Free Vanished by Tim Weaver Page B

the years since I’d given up journalism, but I missed the opportunity towatch and learn from the crowds. All the books on kinesics, on the language of the body and the psychology of interviews, helped fill in the blanks. But I’d never learned more than on weekday mornings when I’d been surrounded by a sea of commuters.
    Once I was on the eastbound train, I got out at every Circle line station, took the escalators or the stairs up to street level and then made my way back down again. At Westminster – the station that would have been the best and most obvious escape route on the day Sam vanished – I spent a couple of minutes moving between the Circle and Jubilee lines. On a regular work day, Sam would have made the switch in order to go east to Canary Wharf.
    Then, about two hours in, I started the journey in reverse – and for the first time a part of me wondered what I was hoping to achieve. In any investigation, you had to feel like you were moving forward; every place you went to, every person you spoke to, had to push the case on. Riding the Tube was a way of understanding Sam better, of getting a feel for his routine. His life. But I’d found nothing of him. No trace of him here, and no trace of him on the footage.
    I pushed the doubts down and carried on.
    At 11.30, I got back to the gateline at Gloucester Road and noticed a couple of Tube employees. One was standing in a booth watching people pass through; the other was talking to a group of Japanese tourists and pointing to a map. The one in the booth looked up as I approached. He was small, wiry, his eyes dark, his face pale. Close in,his skin seemed too thin, as if it were tracing paper that was about to tear.
    ‘Morning.’
    He nodded in reply. Nothing else.
    I ignored the lack of response and pressed on, introducing myself and telling him about Sam. When I was done, I got out a photograph and showed it to him. It was a long shot given the number of people who must have passed through the station every day, but it was a question that needed to be asked. Sometimes, even when you built cases on precision and reason, you had to throw a little mud at the wall and see what stuck.
    ‘Don’t recognize him,’ he said, his eyes straying across the photo and then away again. He shifted back on the stool he was on, and his thin summer jacket opened a little. Underneath I could see a badge pinned to his shirt: DUNCAN PELL . I assumed, given he was at the gateline, that he was a regular customer-service assistant. It was hard to see him as anything more, as a station supervisor or duty station manager.
    ‘Are you here permanently?’ I asked.
    His eyes came back to me. ‘What?’
    ‘Do you always work out of this station?’
    ‘Yeah,’ he said, a frown forming across his brow, as if I was suddenly speaking in a language he didn’t understand. All the time his eyes continued darting left and right; to the gateline, then to the entrance, then back again. Basically anywhere but me.
    ‘My guy used to pass through here every day.’
    Pell snorted. ‘So do a lot of people.’
    ‘You don’t recognize any of the faces that pass through here?’
    ‘Some.’
    ‘But not this one?’
    I held up the photograph in front of him again. He glanced at it and away, off to where a group of girls in their late teens were entering the station. Then he shrugged. ‘It’s busy,’ was all he offered, still watching the girls rather than me. I nodded, put the picture away, but didn’t move. The momentary pause seemed to make him uncomfortable. His eyes switched to me, away, then back and there was something in them.
    A flash of fear.
    ‘Right, I’d better be off, Dunc.’ The other member of staff was back at the booth. He looked at me, looked at Pell, then must have assumed he’d interrupted a conversation, and held up both hands in apology. ‘Oh, sorry – didn’t mean to jump in.’
    ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘I think we’re done.’
    Pell glanced at me sideways