Eye of the Needle(48)
IT HAD TO BE bad news, of course. From the moment he realized Billy Parkin was not going to saunter off that train, Frederick Bloggs knew that Die Nadel had slipped through their fingers again. As the uniformed police moved onto the train in pairs, two men to search each car, Bloggs thought of several possible explanations of Parkin’s nonappearance; and all the explanations were depressing.
He turned up his coat collar and paced the drafty platform. He wanted very badly to catch Die Nadel; and not only for the sake of the invasion—although that was reason enough, of course—but for Percy Godliman, and for the five Home Guards, and for Christine, and for himself….
He looked at his watch: four o’clock. Soon it would be day. Bloggs had been up all night, and he had not eaten since breakfast yesterday, but until now he had kept going on adrenalin. The failure of the trap—he was quite sure it had failed—drained him of energy. Hunger and fatigue caught up with him. He had to make a conscious effort not to daydream about hot food and a warm bed.
“Sir!” A policeman was leaning out of a car and waving at him. “Sir!”
Bloggs walked toward him, then broke into a run. “What is it?”
“It might be your man Parkin.”
Bloggs climbed into the car. “What the hell do you mean, might be?”
“You’d better have a look.” The policeman opened the communicating door between the cars and shone his flashlight inside.
It was Parkin; Bloggs could tell by the ticket inspector’s uniform. He was curled up on the floor. Bloggs took the policeman’s light, knelt down beside Parkin, and turned him over.
He saw Parkin’s face, looked quickly away. “Oh, dear God.”
“I take it this is Parkin?” the policeman said.
Bloggs nodded. He got up, very slowly, without looking again at the body. “We’ll interview everybody in this car and the next,” he said. “Anyone who saw or heard anything unusual will be detained for further questioning. Not that it will do us any good; the murderer must have jumped off the train before it got here.”
Bloggs went back out on the platform. All the searchers had completed their tasks and were gathered in a group. He detailed six of them to help with the interviewing.
The police-inspector said, “Your man’s hopped it, then.”
“Almost certainly. You’ve looked in every toilet, and the guard’s van?”
“Yes, and on top of the train and under it, and in the engine and the coal tender.”
A passenger got off the train and approached Bloggs and the inspector. He was a small man who wheezed badly. “Excuse me,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” the inspector said.
“I was wondering, are you looking for somebody?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, if you are, I was wondering, would he be a tall chap?”
“Why do you ask?”
Bloggs interrupted impatiently. “Yes, a tall man. Come on, spit it out.”
“Well, it’s just that a tall chap got out the wrong side of the train.”
“When?”
“A minute or two after the train pulled into the station. He got on, like, then he got off, on the wrong side. Jumped down onto the track. Only he had no luggage, you see, which was another odd thing, and I just thought—”
The inspector said, “Balls.”
“He must have spotted the trap,” Bloggs said. “But how? He doesn’t know my face, and your men were out of sight.”
“Something made him suspicious.”
“So he crossed the line to the next platform and went out that way. Wouldn’t he have been seen?”
The inspector shrugged. “Not too many people about this late. And if he was seen he could just say he was too impatient to queue at the ticket barrier.”
“Didn’t you have the other ticket barriers covered?”
“Afraid I didn’t think of it…well, we can search the surrounding area, and later on we can check various places in the city, and of course we’ll watch the ferry—”
“Yes, please do,” Bloggs said.
But somehow he knew Faber would not be found.
It was more than an hour before the train started to move. Faber had a cramp in his left calf and dust in his nose. He heard the engineer and fireman climb back into their cab, and caught snatches of conversation about a body being found on the train. There was a metallic rattle as the fireman shoveled coal, then the hiss of steam, a clanking of pistons, a jerk and a sigh of smoke as the train moved off. Gratefully, Faber shifted his position and indulged in a smothered sneeze. He felt better.
He was at the back of the coal tender, buried deep in the coal, where it would take a man with a shovel ten minutes’ hard work to expose him. As he had hoped, the police search of the tender had consisted of one good long look and no more.
He wondered whether he could risk emerging now. It must be getting light; would he be visible from a bridge over the line? He thought not. His skin was now quite black, and in a moving train in the pale light of dawn he would just be a dark blur on a dark background. Yes, he would chance it. Slowly and carefully, he dug his way out of his grave of coal.
He breathed deeply of the cool air. The coal was shoveled out of the tender via a small hole in the front end. Later, perhaps, the fireman would have to enter the tender when the pile of fuel got lower. But he was safe for now.