Walking in Darkness

She bought a token, walked towards the turnstile, and began to push her token into the slot, conscious of a man behind her waiting for his turn. Sophie didn’t look at him. She had learnt never to make eye-contact with men in the subway. She slid through the turnstile and walked on to the platform, staying where she could see the token booth; although it was daylight she still felt uneasy on the subway. There were other passenger

s waiting, she was not alone, but you heard such horror stories. She was relieved when another couple of women came along.

A train rattled along the tunnel and came out into the lighted station; she glanced up at the indicator board, then checked the route number, a big blue numeral, on the front of the coming train.

She was still getting used to the routes and the names of stations; she had to think for a second before she worked out that she would have to change trains at Washington Square to get to the station nearest to her flat. New York’s subway system was as complicated as the underground system in London, to which she had only just become adjusted when she was transferred here.

She was so absorbed that she didn’t hear a sound behind her or see anything.

She had no warning. A hand suddenly hit her in the middle of her back, right between the shoulder blades, propelling her violently forward to the edge of the platform.

2

Steve Colbourne was driving away from the hotel in a cab a quarter of an hour later when an ambulance passed him, siren going, and pulled up outside the entrance to a subway station already surrounded by a small crowd. A couple of uniformed policemen were barring entry to everyone but the medical team which jumped out of the ambulance and ran with their equipment down the stairs.

Steve was in a hurry but his reporter’s instincts wouldn’t let him drive on past without checking it out. He leaned forward and said to the taxi driver, ‘Hey, pull over here, would you? I just want to find out what’s going on.’

The driver looked round at him, shrugged, and put on his brakes. Steve leaned out of the window, and yelled to one of the policemen, ‘What’s happened in there?’

He got an impatient stare. ‘Accident – drive on, you’re holding up traffic.’

Steve pulled out his press card and held it up. ‘Press. What sort of accident?’

The crowd all turned to stare at him. Before the policeman could answer, a young black guy in the crowd shouted, ‘There’s a girl on the line, fell under a train.’

‘Dead?’

The guy spread his hands, his big shoulders moving. ‘Well, they don’t generally get up and walk afterwards, now do they?’

A woman hovering near the kerb complained, ‘Why do they always have to do it during rush hour, huh? I got to get home. They take so long to clear the line after one of these jumpers.’

‘Take the bus,’ the black guy told her, and got a glare.

‘Easy for you to say, you ain’t got my feet.’

He looked down at her swollen ankles. ‘Don’t want ’em neither, lady.’

Others in the crowd began to laugh, but not the policemen. Behind the cab, traffic had now built up in a noisy log jam.

‘Get going!’ the cab driver was ordered by one of the policemen, who came down to the kerb to bang on the top of the cab with his night stick.

‘Hey, don’t damage the cab!’ the driver yelled at him. The air was raucous with car horns blaring, drivers leaning out to shout insults at the cab driver, who turned to say to Steve, ‘Got to go, mister. D’you wanna pay me and get out, or can we drive on now?’

Leaning back, Steve gestured. ‘OK, let’s go.’ After all, it happened all the time, people were always throwing themselves under subway trains, although God knew why they would want so violent and painful a death, but there was nothing in it for him. It wouldn’t rate more than a para in any newspaper, and, anyway, regular news wasn’t his scene. He had always specialized; politics was all he had ever been interested in because, like Catherine Gowrie, he had been bred to it.

All his life, his parents had been active in neighbourhood politics: his mother was on a whole raft of committees, the local PT Association, Mother’s Union, raising money for charities, and his father, a New England academic, had campaigned for his local congressman most of his adult lifetime, a stalwart Republican and boyhood friend at school of Eddie Ramsey’s eldest son. Fred Colbourne had even thought of standing for Congress, himself, until a mild heart attack in his mid-fifties put paid to that idea. His doctor had warned that although he might live another twenty years if he was sensible and took care of himself, he would be asking for trouble if he didn’t slow down. He certainly wouldn’t be fit to cope with the tensions and strain of a political career.

‘Well, that’s the end of the road for me, but one day I’d like to see you in Congress, son,’ he had told Steve wistfully, on his first day back home from hospital, resting on a daybed by a window downstairs in their three-bedroomed white frame Norman Rockwell look-alike house above Chesapeake Bay, Easton, a few miles from the Ramsey family home.

Steve had laughed, grimaced, shaken his head. ‘I’m no politician, Dad. I’ve seen too much of them too close. Call me fussy, but I don’t want to get my hands that dirty.’

His father had bristled. ‘That isn’t fair, Steve. I know plenty of decent politicians. OK, there’s some corruption, there always is in government, but there are plenty of honest men in Washington.’

‘Like the wonderful guys who didn’t come to visit you in hospital?’ Steve knew none of the politicians his father had done so much to help over the years had shown up to see him after his heart attack, and that that had hurt his father, even though he had never said a word about them.

‘They’re busy men. And they probably felt it was a time for family only, and didn’t want to intrude. They’re my friends, Steve, I know them better than you do!’

Steve had heard Fred Colbourne’s voice rasp with distress and anger, and too late remembered his mother sternly warning him not to upset his father. Quickly, he said, ‘I know they’re your friends, and some of them are decent guys. And somebody has to do the job, like somebody has to take out the garbage. We have to be governed, but it isn’t ever going to be me, Dad. Sorry to disappoint you, but keeping an eye on what they get up to is more my style.’