He stepped back from the area around the chairs and inspected the floor once more. ‘Don’t suppose our murdering friends will have left their piece of wire or whatever it was behind them.’ He moved away from the area where the struggle had taken place and stood looking at the door for a long time.
‘Lord Powerscourt, sir,’ young Andrew was back in the hunt, ‘do you think the killers stayed on the train all the way to London, sir? Wouldn’t it be a bit strange to have to spend the journey with a man you’d just killed?’
‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘there are a number of possibilities. The door to the rest of the train was certainly locked. They could, as you say, have remained on the train all the way to King’s Cross. Or they could have killed him before the train left. Or they could have jumped off the train some place where it had slowed down. Whichever way it was done, it would seem likely that the killers were wearing the uniform of the Great Northern Railway.’
Powerscourt put his hand to the door that led to the outside world. It opened easily. There were no clues as to whether somebody might have jumped out of it in the past twenty-four hours.
‘See here,’ said Powerscourt, whipping out a notebook and making drawings of the position of the chairs where the struggle had occurred, ‘I want you to go back to the waiting room and the stationmaster’s office where the interviews are taking place. I want you to bring back the man who drove this train to London and the senior guard on the special train. Quick now, as quick as you can.’
‘Yes, sir, Lord Powerscourt, sir.’
Five minutes later young Andrew was back. ‘Mr Jones, the driver, sir. Mr Smith, sir, the senior guard, sir.’ Both were in their early thirties, Jones painfully thin, Smith more corpulent as if he partook liberally of the various meals on offer to his richer travellers. Both looked to Powerscourt as if they would be steady under fire.
‘Thank you both very much for coming over,’ Powerscourt began. ‘This shouldn’t take very long although I may want you to do something for us in the morning. Now then, Mr Smith, how many guards did you have on the special train this morning?’
‘Two, sir, and myself. Even that was probably too many. There were only three passengers on the train.’
‘And were your two men in this carriage at any time before and during the journey?’
‘No, sir, they were not. We had strict instructions to leave the gentleman in here – Lord somebody or other, wasn’t he? – on his own.’
‘So not even at the beginning of the journey, before the train actually left, were there any people other than the dead man in here as far as you know?’
Smith looked puzzled. ‘No, sir, there were not.’
‘Let me tell you, gentlemen, and I would ask you to keep this under your hats for the present, there must have been two people in here, probably at the start. They may have been wearing GNR uniform so as not to attract attention. I suspect they entered the carriage by the door on the opposite side of the platform where the train would shield them from view. If there’s a problem with how they got in there’s an even bigger problem with how they got out. Mr Smith, you didn’t see another two guards in uniform get off the train at King’s Cross, did you?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Could they have slipped off the train without being seen?’
‘It’s possible, sir, just possible. We have to clear everything away as soon as the train has arrived – plates, glasses, cups and so on. That’s why the guards are usually the last people to leave the train.’
‘Excuse me, sir, Lord Powerscourt, sir,’ – young Andrew was joining the grown-ups, – ‘wouldn’t they have killed the Earl near the start of the journey? Otherwise he could have called for assistance, or tried to escape into another carriage, sir.’
Mr Jones looked closely at the young policeman. He hadn’t finished yet.
‘As I said before, sir, would they have wanted to stay in the carriage all that time with a corpse, sir, Lord Powerscourt, sir?’
‘I was just coming to that,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Mr Jones, you must know this line better than anybody. Are there any stretches where you have to slow down, so that a man could jump out without killing himself?’
‘Before I answer that, my lord, can I ask why they didn’t just tip the body out of the door once they had killed him?’
‘My answer to that, Mr Jones, is that I don’t know. Maybe they thought the body might be discovered before the train reached London and a hue and cry would begin sooner than they would have wanted. Though why they should refrain from throwing the dead man out of the carriage and then throw themselves out of it I have no idea. But come, Mr Jones, are there places where the jumping could have been done?’
Archibald Jones took a long time fiddling with his pipe and getting it to draw. ‘I have been thinking about your requirements while we talked,’ he began. ‘The obvious place to jump would be as we draw close to King’s Cross. There are always red signals there for no apparent reason. But you would have to work out the likelihood of meeting a train coming the other way. You could very easily get yourself killed. The other train might be on you before you knew it was there. There is another place you might jump, on the northern outskirts of Peterborough. The problem there is that the track runs along very close to rows of terraced houses. I don’t think you would be in much danger of being killed by a train coming the other way, but the chances of being seen would be considerable. Two men in the uniform of the Great Northern Railway could cause quite a stir. So I don’t think Peterborough would be the answer.’
Jones the driver drew hard on his pipe and blew a great cloud of smoke across the compartment. Just like one of his engines, Powerscourt thought. Maybe he’s going to get under way in a minute.
‘There is just one place where I think it might be possible,’ Jones went on, ‘and that’s on the way into Spalding. Before the town, while you’re still in open country, there’s a cutting with thick grass and brambles and weeds and loads of blackberries in the autumn. You could throw yourself into that and hope the grass and general undergrowth would check your fall. There’s a road into the town a hundred yards away.’
‘And you wouldn’t be overlooked?’
‘No, sir.’
‘What speed would the train be travelling at?’ asked Powerscourt, suddenly remembering some hazardous leaps in the past with Johnny Fitzgerald.
‘I should think about ten to twelve miles an hour, my lord.’
‘Could you take me there in the morning? In this train with the same carriages?’
‘I’m sure I could, my lord. I’ll just have to clear it with the stationmaster in the morning.’
Powerscourt felt a tugging on his arm and a low but insistent cough.
Young Andrew was not to be denied. ‘Lord Powerscourt, sir, Mr Jones, sir, what about the door? I was told it was closed when the train reached London. How did they close the door after they’d jumped out of it?’
Powerscourt strode over to the door. Before he reached it Jones gave him the answer.
‘It opens outwards, my lord, the door, I mean.’
Powerscourt flung open the door and stared at the railway lines of the Great Northern Railway, a few stray carriages dotted about the tracks. A dull murmur could be heard coming from the stationmaster’s office as the interviews went on. He thought about a trial jump but realized that it wouldn’t tell him anything. Stationary leaps were just not the same.
Twenty minutes later he was conferring with Inspector Blunden.
‘I’ll get all these interviews typed up in the morning, my lord,’ said Blunden. ‘It would seem from what you learnt and what one or two people here said, that two people entered the Candlesby carriage at some point before the train left the station. Can’t think how they persuaded him to let them stay. They may have had keys. Anyway, once the train left the station, I would say, they killed him.’