‘Can I help you?’ His voice sounded weary in his own ears. He tried to offset it with a smile of encouragement that, he decided on reflection, probably made him look like Mr Bean.
‘I thought you were a goner.’ The words contained the slightest American drawl. New York? No. A bit too refined. Something inside his head said Boston, but he didn’t know why. ‘You didn’t look as if you had a chance. I almost fainted.’
‘So did I.’
She smiled and he noticed for the first time the sparkle of a tiny diamond stud at the edge of her left nostril.
‘Sarah Grant.’ She held out a slim hand. ‘At least you’ve kept your sense of humour.’
He took it, surprised at the strength of her grip. ‘Jamie Saintclair.’ When he tried to focus on her eyes the world started to come and go in waves. She said something and the words floated away before he could absorb them.
He shook his head to clear it. ‘Sorry?’
‘I said I wondered why someone would want to kill you.’
‘Excuse me.’ He staggered past her and vomited copiously in the general direction of a nearby waste bin.
‘Feeling better now?’ She had found a park bench in a small, rather unkempt public garden not far from the station, where they sat drinking coffee from over-sized cardboard cups and watching the late-afternoon traffic stream by.
‘Mmmh. Sorry about that. Not the most pleasant way to introduce oneself.’
She shrugged. ‘You never know when the shock will hit you. You didn’t get much sympathy, though.’ She had the kind of voice he associated with dental nurses, soft and reassuring, with just a hint of welcome authority.
‘No,’ he said, remembering the large and very outraged cleaning lady who had looked as if she was about to brain him with her mop. ‘Why didn’t you tell the police?’
She chewed her lip the way he’d discovered she did when she was thinking. ‘The usual reasons. I didn’t want to get involved. You give a statement and your name goes on a list. You never know when it’s going to come back and bite you on the ass. Then again, what could I tell them? I had an impression of someone in the crowd pushing in your general direction. I couldn’t tell them who did it; in fact, it wasn’t until after they’d taken you away that I realized what I’d seen. Once you disappeared under the train it was as if my brain was encased in concrete. I couldn’t even scream.’
‘I could,’ he said with conviction.
‘A big crowd gathered, but once they found out you were alive they drifted away.’ She stared at him. ‘I think some of them were disappointed.’
Now it was his turn to shrug. ‘It’s human nature. If there’s a disaster, people want to say they were there. Bad news is like a magnet if you’re a certain kind of person. You see a crowd and you join the back of it. You work your way to the front. You don’t know if you’re going to see somebody pull a rabbit from a hat or a man lying bleeding on the pavement. You’re disappointed if it’s the magician.’
She nodded. ‘Anyway, I made myself scarce, but I kinda felt an obligation to make sure you were all right.’
‘Why?’
‘You smiled at me.’
He laughed. ‘What makes you think I don’t smile at everyone?’
Her expression stiffened and she moved to get up. ‘If you’re going to make fun of me . . .’
He put a hand on her arm. ‘Please, I didn’t mean anything. You’re the only one who’s given me a thought since it happened and I appreciate that. And you’re . . .’
‘I’m what?’ she demanded.
‘Er . . .’ Christ, thirty years old and he was still acting like a tongue-tied teenager around an attractive woman.
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Yeah?’
‘I appreciate your . . . concern.’
She studied him and he noticed that her hazel eyes had flecks of gold around the pupils and the skin around them crinkled when she grinned. ‘Well, a girl does like to be appreciated.’
He took a deep breath. ‘Look, you don’t even know who I am, apart from the fact that I smile at pretty girls and I have a predilection for jumping in front of trains, neither of which is much of a recommendation.’
‘Pre-dil-ection.’ Her slow drawl stretched the word out on a rack. ‘I like that. All right, Mr Jamie Saintclair, who are you and why would someone want to kill you?’
XVII
4 April 1945
WALTER BROHM HUDDLED miserably in his commandeered greatcoat among five hundred other men in a makeshift prisoner of war cage north of Leipzig. He had traded the black and silver of the SS for the uniform of a Wehrmacht private, hoping that such a lowly rank would allow him to slip through the Allied net, or, at worst, secure his early release if he was captured. The fighting had pushed him south into the path of the American Third Army, but that had suited his purposes perfectly. He’d met Americans before the war and knew them for a kindly, quite innocent people who’d believe anything as long as it was accompanied by a convincing smile. How wrong he had been.