Fear on the Phantom Special

by Edward Marston

‘It certainly did that,’ said Andrews with feeling.

  ‘In your place, I’d just be happy that it has been restored to its proper place. The thief – if that’s what he was – must have been having fun at your expense.’

  ‘Well, he’s not going to get away with it. Find him.’

  ‘That’s a task that you could do more easily than me. What’s clear is that it was stolen by someone you invited into this house and who saw you take the key to that cupboard out of the vase. Now, who did you show that medal to?’

  Andrews pondered. ‘I showed it to lots of people,’ he said at length. ‘In fact, I had eight or nine engine drivers here to celebrate the award when I first got it. They all knew where it was kept. Then there were friends and relatives, of course. I even invited the postman in to show it off to him.’

  ‘What about your neighbours?’

  ‘Half the street has seen it. When word got around, people knocked on the door out of curiosity.’ He became shamefaced. ‘I suppose that I bragged about it far too much.’

  ‘You were entitled to, Mr Andrews.’

  ‘What happens now?’

  ‘To start with, you must make a list of all the people you’ve so far mentioned. I reckon there’ll be twenty or thirty names at least. Add any others that come to mind.’

  ‘Well, there’s Maddy and Lydia Quayle, of course …’

  Hinton smiled. ‘I think we can eliminate them.’

  ‘They’re going to be amazed when they know what happened. I can’t tell you how relieved I am – but that doesn’t mean I’m letting the thief get off scot-free.’

  ‘You’ll catch him by a process of elimination.’

  ‘Can’t you help me?’

  ‘I don’t know anyone on your list. You do. That’s why you’re best placed to solve the crime. There is, however, one piece of advice I’d like to pass on.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Don’t put the medal back in that cupboard. Too many people know where it’s kept and how to get at it. Take it to your daughter’s house,’ said Hinton. ‘I know that Inspector Colbeck has a safe and that you’d be very welcome to leave anything in it. That’s where your award belongs.’

  Colbeck and Leeming decided to combine business with pleasure, discussing the new evidence they’d garnered at the same time as they were eating a meal at the Riverside Hotel. In a quiet corner of the dining room, they put their suspects under the microscope.

  ‘Let’s take Mr Hedley first,’ suggested Colbeck.

  ‘I wouldn’t take him at all, sir.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I can’t see what he’d stand to gain.’

  ‘Then you’ve forgotten Miss Treadgold. You were the first to spot that he was fond of her, and I noticed the way his tone softens whenever he talks about her.’

  ‘Your argument doesn’t hold water,’ said Leeming. ‘He didn’t need to get rid of Piper in order to move closer to Miss Treadgold. Since she’d been cast aside, she was already available.’

  ‘No, Victor. As long as Piper was alive, she wouldn’t look at another man. Even when he married, she’d still have tried to get him back. She loved him.’

  ‘But she had every reason to hate him.’

  ‘Those emotions are not mutually exclusive. In her case, I fancy, they were intermingled. It made her volatile. Having met the lady, I can see what attracted him to her.’

  ‘Then why didn’t they marry?’

  ‘He met someone he felt would be more … acceptable as a wife. When that happened, Hedley saw his chance.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Leeming, shaking his head and reaching for a bread roll. ‘I usually admire your reasoning but not this time. Hedley was dog-loyal to his friend. Piper only had to whistle and the lawyer would come running.’

  ‘That was until Miss Treadgold came on the scene.’

  ‘I’d put him at the bottom of our list.’

  ‘What we’re looking for,’ argued Colbeck, ‘is someone who knows Piper well, is aware of how he’d react in certain situations and has the intelligence to devise a scheme that ends with his complete disappearance. Hedley stands out most obviously as the person I’ve just described.’

  ‘But there’s no blazing anger inside him. That’s what Dymock and Vine have – an inner furnace. You can see the flames dancing in their eyes. Both of them detested Piper.’

  ‘Yet neither of them went on the Phantom Special.’

  ‘What difference does that make?’

  ‘That excursion was crucial. Someone who plotted Piper’s death would surely have been on that train to see that everything went as planned.’

  ‘Dymock could have paid someone else to do that in order to escape attention, and so could Walter Vine. Each of them had a real reason for revenge. Hedley didn’t.’

  ‘I disagree.’

  Leeming was plaintive. ‘Do you mind if we actually eat some food now, sir?’

  Colbeck laughed. Abandoning their discussion, they attacked their meal with relish.

  Madeline was staggered when her father turned up at the house unexpectedly with his beloved medal in his hand. While she shared his delight in seeing his award returned, she had the same underlying unease as Andrews. It meant that somebody could apparently enter the house at will. Only the medal had been taken in the first instance. At a future visit, the thief might steal far more. Her painting of a locomotive was at risk and so were the savings that her father had hidden under a loose floorboard in his bedroom.

  As soon as she’d locked the medal away in the safe, she sat her father down and talked seriously to him.

  ‘This man must be caught,’ she demanded.

  ‘That’s what I told Alan Hinton.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He told me that I had a much better chance of success than him. It has to be someone I know. I have to work very carefully through a list of everyone who’s been in the house and seen me take the medal out of the cupboard.’

  ‘I can’t believe any of your friends would do such a thing.’

  ‘Neither could I at first. Then I began to wonder …’

  ‘Don’t start pointing a finger just yet, Father,’ she warned. ‘You’ve got to follow Robert’s pattern. You gather evidence slowly until you have enough of it – then you can pounce.’

  ‘I’ll do more than pounce, Maddy. I’ll knock his teeth out.’

  ‘Then you’d be charged with assault.’

  ‘It would be worth it,’ he said, malevolently. ‘I just wish that I still had Alan Hinton to help me.’

  ‘He’s given you good advice, Father. Besides, it’s not as if he’s left you in the lurch. Alan has told you exactly what to do and it’s not as if you’re on your own.’

  ‘What do you mean, Maddy?’

  ‘Well, you don’t think that I’m going to miss out on the fun, do you? And I’m sure that Lydia will say exactly the same. There’ll be three of us in this investigation,’ she went on. ‘We’ll find the culprit in no time at all.’

  By the time they reached the main course, they had shifted their interest to Walter Vine. Since the man was still suffering from the wound inflicted on him by Alexander Piper, his desire for revenge was fed by his constant pain and by the humiliation of being vanquished in a duel. Leeming was slowly coming to the view that Vine should be their prime suspect.

  ‘After sending me packing from his house,’ he said, ‘Vine came to see me here. Why? There was no real need. It was not as if he came to apologise. Men like him never do that. They think that an apology is a sign of weakness.’

  ‘When I met him,’ recalled Colbeck, ‘he gave me the impression that he expected the apology to come from me. Vine thinks that he can dismiss police officers with a lordly wave of his hand. I let him know that he was subject to the law of the land just as everyone else is.’

  ‘Ainsley told me he’s had trouble with Vine in the past. You have to feel sorry for the sergeant.’

  ‘Why is that?’


  ‘He’s had arrogant snobs like Walter Vine, Piper and Lord Culverhouse to deal with. Then there’s Hedley,’ said Leeming. ‘He’s not a snob, maybe, but he knew how to help Piper wriggle out of any charge of criminal activity. By rights, Piper should have been locked up in prison with Vine and Hedley. They all broke the law.’

  ‘What about Lord Culverhouse?’

  ‘He’s probably worse than the others.’ Colbeck grinned. ‘He is, sir. Look at the way he indulged his nephew. He let Piper get away with the most dreadful behaviour. My uncle wouldn’t have let me do that. If I did so much as speak out of turn, he used to clip my ear.’

  ‘And as a result,’ said Colbeck, ‘you’ve grown up to be an honest, hard-working, law-abiding citizen. Lord Culverhouse is a very different sort of uncle to the one you had, Victor. He approved of Piper’s disorderly private life because he envied it. At his nephew’s age, I daresay he enjoyed the same excesses.’

  ‘We’re going astray a bit, sir,’ warned Leeming. ‘We were talking about Walter Vine and I think he’s a far more likely culprit than Hedley.’

  ‘Suppose that we’re both wrong.’

  ‘Then it has to be Dymock or Norm Tiller.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Colbeck. ‘It could be someone else entirely, someone who doesn’t even live in Kendal. Then there’s another option, of course. We’ve been looking at four male suspects. What if the person who contrived the disappearance of Alexander Piper was a woman?’

  ‘I thought we decided that Miss Treadgold was innocent.’

  ‘Perhaps we were too hasty in doing so.’

  ‘What was her motive?’

  ‘It could be fury at Piper for casting her roughly aside.’

  ‘Yet she joined the search for him.’

  ‘That might have been an attempt to escape suspicion.’

  ‘Earlier on, you said that she still loved him.’

  ‘I did,’ agreed Colbeck, ‘but love takes many forms. Miss Treadgold might have been so infatuated with Piper that she refused to let anyone else steal him away from her. I think, on reflection, that we might do well to bear the lady in mind.’

  As the vehicle rattled along in the darkness, the driver was wrapped up warm against a persistent wind. The horse kept up a steady trot, its harness jingling and its hooves maintaining a constant drumbeat. There was no sense of hurry. The driver used the journey as a time of reflection, thinking back to the events that occurred at Hallowe’en with mixed feelings. When they finally reached the point where the fire had raged in order to stop the train, the horse was pulled to a halt and the driver got down to the ground.

  Caroline Treadgold knelt beside the railway line and looked around. It was a place that had determined her destiny. She found it hard to pull herself away from it.

  The visit to their son’s house had opened the eyes of Rodney and Emma Piper. Anticipating some rude shocks, they left the building with a degree of reassurance. Alexander had not been the unprincipled rake they thought him, after all. They put it down to the curative effect that Melissa Haslam had had on him. Back at Culverhouse Court, they discussed what they’d found.

  ‘We misjudged him, Emma,’ said her husband.

  ‘I know that now.’

  ‘We should have had more faith in our son.’

  ‘Alex was to blame as much as we were.’

  ‘That’s true. I thought we’d lost him completely and we hadn’t. That Bible proved that he was still ours. I looked inside it. All the places I’d marked when I’d first presented it to him were still there. Though we’d been split asunder,’ he said, ‘I still controlled his Bible study.’

  ‘Mr Hedley held him in such high esteem.’

  ‘I was glad we met him there. With a friend like that, Alex could never be as promiscuous as we feared.’

  ‘What will happen to that house now, Rodney?’

  ‘Nothing can happen to any of his possessions until he’s been found. That may take a considerable time. We’re all powerless until then. But there was consolation to be drawn from our visit this evening. I was touched.’

  ‘Yes, I found it very comforting.’

  ‘It will certainly help us to sleep better tonight.’

  ‘Nothing will ever do that,’ she said, wistfully. ‘Alex went before his time. That’s unnatural. Even asleep, I’ll be troubled by that thought. We failed him, Rodney. I see that now. We must pray for forgiveness.’

  Once started, the names surged out of him like a waterfall. Madeleine had a job to write them down fast enough. They were in the drawing room and Andrews was remembering all the people who’d been invited in to see his medal and – in some cases – to be allowed to hold it. When he finally came to a halt, his daughter thought that it was all over, then five more people popped up in his mind and they had to be added to the list. In the end, he finally ran out of breath and flopped back in the chair.

  ‘That’s all I can remember, Maddy.’

  She was alarmed. ‘You think that there were more?’

  ‘I hope not but I can’t be sure.’

  ‘Let me add these up.’

  Using the pencil to tick off each name, she counted the names and gasped when she realised what the total was.

  ‘Well?’ he prompted her.

  ‘It comes to forty-two.’

  ‘I don’t have that many friends.’

  ‘That’s what worries me, Father. Some of these people are not friends at all. They’re strangers. You hardly know them, yet you let them walk into the house.’

  ‘It was a mistake. I realise that now.’

  ‘Let’s take a closer look at them,’ she said. ‘I’m sure that we can cross out some of these names straight away. Vernon Passmore, for instance, and Dirk Sowerby.’

  ‘They wouldn’t dare steal anything from me.’

  ‘Neither would most of these people. Mr Kingston is another one who’s in the clear. With those crutches of his, he’d have had a job to cross the road. As for the postman, we’ve known and trusted him for years. Here,’ she went on, handing him the list and the pencil, ‘you know them better than I do.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do, Maddy?’

  ‘Cross off the ones we don’t need to bother with. We can then concentrate on the ones that are left.’

  ‘One way or another, we’ll find him,’ he said, grimly.

  After their dinner, they went up to Colbeck’s room to study the diagram of Hither Wood. It was spread out on a small table and they pored over it in silence for some time. Since he’d only been there at night, Leeming was unable to recognise any significant features of the wood. Colbeck, however, pointed out several that he’d noted.

  ‘Somewhere in there is the vital clue that we need,’ he said. ‘Reading that poem by Tiller has made me more certain than ever that the explanation of Piper’s fate is locked away in Hither Wood.’

  ‘But the poem is about Gregor Hayes.’

  ‘I know that, Victor.’

  ‘Alexander Piper isn’t even mentioned in it.’

  ‘How could he be? At the time when the poem was written five years ago, Tiller had never even met him.’

  ‘So how are the two disappearances linked?’

  ‘To be honest, I’m not sure. Perhaps one person was involved in both.’

  ‘We’ve no proof of that, sir.’

  ‘Then we’ll have to find it.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Leeming, confused. ‘In Norm’s poem, the victim was killed by a phantom.’

  ‘That could well be what happened in Piper’s case.’

  ‘How did you work that out?’

  ‘I started from a different place than the poet. Tiller believes in phantoms. He’s lived here for long enough to absorb the folklore of the Lake District and to accept it as proven fact.’ Colbeck sat up. ‘I’m a committed sceptic.’

  ‘I’m not. When we went to the wood, something made me feel scared. I believe it was a ghost.’

  ‘You won’t have that problem when we go
back there.’

  Leeming blenched. ‘I’d rather keep away from that place at midnight, sir. Look what happened last time.’

  ‘We’ll be going in broad daylight,’ said Colbeck, folding up the diagram, ‘and we won’t be taking the same route.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s because I don’t want anyone to know where we are. Last time, the man from whom we hired the horse and dog cart happened to be a drinking companion of Ainsley’s. That’s how the sergeant found out where we’d been.’

  ‘How will we get there, then?’

  ‘We’ll take a train to Birthwaite and hire a cab. Nobody in Kendal will be any the wiser.’

  ‘What’s the reason for secrecy?’ asked Leeming. ‘If we took Ainsley with us, he could save us a lot of time. He knows that wood inside out.’

  ‘I appreciate that. He proved it when he took me there. Ainsley is a good policeman, but he has a besetting fault.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘He’s spent ten long years trying to solve the mystery of Gregor Hayes’s disappearance. During that time, his mind has been clogged with theories he’s been unable to prove. His brain has ossified,’ said Colbeck. ‘It just won’t accept new ideas. If we go to that wood with Ainsley, he’ll recite the same tale that I heard, word for word. We need the freedom to think afresh.’

  ‘I know what I’ll be thinking about tomorrow, sir.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘It will be November 5th.’

  ‘Ah, yes – you’ll be remembering your children.’

  ‘No,’ said Leeming, ‘I’ll be remembering the time we were sent off to Exeter because of what happened there.’

  It had been one of their most gruesome cases. The local stationmaster had vanished and nobody could find him. On Guy Fawkes Day, a massive bonfire had been lit close to the cathedral and the whole city turned out for the event. When the blaze finally died out, the charred remains of the missing man were found among the embers.

  ‘I still shudder when I think of it,’ said Leeming.

  ‘You ought to be heartened.’