15
Gloucester Road Tube station sits on the corner of Gloucester Road and Courtfield Road. Its two-tone facade – all glazed terracotta tiles and sandy brick – harks back to the grand old days of the Underground; to a time when the Tube wasn’t just a vessel to get people to their destination, but an experience, a day out. In truth, it was hard to imagine those times on the hot, cramped District line, moving through the bowels of the earth where there was no air, and eventually no daylight.
Heading out of the Tube, I walked the half-mile to the Wrens’ street, then did a 180 and retraced the same route, just as Sam would have done the day he went missing. Fifteen minutes later I was at the main entrance, passing through the three thin arches that would lead me back into the earth.
I took the stairs down to the Circle line platform. The crowds had thinned out in the time I’d been outside. The westbound train was already in the station, but I wanted to go eastbound, so I took a seat on one of the grey metal benches and watched the other passengers. People had always fascinated me: what made them different, how they lied and covered up, how they emoted and broke down. I hadn’t missed the crush of the commute in the years since I’d given up journalism, but I missed the opportunity to watch and learn from the crowds. All the books on kinesics, on the language of the body and the psychology of interviews, helped fill in the blanks. But I’d never learned more than on weekday mornings when I’d been surrounded by a sea of commuters.
Once I was on the eastbound train, I got out at every Circle line station, took the escalators or the stairs up to street level and then made my way back down again. At Westminster – the station that would have been the best and most obvious escape route on the day Sam vanished – I spent a couple of minutes moving between the Circle and Jubilee lines. On a regular work day, Sam would have made the switch in order to go east to Canary Wharf.
Then, about two hours in, I started the journey in reverse – and for the first time a part of me wondered what I was hoping to achieve. In any investigation, you had to feel like you were moving forward; every place you went to, every person you spoke to, had to push the case on. Riding the Tube was a way of understanding Sam better, of getting a feel for his routine. His life. But I’d found nothing of him. No trace of him here, and no trace of him on the footage.
I pushed the doubts down and carried on.
At 11.30, I got back to the gateline at Gloucester Road and noticed a couple of Tube employees. One was standing in a booth watching people pass through; the other was talking to a group of Japanese tourists and pointing to a map. The one in the booth looked up as I approached. He was small, wiry, his eyes dark, his face pale. Close in, his skin seemed too thin, as if it were tracing paper that was about to tear.
‘Morning.’
He nodded in reply. Nothing else.
I ignored the lack of response and pressed on, introducing myself and telling him about Sam. When I was done, I got out a photograph and showed it to him. It was a long shot given the number of people who must have passed through the station every day, but it was a question that needed to be asked. Sometimes, even when you built cases on precision and reason, you had to throw a little mud at the wall and see what stuck.
‘Don’t recognize him,’ he said, his eyes straying across the photo and then away again. He shifted back on the stool he was on, and his thin summer jacket opened a little. Underneath I could see a badge pinned to his shirt: DUNCAN PELL. I assumed, given he was at the gateline, that he was a regular customer-service assistant. It was hard to see him as anything more, as a station supervisor or duty station manager.
‘Are you here permanently?’ I asked.
His eyes came back to me. ‘What?’
‘Do you always work out of this station?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, a frown forming across his brow, as if I was suddenly speaking in a language he didn’t understand. All the time his eyes continued darting left and right; to the gateline, then to the entrance, then back again. Basically anywhere but me.
‘My guy used to pass through here every day.’
Pell snorted. ‘So do a lot of people.’
‘You don’t recognize any of the faces that pass through here?’
‘Some.’
‘But not this one?’
I held up the photograph in front of him again. He glanced at it and away, off to where a group of girls in their late teens were entering the station. Then he shrugged. ‘It’s busy,’ was all he offered, still watching the girls rather than me. I nodded, put the picture away, but didn’t move. The momentary pause seemed to make him uncomfortable. His eyes switched to me, away, then back and there was something in them.
A flash of fear.
‘Right, I’d better be off, Dunc.’ The other member of staff was back at the booth. He looked at me, looked at Pell, then must have assumed he’d interrupted a conversation, and held up both hands in apology. ‘Oh, sorry – didn’t mean to jump in.’
‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘I think we’re done.’
Pell glanced at me sideways and then shifted away, further back into the booth. The other guy reached down and grabbed a portable ticket machine off the floor, slinging it over his shoulder. He was an RCI; a ticket inspector. When he came up, he looked between us again and must have sensed something was going on.
‘Is everything okay?’
Pell didn’t say anything, so I stepped forward and introduced myself. I held up the picture of Sam again. ‘Do you recognize him?’
The RCI patted the breast pockets of his jacket and then reached into the left one and removed a pair of half-moon glasses. He looked older than Pell – forty-three or forty-four – but was taller, broader and in better condition. His nose was uneven – angled slightly left – like it might once have been broken and not properly reset, and I wondered if he’d grown up in and around boxing clubs. He had the build of a middleweight. ‘Did he use this station?’ he asked, eyes still studying the photograph.
‘Every day.’
But he’d already started shaking his head. He looked up, lips pursed, face telling me everything I needed to know. ‘I’m sorry. We get so many people through here.’
I took the picture and thanked him.
‘Did you recognize him, Dunc?’ the man asked.
Pell’s face dissolved into panic again as he was drawn back into the conversation. He ran a hand across his face, stubble crackling against his hands, and I saw he was wearing a silver ring with an old rune symbol imprinted on it. Then he looked down at the floor. He brushed an imaginary hair from the thigh of his trouser leg, cleared his throat, reached down further to his boots – black steel toecaps with red stitching in them – and scratched something else unseen from them. He didn’t want to answer.
‘Dunc?’ the RCI asked again.
‘No,’ Pell finally said, then quietly added, ‘No, I didn’t.’
The RCI started frowning, as if he didn’t understand what was going on with Pell, then turned to me and shrugged. ‘I can ask around if you like.’
‘No, it’s fine. It was a long shot.’
‘Okay, well, I’d better be off.’
I nodded. ‘Thanks for your help.’
He smiled and headed through the gateline. When I turned back to Pell, he was out of the booth and standing next to the ticket machines about thirty feet away – like he was trying to put some distance between us.
But it didn’t matter.
Distance or not, I’d remember Duncan Pell.