[24 July]
.
"...I have been a bus-driver with the Manassas Bus Company for the last 23 years. Since January of this year I have been driving the Manassas-DC-Manassas route.
Yesterday morning there were maybe 10 or 12 passengers on the 11 a.m. ride from DC to Manassas. Three of them I know by name. Mrs Flores, the schoolteacher; she was returning from a visit to her mother at the hospital where Nurse Henry was murdered. Miss Evans, the widow of the old police chief; she had stayed overnight in DC after seeing something fancy at the theatre. And Mr Jermyn, the postman; he has his own reasons for visiting DC. There were also a number of passengers whose names I don't know off the top of my head but who I would know to see. And of course there was the man who the police are interested in. He was wearing a crumpled linen suit, a bit like those suits that Matlock used to wear on TV and his hair looked like it had been dragged backwards through a bush. He handed me a $20 bill - the fare from DC to Manassas is $12 - and told me that I could keep the change. As it happens, I had to keep the change anyhow. The company operates an exact fares policy so customers either pay their $12 or else they pay more but in any event they don't get change. It was the way this man spoke that caught my attention most. He sounded like Little Lord Fauntleroy all grown up and certainly not the kind of person whom you'd expect to be catching the mid-morning bus from DC to Manassas. Even so, there was something about his accent that wasn't quite right. I emigrated from Jamaica to England before I came to the United States so I know what a genuine upper-class English accent sounds like and his wasn't the real deal. It was too much. More like a Hollywood impression of an Englishman's accent, rather than the real thing.
Anyhow, the man sat down a few rows back and in the mirror I could see him looking at me every now and then. Strange looks as if I had somehow offended him. I paid no attention to him. As a driver I'm well used to getting odd looks from odd customers. It goes with the turf.
When we got to Manassas the man came up to me and said he'd noticed a sign which said that we had CCTV on the bus and that if he'd known his privacy was going to be violated he wouldn't have travelled by bus. I told him that the signs had been put up by the bus company in the hope that it would stop young hoodlums writing graffiti on the bus but that the cameras had never been installed. When he heard this he slapped his thigh and said this was a "cracking" story. There was something about the way he spoke and looked which made me wonder whether he wasn't quite right in the head. But he seemed pleased not to have been caught on CCTV and headed off to do whatever he had to do in Manassas.
Later on when I finished my final run of the day and was doing a tidy-up of the bus I found a newspaper on the back seat and there, staring up at me from the front page, was the strange-looking man I had carried as a bus passenger earlier that day. The picture in the paper was a police drawing and didn't quite capture him right but I have no doubt that the man in the paper and the odd-ball passenger on my bus were the same person. I read the story in the paper, saw that the man was wanted for questioning and came to the police station straightaway...".
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