Looking down from the top of the escalator shaft was Patrick, another cousin of Andy’s. The nineteen year old watched the shiny heads of the divers submerge one by one and their flashlights slowly disappear before returning to watch over the kit. He had an hour or so to kill.

He ambled over to where some workmen were shoring up the walls and roof. ‘You’ve certainly changed this place a lot,’ he said to one of the carpenters, hoping to engage him in conversation. The man was maybe a couple of years older than him and sported a soft beard.

‘Yeah, the place was a wreck. They now want us to repair it.’
He put down his plane and pointed to the escalator shaft. ‘If you remember an old tree trunk blocked it.’ Patrick did. Adjacent to the door stood two display cases, covered by protective sheets.

‘What’s in here?’ he asked, uncovering the nearest.

‘You know – just more junk we found.’ Inside were some of the items which had been retrieved during the excavation of the foyer; plastic bottles, a dirty rucksack, a wallet, several purses and a dozen half rotted shoes. In the second case were two almost complete skeletons, plus an assortment of bones; parts of craniums, femurs and fibulas. A handwritten notice above the case read that the two skeletons had been unearthed in a corner of the station. Just over there, he guessed, looking at the plan and trying to imagine what several bodies might have once looked like, heaped on top of each other. The first skeleton was of a male, identified as Robert Wynberg; an American, forty-two years old. On his wrist he still wore a plastic watch. It showed 5.12 p.m. The second was that of a female, but missing an arm and a lower leg. She was identified as Gloria Onulwalu, fifty-five years old and an employee of London Underground. A faded blue tunic half covered her rib cage and pinned on the left hand breast pocket was a plastic badge, browned by time, but clearly showing: I’m Gloria – love to help you. He contemplated them for some moments, but decided he would prefer to smoke and laze in the sunshine outside, in the copse that was now Piccadilly Circus.

Andy finned his way down the tunnel with slow stokes, turning his head every few moments to make sure that the others were keeping up. He saw a fading line of flashlights. His concern was the divers churning up the silt. Clumsy finning would disturb it, blinding the others who followed. Silt took hours to settle, which could make the return trip that much more hazardous. This was why Andy made it a rule never to go down with groups of more than twenty.