It was hot and it was airless in the railway compartment on the short return journey to Bardon Mill. Neither Atticus nor Lucie had thought to open any of the windows of the carriage and instead they sat side-by-side in complete silence, each gripping the hand of the other and birstled.
It seemed that it was only as they were carried away from Hexham and its Infirmary and after they had left the frantic distractions of the town behind that the full horrors of what they had learned in the mortuary room settled onto them. It settled onto them as the coils of an adder might settle around its prey.
Over the years they had read, in fact they had devoured everything they could find about the notorious multiple murderers; Leather-Apron, Burke and Hare, Mary Ann Cotton and the like. But now they were part of a story as real and as diabolical as any of them. Their names and everything they chose to do in the coming hours and days would be printed in black and white and sent round the Empire. And as a result of Mr Stead’s ‘new journalism,’ those newspapers would not only be reporting the ‘when’ and the ‘how,’ they would also be asking the ‘why’ and, even more worryingly, the ‘why not.’
This was no Lippincott’s Magazine where the facts of the case were packaged and presented in convenient monthly serials, to be discussed and examined over coffee and dainty-cakes. There was a real flesh-and-blood murderer at large somewhere out beyond the glass of the carriage windows and they had no way of knowing where or when he might strike again.
Mercifully the tortured procession of their thoughts was interrupted by the shriek of the locomotive as it approached the village, and the familiar station buildings began to slip past their window, slower and slower and slower until they stopped.
Atticus and Lucie remained where they were, fingers entwined, utterly spent of emotion, staring through the window.
“I suppose we ought to get out, Atticus,” Lucie muttered as the Station Master caught sight of them and politely raised his hat.
They stepped down wearily onto the platform where he was waiting. He looked as if he might have a hundred questions for them but in the end he only wished them a good afternoon before he sent a porter scurrying ahead to retrieve their bicycles from behind the station post office.
After picking at a lunch at the Bowes Hotel in the main street, (where Atticus insisted on paying a bemused but delighted landlord in full for their unoccupied room), they made their way back up the steep hillside to Shields Tower, intent on next examining Samson Elliott’s tiny, tied cottage.