One Under

ONE

Two Under

A suicide is a detective sergeant’s shout. Fortunately for Atherton, who was ‘it’ that Monday, the British Transport Police did the immediate graft. Unless there turned out to be anything suspicious about it, he was only required to attend, in both senses of the word, and write a report afterwards.

Shepherd’s Bush has an Underground station at either end, one serving the Hammersmith and City Line and the other the Central. It was at the Central station that what was called – in the arm’s-length language beloved of policemen – the ‘incident’ occurred. The BTP, like all railway people, called it a ‘one under’.

‘Eastbound platform,’ said the BTP sergeant, Jason Conroy, who met Atherton at the top of the escalators. The ticket gates were locked open; the entrance gates were locked closed, and outside a small crowd had gathered, five-eighths pissed off that they couldn’t catch their train, three-eighths hoping for some excitement in their lives, and a chance to capture something unusual on their mobile phones.

‘Where did he travel from?’ Atherton asked.

‘Oh, right here. He lives locally. Addison Way.’ It was a two-minute walk from the station. ‘Name of George Peloponnos. We got his wallet from the tracks. Various bits of ID, including this.’

It was a laminated pass for a local government building. No one looks entirely human in an ID-card photo, but he was probably looking better there than in real life, after his argument with the business end of a speeding locomotive. The picture showed a man in his mid-forties with thinning, light-coloured hair over a rather large skull, a high forehead and a pleasant, mild, perhaps weak face.

‘I took a photograph of the body on my tablet,’ Conroy went on, ‘if you want to see it, but it’s not much help. His face got a bit messed up.’

‘Pity,’ said Atherton. It was Standard Operating Procedure to match the photo against the corpse – there were unfortunately many reasons a person could have someone else’s documents on him to trip the unwary. When there was any doubt about identification, it meant getting a partner or relative involved to specify other identifying marks – never a happy task.

But Conroy said cheerfully, ‘No worries. We got it all on CCTV. He looks like the photo on the pass. It’s him all right.’

‘And did he definitely jump?’

‘Oh yeah. No doubt about it. D’you wanna see the MPEG? I haven’t edited the whole tape yet, but I’ve downloaded the jump.’

Since the terrorist attacks, Transport for London – as London Transport had wittily renamed itself – had installed some of the best CCTV kit with the widest coverage in the business. Furthermore, Shepherd’s Bush station had been completely remodelled in 2008 when the vast new Westfield shopping centre had been built next door, so it had modern lighting too. Conroy cued up the video clip and turned his tablet for Atherton to see. There was the brightly lit eastbound platform. Conroy pointed to the tallish, lean figure in a dark overcoat waiting among the other travellers – not so many of them, since the rush hour was over. He was standing a little apart, staring straight ahead, his hands down by his sides clenching and unclenching. Then he turned his head towards the tunnel mouth, presumably hearing the train approaching, and the camera got a good view of his face. It certainly looked like the man on the ID card.

Then 240 tons of 1992 BREL/ADtranz rolling stock hurtled out of the tunnel and it was all over.

Atherton handed it back. He had jumped. Nobody had pushed him. So far so good.

‘Witnesses?’ he asked.

‘We’ve interviewed the people standing nearest him. Not that they were much help. As you could see, one was reading the paper and two of them were messing on their mobiles.’ He cued the video again and froze it just before the jump, and showed it to Atherton again. ‘There was this bloke,’ he said, pointing to a young-looking man standing with his hands in his pockets and the leads of an iPod protruding from his ears. ‘But he wasn’t looking.’ He was, indeed, staring absently in the other direction. ‘He says the first he knew, there was this scream, and the bloke with the newspaper stepped back on his foot and nearly knocked him over.’

‘Who screamed?’

‘Woman further down the platform. She saw him jump. The paramedics are treating her for shock. Do you wanna talk to her?’

Carole Parkinson, sitting in a cramped little office behind the concourse, was sufficiently recovered to ensure that Atherton took down her first name correctly, ‘with an e’. Indeed, wrapped in a cellular blanket and clutching a mug of tea, she seemed more stimulated by the attention she was receiving than devastated by what she had witnessed.

She was aged forty-six and was a waitress in a West End restaurant. She had been on her way to work at what was her normal time.

‘I’d just missed a train – it was pulling out just as I reached the platform – so there was no one else there except him. Well, I didn’t think anything about it, obviously. Didn’t really notice him or anything. But when I heard the train coming in, of course I looked that way, and I saw him jump.’

‘Did he jump, or could it have been a slip, or a stumble?’

‘Oh no. He jumped all right. Straight out in front of the train.’ She sipped. ‘Of course, it’s the driver I feel sorry for. When you think about it, it’s a selfish thing to do, kill yourself like that. That poor driver’ll probably never get over it. I mean, if you’ve got to do it, at least don’t involve anybody else. And then all these poor people—’ she gestured round her to indicate the paramedics and the BTP – ‘have got to clear up the mess.’ She shuddered delicately and sipped again. ‘Selfish,’ she concluded. ‘I wonder why he did it. Maybe he left a note.’

She looked hopefully from Atherton to Conroy, but neither of them was interested in satisfying her curiosity. They turned away. Outside, Atherton looked at his watch.

‘Keeping you from something?’ Conroy enquired ironically.

‘You might say. I gave up a perfectly good funeral for this,’ said Atherton.

There was thin April sunshine, but a brisk, chilly wind was blowing: not weather for lingering, though the cemetery was delightfully full of spring-green grass and trees just coming into bud, and there were daffodils everywhere, leaning and straightening in the breeze, on the graves and beside the paths.

Porson had a cold, and looked terrible in the sharp wind and acid sunshine, his face raw and bumpy, pale where it was not reddened. But he was never less than a leader, and everyone naturally gravitated towards him as they exited the chapel. The sullen roar of the nearby A40 was the background to the tweeting and twirting of the birds. Rus in urbe, Slider thought. When it had first been established, Acton Cemetery had been on the far outskirts of London, and the traffic would have been horse-drawn.

Joanna had her arm through Slider’s. She huddled down into her coat against the wind, and pressed close to him for comfort. She had cried during the meagre little service inside. She hadn’t known Hollis well, of course, but a quick imagination would always feel sympathy. And Slider couldn’t help being aware that this was about the due date for the baby that she had lost in December. If he was remembering it, she must be too. In fact, he hadn’t wanted her to come, though it was hard to put her off without mentioning the baby. But she had insisted – as worried about his state of mind, he supposed, as he about hers. She had been giving him covert looks ever since the news of Hollis’s suicide had come in. She thought he was a guilt junkie.

Apart from the police contingent there were only about ten people there. They had made an awkward group in the chapel. Slider regretted the old days of the Book of Common Prayer, when at least you had always known what to expect. Nowadays at a funeral you were more likely to be ambushed by embarrassment than grief. But there had been no eulogies or ‘Fred would have loved this’ jokes, or inappropriate music. Slider had felt only sadness that Hollis’s life should have ended as it did, and be closed with such a paucity of ceremony.

The clergyman who had officiated had already hurried away to his car, and the undertaker’s men had assembled the floral tributes in the porch of the little stone chapel. Hollis’s second wife, Debbie, a hard-faced blonde in what looked like a new black skirt suit and coat, and a small feathered black hat that would have been more appropriate for a wedding, was inspecting them along with the man she had thrown Hollis out for, a lean and professionally-coiffed bounder in a tight-waisted M&S suit. He was a technician at the King Edward hospital and a good few years younger than her.

It was the first wife, Brenda, that Slider had known socially. She came towards him now, bareheaded, in a coat that had seen many seasons, her face worn and softened, as if eroded with cares. Beside her were the two children of the marriage, awkward teenagers of fifteen and sixteen, tall like their father, and with an unfortunate combination of their parents’ worst features. It was somehow all the more heartbreaking that Hollis’s children should be so plain. The boy, besides, had teenage acne and the girl was uncomfortably big-breasted and overweight. They looked so alike with only a year between them, one might have taken them for twins. They stood close together, supporting each other, and Slider had an image of them huddling that way for comfort while the marital split was going on. The girl’s nose was red, the boy’s lip trembled. They gazed out in bewilderment from behind glasses with NHS frames that did nothing for glamour.

Joanna slipped her arm out of Slider’s to free him and hung back to talk to them. Slider took Brenda’s hand. ‘I’m so very sorry,’ he said.

‘It was nice of you to come,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

‘More to the point, how are you? Holding up?’

She glanced at the children, and lowered her voice. ‘Colin was still supporting us. I don’t know how we’re going to manage. I suppose …’ Tears filled her eyes and she bit her lip and breathed out hard to control them. ‘I suppose the social services will help us out. Somehow. Eventually.’

Slider felt helpless. ‘It’s a rotten business,’ he said. ‘I had no idea – none of us had any idea. I knew he was depressed, but …’

Brenda nodded miserably. ‘Debbie …’ she began, but didn’t finish. There were no words adequate to the occasion. She looked around in a lost way. ‘Well,’ she said reluctantly, ‘we’d better go.’

Debbie was now holding court, receiving the commiserations of the other guests and hogging Porson’s attention. She was the official widow. It was all about her. In the chapel she had passed Brenda and the children on her way to the front row and pointedly not asked them to join her.

‘I’ve taken those two out of school,’ Brenda concluded, as though it were not a non-sequitur. The boy was trying desperately not to cry. He had his father’s protuberant eyes, and would have his male-pattern baldness too, one day. The chubby girl put her arm clumsily round his shoulders, staring defiance at the world.

Slider, turning his shoulder so they shouldn’t see, fumbled out his wallet. Brenda moved a hand to stop him. ‘Oh – no. You mustn’t.’

‘Please,’ Slider said urgently, in a low voice. He removed all the notes, folded them in his palm, and pushed them into hers. ‘It’s not much, but – buy them lunch, or something. Please.’ He’d taken out cash the day before, so there was about £160 there. ‘Please, Brenda. I don’t know how we’re going to manage without him. He was a good man.’

It probably wasn’t exactly the right thing to say to the wife he had left for another, but they had remained on civil terms, and he had always supported the children. And Brenda had come to the funeral, hadn’t she?

She nodded, slipping the notes into her pocket, unable to speak, and turned away. She smiled brightly and crookedly to her tall, plain children and they walked off together. Slider wanted to say ‘Keep in touch’, but he knew they wouldn’t – and to what point, anyway?

‘Poor things,’ Joanna said. ‘Those poor children.’

‘If only anyone had known how far gone he was,’ Slider said. ‘I should have known.’

‘Don’t start that again,’ Joanna said. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’d better be getting back.’

‘Yes, we ought to go, too.’ She had come in her own car, as had Porson. Slider had brought McLaren and Mackay, with Nutty Nicholls representing the uniform side. Nutty and Fergus O’Flaherty had tossed for it. Paxman, the other sergeant, was a strict Christian and would not attend the funeral of a suicide on principle.

Slider gathered his troops, and they walked with Joanna down to the gates. There was no car park, but plenty of roadside parking in the immediate area. At his car, Joanna said, ‘See you tonight,’ and left him to find hers.

The four of them got in the car, glad to get out of the sharp wind. Porson was still talking to Debbie’s remaining group – or rather, being talked at by Debbie. They saw her lay a hand on his forearm, as if to stop him escaping.

‘She could have given Brenda some of the flowers,’ Mackay said resentfully. ‘Cow.’

Nicholls, beside him, said, ‘She wouldn’t have wanted ’em.’

‘Still, it’s the thought,’ Mackay insisted.

Slider was aware that Debbie was generally blamed for Hollis’s suicide. He had said many times in his life that suicides did the deed because of what they felt about themselves, not because of what anyone else did or didn’t do. It didn’t stop him feeling guilty, though.

‘It’s a rotten business all round,’ said Nutty.

‘At least he done it tidy,’ said McLaren. ‘Didn’t make a mess for someone else to clear up.’

Hollis had hanged himself – the favoured option, statistically, for men, and especially for policemen in a force that did not routinely carry arms. He’d taken some rope with him in a backpack and taken the Central line out to Epping Forest where he wouldn’t scare anyone, leaving a note at his lodgings and another in his pocket for the avoidance of doubt. Considerate to the last – if you could discount the suicide itself – was Colin Hollis.

‘Well, that’s something, I suppose,’ Nicholls allowed.

They drove in silence for a while, and then Mackay said, ‘Guv, are we getting a replacement?’

‘Obviously, at some point.’

‘No, I mean, soon. Have you heard anything?’

‘No, but Mr Porson knows it’s urgent.’ Even allowing for the cuts the whole of the Met was having to make, Slider’s firm was understaffed for the area and the workload. Of course, the new borough commander mightn’t agree – Mike Carpenter was reputed to be a bean counter, who had got his promotion for his mastery of spreadsheets rather than operational prowess – but it was self-evident they couldn’t manage as they were.

‘Mr Porson’ll tell ’em,’ McLaren concluded. Their boss might be a strange old duck, and use language like a blind man swatting flies, but he was always ready to fight their corner.

‘How was it?’ Atherton asked.

‘Simply divine,’ Slider replied sourly.

‘I just asked. Don’t you want to know how I got on?’

‘Well?’

‘Nothing suspicious about it. He jumped. Definitely suicide.’

‘Good.’ Slider busied himself with what was on his desk, and after a brief pause, Atherton went away.

Now he was alone with his thoughts. He felt terrible about Hollis, the goofy-looking Mancunian who was such a good policeman. Mild, efficient, encyclopaedic of memory, and with a wonderful talent for getting people to open up to him – perhaps because he was goofy-looking, so they saw him as unthreatening. Slider had known he had left the marital home – for a time he had surreptitiously camped out in the Department, to which Slider had turned a blind eye – but lately he had found himself lodgings and Slider had thought he was getting on with his life.

The note in his room had said, ‘I’m sorry, but I just can’t go on. I’m really sorry if this makes trouble for anybody. I don’t blame anybody. I’m doing it off my own bat. I’m sorry.’ Three ‘sorrys’ in one suicide note. Well, that was Hollis.

The note in his pocket had said, ‘This is a suicide. Nobody else is involved.’ And gave his name and address and an instruction to contact Slider. Which the Epping police duly did.

Determined to end it, Slider thought. Like Atherton’s ‘one under’, he jumped. One at each end of the Central Line. But did either of them think about the people they left behind? They were safely out of the way; someone else had to clear up the mess. Including all the feelings, guilt or otherwise.

The phone rang, breaking the unfruitful cycle, and Slider reached for it gratefully.

‘This is DCI Remington, from Uxbridge.’

‘Oh yes? Hello, Pete. Long time no see. How are things?’

‘Oh, you know. Same all over. Cuts. Targets. Initiatives. It’s not like the old days.’

‘Even the old days weren’t like the old days,’ Slider suggested.

‘Congratulations, by the way. How are you liking your promotion?’

‘Doesn’t seem to have made much difference,’ said Slider. As a new detective chief inspector he was barely fifty pounds a month better off. ‘I have more meetings with council officials, that’s about all.’

‘Ah yes,’ said Remington, with a smile in his voice. ‘Actively promoting police/community stakeholder engagement going forward.’

‘Yes, I had one of those memos,’ said Slider. That was the other difference – an increase in the amount of management-speak bollocks that landed on his desk.

‘Sorry to hear about your bloke – Hollis, was it? That’s a nasty one. You always wonder if you could have done something. But the truth is, you never can.’

‘Thanks,’ said Slider, accepting the intended comfort. ‘What can I do for you, anyway – or is it social?’

‘We’ve got a hit-and-run victim – young girl. One of those country lanes out Harefield way. No ID on her, but her fingerprints have come back to someone on your ground.’

‘What’s the name?’ Slider asked.

‘Kaylee Adams – that’s Kaylee with a double e. Age 15. Address, 12 Birdwood House, on the White City Estate. You did her a couple of times for shoplifting.’

Slider made a note of it. The name sounded vaguely familiar, though he wouldn’t have been involved in a shoplifting arrest. ‘What the hell was she doing out in Harefield?’

‘That’s what we were wondering,’ said Remington. ‘Anyway, we’re still at the scene, if you wanted to send somebody to have a look. Or if you’re busy, I can just copy you the reports when we’re done.’

They were busy, of course, but not with anything interesting. So much of the Job now was social work, community liaison and general reassuring. Burglary, domestic violence and missing persons were the highlights. Last week a woman had dialled 999 because she couldn’t get her ten-year-old son to go to bed and he was screaming and throwing things at her. ‘I din’t know where to turn to,’ she sobbed theatrically to the uniformed officer who attended.

As the PC related it in the canteen afterwards, with much exasperation, ‘Scrawny, undersized little kid, and she must have been four times his weight, but she still claimed she couldn’t control him.’

‘Give him four years and it’ll be our job,’ another officer had observed sourly.

So the Harefield hit-and-run was a golden opportunity for Slider to get out of his train of thoughts, and out of the office, before some other shower of bumf urged him to do some blue-sky thinking in a real-time facilitation sense.

Besides, it was an odd place to find a girl from the estate.

‘Thanks, I’ll be along,’ he said.

Slider reached into his reserves of compassion and took Atherton with him.

Harefield was at the far edge of the London Borough of Hillingdon. It was therefore under Metropolitan police jurisdiction, but it was something of an anomaly, a distinctly rural area of muddy fields, cows and horses, narrow winding roads, hedges and barns – though the latter had mostly been converted into garages or desirable residences. But there were still some working farms, sometimes straw on the road and often the tang of manure in the air. A stranger parachuted in would never have guessed it was part of London.

The warren of narrow lanes was mostly unsignposted, but there was a patrol car parked half across the entrance to Thornbrake Lane, which was a bit of a giveaway. The uniformed officer was telling motorists that there was no through road for the present. Slider showed his brief.

‘Oh, yes, sir, DCI Remington told me you were coming. Down here and second on the left. That’s Dog Rose Lane.’

Thornbrake was wide enough to have a dotted line down the middle, but Dog Rose – ‘Charming names they have in these parts,’ said Atherton – barely managed a lane in each direction. Middlesex was an area of the Old Enclosures, so all the lanes had sunk to some extent over the centuries. Dog Rose began claustrophobically between low banks topped by high hedges, but after the first bend the hedges dropped lower and jumped back behind a grass verge and ditch, giving a bit of light and air and a glimpse of damp green fields beyond grazed by a few rough-looking horses.

They soon came to a number of cars parked on the verges. Beyond them, blue-and-white tape stretched across the road a little short of a sharp left-hand bend.

‘Looks like the crime scene,’ said Slider.

‘Crime?’ Atherton queried. ‘Jumping the gun, aren’t we?’

‘Leaving the scene of an accident is a crime,’ Slider reminded him.

Another uniform was standing guard with a clipboard. He checked them off and courteously lifted the tape for them.

It was a nasty, blind sort of bend that the cautious driver would creep round. Beyond it things were well under way, with the Uxbridge detectives, the local SOC team, and the collision scene specialists all busy. A forensic tent had been erected in the middle of the road.

Remington shook their hands. ‘You can see what would have happened,’ he said. ‘She must have been walking along the road here and chummy comes round the corner too fast. It’s a nasty bend, as you can see – local black spot – and the natives all drive like maniacs round these lanes.’ He gave a little shrug. ‘Think they’re immortal.’

‘Where was she found?’ Slider asked.

‘Down the ditch, just over there. Must have been sent flying when she was hit. Of course, the driver might not have seen her at all if it was night – felt the bump, thought it was an animal, didn’t bother to stop. Or else knew what he’d hit and panicked. No witnesses have come forward, unfortunately.’

‘Who found her?’

‘Dog walker, this morning. There’s been plenty of traffic down this road, but you wouldn’t have seen her, where she was, from a passing car. We’ve moved the body now,’ he added, gesturing to the tent, ‘but I’ve got some photographs of the position, if you want to see them.’

Slider and Atherton bent over his screen and scrolled through. There was the general position – they could see exactly where, just up ahead, with an overgrown thorn sprouting from the hedge and throwing arched tendrils over the ditch. Then the girl – lying face down, but with her head slightly turned to the side, one arm under her, the other flung out, one knee bent, just as she might have landed from the brief, violent flight. She was wearing a leather jacket and a miniskirt, and her legs and feet were bare.

‘No shoes?’ Slider asked.

‘We found them further along,’ said Remington. ‘I don’t know if she was knocked out of them, or if maybe she’d taken them off and was carrying them. Has to be said they weren’t best suited for walking.’ He scrolled on, and showed them a photograph of the