The Report Read Online Free PDF Page A

and people spat. Then, the hard, gritty surfaces and the nearness of strangers’ bodies had revolted him. Now all that mattered was quiet. Sleep. The peace and rest of almost safety. He closed his eyes and imagined it, his body stretching along the wall, taking the cold and the damp, Clare’s along his. She didn’t need a lot of protecting, but this he could do.
    Constable Henderson heard someone call his name, but he didn’t respond. Best now to blend in, he thought. He told himself there was still time to get to his post. He’d work his way to the front and, once there, calm everyone down. But as the crowd grew closer, worry flooded in. “Wait!” he called. “Let me through!” No one paid any attention. “Let me through!”
    At the bottom of the first flight of steps, Ada let go of Tilly. Just for an instant. Then she and the girls stumbled onto the landing, where they were steadied by a strong man reaching toward them in the crowd. With her right hand, Ada started Tilly down the second flight of seven steps, safely into the booking hall. Ada’s left hand, arm outstretched, still held Emma. But something was happening: people were falling onto the last step above the landing, and she felt Emma’s small hand slip. Ada heard her cry, “Mama!”—then she was gone. The stairwell seemed to swallow her; the weight of the falling crowd sucked her in. “My daughter’s in there!” Ada screamed, and she clawed at the people in her way. A few seconds later, she turned to one person for help, a warden in a white tin hat. But when she saw the terror and confusion on this man’s face, she became silent, full of purpose. She would have to get Emma out by herself. The people were jumbled together, like fingers clasped in wretched, twisting prayer. Ada ran at the mass of fallen, interlocked bodies again and again, her daughter still calling.
    Bertram stretched up as tall as he could, trying to see what was keeping the crowd back. All he could see was a jostling black mass darker than the night. He smelled sweat on his shirt, and the breath and sweat of the people all around. His stomach heaved, his mouth convulsed as if it were not his own. He knew this street; it had always seemed spacious. He remembered a bus accident that had once blocked the intersection for hours, but that was a crowd paralyzed by tragedy. This was a crowd in motion, a crowd with a destination, unprepared to change its course. Bertram felt elbows and shoulders; tears and sweat covered his cheeks, but he couldn’t raise his hands to wipe them—his arms were pinned. Nothing looked or felt right: even the tree branches above seemed reaching and wrong. He thought of the plans he’d had, Clare at the shelter, her slow smile when she saw the notebook. The crowd compressed even more—he couldn’t draw a deep breath—and then Bertram, temperate and kind, who would have said compassion would last longer, struggled to get his arms up, his hands on the back of the man in front of him. The crowd pressed tighter, friend against neighbor, teacher against student, mother against child, shouting, screaming, crying.
    Inside the station, Warden Low couldn’t see the chaos unfolding outside, but when he looked up from his desk and saw empty space where there should have been a queue at the escalators, he was among the first to understand. If the booking hall was empty, there was an obstruction at the entrance. He immediately called the police station to report an accident, then sprinted across the booking hall. “For God’s sake, keep back!” he cried. People were falling from the upper steps, one after another, already several layers deep. The pensioner Bill Steadman was there, reaching and pulling, but within seconds there was a solid wall of people filling the space between the bottom step and the ceiling. The edge of the mass looked as if it should tip down onto the landing, but it did not.
    Wardens Clarke and Bryant abandoned the escalators and came to