Samit Chatterjee

Who they are

A Community Regulation Officer at Westacres, the shopping centre on London’s western fringe — a security guard in all but title, and a devout Muslim. He works the fountain hub, because every corridor in the centre meets there, and he has been at the job long enough to have apprehended exactly one shoplifter and to have seen exactly one flash mob, from the sidelines at Liverpool Street. Spook Street gives him a shift, not a life: the first working day of the year, windows dressed for a spring that has not arrived, wet floor under everything.

He is the first person Spook Street shows us, and the first of its forty-odd dead. The prologue is his, and it is written as comedy — the three youths with the holdall, the groups converging from every avenue, the crowd stripping off outer layers to show bright shirts, the ghetto-blaster, the dancing — right up to the moment the hub goes up. Samit is briefly caught up in it. He raises a hand to his mouth to hide a smile, or a chorus, and the narration notes that the gesture helped shield his teeth, by which he was later identified. That is the whole of his afterlife in Spook Street: a dental record and a phrase in a briefing.

The Park’s account later reduces him to the guard who suspected something and was killed. He did suspect something — he unclipped his radio and transmitted when he saw the groups converging — and what happened to that transmission is not recorded.

What they want

Stated: to get through the shift without trouble, and to do the job properly, which in his case means the fountain hub, the radio, and a professional suspicion he acts on rather than explains away.

What Spook Street shows him wanting in the thirty seconds before he dies is ordinary and human: to watch. The flash mob is the second he has ever seen and the first he has been inside, and the text lets him enjoy it. The bomb is planted so that this is the last thing he does.

Book 4 — Spook Street

• C00 — Point of view. On duty at the fountain hub on the first working day of the year, he spots the holdall, sees group after group converging, radios it in, and is killed when the flash mob turns out to be cover for the bomb.
• C03 — Offstage. Appears in the Park’s account of Westacres as the guard who suspected something and was killed; the identification by his teeth is already established.

Tells

The fixed post at the fountain, chosen because every corridor meets there — the habit of a man who thinks about sightlines. The radio unclipped before he is sure. And the hand brought up to the mouth, which is how he is remembered and how he is named.

Open questions

What he actually said on the radio, and whether anyone at Westacres acted on it. Who planted the device and how, which the prologue deliberately does not say. Whether his family were ever told more than that he was identified by his teeth — Spook Street does not go back.