“I have to tell you,” said Carswell when Mr. Berger had finished speaking, “that the driver of the train saw nothing and was unaware of any impact. As you can imagine, he was quite shocked to hear that a woman had been reported as throwing herself under his wheels. He aided in the examination of the train himself. It turns out that he has some unfortunate experience of such matters. Before he was promoted to driver, he was a fireman on an engine that struck a man near Coleford Junction. He told us that the driver saw the man on the rails but couldn’t brake in time. The engine made a terrible mess of the poor fellow, he said. There was no mistaking what had happened. He seems to think that if he had somehow hit a woman without knowing, we’d have no trouble finding her remains.”
Carswell lit a cigarette. He offered one to Mr. Berger, who declined. He preferred his pipe, even though it had long since gone out.
“Do you live alone, sir?” asked Carswell.
“Yes, I do.”
“From what I understand, you moved to Glossom fairly recently.”
“That’s correct. My mother died, and she left me her cottage.”
“And you say that you’re a writer?”
“Trying to be a writer. I’ve started to wonder if I’m really destined to be any good at it, to be honest.”
“Solitary business, writing, or so I would imagine.”
“It does tend to be, yes.”
“You’re not married?”
“No.”
“Girlfriend?”
“No,” said Mr. Berger, then he added, “not at the moment.”
He didn’t want Inspector Carswell to think that there might be anything odd or unsavory about his bachelor existence.
“Ah.”
Carswell drew deeply on his cigarette.
“Do you miss her?”
“Miss who?”
“Your mother.”
Mr. Berger considered it an odd question to ask but answered nonetheless.
“Of course,” he said. “I would visit her when I could, and we spoke on the telephone once a week.”
Carswell nodded, as if this explained a lot.
“Must be strange, coming to a new town and living in the house in which your mother died. She passed away at home, didn’t she?”
Mr. Berger thought that Inspector Carswell seemed to know a lot about his mother. Clearly he had not just been asking about a missing woman during his time in Glossom.
“Yes, she did,” he replied. “Forgive me, Inspector, but what has this got to do with the death of this young woman?”
Carswell took the cigarette from his mouth and examined the burning tip, as though some answer might be found in the ash.
“I’m beginning to wonder if you might not have been mistaken in what you saw,” he said.
“Mistaken? How can one be mistaken about a suicide?”
“There is no body, sir. There’s no blood, no clothing, nothing. We haven’t even been able to find the red bag that you mentioned. There’s no sign that anything untoward happened on the track at all. So…”
Carswell took one last drag on his cigarette, then dropped it on the dirt and ground it out forcefully with the heel of his shoe.
“Let’s just say that you were mistaken and leave it at that, shall we? Perhaps you might like to find some other way to occupy your evenings now that winter is setting in. Join the bridge club, or take up singing in the choir. You might even find a young lady to walk out with. What I’m saying is you’ve had a traumatic time of it, and it would be good for you not to spend so much time alone. That way you’ll avoid making mistakes of this nature again. You do understand me, don’t you, sir?”
The implication was clear. Being mistaken was not a crime, but wasting police time was. Mr. Berger climbed down from the stile.
“I know what I saw, Inspector,” he said, but it was all that he could do to keep the doubt from creeping into his voice, and his mind was troubled as he took the path back to his little cottage.
CHAPTER
FOUR
It should come as no surprise to learn that Mr. Berger slept little that night. Over and over he replayed the scene of the woman’s demise, and although he had neither witnessed nor heard the impact, still he saw and heard it in the silence of the bedroom. To calm himself he had taken a large glass of his late mother’s brandy upon his arrival home, but he was not used to spirits, and the alcohol sat ill with him. He grew delirious in his bed, and so often did the woman’s death play out before him that he began to believe that this evening was not the first time he had been present at her passing. A peculiar sense of déjà vu overcame him, one that he was entirely unable to shrug off. Sometimes when he was ill or feverish, a tune or song would lodge itself in his mind. So entrenched would its hooks become that it would keep him from sleep, and he would be unable to exorcise it until the sickness had passed. Now he was having the same experience with his vision of the woman’s death, and its repetitive nature was leading him to believe that he had already been familiar with the scene before he was present at it.
At last, thankfully, weariness overcame him and he was able to rest, but when he woke the next morning that nagging feeling of familiarity remained. He put on his coat and returned to the scene of the previous evening’s excitement. He walked the rough trail, hoping to find something that the police might have missed, a sign that he had not been the victim of an overactive imagination — a scrap of black cloth, the heel of a shoe, or the red bag — but there was nothing.
It was the red bag that bothered him most of all. The red bag was the thing. With his mind unfogged by alcohol — although in truth his head still swam slightly in the aftermath — he grew more and more certain that the suicide of the young woman reminded him of a scene in a book; no, not just a scene but perhaps the most famous scene of locomotive-based self-immolation in literature. He gave up on his physical search and decided to embark on a more literary one.
He had long ago unpacked his books, although he had not yet found shelves for them all, his mother’s love of reading not matching his own and thus leading to her preference for large swaths of bare wall that she had seen fit to adorn only with cheap reproductions of sea views. There was still more room for his volumes than there had been in his own lodgings, due in no small part to the fact that the cottage had more floor space than his flat, and all a true bibliophile needs for his storage purposes is a horizontal plane. He found his copy of Anna Karenina sandwiched in a pile on the dining room floor between War and Peace and Master and Man and Other Parables and Tales, the latter in a nice Everyman’s Library edition from 1946, about which he had forgotten and which almost led him to set aside Anna Karenina in favor of an hour or so in its company. Good sense quickly prevailed, although not before he had set Master and Man on the dining table for further examination at a more convenient time. There it joined a dozen similarly blessed volumes, all of which had been waiting for days or weeks for their hour to come at last.
He sat in an armchair and opened Anna Karenina (Limited Editions Club, Cambridge, 1951, signed by Barnett Freedman, unearthed at a jumble sale in Gloucester and acquired for such a low price that Mr. Berger had later made a donation to charity in order to salve his conscience). He flipped through the pages until he found Chapter XXXI, which began with the words “A bell sounded…” From there he read on quickly but carefully, traveling with Anna past Piotr in his livery and top boots, past the saucy conductor and the woman deformed, past the dirty hunchback muzhik, until finally he came to this passage: