The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime, Volume 8

The Circle David Hewson

The tube line ran unseen beneath the bleak unfeeling city, round and round, day and night, year after year. Under the wealthy mansions of Kensington the snaking track rattled, through cuttings and tunnels, to the bustling mainline stations of Paddington, Euston and King’s Cross where millions came and left London daily, invisible to those below the earth. Then the trains travelled on to the poorer parts in the east, Aldgate, with its tenements and teeming immigrant populations, until the rails turned abruptly, as if they could take the poverty no more, and longed to return to the prosperous west, to civilization and safety, before the perpetual loop began again. The Circle. Melanie Darma had travelled this way so often she sometimes imagined she was a part of it herself.

Today she felt tired. Her head hurt as she slumped on the worn, grubby seat in the noisy, rattling carriage, watching the station lights flash by, the faces of the travellers come and go. Tower Hill, Monument, Cannon Street, Mansion House... Somewhere to the south ran the thick, murky waters of the Thames. She remembered sitting next to her father as a child, bewildered in a shaking train from Charing Cross to Waterloo, a stretch that ran deep beneath the old, grey river. Joking, he’d persuaded her to press her nose to the grimy windows to look for passing fish, swimming in the blackness flashing by. On another occasion, when he was still as new to the city as she was, in thrall to its excitement and possibilities, they’d both got out at the station called Temple, hoping to see something magical and holy, finding nothing but surly commuters and tangles of angry traffic belching smoke.

This was the city, a thronging, anonymous world of broken promises. People, millions of them, whatever the time of day. Lately, with her new condition, they would watch on the train as she moved heavily, clutching the swelling bundle in her belly. Most would stand aside and give her a seat. A few would smile, mothers mostly, she thought. Some, men in business suits, people from the City, stared away as if the obvious extent of her state, and the apparent nearness of her release from it, amounted to some kind of embarrassment to be avoided. She could almost hear them praying... if it’s to happen please God let it not be this instant, when I’ve a meeting scheduled, a drink planned, an assignation with a lover. Any time but now.

She sat the way she had learned over the previous months: both hands curved protectively around the bump in her fawn summer coat, which was a little heavy for the weather, bought cheaply at a street market to encompass her temporary bulk. Her fingers felt comfortable there nevertheless. It was as if this was what they were made for.

So much of her life seemed to have been passed in these tunnels, going to and fro. She felt she could fix her position on the Circle’s endless loop by the smell of the passengers as they entered the carriage: sweet, cloying perfume in the affluent west, the sweat of workmen around King’s Cross, the fragrant, sometimes acrid odour of the Indians and Pakistanis from the sprawling, struggling ethnic communities of the east. Once she’d visited the museum in Covent Garden to try to understand this hidden jugular which kept the city alive, uncertainly at times, as its age and frailty began to show. Melanie Darma had gazed at the pictures of imperious Victorian men in top hats and women in crinoline dresses, all waiting patiently in neat lines for miniature trains with squat smoke stacks and smiling crew. It was the first underground railway ever built, part of a lost and entirely dissimilar age.

When the London bombers struck in 2005 they chose the Circle Line as one of their principal targets, through accident, she thought, not from any conscious attempt to strike at history. The first bomb exploded on an eastbound train between Liverpool Street and Aldgate. The second in a westbound train that had just left Edgeware Road. Fifty-two unsuspecting men and women died in all that day, thirteen of them on the Circle. The entire system was closed for almost a month, forcing her to take buses, watching those around her nervously, glancing at anyone with a dark skin and a backpack, wondering.

She might have been on one of those two carriages had it not been for her father’s terminal sickness, a cruel cancerous death eked out on a hard, cheap bed in some cold public ward, one more body to be rudely nursed towards its end by a society that no longer seemed to care. Birth, death, illness, accident... Sudden, fleeting joy, insidious, lasting tragedy... All these things lay in wait on the journey that was life, ambushes, large and small, hidden in the wings.

Sometimes, as she sat on the train rattling through the black snaking hole in the dank London earth, she imagined herself falling forwards in some precipitous, headlong descent towards an unknown, endless abyss. Did the women in billowing crinoline dresses ever imagine themselves the same way? She doubted it. This was a modern affliction. It had a modern cure too. Work, necessity, the daily need to earn sufficient money to pay the rent for another month, praying the agency would find her some other temporary berth once the present ran out.

There were two more stops before Westminster, the station she had come to know so well, set in the shadow of Big Ben and the grandiose, imposing silhouette of the Houses of Parliament. The train crashed into the darkness of the tunnel ahead. The carriage shook so wildly the lights flickered and then disappeared altogether. The movement and the sudden black gloom conspired to make the weight of her stomach seem so noticeable, such a part of her, she believed she felt a slow, sluggish movement inside, as if something were waking. The fear that idea prompted despatched a swift, guilty shock of apprehension through her mind. The thought: this is real and will happen, however much you may wish to avoid it.

Finally the rolling, careering carriage reconnected with whatever source of energy gave it light. The carriage stabilized, the bulbs flickered back to life.

On the opposite seat sat a young foreign-looking man who wore a dark polyester jacket and cheap jeans, the kind of clothes the people from Aldgate and beyond seemed to like. He had a grubby, red, webbed rucksack next to him, his hand on the top, a possessive gesture, though there was no one there who could possibly covet the thing.

He stared at her, openly, frankly, with a familiarity she didn’t appreciate. His eyes were dark and deep, his face clean shaven, smiling, attractive.

The train lurched again, the lights flashed off and on as they dashed downwards once more.

The young man spoke softly as he gazed at her, and it was difficult to hear over the crash of iron against iron.

Still, she thought she knew what he said, and that was, “They will remember my name.”

She tried to focus on the book in her hands. It came from the staff library. The Palace of Westminster didn’t pay its workers well, but at least they had access to decent reading.

“Are you scared?” the young traveller opposite asked pleasantly, nodding at the bump beneath her hands.

It was a book on philosophy. She chose it for the image on the cover: Ouroboros, the serpent that devoured itself. If she squinted hard she could imagine the familiar London Transport poster, with its yellow rounded rectangle for the Circle Line, transposed in its place.

“Not at all,” she answered immediately without taking her attention off the page.

There was a paragraph from Plato, a description of Ouroboros as the very first creature in the universe, the beast from which everything sprang, and to which everything returned.

She felt a little giddy when she realized the words of some ancient Greek, who had been dust when Christ was born, made some sense to her. It was almost as if she could hear his ancient, cracked voice.

The living being had no need of eyes when there was nothing remaining outside him to be seen; nor of ears when there was nothing to be heard; and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed; nor would there have been any use of organs by the help of which he might receive his food or get rid of what he had already digested, since there was nothing which went from him or came into him: for there was nothing beside him.

It was impossible to concentrate. Melanie Darma didn’t want to ask, not really. But she had to.

“Who will remember?”

Before he could answer they clattered into Temple. The bright station lights made her blink. The doors opened. A burly, scarlet-faced man in a creased, grubby dark suit entered the carriage, looked at their half, then the other, and sat down in the seats opposite her, as far away from the young man with the rucksack as he could. She could still smell the rank stink of beer though.

“And why?” she wondered.

The newcomer grunted, pulled out a copy of the Standard, thrust his coarse face into it. Then he raised his head and stared hard at both of them, as if they’d broken some kind of rule by speaking to each other across the chasm of a Tube train carriage, strangers conversing beneath the streets of London on a breathless July day.

“I don’t know what you mean...” the young man answered quietly.

Perhaps she’d misheard. The train was noisy. She didn’t feel well. But now he had his hands curled round the rucksack the way hers fell in place about her stomach, and his eyes wouldn’t leave her document bag from work, the green canvas carry-all bearing the insignia of the Palace of Westminster, a golden portcullis, crowned, with two chains. It sat in the seat next to her looking important, though in truth it contained nothing of moment.

The train lurched into darkness once more, for several seconds this time. She wondered whether someone had moved during that time. But when the lights returned they were both in the same seats, the older man face deep in his paper, the younger, smiling a little vacantly, glancing in her direction.

She thought of the offices and who would be there, waiting. It was temporary work, six months, no more, until her... “confinement” as one of the older women put it. Temps didn’t get maternity pay, even when they were forced to go through interminable interviews and vetting processes, just so they could answer irate emails to MPs she never met. The men and women there were, for the most part, kind, in an officious, offhand way. Each day she would nod and smile to the policemen on the door, place her bag on the security machine to be scanned, her ID card against the entry system reader to be checked. Nothing ever changed, nothing ever happened. Behind the imposing, ornate doors of the Palace of Westminster, beyond the gaze of the tourists who snapped and gawped at the great building that sat beneath the tower of Big Ben, lay nothing more than the world writ small: little people doing little jobs, leading insignificant lives, just looking, like her, to pay the bills.

No one ever asked who the father was. She was a temp. There was, of course, no point.

She leaned forward, needing to ask him something.

“I was wondering...?” she began.

The man in the creased dark suit glared at her, swore, screwed up his paper, and got to his feet.

Her heart leapt in her chest, her hands gripped the shape beneath her fingers more firmly. It was the middle of the day. Violence on the Tube at that hour was rare, but not unknown.

“Don’t do anything...” she heard herself murmur.

There was an exchange of intemperate words, and the thick-set man stomped off to sit in the far end of the carriage. The train burst into Embankment with a deafening clatter. One more stop to go. In her early days working at the Houses of Parliament she had sometimes abandoned the Tube here and walked the rest of the way, along the Embankment. She enjoyed the view, her left side to the river and the London Eye on the opposite bank, ahead the familiar outline of Westminster Bridge and the great iconic symbol of Big Ben beneath which — and this had long ceased to astonish her — she worked, humbly tapping away at a computer.

There was no possibility that she could walk such a distance any more. She kept her eyes on the grimy carriage floor and said nothing else. At Westminster station she got up and left the train without looking at anyone.

The day seemed brighter than when she first went underground. She glimpsed up at the impossibly tall clock tower to her right, blinking at the now fierce sky.

Then, patiently, as she always did, because that was how she was brought up, she waited at the first pedestrian crossing, until the figure of the green man came and it was safe to walk. It was only a few hundred yards from the mouth of the Tube station to the heavily guarded gate of the Palace of Westminster, close to the foot of the tower, the entrance she had to use. As always, there were police officers everywhere, many carrying unsightly black automatic weapons in their arms, cradling them as if they were precious toys.

No one looked at a pregnant young woman out on the street in London. They were all too busy to notice such a mundane sight. She walked over the final stretch of road when the last pelican crossing allowed, wondering who would be on duty at the security post that day. There was one nice police officer, a friendly sergeant, tall, with close-cropped grey hair, perhaps forty, or a fit fifty, it was difficult to tell. She knew his name: Kelly. Everyone else among the staff who scrutinized her bag and her ID card from time to time, asking pointless questions, picking curiously at her belongings, was still a stranger.

Twenty yards from the high iron gates of the security entrance she turned and saw him.

The young man from the train had his rucksack high over his head. He was running and screaming something in a language she didn’t understand. He looked both elated and scared. There were policemen beginning to circle him, fumbling at their weapons.

Melanie Darma watched all this as if it were a dream, quite unreal, a spectacle from some TV show that had, perhaps, been granted permission to film in the shadow of Big Ben, though this was, she felt sure, improbable.

She walked on and found herself facing the tower of Big Ben again. Kelly — Sergeant Kelly, she corrected herself — was there, yelling at her. He didn’t have a weapon. He never carried one. He was too nice for that, she thought, and wondered why at that moment she chose, quite consciously, not to listen to his hoarse, anxious voice.

“Melanie...!”

The bright, angry sky shook, the horizon began to fall sideways. She found herself thrust forcefully to one side, and felt her hands grip the shoulder bag with the golden portcullis close to her, out of habit, not fear, since all it contained was the book on Ouroboros, a few bills, a purse with £20 and a few coins.

Falling, she clutched the canvas to herself, defending the tender swell at her stomach as she tumbled towards the hard London stone.

Two strong arms were attempting to knock her down to the ground. She broke the fall with one knee and his chin jabbed hard against her skull. Her stockinged skin grazed against the paving. She felt a familiar, stabbing pain from childhood, loose flesh damaged by grit. Tears pricked at her eyes. She was in someone’s arms and she knew, immediately, whose.

She couldn’t see him, but he was still on her, tight arm around her throat.

When she looked up three men in black uniforms circled them, weapons to their shoulders, eyes fixed on a target that was, she understood, as much her as it was him.

Half crouched, gasping for breath she could see the iron security gates were just a few short steps away: security, a safe, private world, guarded so carefully against violent young men carrying mysterious rucksacks. Someone came into view, face in darkness initially since she was now in the shadow cast by the gigantic clock tower and the day seemed suddenly almost as dark as the mouth of the Tube from which she had so recently emerged.

“Don’t shoot me,” she said quietly, and realized there were tears in her eyes. “Don’t...”

Her hands stayed where they were, on her stomach. Somehow she couldn’t say the words she wanted them to hear. Don’t shoot us...

The grip on her neck relaxed, just a little. She caught the eyes of the man in front of her. Sergeant Kelly — she had never known his second name, and feared now she never would — had his hands out in front, showing they were empty. His face was calm and kind, unflustered, that of a gentle man, she thought, one for whom violence was distasteful.

“It doesn’t need to end this way...” he pleaded quietly.

“What way?” the voice behind her demanded.

“Badly,” the policeman said, and moved forward so that they could see his eyes. “Let the young lady get to her feet. Can’t you see she’s hurt?”

Laughter from an unseen mouth, his breath hot against her scalp. She found the courage to look. The old red rucksack was high in the air. From its dirt-stained base ran a slender black cord, dangling down towards the arm that gripped her. Tight in his fingers lay some small object, like a television remote control.

She couldn’t count the black shapes gathering behind Sergeant Kelly. They wore heavy bullet-proof vests and soft caps. Black, ugly weapons stood in their arms tight to the shoulder, the barrels nodding up and down, like the snouts of beasts sniffing for prey.

“She’s pregnant,” the sergeant went on. “You see that? Can’t you?”

The unseen man sighed softly, a note, perhaps, of hesitation. She felt there was some flicker of hope reflected in Sergeant Kelly’s eyes.

“Get up...” the foreign voice ordered.

She stumbled to her feet. Her knee hurt. Her entire body seemed racked by some strange, unfamiliar, yet not unwanted pain.

Her captor’s young face was now just visible. He was looking towards the tower of Big Ben.

“We’re going in there,” he insisted, nodding towards the black iron security gates. “If you try to stop me... she’s dead.” He nodded at the armed officers circling them. “Them or me. What’s the difference?”

She wondered how long the men with guns would wait, whether they were already gauging how wide to make the arc of their circle so that they might shoot safely in order to guarantee a kill, yet not be subject to their own deadly fire when the moment came.

It will be soon... she thought, and found her hands returning to her belly, as if her fingers might protect what was there against the hot rain of gunfire.

Someone thrust aside the barrel of the closest weapon. It was the sergeant again, swearing furiously, not at her assailant, but at the officers with guns. Harsh words. Harsher than she’d ever heard him speak before.

“There are choices,” Sergeant Kelly insisted as he pushed them back.

Hands high, empty, face still calm, determined, he wheeled round to confront the man who held her.

“Choices...” the policeman repeated quietly. “She’s pregnant. Isn’t there,” he shook his head, struggling to locate the right words, “...some rule that says it’s wrong to kill an unborn child?” Sergeant Kelly shrugged. “For me there is, and I don’t believe in anything much, except what I can see and touch. If you believe,” his right hand swept briefly towards the sky, “...something, isn’t it the same?”

“You are not my preacher, policeman,” the voice behind her spat at him.

“No.” Sergeant Kelly was so close that she could feel the warmth of his breath on her face and it smelled of peppermints and stale tobacco. “I’m no one’s priest. But tell me this. What will your god say of a man who knowingly takes the life of an unborn child?” The man gripping her leaned forward, bending his head to one side, as if listening, curiously. “Will he be pleased? Or...”

A stream of angry, foreign words filled the air. The London policeman stood there, his hand out, beckoning.

“She doesn’t belong here,” he said. “Let her go with me. After that...”

He shrugged.

“You... and they...” The way he nodded at the others, the men with the guns, shocked her. It was as if there was no difference between them and the one who had snatched her, out in the bright, stifling day in Parliament Square. “You can do what the hell you like.”

Silence, followed by the distant caterwauling of sirens. This was, she knew, the moment.

“I beg you...” Melanie Darma murmured, not knowing to whom she spoke.

The grip on her neck relaxed. A choking sob rose in her throat. She stumbled forward, out of the young man’s grip, still clutching the bag with the portcullis logo close to her stomach.

“Quickly...” the policeman ordered, beckoning.

She lurched forwards, slipped. Her knee went to the ground once more. The pain made her shriek, made her eyes turn blurry with tears.

One set of arms released her. Another took their place. She was in the grip of Sergeant Kelly, and the smells of peppermint and tobacco were now secondary to the stink of nervous sweat, hers or his, she didn’t know and didn’t care.

She fell against him. His arms slipped beneath hers, pulling, dragging, demanding.

They were close to the gate. She found herself falling again, turning her head around. She had to. It was impossible to stop.

The young man from the Tube had his hands in the air. He was shouting, words she couldn’t understand, foreign, incomprehensible words, a lilting chant that seemed to veer between anger and fear, imprecation and beseechment.

“Melanie...” the police sergeant muttered, as he pulled her away. “Don’t look... Don’t...”

It was futile. No one could not watch a scene like this. It was a kind of theatre, a staging, a play in real life, performed on a dirty stone stage in the heart of London, for all to see.

Not far away there were men with cameras, people holding cell phones, recording everything. Not running the way they should have been.

That puzzled her.

She fell to one knee again, and felt glad the pain made her wake, made her pay more attention.

The dark shapes with the rifles were around him again, more close this time, screaming obscenities and orders in equal measures. Yet his eyes were on the sky, on something unseen and unseeable.

The rucksack flew from his hand. The ugly black metal creatures burst into life in the arms of their owners and began to leap and squeal. She watched the young man she had spoken to on the Tube twitch and shriek at the impact, dancing to their rhythm as if performing some deadly tarantella.

His bag tumbled through the air, falling to the ground, the wire that linked device to owner flailing powerlessly like a snapped and useless tendon.

That part of the performance was over. It was the dance now, nothing but the dance.

Sergeant Kelly didn’t drag her at that moment. Like Melanie Darma he realized the bomb, or whatever it was, had refused to play its part. Like her, he could only watch in shock and terrified wonder.

She closed her eyes, gripping her stomach firmly, intent on ensuring everything there was normal, as it ought to be. As she half-knelt there, feeling the policeman’s strong arms on her shoulder, she was aware of two thin lines of tears trickling slowly down her face. And something else...

“Melanie,” Sergeant Kelly murmured, looking scared.

She looked at him. There was worry, concern in his face, and it was more personal now, more direct than such a vague and ephemeral threat as explosives in a young man’s bag.

Following the line of his gaze she saw what he did. Blood on the pavement. Not that of the man from the Tube. Hers. A line of dark, thick liquid gathering around her grazed knee, pooling as it trickled down her leg.

The wailing of sirens grew louder. Vans and police cars seemed to be descending upon them from every direction. Men were shouting, screaming at one another. A couple were bent down over the broken body leaking on to the ground a few yards away.

Before she could say another thing he bent down, looked in her face, breathed deeply, then scooped her up in his strong, certain arms.

“There’s a nurse inside,” Sergeant Kelly muttered, a little short of breath, as he carried her through the security gate, past the door, and the gawping, wide-eyed officers next to their untended machines, and on into the cool, dusty darkness of the Houses of Parliament.

She knew the medical room, could picture it as he half-stumbled, half-ran along the narrow corridors. In the very foot of the tower, a clean and windowless cubicle with a single medic in attendance, always. Twice, she’d stopped by, for advice, for support, only to be told to see her own doctor instead of troubling the private resources of the Palace of Westminster.

Except in emergencies.

Sergeant Kelly turned down the final passageway, one that led into the very core of the building. The stonework was so massive here it scared her. Trapped beneath several hundred feet and untold tons of grimy London stone, an insignificant creature, like some tiny insect in the bowels of a towering anthill, she felt herself carried into the brightly lit room, lifted on to a bed there, placed like a specimen to be examined.

It was the same nurse. Thickset, ugly, fierce. The place smelled of drugs and chemicals. The lights were too bright, the walls so thick she couldn’t hear a note of the chaos that must have ensued outside.

The nurse took one look at the drying stain on her ankle and asked, “When are you due?”

“Four weeks.”

Her flabby face contorted in a scowl.

“And you’re coming to work? Good God... Let’s take a look.”

She was reaching for a pair of scissors, casually, with no panic, no rush. It was as if life and death cohabited happily in this place, one passing responsibility to the other the way day faded into night.

He was still there as the woman came towards the hem of her dress with the sharp, shiny instrument, staring at the Palace of Westminster bag which she continued to clutch tight against the bump, as if it still needed protection.

“You don’t need that any more,” Sergeant Kelly said, half amused, reaching down for the carry-all in her hands.

She let go and released it into his grip. The nurse advanced again with the scissors, aiming at her dress.

“Sergeant...?” Melanie Darma objected, suddenly anxious.

“I’m a London copper, love,” he answered, laughing a little. “There’s nothing I haven’t seen.”

“I don’t want you to see me,” she told him firmly.

The nurse gave him a fierce stare.

Sergeant Kelly sighed, held the bag up for her to see, and said, “I’ll look after your things outside.”

As he opened the door, the faint wail of sirens scuttled through then died as he closed it again.

It wasn’t like an anthill, she thought. More akin to being in the foundations of a cathedral, feeling the weight of ages, the massive load of centuries of tradition, of a civilization that had, at one time, dominated the known world and now had the power to do nothing more than bear down on her remorselessly.

“The doctor might be a man, love,” the nurse said as she cut the fabric of the cheap dress in two, all the way up to the waist.

Then she stepped back, eyes wide with surprise, unable to speak.

It was all there. The plastic bag with the fake blood, and the telltale path it had left down the side of her leg after she burst it with her fingers. And the bulge. The hump. The being she had brought to life, day-by-day, out of stockings and underclothes, napkins and tea towels, until that very morning. The morning. When something else took its place.

She knew the wires, every one, because he’d told her about each as he placed them there, around the soft, fat wad of material they’d given him, the night before. There was, she wanted to tell the nurse, no other way to penetrate this old and well-protected inner sanctum of a world she had come to hate. No other means to escape the attention of the electric devices, the sniffers, the security people prying into everything that came and went in this great palace, a monument that meant so much to so many.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, reaching for the band of yellow cable, taking the tail to the mouth, as she’d learned and practised so many times in the small, fusty bedroom of the apartment she could barely afford.

The foreign phrase he taught her wouldn’t come. They were, in any case, his words, not hers, codes from a set of beliefs she did not share.

What she did know was the Circle. It seemed to have been with her forever, since the moment she first set foot in the dark world beneath the ground, hand in hand with her father, as he took the first step on the journey to his bleak, cruel end. Ahmed — this was not his real name, she understood and accepted that — had woken the slumbering beast one cold morning that spring when he talked his way into her life after she left the Palace of Westminster. But he was its creature too, not that he recognized the fact.

Her mind could not dismiss the image of Ouroboros at that moment, the picture of the serpent devouring itself. Or the words of the book that was now in the hands of Sergeant Kelly who was, perhaps, a little way away, outside even, eyeing the shattered body in the street.

The living being had no need of eyes when there was nothing remaining outside him to be seen; nor of ears when there was nothing to be heard; and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed. And all that he did or suffered took place in and by himself.

From nothing to nothing, round and round.

With unwavering hands Melanie Darma held the wires above her belly like a halo, bringing together the ends with a firm and deliberate motion, filled with the deepest elation that this particular journey was at an end.