Eye of the Needle(49)
As the light strengthened he looked himself over. He was covered from head to toe in coal dust, like a miner coming up from the pit. Somehow he had to wash and change his clothes.
He chanced a look over the side of the tender. The train was still in the suburbs, passing factories and warehouses and rows of grimy little houses. He had to think about his next move.
His original plan had been to get off the train at Glasgow and there catch another train to Dundee and up the east coast to Aberdeen. It was still possible for him to disembark at Glasgow. He could not get off at the station, of course, but he might jump off either just before or just after. However, there were risks in that. The train was sure to stop at intermediate stations between Liverpool and Glasgow, and at those stops he might be spotted. No, he had to get off the train soon and find another means of transport.
The ideal place would be a lonely stretch of track just outside a city or village. It had to be lonely—he must not be seen leaping from the coal tender—but it had to be fairly near houses so that he could steal clothes and a car. And it needed to be an uphill grade of track so that the train would be traveling slowly enough for him to jump.
Right now its speed was about forty miles an hour. Faber lay back on the coal to wait. He could not keep a permanent watch on the country through which he was passing, for fear of being seen. He decided he would look out whenever the train slowed down. Otherwise he would lie still.
After a few minutes he caught himself dropping off to sleep, despite the discomfort of his position. He shifted and reclined on his elbows so that if he did sleep he would fall and be wakened by the impact.
The train was gathering speed. Between London and Liverpool it had seemed to be stationary more than moving; now it steamed through the country at a fine pace. To complete his discomfort, it started to rain: a cold, steady drizzle that soaked right through his clothes and seemed to turn to ice on his skin. Another reason for getting off the train; he could die of exposure before they reached Glasgow.
After half an hour at high speed he was contemplating killing the engine crew and stopping the train himself. A signal box saved their lives. The train slowed suddenly as brakes were applied. It decelerated in stages; Faber guessed the track was marked with descending speed limits. He looked out. They were in the countryside again. He could see the reason for the slowdown—they were approaching a track junction, and the signals were against them.
Faber stayed in the tender while the train stood still. After five minutes it started up again. Faber scrambled up the side of the tender, perched on the edge for a moment, and jumped.
He landed on the embankment and lay, face down, in the overgrown weeds. When the train was out of earshot he got to his feet. The only sign of civilization nearby was the signal box, a two-story wooden structure with large windows in the control room at the top, an outside staircase and a door at ground-floor level. On the far side was a cinder track leading away.
Faber walked in a wide circle to approach the place from the back, where there were no windows. He entered a ground-floor door and found what he had been expecting: a toilet, a washbasin, and, as a bonus, a coat hanging on a peg.
He took off his soaking wet clothes, washed his hands and face and rubbed himself vigorously all over with a grubby towel. The little cylindrical film can containing the negatives was still taped securely to his chest. He put his clothes back on, but substituted the signalman’s overcoat for his own sopping wet jacket.
Now all he needed was transport. The signalman must have got here somehow. Faber went outside and found a bicycle padlocked to a rail on the other side of the small building. He snapped the little lock with the blade of his stiletto. Moving in a straight line away from the blank rear wall of the signal box, he wheeled the cycle until he was out of sight of the building. Then he cut across until he reached the cinder track, climbed on the cycle and pedaled away.
16
PERCIVAL GODLIMAN HAD BROUGHT A SMALL CAMP bed from his home. He lay on it in his office, dressed in trousers and shirt, trying without success to sleep. He had not suffered insomnia for almost forty years, not since he took his final exams at the university. He would gladly swap the anxieties of those days for the worries that kept him awake now.
He had been a different man then, he knew; not just younger, but also considerably less…abstracted. He had been outgoing, aggressive, ambitious; he planned to go into politics. He was not studious then—he had reason to be anxious about the exams.
His two mismatched enthusiasms in those days had been debating and ballroom dancing. He had spoken with distinction at the Oxford Union and had been pictured in The Tatler waltzing with debutantes. He was no great womanizer; he wanted sex with a woman he loved, not because he believed in any high-minded principles to that effect, but because that was the way he felt about it.
And so he had been a virgin until he met Eleanor, who was not one of the debutantes but a brilliant graduate mathematician with grace and warmth and a father dying of lung disease after forty years as a coal mine worker. He had taken her to meet his people. His father was Lord Lieutenant of the county, and the house had seemed a mansion to Eleanor, but she had been natural and charming and not in the least awestruck; and when Percy’s mother had been disgracefully condescending to her at one point she had reacted with merciless wit, for which he loved her all the more.
He had taken his master’s degree, then after the Great War he taught in a public school and stood in three by-elections. They were both disappointed when they discovered they could not have children; but they loved each other totally and they were happy, and her death was the most appalling tragedy Godliman ever knew. It had ended his interest in the real world, and he had retreated into the Middle Ages.