After the best part of two hours in stuffy train compartments, Tom felt his head needed clearing and would usually have chosen to walk such a short distance. But he had no idea of the layout of the city or the direction of the centre where, he presumed, the cathedral close must be. Nor, if he was being cautious, was it a very sensible notion to set off on foot during the dark and fog in a strange town in the region of a railway station, since stations were rarely built in what Helen might have called the salubrious area of a town.
He looked up and down the platform. Wisps of fog eddied under the glass roof. The platform opposite looked as distant as a foreign shore. No one lingered in the open. The windows of the waiting room and the refreshment room were fugged over. Porters and passengers were making for the ticket hall and the exit. There would be cabs outside the station to collect elderly gents and respectable matrons. Tom bent to pick up his case and noticed that the strap securing it had come undone. He crouched down and discovered that the strap had broken. It must have caught on the rack or the foot-plate. The strap was necessary because the lock was broken and the lock was broken because the case was old and battered. Good quality hide, it had belonged to his father and been made to last by Barrets, but it was showing its age now. His father had been dead many years.
Tom improvised a knot to the strap in place of the useless buckle. As he was crouching on the platform, there was a roar at his back and a flare of light and heat while the monstrous engine trundled past him, reversing out of the station. Tom straightened up and blinked as the smoke from the locomotive mingled with the fog.
When he looked around again he saw that he was alone on the platform.
Well, not quite alone. About twenty yards away, as far as he could see before the fog became an impenetrable curtain, a figure suddenly materialized from an unlighted area of the station buildings and rushed to the edge of the platform. Tom thought that it was about to throw itself off the edge but the figure — no more than a black silhouette — halted just before, seeming to teeter there like a suicide on the brink of a cliff. Tom opened his mouth to call out but something prevented him. He did not want to draw attention to his presence. He glanced in the opposite direction, down the line. The train was still puffing on its backward course. And, at once, Tom realized how absurd was the notion that this individual was about to commit suicide since you’d hardly throw yourself into the path of a train which was retreating from you. Nevertheless, he wished one of the station workers would appear and take charge of matters. If there were any matters to take charge of.
He glanced again at the black shape and the skin on his scalp begin to crawl as a second figure detached itself from the station offices and started a diagonal approach towards the person who was at the platform’s edge. This one didn’t rush but nor did he move normally. There was a creeping quality to his walking like that of a stage villain. No more than half a dozen paces separated the buildings from where the silhouette stood but it seemed to take an age for the second individual to cross this space. His arms were stretched out in front of him as if he were feeling his way in the gloom — or as if he were about to give a final push to the first man teetering on the brink. This time Tom did manage to call out. Afterwards he wasn’t sure exactly what he said. It might have been nothing more than a cry or a fog-strangled yelp. But it was enough.
The creeping figure stopped and turned his head in Tom’s direction. The silhouetted man already on the brink also swivelled sharply to his right and then looked over his shoulder. The movement was sufficient to unbalance him and, with a wild swirl of his arms, he toppled sideways on to the track. Now Tom sensed a movement behind him, a uniformed employee coming out of the ticket hall. Calling out, ‘A man’s fallen on the line!’ he ran to the spot. As he did so he was aware of the second figure, the one who’d been approaching slantwise, shrinking back into the darkness of the buildings.
When he reached the place where the man had plunged off the platform Tom looked down, expecting to see a blackclad figure lying on the track, injured, perhaps unconscious or even dead. But there was no one there, no one lying on or between the rails which glinted dully in the light.
‘What is the trouble, sir?’
‘I saw a man fall on to the line here.’
The railwayman adjusted his cap and came to stand next to Tom. Together they peered down as if a more careful scrutiny might reveal what hadn’t been apparent at first glance.
‘A man on the line?’
‘Yes, down there.’
‘You are sure now, sir?’
The porter, a lugubrious-looking fellow whose face expressed a natural scepticism before he’d even uttered a word, was standing close to Tom. He was only an inch or so less tall than the lawyer. He sniffed the air. Tom wondered if he was sniffing for drink.
‘Of course I’m sure,’ he said. ‘I know what I saw.’
Tom spoke more sharply than he’d intended. He heard the tension in his voice and realized how much the incident had shaken him. The porter said, ‘Well, whatever happened, there’s no damage done, that’s plain. The person you saw must’ve upped and scarpered.’
‘He wasn’t alone, the man who fell, there was someone else on this part of the platform.’
‘Someone. . else?’ said the other, drawing out the words. ‘This is a public place, sir. There is generally someone else.’
‘But this one was about to. .’ Tom paused. He was getting nowhere. Gesturing at the closed doors and shuttered windows, he said, ‘What offices are these behind us?’
‘Storerooms and the like.’
Tom had no authority to request a search of the rooms. No crime had been committed. The worst that had occurred was a minor accident, a man falling from the station platform but sufficiently unharmed to scramble up and disappear from the scene within a few seconds. And even that simple sequence of events was not credited by the railwayman.
‘Will that be all, sir?’ said the porter, scarcely bothering to conceal his impatience.
‘Thank you,’ said Tom. ‘I am sorry to have troubled you.’
‘No trouble is too great for an employee of the London and South Western line,’ said the man, though without sounding as if he believed a word of it.
Tom Ansell walked back to where his case stood, forlorn on the platform, with the improvised repair to its strap. He picked it up and went through the ticket hall. The entire business on the platform had scarcely occupied more than a couple of minutes. Some of the individuals who’d disembarked from the London train were still milling outside by a diminished line of cabs and carriages, even a cart or two (for this was the country). Among them was the porter he’d first spoken to, who was about to assist the elderly gentleman in the shovel-hat to climb into a cab, the last in the line.
This passenger was fumbling in his coat to tip the porter before boarding but as he drew out his purse a shower of coins tumbled on to the ground. The man looked around helplessly while the porter crouched to scoop them up. The cabman surveyed the scene from his perch behind his vehicle but did not get down to assist. Tom, who was standing closest, groped for a couple of sovereigns which had rolled by his feet. He retrieved the book which had fallen from his own coat pocket as he was stooping and pressed the coins into the outstretched palm of the aged passenger, who was wearing a dog collar under a loosely tied muffler. The clergyman said, ‘Thank you, thank you.’
The porter meanwhile had completed his task of gathering up the rest of the coins which he handed back to the cleric with a rather ostentatious flourish, as if to demonstrate his honesty in returning every bit of scattered money. In return the cab passenger gave the porter a large enough tip for the man to touch his cap with a soldier’s smartness. Noticing Tom and wanting to do the world a favour, the porter now said, ‘This gentleman wants to go in the direction of the close too, I believe, sir. The Poultry Cross.’