The Secret Tunnel

by Lear, James

  The sergeant turned and positioned himself between Bertrand’s spread legs, aiming his thick, long dick at the target. Then, with one slow, firm thrust, the whole thing disappeared into the warm tightness that I knew so well. The sergeant sighed, closed his eyes, and started fucking. From the way Bertrand’s hips were moving, I could tell that he was enjoying himself. He raised his ass to meet the sergeant’s thrusts, bracing himself on the trunk with his elbows. Soon the sergeant, McDonald, and Bertrand had established a rhythm; each shove from the rear pushed Bertrand down onto McDonald’s dick, each thrust from the front rammed his buttocks against the sergeant’s hairy thighs.

  I stood for a while watching in stunned silence, but that couldn’t last long; my dick was eager to join in. Bertrand had no holes left to fuck; I would have to wait my turn. Judging by the way the pace was accelerating, I would not have to wait long. In order to waste no time, I started undressing. It was cold in that car, I suppose, but three naked men were warming it up nicely, and I was ready to add my body heat to theirs. I slipped off my shoes and jacket, pulled my shirt over my head, and started unbuttoning my pants.

  “Come here,” ordered the sergeant, never breaking the rhythm he was beating into Bertrand’s ass. “Let me.”

  His hands were huge, his fingers thick but surprisingly deft as he opened my fly and started feeling the bulge in my underpants. Then, to my surprise, he started kissing me full on the mouth. I must have made a very good impression at York station, I thought, rather smugly.

  The sergeant drew my cock out—it was, of course, fully erect—and started squeezing and stroking it while never breaking the kiss. His mouth tasted of tobacco and whiskey and—yes, I was certain—cock and ass. He must have prepared Bertrand for fucking just as a gentleman should.

  My pants dropped around my ankles and I stepped out of them. I heard McDonald groan, and out of the corner of my eye saw him pumping hard into Bertrand’s face, groaning as he shot his load. His cock withdrew from Bertrand’s mouth with a plop, and before I knew it McDonald was on his knees sucking me. Bertrand raised himself on his elbows and craned his neck to watch.

  “Oh, Mitch…”

  “I can’t wait to hear… Oh, yeah… How you got yourself into this mess.”

  “They… They made me… I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize.” I could say no more, as the sergeant pulled me back into a kiss. His stubbly face was setting my skin on fire. From the ardor of his kisses, I guessed he wasn’t far off either.

  But before he reached the point of no return, he broke the kiss and pulled out of Bertrand’s ass. “Turn over,” he commanded. “I want to see your face when I fuck you.”

  Bertrand obeyed, and in the light of the lantern I could see how the rough wood of the trunk had pressed into his hairy belly. But his cock was as hard as could be, and had already oozed a sticky load of precum. He’d obviously not yet been allowed to come, despite the fact that the other two soldiers had already taken their turns with him.

  The sergeant slid his big dick back into him, and Bertrand sighed and closed his eyes. I watched the big man’s muscular buttocks rippling as he pumped away, holding Bertrand’s ankles in his strong, hairy hands. McDonald was still slurping on my cock; he was obviously not the type to give up just after coming. I looked down on the top of his head, which was remarkably bald for one so young, and grabbed his ears.

  The sergeant grunted, pulled out of Bertrand’s ass and shot one huge load of semen right over his body; it landed with a splat on the floor behind Bertrand’s head. The rest—and there was a great deal—was soon glistening on his belly, running down his sides, matting the hair. The sergeant buckled at the knees, and put an arm around my shoulders for support.

  “Just you two to go now, then,” he said. “How are you going to do it?”

  I was ready to pump a load down McDonald’s throat, but I could not bear to see poor Bertrand left unattended, so I disengaged my dick and took the sergeant’s place. Bertrand was not quite as tight as he had been the first time I fucked him, and he was well lubricated. I slipped in easily, and set about fucking him as hard as I could. The two soldiers watched and offered crude encouragement, smacking Bertrand around the face with their sticky, half-hard cocks. Bertrand started jerking himself, hard and fast. I felt his ass ring tighten around me, and soon he was adding his own load to the sergeant’s. I kept fucking him as he squirmed and moaned on his uncomfortable bed, then I leaned forward, pressing my belly against his, lifting his ass into the air and pumping another load inside him. The soldiers applauded.

  It was a rather quiet procession that made its way through the third-class carriages toward the front of the train. The sergeant went first, then me, then Bertrand, then McDonald. It must have looked as if we were under arrest. I hope nobody had a keen sense of smell: the aroma of sex must have been strong on us, but fortunately a good many of the passengers were smoking. The sergeant and McDonald rejoined their brothers in arms, and started passing around a bottle of whiskey. I would have liked to join them, but there was a small matter of a murder to solve.

  “What have you found, Mitch?” asked Bertrand in a half-whisper, as we walked forward.

  “Plenty,” I said, thinking of the interviews that Dickinson and I had conducted. “Plenty.”

  “But what, exactly?”

  We had reached our compartment, and sat down, closing the door.

  “Well…” I began. And then I realized that I did not have the slightest idea who had killed David Rhys. I was still in the dark.

  VIII

  OUR RECENT EXERCISE IN THE CONDUCTOR’S CAR, AND THE steady jogging of the train, made both Bertrand and me very comfortable when we finally reached the safe haven of our carriage. He was complaining of a headache—the soldiers had plied him with whiskey, he said, but he would say no more (for now) of his “ordeal”—and my head was splitting for different reasons. I couldn’t understand what was happening here, under my very nose, on this train. I was confused and in shock, I suppose. The discovery of the body, the distress of Andrews, the muddle of assumed identities, and, above all, the brutal methods of Superintendent Dickinson, had been too much for me. We exchanged a little desultory conversation, and then, I’m ashamed to say, we both fell asleep.

  The next thing I knew, Bertrand was tugging on my sleeve.

  “We’ve stopped again, Mitch!”

  My eyes were dry and my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth; I don’t like sleeping in the afternoon. I had had strange, vivid dreams, and for a moment or two I couldn’t remember what was real and what was fantasy. But there was Bertrand—very much flesh and blood—and outside the window were the lights of Peterborough station. It was dark outside. The snow had given way, as we traveled south, to a nasty, wet sleet, making the platforms glisten.

  I heard the slam of carriage doors and the tramp of feet, and saw the unmistakable dark blue of a British policeman’s uniform. Looking up and down the platform, I could see that the station was crawling with cops. How they had got there I did not have time to figure out—but their purpose was all too clear. They swarmed aboard the train at each end, while each door was guarded. We were surrounded.

  I heard the sound of running feet and quickly stepped out into the corridor, where I almost collided with Mr. Andrews. His eyes were wide, his brow damp with sweat. He almost screamed when he ran into me, but then a look of wild hope crossed his face.

  “Can you hide me?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “You must believe me, I didn’t kill him. I loved him. You understand. Please, help me. I did not kill him.”

  Tramp, tramp, tramp came the heavy police boots along the corridor.

  Andrews’s eyes scanned our compartment for hiding places—under the seats, up on the luggage racks.

  “Please…”

  “There is nothing I can do. What can I do?”

  I wanted to help him, but I was neither willing nor able to pit myself against the full weight
of the law.

  They were nearly upon us. Andrews took one last desperate look at the window, calculated his chances of escape at zero, and suddenly relaxed.

  “It’s quite all right,” he said, more himself again. “I understand.” He rummaged in his jacket pocket and pulled out a small slip of paper. The police were at the compartment door, and Andrews had no time for explanations. He dropped the paper behind him and held out his hands.

  “William Andrews?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of David Rhys.”

  Andrews was handcuffed and led away. The tramp, tramp, tramp of boots receded, doors slammed again, the train was quiet.

  Bertrand and I looked at each other and ran to the window, just in time to see Andrews’s blond head being pushed into a waiting police car. I saw Peter Dickinson, immaculate as ever, shake hands with a uniformed colleague, before the bells rang and the car pulled away.

  The engine puffed and hissed, and we were on the move again. Dickinson remained on the platform. I watched his figure recede as we moved onward to London.

  Bertrand was poring over the scrap of paper that Andrews had left behind him.

  “What does it say?”

  “It is an address in London.”

  “Where?”

  Bertrand handed me the paper—torn from the top of a letter, a printed address in curly type.

  “The Rookery Club, 43 Russell Square,” I read. “Why do you suppose he dropped that?”

  “An accident?”

  “That was no accident. That was a message. When we get to London, we’ll go to the Rookery Club, 43 Russell Square.”

  “You do not believe that he is the killer?”

  “No.”

  “But why? The police believe he is.”

  “There is something wrong.”

  “What?”

  “The smell.”

  Bertrand looked confused, as well he might; I barely knew what I was thinking. “Something does not stack up. Why would Andrews kill Rhys, the man he loved?”

  “Quoi?”

  I explained, briefly, what Andrews had confessed in the dining car; Bertrand was wide-eyed. “Perhaps, after all, you are right—all British men really are this way.”

  “Certainly on this train that seems to be the case.”

  “But, after all, this Monsieur Dickinson, he is a detective, no? And he has his reasons for believing the Andrews is the killer.”

  “You said yourself that you didn’t like Dickinson.”

  “Pff. I do not like the police. That does not mean to say that I think they are necessarily wrong.”

  “But in this case I think they are. I think there is something going on that we don’t know about. The smell…”

  “Always this smell. What are you talking about?”

  “When Andrews came back into the dining car after the blackout, he smelled of lemons, limes, something like that. A very distinctive citrus perfume. Only one other person on this train smells the same.”

  “Dickinson.”

  “Ah! You noticed it too. And for Andrews to smell that way, he must have had some close contact with Dickinson before the murder. That, to me, seems suspicious.”

  “Bien, if that is all, I think there are others on this train who have had what you call close contact with Dickinson. Perhaps they, too, had une liaison.”

  “I don’t think so. Andrews was desperately in love with Rhys. He had traveled all the way to Scotland to be near him—and I think he had even brought his family on this train just so they could be together. Why would a man who is so much in love risk everything for a few moments of fun with Peter Dickinson?”

  Bertrand looked sulky. “He interested you.”

  I was stung. Bertrand was right: I’d been eager enough to rush into une liaison with Dickinson.

  He put an arm around my shoulder. “Come. Let us consider the aspects of the story. We shall find the truth, shall we?”

  I doubted that we would: I had proved myself to be a wholly unworthy detective, fucking and napping on the job while an innocent man was framed for a murder that someone else on the train had committed.

  “First of all,” I began, “there is Hugo Taylor, who received a blow to the head and was reluctant to tell me the truth about how it happened. I don’t buy his story about the cocktail cabinet, or whatever it was. Second, there’s Daisy Athenasy, whose dope habit has probably involved her in some kind of drug smuggling operation. She’s costing the studio thousands of pounds, she is unfaithful to her rich, older husband, who is also her employer, and she loves diamonds, which links her to David Rhys.”

  “If he was, in fact, a diamond merchant,” Bertrand observed.

  “Good point. Andrews says he wasn’t. Also in Hugo Taylor’s party is Francis Laking, aristocratic but impoverished, desperate for money, possibly to pay off blackmailers; he’s such a screaming queen that he’s almost certainly attracted that kind of attention. He’s charming, he’s witty, he knows everyone, but does anyone really know him? Is he who he says he is?”

  “In short, you suspect everyone.”

  “Look at Peter Dickinson. Posing as an employee of the British-American Film Company, but in fact a superintendent from Scotland Yard. Lady Antonia Petherbridge—to all appearances the epitome of the English upper classes, but in fact, according to Francis Laking, a dangerous political radical, probably with dubious foreign connections.”

  “And me?”

  “What?”

  “What about me?” Bertrand said skeptically. “Surely, as a foreigner, I come under suspicion. Traveling without a ticket, my clothes—comment dire, débraillé?—poor, and old, and dirty. Perhaps an anarchist, with a bomb in my suitcase.”

  “You don’t have a suitcase.”

  “And look how easily I befriended you. And what was Simmonds really saying to me in the toilette? And why did I entertain the soldiers? Hein?”

  This gave me pause. What did I know about Bertrand, apart from the fact that his ass fit my dick like a glove?

  “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “Simply this. We are all strange, to those who look hard enough.”

  “Then we must continue to look.”

  “Bien. And my soldiers?”

  “I hadn’t thought of them. But yes, what about ‘your’ soldiers? Why did they find it so desirable to keep us out of the way at the rear of the train while we were stuck in the tunnel for the second time?”

  “Because, perhaps, they realized what a good fuck I am,” said Bertrand, looking very pleased with himself.

  “Yes. But perhaps, also, they were following orders.”

  Bertrand shrugged. “Je ne sais pas. For me it is too much.”

  There was nothing we could do for the rest of the trip other than stare out the window, stare at my notes, and stare at each other. You might be forgiven for expecting me to beguile the time by fucking Bertrand again, or at least getting him to suck my dick. But, for once in my life, I was not in the mood. I felt defeated and dismayed. I trusted nobody, and I felt impotent—not only in the sexual sense. There was nothing I could do to help Andrews, and I was certain, for reasons that had not yet struggled above the level of intuition, that he was innocent.

  Also, of course, there was the fact that I had already come three times in the last 12 hours, once up Vince’s ass and twice up Bertrand’s.

  The rhythm of the train soothed me. Ter-ticky-ti-tum-tum. Ter-ticky-ti-tum-tum. There’s nothing I can do. There’s nothing I can do…

  I slept again, and woke, cold and miserable, as the train pulled into Kings Cross Station, journey’s end. It was eight o’clock in the evening. We were nearly two hours late. The passengers were already alighting from the train with boxes and bags, hailing porters, disappearing into the crowd. What chance had I of piecing together the events of the day, now that all the witnesses had disappeared? Who was I fooling? I wasn’t a detective—not even an amateur. I’d been involved
in one freak crime a few years ago, and I’d fed that fantasy with a lot of random reading and daydreaming—but when it came down to it, I’d been led by my dick, blinded by lust, and hoodwinked by a crafty copper. For all I knew, I had helped the killer to strike.

  Nothing but a lingering smell of lemons, and that scrap of paper that Andrews had dropped in the compartment before his arrest. I stared at it, as if it might somehow rescue my shattered self-respect.

  There was a discreet cough at the compartment door. I looked up, and there stood Simmonds.

  “Excuse me, sir.”

  “Yes?”

  “I wanted to apologize to the young gentleman for the… er…the way I behaved earlier. It was unforgivable.”

  I was in no mood to be charitable, and interrupted Bertrand before he had a chance to accept the no doubt sincere apology. “It’s rather late for fine words, Simmonds. You should have thought of that before you beat him up. If you think you can stop us from complaining to the authorities, you’re—”

  “Tais-toi, Mitch. It is quite all right, monsieur. I forgive you. You were only doing your job.”

  “No, sir. I was not.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I was acting beyond my authority.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I had been told… Oh, God, what have I done?” He sat down, and gripped his hair in his hands.

  “Pull yourself together, Simmonds,” I said, feeling perhaps that some vital piece of information was about to drop into my lap, “and tell us what’s on your mind.”

  “That Mr. Dickinson…”

  Dickinson again. Always Dickinson.

  “Yes? What about him?”

  “He told me that there were reporters on the train, and he told me to deal with them harshly. I was not to let them anywhere near Mr. Taylor’s carriage. I was to use…force, if necessary.”

  “But why Bertrand? He doesn’t look like a reporter. Does he?”

  “Dickinson told me he was.”

  “Moi? Journaliste? Mon dieu,” said Bertrand, as if the very thought disgusted him.