“This creature will wake within a half hour at the latest,” he said softly. “I don’t think this is the time or the place for questioning him. As for murder, there’s already a rope about your neck. Now—get that window open!”
With shaking hands, I pulled on the leather strap, and fell back at the sudden wall of air that hit me at two hundred miles per hour. Its high roar blotted out all sound of the electric motors. Straining with the unexpected weight of unconscious flesh, I helped Pakeshi get the man off the floor and pull him over to the window. We had to turn him sideways to get the shoulders through. For a moment, he balanced on the open window, arms pressed left against the carriage by the blast of air. With a casual motion, Pakeshi lifted the legs and waited for the air to suck the man fully out. Next, he threw out the wallet and then the gun. He pulled up the strap and rubbed both hands together.
“Come along, Anthony,” he said brightly. “The ticket inspector will not be pleased if he finds us in the wrong compartment. And I will note”—he pointed at the sign on the now closed window—“that this too is a non-smoker.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Make mine a double,” I muttered to the waiter. He nodded and finished taking the order. “How can you know,” I said to Pakeshi once we were alone again, “that there aren’t more of them?”
“I don’t,” came the reply. I looked once more round the brightly-lit dining carriage. The two women who’d been waiting outside the toilet were sitting a few tables down. Deep in some chattering conversation, they paid no attention to us. The other diners all seemed reassuringly respectable. They’d given us a look of collective but faint hostility as we entered—my brown paint had now been repaired with a second coating. They’d looked put out by the colour of our faces. Perhaps they were more put out by my failure to remove either hat or gloves. Perhaps it was Pakeshi’s smell, and the smell that still clung to the overcoat he’d lent me. If I was aware of this, others ought to be. But these considerations had, in themselves, been reassuring. Now the waiter was back already with a large glass. I put my cigarette down and drained its contents.
“Another, if you please,” I said, forgetting to bother with my accent. The waiter raised his eyebrows and went away with the glass.
“From your description of what was said,” Pakeshi went on, “I should say he was alone on this railway train. I could, I must accept, be wrong. But my brief tour of the second and even third class carriages revealed no obviously unwelcome truths. I fear, even so, that we shall need to change our travelling arrangements. This is an express, but there will be a stop at York, where we can get off and change. What does most concern me, however, is what could have enabled your friend to catch so unerringly up with you. I can assure you, Dr Markham, that, when I wish not to be followed in a place like London, I am not followed!”
“What are these ‘travelling arrangements?’” I asked, ignoring this last point. “Where are we going?” As I spoke, the lights flickered in the carriage, and there was a rattle of glass and china as the railway train began to slow. I felt my face turn pale under the paint.
“There is nothing to fear,” Pakeshi said in the sort of voice I could imagine he kept for his dying patients. “There is a long stretch of unmagnetised line somewhere between Ely and Lincoln. My understanding is that we shall not stop, but must continue forward with some less modern form of locomotion.” The waiter was now back with my drink. Another was carrying our dinner. Pakeshi beamed at his cheese omelette and unfolded his napkin. “Such excellent service, would you not agree, the London and North Eastern Railway provides to its first class passengers?” He reached into his bag and took out a glass jar filled with some yellow powder. He scattered it liberally over the plate.
I picked miserably and in silence at my reheated lamb cutlets, and tried to ignore the vomit-inducing smell of Pakeshi’s curry powder. Sure enough, the electric hum died gradually away, and the smooth forward motion gave way to the more traditional rumble of metal wheels on metal rails.
Back in our compartment, Pakeshi used the round key he’d taken to lock the door. It wouldn’t prevent a determined attack, he said, but might slow things down. Still, with two shillings worth of spirits sloshing about inside me, I was feeling moderately safer. I looked at one of the late edition newspapers Pakeshi had called for after dinner. My face had now vanished to the inside pages. In its place was news that the entire German Government had got together and “clarified” old Goering’s threat into a rhetorical flourish. Von Mises had spent all day soothing the markets. Hayek was, even now, risking himself on an aeroplane flight to London to discuss things directly with Macmillan. Another crisis that wasn’t leading anywhere.
I thought of what Stanhope had said the previous day about the coming news. This morning, I’d supposed he had some wind of the Goering speech—it made sense, considering his preferred reading material. Obviously, I’d dropped this supposition the moment my own face had turned up in the newspapers. I was now back to wondering if my first supposition had been so wrong.
The other overseas news remained grim. Communal rioting had spread to every main Indian city. The Viceroy had declared martial law in three Provinces, and all the Sikh Regiments were being called to New Delhi. There were unconfirmed reports of clashes between units of the Russian and Japanese armies somewhere on the Mongolian border. The Jews were threatening to drop poison gas on the Arabs unless they evacuated Beirut. The Turks were trying out some of their new German weapons as they put down the rising against them in Teheran. On a lighter note, the wife of the French President had been dancing naked again in some Parisian theatre.
The home news was unusually placid. The Liverpool dock workers had settled their strike. Penguin had brought out an unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and was daring the authorities to prosecute. Three monsters had apparently been photographed at Loch Ness. A bus driver in Rotherham was claiming that aliens had abducted him from his night shift and sexually molested him. The Federation of British Industry was calling on the Chancellor to cut income tax to 1s.3d in his budget, and make up the lost 3d with an excise on generator reagent. That would be ignored, no doubt—though, if I made it far enough into the new tax year, I calculated it might make me £5 better off on balance.
Because there was so little else to report, I dominated the rest of the home news. Pakeshi’s body had supposedly been fished out of the Surrey Canal in Deptford. I’d been sighted in Exeter and in Deal. That turd Barlow was cashing in on what he still claimed I’d done with him in 1952 in the basement of the LSE Library. If I hadn’t already been numb with the horror of all that had happened, I’d have got up and shouted at the unfairness of the newspapers.
But it was late. No one else had come knocking on the door to murder me. Looking at the few lights that went past outside, we were crawling along this stretch of line—crawling and gently swaying. It was the soporific swaying you used to get on long railways journeys before magnetisation of the main lines. I could feel the drink tightening its hold on me. If I nodded off for an hour, I might contrive to feel more cheerful. If I nodded off and more killers broke in, I’d at least be rested when they finally shot me….
I pulled myself together and looked quietly round. I had been dozing. I might even have been sleeping. Since I had no watch, it was impossible to say how long I’d been slouched back with my eyes shut. I could ask Pakeshi for the time. I might also start badgering him for some facts about where we were headed. I might also suggest at least a call to O’Brien. I didn’t fancy putting myself into his hands. But a short conversation might reveal something about what had been done to me.