The Inspector Walter Darriteau Murder Mysteries - Books 1-4 David Carter (autobiographies to read txt) 📖

moving steel and wood and fabric and luggage and food and prams and bikes and humanity, all crammed together on the express train that was hurling itself through the station.

In the melee, Desi stumbled.

She grasped the Sir Fred Berrington closer to her heart as if it might protect her and fell.

The crowd gasped. The sound drowned out by the express.

Hands went to mouths. Eyes widened. Shocked mouths opened.

People looked away, not that there was much to see.

Desi was beneath the still moving last six carriages, as they hurtled over her remains. The crinkly black box had burst open on first impact, throwing the old and coveted trophy toward the centre of the track where it bounced once and stumbled under the far steel wheels, flattened beyond recognition, the passengers feeling the tiniest of jolts, not enough to be of concern. How were they to know that Sir Fred Berrington had been mutilated beyond use, beneath their restless feet?

Desiree Mitford Holloway hadn’t fared any better.

Death was instantaneous.

Decapitation.

Mutilation.

An horrific death.

In five seconds flat Desiree Holloway ceased to exist.

‘Oh my God!’ shrieked a teenage girl, clutching her face. ‘Did you see that?’

She glanced around at her shocked neighbours.

‘I told you!’ yelled the tall man, turning round and staring at the rear of the crowd as if they were personally responsible. ‘I told you so! A poor lady’s gone under the bloody train!’

Thankfully, no one had witnessed her final moment, not after Desiree had disappeared beneath the locomotive. It seemed an age before the long train cleared the station, cleared the view, and as the rear of the train dashed away, shaking people stared down at the bloody remains, strewn along the track toward London.

Unrecognisable.

Was that a head?

Is that really hair?

Isn’t that her black jacket?

Poor woman!

Look, there! A hand, see, just beyond the brown sleeper. It’s a hand, I tell you!

Everyone peered, but not everyone saw it.

‘She jumped, you know!’ someone said.

‘She did not!’

‘She bloody well did!’

‘She stumbled under the weight of the crowd,’ said a third.

‘She jumped, I tell ya!’

“The train now approaching Platform Three is the eleven nineteen calling at London Euston only. Platform Three for the London Euston Train.”

‘Oh, my God; hasn’t somebody sent for someone?’ cried a woman.

The tall man turned round and yelled, ‘Stop this! Fetch someone! Now! A woman has gone under the train!’

Still more people were funnelling down the steps, pushing onto the platform, urged on by the strident tannoy announcement. Latecomers and day-trippers and poor timekeepers and runners with pushchairs; and students with music in their ears, and coloured rucksacks slung over their shoulders; and a big man with a cello, and gaggles of confused foreigners, and school children on a day trip, and lots of them.

‘What’s all the fuss about?’ asked one, jokily.

‘Gawd, it’s busy down here today,’ said another suited man, as he pushed his wheeled bag before him, muttering, ‘Make way, make way! I must get on this train. Matter of life and death.’

Several bystanders looked at him with disdain.

Eyewitnesses at the front, feeling more pressure from the rear, thought better of it, turned about and fought their way away from the trackside. They would go straight home, and not by train, leave it for another day when things were quieter, and safer, and they had re-gathered their nerve, and rediscovered some courage.

The London train was spluttering into the station as if it had a cold, unknowingly cloaking the horror, hiding the evidence. The passengers on the train thought the people on the platform looked a miserable bunch, even more so than usual.

A moment later, a hundred tried to get off. Had to push their way off and fight their way through the nervous throng. God, what was wrong with everyone today? The instant the doors pulled open, three hundred fought to get on, pushing and shoving and elbowing and cursing and grimacing.

Someone said, ‘There’s nothing we can do for her now, and I need to get to London.’

Another said, ‘She jumped anyway, it was her own choice.’

‘You cold bastards!’ yelled the tall man, refusing to board the train, turning around, fighting his way back through more latecomers.

‘Who’s in charge here?’ he demanded. ‘Where’s the station manager?’

People looked at him as if he were a troublemaker, a shilling short of a quid, there’s always someone who wants to make a fuss.

‘Bit of a loony,’ someone suggested, as they hurried on by, and no one was going to argue. There were loads of loonies about these days.

‘He looked a loony,’ said someone else. ‘Very tall people are often loonies!’ and several people glanced around to see if they were standing next to anyone particularly tall.

Not everyone managed to board, though most of them did, crammed together like football crowds from years ago, trying to read their newspapers and magazines and devices over someone else’s shoulder, trying to eat a cheese sandwich or a piece of spicy sausage out of a green packet, or a muesli bar without appearing to do so, trying to reach the packed lavatories, trying not to sniff someone else’s armpit as they stretched, trying to read vital texts, trying to make or receive a phone call, trying to get online, trying to access their Bookface page to broadcast their vital news to the waiting and voyeuristic electronic world, of what they had seen and where they had been, and you should have seen it too, and how exciting it all was, and how incredibly bloody. My God! Better than the TV! Far better!

One standing passenger was heard to intone into his palm-pootler: ‘I’m having a bad day, I’m on the train... but someone else has had a far worse one... they’re beneath it!’ Followed by a cold laugh, and hostile stares.

After the London train had slipped away, one or two remaining on the platform noted that the supposed severed hand had vanished. A few more were taking pictures with their mobile phones, hands in the air like weird worshippers to the modern God, Techno, to be sent on up ahead