The Durham deception

The Railway Station

For at least the tenth time that morning Constable Bert Humphries completed a casual patrol along the down-line platform of Durham Station. He paused at the southern end and stared at the graceful curve of the double lines as they crossed the Flass Vale viaduct. It was a fine June morning and the sun was gleaming on the tracks. Humphries glanced across the valley separating the railway line from the peninsula dominated by castle and cathedral. A light breeze had blown away the haze that usually hung over the city.

Like a sentry at the end of the platform, Humphries performed an about-turn in a military fashion before remembering that this was not the way he was meant to be doing things. Fortunately there was no one to watch him.

Constable Humphries was wearing not his uniform but civilian clothes. He did not mind much the fact that he had been deprived of his police helmet or his brass-buttoned dark blue greatcoat – since these were the obvious and visible signs of his office – but he missed the comfort of the truncheon and rattle. Lacking these made him feel naked. If the fellow they were after was half as dangerous as old Harcourt and the Scotland Yard man had claimed during the briefing at the police-house, then he might well need to summon help with the rattle. But Harcourt insisted that none of them should carry any item which might give away who they were.

Furthermore, Humphries and the rest had been instructed to forget their training and years of experience. They were not to behave like policemen on the beat. Not to stride along with authority. Not to gaze around with suspicion nor to act as if they had the weight of the law behind them. Altogether, Constable Bert Humphries felt like a truanting schoolboy while he mingled with the ordinary travelling folk who were waiting for trains or getting off them.

Humphries took out his watch. Nearly half an hour until Constable Makepiece replaced him at midday. A Newcastle train was due in ten minutes. Humphries had been on duty since the first train at five o’clock that morning, and the mere thought of the early hour caused him to yawn. He glanced at the opposite platform, the up-line, and saw his counterpart, Constable Atkins, avoiding his eye while trying to look inconspicuous. Did he, Atkins, have the appearance of a policeman in his civvy garb? Humphries thought not. But then he’d never thought Atkins had the appearance of a policeman even when he was wearing the uniform.

Bert Humphries was growing increasingly dubious about this business. Inside his jacket was a picture of the man they were searching for, Doctor Anthony Smight. He looked a bit of a villain, true enough, and was supposed to have committed a couple of murders in London and was presently under suspicion for what the local papers were calling ‘The Riverbank Murder’. And they said he was looking to carry out a spot more homicide. Beyond that, Humphries had not been told very much. Why this doctor should be travelling by train to or from Newcastle to commit his murders in Durham had not been explained. Seemed it was some theory of the Great Scotland Yard fellow. Still, theirs not to reason why. Simply do what you’re told.

It took a lot of manpower though. Two police on duty, one per platform, to check the trains arriving in both directions. Inspector Traynor must have plenty of pull to demand the services of half a dozen men a day. Humphries worked out the figures. Six men amounted to about a tenth of the entire City of Durham force. Yes, that represented a lot of pull from the Great Scotland Yard man.

The southbound train appeared in the distance, announced by a smudge of dark smoke and the sudden arrival of a knot of porters and a general air of renewed alertness among the passengers on the platform. The rails quivered and sang as the 11.45 from Newcastle slid into the station and slowed before jerking to an abrupt halt, trailing smoke and steam. Constable Humphries rubbed his eyes and positioned himself at the rear of a group of travellers waiting to board the second-class carriages.

Rapidly the constable dismissed most of the new arrivals. Two ladies descended gracefully from first-class, ready for a day’s shopping or sightseeing in the city. A trio of clergymen from the same section helped each other to clamber arthritically on to the platform. Some unaccompanied children got out of second-class and a gaggle of labourers together with some women who looked like factory-hands swept from the third. The women were talking loudly, the men were silent. Shift-workers, Humphries guessed. There was a rotund person with a bag who looked like a salesman. A well-dressed gent was loudly requiring two porters to manhandle his luggage from a first-class compartment. Humphries wondered why anyone would need to travel with so much gear.

Then he saw him! A man was coming from the tail-end of the train. Tall but stooping slightly, shabbily dressed, his face largely obscured by a wide-brimmed hat but sallowish. He was carrying a small bag. It must be Anthony Smight! Humphries felt a tremor of intuition. The constable automatically turned his gaze away but kept the newcomer in the corner of his eye as he headed for the booking-hall and station exit. His heart beating fast, Humphries recalled what he’d been told. ‘If you see this man do not accost him. Follow him discreetly and keep your distance. Do not arouse his suspicions. Mark where he goes. As soon as he is established somewhere – be it at a lodging-house or a chop-house or a pub – report at once to the police station.’

Humphries decided to give the man half a minute to clear the station. He risked a single look and saw the back of the tall stranger disappearing into the booking-hall. He took a couple of steps in the same direction. He was so absorbed that he collided with another alighting passenger, a second man.

‘Pardon,’ he said instinctively.

The man glanced at him but said nothing and swept past. Bert Humphries’ heart thudded even louder. My God! This individual too had the appearance of the wanted person. He was of more than average height, he had a creased, jaundiced-looking face and he too was moving with a determined air.

Resisting the temptation to get the artist’s impression of Smight from his pocket, Humphries counted to ten and then followed this second individual through the booking-hall and station entrance. On the forecourt were several carriages waiting for fares. The two elegant ladies were boarding one and the trio of clergymen another. The artisans and the factory hands were walking in separate groups away from the station area. As were the two men. From the back they looked quite similar, although the second – the one Humphries had bumped into – wasn’t wearing a hat nor was he carrying anything. The two had nothing to do with each other but were walking separately, yards apart.

The railway station was set high on a hill. The area beyond the forecourt, on which Humphries now stood facing the city, fell away steeply. Any traveller to the centre of Durham who could not afford a cab or who preferred Shanks’s pony had two choices. Either he followed the main road as it looped downward, echoing the path of the railway overhead, or he took a short cut which branched off this road from a kind of lookout point about two hundred yards to the left. This path made a zigzag course down several flights of steps overshadowed by trees and shrubs. An individual walking from the station at night might prefer to take the better lit route by the road but the stepped path was safe enough by day.

Constable Humphries moved off, watching the two men as they headed down the road, each of them keeping to a stretch of pavement in a law-abiding manner. The group of artisans and the female hands were straggling across the road, the women noisily oblivious to the carriages which would shortly be rolling downhill. Humphries was very glad that there were other people on foot. They helped to hide his presence.

The first man he’d seen, the one with the hat, was in advance of the hatless one. Neither looked behind him. Both were walking with a sense of purpose. And, as Humphries had half feared and expected, each proceeded to pick a different path towards Durham. The individual with hat and bag didn’t hesitate but turned off at the lookout point and went down the steeper route. A few seconds after him the other man, the hatless and bagless one, continued down the curve of the roadside with scarcely a glance at the first who was already out of sight down the steps. This split seemed to confirm that neither had anything to do with the other.

But it presented Constable Humphries with an acute dilemma. Which should he follow? The one who’d chosen the short cut or the one who was taking the road? He had only a matter of seconds to resolve the problem or face the possibility of losing both of them.

Humphries put on speed to overtake the working men and women who were dawdling on foot. He attempted to put himself in the mind of a detective like Great Scotland Yard’s Inspector Traynor. How would a proper detective think this through?

Both suspects had alighted from the Newcastle train, both fitted the description of Anthony Smight. It was the first, though, who had given Humphries that tell-tale tremor of intuition. He was wearing a wide-brimmed hat as if he felt the need to conceal his face. He was carrying an anonymous little bag, which somehow added to his suspicious air. And, most conclusive of all, he had turned aside for the short cut into Durham, down a path that wasn’t signposted or named in any way. That decision indicated a familiarity with the city, which was certainly what Smight had.

All this passed through Humphries’ mind during the brief time it took him to reach the lookout point and the beginning of the stepped descent. Taking a final view of the back of the second man, who was striding round the curve of the road, the policeman thudded down the first flight of steps. Behind him he heard the chatter and laughter of the women as they too chose this shorter route.

Constable Humphries estimated that his quarry was only a matter of seconds in front of him but, because of the zigzag nature of the steps and the overhanging tree branches, it was possible to see no more than a few yards ahead. He was conscious too that he was in pursuit of a very dangerous individual – ‘If you see this man do not accost him’ – one who might lash out if he believed someone was after him. So Humphries kept darting his eyes among the shadows on either side of the path. He was quite reassured to hear the women clattering down behind him.

But he saw no one until he emerged at the bottom of the final flight of steps and into a jumbled area of terraced housing dominated by the new church of St Godric’s. There, about a hundred and fifty yards ahead of Humphries, was his man! Unmistakable in the wide-brimmed hat, the little bag swinging at his side, the purposeful stride.

Anthony Smight turned into North Road and Humphries’ task became both easier and more difficult. Easier because there was less likelihood of Smight spotting anyone on his tail, more difficult because it was by now midday and, North Road being a main thoroughfare, it was full of carts and carriages and passers-by. Humphries had to get closer to his quarry or run the risk of losing him in the crowd. He walked faster, keeping his gaze fixed on the top of Smight’s hat. Fortunately the murderous doctor was so intent on his own purposes that, without looking back once, he passed among the idling window-gazers and the shop-workers buying their dinner from the costers’ barrows. He smoothly skirted draymen sliding barrels into the vault of a pub and avoided a cluster of argumentative, besuited men coming down the steps of the Miners’ Institute.

Humphries wished that he could lay eyes on a uniformed policeman. He felt isolated in his pursuit of Smight and, had he seen one of his fellows, he would have alerted him. It would have taken only a moment of explanation since the whole force had been shown the picture of Smight and knew what was what. The uniform could have reported back to the police-house while Humphries continued his chase. But there was not a police uniform in the entire stretch of North Road.

So the constable in civvy clothing pursued the tall man with his bag and hat into the start of Silver Street and across the river by Framwellgate. This was a smarter part of town. Humphries began to wonder where his quarry was going. Surely a fugitive like Anthony Smight should be haunting the less reputable areas of the city? And Humphries suffered his first twinge of doubt. Was he on the trail of the right man? What had happened to the other one, the one who went walking on down the station road?

Then Humphries was reassured when he saw Smight turn aside and enter a chemist’s near the marketplace. Reassured, because he knew that Smight might be seeking to purchase supplies of opium or laudanum. This area of the city was sometimes allotted as his beat and Constable Humphries was on nodding terms with the chemist, whose name FRED’K W. PASCAL was emblazoned in a gilded arc across the plate-glass window. Humphries kept his distance, looking in a ladies’ dress-shop before he realized the incongruity of standing before a golden sign for WOMENSWEAR. So he shifted a few yards further to study a gentleman’s outfitter’s. All the time, though, he kept his eyes on the door to Pascal’s.

He waited a long time, almost a quarter of an hour by his pocket-watch. Bert Humphries wondered whether Smight was committing some outrage inside the chemist’s. Had he attacked Frederick W. Pascal in his frantic search for drugs? Had he left the unfortunate apothecary bleeding behind his counter while he made his escape through a back door? But that could hardly be, because during this anxious quarter of an hour several other customers had come and gone through the door of FRED’K W. PASCAL. None of them appeared to have been witness to any horrors.

Unable to stand the suspense any longer, Humphries was on the point of going into Pascal’s himself, when the tall man emerged. He was still wearing his hat and carrying his little bag. He turned, not down towards where Humphries was standing outside the outfitter’s, but up along Saddler Street.

Humphries moved fast. He darted into the chemist’s. Frederick Pascal was not lying bleeding or dead on the floor. He was up on tiptoe replacing a jar on an upper shelf. He finished what he was doing and turned round with a what-can-I-do-for-you-sir? air.

‘Mr Pascal, it’s me. Constable Humphries.’

‘So it is, Constable. I didn’t recognize you out of uniform. Day off?’

‘No. I am on duty,’ said Humphries, conscious that with every passing second his quarry was striding further up Saddler Street. ‘The man who just left, the one with the hat, what did he buy?’

The chemist, a short man with deep-set eyes, scratched his head.

‘He didn’t buy anything.’

‘What was he doing here then? Tell me, for heaven’s sake.’

‘He was selling not buying.’

Seeing the baffled, almost panicky expression on Humphries’ face, Pascal said, ‘That was Mr Fish. I know him.’

‘Fish? Yer sure his name ain’t Smight.’

‘As sure as I am that your name is Albert Humphries. Fish visits the chemists in Durham every month or so to peddle his cod-liver oil. Not his, of course. He represents the manufacturer. The quality of the oil from North Sea cod is second to none. I have just taken four bottles from him and he will be on his way to sell some to Bennet’s up the road. I’ve always thought it humorous that a man with the name of Fish should find himself selling cod-liver oil. Yet we always pass the time pleasantly and the subject of his name has never been mentioned. Are you all right, Constable?’

Humphries had gone to the door. He was gazing up Saddler Street. The tall man with the hat and bag was still in sight. If he’d run Humphries could have caught up with him. But there was no point now.

Humphries wondered about the other man who had alighted from the Newcastle train. Had he made the wrong choice, or was the whole thing a wild goose chase?

Constable Humphries had made the wrong choice. The other man who’d alighted from the 11.45 from Newcastle, the one whom Humphries had bumped into, was Doctor Anthony Smight. The murderer had no inkling that the stolid individual on the platform was a policeman in civvy clothes. He barely glanced at Humphries or at a man of about his own height and build who had got off the train ahead of him. Smight was too intent on the next stage of his plans to pay much attention to others. He walked down the curving road away from Durham station and then, by the arches of the Flass Vale viaduct, turned towards the centre of the city.

It was extraordinary, he reflected, how fate had brought him to the same northern place as Sebastian Marmont, the soldier turned magician. Smight had reason to resent Marmont – what he saw as the theft of the girl Padma from him – but it was a resentment which had burned low over the years although he had tried to cause mischief once by spreading the story in London that Marmont had stolen the Lucknow Dagger. His old antipathy to Marmont only flared again when he’d glimpsed the very man on the stage of the Assembly Rooms. Then he encountered Eustace Flask after his humiliating disappearance and saw a way to achieve a small retaliation against Marmont by enlisting the medium’s help. It had not quite worked out. Smight remembered the sight of Flask’s body, still twitching and bleeding in the wooded glade by the River Wear.

But the death of Flask or Smight’s hostility towards Marmont were less significant than his campaign of revenge against all those who had a share in the suicide of Ernest Smight. Anthony was the younger brother to Ernest. He had revered his brother. Ernest had looked after him and their sister Ethel, who was between them in age. Many years before as children, at the beginning of Victoria’s reign, they had played in the grounds of the large family house in Mortlake. Once, Ernest had saved Anthony’s life by wading into a pond and freeing the drowning six-year-old from the weeds in which he was entangled. Anthony remembered lying on the grass beside the pond with Ernest kneeling beside him, love and distress etched into his face.

They enjoyed an idyllic childhood, the three of them, untroubled by their mother and father, unrebuked by the servants. Then something had gone wrong. The family’s money had vanished, almost overnight. Anthony – Tony to his brother and sister – was too young to understand, too young even to be told anything. But he overheard incomprehensible talk of investments on the other side of the world, of minerals in South America, of returns which had not materialized, of more investments and bigger losses. He remembered his father talking about throwing good money after bad, and young Tony visualized a pit in which banknotes fell like leaves to join piles of others which were slowly decaying.

They lost the house at Mortlake and moved to Orpington. Somewhere around that time, they lost their father too. He did not die, he simply disappeared. And, whenever their mother mentioned him again, it was through pursed lips. A few years later their mother died too, and the two brothers and the sister were thrown upon each other even more.

They did go their separate ways eventually, or rather Anthony did by training as a physician and travelling thousands of miles to India. During that time he was caught up in the Lucknow siege, and the rivalry with Lieutenant Marmont over the Indian girl. It was almost a quarter of a century before he returned to England and, when he did see his siblings again, they thought him the shell of the man he had once been. Ernest and Ethel kept house together. They had not exactly prospered either, although the medium enjoyed a brief period of popularity after being taken up by a peer of the realm.

Doctor Tony settled himself in Rosemary Street. He found himself a comfortable niche among the opium-smokers in Penharbour Lane. He did a good deed occasionally, as when he attended to the sick child in George Forester’s family. He did no great harm otherwise. Or no more than the odd spot of criminality. But everything changed when he heard the news of brother Ernest’s death. The thought of Ernest sliding beneath the cold, dark waters of the Thames – as he, Tony, had once almost slid beneath the weed-infested waters of the Mortlake pond – roused in the doctor a raging pity.

The more he turned over his brother’s fate, the more passionate Anthony Smight became in his determination to extract every last drop of vengeance. There were four people he considered guilty. He had set George Forester to spy on the Seldons and the Ansells, and to find out details of their households. He had dealt with the Seldons, not crudely by bludgeoning them over the head or shooting them through the heart with the gun which he kept about his person. Instead he had performed the task in a subtle, almost tortuous style, choking them to death by opening the gas valves in the house in Norwood. There was satisfaction in knowing that the Seldons had perished by drawing poisonous fumes into their lungs just as Ernest had died through absorbing water into his.

Doctor Tony was satisfied to read the account in the papers of the accident although later reports hinted at further police investigations. Smight did not care what they found. He did not even care if they found him eventually, as long as he fulfilled his mission. By now, he had travelled north in pursuit of Mr and Mrs Ansell, the other couple who were going to pay for what they had done to Ernest. As Inspector Traynor correctly surmised, Smight decided to base himself in Newcastle rather than Durham. He preferred the anonymity of a larger city and he felt at home in the area by the docks. But he spent lengthy periods in Durham, tracking his next victims. They were not so accessible as the Seldons and action against them required more thought. Besides, Smight took pleasure in concocting an elaborate plan. As he was doing now.

He was not aware of all the police activity. If he had been, he would still have believed himself capable of outwitting the whole pack of them. Although years of opium-taking might have sapped his moral sense, as Traynor claimed, it had not undermined his sense of superiority. Indeed, at times, he felt invulnerable. He suffered from bad dreams, though.