She shivered and turned around, suddenly getting the feeling she was being watched. There were a few other people on the platform: a group of young women in their twenties, giggling and dressed more for summer than winter! A girls’ night out, by the look of it, and quite a drunken one. An office party or a hen-night. An older man further along the platform was pretending to read a poster on the wall, but she could see he kept flicking sideways glances at the group of laughing women. He caught her eye and looked away. More people piled onto the platform and a short while later the train arrived.
At Marylebone she ran as fast as she could; she wasn’t exactly wearing high-heeled shoes, but she wasn’t wearing flats either. People with the same idea flew past her, men mainly, who weren’t hampered by their footwear.
She hurried up the stairs leading from the Underground, up and onto the concourse, and then ran up to the barrier connecting to the overland Chiltern Railways; she had to run up almost one entire platform and then sideways to another platform — the train was still there, and she made it inside with seconds to spare.
She smiled apologetically to the man sitting opposite her as she drew in deep breaths and ran her hand across her forehead. He nodded almost dismissively and returned to the crossword he was studying. She looked at the paper, the Saturday Telegraph, and raised an eyebrow; he’d had long enough to complete it.
She looked at her reflection in the mirrored effect of the windows and smiled. She did look flushed, but happily flushed. She was pleased with what she saw. Today drew a line under everything. Today was going to change things. And so it would.
Just not in the way she imagined it.
Not in her worst nightmares.
3
Easter week … Wednesday
ANDREW JOHNSON WAS a pillar of his local community. And he was quite happy to tell that fact to anyone who would listen.
It wasn’t entirely true.
He’d joined the Rotary Club at twenty-two years old and moved on to the Rotarians when he was past forty. He was a member of the local Masons’ Lodge and had been invited to dine with the Lord Mayor of London on more than one occasion. He was maybe still a few years away from getting the pin-striped morning-suit trousers, but it was only a matter of time. Patience and perseverance. That was Andrew’s mantra. All things come to he who waits. Even if you have to go out and get them sometimes.
He was the forty-five-year-old manager of a country pub called The Crawfish, in Lavenham, a pretty market town in Suffolk. He was married with no children. He had had a vasectomy at the age of thirty-eight, on his wife’s urging. He hadn’t baulked at the idea, having no particular desire himself to father children. The pub was medium-sized, with a lounge bar and a public bar. The lounge bar had a large open fire that was always lit on cold days, even in the summer, if it was wet enough out; and it was popular with the older local customers and the many thousands of tourists who flocked into the town. On one wall of the room hung an original Andrew Haslan — a local artist particularly renowned for his stunning wildlife paintings and etchings. It was of a hare in a wood under a full moon at winter, with snowflakes dancing in the air around him. It had the air of a 1930s Art Deco kind of illustration about it and Andrew Johnson particularly disliked it. But his wife had bought it at a charity auction, for a figure that still made his blood boil, and had insisted that it be proudly displayed so that the world would know what a charitable woman she was.
Charity should begin at home, Andrew would have told her, but he had learned in the many years of their marriage that it was simpler in the long run just to agree with what she wanted. One of these days he was going to toss the bloody painting in the open fire and see what she had to say when it went up in flames. For now, though, he gritted his teeth, sold pints of best or Broadside ale to the customers and listened to their inane CAMRA nonsense, contenting himself with the thought that fairly shortly he would be making one of his little trips. As far as his wife knew, he was going to London on Lodge business or to see his accountants. And sometimes that was true, but it wasn’t the only reason he headed south
Every couple of months or so, when his patience had worn thin and his desires waxed large — desires that could not be satisfied by his wife, for all manner of reasons — he travelled on the railway down from the country to London. It was a six-mile drive to the nearby town of Sudbury, where he would park his car and catch the train to London’s Liverpool Street. It was a pleasant journey with just one change at Marks Tey, and in an hour and twenty minutes he was in the capital.
Andrew liked travelling on the railway, for it gave him time to think of the pleasures that lay ahead. Anticipation was always nine-tenths of the pleasure after all, was it not, as he was wont to joke with his customers when they had to wait for him to change a barrel of the local ale from Adnams brewery. Most of the locals considered Andrew a genial host, and he was. But he was a businessman first and foremost, and his ready smile slipped away when he was not front-of-house.
He always stayed in the same place when he travelled south — a bed-and-breakfast boarding house in Harrow five minutes’ walk from the Underground station. He could have stayed closer to the city centre, but his accountant was based there — going back to the days when he and his wife ran a pub in Northwood Hills, before they sold up and moved to live the country dream. Andrew’s wife had berated him constantly until he finally gave in. She had been addicted to watching Escape to the Country type programmes and was like a dog with a bone about the idea. Country dreams … Country nightmare more like, Andrew thought. The trouble with quiet rural locations was just that. Too quiet, too little entertainment. So the locals made their own entertainment by keeping their noses in everybody else’s business. A short distance from Lavenham was the ancient town of Long Melford, which had the longest street of antique shops in England. It also had two pubs that had topless barmaids working twice a week, and Andrew would dearly have loved to visit them. But he knew that news of that visit would surely fly back to Lavenham and he would never hear the end of it from his wife. As much as he considered himself a pillar of the community, she did even more so. Although she rarely worked, helping out in the pub, she sat on numerous committees and did endless charity work. Face was everything to her and Andrew had to play very, very carefully. But play he did.
In London. Where every variety of play was to be had. The B&B where he stayed in Harrow was frugal, basic accommodation, cereal for breakfast, a shared bathroom, but the place was cheap. The old woman who ran the house kept her rates low and her rooms full. Andrew Johnson liked it that way — he wanted to spend his hard-earned money on other things. More exciting things. The sort that would make the blood pound in his brain. The sort of entertainment he couldn’t readily undertake in Lavenham.
Sometimes he saw the same girls, but not often. It wasn’t about what was comfortable for Andrew Johnson. What was familiar and safe. For him it was about the new. But he always went for the same type of woman. Dark curly-haired women. Of medium height. And he always wanted them to dress the same way. This had posed a problem for him initially — as most working girls in the price bracket he liked to use didn’t usually have the sort of outfit he liked them to wear. Schoolgirl uniforms, nurses’, policewomen’s. These were commonplace enough. Bought cheap from Ann Summers or online. Tools of the sex trade. But Andrew liked his women dressed like businesswomen. Power suits and suspenders. Attitude in Armani. High heels and haughty couture. But the wardrobes in the small rooms he visited above the staircases of Soho contained no such expensive items. And so Andrew had bought his own, at considerable expense.