Andrew Martin - The Necropolis Railway

'Well, I'm sure I shall like it'1 said, and I started to read the words on the tin: it was called 'Vi-Cocoa', which I had never heard of before. 'In tiring work,' I read, 'there is nothing like Vi-Cocoa.'

'Never mind about that, mate,' said the fellow in blue. 'Are you for a turn on the wheel or not?' Then he said, 'What happened to your bonce?'

'Somebody knocked me into the middle of next week' I said, at which my landlady suddenly turned to me and said, 'If, two weeks ago, you were knocked into the middle of next week, then what week are you in now?' It was a good question.

I paid the money and stepped into the cabin. With my beautifully sewn face, my cocoa and the girl I was stuck on, I felt like… well, King Edward himself, I would have wagered, was never happier.

Twenty other people or thereabouts were shown into the cabin with us, and as soon as my landlady stepped aboard she said, 'Electric light!' The cabin was like a wide railway carriage with seats along both sides and looking glasses above them. The doors were slammed, the cabin gave a jerk and we began to rise up, but had gone hardly any distance before we stopped again. 'We are neither up nor down,' I said, turning to look out.

'No,' said my landlady, and she was holding my hand very tightly, 'we are up!'

We started to rise once more, and somehow there were violins in my head. I thought: this must be the sound that balloonists hear all the time. We were above the roofs of the houses now, level with the chimney pots, and then we carried on, rising with the smoke that came out of them. The higher we climbed, the more we saw of their back gardens, and very nice ones they were. I saw my landlady looking at them, and there was an expression on her face that I would almost have called sadness, so I put my arm about her waist and said, 'We will have a garden like that. You can get them out Wimbledon way. I know, because I've seen them.'

We continued to climb, and the large gardens slowly became quite small, and then the whole of West Kensington station could be seen, and the streets beyond going on for miles. Looking down the line of the District, I said, 'You can see the next train to come into the station from London, and the one after that.'

My only disappointment was that I could not see the edge of the city. There was no end to the houses and that was all about it. Our cabin stopped again, and my landlady and I walked towards the windows, for now we were at the top -just in the nick of time, too, because the light was going and the lamps were coming on.

'Look at the lines of electric lights,' said my landlady. "They spread across town like necklaces… I wonder whose electricity it is.' That was always one of her strange concerns. 'Can you see Waterloo?' I asked her.

'I do not want to see Waterloo,' she replied, full of indignation. Looking down, I could see the crowd around the base of the Great Wheel, and the walkers in the Japanese garden. Beyond the gardens were some tennis players, who looked comical as they dashed about in the gathering darkness, and not at all good at the game, but they were trying their best and my heart was filled with good wishes for them and with love for my landlady.

Then something made me go back to the Japanese garden. A man was walking slowly along one of the paths. He wore a very fine grey felt hat. As I watched, the Japanese lights in the garden around him came on in one soft, swift burst. They were all colours and very pretty but they seemed to have vexed the man in the fine hat, who stopped and looked up at the Great Wheel, then down again, before continuing. He seemed to walk very lightly, almost floating; his clothes were of the latest cut, and I believed he was smoking a cigarette, for he kept bringing his hand to his face. The gentleman was moving towards the bamboo bridge now. Watching him walk was like listening to funny music.

A woman was coming over the bridge towards him, and when the man lifted his hat I expected his hair to spring up, which it did not, and I expected not to see a beard, which I did. But he was Rowland Smith all the same.

My landlady was saying, 'I think I can see St Paul's! But if that is St Paul's then that can't be the Houses of Parliament.'

He has put Brilliantine on his hair and grown a beard so as to start again as a new person, I thought quite calmly as our cabin began rolling past the buildings at the base of the Wheel and the Japanese garden disappeared from view. We began to climb again, far too slowly, and with the garden gone I became sure I had made a mistake. But here was the Japanese scene again, and, yes, there was evil and not just sadness behind the mysteries of the Necropolis, and I had a dizzy sense of beginning a fall that has lasted me, in a way, the rest of my days.

For there was Smith again on the bamboo bridge, with his hat back on his head, the lady far away.

I called to my landlady, so loudly that everyone in the cabin took fright. She came over, saying, 'Is it your head?'

I said, 'Look down there. You see that man with the beard on the little bridge?'

She nodded; she was anxious now. I had taken away all her fun and the others in the cabin were all looking at us. 'That is Rowland Smith,' I said. "The one who's dead, you mean?' "The one who was dead.'

I saw all the bad shots I'd made in hospital over this business, and for these I immediately blamed the ether. But I was now haring down a second trail, and I turned to my landlady and started on what must have seemed to her the queerest of all my speeches: 'Mack's little friend who could not grow a moustache told me in the bar of the North Station at the Necropolis that corpses had been dug up, and some left lying about the place. Mack – well, it had to be him; he was on the fly as everybody knew – would have been under orders to find the body of a man the size of Smith; others he could abandon, knowing they'd be put down to the work of grave robbers. He would have been well paid for it. Why, he told me in the Citadel that he was poor as a rat, but he was always in funds, and those brain dusters in the Kingdom of Italy did not come cheap.' 'What are you talking about?' said my landlady.

'But no,' I said. 'Smith lived in a flat, with a gatekeeper at the door. The coroner's report had said so. How could a body be got in?'

My landlady, still looking down at Smith, had somehow caught up with me. 'I thought,' she said slowly, 'that when you told me of that coroner's report, you said the firemen had played their hoses through doors giving on to a garden.'

'You're right!' I said. 'I hadn't thought you were listening. Not long before, Smith bought a new flat -1 heard him telling Erskine Long so – and he'd done it for one reason only: to get a garden!'

In my mind's eye I saw the swanky flat with the beautiful garden facing away from the road. I saw Mack, with some of his friends who were out of the straight, turning up after dark with the right sort of dead man after leaving some of the wrong sort lying about in Brookwood or other places. Maybe he had brought paraffin too. I saw Smith, talking of being tired to the gatekeeper. I saw him light the fire and leave.

'But why did Smith do it?' I exclaimed, at which some of the others in the cabin who'd left off staring at us began to do so again.

The Great Wheel rolled upward once again, and my thoughts roamed as wide as the view from our cabin, a hundred ideas coming into my mind. I revolved in my mind the words that Vincent had used of Smith on the coal heap at Nine Elms, and the sort of scandal that might go along with it. That I did not like to mention in front of my landlady. I was now at a height to see where the buildings merged into grey greenness at the edge of the city, and this brought the land sales flooding into my thoughts.

"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!'