Holy Disorders. Edmund Crispin

hitherto quiescent, awoke and embarked upon a running commentary of snorts and shrieks; it grunted like the pig-baby in Alice, until they expected it to be metamorphosed before their eyes. The mother jogged it ruthlessly up and down, and glared malignantly at the progenitors of the disturbance. People searching for seats peered into the compartment and attempted to assess the number of people engaged in this hullabaloo. One went so far as to open the door and ask if there was any room, but he was ignored, and soon went away again.

      ‘Disgraceful!’ said the woman with the baby. She bumped it up and down even more furiously than before, and cooed at it, adding to its noises with her own.

      The net was by now secured at either end, and more or less conveniently placed, except that anyone rising incautiously or coming into the compartment was liable to bang his head on it. Geoffrey profusely thanked his assistants, who sat down again looking hot but pleased. He turned back to transfer the remainder of his belongings from the seat on to the rack. They were now topped by a letter not his own, but plainly addressed to him. The paper and typing looked uncomfortably familiar. He opened it and read:

      There’s still time to get off the train. We have our setbacks, but we can’t go on failing indefinitely.

      Ignoring Fielding’s curious glance, he put it thoughtfully in his pocket and heaved the remainder of his things out of the way. In the confusion of a moment before, anyone in the compartment could have dropped that note, and for that matter – since the window was wide open – anyone could have flicked it in from outside. He tried to remember the dispositions of the various persons in the compartment, and failed. He sat down feeling somewhat alarmed.

      ‘Another?’ said Fielding; he raised his right eyebrow in elaborate query.

      Geoffrey nodded dumbly and handed him the note.

      He whistled with noisy astonishment as he read it. ‘But who—?’

      Geoffrey shook his head, still refusing to utter a sound. He hoped to convey by this means his suspicion of one of the occupants of the compartment. Any open discussion of the matter might, he obscurely felt, convey information of value to the enemy. The others were eyeing unenthusiastically this gnomic interchange.

      But Fielding was for the moment oblivious of such innuendoes.

      ‘Quick work,’ he said. ‘They must have had a second line of defence ready in case the business in the store failed. Simply a matter of phoning someone here while we were on our way. They’re certainly taking no chances.’

      ‘I wish you’d remember,’ said Geoffrey a trifle peevishly, ‘that I’m the object of all this. It’s no pleasure to me to have you sitting there gloating over the excellence of their arrangements.’

      No notice was taken of this. ‘And that means,’ Fielding continued impassively, ‘that the typewriter they used is somewhere in this neighbourhood – damn it, no it doesn’t, though. The wording of that second note is so vague it could easily have been got ready beforehand.’ The failure of his calculation threw him into a profound despondency; he stared dejectedly at his feet.

      Geoffrey meanwhile was carrying out an inventory of the other persons in the compartment. The man opposite, who had been so helpful over Fen’s butterfly-net, had a well-to-do professional air. Geoffrey was inclined to put him down as a doctor, or a prosperous broker. His face was amiable, with that underlying shyness and melancholy which seems always to be beneath the surface in fat men; he had sparse straight hair, pale grey eyes with heavy lids like thick shutters of flesh, and very long lashes, like a girl’s. The material of his suit was expensive, and it was competently tailored. He held a thick black book, one of the four volumes, Geoffrey observed with surprise, of Pareto’s monumental The Mind and Society. Did doctors or brokers read such things on railway journeys? Covertly, he regarded his vis-à-vis with renewed interest.

      Next door was the woman with the baby. Repeated jogging had now shaken the infant into a state of bemused incomprehension, and it emitted only faint and isolated shrieks. By compensation, it had begun to dribble. Its mother, a small woman vaguely and unanalysably slatternly in appearance, periodically wiped a grubby handkerchief with great force and determination across its face, so that its head almost fell off backwards; while not occupied in this way, she gazed at her companions with great dislike. Probably, Geoffrey reflected, she could be omitted from the list of suspects. The same could not be said for the clergyman sitting in the corner on her right, however. It was true that he looked reedy, young, and ineffectual, but these were too much the characteristics of the stage curate not to be at once suspicious. He was glancing occasionally, with anxious inquiry, at the woman with the rug. She, meanwhile, was engaged in that unnerving examination of the other persons in the compartment which most people seem to regard as necessary at the beginning of a long railway journey. Eventually, feeling apparently that this had now been brought to the point where embarrassment was likely to become active discomfort, she said to the clergyman, looking sternly at a small wrist-watch:

      ‘What time do we get into Tolnbridge?’

      This query aroused some interest in other quarters. Both Geoffrey and Fielding started slightly, with well-drilled uniformity, and shot swift glances at the speaker, while in the Pareto-addict opposite Geoffrey some stirrings of attention were also discernible. All things considered, it was not very surprising that someone else in the compartment should be going to Tolnbridge, even though compared with Taunton and Exeter it was an unimportant stop; but Geoffrey at all events was too alarmed and uneasy to make such a simple deduction.

      The clergyman seemed at a loss for an answer. He looked helplessly about him and said:

      ‘I’m afraid I’m not sure, Mrs Garbin. I could perhaps find out—?’ He half-rose from his seat. The man opposite Geoffrey leaned forward.

      ‘Five-forty-three,’ he said with decision. ‘But I’m afraid we’re likely to lose time on the way.’ He took a gold watch from his waistcoat pocket. ‘We’re ten minutes late in starting already.’

      The woman with the rug nodded briskly. ‘In wartime we must resign ourselves to that sort of thing,’ she said, her tone loaded with stoic resignation. ‘You are getting off there yourself?’ she asked after a moment.

      The fat man bowed his head. The reluctant and self- conscious democracy of the railway compartment was set into creaking motion. ‘Have you far to go?’ he inquired of Geoffrey.

      Geoffrey started. ‘I am going to Tolnbridge, too,’ he replied a trifle stiffly. ‘The trains are almost always late nowadays,’ he added, feeling his previous remark to be by itself an insufficient contribution to the general entertainment.

      ‘Inevitably,’ said the clergyman, contributing his mite. ‘We are fortunate in being able to travel at all.’ He turned to the woman with the baby. ‘Have you a long journey, madam? It must be very tiring travelling with a child.’

      ‘I’m going further west than the rest of you,’ said the mother. ‘Much further west,’ she added. Her tone expressed a determination to remain in her seat as far west as possible, even if the train should be driven over Land’s End and into the sea.

      ‘Such a good boy,’ said the clergyman, gazing at the child with distaste. It spat ferociously at him.

      ‘Now, Sally, you mustn’t do that to the gentleman,’ said the mother. She glowered at him with unconcealed malevolence. He smiled unhappily. The fat man returned to his book. Fielding sat morose and silent, scanning an evening paper.

      It was at this moment, amidst a shrieking of whistles which advertised immediate departure, that the irruption occurred. A man appeared in the corridor outside, carrying a heavy portmanteau, and peered through the window, bobbing up and down like a marionette in order to see what lay within. He then thrust the door aside and stepped aggressively over the threshold. He wore a shiny black suit with a bedraggled carnation in the buttonhole, bright brown shoes, a pearl tie-pin, a dirty grey trilby hat, and a lemon-coloured handkerchief in his breast-pocket; his hands were nicotine-stained and his nails filthy; his complexion was sanguine, almost apoplectic, and he wiped his nose