Malice in London by Graham Thomas Page A

Surbiton, having made arrangements the previous evening to meet Tony Osborne at his flat in Soho first thing in the morning. After bolting down a bowl of something that tasted like little squares of cardboard, he drove in his Triumph TR4 to the train station and hurriedly secured the tonneau cover in the station car park. He only just managed to hop aboard the 9:54 to London Waterloo as it was about to pull away. The coach was packed with young couples off to London for a day’s shopping, each it seemed with a statistically improbable clutch of three or four small children, which made for a diverting if mercifully short journey.
    At Waterloo Station, he boarded the tube for Piccadilly amidst a crush of other travelers. Arriving at the last vacant seat in the coach at the same time as an elderlywoman laden with shopping bags, he smiled and gestured for her to sit down.
    She smiled wearily “Thanks, love,” she said. “Me old dogs is killing me.”
    Powell held on as the coach hurtled through the darkness deep beneath the teeming streets of the city. The tube was not unlike a cosmologist’s wormhole, he supposed fancifully. Disappear into a black hole and pop up, as if by magic, somewhere else in space and time—or at least at Embankment Station, he thought as the train slowed to a stop.
Mind the gap
, came the familiar admonishment over the loudspeaker.
    He took a seat in the brief interval before the passengers getting on could fill the vacuum created by those leaving. As the train started up again, heads bobbed and swayed in unison with the rocking, lurching motion of the coach. A man intently perusing his
Racing Post
, another in a business suit with his eyes closed, and a young woman reading the
Sunday Times Style Magazine
, the tinny sound of an electronic drumbeat leaking from her earphones. No idle chatter here, just people immersed in their own affairs, quintessentially English and oddly comforting amidst these tatty surroundings. Powell felt a fond attachment to the aging, clanking Underground that was as much pragmatic as sentimental, since the alternative—driving anywhere in central London—was not a practical proposition.
    In a long, windowless room in the middle of Scotland Yard known as the Central Command Complex, a team of officers monitor video images from three hundred camerasfixed to lampposts and tall buildings throughout the city, enabling them to skip, at the touch of a keypad, unencumbered above the fray from Paddington to Piccadilly to Pimlico, assessing traffic flow and congestion. Various set computerized plans that control the sequence of traffic signals are implemented, depending on the circumstances, to try and keep things moving. They don’t like to use the American term
gridlock
—which implies an orderly grid system of roads that does not exist in London, where everything leads to the center—preferring instead a system of color codes, ranging from green (traffic moving freely) to black (bus driver with feet up reading newspaper). The reality is the average speed of London traffic is about ten miles an hour with vehicles spending a third of their time stationary.
    Powell’s reverie was interrupted by a subdued chuckle from the lady sitting next to him, who was engrossed in a dog-eared paperback. He tried to read the title at the top of the page nearest him without being too obvious about it.
Malice in the Something-or-other.
He couldn’t make it out. A crime novel, probably. He wondered how people could read such tripe. If real policemen operated the same way as fictional detectives, we’d all be in big trouble, he thought, feeling superior—
    “Ahem.” It was the merest suggestion of a sound.
    He looked up. A tall, middle-aged woman in a leather coat was standing over him, staring at him, or rather through him at his seat, no doubt imagining herself ensconced in it. He smiled benignly then looked away. It was probable from an actuarial point of view that, beinga woman, she