Free Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson Page B

People were at the front trying to stop the guy bleeding, the police were coming. There was nothing I could do to help.”
    “Wanted to keep your head down, more like,” Spicer murmured.
    “I see,” Collins said. “Did you see a knife?”
    “I’m sorry?”
    “A knife. The gentleman was stabbed three times. Did you see the knife?”
    “No. Sorry, no. I just saw the guy start to take his hand out of his pocket, then the other guy moved in front of him. I didn’t see what was in his hand.”
    Jim stood up. “Thank you, Superintendent.”
    “There’s still about half a dozen passengers to interview,” Spicer pointed out.
    “I think I have an adequate idea of what went on from Mr Ross’s statement,” Jim said. “Is there any word on the attacker?”
    Spicer got up and followed him to the door of the monitor suite. “There’s a good image of him from the bus camera; we’re circulating that. And half the people on the bus were filming the incident on their phones and sending the footage to their media accounts or their friends or the news agencies, so there’s no shortage of video. Most of the street cameras were either down for maintenance or out of order. We’re working through them street by street, but so far we don’t know where he went.”
    “Hm.”
    As they reached the door, Jim heard Ross say, “So, how is the guy? Is he going to be okay?”
    “I’m afraid the gentleman died in hospital,” Collins replied.
     
     
    A FLOOR UP from the monitor suite, two police officers sat in a small office. Neate, the sergeant, was sitting behind the desk, his feet up, eyes closed. The constable, Ferris, was sitting in one of the visitor chairs twiddling his thumbs. Jim noted as he stepped through the door that all their comms gear had been removed, and there was a bare space on the desk where a monitor had been hurriedly cleared away.
    “This gentleman wants to talk to you about tonight’s incident,” Spicer told them. “You’re to give him all possible cooperation. Charlie. Stop being insubordinate.”
    Neate lowered his feet to the floor and assumed an attentive pose behind the desk. He was younger than Ferris, perhaps in his mid-twenties to Ferris’s early forties. He had the look of a ‘flier,’ an officer bound for greater things. Ferris, on the other hand, had the calm, rumpled, professional look of a copper who had pounded many miles of pavement, had perhaps been passed over for promotion once, accepted it as his lot, and quietly got on with doing his job.
    There being no more chairs in the office, Jim perched on the corner of the desk while Spicer stood with his back to the closed door. The room felt cramped, claustrophobic, too warm.
    He told the officers, “This is not an official interview, and it won’t appear on your records. I’ve seen your reports of the incident at Camden Town Station earlier this evening, but I’m just here to fill in the gaps, get a personal sense of things to take to my superiors.”
    “Gaps?” Neate asked. “What kind of gaps?”
    Jim smiled. “Perhaps I put that badly. You’re not under investigation here, but it could be important that I get a feel for what happened, and that’s hard to do from reports, no matter how professional they are.” He added, “It’s what we call human intelligence, or humint .” That bounced right off Ferris, he saw. The constable knew he was being handled. He probably also knew that no one had used the word ‘humint’ for at least two decades now.
    Neate, on the other hand, seemed mollified. Eager, even. His file said he had applied to the Security Service but failed his interview, although it didn’t say why.
    “What do you want to know?” he asked.
    “Well, let’s start with your evening, shall we? How was that going, before you got the call?”
    Neate and Ferris glanced at each other. Ferris said, “Slow. Always is, midweek. Couple of drunks making a nuisance of themselves outside Mornington Crescent Station, lady