The Necropolis Railway (31 page)

"There was something wrong with the land sales,' I said out loud. I pictured the name of White-Chester in the Necropolis minute book, and that brought me to it. 'Smith was selling off the land at cut-price rates to his friends, or perhaps even to himself in a roundabout way. There's this fellow at the Necropolis: Argent. He has sound looks, and seemed up to snuff. I saw him at Smith's funeral. He was not in the least downcast; he was swishing the grass with his black cane!'

'Calm down,' said my landlady. 'And where does he come in, anyway?'

'He was against the land sales. All the Necropolis board had doubts over it, but Argent led the way. After the funeral, he said to the chairman, Long, that it was the terms on which the lands were sold that he was particularly against. Long asked him what he might bring it to and he said a vote. They were all on to Smith. They were going to set things to rights, and Smith could see where it would all end.'

I pictured myself as a boy at the West Cliff marshalling yard in Whitby with Mr Hammond explaining railway mysteries to me. Had there been a vote in the background of his disgrace? However it had come about, he had been stopped from ever being involved with companies, and it had been the finish of him. Smith must have feared the same thing: the vote, then open court, or worse yet.

'Gaol?' said my landlady.

'Probably,' I said, 'and he could not have kept up his exquisite ways in stir.'

Now our cabin was at its fullest height, and I could see trains cutting crazily through the streets in all directions, as if each was saying, 'My way is best!' or they were ever-growing pointers of clocks, driving the world forward into the future.

A new thought brought me down to earth. 'Yet Stanley did the murders,' I said. 'I must have been right over that.
He
finished off Sir John Rickerby, Henry Taylor and Mike all right. Why else would he have crowned me and locked me in a coffin?'

'Yes,' said my landlady, 'but who put him up to it?'

I looked down into the Japanese garden, at Smith, still there, smoking a cigarette and looking all at once like a man who cared not a rip for anything but himself.

I nodded. 'Smith was the true killer,' I said, 'and poor Stanley was just the tool with which the job was done.'

'I'm sure you have that right,' said my landlady, although of course she was the one who had got to it first. And this was what Stanley had meant by darkness: he had seen from my diary that while I had known enough to send him to the gallows, I had not got the thing straight.

'Smith asked him to bash poor old Sir John Rickerby so as to give himself control of the Necropolis Company so that he could start selling the land,' I said. 'As for the next part, it was as I said in the hospital: Stanley was seen by Henry Taylor, or at any rate he thought as much, and so Taylor was done too. Then Mike, for what he knew, or might have known.'

'Or what he might have told the detectives who would never leave him be,' added my landlady.

Our cabin was once more descending. I looked at Smith again, and there seemed to be a white flash in the darkening air around him. He began looking in the stream below the bridge - and then was gone, for we were now too low to see him.

And with the loss of the vista, more doubts came. I was sure Sir John Rickerby had been killed on the say-so of Smith, but whether Smith had also ordered the destruction of Henry Taylor and Mike I could not guess. That might have been the private business of Stanley, for the noose was more closely about his neck - he had done the deed, after all. Smith, realising that he was in Queer Street too should the police be put on to Stanley, might have gone along with these other killings, or he might have been furious at them.

The two had made a deal: why else would Stanley's address have been allowed to continue every Tuesday, there being so little call to hear it?

'Stanley really was as poor as a rat,' I said.

'That's why he wanted my room,' said my landlady sadly. She was at my shoulder. I was ashamed to think that I had forgotten about her for the minute. 'It was the only one he could afford,' she added, and I realised then - which I had never thought before - that she knew very well that her rooms were not excellent, or whatever hopeful words she had used.

'He needed the money that Smith could pay him for the killing,' I said. 'But he botched the job by doing it in full view, or so he thought, of Taylor, and Smith likely told him he could sing for any true reward.

'He was a madman,' said my landlady.
‘I
could see that; I would still have given him the room, though.'

'Yes,' I said, 'Stanley was off his onion. And Smith was at the mercy of a madman likely to tell all, or do worse than that, so he had another good reason to disappear.'

I thought of those half-finished letters among Stanley's papers: they were meant for Smith, and I was sure some of

the same sort had actually been sent. I reminded my landlady of them, and that Stanley had spoken of himself in one as an expert in some matter beginning with 'e'.

We could not answer that, but it was obvious to me now that those letters were in some way threats. Of course, by making these, Stanley ran the risk of being jacked in himself, but Smith was a wily worm. I had him down as quite cautious in the killing line.

Our cabin was right at the bottom now, passing the queue forming for the next ride. As we climbed again, I fixed on the question of why Smith had brought me down from Yorkshire. I turned to my landlady, who was looking straight ahead at nothing but sky, and again I felt sorry for spoiling her day. 'Why did Smith want me as his little detective?' I asked her. 'Why would he want me snooping among the murders he himself had caused to be done?'

My landlady turned to me and said,
‘I
don't know.' Then she said, 'You must learn to be smart.'

That helped because it was true, and the answer came to me double-quick: 'Because that would make him look innocent.'

My landlady nodded.

'The police were questioning everybody. It would be good for him if he could seem as keen to find the answer as anybody else. That
has
to be it. At the Necropolis station, Erskine Long was standing behind us when Smith said he would like to quiz me about events at Nine Elms. Smith didn't exactly speak in an under-breath: Long had been
meant
to overhear.'

The rest came to me in rapid thoughts. Before disappearing behind a wall of flame, Smith had written the letter asking to see me on the same point. He had kept the letter - in which he had put a down on the half-link - in his safe for the police to find after the fire. He wanted to make himself seem keen as mustard in the search for the truth, and in this he had gulled the Governor into helping.

It was the strangest thing of all that thoughts of the Governor should have come to me at that moment, for we were now at a height to see the Japanese garden once again, and there was the very gentleman, alongside Rowland Smith on the bamboo bridge.

Well, I knew that London could serve up no more shocks now.

Smith was pointing to the stream and saying something. The Governor had stopped laughing and was coughing, which, as ever, brought his colour up. He had always looked to me a very fine man, but now, though his body had not changed a jot since I had last seen him at the hospital, he looked a true fiend, with the redness not of Father Christmas but of the very devil.

Just then, the Governor and Smith, with one last look down into the stream, stepped off the bamboo bridge. My landlady and I watched them walk in the direction of the railway station, and as we did so the wheel gave a jolt, and my landlady fell against me.

'There is no cause for alarm,' I said.

'Oh, don't be ridiculous,' said my landlady. 'I'm not in the least alarmed.'

A second later, the wheel continued as smoothly as before, but by then the Governor and Smith had been lost to view.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Saturday 9 January

five minutes later

As we stepped off the Great Wheel, the crowd waiting to get on looked at us with envious eyes.

I was coming to the end of telling my landlady, in a kind of daze, as if it was nothing out of the way, that I had just seen the Governor in the garden with Rowland Smith, and she said,
‘I
know a little of what it is like to live in the thick of coal dust and smoke, and your Governor was getting on in years. He would want something back in return.'

This notion came to me as though in a dream, and I said, more or less to myself, 'He made true engine men eat dog, but even though he hated the half-link, he also needed them. He needed them to take the knock for Stanley's exploits.'

We were walking by the buildings at the foot of the Wheel. There was a good deal of fried fish paper blowing about, and the Pierrot dog was eating the scraps. Everything seemed scruffier than before, and it was as if the cabins around us had lately crashed from the Wheel above.

‘I
remember how the Governor put his knife into the half after the murder of Mike,' I said, 'with the Captain listening in. The Governor, I shouldn't wonder, set that one up for Stanley himself. He ordered Barney to take Mike off-shed into the middle of the fog, perhaps hoping that Barney would drift off for a stiffener.'

My landlady turned to me and smiled. 'Do you think the two of us should do the same?' she said.

'But you won't drink,' I said.

'Oh, tea will do the job for me,' she said.

'First let's take a turn in the Japanese garden,' I said.
‘I
think I saw Smith drop something in the stream.'

'Hawk eyes,' said my landlady.

We walked towards the little red gates - Japanese gates, they were, I suppose. All was now slowly, sadly becoming clear.

'The Governor was keen to make the Captain think of Mike's death as being down to the half,' I said, 'and it suited his programme to put it about that the fire at Smith's place might be their work too. He showed the police the letter Smith sent me, warning me of the half, and after Smith's funeral he ordered me to stay about the shed for fear of what the half might do. And this time there was Nolan around to hear.'

'He always made sure there was a witness to hear him say the right things,' said my landlady.

"That is it exactly,' I said. 'It was the same game that his friend Smith was playing. The Governor wanted at all times to make it seem as though he suspected the half, but he would never go too far into the details in case somebody should stumble over the truth. I can see now that he didn't like it when I asked about Taylor's last ride out.'

I held open the little gate for my landlady. She laughed and said, "The Japanese are smaller than us.'

'After all, that last ride had taken Taylor to the cemetery on the very day that Stanley had started on his line of murders. The Governor could hardly fail to answer my question, because Nolan was there watching, but in the event he needn't have worried. The book he took down showed him, or maybe it
reminded
him, that Arthur Hunt and Vincent had been on hand at the cemetery -'

'Landing themselves in it like ducks on a dough pile,' said my landlady, most surprisingly.

We walked on, following the paths that went under the lights, which I thought of as being all colours, but were in fact only blue, red and green.

'It must have scared the Governor', my landlady went on after a while, 'to hear that you had got on to Stanley in spite of all.'

I nodded. 'Now that I think of it, he was like a cat on hot bricks in the hospital.' I pictured him at the end of my bed
looking like a man with the noose already about his neck.
And had he not at one moment made a bloomer in saying
'Smith
has
many good points
’
not 'Smith had
had not

returned to work since my accident, and had not seen the Governor since being in the hospital. I could not be sure, but I guessed that he would have heard of Stanley's death, and now Smith would know of it too. They would have been glad to hear of it. Now that all was fixed on a dead man, they would think the matter ended. But in that they were wrong.

We were walking beneath the branches of a tree in which were some of the paper lanterns. 'You couldn't do that with gas
’
said my landlady, looking up.

But my mind was going back to Grosmont, and the start of it all. The muttering in the ticket office, the growling of
T
.
T
. Crystal, and the smoothness of Smith's voice. Crystal would have been apologising for the delay in selling Smith his ticket and would have been blaming me, damning me with half curses, calling me a layabout and a blockhead. If so, Smith could have been sure that I would not be any great hand at detecting. Maybe I was a blockhead, and maybe I had still not got the Necropolis mysteries quite straight, even now, but I would put salt on those fellows who wanted to turn beautiful land into houses for little men.