Tim Weaver - Vanished

At 7.33 a.m., Duncan Pell drifted into view. He came from the left-hand side of the camera, up from the booth he’d been in when I’d talked to him at the station. He was focused on something: head still, eyes fixed, cutting through the crowds like a knife.

Then I realized what he was doing.

There were three doors into the ticket hall. At the left-hand one, propped against a sandy brick pillar, was a man holding a piece of cardboard. It was difficult to make him out at first, but as Pell arrived he shifted around and I saw him more clearly: not all that old – forty maybe – but dishevelled, dirty, cloaked in a long winter coat and a thick roll-neck sweater, with dark trousers and dark boots. He had a beard, unruly, uncared for, and a black holdall on the floor next to him.

The slightly washed-out quality of the footage made it hard to see the writing on the cardboard, but I could make out one of the words right at the top. Homeless . I leaned in even closer as Pell started talking to him. After a minute, Pell was gesturing, pointing over the homeless man’s shoulder, then – when the man didn’t appear to get the message – he started jabbing a finger into the man’s arm as if delivering a warning. After that, the man shrank a little, the resolve disappearing, and he bent down, picked up his holdall and moved off. Within a couple of seconds, he was gone from view.

Pell returned to his booth, out of sight.

Three minutes later, at 7.41, two men entered the station.

They were laughing at something. One of them was tall, skinny, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with a thin jacket – all despite the cold – the other smaller, but not by much, and dressed more practically: a thick coat over denims and white trainers. I didn’t know what James Quinn and Robert Stonehouse looked like, but these two seemed a decent fit: they had small, combative faces, they were the only men I’d seen enter the station together in the fifteen minutes I’d been watching, and as I saw one of them take out an Oyster card and gesture towards the self-service machines, a well-dressed black guy arrowed in from the right of the picture and nipped into the queue in front of them.

Simon Mbebeni.

Over the phone, PC Brian Westerley said the official police report had Stonehouse as the instigator, and I watched as the taller of the two men – the one wearing a T-shirt and summer jacket – said something to his friend. Mbebeni turned around, frown on his face, and spoke to them. Stonehouse smiled at Mbebeni and shrugged. Mbebeni – six foot, around fifteen stone, plainly not about to be intimidated – took another step towards them. And then Stonehouse threw a punch.

It missed Mbebeni and he moved quickly to react: he pushed Stonehouse back into a ticket machine on the right, Quinn getting knocked aside on the way through. Stonehouse came back, fists swinging, and connected with Mbebeni’s face. A second later, as the footage glitched a little, I could see blood all over Mbebeni’s shirt.

Then, from the top of the picture, came Sam Wren.

At first he seemed oblivious to what was going on, checking his phone, but then he looked up and was pulled right into the eye of the storm. As Stonehouse and Mbebeni squared off again, Quinn stepped back into Sam. All around the ticket hall, people had stopped and backed away, some looking on in horror, others faintly amused. Quinn turned to see who he’d bumped into, Sam said something – an automatic reaction to being hit – and Quinn punched him. It was just like a lot of fights: created out of nothing. Sam clutched his face and took a couple of steps back.

Then he moved towards Quinn.

I paused the video. This was only the second time I’d seen Sam in motion. I’d looked at photographs of him over and over, and I’d watched footage of him disappearing into thin air. But now here he was, a different man at a different time. He looked bigger around the face, healthier, but he also looked more assertive, more forceful, and not only because he’d just been attacked. Maybe this was the Sam everyone talked about: the one who worked as an investment banker, who earned six-figure bonuses, who could swim with the sharks. At the end he was none of those things. At the end he was small, confused and forlorn. A man with none of the fight left in him.

I started the video again. Within a couple of seconds, Pell emerged from the same position as earlier, heading towards Stonehouse and Mbebeni, and then Sam was on Quinn – Quinn half turned away from him – and throwing a punch. It looked clumsy, but because of Quinn’s position, it was devastating: it connected with Quinn’s throat, and – in the blink of an eye – his legs gave way and he hit the floor. It was difficult to make out Sam’s face after that: he was bent over, hands on his knees, blood dripping from his face to the floor, as more Tube staff emerged. One made for Quinn, the other for Stonehouse.

Except Pell already had Stonehouse.

Mbebeni was somewhere off to the side, leaning against a wall, looking dazed. Stonehouse was wrestling with Pell, the two of them locked together, arms on each other’s shoulders, gritted teeth, fierce, unrelenting expressions like neither of them was about to give in. Finally, Pell got the better of Stonehouse: he swept his legs out from under him – a quick, efficient movement – and Stonehouse hit the deck hard. I remembered for a moment what Westerley had told me about Pell being an ex-soldier, and that immediately seemed obvious in how he moved, in how precise he was. But as the clock rolled on, as I expected Pell to suppress his opponent and keep him there until he had help, he instead went on the attack. When Stonehouse hit the floor, Pell clamped a hand around his throat and jabbed a fist into the side of Stonehouse’s face. Once. Twice. Three times. Stonehouse was done already, limp and unresponsive, but Pell just continued punching, over and over, even as Stonehouse lay there unconscious, until finally, like a light switching off, he stopped, got up and looked down, a foot placed either side of the body.

About ten seconds later, a couple of cops rushed in through the doors at the front of the station, and Pell stepped away from the body for the first time, straightening out his jacket and looking around the hall. His eyes locked on to Sam, and he moved across and said something to him. Sam looked up at him, as if he didn’t know who Pell was or what he wanted, then he seemed to process whatever it was that Pell had asked, and started nodding slowly. A few seconds later, Sam pointed to Quinn on the floor. He must have known by then that he’d done some serious damage to him. Quinn hadn’t moved an inch.

But it was Pell I couldn’t take my eyes off.

As Sam stood there, his hands still on his knees, in shock and worried about what he might have done, Pell was looking off towards Stonehouse with nothing in his face at all.

No emotion. No regret.

As if he didn’t feel anything.

36

After seeing him in action, I figured the rest of the footage on the DVD would give an even better sense of who Duncan Pell was. For Sam, the pattern mostly remained the same: he’d come in through the three-arch entrance at Gloucester Road and head across the ticket hall towards the turnstiles. The only day that changed was the day after the fight. Sam didn’t turn up at all. I assumed that was down to the events of the previous twenty-four hours: he’d been in a fight, he’d punched a man unconscious and the police had probably warned him it might be about to get worse. He would have been shaken up by what happened, which is why he must have taken the day off work.

But Duncan Pell was different.

He came to work the next day, and every morning – just as on the morning of the fight – he’d stick to the same routine: head for the front of the station where the homeless man had returned, and ask him to leave. Except he didn’t just ask. Every day he became a little more aggressive: only pointing and gesturing initially; then actually planting a hand on the man and pushing him away from the entrance; then grabbing him off the floor and dragging him along the pavement until they both disappeared from sight. Finally, Pell resorted to another tactic: he dropped to his haunches, the man slumped at one of the entrances, and Pell leaned in to him and said something into his ear. The reaction was instant: the homeless man glanced at Pell like he couldn’t believe what he’d heard, and Pell grabbed him by the arm, hauled him to his feet and threw him off, out of view. The man’s black holdall remained in shot for a moment, before Pell kicked it off in the direction he’d thrown the man.