Facebook listed eighty Paul Collingwoods. Of the half with photographs, however, none matched the man Laurie was looking for. Forty-odd others were visible only as stylised silhouettes, and at least twenty of those were potential London-dwellers. There was no way Laurie was going to send all of them a friend request, and without that any message would just get stuck in a spam filter.
The BT website was more helpful. There were seventeen Collingwoods with London telephone numbers; a surprisingly high proportion – eight – had the initial ‘P’, but only two of those lived in north London. Laurie noted the numbers. She would call them that evening, away from office eavesdroppers. Then she remembered; Paul had said he was going to be out of London for the rest of the week, taking his kids to his mum’s. Ah well. Perhaps a few days of enforced separation would be no bad thing. If she still felt like tracking him down on Monday, she’d know it was serious. Right now, Monday seemed a long way off.
Laurie straightened in her seat. That had been an unproductive way to spend the first twenty minutes of her working day. It was time to get back to Michael’s model. He had been at his desk since she arrived, in much the same position as when she had left the previous afternoon: hunched over his keyboard, face rendered even more pallid by the glow from his screen. Only the different pattern on his shirt provided any indication that he had not been there all night. He must be expecting her to get down to work now, to match him keystroke for keystroke as she methodically changed the variables and noted each set of results. It was such a boring and repetitive process – even Michael looked glassy-eyed – but there was no help for it. She settled down to work.
There was, Laurie had to admit, something faintly satisfying about the routine. It kept enough of her mind occupied to stop it wandering, but demanded nothing more in the way of intellectual effort. Enjoyment was too strong a word, but there was a sense of safety in the knowledge that she was doing exactly what Michael had asked her to do. So the ringing on her mobile, when it came, was a surprisingly unwelcome distraction. Neither Laurie nor her phone recognised the number. Might it be Paul? Laurie hardly dared hope as she pressed the green answer key.
But it was a woman’s voice at the other end. ‘Am I speaking to Miss Lauren Bateman? This is Sergeant Atkins, British Transport Police, Euston station. I understand you reported your name as a witness to an incident here on the morning of the twenty-first of July.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’ Conscious that Michael had looked up from his computer, Laurie didn’t feel like volunteering anything more.
‘We’d like you to come in to make a statement, if that’s convenient.’ There was no interrogatory uplift to end the sentence. Its second half was there for form’s sake only.
Laurie looked regretfully at her computer screen. Was it really half past three already? She must have worked through lunch without realising. Her sigh was entirely unintentional, but still audible at the other end of the line.
‘I’m sorry if it’s a bother to you, madam.’ Sergeant Atkins’s tone made it clear she wasn’t sorry at all. ‘But you will appreciate that there has been a fatality and we need to establish the circumstances surrounding it as expeditiously as possible.’
Laurie surrendered. ‘Of course, when would you like me to come in?’
It seemed that the sergeant was hoping to complete her paperwork this evening. She made it clear that she was expecting Laurie before then: in fact, as soon as possible. Quite why she was calling now, rather than earlier in the day, or even yesterday, never became apparent. Laurie didn’t dare ask, let alone suggest that she would have appreciated a little more notice. For all she knew, her evidence was necessary before they could release the body to the family.
Laurie noted where she’d got to in her progression through Michael’s variables and rose from her seat. As if attached by an invisible cord, Michael’s chin rose to face her. Laurie looked at him and sighed. ‘I’m sorry about this. It’s a bit of a long story, but I was a witness to an accident a couple of days ago and the police want me to make a statement. I’ll be as quick as I can.’
As she changed out of her work clothes and cycled to Euston, Laurie tried to rationalise why she felt guilty at leaving Michael like that. It wasn’t as if she had to work on his bloody model for him; it was way beyond her job description.
There was a man sitting behind the glass screen at Euston police station. He took Laurie’s details, registered that she was here to meet Sergeant Atkins, and motioned for her to sit in one of the three chairs that lined the flank wall.
Laurie chose the seat nearest the screen. There was no one else in the room, but if anyone arrived, she wanted to make sure she was at the front of any developing queue. The plastic squeaked slightly as she settled into it. Posters on the wall told her about Crimestoppers, about always reporting a suspicious or abandoned bag, about when to call 999 and when 111 was more appropriate. It all felt so different from the last time Laurie had spent any time in a police station. Then, boredom had been the least of her worries.
Laurie looked at her phone: no signal, no opportunity to divert herself in any way. For a moment she wished she had not deleted Candy Crush. Even the Metro would have been better than nothing.
A man and a woman came into the waiting room. Laurie prepared herself to interact, to acknowledge some fellow feeling as they joined her on the chairs, but they let themselves through, past the glass screen, without even looking at her.
Half past four: Laurie had been waiting for twenty minutes. Apparently Crimestoppers’ specially trained agents will make sure your report contains no information that could identify you. Every time Laurie shifted, her chair squeaked in sympathy, its sound amplified by the smallness of the room. Should she go and ask the man behind the screen if it was OK to go out and get a paper? Laurie got as far as standing up, only to see that she was now alone. Presumably the man only appeared in response to a buzz on the outside door; at other times, he had better things to do.
It was another ten minutes before the door beside the glass screen opened, this time from the inside. A disembodied female voice said, ‘Lauren Bateman.’ Laurie got up and was almost at the door before she saw the speaker. ‘I’m Sergeant Atkins.’
Laurie had never thought of herself as tall, so it was disconcerting to realise that her chin was level with the top of the policewoman’s head. Didn’t the police have some sort of minimum height requirement? Did the fact the sergeant wasn’t in uniform mean she was CID? Laurie considered asking, but something about Atkins’s manner – the way she had not yet made eye contact, the projected aura of having been interrupted on important business – discouraged any attempt at small talk. The magnanimous ‘No problem’, which Laurie had been prepared to issue in response to an apology for being kept waiting, proved to be entirely unnecessary.
Then all thoughts of social niceties ceased. Along the corridor a door opened to reveal a young man dressed in the standard t-shirt and shorts of a tourist. Without trying to analyse his looks, Laurie could see immediately that he was beautiful; there was no other word for it. Behind him a uniformed policeman had a grip on his elbow. The two of them stood there in the corridor, side on to Laurie, before the young man turned to the left and looked her full in the face. In that moment, he made his calculation. What occurred next seemed to happen unbearably slowly, although Laurie still had no time to cry out. In one move the man wrenched his elbow free from the guiding hand behind him, turned around, headbutted the policeman’s nose with an audible crack, and kneed him hard in the groin. Then he sprinted towards Laurie, clearly aiming for the door she had just entered while it was still ajar.
The sergeant had her back to the corridor. The man dealt with her even before she realised there was a problem, pushing her over with ridiculous ease. Then he came to Laurie. The shove in her chest made her stagger back and out of his way. ‘How dare he?’ Instinctively, Laurie stuck out her foot, making the man stumble as he headed for the door.
‘Bitch!’ The man wheeled round and punched her hard in the stomach, a winding blow so painful she was sure he must have broken a rib. She crouched down, arms round her middle, desperate to breathe, unable to protect herself from the blows that would be sure to come.
None did. Instead Laurie was assaulted by an alarm so loud she had to put her hands over her ears. She opened her eyes in time to see Sergeant Atkins and another policeman running past her, heading on into the train station, presumably in pursuit of the man who had vanished.
The air seeped back into Laurie’s lungs. The pain receded. She stood up, uncertain what to do next. Then the man she had originally seen manning the desk appeared in front of her. He must be fifty at least, Laurie realised, with enough of a paunch to mean he wouldn’t be running anywhere very fast. Conversation was impossible, but he beckoned for Laurie to follow him further into the corridor. The policeman whose nose she had heard break was still there, sitting slumped against the wall. He must have been too wrapped up in his own concerns to notice what had happened to Laurie; now he eyed her over the bloodstained tissue pressed against his face. Her guide looked at him, clearly deciding what to do next. Then he opened the door beside him, the one from which Laurie had seen the two men emerge – was it really only a minute or so ago? – gestured for Laurie to go in, and closed the door behind her.
The alarm rang on, precluding any thought, dominating Laurie’s consciousness.
And then it stopped. Now it was the silence that was overwhelming. Laurie shut her eyes and concentrated on getting her breathing back to normal. What had she been thinking? The only thing she knew about that man was that he was capable of extreme violence. And she had tried to trip him. It was only luck that his need to escape outweighed any desire for vengeance. Never fight if you can run. Isn’t that what they’d drummed into them in those self-defence classes at school? She would remember it next time.
Her pulse slower now, Laurie looked around the room she had entered. It was windowless, with strip lights in the ceiling. Two chairs faced each other across a table. Laurie sat down in one, realising as she did so that it was fixed to the floor. So was the table. She looked up; a security camera seemed to be aimed at her face. Another realisation: there was no handle on this side of the door. If Laurie had not already used up her stocks of adrenaline, this might have been a time to panic, to succumb to claustrophobia. As it was, she could only greet her surroundings with recognition. She wasn’t stuck in a nightmare. This was an interview room, entirely similar to the one she had occupied in Cambridge, the one where she had not so much been interviewed as lectured about the dangers of drugs and underage drinking. On that occasion the arresting officer had given the impression that he cared about her, even as she was processed through fingerprints and mugshot, and waited for Dad to come to retrieve her from the holding cell. She had only been fifteen of course, covering her fear with bravado.
So when Sergeant Atkins arrived about twenty minutes later, Laurie’s residual shock at what had occurred was overlaid by a spirit of warmth towards the police. There was nervousness too, the sort she always felt in any encounter with a figure of authority. She had to suppress the urge to rise at the policewoman’s entrance, remembering her old headmistress as she did so (‘Stand up when I come into the room!’).
The sergeant placed herself in the chair opposite Laurie’s. They looked each other full in the face for the first time. Laurie saw a woman a few years older than herself: shoulder-length brown hair, no obvious make-up. The sergeant gave a little nod, as if of recognition (surely that mugshot had been destroyed?), examined her notebook, and began: ‘You are Lauren Miranda Bateman?’
‘Yes,’ Laurie replied, and then, still eager to please: ‘How is your colleague? You know I saw the assault. Would you like a statement about that too?’ Laurie paused, wondering if she should mention that he’d hit her too. Was that relevant?
‘I’ll note your details on the file in case the investigating officer wishes to be in touch. In the meantime, I’d be grateful if we could focus on the reason you are here. On 21st the twenty-first of July you reported yourself as the witness to an incident on the Victoria line southbound platform here at Euston station. Is that correct?’
And so the interview began. At one level, it was relatively unremarkable. Throughout, Sergeant Atkins continued to be unfriendly, almost austere. Was Laurie just imagining that she had been weighed in the balance, and somehow found wanting? There was certainly no understanding that she might be distressed by the way a random encounter, sparked by friendliness, had ended in a death, no attempt to get to know Laurie herself. Rather, the policewoman’s concern was simply to establish why Laurie was so sure the man’s death was accidental. She took her through the sequence of events that led to him falling at least three times. Did Laurie really think he’d been trying to point out a smudge on her nose? The disbelief with which she treated Laurie’s suggestion seemed to be rooted in scorn.
The final part of the interview provided some explanation for Sergeant Atkins’s behaviour. Laurie had just said something like, ‘I didn’t move for a while, but then I came up to the surface as quickly as possible for some fresh air,’ when she noticed the policewoman nodding. That was when Laurie realised: ‘I suppose you’ve been able to see me on the platform video?’
Laurie blushed as she remembered her moment of panic, all consideration for others thrown aside as she barged through to the escalators. All she could say was, ‘I’m not usually like that.’
And all Sergeant Atkins would say in return was, ‘You’ll appreciate that there are reasons why passengers are asked to make their way upstairs in an orderly manner.’
Even after the interview, the sergeant still had to transcribe Laurie’s words onto a statement form for her signature. Converted into witness-speak, the result bore little relation to Laurie’s own description, and made no attempt to convey her accompanying emotions, but it was, at least, an accurate summary of what she had seen. Several other forms established Laurie’s personal details, from address to ethnic identity. One final admonition seemed particularly heavy-handed: ‘If you are summonsed to attend the inquest then I must warn you that failure to do so will be an offence and the coroner can impose a fine or prison sentence.’
Laurie was sensible enough to realise that this would not be a good time to lose her temper. ‘I understand,’ she replied. ‘Any idea when that might be?’
Sergeant Atkins’s response was businesslike but surprising. ‘My investigation is almost complete, but psychiatric reports generally take at least three months.’
‘Psychiatric reports? Does that mean you think he killed himself? But I know it was an accident. I saw him fall.’
‘Your statement will be passed to the coroner, together with the other evidence.’
The interview ended on that unsatisfactory note. In the corridor outside there was no sign that anything untoward had ever taken place. Laurie wondered if she should ask Sergeant Atkins about what had happened again. Had they caught the man? Why hadn’t the sergeant at least asked how she was? Did she even know that she had been attacked as well? Laurie was still in two minds when they reached the door to the waiting room, and there the sergeant left her, with a handshake that was such a surprise, and so out of place, that it could only have come from a training manual.
Back in the station concourse, the evening rush hour was at its peak. Commuters hurried past Laurie, heading for the trains to take them north and out of London. No one gave her a second glance, but that was just as well. What would she have done if they had? How many of them had the capacity for the sort of violence she had just experienced? Where was the man? If he had escaped then he would surely be a long way from Euston by now, wouldn’t he?
Laurie’s route to her bike took her by the escalators going down to the ticket hall for the Underground. She must have passed them on her way to the interview without a second thought. Now she couldn’t help shivering a little. Was it Euston station itself that was dangerous? The people around her did not seem to think so. Or was it just that the potential for horror existed everywhere?
None of these thoughts seemed so powerful outside in the evening sun. Laurie looked at her phone: seven o’clock. Perhaps she should return to work? She imagined Michael sitting there, tapping away, as desks slowly emptied around him. It wasn’t as though he was able to authorise overtime, but he’d surely be pleasantly surprised to see her; the routine she had established during the afternoon would be a good return to normality. Laurie shook her head and smiled. The last thing she wanted now was to be stuck in an office. She wheeled her bike to Eversholt Street and headed for Tufnell Park.