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for us to be talking to him, to be near him,’ Jane said.‘I tried to get him to tell me more but he wouldn’t.’
    Alex Churchill nodded. ‘I tried again at the hospital too, but he said it was useless, that nobody could help him. He sounded full of despair.’
    Ella thought Alex himself sounded pretty low too. ‘Did he have a psych history?’ she asked.
    ‘Not that he admitted to us,’ Jane said.
    ‘Did he suffer any sort of head injury inthe accident?’
    ‘He didn’t have so much as a bruise.’
    ‘The airbag had gone off, but otherwise it looked very low impact,’ Alex said. ‘The damage to the bonnet wasn’t severe. There were no skid marks, and no damage to the back as if somebody had hit him. It looked like he really did drive himself into the pole.’
    ‘Did he tell you who was after him?’ Ella asked.
    ‘He said hecouldn’t tell us, that it was dangerous for us to know,’ Jane said.
    ‘So he had someone in mind?’ Murray said. ‘It wasn’t some random bad guy, or agent from the government, or whatever?’
    ‘I got the feeling he knew who it was,’ Jane said.
    Murray glanced towards the train. ‘And you’re certain it’s him under there?’
    ‘We saw his face,’ Alex said. ‘There’s no doubt.’
    Ellacircled RPA in her notebook. That would be the next step: to find out if he was assessed and what was found. Doctor Callum McLennan might be on shift. She felt a peculiar mix of hope and trepidation at the thought.
    ‘What details did he give you?’ Murray asked.
    ‘His name’s Marko Meixner,’ Jane said again. ‘He’s thirty-five years old and lives in North Sydney. I can’t remember his exactaddress, but it’s on my case sheet up in the ambulance. I don’t know anything else about him. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but some guys don’t, do they.’
    She sounded upset. Ella studied her, then looked around. ‘North Sydney.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘This is the platform for the Bankstown line,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t going home.’
    Murray put his hands on his hips. ‘So where was he going?’
    *
    The female witness in the pink shirt described the man who’d pushed her as wearing a brown cap, jeans and a black T-shirt. Her name was Jessica Sullivan and she was twenty-five years old and lived in St Peters. She carried a bright pink handbag tucked high under her left arm and held two paper bags from The Body Shop in her right hand. Her hair was tall and pink and so were her heels.
    ‘He shoved right past me,’ she said.
    ‘Did you say anything to him?’
    She shook her head. ‘I thought he was crazy, and everyone knows you don’t engage with the crazies. But he was gone in a second anyway.’
    ‘Did you see much of his face?’ Murray asked. ‘Or his arms? Notice any tattoos, anything like that?’
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘I only saw the side of his face, and it was forthe briefest fraction of a second. He was white, and he didn’t have a beard or a mo, but that’s about all I could say.’
    ‘What happened then?’ Ella asked.
    ‘Almost straightaway the smoke started. There was screaming and a mad rush for the stairs at the same time as the train came in. I went up the stairs too, then thought perhaps the crazy had something to do with the fire. I told aguard on the gates up there about it and she said I should tell the police. It was after that I heard somebody fell in front of the train. Was it him?’
    ‘We don’t think so,’ Murray said.
    ‘It was just some commuter?’ She shook her head. ‘That’s awful.’
    The witness in the black-and-white striped dress told them she’d been close to the spot where the smoke started. She was fifty-five,lived in Punchbowl, and her name was Sally-Anne Petrie. She smelled of cigarettes and breath freshener, and had a tiny red stone embedded in her left front tooth.
    ‘I tend to notice things, you know? Things that would never register on anyone else’s radar. So I’m standing there and I heard a noise like somebody