Blood on the Tracks

by Martin Edwards

  ‘An appropriate and dramatic end to a singular and yet typical case,’ said Thorndyke, as he put down the newspaper. ‘I hope it has enlarged your knowledge, Jervis, and enabled you to form one or two useful corollaries.’

  ‘I prefer to hear you sing the medico-legal doxology,’ I answered, turning upon him like the proverbial worm and grinning derisively (which the worm does not).

  ‘I know you do,’ he retorted, with mock gravity, ‘and I lament your lack of mental initiative. However, the points that this case illustrates are these: First, the danger of delay; the vital importance of instant action before that frail and fleeting thing that we call a clue has time to evaporate. A delay of a few hours would have left us with hardly a single datum. Second, the necessity of pursuing the most trivial clue to an absolute finish, as illustrated by the spectacles. Third, the urgent need of a trained scientist to aid the police; and, last,’ he concluded, with a smile, ‘we learn never to go abroad without the invaluable green case.’

  The Eighth Lamp

  Roy Vickers

  William Edward Vickers (1889–1965) wrote under the name Roy Vickers, as well as using a series of pseudonyms, including Sefton Kyle and David Durham. After briefly contemplating a career as a barrister, he turned to journalism and started writing fiction. So prolific did he become that his bibliography is a little uncertain, but it seems that his first published novel was The Mystery of the Scented Death (1921). He is best known for his stories about Scotland Yard’s Department of Dead Ends, and he became a leading figure in the Crime Writers’ Association after its formation by John Creasey in 1953.

  On behalf of the CWA, Vickers edited the 1960 anthology Some Like Them Dead, and in his introduction, he discussed his views about the short crime story: ‘a crime story has vitality when it presents a pattern of human behaviour—using the basic facts of crime and the police as a painter uses colours on a palette—to depict a fabular truth that is not concerned with the actuality of crime. The pattern should be based on a bright idea in a colourful setting and the technique of narration should not intrude on your attention.’ This is one of his very earliest stories, dating from 1916.

  With a muffled, metallic roar the twelve-forty-five, the last train on the Underground, lurched into Cheyne Road station. A small party of belated theatre-goers alighted; the sleepy guard blew his whistle, and the train rumbled on its way to the outlying suburbs.

  A couple of minutes later, Signalman George Raoul emerged from the tunnel, swung himself on to the up-platform and switched off the nearest lamp. Simultaneously a door in the wall on the down-side opened and the stationmaster appeared.

  ‘Nothing to report, Mr Jenkins,’ said Raoul. He spoke in an ordinary speaking voice, but in the dead silence of the station his words carried easily across the rails—words that were totally untrue. He had something of considerable importance to report, but he knew that if he were to make that report he would probably be marked down as unfit for night duty, and he could not afford to risk that at present.

  ‘All right, George. Good night.’

  ‘G’night, Mr Jenkins.’

  Raoul passed down the length of the up-platform, dousing each light as he came to the switch. Then he dropped on to the track, crossed, and made for the farthest switch on the down-platform.

  Cheyne Road station was wholly underground—it was but an enlarged strip of tunnel—and the lighting regulations did not apply to it. There were eight lamps on each platform.

  The snap of the switch echoed in the deserted station like the crack of a pistol. Raoul started. The silence that followed gripped him. Pulling himself together he hurried on to the second switch.

  ‘Ugh!’

  By the third lamp he stopped and shuddered as his eye fell upon a recruiting poster. In the gloom the colouring of the poster was lost—some crudity in the printing asserted itself—and the beckoning smile of a young soldier seemed like the mirthless grin of a death mask. And the death mask was just like—

  ‘You’re all right,’ he assured himself aloud. ‘It’s the new station that’s doing it.’

  Yes, it was the new station that was doing it. But he would not grumble on that account. It was a bit of rare luck, being transferred from Baker Street—just when he was transferred. For all its familiarity, he could never have stood night-work at Baker Street—now.

  Even after three weeks in the new signal-box he could never pass a Circle train without a faint shudder. The Circle trains had a morbid fascination for him. They passed you on the down-line. Half a dozen stations and they would be pulling up at Baker Street. Then on through the tunnel and, in about an hour, back they came past your box and still on the down-line. In the Circle trains his half-nurtured imagination saw something ruthless and inevitable—something vaguely connected with fate and eternity and things like that.

  His mind had momentarily wandered so that he took the fourth switch unconsciously. As he made for the fifth, his nerve again faltered.

  ‘Didn’t ought to have taken on this extra work,’ he seemed to shout into the dark mouth of the tunnel.

  ‘’Tain’t worth it for three bob. It’s the cleaner’s job by rights.’

  Yes, it was the cleaner’s job by rights. But the cleaner was an old man, unreliable for night-work; and when the stationmaster had offered Raoul the job of ‘clearing up last thing’ for three shillings a week, he had jumped at it. The three shillings would make life perceptibly brighter for Jinny—her new life with him.

  Between the fifth lamp and the sixth was the stationmaster’s den. On a nail outside the door hung the keys with which Raoul would presently lock the ticket-barrier and the outer door of the booking-office.

  He snatched the keys as he passed and then, as if to humanise the desolation, he broke into a piercing, tuneless whistle that carried him to the seventh lamp.

  A trifling mechanical difficulty with the seventh switch was enough to check the whistling. For a moment he stood motionless in the silence—the silence that seemed to come out of the tunnel like a dank mist and envelop him. He measured the distance to the switch of the eighth lamp. The switch of the eighth lamp was by the foot of the staircase. He need scarcely stop as he turned it—and then he would let himself take the staircase two, three, four steps at a time.

  Click!

  The eighth lamp was extinguished. From the ticket-office on the street level a single ray of light made blacker the darkness of the station. But Raoul, within a couple of feet of the staircase, waited, crouching.

  His hand clutched the stair-rail and he twisted his body round so that he could look up the line. He could not see more than a few feet in front of him, but he could hear, distinct and unmistakable, the rumbling murmur of an approaching train.

  All his instincts as a railway man told him that his senses were deceiving him. The twelve-forty-five was the last train down—and he and the stationmaster had together seen it through. There were a dozen reasons why it would be impossible for another train to run without previous notification to the signalling staff. And yet—the rumbling was growing momentarily louder. The air, driven through the tunnel before the advancing train, was blowing like a breeze upon his face.

  Louder and louder grew the rumbling until it rose to the familiar roar. In another second he would see the lights.

  But there were no lights. The train lurched and clattered through the station and was swallowed up in the down-side tunnel. There were no lights, but Raoul had seen that it was a Circle train.

  For a nightmare eternity he seemed to be rushing with gigantic strides up an endless staircase—across a vast hall that had once been a ticket-office, and then:

  ‘Hi! Where yer comin’ to?’

  The raucous indignation of the night constable, into whom he had cannoned, recalled him to sanity.

  ‘Sorry, mate!’ he panted. ‘I didn’t see you—as I come by.’

&nb
sp; ‘Call that comin’ by?’ demanded the constable. ‘Why, you was running like a house afire! What’s going on down there, then?’

  ‘Nothing,’ retorted Raoul.

  The constable, unsatisfied, walked through the ticket-office and peered over the barrier. The silence and the darkness gave him a hint.

  ‘Bit lonesome down there, last thing, ain’t it?’ he suggested.

  ‘Yes,’ grunted Raoul, as he locked the barrier, ‘somethin’ chronic.’

  ‘I know,’ said the constable. He had not been on night duty for ten years without learning the meaning of nerves.

  A short chat with the constable served to restore Raoul’s balance, after which he locked up as usual and made his way to the tenement he shared with Jinny, resolving that this time he would report the occurrence to the stationmaster on the following day.

  During their three weeks’ occupation of the tenement Jinny had made a practice of waiting up to give him his supper. As he came in she was lying asleep, half-dressed, in the second-hand upholstered armchair that had been theirs for three weeks.

  ‘Hullo, Jinny!’ he called, with intentional loudness. He wanted to wake her up thoroughly so that she would chatter to him.

  ‘Blessed if I hadn’t dropped off!’ she exclaimed by way of apology, as she hastily got up and busied herself with his cocoa.

  ‘There’s no need for you to wait up, you know, Jinny,’ he said, as he seated himself at the table. ‘Only I’m not denying as I’m glad to see you a bit before we turn in.

  ‘Funny thing ’appened tonight,’ he went on. ‘After I’d seen the twelve-forty-five through and Mr Jenkins ’ad gone and I’d nearly finished turnin’ off the lights—’

  He told the whole story jovially, jauntily, as if it were a rather good joke. He attained a certain vividness of expression which only became blurred at that part which dealt with his own sensations after the passing of the train.

  The woman was wide awake before he had finished. All her life she had indirectly depended on the Underground railway, and knew its workings almost as well as the signalman himself.

  ‘’Arf a mo’, George!’ she said, as he finished. ‘How did it get past the signal if you was out of your box?’

  ‘That’s what beats me!’ exclaimed George Raoul, thumping the table as if herein lay the very cream of the joke.

  She looked at him with the dawning suspicion that he had been drinking; but as she looked she knew that he had not.

  ‘What sort o’ train was it?’ she asked; keeping her eyes fixed on his.

  For a moment he did not reply. His gaze dwelt on his cocoa as he answered:

  ‘Circle train.’

  Jinny made no reply, and the subject was dropped.

  An hour later neither of them was asleep.

  ‘Jinny,’ said Raoul, ‘what yer thinkin’ about?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she retorted, and her voice came sulkily through the darkness.

  ‘Go on. Out with it!’

  ‘All right! ’Ave it your own way, an’ don’t blame me. I was wonderin’ what Pete was doin’ now—this minute.’

  ‘Pete!’ echoed Raoul, through teeth that chattered, though he tried to clench them. ‘You’ve no call to wonder about ’im—not after the way he served you, his lawful, wedded wife.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to,’ she defended herself; ‘only you tellin’ me about that train—and ’im being a Circle driver—set me off.’

  ‘You’ve no call to think about ’im,’ repeated Raoul doggedly. ‘You can lay he ain’t thinkin’ about you—’e’s thinkin’ about the woman he left you for.’

  There was a moment’s silence, and then:

  ‘P’r’aps—and p’r’aps not,’ replied Jinny.

  On the following morning Raoul decided that he would still say nothing to the stationmaster about the train that had followed the twelve-forty-five.

  The position was by no means an easy one. He knew that his nerves would not stand the strain of turning out the lights on the platform—not yet awhile, anyhow. On the other hand, he dared not throw up his job. During the last three weeks he had seen something of Jinny’s nature; and although his animal love for her had in no way abated, he had a pretty shrewd suspicion that she would not face even temporary destitution with him.

  After much deliberation, he hit on a comparatively neat compromise. As he left home to go on duty he approached an elderly loafer leaning against the wall of a public-house near the station.

  ‘Suppose you don’t want a tanner a night for five minutes’ work as a child could do?’ he suggested.

  ‘All accordin’ to what the work is,’ answered the loafer.

  ‘Turnin’ off the lights mostly,’ said Raoul. ‘Anyway, if you want the job ’ang about ’ere’—indicating the station—‘at twelve-forty-five sharp until you see the stationmaster come off. Then ’op into the station. You’ll find me on the platform.

  ‘I’m doing this on me own,’ he added. ‘My missis likes me to be ’ome early, and it’s worth a tanner a night for a bit of ’elp. See?’

  The loss of the extra three shillings a week, Raoul decided, could safely be ascribed to an act of war economy on the part of the railway company. Better lose three bob a week than have to chuck up your job, he reasoned.

  The services of the loafer proved a wise investment. Raoul showed him where to find the switches. On the first night he explained it all over and over again, glancing from time to time towards the tunnel, thereby extracting full value for his sixpence.

  The explanation finished, and while three lamps remained burning, he left the loafer for a suddenly remembered duty on the ticket-office level. Thence, in a comfortable circle of light, he presently called:

  ‘Turn off them last three lights, mate, and come up.’

  The loafer sluggishly obeyed, and then shambled up the staircase to receive the most easily earned sixpence of his life.

  ‘Same time tomorrer night if you’re on,’ said Raoul.

  ‘I’m on right enough,’ replied the loafer.

  That formula was repeated every night for some half-a-dozen nights. Then came a night on which the loafer failed to appear.

  For five minutes Raoul waited. He went up to the street level and looked round. The station was deserted—there was not even a constable on point duty.

  When the loafer’s defection became obvious, Raoul’s first thought was to leave the lights burning and go straight home. Reflection showed that this would mean the sack—which in turn would mean the probable loss of Jinny—the loss of that for which the very agonies he was now enduring had been incurred.

  Besides, there was another thought that drove him back into the station. Somehow or other he would be compelled to explain why he had left the lights burning—why he had been afraid to return to the station. They would ask questions. And God knew where those questions might lead!

  The up-platform presented no terrors. On the down-platform—in the moment of utter darkness when the eighth lamp was extinguished—he knew that his fear would reach its zenith. And precisely at that moment the distant rumbling in the tunnel began—the driven air, like a breeze, played about his temples.

  He could not prevent his eyes from staring in the direction of the tunnel. He tried to move backwards up the staircase, but all power of voluntary action had left him.

  The train seemed to slacken speed as it rolled into the station. As it came towards him, slowly and more slowly, his eyes were glued to a faint luminosity in the driver’s window—a luminosity that gathered shape as it came nearer and nearer.

  ‘Pete!’ he gasped—and with that conscious effort of the muscles his brain regained control of his body and he rushed up the stairs, uncertain whether the train had stopped—knowing that if it came again it would stop and wait for him.

  Jinny was awake and moving about the room w
hen he returned. She glanced at his drawn face and knew what had happened.

  ‘Seen it again?’ she asked.

  ‘Wot if I have?’ he demanded.

  ‘Nothing,’ she retorted.

  She waited while he ate his supper in silence.

  ‘George,’ she said, as he put down his cup for the last time.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Suppose we knew for certain as Pete was dead’—she paused, but did not know enough to look at his mouth, and his eyes were turned from her—‘why, then we—we could get spliced proper, couldn’t we?’

  Still avoiding her gaze he nodded.

  ‘Suppose,’ she said, leaning across the table until her elbows touched his, ‘suppose we was to go about the banns tomorrer?’

  Then did Raoul look up and meet the woman’s gaze. In her eye there was nothing of accusation. But there was nothing of doubt.

  ‘Right-o!’ he said.

  On the following morning they went together to the parish church and, being recommended thence to the vicarage, explained their needs. They learnt that they would have to wait for three Sundays before they could be married.

  He was gloomy and depressed as they left the vicarage.

  ‘Three weeks’ll soon pass,’ she said, as if to console him.

  ‘Aye,’ he grunted.

  ‘An’ you’ll feel a lot better when it’s done,’ she added.

  To this he made no reply, and she did not labour the point. Indeed, it was the last veiled allusion she ever made to the subject.