by Dan Waddell
He told Ron, who was back at his station.
‘I’ll join you, mate,’ Ron said jovially, obviously having forgiven him for his trespass. ‘Need another fag.’
Nigel had put his coat on. Ron wandered down in just his T-shirt. Outside the front entrance, he lit his cigarette while Nigel watched a few cars flash past, not interested in a roll-up. He pulled his mobile from his pocket and switched it on.
No new messages. Not that he expected to be the first person to be told when they arrested the killer. ‘Low battery’ flashed up on his screen. He cursed himself for failing to charge it that morning and turned it off once more to save what little power he had.
‘How’s it going?’ Ron asked, exhaling with force.
Nigel looked at him apologetically.
‘I know you can’t tell me the details, but you can tell me whether it’s going well, can’t you?’
‘It’s going… OK. Just got microfilm eyes, that’s all.’
Ron nodded in sympathy. ‘You know how they used to get the papers flat enough so they could be filmed?’
‘Can’t say I do.’
‘Iron. Used to have a team of women that flattened them with domestic irons.’
‘Really?’
‘Straight up,’ Ron replied and took another enormous, loud drag on his cigarette.
Nigel realized he had to get more specific in his search. ‘I need the Chelsea Times,’ he said.
‘I’ll get down there and get it for you once I’ve finished smoking this,’ Ron offered. ‘Might take me a while, though. It’s not life or death, is it?’
Nigel smiled. ‘It could be.’
Foster was in his car, reliving the memory of the previous Sunday in Avondale Park in Notting Dale when he’d been called to the scene of the tramp’s death. There had seemed little remarkable at the scene when he first arrived there. The rain had fallen steadily throughout the night, and he remembered the trees appeared to be bowing under the weight of water. The tramp had been found hanging from the frame of a children’s swing, though he had been cut down by the attending officer in a vain attempt at resuscitation, so Foster did not see the body in situ.
He’d been back to the office and collected some pictures. The rope, the swing, the tramp’s body, the area around the scene. None of it looked in any way out of the ordinary. The rope had been sent to forensics for examination and Carlisle had been summoned to do a second post-mortem. Foster had called the park keeper, who had found the body at dawn, and been assured, as he had been the previous week, that no one had witnessed anything strange or different the day or night leading up to the body’s discovery. Yet the park had been closed at five p.m., which meant the killer must have dragged or hauled the body into the park by some means. Foster had walked around the park perimeter and could see no obvious way in.
The question that bothered him was: Why was there no stab wound? Barnes had told him that all three victims in 1879 had been stabbed. So why hang the first one?
They needed an ID. He had asked for dental records to be prepared and compared against those on the missing persons database, but that would take time. So, here he was in his car, kerb-crawling through the streets of Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill, armed with a stack of pictures of a dead man. He started by St John’s Churchyard. Pieces of police tape attached to the railings still fluttered in the wind. But the churchyard itself was empty.
He drove along Portobello Road; the market stallholders had long since packed away their stalls, though the detritus of a busy Saturday still littered the road. He parked up when he reached the railway bridge, at the northern, darker end of the street. It was here the winos liked to hang out, in and around the alleys, buildings and dark corners that constituted life under the Westway.
He checked Acklam Road, a pedestrianized street running parallel to the overhead motorway. There was no sign of anyone, homeless or not. He crossed back over Portobello and walked beside the Westway towards Ladbroke Grove. There was a small park called Portobello Green, a haven for local workers eating their lunch by day, and for the chaotic and confused drifters drinking fortified wine by night. He pushed the gate that led into the park, and heard it creak. From the other side he could hear voices, people laughing and shouting. As he got closer he could see a group of homeless gathered around one park bench, falling quiet as he drew near, recognizing him as trouble.
The person he wanted was sitting in the middle, the others circled around her, like children hearing a story.
‘Good evening, Sheena,’ he said, as silence fell.
Ciderwoman was wearing the same clothes as on their previous meeting. In the late dusk, and away from the harsh lights of the police station, she appeared less grimy. Her eyes, yellow and narrow, stared long and hard at him for some time before informing the brain.
‘What the fuck do you want?’ she said, remembering him at last. She looked at the gnarled old man next to her, bald head, bushy dirty-grey beard, sucking on a cigarette as if his life depended on it while he rocked forwards and back. ‘This one’s a copper,’ she slurred. ‘Asked me about that murder in the church.’
‘Sorry to gatecrash the party when it’s going so well,’ Foster said. ‘But I’m afraid I need your help again, Sheena. The rest of you might be able to help me, too.’ He pulled a copy of the photo of the dead tramp from his inside jacket. ‘Do any of you know this guy?’
Ciderwoman snatched the photo from his hand and put it within an inch of her face. She shut one eye and tried to focus. Foster pulled a small torch from his pocket and flicked it on.
‘This might help.’
He gave it to Ciderwoman. She held it unsteadily in one hand and shone it on the picture.
‘He’s fucking dead,’ she said eventually.
‘I know that. Do you recognize him?’
She looked again. The others had crowded behind both her shoulders to take a look. She passed the torch and picture to a few others.
‘Never seen ’im,’ she said with certainty.
The photo did the rounds: no one else had seen him either.
‘If he did hang around this part of town, would it be fair to say you’d know him?’
She cracked her tombstone smile. ‘If he’d hung around here, it’d be fair to say I’d probably shagged him,’ she said, then let rip with her wheezy, gasping laugh.
The rest joined in.
That’s an image that will take some time to dispel, Foster thought.
Nigel was browsing the online catalogue when Ron returned, a couple of bound volumes under his arm, wheezing with the effort. No microfilm, Nigel thought with some relief. He took them from him and placed one volume on the reading stand. He pushed his glasses back from the tip of his nose and opened the front cover. The pages were dry as sandpaper and as stiff in his hand. It felt wonderful; he could almost sense the years falling away. He flicked giddily through the pages, until he reached the edition of April 2nd.
He thought wrong. There wasn’t a single word. The newspaper consisted of two pages, both filled with advertising, grocery prices, a trade directory and other minutiae of Victorian life. Any other time it would have been a fascinating insight. But not now. He needed news.
Ron had shuffled away towards his station. Nigel called him back.
‘Can you get the Kensington News and West London Times for 1879?’ Nigel asked.
‘Never heard of them,’ Ron said mournfully.
‘It’s one newspaper,’ Nigel replied. ‘A weekly.’
Ron ambled slowly out of the room, back towards the depths.
Half an hour later, Ron returned with another bound volume. Nigel found the edition for April 4th. The murder spree was front page. It concentrated on the worried reactions of Notting Hill residents, including a number who believed the killer to be some sort of golem. One ‘eyewitness’ had described seeing a man ‘more than seven feet in height, hair overgrowing his visage’ in the vicinity of the first murder.
Nigel read the report ca
refully. Nothing was new until he reached the point where the reporter had managed to find a talking head who claimed to know the person who had found the body. The man, unnamed, had been taking an early-morning walk beside the Hammersmith and City Railway when he came across the body near the station.
He rose to go and ring Foster. Then he stopped: Notting Hill Gate was underground. Unless this guy lived in a tunnel, what the hell was he doing walking alongside the track?
Nigel sat back down. Hammersmith and City Railway. Which line was that now? The Hammersmith and City Line still ran, of course, but it didn’t go to Notting Hill Gate. That was on the Central Line. He thought the Circle and District Lines ran through it too.
He needed a reference book. He checked a few of the shelves, but they had nothing useful. The Internet, he thought. He went to the library catalogue and clicked the Internet icon. His first search term was ‘London underground’. A minute later he had 369,000 results to choose from. The first was an online journey planner; the second was the Transport for London official website. He clicked that. For what felt like an age nothing seemed to happen. Just when he was about to try again, the page appeared. He clicked the link marked ‘tube’. He scanned the page as quickly as he could, looking for a link to the network’s history. He could not see anything about history. On the browser, he clicked ‘back’ to the list of search results.
The next result was more promising. It was ‘Underground history: the disused stations on London’s underground’. It concentrated on the ‘ghost’ stations on the tube: the platform you can see, if your eyes work in the dark, between Tottenham Court Road and Holborn on the Central Line, which has been closed since 1932, and used to be the station for the British Museum; or Down Street on the Piccadilly Line between Green Park and Hyde Park Corner.
He clicked back on the browser once more. He entered ‘Notting Hill station’ and hit return. The first listed site was Wikipedia: a free encyclopedia, the entries submitted by punters. He clicked it and read the short, bland entry.
Notting Hill Gate tube station is a London underground station in Notting Hill. On the Central Line it is between Holland Park and Queensway, and on the District Line and Circle Line it is between High Street Kensington and Bayswater. It is in both zones 1 and 2. It opened on July 30, 1900 and is most famous for its proximity to Portobello Road, the site of the movie Notting Hill, the Notting Hill Carnival, and the Portobello Market.
July 30, 1900? Nigel read it again and again. But the date didn’t change. Was it a typo? Or was it right? If so, where the hell was the station before then? It existed, he had read about it in several newspapers. But where was it? He thought of Foster and his team waiting to pounce at Notting Hill Gate. He looked at his watch. It was nearly ten p.m. I’ll give it another ten minutes, he thought.
He typed in the address for Google and entered the search term ‘History of the London underground’. The first hit was a site that offered a history of the tube decade by decade, beginning with 1860–69. In 1863 it told how the Metropolitan Railway was opened between Paddington and Farringdon Street, stopping at Edgware Road, Baker Street, Portland Road (now Great Portland Street), Gower Street (now Euston Square) and King’s Cross. No mention was made of Notting Hill.
The next page told the story of how the independent Hammersmith and City Railway opened between Paddington and Hammersmith in 1864 as a feeder for the new underground system. Locomotives ran on the overground track and then entered the underground system.
The intermediate stations on this new railway were Notting Hill (now Ladbroke Grove) and Shepherd’s Bush.
Before he had even finished the sentence, Nigel had dug into his pockets, grabbed his mobile phone, dialled it and put the phone to his ear. It rang twice and went dead. He looked at the screen: blank. He checked his pockets: he had a fifty-pence coin. That would last seconds – landline-to-mobile phone calls devoured money. He ran down the stairs to the pay phone, picked up the receiver and called Foster.
The phone rang. And rang.
‘Pick the bloody thing up,’ he hissed.
‘This is DCI Grant Foster. I can’t answer my phone…’
‘It’s Nigel,’ he said after the beep, not wanting to waste a word. ‘You’re in the wrong place. You need to be at Ladbroke Grove station. It used to be called Notting Hill. My phone is dying. Go to Ladbroke Grove. I’ll go there…’
Then his money ran out.
Emergency calls were free. He punched the number in.
‘Fire, ambulance or police?’
‘Police.’
He was put through.
‘I need to speak to Detective Chief Inspector Foster,’ he said before the telephonist had asked what he wanted. ‘It’s really, extremely urgent. I really cannot stress how urgent it is.’
Foster was looking through a pair of binoculars from the seventh floor of a drab, watery-grey office block that towered over the area surrounding Notting Hill Gate tube station. Drinkwater had hired the entire floor because it gave them a clear sight of Kensington Church Street, Notting Hill Gate itself, and then the residential area behind. The floor was empty, save for a few desks, chairs and phone leads, and bore the stale smell of an unloved place of work.
It was Saturday night and the street beneath Foster was teeming with locals and tourists, on their way to overpriced bars and restaurants. His team was in position, primed and ready to go. An armed response unit was on standby, comparing guns in the far corner of the office. Two officers were posing as homeless by each exit of the tube station. An unmarked car was parked on Uxbridge Street, which ran parallel to Notting Hill Gate, behind the Coronet and Gate cinemas. Another was parked on the other side of Notting Hill Gate, on Pembridge Gardens.
Foster’s radio crackled into life. He could see there was a commotion across the other side of the street. A woman was screaming outside one of the high-street banks and a group of people had gathered around her.
‘Come on!’ Foster shouted and sprinted from the room.
He ran down the stairwell, Heather and Drinkwater behind him. They tumbled out on to Notting Hill Gate.
‘What’s happening, people?’ he barked into the receiver.
No reply.
The three detectives ran across the road. Officers were converging on the group outside the bank.
A group of rubberneckers were staring at an hysterical black woman, who was shouting at the top of her voice, ‘He took my bag. He took my facking bag.’
Her friends were consoling her. None of them, or any of the gawpers, seemed impressed that a simple bag snatch had attracted the attention of half of west London’s police. An officer in uniform further down the street was walking towards them, clutching a teenage boy by the arm, the woman’s bag in the other.
‘Give’ im here,’ the woman screamed. ‘I’ll tear his facking head off.’
Even from ten feet away, Foster could see that her fingernails were up to the task; the threat was uttered with absolute conviction. The teenager looked terrified. Foster’s eyes scanned the length of the street. All seemed normal.
‘Still all quiet?’ he said into his radio.
The answer came back that it was.
Foster holstered the radio. ‘Let’s get back inside,’ he said.
His breath had shortened, the anticipation and adrenalin still coursing through his body.
In the chaos, he failed to hear his phone ring.
Nigel had given up trying to speak directly to Foster. The woman who took his call treated him like a crank. He tried to urge her to at least pass the message on to the incident room, but she kept asking him for a phone number and location, believing he had witnessed a murder and not that he was foreseeing one, or its aftermath. When the call ended, he knew he could not afford to wait and see what happened, to find out whether the message had got through; he needed to get there, to the scene of the potential crime.
He left the library, hoping to hail a black cab. The road outside was dark and silent –
little chance of a taxi passing by. He ran to the tube. Within five minutes a train came. He rode it southwards to King’s Cross. When he got there, his first instinct was to get a taxi, but on a Saturday night at the gateway to the north he may be waiting ages; it would be just as quick to ride the Hammersmith and City Line to Ladbroke Grove.
It was almost eleven thirty when he tumbled out at Ladbroke Grove. Drinkers, revellers, winos and nutters thronged the area in front of the tube. The place stank of chip fat, booze and piss. People passed on their way from bar to club, or spilled from the tube to their homes. A nearby bus stop swelled numbers. Car stereos blasted out cavernous bass tunes, young couples laughed and argued. Nigel normally did all he could to avoid being in such places at a time like this. But here he didn’t care: he stood for a few seconds and wondered which way to head – apart from one squad car parked a hundred yards down the street, there was no sign of any police presence.
He walked up the grove, under the railway bridge. A tube rattled into the station above. He stopped once more to look around. Nothing unusual. He started walking again, to where he didn’t know.
Then he heard a scream.
It was a piercing, wounded cry that tore through the night. At first he put it down to a drunken fight, but it continued. No one else seemed to notice, or felt it too commonplace to act.
Nigel felt his blood thicken.
The screaming was coming from the right, behind the tube station. There was a short alley, along the side of a bar. He headed down it. The pavement widened into a road. Above him loomed the monstrous concrete Westway; the white noise of its traffic a background thrum. Yet the screaming got louder. Nigel quickened his pace to a jog. Fifty yards down the street, he could see a young woman. Her arms were spread wide and, as she screamed, she bent double with the effort. Beside her a car was parked diagonally in the road, its driver’s door open and headlights shining. From the billow of fumes from the exhaust, he could see the engine was running. Nigel sprinted towards her.
