The Secret of the Night Train

by Sylvia Bishop

  “Well,” said Marguerite to Max, in a loud stage whisper, “I don’t think that was very professional. I could be hiding half the Louvre in my shoes.”

  Max thought that this was unlikely, even in Marguerite’s enormous shoes. But she was too busy watching Commandant Le Goff to object. He was scrambling hastily through the remaining bags, asking people vague questions and looking at his watch. He really didn’t seem to be doing the job very thoroughly at all. He made it to the end of the carriage at top speed, thanked them for their time, announced that his junior officers would be staying on the train and should be alerted to anything suspicious, then ducked out of the carriage and off the train at double speed. As he hurried down the platform, the officers at the doors flocked after him. They were gone as swiftly as they had arrived.

  The two officers left on board nodded importantly at everyone, and fiddled importantly with their hats. Then when that was done, they marched off importantly to fiddle with their hats in the other carriages as well.

  Max scribbled all this down in her notebook, and twirled a plait as she thought it all over. “Sister,” she began, “do you think there could really—” but then she was distracted by another tut-PFFfff. She thought Le Goff had come back. But the man who entered was very much not Le Goff.

  He was a young man with flyaway hair, wearing a tweed jacket and the amazed smile of a man who is half an hour late for his train and finds it hasn’t left the station yet. He made his way down the aisle, but did a terrible job of it, tripping over and bumping into everything available, squinting at all the seats as he went.

  He stopped and had a really good squint at the pair opposite Max and Marguerite. “Excuse me,” he said, “is this seat ninety-eight?”

  “Seek and ye shall find,” said Marguerite.

  “Pardon?” The man’s French had a heavy British accent.

  “Yes,” clarified Max, “it is.”

  “Magnificent news.” The man put his bag on the rack overhead and folded himself into the seat. He fished into his pocket, and held up two halves of a pair of glasses, smiling ruefully. “Snapped them in London this morning. Absolute disaster. I waited ages on platform eight, only to find I was actually waiting on platform three. Piece of luck the train’s delayed!”

  “We had a police search. You missed all the fun,” said Marguerite – raising her eyebrows at Max, as if to say, conveniently.

  The man didn’t notice, and kept smiling at a spot just to Marguerite’s left. “Goodness, really?” he said, resting a casual arm on the table and accidentally knocking over the houseplant. Which, to be fair, Max thought, he could hardly have expected to be there. “Oh,” he said, a bit confused, “sorry. Er – what was that?”

  Sister Marguerite delved into her habit, produced a banana, tried again, and produced a small bottle of superglue. “Give those spectacles here,” she said. “Let’s get them fixed before you hurt yourself.” And she waved the glue in his face, where he could see it.

  “Heavens,” the man exclaimed. “You are a star and a saint. Goodness! Piece of luck meeting you two! Now, what did I do with them?”

  While he groped around in his pockets, the train gave a cough, and began to pull slowly out of the Gare de l’Est. As the changing view of Paris began to pick up speed, a knot in Max’s stomach tightened violently, and she thought very hard about diamond thieves and mysteries to loosen it. Why wasn’t the man out of breath like all the other latecomers? she thought to herself loudly. Had it really taken him half an hour to realize his mistake?

  Outside the window, Parisian town houses began to give way to modern apartments, and the train was moving faster and faster. Max twizzled her plaits together and breathed deeply. But she felt worse than ever, as if without Paris to hold her together, she might just unravel completely.

  So she imagined as hard as she could. She imagined that she had a long black coat like Le Goff’s, and a stern face, and that she was on the trail of diamond thieves, and would never dream of feeling homesick. She imagined that she was secretly investigating this man, who had dodged the police inspection so neatly. Watching him carefully, she put on her best innocent face, and asked: “Sister, do you think the Phantoms are really on the train?”

  “Phantoms have struck again, have they?” said the man. He looked casual. It was hard to tell when he couldn’t meet your eyes properly.

  “It’s all over the papers, mon poulet.” (Poulet is French for “chicken”. Again, it’s a nice thing to call someone. Maybe chickens are noble beasts in France.)

  “If only I could read them!” said the man, gesturing to his glasses.

  “Not long now.” Marguerite pressed down on the frames, cross-eyed with concentration.

  “You’re an absolute star,” said the man. “I’m Rupert, by the way. Rupert Nobes.”

  “Marguerite,” said Marguerite, and “Max,” said Max. And then the announcement came on to welcome them to the train, and it was in German first, which Max didn’t speak, and it was announcing stops that she had never heard of. Think about something else, she reminded herself. She stood up, with a swish of her imagined long black coat.

  “Sister Marguerite,” she said, “may I explore the train?”

  Rupert looked a bit surprised, as if maybe it wasn’t normal to want to explore a train that is the same all the way along. But Sister Marguerite just said, “Off you pop, find us something interesting,” and swung her legs aside to let Max pass.

  This was Max’s plan:

  Imagining being a detective wasn’t enough to stop the unravelling feeling: she was going to have to really do some detecting to take her mind off things. And besides, she told herself, somebody ought to look properly. Le Goff had done the bare minimum, and if there had really been a tip-off that the diamond was on the train, then surely it was worth a little more investigation.

  The first thing a detective needed was suspects. Rupert had to be Suspect Number One, because he had so neatly missed the police, but anyone with half a brain could have got past that inspection. That meant that everyone was a suspect, which was a bit overwhelming. But: if the thief was heading for Istanbul, they would make the same changes as Max and Marguerite. If Max could keep tabs on which of the passengers boarded the next train, that should narrow down the suspect list.

  She just needed to know who was on this train first. She took her notebook out of her pocket, and turned to a blank page.

  There were quite a lot of seats.

  This was fine, because it was a seven-hour journey, and soon Paris suburbs were giving way all too fast to rolling fields and long thin trees, and Max was very happy to have a distraction. If she hadn’t been feeling so jumbled up inside, it would have been fun. She had to be cunning: people don’t appreciate you taking notes while staring at them, so she did a lot of wandering-up-and-down-looking-lost, and then darting into empty seats or tiny train toilets to scribble things down. She laid her pages out like the train carriage, and wrote down something unusual about everyone – like this:

  At each stop, people left, and could be crossed off. “Red hat” and “Has tiny dog”, for example, were gone at Strasbourg, and “Green hair” got off at Karlsruhe. The train really emptied out at Stuttgart: Max crossed off lots and lots of people, and made a little note next to Stuttgart on her map. By this time the two police officers had a lot less people to look importantly at, and as they tramped up and down, Max got the feeling that their hearts weren’t really in it. Max, on the other hand, was starting to get excited. With so few people left on board, the idea of catching the thief suddenly seemed much more real.

  She traced her finger along the line from Paris to Stuttgart. She had well and truly left France. It wasn’t too bad on the warm bright train, speeding through the darkness. She only felt queasy when they pulled into train stations, dimly lit and alien, and she remembered that soon she would have to get back out again somewhere strange.

  But then, each station also brought the fascination of finding out who w
ould leave. By the time they pulled out of Augsburg, the stop before Munich, the train had almost emptied and her list had shortened dramatically.

  There were several likely suspects on there, she thought. Her favourites were a fabulously well-dressed young woman in sunglasses; an elderly German lady in furs and jewels with a foghorn voice, who was travelling with a younger man built like a small mountain; two sharp businessmen with even sharper moustaches; and a bristled man in a raincoat clutching his suitcase very tightly. Some were so unlikely that she was almost tempted to cross them off – it probably wasn’t the family with three toddlers, or the young couple reading poetry to each other – but she was a thorough detective, and she couldn’t cross them off without good reason. After all, the thief could be hiding in plain sight by looking as ordinary as possible.

  After her post-Augsburg headcount, she made her way back to her seat at last. Rupert still here, she thought. A lot of her favourite suspects were still on the train, in fact. The woman with the foghorn voice was still there, and as Max walked back to her own seat she was blaring angrily at the businessmen about something. The businessmen looked like they were trying not to cry. Max made a little note next to her: slightly terrifying.

  “Find anything interesting?” said Sister Marguerite.

  “Lots,” said Max. Marguerite nodded approvingly. Rupert just snored gently – he was asleep, wonkily restored glasses back on his nose. Max had to admit that he didn’t look like an international criminal.

  Sister Marguerite started sweeping things back into her habit. “Get yourself ready, mon lapin,” she said. “We’re almost at Munich. Time for train number two!” And the driver came on and announced that this was the end of the line, all change, please, all change; and all around her the remaining passengers reached for their bags.

  Max’s stomach knot tightened. But she picked up her suitcase, and all the things that Sister Marguerite managed to forget (superglue, needle and thread, newspaper, empty jelly-bean jar). She wound her scarves tighter, and recited firmly to herself:

  Munich. Budapest. Bucharest. Istanbul.

  Stepping out at Munich was a lovely surprise, after all the dead, empty stations they had passed. It was just a huge grey barn, with none of the frills of the station in Paris, but it was bright and welcoming and busy – and there was food. Max hadn’t realized how hungry she was.

  “Right,” said Sister Marguerite. “Just a couple of hours here, Max. Dinner!”

  Max agreed wholeheartedly. But she dallied nonetheless, looking back over her shoulder as some of her suspects went through the exit and disappeared into the Munich night. She lost the fabulously well-dressed woman, which was a disappointment, and the sharp businessmen too. The two officers, duty done, left the train and trudged off to look importantly at some cups of coffee before returning to Paris.

  They obviously hadn’t seen anything suspicious. Maybe there was nothing to see. But Max would find out who got on the next train, at least; she was curious now.

  The brightly lit food hall was decorated for Christmas, full of fake evergreen wreaths and wicker reindeer. Sister Marguerite steered them past a tempting pizza stall – “Germany, Max!” she declared. “Let’s eat the most German thing we can find!” – and ordered something that sounded like a sneeze, but according to the sign was schnitzel. The man who sold them the schnitzel was friendly, and asked Max where she was from, in English. She knew a little bit of English from school. They managed a pretty good conversation, for two people speaking a second language.

  She scanned the room. Rupert was here, talking to another of Max’s suspects at the bar. She was a red-headed woman, covered in freckles, with a high forehead and flared nose that made Max think of a proud young dragon. Max had noticed her especially on the train because her eyes were different colours – one blue, one green. The effect was rather beautiful. Even from this distance Max could see that Rupert was doing a really terrible job of trying to impress her, smiling too much and laughing too long – and she was doing a really excellent job of ignoring him.

  When they sat down with their schnitzel, which turned out to be a tasty sort of pork in breadcrumbs, Marguerite got the houseplant out again.

  “Um. Sister,” said Max.

  “Yes?”

  “What – er –” Max was looking for a subtle way to ask the question, but had to give up “ – why do you have a houseplant with you?”

  “A little keepsake, mon lapin!” said Marguerite, waving an enthusiastic fork. “It’s from the convent. It’s to stop me feeling homesick.”

  “Oh.” Max considered this. “Does it work?”

  “The right amount,” said Marguerite. “I don’t want to not be homesick. I like my home. But I don’t want it to stop me going places. You do whatever you have to do to get past it.” She pointed the fork at Max. “I know you’ve had the same trouble, mon lapin, and you’re doing well. That notebook of yours – I don’t know what you’re writing, but it’s working. Keep doing it.”

  Max nodded, wondering what Sister Marguerite would say if she knew that Max was writing a suspect list for her investigation into an international diamond-smuggling operation. “I will,” she said.

  After that Marguerite mostly told unlikely stories about the nuns in her convent, which were so funny that Max began to relax. Before she knew it, it was almost time to leave. Just for a few minutes, she stood at the front of the station, soaking up the crowds chattering in German and the lit-up restaurants and hotels and the wide roads and the bustle of Munich at night. The fresh air was steadying, and the mysterious sounds of German were exciting. Even though Max’s stomach knot was still there, the balloon of excitement in her chest was back too, and they were in a tug of war inside her.

  Sister Marguerite tapped her shoulder. “Come on, Max, we’ll miss the train. You can have all day in Budapest tomorrow.”

  “I think I’ll come back to Munich one day,” said Max, yawning.

  “Good plan,” said Sister Marguerite, and she flapped her habit encouragingly in the direction of the train. So Max took one last swallowing-up look at Munich, then followed her inside.

  Max had expected that a sleeper train would be enormous, but the Kálmán Imre was very small indeed. A tiny corridor led to even tinier rooms, that Sister Marguerite called “couchette cars” – little rooms with six bunks for sleeping on (“They’re called berths,” said Marguerite, “like on a ship”). The berths folded out from the wall, a stack of three on each side, and could be turned back into seats again; there were straps at the side of the middle and top ones, to stop you falling out, and a pile of white sheets and brown rug waiting on each. The car was so small that only one person could stand in it at a time, so they all had to queue to stash away their luggage and make their beds, then lie down to make way for the next person.

  Max was on a middle berth. There wasn’t quite enough space to sit upright. She tucked her notebook under her pillow, wrapped herself up tightly in her brown rug, and watched as Sister Marguerite made a marvellous mess of putting sheets on the berth below.

  “Are you finished yet?” barked a voice from behind.

  The voice was speaking French, which was strange, because Max could have sworn it was the elderly German foghorn lady from the first train. Her voice was difficult to mistake. It was a thunderous croak, as though a frog had been given a megaphone.

  “Just a moment,” said Sister Marguerite cheerfully.

  “There have already been moments,” said the voice. “We have been here for so many moments that I can feel my skin wrinkling as I wait.”

  Sister Marguerite turned around to see the speaker, and accidentally (or was it?) spun the sheet as she twisted and somehow got it tangled up in her own habit. “Goodness,” she said, “what active wrinkles you must have. I hardly ever notice mine. Oh dear, look what I’ve done.”

  Max craned round past her to see the speaker. It was the same woman. She had a remarkably triangular face – a perfectly normal forehead that
ballooned out into a huge jaw – and below that she was a bundle of furs and jewels. Her elbows and knees stuck out to the sides, so that she walked in a sort of wide squat, which put Max in mind of a scuttling crab. In one hand she clutched a bag of pear drops, and in the other, a smart black walking stick, which she tapped against the ground with an impatient click-click-click.

  Behind her loomed an enormous young man, his face squashed into a permanent expression of menace. Max was worried that he might turn that menace on Marguerite, but to her astonishment, he chuckled boyishly at her instead. “Let me help you there,” he rumbled. Like the woman, his French was perfect, but they both had an accent that Max couldn’t quite place.

  “Thank you, Mr—”

  “Grob. Klaus Grob. Call me Klaus. And this is Ester.”

  “Thank you, Klaus. I’m Sister Marguerite. This up here is Max.”

  Max waved from her berth.

  “ARE YOU FINISHED YET?” croaked Ester.

  “Nearly! Now, Klaus –” and Sister Marguerite paused mid-tuck, innocently, while an explosive tut erupted behind them “– is that a Swiss accent you’ve got?”

  Of course! Switzerland has three official languages – German, French and Italian. That explained their switch from German to French. Max hugged her rug a little tighter. If only all her investigations could be conducted lying here in bed.

  “It is! Very good!” exclaimed Klaus, with genuine delight.

  “But very irrelevant,” added Ester, “to the task at hand.”

  “Here,” said Klaus to Marguerite, smiling apologetically, “let me finish that for you.” And he lifted Marguerite up by the elbows, put her in the corridor and whisked the sheets into place with a surprisingly deft touch, while chattering about where in Switzerland he was from; he had moved to Spiez recently, he said, but he grew up in Kandersteg, which is very pretty, oh! – lots of waterfalls and beautiful forests, you must visit it, best cheese in the whole country, very lovely people.