60
As I’d expected, the stairs on the other side of the partition took me back up to the Circle and District lines. Healy said he would give me ten minutes before calling it in to Craw. I moved through the empty tunnels and up to the ticket hall, where Stevie O’Keefe was waiting with the station supervisor. Neither of them said much, but I got the feeling O’Keefe had been read the riot act for leaving us unattended on the line, and I also got the feeling he didn’t particularly care. As I sidestepped a series of questions from the supervisor, I looked across at O’Keefe and saw a strange kind of acquiescence in him: an acknowledgement that he’d done the wrong thing, but that he couldn’t bring himself to be down there. He offered to walk me out, and the supervisor – barely communicative by the end – just shrugged and watched us go.
As we walked, I thought about Wellis. He’d died the way he’d lived. He’d died a death he deserved. But even if I loathed everything he stood for, without pause, and knew that the world would be better off without him, it was hard not to look at a man in the aftermath of such a death and not feel troubled by it.
‘I have an old friend,’ O’Keefe said, as I tuned back in. ‘Gerry. He does the same job as me on the Circle. We meet down on the Jubilee platform sometimes. Just a little routine we have. For some company, you know? Normally Tuesdays and Thursdays.’
I nodded and smiled, but my thoughts were already moving on to where Healy and I went next.
‘I just chatted to him,’ O’Keefe went on. ‘We were supposed to meet in our usual spot on Thursday, down on the platform, but Gerry never turned up.’
O’Keefe stopped walking. I stopped too out of politeness.
‘Thing is, he said he did turn up there.’
‘Where?’
‘On the Jubilee platform – where we were tonight.’
I frowned. ‘I’m not sure I follow.’
‘Gerry got there before me on Thursday, to the Jubilee line. Normally we just have a coffee and a chinwag. He brings the flask, I bring the conversation. It can get lonely down on the tracks all by yourself.’ O’Keefe stopped and looked at me. ‘But when Gerry got down to the line, he said he kept hearing this noise, like a beeping. And when he followed it, he realized it was the phone.’
‘Wait, he found the phone before you?’
‘Must have done.’
‘So why didn’t he pick it up himself?’
‘He said it was on the actual track itself.’
‘Beyond the screens?’
‘Yeah. He said he opened up the screens and got down on to the line, but when he got down there he started feeling …’ Another pause. ‘Started feeling strange.’
‘Ill?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not ill.’
He meant Gerry was like him. He meant they’d both felt something had been off that night in the dark of the station and its tunnels. Gerry didn’t even have it in him to reach down and pick up the phone. He’d just backed up and walked away. Minutes later, O’Keefe had arrived and picked up the phone himself. But he didn’t seem to realize what else he’d said, the bigger revelation: that when Gerry had found the phone, it was on the track itself. When O’Keefe had found it, it was on a bench, on the platform, in plain sight. As if it had been placed on the track originally to make it look like an accident, to make it look like just another piece of lost property. But then, when Gerry had failed to pick it up, it had been deliberately moved again, to ensure it was found the second time.
And there was only one reason to do that: to make absolutely certain the police were pushed in Sam Wren’s direction.
I knew then that the Met wouldn’t find anything on CCTV, because the cameras went off as soon as the station shut up for the night. Whoever had left the phone on the track had definitely been inside the station after hours. Whoever it was had to have felt comfortable here, had to have known the Tube, its lines, its tunnels. And, to me, there wasn’t much doubt about who that person was.
Duncan Pell.