Secret Story

Chapter One "Dudley, there's something I haven't been telling you," she said, and at once he was terrified that she knew. Chapter Two Her first mistake was thinking he was mad. As the train left the station he started to talk in a low passionate voice. They were alone in the carriage farthest from the driver, except for two beer bottles rolling about in their own stains and bumping together as if they were trying to mate on the unswept floor. Greta pretended she was moving away from them and not from the young man crouched low on his seat. She sat close to the doors into the next carriage and was taking the latest prize-winning bestseller by Dudley Smith out of her handbag when she saw he was talking to a mobile phone. "I don't know what you want," she could just hear. "I thought you said I gave you what you asked for. If that's not love I don't know what is." She moved to sit with her back to him in case she embarrassed him. When the train pulled into Birkenhead Park she glanced over her shouldershe could have been looking for someone on the platform. He'd slipped the phone into his discreetly elegant suit jacket and was staring straight ahead. Even at that distance she saw the unused intelligence in eyes blue as a summer sky; he looked mature beyond his years. His hair was neatly cropped, his nose straight, lips firm, chin square. She turned away before he caught her watching. Then four men in track suits stampeded over the pedestrian bridge. They made for the front carriage. She let out a breath of relief and wished she'd taken the opportunity to make some remark to the young man. As the train gathered speed she opened her book. She was anxious to find out what happened next, but she hadn't finished a paragraph when she heard a door slam. The men were coming up the train. She felt trapped by the overgrown embankments that were tarred with dark. Then an underground tunnel chased those away and closed with a roar around the train. The first man flung the door between the carriages wide, and the four of them strutted down the aisle. There was room for one of them next to her, and three on the facing seat. Before she could move closer to the young man with the phone, they boxed her in. The man beside her put his feet up, blocking her escape. He smelled of sweat and tobacco smoke and too much aftershaveperhaps he'd slapped it on his bald grey scalp. The man opposite her gave her a loose wet grin with yellow teeth and a bloody gap in them under his broken nose. "On your own, love?" "Must be," said the man in the middle and spat across the aisle. "She's got to read a book." The man he'd spat past rolled up his purple sleeve and scratched a hairy tattoo of a skull inside a heart. "What's it about?" Greta never liked to be rude. "Someone everybody thinks is ordinary," she said, "but really he's a master criminal." "Sounds great," bloody-mouth seemed to think. "Give us a read of it." He opened the paperback so wide she winced, and stuck his finger in. She would have asked him to be gentle, but the tattooed man took out a packet of cigarettes. "You can't smoke on the train," she said. "We can do what we like, love," said the man with his legs up. "Plenty's saidCampbell, Ramsey is the author of 'Secret Story', published 2006 under ISBN 9780765316165 and ISBN 0765316161.