The Blood Detective

7

Notting Hill Gate tube station is a London underground station in Notting Hill. On the Central Line it is between Holland Park and Queensway, and on the District Line and Circle Line it is between High Street Kensington and Bayswater. It is in both zones 1 and 2. It opened on July 30,1900 and is most famous for its proximity to Portobello Road, the site of the movie Notting Hill, the Notting Hill Carnival, and the Portobello Market.

July 30, 1900? Nigel read it again and again. But the date didn't change. Was it a typo? Or was it right? If so, where the hell was the station before then? It existed, he had read about it in several newspapers.

But where was it? He thought of Foster and his team waiting to pounce at Notting Hill Gate. He looked at his watch. It was nearly ten p.m. I'll give it another ten minutes, he thought.

He typed in the address for Google and entered the search term 'History of the London underground'.

The first hit was a site that offered a history of the tube decade by decade, beginning with 1860.

In 1863 it told how the Metropolitan Railway was opened between Paddington and Farringdon Street, stopping at Edgware Road, Baker Street, Portland Road (now Great Portland Street), Gower Street (now Euston Square) and King's Cross. No mention was made of Notting Hill.

The next page told the story of how the independent Hammersmith and City Railway opened between Paddington and Hammersmith in 1864 as a feeder for the new underground system. Locomotives ran on the overground track and then entered the underground system.

The intermediate stations on this new railway were Notting Hill (now Ladbroke Grove) and Shepherd's Bush.

Before he had even finished the sentence, Nigel had dug into his pockets, grabbed his mobile phone, dialled it and put the phone to his ear. It rang twice and went dead. He looked at the screen: blank. He checked his pockets: he had a fifty-pence coin. That would last seconds - landline-to-mobile phone calls devoured money. He ran down the stairs to the pay phone, picked up the receiver and called Foster.

The phone rang. And rang.

'Pick the bloody thing up,' he hissed.

'This is DCI Grant Foster. I can't answer my phone . . '

'It's Nigel,' he said after the beep, not wanting to waste a word. 'You're in the wrong place. You need to be at Ladbroke Grove station. It used to be called Notting Hill. My phone is dying. Go to Ladbroke Grove. I'll go there . . .'

Then his money ran out.

Emergency calls were free. He punched the number in.

'Fire, ambulance or police?'

'Police.'

He was put through.

'I need to speak to Detective Chief Inspector Foster,' he said before the telephonist had asked what he wanted. 'It's really, extremely urgent. I really cannot stress how urgent it is.'

Foster was looking through a pair of binoculars from the seventh floor of a drab, watery-grey office block that towered over the area surrounding Notting Hill Gate tube station. Drinkwater had hired the entire floor because it gave them a clear sight of Kensington Church Street, Notting Hill Gate itself, and then the residential area behind. The floor was empty, save for a few desks, chairs and phone leads, and bore the stale smell of an unloved place of work.

It was Saturday night and the street beneath Foster was teeming with locals and tourists, on their way to overpriced bars and restaurants. His team was in position, primed and ready to go. An armed response unit was on standby, comparing guns in the far corner of the office. Two officers were posing as homeless by each exit of the tube station. An unmarked car was parked on Uxbridge Street, which ran parallel to Notting Hill Gate, behind the Coronet and Gate cinemas. Another was parked on the other side of Notting Hill Gate, on Pembridge Gardens.

Foster's radio crackled into life. He could see there was a commotion across the other side of the street.

A woman was screaming outside one of the high street banks and a group of people had gathered around her.

'Come on!' Foster shouted and sprinted from the room.

He ran down the stairwell, Heather and Drink water behind him. They tumbled out on to Notting Hill Gate.

'What's happening, people?' he barked into the receiver.

No reply.

The three detectives ran across the road. Officers were converging on the group outside the bank.

A group of rubberneckers were staring at an hysterical black woman, who was shouting at the top of her voice, 'He took my bag. He took my facking bag.'

Her friends were consoling her. None of them, or any of the gawpers, seemed impressed that a simple bag snatch had attracted the attention of half of west London's police. An officer in uniform further down the street was walking towards them, clutching a teenage boy by the arm, the woman's bag in the other.

'Give 'im here,' the woman screamed. 'I'll tear his facking head off.'

Even from ten feet away, Foster could see that her fingernails were up to the task; the threat was uttered with absolute conviction. The teenager looked terrified.

Foster's eyes scanned the length of the street.

All seemed normal.

'Still all quiet?' he said into his radio.

The answer came back that it was.

Foster holstered the radio. 'Let's get back inside,'

he said. His breath had shortened, the anticipation and adrenalin still coursing through his body.

In the chaos, he failed to hear his phone ring.

Nigel had given up trying to speak directly to Foster.

The woman who took his call treated him like a crank. He tried to urge her to at least pass the message on to the incident room, but she kept asking him for a phone number and location, believing he had witnessed a murder and not that he was foreseeing one, or its aftermath. When the call ended, he knew he could not afford to wait and see what happened, to find out whether the message had got through; he needed to get there, to the scene of the potential crime.

He left the library, hoping to hail a black cab. The road outside was dark and silent - little chance of a taxi passing by. He ran to the tube. Within five minutes a train came. He rode it southwards to King's Cross. When he got there, his first instinct was to get a taxi, but on a Saturday night at the gateway to the north he may be waiting ages; it would be just as quick to ride the Hammersmith and City Line to Ladbroke Grove.

It was almost eleven thirty when he tumbled out at Ladbroke Grove. Drinkers, revellers, winos and nutters thronged the area in front of the tube. The place stank of chip fat, booze and piss. People passed on their way from bar to club, or spilled from the tube to their homes. A nearby bus stop swelled numbers. Car stereos blasted out cavernous bass tunes, young couples laughed and argued. Nigel normally did all he could to avoid being in such places at a time like this. But here he didn't care: he stood for a few seconds and wondered which way to head - apart from one squad car parked a hundred yards down the street, there was no sign of any police presence.

He walked up the grove, under the railway bridge.

A tube rattled into the station above. He stopped once more to look around. Nothing unusual. He started walking again, to where he didn't know.

Then he heard a scream.

It was a piercing, wounded cry that tore through the night. At first he put it down to a drunken fight, but it continued. No one else seemed to notice, or felt it too commonplace to act.

Nigel felt his blood thicken.

The screaming was coming from the right, behind the tube station. There was a short alley, along the side of a bar. He headed down it. The pavement widened into a road. Above him loomed the monstrous concrete Westway; the white noise of its traffic a background thrum. Yet the screaming got louder.

Nigel quickened his pace to a jog. Fifty yards down the street, he could see a young woman. Her arms were spread wide and, as she screamed, she bent double with the effort. Beside her a car was parked diagonally in the road, its driver's door open and headlights shining. From the billow of fumes from the exhaust, he could see the engine was running.

Nigel sprinted towards her.

The woman didn't see him coming; she just continued to scream. As he arrived, she backed off. He had his hands up to show it was all right, for her not to panic. He looked around but couldn't see what she was screaming at. Her shouts decreased to a whisper. Her left hand went to her mouth; her right hand pointed to a garage door, half open. The beams lit the door; the gap beneath was in darkness. Nigel walked towards it. All he could see was white graffiti on the door: 'Fuck Chelski'.

The street was deserted. Nigel licked his parched lips and bent down to see under the door. Too dark.

The woman had stopped screaming and started to keen.

Nigel got up and walked to the door. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and used it to take hold of the handle. He began to lift carefully, inch by inch, so that the car headlights and the floodlit glow from the Westway slowly illuminated the interior of the garage. He was hit with a pungent combination of oil and turpentine. As the light grew, the shape of a body was revealed. A young woman. Nigel let go of the door and checked to make sure it wouldn't fall. Then he stepped inside.

Close up, he could see she was blonde, dressed in jeans and a shirt of several colours, torn open to reveal a pair of bloodied, mutilated breasts. The blood around them seemed to have solidified, become gelatinous. She was laid on her back, arms stretched out. Nigel's eyes went to her face. It was pristine, untouched. But where once her eyes had been, there were instead two gaping holes, congealed blood and matter garnishing the empty, cavernous sockets that still seemed to stare, baleful and black.

Nigel knew the scene would stay with him until his final breath, that it would play in his mind like some macabre screensaver whenever he closed his eyes at night. He stepped out and slowly lowered the garage door, as if to try and protect what remained of the young woman's dignity.

Two or three people had gathered in the road; one was attempting to calm the woman. Another was on his mobile phone.

'You all right, mate?' one black guy shouted.

Within a few seconds the crowd was in double figures.

Nigel nodded. Slowly he sat on the ground in front of the garage door, blocking the path to it.

In the distance he could hear sirens.