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.

“I can let you have four men from the Bayswater station.”

This was a police branch close by Paddington. “Thank you, Sir Richard.”

“For five hours. Not twelve.”

“Ah. Thank you.”

“I don’t have the time to fall out with Inspector Dunn today, either. So steer clear of him.”

“Happily, sir.”

Mayne looked away through the window to the Thames. It was busy—small ships crossing each other’s wakes, a few large ones turning fat into the tide, bound for the ocean after weeks in dry dock.

“What do you think it’s about, this murder? Is it really a problem for Manchester?” he asked. “The thing bothers me.”

Lenox shook his head. “I cannot say, sir. It’s too soon.”

“Hm.” Mayne tore the sheet off and handed it to Lenox. “Very well. On you go.”

Lenox crossed town to the Bayswater police station. He didn’t know anyone there, but they were friendly, and complied immediately with Mayne’s note. Lenox sent one of the five men they gave him straightaway to find the home of Joseph Beauregard Stanley—the stationmaster—and ask him whether he had known the conductor before the previous night.

The remaining four he took to Paddington. There he was able to discover, from the logs, the name of the gentleman who was scheduled to have been the conductor of the 449 the evening before: Mr. Norman Haase.

This accomplished, he set about hiring horses. There was no horse path along the railroad, but Lenox didn’t need one—for a very specific reason.

Though the number seemed arbitrary, it was not accidental that the width between railroad tracks all across England was exactly four feet eight and a half inches, measured from the inside of each track. It was because that was the width of a horse-drawn wagon.

At the turn of the century, it had been horses that carried coal out of the mines by the ton. This job was easier if there were metal tracks laid down upon which the wagons could roll.

Ever enterprising, it was coal barons who, forty or more years before, had understood the potential use of locomotion in their line of work. Indeed, many of the first, tiny rail lines to exist had traveled between coal mines and nearby depots.

What this meant for Lenox was that he could hire four horses from a stable near Paddington, divide them into pairs pulling small dog carts, and move with ease along the train tracks that ran on either side of the line upon which the 449 had traveled into London.

Lenox explained all of this, with some small pride, to the two constables with whom he rode.

To his surprise, one of them, a tall, graying fellow called Simonson, said, “Not only that, sir—they were the same width exact for the war chariots of ancient Rome.”

They had been trotting at a good pace for ten minutes and were now perhaps half a mile away from Paddington. The additional tracks would split off in different directions after about a mile. Then they would have to ride on horseback, he figured.

“Is that so?” he said, curious.

“My father said as much, at least,” Simonson replied.

“How very interesting to know,” said Lenox. “They were marvelous, the Romans. Did you know—”

But just at that moment there was a cry from the pair of Bayswater constables on the other side of the track.

There, lying face up in the ditch between tracks, was the body of a man.

Simonson and Lenox crossed the tracks and came down from their horses, forming a small circle around the corpse.

“Well spotted, gentlemen,” said Lenox soberly.

It would have been easy to miss the body—so covered was all his skin and clothing in coal dust and dirt.

But he wore the unmistakable double-breasted cloak of a conductor. It must be Norman Haase. He lay there, pale in the few places where his skin was visible, eyes open but unseeing. His throat was cut.