“Back towards the High Street; he went round the corner and he was gone.”
“And what happened next on the bus?”
“Chaos. People were shouting and screaming. Someone went to see if the guy was okay and then she started to scream and I saw there was blood on her hands and on the floor. People were trying to get off the bus and the driver shut the doors and said something over the public address about having to call the police and everyone on the bus being a witness and people started shouting at him.” Ross shrugged. “Chaos.”
“And you did what, while all this chaos was going on?”
“I sat where I was.”
“Why?”
“Nobody needed me getting in the way. People were at the front trying to stop the guy bleeding, the police were coming. There was nothing I could do to help.”
“Wanted to keep your head down, more like,” Spicer murmured.
“I see,” Collins said. “Did you see a knife?”
“I’m sorry?”
“A knife. The gentleman was stabbed three times. Did you see the knife?”
“No. Sorry, no. I just saw the guy start to take his hand out of his pocket, then the other guy moved in front of him. I didn’t see what was in his hand.”
Jim stood up. “Thank you, Superintendent.”
“There’s still about half a dozen passengers to interview,” Spicer pointed out.
“I think I have an adequate idea of what went on from Mr Ross’s statement,” Jim said. “Is there any word on the attacker?”
Spicer got up and followed him to the door of the monitor suite. “There’s a good image of him from the bus camera; we’re circulating that. And half the people on the bus were filming the incident on their phones and sending the footage to their media accounts or their friends or the news agencies, so there’s no shortage of video. Most of the street cameras were either down for maintenance or out of order. We’re working through them street by street, but so far we don’t know where he went.”
“Hm.”
As they reached the door, Jim heard Ross say, “So, how is the guy? Is he going to be okay?”
“I’m afraid the gentleman died in hospital,” Collins replied.
A
FLOOR UP
from the monitor suite, two police officers sat in a small office. Neate, the sergeant, was sitting behind the desk, his feet up, eyes closed. The constable, Ferris, was sitting in one of the visitor chairs twiddling his thumbs. Jim noted as he stepped through the door that all their comms gear had been removed, and there was a bare space on the desk where a monitor had been hurriedly cleared away.
“This gentleman wants to talk to you about tonight’s incident,” Spicer told them. “You’re to give him all possible cooperation. Charlie. Stop being insubordinate.”
Neate lowered his feet to the floor and assumed an attentive pose behind the desk. He was younger than Ferris, perhaps in his mid-twenties to Ferris’s early forties. He had the look of a ‘flier,’ an officer bound for greater things. Ferris, on the other hand, had the calm, rumpled, professional look of a copper who had pounded many miles of pavement, had perhaps been passed over for promotion once, accepted it as his lot, and quietly got on with doing his job.
There being no more chairs in the office, Jim perched on the corner of the desk while Spicer stood with his back to the closed door. The room felt cramped, claustrophobic, too warm.
He told the officers, “This is not an official interview, and it won’t appear on your records. I’ve seen your reports of the incident at Camden Town Station earlier this evening, but I’m just here to fill in the gaps, get a personal sense of things to take to my superiors.”
“Gaps?” Neate asked. “What kind of gaps?”
Jim smiled. “Perhaps I put that badly. You’re not under investigation here, but it could be important that I get a
feel
for what happened, and that’s hard to do from reports, no matter how professional they are.” He added, “It’s what we call human intelligence, or
humint
.” That bounced right off Ferris, he saw. The constable knew he was being handled. He probably also knew that no one had used the word ‘humint’ for at least two decades now.
Neate, on the other hand, seemed mollified. Eager, even. His file said he had applied to the Security Service but failed his interview, although it didn’t say why.
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
“Well, let’s start with your evening, shall we? How was that going, before you got the call?”
Neate and Ferris glanced at each other. Ferris said, “Slow. Always is, midweek. Couple of drunks making a nuisance of themselves outside Mornington Crescent Station, lady had her bag snatched on the High Street. Bit of a domestic at Silverdale.”
“Silverdale?” asked Jim.
“It’s a block of flats,” said Neate. “Down towards Euston. Scheduled for demolition. Full of asylum seekers and migrants.”
“Could you tell me about that?” Jim asked. “The domestic at Silverdale?”
Neate and Ferris glanced at each other again. Ferris said, “Bulgarian couple, been in the country a couple of years. She works as a cleaner on the Underground, he hasn’t been able to find a job.”
“On account of being an alcoholic,” Neate put in.
“On account of being an epileptic and unable to afford medication,” Ferris corrected mildly. “But he does drink. He knows he shouldn’t, but, well, man in his situation, can’t support his wife, he gets angry with himself.”
“They row a lot,” Neate said. “We’ve been to see them before. Usually it’s at weekends, though, and usually she gives as good as she gets. This time the neighbours said they heard a lot of shouting and screaming, then what sounded like someone being beaten with something, then the sound of a man crying.”
Jim raised his eyebrows. “My word. And what did you find when you got there?”
“They’d started out having a go at each other,” Ferris said. “He’d been drinking, she couldn’t find some money she’d put aside for food, she accused him of spending it on drink. He slapped her, she punched him.”
“Then she killed his dog,” Neate said.
Jim blinked at him.
“Beat it to death with a chair leg,” Ferris added.
“He loved that dog,” Neate went on. “More than he loved her, probably. Took it everywhere with him. Taught it to do tricks. You know, roll over, play dead, that sort of thing.” He grinned.
Jim decided he didn’t like Sergeant Neate.
“When we got there he was sitting on the sofa cradling the dog in his arms, crying like a baby,” Ferris said. “She was still holding the chair leg, this dazed expression on her face.” He shook his head. “I mean, the dog’s bad enough, but imagine if they’d got kids.” He looked at Jim as if hoping for an answer, and when none was forthcoming he said, “Anyway, we called the social services and the RSPCA and let them pick up the pieces.”
“Was that wise?”
Ferris shrugged. “All the fight had gone out of her. As I said, she was sort of dazed. The RSPCA came and took the dog away and he went with them; the social services came and took her to a refuge.”
“We took the chair leg away from her first,” Neate put in.
“It was all over by the time we got there,” Ferris said. “They’d stopped fighting. Nobody had been hurt. It’s up to the RSPCA to bring proceedings against the wife about the dog.”
Jim shook his head. “And when did you get the call to Camden station?”
“Almost immediately,” Neate said. “Eighteen sixteen zulu.”
“Just after quarter past six,” Ferris said. “We’d only just got back in the car. All-units call to Camden Town Station. Reports of a disturbance on a bus, possible use of weapons.”
“How long did it take you to get there?”
Neate shrugged. “Not more than ten minutes. It’s not far, but the traffic’s always bad that time of night.”
“I presume you were running with your siren on,” Jim said.
“There’s never any room for anybody to get out of your way,” Ferris explained. “The traffic funnels down to where the road divides by the station and everybody gets bottlenecked there.”
“They tried putting in an ESPL a few years ago but the local traders complained,” Neate said.
“A what?”
“Emergency Services Priority Lane,” said Ferris. “There was nowhere for shoppers and delivery vans to park and the shopkeepers said they were losing trade, so the local council knocked the lane on the head.” He shrugged. “We made the best time we could.”
“And you were the first emergency services on the scene.”
Neate and Ferris nodded.
“And what did you find when you got there?”
“134 to North Finchley,” said Ferris. “Pulled up at the stop just down Kentish Town Road from the station. Doors shut, passengers inside. Lots of shouting and screaming. We pulled up behind him, I went round and spoke to the driver through his window. He told me one of the passengers had been stabbed but the assailant had fled the scene. He opened the front door and Charlie went on board.”
“Almost got trampled by passengers trying to get off,” Neate said.
“Excuse me,” Jim said. “Didn’t the driver try to give first aid? Did he just sit in his seat the whole time?”
“They’re told to do that,” Neate explained. “The bus company don’t want them to do anything that exposes them to liability, so they’re told to call for help and sit tight.”
“Even when a man’s bleeding to death not three feet away from them?”
Neate shrugged.
Jim shook his head. “So the driver opens the door for you, and you see...?”
“White chap, in his early forties,” Neate said. “Lying on the platform at the front of the bus, head towards the door, hands clasped to his abdomen. Blood all over the floor.”
“And you did what...?”
“Called it in. Assault, query stabbing, one victim, assailant away on his toes. Tony had gone back to the car for the emergency kit, brought it round, we tried to stop the bleeding.”
“Without success.”
“With no success at all. Meanwhile the passengers were going frantic, so Tony went to try and calm them down, get a bit of an idea what happened.”
Jim looked at Ferris. “So you didn’t hear him speak.”
Ferris shook his head. “Everyone was standing round me, shouting at the same time.”
Jim looked at Neate. Neate said, “He grabbed my wrist all of a sudden and he said, ‘I want to claim political asylum. Tell them I’ve seen a map.’ Then he passed out.”
“And those were his exact words? No chance you could have misheard him?”
“He was as close to me as this.” Neate held the flat of his hand perhaps six inches from his face. “That’s what he said. Then the paramedics arrived and took over, and a minute or two after that an ambulance turned up.”
“And you did what, then?”
“Helped Tony take statements. We’re required to call in political asylum claims, so I did that. Ten minutes or so later we got word to hang on to the passengers because they were all going to be transported here for interview.”
“Ten minutes?”
“About that. Maybe a bit less.”
“Isn’t one of you supposed to go to hospital with the victim?”
“We were told to remain on scene, continue to take statements from the passengers, wait for further instructions.”
Jim got down from the corner of the desk. “Thank you, gentlemen.”
“Can you tell us why we’ve been kept here waiting half the night?” Neate asked.
“I’m afraid the gentleman who was stabbed was the subject of a Security Services investigation,” Jim said. “And I’m afraid he is now also the subject of a murder inquiry.”
S
PICER WALKED HIM
back through the corridors of the police station.
“I know we’ve visited the subject of detaining the passengers, Superintendent, but where’s the bus driver?” Jim asked.
“Gave his statement, went home,” Spicer said wearily. “Would you like me to send a car to pick him up?”
Jim thought about it, shook his head. “We can find him if we need him. I just wanted to hear him explain how he could sit there while a man needed his help.”
Spicer looked at him and gave a sad little smile. “It’s like Charlie said. They’re trained to call for backup and not get involved, in case they do something the company can be sued for later.”
“It’s stupid,” Jim said.
Nearing the ground floor, Spicer said, “May I ask what your interest in the victim is, sir?”
“He was running PR for a little jihadi group,” Jim told him. “He was being kept under surveillance. Which he managed to evade, which is a little embarrassing. We’d quite like to know what he was doing in the Warren Street area, who he was seeing, that kind of thing. So if you turn up something like that in the course of your inquiries, we’d be interested to hear about it.”
“Of course.”
“And please, let me know the details of the other matter you mentioned. I’ll make sure you get the information you need.”
“We’d appreciate it, sir.”
At the back door, Spicer buzzed Jim out. They shook hands and Jim got into the car. The driver knew where to go next.
T
HE CAR TOOK
him up through Kentish Town and Archway, then up the Archway Road, through East Finchley and North Finchley. Passing Tally Ho Corner, Jim looked up briefly from the texts on his phone and wondered just what the stabbing victim had been coming up here for. Had he just wanted to get as far out of London as a random bus would take him, or was there something here he wanted? A native of Bromley, Jim was unfamiliar with this part of the Capital, and it looked unremarkable to him.
The roads seemed busy this evening. Fifteen years after the last deaths from the Xian Flu and people were only just starting to reconnect with normal life. The British Isles had got away comparatively lightly from the pandemic, but for years afterward the country had seemed deserted, people had buttoned themselves up in their homes, still unwilling to mix with others who might have been infected. The economy had teetered on the brink yet again. Last year there had been incidents of large-scale social unrest in the Midlands – riots in Leicester and Derby – and, counterintuitively, commentators had looked benignly on it, seeing a return to some kind of normality, an expression of shell-shock more than anything else.