stationmaster thought he was middle-aged, the women that he was quite old.'
'So not an octogenarian grandmother, at least, then?'
'Quite honestly, Laurence, it could wel have been a giraffe for al the powers of observation of those on the platform. The stationmaster said the mystery man hadn't bought a ticket. Not that day, anyway, but he could have had one already.'
'Then Liley wasn't shot in the face?'
'No, but his legs were cut off by the train.'
'So,' Laurence summed up, finding himself indifferent to Liley's horrible end, 'if we assume that Liley was no accident, and that the same man was involved in Liley's death as with the others, which is a bit of a leap but not a huge one, then it seems he manages to avoid attention because he has no particular distinguishing features and he dresses in clothes worn by half the men in England.'
'It has the feel of your man. Your unknown man. Although the police would have liked to speak to him, of course, they believed it was just the typical modesty of a decent Englishman, slipping away to avoid thanks, having done al he could. But this is a smal station. Not many people use it. Liley did, regularly, but did the unknown man know this? And if he did, how did he know it? It could be that he lives near by.'
'And it could, just possibly, be why John ended up where he did.' Laurence heard the excitement in his own voice. 'But this man, he couldn't have used the station regularly or the stationmaster would have recognised him.'
'He did recognise him, of course,' said Charles, 'if only slightly. Perhaps he's got a motorcar.'
Laurence thought for a minute. 'The murder of Jim Byers seems likely to have been committed by a man with a car. No other way, realy. That bit of Devon's pretty isolated. He wouldn't have needed one for Mulins or Tucker. I think we do have to include those two on our list.'
Laurence began to calculate the distance from Fairford to Chalow: fifteen miles or so, he guessed. George Chilvers had a car. Could the fact that the presumed murderer had always been seen in a military greatcoat be a clever ruse? Unlike most men of his age, Chilvers had never been in the forces. However, in al other ways Chilvers seemed an unlikely kiler. He was too fastidious and although a buly and a thief, he didn't seem like a man with the ruthlessness to carry out so many murders and, with some regret, Laurence had to accept that he had no conceivable link with any of the other dead men.
'I'm too tired to think al this through,' he said finaly. 'But I don't think there's much doubt that we're looking at murder now. Probably four murders, maybe more. I'm going to go back and talk to Mrs Lovel. She must know more than she's letting on. To start with, I wondered whether Hart could be her son, but it doesn't fit. Al the same, I do think her son's story may be mixed up with the execution and its aftermath. I might get a picture out of her on some pretext, though I can't think of any now, and she won't be letting any photographs far out of her sight, I imagine.'
Charles nodded, holding his glass with both hands. 'You could say you thought you might have known him, I suppose?'
It was obvious, yet Laurence had more of a problem with the idea of lying to Gwen Lovel than to the others he had deliberately misled. He didn't answer.
'You're thinking, what if the old girl is excited at being able to exchange recolections of her boy?' said Charles.
'Yes, I suppose I am. But also we aren't even absolutely certain he was ever in the army. The records don't show it.'
'Difficult one. Perhaps Lovel lied to his mama? Ran away to avoid being caled up? Perhaps she lied to you? Not impossible. If you want me to come along to see Mrs Lovel, I wil.' He looked at Laurence expectantly.
Although tempted for a moment, Laurence sensed he would get more out of Mrs Lovel if he were alone. Force of numbers might cause her to be suspicious and he thought Charles's jocular confidence might grate on her. Nevertheless, if her son had not been a soldier and she knew it, then she had lied persuasively about receiving the telegram.
Just as Charles put his glass down and stood up, Laurence said, 'Why do you think Somers, if it was him, took Emmett to the Connaught instead of his club?
It's a bit furtive.'
'The Connaught is hardly a Limehouse opium den. And skulking about is not realy in his character, I'd say,' Charles replied.
'You know Limehouse wel, then?' Laurence asked, keeping his face expressionless.
'Of course.' Charles was struggling into one arm of his coat. 'Opium dens—just the sort of place the realy depraved murderer plots his crimes. Ask Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Or there's Fu Manchu—you don't have to have smoked an opium pipe to know where to find trouble. To get inside the mind of a drug fiend in his lair, you just need to read a few books. After al, you haven't been to the Connaught either but you know how it'l be in there. Palms. Tea. Cocktails. A grand piano.
And plenty of people who don't know one another. That's the key to anonymity.' He finaly heaved his coat over his shoulders. Actualy a chap I knew from Birmingham days—Arthur Ward—his father was our works foreman—he wrote the Fu Manchu stories.'
'I could have sworn the author was—'
'Rohmer. Sax Rohmer. German name, but not his real one. 'Arthur Ward' carried too much of the smel of the tannery for tales of the Orient. Taking a German pseudonym was an odd sort of choice, but there we are. Damn good yarns.'
Chapter Thirty-two
For a while Laurence had considered it just possible that the tensions between John and Sergeant Tucker had become lethal. Now that he knew that so many of those involved were dead, the situation seemed unreal, something out of Charles's detective novels. Leonard Byers' rueful comment about a curse was close to the truth but there was nothing supernatural about these deaths. Neither John nor Tucker could have kiled al three men: Liley, Jim Byers and Mulins, because both were by then dead themselves. So who else knew them al and could have
