Peril on the Royal Train Read online

  ‘That’s brilliant, Tam!’

  ‘We can count on your help, then?’

  Dalton grinned. ‘You won’t be able to keep me away.’

  The first thing that Colbeck did after an early breakfast was to visit Nairn Craig to acquaint him with the latest development. The latter was shaken to the core by the notion that his railway would be the setting for an attempted assassination. Colbeck impressed upon him the need to maintain secrecy. If news of the plot leaked out, it would spread quickly and, ultimately, reach the ears of those planning the crime. They would be frightened away and Craig might never discover who had caused the train crash. When he’d controlled his feelings of panic, Craig accepted the wisdom of the advice and promised to say nothing. As a patriotic man, however, he was outraged.

  ‘How could anyone wish to murder our dear Queen?’

  ‘A number of people have already tried, sir,’ said Colbeck, ‘and they’ve not all been deranged. I can’t believe that anyone would hate Her Majesty enough as a person to want her dead. It’s what she represents that attracts enemies.’

  ‘Do you think that this is a foreign conspiracy?’

  ‘It could be.’

  ‘Then it has to be the Russians,’ decided Craig. ‘They’ll never forgive us for winning the Crimean War. This is their revenge.’

  ‘It could equally be the revenge of someone much nearer home,’ said Colbeck. ‘The Act of Union provoked great opposition at the time and it still rankles with some people a hundred and fifty years later. Deplorable as it is, there are fanatics who’d take their Scottish nationalism to extremes. Then there’s something else you must consider,’ he went on. ‘The Queen may be only an incidental casualty. Her husband will be travelling with her and he has his own detractors. Supposing one of those enemies has designs on Prince Albert’s life? Supposing that he is the target?’

  ‘The threat is too horrible to contemplate.’

  ‘Forewarned is forearmed.’

  ‘But wait a moment,’ said Craig, spying a possible source of relief. ‘There’s no certainty that the Caledonian has been chosen by these people, is there? The royal train will go all the way from London to Aberdeen. It could be attacked anywhere along the line. Why single out us?’

  ‘Because that’s where they held their trial,’ replied Colbeck. ‘All the elements required were present. They had rural seclusion, a rock face that could be blasted apart and a gradient that slowed the train down. On the journey between Carlisle and Glasgow, those factors are repeated time and again. The logical supposition is that they’ll select your railway again, Mr Craig. Why put themselves to the trouble of searching for an ideal location two or three hundred miles south when they already have what they need on a stretch of the Caledonian?’

  The general manager’s hands went to his head and he emitted a low moan.

  ‘We’re doomed,’ he said.

  ‘You shouldn’t view it in those terms, sir. Instead of seeing this as a plot against the royal family,’ said Colbeck, ‘regard it as the one chance we have of apprehending the villains behind it – and behind the earlier crash, of course.’

  ‘Must you bait the hook with the royal family to do so?’

  ‘That will be up to them, sir. No compulsion will be involved. They’ll be made fully aware of the situation before they agree to take their holiday in Scotland at the appointed time.’

  ‘This is all too much for me,’ said Craig, pacing his office and searching for a way out of his dilemma. ‘Coming on top of the crash, it’s a crippling blow. Imagine what would happen if the Queen were assassinated on the Caledonian. We’d bear a stigma for ever.’

  ‘By the same token,’ Colbeck told him, ‘if the plot is foiled, you’ll get your share of congratulation for the way that you helped us. There’ll be no stigma, sir. I promise you that it will never reach that stage.’

  ‘Can you guarantee that a calamity will be averted?’

  Colbeck measured his words carefully. ‘One can never offer an absolute guarantee,’ he said. ‘What I can pledge is our total commitment to the task of finding and arresting these people before they have the chance to carry out their attack. I have every confidence that we’ll succeed, Mr Craig.’ He flashed a reassuring smile. ‘As you’re aware, we have a strange habit of doing so.’

  The newspapers that morning were painful to read. Edward Tallis was once again attacked by name. It was not for any fault on his part. The detectives involved in a bungled investigation in Whitechapel should have been excoriated, not the man who had delegated the task to them. That, at least, was what he believed. It was always the same. The press had chosen Tallis as their favourite target and his relations with them remained hostile. He had even featured in cartoons. Colbeck knew how to deal with reporters. His blend of charm and diplomacy always earned him flattering headlines. The superintendent, by contrast, was characteristically truculent with the press and he paid the price for it. After reading the latest hurtful descriptions of him and his detectives, he put the newspapers in the wastepaper basket and sulked.

  The truth of it was that solving the murder in Whitechapel had been beyond the men he assigned to the case. They were too raw and untried, making mistakes at every stage and – worst of all – allowing the chief suspect to flee to Dover where he boarded a ship to France. That constituted an admission of guilt in Tallis’s view and in the opinion of the press. The killer would never be brought to justice, it was claimed, because he’d gone abroad where Scotland Yard had no jurisdiction. That would not have deterred Robert Colbeck. In order to solve a murder that occurred on the Sankey Viaduct, he had once followed a trail to France and made significant arrests there. Colbeck would go anywhere in pursuit of the guilty even if, Tallis recalled, it meant crossing the Atlantic.

  Unfortunately, Colbeck was unique. Apart from anything else, he seemed to have extraordinary luck. It was something glaringly absent from Tallis’s life. He was dogged by ill fortune. The superintendent was certain that Colbeck would have solved the murder of a Whitechapel tailor within a matter of days, whereas the detectives who handled the case spent the whole time in a state of total confusion before letting their chief suspect slip through their fingers. The trouble was that the Railway Detective was still in Scotland when he was desperately needed in London. Unusually, Colbeck had not so far distinguished himself in his latest investigation, sending an ambiguous report of his activities to mislead the superintendent. That had made Tallis livid. He wanted Colbeck back at Scotland Yard to upbraid him.

  Rising from his chair, he stormed out of the room and walked along the corridor to Colbeck’s office. There was one thing he could be sure of finding there and that was a copy of Bradshaw’s railway timetables. Tallis snatched the volume down from the shelf and flicked through the pages until he found the one he wanted.

  ‘Get back here, Colbeck,’ he warned, menacingly, ‘or I’ll come to Glasgow to drag you back here.’

  He snapped the book shut like a steel trap.

  On the first stage of their journey, they were fortunate enough to have a first-class compartment to themselves. Colbeck and Madeleine sat with their backs to the engine while Andrews and Leeming faced it. Carlisle was just over a hundred miles from Glasgow and it was there that they’d change trains to travel on the LNWR. Until then, they had both privacy and relative comfort. Three of them settled back to enjoy the journey. Leeming viewed it with dread. Apart from the descent of Beattock Bank, there was half a day on the railway to face. What reconciled him to the trip was the thought that he’d be reunited with his wife and children. It was worth suffering any amount of pain and disquiet. Against that joy could be set the misery of having to return to Scotland before long. It was disconcerting.

  For Andrews the train journey was a march of triumph. Thanks to him, he decided, a crime that would have outraged the entire country could be nipped in the bud. His son-in-law had been highly complimentary but the gratitude would not end there. Andrews fully expected to be showere
d with praise at Scotland Yard and invited to the palace to be thanked in person by the Queen. As he let his imagination flow freely, he saw himself being brought out of retirement to drive the royal train to Scotland. He even envisaged a moment when he would be the subject of glowing tributes in the newspapers, spreading his fame far and wide. A medal might be struck in his honour. He would wear it with excessive pride. The broad smile on his face came in sharp relief to the expression of foreboding on the man beside him.

  ‘When do we come back to Scotland?’ asked Andrews.

  ‘Father!’ reproached Madeleine. ‘We haven’t even left it yet.’

  ‘It was a fair question, Maddy.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Colbeck, ‘but it’s based on a false assumption. Victor and I may well be returning north of the border but there’s no need to involve you.’

  ‘I’m already involved.’

  ‘That doesn’t entitle you to get in the way,’ said Madeleine.

  ‘I wouldn’t be in the way. I’d be helping.’

  ‘You’d do that best by leaving everything to Robert and the sergeant.’

  ‘Without me,’ Andrews reminded her, ‘the truth would never have come out.’

  ‘Without Madeleine,’ said Colbeck, ‘you’d never have been in a position to make the deductions that you did. It was your daughter who extracted the information from Mrs Renwick. We are indebted equally to both of you.’

  ‘In any case,’ said Leeming, joining in the argument, ‘it may not be necessary for any of us to come back to this weird country where most people haven’t even learnt to speak English yet. That’s my hope, anyway. When the Queen hears about the threat, she’ll probably cancel the visit to Balmoral, which will be a pity. If that happens, there’ll be no attack on the royal train.’

  ‘But there’ll certainly be an attack of another kind. The difference in that case,’ stressed Colbeck, ‘is that we’ll have no idea when and where it will come. We’re dealing with people dedicated to a course of action. If one plan falls apart, they won’t simply give up. They’ll devise another.’

  Madeleine shivered. ‘That’s a frightening thought!’

  ‘So is making this train journey again,’ murmured Leeming.

  ‘I still think that you should make use of me,’ persisted Andrews. ‘I have a stake in this investigation.’

  ‘You’ve done all you need to do,’ said Colbeck, ‘and we salute you for that. While I’m away in Scotland, however, I take solace from the fact that you’ll be in London to look after Madeleine.’

  ‘It’s the other way around,’ she teased.

  ‘You’re interdependent and that’s how it should be. There’s another drawback to your kind offer, Mr Andrews, and that’s our superintendent. He’d never let a civilian take a central role in an investigation. Victor and I are trained to cope with violence and danger. You are not.’

  ‘Nothing frightens me,’ declared Andrews.

  ‘The decision must stand.’

  ‘Well, it’s a wrong decision.’

  ‘Father!’ exclaimed Madeleine. ‘Accept it with dignity.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Maddy,’ he said, raising a palm. ‘My tongue ran away with me. I should have looked in the mirror to remind myself how old I am. I can’t go running up these hillsides like a mountain goat. That’s for younger men.’

  Leeming glanced through the window. ‘I’m a younger man,’ he said, ‘but I shudder at the notion of climbing some of these crags. I’d get dizzy up there. What I want to know,’ he continued, ‘is who exactly we’re looking for?’

  ‘We’re looking for implacable enemies of the Crown,’ replied Colbeck.

  ‘But where have they come from?’

  ‘Mr Craig thought that they might be Russians, enraged by the way that they lost the Crimean War.’

  ‘Do you think that’s likely, Robert?’ asked Madeleine.

  ‘To be candid, I don’t. Their language and appearance would mark Russians out at once. And how would they know that details of the royal visit to Balmoral would be kept in Mr Renwick’s house? Meticulous planning has gone into this. Advice has been taken from someone with an inside knowledge of the railways.’

  ‘What’s your theory?’

  ‘I don’t have one, Madeleine. It could be the work of Scottish nationalists or of English people with republican sentiments. And there are an untold number of other possible candidates. Not least among them are Irish dissidents.’

  ‘They’re always banging the drum about something,’ complained Andrews.

  ‘Some people might say they had just cause.’

  ‘Well, I’m not one of them.’

  ‘What about those sabbatarians we heard about?’ asked Leeming. ‘Could they turn out to be the devils behind all this?’

  ‘No, Victor,’ said Colbeck with amusement. ‘Their campaign is against devilry and they see it manifested in railway companies that run trains on Sundays. Sabotage might be within their compass but they’d revere the royal family and do nothing to harm them. One group we can safely forget are the sabbatarians.’

  The first thing that greeted him when Tam Howie returned home from work that evening was the sound of the piano. His wife was filling the whole house with the mellifluous strains of a Beethoven sonata. Flora played the organ at the kirk and was at home with any keyboard instrument. Her musical taste was catholic. As the sonata died out, it was replaced by the sound of a Hebridean folk song. After hanging his hat on the stand, Howie came into the parlour and kissed her gently on the head. She broke off at once and turned round.

  ‘Don’t stop,’ he said. ‘I love that tune.’

  ‘I’ve practised long enough, Tam. My fingers are aching. Did you have a good day at the office?’

  ‘It was much like any other. But what have you been doing with yourself this afternoon – apart from coaxing lovely music out of the piano, that is?’

  ‘I’ve taken another look at the map,’ she said.

  ‘I was hoping you’d do that.’

  ‘Well, we need to make a decision soon.’

  Swinging round on the piano stool, she stood up and crossed to the table. A map of south-west Scotland lay open on it, the Caledonian railway zigzagging its way between Dumfries and Strathclyde. A number of crosses had been marked along its route. Howie bent over the table to examine them.

  ‘Do we need to go far from Glasgow?’ he asked.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘There’s open countryside much closer.’

  ‘But it doesn’t always give us what we want.’

  ‘I don’t understand, Flora.’

  ‘Take this place, for instance,’ she said, touching one of the crosses on the map. ‘It looks ideal and it’s less than fifteen miles away. But I discovered that they’re cutting down the forest nearby and sending the timber to Carlisle. The area will be crawling with people. If we go there, we’re sure to be seen.’

  ‘Someone has been doing her homework,’ he said, appreciatively.

  ‘We can’t be too careful, Tam.’

  ‘What else have you found out?’

  Flora worked her way through the other places marked on the map. All the locations had promise but some were more tempting than others. Her choice fell on a place that looked completely isolated on the map.

  ‘This is the one,’ she decided.

  ‘It would take us ages to get there in a trap.’

  ‘Then we take a train to the nearest station and hire our transport. We’d be taken for a middle-aged couple out for a bracing ride in the country.’

  ‘But there’ll be three of us,’ he reminded her. ‘Ian will be there.’

  ‘I’m wondering if that’s such a good idea.’

  ‘He’s fully committed, Flora. There’s not a shadow of doubt about that.’

  ‘We don’t need to involve him on Saturday. We can reconnoitre the area on our own and report back to him.’

  ‘Ian would only feel excluded.’

  ‘I’m thinking of his wife.
’

  ‘Morag doesn’t have a clue what we’re up to, Flora.’

  ‘I wonder,’ she said. ‘When I was out shopping this morning, I met her in the street. Morag was pleasant enough – she always is – but she gave me a strange look. It must worry her that her husband has been out late at night. I had the feeling that she blames us for leading him astray.’

  ‘What if she does? She won’t breathe a word about it to anyone else.’

  ‘It might be better if Ian stayed at home with her on Saturday.’

  ‘But he wants to be with us,’ argued Howie. ‘As for his wife, she’ll never challenge him. Morag is as timid as they come. One day – when we finally regain the Sabbath for its true purpose – Ian will tell her the truth. It will be safe to do so when it’s all over. If she realised what was going on at this point, the woman would worry herself to death.’

  ‘She’s going to worry a great deal if her husband leaves her for a whole day on Saturday. What will Morag think about us then?’

  ‘She’ll think what she’s always thought about us. I’ll be looked upon as a pillar of the kirk and you’ll be viewed as the gifted organist you are. In other words, Flora, we’re above suspicion.’ He put an arm around her. ‘Morag is not like you, my dear, able to take a full part in the campaign. You’re a woman in a thousand. But I’ve promised Ian that he’ll be travelling with us on Saturday,’ he said with firmness, ‘and that arrangement must stand.’

  Edward Tallis had had a day of unrelieved distress. Having read the unfavourable comments about himself in the press, he had to listen to them again when he was summoned to the commissioner’s office and asked to explain why Scotland Yard was being mocked so openly. News then arrived of the collapse of a trial in which Tallis had an interest. By dint of patient surveillance, two of his officers had identified what they believed to be a man who forged official documents for other criminals. His arrest was regarded as a coup and the subsequent trial a formality. Yet the evidence was deemed inadequate by the jury and the judge set the man free to continue his criminal career. Since he had set the original investigation in motion, Tallis felt the setback like a blow in the stomach.