The first mistake was calling them witnesses.
There were forty-three follow-up statements by lunchtime, which sounded excellent until I noticed that twenty-nine had used the phrase a red coat, wet at the shoulders. Nobody describes a coat that way unless they have read it somewhere or are being paid by the word.
Shortly before eight that morning, a woman had apparently come out of the sealed tunnel beneath Central Station. She had asked a cleaner what year it was and thrown up into a bin. By nine, the city's incident feed had published the cleaner's statement. By ten, the woman had a name, a photograph, and a fan account claiming she was a warning from the future.
By eleven, the transport authority wanted me to certify that she had never been there.
I work in the Office of Record Dependence. Our name is a bureaucratic way of saying that if three newspapers quote the same idiot, the city does not have three idiots' worth of evidence. Most days I spend hours finding the first mouth a sentence came from. Sometimes it belongs to a printer. That is the part they left out of my job interview.
“It's a sealed tunnel,” said my manager, Kern, standing in my doorway with the expression he wore when a problem threatened to become visible to elected people. “It was filled in forty years ago. There isn't a door.”
“Then this should be quick.”
He put a printout on my desk. The woman in the photograph looked about thirty. Her hair was plastered to her forehead. Her coat was dark, and the shoulders were wet, but the colour was impossible to tell under the station's orange lights.
“She's asking for someone called Nola Fenwick,” Kern said.
That was my name.
At Central, the station manager had installed a rope barrier around the stretch of wall where a door did not exist. People lined up to photograph the rope. Hardly anyone turned a camera towards the wall.
The cleaner, Mrs Dace, showed me the bin. She was furious that someone had moved it.
“I saw her come from the wall,” she said. “Don't make that face. I know what a wall is.”
I asked what colour the coat was.
“Green. Why?”
The feed had it red. Mrs Dace looked at my screen and made a sound of professional disgust.
“They took the statement over the phone. The boy asked whether it was red. I said it could have been. I was cleaning sick out of the escalator.”
The boy had entered red coat, wet at the shoulders into the incident system. The system had pushed an alert to staff phones. Twenty-nine people had repeated the phrase in their statements. Nine more had paraphrased the alert. The other five had not seen her either: four worked in a different station, and one had been in hospital since Friday.
The station camera faced the wall. The woman entered its frame from the left, beside the public toilets. On Kern's printout, three stills sat in a neat row: woman at the wall, barrier alarm, woman walking away. The camera clock was twelve minutes slow.
I called him.
“Mrs Dace saw her by the bin,” I said. “Your film starts at the toilets.”
“Good. So it's finished.”
“The woman is still here.”
“The woman is somebody's problem. The tunnel is ours.”
He hung up. A few minutes later, the authority's statement appeared on the feed: No independently verified access to the former tunnel has occurred. It sat beneath the woman's photograph. The man beside me read it, put his phone away and left.
She was in the station office with a paper cup of tea. She had not drunk it. Her coat, hanging on the chair, was green.
“Nola,” she said, and stood up too quickly.
I had expected a stranger who knew my name. I had not expected her to know what my face looked like when I was trying not to show fear.
“Who are you?”
“Romy.”
I knew one Romy. She was nine years old and at school, where she was supposed to be making a papier-mâché volcano. She had the same narrow gap between her front teeth as this woman. My mother had it too.
“Who told you to ask for me?”
“You did.”
She pushed the paper cup away. Her hands were shaking.
“I know how this sounds. I practised saying it on the train. It sounded bad there as well.”
“Which train?”
“The one that came through the old tunnel.”
I looked at the station manager. He looked at his shoes.
Romy saw the exchange and laughed once, without humour. “Right. We're still at that stage.”
I asked her for something only my daughter would know. She told me about the small blue button I kept in a kitchen drawer because Romy had pulled it off her rabbit costume and cried when I offered to sew it back on. She told me I would lose my temper the following winter over a school form and apologise badly. I kept my hand on the untouched cup of tea between us.
Then she said, “The station will close the service doors at six. Don't let them.”
“Why?”
“Because people are in there.”
She meant the tunnel. Kern had scheduled a concrete pour for that evening. A routine reinforcement job, ordered weeks earlier. If there was an opening behind the wall, the pour would fill the access shaft.
“How many people?” I asked.
“I don't know. There were five in my carriage when the lights went out. I only saw myself get off.”
I tried to picture five people in the space behind the wall. All I could remember of it was a maintenance door painted shut.
I went to the old records room under the station. Its last keeper had retired without handing over a password, so the authority had solved the problem by never connecting the room to anything. There were track plans, paper maintenance logs and a cupboard of objects nobody had dared throw away in case one of them was load-bearing.
The 1984 tunnel closure file said the passage had been filled. A second file, older and handwritten, showed a service recess beside the passage. It had its own narrow access hatch. The closure drawing had flattened the two spaces into one rectangle. The concrete crew would have relied on the newer plan.
I took photographs and rang Kern again.
“There may be a recess behind the wall,” I said. “Pause the pour until we check it.”
“Is this because she says she's your daughter?”
“It's because your drawing is wrong.”
“The drawing was approved.”
“So was the one that put a toilet where the fire stairs are. We use that as a stationery cupboard now.”
“You have no evidence of anyone inside.”
I laid the two drawings side by side. In one, concrete filled the space. In the other, a narrow hatch led into it.
“Stop the pour long enough to open that hatch,” I said.
Kern said the contractor would charge for a day's delay. I wrote the amount in the margin beside the hatch.
I filled in a safety hold. The box for a second signature stayed empty. Only the station manager could sign it, and he had spent the morning telling journalists that a wall was a wall.
I rang our neighbour to collect the younger Romy from school, then brought the station manager the two plans. He studied them for a long time.
“If I sign,” he said, “they'll say I knew about the recess.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Then write that down.”
“They'll still say it.”
“Probably,” I said.
He signed.
At five forty, a crew opened the service hatch. Mrs Dace insisted on watching. Romy waited with us, holding the station manager's torch so tightly that the plastic creaked.
The recess smelled of dust and hot metal. Beyond it lay a maintenance cavity just wide enough for a person to crouch in. The crew found four people there: two station contractors, a man in a business suit, and a child carrying a bag of toy dinosaurs. All were alive. The contractors had entered through the service hatch that morning to investigate a reported knock. The hatch had jammed behind them. The other two could not explain how they got in. Neither remembered a train. The child asked for her mother.
Romy stared into the cavity as the crew brought them out.
“There were five,” she said.
“Four,” said the foreman.
“Five counting me.”
The foreman gave me the entry time for the two contractors: nine thirty. Mrs Dace had seen Romy before eight. Romy looked at their overalls.
“They weren't in my carriage.”
The foreman sounded the back wall of the cavity with a steel rod. It answered solidly. He did it again, further down. When the little girl found her mother, I took the torch back from Romy and asked him to leave the hatch open.
The suited man had a ticket from a line that had never used the old tunnel. The child's mother said they had been separated on a crowded platform. She kept smoothing the girl's hair while I searched the station footage for the moment her daughter reached the hatch.
Kern called to congratulate me on the safety hold and ask for the report to be titled Four persons recovered from obsolete service space. He did not ask about Romy.
The station manager brought us the old closure ledger. Its final entry listed the filled passage, the recess, and a note in a different hand: If someone comes through, keep the hatch open until all are counted. There was no date beside it. The ink looked old. The handwriting could have belonged to any of the people who had kept the book.
“What do I put in the report?” he asked.
Romy watched the little girl with the dinosaurs being bundled into a coat by her mother. Her own green coat was still dripping onto the station floor.
I handed him my pen. “Put the note in. All of it.”
That night, I struck out Kern's title and entered the four people by name. I attached the first station alert to the thirty-eight statements that had followed it. On the next form I wrote Woman identifying herself as Romy Fenwick. The box marked route of arrival stayed empty. I left the safety hold in place for the night crew.
Kern rang twice. I let it ring.
At home, my daughter was asleep at the kitchen table beside a volcano that had collapsed under its own glue. I carried her upstairs. When I came back, the older Romy was still standing in the doorway. I had spent the journey wondering what she would say when she met the child. She asked whether she could wash her coat.
“Of course,” I said.
She picked up the little blue button from the drawer while I looked for washing powder. Then she put it back. We both pretended I hadn't seen.
I made up the sofa. She set her coat over a chair where it would drip onto the mat and waited for me to show her the light switch.
When I turned off the light, the older Romy said, “What should she call me?”
“We can ask her in the morning.”
The house settled around us with its ordinary clicks. Upstairs, my daughter called out in her sleep, and both of us answered her.
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