Platform Seven

by Louise Doughty

  The doctor exhales, then says, ‘Are you investigating? It was a suicide, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Did you know Mr Warren?’

  ‘No, not at all, I’m just, I have an interest in the topic actually.’ His hesitation is so brief it is almost imperceptible. ‘Actually, it was my research speciality, mental health. I considered training in psychiatry but it seemed like a mad idea. Sorry, poor taste joke!’

  It is much more than poor taste: it is bizarre. Dr Goodison’s own girlfriend died that way – even though he doesn’t know that Lockhart knows about that, it still seems an extraordinary remark. There is something about the man’s bonhomie, his blokiness, that sets Lockhart’s now-clean teeth on edge. It’s the man-to-manliness of it, the we’re just two professionals doing our job so we can josh amongst ourselves thing. It doesn’t work for him. ‘Unofficially, we’re not looking for anyone else in connection with Mr Warren’s death,’ he says. ‘But obviously it’s up to the Coroner to ascertain the precise circumstances surrounding the incident.’

  ‘So it’s just like the other one then, a suicide? Not been all that lucky on that station.’

  Lockhart has to pause for a moment here – can Goodison really be that callous, or is he just covering up his own emotional pain with a pretence?

  ‘We’re pretty sure it was a suicide, yes.’

  ‘Well, interesting. Listen, I can walk you down to the mortuary if you like, it’s easy to get lost in this place, even the staff do sometimes.’

  ‘Do you have the time?’

  ‘Technically it’s my lunch break, although morning clinic is overrunning of course, but I can show you the way quickly. There’s a short cut, back route, outside and in again, as long as it’s not raining out there, that is.’ The doctor turns to the receptionist behind the desk and lifts his hand, splaying his fingers in a five minutes gesture. The receptionist looks back at him with raised eyebrows.

  They turn in the opposite direction from A & E and through a pair of swing doors with no signage above them. A few paces down the corridor, Dr Goodison turns left and presses the horizontal handle on a fire exit door that allows them into a concrete courtyard surrounded by hospital buildings. As they cross the courtyard, the doctor asks Lockhart where he grew up and Lockhart says West London and the doctor says, ‘Thought that wasn’t a local accent there, thought I could tell a fellow southerner.’ He adds that he grew up in Dorking. Lockhart reflects that Dorking and Southall are not really as similar as the doctor seems to be implying.

  ‘What brought you up this way?’ the doctor asks.

  ‘The job,’ Lockhart says.

  ‘Me too!’ the doctor says brightly, as if they have discovered unlikely or unusual common ground, like an obsession with Chinese opera or a shared dislike of coriander.

  On the other side of the courtyard, the doctor punches a series of small buttons ranged in a vertical row and admits them to another corridor, where there is no pretence of putting on a show for members of the public – long, wide, no pictures. They walk a few steps and then all at once, the doctor points down another long corridor that leads off to the left and says, ‘Straight down there, left at the end. Can’t miss it.’

  ‘Thanks,’ says Lockhart.

  The doctor shakes his hand again, making eye contact. ‘You’re welcome, see you!’ He turns briskly, back the way they have come.

  Lockhart pauses, absorbing this encounter, then walks down the other corridor and turns left and pushes through the swing doors that have the sign above reading MORTUARY.

  The Mortuary Manager takes him into her small office. She is much younger than she sounded on the phone, plump, short dark hair and sparkly blue nail varnish. Lockhart has the unworthy thought that he would fancy her if she lost a few pounds. Her name is Bina.

  She hands him the pathology report in a blue plastic folder, ten pages or so. There will be pictures, diagrams, a conclusion. He takes it and feels how flimsy it is, how slippery between his fingers. That’s what we all become, in the end, he thinks, a few pages between thin plastic.

  As Lockhart turns to go, he says to Bina, ‘I spoke to that junior doctor you mentioned, Dr Goodison. What do you make of him?’

  ‘Oh, he’s a real dreamboat,’ Bina replies with a warm smile. ‘Very charming, nurses all love him, patients too. That’s why I noticed when he came round and was a bit odd. He’s normally so charming, always asks lots of questions about yourself, you know, always takes an interest.’ Bina is still smiling as she speaks.

  Lockhart thanks her, bids her goodbye and walks back down the corridor following signs for the exit, still interrogating his puzzlement at Goodison’s behaviour.

  *

  I’m in the back of Lockhart’s car as he drives back to the station, watching Peterborough pass by. I glance at Lockhart’s head from time to time and observe that he has some small pimples on his neck – I’m doing anything to try and get the image out of my head. Matty. My Matty. It really was him – the competent doctor who I saw through Lockhart’s eyes, stooping slightly because of his height, his pale smile. Firm handshake. A bit of a dreamboat – always takes an interest: the man who killed me, liked by everyone.

  *

  Back at his desk, Lockhart finishes collating the information on Thomas Warren, then he looks for a bit more information about me.

  The search engine on the Peterborough Telegraph is unsophisticated and full of so many pop-up advertisements it’s hard to find anything. Putting in my name produces no results. He tries a Google search next and that comes up with thousands of Lisa Evanses, soap stars, footballers, cheerleaders, social workers – they are on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn; they live in London, East Kilbride and Alabama. That’s just for starters. But eventually he finds it, a small piece in the Telegraph: the day after the incident police are appealing for witnesses; later in the week they are keeping an open mind and three days later they are not looking for anyone else in connection with the incident. The inquest takes place three months later, in Huntingdon, at the Coroner’s Court. The verdict is suicide. Afterwards, the family release a statement.

  I made a good photograph. It was the one the school used on the noticeboard in the main foyer. I am smiling, looking straight on. I look confident, and happy. When Lockhart finds the report on the inquest, the Telegraph have put it on the front page with the photograph in full colour and enlarged. The headline is ‘School Called in Counsellors after Tragic Teacher’s Death’. I experience a reflexive moment of annoyance at the grammar: ‘Teacher’s Tragic Death’, it should be. I wasn’t tragic until I died. The piece focuses on what a popular and well-liked member of staff I was, how nobody could understand why it had happened. At the end of the article, there is a quotation from Lisa Evans’s boyfriend, who has requested privacy and asked not to be named in newspaper reports. That explains why Bina at the hospital didn’t make the connection herself, Lockhart thinks. His close colleagues would have known, presumably, but not the wider staff.

  ‘It’s still difficult for me to come to terms with,’ the anonymous boyfriend is quoted as saying. ‘We had our problems from time to time, like any couple, but we had talked about having a family one day and it’s still hard for me to believe, despite her troubled history, that she would go this far and hurt the ones who loved her so much. I am simply heartbroken.’

  Lockhart thinks of Goodison’s face, the friendliness in his eyes, and he thinks, how could you make an offhand remark about a suicide on a railway station if your own girlfriend had died that way less than two years previously? And when he had told Goodison he was there to ask about Thomas Warren, what was behind that exhalation he gave, the flicker in his eyes? Relief, perhaps?

  Lockhart has the feeling he used to get when they visited Midlothian when he was small, him and his mum and dad and his big and little sister. They would stay with Aunty Meg and Uncle Richard, and Uncle Richard would wrestle with him on the carpet and Aunty Meg never said a word and the meals were always fun and noisy as neighbour
s would come in and his mother would always be very quiet on those trips. He and his sisters would sleep in a tiny box room on blow-up beds, next to Aunty Meg and Uncle Richard’s bedroom, and he would hear raised voices late at night. Once, on the long drive home, he said to his mother, ‘Mum, do you like going to Scotland?’

  He saw his parents turn their heads slightly as if they were exchanging a look, and then his mum said, ‘Of course, Akash, I love Scotland, it’s beautiful.’ There was a silence then, as if his parents were thinking something through between the two of them. After a while, his father said, ‘Aunty Meg and Uncle Richard have had a few problems, Akash, so that’s why things sometimes seem a bit funny up there. It’s grown-up stuff.’

  The following year, his mother told him that Aunty Meg and Uncle Richard didn’t live together any more and that Uncle Richard had been very nasty to Aunty Meg, so nasty that it went to court and a judge said he was lucky not to be sent to prison.

  He had a funny feeling then, a feeling of not being told the whole story but of not really wanting to know, because it was dark and complicated and adult and however much he wanted to be grown up – principally, so he could drive a car – there were still things in the dark and complicated adult world that he knew, instinctively, he was not yet ready to know.

  And he has the same feeling now, that he doesn’t really want to know more, because a young woman is dead and PC Akash Lockhart from the British Transport Police knowing more about why she is dead won’t bring her to life again, after all. And shouldn’t he be concentrating on the prevention of future crime, not worrying about one that a coroner said wasn’t even a crime, just some awful tragedy like all the other awful tragedies that happen? It isn’t in his interests to pursue this, not on any level. He just feels like it’s the right thing to do.

  19

  Ghost stories are rubbish, complete bollocks, every word – you know the ones I mean. We don’t appear in wavery form or stare out of mirrors. We don’t rescue the lives of those who loved us, drawing a heroic father to a drowning younger sibling, like a barking dog. Poltergeists? Don’t get me started. If I could move objects I would have done it by now; it’s been over eighteen months and it feels a lot longer. If I had the power to move objects, I could have entertained myself at least, pushing people off platforms when I was in a malevolent mood, tipping a cup of tea into the lap of a bad-tempered commuter in the Pumpkin Cafe when I was feeling impish. It must be a lot of pressure, having that kind of power or any kind of power: you’d have to be wicked or cute and, let me tell you, I don’t fancy either.

  I’m feeling bitter, as I sit by Lockhart. If I had one fraction of a poltergeist’s power, I could communicate the whole story to him – I could depress the keys on his computer, one by one, as he sat aghast in his seat. I can just picture it – him pushing the chair back and gripping the arms as, on his screen, a few words appear, then sentence after sentence. I could tell him the whole story. He would be pale and shaking and call out in a high voice to the officer in the next door room, ‘Er, Sarge, do you want to come here a minute …?’

  All I can do is drift sadly away … I leave the police building, cross the road, and wait for Andrew to come back from work.

  *

  I see him straight away, exiting the station through the open barriers, just one young man in a suit a little too large for him, average height, slender build, an office worker amongst all the other commuters in suits and macs. I follow him, just like I did that first time, staying a few paces behind and watching his back – something is bothering him again, I can tell by the slope of his shoulders. His head is tilted a little as he walks, as if he is facing a hard oncoming wind and needs the momentum to carry him forward.

  I feel so sad for him. The desire to possess him has gone, and in its place is a small ache. I think of how I taught my class the poets of the Great War and how everyone thought it was all posh Rupert Brooke with his blond curls and honey but how my favourite was Isaac Rosenberg, the East End Jewish boy who joined up because his family needed the money, the one who knew what was coming. Snow is a strange white word … It hasn’t snowed yet this year. I wonder if it will after Christmas. I watch Andrew, the ordinary young man of my dreams. Your body is a star, unto my thought … I thought it was lust, the desire to possess – that’s all lust is, after all, possession. You’re mine, Matty used to say. You belong to me. How charmed I was, without realising that no desire for possession can ever last – once the object of desire has been possessed, desire dies. Love isn’t ownership and that’s how I know I really love this troubled, fair-haired one, as I follow him. I still want to love him but if I can’t love him, then I want him to be loved.

  He climbs the steps up to Cowgate but instead of turning towards home, he walks into town, then takes a left. He comes to a new building set back slightly from the street, a cheap-looking redbrick cube with a disabled access ramp and grey slatted blinds at the window. A small plaque next to the buzzer reads: The Branfield Centre. I know this place. Some of my more difficult students got referrals here. I wonder what he is doing here out of hours. Maybe they do evening appointments for grown-ups.

  He pauses on the step and checks his watch. He looks from side to side, then he pivots briskly on one heel and strides round the corner where a small alleyway leads up to a row of low terraced housing. There are no shops in sight but a few metres down, set between two houses, is a tiny pub. Inside, it is no more than a sitting room, with a single bar and leaded, opaque windows. An old man sits in the corner, full-lipped and muttering to himself, a half of stout in front of him, nearly finished. At the bar stand two young men, Polish or Ukrainian possibly, who give Andrew a single blank stare then return to their conversation.

  A bored-looking middle-aged man is behind the bar, his left arm a sleeve of tattoos, his green T-shirt a size too small. He gives Andrew an unfriendly glance.

  Andrew says, ‘Gin and tonic please, and a packet of chilli nuts.’

  The look on the man’s face implies that he thinks gin and tonic is a girl’s drink but he isn’t going to argue. He lifts his elbow and flips the lid off the tonic bottle with an intense fzzzt! sound and tosses the packet of nuts on the counter top. Andrew goes to the corner opposite the old man. He takes a sip of the drink, tears open the packet of nuts and pours a pile of them into his palm, then does that thing that only men do: at least, I’ve never seen a woman do it. He raises the palmful of nuts to his mouth in one swift lever motion and tips them in, shovelling them in in one go. I’m guessing the nuts were what he really wanted and the gin and tonic was just an excuse. He leans back in his seat while he crunches the nuts in his mouth, rests his head on the wall behind him, closes his eyes.

  I watch his face. He looks older than his years. He is hungry, exhausted – he wants to be anywhere but here and to be doing anything except what he is about to do.

  Andrew, my lovely young man, I’m so very sorry.

  After a moment, his phone buzzes in his pocket and he withdraws it and reads a text from Ruth. I’m here. I’m outside. You here yet? Xx

  He texts back. Nearly there. Go in. I’ll be there soon. Xx

  *

  The therapist is called Isobel. She says hello to Ruth, nodding, introduces herself to Andrew and shakes his hand, gestures for them to sit in two upright chairs on one side of a low coffee table. On the coffee table is a box of tissues, with one pulled halfway out, all ready and waiting. Isobel sits on another upright chair. Andrew and Ruth’s chairs are some way apart so all three of them are sitting at the points of an isosceles triangle.

  Isobel – she’s around forty, I’m guessing, small and dark, a calm air – turns to Andrew and says, ‘Well, before we start I just wanted to say thank you for coming, Andrew. I know this is something you have reservations about and these things are always difficult, but it’s a very good sign that you’ve been able to come along and I wanted you to know that I, and Ruth, appreciate it.’

  Andrew gives a terse nod. He looks
as though he wishes he could be the hedgehog at the bottom of his garden and curl up into a small, spiky ball.

  Isobel turns to Ruth. ‘Ruth, perhaps you could begin by telling us how it feels to have Andrew here.’

  Ruth replies slowly but confidently. She has been in the process for quite a while, after all. ‘Well, I’m pleased because I know he’s been angry with me for a long time and a lot of stuff has come up because of what’s happened, so I’m hoping that this will give him a chance to express that, and that it’s, well, the beginning of … To be honest I’m just glad we’re talking again.’

  She stops, and both the women look at Andrew, who now looks as if he’s thinking, forget being a hedgehog, just take me back to Platform Seven.

  There is a long silence and then Isobel says, her voice soft, ‘Andrew, sometimes it’s hard to know where to begin.’

  She stops again, and waits. This gentle tactic elicits no response from Andrew, whose gaze is fixed on the box of tissues, which he stares at as if he is wondering whether he could lean forward, pull one out and find it had the right answer scrawled on it in biro.

  After a decent interval, Isobel tries again. ‘If it’s not too presumptuous of me, I’m going to suggest a place where we might start. Perhaps you could begin by saying why you were so angry when your sister first told you she was going to the police.’

  Ruth interrupts, ‘Sorry, Isobel, just to correct you, I think that’s it, I didn’t tell Andrew, it wasn’t me, I mean. I should’ve, of course, but we hadn’t been in contact at all for a couple of years. I was just so angry that he still saw Dad but because we never talked then we couldn’t even talk about that, so when I went to the police, the first time I mean, he had no idea. We weren’t speaking, at all, I mean.’

  Andrew finally chips in. ‘You must’ve known they’d come and talk to me, though. First I knew was when they showed up on my doorstep.’