Beware of the Trains

by Edmund Crispin

  “So I gathered.”

  “And the next thing is, could Bailey have left the train between Borleston and here?”

  “The train,” said Fen, “didn’t drive itself in, you know.”

  “Never mind that for the moment,” said Humbleby irritably. “Could he?”

  “No. He couldn’t. Not without breaking his neck. We did a steady thirty-five to forty all the way, and we didn’t stop or slow down once.”

  There was a silence. “Well, I give up,” said Humbleby. “Unless this wretched man has vanished like a sort of soapbubble——”

  “It’s occurred to you that he may be dead?”

  “It’s occurred to me that he may be dead and cut up into little pieces. But I still can’t find any of the pieces.… Good Lord, Fen, it’s like—it’s like one of those Locked-Room Mvs teries you get in books: an Impossible Situation.”

  Fen yawned again. “Not impossible, no,” he said. “Rather a simple device, really….” Then more soberly: “But I’m afraid that what we have to deal with is something much more serious than a mere vanishing. In fact——”

  The telephone rang, and after a moment’s hesitation Humbleby answered it. The call was for him; and when, several minutes later, he put the receiver back on its hook, his face was grave.

  “They’ve found a dead man,” he said, “three miles along the line towards Borleston. He’s got a knife in his back and has obviously been thrown out of a train. From their description of the face and clothes, it’s quite certainly Goggett. And equally certainly, that”—he nodded towards the platform—“is the train he fell out of.… Well, my first and most important job is to interview the passengers. And anyone who was alone in a compartment will have a lot of explaining to do.”

  Most of the passengers had by now disembarked, and were standing about in various stages of bewilderment, annoyance and futile enquiry. At Humbleby’s command, and along with the Guard, the porters and Mr. Maycock, they shuffled, feebly protesting, into the waiting-room. And there, with Fen as an interested onlooker, a Grand Inquisition was set in motion.

  Its results were both baffling and remarkable. Apart from the motorman, there had been nine people on the train when it left Borleston and when it arrived at Clough; and each of them had two others to attest the fact that during the whole crucial period he (or she) had behaved as innocently as a newborn infant. With Fen there had been the elderly business man and the genteel girl; in another compartment there had likewise been three people, no one of them connected with either of the others by blood, acquaintance, or vocation; and even the Guard had witnesses to his harmlessness, since from Victoria onwards he had been accompanied in the van by two melancholy men in cloth caps, whose mode of travel was explained by their being in unremitting personal charge of several doped-looking whippets. None of these nine, until the first search for Bailey was set on foot, had seen or heard anything amiss. None of them (since the train was not a corridor train) had had any opportunity of moving out of sight of his or her two companions. None of them had slept. And unless some unknown, travelling in one of the many empty compartments, had disappeared in the same fashion as Bailey—a supposition which Humbleby was by no means prepared to entertain—it seemed evident that Goggett must have launched himself into eternity unaided.

  It was at about this point in the proceedings that Humbleby’s self-possession began to wear thin, and his questions to become merely repetitive; and Fen, perceiving this, slipped out alone on to the platform. When he returned, ten minutes later, he was carrying a battered suitcase; and regardless of Humbleby, who seemed to be making some sort of speech, he carried this impressively to the centre table and put it down there.

  “In this suitcase,” he announced pleasantly, as Humbleby’s flow of words petered out, “we shall find, I think, the motorman’s uniform belonging to the luckless Bailey.” He undid the catches. “And in addition, no doubt… Stop him, Humbleby!”

  The scuffle that followed was brief and inglorious. Its protagonist, tackled round the knees by Humbleby, fell, struck his head against the fender, and lay still, the blood welling from a cut above his left eye.

  “Yes, that’s the culprit,” said Fen. “And it will take a better lawyer than there is alive to save him from a rope’s end.”

  Later, as Humbleby drove him to his destination through the December night, he said: “Yes, it had to be Maycock. And Goggett and Bailey had, of course, to be one and the same person. But what about motive?”

  Humbleby shrugged. “Obviously, the money in that case of Goggett’s. There’s a lot of it, you know. It’s a pretty clear case of thieves falling out. We’ve known for a long time that Goggett had an accomplice, and it’s now certain that that accomplice was Maycock. Whereabouts in his office did you find the suitcase?”

  “Stuffed behind some lockers—not a very good hidingplace, I’m afraid. Well, well, it can’t be said to have been a specially difficult problem. Since Bailey wasn’t on the station, and hadn’t left it, it was clear he’d never entered it. But someone had driven the train in—and who could it have been but Maycock? The two porters were accounted for—by you; so were the Guard and the passengers—by one another; and there just wasn’t anyone else.

  “And then, of course, the finding of Goggett’s body clinched it. He hadn’t been thrown out of either of the occupied compartments, or the Guard’s van; he hadn’t been thrown out of any of the unoccupied compartments, for the simple reason that there was nobody to throw him. Therefore he was thrown out of the motorman’s cabin. And since, as I’ve demonstrated, Maycock was unquestionably in the motorman’s cabin, it was scarcely conceivable that Maycock had not done the throwing.

  “Plainly, Maycock rode or drove into Borleston while he was supposed to be having his supper, and boarded the train—that is, the motorman’s cabin—there. He kept hidden till the train was under way, and then took over from Goggett-Bailey while Goggett-Bailey changed into the civilian clothes he had with him. By the way, I take it that Maycock, to account for his presence, spun some fictional (as far as he knew) tale about the police being on Goggett-Bailey’s track, and that the change was Goggett-Bailey’s idea; I mean, that he had some notion of its assisting his escape at the end of the line.”

  Humbleby nodded. “That’s it, approximately. I’ll send you a copy of Maycock’s confession as soon as I can get one made. It seems he wedged the safety handle which operates these trains, knifed Goggett-Bailey and chucked him out, and then drove the train into Clough and there simply disappeared, with the case, into his office. It must have given him a nasty turn to hear the station was surrounded.”

  “It did,” said Fen. “If your people hadn’t been there, it would have looked, of course, as if Bailey had just walked off into the night. But chance was against him all along. Your siege, and the grouping of the passengers, and the clothcapped men in the van—they were all part of an accidental conspiracy—if you can talk of such a thing—to defeat him; all part of a sort of fortuitous conjuring trick.” He yawned prodigiously, and gazed out of the car window. “Do you know, I believe it’s the dawn.… Next time I want to arrive anywhere, I shall travel by bus.”

  Humbleby Agonistes

  “In my job,” said Detective-Inspector Humbleby, “a man expects to be shot at every now and again. It’s an occupational risk, like pneumoconiosis in coal-mining, and when you’re on duty you’ve obviously got to be prepared for it to crop up. But a social call on an old acquaintance is quite a different matter. Here am I on my Sabbatical. I drop in to see this man I’ve known ever since the 1914 war. And what happens? Before I have a chance to as much as open my mouth and ask him how he is, he snatches a damned great revolver out of his pocket and lets it off at me. Well, I was petrified. Anyone would be. I was so astonished I literally couldn’t move.”

  “He doesn’t seem to have hit you, though.” From the depths of the armchair in his rooms at St. Christopher’s, Gervase Fen, University Professor of English Language and Literatu
re, regarded his guest with a clinical air. “I see no wound,” he elaborated.

  “There is no wound. Three times he fired,” said Humbleby dramatically, “and three times he missed. Which, of course, makes it all the odder.”

  “Why ‘of course’? I’ve always understood that revolvers——”

  “I say ’of course’ because Garstin-Walsh, whom I’m speaking of, is a retired Army man: a brevet-rank Colonel, to be precise.… Yes, I know what you’re going to tell me. You’re going to tell me that Army men seldom actually use revolvers, even though they may carry them; and that consequently it’s naïve to expect them to be good marksmen. Agreed. But the trouble in this instance is that Garstin-Walsh has always made a hobby of shooting in general—he’s the sort of man it’s impossible to visualise outside the context of dogs and guns and an interest in dahlias—and of pistol-shooting in particular. That’s why I’m so certain he missed me on purpose: at a yard’s range even I could hardly go wrong.… But perhaps I’d better begin at the beginning.”

  Fen nodded gravely. “Perhaps you had.”

  “As you know,” said Humbleby, “I was in Military Intelli gence during the 1914 war; and it was while I was investigating an unimaginative piece of sabotage at an arms depot near Loos that I first met Garstin-Walsh, who at that time was a Captain in the Supply Corps. It’d be an exaggeration to say that we became close friends—and looking back on it, I can’t quite see why we should have become friends at all, because our temperaments weren’t at all alike, and we had very few interests in common. Still, for some obscure reason we did in fact get on well together; and I think that much of his attraction for me must have been due to his complete humourlessness—we were all a bit hysterical in those days, whether we knew it or not, and a man who never laughed was unexpectedly restful.

  “We used to meet, then, as often as we could; and after the Armistice we kept up a sporadic correspondence and managed some sort of reunion once or twice every year. Then eighteen months ago Garstin-Walsh retired and went to live at a village called Uscombe, which is a few miles from Exeter; and since I was staying with my sister at Exmouth, and hadn’t seen him for some considerable time, I decided, the day before yesterday, to drive over and pay him a surprise visit.

  “I left Exmouth immediately after breakfast and got to Uscombe about ten-thirty. Uscombe’s not as cut off from the rest of the world as some Devon villages, because it’s only a quarter of a mile from the main London road; but in all other respects it’s fairly typical—settled to some extent by middleclass ’foreigners,’ I mean, with an unsuccessful preparatory boarding-school in a tumble-down manor-house, and a church tower scheduled dangerous; you know the sort of place. I hadn’t been there before, so I stopped at one of the village shops to enquire for Garstin-Walsh’s house. And the way they looked at me, as they gave me directions, was the first intimation I had that anything was wrong.

  “The house proved to be a nice, trim, up-to-date little redbrick villa beyond the church, with lots of chrysanthemums in the garden and a carefully weeded front lawn; so that was all right. But then the trouble started. The painters were in, for one thing; an Exeter C.I.D. Inspector was hanging about the hall, for another; and an undeniably dead body was in process of being removed by a mortuary van. I need hardly tell you that if I’d known about all this I should have gone back to Exmouth and tried again some other day; but by the time the situation became clear I’d rung, and been let in by the housekeeper, and so couldn’t very well escape without positive incivility.

  “Garstin-Walsh was still upstairs dressing. But the Exeter man, Jourdain he was called, had heard me give my name to the housekeeper, and lost no time in introducing himself. ‘You’ll be curious,’ he said dogmatically, ’about that body they’ve just taken away.’ I denied this, but it was no good, he insisted on telling me about the affair just the same. And stripped of inessentials, the story I heard, while we waited in the hall for Garstin-Walsh to come down, was as follows:

  “A year previously, the ramshackle cottage near Garstin-Walsh’s house had been rented by one Saul Brebner, he whose remains were at present en route for the Exeter City Mortuary. A powerful, malignant, drunken, slovenly man of about fifty was Brebner, and the people of Uscombe had gone in fear of him almost from the day of his arrival. He was without family, lived alone in squalor, had money in spite of working not at all, and divided his time fairly evenly between poaching and The Three Crowns. The police kept an eye on him, of course, but he succeeded in steering clear of them. And the only person in the village who ever had a good word to say for him was, surprisingly enough, Garstin-Walsh.

  “That there was a reason for this the village soon discovered: Brebner had been Garstin-Walsh’s batman in the 1914 war, and it was realised that Garstin-Walsh’s toleration of the creature derived from this. However, the toleration wasn’t by any means mutual: Brebner made no secret of his loathing for Garstin-Walsh, and from time to time, when in liquor, was heard to hint that there were phases of the Colonel’s career which would not bear investigation. The village, which quite liked Garstin-Walsh, discounted these innuendoes as the vapourings of malice, and even when Brebner became more specific, referring to misappropriation of supplies in France, refused to take him seriously. Indeed, on the night of the incident which wrote finis to Brebner’s unlovely existence, he was so vituperative about Garstin-Walsh in the public bar of The Three Crowns that there was very nearly a riot, and when he left the pub at closing time—half past ten—he was dangerously enraged as well as, what was normal, dangerously drunk.

  “Garstin-Walsh reached home that evening at about a quarter to eleven (I’m referring, you understand, to what to me, visiting him, was the previous evening). He’d spent the day acting as starter at the village sports, had dined at the Vicarage, and afterwards had worked with the Vicar at the parish accounts; and he got back to his house just in time to meet his solicitor on the doorstep, the said solicitor having driven there, on urgent business, from Exeter. Well, they went into the study, a large room on the ground floor, and got on with whatever it was they had to discuss. And according to the solicitor, a respectable old party named Weems, it was exactly five to eleven when the french windows burst open and Brebner, carrying a double-barrelled shotgun, lurched into the room.

  “It was all over in a moment. Brebner levelled the gun at Garstin-Walsh and fired off one barrel. But he was pretty far gone, and the pellets spattered the room without touching their target. The second barrel remained. Steadying himself, Brebner aimed again. And Garstin-Walsh, grabbing up the pistol which he’d been using all day to start races, and which he’d reloaded immediately on his return, fired just in time to save his own life. It was good shooting, partly because the end of the room where Brebner stood was in semi-darkness, and partly because Garstin-Walsh, according to Weems’ deposition, was fairly thoroughly unnerved. Brebner staggered, dropped the shotgun, and collapsed on the carpet with a bullet in his head.

  “Well, the village constable was summoned; and since Brebner, though unconscious, was still just alive, a doctor was summoned too. The doctor refused to have Brebner moved, and Garstin-Walsh was forced to allow him to stay in the study, with a nurse to look after him, until next morning at nine o’clock he died there without recovering consciousness.”

  Humbleby sucked complacently at his cheroot. “That, then, was the story Jourdain told me while we waited for Garstin-Walsh to appear. A clear case of self-defence, and a very good riddance, and the only reason Jourdain was there was to have a look at the study where the thing had happened, for the purpose of making the usual routine report.

  “He’d just finished his tale when Garstin-Walsh came downstairs. Garstin-Walsh has always been a stringy, bony sort of man, and even when I first knew him he looked old; so the years have really altered him very little, in comparison with the rest of us. At the moment he was a bit haggard and white, and I guessed he hadn’t slept much; I got the impression, too, that all the time he was talking
to us he was preoccupied, inwardly, with some sort of intellectual balancing trick: I mean that he had the precarious, constricted air you notice in people who are trying to think of two things at once. But he was very civil with us, brushing aside my suggestion that I should go away and come back at some more convenient time; and he took Jourdain and myself into the study as soon as the nurse, who’d been packing and tidying, quitted it.

  “It was a pleasant room, its pleasantness a bit marred, at the moment, by surgical smells and paint smells (the painters hadn’t finished with it till supper-time the previous day); and while Jourdain explained that he’d come to look at the shotholes and so forth—rather needlessly, since he’d already said all that to the housekeeper, and she, presumably, had conveyed it to Garstin-Walsh—I had a look round. There was more shabbiness than I should have expected: Garstin-Walsh had—has—an unusually spick-and-span sort of mind, and there are considerable private means for him to spend as well as his pension, so that the threadbare carpet and the dented brass coal-scuttle, which you wouldn’t notice these days in most people’s houses, surprised me at first. But of course, there was, in view of Brebner’s insinuations and independent income, one very plausible explanation of the shabbiness. And it’ll show you how superficial my friendship with Garstin-Walsh was when I say that the possibility of blackmail neither shocked nor astonished me particularly, and that I wasn’t conscious of there being any disloyalty involved in my having my suspicions about Garstin-Walsh’s professional past.

  “So there we all were: Garstin-Walsh fidgeting in a monkish kind of dressing-gown which he wore over his shirt and plusfours instead of a coat, Jourdain gabbling away as only a County D.I. can gabble, and myself thinking disinterested thoughts about consignments of service dress which had gone astray, and never been recovered, during the first months of 1917. It’s no use my pretending I was comfortable. I wasn’t. On the other hand, my uneasiness had nothing whatever to do with blackmail or its pretexts, or with the problem of what, in this particular instance, I ought to do about them—since I intended, very firmly indeed, to do nothing about them whatever. No, it was more the sort of sensation you have when in crossing a road you hear a car coming at you and can’t for the moment either see it or judge, from the sound of it, what direction it’s coming from. I remember I was actually humming quietly, to keep my spirits up, as I strolled over to the french windows to have a look at the view.