A Very Big Bang by Philip McCutchan

Author:Philip McCutchan [McCutchan, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Media
Published: 2018-06-13T22:00:00+00:00

Eleven

Walking the silent underground had been the eeriest of night experiences: an empty station, closed booking hall with shuttered windows, the escalators motionless, the girls in scanty underwear staring from unappreciated adverts, showing their almost all to the desert air. Voices, kept lowered as though in church, tended to echo even so. Shard and Partington, after an infuriating visit to West End Central nick, walked down the escalator one behind the other, waited on the dim platform for the arrival of the maintenance gang’s train that would take them to Charing Cross. The train’s racket was heard long before its arrival, a weirdly rising sound in the stillness. It cascaded in, stopped to take the two passengers aboard: workmen of London Transport stared without much interest, carrying their meal-tins and thermos flasks of tea, bags of tools on oily seats beside them, air thick with smoke. Discreetly Shard studied the faces: like the rest of workaday London, all colours from Tide white to deepest black, but no one who looked like the Middle East. That didn’t have to mean much: Shard tried not to think that what was going to happen, could happen tonight. They rattled on, swaying, not talking now. The train decanted them at Charing Cross, along with some of the maintenance men, then roared away into the tunnel. The gangs dispersed about their business and Shard followed Partington towards a locked telephone box. The security man opened it up and made a brief call.

Ringing off and leaving the box unlocked, he said, “They’ll call back when the current’s off.”

“No more workmen’s trains?”

Partington shook his head. “Not on this section.”

They waited: a long wait — Partington said, until the train they’d come in had cleared the length of track that would be affected by the power cut-off. When the confirming call came, the jangle shattered the silence horribly. Partington answered, acknowledged, re-locked the box.

“All safe, Mr Shard.”

Down onto the line, along the track: Shard remembered the traditional advice to drunks: don’t pee on the live rail. Walking close, trousers touching from time to time, he shivered. If and when the blow-up came, if it was what he feared, killing doses of power were going to be water-borne like lightning along the system before someone cut the supply.

Into the tunnel, into thick, thick darkness sliced by a powerful beam from Partington’s workmanlike torch. A stale smell, a smell of metal and grime and damp: they moved on, stumbling over the rails of the four foot eight-and-a-half inch gauge: two conductor rails, in the centre a negative that was nominally at 220 volts below neutral, at the side of the track a positive, nominally at 440 volts above neutral; the negative rail was held on the centre of the jarrahwood sleepers by porcelain insulators, the positive being held in insulators on special wooden blocks sunk into the concrete that on the deep tracks took the place of the ballast used in the open sections and in the sub-surface tunnels of such lines as the District.

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