Blood on the Tracks

by Martin Edwards

  Dora moved cautiously forward till she stood in a little opening, clear of the undergrowth, free to use her right arm.

  ‘Good morning, Mr McCrowder!’ she cried sharply.

  The man started, and turned and saw a girl half a dozen yards off standing clear in the sunlight, with a mocking smile on her face.

  His lips growled out a curse; his right hand left the bags and stole to his side pocket.

  ‘Stop that!’ The command came clear and sharp. ‘Throw up your hands!’

  He looked again. The sunlight glinted on the barrel of a revolver, pointed straight at his head, with a steady hand.

  ‘Up with your hands, or I fire!’ and his hands went up over his head. The next instant Jim Pollock came crashing through the underwood, like an elephant through the jungle.

  He stopped short with a cry of amazement.

  ‘Steady!’ came Dora’s quiet voice; ‘don’t get in my line of fire. Round there to the left—that’s the way. Take away his revolver. It is in his right-hand coat pocket. Now tie his hands!’

  Jim Pollock did his work stolidly as directed. But while he wound the strong cord round the wrists and arms of Mr McCrowder, he remembered the railway carriage and the strangling grip at his throat, and the chloroform, and the disgrace that followed, and if he strained the knots extra tight it’s hard to blame him.

  ‘Now,’ said Dora, ‘finish his packing,’ and Jim crammed the remainder of the canvas sacks into the big bicycle bag.

  ‘You don’t mind the weight?’

  He gave a delighted grin for answer, as he swung both bags in his hands.

  ‘Get up!’ said Dora to the thief, and he stumbled to his feet sulkily. ‘Walk in front. I mean to take you back to Eddiscombe with me.’

  When they got on the roadside Pollock strapped the bicycle bag to his own handlebar.

  ‘May I trouble you, Mr Pollock, to unscrew one of the pedals of this gentleman’s bicycle?’ said Dora.

  It was done in a twinkling. ‘Now give him a lift up,’ she said to Jim, ‘he is going to ride back with one pedal.’

  The abject thief held up his bound wrists imploringly.

  ‘Oh, that’s all right. I noticed you held the middle of your handlebar from choice coming out. You’ll do it from necessity going back. We’ll look after you. Don’t whine; you’ve played a bold game and lost the odd trick, and you’ve got to pay up, that’s all.’

  There was a wild sensation in Eddiscombe when, in broad noon, the bank thief was brought in riding on a one-pedalled machine to the police barrack and handed into custody. Dora rode on through the cheering crowd to the hotel.

  A wire brought Sir Gregory Grant down by the afternoon train, and the three dined together that night at his cost; the best dinner and wine the hotel could supply. Sir Gregory was brimming over with delight, like the bubbling champagne in his wine glass.

  ‘Your health, Mr Pollock,’ said the banker to the junior clerk. ‘We will make up in the bank to you for the annoyance you have had. You shall fix your own fee, Miss Myrl—or, rather, I’ll fix it for you if you allow me. Shall we say half the salvage? But I’m dying with curiosity to know how you managed to find the money and thief.’

  ‘It was easy enough when you come to think of it, Sir Gregory. The man would have been a fool to tramp across the country with a black bag full of gold while the “Hue and Cry” was hot on him. His game was to hide it and lie low, and he did so. The sight of Mr Pollock at the hotel hurried him up as I hoped it would; that’s the whole story.’

  ‘Oh, that’s not all. How did you find the man? How did the man get out of the train going at the rate of sixty miles an hour? But I suppose I’d best ask that question of Mr Pollock, who was there?’

  ‘Don’t ask me any questions, sir,’ said Jim, with a look of profound admiration in Dora’s direction. ‘She played the game off her own bat. All I know is that the chap cut his stick after he had done for me. I cannot in the least tell how.’

  ‘Will you have pity on my curiosity, Miss Myrl.’

  ‘With pleasure, Sir Gregory. You must have noticed, as I did, that where the telegraph was broken down the line was embanked and the wires ran quite close to the railway carriage. It is easy for an active man to slip a crooked stick like this’ (she held up Mr McCrowder’s stick as she spoke) ‘over the two or three of the wires and so swing himself into the air clear of the train. The acquired motion would carry him along the wires to the post and give him a chance of breaking down the insulators.’

  ‘By Jove! You’re right, Miss Myrl. It’s quite simple when one comes to think of it. But, still, I don’t understand how…’

  ‘The friction of the wire,’ Dora went on in the even tone of a lecturer, ‘with a man’s weight on it, would bite deep into the wood of the stick, like that!’ Again she held out the crook of a dark thick oak stick for Sir Gregory to examine, and he peered at it through his gold spectacles.

  ‘The moment I saw that notch,’ Dora added quietly, ‘I knew how Mr McCrowder had “Cut his stick”.’

  The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway

  Baroness Orczy

  Baroness Orczy is today remembered principally as the creator of Sir Percy Blakeney, alias ‘the Scarlet Pimpernel’, but her contribution to crime fiction deserves to be remembered. Orczy (1865–1947), the daughter of a Hungarian musician, moved to England at the age of fourteen, and married an Englishman. She turned to writing as a means of supplementing the family income, and created three different detectives, including the title character in Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910) and the crafty lawyer Patrick Mulligan, whose cases are chronicled in Skin O’ My Tooth (1928).

  Orczy’s principal sleuth was the Old Man in the Corner, who remains one of the most interesting and original examples of the ‘armchair detective’, even though his favourite seat in the corner of an A.B.C. teashop in London was scarcely an armchair. Rather than rushing around hunting for clues, he solves crimes by applying his intellect to puzzles recounted by the journalist Polly Burton. He first appeared in 1901 in ‘The Fenchurch Street Mystery’, and his case-book ultimately extended to three collections of stories. This story, which first appeared in the Royal Magazine in 1901, was televised in 1973 in the BBC TV series The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes. The cast included such notable actors as Judy Geeson (as Polly Burton), John Savident, Christopher Timothy, and Richard Beckinsale. In a classic example of the oddities of television adaptation, Alan Cooke’s screenplay removed the Old Man in the Corner from the storyline, and Polly became the star of the show.

  It was all very well for Mr Richard Frobisher (of the London Mail) to cut up rough about it. Polly did not altogether blame him.

  She liked him all the better for that frank outburst of manlike ill-temper which, after all said and done, was only a very flattering form of masculine jealousy.

  Moreover, Polly distinctly felt guilty about the whole thing. She had promised to meet Dickie—that is Mr Richard Frobisher—at two o’clock sharp outside the Palace Theatre, because she wanted to go to a Maud Allan matinée, and because he naturally wished to go with her.

  But at two o’clock sharp she was still in Norfolk Street, Strand, inside an A.B.C. shop, sipping cold coffee opposite a grotesque old man who was fiddling with a bit of string.

  How could she be expected to remember Maud Allan or the Palace Theatre, or Dickie himself for a matter of that? The man in the corner had begun to talk of that mysterious death on the Underground Railway, and Polly had lost count of time, of place, and circumstance.

  She had gone to lunch quite early, for she was looking forward to the matinée at the Palace.

  The old scarecrow was sitting in his accustomed place when she came into the A.B.C. shop, but he had made no remark all the time that the young girl was munching her scone and butter. She was just busy thinking how rude he was not even to have said ‘Good
morning’, when an abrupt remark from him caused her to look up.

  ‘Will you be good enough,’ he said suddenly, ‘to give me a description of the man who sat next to you just now, while you were having your cup of coffee and scone.’

  Involuntarily Polly turned her head towards the distant door, through which a man in a light overcoat was even now quickly passing. That man had certainly sat at the next table to hers, when she first sat down to her coffee and scone; he had finished his luncheon—whatever it was—a moment ago, had paid at the desk and gone out. The incident did not appear to Polly as being of the slightest consequence.

  Therefore she did not reply to the rude old man, but shrugged her shoulders, and called to the waitress to bring her bill.

  ‘Do you know if he was tall or short, dark or fair?’ continued the man in the corner, seemingly not the least disconcerted by the young girl’s indifference. ‘Can you tell me at all what he was like?’

  ‘Of course I can,’ rejoined Polly impatiently, ‘but I don’t see that my description of one of the customers of an A.B.C. shop can have the slightest importance.’

  He was silent for a minute, while his nervous fingers fumbled about in his capacious pockets in search of the inevitable piece of string. When he had found this necessary ‘adjunct to thought’, he viewed the young girl again through his half-closed lids, and added maliciously:

  ‘But supposing it were of paramount importance that you should give an accurate description of a man who sat next to you for half an hour today, how would you proceed?’

  ‘I should say that he was of medium height—’

  ‘Five foot eight, nine, or ten?’ he interrupted quietly.

  ‘How can one tell to an inch or two?’ rejoined Polly crossly. ‘He was between colours.’

  ‘What’s that?’ he inquired blandly.

  ‘Neither fair nor dark—his nose—’

  ‘Well, what was his nose like? Will you sketch it?’

  ‘I am not an artist. His nose was fairly straight—his eyes—’

  ‘Were neither dark nor light—his hair had the same striking peculiarity—he was neither short nor tall—his nose was neither aquiline nor snub—’ he recapitulated sarcastically.

  ‘No,’ she retorted; ‘he was just ordinary looking.’

  ‘Would you know him again—say tomorrow, and among a number of other men who were “neither tall nor short, dark nor fair, aquiline nor snub-nosed”, etc.?’

  ‘I don’t know—I might—he was certainly not striking enough to be specially remembered.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he said, while he leant forward excitedly, for all the world like a Jack-in-the-box let loose. ‘Precisely; and you are a journalist—call yourself one, at least—and it should be part of your business to notice and describe people. I don’t mean only the wonderful personage with the clear Saxon features, the fine blue eyes, the noble brow and classic face, but the ordinary person—the person who represents ninety out of every hundred of his own kind—the average Englishman, say, of the middle classes, who is neither very tall nor very short, who wears a moustache which is neither fair nor dark, but which masks his mouth, and a top hat which hides the shape of his head and brow, a man, in fact, who dresses like hundreds of his fellow-creatures, moves like them, speaks like them, has no peculiarity.

  ‘Try to describe him, to recognise him, say a week hence, among his other eighty-nine doubles; worse still, to swear his life away, if he happened to be implicated in some crime, wherein your recognition of him would place the halter round his neck.

  ‘Try that, I say, and having utterly failed you will more readily understand how one of the greatest scoundrels unhung is still at large and why the mystery on the Underground Railway was never cleared up.

  ‘I think it was the only time in my life that I was seriously tempted to give the police the benefit of my own views upon the matter. You see, though I admire the brute for his cleverness, I did not see that his being unpunished could possibly benefit anyone.

  ‘In these days of tubes and motor traction of all kinds, the old-fashioned “best, cheapest, and quickest route to City and West End” is often deserted, and the good old Metropolitan Railway carriages cannot at any time be said to be over-crowded. Anyway, when that particular train steamed into Aldgate at about 4 p.m. on March 18th last, the first-class carriages were all but empty.

  ‘The guard marched up and down the platform looking into all the carriages to see if anyone had left a halfpenny evening paper behind for him, and opening the door of one of the first-class compartments, he noticed a lady sitting in the further corner, with her head turned away towards the window, evidently oblivious of the fact that on this line Aldgate is the terminal station.

  ‘“Where are you for, lady?” he said.

  ‘The lady did not move, and the guard stepped into the carriage, thinking that perhaps the lady was asleep. He touched her arm lightly and looked into her face. In his own poetic language, he was “struck all of a ’eap”. In the glassy eyes, the ashen colour of the cheeks, the rigidity of the head, there was the unmistakable look of death.

  ‘Hastily the guard, having carefully locked the carriage door, summoned a couple of porters, and sent one of them off to the police-station and the other in search of the station-master.

  ‘Fortunately at this time of day the up platform is not very crowded, all the traffic tending westward in the afternoon. It was only when an inspector and two police constables, accompanied by a detective in plain clothes and a medical officer, appeared upon the scene, and stood round a first-class railway compartment, that a few idlers realised that something unusual had occurred, and crowded round, eager and curious.

  ‘Thus it was that the later editions of the evening papers, under the sensational heading, “Mysterious Suicide on the Underground Railway”, had already an account of the extraordinary event. The medical officer had very soon come to the decision that the guard had not been mistaken, and that life was indeed extinct.

  ‘The lady was young, and must have been very pretty before the look of fright and horror had so terribly distorted her features. She was very elegantly dressed, and the more frivolous papers were able to give their feminine readers a detailed account of the unfortunate woman’s gown, her shoes, hat, and gloves.

  ‘It appears that one of the latter, the one on the right hand, was partly off, leaving the thumb and wrist bare. That hand held a small satchel, which the police opened, with a view to the possible identification of the deceased, but which was found to contain only a little loose silver, some smelling-salts, and a small empty bottle, which was handed over to the medical officer for purposes of analysis.

  ‘It was the presence of that small bottle which had caused the report to circulate freely that the mysterious case on the Underground Railway was one of suicide. Certain it was that neither about the lady’s person, nor in the appearance of the railway carriage, was there the slightest sign of struggle or even of resistance. Only the look in the poor woman’s eyes spoke of sudden terror, of the rapid vision of an unexpected and violent death, which probably only lasted an infinitesimal fraction of a second, but which had left its indelible mark upon the face, otherwise so placid and so still.

  ‘The body of the deceased was conveyed to the mortuary. So far, of course, not a soul had been able to identify her, or to throw the slightest light upon the mystery which hung around her death.

  ‘Against that, quite a crowd of idlers—genuinely interested or not—obtained admission to view the body, on the pretext of having lost or mislaid a relative or a friend. At about 8.30 p.m. a young man, very well dressed, drove up to the station in a hansom, and sent in his card to the superintendent. It was Mr Hazeldene, shipping agent, of 11, Crown Lane, E.C., and No. 19, Addison Row, Kensington.

  ‘The young man looked in a pitiable state of mental distress; his hand clutched nervously a copy of the St
James’s Gazette, which contained the fatal news. He said very little to the superintendent except that a person who was very dear to him had not returned home that evening.

  ‘He had not felt really anxious until half an hour ago, when suddenly he thought of looking at his paper. The description of the deceased lady, though vague, had terribly alarmed him. He had jumped into a hansom, and now begged permission to view the body, in order that his worst fears might be allayed.

  ‘You know what followed, of course,’ continued the man in the corner, ‘the grief of the young man was truly pitiable. In the woman lying there in a public mortuary before him, Mr Hazeldene had recognised his wife.

  ‘I am waxing melodramatic,’ said the man in the corner, who looked up at Polly with a mild and gentle smile, while his nervous fingers vainly endeavoured to add another knot on the scrappy bit of string with which he was continually playing, ‘and I fear that the whole story savours of the penny novelette, but you must admit, and no doubt you remember, that it was an intensely pathetic and truly dramatic moment.

  ‘The unfortunate young husband of the deceased lady was not much worried with questions that night. As a matter of fact, he was not in a fit condition to make any coherent statement. It was at the coroner’s inquest on the following day that certain facts came to light, which for the time being seemed to clear up the mystery surrounding Mrs Hazeldene’s death, only to plunge that same mystery, later on, into denser gloom than before.

  ‘The first witness at the inquest was, of course, Mr Hazeldene himself. I think everyone’s sympathy went out to the young man as he stood before the coroner and tried to throw what light he could upon the mystery. He was well-dressed, as he had been the day before, but he looked terribly ill and worried, and no doubt the fact that he had not shaved gave his face a careworn and neglected air.