Platform Seven Read online

  I follow Inspector Barker inside. He turns left into the mess room and immediately the two PCs sitting at the table, Akash Lockhart and another young man I don’t know, look up in alarm. There is a family packet of Hobnobs on the table between them. It’s been ripped open and the biscuits lie like fallen dominoes. There are crumbs everywhere. Lockhart reaches out a hand to brush the crumbs away because his boss has walked into the room and Barker feels a rush of nostalgia for the days when junior officers would jump to their feet when someone of his rank came through the door.

  ‘At ease, lads,’ says Inspector Barker, ‘just here to get my music case.’ He goes to his locker in the corner of the mess room, where he opens the metal door and takes out a black bag with a foldover top secured with Velcro. His beautiful new uke, the Uluru, is also in the locker but he knows as soon as he looks at it that he can’t bring himself to take it to the pub today. He closes the locker door, leaving it there. He is keeping it at work for the time being as he hasn’t quite owned up to the missus. They’ve been going through a bit of a bad patch, in fact, arguing quite a lot, mostly about money. The dishwasher broke down two days after he bought the new ukulele and they are still debating whether it’s fixable or whether it’s too old and they should cut their losses and get a new one from John Lewis. He thinks it’s hardly worth it now it’s just the two of them and she says, that’s alright for him to say, it isn’t him that does the washing up. So he’s keeping the Uluru in his locker at work for the foreseeable. A good marriage is all about judicial timing when it comes to the announcement of unwelcome information, after all.

  ‘You going over for the 13.46?’ The Posh have got a home game with Southend United this afternoon and with roadworks on the M11 they’re expecting more fans than usual coming up on the trains.

  ‘Sir,’ Lockhart says.

  ‘How many are Milton Keynes sending over?’ Inspector Barker asks. He’s off duty, it isn’t his problem, but a man like Inspector Barker is never off duty, not really. There aren’t enough of them in Peterborough BTP for a full football train so there’s always a bit of redistribution of resources come match day, depending on who the visitors are. Causes a bit of tension amongst the higher-ups, it does.

  ‘Six, sir, and Dawson and Bowles are over there already. We’re just about to join them,’ Lockhart replies. Dawson is the sergeant on duty that afternoon – she’s known for having a temper when crossed and can bark at a bending drunk with such ferocity he snaps upright quickly enough to do his back in. Bowles is a tall thin PC who looks like he should be an architect or a potter or one of those arty jobs but in fact is a black belt in something and can wrestle men twice his weight to the floor in a couple of seconds. They’re both pretty useful when it comes to football fans.

  ‘Any reports from down the line?’ He is asking if there’s any shared intelligence on how the fans are behaving on the journey.

  ‘Not as far as we know, sir.’

  ‘Right-o.’

  Lockhart and his fellow PC are dying for the inspector to leave and Barker knows it. He’s an old-fashioned sort, can’t resist asserting his authority, even over these lads, who he thinks of as good lads. He looks at Lockhart and his expression softens a little – he is remembering that Lockhart was clearing body parts off the track less than a week ago.

  ‘How you doing, son?’ he says. The Coroner Liaison Officer is off on long-term sick leave so Barker has asked Lockhart to get the paperwork together. The lad seems keen enough to do it but he’s wondering whether it was a good idea. Lockhart is a bit soft, as well as keen. Too much university.

  Lockhart replies quickly, ‘Fine, sir, thank you for asking,’ but it is a stock response, the knee-jerk reaction of a young PC who would die before he admitted weakness of any sort to a superior officer.

  Barker leans against the counter top, still holding his music case. ‘So what’s the latest?’ He doesn’t need to specify about what.

  Lockhart says, ‘Thomas Warren, sixty-two years of age, divorced, lived alone. And he was under investigation.’

  The other PC says, ‘What for?’

  ‘Historic sex abuse,’ Lockhart replies.

  Barker stands upright and tucks the music case under his arm. ‘Well, he saved the public purse a lot of money, then. Don’t think we’ll be shedding all that many tears on this one, will we?’

  ‘Guess not, sir,’ the other PC says.

  As Barker heads for the door, Lockhart says, ‘Sir, can I just ask something?’

  Barker turns, with the air of a man who is hoping it’s a quick question because he’ll be late for rehearsal now if he doesn’t hurry, Saturday traffic and all.

  ‘That woman that went onto the tracks eighteen months ago. Driver didn’t see her till she was already in the four-foot; I read the Coroner’s Report. But you know what doesn’t make sense? Why did she go over the back through the freight depot, when she could have walked in the front like Thomas Warren? She went over two fences. Bit odd, isn’t it?’

  Barker says, ‘Yes …’ He is thinking maybe the lad should be more worried about ISIS targeting Peterborough Station than he is about whether some crazy girl threw herself in front of a train because her boyfriend dumped her or whatever.

  ‘I dunno, it’s just …’

  Barker’s sceptical expression makes Lockhart dry to a halt.

  ‘Coroner’s verdict was quite clear. Not really the kind of place you’d wander into by accident, is it?’

  ‘Did anyone do a Victimology?’ Lockhart asks.

  ‘I would think so,’ Barker replies. ‘Ask CID. She had history, I think, vulnerable person.’

  ‘Mind if I take a look?’ Lockhart asks with some hesitancy. Looking back at a case that’s done and dusted is always an implicit criticism of the original investigation. He knows it and he knows his boss knows it.

  Leyla.

  Barker isn’t all that bothered. He’s only been inspector here a year, joined just after Lockhart, so the young woman was before his time. It’s no skin off his nose if Lockhart wants to play TV cop; all the young PCs want to, from time to time. By and large, they grow out of it. It comes to him that what he really wants is a chicken and chorizo pasty from the West Cornwall Pasty Company, he loves how they are slightly spicy, and he wonders if he’s got time to nip over to Platform One and get one. Trouble is, he’ll have to eat it while he drives and then he’ll get flakes of pastry all over the car, it’s unavoidable. Wife will go ballistic.

  ‘Of course,’ Barker says, ‘go ahead.’ He likes Lockhart, bit politically correct and all that, with his degrees and everything, but a good lad at heart.

  *

  After Barker has gone, Lockhart and his colleague return to their biscuits. Lockhart nibbles on the edge of a Hobnob and wonders whether he should move sideways after a few years, over to the Home Office force, do detective training and aim high, apply to join a murder squad. BTP is all very well; there’s a good sense of solidarity in Division C on account of there being only four thousand of them for the entire country – he’d like to see the Met do better on that ratio – and the promotion prospects are quite good. But he’s not sure it’s where he sees himself in ten years’ time.

  He takes a sip of his coffee and his fellow PC says, ‘I don’t know how you drink that piss when you’ve left it half an hour. Makes me shudder.’

  Lockhart ignores his colleague – he likes it lukewarm.

  The two young men fall into silence. They are both thinking about the train full of football supporters that has just left Stevenage and is hurtling towards them.

  I look past Lockhart’s head at the map on the wall. It is A3 size, fixed to the wall by big lumps of Blu-tack at each corner and smaller lumps along the edge, as if Blu-tack became rationed after the corners were stuck. Greasy marks leak through the paper. It is a map of the station, blown up large, and the surrounding area. Around the station is a line in blue crayon. It traces a boundary that includes the freight depot and sidings at the back, the c
ar park and the BTP offices at the front. It doesn’t include Waitrose or the Great Northern Hotel. Inspector Barker has a similar map on the wall of his office upstairs; a neater, smaller one. Whenever I look at the maps, I feel troubled without understanding why. Maybe it’s for the same reason that the name Leyla pops into my head whenever I look at Lockhart: the flashes, the images I get from time to time, the picture of the elderly woman sitting on the edge of a bed in a nightie.

  *

  I drift outside, up and down Station Approach for a bit, half doze, and when I come to again, I’m still hanging around outside the station and the football fans have been and gone and it is almost dusk.

  Dusk is a difficult time: it comes; again it comes; it comes again. I don’t mind the dark. You know where you are at nighttime, it’s very simple: it’s night. Even if you hate the night – and I don’t, not any more – the fact that you are in it means it is already passing. You just have to hang on until dawn.

  Dusk is different. At first, when the light begins to fade, it might just be a cloudy day – we all know how depressing grey days are. But it gets gloomier, and gloomier still, as if the sky is saying, look, it isn’t just cloudy, sucker, it’s dusk. That strange half-light before the night falls – I hate it. Even though the streetlights have started to come on, the world is undefined: there is no sense of the dark bits and the light bits, just a grey gauze over everything, like a fog or a mist, or as if there is something on your cornea. The edges of buildings are blurred; even other people seem ill-defined as they rush past. It involves a lot of peering.

  The shoppers with young children head over from Queensgate and take their offspring – small and squally, hungry and tired – back to the towns where they live. Others will come over the bridge later – at this time of year, the shops are open for some time after dark. The London shoppers won’t return for ages yet. They will mingle with the clubbing crowd. Hundreds and hundreds of people will come and go and all of them will stride right through me. None of them will be Caleb.

  As dusk falls over Peterborough Station, I drift around the entrance, feeling endless and just wanting to be one thing or another, not trapped in this gloom, not here. My sadness has come back and I need more of Caleb to alleviate it. Will he come on Monday, try to go to work again? Perhaps if he does, and fails again, and sits in the cafe, we can hang around together for a bit and I’ll think of a way to communicate with him at this barricade, this blur between the living and the dead.

  It happens on the edge of the car park. I have drifted outside again for a bit and I’m perched on top of the double telephone kiosk opposite the taxi rank. Odd that those telephone kiosks still exist, but maybe it’s more trouble to take them out, what with the wiring and everything, than it is to leave them there. I remember using them years ago, when I was a teenager, how the enclosed space always seemed to trap the cold, how they smelled of stale cigarettes. I am thinking this, watching the shoppers and gazing across the road towards Queensgate Shopping Centre, when I see something – it isn’t a someone, it is definitely a thing. How to describe it? A grey shape, greenish-grey, with a bulbous top and drifting tail, like a large comma or a giant tadpole, but blurry at the edges, floating on the sixth floor, the top floor, of the multi-storey car park, just hovering there high up above the yellow metal railing and blowing slightly in the breeze, like the column of smoke from a fire but with more definition. I know immediately, instinctively – and it is a cold feeling – that in some way, I recognise it.

  Odd that my reaction should be so leaden, so full of dread: you would think I would be delighted to know for certain I am not alone, with all these hot fleshy humans rushing about their business and unable to even see me. But I stare at the shape for a while and a feeling comes over me that I would describe as fear if I were capable of fear. I’m dead – what is there to be afraid of? And yet although I don’t know what the grey thing is I know this, with certainty: it is looking back at me, and it is full of malice.

  There are others, out there, and I’m certain that grey shape is trapped in the multi-storey car park as surely as I am trapped in the station. I turn back towards the concourse. As I do, a woman in an orange trouser suit with a green T-shirt underneath crosses the road in front of me. She has white hair in a swinging bob and a cigarette held loosely between the fingers of one hand. She pauses as she crosses the road, to allow a small red cardboard box to bump and cartwheel across the road ahead of her. I rush past her and over the barriers, to the safety of Platform One.

  I am not alone.

  PART THREE

  7

  It is Monday. I’m in the entrance hall before dawn, watching the staff walk up and down in little dancing movements, slapping their arms around their torsos like athletes limbering up. A queue of cars builds up to enter the car park. Time elongates, decelerates. Passengers begin to flow through the concourse, moving as if in slow motion. Then there is a blur, a blare of sound, and they speed up again. Eventually, the flow diminishes. Men and women come in single file, some but not all of them hurrying because they are late. All at once, it is daylight. The rush hour has been and gone. The entrance hall echoes and the staff have time to hang around and chat. No sign of Caleb.

  Perhaps he really was ill. What was it he told his office on Friday? A virus. They can make you poorly for days. Perhaps he made the mistake of going out over the weekend, thinking he was through the worst of it, and set himself back. We’ve all done it. Then I remember my conviction that there was nothing physically wrong with him and I start to feel a bit frightened. What if he never comes back? What if he’s lying on the carpet in his flat, slipping in and out of consciousness, with nobody to miss him or raise the alarm? What if he’s simply moved away from Peterborough? St Neots, perhaps. I’ll never see him again.

  On Tuesday morning, I wait again, but no matter how many commuters stream through the concourse, there is no sign of Caleb. I’m there from 7 until 10 a.m. and I watch everyone who comes through the sliding doors. There’s no way he could slip past me.

  I will be here at that time all week if I have to, and the week after that. There is nothing else for me to do.

  *

  Mid-morning, I give up and I float into Melissa’s office. I sit on her desk for the rest of the day while she does her emails and makes phone calls. I chat away to her, in my head. You’re the same age as me, Melissa, how come you’re alive and I’m not? You seem to have things pretty sorted. What’s the trick?

  I’m still there when her mobile goes around five that afternoon. It lights up on her desk where it lies and the smiling face of a sixty-something woman appears as background to the letters: Mum.

  It hurts me, seeing that.

  Melissa answers straight away. ‘Hi,’ she says, leaning back in her chair. ‘Yes, sure, no, I can ring them later if you like … yeah, no problem, sure.’ There is a long pause, then, while the mother talks for a while and Melissa looks up at the ceiling above her, settling down further in her seat. Her lips purse and twitch in an indulgent smile. Eventually she says, ‘Mum, seriously, it’s no … No, I’m not worried at all. Well, he’s nice but I’m not sure how bothered I am, to be honest … Well, that makes me lucky, doesn’t it?’ Melissa glances at the wall clock above her desk. ‘Mum, I’ve got a meeting soon … yes, sure, yes, no problem, of course … bye … bye. Love you too. Bye.’

  She is still smiling as she puts the phone back on her desk. I’m touched by her indulgence. Melissa’s mum is clearly one of those mums who finds a small, practical excuse to call when she’s worrying about something else entirely and then can’t prevent herself from talking about the something else. I’m not sure I would have been so patient if my mum had started bemoaning my single status when I was trying to get some work done.

  *

  It was one of the few times I saw my mum snap at my dad. We were having a cup of tea in the kitchen. I had just broken up with Ian – well, we hadn’t so much broken up as sort of dribbled to a halt, but I had use
d the phrase ‘broken up’ because it was easier than explaining to my parents that someone who had never been much more than a friend-with-benefits was now just a friend and neither of us was all that bothered either way. Dad was topping up the teapot from the kettle that always leaked and as he did, pronounced cheerily, ‘Crikey, you want to get a move on, my girl, you’re getting past your sell-by date.’

  ‘George!’ Mum exclaimed from the other side of the room, turning from where she was wiping the surface round the hob with a blue J-cloth. ‘That’s a dreadful thing to say!’

  My father shrugged, nodded in my direction where I sat at the kitchen table. ‘Oh go on, she knows I’m only joking.’

  Does she? I thought to myself, but said nothing.

  *

  It is nine o’clock that evening. I have long since given up for the day but as chance would have it, I am just turning away from Platform One to head back outside – and there he is, coming straight towards me through the open barriers.

  Caleb. Where the hell have you been?

  I feel that small blast of shock you get when someone you really want to see shows up unexpectedly – eighty per cent joy and twenty per cent affront. What is he doing on the station at this hour? He isn’t in his working suit this time, he’s wearing jeans, trainers and a grey puffa jacket with a dark red scarf hanging loose round his neck. He looks quite different from our first encounter – he is one of those men transformed when he isn’t wearing his suit. He is moving differently too, with a sense of purpose. Even though I am looking right at his face and recognise him straight away, I have the strange sense that he could be someone else entirely.