John Carr - He Who Whispers

Two or three last doors slammed. The one-thirty train to London, smoothly gliding, drew out of Southampton Central Station and gathered speed so that its windows seemed to flash past.

“You can't do it, I tell you!” panted Stephen Curtis.

“Want to bet?” Miles said through his teeth. “Drive the car back, Steve. I'm all right now.”

“Never jump on a train when it's going as fast as that!” yelled Stephen. “Never . . .”

The voice receded. Miles was running blindly beside the door of a first-class smoking compartment. He dodged a luggage-truck, with someone shouting at him, and laid hold of the door-handle. Since the train was on his let-hand side as he ran, the jump wasn't going to be easy.

He yanked open the door, felt through his back the terrifying crick-crack twinge of overbalancement as he jumped, saved himself by a reeling catch at the side of the door, and, with the dizziness of his old illness pouring through his head, slammed the door behind him.

He had made it. He was on the same train with Fay Seton. Miles stood at the open window, panting and half-blind, staring out and listening to the click of the wheels. When he had partly got his breath he turned round.

Ten pairs of eyes regarded him with barely concealed loathing.

The first-class compartment, nominally built to seat six persons, now held five squeezed in on each side. To railway travellers there is always something infuriating about a late arrival who gets in at the last moment, and this was a particularly bad case. Though no one said anything, the atmosphere was glacial except for a stoutish Waaf who gave him a glance of encouragement.

“I—er--beg you pardon,” said Miles.

He wondered vaguely whether he ought to add a maxim from the letters of Lord Chesterfield, some little apothegm of this sort; but he sense the atmosphere and in any case he had other things to worry about.

Miles stumbled hastily across feet, gained the door to the corridor, went out and closed it behind him and a general wave of thankfulness. Here he stood considering. He was reasonably presentable, having sloshed water on his face and scraped himself raw with a dry razor, though his empty stomach cried aloud. But this wasn't important.

The important thing was to find Fay immediately.

It was not a long train, and not very crowded. That is to say, people were packed into seats trying to read newspapers with their hands flat against their breasts like corpses; dozens stood in the corridor amid barricades of luggage. But few were actually standing inside the compartments except those fat women with third-class tickets who go and stand in first-class compartments, radiating reproachfulness, until some guilty-feeling male gives them his seat.

Working his way along the corridors, tripping over luggage, becoming entangled with people queuing for lavatories, Miles tried to work out a philosophical essay in his mind. He was watching, he said to himself, a whole cross-section of England as the rain rattled and swayed, and the green countryside flashed by, and he peered into one compartment after another.

But, in actual fact, he wasn't feeling philosophical.

After a first quick journey he was apprehensive. After a second he was panicky. After a third . . .

For Fay Seton was not aboard the train.

Steady, now! Don't get the wind up!

Fay's got to be here!

But she wasn't.

Miles stood in a corridor midway along the length of the train, gripping the window-raining and trying to keep calm. The afternoon had grown warmer and darker, in black smoky clouds that seemed to mix with the smoke of the train. Miles stared out of the window until the moving landscape blurred. He was seeing Dr. Fell's frightened face, and hearing Dr. Fell's voice.

That “explanation,” delivered by the doctor in a vacant undertone while engaged in cramming biscuits into Miles' pockets to take the place of breakfast, had not been very coherent.

“Find her and stay with her! Find her and stay with her!” That had been the burden of it. “If she insists on coming back to Greywood tonight, that's all right—in fact, it's probably the best thing—but stay with her and don't leave her side for a minute!”

“Is she in danger?”

“In my opinion, yes,” said Dr. Fell. “And if you want to see her proved innocent of”--he hesitated—“of at least the worst charge against her, for the love of heaven don't fail me!”

The worst charge against her?

Miles shook his head. The jerk of the train swayed and roused him. Fay had either missed the train—which seemed incredible, unless the bus had broken down—or, more probably, she had turned back after all.

And here he was speeding away in the opposite direction, away from whatever might be happening. But . . . hold on! Here was a hopeful point! . . . the “something damnable” Dr. Fell had predicted seemed to concern what would occur if Fay went to London and returned to carry out her plans. That meant there was nothing to worry about. Or did it?

Miles could never remember a longer journey. The train was an express; he couldn't have got out to turn back if he had wanted to. Rain-ships stung the windows. Miles got entangled with a family party which overflowed from compartment into corridor like a camp-fire group, and remembered that its sandwiches were in a suitcase under a mountainous pile of somebody else's luggage, and for a time created the general wild aspect of moving-day. It was twenty minutes to four when the train drew in at Waterloo.

Waiting for him, just outside the barrier, stood Barbara Morell.

The sheer pleasure he felt at seeing her momentarily drove out his anxieties. Round them the clacking torrent from the train poured through the barrier. From the station loud-speaker a refined voice hollowly enunciated.

“Hello,” said Barbara.

She seemed more aloof than he remembered her.

“Hello,” said Miles. “I—er--hardly liked to drag you over here to the station.”

“Oh, that's all right,” said Barbara. He well remembered, now, the grey eyes with their long black lashes. “Besides, I have to be at the office later this evening.”

“At the office? On Sunday night?” “I'm in Fleet Street,” said Barbara. “I'm a journalist. That's why I said I didn't 'exactly' write fiction.” She brushed this away. The grey eyes studied him furtively. “What's wrong?” she asked suddenly. “What is it? You look . . .”

“There's the devil and all to pay,” Miles burst out. He felt somehow that he could let himself go in front of this girl. “I was supposed to find Fay Seton at any cost. Everything depended on it. We all thought she'd be in this train. Now I don't know what in blazes to do, because she wasn't in the train after all.”

“Wasn't in the train?” Barbara repeated. Her eyes opened wide. “But Fay Seton was in the train! She walked through that barrier not twenty seconds before you did!”

“Will pass-en-gers for Hon-i-ton,” sang the dictatorial loudspeaker, “join the queue outside Platform Num-ber Nine! Will pass-en-gers for Hon-i-ton . . .”

It blattered above every other noise in the station. And yet the realm of nightmare had returned.

“You must have been seeing things!” said Miles. “I tell you she wasn't aboard that train!” He looked round wildly as a new thought occurred to him. “Stop a bit! So you do know her after all?”

“No! I'd never set eyes on her before in my life!”

“Then how do you know it was Fay Seton?”

“From the photograph. The coloured photograph Professor Rigaud showed us on Friday night. After all, I . . . I though she was with you. And so I wasn't going to keep the appointment. Or at least—I didn't quite know. What's wrong?”