The Last Passenger - A Prequel Read online

  “You no doubt observe what else is missing, too, of course,” said Lenox.

  “Eh? Oh?” said Hemstock, as if in fact he did reserve the right to doubt that he had noticed it.

  “No hat,” said Lenox.

  That was indeed uncommon for any man, of any class. “No hat.”

  “To go with no money. No watch. No overcoat. Nor even a handkerchief. I checked all of his pockets twice.”

  He had checked the rest of the carriage, too, every inch of it. Empty.

  “Those are all items of value,” Hemstock said. “They might have been taken more easily than the boots.”

  “All of them?” Lenox asked.

  “No,” Hemstock said. “I suppose not.”

  It took Lenox an instant to realize what Hemstock was really feeling: fear. This crime lay beyond his regular abilities. He was like a schoolboy sitting to an exam for which he was unprepared.

  “It will be all right, you know,” Lenox said. “It is just a case to be solved, not more, not less.”

  “Perhaps a bit more,” muttered Hemstock.

  “We shall manage it.”

  Just then there were voices outside the carriage. Lenox glanced at his watch. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning. In another version of this evening, where it had never rained, he was at a ball attaining its last raucous crescendo.

  Instead, he and Hemstock descended the train’s stairs. On the platform were two men, one Lenox recognized, one he didn’t.

  “Good evening, Inspector,” said the one Lenox did.

  “Good evening, Dunn.”

  This was Hemstock’s superior, a fellow named Ephraim Dunn, short, handsome, and officious. He had jet-black hair, which he pomaded into a brilliant slickness, so that despite his height you could see the glint of him from a London block away—as the constables would joke. He was clean shaven, the better to show the expression of a man who looked for ill in the world each day and never went to sleep disappointed.

  “And Mr. Charles Lenox,” he said. “How exceedingly benevolent of you to come to our assistance!”

  “Mr. Dunn,” said Lenox, nodding his head.

  “Still, I think you may leave. Winstanley—the body. Hemstock, go and fetch the two men with the stretcher, please. They’re in Praed Street. They’ll have to drive round.”

  Hemstock jumped to it, glad to be a soldier rather than a commander. Meanwhile Dunn and Winstanley boarded the train. Winstanley, a thin, wistful person who looked as if he needed a solid meal, was apparently the medical examiner.

  Lenox stood on the platform, gazing down at the gravel between the wooden railroad ties.

  He had learned to use moments like this to think. Of course, he reasoned, the lack of clues in this case was the clue. It would have taken the murderer precious time to cut the labels from each garment, to remove each boot. To gather the hat, handkerchief, boots, and watch, all the small outward gestures of acquisition that defined a person by a glance.

  Then to leave Paddington with all of it, unnoticed … he must have had a large piece of luggage, Lenox thought. If it was well after the station had emptied, perhaps he had been seen.

  Winstanley and Dunn descended from the 449 to the platform about ten minutes later, just as Hemstock returned with two burly constables, there to carry the body to Winstanley’s wagon.

  Winstanley, peering carefully at the group above his round spectacles, said, “The victim appears to have been stabbed to death.”

  “I thought so, too,” Hemstock said.

  “It is hard to conceive of anyone disagreeing,” Dunn said shortly. “Was there anything else?”

  “No. It is all perfectly straightforward.”

  That, in fact, was a statement with which one could conceive some disagreement. But at that moment Lenox realized something.

  “I saw no wounds on his hands,” he said. “Only blood.”

  Winstanley’s turtlelike scrutiny shifted to him. “Sir?”

  “Perhaps he didn’t see the attack coming,” Lenox said. “Perhaps he was asleep. Or perhaps he knew his murderer.”

  “It is high time you left speculation to the professionals,” Dunn said. “Good evening, Mr. Lenox. No doubt there is some champagne breakfast or horse racing event at which you are required early tomorrow.”

  “None at all,” said Lenox, anger rising in him.

  “Nevertheless,” said Dunn, “I’m sure you will welcome your rest. Good evening.”

  And so Lenox had no choice but to leave. It was useless to point out that he had helped Scotland Yard; still more useless to point out that he knew already he wouldn’t sleep much that night. He nodded goodbye and made his way back to his carriage, the rain thrumming relentlessly on the station’s glass roof.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The next day dawned chilly, innocent, and clear, with a soft white sky. Lenox, after studying his notes from the scene, stirred the banked coals in the hearth. He had already put on a morning coat with a heavy wool collar since coming down twenty minutes before. A first October taste of winter.

  There was a quiet knock at the door. “Yes?” Lenox called.

  Graham entered. He had brought a pot of tea. “Good morning, sir.”

  Lenox checked his watch. “It’s not even six o’clock,” he said. “How did you know I was awake?”

  “I must have heard you, sir.”

  Lenox doubted it. But Graham had an infallible sympathetic understanding of this house—who was moving within it, who was awake, asleep, eating, coming, going, skiving off work. The latter category occasionally included Lenox himself.

  But not now.

  “Thank you,” he said, as he accepted a cup of tea “A hot drink’s very welcome. Sit, please, if you wish.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Lenox laid down his pen and reclined in his desk chair, holding the delicate cup in both hands. His careful notes were complete. He looked out through the windows at pretty, peaceful Hampden Lane, with its booksellers and bakers, its slumbering houses, its maids coming to the doors to fetch the milk. Weak sunlight filtered through the wet trees, which shook drops onto the pavement at each gust of wind.

  “The papers are in, sir. Only one has the story. The Morning Illustrated.”

  Lenox turned. “Them! Do you have it?”

  “Right here, sir.”

  “Thank you.”

  He read the article.

  MYSTERIOUS DEATH ON THE 449 TO PADDINGTON

  Stabbing wounds thought to be gang-related

  Information sought by Hemstock, Dunn

  A body was discovered late last night on the 449 from Store Street, Manchester—that of a man slain in most gruesome fashion. The police have not yet identified him but believe he was a victim of the deadly gang conflict currently taking place in that city.

  “His guts were spilling out,” Inspector Dunn informed the Morning Illustrated exclusively and vividly. “It had the mark of their vicious kind. It’s not the England I know and love, but Manchester has troubles it can’t get in hand. Now they’re coming to the capital.”

  Sharp-eyed readers of this journal may recall that the 449 was also the site of the unsolved death of Gabriel Taylor, 17, of Salford, in May. Taylor was thrown from the train near Wilmslow and suffered a broken neck.

  Inspector Dunn would neither confirm nor deny that the deaths are related.

  Check later editions for further information.

  Lenox looked at Graham. “Dunn would have had to go straight to the offices of the Morning Illustrated to squeeze this into the early edition. I wonder that he bothered. Though perhaps it is in his interest to be on friendly terms with the paper.” He looked at the article again, then murmured, mostly to himself, “The England I know and love.”

  He recalled the death of Gabriel Taylor clearly. It had been by no means decided whether Taylor—a promising boxer, well known in Manchester’s sporting circles—had been thrown from the train, jumped, or fallen by accident, inebriated. Lenox rememb
ered having been inclined to the third explanation. It was the lad’s first trip to London.

  “Did you read the article?” Lenox asked Graham.

  “I did, sir.”

  Lenox took a sip of his tea, which had cooled, and picked up a custard cream from the silver dish next to it. “And what did you make of it?”

  “I was curious how it matched up to your visit to the scene, sir.”

  Lenox nodded, thinking. He soaked the biscuit in his tea until it was just on the very edge of breaking, a skill that he had spent arduous years at school mastering, ruining many a cup of tea in the process.

  He took a bite and found it mostly softened to mush yet still just firm. Perfect. Ah—he had been hungry, thirsty. He was tired. This was better.

  Taking another, he told Graham about his visit to Paddington. Graham was a careful listener and asked several questions.

  “And what did he look like, sir?”

  Lenox frowned. “Fairly handsome, I think. It’s always difficult to tell, after death. But he was young and had good bones. Light brown hair, a bit longer than mine.”

  “Was there any damage to his face or hands, sir?”

  “No, there wasn’t—no evidence of defense.”

  “I see, sir,” said Graham, nodding. Then added, in his customarily courteous way, “I had wondered whether he was a boxer. But self-defense is the more pertinent question, sir.”

  Lenox hit his forehead. “No—like Gabriel Taylor. I should have thought of it. Anyhow our man was young, like Taylor, but not a boxer. No nicks, no scars I could see, hands as soft as or softer than the average man in a third-class carriage’s would be. Neither a boxer nor a gang member, at least that I would have guessed.”

  “Did you look through the other carriages, sir?”

  Lenox shook his head. “Dunn had arrived to see me off by the time I could have. As I was leaving, though, Hemstock and the constables were setting about the job. Presumably even they would have found a hidden murderer.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Something was bothering Lenox. Was it from the article? After a moment he wandered over to the mantel. It was here that he left the debris of his comings and goings, with strict instructions to Graham, Mrs. Huggins, and the rest of the staff not to touch it. (Mrs. Huggins was Lenox’s housekeeper—something he would not have said he needed, though in fact her management of the household had taken a great deal off of Graham’s shoulders, and the minor details of her care all made the house gleam, freshly polished by her attention in a way it never had been before.)

  Among the coins and calling cards, he found a worn ticket from the same line as the 449. It was from a trip he had recently taken to Birmingham for a case.

  The ticket’s letters had been smudged and faded by the friction of his pocket; he rubbed the smooth cardstock with his thumb, thoughtful.

  No genie emerged. Worse luck.

  Then he had a thought. “Graham,” he said. “Is Ellie awake?”

  This was the house’s cook, who made a wonderful, delicate potato soup and swore as if she had been raised in the navy. Graham glanced at the carriage clock on the desk. “I’m quite sure she is, sir.”

  “Would you fetch her, please?”

  “Did you want breakfast, sir?” asked Graham.

  “No, no,” said Lenox. “In fact, better yet, I will go down to the kitchen.”

  Graham looked alarmed. “If you wish, sir.”

  Lenox was already crossing the hall, and after an instant took the thin stairwell down to the kitchen two steps at a time. “Ellie!” he called.

  “What?” a voice replied irritably. He came into her view and saw that she was rolling out crescents. She looked in no way abashed to discover that her curtness had been directed at the master of the house. She merely stared at him. “Well?”

  “Your brother is a train conductor, isn’t he? Do I have that correct?”

  “Yes,” she said. Her face softened. “Our Sam. The youngest of us. He works for the London and North Western.”

  This was the largest of the rail lines. It ran the 449, as well as the train Lenox had taken to Birmingham and whose ticket he was still holding. “What’s his route?”

  “His route, sir? He doesn’t have one as such. It varies, see. Sometimes he’ll come out of Glasgow a week—then Lancaster—then Rutland. They always get him home to Chester in the end. Might be a night in an inn somewhere between, but the line pays for his board in that case.”

  Ellie was herself from Chester, in Cheshire, a lovely city on the River Dee. “But he doesn’t have a regular route?” asked Lenox.

  “No, he’s only thirty-one. Them as get the regular clockwork routes are quite senior. He might be directed any old place. He doesn’t mind it that way, Sam. Chance to see the whole of the—”

  “Thank you!” Lenox cried, turning and flying.

  “All sorts barging about,” he heard Ellie mutter as he left, but he paid her no heed.

  Graham, who kept up with him pretty well, was asking what it was, but Lenox was already in the front hall putting on his topcoat.

  He realized he still had his morning coat on—“Your tie, sir!” cried Graham, as Lenox began to open the door—but didn’t care. He had to get to the Yard as soon as he could.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sir Richard Mayne looked down at the small rectangular rail ticket that Lenox had placed on his desk.

  Sir Richard was a formidable man. He wore full side-whiskers, and was sober in his dress. The son of an important judge, he had been born in Dublin, then educated first at Trinity College in that city and subsequently at Cambridge, before becoming a celebrated barrister. Finally he had risen to the position of Commissioner of the Police of the Metropolis. He was so strict in this capacity that the year before he had ordered his police force to crack down on children who were making snowballs.

  By virtue of any single one of those facts—even the whiskers—he would have been intimidating. For Lenox there was the additional fact that he was Lenox’s only, uneasy ally in official police work. Like Dunn, Mayne resented the interference of an amateur; unlike Dunn, he appreciated Lenox’s thoughtful investigations and attention to detail.

  And after all, he was still only a man. Lenox had not personally noticed any decline in the incidence of snowball fights among children the previous winter—thank goodness.

  Mayne looked up from the ticket to Lenox. “You are proposing that I deploy ten of my men along the rail line on the strength of this ticket.”

  “If that’s all you can spare,” said Lenox.

  “Ha!”

  Mayne looked down at the ticket again with the bitter expression particular to an administrator of whom everyone expects five times what he can afford and twenty times what he can achieve.

  The ticket was unusual in no way. The initials L.A.N.W. at the top stood for London and North Western, the rail line that also operated the 449. 206 was the number of the train.

  The only consequential fact about the ticket was that Lenox still had it.

  It was this that led him to believe he had stared into the eyes of the murderer the night before: the man who had presented himself as the conductor of the 449.

  There had been just this one reason at first, the ticket. What had the man said about finding the body? Something roughly like: I had collected all the tickets from the seats before London, but I was missing my own bus ticket to go home.

  It was an understandable slip. There were numerous smaller train lines that did, in fact, collect the tickets wedged between seats before their journeys ended. They were then reused. But as Lenox’s possession of the ticket from Birmingham to Fenchurch Street showed, the big rails—and specifically the London and North Western—did not.

  There it was, then: a lie.

  After Lenox realized that the conductor had lied, he replayed their encounter in his memory, and the exercise produced several other puzzling details in his mind.

  Arriving at Paddington, for instance,
Lenox had assumed that the conductor and the stationmaster were acquainted. But then (as he had explained just now to Sir Richard Mayne, who was still staring at the ticket, sipping from a cup of black tea with lemon), he had gone downstairs and spoken to Ellie. In fact, as the cook had confirmed, it was just as possible that they had never met. No doubt many conductors and stationmasters were friendly, but it was not a hard and fast rule.

  After that, as Lenox told Mayne, there were small things, odd little skips in the tune. The man had never given his name. Meaningless or meaningful? Was it actually possible that a custodian had mistaken a dead man for a sleeping one and cleaned around him? And then—the conductor had mentioned losing his omnibus ticket. But wasn’t it the widely known rule that conductors lived as close to their home stations as possible?

  Finally, there had been his dress. The conductor had worn a black frock coat and no hat. Lenox had not remarked on this at the time, but as all Londoners and most other Britons knew, conductors and train guards generally wore a single style of uniform: a long blue coat with two rows of vertical buttons, usually buttoned only at the very top so that the conductor had easy access to his pocket watch—the time being very important to this line of work, of course—and a flat-brimmed hat, generally with the number of the train fixed to it on a detachable medallion by two small brass chains.

  The conductor Lenox had met might have changed out of this uniform. But would he have, if he were going straight home from the station? And more damningly, if he had changed, where had been his luggage?

  Having heard all these questions, Sir Richard looked up at Lenox now with an appraising eye for a long moment. It was all circumstantial, Lenox would grant that—and thus, he felt a surge of gratitude for Mayne’s faith in him when the commissioner began to write out a note.