Broken Homes

3

Just before Christmas I’d assisted with a murder that took place on Baker Street Underground station. It was during that investigation that I made the acquaintance of one Sergeant Jaget Kumar, urban explorer, expert pot-holer and the British Transport Police’s answer to Mulder and Scully. Together we helped catch the murderer, discovered an entire underground civilisation, albeit a small one, and, unfortunately, destroyed one of the platforms at Oxford Circus. During that mess I ended up buried underground for a half a day, where I had a waking dream that still keeps me from sleeping. But that, as they say, is a whole different counselling session.

Despite the fact that services had returned to normal by the end of January, I was not really Mr Popular with Transport for London, who run the Underground and the BTP who have to police it. Which might be why, when Jaget said that he had some information for me, we didn’t meet in the BTP Headquarters at Camden Town but in a cafe just down the road.

We sat down for coffee and Jaget unshipped his Samsung and pulled up some files.

‘We had this one-under at Paddington last week,’ he said. ‘And he came up on your list.’ The Folly maintains a list of potentially interesting people, the dwindling number of surviving practitioners from World War Two, suspected Little Crocodiles and people that consort with fairies, which raises a flag should anyone run an Integrated Intelligence Platform check on them.

Jaget turned the tablet to show me a picture of a middle-aged white man with thinning fair hair and thin bloodless lips. Judging by his pallor and glassy stare the picture was post-mortem — the kind you did to show to relatives and potential witnesses without scaring the shit out of them. That made sense since one-under was tube slang for when a member of the public throws themselves under a train. Two hundred and forty tonnes of locomotive can mess up your whole day.

‘Richard Lewis,’ said Jaget. ‘Aged forty-six.’

I looked him up in my little black book — I had all the potential Little Crocodiles listed by date of birth. Jaget smiled when he saw it.

‘Good to see you embracing the potential of modern technology,’ he said, but I ignored him. Richard Lewis had indeed been at Oxford between 1985 and 1987, but wasn’t on the main list of confirmed Little Crocodiles — he was on a secondary list made up of those who had been personally tutored by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, former official wizard and the man stupid enough to start teaching magic unofficially. Nightingale doesn’t swear very often, but when he talks about Geoffrey Wheatcroft you can tell he really fucking wants to.

‘Is it just the fact that he’s on the list?’ I asked.

‘There was something off about the suicide,’ he said.

‘He was pushed?’

‘See for yourself,’ said Jaget and cued up the CCTV footage on his tablet. Because London’s tube stations are the target for everything from casual public urination to mass murder the CCTV coverage is literally wall to wall.

‘Here he comes,’ said Jaget.

Jaget had obviously spent some time editing the footage together because it told the story with quite a bit of unnecessary flair. You could have put it to music, something grim and German maybe, and sold it to an art gallery.

‘How bored were you when you did this?’ I asked.

‘We don’t all have careers full of mystery and magic,’ said Jaget. ‘See, he rides the escalator all the way up but, before he reaches the ticket barrier, he turns round and heads back down again.’

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.

He spent about an hour shuttling back and forth through the footage of the booking hall to see if he could spot a practitioner amongst the crowds of passengers. Nightingale’s level of concentration can be frightening, but even he couldn’t isolate anyone suspicious.

‘He might have been walking two steps behind him,’ said Nightingale. ‘It’s not as if we know what he looks like.’

Lesley, when we briefed her later, wanted to know why we were assuming it was the Faceless Man at all. ‘It could have been one of Peter’s watery girlfriends,’ she said. ‘Or something else equally weird that we haven’t encountered yet.’

I pointed out that Richard Lewis had been on the list of potential Little Crocodiles, which she agreed was a possible lead and should be checked.

‘You need to get over to his house and have a sniff around,’ she said. ‘If you find something, then we’ll know it will be worth looking into the suicide.’

‘Want to come with?’ I asked but Lesley said that while the prospect of a day trip to Swindon was an attractive one, it was a pleasure she’d have to forgo.

‘I’ve got to finish the report on Nolfi the magnificent,’ she said. There would be two reports, one for the Folly files and a sanitised version for the wider Met. Lesley was particularly good at coming up with the latter.

‘I’m going to blame it on his attempt to do the lighter fluid trick but with brandy,’ she said. ‘That way his official statement — that he was doing a magic trick that went wrong — will match the evidence.’

It went without saying that we weren’t going to charge him. Instead he was going to get what we like to call ‘the safety lecture’ from Dr Walid. Half an hour with the good doctor and his brain sections was enough to put anyone off magic for life.

So it was that I climbed into the Asbo on my tod and headed up the M4 for the wilds of the Thames Valley.

It rained most of the way and the radio threatened floods.

Richard Lewis had lived in a Grade II listed thatched cottage with its own private approach lane and what looked like, through the rain, its own orchard. It was the sort of madly picturesque place that gets bought by people with rural fantasies and a shed full of cash. Looking at it, I really wished I’d had time to go over Mr Lewis’s finances — because there was no way he could afford a place like this on what he earned from Southwark Council. I wondered if he’d had his hand out under the table. Maybe he’d got greedy and asked for a bit extra from the wrong person.

Or his registered civil partner, a Mr Phillip Orante, could have been rich.

I parked outside next to a Sloane green Range Rover, less than a year old and never been driven off road judging by its wheel arches, and crunched up the wet gravel drive to the front door. Although it was early afternoon, the low cloud and the drizzle meant it was gloomy enough for the inhabitants to need to put the downstairs lights on. Seeing that someone was at home was a relief, since I’d decided not to call ahead.

You don’t call ahead if you can avoid it, on account of it always being better to arrive on someone’s doorstep as a horrid surprise. Things generally go smoother if the people you’re talking to don’t have a chance to rehearse their alibis, think about what they’re going to say, hide evidence, bury body parts — that sort of thing.

The oak front door had an authentic bell pull with what sounded like a cow-bell attached to the other end. The thatch overhanging the porch tried to drip water down my back so I stepped away while I waited. The grounds around the house — they were too large for me to call it a garden — were damp and quiet in the soft rain. Somewhere around the corner I could smell a wet rose bush.

The door was opened by a middle-aged woman with a round brown face with black eyes and short dark hair — Filipino if I had to guess. She wore a white plastic apron over a blue polyester tunic and a pair of yellow washing-up gloves. She didn’t seem thrilled to see me.

‘Can I help you?’ She had an accent I didn’t recognise.

I identified myself and asked to speak to Mr Orante.

‘Is this about poor Richard?’ she asked.

I said it was, and she told me Phillip’s heart was broken.

‘Such a shame,’ she said and invited me in and told me to wait in the living room while she went to fetch Orante.

The interior of the cottage was disappointingly furnished in bog standard designer bland — cream-coloured sofas, steel tube occasional furniture and the walls painted in estate-agent-friendly shades of tinted white. Only the pictures on the walls, black and white photographic prints for the most part, had any character. I was examining a verite portrait of a couple of New Orleans jazzmen when the woman in the apron returned with Phillip Orante.

He was a short, slight man in his late thirties. Despite the thinner face, his features were similar enough to the older woman’s to mark her as a relative. His mother, I thought, or at the very least an older sister or aunt. She seemed a bit young to be his mother.

The beauty of being the police, though, is you can satisfy your curiosity without worrying about being socially awkward.

‘Are you a relative?’ I asked.

‘Phillip is my son,’ she said. ‘My eldest.’

‘She came over to, ah, help out, you know,’ said Phillip. ‘After.’

He motioned for me to sit down, I automatically waited until he’d chosen the sofa before perching on an occasional chair — the better to maintain my height advantage. We worked our way through the normal conversational openings — I was sorry for his loss and he was sorry I was sorry and would I like some coffee.

You always take the coffee from bereaved relatives, just as you always start with the rote expression of condolences. The banality of the exchange is what helps calm the witness down. People who’ve had their lives disrupted are looking for order and predictability — even if it’s just in the little things. That’s when being PC Plod is at its most useful — look stolid, talk slowly and, ninety per cent of the time they’ll tell you everything you want to know.

Phillip had an accent which I thought was Canadian but which turned out, when I asked, to be Californian. San Franciscan to be precise. His mum was Filipino but had moved to California in her twenties and had met Phillip’s dad, whose parents had been Filipino but had himself been born in Seattle, while both were visiting relatives in Caloocan. So we did a bit of bonding over a discussion of the joys of growing up with the extended diaspora family and mothers who unreasonably felt that a young man’s priorities should be schoolwork, household chores and family commitments. Time enough for a social life once you’ve finished university, got married and provided grandchildren. The obvious contradiction never seems to bother them.

‘We were working on the grandchildren,’ said Phillip.

Adoption or surrogacy, I wondered? It didn’t seem the time to ask.

His mum brought us coffee on an enamelled tray with kittens painted on it. I waited until she’d bustled back out before asking how he’d come to move to the UK and meet Richard Lewis.

‘I was a dot.com millionaire,’ he said simply. ‘Co-founder of a company that you’ve never heard of, which was bought out by a bigger company that I signed a non-disclosure agreement with. They gave me a huge share option which I cashed in just before the market went south.’

He gave me a thin smile. Obviously this was his standard spiel with its appropriate pauses for rueful laughs and self-deprecating chuckles — only this was the first time he’d told it with his partner dead.

‘I always worry when there’s too much of a good thing,’ he said.

Having made his millions he headed to London, for the culture, the nightlife and most of all because, as far as he knew, none of his immediate relatives lived there.

‘I love my family,’ he said, glancing after his mother. ‘But you know how it is.’

He’d met Richard Lewis at the Royal Opera House during a performance of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera. He’d gone on impulse and had been in the standing-room-only section when a well-dressed stranger had turned to him and said, ‘God this is a bloody awful performance.’

‘He said that he could think of at least five things that he’d rather be doing,’ said Phillip. ‘I asked him what was on the top of the list and he said, “Well, a stiff drink would be a good start, don’t you think?” So off we went for a drink and that was it, cupid’s arrow right between the eyes.’

But it hadn’t quite been love at first sight. Phillip hadn’t flown across the pond with a large fortune just to fall for the first half-decent proposition. ‘He worked at it,’ said Phillip. ‘He was methodical and patient and-’ Phillip looked away and stared at a blank piece of wall for a moment before taking a breath. ‘Really fucking funny.’

Three months later they were married, or more precisely they entered into a Civil Partnership, with due ceremony, celebration and a suitable pre-nup.

‘That was Richard’s idea,’ said Phillip.

I judged that this was about as good a time as any to wheel out the questionnaire. It had been drawn up by Dr Walid and Nightingale to uncover evidence of real magical practice — as opposed to an interest in the occult, ghost stories, fantasy novels and that old time religion. Dr Walid had thrown in some questions from established psychometric and sociological surveys to make it sound kosher. I called it the Voigt-Kampf test even though only Dr Walid got the joke — and he had to look it up on Wikipedia.

‘It’s to provide background about these. . tragic incidents,’ I said. ‘To see what can be done to prevent them in the future.’

Up till now I’d mostly given the spiel to potential Little Crocodiles who I was pretending to interview on a totally random basis. Watching Phillip’s face, I decided we were going to have to dream up a whole new strategy for dealing with bereaved relatives. Either that or Dr Walid could come and administer his own bloody tests.

Phillip nodded as if this was all perfectly reasonable — perhaps he was just pleased we were taking an interest.

The test started with a couple of psychological questions as warm up, and I almost skipped number five, ‘Did the subject indicate dissatisfaction with any aspect of his life?’ But Dr Walid had stressed consistency in application.

‘I didn’t think so,’ said Phillip. ‘Not until I saw the tape of the accident.’

‘They let you see it?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I insisted,’ said Phillip. ‘I thought there was no way that Richard would kill himself. What reason would he have? But it’s hard to argue with the evidence of your eyes.’

I moved onto the ‘spiritual’ questions which revealed that Richard had almost been an Anglican in the same way that Phillip had almost been a Catholic. Phillip told me proudly that his mum had ceased to be a practising Catholic the day after he came out.

‘She says she will go back to the Church the day it apologises,’ he said.

Lewis hadn’t had any interest in the occult beyond that needed to appreciate Wagner or the Magic Flute and he didn’t own any books about magic, or many books at all.

‘He gave away most of his old books when we moved here,’ said Phillip. ‘And he said his Kindle was much handier for the commute to London. Now I resent all the hours he spent on that train. But he loved his home here and he wouldn’t give up his job.’

Not that Phillip could understand why. ‘I know he didn’t get anything in the way of job satisfaction,’ he said. Phillip could have certainly used him in his own company, which arranged finance for high-tech start-ups. ‘He hated working in London, said he hated the city and I begged him to quit for like five years, but he wouldn’t.’

‘Did he say why?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Phillip. ‘He always changed the subject.’

Up till then I’d been doodling, but now I started taking notes. Keeping a secret always makes the police suspicious. And while we’re willing to believe in the possibility of a totally innocent explanation, we never think that’s the way to bet.

I asked whether there was any aspect of Richard’s work as a town planner that he’d talked about more than others, but Phillip hadn’t noticed. Nor had Richard complained about incidents of corruption or coming under any pressure to influence a planning decision one way or the other.

‘And whatever it was keeping him there,’ said Phillip, ‘he was obviously over it, because he told me that he was quitting.’ He looked away from me and fumbled for his tea cup to cover his tears.

The mother bustled back in, saw the tears and gave me a poisonous look. I worked my way quickly through the last of the questionnaire, offered my condolences once more, and left.

Something fishy and possibly supernatural had happened to Richard Lewis but since he obviously wasn’t a practitioner I couldn’t think what his connection with the excitingly terminal world of modern magic might be. When I got back to the Folly I wrote it up and filed the requisite two reports. The thinking in police work with this sort of non-lead is that either some other completely different line of inquiry will prove unexpectedly connected or you will never find out what the fuck was going on.

My gut instinct was that we were never going to find out why Richard Lewis threw himself under a train — which just goes to show why you should never trust your gut.