He kept the clothes in a small locked suitcase in a locked cupboard in his windowless office, which used to be a storeroom, at the back of the pub, behind the kitchen. And he would take them with him when he made one of his ‘essential’ business trips to London. His wife, Marjorie, was a large, tall, blonde woman who would have fitted into one of his outfits as easily as the proverbial camel would have fitted through the eye of a needle. He would have said that he didn’t know why he married her. But he knew exactly why. Without her money he would still be a second-rate salesman for a second-rate recruiting agency in Wembley specialising in accountancy personnel, where his entire client base was made up of people from the Indian Subcontinent. Andrew Johnson was not a racist by any means, as he was happy to tell anyone who wished to listen to him, but the one thing he didn’t miss by moving to Suffolk was the world of dark-skinned faces that he had had to deal with every day. Suffolk was like England in the Fifties, and a foreign or ethnic face was something of a rarity, something to provoke comment. And the fact that the women he chose to play with were all white was not being racist either. How can a sexual attraction be racist? he thought. Given the things he liked to do, and dreamed of doing, he would have been more racist, in his opinion, had he chosen ethnic women. But he didn’t.
The woman who was modelling his favoured outfit that evening was a tad chubbier than he usually liked. She was called Melody, according to the card on the wall at the base of the stairs, and the notice by the grimy bell on the door to the small flat. In reality her name was Natalie, and she was a single mother of two young children. She lived in Birmingham and commuted down to London three days a week. She earned enough in those three days to take the other four off.
At that moment, however, her hands were tied to the bedstead behind her. The silk blouse she had been given to wear had been opened to expose her breasts, which were cupped in a blood-red corset/bra combination from Agent Provocateur, that was a good size too small for her ample figure. The pinstriped skirt of the suit was pushed up around her waist. One of her high-heeled shoes had flopped from her right foot as it bounced uncontrollably as Andrew Johnson penetrated her. She would have grunted, maybe screamed as the weight of him landed on her soft belly. But the silky knickers he had supplied as well, had been removed and stuffed into her mouth. Her eyes bulged as much as those of the red-faced and perspiring man above her.
Then Andrew’s eyes closed as he came, the tension in his thighs and knees relaxing as he collapsed his full weight upon her again, so that she feared she might well suffocate. He snatched the knickers from her mouth and used them to wipe himself.
‘Jeez, you nearly crushed me to death,’ said the woman beneath him.
Then Andrew Johnson opened his eyes again.
And there was no kindness in them.
Half an hour later he was waiting on the west-bound platform of the Bakerloo Line. Waiting for the train to take him to Baker Street, where he would catch his connecting Metropolitan Line train back to Harrow-on-the-Hill.
A small smile broke out on his face as he replayed in his mind what had happened in the flat. The look of fear in her eyes. The thought of it aroused him once more. He moved his hand surreptitiously down and stroked himself through his trousers.
The sound of a train clattering in the tunnel did little to distract him from his dark thoughts. Past and future pleasures imagined. He smiled again.
A hand fell on his shoulder.
4
‘I CANNOT TELL you what was in the man’s mind. I have had a jumper once before. A woman — she put herself in the path of my train. Her motion was such that it indicated no panic, no fear, but a resigned acceptance of her fate.’
‘I see.’
‘But this man, his face was not towards me, his arm was raised. Maybe in a farewell gesture. I would simply be speculating if I were to say what his motivations might have been.’
Detective Inspector Tony Hamilton nodded and made a note in his book. ‘I was simply asking if you thought it was a suicide, or if you saw someone push him?’
The train driver was a tall man, in his early fifties, Tony would have guessed, with long, but neat, greying hair and half-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses perched on the end of a long, aquiline nose. There was something stork-like about him, Tony decided.
‘If someone pushed him, I don’t recall seeing it. My focus was straight ahead.’
‘Ken here used to be an English teacher,’ said Terry Randall, one of the two transport policemen who were assisting him with his enquiries into the suicide of an unknown man who had jumped in front of a west-bound Bakerloo Line train at Piccadilly Circus station. Constable Terry Randall, like the train driver, was in his early fifties, but was shorter, squatter and had a sour expression on his face that showed what he thought of the Metropolitan Police invading what he perceived as his territory. Back in 2006 Sir Ian Blair, the then head of the Metropolitan Police, had wanted a single police force in the capital. He had proposed absorbing the British Transport Police into his force, and this was agreed to by the then Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, bringing it under the control of the Home Office. But it never happened and the two forces remained separate entities. The only difference being that constable was as high as the BTP’s law-enforcing ranks rose. Any serious crimes and the Met would be brought in. Some constables like Randall resented it, but his colleague, Constable Emily Wood, didn’t mind. She was in her early thirties, blonde-haired with a bubbly sense of humour, and she obviously liked the look of the tall, dark-haired detective.
‘Couldn’t face the horror of it, could you, Ken? And so became a train driver.’
‘My doctor advised that I take a less stressful occupation some years ago,’ agreed the thin man. ‘I have always been interested in trains, electric and steam, and my pension was such that I could indulge my hobby and remain in full-time employment.’
‘Is it easy to become a Tube driver?’ asked DI Hamilton.
‘Why’s that, Detective?’ asked Emily Wood. ‘Thinking of hanging up your truncheon?’
Tony smiled at her. ‘I’m a detective, remember. I don’t carry a truncheon.’
The female constable quirked an eyebrow at him, suggesting she thought that might not strictly be true. He had to force himself not to smile as the driver answered his question.
‘It’s not easy, no. Vacancies are rare. To get on the handle isn’t as easy as some people think.’
‘On the handle?’
‘It means driving the train,’ said the male constable, a tad patronisingly.
‘I thought they drove themselves mainly?’
‘Only on the Victoria and Central Lines, sir,’ said Emily Wood.
‘That’s right,’ agreed the driver.
‘Can I ask what difference it makes?’ said Constable Randall.
Tony Hamilton gave him a flat look. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You can’t.’
‘He means was my concentration focused elsewhere, so that I might not have seen clearly what happened.’
‘And was it?’
‘No, like I said. It happened very quickly — he hit into the window facing away from me, his right arm raised, and then he was down and under the wheels.’
DI Hamilton grimaced. ‘I imagine that would be quite stressful for you.’
‘You would be right, Detective. I may well reconsider my position. Once was bad enough; twice is …’ He paused, looking for the right words. ‘As you say, very stressful.’