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James’s Park. More protesters. More commuters. The same thing: train arrived, no sign of Sam, train departed. Next I loaded up Westminster. Zipping forward to just after 8 a.m., I hit Play. Sam’s train wouldn’t be arriving for another five minutes, but I wanted to get a sense of how it was before his arrival.
    Westminster was a battlefield: a sea of faces, a mass of bodies. Basically the perfect place to instigate an escape plan. The doors opened. I watched closely, every head, every face, while my mind continued to turn things over.
    The station had been set up to funnel people off and away from the trains as fast as possible. In the middle, one of the exits had a sign on the wall next to it that said: PROTESTERS EXIT HERE . At the far end of the station, I could just about make out another sign above another exit: NON - PROTESTERS EXIT HERE . The attempt to smooth traffic flow hadn’t worked: the platform was jammed with people not moving at all.
    As Sam’s train emerged into the station, I hit Pause and inched it on again with the right cursor. When the doors opened it was like a dam breaking: people poured out – almost fell out – a mix of suited executives, tourists looking lost, and legions of red shirts, all heading for the march. The wave of movement had been too fast, and scattered in too many directions, to keep track of properly, so I stopped the video before it got any further, dragged the slider back sixty seconds and started again.
    This time I went even more slowly. I knew which carriage Sam had been in, so kept my attention fixed on it asthe doors slid open. A ton of people spilt out – but not Sam. Once or twice, I thought I spotted him – fair hair, black suit, blue tie – but then a face would turn in my direction and it was someone else. I rewound the footage a third time and concentrated on the protesters. If I was assuming he might use the demonstration as cover, I had to consider the possibility he might pull on a red T-shirt too. I slowed the action down to a crawl and searched the sea of faces. Anyone who looked like him. Anyone with a T-shirt over a suit, or over a shirt and tie. Anyone carrying a jacket, a briefcase or both. There was nothing. On the fourth and final run-through, I kept my eyes on the carriage itself. As it emptied, I hoped to glimpse Sam still inside the train. But, once again, there was no sign of him.
    Then, further down the platform, a fight broke out.
    At first, there was a swell of movement, like the eye of a whirlpool, and then it spread out, crowds pushing back in all directions, trying to avoid being caught up. Pretty soon it became obvious what was going on: two men, one in the red of the protest march, another in a white T-shirt with a Union Jack on the back, were throwing punches at each other.
    Six Underground staff, stationed at equal distances along the back wall of the platform, descended on them immediately, but not before people had stopped to watch and the whole station had come to a halt. From the carriages of the train, people peered out, trying to see what was going on. Some even stepped on to what space they could find on the platform to take a look. From the bottom of the shot, another member of London Underground emerged, waving his hands, presumably telling people tomove up the platform and create space. But it was complete chaos: people seemed to be ignoring him, unable to hear him or see him, or more interested by what was going on further up. Within ten seconds, the Tube staff had created a kind of makeshift wall, three of them in a semicircle around the fight, the other three trying to break it up and move everyone on. It took another twenty seconds for them to put an end to it, and then the two men were taken off through the exit at the middle of the platform, and the remaining staff got things moving again. As the man in the white T-shirt got closer to the camera, I could see what was printed on the front: CUT NOW, STRONGER LATER .
    But,