Was the stranger I observed from the train part of an unsolved crime?

In the latest in his series of reflections about place and pathway, Will Gore wonders whether the people we pass are part of something more exciting

Pondering a backstory is a great way to pass our time on a journey (Getty/iStock)

Fleeting glimpses of people seen from train windows are useful plot devices for murder mysteries.

Last week I was on a London-bound train near Bushey in Hertfordshire when I happened to glance out, just as we rumbled past an area of muddy wasteland. It was a sizeable plot; a couple of acres perhaps, much longer than it was wide. And while it was both pretty barren and surrounded by rough boarding to keep the public out, evidently vehicles had travelled through it with some regularity, judging by the sludgy track that wound its way between areas of scrubby undergrowth.

At the northern end, a flimsy looking gate – really just two hinged boards chained loosely together – hung partially open, almost an affront to the notion of security. And hurrying towards them was a man in a dark suit, with a shoulder bag at his side. He had dark hair too I think, and the suit itself looked fairly old (or cheap). I couldn’t see his shoes, but they must have been filthy. What’s he up to, I thought to myself, like some wannabe member of the Secret Seven. And it’s true to note that I have recently been reading a lot of Enid Blyton books to my four-year-old, so perhaps I was on alert for suspicious or unusual behaviour. Was he fleeing the scene of a crime, or hunting for buried loot? Was he the missing link in a previously unsolved conspiracy? By rights, I should have jotted down a description in my Famous Five notepad there and then, before pausing for ginger beer.

It’s conceivable of course that he was desperately trying to catch a train, taking a shortcut through a future housing estate which has been land-banked by a developer and left to fester. He may, more embarrassingly, have been caught short and popped through the wonky gate to find a place to relieve himself. Or maybe he was a surveyor, working on behalf of the aforementioned developer and getting muddy soles for his troubles.

It’s always fun to wonder. Just as I wondered about the German family who we met at Scotland’s most remote youth hostel. Or the American guy who my friends and I ended up having a pizza with in the back streets of Naples. Or the couple who were walking out to a darkening headland in Devon just as I was feeling grateful to be off it. I speculated wildly about the lot of them, imagining them to be spies, escapees, smugglers – anything rather than mere holidaymakers.

Yet, as I thought about the suited man in a patch of wasteland near Watford, I wondered what other people – thousands of them over the years – must have thought of me, a stranger passing them by just for a moment.

Most, presumably, would not have looked twice. And the man who drove past me once, wound down his window and yelled “oi mate, you look like a w****r” was clear enough in his view. But what about people who saw me weaving tearfully across Waterloo Bridge after one too many (once too often) in my 20s? Or those who saw me walking in suit and sunglasses through Sarajevo old town 10 yards behind an ageing British academic in the mid-2000s. Too young for a bodyguard, they’d conclude; maybe an MI5 trainee? I wish.

And did anyone see me trudging across a desolate stretch of moor not far from Hathersage in January 2015, through drizzle and thick fog, and wonder who I was speaking to on the phone, out there in the middle of nowhere? The caller was, as it happens, the former editor of The Independent, but I’d like to think any hidden onlookers might have thought it was someone even more exciting – if that is possible.

Whenever we look at strangers in our midst and imagine what their backstory might be, what keys they might hold to unknown mysteries, perhaps it pays to remember they might be thinking just the same about us.