'Then there would be no triumphs of civil engineering.'
'No triumphs, maybe, but far less sweat and toil.' He shook his head. 'I still can't accept that Gaston is dead. I always found him such an honest fellow. Why tell me that he was going to Paris when he intended to sail to England?'
'He was being discreet, I expect.'
'In what way?'
'There was a lady involved.'
'Ah, of course. Do you know who she was?'
'No,' said Colbeck, determined to honour his promise to keep Hannah Marklew's name out of it. 'But I'm convinced that Chabal was on his way to visit her when he was killed.'
Aubrey Filton was very upset to hear of his colleague's murder. It made him twitch slightly and glance over his shoulder. His office was in a much smaller hut, but it was perfectly serviceable. Victor Leeming glanced at the array of drawings that had been pinned to the wall.
'What are these, Mr Filton?' he said.
'Part of the original survey.'
'Is this your work, sir?'
'I wish it was, Sergeant,' replied Filton, looking enviously across at the wall, 'but my drawings are not quite as neat and accurate as these. Gaston was very gifted.'
'Do you mean that Chabal did these?'
'Most of them. It's all we have to remember him by.'
Leeming was pleased to have the responsibility of questioning Aubrey Filton. It gave him something to do and took his mind off the queasiness that he still felt. Having heard so many French voices since their arrival, he was relieved to be talking to an Englishman.
'Mr Brassey mentioned some incidents,' he said, taking out a notebook and pencil. 'Could you tell me what they were, sir?'
'The most recent happened only yesterday. When I inspected a tunnel, I discovered that someone had levered the rails off their sleepers and scattered the ballast everywhere. A week earlier, we had a more serious setback.'
'Go on, Mr Filton.'
'A fire had been started in one of our storage huts. We were able to stop it spreading but it destroyed everything inside. It slowed us down, Sergeant Leeming. Time costs money in this business.'
'And were there any other incidents?'
'The first was a case of simple theft – at least that's what we thought at the time. But who would want to steal gunpowder?'
'Someone who needed to blast through rock.'
'The second incident was a week later,' said Filton. 'A stack of our timber was pushed into the river. By the time we became aware of it, the sleepers had floated over a mile away.'
'Stolen gunpowder, missing timber, arson in a storeroom and wreckage in a tunnel. These are all serious crimes, Mr Filton. Have you reported them to the police?'
'Mr Brassey chose not to, Sergeant.'
'Oh.'
'He believes that we should take care of our own security and he does not want too much interference from the French. We have enough of that, as it is. In any case,' he continued, 'there's no police force out here in the wilds. The nearest constable is ten miles away. What can one man on a horse do?'
'Travel in comfort,' said the other with feeling. 'From what you tell me, it's evident that somebody is taking pains to delay the building of this railway. This is not wanton damage. It's deliberate.'
'That's what I feel about the scaffolding.'
Filton told him about the way that Brassey and his companion had fallen when the scaffolding had collapsed under them. Leeming duly noted the information down. It was Filton who discerned a clear connection with the murder.
'It's all part of the same plot,' he decided.
'Is it, sir?'
'In killing Gaston Chabal, they've inflicted yet another blow.'
'A critical one at that, Mr Filton.'
'They'll stop at nothing to wreck this railway.'
'Have you any idea who these people might be?' asked Leeming. 'Do you have any suspects in mind?'
'Several of them.'
'Such as?'
'Business rivals, for a start,' said Filton. 'This contract is worth a large amount of money. Mr Brassey was not the only person to put in a tender. He was up against others.'
'French or English?'
'Oh, French. They resent the fact that a contractor has been brought over from England, in spite of the fact that Mr Brassey has such an outstanding record of work in this country.'
'Anybody other than jealous rivals, sir?'
'Resentful navvies. We brought most of our labour with us because it's more reliable, but we've had to take on some Frenchmen as well. They bear grudges.'
'Why would that be?'
'They get paid less than our own men,' said Filton, 'and it's caused a lot of bad blood. Yes,' he went on, warming to his theme, 'I fancy that's where the trouble is coming from – French labour. It's their way of making a protest.'
'Then it has no connection with M. Chabal's death, sir.'
'I believe that it does.'
'Why would someone track him all the way across the Channel,' asked Leeming, 'when they could have killed him here? More to the point, how could a mere labourer possibly know that Chabal was going to England in the first place? I'm sorry, Mr Filton. I think you are forging links where they may not exist.' He consulted his notebook. 'Let's go back to the first incident, shall we? You say that gunpowder was stolen – for what purpose?'
'I dread to think, Sergeant Leeming.'
They moved swiftly. While one man kept watch, the other scuttled along the track in the darkness until he reached one of the largest of the wagons. He packed the gunpowder firmly beneath it and ran a fuse alongside the iron rail. Both men made sure that they were well clear of the danger area before the fuse was lit. When they saw it burning away purposefully in the direction of the wagon, they ran off quickly to their hiding place. The explosion was deafening. Shattering the silence, it lifted the wagon high off the track and blew it into small pieces that were dispersed everywhere at great velocity. Rolling stock in the immediate vicinity was also destroyed in the blast. A section of rail was plucked from the sleepers and snapped apart. Fires started. Injured men screamed in pain. Falling debris killed a dog.
Another incident could be added to the list.
CHAPTER SIX
Robert Colbeck and Victor Leeming were staying at a cottage almost a mile away, but the noise of the blast woke them up. Though railway companies often used gunpowder to shift awkward obstructions, they would never do so at night. To someone like Thomas Brassey, it would be anathema. He was renowned for the care he took to keep any disruption to an absolute minimum in the locality where his men were working. Instead of putting all his navvies in one camp, and risking the uncontrollable mayhem that usually followed the creation of a private town, he placed as many of them as he could in houses, inns and farms in the area to spread them out. It was also a
