The Tiger in the Smoke

I GHOSTS-3

“I’ve got one of the street pictures here, but this isn’t the time to get it out,” he murmured, and once again his glance roved round the vast station. He was puzzled and making no secret of it. “Yes, I see why you got the wind up.”

His shrewdness and friendliness took any offence out of the observation. “There is a look there. I see what you mean. Yes. Tell me, Mrs. Elginbrodde, did your husband have any young brothers or cousins?”

“No, none I ever heard of.” The suggestion was a new idea to her and in the circumstances hardly attractive.

“Now look here”—Luke became a conspirator and his overpadded shoulders seemed to spread even wider to screen her—“the only thing you’ve got to do is to keep your head. It all depends on you. It’s a million to one that this will turn out to be the usual blackmail by a customer with a record as long as a train. He’s behaving altogether too cautiously so far and that may mean that he’s not sure of his ground. He may just want to look at you, or he may risk talking to you. All you’ve got to do is to let him. Leave the rest to me, see?”

“Time is getting on,” put in Mr. Campion behind him. “Fifteen minutes to go.”

“I’d better go to the platform.” Meg moved as she spoke and Campion drew her back.

“Not yet. That’s where he’ll look for you. Don’t move from here until we spot him.”

She was surprised and her narrow brows rose high on the smooth forehead, which was rounded like a little girl’s and had been fascinating Luke for some time.

“But I thought the message meant that he was coming off the Bath train?”

“That’s what he wants you to think.” The D.D.C.I. was in danger of becoming fatherly. “He wants you to watch the train so that he can pick you out at leisure. The postmark was London, wasn’t it? He doesn’t have to go to Bath to take a platform ticket.”

“Oh. Oh, of course.” She sighed on the word and stepped back beside him, her hands folded. In spite of their escort she looked lonely, peering out anxiously, waiting.

The fog was thickening and the glass-and-iron roof was lost in its greasy drapery. The yellow lights achieved but a shabby brilliance and only the occasional plumes of steam from the locomotives were clean in the gloom. That tremendous air of suppressed excitement which is peculiar to all great railway stations was intensified by the mist and all the noises were muffled by it and made more hollow-sounding even than usual. From where they stood they could see all the main-line gates and over on the left the great entrance with its four twenty-foot doors and the bright bookstall just beside it.

The afternoon rush was beginning and wave after wave of hurrying travellers jostled out of the booking hall and fanned on to the wide ledge of one of the longest platforms in the world. Away to their right was the other carriageway climbing bleakly into Crumb Street, and behind them was the tunnel to the Underground and the double row of telephone boxes.

Luke was watching the main entrance with misleading idleness, while Campion kept a discreet eye on the Underground, and neither was prepared for the sudden cry beside them.

“Oh! Look! Over there. There he is. Martin!”

Meg had forgotten everything else in the world. She stood transfixed, pointing like a child and calling at the top of her voice.

Fifty yards away on a strip of sooty pavement, which was otherwise deserted, a neat soldierly figure had appeared. He wore a distinctive but well-cut sports jacket and the inevitable green pork-pie hat, and had just turned in smartly out of the drive from Crumb Street. He had a brisk purposeful step and was not looking about him. Even at that distance the shadow of a large moustache was discernible, and from behind him, as though designed to increase the somewhat theatrical militariness of his appearance, the rowdy street band thumping out the violent marching song sounded clearly from the distance.

“Martin!” Meg broke away before they could stop her. There was something in the cry which reached the man above the noises of the station. It was not the sound itself but something emotional which ran through the other loiterers, as if between them they had made a telephone wire. Campion saw a line of turning heads and at the end of it the stranger starting violently, stopping, pausing frozen for a moment. Then he ran.

He fled like a deer down the first avenue of escape. A mass formation of porters’ trucks, each piled high with luggage, lay directly ahead of him, and his pursuers were sweeping down on him from his left, so he turned right through the open gateway of the suburban-line platform where the slow down train stood waiting. He ran as though his life depended on it, blindly, knocking strangers headlong, leaping over suitcases, darting round lamp standards only just in time to avoid disaster. Luke shot after him, clutching his coat skirts round him and gaining because of his superior stride. He sped past Meg, who would have followed him had not Campion’s hand closed firmly on her wrist.

“This way,” he said urgently, and swept her on towards the other platform immediately behind and parallel to the stationary train.

Meanwhile the crowd hampered everybody. Luke charged through it like a bull, shouting the familiar “Mind your backs, please!” of the station staff. Porters paused in the fairway, staring. Ticket collectors hesitated and got in the road. Children appeared from nowhere and scampered up and down, screaming, and the great solid mass of apathetic gazers who spring out of the very stones of a city the moment there is anything to look at shuffled after the fugitive, making any return journey impossible.

On the other platform, however, when at last they reached it, Mr. Campion and the girl found themselves practically alone. The suburban train, still unlit and lying like a black caterpillar on the second row of rails, was separated from them by a gulf of blackness striped with dull silver. Since all the excitement was taking place on the other side of it, there were no faces at the windows and no sign of movement from within. Meg was very white and her hands were shaking.

“He ran away,” she began huskily. “Martin——”

The word died abruptly. Campion was not looking at her. He was watching the dark side of the train, his coat buttoned tightly and his hands ready. The overhead lamp shining on the fog made it look as though the scene were taking place under muddy water. Distances were deceptive and colours untrue. For Meg it was a moment of unreality. She did not believe in it, and her eyes, as they followed Campion’s gaze, were incredulous.

At last the moment he waited for occurred. A door halfway down the train swung back abruptly and a dark figure dropped out on to the line. He tripped over a sleeper but recovered himself and stumbled across to the platform, only to find the stone rim level with his shoulders. He sprang at it and clung there, his head turned from them, as he peered anxiously down the line. Any incoming engine must crush him, but at the moment there was no sign of one, only the fog and the coloured lights.

He slipped back and made another effort, just as Campion’s lean arm shot out and caught him by the collar. At the same moment Luke appeared behind him and the train became alive with spectators. Windows rattled down, heads were thrust out, and the shrill clatter of voices broke over them in a wave. Luke dropped on to the line with unexpected lightness. He was in perfect condition, lithe and powerful. He caught the stranger by the waist, heaved him into Campion’s arms, and vaulted up beside him, his hat still in place.

A white face with narrow black frightened eyes looked up at them. All the soldierliness had vanished. The swagger had melted and the body shrunk into the clothes. The moustache looked enormous and ridiculous. He made no sound at all, but stood shaking and twitching, ready to run again the moment the grip on his arm should relax.

“Oh . . . oh, I’m so sorry. How crazy of me. Now I see him close he’s not even like him.”

They had not noticed Meg come up and her wondering voice took them by surprise. She was staring at the captive in bewilderment, the colour pouring into her face, relief fighting with disappointment in her eyes.

“It was at that distance—I could have sworn, I don’t know why. The build, the clothes, the——” She put out her hand to touch the tweed coat sleeve and the prisoner leapt away from her as if she had been a live rail. There was a momentary struggle and as they over-powered him again Luke jerked the man towards him so that their faces all but met.

“You’re losing something, mate,” he remarked with ferocious good humour. “Look at this. It came off in my hand.” The movement was too swift to be resisted. The stranger swore in a husky whisper and was silent again. The moustache had been lightly gummed and now the skin on the long upper lip was pale where it had been. Luke tucked the piece of hair into his waistcoat pocket. “Nice one,” he said shamelessly. “Must have cost a packet and come from a swell costumier’s. I’ll take care of it for you.”

Without his moustache, it was difficult to believe that the stranger had ever resembled any other man closely. He had a distinctive mouth, marred by the scar of a sewn harelip, a broken tooth in the centre front, and an indefinable air of slyness which at this moment was overshadowed by a terror quite out of proportion to his crime, at least so far as it was suspected.

Meg put her hand up to her cheek. She was incoherent with embarrassment and bewilderment. It was evident that two more different men than the captive and Martin Elginbrodde were impossible to imagine, and yet she had been so sure.

Luke grinned at her. “He didn’t risk coming too close, did he?” he said. “But he quite took you in at a distance. Quite a performance.”

She turned away abruptly and Luke lifted his chin to peer down the platform. Two heavy men in raincoats were running towards them, followed by a small section of the crowd who had just discovered what had happened.

“Your men?” Campion sounded relieved.

Luke nodded. “I put them on the entrance doors in case. They spotted the rumpus and used their heads.” He raised his hand to the newcomers as he spoke and returned to his prisoner. “Well, Chatty,” he said cheerfully, “don’t go getting any funny ideas about this being an arrest.” He shook the arm he held by way of emphasis. “This is just a friendly invitation to a quiet talk in a nice warm room. You may even get a cup of tea, for all I know. Understand?”

The man said nothing. He might not even have heard. His face was wooden. Only his eyes shifted uneasily. He was quiet now, but there was still a tenseness in his body. He was still ready to make a dash for freedom the moment he got a chance.