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woman entered the shot, walked to the middle of the platform and stood there checking her phone. Three minutes later, more people joined her. Then more. By 6 a.m., the station was starting to get busy.
    I grabbed the timeline on the video window and dragged it right, stopping at 6.50. By now, the station was in full flow, people filing off the trains, but mostly filing on. The camera above the entrance to the platform gave a good view. If the Wrens’ house was half a mile from the Tube station, and he was averaging two miles per hour, Sam would enter at about 7.20, and be in shot by 7.30.
    He took a little longer.
    At 7.45 a.m., he emerged on to the eastbound platform,moving in a mass of bodies. It was incredibly busy, even for a weekday morning. At one stage, he got stuck behind an old couple – tourists – who looked shell-shocked by the carnage unfolding around them, but eventually he found a space on the platform, about two lines back from the edge. He was holding a takeaway coffee in his left hand, which was why he must have taken longer to get to the station, and a briefcase in his right. The coffee was interesting. It suggested a routine; as if this day wasn’t that different from any other and he hadn’t been expecting any surprises. And yet, in the washed-out colours of the CCTV footage, he looked even worse than in the photo Julia had given me: paler, thinner, his eyes dark smudges against his face. He just stood there the whole time, staring into space.
Did you have a plan?
I thought.
Or did you only decide to take off once you were on the Tube?
    The train emerged from the edge of the shot, its doors opening, and the scramble began. You could tell the regular commuters: they barged their way on to the train, eyes fixed on the doors, everyone around them expendable. Sam was the same. When someone tried to move in front of him, he shuffled into their line of sight.
    Then he was on the train.
    The doors closed.
    And the train was gone from shot.
    I got up, poured myself a glass of water, returned and loaded up the second video – South Kensington – and fast-forwarded it. Sam’s train had left Gloucester Road at 7.51; two minutes later it was pulling into South Kensington. I leaned in, trying to get a handle on the chaos. Like Gloucester Road, the platform was packed: shoulder toshoulder, men and women stood on its edges, jostling as the train doors opened.
    A second’s lull, and then people started pouring out. I shifted even closer to the screen and pressed Pause. This time, I edged it on manually using the cursor keys. The camera was about three-quarters of the way down the platform, and was taking in about 80 per cent of the train. At Gloucester Road, Sam had boarded the second carriage from the front, so – unless he’d spent the two-minute journey sprinting from one end of the train to the other, barging commuters out of the way – he would be visible if he got off.
    But he didn’t get off.
    The whole place was jammed. I played it and replayed it a couple of times just to be sure, but there was still no sign of him.
    It was the same story at Sloane Square.
    At Victoria, it was going to be even harder to pick him out. It doubled up as a mainline station, so the platform was just a sea of heads. Then I saw something else: a group of men and women, all dressed in the same red T-shirts, all holding placards.
    A demonstration.
    I downsized the video file and googled ‘16 December protest’. The top hit was a report from the
Guardian
about a march on Parliament by opponents of the government’s spending cuts. I remembered it. Authorities had asked that protesters use the Circle line, and commuters, tourists and everyone else use the District. The warning looked to have been heeded by some, but not all. And certainly not by Sam. If he’d planned his escape beforehand, he couldn’t have picked a better day.
    I checked Victoria’s footage, without any sign of him, then moved on to the next stop, St