A woman was coming over the bridge towards him, and when the man lifted his hat I expected his hair to spring up, which it did not, and I expected not to see a beard, which I did. But he was Rowland Smith all the same.
My landlady was saying, 'I think I can see St Paul's! But if that is St Paul's then that can't be the Houses of Parliament.'
He has put Brilliantine on his hair and grown a beard so as to start again as a new person, I thought quite calmly as our cabin began rolling past the buildings at the base of the Wheel and the Japanese garden disappeared from view. We began to climb again, far too slowly, and with the garden gone I became sure I had made a mistake. But here was the Japanese scene again, and, yes, there was evil and not just sadness behind the mysteries of the Necropolis, and I had a dizzy sense of beginning a fall that has lasted me, in a way, the rest of my days.
For there was Smith again on the bamboo bridge, with his hat back on his head, the lady far away.
I called to my landlady, so loudly that everyone in the cabin took fright. She came over, saying, 'Is it your head?'
I said, 'Look down there. You see that man with the beard on the little bridge?'
She nodded; she was anxious now. I had taken away all her fun and the others in the cabin were all looking at us. 'That is Rowland Smith,' I said. "The one who's dead, you mean?' "The one who was dead.'
I saw all the bad shots I'd made in hospital over this business, and for these I immediately blamed the ether. But I was now haring down a second trail, and I turned to my landlady and started on what must have seemed to her the queerest of all my speeches: 'Mack's little friend who could not grow a moustache told me in the bar of the North Station at the Necropolis that corpses had been dug up, and some left lying about the place. Mack – well, it had to be him; he was on the fly as everybody knew – would have been under orders to find the body of a man the size of Smith; others he could abandon, knowing they'd be put down to the work of grave robbers. He would have been well paid for it. Why, he told me in the Citadel that he was poor as a rat, but he was always in funds, and those brain dusters in the Kingdom of Italy did not come cheap.' 'What are you talking about?' said my landlady.
'But no,' I said. 'Smith lived in a flat, with a gatekeeper at the door. The coroner's report had said so. How could a body be got in?'
My landlady, still looking down at Smith, had somehow caught up with me. 'I thought,' she said slowly, 'that when you told me of that coroner's report, you said the firemen had played their hoses through doors giving on to a garden.'
'You're right!' I said. 'I hadn't thought you were listening. Not long before, Smith bought a new flat -1 heard him telling Erskine Long so – and he'd done it for one reason only: to get a garden!'
In my mind's eye I saw the swanky flat with the beautiful garden facing away from the road. I saw Mack, with some of his friends who were out of the straight, turning up after dark with the right sort of dead man after leaving some of the wrong sort lying about in Brookwood or other places. Maybe he had brought paraffin too. I saw Smith, talking of being tired to the gatekeeper. I saw him light the fire and leave.
'But why did Smith do it?' I exclaimed, at which some of the others in the cabin who'd left off staring at us began to do so again.
The Great Wheel rolled upward once again, and my thoughts roamed as wide as the view from our cabin, a hundred ideas coming into my mind. I revolved in my mind the words that Vincent had used of Smith on the coal heap at Nine Elms, and the sort of scandal that might go along with it. That I did not like to mention in front of my landlady. I was now at a height to see where the buildings merged into grey greenness at the edge of the city, and this brought the land sales flooding into my thoughts.
"There was something wrong with the land sales,' I said out loud. I pictured the name of White-Chester in the Necropolis minute book, and that brought me to it. 'Smith was selling off the land at cut-price rates to his friends, or perhaps even to himself in a roundabout way. There's this fellow at the Necropolis: Argent. He has sound looks, and seemed up to snuff. I saw him at Smith's funeral. He was not in the least downcast; he was swishing the grass with his black cane!'
'Calm down,' said my landlady. 'And where does he come in, anyway?'
'He was against the land sales. All the Necropolis board had doubts over it, but Argent led the way. After the funeral, he said to the chairman, Long, that it was the terms on which the lands were sold that he was particularly against. Long asked him what he might bring it to and he said a vote. They were all on to Smith. They were going to set things to rights, and Smith could see where it would all end.'
I pictured myself as a boy at the West Cliff marshalling yard in Whitby with Mr Hammond explaining railway mysteries to me. Had there been a vote in the background of his disgrace? However it had come about, he had been stopped from ever being involved with companies, and it had been the finish of him. Smith must have feared the same thing: the vote, then open court, or worse yet. 'Gaol?' said my landlady.
'Probably,' I said, 'and he could not have kept up his exquisite ways in stir.'
Now our cabin was at its fullest height, and I could see trains cutting crazily through the streets in all directions, as if each was saying, 'My way is best!' or they were ever-growing pointers of clocks, driving the world forward into the future.
A new thought brought me down to earth. 'Yet Stanley did the murders,' I said. 'I must have been right over that. He finished off Sir John Rickerby, Henry Taylor and Mike all right. Why else would he have crowned me and locked me in a coffin?' 'Yes,' said my landlady, 'but who put him up to it?'
I looked down into the Japanese garden, at Smith, still there, smoking a cigarette and looking all at once like a man who cared not a rip for anything but himself.
I nodded. 'Smith was the true killer,' I said, 'and poor Stanley was just the tool with which the job was done.'
'I'm sure you have that right,' said my landlady, although of course she was the one who had got to it first. And this was what Stanley had meant by darkness: he had seen from my diary that while I had known enough to send him to the gallows, I had not got the thing straight.
'Smith asked him to bash poor old Sir John Rickerby so as to give himself control of the Necropolis Company so that he could start selling the land,' I said. 'As for the next part, it was as I said in the hospitaclass="underline" Stanley was seen by Henry Taylor, or at any rate he thought as much, and so Taylor was done too. Then Mike, for what he knew, or might have known.'
'Or what he might have told the detectives who would never leave him be,' added my landlady.
Our cabin was once more descending. I looked at Smith again, and there seemed to be a white flash in the darkening air around him. He began looking in the stream below the bridge – and then was gone, for we were now too low to see him.
And with the loss of the vista, more doubts came. I was sure Sir John Rickerby had been killed on the say-so of Smith, but whether Smith had also ordered the destruction of Henry Taylor and Mike I could not guess. That might have been the private business of Stanley, for the noose was more closely about his neck – he had done the deed, after all. Smith, realising that he was in Queer Street too should the police be put on to Stanley, might have gone along with these other killings, or he might have been furious at them.
The two had made a deaclass="underline" why else would Stanley's address have been allowed to continue every Tuesday, there being so little call to hear it? 'Stanley really was as poor as a rat,' I said.
'That's why he wanted my room,' said my landlady sadly. She was at my shoulder. I was ashamed to think that I had forgotten about her for the minute. 'It was the only one he could afford,' she added, and I realised then – which I had never thought before – that she knew very well that her rooms were not excellent, or whatever hopeful words she had used.