD THRILLER

  Alex Scarrow

  THE LAST TRAIN

  Copyright © 2021 by Alex Scarrow

  All rights reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Published by GrrBooks

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  DCI BOYD RETURNS IN

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Alex Scarrow

  About the Author

  Dedicated to the innocent victims of hate, past and present.

  One day, hopefully, we’ll learn.

  Prologue

  He stared through the slats of wood at the horror going on outside. At the body of his father lying on his back, blood pooling beneath his head as his eyes swivelled and rolled and his jaw opened and closed in a post-mortem spasm. At his mother screaming on the kitchen table, pinned down by the monster on top of her. His older sister had been raped first – she was dead now too.

  The only thing stopping him from screaming along with his mother, and giving himself away in his hiding place beneath the kitchen counter, was one tiny detail. He focused hard.

  There was a water bottle on the man’s belt, bouncing and swinging with his exertions. It had a word scrawled across it.

  He concentrated on the letters. Burning them into his mind forever. Mouthing a silent mantra…

  Remember…

  Remember…

  Remember…

  1

  Friday, 11.13 p.m.

  DCI Bill Boyd strode up the gentle slope of Queens Road towards Brighton station. It was gone eleven in the evening and the ‘cool’ side of the town centre was buzzing with bohemian life. It was September, a very warm one. Summer had arrived late this year but was making up for it now; the cafés and wine bars were still pretty busy with customers outside, sitting at the tables and chairs, laughing, drinking, eating, making Brighton look very Mediterranean.

  One of the by-products of the Covid-lockdown aftermath had been an uptake in pavement seating and café culture. A rather pleasant by-product, thought Boyd. But then young and pretty people tended to make any new trend look good. Voted the happiest place to work and live in the UK God knows how many times, Brighton was heaving with university students and twenty- and thirty-somethings who’d migrated down from London to begin tech and media careers.

  Boyd was a little worse for wear having shared several pints with an ex-colleague, a welcome reward for having had to sit through a whole day’s worth of Powerpoint presentations on LEDS’s new and (supposedly) easier-to-use user interface.

  Absolutely gripping stuff.

  Seeing Sunil Chandra – Sunny – presenting one of the workshops had been a pleasant surprise and after the day-long session it had been nice to sit outside with him and sip a pint or several, watching Brighton’s long shingle beach being gently bathed in the evening sun to the sound of a busking skiffle band playing on the promenade.

  Sunny was doing much better for himself as a consultant for the police than he had as an employee of the force, and was still insisting that his plan to remain in London and buy himself a Thames-side apartment at a bargain price was going to pay off.

  Detective Superintendent Sutherland was supposed to have attended the day’s training, but his phobia of all things computer-related, plus his spurious claim that his recently healed broken ankle wouldn’t cope with walking from workshop to workshop had sealed the deal. Instead, Boyd would attend, learn and bring back knowledge of all the cool new computery tweaks.

  And he was glad he’d gone. It had been lovely seeing Sunny again.

  Boyd stepped into the station and checked the fluttering departure board. The last train to Hastings departed at 11.35 p.m. He texted Emma to say that he was grabbing that, and that she shouldn’t wait up to give him a lift. She had an early shift tomorrow; he’d walk or get a cab.

  He scratched his beard as he deliberated his options in the time he had left before his train departed. Time enough, he decided, to grab a coffee from the stand in the main concourse.

  In the interviews to come in the next few days, he would state that this was the moment he first noticed the man, at 11.13 p.m. The man was directly ahead of him in the short queue. He had a vaguely Middle Eastern or perhaps Mediterranean appearance, with tanned skin, dark hair and a beard. He was wearing a small backpack, a baseball cap, jeans and a baggy hoodie – just like most of the male student population of Brighton. It was his manner that caught Boyd’s attention, though. He was abrupt, almost to the point of being rude to the young lad serving in the stall.

  He’d wanted water. Just water. Now. And nothing else.

  2

  11.25 p.m.

  Boyd was sorely tempted to grab himself a doner kebab. He’d walked past a place just fifty yards short of the station and his tipsy – no, let’s call a spade a spade – his drunken self rather fancied tearing into a greasy kebab. The smell of the sizzling fat-on-a-stick was driving him nuts. But, he told himself, tomorrow he’d regret the additional two thousand calories’ worth of Fail. The best way to resist the urge was to recall an eww moment on the Hammersmith and City Line many years ago.

  On a packed underground train, he’d caught the whiff of a Cornish pasty on a day when he’d not had any breakfast or any lunch and had been absolutely starving. His mouth had been quite literally watering and he’d been half seriously considering offering money to whoever was eating it for whatever was left of it. But, as the Tube train drew up at a station and a man with a very sweaty head and damp armpits pushed past him to get out, he’d discovered the actual source of the odour. The man himself smelled of pasty.

  That did the trick. He decided to stick with his coffee.

  At 11.31 p.m. Boyd headed onto platform seven and made his way to the four-carriage diesel train that was waiting to sputter and growl across Sussex to Lewes and then onto Hastings.

  His phone rang. It was Emma.

  ‘How was your day out?’ she asked.

  ‘Long. Brighton’s nice, though.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve heard,’ she replied. ‘Why didn’t we buy a place over there?’

  ‘Errr… price?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. They have jazz and stuff down on the beach, don’t they?’

  ‘Yup. Found myself toe-tapping.’

  ‘You sound pissed.’

  ‘I might be a little merry, maybe…’

  He heard her draw in a judgemental breath. ‘You’ll have a sore head tomorrow, then.’

  ‘I think that might well be. I bumped into an old colleague and had one or four.’

  She tutted. ‘Honestly, Dad… and you lost nearly three pounds this week.’

  ‘Yeah, but –’ he sounded like a scolded teenager – ‘I managed to stay out of the kebab shop. Let’s focus on the positives, Em.’

  ‘I
’m very disappointed,’ she said in a mock-solemn voice. ‘You let me down, you let Ozzie down, but most of all you –’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Up yours. Look, like the text says… Don’t wait up, Ems. I’ll grab a cab.’

  ‘Right, you drunk doofus. See you tomorrow. Night!’

  He looked into the rear carriage as he walked up the platform. It looked far too busy and noisy with pub-turnout passengers. The one after looked a little more promising. But, with a whistle blowing and the sound of open doors being slammed shut behind him by the guard on the platform, he decided to hop into the next carriage, second from the front, and figure it out from there.

  One more casual decision, he would later realise, that would feed into the sequence of events due to unfold in the hours ahead.

  3

  11.32 p.m.

  Boyd managed to find a table that had three spare seats and he shuffled along to sit opposite a man who had a couple of cans of Black Label on the table in front of him and was gazing listlessly out of the window. The man smiled and nodded as Boyd sat down, fidgeting to find an uncontested space for his knobbly knees.

  Boyd settled for a wide knee spread, one against the carriage wall, the other angled outwards towards the aisle. His legs were like a grasshopper’s, far too long and invasive to be shoved beneath one of those carriage tables. The man opposite seemed as though he was deep in thought, his dark-lidded eyes half-closed beneath a bushy monobrow of thick black hair. With his chin, jaw and mouth darkened by bristles, he looked vaguely like a raccoon… or whatever that wise-cracking little weasel-thing in The Lion King was.

  A third person dithered beside their table as a whistle blew again and the diesel train revved impatiently, making the point it was ready to go. It was a woman about Emma’s age. She looked at a cardboard slip tucked into a headrest. ‘Are these reserved?’ she asked.

  Boyd hadn’t even noticed them. He turned to see there was a card stuck in the headrest behind him too. ‘Oh, bugger.’

  ‘Not worry,’ said the man opposite. ‘I reserve… but someone sit in my seat.’ He shrugged. ‘So I sit in someone else seat. Always this happen on Friday nights.’

  The woman nodded. ‘When it’s this busy, nobody takes these seriously, do they?’

  Monobrow shrugged. ‘Waste of time.’

  Since he seemed to be taking up less room than Boyd, she sat down next to him.

  The train left Brighton bang on time – 11.35 p.m.

  Boyd gazed out of the widow and reflected on his evening. Chatting with Sunny about the old days had been good. Sunny was a part of the mosaic of memories that included Julia and Noah, and Emma when she was a precocious ten-year-old who couldn’t decide whether she wanted to be a tough-as-nails copper or a fabulous princess. Sunny was a touchstone back to those times. While it had been good to laugh at the pranks and the fuckwits of the past, rejoicing in the cases that had gone well and eye-rolling at the mistakes of cases gone by, it had left Boyd feeling maudlin as he sat watching sodium-orange street lights flicker past outside the grimy window, catching snapshot glimpses of lounges and bedrooms and kitchens. Happy families.

  They were out into pitch-black countryside within a few minutes.

  ‘All right?’ asked the man opposite. He had a thick accent. Something Eastern European perhaps, Boyd thought.

  ‘Yeah, had a bit too much to drink, I think,’ Boyd replied sheepishly.

  He laughed. ‘Me also. I have these –’ he gestured at his two untouched cans of lager and shook his head – ‘but I think I have had enough.’ He huffed his Hs like he was hawking up stuck popcorn.

  ‘Always seems like a good idea at the time, right?’ said Boyd.

  Monobrow grinned and nodded. ‘Beer-thinking. Not very smart, eh?’

  The young woman nodded along with that. She looked up from her phone and laughed. ‘Which is why I probably need to step away from Amazon right now.’ She turned her screen round to show listings for designer satchels. ‘The rubbish I end up ordering when I’ve had a couple of drinks.’

  ‘You been to beach this evening?’ asked the man.

  Boyd nodded. ‘Along the front. Nice. Really chilled.’

  ‘Does Chris Eubank still cruise up and down in his big truck?’ asked the woman.

  ‘Huh?’ Boyd had no idea.

  She smiled. ‘It’s a thing… apparently. He was a boxer or something once, wasn’t he?’

  Boyd nodded.

  ‘I heard that on busy summer nights he drives along the front in a pimped-up truck and honks his horn and waves at everyone.’

  ‘Brighton’s got the X factor,’ said Boyd. ‘That’s for sure.’

  He glanced at his watch. It was 11.47 p.m. The moment – he would later recall – that he spotted the man with the backpack and baseball cap again. Boyd watched him enter the carriage at the end and make his way up slowly, staring intently at the people gathered around each table before moving onto the next.

  The man paused by their table, studied the passengers at the table opposite, then turned to look at Boyd and his table companions. The stranger lingered briefly and for a second Boyd thought he was going to plonk himself down right next to him… but the man eventually moved on.

  Boyd felt his copper’s instinct kick in. He’d use that term in the interviews to come, although he was well aware that it was an explanation too easily used to wallpaper over prejudices and assumptions. He would look back at that moment and say it was down to the man’s demeanour – he seemed edgy, uncomfortable. It was his darting eyes. The way that he studied everyone. It wasn’t the backpack, or the dark beard, or the skin.

  Or maybe it had been all those things.

  Boyd’s gaze followed the man as he continued in the same manner all the way through the carriage until he disappeared into the next one.

  ‘I think he wants own table,’ said Monobrow.

  ‘Well, good luck finding that,’ said the woman, ‘It’s packed tonight.’

  Monobrow nodded. ‘Very packed.’ He nodded again at his unopened lagers on the table. ‘Hey! You want?’

  Boyd was vaguely aware the man was talking to him. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You want beer?’ He was holding out one of the cans. Boyd could see it was still fridge-cold; beads of condensation ran down the side and dripped onto the table. It was very stuffy in the train. Plus… he could feel the tail end of being slightly pissed crossing over into hangover territory.

  ‘You sure?’

  Monobrow nodded. ‘Da. Take.’

  Boyd took it. ‘Thanks.’

  The man looked at the woman. ‘You want this one?’

  She shook her head vigorously and puffed her cheeks. ‘Got to work tomorrow. I’m bad enough as it is. But thanks.’

  Boyd popped the can and chugged a mouthful, savouring how good the cold beer and the suds felt in his dry mouth.

  The man sighed. ‘I will not let you drink alone.’ He opened the other can and held it out for Boyd to clunk gently. Boyd obliged.