had to be him; he was on the fly as everybody knew – would have been under orders to find the body of a man the size of Smith; others he could abandon, knowing they'd be put down to the work of grave robbers. He would have been well paid for it. Why, he told me in the Citadel that he was poor as a rat, but he was always in funds, and those brain dusters in the Kingdom of Italy did not come cheap.' 'What are you talking about?' said my landlady.
'But no,' I said. 'Smith lived in a flat, with a gatekeeper at the door. The coroner's report had said so. How could a body be got in?'
My landlady, still looking down at Smith, had somehow caught up with me. 'I thought,' she said slowly, 'that when you told me of that coroner's report, you said the firemen had played their hoses through doors giving on to a garden.'
'You're right!' I said. 'I hadn't thought you were listening. Not long before, Smith bought a new flat -1 heard him telling Erskine Long so – and he'd done it for one reason only: to get a garden!'
In my mind's eye I saw the swanky flat with the beautiful garden facing away from the road. I saw Mack, with some of his friends who were out of the straight, turning up after dark with the right sort of dead man after leaving some of the wrong sort lying about in Brookwood or other places. Maybe he had brought paraffin too. I saw Smith, talking of being tired to the gatekeeper. I saw him light the fire and leave.
'But why did Smith do it?' I exclaimed, at which some of the others in the cabin who'd left off staring at us began to do so again.
The Great Wheel rolled upward once again, and my thoughts roamed as wide as the view from our cabin, a hundred ideas coming into my mind. I revolved in my mind the words that Vincent had used of Smith on the coal heap at Nine Elms, and the sort of scandal that might go along with it. That I did not like to mention in front of my landlady. I was now at a height to see where the buildings merged into grey greenness at the edge of the city, and this brought the land sales flooding into my thoughts.
'There was something wrong with the land sales,' I said out loud. I pictured the name of White-Chester in the Necropolis minute book, and that brought me to it. 'Smith was selling off the land at cut-price rates to his friends, or perhaps even to himself in a roundabout way. There's this fellow at the Necropolis: Argent. He has sound looks, and seemed up to snuff. I saw him at Smith's funeral. He was not in the least downcast; he was swishing the grass with his black cane!'
'Calm down,' said my landlady. 'And where does he come in, anyway?'
'He was against the land sales. All the Necropolis board had doubts over it, but Argent led the way. After the funeral, he said to the chairman, Long, that it was the terms on which the lands were sold that he was particularly against. Long asked him what he might bring it to and he said a vote. They were all on to Smith. They were going to set things to rights, and Smith could see where it would all end.'
I pictured myself as a boy at the West Cliff marshalling yard in Whitby with Mr Hammond explaining railway mysteries to me. Had there been a vote in the background of his disgrace? However it had come about, he had been stopped from ever being involved with companies, and it had been the finish of him. Smith must have feared the same thing: the vote, then open court, or worse yet. 'Gaol?' said my landlady.
'Probably,' I said, 'and he could not have kept up his exquisite ways in stir.'
Now our cabin was at its fullest height, and I could see trains cutting crazily through the streets in all directions, as if each was saying, 'My way is best!' or they were ever-growing pointers of clocks, driving the world forward into the future.
A new thought brought me down to earth. 'Yet Stanley did the murders,' I said. 'I must have been right over that. He finished off Sir John Rickerby, Henry Taylor and Mike all right. Why else would he have crowned me and locked me in a coffin?' 'Yes,' said my landlady, 'but who put him up to it?'
I looked down into the Japanese garden, at Smith, still there, smoking a cigarette and looking all at once like a man who cared not a rip for anything but himself.
I nodded. 'Smith was the true killer,' I said, 'and poor Stanley was just the tool with which the job was done.'
'I'm sure you have that right,' said my landlady, although of course she was the one who had got to it first. And this was what Stanley had meant by darkness: he had seen from my diary that while I had known enough to send him to the gallows, I had not got the thing straight.
'Smith asked him to bash poor old Sir John Rickerby so as to give himself control of the Necropolis Company so that he could start selling the land,' I said. 'As for the next part, it was as I said in the hospital: Stanley was seen by Henry Taylor, or at any rate he thought as much, and so Taylor was done too. Then Mike, for what he knew, or might have known.'
'Or what he might have told the detectives who would never leave him be,' added my landlady.
Our cabin was once more descending. I looked at Smith again, and there seemed to be a white flash in the darkening air around him. He began looking in the stream below the bridge – and then was gone, for we were now too low to see him.
And with the loss of the vista, more doubts came. I was sure Sir John Rickerby had been killed on the say-so of Smith, but whether Smith had also ordered the destruction of Henry Taylor and Mike I could not guess. That might have been the private business of Stanley, for the noose was more closely about his neck – he had done the deed, after all. Smith, realising that he was in Queer Street too should the police be put on to Stanley, might have gone along with these other killings, or he might have been furious at them.
The two had made a deal: why else would Stanley's address have been allowed to continue every Tuesday, there being so little call to hear it? 'Stanley really was as poor as a rat,' I said.
'That's why he wanted my room,' said my landlady sadly. She was at my shoulder. I was ashamed to think that I had forgotten about her for the minute. 'It was the only one he could afford,' she added, and I realised then – which I had never thought before – that she knew very well that her rooms were not excellent, or whatever hopeful words she had used.
'He needed the money that Smith could pay him for the killing,' I said. 'But he botched the job by doing it in full view, or so he thought, of Taylor, and Smith likely told him he could sing for any true reward.
'He was a madman,' said my landlady. 'I could see that; I would still have given him the room, though.'
'Yes,' I said, 'Stanley was off his onion. And Smith was at the mercy of a madman likely to tell all, or do worse than that, so he had another good reason to disappear.'
I thought of those half-finished letters among Stanley's papers: they were meant for Smith, and I was sure some of the same sort had actually been sent. I reminded my landlady of them, and that Stanley had spoken of himself in one as an expert in some matter beginning with 'e'.
We could not answer that, but it was obvious to me now that those letters were in some way threats. Of course, by making these, Stanley ran the risk of being jacked in himself, but Smith was a wily worm. I had him down as quite cautious in the killing line.
Our cabin was right at the bottom now, passing the queue forming for the next ride. As we climbed again, I fixed on the question of why Smith had brought me down from Yorkshire. I turned to my landlady, who was looking straight ahead at nothing but sky, and again I felt sorry for spoiling her day. 'Why did Smith want me as his little detective?' I asked her. 'Why would he want me snooping among the murders he himself had caused to be done?'
My landlady turned to me and said, 'I don't know.' Then she said, 'You must learn to be smart.'
That helped because it was true, and the answer came to me double-quick: 'Because that would make him look innocent.' My landlady nodded.
'The police were questioning everybody. It would be good for him if he could seem as keen to find the answer as anybody else. That has to be it. At the Necropolis station, Erskine Long was standing behind us when Smith said he would like to quiz me about events at Nine Elms. Smith didn't exactly speak in an under-breath: Long had been meant to overhear.'
The rest came to me in rapid thoughts. Before disappearing behind a wall of flame, Smith had written the letter asking to see me on the same point. He had kept the letter – in which he had put a down on the half-link – in his safe for the police to find after the fire. He wanted to make himself seem keen as mustard in the search for the truth, and in this he had gulled the Governor into helping.
It was the strangest thing of all that thoughts of the Governor should have come to me at that moment, for we were now at a height to see the Japanese garden once again, and there was the very gentleman, alongside
