‘How do you know? Has he confessed?’
‘Practically. He’s dead. Killed himself. He left a letter to the woman, begging for forgiveness, and saying that when he saw her with Plant he felt murder come into his heart. “I have revenged myself,” he says, “on him who dared to love you.” I suppose he got the wind up when he saw we were after him—I wish these newspapers wouldn’t be always putting these criminals on their guard—so he did away with himself to cheat the gallows. I may say it’s been a disappointment to me.’
‘It must have been,’ said Wimsey. ‘Very unsatisfactory, of course. But I’m glad my story turned out to be only a fairy-tale, after all. You’re not going?’
‘Got to get back to my duty,’ said the Inspector, heaving himself to his feet. ‘Very pleased to have met you, my lord. And I mean what I say—you ought to take to literature.’
Wimsey remained after he had gone, still looking at the portrait.
‘“What is Truth?” said jesting Pilate. No wonder, since it is so completely unbelievable…I could prove it…if I liked…but the man had a villainous face, and there are few good painters in the world.’
The Railway Carriage
F. Tennyson Jesse
Wynifriede Margaret Tennyson Jesse (1888–1958) inverted her first name, and called herself Friniwyd (or ‘Fryn’ for short), and wrote both fiction and non-fiction as F. Tennyson Jesse. Her first story about Solange Fontaine, ‘Mademoiselle Lamont of the Mantles’, appeared in the Metropolitan Magazine in 1918. In her foreword to The Solange Stories (1931), Jesse explained that she created a female sleuth because she thought this would be commercially beneficial, and that since ‘I myself have occasionally had…a sudden warning of the nerves’, she ‘built up a woman detective with a “feeling” that told her of evil’.
‘The Railway Carriage’ was Solange’s final recorded case, first published in the Strand in 1931, shortly after The Solange Stories appeared. Introducing The Compleat Adventures of Solange Fontaine (2014), Douglas Greene described the story as one of her finest, and Solange as ‘one of the most convincing occult sleuths in the literature’. The story also reflects Jesse’s abiding interest in ‘true crime’. Her Murder and its Motives (1924) displays her insight into the psychology of crime, and she also edited volumes of Notable British Trials. Even her most famous novel, A Pin to See the Peep-Show (1934), is effectively a fictionalisation of the Thompson-Bywaters case. That book reflects her thought-provoking approach to murder cases and capital punishment; so does ‘The Railway Carriage’.
Solange Fontaine nearly missed the train that Monday morning. She had been staying at Merchester for the weekend, with that old Colonel Evelyn, whose son she had been the means of saving from the gallows, and the old gentleman had kept on talking, with the pathetic garrulity of age, till the cab-driver had warned her that there was a bare five minutes to get to the station. Luckily, Solange had only a small suitcase, and she ran across the platform to the nearest carriage, wrenched open the door, and jumped in as the cabman flung the case in after her. She handed him his half-crown through the window as the train began to move.
At first, Solange, like anyone who has ever just caught a train at the last moment, leaned back, breathed thankfully, and took no notice of her surroundings. Then, also like everyone else, she looked round with a little smile of self-congratulation on her lips, ready to share with any strangers present that fraction of intimacy which such a happening strikes, like a spark, from one’s fellow men.
It was a third-class carriage, with hard seats and varnished wooden doors. Its only other occupant was a woman who was sitting in the far corner. Apparently she had noticed neither Solange’s abrupt entry nor her smile. She was an elderly woman, dressed in shabby black, she had no luggage, and she was sitting with her hands—the knotted veiny hands of a working woman—folded together in her lap. She was staring out of the window, and her lips were moving a little, as though she were talking to herself soundlessly.
Solange’s smile died a natural death; she looked at herself in the little mirror from her handbag to make sure her hurry had not disturbed the set of her plain little helmet-hat. All was well; she was her usual clear, fine-drawn self, save for an unwonted flush on her pale cheeks, and one loose feather of fair hair that lay against her temple. She tucked it back and put the mirror in her bag again. Her cigarette-case caught her eye as she did so; she took it out, then hesitated, and glanced at the silent woman.
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ asked Solange.
The woman drew her eyes away from their blind staring as though by a physical wrench, and looked at her. Something in that gaze struck unpleasantly on Solange’s senses, but, as the woman did not seem to have understood her, she repeated her question.
‘Eh? Oh, naow. It don’t make no matter.’
The woman had a slight Cockney accent, but a surprisingly soft voice for one of her hard, almost wooden appearance. Solange thanked her and took out a cigarette, only to discover that she had no matches and that, as usual, her lighter wouldn’t work. She glanced again at the woman, who had reverted to her occupation of staring out of the window. No good asking her for a light. She would just have to wait till someone else got in; the train was due to stop at the junction in another couple of minutes.
The platform was crowded, for it was market day at a neighbouring town, and it seemed that every farmer in the countryside was going in by this train. The carriage in which Solange was, however, being at the tail-end of the train, only one man came towards it and got in. He was a small, insignificant-looking man, with a big grey felt hat pulled right over his ears, and he carried a black bag.
He glanced sharply from Solange to the woman in black as he opened the carriage door and seemed satisfied by what he saw. Before he took his seat he stood for a moment, his bag in his hand, as though uncertain what to do with it. He glanced up at the rack, and even made a movement towards it, then sat down opposite Solange and stowed the bag away between his feet, under the seat. The whistle blew, the guard waved his flag, and the train started off again through the hot, summer countryside.
Solange took out a cigarette and leaned towards him with a smile.
‘Will you be so kind as to let me have a match?’ she asked. The little man started. He, like the woman in black, seemed oddly abstracted. He stared at her, and then repeated: ‘A match? Oh, yes.’ He also had an accent, but it was a North-country one, Solange noted. He almost said: ‘A match. Oh, yez…’ Solange began to feel a little impatient. Was the world peopled by the half-dead this fine morning?
He brought out his matchbox pretty smartly, however, and struck a light for her. His gallantry might be a little clumsy, but his movements were noticeably deft and economical, so much so that Solange was struck by the contrast between his stubby fingers and their neat precision of action.
Her cigarette alight, she leaned back, and the little man relapsed into a sort of surly abstraction. The elderly woman continued to stare out of the window at the bleached fields and the dark trees, and the rhythmic movements of the haymakers. The train gathered speed and roared and rattled through the lovely domestic landscape, a landscape with no touch of savagery or wild beauty, but which held in its contented folds the pastoral activities of men for generations past.
It was a run of ten minutes to the next stop—the village before the market town—after which the train would suddenly become converted into an express and pursue its quickened and uninterrupted way to London.
To Solange, in spite of the lovely country, and of the inoffensiveness of her fellow-travellers, that ten minutes seemed like one of those curious spaces when time, as we know it, ceases, and an endless period, like a breath held beyond human endurance, is the only measure. Why this should be so, she could not have told. She only knew that she would have given a great deal to be out of that little third-class carriage, to be in a modern corridor train, to be—this, ab
ove all—away from her travelling companions. Inoffensive…? Obviously…then what was wrong—and when had it begun?
The silent wooden woman had struck her with a sense of oddness, but not with any feeling of something definitely wrong. The commonplace little man, with his shaven cheeks and his deft, stubby fingers, had seemed unusual in a way that was not altogether good, but no message of evil such as had so often told her of harm, had knocked upon her senses when he entered the carriage. Yet it was only since he and the old woman had been in it together that she had felt this spiritual unease. Something was wrong between these two human beings—and yet they apparently did not know each other. Neither even knew that the other was in some queer way inimical, each was self-absorbed to the exclusion of the other, the woman in her strange daze of thought that was like a stupor, the man in some stony sort of regret. Sorry—that was the word for him, thought Solange, sorry but stubborn. He wasn’t unhappy as the woman was unhappy, only ill at ease, as an animal is ill at ease when it is driven up the road to the slaughter-house.
Solange was glad when the train drew up at a little wayside station. This time their carriage was invaded by four or five men, for the front of the train was already full. Solange felt a curious sense of relief at this influx of other human beings. At least she would not be penned in with the two strange, lost people who had sat silently on the seat opposite her, one at each end, for the last ten minutes. There was only another quarter of an hour to go before the market town was reached, and then, doubtless, everybody would get out and she would have the carriage to herself for the rest of the run to London.
A big red-faced farmer, with side-whiskers, sat beside Solange, and pulled out his pipe, glanced at her, and saw she was smoking herself. She smiled at him, and he grinned back and proceeded to light up.
‘That’s good, Missis,’ he said. ‘I don’t like to get the ladies’ hair full of smoke, but it’s hard luck on a man not to have his pipe.’
A thin, dried-up man, who was sitting opposite to the farmer, nodded several times as he proceeded to pack his own pipe with peculiarly evil-looking tobacco.
‘That’s so,’ he agreed. ‘I wonder if they let that poor young devil have a last smoke this morning.’
‘Sure they did,’ said the farmer, authoritatively, ‘they always let ’em do what they like. He could ’ave ’ad a bottle of champagne if he’d fancied it.’
‘No!’ said the other man, in admiring disbelief. ‘Is that so?’
‘That is so,’ asseverated the farmer.
‘Well, now, I thought,’ said a third man, ‘that all they was allowed was an ordinary sort of breakfast—a good one, mind you, eggs and bacon, and anything like that.’
‘I heard they was given nothing but brandy in the way of a pick-me-up,’ said the thin man, rather encouraged by this contradiction of the farmer on the part of the third man.
‘Anything they likes,’ repeated the farmer, stubbornly, ‘everyone knows that.’
‘Suppose they wanted poison, eh?’ asked the thin man. ‘Something that would do it nice and quick without having to stand on the trap and have their necks broken. Don’t tell me they’d give ’em poison.’
The farmer was rather staggered by this novel suggestion. ‘Perhaps not poison,’ he said, ‘but champagne I don’t doubt.’
Solange guessed of what they must be speaking. There must have been an execution that morning. She refrained from saying that bromide and four ounces of brandy was the official assuagement for the last agony. The execution must have been at Merchester, and it was not remarkable that she heard nothing of it, for she had been staying with Colonel Evelyn, and such subjects were never mentioned in his house since that dreadful night, which might have been young Charles Evelyn’s last. That was why the servants had watched the old Colonel so anxiously and why the local paper had not been forthcoming…The Colonel had been very childish since his son’s narrow escape, and it was easy to delude him in little practical matters.
‘I don’t believe,’ said a fourth man, of the black-coat class, perhaps some lawyer’s clerk travelling to his work at the market town, ‘that they ought ever to have hanged him. It was a cruel shame, that’s what it was. After all, it was only circumstantial evidence.’
‘That’s as good as any other evidence, and better,’ said the farmer, stoutly: ‘the only other evidence is what folks tells you they’ve seen, and we have it on the authority of the Bible that all men are liars. Give me circumstances every time, I says, they can’t lie nearly as well as a man can.’
‘And a man can’t lie near as well as a woman,’ said the clerk, with a little snigger.
‘That’s true enough,’ said both the other men in chorus.
It suddenly struck Solange as odd that only the newcomers were talking. The little man with the black bag and the woman in the corner were still silent.
‘Well,’ said the farmer, ‘I met young Jackson once or twice, and he seemed to me a decent young fellow enough, not the sort of chap you’d expect to go and cut a man’s throat behind his back, as you might say.’
‘He did it all right,’ said the clerk, ‘that’s plain enough.’
‘They were both after the same woman, weren’t they? And t’other man got her. You don’t need to look much further than that. There’s motive enough for you. Must ha’ been fools.’
‘Come now,’ said the farmer, ‘that’s not very polite, with ladies present.’ He glanced at the silent woman in the corner, but she seemed to have heard nothing. She was no longer staring out of the window, her eyes were closed, and her hands were tightly folded together in her lap, and he looked away from her to Solange.
‘I only came over from France on Friday,’ she said, ‘so I’m afraid I’m very ignorant. Has something—been happening?’ She didn’t like to say: ‘Has there been an execution?’ so strongly were the memories of that dreadful morning in Merchester Jail implanted in her consciousness.
‘Something happening!’ said the farmer, ‘I should say so. Why, all Merchester has talked of nothing else for weeks and weeks. A young fellow called Jackson, Timothy Jackson, who served in Jordan’s, the corn chandler’s at Merchester, was walking out with a young woman who was already tokened a bit above her station—to a young lawyer. Smart fellow, young Ted Emery. My lawyer he was, at least his father’s my lawyer,’ added the farmer, importantly, ‘and one night in a dark lane young Jackson has a row with him and cuts his throat. He was hanged this morning, young Jackson was, in Merchester Jail. People were pretty sorry round about. Tim Jackson was a good fellow, though he was a Londoner. Had to live in the country for his health. He was delicate-looking, white as a girl, but handsome enough if it hadn’t been for one of them birthmarks on one cheek. Shaped like a bat’s wing, it were, and my old missus allers said it fair gave her a turn to look at. But he was handsome, in spite of it, and this girl took a fancy to him. But he was no match for young Emery, who was one of those smart young fellows who think no end of themselves, and had a motor-bike and a sidecar to take his girl in and all that sort of thing. She was pretty bitter against Tim Jackson at the trial. If you ask me, she had only been amusing herself and would rather have got Emery than young Jackson. Now she’s got neither, and serve her right, too.’
‘Aye, that’s right enough,’ said the man opposite him.
Solange remembered having read something about the case in the Continental Daily Mail three weeks earlier. Only a short paragraph, for it had been an ordinary enough crime of jealousy. The judge had made some scathing remarks as to the method of the murder. It was ‘un-English’ to cut a man’s throat. It would have been more English, and consequently better, if he had killed his adversary with a blow of a club, or his fist. Jackson, being a rather weedy town-product, had been unable to do this essentially English thing, and had resorted, in a moment of passion, to a razor. There had been a struggle, he hadn’t crept up to the other man from behind
, but undoubtedly in the course of the struggle he had cut his throat from behind, getting his arm round his neck and pulling the heavier man back towards him.
‘I hear he confessed,’ said the clerk, importantly, ‘they were saying that at our Merchester office this morning, so I was told. It’s my day at Winborough, you know, but they rang me up and told me just before I left home.’
The whole carriage, still with the exception of the little man with the black bag and the elderly woman, was agog at this piece of news.
‘Confessed, did he?’ said the farmer. ‘Oh well, that’ll put everybody’s mind at rest. It’s something to know justice has been done.’
‘Justice?’ said the man opposite, bitterly. ‘Do you call it right to hang a decent young fellow because a woman had been driving him crazy? And if it comes to that, I’m not so keen on this capital punishment business. What right have we got to take life, I should like to know? I can tell you this, I’d sooner meet a young fellow like Timothy Jackson than meet the man who hanged him. There’s a fellow I shouldn’t like to shake by the hand. That’s a dirty trade.’
‘Dirty enough,’ agreed the farmer, soberly.
The rhythm of the train began to slacken. Winborough was reached, and the carriage was emptied, but Solange saw, with a little feeling of dismay, that her original companions were continuing with her to London. She suddenly felt she couldn’t bear this strange atmosphere of which she was conscious as surrounding them, and she got up to see if she couldn’t change her carriage, but she had left it till too late. For the fourth time since the brief half-hour when she had jumped into the carriage at Merchester, she heard the guard blow his whistle, and the rhythm of the train began to beat upon her senses once more. Now there was no getting away from her strange, dumb companions for an hour and a half. She had to stay with them whether she would or no. It was really an outrage, she thought to herself, that such a thing as a non-corridor train should still exist. This wasn’t even a very good train of the old-fashioned type. It ran very bumpily. Perhaps, thought Solange, all the rolling-stock on this line was very old. Then in a flash she realised that something had gone wrong. The train was bumping in a curious fashion, its rattle changed to a roar, a crashing sound broke through the rapidly accelerating conglomeration of other noises, and then the whole world seemed to go mad. The coach reared up, attacked the coach in front like a mad beast, rocked, lurched sideways, and at last came to a standstill, like a leaning tower, poised on its rear end. Solange and her two companions were spilled like rubbish from a shoot, against the door and windows at the bottom end, splintered glass all about them, and the black bag hit Solange full upon the temple…
Blood on the Tracks Page 24
