‘I am most grateful to you, Mr Lambert,’ he said. ‘I must go now. I have an appointment very soon to jump out of a train.’
‘What interesting lives you investigators lead,’ said Lambert with a smile, taking a final rub at his glasses. ‘Let me wish you a safe jump.’
‘Thank you,’ said Powerscourt, ‘thank you very much. Can I ask you a question?’
‘Of course.’
‘These racing pictures here,’ Powerscourt waved his hand expansively round the walls, ‘something tells me they don’t all belong to the bank. I think most of them are yours. Would I be right?’
Sebastian Lambert gave a rueful grin. ‘You are absolutely right, Lord Powerscourt. I don’t think I want to know how you worked it out.’
‘And do you go to the races yourself, Mr Lambert?’
The bank manager looked carefully at the glass panels on his door to make sure nobody could hear him. ‘Well,’ he whispered, ‘I do, as a matter of fact. But I have to go quite a long way away from here. I don’t think the bank and some of the customers would approve if the manager was seen placing a large wager on the two thirty at Lincoln. So I travel south to Epsom or Sandown Park. I once went as far as Exeter, God help me.’
‘Disguise?’ said Powerscourt hopefully. ‘False beard, limp, strange clothes, that sort of thing?’
‘Alas, no. I don’t go round like Sherlock Holmes pretending to be a washerwoman or whoever it was. And could I remind you of one relevant fact, Lord Powerscourt? That last bit of information about the races, that’s confidential, that is. Highly confidential.’
Powerscourt found Detective Inspector Blunden reading rather sadly through a pile of interview notes. ‘There’s a set of these for you over there, my lord. It’s remarkable how little twenty or twenty-five people are able to tell you about the morning of a murder. Apart from the fact that two people thought they saw two men, height, hair colour, weight, age all unnoticed, going into the special train, that’s about it. Hours and hours spent interviewing; we might as well have passed yesterday evening reading the railway timetables. God in heaven.’
‘Has any information come out about GNR uniforms, Inspector? About where the people who work here get theirs, for instance?’
‘That’s not going to bring any joy to your heart, my lord. There are a lot of seasonal staff employed on the railway in the summer so the company keeps a good supply of the trousers and shirts and so on at one of the big clothes shops in the town. And nobody’s been in there in the past month buying any uniforms. I went to see them myself while you were with the bank manager. It’s all bad today.’
‘I tell you what,’ said Powerscourt, ‘why don’t you join us on a little expedition? Let’s take a special train in the direction of Spalding. Let’s pretend to murder an Earl in the early stages of the trip. Let’s jump out of the door of the moving train when it is doing ten to twelve miles an hour at a cutting just outside the town. Remember, if you’re the last man, to close the train door behind you when you go, or all our theories have turned to dust. And if it doesn’t work the first time around we have to ask the good Mr Jones, the man who drove the train yesterday, to go into reverse and do it again. What do you say?’
The Inspector smiled. Powerscourt was always surprised how a spot of danger could cheer some men up. ‘I’d be delighted, my lord. Much better than reading any more of this stuff.’
At a quarter past two there was an impromptu conference in the special train: Powerscourt, Inspector Blunden, Archibald Jones the driver and young Andrew Merrick, almost too overawed by his superior officer to speak.
‘I’ve been giving this matter some thought, so I have, gentlemen,’ said Jones the driver. ‘We have one problem to do with how you know when to jump. I propose to give two short hoots when we are less than a minute from the cutting. When I reach it I’m going to give one continuous hoot, so just go at that stage. I’m not sure there’ll be enough time for all three of you to jump. Somebody may have to be left behind.’
Andrew Merrick knew where his duty lay. He might be younger, he might be fitter, he might be nearer in years to the murderers than his superiors – none of that mattered.
‘I’ll come third,’ he said. ‘I’ll jump, of course, if I can.’
‘You remember what I said yesterday, my lord? A cutting, with long grass and brambles and general undergrowth. The hooter will tell you when to go.’
‘Please, sir, Lord Powerscourt, sir, Inspector Blunden, sir, I have been conducting experiments around the station this morning.’
‘And?’ said the Inspector, who had come across young Andrew Merrick before.
‘It’s the door, sirs. I think it might be quite difficult to close it and jump at the same time.’
‘Aha,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I may have the advantage of you all here. I have actually jumped off a moving train and closed the door. It was difficult but not impossible.’
‘Whereabouts was this, my lord?’ Jones was fascinated to meet a veteran jumper out of moving trains.
‘It was in Northern India, in Kashmir actually. There were some other people on the train who didn’t want me to leave it alive so it seemed a better bet to jump.’
‘Right, gentlemen, I think it’s time to go.’ Driver Jones began moving off towards his cab. ‘If all goes well I shall reverse back down the line to the cutting and pick you up. If all does not go well I can still pick you up and we can try once more. I think we have enough time on the lines for three jumps before the next train arrives.’
A few moments later they watched the tell-tale signs as smoke began drifting past the window. Inspector Blunden began a series of stretching exercises he used to perform on the rugby fields of the Midlands. Andrew Merrick peered out of the window and tried to appear nonchalant. They were out of the town now, the train building up speed as it drove through the lush fields between Boston and Spalding.
Powerscourt felt nervous, almost frightened. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t jumped out of trains before. But he felt irritated now to be risking limb if not life on the case of two of the most unpleasant human beings he had ever come across. Murderers, in his experience, were not usually totally evil people. They all shared one fatal flaw, of course, depriving one or more of their fellow citizens of life, but they could also be clever or charming or witty. None of those adjectives could be used in conjunction with the Dymoke family.
Time to stop this introspection, Powerscourt said to himself and began touching his toes. The Inspector was leading the way to the carriage doors with Powerscourt behind him and the young man in third place, hopping anxiously from foot to foot. In the distance on their right they could just see the outskirts of Spalding. Above them a hovering bird was circling in the sky, looking for its prey. There were two short blasts on the train hooter. Inspector Blunden grasped the door handle firmly in his right hand.
‘Good luck, my lord!’
Powerscourt smiled. One long continuous blast. They could feel the train slowing down. Inspector Blunden opened the door and jumped towards the cutting. Powerscourt had already decided that he would close the door behind him, thus ensuring that young Andrew would not have the chance to jump out of the train and break his legs. Powerscourt knew what he had to do. A few years before, he and Lady Lucy had gone to St Moritz to walk in the mountains and watch the skiing for the weekend. Bend your knees, he said to himself as he stepped on to the little rung just below the point where the door joined the carriage. Bend your arms. Grab the door in your right hand. Jump as hard as you can. Swing the door closed behind you. Wait for the landing. Everything happens so fast. Now he was rolling forward along the cutting, the brambles cutting his face. But he was safe. He hadn’t broken anything. Looking back, he just had time to see that the door was properly closed before the train turned a corner and vanished from view. Inspector Blunden was rubbing an ankle a few yards away.