by Lear, James
“Precisely.”
“So she’s bringing the stuff in—”
“Her? Don’t be ridiculous. Daisy is one of those rare, delightful creatures who really is as stupid as she looks. What little intelligence she may once have had was used up on snaring and marrying Herbert Waits. No: Daisy is just a cover. But if you take a look inside her trunks, in among the swansdown and the sequins you will find a very large quantity of heroin.”
“Good God. Who put it there?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“Not Hugo Taylor, surely.”
“You wouldn’t think so, would you? The clean-cut hero, every mother’s son. But Hugo Taylor has his own secrets. Maybe his hands are tied.”
“Blackmail?”
“It’s possible. Scotland Yard has a file on him this thick. But we don’t act against him; what would be the point? Another career ruined, thousands of weeping fans, a lot of pointless prison sentences. I’d prefer to be out there catching the real villains. What does it matter to me whether Hugo Taylor fucks a few pretty chorus boys?”
“That’s a very enlightened view.”
“I’m a very enlightened man. As you shall find out, if we ever get to London and anywhere near a hotel room.”
“You surely don’t suspect Francis Laking?”
“Oh, I do.”
“Good grief. And what about Joseph?”
“The muscle man? Yes, it’s entirely possible. Although I think his main job is to keep Miss Athenasy quiet.”
“By fucking her.”
“Yes. And I believe she is absolutely addicted to cocksucking. You’d be surprised where those famous bee-stung lips have been.”
“So why David Rhys? What’s he got to do with anything? A diamond merchant—and a very successful one, by the look of things.”
“All that glitters is not gold—often have you heard that told.”
“You mean the diamonds were fake?”
“Come on, Mitch. Who travels by rail wearing thousands of pounds’ worth of diamond on his finger? Advertising his wealth in that way? Asking to be robbed?”
“You think this was a robbery?”
“No. I think the diamonds were a cover, and a bad cover at that. Rhys was no more a diamond merchant than I am. I suspect—and I intend to prove—that he was the ringleader of the smugglers.”
“I saw him in the bathroom with that man—Andrews.”
“When?”
“I can’t remember… Let me get this straight.” I referred to my notes. “We left York—”
“Just after I had finally got rid of those two reporters.”
“Ah, so that’s where you were. And they really were reporters, were they? Not assassins, or spies?”
Dickinson arched an eyebrow and smiled. “Oh, yes, they were reporters. And I’m afraid they were in very grave danger of ruining the whole operation with their childish curiosity.”
“On the scent of a juicy scandal, I suppose.”
“Yes—but on the wrong scent. The papers think they’re clever if they catch Daisy and Hugo traveling in a private carriage together—as if they’re carrying on some outrageous affair under the nose of her poor husband. Well, believe me, if that was the case everyone, not least Herbert Waits, would be relieved and delighted. It would mean that Hugo Taylor wasn’t picking up rough trade in East End pubs, it would mean that Daisy Athenasy wasn’t taking dope and sucking off her Albanian bodyguard, it would be a rather wholesome situation rather than the disgusting mess that we are currently in.”
“So you threw them off the train at York. Is that why we stopped?”
“No. I couldn’t have made the train stop without blowing my cover. But it was convenient. It was preferable to tying them up in the conductor’s car, which is what I was intending to do.”
“I didn’t see them get off.”
“You weren’t meant to. And as I recall, your attentions were elsewhere. On your little friend’s bum, to be precise.”
“Yes…” And the soldiers, and the engineer, and the stoker, and everyone else I had been planning to seduce. What a hopeless detective I was! I had not even noticed that two of the most suspicious characters on the train had disappeared.
“What happened next, Mitch?”
“Right, let me see…” I could only think of the things that mattered to me: fucking Bertrand, watching Dickinson’s fingers sliding in and out of his ass…
“We left our compartment, but the bathroom was locked. That’s right. That’s when I saw Rhys and Andrews coming out.”
“They had been in there together?”
“Yes. I assumed there was some kind of deal going on.”
“That’s not like you, Mitch. I would expect you to jump to a far more pleasant conclusion.”
“Not even I believe that every single man on the train is queer, superintendent.”
“The family man, complete with wife and three little girls… The best disguise in the world.”
“But he’s been so preoccupied. Obviously his nerves are on edge. And when I spoke to Rhys, he was distracted too. I was in the way. He didn’t want to be seen.”
“By you?”
“Or by you.” I remembered how Rhys had disappeared the moment he heard footsteps coming along the corridor—the footsteps, as it turned out, of a police superintendent. “When he saw you coming, he ran.”
“That’s when I was getting Hugo and Daisy their dinner. Which turned out to be completely wasted. When I walked in, Hugo was lying on the sofa smoking a cigarette, watching her suck Joseph’s cock.”
“Didn’t he join in?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised, but he doesn’t know me well enough to let his guard down. As far as Hugo’s concerned, I’m just another new publicity manager that the studio has foisted on him. And that means that they’re spying on him—or so he thinks. He’s convinced that I’ve been assigned to this film purely to keep him out of trouble.”
“So he doesn’t consider the fact that Daisy Athenasy is a cocksucking drug fiend to be of interest?”
“Daisy isn’t his concern. She can go to hell as far as he’s concerned. She’s a necessary evil. If you want to star in a British-American picture—and who doesn’t, with the fees they pay?—then you have to act opposite her. It’s part of the deal.”
“Is he big, by the way?”
“Enormous.”
“Bigger than you?”
“Even bigger than me. By a good inch. That’s got you interested.”
“Yeah.” My own cock was hard again, and I was losing focus. I wanted to kiss Dickinson, to taste his lips, to inhale his scent. I must have leaned forward without meaning to, because I suddenly found myself only inches from him. I could feel his body heat.
“Mitch…”
“Hmmm?”
“Would it help you to concentrate if we… You know…”
“Mmmm…”
He took my hand and guided it down; his crotch was hot as hell. He sighed. “Just suck me.”
It was like a dream—sitting in an open carriage, where anyone might enter, about to have sex with a senior policeman.
“Ooh, gentlemen, excuse me.” It was the steward, bustling in from the kitchen with a tray of clean glasses. We came to our senses.
“That’s all right. Dr. Mitchell and I are just—”
“I shall see to it that you’re not disturbed.”
“No.” I stood up and opened a window; we could hear the drip, drip of water from the roof of the tunnel. “We’re fine, thanks. Some coffee, if you have any, would be good.” I needed to wake up from this strange reverie. Dickinson was acting on me like a drug. But there was a dead man down the corridor, his killer still on the train.
“Coffee coming up, sir. Hot and strong.” The steward giggled, and retreated to the kitchen.
“Sit down, Mitch.”
“No. I prefer to stand. I don’t trust myself.”
“So I see.” My cock was making my pa
nts stick out at the fly. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, smelling the mold and moss of the tunnel, the sharp, bitter scent of coal and soot. My cock started to subside.
“We finally made it to the bathroom, Bertrand and I.”
“And you…?”
“Yes. And that’s when the train stopped, right in the tunnel. Right where we are now.”
“So that would have been—when?”
“Hard to say. We had been in there for some time.”
“It’s difficult to judge time when you have your cock up an arse.”
“Yes. Where were you when we stopped?”
“I had just left Daisy and Hugo.”
“Had he hurt his head?”
“No. That happened when we stopped.”
“Did it? Did it really?”
“As far as I’m aware. You clearly think otherwise.”
“I don’t know what I think. But the injury was not consistent with his description of how it happened.”
“Note that down.”
“And then we were stuck in the bathroom for a while.” I shuddered at the memory. “It was horrible.”
“How did you get out?”
“The conductor released us.”
“With his key?”
Shit! The key! The key that he said he had lost! Either Simmonds was lying, or he had lost the key much later than he imagined, between letting us out of the bathroom and our discovery of Rhys’s dead body.
“We’ll ask him,” I said, making a note. “We saw Daisy in the corridor, looking very much under the influence. We saw Hugo’s head. We went back to third class, and attended to a couple of bumps and sprains.”
“Then you returned to the dining car for lunch. What time was that?”
“The steward complained that we had nearly missed lunch.” He was hovering, probably listening. “Hey!” I shouted to the steward. “Come in here a moment!”
“Sir?”
“What time did I come up for lunch? When we were stuck the first time.”
“Approximately one-thirty, sir. We normally don’t take orders after then, but as it was you, sir, and your young friend—”
Dickinson continued, “And did you come straight here from the third-class carriages? Or did you stop off for more fun?”
“We came straight here,” I replied. “I was hungry, so we were in a hurry. That’s right: the lights came back on, so it was easy to make our way along the train.”
“And you noticed nothing unusual along the way?”
“No. That bathroom was in use again—I suppose now that Rhys was already in there, dead or alive—”
“But you heard nothing? Nothing aroused your suspicion?”
“Nothing. It’s been occupied for most of the trip, for one reason or another.”
“Every reason apart from the one it was intended for, by the sound of it.”
This was true. First of all, poor Bertrand had been assaulted by the conductor, then I’d seen Andrews and Rhys emerging after some kind of tête-à-tête, and finally we had used the toilet for our own enjoyment. It was hardly surprising that one of my fellow first-class passengers was in there as soon as the lights went on.
“Who was in the dining car when you and Bertrand returned?”
“Mrs. Andrews and her daughters. Lady Antonia and Chivers, her companion. Frankie Laking. The steward, of course. And all the other tables were occupied as well, with people I had not noticed before and I doubt I could recognize again.”
“There are eight tables, is that correct?”
“Yes, sir,” answered the steward, polishing glasses and now listening quite blatantly to our conversation.
“Do you have a passenger list?”
“No, sir. I’m afraid we don’t carry such things.”
“But you have a book of table reservations.”
“Yes, sir. Here.”
“So,” said Dickinson, flicking through the book, “we can, I suppose, eliminate the people who were actually here at the time of the murder…”
“It’s hopeless,” I said. “There are too many of them.”
“And you believe that all of them may have had a motive to bump off poor old Rhys?”
“Not at all. But they had as much reason to do so as, say, Lady Antonia.”
Dickinson looked at me. “One knows so little about people one meets on railway journeys,” he said.
We drank our coffee in silence, and I pored over my notes. Where was the truth in this mess of scribbling? What was I missing? My brain was clouded—by alcohol, by shock, and by the physical presence of Dickinson.
There was a tap at the door, and Simmonds came in, looking much more composed.
“What is it?”
“It’s Mr. Andrews, sir. He wants to have a word.”
“Send him in,” said Dickinson, thoughtfully. “There’s something about that respectable father of three that I don’t quite like.”
“Indeed,” I said, “he was out of the dining car at the time of the murder. He came in just before we were served. And I saw him coming out of the toilet.”
“Well, I hope he washed his hands before eating.”
“Oh, I’m sure he did. I’m certain that he—”
And then I remembered. That was it. The soap. When Andrews had returned to the dining car, I had sensed something odd about him. At the time, I couldn’t put my finger on it, and it had troubled me ever since. Now it suddenly fell into place. The smell. He did not smell of the floral soap that was used in the first-class bathroom.
This had been a different smell, a sharper, higher scent.
The scent of lemons.
VII
ANDREWS HAD HITHERTO STRUCK ME AS THE TYPICAL BRITISH family man, buttoned up, responsible, emotionally distant. The man who walked into the dining car was none of those things. He looked haunted. His pale skin had gone a nasty shade of gray, his eyes were puffy and bloodshot. I suspected that he had recently vomited. His hair was damp around the forehead, and he could not stop his hands from shaking.
“Is it true, then?” he stammered, wavering in the doorway. I pulled out a chair and seated him before he fell.
“What?”
“Is he…dead?”
“If you mean Mr. Rhys,” said Dickinson, “the answer is yes.”
Andrews looked wildly around, as if searching for a means of escape—not from us, perhaps, but from the news he had just heard. His stomach heaved, and he grabbed a napkin, but there was nothing left to come up.
“He can’t be… Oh, God. What happened?”
“We aren’t sure of the cause of death yet, sir. But he was found in the first-class lavatory.” Dickinson was cold, without sympathy. What did he know, or suspect, of Mr. Andrews?
“This is like a nightmare.”
“We’re going to have to ask you some questions, Mr. Andrews,” I said, trying to sound a little more sympathetic.
“Anything. Anything at all. It will all come out now anyway. I don’t care what happens to me.”
“What was your connection to Rhys?” Dickinson interrupted.
“We met professionally.”
“I see. And what might your profession be?”
“I work in the city, for a large bank. Rhys was investing some money. We met at a party in London, and we got talking about—”
“What sort of party?”
Andrews wheeled around. “What do you mean, what sort of party?”
“Were ladies present?”
“Of course ladies were present,” said Andrews. “Oh. I see what you’re getting at. No, there was nothing of that manner involved. It was a party that the bank throws every Christmas for existing and prospective clients. I was there with Christina, my wife, we were introduced to Rhys, and we hit it off. Talking about money, about politics. We were both too young to have seen active service in the war, but we’d both lost older brothers. That sort of thing.”
“He had money to invest, you say?” Dickinson continued.
“Selling diamonds?”
“Diamonds? Good God, no. Insurance. He’s an insurance broker.”
“Was an insurance broker,” said Dickinson, unnecessarily harshly. Andrews put a hand over his eyes and sighed deeply.
“You’d better tell us everything, my friend,” I said, shooting daggers at Dickinson, who had the bedside manner of Jack the Ripper. “Don’t worry. Nothing you say will be held against you.”
Dickinson raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
“I suppose I must,” said Andrews. “Well, the truth is that there was more to our friendship than the normal relationship between a banker and his client. He did invest money with us—quite a large amount of money, in fact—and I made sure that he got the best possible service. But we became friends, too. He invited me to play tennis with him, to go riding. Christina is so busy at home with the children, I think she was glad to see me developing some outside interests. Rhys was a good all-rounder, a top-quality tennis player, a good horseman, a good sport, you might say. It did occur to me that it was strange he’d never married, but one doesn’t ask questions of that sort, and he did not volunteer any information.
“I found myself looking forward to our meetings, and thinking about him a great deal in between times. At first it seemed innocent enough; I thought about what a jolly good game of tennis we’d had, how powerful his serve was, how much I’d enjoyed galloping his gray mare. He kept horses in a stable out at his place in Richmond. But then I started thinking more about him—about the way he smiled, screwing up his eyes as if the sun was dazzling him, or about the way he looked when he took his shirt off after a hard game. When I was having relations with my wife, I was thinking about him. Oh, God—I didn’t know what was happening to me. I’d never encountered anything like that before: I’m not one of those public school types to whom buggery is as familiar as Latin and geography. I’ve seen them about the West End, of course, painted up like tarts—but that wasn’t me, and it certainly wasn’t him. But there was no doubt in my mind about my feelings for Rhys. I’m not a fool, and I don’t like blinding myself to the truth. I wanted him, and I began to think that maybe he wanted me as well.”
“Go on, Andrews,” I said. “Nothing you can say will shock us.”