by Mark Pearson
She looked up at the monitor again: four minutes to go. She had made a decision. John had said he would call her in a couple of days and, when he did, she would agree to see him again. She smiled to herself and felt the warmth of it spread through her body. And it wasn’t just the champagne working.
Two minutes to go. Not only had she stayed later than she planned at Kettner’s, but the automatic ticket gates hadn’t been working at Piccadilly, wouldn’t recognise her Oyster card, and she had had to wait for a guard to let her through.
She’d arrived on the platform just as the doors of her train closed and it had started to move away. She hated missing her train. Another eight minutes to the next one. She’d have to run to make the connection at Marylebone to catch the fast overland. If she missed it, it was another half-hour wait.
She shivered and turned around, suddenly getting the feeling she was being watched. There were a few other people on the platform: a group of young women in their twenties, giggling and dressed more for summer than winter! A girls’ night out, by the look of it, and quite a drunken one. An office party or a hen-night. An older man further along the platform was pretending to read a poster on the wall, but she could see he kept flicking sideways glances at the group of laughing women. He caught her eye and looked away. More people piled onto the platform and a short while later the train arrived.
At Marylebone she ran as fast as she could; she wasn’t exactly wearing high-heeled shoes, but she wasn’t wearing flats either. People with the same idea flew past her, men mainly, who weren’t hampered by their footwear.
She hurried up the stairs leading from the Underground, up and onto the concourse, and then ran up to the barrier connecting to the overland Chiltern Railways; she had to run up almost one entire platform and then sideways to another platform – the train was still there, and she made it inside with seconds to spare.
She smiled apologetically to the man sitting opposite her as she drew in deep breaths and ran her hand across her forehead. He nodded almost dismissively and returned to the crossword he was studying. She looked at the paper, the Saturday Telegraph, and raised an eyebrow; he’d had long enough to complete it.
She looked at her reflection in the mirrored effect of the windows and smiled. She did look flushed, but happily flushed. She was pleased with what she saw. Today drew a line under everything. Today was going to change things. And so it would.
Just not in the way she imagined it.
Not in her worst nightmares.
3.
Easter week … Wednesday
ANDREW JOHNSON WAS a pillar of his local community. And he was quite happy to tell that fact to anyone who would listen.
It wasn’t entirely true.
He’d joined the Rotary Club at twenty-two years old and moved on to the Rotarians when he was past forty. He was a member of the local Masons’ Lodge and had been invited to dine with the Lord Mayor of London on more than one occasion. He was maybe still a few years away from getting the pin-striped morning-suit trousers, but it was only a matter of time. Patience and perseverance. That was Andrew’s mantra. All things come to he who waits. Even if you have to go out and get them sometimes.
He was the forty-five-year-old manager of a country pub called The Crawfish, in Lavenham, a pretty market town in Suffolk. He was married with no children. He had had a vasectomy at the age of thirty-eight, on his wife’s urging. He hadn’t baulked at the idea, having no particular desire himself to father children. The pub was medium-sized, with a lounge bar and a public bar. The lounge bar had a large open fire that was always lit on cold days, even in the summer, if it was wet enough out; and it was popular with the older local customers and the many thousands of tourists who flocked into the town. On one wall of the room hung an original Andrew Haslan – a local artist particularly renowned for his stunning wildlife paintings and etchings. It was of a hare in a wood under a full moon at winter, with snowflakes dancing in the air around him. It had the air of a 1930s Art Deco kind of illustration about it and Andrew Johnson particularly disliked it. But his wife had bought it at a charity auction, for a figure that still made his blood boil, and had insisted that it be proudly displayed so that the world would know what a charitable woman she was.
Charity should begin at home, Andrew would have told her, but he had learned in the many years of their marriage that it was simpler in the long run just to agree with what she wanted. One of these days he was going to toss the bloody painting in the open fire and see what she had to say when it went up in flames. For now, though, he gritted his teeth, sold pints of best or Broadside ale to the customers and listened to their inane CAMRA nonsense, contenting himself with the thought that fairly shortly he would be making one of his little trips. As far as his wife knew, he was going to London on Lodge business or to see his accountants. And sometimes that was true, but it wasn’t the only reason he headed south
Every couple of months or so, when his patience had worn thin and his desires waxed large – desires that could not be satisfied by his wife, for all manner of reasons – he travelled on the railway down from the country to London. It was a six-mile drive to the nearby town of Sudbury, where he would park his car and catch the train to London’s Liverpool Street. It was a pleasant journey with just one change at Marks Tey, and in an hour and twenty minutes he was in the capital.
Andrew liked travelling on the railway, for it gave him time to think of the pleasures that lay ahead. Anticipation was always nine-tenths of the pleasure after all, was it not, as he was wont to joke with his customers when they had to wait for him to change a barrel of the local ale from Adnams brewery. Most of the locals considered Andrew a genial host, and he was. But he was a businessman first and foremost, and his ready smile slipped away when he was not front-of-house.
He always stayed in the same place when he travelled south – a bed-and-breakfast boarding house in Harrow five minutes’ walk from the Underground station. He could have stayed closer to the city centre, but his accountant was based there – going back to the days when he and his wife ran a pub in Northwood Hills, before they sold up and moved to live the country dream. Andrew’s wife had berated him constantly until he finally gave in. She had been addicted to watching Escape to the Country type programmes and was like a dog with a bone about the idea. Country dreams … Country nightmare more like, Andrew thought. The trouble with quiet rural locations was just that. Too quiet, too little entertainment. So the locals made their own entertainment by keeping their noses in everybody else’s business. A short distance from Lavenham was the ancient town of Long Melford, which had the longest street of antique shops in England. It also had two pubs that had topless barmaids working twice a week, and Andrew would dearly have loved to visit them. But he knew that news of that visit would surely fly back to Lavenham and he would never hear the end of it from his wife. As much as he considered himself a pillar of the community, she did even more so. Although she rarely worked, helping out in the pub, she sat on numerous committees and did endless charity work. Face was everything to her and Andrew had to play very, very carefully. But play he did.
In London. Where every variety of play was to be had. The B&B where he stayed in Harrow was frugal, basic accommodation, cereal for breakfast, a shared bathroom, but the place was cheap. The old woman who ran the house kept her rates low and her rooms full. Andrew Johnson liked it that way – he wanted to spend his hard-earned money on other things. More exciting things. The sort that would make the blood pound in his brain. The sort of entertainment he couldn’t readily undertake in Lavenham.
Sometimes he saw the same girls, but not often. It wasn’t about what was comfortable for Andrew Johnson. What was familiar and safe. For him it was about the new. But he always went for the same type of woman. Dark curly-haired women. Of medium height. And he always wanted them to dress the same way. This had posed a problem for him initially – as most working girls in the price bracket he liked to use didn’t usually have the sort of out
fit he liked them to wear. Schoolgirl uniforms, nurses’, policewomen’s. These were commonplace enough. Bought cheap from Ann Summers or online. Tools of the sex trade. But Andrew liked his women dressed like businesswomen. Power suits and suspenders. Attitude in Armani. High heels and haughty couture. But the wardrobes in the small rooms he visited above the staircases of Soho contained no such expensive items. And so Andrew had bought his own, at considerable expense.
He kept the clothes in a small locked suitcase in a locked cupboard in his windowless office, which used to be a storeroom, at the back of the pub, behind the kitchen. And he would take them with him when he made one of his ‘essential’ business trips to London. His wife, Marjorie, was a large, tall, blonde woman who would have fitted into one of his outfits as easily as the proverbial camel would have fitted through the eye of a needle. He would have said that he didn’t know why he married her. But he knew exactly why. Without her money he would still be a second-rate salesman for a second-rate recruiting agency in Wembley specialising in accountancy personnel, where his entire client base was made up of people from the Indian Subcontinent. Andrew Johnson was not a racist by any means, as he was happy to tell anyone who wished to listen to him, but the one thing he didn’t miss by moving to Suffolk was the world of dark-skinned faces that he had had to deal with every day. Suffolk was like England in the Fifties, and a foreign or ethnic face was something of a rarity, something to provoke comment. And the fact that the women he chose to play with were all white was not being racist either. How can a sexual attraction be racist? he thought. Given the things he liked to do, and dreamed of doing, he would have been more racist, in his opinion, had he chosen ethnic women. But he didn’t.
The woman who was modelling his favoured outfit that evening was a tad chubbier than he usually liked. She was called Melody, according to the card on the wall at the base of the stairs, and the notice by the grimy bell on the door to the small flat. In reality her name was Natalie, and she was a single mother of two young children. She lived in Birmingham and commuted down to London three days a week. She earned enough in those three days to take the other four off.
At that moment, however, her hands were tied to the bedstead behind her. The silk blouse she had been given to wear had been opened to expose her breasts, which were cupped in a blood-red corset/bra combination from Agent Provocateur, that was a good size too small for her ample figure. The pinstriped skirt of the suit was pushed up around her waist. One of her high-heeled shoes had flopped from her right foot as it bounced uncontrollably as Andrew Johnson penetrated her. She would have grunted, maybe screamed as the weight of him landed on her soft belly. But the silky knickers he had supplied as well, had been removed and stuffed into her mouth. Her eyes bulged as much as those of the red-faced and perspiring man above her.
Then Andrew’s eyes closed as he came, the tension in his thighs and knees relaxing as he collapsed his full weight upon her again, so that she feared she might well suffocate. He snatched the knickers from her mouth and used them to wipe himself.
‘Jeez, you nearly crushed me to death,’ said the woman beneath him.
Then Andrew Johnson opened his eyes again.
And there was no kindness in them.
Half an hour later he was waiting on the west-bound platform of the Bakerloo Line. Waiting for the train to take him to Baker Street, where he would catch his connecting Metropolitan Line train back to Harrow-on-the-Hill.
A small smile broke out on his face as he replayed in his mind what had happened in the flat. The look of fear in her eyes. The thought of it aroused him once more. He moved his hand surreptitiously down and stroked himself through his trousers.
The sound of a train clattering in the tunnel did little to distract him from his dark thoughts. Past and future pleasures imagined. He smiled again.
A hand fell on his shoulder.
4.
‘I CANNOT TELL you what was in the man’s mind. I have had a jumper once before. A woman – she put herself in the path of my train. Her motion was such that it indicated no panic, no fear, but a resigned acceptance of her fate.’
‘I see.’
‘But this man, his face was not towards me, his arm was raised. Maybe in a farewell gesture. I would simply be speculating if I were to say what his motivations might have been.’
Detective Inspector Tony Hamilton nodded and made a note in his book. ‘I was simply asking if you thought it was a suicide, or if you saw someone push him?’
The train driver was a tall man, in his early fifties, Tony would have guessed, with long, but neat, greying hair and half-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses perched on the end of a long, aquiline nose. There was something stork-like about him, Tony decided.
‘If someone pushed him, I don’t recall seeing it. My focus was straight ahead.’
‘Ken here used to be an English teacher,’ said Terry Randall, one of the two transport policemen who were assisting him with his enquiries into the suicide of an unknown man who had jumped in front of a west-bound Bakerloo Line train at Piccadilly Circus station. Constable Terry Randall, like the train driver, was in his early fifties, but was shorter, squatter and had a sour expression on his face that showed what he thought of the Metropolitan Police invading what he perceived as his territory. Back in 2006 Sir Ian Blair, the then head of the Metropolitan Police, had wanted a single police force in the capital. He had proposed absorbing the British Transport Police into his force, and this was agreed to by the then Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, bringing it under the control of the Home Office. But it never happened and the two forces remained separate entities. The only difference being that constable was as high as the BTP’s law-enforcing ranks rose. Any serious crimes and the Met would be brought in. Some constables like Randall resented it, but his colleague, Constable Emily Wood, didn’t mind. She was in her early thirties, blonde-haired with a bubbly sense of humour, and she obviously liked the look of the tall, dark-haired detective.
‘Couldn’t face the horror of it, could you, Ken? And so became a train driver.’
‘My doctor advised that I take a less stressful occupation some years ago,’ agreed the thin man. ‘I have always been interested in trains, electric and steam, and my pension was such that I could indulge my hobby and remain in full-time employment.’
‘Is it easy to become a Tube driver?’ asked DI Hamilton.
‘Why’s that, Detective?’ asked Emily Wood. ‘Thinking of hanging up your truncheon?’
Tony smiled at her. ‘I’m a detective, remember. I don’t carry a truncheon.’
The female constable quirked an eyebrow at him, suggesting she thought that might not strictly be true. He had to force himself not to smile as the driver answered his question.
‘It’s not easy, no. Vacancies are rare. To get on the handle isn’t as easy as some people think.’
‘On the handle?’
‘It means driving the train,’ said the male constable, a tad patronisingly.
‘I thought they drove themselves mainly?’
‘Only on the Victoria and Central Lines, sir,’ said Emily Wood.
‘That’s right,’ agreed the driver.
‘Can I ask what difference it makes?’ said Constable Randall.
Tony Hamilton gave him a flat look. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You can’t.’
‘He means was my concentration focused elsewhere, so that I might not have seen clearly what happened.’
‘And was it?’
‘No, like I said. It happened very quickly – he hit into the window facing away from me, his right arm raised, and then he was down and under the wheels.’
DI Hamilton grimaced. ‘I imagine that would be quite stressful for you.’
‘You would be right, Detective. I may well reconsider my position. Once was bad enough; twice is …’ He paused, looking for the right words. ‘As you say, very stressful.’
The detective walked over to the table where a small, battered suitcase had been opened and some
items of clothing were placed in evidence bags.
‘Nobody handled these?’ he asked the Soco officer who stood beside the table.
‘Just me.’
‘Good.’
The detective turned back to Emily Wood. ‘And there was no identification on him? No wallet? Nothing?’
‘No, sir, just that card.’
She pointed to a smaller evidence bag. DI Hamilton picked it up and looked at the card. It showed a picture of a medieval man hanging by his one foot from a T-shaped tree. Red hose, blue jerkin and a yellow corona around his head. The Hanged Man.
‘Tarot card, sir,’ said Emily Wood.
‘I can see that.’
‘Major Arcana.’
‘You know about this kind of stuff?’
‘A little, sir. My mother is very into it.’
‘What does it signify?’
‘Do you think it is important?’ asked her colleague.
DI Hamilton shrugged. ‘I have absolutely no idea. It’s what we detectives do, Constable. Find clues. See what they mean.’
‘He killed himself. He jumped in front of a train. No one saw him pushed. And there were lots of people there. It’s no great mystery.’
‘I tell you what, Constable. Why don’t you do your job and let me do mine?’
‘I was just saying—’
‘Well, don’t,’ Tony interrupted him. ‘Just button it! Go on, Emily, tell me more.’
The constable grinned, as much at her colleague’s scowling face as flirting with the detective.
‘It’s a Major Arcana card, sir.’
‘Which means?’
‘Well, there are two types of card in the tarot deck. Major and minor arcana. Bit like in an ordinary deck, with the court cards and the ordinary cards.’
