This station stood isolated, half a mile from Whipstead village. Less than a dozen trains stopped there during the day. It was the sort of place the coy criminal would be expected to avoid, but criminals make mistakes and are tied by circumstances; and inquiries were made at Whipstead as a matter of course. They were fruitful only in the unexpected, for they turned up the two incogniti.
On the 28th of July, the evening of Raymond Shearsby’s death, the 5.10 from Cambridge to London, stopping at Whipstead at 5.31, emitted about a dozen passengers, all, with one exception, local residents well known to the station staff, which consisted of the stationmaster and a youthful porter. The exception was a young man carrying a suitcase. He had a third class return from Cambridge. The stationmaster, retiring to the ticket office, saw no more of him at that time; but the porter watched him take the road to Whipstead village. Both officials were certain that they had never seen this stranger before. They described him as having a fresh colour and a small-featured, boyish face. He was wearing a neat but by no means new suit of blue serge, with a large cloth cap pulled over his eyes.
Between the infrequent trains the station staff usually dispersed—the stationmaster to his house near by, the porter to his home in Whipstead. The next stopping train after the 5.31 was the 6.43 from King’s Cross, on its way to Cambridge. The porter returned to the station soon after half-past six, and while wheeling milk-churns down the platform saw a figure leaning on the parapet of the road bridge which crossed the line just beyond the platform ramp. It was the strange young man in the blue serge suit: the porter recognized him by his large cloth cap. From the high bridge one obtained an extensive view northward over the flat country about Stocking, and the stranger was gazing over this landscape. On hearing the rattle of the milk churns he looked down at the platform and withdrew out of sight.
The 6.43 discharged quite a crowd of local people who had been to London for the day. Among them was a second stranger—a tall, greyhaired man of gentlemanlike appearance, dressed in a grey tweed suit and a grey felt hat. He carried an attache-case. The stationmaster, who took his ticket—a third class single from King’s Gross—thought he had a vaguely ecclesiastical air, but could not explain more precisely what he meant. This newcomer seemed to know his way about, for though he made no inquiry he was seen by the stationmaster, from the ticket office window, strolling at the tail of a little procession taking the footpath which cut across the chord of the loop made by the road from Stocking. Except in very miry weather this path was always used by people walking between that village and the station.
There was an interval of just over an hour before the next train pulled in. This was the 7.48 from Cambridge, which set down some more local residents and provided no surprises. It was followed, at 8.5, by the last stopping train of the day. On the down line, it was due in at Cambridge at 8.27.
This train, like the others, was almost on time. It was signalled, and its smoke could be seen, when the young man in the blue suit hurried into the station. The porter, who clipped his return ticket, said he was a little breathless. He was still carrying his suitcase. The train discharged a further body of passengers: pushing his way through them, the young man boarded it and was conveyed from the scene.
The countryman’s passionate interest in strangers having supplied not only news, but quite good descriptions, of these two travellers, Sergeant Oake continued, as a matter of routine, to follow up the clues thus provided. He did not really expect them to lead anywhere: the travellers bore no resemblance to any of the dramatis personae of whom he had information, and they had no doubt come to Whipstead station for legitimate reasons, which would soon appear. But now came the perplexing part of this piece of by-play. No such reasons were discoverable. The two strangers had come to this isolated station, from opposite directions, without any apparent object.
The young man in blue had been seen in the outskirts of Whipstead, carrying his suitcase, at about half-past five. He had then gone down a lane which led nowhere in particular, reappearing in the village an hour later on his way back to the station. In Whipstead he called nowhere and spoke to nobody, and he was quite unknown in the place. He was lost to view again between 6.30, when the porter saw him on the bridge, and his return to the station to catch the 8.5. He had not gone back to Whipstead, nor on to Stocking. In short, he seemed to have come from Cambridge for the pleasure of walking about with his luggage for three hours.
As for the tall elderly man in grey, last seen strolling up the path to Stocking, that village had not glimpsed hide or hair of him. A quarter of a mile from the station the path ran beside a loop of the Cat Ditch, here screened by willows and other shrubs. At this point a second path forked off to the west, crossing the stream by a plank bridge, and continuing over the fields came out in the lane in which Raymond Shearsby’s cottage stood, between that cottage and the bridge beneath which the writer’s body was found. The man in grey must have taken this route, but where he was bound there was no showing.
