On his way to the station he came across the loafer in the usual place outside the public-house. The man shambled towards him ready with an excuse, but Raoul cut him short.
‘Shan’t be wantin’ you no more,’ he said gruffly, and thereby burnt his boats behind him.
During the hours that passed between his going on duty in the early afternoon and his leaving the box after the passing of the twelve-forty-five, he did not once repent having dispensed with the services of the loafer. True, his mind dwelt almost continuously on the ordeal before him. But Jinny had unconsciously given him a weapon when she had told him he would feel better when it was done.
That night, as he doused the eighth lamp, he turned and faced the tunnel.
‘I’m actin’ square by ’er now, ain’t I?’ he shouted.
Then, for all the furious beating of his heart, he walked at a leisurely pace up the staircase, and so, completing his duties, into the street.
On the next night it was easier, and, with each night that brought his marriage nearer, his confidence grew. His nerve would falter sometimes, but always he managed to ascend the staircase one step at a time. Jinny was a secret tower of strength to him—so that all went reasonably well with him until, by the merest accident, the tower of strength crumbled.
Three Sundays had passed since their visit to the vicarage when the accident happened. The accident took the form of his meeting Mabel Owen as he was returning home from duty.
He had known Mabel in the Baker Street days before he had known Jinny—a fact of which Jinny was well aware. Mabel was returning from some unmentioned errand in the West End when she ran into him and exclaimed:
‘Blessed if it ain’t George Raoul! ’Ow goes it, George? Seems ages since we met, don’t it! An’ what might you be doin’ in these parts?’
‘I work over ’ere now,’ explained Raoul. ‘Cheyne Road. ’Ow goes it with you?’
Then, because he had no wish to appear churlish to a girl with whom he had once walked out, he invited her to an adjacent coffee stall.
He arrived at the tenement barely half an hour later than usual. But that half-hour was more than enough for Jinny.
‘You’re late, George,’ she said, as he came in.
‘Sorry, Jinny,’ he replied. ‘Couldn’t help myself. Met a friend as I was comin’ off. Had to say a civil word to ’er.’
‘’Er!’ repeated Jinny.
‘Mabel Owen,’ he said—and his clumsy effort to say it casually fanned her suspicion.
‘Oh!’ shrilled Jinny. ‘So you keep me waitin’ while you go gallivantin’ about with that dressed up bit o’ damaged goods!’
‘You’ve no right to say that of Mabel,’ protested Raoul.
‘No right!’ she echoed. ‘Oh no! I’ve no right to say that of ’er, me livin’ with you with no weddin’-ring as you’ve given me. No better than ’er, I’m not. And don’t you let me forget it neither, George Raoul!’
‘Stow that, Jinny!’ he commanded, with rising anger. ‘Ain’t we fixed it up to get spliced proper day after tomorrer?’
The glint in his eye, partly of anger but partly also of fear, restrained her from further outburst and drove her indignation inwards so that she sulked.
She was still sulking on the following day, compelling him to eat his midday meal in gloomy silence, wherefore he left home for work sooner than was necessary.
He was in the signal-box before he recognised that the secret tower of strength had crumbled as a result of the accident of his meeting with Mabel Owen. Jinny had shown him a side of her nature that had been conspicuously absent in the earlier stages of his infatuation. And now his life was to become irrevocably linked with hers.
With the first taste of the bitterness of his sin came remorse; and with remorse came, with renewed strength, the terror which he had partly beaten back.
The terror began to grip him even before the stationmaster had left. In the signal-box he had formed the plan of telling the stationmaster that he could not turn out the lights that night—that he must hurry to the bedside of a dying child—any lie would do provided it saved him for that night. Tomorrow night he would be married to Jinny. He would have made what reparation lay in his power and would feel the safer.
‘Good night, George.’
‘G’night, Mr Jenkins.’
The stationmaster hung the keys on the nail outside his den and walked off. Raoul would have called after him, but checked himself. The stationmaster would not believe that lie about the dying child. His face would betray his terror—his terror of the tunnel. The stationmaster would ask him why he was afraid of the tunnel, and—God knew where those questions would lead!
‘Funny, it’s worse’n ever tonight!’ he said, as he finished the lights on the up-platform—for he was not analytical and did not wholly understand why the secret tower of strength had crumbled. He only knew that he did not want to marry Jinny on the following day. He only saw his sin in gaining possession of her—in the way that he had gained possession of her—in its naked hideousness.
The odd fatalism of his class prevented him from shirking the lights on the down-platform. What has to be will be. The same fatalism drove him ultimately to dousing the eighth lamp and turning, like a doomed rat, to face the already rumbling horror of the tunnel.
More slowly than before, as if it knew that he must wait for it, the train came on. Then in his ears sounded the familiar grinding of the brakes.
The train had stopped in the station. The faint luminosity in the driver’s window grinned its welcome. Then it beckoned.
‘I’m comin’, Pete.’
From the corner by the staircase, where he had been crouching, he moved across the platform and boarded the train.
Dawn, breaking over the serried roofs of Chelsea, found Jinny sitting wide-eyed before the untouched meal she had prepared hours ago for Raoul.
As if the first faint streaks of light ended her vigil she dropped her face on her arms and burst into tears.
‘Fool that I was! Why couldn’t I ’ave ’eld me jore about Mabel Owen till we was spliced proper? And now he’s left me, and Pete—’
The passion of weeping rose to its height, spent itself, and left her in another mood.
‘’E needn’t think ’e can get away as easy as all that,’ she muttered savagely. ‘If I’m a fool, he’s a worse one—as ’e’ll soon find to ’is cost.’
At eight o’clock she washed herself and donned her black dress. Thus arrayed as a respectable woman of the working-class she made her way to the nearest police-station and asked for the Inspector.
‘I’m Mrs Pete Comber,’ she explained. ‘My husband used to be a driver on the Underground. Circle train, he druv.’
‘Well?’ said the Inspector.
She did not hesitate in her confession. She had weighed the cost of her revenge, and did not shrink from paying it.
‘A man called George Raoul used to lodge with us—a signaller, ’e was, and worked at Baker Street. Me and ’im got friendly, if you understand, only I wouldn’t ’ave nothing to do with him while I was livin’ with my ’usband, not being that sort.
‘’Bout a couple of months ago George come to me and says, “Jinny,” he says, “you won’t see Pete no more,” he says. “Why not?” I says. “Chucked up his job and everythink,” he says; “met him when we was bein’ paid,” he says, “an’ he asked me to tell you quite friendly like,” he says.’
‘Look here,’ interrupted the Inspector, ‘we can’t have anything to do with all this.’
‘You wait,’ replied Jinny, scarcely noticing the interruption. ‘As soon as George told me, I was that wild with my ’usbin that I let George take me off—me that had always been a respectable woman. Never entered my ’ead as he wasn’t tellin’ the truth. Next day George was turned on to Cheyne Road an’ we come to live up ’ere.
&n
bsp; ‘Well, first he begun tellin’ me as he’d bin seein’ things on the Underground. That started me thinkin’. I can put two an’ two together, same as anyone else, an’ I started takin’ notice of what he was talking about in ’is sleep. And I tell you as sure as I stand here, George Raoul killed my ’usbin, and I dessay ’e’s put ’im in one of the old holes in the Baker Street tunnel wot they used to use for storin’ the tools.’
The Inspector began to take notes and to ask a number of questions. Of one thing only was he sure—that the woman before him was giving a genuine expression of opinion.
‘And now George has left you, I suppose, and that’s why you’ve come along to us?’ he suggested.
‘He has left me,’ replied the woman. ‘But I only found all this out properly night before last, an’ I couldn’t be sure. I’d have come along ’ere any’ow.’
The Inspector guessed that the last statement was a lie. But unless the man, when they caught him, definitely implicated the woman he knew that the Crown would not prosecute her.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll find George for you. Leave your address and call here tomorrow.’
The Inspector, after instructing a plain-clothes man to shadow Jinny to her home, went to interview the Cheyne Road stationmaster.
On the following morning, when Jinny called at the police-station, she was asked to examine a suit of clothing, a pocket-knife, and a greasy case containing a number of small personal papers and other belongings.
‘Yes, they’re Pete’s right enough, pore dear!’ she exclaimed, and then burst into a flood of maudlin tears.
The Inspector waited unmoved. He believed not at all in the genuineness of Jinny’s grief; but convention had its claims, and he said nothing until the storm of tears had subsided.
‘Now, Mrs Comber,’ he said presently, ‘I want you to dry your face and come along o’ me.
‘It’s all right,’ he added. ‘Nothing’s going to happen to you.’
He took her for some distance in a taxi-cab to a low, vault-like building near the river. There, after parley with the local officials, he led her to an inner room.
‘Steady now,’ he warned her. ‘We’re going to show you a dead body.’
Someone removed a cloth, and at the same moment the Inspector demanded:
‘Who’s that?’
‘George Raoul!’ gasped Jinny.
As the Inspector, taking her by the arm, led her from the room a question forced itself to her lips.
‘You—you ain’t ’ung him already?’
‘No,’ replied the Inspector, with a grim laugh, ‘we ain’t ’ung him. Wasn’t needed. We found your husband in that disused hole, same as you said—and we found George Raoul alongside him—like that. Heart failure, the doctor says. Funny thing! As far as I can make out, he must have been skeered or something and run all the way through the tunnel from Cheyne Road to Baker Street where he done it. Must have been the running as did for his heart.’
That, at any rate, was the explanation based on the findings of the Coroner’s Court.
The Knight’s Cross Signal Problem
Ernest Bramah
Ernest Bramah’s first book, English Farming and Why I Turned It Up, was published in 1894, and was inspired by the principle ‘write what you know’: at the age of seventeen he had become a farmer, but it proved an unhappy career choice. Bramah, who came from Manchester, and whose real name was Ernest Brammah Smith, dabbled in journalism, and took a job as secretary to Jerome K. Jerome, before becoming a full-time writer. His humorous stories about the Chinese rogue Kai Lung enjoyed considerable popularity in their day, but it is his detective fiction that has stood the test of time.
The success of his mysteries is due in part to his smoothly professional writing, but mainly to his creation in 1914 of a memorable sleuth. Max Carrados is by no means the only blind detective in fiction, but he is probably the most highly regarded. In his history of the genre, Bloody Murder (1972), Julian Symons said that Carrados and his friend, the discredited solicitor turned inquiry agent Louis Carlyle, ‘make an agreeable variation on the Holmes-Watson relationship, with Carlyle more sophisticated and more distinctively characterised than most assistants, and Carrados insistent on the value of having “no blundering, self-confident eyes to be hoodwinked”.’
‘Louis,’ exclaimed Mr Carrados, with the air of genial gaiety that Carlyle had found so incongruous to his conception of a blind man, ‘you have a mystery somewhere about you! I know it by your step.’
Nearly a month had passed since the incident of the false Dionysius had led to the two men meeting. It was now December. Whatever Mr Carlyle’s step might indicate to the inner eye it betokened to the casual observer the manner of a crisp, alert, self-possessed man of business. Carlyle, in truth, betrayed nothing of the pessimism and despondency that had marked him on the earlier occasion.
‘You have only yourself to thank that it is a very poor one,’ he retorted. ‘If you hadn’t held me to a hasty promise—’
‘To give me an option on the next case that baffled you, no matter what it was—’
‘Just so. The consequence is that you get a very unsatisfactory affair that has no special interest to an amateur and is only baffling because it is—well—’
‘Well, baffling?’
‘Exactly, Max. Your would-be jest has discovered the proverbial truth. I need hardly tell you that it is only the insoluble that is finally baffling and this is very probably insoluble. You remember the awful smash on the Central and Suburban at Knight’s Cross Station a few weeks ago?’
‘Yes,’ replied Carrados, with interest. ‘I read the whole ghastly details at the time.’
‘You read?’ exclaimed his friend suspiciously.
‘I still use the familiar phrases,’ explained Carrados, with a smile. ‘As a matter of fact, my secretary reads to me. I mark what I want to hear and when he comes at ten o’clock we clear off the morning papers in no time.’
‘And how do you know what to mark?’ demanded Mr Carlyle cunningly.
Carrados’s right hand, lying idly on the table, moved to a newspaper near. He ran his finger along a column heading, his eyes still turned towards his visitor.
‘“The Money Market. Continued from page 2. British Railways,”’ he announced.
‘Extraordinary,’ murmured Carlyle.
‘Not very,’ said Carrados. ‘If someone dipped a stick in treacle and wrote “Rats” across a marble slab you would probably be able to distinguish what was there, blindfold.’
‘Probably,’ admitted Mr Carlyle. ‘At all events we will not test the experiment.’
‘The difference to you of treacle on a marble background is scarcely greater than that of printers’ ink on newspaper to me. But anything smaller than pica I do not read with comfort, and below long primer I cannot read at all. Hence the secretary. Now the accident, Louis.’
‘The accident: well, you remember all about that. An ordinary Central and Suburban passenger train, non-stop at Knight’s Cross, ran past the signal and crashed into a crowded electric train that was just beginning to move out. It was like sending a garden roller down a row of handlights. Two carriages of the electric train were flattened out of existence; the next two were broken up. For the first time on an English railway there was a good stand-up smash between a heavy steam-engine and a train of light cars, and it was “bad for the coo.”’
‘Twenty-seven killed, forty something injured, eight died since,’ commented Carrados.
‘That was bad for the Co.,’ said Carlyle. ‘Well, the main fact was plain enough. The heavy train was in the wrong. But was the engine-driver responsible? He claimed, and he claimed vehemently from the first and he never varied one iota, that he had a “clear” signal—that is to say, the green light, it being dark. The signalman concerned was equally dogged that he never pulled off the sig
nal—that it was at “danger” when the accident happened and that it had been for five minutes before. Obviously, they could not both be right.’
‘Why, Louis?’ asked Mr Carrados smoothly.
‘The signal must either have been up or down—red or green.’
‘Did you ever notice the signals on the Great Northern Railway, Louis?’
‘Not particularly. Why?’
‘One winterly day, about the year when you and I were concerned in being born, the engine-driver of a Scotch express received the “clear” from a signal near a little Huntingdon station called Abbots Ripton. He went on and crashed into a goods train and into the thick of the smash a down express mowed its way. Thirteen killed and the usual tale of injured. He was positive that the signal gave him a “clear”; the signalman was equally confident that he had never pulled it off the “danger.” Both were right, and yet the signal was in working order. As I said, it was a winterly day; it had been snowing hard and the snow froze and accumulated on the upper edge of the signal arm until its weight bore it down. That is a fact that no fiction writer dare have invented, but to this day every signal on the Great Northern pivots from the centre of the arm instead of from the end, in memory of that snowstorm.’
‘That came out at the inquest, I presume?’ said Mr Carlyle. ‘We have had the Board of Trade inquiry and the inquest here and no explanation is forthcoming. Everything was in perfect order. It rests between the word of the signalman and the word of the engine-driver—not a jot of direct evidence either way. Which is right?’
‘That is what you are going to find out, Louis?’ suggested Carrados.
‘It is what I am being paid for finding out,’ admitted Mr Carlyle frankly. ‘But so far we are just where the inquest left it, and, between ourselves, I candidly can’t see an inch in front of my face in the matter.’
‘Nor can I,’ said the blind man, with a rather wry smile. ‘Never mind. The engine-driver is your client, of course?’
Blood on the Tracks Page 17
