The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 13

I: Finchley Road to Swiss Cottage

London has the oldest underground railway system in the world. Construction began in 1863 and was completed in 1884. Much later it was electrified, and since then has been periodically modified. A great many of the original stations have been abandoned, renamed or resited. A partial list of these would include Aldwych, British Museum, Brompton Road, York Road, St Mary’s, Down Street, Marlborough Road, South Kentish Town, King William Street, North End and City Road. In many cases the maroon-tiled ticket halls remain, and so do the railway platforms. Even now, some of these tunnels are adorned with faded wartime signs and posters. Crusted with dry melanic silt produced by decades of still air, the walls boom softly as trains pass in nearby tunnels, but the stations themselves no longer have access from the streets above, and are only visited by scuttling brown mice. If you look hard, though, you can glimpse the past. For example, the eerie green and cream platform of the old Mark Lane station can be spotted from passing trains to the immediate west of the present Tower Hill Station.

‘You know what gets me through the day? Hatred. I hate the little bastards. Each and every one of them. Most of the time I wish they would all just disappear.’ Deborah fixed me with a cool stare. ‘Yeah, I know it’s not the best attitude for a teacher to have, but when you know them as well as I do. ’

‘I think I do,’ I replied.

‘Oh? I thought this work was new to you. Being your first day and all.’

‘Not new, no.’

‘My boyfriend just decided he wants us to have kids. He never liked them before. When he was made redundant he started picking me up from school in the afternoons, and saw them running around my legs in their boots and rain-macs asking endless questions, and suddenly he thought they were cute and wanted to have a baby, just when I was thinking of having my tubes tied. I don’t want to bring my work home with me. We still haven’t sorted it out. It’s going to ruin our relationship. Hey, hey.’ Deborah broke off to shout at a boy who was trying to climb over the barrier. ‘Get back down there and wait for the man to open the gate.’ She turned back to me. ‘Christ, I could use a cigarette. Cover for me when we get there. I’ll sneak a couple in while they’re baiting the monkeys, that’s what all the other teachers do.’

Good teachers are like good nurses. They notice things ordinary people miss. Ask a nurse how much wine she has left in her glass and she’ll be able to tell you the exact amount, because for her the measurement of liquids is a matter of occupational observation. The same with teachers. I can tell the age of any child to within six months because I’ve been around them so much. Then I got married, and I wasn’t around them any more.

But old habits die hard. You watch children constantly, even when you think you’re not, and the reflex continues to operate even in civilian life. You bump into pupils in the supermarket. ‘Hello, Miss, we didn’t know you ate food.’ They don’t quite say that, but you know it’s what they’re thinking.

If there’s one thing I know it’s how children think. That was why I noticed there was something wrong at Baker Street. My senses had been caught off guard because of the tunnels. Actually, I sensed something even before then, as early as our arrival at Finchley Road Tube station. I should have acted on my instincts then.

God knows, I was nervous enough to begin with. It was the first day of my first week back at work after twelve long years, and I hadn’t expected to have responsibility thrust at me like this, but the school was understaffed, teachers were off sick and the headmaster needed all the help he could get. The last time I had worked in the education system, the other teachers around me were of roughly the same age. Now I was old enough to be a mother to most of them, and a grand-mother to their charges. I wouldn’t have returned to Invicta Primary at all if my husband hadn’t died. I wasn’t surprised when the bank warned me that there would be no money. Peter wasn’t exactly a rainy-day hoarder. I needed to earn, and have something to keep my mind occupied. Teaching was the only skill I was sure I still possessed.

Which was how I ended up shepherding twenty-seven eight-year-old boys and girls on a trip to the London Zoological Gardens, together with another teacher, Deborah, a girl with a tired young face and a hacking smoker’s cough.

I hadn’t been happy about handling the excursion on my first day back, especially when I heard that it involved going on the Tube. I forced myself not to think about it. There were supposed to be three of us but the other teacher was off with flu, and delaying the trip meant dropping it from the term schedule altogether, so the headmaster had decreed that we should go ahead with the original plan. There was nothing unusual in this; the teaching shortage had reached its zenith and I’d been eagerly accepted back into the school where I’d worked before I was married. They put me on a refresher course, mostly to do with computer literacy, but the basic curriculum hadn’t changed much. But things were very different from when I was a pupil myself. For a start, nobody walked to the school any more. Parents didn’t think it was safe. I find parents exasperating — all teachers do. They’re very protective about some things, and yet utterly blind to other, far more obvious problems. If they found out about the short-staffed outings, everybody would get it in the neck. The parents had been encouraged to vote against having their children driven around in a coach; it wasn’t environmentally friendly. It didn’t stop them from turning up at the school gates in people-carriers, though.

Outside the station the sky had lowered into muddy swirls of cloud, and it was starting to rain. Pupils are affected by the weather. They’re always disruptive and excitable when it’s windy. Rain makes them sluggish and inattentive. (In snow they go mad and you might as well close the school down.) You get an eye for the disruptives and outsiders, and I quickly spotted the ones in this group, straggling along at the rear of the Tube station hall. In classrooms they sit at the back in the corners, especially on the left-hand side, the sneaky, quiet troublemakers. They feel safe because you tend to look to the centre of the class, so they think they’re less visible. Kids who sit in the front row are either going to work very hard or fall in love with you. But the ones at the rear are the ones to watch, especially when you’re turning back towards the blackboard.

There were four of them, a pair of hunched, whispering girls as close as Siamese twins, a cheeky ginger-haired noisebox with his hands in everything, and a skinny, melancholy little boy wearing his older brother’s jacket. This last one had a shaved head, and the painful-looking nicks in it told me that his hair was cut at home to save money. He kept his shoulders hunched and his gaze on the ground at his feet, braced as though he was half-expecting something to fall on him. A pupil who hasn’t done his homework will automatically look down at the desk when you ask the class a question about it, so that only the top of his head is visible (this being based on the ‘If I can’t see her, she can’t see me’ theory). If he is sitting in the back row, however, he will stare into your eyes with an earnest expression. This boy never looked up. Downcast eyes can hide a more personal guilt. Some children are born to be bullied. They seem marked for bad luck. Usually they have good reason to adopt such defensive body language. Contrary to what parents think, there’s not a whole lot you can do about it.

‘What’s his name?’ I asked.

‘Oh, that’s Connor, he’ll give you no trouble. Never says a word. I forget he’s here sometimes.’ I bet you do, I thought. You never notice him because he doesn’t want you to.

‘Everybody hold up their right hand,’ I called. It’s easier to count hands than heads when they’re standing up, but still they’ll try to trick you. Some kids will hold up both hands, others won’t raise any. I had lowered my voice to speak to them; you have to speak an octave lower than your normal register if you want to impose discipline. Squeaky high voices, however loud, don’t get results. They’re a sign of weakness, indicating potential teacher hysteria. Children can scent deficiencies in teachers like sharks smell blood.

‘Miss, I’m left-handed.’ The ginger boy mimed limb-failure; I mentally transferred him from ‘disruptive’ to ‘class clown’. They’re exuberant but harmless, and usually sit in the middle of the back row.

‘I want to see everybody’s hand, now.’ Sixteen, and the four at the rear of the ticket hall. ‘Keep right under cover, out of the rain. You at the back, tuck in, let those people get past.’ Seventeen, the clown, eighteen, nineteen, the Siamese twins,twenty, the sad boy. ‘We’re going to go through the barrier together in a group, so everybody stay very, very close.’ I noticed Deborah studying me as I marshalled the children. There was disapproval in her look. She appeared about to speak, then held herself in check. I’m doing something wrong, I thought, alarmed. But the entry gate was being opened by the station guard, and I had to push the sensation aside.

Getting our charges onto the escalator and making them stand on the right was an art in itself. Timson, the class clown, was determined to prove he could remount the stairs and keep pace with passengers travelling in the opposite direction. An astonishingly pretty black girl had decided to slide down on the rubber handrail.

‘We step off at the end,’ I warned. ‘Don’t jump, that’s how accidents happen.’ My voice had rediscovered its sharp old timbre, but now there was less confidence behind it. London had changed while I had been away, and was barely recognizable to me now. There were so many tourists. Even at half-past ten on a wintry Monday morning, Finchley Road Tube station was crowded with teenagers in wet nylon coats, hoods and backpacks, some old ladies on a shopping trip, some puzzled Japanese businessmen, a lost-looking man in an old-fashioned navy-blue raincoat. Deborah exuded an air of weary lassitude that suggested she wouldn’t be too bothered if the kids got carried down to the platform and were swept onto the rails like lemmings going over a cliff.

‘Stay away from the edge,’ I called, flapping my arms at them. ‘Move back against the wall to let people past.’ I saw the irritation in commuters’ faces as they eyed the bubbling, chattering queue. Londoners don’t like children. ‘We’re going to be getting on the next train, but we must wait until it has stopped and its doors are open before we move forward. I want you to form a crocodile.’

The children looked up at me blankly. ‘A crocodile shape, two, two, two, two, all the way along,’ I explained, chopping in their direction with the edges of my palms.

Deborah gave me a wry smile. ‘I don’t think anyone’s ever told them to do that before,’ she explained.

‘Then how do you get them to stay in lines?’ I asked.

‘Oh, we don’t, they just surge around. They never do what they’re told. You can’t do anything with them. The trouble with children is they’re not, are they? Not children. Just grabby little adults.’

No, I thought, you’re so wrong. But I elected not to speak. I looked back at the children gamely organizing themselves into two wobbly columns. ‘They’re not doing so badly.’

Deborah wasn’t interested. She turned away to watch the train arriving. ‘Crocodile, crocodile,’ the kids were chanting, making snappy-jawed movements to each other. The carriages of the train appeared to be already half-full. I had expected them to be almost empty. As the doors opened, we herded the children forward. I kept my eyes on the pairs at the back, feeding them in between my outstretched arms as though I was guiding unruly sheep into a pen. I tried not to think about the entrance to the tunnel, and the stifling, crushing darkness beyond it.

‘Miss, Raj has fallen over.’ I looked down to find a minuscule Indian child bouncing up from his knees with a grin on his face. I noted that no damage had been done, then lifted his hands, scuffed them clean and wrapped them around the nearest carriage pole. ‘Hang on,’ I instructed as the doors closed.

‘Miss, how many stops is it?’ asked a little girl at my side.

‘We go to Swiss Cottage, then St John’s Wood, then Baker Street, then we change from the Jubilee Line to the Bakerloo Line and go one stop to Regent’s Park.’

‘Miss, is there a real cottage in Swiss Cottage?’

‘Miss, are we going to Switzerland?’

‘Miss, can you ski in Swiss Cottage?’

‘Miss, are we going skiing?’

‘We’re going skiing! We’re going skiing!’

The train pulled away and everyone screamed. For a moment I sympathized with Deborah. I looked out of the window as the platform vanished. When I married Peter we moved out to Amersham, at the end of the Metropolitan line, and stopped coming into central London. Peter was a lecturer. I was due for promotion at the school. In time I could have become the headmistress, but Peter didn’t want me to work and that was that, so I had to give up my job and keep house for him. A year later, I discovered that I couldn’t have children. Suddenly I began to miss my classroom very badly.

‘Miss, make him get off me.’ Timson was sitting on top of a girl who had grabbed a seat. Without thinking, I lifted him off by his jacket collar.

‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ said Deborah. ‘They’ll have you up before the Court of Human Rights for maltreatment. Best not to touch them at all.’ She swung to the other side of the central pole and leaned closer. ‘How long has it been since you last taught?’

‘Twelve years.’

‘You’ve been away a long time.’ It sounded suspiciously like a criticism. ‘Well, we don’t manhandle them any more. EEC ruling.’ Deborah peered out of the window. ‘Swiss Cottage coming up, watch out.’

II: Swiss Cottage to St John’s Wood

Many projects to build new Tube lines were abandoned due to spiralling costs and sheer impracticability. An unfinished station tunnel at South Kensington served as a signalling school in the 1930s, and was later equipped to record delayed-action bombs falling into the Thames that might damage the underwater Tube tunnels. The Northern Heights project to extend the Northern Line to Alexandra Palace was halted by the Blitz. After this, the government built a number of deep-level air-raid shelters connected to existing Tube stations, several of which were so far underground that they were leased after the war as secure archives. Aslate as the 1970s, many pedestrian Tube subways still looked like passageways between bank vaults. Vast riveted doors could be used to seal off tunnels in the event of fire or flood. There was a subterranean acridity in the air. You saw the light rounding the dark bend ahead, heard the pinging of the albescent lines, perhaps glimpsed something long sealed away. Not all of the system has changed. Even now there are tunnels that lead nowhere, and platforms where only ghosts of the past wait for trains placed permanently out of service.

Trying to make sure that nobody got off when the doors opened would have been easier if the children had been wearing school uniforms. But their casual clothes blended into a morass of bright colours, and I had to rely on Deborah keeping the head-count from her side of the carriage. In my earlier days at Invicta the pupils wore regulation navy blue with a single yellow stripe, and the only symbol of non-conformity you saw — apart from the standard array of faddish haircuts — was the arrangement of their socks, pulled down or the wrong colour, small victories for little rebels.

I avoided thinking about the brick and soil pressing down on us, but was perspiring freely by now. I concentrated on the children, and had counted to fifteen when half a dozen jolly American matrons piled into the car, making it hard to finish the tally. I moved as many of the children as I could to one side, indicating that they should stay in crocodile formation. I instinctively knew that most of them were present, but I couldn’t see the sad little boy. ‘Connor,’ I called, ‘make yourself known please.’ An elliptical head popped out between two huge tourists. So unsmiling. I wondered if he had a nemesis, someone in the class who was making his life hell. Bullies are often small and aggressive because of their height. They go for the bigger, softer boys to enhance their reputation, and they’re often popular with games teachers because of their bravado. There’s not much I don’t know about bullies. I was married to one for twelve years.

‘I’ve got these new assignment books in my bag,’ said Deborah, relooping her hair through her scrunchie and checking her reflection in the glass. ‘Some government psychology group wants to test out a theory about how kids look at animals. More bloody paperwork. It’s not rocket science, is it, the little sods just see it as a day off and a chance to piss about.’

‘You may be right,’ I admitted. ‘But children are shaped far more by their external environment than anyone cares to admit.’

‘How’s that, then?’

‘They recently carried out an experiment in a New York public school,’ I explained, ‘placing well-behaved kids and those with a history of disruption in two different teaching areas, one clean and bright, the other poorly lit and untidy. They found that children automatically misbehaved in surroundings of chaos — not just the troubled children but all of them, equally.’

Deborah looked at me oddly, swaying with the movement of the train. Grey cables looped past the windows like stone garlands, or immense spider webs. ‘You don’t miss much, do you? Is that how you knew Connor was hiding behind those women?’

‘No, that’s just instinct. But I’ve been reading a bit about behavioural science. It’s very interesting.’ I didn’t tell her that before I was married I had been a teacher for nearly fourteen years. The only thing I didn’t know about children was what it was like to have one.

‘Well, I’m sorry, I know it’s a vocation with some people, but not me. It’s just a job. God, I’m dying for a fag.’ She hiked her bag further up her shoulder. ‘Didn’t your old man want you to work, then?’

‘Not really. But I would have come back earlier. Only. ’ I felt uncomfortable talking to this young woman in such a crowded place, knowing that I could be overheard.

‘Only what?’

‘After I’d been at home for a while, I found I had trouble going out.’

‘Agoraphobia?’

‘Not really. More like a loss of balance. A density of people. Disorienting architecture, shopping malls, exhibition halls, things like that.’

‘I thought you didn’t look very comfortable back there on the platform. The Tube gets so crowded now.’

‘With the Tube it’s different. It’s not the crowds, it’s the tunnels. The shapes they make. Circles. Spirals. The converging lines. Perhaps I’ve become allergic to buildings.’ Deborah wasn’t listening, she was looking out of the window and unwrapping a piece of gum. Just as well, I thought. I didn’t want her to get the impression that I wasn’t up to the job. But I could feel the pressure in the air, the scented heat of the passengers, the proximity of the curving walls. An over-sensitivity to public surroundings, that was what the doctor called it. I could tell what he was thinking: Oh God, another stir-crazy housewife. He had started writing out a prescription while I was still telling him how I felt.

‘We’re coming into Baker Street. Christ, not again. There must have been delays earlier.’ Through the windows I could see a solid wall of tourists waiting to board. We slowed to a halt and the doors opened.

III: Baker Street to Regent’s Park

The world’s first tube railway, the Tower Subway, was opened in 1870, and ran between the banks of the Thames. The car was only ten feet long and five feet wide, and had no windows. This claustrophobic steel cylinder was an early materialization of a peculiar modern phenomenon: the idea that great discomfort could be endured for the purpose of efficiency, the desire to reach another place with greater speed. An appropriately satanic contraption for a nation of iron, steam and smoke.

‘This is where we change,’ called Deborah. ‘Right, off, the lot of you.’

‘Can you see them all?’ I asked.

‘Are you kidding? I bet you there’s something going on somewhere as well, all these people, some kind of festival.’ The adults on the platform were pushing their way into the carriage before we could alight. Suddenly we were being surrounded by red, white and green-striped nylon backpacks. Everyone was speaking Italian. Some girls began shrieking with laughter and shoving against each other. Ignoring the building dizziness behind my eyes, I pushed back against the door, ushering children out, checking the interior of the carriage, trying to count heads.

‘Deborah, keep them together on the platform, I’ll see if there are any more.’ I could see that she resented being told what to do, but she sullenly herded the class together. The guard looked out and closed the train doors, but I held mine back.

‘How many?’ I called.

‘It’s fine, they’re all here. Come on, you’ll get left behind.’

I pushed my way through the children as Deborah started off toward the Bakerloo line. ‘You worry too much,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘I’ve done this trip loads of times, it’s easy once you’re used to it.’

‘Wait, I think we should do another head check—’ But she had forged ahead with the children scudding around her, chattering, shouting, alert and alive to everything. I glanced back anxiously, trying to recall all of their faces.

I saw him then, but of course I didn’t realize.

Four minutes before the next train calling at Regent’s Park. I moved swiftly around them, corralling and counting. Deborah was bent over, listening to one of the girls. The twins were against the wall, searching for something in their bags. Timson, the class clown, was noisily jumping back and forth, violently swinging his arms. I couldn’t find him. Couldn’t find Connor. Perhaps he didn’t want me to, like he didn’t want Deborah to notice.

‘Let’s see you form a crocodile again,’ I said, keeping my voice low and calm.

‘Miss, will we see crocodiles at the zoo?’

‘Miss, are you the crocodile lady?’

Some of the children at the back moved forward, so I had to start the count over. I knew right then.Nineteen. One short. No Connor. ‘He’s gone,’ I said. ‘He’s gone.’

‘He can’t have gone,’ said Deborah, shoving her hair out of her eyes. She was clearly exasperated with me now. ‘He tends to lag behind.’

‘I saw him on the train.’

‘You mean he didn’t get off? You saw everyone off.’

‘I thought I did.’ It was getting difficult to keep the panic out of my voice. ‘There was — something odd.’

‘What are you talking about?’ She turned around sharply. ‘Who is pulling my bag?’ I saw that the children were listening to us. They miss very little, it’s just that they often decide not to act on what they see or hear. I thought back, and recalled the old-fashioned navy-blue raincoat. An oversensitivity to everyday surroundings. He had been following the children since Finchley Road. I had seen him in the crowd, standing slightly too close to them, listening to their laughter, watching out for the lonely ones, the quiet ones. Something had registered in me even then, but I had not acted upon my instincts. I tried to recall the interior of the carriage. Had he been on the train? I couldn’t—

‘He’s probably not lost, just lagging behind.’

‘Then where is he?’

‘We’ll get him back, they don’t go missing for long. I promise you, he’ll turn up any second. It’s quite impossible to lose a small child down here, unfortunately. Imagine if we did. We’d have a bugger of a job covering it up.’ Deborah’s throaty laugh turned into a cough. ‘Have to get all the kids to lie themselves blue in the face, pretend that none of us saw him come to school today.’

‘I’m going to look.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Suppose something really has happened?’

‘Well, what am I supposed to do?’

‘Get the children onto the next train. I’ll find Connor and bring him back. I’ll meet you at the zoo. By the statue of Guy the gorilla.’

‘You can’t just go off! You said yourself—’

‘I have to, I know what to look for.’

‘We should go and tell the station guards, get someone in authority.’

‘There isn’t time.’

‘This isn’t your decision to make, you know.’

‘It’s my responsibility.’

‘Why did you come back?’

Deborah’s question threw me for a second. ‘The children.’

‘This isn’t your world now,’ she said furiously. ‘You had your turn. Couldn’t you let someone else have theirs?’

‘I was a damned good teacher.’ I studied her eyes, trying to see if she understood. ‘I didn’t have my turn.’

There was no more time to argue with her. I turned and pushed back through the passengers surging up from the platform. I caught the look of angry confusion on Deborah’s face, as though this was something I had concocted deliberately to wreck her schedule. Then I made my way back to the platform.

I was carrying a mobile phone, but down here, of course, it was useless. Connor was bright and suspicious; he wouldn’t go quietly without a reason. I tried to imagine what I would do if I wanted to get a child that wasn’t mine out of the station with the minimum of fuss. I’d keep him occupied, find a way to stop him from asking questions. Heavier crowds meant more policing, more station staff, but it would be safer to stay lost among so many warm bodies. He’d either try to leave the station at once, and run the risk of me persuading the guards to keep watch at the escalator exits, or he’d travel to another line and leave by a different station. Suddenly I knew what he intended to do — but not where he intended to do it.

IV: King’s Cross to Euston

There exists a strange photograph of Hammersmith Grove Road station taken four years after the service there ceased operation. It shows a curving platform of transverse wooden boards, and, facing each other, a pair of ornate deserted waiting rooms. The platform beyond this point fades away into the mist of a winter dusk. There is nothing human in the picture, no sign of life at all. It is as though the station existed at the edge of the world, or at the end of time.

I tried to remember what I had noticed about Connor. There are things you automatically know just by looking at your pupils. You can tell a lot from the bags they carry. Big sports holdalls mean messy work and disorganization; the kid is probably carrying his books around all the time instead of keeping them in his locker, either because he doesn’t remember his timetable or because he is using the locker to store cigarettes and contraband. A smart briefcase usually indicates an anal pupil with fussy parents. Graffiti and stickers on a knapsack mean that someone is trying to be a rebel. Connor had a cheap plastic bag, the kind they sell at high-street stores running sales all year round.

I pushed on through the platforms, checking arrival times on the indicator boards, searching the blank faces of passengers, trying not to think about the penumbral tunnels beyond. For a moment I caught sight of the silver rails curving away to the platform’s tiled maw, and a fresh wave of nausea overcame me. I forced myself to think about the children.

You can usually trace the person who has graffitied their desk because you have a ready-made sample of their handwriting, and most kids are lousy at disguising their identities. Wooden pencil boxes get used by quiet creative types. Metal tins with cartoon characters are for extroverts. Children who use psychedelic holders covered in graffiti usually think they’re streetwise, but they’re not.

You always used to be able to tell the ones who smoked because blazers were made of a peculiar wool-blend that trapped the smell of cigarettes. Now everyone’s different. Spots around a child’s nose and mouth often indicate a glue-sniffer, but now so many have spots from bad diets, from stress, from neglect. Some children never—

He was standing just a few yards away.

The navy-blue raincoat was gabardine, like a fifties school-child’s regulation school coat, but in an adult size. Below this were black trousers with creases and turn-ups, freshly polished Oxford toecap shoes. His hair was slicked smartly back, trimmed in classic short-back-and-sides fashion by a traditional barber who had tapered the hair at the nape and used an open razor on the neck. You always notice the haircuts.

He was holding the boy’s hand. He turned his head and looked through me, scanning the platform. The air caught in my lungs as he brought his focus back to me, and matched my features in his memory. His deep-set eyes were framed by rimless spectacles that removed any readable emotion from his face. He held my gaze defiantly. We stood frozen on the concourse, staring at each other as the other passengers surged around us, and as Connor’s head slowly turned to follow his new friend’s sight line, I saw that this man was exhilarated by the capture of his quarry, just as I knew that his initial elation would turn by degrees to sadness and then to anger, as deep and dark as the tunnels themselves.

The tension between their hands grew tighter. He began to move away, pulling the boy. I looked for someone to call to, searching faces to find anyone who might help, but found indifference as powerful as any enemy. Dull eyes reflected the platform lights, slack flesh settled on heavy bodies, exuding sour breath, and suddenly man and boy were moving fast, and I was pushing my way through an army of statues as I tried to keep the pair of them in my sight.

I heard the train before I saw it arriving at the end of the pedestrian causeway between us, the billow of heavy air resonating in the tunnel like a depth charge. I felt the pressure change in my ears and saw them move more quickly now. For a moment I thought he was going to push the boy beneath the wheels, but I knew he had barely begun with Connor yet.

I caught the doors just as they closed. Connor and the man had made it to the next carriage, and were standing between teenaged tourists, only becoming visible as the tunnel curved and the carriage swung into view, briefly aligning the windows. We remained in stasis, quarry, hunter and pursuer, as the train thundered on. My heart tightened as the driver applied the brakes and we began to slow down. Ahead, the silver lines twisted sinuously toward King’s Cross, and another wall of bodies flashed into view.

As the doors opened, fresh swells of passengers surged from carriage to platform and platform to carriage, shifting and churning so much that I was almost lifted from my feet. I kept my eyes focused on the man and the boy even though it meant stumbling against the human tide. Still he did not run, but moved firmly forward in a brisk walk, never slowing or stopping to look back. The carriage speakers were still barking inanely about delays and escalators. I could find no voice of my own that would rise above them, no power that would impede their escape. Wherever they went, I could only follow.

V: Euston to Camden Town

Once, on the other side of that century of devastating change, Oscar Wilde could have taken the Tube to West End. The Underground was built before the invention of the telephone, before the invention of the fountain pen. Once, the platform walls were lined with advertisements for Bovril, Emu, Wrights Coal Tar Soap, for the Quantock Sanitary Laundry, Peckham, and the Blue Hall Cinema, Edgware Road, for Virol, Camp Coffee and Lifebuoy, for Foster Clark’s Soups and Cream Custards, and Eastman’s Dyeing & Cleaning. These were replaced by pleas to Make Do And Mend, to remember that Loose Lips Sink Ships, that Walls Have Ears, that Coughs And Sneezes Spread Diseases. Urgent directional markers guided the way to bomb shelters, where huddled families and terrified eyes watched and flinched with each thunderous impact that shook and split the tiles above their heads.

On through the tunnels and passages, miles of stained cream tiles, over the bridges that linked the lines. I watched the navy-blue raincoat shifting from side to side until I could see nothing else, my own fears forgotten, my fury less latent than his, building with the passing crush of lives. Onto another section of the Northern Line, the so-called Misery Line, but now the battered decadence of its maroon rolling stock had been replaced with livery of dull graffiti-scrubbed silver, falsely modern, just ordinary. The maroon trains had matched the outside tiles of the stations, just as the traffic signs of London were once striped black and white. No such style left now, of course, just ugly-ordinary and invisible-ordinary. But he was not ordinary, he wanted something he could not have, something nobody was allowed to take. On through the gradually thinning populace to another standing train, this one waiting with its doors open. But they began to close as we reached them, and we barely made the jump, the three of us, before we were sealed inside.

What had he told the boy to make him believe? It did not matter what had been said, only that he had seen the child’s weakness and known which role he had to play: anxious relative, urgent family friend, trusted guide, helpful teacher. To a child like Connor he could be anything as long as he reassured. Boys like Connor longed to reach up toward a strong clasping hand. They needed to believe.

Out onto the platform, weaving through the climbing passengers, across the concourse at Euston and back down where we had come from, toward another northbound train. We had been travelling on the Edgware branch, but it wasn’t where he wanted to go. Could he be anxious to catch a High Barnet train for some reason? By now I had deliberately passed several guards without calling out for help, because I felt sure they would only argue and question and hinder, and in the confusion to explain I would lose the boy for ever. My decision was vindicated, because the seconds closed up on us as the High Barnet train slid into the station. By now I had gained pace enough to reach the same carriage, and I stood facing his back, no more than a dozen passengers away. And this time I was foolish enough to call out.

My breathless voice did not carry far. A few people turned to look at me with anxious curiosity. One girl appeared to be on the edge of offering her help, but the man I was pointing to had suddenly vanished from sight, and so had the boy, and suddenly I was just another crazy woman on the Tube, screaming paranoia, accusing innocents.

At Camden Town the doors mercifully opened, releasing the nauseous crush that was closing in on me. I stuck out my head and checked along the platform, but they did not alight. I could not see them. What had happened? Could they have pushed through the connecting door and — God help the child — dropped down onto the track below? They had to be on board, and so I had to stay on. The doors closed once more and we pulled away again into the suffocating darkness.

VI: Kentish Town to South Kentish Town

The tunnels withstood the firestorms above. The tunnels protected. At the heart of the system was the Inner Circle, far from a circle in the Euclidean sense, instead an engineering marvel that navigated the damp earth and ferried its people through the sulphurous tunnels between iron cages, impervious to the world above, immune to harm. Appropriately, the great metal circles that protected workers as they hacked at the clay walls were known as shields. They protected then, and the strength of the system still protects. The tunnels still endure.

He had dropped down to his knees beside the boy, whispering his poisons. I had missed him between the bodies of standing, rocking travellers, but I was ready as the train slowed to a halt at Kentish Town. I was surprised to see that the platform there was completely deserted. Suddenly the landscape had cleared. As he led the boy out I could tell that Connor was now in distress, pulling against the hand that held him, but it was no good; his captor had strength and leverage. No more than five or six other passengers alighted. I called out, but my voice was lost beneath the rumble and squeal of rolling steel. There were no guards. Someone must see us on the closed-circuit cameras, I thought, but how would eyes trained for rowdy teenaged gangs see danger here? There was just a child, a man, and a frightened middle-aged woman.

I glanced back at the platform exit as the train pulled out, wondering how I could stop him if he tried to push past. When I looked back, he and Connor had vanished. He was below on the line, helping the child down, and then they were running, stumbling into the entrance of the tunnel.

We were about to move beyond the boundaries of the city, into a territory of shadows and dreams. As I approached the entrance I saw the silver lines slithering away into amber gloom, then darkness, and a wave of apprehension flushed through me. By dangling my legs over the platform and carefully lowering myself, I managed to slide down into the dust-caked gully. I knew that the raised rail with the ceramic studs was live, and that I would have to stay at the outer edge. I was also sure that the tunnel would reveal alcoves for workers to stand in when trains passed by. In the depth of my fear I was colder and more logical than I had been for years. Perhaps by not calling to the guards, by revealing myself in pursuit, I had in some way brought us here, so that now I was the child’s only hope.

The boy was pulling hard against his stiff-legged warden, shouting something upwards, but his voice was distorted by the curving tunnel walls. They slowed to a walk, and I followed. The man was carrying some kind of torch; he had been to this place before, and had prepared himself accordingly. My eyes followed the dipping beam until we reached a division in the tunnel wall. He veered off sharply and began to pick a path through what appeared to be a disused section of the line. Somewhere in the distance a train rattled and reverberated in its concrete causeway. My feet were hurting, and I had scraped the back of my leg on the edge of the platform. I could feel a thin hot trickle of blood behind my knee. The thick brown air smelled of dust and desiccation, like the old newspapers you find under floorboards. It pressed against my lungs, so that my breath could only be reached in shallow catches. Ahead, the torch beam shifted and hopped. He had climbed a platform and pulled the boy up after him.

As I came closer, his beam illuminated a damaged soot-grey sign: SOUTH KENTISH TOWN. The station had been closed for almost eighty years. What remained had been preserved by the dry warm air. The platform walls were still lined to a height of four feet with dark green tiles arranged in column patterns. Every movement Connor made could be heard clearly here. His shoes scuffed on the litter-strewn stone as he tried to yank his hand free. He made small mewling noises, like a hungry cat.

Suddenly the torch beam illuminated a section of stairway tiled in cream and dark red. They turned into it. I stopped sharply and listened. He had stopped, too. I moved as quickly and quietly as I could to the stairway entrance.

He was waiting for me at the foot of the stairs, his fingers glowing pink over the lens of the upright torch. Connor was by his side, pressed against the wall. It was then I realized that Connor usually wore glasses — you can usually tell the children who do. I imagined they would be like the ones worn by his captor. Because I was suddenly struck by how very alike they looked, as though the man was the boy seen some years later. I knew then that something terrible had happened here before and could so easily happen again, that this damaged creature meant harm because he had been harmed himself, because he was fighting to recapture something pure, and that he knew it could never again be. He wanted his schooldays back but the past was denied to him, and he thought he could recapture the sensations of childhood by taking someone else’s.

I would not let the boy have it stolen from him. Innocence is not lost; it is taken.

‘You can’t have him,’ I said, keeping my voice as clear and rational as I could. I had always known how to keep my fear from showing. It is one of the first things you learn as a teacher. He did not move. One hand remained over the torch, the other over the boy’s right hand.

‘I know you were happy then. But you’re not in class any more.’ I raised my tone to a punitive level. ‘He’s not in your year. You belong somewhere different.’

‘Whose teacher are you?’ He cocked his head on one side to study me, uncurling his fingers from the torch. Light flooded the stairway.

‘I might have been yours,’ I admitted.

He dropped the boy’s hand, and Connor fell to the floor in surprise.

‘The past is gone,’ I said quietly. ‘Lessons are over. I really think you should go now.’ For a moment the air was only disturbed by my uneven breath and the sound of water dripping somewhere far above.

He made a small sound, like the one Connor had made earlier, but deeper, more painful. As he approached me I forced myself to stand my ground. It was essential to maintain a sense of authority. I felt sure he was going to hit me, but instead he stopped and studied my face in the beam of the torch, trying to place my features. I have one of those faces; I could be anyone’s teacher. Then he lurched out of the stairwell and stumbled away along the platform. With my heart hammering, I held Connor to me until the sound of the man was lost in the labyrinth behind us.

‘You’re the Crocodile Lady,’ said Connor, looking up at me.

‘I think I am,’ I agreed, wiping a smudge from his forehead.

Unable to face the tunnels again, I climbed the stairs with Connor until we reached a door, and I hammered on it until someone unlocked the damned thing. It was opened by a surprised Asian girl dressed only in a towel. We left the building via the basement of the Omega Sauna, Kentish Town Road, which still uses the station’s old spiral staircase as part of its design. London has so many secrets.

The police think they know who he is now, but I’m not sure that they’ll ever catch him. He’s as lost to them as he is to everyone else. Despite his crimes — and they have uncovered quite a few — something inside me felt sorry for him, and sorry for the part he’d lost so violently that it had driven him to take the same from others. The hardest thing to learn is how to be strong.

Everyone calls me the Crocodile Lady.