The Cilla Rose Affair by Winona Kent Read Free Book Online

hell, he knew that for a fact. And he was getting worse by the hour.
    All he wanted now was to go home to Epsom to his wife, and the 15.22 from Waterloo would accomplish that in short order.
    He walked the short distance to Oxford Circus, lacking the patience and the stomach for a taxi ride through traffic. He went down and bought a ticket to Waterloo from a machine, and found his way down to the trains.
    The southbound Bakerloo platform was crowded. There’d been a delay somewhere and the trains were arriving packed full of passengers, and very few of them were getting off. Simon leaned back against the wall. His legs were aching. His bowels were in rebellion. His temperature, he was certain, was well over 100. He had nothing left to expel, and still the nausea and the cramps gripped his insides, squeezing his middle like a malevolent fist.
    I should have taken that taxi , he thought. He was suffocating down here, on the airless platform. He let several trains go through without getting on, thinking the overcrowding would lessen, but it was hopeless. As soon as one backlog of passengers cleared out, another trainful descended from above.
    Sweating, he checked his watch, and was alarmed to discover that if he didn’t make some sort of concerted effort to get aboard the next train, he would almost certainly miss his connection at Waterloo.
    Wearily, he made his way through the backpackers and punk rockers and tourists to the edge of the platform. He watched for the clues that heralded another train’s imminent approach—the golden prediction of the computerized indicator suspended from the wall; a subtle breeze; a distant, throaty roar that had always made him think of an emptying drain in a bath.
    Yes, there was one coming. The indicator confirmed it. He could hear the train’s wheels whipping the track.
    Suddenly very dizzy, he lurched slightly to his left to make room on the platform edge for a young man in an ill-fitting suit and found himself, quite by accident, staring at a large representation of himself pasted on the track side of the tunnel wall: Simon Darrow for the Crisis Line — when you’re desperate, when you’ve nowhere to turn —
    In the newspapers the following morning, it would be variously reported that Simon Darrow died as a result of an appalling crush on an already congested platform at Oxford Circus; a desperate suicide bid; a heart attack; a deliberate push. In truth, his temperature soaring, disoriented and reeling, the darling of British broadcasting had tumbled over the edge quite by accident, collapsing onto the tracks just as a train burst from its tunnel and roared along the length of the station.
    Simon Darrow had met his end quickly, crushed by the wheels of the train and finished off by the 600 volts carried in the two raised conductor rails, overseen benevolently by his own smiling face, offering sanctuary from the world’s worst troubles.

Chapter Six
    Friday, 23 August 1991
    Was it his imagination?
    A young man, it was, in trainers and a sweatshirt, following him.
    Evan stopped, and bent down to check his shoelace. The young man walked past him, crossed the road, then lingered midway along the block, admiring the architecture of a nearby Georgian row.
    His place behind Evan was taken by an older man in a cloth cap.
    It could, of course, have been nothing more than a training exercise. British Intelligence were inordinately fond of sending their fledglings round to friendly agents with orders to maintain surveillance—the degree of their success dependent upon whether or not they were detected by their target.
    Evan doubted these two were tender young recruits: they were too good. He’d first noticed them as he’d left his flat in Queen Anne Square and walked up along Brompton Road towards Knightsbridge Station.
    He made a small diversion and boarded a bus, noting the older man as he followed him up the steps to the top and chose a seat in the rear. The younger man loitered on the