The Start of Everything (11 page)

I ran up Trinity Lane. I ran to Bridge Street and then down, down, down its straight line, through all its changing names: Sidney Street, Regent Street, Hills Road. I knew I could make it in time. I stopped only for crossings, rocking from foot to foot while I waited for each green man to appear.

The Cambridge train station is situated far down Hills Road, built there so it won’t tempt students to London. The front of it is blocked by bus stops and a taxi stand. My view was further obscured by a sudden flurry. Snow blew into my face, like the sudden fizz from a shaken Coke bottle.

The waiting-room floor had already gone slippery from footprint slush. Some people curled around their mobiles, calling for lifts, making an obstacle course for the hurriers pushing through to secure their places in the taxi queue and inevitable traffic snarl. Shoes slid and churned against the wet. I hung back.

The three-forty-five train lumbered in. I advanced, turning my shoulders this way and that, to slide myself into the spaces between other bodies.

The train had six cars, each with doors at both ends. I imagined Stephen to have blond hair but knew there was no basis for this. I looked for young men, and there were dozens, new dozens every moment.

“Stephen?” I asked. I touched arms and pulled men around to make them hear me. “Stephen?” I asked. Not him, nor him. Some of them had got through the station doors already. I ran down the length of the train. My elbows knocked against newspapers folded in the hands of tall men, and the head of a child. I grabbed a man’s arm to steady myself, near skating on the wet concrete floor. Not one of them was Stephen. “Stephen?” I said to everyone. I had to tell him why Katja wasn’t there. I had to explain. I couldn’t let him misunderstand. I couldn’t let him think she’d meant something by not coming, when
she hadn’t even known. When she hadn’t been able to know. I was sure that Katja was the dead woman in the water, in the red sweater. I had to tell him.

Near the end of the roofed platform, I couldn’t tell who’d come out of the train and who was waiting for the next one. There were women and a boy and three older men. One big man was there. I knew him, of course, but I didn’t say his name. I said, because it’s what I’d been saying, “Stephen? Are you Stephen?”

His hand jutted out, flat and perpendicular to the ground, as if he were saying “stop.” It punched between my breasts, shoving me out into the now-thick snowfall. Cold bit at all my bare parts, my back burst into pain, then my body flopped and dragged over gravel and metal bumps. The world inverted: Snow sprayed upward, pricking me hot rather than cold, raging little stars in fountains on either side. “Sparks,” I tried to say out loud. I recognised at last that the hot ones were sparks.

CHAPTER 10

CHLOE FROHMANN

T
wo dozen commuters had been held for us in the waiting room, because they had something to say. The rest had given their contact information and been let go. There’s no place to sit in the room, just floor space for a winding ticket queue, and the witnesses are clearly irritated at the time they’ve been kept standing for us. We both step forward. They all look to Keene.

“She was asking for someone called Stephen,” a teen in school uniform volunteers, his mother gripping his shoulders protectively from behind. “She pestered everyone who came off the train.” Agreement echoes in the small space. Mathilde Oliver—that was the name on the library card—had been looking for a Stephen, haphazardly. She’d accosted men of different heights and builds and colouring, all coming off that train. So she’d known his expected movements, but not what he looked like.

“Any of you called Stephen?” Keene asks. All shake their heads.

Sergeant Robinson, in the bright yellow vest of the transport police,
steps in. “There were two Stephens on the bystander list. One waiting for a train, the other from off a train.” The officer coughs apologetically. “We didn’t know that was important when we let them go.”

“Right,” Keene says. “Anyone here see it happen?”

A woman in a vivid purple blouse and thick gold jewellery raises her hand. “I was next to her.” She shudders. “I heard it. I had my back to her. Thank God.”

“Anyone else?” Three other people shuffle forward. A man in a business suit, and an older couple dressed for an evening out. They’d been near but paid attention only after she was falling.

“Had she been bumped into? Was it an accident?” Keene asks.

They all deny that they’d had physical contact with her, and they hadn’t noticed if anyone else had.

I’m making notes on the list of names Robinson gave us. Keene keeps prodding them with questions. “Who else was nearby? Is this everyone?”

“I remember a man in a suit pushed past me, away from the tracks, when I turned at the sound of the screams,” says the purple-blouse lady.

Keene raises his eyebrows at the only man in the group in a suit. “I didn’t push anyone!” he insists.

“It’s not an accusation, sir. We’re just trying to ascertain who was nearby.”

“I already said I was nearby!”

“Right. I’ve got that. What did you do when she fell? Did you push past …” I hold the list up to him and point. “Did you push past Ms. Delphy, Mr. Birnbaum?”

“I didn’t push past anyone. I froze,” he admits.

“All right. Ms. Delphy, do you see the man who pushed past you here?”

She looks around. “No,” she said. “Or maybe I do, but all I saw was a suit. A white man in a dark suit. Dark hair.” She points at Mr. Birnbaum. “He’s the only one in a suit here now. Except for you, of course,” she clarifies.

Robinson leans in. “There were lots of men in suits, Inspector. Dozens. At the time, it didn’t seem necessary …”

“Yes, I know,” Keene says. It wasn’t feasible to keep two hundred
cranky commuters detained and organised in this small station. Even if we’d wanted to, they had started leaking out the exits as soon as the screams faded.

Robinson adds, “We have everyone’s name and address, sir. At least, everyone who stayed about. There was a certain amount of confusion.” I stifle a laugh. That was an understatement to describe a train station at four on a Friday afternoon. “We’ve got two camera phones. People took pictures.”

Of course people took pictures. And there was the station’s CCTV. We’ll see who was wearing a dark suit. Keene confabs with Robinson. I leave them to it and step out onto the platform.

The train is still on the track. No more will come through this evening; commuters are being diverted onto buses. The driver sits on a bench on the platform, still stunned.

“I braked, but she … There was little chance,” he says.

“Of course. No one holds you responsible.” I sit next to him. “Was anyone close to her on the platform?”

“A dozen people! That time of day, the station is swarming.…”

“Could someone have pushed her?” I ask.

He shrugs. “I wasn’t looking at her until she came at me. How she got to be that way, I couldn’t say.”

I catch the eye of the officer who’s been discreetly looking after him. “His wife’s on her way,” she says, so I move on.

Keene joins me on the platform edge. We go up to the blue-and-white tape but don’t slip under. The CSI unit is doing their hopeless best with footprints in the slush near the lip of the platform. “Was the snow before or after?” I ask.

“Concurrent,” one of the team answers.
All right, maybe she slipped. Maybe this was an accident
.

“Is she still down there?” I stretch my neck. The tracks are several feet below the level of the platform.

“Not much point getting her to the hospital in a hurry.” Keene skirts the taped-off area and leans around.

Jensen, the pathologist, is down on the tracks. “She died from being hit by a train,” he deadpans.

“Did she have a ticket in her pocket?” I ask.

“I can tell you that later.” He hasn’t even rolled her over yet.

“Any thoughts on pushed, jumped, fell?”

He shakes his head. “There’s not much in the aftermath to distinguish one way of having got here from another.”

“Anything inconsistent?” Meaning:
Any damage that doesn’t look train-related?

“Not from here. I’ll call you if I find anything.”

A young woman from the CSI team brings me the articles that had been strewn from, presumably, the victim’s bag. No train ticket, but a notebook and a letter. The letter is to a Katja, from a
Stephen
.

Keene leans over my shoulder and reaches. “Gloves,” I chide, having already pulled a pair on myself. He stuffs his hands in his pockets. I wait for them to come out again, but they don’t. It comes to me:
Can he even pull latex gloves on anymore?
I angle the letter so we can both read it.

“It’s not to Mathilde,” I point out. “It’s made out to someone called Katja. And the notebook has drafts of other Katja/Stephen letters, or transcriptions.”

“Interesting,” he says. “Could the library card be wrong? Could she be called Katja?”

Robinson inserts himself. “I don’t think so, sir. A tag was sticking up out of her collar. It had ‘M. Oliver’ on it.”

“Christ, Robinson, how close did you get?” The disgust in Keene’s voice is new.
Since when did he become so squeamish?

“I had to be sure she didn’t require assistance, sir,” Robinson says delicately, as if appalled that anyone would wonder.

A shudder brings Keene back to himself. “Is there an address?”

“Not much of one,” I answer. “Just ‘Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.’ ”

“How did Mathilde Oliver have this letter? Was she at Corpus, too?”

Robinson is on top of things. “Her father was at Corpus. It was his memorial today.”

“As in dead?” I ask.

He nods. Suicide was a vivid possibility, then. Grief.

Keene is satisfied. “All right. Likely there was no wrongdoing, but we’ll let CSI and Jensen comment before we let it go. In the meantime,
I’ll check with the college. Chloe, you view the station’s CCTV footage.”

“Wait,” I say, skimming the words one more time. “Stephen’s written to Katja several times. He complains of no reply. And he writes that she has his red sweater.”

“The sweater’s been in the news. If Mathilde made the same guess we are …” Keene rubs his jaw, working out the coincidence.

If Mathilde made the same guess
 … If she looked for her, and perhaps came close to finding her … then the crimes could be related. Maybe Mathilde Oliver didn’t slip in the snow or end it all in grief.

CHAPTER 11

MORRIS KEENE

I
push the car door shut behind me. Chloe has dropped me at the Market Square; she’s off to view CCTV footage in the basement of the Guildhall. I jog around to Bene’t Street, the corner of which is lit pink by the new clock. I stop in its glow, under the robot grasshopper, to phone Richard again, but again there’s no answer. I swear, and resist the impulse to hurl my mobile against the pavement. Nothing to do but keep walking.

The Corpus porters’ lodge is just around the corner. I knock, push open the door, and lean over the counter.

“What can I do for you?” asks a man in a neat black suit. The porters’ names are displayed on the wall beneath photos, and
Louis
is his.

“Good evening, Louis.” I have my warrant card ready, in my inside jacket pocket. I pull it out left-handed, with a gesture I’m gratified to notice is becoming more natural, and introduce myself and my rank. His chin tilts up.

“I’m looking for someone called Katja,” I explain.

“We don’t have any Katjas at present,” he tells me, “but we have a great many people looking for one.”

“Really?” Now, that’s interesting.

“A young man this evening insisted his friend Katja is a student here. He tried to describe her to me, but I hope you understand that telling me she’s pretty and twenty and dark-haired isn’t going to get us anywhere.” I ask him to describe the young man, and “blond ponytail” is the sum of him. He goes on: “And Mathilde Oliver has been after Katja as well. She’s not a student; her father was a Fellow here.”

“Mathilde Oliver?” I repeat, trying to keep my voice bland. Louis takes me over to a bulletin board where “Katja” is written neatly on a folded note. He unpins it and hands it to me. It’s a request to be contacted, nothing more.