VANISHED

         
          After Task left for his golf tournament, I ran the footage from Gloucester Road. Sun poured through the window of the spare room, the air still, the heat prickling against my skin. I felt the familiar buzz that came at the start of a case. The lack of onboard footage was a problem, but not an insurmountable one. I'd just have to work around it.
          Onscreen, there was a time clock in the bottom left, with the date adjacent to that. It was 5.30 a.m. In the video, there was no one in shot. Off to the left, the District line platform was visible; on the right were two Circle line tracks, one for westbound trains, one for eastbound. At 5.38, a woman entered the shot, walked to the middle of the platform and stood there checking her phone. Three minutes later, more people joined her. Then more. By 6 a.m., the station was starting to get busy.
          I grabbed the timeline on the video window and dragged it right, stopping at 6.50. By now, the station was in full flow, people filing off the trains, but mostly filing on. The camera above the entrance to the platform gave a good view. If the Wrens' house was half a mile from the Tube station, and he was averaging two miles per hour, Sam would enter at about 7.20, and be in shot by 7.30.
He took a little longer.
          At 7.45 a.m., he emerged on to the eastbound platform, moving in a mass of bodies. It was incredibly busy, even for a weekday morning. At one stage, he got stuck behind an old couple - tourists - who looked shell-shocked by the carnage unfolding around them, but eventually he found a space on the platform, about two lines back from the edge. He was holding a takeaway coffee in his left hand, which was why he must have taken longer to get to the station, and a briefcase in his right. The coffee was interesting. It suggested a routine; as if this day wasn't that different from any other and he hadn't been expecting any surprises. And yet, in the washed-out colours of the CCTV footage, he looked even worse than in the photo Julia had given me: paler, thinner, his eyes dark smudges against his face. He just stood there the whole time, staring into space. Did you have a pIan? I thought. Or did you onfy decide to take off once you were on the Tube?
The train emerged from the edge of the shot, its doors opening, and the scramble began. You could tell the regular commuters: they barged their way on to the train, eyes fixed on the doors, everyone around them expendable. Sam was the same. When someone tried to move in front of him, he shuffied into their line of sight.
          Then he was on the train.
          The doors closed.
          And the train was gone from shot.
          I got up, poured myself a glass of water, returned and loaded up the second video - South Kensington - and fast-forwarded it. Sam's train had left Gloucester Road at 7.51; two minutes later it was pulling in to South Kensingtone. I leaned in, trying to get a handle on the chaos. Like Gloucester Road, the platform was packed: shoulder to shoulder, men and women stood on its edges, jostling as the train doors opened.
A second's lull, and then people started pouring out. I shifted even closer to the screen and pressed Pause. This time, I edged it on manually using the cursor keys. The camera was about three-quarters of the way down the platform, and was taking in about 80 per cent of the train. At Gloucester Road, Sam had boarded the second carriage from the front, so - unless he'd spent the two-minute journey sprinting from one end of the train to the other, barging commuters out of the way - he would be visible if he got off.
But he didn't get off.
          The whole place was jammed. I played it and replayed it a couple of rimes just to be sure, but there was still no signof rum.
          It was the same story at Sloane Square.
          At Victoria, it was going to be even harder to pick mm out. It doubled up as a mainline starion, so the platform was just a sea of heads. Then I saw something else: a group of men and women, all dressed in the same red T-shirts, all holding placards.
          A demonstration.
          I downsized the video file and googled  '16 December protest'. The top hit was a report from the Guardian ahout a march on Parliament hy opponents of the government's spending cuts. I remembered it. Authoriries had asked that protesters 'use the Circle line, and commuters, tourists and everyone else use the District. The warning looked to have heen heeded hy some, hut not all. And certainly not hy Sama If he'd planned his escape beforehand, he couldn't have picked a hetter day.
          I checked Victoria's footage, without any sign of him, then moved on to the next stop, St James's Park. More protesters. More commuters. The same thing: train arrived, no sign of Sam, train departed. Next I loaded up Westminster. Zipping forward to just after 8 a.m., I hit Play. Sam's train wouldn't be arriving for another five minutes, but I wanted to get a sense of how it was before his arrival.
          Westminster was a battlefield: a sea of faces, a mass of -, bodies. Basicaliy the perfect place to instigate an escape plan. The doors opened. I watched closely, every head, every face, while my mind continued to turn things over.
          The station had been set up to funnel people off and away from the trains as fast as possible. In the middle, one of the exits had a sign on the wall next to it that said: PROTESTERS EXIT HERE. At the far end of the station, I could just about make out another sign above another exit: NON-PROTESTERS EXIT HERE. The attempt to smooth traflic How hadn't worked: the platform was jammed with people not moving at all.
          As Sam's train emerged into the station, I hit Pause and inched it on again with the right cursor. When the doors opened it was like a dam breaking: people poured out - almost fell out - a mix of suited executives, tourists looking lost, and legions of red shirts, all heading for the march. The wave of movement had been too fast, and scattered in too many directions, to keep track of properly, so I stopped the video before it got any further, dragged the slider back sixty seconds and started again.
          This time I went even more slowly. I knew which carriage Sam had been in, so kept my attention fixed on it as the doors slid open. A ton of people spilt out – but not Sam.

Moje první knížka v anglickém originále. Doporučuju pro mírně pokročilé, je srozumitelná a docela čtivá i bez slovníku. Jednou jsem v Londýně strávil 14 dní. Čas od času se tam vracím. S takovou je mnohem snazší se s knihou ztotožnit, když znáte místní reálie, tedy aspoň ty, o kterých se v románu mluví. MIND THE GAP!