“Not there now?”
“No, sir. He came out again through the other door of the Clarence, the public bar. Then he walked so smart I could hardly keep up with him. Straight down to the King’s Road and hailed a cab. It was a minute or two before one came along, otherwise I’d never have caught the order he gave the driver.”
“Well?” said Gregson aggressively. “Lost our tongue, have we?”
“Oh no, sir,” said the infant innocently. “I heard him. Liverpool Street Station. He even give the platform. Platform 12. I could have hopped on the board at the back, crouched down and gone wiv ’im. But then I wouldn’t be here to tell you, would I, sir?”
“Was he carrying anything?” I asked.
“Naw, sir. Not to speak of. Little attaché case. Nuffing more.”
Holmes reached down and patted the uncombed head. He drew a sovereign from his note-case.
“Well done, Smiler! If Mr Gregson knows his onions, you may find yourself in the detective division a year or two from now.”
“Thank you, Mr Holmes! Thank you very much, sir.”
This infant prodigy scuttled off, gripping the coin in his right hand.
“Platform 12!” said Gregson vindictively. “Harwich! Hook of Holland! The overnight crossing! In three or four hours, Major Mordaunt could be outside territorial waters. Tomorrow he might be on an express train to anywhere in Europe. Try bringing him back from Spain or Italy, where there’s no extradition treaty!”
“You have alerted Harwich, as well as the Channel ports?”
“I wasn’t born yesterday, Mr Holmes. He’ll do as his lady friend advised, and she knows it. He’ll be waiting for her on the other side. He can’t leave her loose to talk.”
“You will not catch him at Liverpool Street, however,” said Holmes, pocketing his watch. “The train for the Hook of Holland ferry left Liverpool Street ten minutes ago. If memory serves, there is no other tonight, except the mail train at ten minutes to midnight. Passengers are not carried upon it.”
This might be unwelcome news, but before Gregson could say so, Holmes suggested blandly, “All things considered, you had best telegraph Chief Inspector Lestrade to meet us at Liverpool Street—Platform 12—in half an hour from now. He has just about got enough time.”
The unease on Gregson’s pale, dyspeptic features suggested to me a fish rising reluctantly from the bottom of an opaque and stagnant pool.
11
No express could now overtake the Harwich ferry train. In any case, not even Scotland Yard could command a pursuit train to be added to the busy railway traffic in the middle of the night. As for other forms of transport, when these events occurred some thirty years ago, the motor car was a tortoise by comparison with the slowest train. The aeroplane was not even a show-ground curiosity. Communication by a telegram or “wire” might convey a message almost instantaneously—but it could only be received at certain fixed points. Beyond them, it was delivered by hand. Once we set off by night in pursuit of James Mordaunt, we must depend on our own wits.
Fortunately, Sherlock Holmes had a connoisseur’s knowledge of the oddities of the British railway system. During the hours of darkness, there were trains which cross-crossed the country without being listed in Bradshaw’s passenger time table. Many were supervised by the railway police on behalf of Her Majesty’s Royal Mail. They included “high-value-package” coaches, kept out of bounds to the travelling public.
From Smiler Hawkins’s information, Mordaunt must have intended to catch the eleven o’clock ferry train from Liverpool Street to Harwich, for the overnight crossing to the Hook of Holland. Or did he merely want us to think this, the more easily to throw us off the scent? The 11 p.m. was the last passenger train on the Harwich line and we had missed it already. Our thoughts turned to the 11.50 East Coast mail train. Its vans carried the bulky canvas post-bags from the City of London sorting-office to King’s Lynn in Norfolk, via Chelmsford, Colchester, Felixstowe, Harwich and Great Yarmouth.
By good fortune, Lestrade was duty commander of the Criminal Investigation Division at Scotland Yard overnight. As Holmes suggested, Gregson turned to his sergeant with orders to alert the chief inspector and request his presence urgently at Liverpool Street.
“A further wire to be sent to Harwich,” Gregson added, calling the man back. “The ferry train is to be met at the docks. All passengers to be checked. Look for a thick-set man with red hair and whiskers, wearing a brown-and-white plaid coat. Possibly carrying or wearing a grey hat.”
“You think of everything, my dear fellow!” said Holmes admiringly. I looked at my friend uneasily.
Gregson ignored this compliment and beckoned the police van which had brought us to Eaton Place. A moment later its two horses were moving at a gallop across Belgrave Square, down the Strand, up Ludgate Hill and past St Paul’s, towards Bishopsgate Street and the East Coast mail. We passed the illuminated face of Liverpool Street Station clock-tower, whose hands pointed to twenty-five minutes to midnight. Gregson glanced at it and checked his watch. A moment later the inspector got down from the van in the station forecourt and strode towards the office door of the railway police.
Under the glass canopy of the departure platforms, the lamp lit air was filled by columns of steam and the boom of engines in motion. Holmes and I headed for Platform 12, where the mail train appeared as a set of six security vans with very few windows, all of them barred. Inside it, as the powerful locomotive rattled through the night, workers in brown overalls and arm-bands stood at long tables. Deftly and casually, they would sort envelopes and packets from the canvas bags into bundles for delivery to the towns and villages of East Anglia. At every stop along the line, another squadron of bags would be hoisted out onto flat trolleys.
At the iron-railed gate of the platform, a lean ferret-like man in an Inverness cape, his air furtive and sly, was already standing by the gate. Scotland Yard was nearer to Liverpool Street than Belgravia had been. Chief Inspector Lestrade held out his hand in greeting.
“Well, Mr Holmes! Should I thank you for giving us Maria Jessel? A most contrary lady! From all that’s happened, Mordaunt ought to be a dose of poison to her. Rum thing is, she won’t say a word against him now. What she’s hoping for? Do you know?”
“Her freedom, I suppose,” said Holmes unhelpfully.
Lestrade pulled a face.
“I don’t see it. What’s she after?”
“Justice, if you prefer it.” My friend looked at me, his back to the chief inspector, and raised his eyebrows as if in despair of him.
“Then why won’t she ditch him and have done with it, sir?”
Holmes swung round on him.
“I believe, Lestrade, I may go so far as to say we shall learn the answer to that by tomorrow morning. Meantime, I have two requests to make.”
The Scotland Yard man’s eyes narrowed a little.
“Yes? Such as?”
“Your colleague Gregson is on a somewhat different track to us. He fancies Mordaunt will make a dash for the Hook of Holland.”
“And how do you propose to remedy that, Mr Holmes?”
“By assuming that Mr Gregson is mistaken. The ferry train is not half-way to Harwich yet. Colchester is the last stop before the docks, I believe. Put aboard two plain-clothes men for the last leg of the journey. Give them Mordaunt’s description, as we have it. He can hardly change it much in full view of the other passengers. By this time of night there will be only a final handful of travellers still making for the docks. Just let your two men search the train unobtrusively between Colchester and Harwich for anyone who might be Mordaunt. From the police post at the docks let them wire the result of their search to every station-master along the route.”