The train journey

She knew when they reached East Croydon that she was going to die. Her killer had boarded at Haywards Heath in a tang of sweat. He wore a crumpled suit. In his dark skin he limped down the aisle. The train jolted. He grabbed the back of Julia's seat to steady himself. She felt his fingers graze her hair.

People said she was superstitious but she had instincts. She was right about Harry being a bad egg. She lacked Nan's judgement. She was learning. But like Nan said, there was much to be afraid of.

The murderer sat opposite. His waist was narrow like a girl's but he had wide hands. Strangler's hands. The carriage was nearly empty. An overweight couple slumped against each other in the seat behind and a boy sat across from her, eyes shut in a reverie of guitar.

No one had noticed.

Julia tensed as the man reached inside his jacket. When he extracted a banana, she relaxed. Why would he carry a gun? This was the 14.17 Southern service from Lewes, not the LA subway. He'd be dangerous later.

She watched him sideways. He slit his banana down its length with a fingernail and broke it apart piece by piece. His olive cheeks pulsed as he ate. He was thinner than she'd thought. The press had bored of the story soon after the last attack, but Julia never forgot a face, even a composite. They'd got his eyebrows wrong.

He folded his banana skin and it splayed like legs opening. Julia felt a surge of panic. What would she do at Victoria Station? She had read about his methods in the Daily Mail. He would pursue her into the darkest corner.

She turned away. Now he had eaten, he would seek prey. She watched the rooftops beat past, heart pounding. The train was well into the hinterland of Greater London when she felt his gaze on her neck.

Across the bridge at Battersea, the Thames glinted. Joanna would have leant across to look at the last of the sunset, thinking of cocktails by the river with the girls, but the man might think she was a tourist and an even easier victim. She tried to breathe and stared at the headrest with its airport pattern, rubbed pale from a million heads.

He was looking at her breasts in her cashmere sweater, the one that had shrunk. She didn't trust those Chinese dry cleaners. Her lungs tightened. Fear almost made her pass out. What would she do at Victoria?

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Edward was having a bad day.

He ate his banana on the train, peeling it in his usual way. At school, a rumour had gone round that if you ate it with the fruit jutting upwards, monkey-style, you were a faggot. Thirty years had passed and Edward was fine with being gay, but he still couldn't peel a banana. He wondered how many other public schoolboys were similarly afflicted.

He hated the hospice visits. Every time, more of his mother slipped away. What was left of her eighty years bobbed in a mulch of TV dinners and impatient nurses. Sometimes she latched onto a shiny memory – her rose garden or Edward's name – and burst up like a child with an apple at Halloween, only to sink again.

He glanced at the girl on the other side of the car. Pink and flustered, she was awkwardly tugging at her sweater. Was she all right? What did one do in these situations? He looked around for the source of her discomfort and gave the boy with the loud earphones a good hard glare - disrespectful youth - before settling back into his seat.

It was a glistening spring evening and the Sussex countryside soothed him. Renewed with rain, trees and hedgerows fought to claim the deepest green. Rabbits dotted the corners of the fields. But the guilt returned as the train rattled into Victoria Station. A new week meant another visit. He gathered his possessions and filed into line to wait the thirty seconds before the doors opened.

It was then that it happened. The headphone boy with the angelic rounded features eased his hand into the girl's bag. She stood oblivious, staring at the door as if she could will it to open. The boy slid out a purse and slipped it into his guitar case, nodding his head to the beat.

Edward was shocked.

"Wait a minute." He pushed past the woman in front of him. "Hey. You can't do that."

The doors opened and the boy dropped like a cat onto the platform. Edward lumbered after him, conscious of the girl running just ahead. His leg was still bad from the operation; the girl lacked agility and the boy was gone when they reached the barrier. Edward touched her arm. She spun and froze, dropping her bag. Edward retrieved it.

"Look, I'm terribly sorry," he said. She flicked her gaze between him and the bag. There was empty terror in her eyes. Edward tried a smile. "Is there anything I can do?"

The girl spat with full force at him. Edward recoiled.

"I'm sorry," he said, mechanically. He felt the prick of tears. "Wait a minute." He held out her handbag but she lunged for the exit. People turned to look and Edward dropped his arms.

"Bugger."

He stood on the platform until the crowd had passed to regain his composure. He wiped the spit from his cheek and looked into the handbag. A mobile phone and a bullet-shaped object he took to be a lipstick. He carried the bag out of the station like a vase of expensive flowers. Trouble down in the tube again. Luminous police officers jogged up the stairs and secured the exit. Edward approached them.

"Excuse me, would you point me in the direction of the lost property office?"

A distracted policewoman looked through him.

"I'm sorry, sir, there's a casualty. You can't come this way."

A casualty? Edward sucked in his breath. He shook his head and backed away. Terrorism, maybe, or one of those schizophrenics you read about. London was too much. Sometimes he thought his mother had it easy, lost in her mulch. In her day, you could trust your fellow countrymen. She had hitchhiked alone around Britain in her RAF uniform, "safe as a penny" as she liked to say. Now you never knew if a potential killer was in the next car, bombs slung around his waist. Even Edward raised suspicions, with his dark skin. Him, a threat. He couldn't help but smile at the thought as he walked towards St James's Park, dislodging a pigeon from a scrap. It jumped into the gutter.

So much to be afraid of, he thought. It had started raining. He would hand the bag in tomorrow. Edward put up his umbrella and started for home. The thought of James cooking in the warm light of the kitchen calmed him after the trauma of the journey. Perhaps Edward would stop off for a bottle of wine.

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She fled down the platform as he pursued her. He grabbed her arm and she felt her jumper tear but she shook him off and pushed past the guard at the barrier. She skittered on her heels down the steps to the tube, thronged with people, everyone a different colour and all moving in different directions. She thrust her Oyster card against the gates and pelted forward, feeling him behind her. Rising shouts meant that others had finally seen him. There would be justice.

She hurled herself over the precipice of the escalator. A heel snagged between two steps. Julia teetered and plunged forward.

She was safe now.