The Heel of Achilles: A Golden Age Mystery

by E.

  “Reckon so, mate.” Pained resignation found an echo in the faces of the other passengers.

  “Frightened of speed, Charlie is,” he added. “Ain’t never known him do more than twenty miles a’nour at his best.”

  There were nods. “’Fraid train will run away with him, he is. That’s what I reckon.”

  Silence followed as the company gloomily contemplated the fell possibilities of the train running past itself. The sight of the gently moving countryside dispelled any fear. The morose-looking man in a corner broke the silence.

  “It’s all along o’ his bicycle,” he said.

  The gathering looked up in concerted interest.

  “Whose bicycle?”

  “Old Charlie’s. He learned suddenly to ride a bike. Fifty he was at the time. He was going down a hill and the bike ran away with him. Lost his nerve, Charlie did. Forgot he’d got a brake.” He ceased talking and gazed out of the window, ruminatingly.

  “What happened?” asked the girl.

  “Bike threw Charlie over a hedge into a pond. Never rode it again. Hadn’t the nerve.” He paused. “Nearly drownded him, it did.”

  “And he thinks the train will run away with him some time?” The stranger among them spoke for the first time.

  “Could be,” said the morose man. “Happened ten years ago,” he added, inconsequentially.

  “No ruddy fear of that.” The artisan waxed sarcastic. “Not at the speed Charlie drives the engine.”

  The train pulled up at Thames Pagnall platform. “All stations to Waterloo,” chanted a porter. “Close the doors, please.”

  “As if we’d leave the ruddy doors open on a morning like this.” The morose man pulled his overcoat closer.

  “Your language!” The girl tittered as the train got under way again on its trek.

  Two minutes passed. The sudden silence in the carriage was broken by a loud screeching of brakes. The train came to a standstill.

  “Gawd’s truth. He’s at it again,” said the artisan. “Every time Charlie’s driving this ’ere train, he stops here. What’s ’e do it for?” he demanded passionately. “Young Masters don’t do it. Charlie damn near always does, and I misses me bus and has to wait ten minutes for the next. What the hell for?”

  “The signal’s against him, I expect.” The girl looked resignation.

  “Can’t be.” The artisan emphasized the fact with a forefinger. “We’re on the local line. There’s no other train for ten minutes except the fast from Esher that stops at Surbiton. That’s on the fast up-line. There’s nought on the local line except us.”

  “Perhaps we’re before our time,” said a fellow traveller. The suggestion of the stranger was brushed aside. “Old Charlie ain’t never been before his time in his life,” insisted the artisan.

  “Don’t need no other train for signal to be agen us.” The morose man glowered. “Signalman works signals. Mebbe it’s about this time he’s making a cup o’ tea. So he don’t pop the signal down till he’s made it. See?” he added, darkly.

  Three minutes passed in immobility. A mood of depression descended upon the company. The artisan saw in mental vision his bus passing into the limbo of forgotten things. The stranger looked at his watch. “I’ll miss my connection at Surbiton,” he announced. He became plaintive. “And the one at London,” he added, after a pause for mathematical checking.

  After four minutes an air of restlessness rustled through the company. The girl voiced alarm. “Perhaps the train’s broken down,” she suggested.

  “No,” said the artisan. He elucidated. “Compressor’s working. Listen.” The staccato stabbing of the air being drawn into the brakes sounded somewhere ahead.

  “Must be signals then.” The girl was definite.

  The morose man let down a window and poked a head out. The green of the signal winked down at him in the semi-darkness. “Signal’s all right,” he announced. He dropped his gaze to the line, and bellowed.

  “Cor suffering Mike,” he said. “He’s sitting down between the rails.”

  “What!” A second head screwed through the window. The artisan peered out in the lightening dawn. He recognized the black-and-white-striped box beside the driver and relayed the news. “He’s telephoning,” he explained.

  “Oh, dear. Perhaps we’re being broadcast,” the girl’s spirits returned. “I shall tell my friends—”

  A shout from the next carriage sent up startled heads. “Crumbs, old Charlie’s done it this time. He’s knocked a bloke down.”

  There was a rush of heads through the windows on the other side of the train. In the faint daylight the figure of a man was visible lying beside the lines.

  Death spoke eloquently from the body. It lay stretched out straight, as comfortably as though the man had lain himself down to sleep. The girl took one look and retreated hurriedly into the carriage, a handkerchief to her mouth. Everybody looked the other way.

  “There are so many ways to let out life,” quoted the stranger. “Massinger,” he explained. It conveyed nothing to the company.

  Meanwhile, Charlie at the telephone was talking to the signal box at the terminus. “Bill, there’s a body on the line,” he announced. “Knocked down by train. Not my train.” He put forward the defence hurriedly.

  The signalman chuckled. “No, I reckon it wouldn’t be, Charlie. You ain’t fast enough to knock a fly down. Dammit, you’re five minutes late now and Surbiton’s asking where the hell you are. Where’s the body?”

  “Just past the bridge at Thames Pagnall.”

  Bill started in alarm. “Cor lumme, Charlie, ain’t you any further than that?” he demanded. “You’ll have the slow Guildford running into you.”

  Charlie squeaked a protest. “I had to make sure it were a body, hadn’t I? Then I had to get to this ’ere phone box. It ain’t got no head. Cut off by train.” The explanation seemed superfluous.

  “Then it must have been the last down train last night. You get away, quick, Charlie. I’ll have to put the down train on your line. Hop it.”

  Charlie replaced the receiver, closed the box and climbed back on to the driving cabin. The train whistled and set off for the third time. The passengers, now warmed by the excitement, settled down to discuss the shortness of life in general, and the sudden and dramatic terminations they had in their various walks of life witnessed.

  In the signal box the operator waited until Charlie had passed the distant signal, then set it at danger. He pulled over the points of the down line on to the up-track and signalled Surbiton the warning. Then he hurried to the station-master’s office.

  A telephone call to the police station came through just as the inspector was on the point of departure. Mackenzie was a tall, burly man in plain clothes, whose features some freak of heredity had assembled into a perpetual expression of ferocity, so that to be in his company was like consorting with a man on the point of committing violent assault. He listened to the tale of the dead trespasser on the company’s premises.

  “I’ll be along,” he announced. “With the police surgeon and a sergeant. You’d better send some of the staff down to see nobody goes near the body. And tell ‘em not to go near it, themselves.”

  “I’d like the railway doctor to be there, Inspector, before anything is moved,” announced the station-master. He was old in the service of the company, and a cautious man.

  “All right. You get him to the station, and I’ll pick you up—say in a quarter of an hour.”

  The inspector was as good as his word. He led a procession of five along the ballast way to where a couple of plate-layers were already waiting. One of them was sitting with his head between his knees; he had been violently sick.

  Mackenzie looked down at the corpse. “Anybody we know, Bunny?” he asked of the sergeant.

  “Don’t know yet, sir.” The fact was not altogether surprising.

  “Where’s his head?” demanded the inspector.

  A plate-layer nodded in the direction of the grass at t
he edge of the ballast way. “It took a toss over there,” he announced. He was the plate-layer who had not been vomiting, having twice within thirty years been engaged in the process of prodigious and lawful shedding of men’s blood in two wars.

  The sergeant took a quick peek at the face peering up at him from between blades of long grass. He thought of the Japanese executions he had seen along the Burma road. The Japs buried their victims up to the neck in the earth, and then lopped off their heads.

  “It’s a fellow named Canley, sir,” he announced. “Lives—lived,” he corrected himself—“in a cottage in the lane there. He indicated with a wave of a hand the rural lane below the railway line.

  “Anything to do with you, Mr. Station-master?” asked the inspector.

  “Really, sir.” The braided official pardonably mistook heredity for malignity in the policeman’s face. “If that’s meant to be serious—”

  The inspector stared at his indignation. “Don’t be damned silly,” he chided. “I mean is he an employee of the railway?”

  “No.”

  “Then he was trespassing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everybody trespassed,” said the plate-layer. He pointed to a well-defined track across the lines. A width of a foot was trodden hard like a rabbit run across a field. There was a certain petulancy in his voice at the idea that a train had the right to knock down only one trespasser out of so many.

  “People use it as a short cut to the other side of the village,” the station-master explained. “They aren’t supposed to.”

  The inspector turned to the body. “Well, we know who he was and what he was doing here. You two medical gents better have a look at the corpse while the sergeant and I browse round the scene of the accident.”

  The first discovery was made a few yards in the direction of the station. The inspector picked up a butt-end of a cigar. Although he searched carefully all round, that was the only discovery of any article that might not be expected to be on the spot in the ordinary way of things.

  He parked it in a pocket of his waistcoat as Sergeant Bunny called him across to the edge of the embankment, and pointed to a line of footprints, the toes pointing in the direction of the ballast way.

  “Better make sure they’re his, Bunny.” The sergeant crossed to the body and returned with one of the shoes. He looked at the sole and compared it with the marks of the prints. The impressions were about a quarter of an inch deep; the sergeant fitted the shoe into one of them. “It matches, sir,” he reported. “I reckon he came up this path from the lane like they all do when they’re making the short cut.”

  Inspector Mackenzie was looking at the prints and wrinkling his brows. “They’re overprinting others in one or two instances, Bunny,” he pointed out. “And there are none overprinting Canley’s.” Something he had read in the criminological library of his city police station as a constable, came into long-delayed use. “What time did it stop raining last night? Anybody know?” The constable nodded vigorously. “Yes, sir, half past ten pronto.”

  “Sure of that?”

  “Quite. I was just finishing my beat, and it had rained all through my duty time.”

  “Then that settles the time they were made. In my humble opinion, the man walked up the bank after 10.30.” He smirked smug satisfaction at the inquiry in the sergeant’s eyes. “Matter of observation, Bunny,” he announced, grandiloquently. “If rain had fallen after footprints were made, then the prints would have filled with water, and the marks of the patch on the sole would have been smoothed out by the water. Then, the edges of the impressions are sharp. Water would have taken the edge off them when the rain beat on the ground. Ever read Gross’s Criminal Investigation, Bunny?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You should. Every police officer ought to study it. I did. Well, I think it’s pretty clear now. Let’s see what the doctors say about the death.”

  The police surgeon looked up at their approach. Dr. Gaunt’s duties rarely went beyond certifying that an obstreperous man was drunk, or had had such drink as made him unfit to be in charge of a motor vehicle. He was a cheery soul, with a round face, the projecting part of which bore unmistakable signs that whatever he might think of women and song, he was in attune with the wine part of the triplet. On the other hand, the railway doctor was a worried, ascetic-looking and elongated man. He seemed to be meditating the scene with some secret inhibitions.

  “You’ll be wanting to know the time of death, Inspector?” suggested Dr. Gaunt. The inspector indicated acceptance. “Well, we agree that it was some time between 10 p.m. and midnight. Can’t put it any nearer than that.”

  The inspector glanced for confirmation at Dr. Jervis. The railway doctor nodded.

  Inspector Mackenzie detailed the discoveries of his sergeant and himself, including the evidence of the footprints.

  “Then that settles it.” Dr. Gaunt looked his satisfaction. He also looked at his watch; he was thinking of breakfast. “The fellow crossed by the short cut, got on the lines, and was knocked down by the train, fell across the line and was beheaded. I’d better be getting away now.”

  “I dispute that.”

  “What!” the ejaculation came from Dr. Gaunt. He glared at his professional colleague.

  “I said I dispute that he was taking the short cut and was knocked down by the train. I don’t accept responsibility so far as the railway is concerned until the circumstances have been investigated.”

  “You—you—” Dr. Gaunt, the vision of his breakfast receding into some dim future, became incoherent.

  “I should have thought the facts were plain enough, Doctor,” said the inspector. “I realize that it may be a question of damages from the railway company for the death of the man, but—” He paused for thought. “What grounds have you for doubting the means of death?”

  “Perhaps he thinks the man cut off his own dashed head.”

  Dr. Jervis ignored the police surgeon’s outburst. “I think there are several grounds on which it could be argued that the facts are not quite as simple as they look,” he insisted. “I shall report what I think to the Company at Waterloo, and I shall ask for Scotland Yard to be called in.”

  “This is Surrey, not London, Doctor.” Inspector Mackenzie’s face acquired a ferocity additional to his hereditary one. “It is my area.”

  “It is also the railway company’s property, Inspector, with its own police, and headquarters in London. I shall demand that the Yard be called in. In the meantime, I must ask that the body shall not be moved until a new examination has been made by a pathologist.” He turned to the station-master. “And I think you had better have a thorough examination made of the train which is supposed to have knocked the man down.”

  Sergeant Bunny scratched his head. The inspector looked from one to the other of the two medical men. “And what am I supposed to do?” he asked in high dudgeon.

  “I should say that it would be best to take the greatest care that none of the footprints are disturbed, and that somebody is left here to see that there is no disturbance of what may be vital facts.”

  The inspector decided. “You take charge here, Bunny,” he said, “until you receive further instructions.” He turned on his heel and began his walk back to the station. Dr. Gaunt followed him. The railway doctor crossed to the side of the station-master. After a few words, he, too, left the lines.

  Sergeant Bunny, after due consideration, expressed his opinion to the police constable. “It’s a rum do, Perkins,” he said.

  The constable, who was born a yokel and after twenty years in the force remained one, gave careful and apparently painful thought to the problem.

  “Ah!” he said.

  CHAPTER XI

  The telephone bell shrilled out in the hall of a flat in Whitehall Place, which runs alongside the War Office. A manservant in the dull black of ‘service’ answered it, placed the receiver gently on the table, knocked at a door and entered the breakfast room.

  “S
cotland Yard, sir,” he proclaimed sombrely; it might have been a Lord Bishop at the other end, judged from the solemnity of his voice.

  Dr. Harry Manson rose, dropped his napkin on the table and crossed to the hall. He picked up the receiver.

  “Manson here,” he announced.

  The voice of Superintendent Jones reverberated through the purlieus of Whitehall Place.

  The superintendent was a big man; and his voice was in proportion. But it differed from his personality. The super was slow and lumbering in gait and thought; his voice spoke in staccato jerks—they resembled as much as anything a machine-gun firing rounds of explosive bullets in bursts.

  Crime reporters who gathered in the Press Bureau of the Yard added that he spoke in shorthand; they meant that the super left out of his conversation the little words between the essential ones, thereby saving much time and energy.

  Newcomers to the Force were wont to wonder how Jones ever became a detective at all, and by what miracle he, having insinuated himself into that occupation, had climbed to the rank of superintendent. No make-up man on earth or in Hollywood—which is not of the earth earthy—could have disguised Jones, not even to a person stricken with blindness. He could not have approached within a hundred yards of a suspect without being recognized.

  But Old Fat Man—his nickname in the Yard—had two remarkable aids to detection. Firstly, he had a large and innocent-looking face—’baby-face’ is the description usually given to it—which looked out on the wicked world with such lack of guile, and surveyed malefactors with such trusting innocence in their protestations and explanations of this and that endeavour or dispute, that they were persuaded to pull the long bow until it broke and left them defenceless. His second attribute was a painstaking genius for delving into a mass of verbiage and coming to the surface with all the essential facts.

  His lack of imagination was a joke in the force. But nobody had ever known him to miss a fact. He might not reveal it at the time, because he had not the imagination to realize that it was a fact. But sooner or later, when that particular fact was essential to an investigation, Superintendent Jones would conjure it from the pigeon-hole of his memory with the same dexterity that an illusionist produces a rabbit out of a hat.