Hartog reached out a hand and laid long, sensitive fingers gently on that key.
He felt a strange tingling sensation in his spine as he did this and he stepped back, breathing fast. He found he was sweating profusely, and he took up a white towel and wiped his face and neck. He stared upward through the glass dome at the beaming-mast with its intricate antennae which moved fractionally, almost imperceptibly unless you knew it was in motion, lining up in automatic response to Bluebolt as the satellite sped down the length of Africa from approximately NNE to SSW. At the top of the short mast a curious attachment, rather like the spread wings of a butterfly, canted upward very gently, held straight for a brief moment, and then very gradually began to lower, facing this time towards the south and Cape Town.
CHAPTER TWO
On the night prior to the breaking of the rains in Nogolia Commander Esmonde Shaw had been working late at the Admiralty, engaged on some routine paper-work in connexion with an assignment which he had recently carried out. He had left just in time to catch a train from Trafalgar Square which connected with the last westbound Piccadilly Line train to Barons Court and home. He could not have known that before he reached Barons Court he would be out of that train and walking by torchlight, with the guard, along the track.
But that was just what he was doing — fumbling, tripping over rails and dirt, scraping his shoulder against the tunnel wall.
The current had been cut off now, by the contact procedure with the telephone wires running along those walls; but Shaw and the guard pressed their bodies away from the ‘live’ rail running cold and shining, and still somehow deadly, up the centre of the track — pressed away instinctively even though they knew it was perfectly safe.
There was a faint draught blowing through the tunnel, but even so the air was close, fetid with the day-long exhalations of the crowded tubes. Drips of water streaked the grime of the walls, fell now and again on to Shaw’s head and shoulders as he edged his tall, wiry frame along behind the guard, who was outlined in the back-glare from his torch. That torch sliced ahead into the total darkness, the almost tangible darkness stretching away below South Kensington, a darkness no longer relieved by the squares of yellow light from the train’s windows. It was like walking into some long-sealed tomb. The muffled sound of an eastbound train boomed out hollowly, shaking the very air of the tunnel, and when it had passed in its own sealed-off tomb their footsteps echoed again along the track, eerily. Shaw heard the heavy breathing of the guard ahead of him. The man was clearly scared, scared for his own skin because of what people might be going to say.
That guard was a coloured man — from Africa, by the look of him; a man from a troubled, unhappy continent, now a stranger in a largely hostile land — and Shaw couldn’t help feeling sympathy on that score alone. He knew that London’s coloured population had plenty to contend with in the deep-seated feelings of hostility which their skins seemed so often to arouse, and possibly because of that latent hostility the man was scared of what might happen to him now that a white man had died, scared that ‘they’ might not believe his story.
The two went along as fast as they could, Shaw’s head bent away from possible projections, the instinctive self-preservation of a tall man even when he knows he has plenty of clearance.
He asked, “Can you see anything yet?”
“No. I can’t see anything. Sir, it wasn’t my fault.” Shaw, who earlier had seen the greenish tinge of the ebony face— the robust, open face — and the rolling fright in the eyes, caught the note of panic now. “That man, he’d been drinking, sure. He just came for me.”
Shaw nodded slightly, thinking back. He himself and an elderly man had been alone in the last-but-one compartment, and the guard had been alone with that other man, the one who was now almost certainly dead, in his compartment immediately in rear of Shaw’s. Shaw had seen, through the connecting doors, what had looked like a struggle and then the other man had disappeared from his line of vision and then, perhaps a quarter of a minute later, the train had slowed and stopped. After that, Shaw had lowered the window in his compartment and banged on the guard’s window. The coloured man, who was badly frightened, had told him that a passenger had forced the door open and had fallen out. After some argument as to the right of passengers on the track, Shaw had used the authority latent in his quiet voice and his bearing, and had carried his point that two might save life where one might not; and so here they were walking back in the direction of Gloucester Road station, towards where it had happened.
The guard said for the third time, “Certain sure they’re going to say it was my fault. But it wasn’t. That man, he just gets up and comes for me, then he makes for the door… maybe he’s drunk and he thinks we’re just coming into Earl’s Court, maybe he wants to kill himself, maybe… I don’t know. I tried to stop him, honest I did.”
Shaw grunted non-committally, ran a hand over his long, determined jaw. Personally, he was prepared to believe the man. He looked a decent lad, and honest. He said, “Well, that’s not my concern, laddie. Press on. Perhaps it’s not as bad as we think.”
“Please… God, it isn’t.”
Shaw scarcely noticed the slight hesitation then, though he was to recall it later. He said, “Don’t start worrying yet, anyway. Any reason why he should have attacked you?”
“No.”
“Did you know him — had you seen him before?”
The guard hesitated for a moment. “I’d seen him, sir, when I’d been on this late turn. I didn’t know him, though.”
“He was a regular user of this last train?”
“Maybe he was. I just don’t know about that. I just saw him once or twice.”
They groped forward, streaked now with dirt where they’d rubbed the walls of the tunnel, faces running with sweat. A few moments later Shaw heard the hiss of breath from the guard, and the man stopped. The beam of his torch wavered.
Shaw said briskly, “Here, lad. Give it to me.”
He took the torch from shaking fingers, shone the beam ahead on to the track, felt his scalp tingling as he looked at what had so recently been a living body and was now very, very dead indeed. The man was lying half across the ‘live’ rail, and there was still a stench of scorched flesh and cloth; it fanned into Shaw’s nostrils on the draught as he went forward, bent down and examined the broken body. The legs were severed. It looked as though he’d swung back into the spinning wheels of the rear compartment as he’d fallen, and the legs had been nipped off neatly at the knee-joints. The head lolled horribly; the back of the skull was smashed in like an egg. Since this would be a police affair Shaw didn’t want to disturb anything by going through the pockets for means of identification. He said, “Nothing we can do for him, poor beggar. We’ll have to get word through… we mustn’t move him ourselves, you understand?”
He looked at the guard in the light of the torch, saw the nervous way in which the young fellow fingered his upper lip. The coloured man said, “You mean until the police come?”
Shaw nodded, looked with concern at the almost grey face. “I’m sorry. Now listen — do you feel all right?”
“Right enough, sir.”
“Do you feel up to walking back to Gloucester Road, tell them what’s happened?”
“I can do that, sure. Don’t want to — to stay here.” The guard was shaking badly. “I’ll go right along now.”
“Good man. I’ll stay here, then.”