"Michael Marshall Smith - Missed Connection" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Michael Marshall)

As it made its way into central London, the tube began to get more and more crowded, and during a two-minute
pause in a tunnel, Lawson elected to get off at the next stop. Not only was Warren Street actually quite convenient, as
it was at the top of Tottenham Court Road, it was a station which comparatively few of the mass now blocking the
aisles would be familiar with. When the tube eventually started moving again he stood up and made his way to the
doors, so as not to be obstructed when the time came to disembark.
Lawson of course knew which side of the tube was the right one to go to, the one that would open on to the
platform on this particular station; and so when it pulled into Warren Street all he had to do was step lightly off. He
was gratified to notice that no one else left the carriage with him. Even the tube driver appeared to realise that the
station would not be a popular choice on a pre-Christmas afternoon. The carriage doors seemed to shut and the tube
to whip out of the station almost before Lawson's feet had reached the platform.
Shouldering his bag into a more comfortable position, he turned to the right and started to walk. He didn't get very
far, however, before almost running straight into a wall. Confused, he looked up. He was standing at the extreme right
hand side of the platform (as one saw it from the train), up against the wall next to the tunnel.
Turning slowly, Lawson looked around. Behind him were the tracks, to the right the wall, and extending out to his
left was the platform. The Exit signs pointed to his left.
As they should. Shaking his head, Lawson walked down the platform. After a few yards he realised the source of
his confusion, and stopped. The way out should have been to the right. Puzzled, he turned to look back at the
platform. He'd got on the last carriage to the right of the platform at Finsbury Park. When the tube got to Warren
Street, he should still have been in the last carriage to the right. Instead, he'd got out at the far left of the platform.
Walking through the archway into the area that funnelled passengers from the two opposite platforms towards the
escalator, Lawson struggled to get his mind around the problem, sure that there was a straightforward explanation, but
unable for the life of him to work out what it was. A possibility was that the tube had somehow pulled much further
through the platform than usual, pulling his carriage up to the left-hand side of the platform instead of the right.
Unfortunately this was also impossible. It would mean that all the people who had got on to the left of him at
Finsbury Park would have been pulled through into the tunnel past the platform, unable to get off. And where had all
the carriages behind his come from? People who got on to them at Warren Street would be unable to get off at other
stations, which was bound to be rather unsatisfactory.
Not that other people were exactly a feature of the station. He'd been right to choose it, as no one else had got off
there, and the way to the escalators was empty. Smiling, sniffing and consigning the problem to his mental 'Strange
things that have happened to me on the tube' file (which was pretty small), Lawson got on to the escalator.
Halfway up he noticed that the down escalator was working too: that they, both of them, were functional at the
same time. That is, that people could use escalators to go both up and down simultaneously. Now that was an
incident for the 'Strange things etc' file. The down escalator had been broken so long that to see them both working at
once was like an optical illusion. Part of what had irritated him so much about the broken escalator was that he'd never
seen anyone working on it. This presumably was the explanation тАУ they beavered away at night.
Reaching the top, Lawson scanned the posters for anything new or interesting as he made his way to the next set
of escalators. While there was nothing particularly interesting, there was certainly plenty that was new. Side-by-side
with the escalator-fixers the billboard stickers had obviously put in a hard night's work. He recognised none of the
adverts that festooned the walls.
His temporary goodwill towards Underground engineers faded rapidly as he reached seeing distance of the next
set of escalators. Both were roped off. And roped off, he noticed as he drew nearer down the cylindrical corridor, with
an emphatic irrevocability that seemed to speak of the despair of the engineers that the escalators would ever work
again, at least in their lifetimes.
Shoulders slumping, Lawson stopped a few yards short. His flu had brought with it attendant aches in his back
and the thought of struggling up about a million stairs was not a very pleasant one. Why couldn't the damn things
have waited another day to stop working? They'd been fine yesterday, when he'd manfully made his way in to work;
but now he was coming in his own time, they had to grind to a halt. He stared at the escalators bleakly, trying to
galvanise himself into moving in search of an alternative route up, and wandered up to their feet.
Where he noticed two odd things. The first was that the stationary escalator was filthy. The sides were covered
with dust, as were the handrails, normally rubbed smooth with the grip of countless hands. Not only that, but the