The Sentence Is Death

9 PUT

I’ve always had a fascination with secret passageways and places you’re not allowed to go. When I was a child, my parents used to take me to expensive hotels and I still remember sneaking into the service areas: I loved the way the plush carpets and chandeliers suddenly stopped and everything was grubby and utilitarian. In Stanmore, north London, my sister and I would crawl under the fence to sneak around the office complex next door to our home and even today, in a museum, a department store, a theatre, a Tube station, I’ll find myself wondering what goes on behind those locked doors. I sometimes think that it’s actually a good definition of creative writing: to unlock doors and take readers through to the other side.

So I felt an almost childish excitement the next day when Hawthorne and I turned up at the offices of the British Transport Police at Euston station. Here was a small, nondescript door that I must have passed dozens of times without noticing, tucked away in a distant corner just past the Left Luggage Office and opposite the entrance to platforms 16–18. Of course it was going to be disappointing on the other side but that wasn’t the point. It was somewhere I had never been.

The door opened into a reception area where we were greeted by a tired-looking woman in uniform, sitting behind a wire-mesh screen. Hawthorne gave her the name of our contact, Detective Constable James McCoy, and almost immediately he appeared, a thickset, square-jawed man with a military haircut and – jeans, sweatshirt, anorak – civilian clothes.

‘Mr Hawthorne?’

‘Yes.’

‘Come on through . . .’

We filled in a form and another door buzzed open, taking us into a maze of narrow corridors and tiny offices that extended much further than I would have thought possible. Everything was remarkably shabby. We followed a blue carpet covered in all manner of stains past a softly vibrating drinks dispenser and on round another corner. Some of the rooms were hardly bigger than cupboards. A criminal being interviewed there would be able to touch knees with the officer who had arrested him. We passed an incident room and I glimpsed half a dozen men and women examining printouts and transferring the contents to the whiteboards that surrounded them. Forget modern technology. This might be the front line against crime and terrorism but it was all resolutely old-fashioned, with chunky Hewlett Packard computers on Formica-covered desks and a whole crowd of cheap swivel chairs. There were no windows. This really was a world apart.

Hawthorne had arranged the meeting. I hadn’t needed to tell him about the newspaper article. He’d seen it himself and had called me that same evening. I hadn’t spoken to Cara Grunshaw either. I hadn’t forgotten the way she had threatened me but I’d decided to leave any further contact for at least a week, by which time, hopefully, Hawthorne would have solved the case anyway. Or maybe I would. I was still quite attracted to the idea that I would be the one who made sense of it all and that when the suspects were gathered together in one room in the final chapter, I’d be the one doing the talking.

There was a second man waiting for us in the statement room. This was a uniformed officer, barely out of his twenties, who had been brought across to talk to us. His name was Ahmed Salim and he had been the first to deal with the body. I was puzzled to find myself in Euston, incidentally, when the death had happened in King’s Cross, but apparently there was no CID division there. As McCoy explained, he was responsible for all incidents north of the Central line, travelling as far as Stratford East and Chelmsford. He had now been put in charge of the inquiry into Gregory Taylor’s death.

This, according to the two men, was what had happened.

Gregory Taylor had come to London on the morning of Saturday 26 October, one day before Richard Pryce had died. He had taken an early train from Horton-in-Ribblesdale – there is no station in Ingleton – and was now on his way back home. The station was unusually crowded for a Saturday. There had been a football match that day – Leeds vs Arsenal – and the platform was jammed with supporters. Normally, Virgin won’t allow passengers through the ticket barrier until the train has pulled in, but they change the rules when there’s a major disruption and as it happened there had been a signal failure at Peterborough and the service was running late. So there were up to four hundred people waiting as the train drew in.

Taylor reached the platform at twelve minutes past six. He was in no hurry. He had bought himself a coffee at Starbucks and a thick doorstop of a book at W. H. Smith. This was Prisoners of Blood, the third volume in the Doomworld series by the bestselling author Mark Belladonna. By coincidence, I knew the series because I’d recently been approached by Sky to adapt it for TV. Doomworld had been compared (unfavourably) to Game of Thrones, which was then in its third season. It was a fantasy version of England in the time of King Arthur, weaving magic and mystery with really quite extreme levels of violence and pornography. The Daily Mail had branded the books ‘pure porn poison’, which the publishers had cheekily reprinted on the cover. I’d read about half of the first volume but I hadn’t really enjoyed it and it had been an easy decision to turn the show down.

The third volume had just arrived in the shops and it was on special offer. Taylor bought it and received a free Kit Kat and a bottle of water.

He went through the ticket barrier and started walking up the platform, staying behind the yellow line but still fairly close to the edge. At the same time, the delayed train appeared in the distance, moving towards him. Police Constable Salim told us what happened next.

‘I’d just arrived at the station for the evening shift when it all kicked off. I knew we had a PUT before I got the call over my radio . . .’

‘What’s a PUT?’ I asked.

‘Person Under a Train.’

‘We also call them “one unders”,’ McCoy added.

‘I could hear screaming,’ Salim went on. ‘And the driver had sounded his horn, which is standard practice. So I knew something was up and I went straight to the platform, which is how I came to be the first on the scene.

‘My immediate thought was that it must be a suicide. But King’s Cross is an end-of-line station so we don’t get that many of those. Anyway, there’s the Harry Potter experience on the main concourse and that cheers people up. So maybe it was an accidental – but that doesn’t happen very often either. I don’t know. I just wanted to get there and see what I could do to help.

‘Well, it turned out that the poor guy had made it about two-thirds of the way up the platform before he’d slipped over the side, straight into the path of the oncoming train. He might have been lucky. He might just have been injured – badly. But I’m afraid it wasn’t like that. He’d fallen across both rails and he’d lost both his legs and he’d been decapitated, so he wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry.’

My iPhone was on low battery and I was writing all this down. He waited for me to catch up. Both McCoy and Salim knew I was a writer and they were enjoying talking to me. It’s funny how many people are keen to have their work described in books.

‘My first job was to clear the area. There were a lot of people screaming. A couple of them had been sick. There was one woman in shock. And of course there were the usual perverts filming the whole thing on their mobile phones. Most of them were wearing football kit – scarves, hoodies, beanies . . . that sort of thing. It was hard to tell who was who. I started to move people back and I told them not to leave the immediate area. We’d need to take names and addresses, witness statements and all the rest of it. By now, quite a few more officers had arrived and I knew BT Central Control were on to it. The London Ambulance Service and the Air Ambulance Service would be on the way. My biggest worry was that someone was going to have a heart attack. It’s happened before and it just makes everything twice as complicated.

‘We managed to get a cordon up and we had the environment under control, but now we had to get the deceased out from under the train. And we only had forty-five minutes.’

‘Why was that?’ I asked. I was fascinated by the whole procedure.

‘It’s the cost,’ Salim explained. ‘When this sort of thing happens, we have to clear the platforms and keep the trains running. We can’t afford to hang around.’

‘Was it you who got the body out?’ Hawthorne asked.

Salim nodded. ‘Yeah. You get a fifty-quid bonus if you’re up for that and I’m saving up for a holiday with my mum. It could have been worse. The train hadn’t been moving very fast so there were no body parts flying into the air or anything like that. And there was no need for a specialist unit to lift up the train. The driver was pretty shaken up but I got him to shunt the train back and it was fairly easy after that. We got the body out and I bagged up the hands and all the rest of it. After that, DC McCoy arrived and he took over.’

McCoy did the same now.

‘There wasn’t a lot left for me to do,’ he said. ‘I got the dead man’s ID from his wallet and I got the North Yorkshire police to send round a couple of PCs to inform the widow. She was at home with two young daughters and I didn’t want her to hear it over the phone. She left for London straight away and I actually saw her the day after. Susan Taylor. Totally shocked. Couldn’t believe it had happened. Her husband hadn’t been well and the two of them had financial difficulties, which is to say they were skint like everyone else, but there was no history of depression. In fact, she said his trip had been a big success. The two of them had booked a restaurant, planning a celebration on Sunday night.’ He drew a breath. ‘Well, that didn’t happen.’

‘What was he doing in London?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘Seeing a friend.’

Hawthorne waited for more information, then saw that McCoy had nothing more to add.

‘That’s all she told me,’ he explained. ‘I interviewed her: she was staying at the Holiday Inn off the Euston Road. But I couldn’t get much sense out of her. The poor woman was in pieces. Her husband under a train! The two of them had been married twenty years. She had to ID the body and that was horrible for her. I’d already decided it was an unexplained. I didn’t think there was anything much she could add.’

‘An unexplained?’ I jotted down the word.

‘We have three classifications. Unexplained, explained and suspicious. There was certainly nothing suspicious as far as I could see, but even with the CCTV images there was no obvious reason why Mr Taylor had taken that fall.’

‘There was that witness statement,’ Salim reminded him.

‘What was that?’ Hawthorne asked.

McCoy glanced at Salim, perhaps a little annoyed that he’d been contradicted by a junior officer. ‘Just before he fell, Taylor cried out. It was only two words. “Look out!” But quite a few people heard him.’

‘Someone had bumped into him?’

‘They’d have had to bump into him pretty hard to project him out like that. He was almost horizontal when he hit the tracks. At the same time, quite a few of the people waiting for that train had had their fair share of booze. You know what it’s like after a football game.’

‘Could he have been deliberately pushed?’

‘Nobody saw anything. They just heard him shout and then it was over. But we’ve got the CCTV images. You can look for yourself.’ McCoy had a laptop computer. He swung it round so we could see the screen. At the same time, he explained: ‘The first thing I did when I got to the station was to call up Alpha Victor in Victoria. They had the images downloaded to me in no time. Thanks to them, we were able to follow him back to the Starbucks and the newsagent. We saw him arrive at the station.’

‘How did he get there?’

‘He took the Tube down from Highgate.’

Highgate. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

‘Here . . .’ McCoy hit the button.

The images we manufacture on television and the big screen are nothing like the real thing. The pictures recorded at King’s Cross Station were indistinct and grainy, as if a layer of dust had deposited itself on the lens. The camera was in the wrong position, too high up and at an oblique angle. The colours were muted, slightly off-kilter. The navy and gold of the Leeds United football strip, for example, were more nightfall and French mustard. Gregory Taylor’s death was seen at its most mundane, stripped of any art or excitement. Here one minute, gone the next.

At first, I couldn’t see the train, just a large crowd, many of them football supporters, milling around.

‘That’s Taylor there,’ McCoy said.

Sure enough, a blurry figure was making its way along the outside of the platform, close to the edge but not so close as to put himself in danger. He wasn’t in a hurry. There was no sound with the image and he was very small and far away but I got the impression that he was politely asking people to allow him to pass. Then three things happened almost simultaneously. Gregory Taylor disappeared from sight, swallowed up by the crowd just as the bright red Virgin train appeared. It had been moving quite slowly in real life but it seemed to take no time at all to reach the edge of the screen. Then Gregory fell in front of it. His back was to the camera but even if we’d been able to see it, it would have been impossible to make out any expression on his face. He was little more than a paint stroke, brushed across the canvas. He plunged down and disappeared a second time. The train continued implacably, crushing him. There was a few seconds’ delay before people realised what had just happened. Then the crowd recoiled, forming a pattern like an exploding sun. I could easily imagine the screams.

‘These are from the camera on the front of the train,’ McCoy said.

The same sequence but seen this time from the driver’s point of view. The tracks stretched out ahead. The waiting passengers were over to the right. Then something – it could have been anything – scythed through the image. That was Gregory Taylor in the last second of his life. The driver might have hit the brakes but the train didn’t seem to slow down.

I had just watched a man die.

McCoy closed his laptop, folding the lid down. ‘The coroner at King’s Cross gave us permission to move the body and he was taken off to the nearest mortuary. I’ve handed the file to the Fatality Investigation Team and of course there’ll be an inquest. But in all honesty, I can’t see any evidence of foul play. I’m ninety per cent sure it was an accident. Just one of those things.’

‘Did he have enemies?’ Salim asked. ‘Is that why you’re investigating?’

‘He may have been involved in a murder that took place in Hampstead the next day,’ Hawthorne said.

‘Well at least he’s one suspect you can cross off your list,’ Salim muttered, reflectively. ‘He wouldn’t have been up for anything.’

We left the offices and walked out to the area in front of the concourse. As soon as we were in the fresh air, Hawthorne lit a cigarette. I could see him turning over everything he had just heard. There were times where he reminded me of a scientist on the threshold of a great discovery or an archaeologist about to open a tomb. He showed almost no emotion but I could feel his energy and excitement.

‘What do you think?’ I asked.

‘He was in Highgate.’

‘Maybe he’d come to London to see Davina Richardson.’

‘Or Richard Pryce. You could walk to either of their places from the same station.’

‘Well, it can’t be a coincidence. He died almost exactly twenty-four hours before the murder.’

‘You’re right there, Tony. It’s not a coincidence.’

He smoked his cigarette in silence. Euston is one of the ugliest stations in London and I felt grubby even standing there, surrounded by fast-food restaurants and concrete. Finally, Hawthorne spoke. ‘Ingleton.’ The way he spoke that single word, I got the impression he’d been there before. And that he hadn’t liked it.

‘What about it?’

‘Are you busy at the moment?’

‘You know I am.’

‘We’re going to have to go there.’ Again, he wasn’t enthusiastic.

He finished his cigarette and we went into the ticket office and bought the tickets, leaving the next day.