Inspector Foster was saying something and he had missed it.
‘Sorry?’ he said.
‘The Inspector was wishing us a happy future together,’ said Helen.
Perhaps noticing the look on Tom’s face, Foster said, ‘I hope I have not spoken out of turn, but I am right in thinking that. . ’
‘Someone has yet to ask the question,’ said Helen.
‘And someone else has yet to make the reply when the question is asked,’ said Tom.
And so they boarded the train.
I suppose it is possible that Tom Ansell might have proposed to Helen Scott there and then on the train, since he had already been frustrated or intercepted in his intention on two or three occasions and had almost given up the search for the propitious moment. The compartment floor was a little dusty and greasy but he might have crouched down in a gingerly fashion rather than kneeling properly, and asked her for her hand. He might have proposed like that and she would almost certainly have accepted, if they had had the compartment to themselves.
But they were not to be alone. At the last instant, as the train was about to pull out of the station, the door was opened and an oldish lady was almost pushed inside by a porter who deposited a capacious bag immediately afterwards on the floor of the compartment. She was wearing a large hat which would have flown off with the speed of her arrival, had she not clasped it to her head with a black-gloved hand. Tom, who was sitting on the other side of the compartment with Helen opposite him, stood up and hoisted the lady’s bag on to the rack above her head. She thanked him, sotto voce, and then, without more than the swiftest glance at the young couple, produced a small, serious book from somewhere in her voluminous dress and proceeded to study it as intently as if it were the Bible or a devotional volume.
Tom was disappointed. He’d hoped to be alone with Helen. Even if he wasn’t to propose to her, they might have enjoyed chatting about the events in Salisbury and talking about what the Inspector had told them. But it did not seem appropriate to discuss their part in an exciting drama when there was company. He remembered that when he’d been travelling down to Salisbury, his compartment had been occupied by an old lady whom he’d also helped with her luggage. Was this the same one? He did not think so, but there was a symmetry to this absolutely meaningless coincidence.
Tom settled himself into the seat next to the window and smiled at Helen. Prepared for the train journey, she already had a book to hand. It was titled, Tom could see, The Shame of Mrs Prendergast. Another sensation novel, no doubt, to judge by its title and enticing cover, which showed a woman with a low-cut dress and necklace of pearls glancing in apprehension over her shoulder at a man who stood in the doorway to her room. For himself, Tom had nothing to read apart from Baxter’s On Tort, which he had considered discarding in The Side of Beef in Salisbury for Jenkins to ponder over but which some last-minute scruple had caused him to pack after all. There was also the Salisbury manuscript in his case, which he would certainly not have got out and opened in a railway carriage. So he had to content himself with looking out of the window at the bare, wintry landscape of the plain.
From time to time — very often, in fact — he glanced across at Helen. At first she returned his looks and smiles but then he observed that her attention seemed to be distracted away from him or from her book and towards the old lady who was sitting in the diagonal corner. Tom glanced sideways but the woman with the hat, which obscured most of her face, seemed to be absorbed in her book.
He returned his gaze to the dreary view from the window. When he next looked towards Helen, it was to see a change in her expression. Her mouth was open in surprise and she was shaking her head urgently, not at him but at the other occupant of the compartment. When Tom twisted in his seat, he saw the old lady was staring straight at him. The hat had been pushed back on her — or rather, his — head. She — or rather, he — was holding a gun, a small gun, snug in a fist.
It was, he realized with a rush of terror, no old lady but Adam Eaves, garbed in black and disguised as a female. It would have been absurd, unbelievable, if it hadn’t been for the deadly earnest expression on Eaves’s small face. The glint of his eyes. The weapon in his hand. The devotional book thrown on to the floor of the compartment.
‘What’s the matter, Mr Ansell? You’re looking at me as if I was a dead man.’
Tom opened his mouth but no words came out beyond a gargled croak which he turned into a cough. Helen, who’d had little more than a glimpse of the murderous gardener outside Venn House, was quicker to recover.
‘We thought you were dead,’ she said. Her voice was quite steady in the circumstances.
‘Being dead is convenient, I’ve found,’ said Eaves. ‘I’ve been dead before. It enables you to pass unseen. Like being an old lady, when nobody notices you either. That’s true, isn’t it, Miss. . Miss. .? Not that you’d know, because everyone’s certainly going to notice you. Is it Miss or is it Mrs. . I can’t see a ring on account of your gloves, and I haven’t had the pleasure of an introduction.’
‘Miss Scott will do.’
Helen said this coldly, and Tom didn’t think he’d ever admired or loved her more than he did at that moment. He spoke, more to distract attention away from Helen than anything else.
‘The body which fell from the cathedral was your brother’s, then. It was Seth’s?’
‘Course it was. He didn’t have a head for heights like me, poor fellow.’
‘But there was your confession,’ said Tom.
‘My confession?’ said Adam Eaves. ‘Oh yes, I read about that in the paper and had a good laugh. But it was none of mine, Mr Ansell. It was Seth as wrote it out and brought it to me just as I was leaving Venn House for good ’n’ all. He got upset when I wouldn’t sign it. Why should I put my monicker to a document like that, eh? You’re a lawyer. Tell me, would you?
‘Probably not,’ said Tom, wondering whether he dreaming this whole scene.
‘But Seth, he thought he could make me sign and turn me in or some such nonsense. He got into a right state when I disagreed with him, he tried to attack me, chased me all about the place. I believe you saw us, Mr Ansell.’
At this, Eaves stood up. A ridiculous figure in full skirts of some cheap material and a great-brimmed hat tilted to the back of his head like a cowboy in an illustrated magazine. He swayed slightly with the motion of the train but the gun was steady in his hand. It was a little gun, such as a woman might carry concealed in countries where women did carry such things. Tom thought of the United States.
‘Why don’t you leave us alone?’ he said. ‘Why don’t you make your escape instead of causing more trouble?’
‘I could do, couldn’t I?’ said Adam Eaves, as if the idea was occurring to him for the first time. ‘Why don’t I? Because I’m not minded to is why.’
‘There is a station soon,’ said Helen.
‘Is there, Miss Scott? No station for a fair few minutes yet. I know this line better than you, see. What I am going to do is fire this weapon a couple of times because this model is special, it has two barrels. I will do harm to you — the both of you — kill you, perhaps. And then I am going to pull what they call the communication cord. Have you noticed that, Mr Ansell and Miss Scott, the communication cord? It’s quite the new device and hangs on the outside of this carriage, just above the window. It rings a bell in the driver’s platform and when it rings he says to himself, oh there’s trouble, I wonder what, maybe a passenger taken sick of a sudden, and he puts on the brakes, and so this train draws to a standstill and so I make my escape over these fields, leaving you two here groaning and moaning. Or making no noise at all maybe, because you can’t. By the time anyone finds out what’s happened, I’ll be over the hills and far away.’