It’s quiet tonight, though: no bicycle theft, no drunks as yet – it’s only Tuesday. The drunks are generally around from Thursday onwards, coming for the early morning trains home. They arrive in ones and twos, men and women, inadequately dressed and shivery, fresh from Peterborough’s choicest nightclubs. They stagger onto the platforms either arm in arm or shoving at each other. Then, inevitably, one of them will perform a sudden jackknife gesture with their upper body, go hairpin-shaped and vomit in splatty puddles all over the platform. That’s the cleaners’ problem, thank God, although Tom has been known to shovel snow and scatter grit in winter. If a blizzard falls just before the morning rush hour, he doesn’t have any choice. Peterborough Station could really do with a roof, in his opinion.

If it isn’t the drunks, it’s those with mental health issues. There have been a few incidents recently with a middle-aged woman known to the British Transport Police, clearly a raging insomniac, who roams the station as soon as it opens and bothers the early commuters. She wears a brown coat over a floor-length nightie and wellington boots and goes around tapping her lips with two fingers in a give us a fag motion, which given that nobody has been allowed to smoke on a railway station since 2007 is a somewhat futile gesture. Once in a while, a homeless person vaults the security fence – it isn’t hard to break into the station – but Tom usually catches their dropping forms on the CCTV before their feet hit the platform and he heads out and yells across the tracks that they can exit through the front or the BTP will come out. There’s never any trouble. If it’s really freezing, Tom has been known to ignore what he sees on the screens – as long as it’s a shape he recognises – and let them huddle in a waiting room for a bit, until they are discovered by whichever security guard is on duty. He knows he shouldn’t do it but some nights, he just doesn’t have the heart.

None of that is happening tonight, though. Tonight, all is silent. The only thing of interest on the CCTV screens is the fox, patrolling the station in search of any litter that might contain a scrap of food, disappearing from the corner of one screen and magically appearing in another.

Tom and Dalmar are deep in discussion about Dalmar’s career development, and only looking at the CCTV now and then – so they don’t see the fox and they don’t see the man. It is only me, hovering around the office and listening in to their discussion out of sheer boredom, who sees the man enter the station and turn towards the stairs that lead up to the covered walkway over the tracks. I know straight away where he is heading. He’s going to Platform Seven.

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