Langton knelt beside the body on the pavement. One of the constables offered him a small lantern; in its light, he saw a diagonal gash running from the prone man’s shoulder down to his hip. Blood seeped from the wound and onto the pavement. As Langton found a pulse, the constable opened his eyes and tried to sit up.
“Don’t move,” Langton said.
“He came at me out of the fog,” the constable said. “I didn’t see the sword until it was too late.”
Langton remembered the doctor’s stout cane. Many men, even respectable ones, carried sword canes. “Just relax, man. Help will soon arrive.”
“I know, sir. But it’s so cold.”
As Langton tore off his own coat and tucked it around the injured man, he turned to the waiting constables. “One of you fetch a doctor. The other two carry this man inside the nearest house and keep him warm. The wound looks shallow but needs attention.”
Even as the constables hammered at doors, Langton ran off up the street. The fleeing doctor had gained valuable time by attacking the constable. He could be half a mile away. Farther, if he’d found a carriage.
A cold wind shredded the fog for a moment. Langton hesitated at the top of the street. Opposite him, across Botanic Road, stood a sandstone wall five feet high. Police whistles sounded again, left and right. Another whistle, deeper and more powerful, sounded straight ahead. As the ground rumbled beneath his feet, black smoke billowed over the wall and joined the yellow fog. Langton could even hear the rattle of the early-morning steam train’s carriages.
He ran to the wall. He still carried the constable’s lantern. He played the beam over the sandstone blocks and saw fresh scuff marks. A smudge of black polish from a leather shoe.
Stowing the lantern in a pocket, Langton scaled the wall, following the same route as the doctor. At the top, he hesitated, sitting astride the wide coping stone. The Edge Hill sidings lay spread below him, a broad, deep basin of darkness dotted with lamps, the red and green track signals like animals’ eyes.
He had no idea of the drop below him. Those lights seemed a good eighty or hundred feet below the level of the road. And he knew that the Liverpool-bound trains disappeared into tunnels bored deep underground only to reappear at Lime Street miles away. But the doctor had gone this way.
With the wind cutting through him, Langton shivered and eased himself down the dark side of the wall, feet first. His arms ached. He felt for ground beneath him but found nothing. Then, with his toecaps
scraping the wall, he touched solid ground. He let go of the top of the wall and dropped down.
The ground crumbled beneath him. He flailed out, trying to save himself; unseen thorns and rocks dug into his hands, but still he fell, rolling and tumbling down the steep embankment. Frozen branches cracked under him. Stones slammed the breath from his body. He curled into a ball and tucked his head tight to his chest. The fall seemed to last for minutes.
Then, with one final impact that stunned him, Langton sprawled at the foot of the slope. He lay there, dazed and battered. He tasted blood, but when he tried to move nothing seemed broken. Nothing except the shattered lantern in his pocket. He checked his other pockets and found the Webley. He held it ready in his right hand and looked around.
He was level with the gleaming rails now. The wall and streets stood a hundred feet above him. A swaying, snorting steam train appeared out of the fog not twenty yards away, its single lantern eye bearing down on him. Then it turned and plunged into a tunnel, its exhaled smoke flattening over its cargo trucks.
As the sound died away, Langton started out across the tracks. The doctor could be anywhere. If he’d fallen just as Langton had fallen, where would he make for? What chance of escape would he find?
Langton stepped over metal rails and wooden sleepers. Gravel crunched beneath his feet. Down here, in this basin scooped out from the earth, it seemed much colder. Langton drew his thin dress jacket tighter with his bloodied left hand. His right held the Webley ready at his side.
More rails. More sleepers. How many tracks intersected here? How many points and sidings and switchbacks converged at this point? And which track had the doctor taken?
Langton stood beneath a wooden signal pole and listened. Far off, the blast of a train’s whistle. The wind snapping. From above him, the
whirr and click of a signal dropping its arm, changing from red to green. A corresponding whirr and click as nearby points realigned themselves.
Then, close by, the crunch of gravel.
It could be a rat. No doubt the tunnels held thousands of the vermin. Rats would not make that much noise.
Langton stepped forward, taking care to choose sleepers and not gravel. The footsteps grew louder. The fog swirled around everything, its density varying: sometimes solid, sometimes no more than wisps. Langton stared at where he thought the sound originated. He held the gun ready.
A rush of wind shredded the fog. The doctor stood less than ten yards away, the sword naked in his hand. He stared at Langton, openmouthed. Then he ran.
“Halt or I fire,” Langton said, raising the Webley. “Halt, Doctor.”
The man kept running. Over the rails, over sleepers, with the sword loose at his side.
Langton fired once into the air. The man stumbled but kept running. Langton cursed and followed.
From behind him, the roar and shriek of a train as it erupted from a tunnel. The ground shook. Clouds of steam rolled against the fog. Langton concentrated on the fleeing man. Ahead, the doctor stumbled and slipped on the greasy sleepers. He looked back and saw Langton, then ran faster.
Looking up, Langton saw the doctor’s destination: the signal box. A spiral metal staircase rose from the yards’ floor and joined a wooden hut built into the sheer sandstone face of the basin’s sides. Another series of switchback stairs led up from the signal box to the roadway above. The chance of escape.
Before the fog rolled in again, Langton saw electric lights inside the signal box, lights reflecting from rows of gleaming metal levers. As he watched, a man stepped forward, gripped a lever, and eased it back. Then the fog obliterated the view.
Langton could still make out the doctor. Not fifteen yards away, just where the tracks wove a complex knot of intersecting rails.
“Doctor, halt.”
Langton sighted along the barrel and fired again. The shot whined off a rail a few feet from the doctor’s legs. The doctor froze.
“Drop your sword,” Langton said, stepping forward. “Now.”
The dropped sword rang as it struck the rails. The doctor turned to face Langton. The front of his torn suit bore streaks of soil, just like Langton’s. His collar had sprung open and now flapped in the wind. He’d lost one shoe.
“Walk toward me,” Langton said.
The doctor shook his head.
Langton repeated his order, but the doctor still refused. Langton looked at the interwoven mesh of rails between him and the doctor. Above him, the whirr and click of a signal changing. “Doctor, it’s all over. Come here.”
Still the man shook his head. “I can’t.”
“You have no choice.” Langton looked up as another signal changed from red to green. The rails began to hum. “Please.”
From Langton’s left, out of the east, came a brief whistle. A single yellow eye appeared in the fog. “For God’s sake, man. Don’t just stand there.”
The doctor looked down the tracks, then back to Langton. “I’m sorry.”
Another blast on another whistle, this one deep and brash. Another lamp appeared in the fog, running alongside the first. Langton wanted to yell at the doctor. He took a step onto the first set of rails, then drew back. Which of the tracks would the engines use?
As the ground trembled under him, Langton said, “Run, man, before it’s too late.”
The doctor turned to face the approaching locomotives. He had to shout above the hoarse pounding of the steam pistons. “There are worse things than death, sir.”
The points clicked as they changed. The stressed rails moaned under the oncoming weight. The ground shook.
Langton glanced at the two trains thundering from the east, their lanterns side by side. He thrust the Webley into his pocket, took a breath, and sprinted across the tracks toward the doctor.
Too late. An express erupted from the tunnel behind Langton. The eastbound train screamed down the central rails, its gleaming black body slick with steam. Its fender took the doctor in the small of the back and broke him like a rag doll. The enormous wheels chewed him, one after the other. First the engine, then the tender, then the glowing passenger carriages.
Langton pulled up only feet away. He had time to see the openmouthed driver, with red firelight reflected from the man’s greasy face. Then the express roared past.
Langton looked left. The two westbound trains bore down on him. He threw himself off the rails and down onto the gravel verge. Hands clamped over his ears, he saw the sparking wheels bend the rails less than a foot from his head. A banshee wind tore at his clothes. Coal smoke filled his lungs and eyes.
He couldn’t move. Like an animal transfixed, he lay motionless on the gravel as the tunnels in the sandstone walls swallowed the two westbound trains. Only their brake-wagon lanterns glowed through the fog for a moment, then were gone.
Slowly, so slowly, Langton sat up. The trains’ roar still filled his ears. He blinked the smoke from his eyes and saw a fragment of torn black cloth by his feet. A hand poked from the bloodied cuff. A dozen feet away, another hand, close by a leg, more fragments of cloth, a starched collar curling like a red leaf.
Langton got to his feet and stared at the remnants of the fugitive doctor. He looked up to the signal box, where two men pressed their faces to the glass, watching him. Then Langton bent double and vomited onto the cold, stained gravel.
T
HE OPEN COAL
fire sent waves of heat out across Forbes Paterson’s office. Langton stretched out his legs and upturned hands to the warmth, trying to drive out the chill that gripped him. His torn dinner suit bore dark streaks of mud and grease; ocher stains of dried blood flecked his cuffs and shoes.
Langton focused on the flames within the grate. From behind him, the sounds of desk drawers opening and closing, a cork pulled from a bottle, the clink of glass on glass.
“Drink this.” Paterson held out a glass of amber liquor. “My emergency supply.”
Langton didn’t refuse. He breathed in fumes of peat and heather, then took a deep draft of whiskey that burned all the way down his throat. He took another drink and cradled the glass on his stomach.
Paterson pulled a rickety chair closer to the fire and rested his own glass on his knee. After a minute’s silence, he said, “Why didn’t he save himself? What drove him to stay on the tracks?”
Without looking away from the flames, Langton said, “Fear.”
“Surely fear would make him jump? With trains coming at me, I know I would.”
“‘There are worse things than death,’” Langton said. “Those were his words. He feared something so much that he preferred a quick death.”
“Something?” Paterson said. “Or someone?”
Langton nodded. The man who had died on the rails at Edge Hill had been a lieutenant working for another, a man he feared above all else. “Doktor Glass.”
“It must be,” said Paterson. “Proving it is another thing. At least we have Reefer Jake.”
“Where is he?”
“In the basement cells.” Paterson drained his glass and stood up. “Will you sit in on the interview?”
Langton looked down at his soiled clothes. He knew he should go home and change. He cared nothing for his appearance but he could smell the trains’ smoke in his suit, and the blood reminded him of that final collision.
He gulped the last of his whiskey. “I’ll sit in.”
Langton followed Paterson downstairs. At this time of the morning, just before five, headquarters belonged to the few night shift officers and to the cleaners; the stooped women paused in their mopping as Langton and Forbes Paterson descended, and told them to watch their step on the wet stairs.
“Why do you call him Reefer Jake?” Langton asked.
“He used to be a seaman and the nickname seems to have stuck. I’ve never spoken to him although we’ve been after him for close on a year now.”
“And you’re sure he works for Doktor Glass?”
“Sure as I can be.” Forbes Paterson glanced at Langton. “Informers will turn belly-up soon as they see half a crown or a pound note, or sniff another stretch in Walton Jail. Usually. Mention Doktor Glass and they lose their voices.”
The sergeant on the basement cells saw the inspectors approaching and unlocked the barred door. “You’ve sent us a right devil, sir, and no mistake.”
“He’s giving you trouble?” Paterson said.
The sergeant rubbed a rapidly forming bruise on his chin. “Not anymore. He’s in the blockhouse out back.”
Stout black metal doors lined an echoing corridor of white tile. The sergeant slid back the viewing panel on the last door and twisted his key in the lock. “Call out if you need us, sir.”
Inside the bare-brick cell, Langton saw two massive, bullnecked constables sitting on one-legged stools either side of a stone table. Across their knees, dark wooden cudgels the size of cricket bats. They stood up and set their stools against the wall. “He’s quiet for now, sirs.”
From above the table, a single electric bulb in a recessed metal cage threw light onto the broad neck and shoulders of Reefer Jake. He raised his shaven head and stared with dull, swollen eyes at Langton and Forbes Paterson. The skin around his jaw and cheekbones had already started to darken into bruising. Dried blood encrusted the knuckles of his enormous hands locked tight to the stone table by steel manacles.
Jake’s ankles had been shackled to the table’s brick piers. A dented steel bucket stood between his legs; a stale, acrid smell caught the back of Langton’s throat.
When the sergeant appeared with two chairs, Paterson sat opposite Jake and motioned Langton to do the same. The door slammed shut. The two constables stood either side of the table, the cudgels at their sides. Paterson drew a typewritten sheet from his pocket and held it to the light.