by Otto Penzler
“Dr. Meade just examined her body. Mr. Hastings pleaded with him not to remove the covering, said he couldn’t bear it. And my pet was still wearing the little wrist watch her mother gave her before she died—”
“They substituted another body for hers, that’s all; I don’t care how many wrist watches it had on it,” Ainslie told her brutally. “Stole that of a young girl approximately her own age who had just died from heart failure or some other natural cause, most likely from one of the hospital morgues, and put it over on the doddering family doctor and you both.
“If you look, you’ll probably find something in the papers about a vanished corpse. The main thing is to stop that burial; I’m not positive enough on it to take a chance. It may be she in the coffin after all, and not the substitute. Where was the interment to be?”
“In the family plot, at Cypress Hill.”
“Come on, Cannon; got your circulation back yet?” He was at the top of the stairs already. “Get the local police and tell them to meet us out there.”
Ainslie’s badge was all that got us into the cemetery, which was private. The casket had already been lowered out of sight. They were throwing the first shovelsful of earth over it as we burst through the little ring of sedate, bowing mourners.
The last thing I saw was Ainslie snatching an implement from one of the cemetery workers and jumping down bodily into the opening, feet first.
The face of that silver-haired devil, her guardian Hastings, had focused in on my inflamed eyes.
A squad of Lake City police, arriving only minutes after us, were all that saved his life. It took three of them to pull me off him.
Ainslie’s voice was what brought me to, more than anything else. “It’s all right, Cannon,” he was yelling over and over from somewhere behind me. “It’s the substitute.”
I stumbled over to the lip of the grave between two of the cops and took a look down. It was the face of a stranger that was peering up at me through the shattered coffin lid. I turned away, and they made the mistake of letting go of me.
I went at the secretary this time; Hastings was still stretched out more dead than alive. “What’ve you done with her? Where’ve you got her?”
“That ain’t the way to make him answer,” Ainslie said, and for the second and last time throughout the whole affair his voice wasn’t toneless. “This is!”
Wham! We had to take about six steps forward to catch up with the secretary where he was now.
Ainslie’s method was all right at that. The secretary talked—fast.
Alice was safe; but she wouldn’t have been, much longer. After the mourners had had a last look at her in the coffin, Hastings and the secretary had locked her up for safekeeping—stupefied, of course—and substituted the other body for burial.
And Alice’s turn was to come later, when, under cover of night, she was to be spirited away to a hunting lodge in the hills—the lodge that had belonged to her father. There she could have been murdered at leisure.
When we’d flashed back to the New Hampshire Avenue house in a police car, and unlocked the door of the little den where she’d been secreted; and when the police physician who accompanied us brought her out of the opiate they’d kept her under—whose arms were the first to go around her?
“Jimmy”—She sighed a little, after we took time off from the clinches—“he showed up late that night with Chivers, in that dinky little room you left me in.
“They must have been right behind us all the way, paying all those people to say they’d never seen me.
“But he fooled me, pretended he wasn’t angry, said he didn’t mind if I married and left him. And I was so sleepy and off guard I believed him. Then he handed me a glass of salty-tasting water to drink, and said, ‘Come on down to the car. Jimmy’s down there waiting for you; we’ve got him with us.’ I staggered down there between them, that’s all I remember.”
Then she remembered something else and looked at me with fright in her eyes. “Jimmy, you didn’t mind marrying little Alice Brown, but I don’t suppose Alma Beresford would stand a show with you—?”
“You don’t-suppose right,” I told her gruffly, “because I’m marrying Alice Brown all over again—even if we’ve gotta change her name first.
“And this ugly-looking bloke standing up here, name of Ainslie, is going to be best man at our second wedding. Know why? Because he was the only one in the whole world believed there really was a you.”
BEWARE OF THE TRAINS
ROBERT BRUCE MONTGOMERY (1921–1978) had a long, successful career as a pianist, organist, conductor, and composer, creating operas, requiem masses, and even the background music for many British motion pictures, including six of the famous Carry On … comic film series, such as Carry on Nurse (1959). Using the pseudonym Edmund Crispin, he enjoyed a career as the author of detective novels and stories featuring Gervase Fen, a literary critic and professor at Oxford University, which he attended as well. Although he published only nine novels (all with Fen) and two short-story collections, Crispin quickly became a favorite of readers who like intelligent, witty, fair-play detective fiction. Two of his novels, The Moving Toyshop (1946) and Love Lies Bleeding (1948), were selected for the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone Library. In the former, a poet stumbles upon a corpse in a room above a toy shop and is immediately knocked unconscious. When he comes to, the corpse is missing—and so is the entire toy shop. The latter focuses on the search for a long-lost, priceless Shakespearean manuscript. Eight of Crispin’s novels and a short-story collection were written during a ten-year stretch (1944–1953), and it appeared that he would take his place with the greatest of the greats when he abruptly stopped writing detective fiction to devote his career to music, reviewing crime fiction, and editing science fiction anthologies. He wrote only one more novel, Glimpses of the Moon (1977), before his death; Fen Country (1979), his second collection, was published posthumously.
“Beware of the Trains” was first published as “Nine Minus Nine Equals One” in the March 1951 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; it was first collected in Beware of the Trains (London, Gollancz, 1953).
EDMUND CRISPIN
A WHISTLE BLEW; jolting slightly, the big posters on the hoardings took themselves off rearwards—and with sudden acceleration, like a thrust in the back, the electric train moved out of Borleston Junction, past the blurred radiance of the tall lamps in the marshalling-yard, past the diminishing constellations of the town’s domestic lighting, and so out across the eight-mile isthmus of darkness at whose further extremity lay Clough. Borleston had seen the usual substantial exodus, and the few remaining passengers—whom chance had left oddly, and, as it turned out, significantly distributed—were able at long last to stretch their legs, to transfer hats, newspapers and other impedimenta from their laps to the vacated seats beside them, and for the first time since leaving Victoria to relax and be completely comfortable. Mostly they were somnolent at the approach of midnight, but between Borleston and Clough none of them actually slept. Fate had a conjuring trick in preparation, and they were needed as witnesses to it.
The station at Clough was not large, nor prepossessing, nor, it appeared, much frequented; but in spite of this, the train, once having stopped there, evinced an unexpected reluctance to move on. The whistle’s first confident blast having failed to shift it, there ensued a moment’s offended silence; then more whistling, and when that also failed, a peremptory, unintelligible shouting. The train remained inanimate, however, without even the usual rapid ticking to enliven it. And presently Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford, lowered the window of his compartment and put his head out, curious to know what was amiss.
Rain was falling indecisively. It tattooed in weak, petulant spasms against the station roof, and the wind on which it rode had a cutting edge. Wan bulbs shone impartially on slot-machines, timetables, a shuttered newspaper-kiosk; on governmental threat and commercial entreaty; on peeling green
paint and rust-stained iron. Near the clock, a small group of men stood engrossed in peevish altercation. Fen eyed them with disapproval for a moment and then spoke.
“Broken down?” he enquired unpleasantly. They swivelled round to stare at him. “Lost the driver?” he asked.
This second query was instantly effective. They hastened up to him in a bunch, and one of them—a massive, wall-eyed man who appeared to be the Station-master—said: “For God’s sake, sir, you ’aven’t seen ’im, ’ave you?”
“Seen whom?” Fen demanded mistrustfully.
“The motorman, sir. The driver.”
“No, of course I haven’t,” said Fen. “What’s happened to him?”
“ ’E’s gorn, sir. ’Ooked it, some’ow or other. ’E’s not in ’is cabin, nor we can’t find ’im anywhere on the station, neither.”
“Then he has absconded,” said Fen, “with valuables of some description, or with some other motorman’s wife.”
The Station-master shook his head—less, it appeared, by way of contesting this hypothesis than as an indication of his general perplexity—and stared helplessly up and down the deserted platform. “It’s a rum go, sir,” he said, “and that’s a fact.”
“Well, there’s one good thing about it, Mr. Maycock,” said the younger of the two porters who were with him. “ ’E can’t ’ave got clear of the station, not without being seen.”
The Station-master took some time to assimilate this, and even when he had succeeded in doing so, did not seem much enlightened by it. “ ’Ow d’you make that out, Wally?” he enquired.
“Well, after all, Mr. Maycock, the place is surrounded, isn’t it?”
“Surrounded, Wally?” Mr. Maycock reiterated feebly. “What d’you mean, surrounded?”
Wally gaped at him. “Lord, Mr. Maycock, didn’t you know? I thought you’d ’a’ met the Inspector when you came back from your supper.”
“Inspector?” Mr. Maycock could scarcely have been more bewildered if his underling had announced the presence of a Snab or a Greevey. “What Inspector?”
“Scotland Yard chap,” said Wally importantly. “And ’alf a dozen men with ’im. They’re after a burglar they thought’d be on this train.”
Mr. Maycock, clearly dazed by this melodramatic intelligence, took refuge from his confusion behind a hastily contrived breastwork of outraged dignity. “And why,” he demanded in awful tones, “was I not hinformed of this ’ere?”
“You ’ave bin informed,” snapped the second porter, who was very old indeed, and who appeared to be temperamentally subject to that vehement, unfocussed rage which one associates with men who are trying to give up smoking. “You ’ave bin informed. We’ve just informed yer.”
Mr. Maycock ignored this. “If you would be so kind,” he said in a lofty manner, “it would be ’elpful for me to know at what time these persons of ’oom you are speaking put in an appearance ’ere.”
“About twenty to twelve, it’d be,” said Wally sulkily. “Ten minutes before this lot was due in.”
“And it wouldn’t ’ave occurred to you, would it”—here Mr. Maycock bent slightly at the knees, as though the weight of his sarcasm was altogether too much for his large frame to support comfortably—“to ’ave a dekko in my room and see if I was ’ere? Ho no. I’m only the Station-master, that’s all I am.”
“Well, I’m very sorry, Mr. Maycock,” said Wally, in a tone of voice which effectively cancelled the apology out, “but I wasn’t to know you was back, was I? I told the Inspector you was still at your supper in the village.”
At this explanation, Mr. Maycock, choosing to overlook the decided resentment with which it had been delivered, became magnanimous. “Ah well, there’s no great ’arm done, I dare say,” he pronounced; and the dignity of his office having by now been adequately paraded, he relapsed to the level of common humanity again. “Burglar, eh? Was ’e on the train? Did they get ’im?”
Wally shook his head. “Not them. False alarm, most likely. They’re still ’angin’ about, though.” He jerked a grimy thumb towards the exit barrier. “That’s the Inspector, there.”
Hitherto, no one had been visible in the direction indicated. But now there appeared, beyond the barrier, a round, benign, clean-shaven face surmounted by a grey Homburg hat, at which Fen bawled, “Humbleby!” in immediate recognition. And the person thus addressed, having delivered the injunction “Don’t move from here, Millican” to someone in the gloom of the ticket-hall behind him, came on to the platform and in another moment had joined them.
He was perhaps fifty-five: small, as policemen go, and of a compact build which the neatness of his clothes accentuated. The close-cropped greying hair, the pink affable face, the soldierly bearing, the bulge of the cigar-case in the breast pocket and the shining brown shoes—these things suggested the more malleable sort of German petit bourgeois; to see him close at hand, however, was to see the grey eyes—bland, intelligent, sceptical—which effectively belied your first, superficial impression, showing the iron under the velvet. “Well, well,” he said. “Well, well, well. Chance is a great thing.”
“What,” said Fen severely, his head still projecting from the compartment window like a gargoyle from a cathedral tower, “is all this about a burglar?”
“And you will be the Station-master.” Humbleby had turned to Mr. Maycock. “You were away when I arrived here, so I took the liberty——”
“That I wasn’t, sir,” Mr. Maycock interrupted, anxious to vindicate himself. “I was in me office all the time, only these lads didn’t think to look there.… ’Ullo, Mr. Foster.” This last greeting was directed to the harassed Guard, who had clearly been searching for the missing motorman. “Any luck?”
“Not a sign of ’im,” said the Guard sombrely. “Nothing like this ’as ever ’appened on one of my trains before.”
“It is ’inkson, isn’t it?”
The Guard shook his head. “No. Phil Bailey.”
“Bailey?”
“Ah. Bailey sometimes took over from ’inkson on this run.” Here the Guard glanced uneasily at Fen and Humbleby. “It’s irregular, o’ course, but it don’t do no ’arm as I can see. Bailey’s ’ome’s at Bramborough, at the end o’ this line, and ’e’d ’ave to catch this train any’ow to get to it, so ’e took over sometimes when ’Inkson wanted to stop in Town.… And now this ’as to ’appen. There’ll be trouble, you mark my words.” Evidently the unfortunate Guard expected to be visited with a substantial share of it.
“Well, I can’t ’old out no longer,” said Mr. Maycock. “I’ll ’ave to ring ’eadquarters straight away.” He departed in order to do this, and Humbleby, who still had no clear idea of what was going on, required the others to enlighten him. When they had done this: “Well,” he said, “one thing’s certain, and that is that your motorman hasn’t left the station. My men are all round it, and they had orders to detain anyone who tried to get past them.”
At this stage, an elderly business man, who was sharing the same compartment with Fen and with an excessively genteel young woman of the sort occasionally found behind the counters of Post Offices, irritably enquired if Fen proposed keeping the compartment window open all night. And Fen, acting on this hint, closed the window and got out on to the platform.
“None the less,” he said to Humbleby, “it’ll be as well to interview your people and confirm that Bailey hasn’t left. I’ll go the rounds with you, and you can tell me about your burglar.”
They left the Guard and the two porters exchanging theories about Bailey’s defection, and walked along the platform towards the head of the train. “Goggett is my burglar’s name,” said Humbleby. “Alfred Goggett. He’s wanted for quite a series of jobs, but for the last few months he’s been lying low, and we haven’t been able to put our hands on him. Earlier this evening, however, he was spotted in Soho by a plain-clothes man named, incongruously enough, Diggett …”
“Really, Humbleby …”
“… And Diggett chase
d him to Victoria. Well, you know what Victoria’s like. It’s rather a rambling terminus, and apt to be full of people. Anyway, Diggett lost his man there. Now, about mid-day today one of our more reliable narks brought us the news that Goggett had a hide-out here in Clough, so this afternoon Millican and I drove down here to look the place over. Of course the Yard rang up the police here when they heard Goggett had vanished at Victoria; and the police here got hold of me; and here we all are. There was obviously a very good chance that Goggett would catch this train. Only unluckily he didn’t.”
“No one got off here?”
“No one got off or on. And I understand that this is the last train of the day, so for the time being there’s nothing more we can do. But sooner or later, of course, he’ll turn up at his cottage here, and then we’ll have him.”
“And in the meantime,” said Fen thoughtfully, “there’s the problem of Bailey.”
“In the meantime there’s that. Now let’s see.…”
It proved that the six damp but determined men whom Humbleby had culled from the local constabulary had been so placed about the station precincts as to make it impossible for even a mouse to have left without their observing it; and not even a mouse, they stoutly asserted, had done so. Humbleby told them to stay where they were until further orders, and returned with Fen to the down platform.
“No loophole there,” he pronounced. “And it’s an easy station to—um—invest. If it had been a great sprawling place like Borleston, now, I could have put a hundred men round it, and Goggett might still have got clear.… Of course, it’s quite possible that Borleston’s where he did leave the train.”
“One thing at a time,” said Fen rather peevishly. “It’s Bailey we’re worrying about now—not Goggett.”