I watched as Richard Lewis shuffled patiently along a corridor with the rest of the crowd, down a flight of stairs and onto the platform. He wormed his way forward until he was standing on the yellow line that marked the edge. There he waited, staring straight ahead, for the next train. When it arrived Richard Lewis turned his head to watch its approach and then, at what Jaget said was precisely the right moment, jumped in front of it.
I presumed there was more footage of the collision but luckily Jaget hadn’t felt it necessary to inflict it on me.
‘Where did he travel from?’ I asked.
‘London Bridge,’ said Jaget. ‘He worked for Southwark Council.’
‘Why would he travel from one station to another before topping himself?’ I asked.
‘Oh, that’s not unusual,’ said Jaget. ‘We had one woman who paused to finish her crisps before she stepped off and one guy at South Ken who wouldn’t go while there were any kids that might see him.’ Jaget described how the man, dressed respectably in a pinstripe suit and holding an umbrella, had grown visibly more agitated with each missed opportunity. Finally when he had the platform to himself, you could see him on the CCTV straightening his cuffs and adjusting his tie.
‘As if he wanted to make a good impression when he got there,’ said Jaget.
Wherever ‘there’ might be.
Then when the next train was a minute out, an entire school party, fresh from the museums, descended on the platform. Kids and harassed teachers from one end to the other.
‘You should have seen his face,’ said Jaget. ‘He was so frustrated.’
‘Did he manage it eventually?’ I asked.
‘Nah,’ said Jaget. ‘By that time somebody in the station control room had noticed and ran down to intervene.’ And less than six hours later the man in the pinstripe suit was detained, sectioned and whisked off to a psychiatric unit for a quick chat with the duty psychologist.
‘I wonder if he tried again?’
‘Just as long as he didn’t do it on our time,’ said Jaget.
‘So what makes our Mr Lewis suspicious?’
‘It’s where he jumped from,’ said Jaget. One-underers tended to be quite predictable when it came to choosing their jumping-off point into oblivion.
‘If they’re just making a cry for help,’ he said, ‘then they go from the far end of the platform — so that the train has almost stopped before it gets there. If they’re serious, then they go to the other end where the driver has no chance to react and the train’s going full speed. Shit, if you do it there you don’t even have to jump — just lean out and the train will take your head right off.’
‘And if they jump from the middle?’
‘Then they’re not sure,’ said Jaget. ‘It’s a graduated thing, a bit of doubt and they go one way, if they’re pretty sure they go the other.’
‘Mr Lewis went from the middle,’ I said. ‘Meaning he was in two minds.’
‘Mr Lewis,’ said Jaget winding the footage to just before the jump, ‘went from just in front of the passenger entrance. If a train had come immediately, I’d understand. But he had to wait. It’s like his position on the platform was irrelevant.’
I shrugged. ‘So?’
‘Your position is never irrelevant,’ said Jaget. ‘It’s the last thing you’re ever going to do — look at him. He just glances once at the train to get the timing right and bang! He’s gone. Look at the confidence in that jump, nothing hesitant at all.’
‘I bow to your superior knowledge of train suicides,’ I said. ‘What exactly is it you think might have happened?’
Jaget contemplated his coffee for a moment and then asked, ‘Is it possible to make people do things against their will?’
‘You mean like hypnotism?’
‘More than hypnotism,’ he said. ‘Like instant brainwashing.’
I thought of the first time I’d met the Faceless Man and the casual way he’d ordered me to jump off a roof. I’d have done it, too, if I hadn’t built up a resistance to that sort of thing.
‘It’s called a glamour,’ I said.
Jaget stared at me for a bit — I don’t think he’d expected me to say yes.
‘Can you do it?’ he asked.
‘Do me a favour,’ I said. I’d asked Nightingale about glamour and he’d told me that even the easiest type was a seventh-order spell and the results were not what you’d call reliable. ‘Especially when you consider that it’s hardly a chore to defend against,’ he’d said.
‘What about your boss?’
‘He says he learnt the theory but he’s never actually done it,’ I said. ‘I got the impression he didn’t think it was a gentlemanly thing to do.’
‘Do you know how it works?’
‘You activate the forma and then you tell the target what to do,’ I said. ‘Dr Walid thinks it alters your brain chemistry, making you unusually suggestible, but that’s just a theory.’
Not least because me and Dr Walid’s putative experimental protocol, zap some volunteers and check their blood chemistry before and after, was at the far end of a long list of other things we wanted to test. And that’s assuming we could get Nightingale and the Medical Research Council to approve.
‘You think our Mr Lewis was compelled into suicide?’ I asked. ‘Based on what? Where he jumped from?’
‘Not just that,’ said Jaget and cued up another mpeg on his tablet. ‘Watch this.’
This one was stitched together from close-ups of Richard Lewis’s head and shoulders as he rode the escalator up to the concourse. The resolution on CCTV cameras has been rapidly improving and the London Underground, a terrorism target since before the term was invented, has some of the best kit available. But the image still suffered from the grain and sudden lighting changes that hinted at some cheap and cheerful enhancement.
‘What am I looking for?’ I asked.
‘Watch his face,’ said Jaget. So I did.
It was your bog-standard commuter’s face, tired, resigned, with occasional flickers as he spotted something, or someone, that caught his eye. He checked his watch at least twice while riding the escalator — anxious to catch the early train to Swindon.
‘He lives on the outskirts,’ said Jaget and we shared a moment of mutual incomprehension at the inexplicable life choices of commuters.
The image was good enough to capture the moment of anticipation as he stepped off the escalator at the top and the scan for the least crowded ticket gate. He checked his watch once again and set off purposefully for his chosen exit. Then he stopped and hesitated for a moment before turning on his heel. Heading for the down escalator and his date with the business end of a Mark II 1972 rolling stock.
It looked like he’d just remembered that he’d forgotten something.
‘It’s too quick,’ said Jaget. ‘You forget something, you stop, you think “Oh god I have to go all the way back down the escalator, do I really need whatever it is that badly?” And then you turn.’
He was right. Richard Lewis stopped and turned as smartly as if he was on a parade ground and had been given a command. As he rode back down his expression was abstracted and intent — as if he was thinking about something important.
‘I don’t know if it’s a glamour,’ I said. ‘But it’s definitely something. I think I need a second opinion.’
But I was already thinking it was the Faceless Man.
‘Tricky,’ said Nightingale after I’d lured him into the tech cave and shown him the footage. ‘It’s a very limited technique and an Underground station at rush hour is hardly an ideal environment in which to practise it. Do you have any film that shows a wide view of the booking hall?’
It took me a couple of minutes to dig out the files Jaget had sent me, not least because of his eccentric file labelling scheme. Nightingale made an impressed murmur at the ease and speed at which the ‘film’ could be manipulated. ‘Or is it called tape?’ he asked.
I didn’t tell him that it was all stored as binary information on rapidly spinning shiny discs, partly because I’d have to look up the details myself, but mostly because by the time he’d understood the technology it would have been replaced by something else.