The Necropolis Railway

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Saturday 9 January five minutes later

As we stepped off the Great Wheel, the crowd waiting to get on looked at us with envious eyes.

I was coming to the end of telling my landlady, in a kind of daze, as if it was nothing out of the way, that I had just seen the Governor in the garden with Rowland Smith, and she said, 'I know a little of what it is like to live in the thick of coal dust and smoke, and your Governor was getting on in years. He would want something back in return.'

This notion came to me as though in a dream, and I said, more or less to myself, 'He made true engine men eat dog, but even though he hated the half-link, he also needed them. He needed them to take the knock for Stanley's exploits.'

We were walking by the buildings at the foot of the Wheel. There was a good deal of fried fish paper blowing about, and the Pierrot dog was eating the scraps. Everything seemed scruffier than before, and it was as if the cabins around us had lately crashed from the Wheel above.

'I remember how the Governor put his knife into the half after the murder of Mike,' I said, 'with the Captain listening in. The Governor, I shouldn't wonder, set that one up for Stanley himself. He ordered Barney to take Mike off-shed into the middle of the fog, perhaps hoping that Barney would drift off for a stiffener.'

My landlady turned to me and smiled. 'Do you think the two of us should do the same?' she said. 'But you won't drink,' I said. 'Oh, tea will do the job for me,' she said.

'First let's take a turn in the Japanese garden,' I said. 'I think I saw Smith drop something in the stream.' 'Hawk eyes,' said my landlady.

We walked towards the little red gates – Japanese gates, they were, I suppose. All was now slowly, sadly becoming clear.

'The Governor was keen to make the Captain think of Mike's death as being down to the half,' I said, 'and it suited his programme to put it about that the fire at Smith's place might be their work too. He showed the police the letter Smith sent me, warning me of the half, and after Smith's funeral he ordered me to stay about the shed for fear of what the half might do. And this time there was Nolan around to hear.'

'He always made sure there was a witness to hear him say the right things,' said my landlady.

"That is it exactly,' I said. 'It was the same game that his friend Smith was playing. The Governor wanted at all times to make it seem as though he suspected the half, but he would never go too far into the details in case somebody should stumble over the truth. I can see now that he didn't like it when I asked about Taylor's last ride out.'

I held open the little gate for my landlady. She laughed and said, "The Japanese are smaller than us.'

'After all, that last ride had taken Taylor to the cemetery on the very day that Stanley had started on his line of murders. The Governor could hardly fail to answer my question, because Nolan was there watching, but in the event he needn't have worried. The book he took down showed him, or maybe it reminded him, that Arthur Hunt and Vincent had been on hand at the cemetery -'

'Landing themselves in it like ducks on a dough pile,' said my landlady, most surprisingly.

We walked on, following the paths that went under the lights, which I thought of as being all colours, but were in fact only blue, red and green.

'It must have scared the Governor', my landlady went on after a while, 'to hear that you had got on to Stanley in spite of all.' I nodded. 'Now that I think of it, he was like a cat on hot bricks in the hospital.' I pictured him at the end of my bed looking like a man with the noose already about his neck. And had he not at one moment made a bloomer in saying 'Smith has many good points' not 'Smith had had not returned to work since my accident, and had not seen the Governor since being in the hospital. I could not be sure, but I guessed that he would have heard of Stanley's death, and now Smith would know of it too. They would have been glad to hear of it. Now that all was fixed on a dead man, they would think the matter ended. But in that they were wrong.

We were walking beneath the branches of a tree in which were some of the paper lanterns. 'You couldn't do that with gas' said my landlady, looking up.

But my mind was going back to Grosmont, and the start of it all. The muttering in the ticket office, the growling of T. T. Crystal, and the smoothness of Smith's voice. Crystal would have been apologising for the delay in selling Smith his ticket and would have been blaming me, damning me with half curses, calling me a layabout and a blockhead. If so, Smith could have been sure that I would not be any great hand at detecting. Maybe I was a blockhead, and maybe I had still not got the Necropolis mysteries quite straight, even now, but I would put salt on those fellows who wanted to turn beautiful land into houses for little men.

We had now arrived at the bamboo bridge where Smith and the Governor had been standing. 'Smith dropped something into the water' I said again. 'And there it is' said my landlady.

The stream was no stream at all, just something to keep the bridge from looking lonely. It was a trench with a rubber mat at the bottom and a foot of water that did not flow. The red lantern on the bridge cast a broken picture of itself into the water, and there in the middle of the redness floated a scrap of paper. I moved to the bank, bent down and scooped it up. As I did so it wrapped itself about my finger, and I peeled it away by degrees, reading aloud as I did so. 'It's touching on railways,' I said, for the first thing I saw were the words 'London amp; North Western Railway'. 'He's with this show now,' I said. But the next words I read out were 'Received with Gratitude'. 'It's a receipt!' I exclaimed, and carried on reading: 'Received with Gratitude, the sum of twelve shillings and…' 'Oh, do come on,' said my landlady.

'It's for twelve and sixpence ha'penny,' I said, when I had finally made out the words, which were handwritten in ink that had run.

'It's for a ticket,' said my landlady. 'But does it show his name? My receipts, on the few occasions I have cause to write them, carry the names of both parties.'

'It is not commonly done like that on the railways,' I said, still examining the paper. 'I might have known it would not be,' said my landlady.

'Twelve and six, it says, in respect of… first-class single… Euston to Manchester.' The thing was now stretched out in the palm of my hand. 'This will help put the fixments on him,' I said, 'although it will not be easy. There's so little evidence.'

'Evidence,' said my landlady. 'That was the word in the letter from Stanley to Smith.'

'Stanley had the evidence; Stanley was the evidence, but he's dead.'

"Then you must get what you can from his papers,' said my landlady. 'They will be a start. And finding a no-name in Manchester will be a lot easier than finding one down here.'

'The Necropolis Board will help,' I said. 'I'm sure they would love to see him brought to book.'

'And you will have the police force to provide such little assistance to you as they are able,' said my landlady.

I laughed. 'It is crazy to think I will do the job on my own,' I said. But my landlady looked quite grave as she said, 'Oh, I don't know, you seem to have got everything else you wanted.'

We both looked up at the Great Wheel, with all its cabins lit up against the dark-blue sky, thinking our own thoughts for a moment before turning back to face each other, ready to kiss.