George Barnabas - 04 - Fourth Attempt (45 page)

She stood there staring down at the platform, trying to be systematic in her observations. She started at the far end of the eastward-travelling platform, mainly because it was the least crowded, and raked it with her eyes, moving her gaze across from side to side as neatly as though she were a ploughman in a very narrow field. She registered a couple of shaven-headed, earringed and tattooed boys with cans of lager staring pugnaciously at a very large group of chattering Asians, clearly loathing them but, happily, outnumbered and unable to get vicious in consequence. Good, George thought and carried on.

Some nondescript women in dull clothes, lost in a middle-aged reverie; a trio of pretty girls in skin-tight pelmet skirts that displayed interminable lengths of leg which were beginning to distract the lager-drinkers. No sign of Sheila or anyone else she knew.

She glanced over her shoulder looking for Gus: no sign of him either, and she bit her lip and returned her attention to the platforms, now looking at the westward-bound and more crowded side. Clearly a train was due very soon; people were moving towards the edge of the platform as people always did when they were regular users of the underground, seeming to know instinctively just where in the system their train was and how soon it would arrive.

She started her raking efforts again, this time beginning at the other end of the platform and the tunnel mouth from which the approaching train would emerge. She saw a woman with a small child in a baby buggy; a couple of older children who were squabbling over something George couldn’t see, but which made them wail loudly as their angry mother tried to distract them; some more Bengali men, this time wearing the pyjama suits that had once been their comfortable dress in their home village; a cluster of teenagers with knapsacks, jabbering to each other and looking very
foreign in the dimness with their glinting yellow hair and broad shoulders. Scandinavian tourists, George thought. Two people standing fairly near the edge, looking at each other and —

It was like a douche of very hot water hitting the back of her head and trickling down her back. She caught her breath, and the hot water immediately became icy cold.

Sheila, standing near the edge with her back to the railway line, her head tipped up and chattering vivaciously with a man, a tall man. A man George knew. She felt sick. She had been so sure and now she knew she was so wrong, so very, very wrong, and it hurt.

Zack, his hands in his pockets, looking down at Sheila with an oddly quizzical expression on his face, seeming to concentrate on her chatter, but now and again looking over her head towards the tunnel from which the train would arrive, large, noisy and sparking with electric power.

Somehow George stopped herself from shouting, from warning Sheila to move away from the edge, to get closer to the back of the platform where she could press herself against the big posters advertising some banal pop concert. She did so by biting her tongue and looking round more urgently for Gus. Still no sign of him, nor of anyone who might possibly be a policeman. She was alone and would have to cope alone. Somehow.

She pressed forwards to go down to the platform and then realized with a shock of horror that she had no ticket. She couldn’t get past the barrier, and she looked over her shoulder at the platform below, trying to estimate how long it would be before the train came, holding her head up as she tried to identify the breath of fetid air that an oncoming tube train pushes ahead of itself. There was none, yet still the people on the platform showed their readiness for it. They knew it was close.

‘Oh, shit!’ She ran for the ticket machines, scrabbling in her
pocket for a coin. She had managed to make the machine discharge a ticket, and turned to run back to the platforms, leaving her change behind her, when someone pulled on her arm. ‘It’s all right,’ she gasped. ‘I don’t want the change. You take it.’ She tried to pull away, but whoever it was held on. She whirled, her mouth open to shout her fury; and then stopped, amazed.

James Corton was standing there, his face white and glistening with sweat and staring at her with eyes so wide she could see the whites all round the pupils. She thought for a moment he was ill, but it was agitation. He shook her arm and said breathlessly, ‘Thank God, there’s someone here. You’ve got to help. Something awful’s going to happen. You’ve got to help. Come on.’

‘What —’ she began, pulling away from him, wanting to run down to the platform. He seemed to be pulling her in the other direction. ‘I can’t go —’

‘This time it’s for real!’ He almost wept it. ‘This time it really will happen! You’ve got to help. Please listen to me — he was down there with her and this time it’ll happen, I know it will.’

She gaped at him and then managed to speak. ‘Zack,’ she said. ‘Zack is down there with Sheila. And you say that —’

‘Yes, oh yes! Please, get the police to do something. I don’t know what but —’

‘Come with me. Get yourself a ticket and come on.’ She whirled and ran to the barrier.

He didn’t stop for a ticket as she pushed hers into the slot and the barrier arm let her through; he just took a flying leap and was over easily and then the two of them were running down the stairs towards the platform where as far as George could see nothing had changed: Sheila was still standing with her back to the tunnel and Zack was still standing in front of her as the other people on the platform went on pushing closer still to the edge. Because this time there was no mistaking it. That long sighing breath of air came towards them
from the runnel, and a glinr of lighr and the distanr sound of an approaching train, and George ran as she never had, pushing past the people at the back of the waiting crowd who had, blessedly, left a space between themselves and the curving wall, aiming for the far end of the platform.

James overtook her, running with long easy lopes. She saw him come up to the waiting pair and reach forwards just as the train came bursting out of the tunnel. George shouted but she couldn’t be heard above the noise the train was making, except by people near her, who turned to stare and then turned back the other way as a scuffle developed.

George couldn’t see what happened then. Only that all three of them, Sheila and Zack and James, were struggling in a heap on the platform ahead very near the edge. Or was it all three of them? she thought as she desperately covered the last few yards. Surely there are just two there? Who then is on the line? Because the train had pulled to a shuddering wheel-screaming stop well before the far end of the platform and all around there were loud cries and expostulating voices and inside her head a shriek of rage and pain and misery as she realized she was too late and Sheila wasn’t there.

Lights, she remembered. Lights and noise and people shrieking and chattering and children bawling and then Gus and the police and paramedics and trolleys and onlookers being herded away before the work of clearing the ghastly mess that had been Sheila from the line; and then, at last, long after, sitting there in the awkward yet oddly comfortable chairs at the nick, listening, nodding, asking questions and listening again as Gus made notes, and both of them, Zack and James, filled in the holes that no amount of thinking on her part could ever, she knew, have managed to get on to her own clipboard. And she felt the shame of her own failure to see the truth sweep into every last corner of her.

Sheila, the architect of all that had happened at Old East these past weeks? Sheila, the gossiping, sharp-tongued yet tolerable colleague, a murderer as cold and calculating as any murderer ever had been? It seemed impossible; but she had listened to all that Zack and James had told Gus, and the truth of it was inescapable. It had been Sheila. George’s fury at the way Sheila had behaved added to her own sense of failure in not recognizing the woman’s true personality warred inside her to a point where she felt downright sick to her stomach.

But she drank the coffee that kept coming — Gus had clearly trained his staff well on that issue — and watched the
two faces, Zack’s and James’s, as the light changed with the ending of the daylight and the slow ascendancy of the electric bulbs, until, by eleven o’clock, they both looked washed-out, grey and haggard — but that was as much exhaustion as shock and, as she told herself a little wryly, a form of posttraumatic disorder.

She interrupted then. Gus had just asked James what he promised was the last question, and James had managed, somehow, to answer it, though between stiff lips that could barely move.

‘That guy’s at the very end of his rope,’ she said. ‘I know you have to do your job and all that-stuff but there comes a point when it’s sheer cruelty to go on, whatever he did.’

Gus looked at her sideways and made a grimace. ‘Does she bully you fellas at work the way she bullies me?’ he murmured at Zack. ‘Never a decent word to say to a bloke doing his best as best he can, like what I am right now’

‘I doubt you have much of a problem,’ Zack said, trying to smile but failing. ‘And she’s right. He’s about to keel over.’ He too looked across at James, who was sitting upright, glassy-eyed, pale and sweating, staring at nothing at all. ‘And I’m not feeling up to much myself, thanks to everyone for noticing so kindly.’

‘You’ll get over it,’ George said, more unkindly than she had meant to. ‘You’re older, and anyway you’re not in the sort of shtook he is.’

‘Oh, aren’t I? Aren’t I really?’ He was very sardonic. ‘I must have missed something you worked out and never told me. Like that the entire bloody research side of Old East
isn’t
about to collapse. Like I
haven’t
got to start all over again somewhere else, if I’m not too old and past getting any sort of post. Like I
don’t
have to try to get my bloody research started up again when no one’ll touch a guy who’s worked with crooks like Klein. Jesus, that man was actually
paying
a social worker at St Dymphna’s to let him do illicit testing on live human subjects! And if that sort of association isn’t bad
enough, I let someone help with some of my procedures who was a lousy phoney con artist.’ He threw another look at James, this time with anger and loathing mixed in with his pity. ‘I can’t exactly see the funders falling over themselves to keep us going, though maybe you can. I’m left with shit, after all these years of —’

‘At least you’re alive,’ Gus cut in quietly.

There was a little silence and Zack dropped his head and stared down at his hands, loosely linked on his lap. ‘Fair enough,’ he said at last. ‘I suppose I should be more grateful.’ Then he looked up at George, ‘I’m very grateful to you, George. Believe me. Without you —’

‘With me you’d be a piece of chopped meat, the way Sheila is, and waiting in my mortuary for a post-mortem,’ she said loudly and very clearly. ‘I wasn’t the one who got to you in time. James was. He arrived first. He stopped her from shoving you on the line under the train. Her idea was just to get me there to be a witness, see what had happened
after
it had happened. To see that the last attempt by her mysterious assailant had only failed because somehow she’d managed to overcome him and push him on the line as he’d intended to push her. RIP Zack Zacharius.’

‘She was a bloody clever bitch,’ Gus said, lifting his sheaf of notes. ‘Only, on this last effort, she got her timing wrong. George got there too soon and buggered it up for her. So you did your share, George, more than your share. Now, stop squabbling. Put that boy down on the couch over there and then let’s go over what I think is my case. It’ll never get to court, except for the inquest, of course. But I want to get it all clear in my head, and in yours, both of you. You need to know, Zack. Fair enough? I’ve sent for sandwiches, by the way. You might be ready for them.’

Obediently, they put James on the couch. He didn’t demur. He didn’t do anything, simply co-operated like an automaton in any way they wanted, moving his legs when they propelled him forwards, lying down when George put a hand on his
chest, lifting his head to accommodate a cushion when she put one there and then just lying staring upwards at the ceiling and saying not a word throughout. He was still pale and sweating, but his pulse was reasonably strong when George checked it. She put his condition down to his mental state rather than to any immediate physical problem, and went back to her own chair to listen to Gus, while still keeping an eye on James.

Zack was already sitting waiting; Gus looked over George’s shoulder at James and then nodded. ‘OK. Here we go then. Here’s the scenario as I understand it. The complete story we’ll never get, I don’t suppose, since the only real witness is a very dead person. But between you you two know enough to add to what we’ve got. Like I said, here goes.’

He took a deep breath, reached out to switch on his desk light, and at the same time lifted his chin to bawl something incomprehensible. A policeman on the other side of the glass wall that separated Gus’s room from the main incident room reached a hand in and switched off the overhead light. The room became softer, more relaxed, and George felt her weary shoulders sag a little. But not too much. She had to listen.

‘All right,’ Gus said. ‘Sheila Keen, whom I thought I knew and had the measure of, and have done these past four or five years, was a desperate woman. I always knew she wanted a man, we all did. But it wasn’t just sex, as some people suspected — like Jerry at the lab. No, she wanted much more. She wanted to settle down and marry. Wanted status. I also knew she was a gossip, liked to know what she could find out and enjoyed spreading it around.’

‘We thought we knew all that too,’ George said in a low voice. ‘But there was so much more to it.’

‘Indeed there was.’ Gus shook his head at her. ‘No more interruptions, George. This is my patch, OK? Now, Sheila had allowed these two needs to become obsessive. To get a husband, that had become the be-all and end-all for her. She’d always been on the lookout for a man, of course, but
when she was younger, I guess she was like a lot of self-important pretty women: too choosy. Too — calculating, I suppose. Anyway, here she was, old in her own eyes — she was fifty-one by the way, though she’d managed to keep that pretty quiet — been lying about her age for years — and obsessed with getting a husband, and with using the information she collected to help her do it. She started on blackmailing people, first for money, I suspect, simply because she could. It’s so easy, I’m afraid. Once people know someone has found out something bad about them, they try to bribe their way to safe secrecy. They set themselves up for it. We don’t know when it started, none of us do. But she must have been at it for some time from what James told us.’