THE MAN WHO GOT OFF THE GHOST TRAIN

By Kim Newman

 

 

CULLER’S HALT

 

“Ten hours, guv’nor,” said Fred Regent. “That’s what the timetable says. Way this half-holiday is going, next train mightn’t come for ten months.”

 

Richard Jeperson shrugged. A cheek muscle twitched.

 

Pink-and-gray-streaked autumn skies hung over wet fields. Fred had scouted around. No one home. Typical British Rail. He only knew Culler’s Halt was in use because of the uncollected rubbish. Lumpy plastic sacks were piled on the station forecourt like wartime sandbags. The bin-men’s strike was settled, but maybe word hadn’t reached these parts. A signpost claimed “Culler 3m.” If there was a village at the end of the lane, it showed no lamps at the fag-end of this drab afternoon.

 

Fred wasn’t even sure which country Culler was in.

 

On the platform, Richard stood by their luggage, peering at the dying sunlight through green-tinted granny glasses. He wore a floor-length mauve travel coat with brocade flogging, shiny PVC bondage trousers (a concession to the new decade) and a curly-brimmed purple top hat.

 

Fred knew the Man from the Diogenes Club was worried about Vanessa. When a sensitive worried about someone who could famously take care of herself, it was probably time to panic.

 

At dawn, they’d been far south, after a nasty night’s work in Cornwall. They had been saddled with Alastair Garnett, a civil servant carrying out a time-and-motion study. In a funk, the man from the ministry had the bad habit of giving orders. If the local cops had listened to Richard rather than the “advisor,” there’d have been fewer deaths. The hacked-off body parts found inside a stone circle had had to be sorted into two piles—goats and teenagers. An isolated family, twisted by decades of servitude to breakfast food corporations, had invented their own dark religion. Ceremonially masked in cornflakes packets with cut-out eyeholes, the Penrithwick Clan made hideous sacrifice to the goblins Snap, Crackle and Pop. Bloody wastage like that put Richard in one of his moods, and no wonder. Fred would happily have booted Garnett up his pin-striped arse, but saw the way things were going in the eighties.

 

Trudging back to seaside lodgings in Mevagissey, hardly up for cooked breakfast and sworn off cereal for life, they were met by the landlady and handed Vanessa’s telegram, an urgent summons to Scotland.

 

Abandoning the Penrithwick shambles to Garnett, Richard and Fred took a fast train to Paddington. They crossed London by taxi without even stopping off at homes in Chelsea and Soho for a change of clothes or a hello to the girlfriends—who would of course be ticked off by that familiar development—and rattled out of Euston in a slam-door diesel.

 

The train stank of decades’ worth of Benson & Hedges. Since giving up, Fred couldn’t be in a fuggy train or pub without feeling queasily envious. At first, they shared their first-class compartment with a clear-complexioned girl whose T-shirt (sporting the word “GASH,” with an Anarchy Symbol for the “A”) was safety-pinned together like a disassembled torso stitched up after autopsy. She quietly leafed through Bunty and The Lady, chainsmoking with a casual pleasure that made Fred wish a cartoon anvil would fall from the luggage rack onto her pink punk hairdo. At Peterborough, she was collected by a middle-aged gent with a Range Rover. Fred and Richard had the compartment to themselves.

 

Outside Lincoln, something mechanical got thrown. The train slowed to a snail’s pace, overtaken by ancient cyclists, jeered at by small boys (“get off and milk it!”), inching through miles-long tunnels. This went on for agonising hours. Scheduled connections were missed. The only alternative route the conductor could offer involved getting off at York, a stopping train to Culler’s Halt, then a service to Inverdeith, changing there for Portnacreirann. In theory, it was doable. In practice, they were marooned. The conductor had been working from a timetable good only until September the 1^st of last year. No one else had got off at Culler’s Halt.

 

Beyond the railbed was a panoramic advertising hoarding. A once-glossy, now-weatherworn poster showed a lengthy dole queue and the slogan “Labour isn’t working—Vote Conservative.” Over this was daubed “No Future.” A mimeographed sheet, wrinkled in the fly-posting, showed the Queen with a pin through her nose.

 

“There’s something wrong, Frederick,” said Richard.

 

“The country’s going down the drain, and everyone’s pulling the flush.”

 

“Not just that. Think about it: ‘God Save the Queen’ came out for the Silver Jubilee, two years before the election. So why are ads for the single pasted over the Tory poster?”

 

“This is the wilds, guv. Can’t expect them to be up with pop charts.”

 

Richard shrugged again. The mystery wasn’t significant enough to be worth considered thought.

 

They had more pressing troubles. Chiefly, Vanessa.

 

Their friend and colleague wasn’t a panicky soul. She wouldn’t have sent the telegram unless things were serious. A night’s delay, and they might be too late.

 

“I’m not happy with this, Frederick,” said Richard.

 

“Me neither, guv.”

 

Richard chewed his moustache and looked at the timetable Fred had already checked. Always gaunt, he was starting to seem haggard. Deep shadow gathered in the seams under his eyes

 

“As you say, ten hours,” said Richard. “If the train’s on time.”

 

“Might as well kip in the waiting room,” suggested Fred. “Take shifts.”

 

There were hard benches and a couple of chairs chained to pipes. A table was piled with magazines and comics from years ago: Patrick Mower grinned on the cover of Tit-Bits; Robot Archie was in the jungle in Lion. A tiny bookshelf was stocked with paperbacks: Jaws, Mandingo, Sexploits of a Milk Monitor, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Guy N. Smith’s The Sucking Pit. Richard toggled a light switch and nothing happened. Fred found a two-bar electric fire in working order and turned it on, raising the whiff of singed dust. As night set in, the contraption provided an orange glow but no appreciable heat.

 

Fred huddled in his pea-coat and scarf. Richard stretched out on a bench like a fakir on a bed of nails.

 

The new government wasn’t mad keen on the Diogenes Club. Commissions of Inquiry empowered the likes of Alastair Garnett to take a watching brief. Number Ten was asking for “blue skies suggestions” as to what, if anything, might replace this “holdover from an era when British intelligence was run by enthusiastic amateurs.” Richard said the 1980s “would not be a comfortable decade for a feeling person.” His chief asset was sensitivity, but when his nerves frayed he looked like a cuckoo with peacock feathers. Called up before a Select Committee, he made a bad impression.

 

Fred knew Richard was right to be paranoid. Wheels were grinding, and the team was being broken up. He had been strongly advised to report back to New Scotland Yard, take a promotion to Detective Inspector and get on with “real police-work.” Rioters, terrorists and scroungers needed clouting. Task Forces and Patrol Groups were up and running. If he played along with the boot boys, he could have his own command, be a Professional. The decision couldn’t be put off much longer.

 

He’d assumed Vanessa would stay with the Club, though. Richard could chair the Ruling Cabal, planning and feeling. She would handle fieldwork, training up new folk to tackle whatever crept from the lengthening shadows.

 

Now, he wasn’t sure. If they didn’t get to Vanessa in time ...

 

“There used to be a through train to Portnacreirann,” mused Richard. “The Scotch Streak. A sleeper. Steam until 1962, then diesel, then ... well, helicopters took over.”

 

“Helicopter?” queried Fred, distracted. “Who commutes by helicopter?”

 

“nato. Defence considerations kept the Scotch Streak running long after its natural lifetime. Then they didn’t. March of bloody progress.”

 

Richard sat up. He took off and folded his glasses, then tucked them in his top pocket behind an emerald explosion of display handkerchief.

 

“It’s where I started, Frederick,” he said. “On the Scotch Streak. Everyone has a first time ...”

 

“Not ‘arf.” Fred smiled.

 

Richard smiled too, perhaps ruefully. “As you so eloquently put it, ‘not ‘arf.’ For you, it was that bad business at the end of the pier, in Seamouth. For your lovely Zarana, it was the Soho Golem. For Professor Corri it was the Curse of The Northern Barstows. For me, it was the Scotch Streak ... the Ghost Train.”

 

Fred’s interest pricked. He’d worked with Richard Jeperson for more than ten years, but knew only scattered pieces about the man’s earlier years. Richard himself didn’t know about a swathe of his childhood. A foundling of war, he’d been pulled out of a refugee camp by Major Jeperson, a British officer who saw his sensitivity. Richard had been raised as much by the Diogenes Club as by his adoptive father. He had no memory of any life before the camps. Even the tattoo on his arm was a mystery. The Nazis were appallingly meticulous about recordkeeping, but Richard’s serial number didn’t match any name on lists of the interned or to-be-exterminated. The numbers weren’t even in a configuration like those of other Holocaust survivors or known victims. Suspicion was that the Germans had seen the boy’s qualities too and tried to make use of him in a facility destroyed, along with its records and presumably other inmates, before it could fall into Allied hands. The lad had slipped through the cleanup operation, scathed but alive. Major Geoffrey Jeperson named him Richard, after Richard Riddle—a boy detective who was his own childhood hero.

 

Of Richard’s doings between the war and the Seamouth Case, Fred knew not much. After Geoffrey’s death in 1954, Richard’s sponsors at the Club had been Edwin Winthrop, now dead but well remembered, and Sir Giles Gallant, now retired and semidisgraced. Vanessa had come into the picture well before the Seamouth Case. She had Richard’s habit of being evasive without making a fuss about it. All Fred knew was that her first meeting with their patron was another horror story. Whenever it came up, she’d touch the almost-invisible scar through her eyebrow and change the subject with a shudder.

 

“Now we’re near the end of the line,” said Richard, “perhaps you should hear the tale.”

 

They were here for the night. Time enough for a ghost story.

 

“Frederick,” said Richard, “it was 195—, and I was down from Oxford

 

* * * *

 

ACT ONE: LONDON EUSTON

 

I

 

It was 195— and Richard Jeperson was down from Oxford. And the LSE. And Cambridge. And Manchester Poly. And RADA. And Harrow School of Art. And ... well, suffice to say, many fine institutions, none of which felt obliged to award him any formal qualification.

 

Geoffrey Jeperson had sent him to St. Cuthbert’s, his old school. Richard hadn’t lasted at “St. Custard’s,” setting an unhappy precedent insofar as not lasting at schools went. After the Major’s death, Edwin Winthrop took over in loco parentis. He encouraged Richard to regard schooling as a cold buffet, picking at whatever took his fancy. Winthrop called himself a graduate of Flanders and the Somme, though as it happened he had a Double First in Classics and Natural Philosophy from All Souls. Since Richard was known for his instincts—his sensitivities, everyone said—he was allowed to follow his nose. He became a “New Elizabethan renaissance man,” though teachers tended to tut-tut as he acquired unsystematic tranches of unrelated expertise then got on with something else before he was properly finished.

 

Though the Diogenes Club supported him with a generous allowance, he took on jobs of work. He assisted with digs and explorations. He sleuthed through Europe in search of his past, and drew suspicious blanks—which persuaded him to pay more attention to his present. He spent a summer in a biscuit factory in Barnsley, making tea and enduring harassment from the female staff. He was a film extra in Italy, climbing out of the horse in Helen of Troy. He couriered documents between British embassies in South America. He studied magic—stage magic, not yet the other stuff—with a veteran illusionist in Baltimore. He dug ditches, modelled for catalogues, worked fishing boats, wrote articles for manly magazines, and the like.

 

Between education and honest toil, he did his National Service. He was in the RAF but never saw an aeroplane. The Club placed him in a system of bunkers under the New Forest. He fetched and carried for boffins working on an oscillating wave device. After eighteen months, a coded message instructed him to sabotage an apparently routine experiment. Though he liked the backroom boys and had worked up enthusiasm for the project, he followed orders. The procedure failed and—he was later given to understand—an invasion of our plane of existence by malign extradimensional entities was prevented. That was how the Club worked under Edwin Winthrop: preemptive, unilateral, cutting out weeds before they sprouted, habitually secretive, pragmatically ruthless. A lid was kept on, though who knew whether the pot really had been boiling over?

 

After the RAF, Richard spear-carried for a season at the Old Vic, and played saxophone with The Frigidaires. The doo-wop group had been on the point of signing with promoter Larry Parnes—of “parnes, shillings and pence” fame—when the girl singer married a quantity surveyor for the security. Though her rendition of “Lipstick on Your Collar,” lately a hit for Connie Francis, was acceptable, Richard couldn’t really argue with her. Frankly, The Frigidaires were never very good.

 

Richard only knew within a year or so how old he actually was, but must be out of his teens. Edwin felt it was time the boy knuckled down and got on with the work for which he had been prepared. Richard moved into a Georgian house in Chelsea which was in the gift of the Club, occasionally looked after by an Irish housekeeper who kept going home to have more children. He meditated, never missed Hancock’s Half Hour on the wireless and read William Morris and Hank Jansen. Edwin told him to wait for a summons to action.

 

Richard dressed in the “Edwardian” or “teddy boy” manner: scarlet velvet frock coat with midnight black lapels (straight-razor slipped into a special compartment in the sleeve), crepe-soled suede zip-up boots with winkle-picker toe-points, a conjurer’s waistcoat with seventeen secret pockets, his father’s watch and chain, bootlace tie with silver tips, navy-blue drainpipe jeans tighter than paint on his skinny legs. His thin moustache was only just established enough not to need augmentation with eyebrow pencil. A Brylcreem pompadour rose above his pale forehead like a constructivist sculpture in black candyfloss.

 

If he took his life to have begun when his memory did, his experience was limited. He had never seen a woman naked, except in Health & Efficiency magazine. He could not drive a car, though he intended to take lessons. He had never killed anything important. He had never had a broken bone. He had never eaten an avocado.

 

Within a year, all that would change.

 

One morning, a special messenger arrived on a motorbike, with instructions that he give himself over to a sidecar and be conveyed to the Diogenes Club. This, he knew, was to be his debut.

 

The retired Royal Marine Sergeant who kept door in the Mall went beet-coloured as Richard waltzed past his post. Outlandish folk must come and go from the Diogenes Club, but Richard’s clothes and hair were red rag to a bull for anyone over twenty-five—especially a uniformed middle-aged man with a short back and sides and medal ribbons. There was talk about playwrights and poets who were “angry young men,” but the older generation would not easily yield a monopoly on sputtering indignation.

 

He rather admired himself in the polished black marble of the hallway pillars. The whole look took hours to achieve. His face no longer erupted as it had done a few years earlier, but the odd plague-rose blemish surfaced, requiring attention.

 

Escorted by a silk-jacketed servant beyond the famously noiseless public rooms of the Club, he puffed with pride. Ordinary Members mimed harrumphs, seconding the doorman’s opinion of him. The servant opened an inner door, and stood aside to let Richard pass. He had not been this deep into the building since childhood. Then, he had almost been a possession, shown off by his father. Now, he was entitled to pass on his own merit. He could walk the corridors, consult the archives, visit the private collections, accept commissions. He was not merely a Life Member, inheriting that status from Major Jeperson, but an Asset, whose Talent suited him to act for the Club in Certain Circumstances.

 

He was treading in the footsteps of giants. Mycroft Holmes, the mid-Victorian civil servant who was instrumental in founding what was ostensibly a “club for the unclubbable” but actually an auxiliary extraordinary to British intelligence and the police. Charles Beauregard, the first Most Valued Member—the great puzzle-chaser of the 1880s and ‘90s and visionary chairman of the Ruling Cabal through the middle-years of the current century. Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder. Several terrifying individuals who operated covertly under the goggles of “Doctor Shade.” Adam Llewellyn de Vere Adamant, the adventurer whose disappearance in 1903 remained listed on the books as an active, unsolved case. Catriona Kaye, Winthrop’s lifelong companion, the first woman to accept full membership in the Club. Flaxman Low. Sir Henry Merrivale. Robert Baldick. Cursitor Doom.

 

He was ushered upstairs. In an underlit anteroom, his coat was taken by a turbaned orderly. He had a moment before a two-way mirror to be awed by the great tradition, the honour to which he would ascend in the presence of the Ruling Cabal. He patted his pockets, checked his fly and adjusted his tie. The weight of the razor was gone from his sleeve. Somewhere between the street and the anteroom, he had been frisked and defanged.

 

A baize door opened, and a tiny shove from the silent Sikh was necessary to propel him along a short dark corridor. One door shut behind him and another opened in front. Richard stepped into the windowless Star Chamber of the Ruling Cabal.

 

“Good Gravy, Edwin,” said someone sour, “is this what it’s come to? A bloody teddy boy!”

 

Some of Richard’s puff leaked out.

 

“I think he’s sweeet,” purred a woman with a whisky-and-cigarettes voice, like Joan Greenwood or Fenella Fielding. “Winner of the Fourth Form fancy dress.”

 

The last of his self-esteem pooled on the floor.

 

“Cool, man,” said another commentator, snapping his fingers. “Straight from the fridge.”

 

He didn’t feel any better.

 

Edwin Winthrop sat at the big table that had been Mycroft’s desk, occupying one of three places. He had slightly hooded eyes and an iron-grey moustache. Even if Richard weren’t attuned to “vibrations,” he’d have had no doubt who was in charge. Next to him was Catriona Kaye, a compact, pretty woman as old as the century. She wore a dove-grey dress and pearls. The only one of the Inner Circle who had treated him as a little boy, she was now the only one who treated him as a grownup. She was the heart and conscience of the Diogenes Club. Edwin recognised his own tendency to high-handedness, and kept Catriona close—she was the reason why he wasn’t a monster. To Edwin’s right was an empty chair. Sir Giles Gallant, make-weight on the Ruling Cabal, was absent.

 

“If we’ve finished twitting the new boy,” said Edwin impatiently, “perhaps we can get on. Richard, welcome and all that. This is the group Edwin introduced everyone. Richard put faces to names and resumes he already knew.

 

Dr. Harry Cutley, the pipe-smoking, tweed-jacketed scowler, held a chair of physics at a provincial redbrick university. He had unexpectedly come under the Club’s remit, as quantum mechanics led him to parapsychology. When Edwin vacated the post of Most Valued Member to run the Ruling Cabal, Sir Giles recruited Cutley to fill his roomy shoes. The academic finally had funds and resources to mount the research programme of his dreams, but was sworn not to share findings with his peers, turning his papers over instead to the Cabal. They then had to root out others capable of understanding Cutley’s work and determining what should leak onto the intellectual open market and what the world was not yet ready to know. In practice, Cutley had exchanged one set of grumbling resentments for another. He knew things no one else on the planet did, but colleagues in the real world wrote him off as a dead-ended time-server whose students didn’t like him and whose ex-wife slept with other faculty members. Cutley had a boozer’s red-veined eyes, hair at all angles and a pulsing, hostile aura—the plainest Richard had ever sensed, as if inner thoughts were written on comic strip bubbles.

 

The husky-voiced blonde in the black leotard and pink chiffon scarf was Annette Amboise, of Fitzrovia and the Left Bank. She wore no lipstick but a lot of eye makeup and had hair cropped like Jean Seberg as Joan of Arc. She smoked Gauloises in a long, enamel holder. Of Anglo-French parentage, she’d spent her mid-teens in Vichy France, running messages for the Resistance and Allied Intelligence. She had come to the Club’s notice after an unprecedented run of good fortune, which is to say she outlived all other agents in her district several times over. Catriona diagnosed an inbuilt ability to intuit random factors and predict immediate danger. Annette thought in knight moves—two hops forward, then a kink to the side. Since the war, she’d been doing other things. A retired interpretive dancer, past thirty with too many pulled muscles, she was authoress of a slim volume, Ectoplasm and Existentialism. Knowing what would probably happen next gave her a peculiarly cheerful fatalism. She had no accent, but showed an extremely French side in occasional “fa va” shrugs.

 

The tall, thin hipster was Danny Myles, whom Richard recognised as Magic Fingers Myles, piano player in a modern jazz combo famous for making “I Can’t Get Started With You” last an entire set at Ronnie Scott’s. He wore a green polo-neck and chinos, and had a neatly trimmed goatee. His fingers continually moved as if on an infinite keyboard or reading a racy novel in Braille. Born blind, Myles developed extra senses as a child. Gaining sight in his teens, Myles found himself in a new visual world but retained other sharpnesses. Besides his acute ear, he had “the Touch.” Richard and Annette took the psychic temperature of a room with invisible antennae (Catriona called them “mentacles”), but Myles had to lay hands on something to intuit its history, associations or true nature. The Magic Fingers Touch worked best on inanimate objects.

 

“This is Geoffrey’s boy,” explained Edwin. “We expect great things from him.”

 

From Magic Fingers, Richard gathered nonverbal information: he understood how everyone related to each other, where the frictions were, whom he could trust to come through, when he’d be on his own. Cutley was like a football manager required to play a board member’s nephew in goal. He hated “spook stuff’ and wanted to haul paraphenomena back to measurable realities. Annette was emotionally off on another plane, but mildly amused. She had vague, “not related by blood” auntie feelings for Richard and a nagging concern about his short-term future that did little for his confidence. Richard thanked Myles with a nod no one else noticed.

 

This is what it was like: Richard knew things most people had to guess at. A problem growing up, which he was not quite done with, was that he rarely appreciated few others felt and understood as he did. His first thought was that English people were too polite to mention things which were glaringly obvious to him. That had not gone down well at St. Custard’s. If he hadn’t been able to a chuck a cricket ball with a degree of devious accuracy, he’d likely have been burned at the stake behind the Prefects’ Hut.

 

“Now we’re acquainted,” said Edwin, “let’s get to why you’ve been brought together. Who’s heard of the Scotch Streak?”

 

“It’s a train, man,” said Myles. “Euston to Edinburgh, overnight.”

 

“Yes,” said Edwin. “In point of fact, the service, which leaves London at seven o’clock every other evening, does not terminate in Edinburgh. It continues to Portnacreirann, on Loch Linnhe.”

 

“Is this one of those railway mysteries?” asked Annette, squeezing her palms together. “I adore those.”

 

Edwin nodded, and passed the conch to Catriona.

 

* * * *

 

II

 

“In 1923, Locomotive Number 3473-S rolled out of foundry sheds in Egham,” began Catriona Kaye, the Club’s collector of ghost stories. “It was an A1 Atlantic Class engine. To the non-trainspotters among us, that means a shiny new chuff-chuff with all the bells and whistles. It was bred for speed, among the first British trains to break the hundred-mile-an-hour barrier. The London, Scotland and Isles Railway Company presented the debutante at the British Empire Exhibition in 1924, and christened ‘the Scotch Streak.’ A bottle of champagne was wasted on the cowcatcher by the odious Lady Lucinda Tregellis-d’Aulney. She mercifully passes out of the narrative. The LSIR got wind of a scheme by a rival to run a nonstop from London to Edinburgh, and added a further leg to their express, across Scotland to Portnacreirann. This sort of one-upmanship happened often before the railways were taken into public ownership. The Streak’s original colours were royal purple and gold. Even in an era of ostentation in highspeed transport, it was considered showoffy.

 

“The Scotch Streak was quickly popular with drones who wanted to get sozzled in Piccadilly, have a wee small hours dram in Edinburgh, then walk off the hangover in Glen Wherever while shooting at something feathery or antlered. All very jolly, no doubt. Until the disaster of 1931.

 

“There are stories about Inverdeith. In the eighteenth century, fishermen on Loch Gaer often netted human bones. After some decades, this led to the capture of the cannibal crofter famed in song as ‘Graysome Jock McGaer.’ He was torn apart by a mob on his way to the scaffold. During the interregnum, the Scots God-botherer Samuel Druchan, fed up because England’s Matthew Hopkins was hogging the headlines, presided over a mass witch-drowning. As you know, proper witches float when ‘swum,’ so Druchan took the trouble to sew iron weights to his beldames’ skirts. In 1601, a local diarist recorded that a ‘stoon o’ fire spat out frae hell’ plopped into the waters with a mighty hiss. However, the railway bridge disaster really put Inverdeith on the tragedy map.

 

“What exactly happened remains a mystery, but ... early one foggy morning in November, the Scotch Streak was crossing Inverdeith Bridge when—through human agency, gremlins, faulty iron or sheer ill-chance— 3473-S was decoupled from the rest of the train. The locomotive pulled away and steamed safely to the far side. The bridge collapsed, taking eight passenger carriages and a mail car with it. The rolling stock sank to the bottom of Loch Gaer with the loss of all hands, except one lucky little girl who floated.

 

“A board of inquiry exonerated Donald McRidley, the engine driver, though many thought he’d committed the unforgivable sin of cutting his passengers loose to save his own hide. Only Nicholas Bowler, the fireman, knew for sure. Rather than give testimony, Bowler lay on the tracks and was beheaded by an ordinary suburban service. McRidley was finished as an engineer. Some say that, like T. E. Lawrence reenlisting as Aircraftman Ross, McRidley changed his name and became a navvy, working all weathers on a maintenance gang, looking over his shoulder at dusk, dreading the reproachful tread of the Headless Fireman.

 

“Whatever he might or might not have done, McRidley couldn’t be blamed for the ‘In-for-Death Bridge.’ All manner of Scots legal inquiries boiled down to an unlovely squabble between Inverdeith Council and the LSIR. One set of lawyers claimed the sound structure wouldn’t have collapsed were it not for the Scotch Streak rattling over it at speeds in excess of the recommendation. Another pack counter-claimed eighty-nine people wouldn’t be dead if the bridge wasn’t a rickety structure liable to be knocked down by a stiff breeze. This dragged on. A newspaperman dug up a local legend that one of Druchan’s witches cursed her weights as she drowned, swearing no iron would ever safely span the loch. ‘Local legend’ is a Fleet Street synonym for ‘something I’ve just made up.’ The Streak ran only from London to Edinburgh until 1934, when a new bridge was erected and safety-tested. A fuss was made about the amount of steel used in the construction. Witches have nothing against steel, apparently. Then, full service to Portnacreirann resumed.

 

“Memories being what they were, folks who didn’t have a financial interest in the venture were reluctant to board the ‘In-for-Death Express.’ Only grimly smiling directors and their perspiring wives and children were aboard for the accident-free re-inaugural run. You can imagine the sighs of relief when Inverdeith Bridge was safely behind them. Controlling interest in the LSIR was held by Douglas Gilclyde of Kilpartinger, who horsewhipped a secretary he thought misreferred to him as ‘Lord Killpassengers.’ It was a point of pride for His Lordship, a parvenu ennobled by Lloyd George, to make the Scotch Streak a roaring success again. He tarted 3473 up with a fresh coat of purple and replaced the gold trim with his own newly minted tartan—which the unkind said made the engine look like a novelty box of oatcakes.

 

“Kilpartinger lured back the hunting set by trading speed records for social cachet. From 1934, the Scotch Streak became famously, indeed appallingly, luxurious. Padding on padding, Carrera marble sinks, minions in Gilclyde kilts servicing every whim. The train gained a reputation as a social event on rails. 3473 pulled a ballroom carriage, a bar to rival the Criterion and sleeping cars with compartments like rooms at the Savoy. In addition to tweedy fowl-blasters, the Streak gained a following among the ‘fast’ crowd. Debutantes on the prowl booked up and down services for months on end, in the hope of snaring a suitable fiancé. One or two even got married before they were raped. When his disgusted pater kicked him out of the family pile, Viscount St. John ‘Buzzy’ Maltrincham took a permanent lease on a compartment and made the Scotch Streak his address—until a pregnant Windmill Girl cut his throat somewhere between the Trossachs and Clianlarich.

 

“He wasn’t the only casualty. The Streak’s Incident Book ran to several spine-tingling volumes. People threw themselves under the train, got up on top and were swept off in tunnels, were decapitated when they disregarded ‘do not lean out of the window’ notices, opened doors and flung themselves across the landscape. Naturally, a number of fatalities occurred around Inverdeith. There was a craze for booking the up service on the Streak, naturally not bothering with the return. The procedure was to put a particular record on the wind-up Victrola as the train crossed the bridge, then take a graceful suicide leap as Bing Crosby crooned ‘a golden good-bye.’ Mistime it, and you smashed into a strut and rained down in pieces.

 

“Kilpartinger played up the Streak’s glamour by engaging the likes of Noel Coward, Ethel and Doris Waters, Jessie Matthews and Gracie Fields to entertain through the night. A discreet doctor prescribed pick-me-ups to keep the audience, and not a few performers, awake and sparkling. Houdini’s less-famous brother escaped from a locked trunk in the mail van and popped out of the coal tender. The Palladium-on-Rails business soured when a popular ventriloquist was institutionalised after an argument with his dummy. His act started off with the usual banter; then the dummy began making passes at women in the carriage. The vent was besieged. His dummy jeered him as he was beaten up by angry escorts. He snatched a hatchet and chopped at the dummy’s mocking head, taking off three of his own fingers.

 

“Of course, there were whispers. Among railwaymen, the Streak picked up a new nickname, ‘the Ghost Train.’ In 1938, I drafted a pamphlet for inclusion in my series, Haunted High-Ways. I got a look at the Incident Book. I conducted tactful interviews with passengers. They expressed a vague, unformed sense of wrongness. They saw things, felt things. Anecdotes piled up. The dirty dummy and the throat-cut bounder were the least of it. Several regulars dreaded trips on the Streak, but were unable to resist making them—as if afraid of what 3473 would do if they abandoned it. Real addicts use the serial number, never the name. Lord Kilpartinger issued writs and threats, then invited me to tea at Fortnum & Mason. With some justification, he pointed out that any train that carried as many passengers over as many years must collect horror stories and that I might as well investigate tragedies associated with the five-twelve twelve from Paddington to Swindon. Besides, he had just bought a controlling interest in my publisher and wondered if I wouldn’t rather write books on flower arrangement or how to host a dinner party.

 

“As I left, in something approaching high dudgeon, His Lordship tried to reassure me about the train. After all, he said, he’d travelled more miles on the Streak than anyone else with no obvious ill-effects. A month later, for some anniversary run or other, he boarded at Euston, posing cheerfully in his tartan cummerbund for the newspapers, clouds of steam billowing all around. After retiring to his compartment, he disappeared and did not pop out of the coal tender. He didn’t get off at Edinburgh or Portnacreirann. The general consensus was that he had contrived a fabulous exit to avoid the bankruptcy proceedings which, it turned out, were about to bring down the LSIR. Maybe Kilpartinger became another anonymous navvy on his beloved line, swinging a hammer next to the disgraced McRidley. Or perhaps he dissolved into a Scotch mist and seeped into the upholstery. If you run across him, give him my best.

 

“With the LSIR in ruins, it seemed likely the Streak had made its last run. It was saved by the war. Luxury took a backseat to pulling together, but the Streak was classified an essential service, supporting the Royal Navy Special Contingencies School at Portnacreirann. The Diogenes Club was busy on other fronts, but spared a young parapsychologist with a plum-bob and an anemometer to make a routine inspection. He ruled the train, the tracks and Inverdeith Bridge were perhaps slightly haunted. Had the Ruling Cabal listened to me rather than that bright lad, we would perhaps not be in this current pickle, but there’s no use squalling about it now.

 

“Soon, there was another strange story about. Take the Streak to your Special Contingencies course, and you’d win a medal. I went over the records last week—an enormously tedious job—and can confirm this was, in fact, true. ‘Special Contingencies,’ as you might guess, is a euphemism for ‘Dirty Fighting,’ which goes a long way towards explaining things. Nevertheless, a high proportion of the Streak’s sailors proved aggressive, valiant and effective in battle. A high proportion of that high proportion got their gongs posthumously. The more often a man rode the Scotch Streak, the more extreme his conduct. We don’t publicise the British servicemen tried for war crimes, but out of fewer than a dozen bad apples in the Second World War, five were Streak regulars. Americans rode the Ghost Train too. We don’t have official access to their records, but they have Alexanders and Caligulas too.

 

“After the war, the railways were nationalised. In Thomas the Tank Engine, the Fat Director became the Fat Controller. The LSIR was swallowed by British Rail 3473-S steams still, purple faded to the colour of a weak Ribena, tartan trim buried under a coat of dull dun. No Noel, no Gert and Daisy, no Archie Andrews. Providing you don’t mind changing trains at Edinburgh, there are cheaper, faster ways of getting to Loch

 

Linnhe. But the Scotch Streak clings to its ‘essential service’ classification. Which saves it from the unsentimental axe taken to unprofitable branch-lines and quaint countryside stations.

 

“The haunting never stopped.”

 

* * * *

 

III

 

“We’ve reams of anecdotal evidence for ab-natural activity,” said Edwin, taking over from Catriona. “Apparitions, apports, bilocation, sourceless sound, poltergeist nuisance, echoes from deep time, fits of precognition, possession, spontaneous combustion, disembodied clutching hands, phantoms, phantasms, pixies, nipsies, revelations, revenants, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Few sleep well on the sleeper. A typical toff thinks he’s slightly train-sick and decides to spend his next day out murdering English foxes rather than Scottish grouse. A percentage have much nastier turns. Outcomes range from severe ill-health and mental breakdown to disappearance and, well, death.”

 

“What about the staff, Ed?” asked Cutley, who had been taking notes.

 

Richard saw Edwin calculate how to keep aces in his hole while seeming to lay his cards on the table. It was habitual in these circles.

 

“BR have trouble keeping guards, waiters and porters,” Edwin admitted. “Even then, one see-no-evil conductor who’s been on the Streak for yonks swears the shudder stories are all hogwash. Presumably, he’s the opposite of sensitive.”

 

“Why now?” asked Annette, pluming smoke. She drew a question mark in the air with her burning cigarette-end.

 

“That’s the thing, Annie,” said Edwin. “With fewer souls riding the Streak, the haunting isn’t as noticeable as when Cat was on the case. But the Americans have expressed a concern. HM Government is under diplomatic pressure to sort things out, and you know where Ministers of the Crown call when ghoulies and ghosties rattle chains without permission.”

 

Edwin opened his hands, indicating the whole room.

 

Richard had paid close attention to Catriona Kaye’s story. Something in it jogged his mind.

 

“We’ve Miss Kaye’s manuscript and the wartime report,” said Harry Cutley, as if giving a tutorial. “Everyone is to read them by Thursday; then we’ll start fresh. Those of you who were with me on the Edgley Vale Puma Cult know how I like things done. Those of you who weren’t will find out soon enough. Annette, visit the newspaper library and go over all the cuttings on the Scotch Streak since the boiler was cast. Magic Fingers, get out in the yards, talk to railwaymen, choo-choo bores ... pick up any more stories for the collection. You ... ah, sorry ... the Jeperson boy ...”

 

Cutley knew very well what his name was, but waited for the prompt.

 

“Richard.”

 

The Most Valued Member flashed a joyless smile.

 

“Thank you. I will remember. Not Greasy Herbert, but Richard. Richard Jeperson. Dick the Lad. Rickie the Roll-and-Rocker. Fixed in the mind’s file, now. Anyway, Richard, you get your haircut down to Euston, trying not to slash cinema seats or terrorise old ladies en route, and book us on Thursday’s Streak. Get me and Annette First Class sleeping compartments, a berth in Second for Magic Fingers, and the railway equivalent of steerage for you. We have to cover the whole train.”

 

“I’ll ride the mail car if you think it’s a good idea.”

 

Cutley considered it.

 

“The Club can spring for four compartments,” put in Edwin airily. “If you’re all in First Class, no one will mind if you wander. With any other tickets, Richard and Danny wouldn’t be allowed where interesting business might be going on.”

 

“Whatever you think best,” said Cutley. “If money’s no object, we might as well all get the gold toilet seats and mints on the pillows. Dickie will qualify for a half-fare anyway.”

 

The academic was used to working on the cheap, in fear of a redbrick budget review. He also wasn’t happy to be given command of a group then undercut in front of them. Edwin had made Cutley Most Valued Member, but was prone to step out from behind the desk and upstage his successor. Catriona laid a hand on Edwin’s elbow, chiding with a gesture only the recipient and Richard noticed.

 

“Keep all the chits,” said Cutley. “Bus tickets, and so forth. My procedure is big on chits, comprenons-oui?”

 

Now, Cutley was needling Richard because he couldn’t afford to prick back at Edwin. Richard was getting a headache with the politics.

 

“This is a haunted house on wheels,” Cutley told them. “There are boring procedures for haunted houses, which will be followed. Background check, on-the-spot investigation, listing of observable phenomena and effects. Once that’s over, I will assess findings and make recommendations. If the haunting can be dispelled through scientific or spiritual efforts, no one will complain. Annette, I’d appreciate a rundown of possible rituals of exorcism or dispellment. Bell, book and railwayman’s lamp? Of course, we can always advise the train be taken out of service and the line abandoned. If there are no passengers to be haunted, it doesn’t matter if spectres drag their sorry shrouds along the rails.”

 

Richard put his hand up, as if in class.

 

Cutley, annoyed, noticed. “What is it, boy?”

 

“A thought, sir. If the train could be put out of service, it already would have been. There must be a reason to keep it running.”

 

Richard looked at Edwin. So did everyone else. Catriona massaged his arm.

 

At length, Edwin responded. “No use trying to keep secrets in a roomful of Talents, obviously.”

 

Danny Myles whistled.

 

“What is it?” asked Cutley, catching up.

 

“The Scotch Streak must stay in service. The Special Contingencies School is now a submarine base. A vital component in our national deterrent.”

 

“The gun we have to their heads while theirs is stuck into our tummy,” put in Catriona.

 

“Cat goes on Aldermaston marches and wants to ban the Bomb,” Edwin explained. “As a private individual, it is within her rights to hold such a position. In this Club, we do not decide government policy and can only advise....”

 

Annette almost snorted. She obviously knew Edwin Winthrop better.

 

“Every forty-eight hours,” Edwin continued, “mathematicians convene in Washington D.C. and use a computer to generate number-strings which are fed into an electronic communications network accessible only from secure locations at the Pentagon and our own Ministry of War. There’s another terminal in Paris, but it’s a dummy—the French can fiddle all they want, but can’t alter the workings of the big machine. We wouldn’t want them getting offended by the creeping use of terms like ‘le weekend’ and kicking off World War Three in a fit of haughty pique. Annie, the French half of you didn’t hear that. Once the numbers are in the net, they have to be conveyed to the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of Great Britain and selected officers on the front lines of the Western Alliance. We don’t use telephone, telegraph, telegram or passenger pigeon—we send couriers. The number-strings are known as the ‘Go-Codes.’ Unless they are keyed properly on special typewriters, orders cannot be given to arm a warhead, launch a missile or drop a bomb. Without the Go-Codes, we have no nuclear weapons.”

 

“And with them, we can end the world,” put in Catriona.

 

“So,” said Myles, waving his hands for emphasis, “we’ve B-52s zooming over the Arctic, nuclear subs cruising the seven seas, ranks of computers the size of Royal Pavillion, and brave soldier boys in the trenches ready to respond to any dire threat from the godless Commie horde ... but it all depends on some git catching a seven o’clock steam train from Euston every other evening?”

 

“That’s it, exactly,” said Edwin

 

“Crazy, man,” said Myles, snapping his fingers.

 

“As I said, matters of defence policy are beyond our remit. You understand now why governments are in a lather. If the Streak isn’t secure, nato wobbles. Quite apart from the haunting, they’re worried about spies. One reason the Go-Codes are still carried by train is that our fiendish intelligence friends think the Russkies don’t believe we’d really entrust so vital a duty to a couple of junior ratings on an overnight puff-puff.”

 

“I hope I meet a spy,” said Annette, posing languidly. “I always saw myself as Mata Hari. Can I lure young lieutenants to their doom?”

 

“Leave them alone, Annie,” said Edwin. “They’ve enough on their plates, what with World Peace in their pockets. There’s been a high turnover on that detail. One nervous collapse, one self-inflicted gunshot wound, one sudden convert off in a monastery somewhere. Do not let it be known outside this room, but in the past year there have been four separate blocks of up to eighteen hours when our defences were compromised because the Go-Codes didn’t arrive without incident. Consider the poor General whose burdensome duty it is to inform the President of this situation, let alone the possibility the Other Side might get wind of a first-strike opportunity. If we do hold a gun to their head, they’d best not find out the firing pin is wonky.”

 

Richard felt sickness in the pit of his stomach, as if he had washed down a half-pint of salted cockles with a strawberry milkshake. Despite Cutley’s “boring procedures for haunted houses,” this was a bigger deal than pottering around Borley Rectory feeling out cold spots. The nausea passed and, to his embarrassment, he found he was physically in a state of high excitement. He gathered this was common in the corridors of power— though since his voice had broken, it seemed the minutes of the day when he wasn’t sporting a raging erection were more noteworthy. Tight trousers did not make him any more comfortable. He blushed as Annette, perhaps peeping indelicately into his immediate future, smiled at him.

 

“Will the Yanks know we’re aboard?” asked Cutley.

 

“In theory, at the highest level. The boys on the train don’t know anything. They’ve been encouraged to believe they’re a decoy, and that their envelopes are to do with an inter-services gambling ring organised by a motor pool sergeant in Fort Baxter, Kansas. Spot the couriers if you must, but don’t get too close. Come back with concrete intelligence about whatever threats are gathering in the dark. I’ve always wanted to end a briefing by saying ‘this mission could shorten the war by six months.’ The next best thing is ‘the fate of the free world depends on you,’ which, I am sorry to say, it does. I’m sure you’ll do us proud, Harry.”

 

The lecturer shot glances at his group. Richard knew what Cutley thought of Annette, Magic Fingers and him. Two beatniks and a ted, not an elbow patch between them, just the sorts Hard-Luck Harry had hoped to get away from: bloody students!

 

“We’ll make the best of it, Ed,” said Cutley.

 

* * * *

 

IV

 

Richard walked under the Doric arches of Euston Station at five o’clock, two hours before the Scotch Streak was due to depart. He was among crowds, streaming from city offices to commuter trains.

 

“Star, News and Standard’,” shouted competing sixty-year-old “boys,” hawking the evening papers. Kruschev was in the headlines, shoe-banging at the UN. The Premier wouldn’t be such a growling bear if he knew Uncle Sam’s pants were down for up to eighteen hours at a time. If his Sputnik spied a gap in the curtain, Old Nikita might well lob a couple of experimental hot ones just to see what happened.

 

“Don’t even think about it, kiddo,” said a voice close to his ear. “World’s safe till midnight, at least. After that, it gets blurry ... but Madame Amboise sees all. Worry not your pretty little head.”

 

He recognised Annette from her perfume, Givenchy mingled with Gauloise, before he heard or saw her. She spun him round and kissed both his cheeks, not formally. Her wet little tongue dabbed the corners of his mouth.

 

For the trip, she had turned out in a black cocktail dress, elbow-length evening gloves, a shiny black hat with a folded-aside veil and a white fox-fur wrap with sewn-shut eyes. This evening, she wore lipstick—thin lines of severe scarlet. She posed like Audrey Hepburn, soliciting his approval, which was certainly forthcoming.

 

“That’s the spirit,” she said, patting his cheek.

 

He had a mental image of Annette in her underclothes—black, French and elaborate. It flustered him, and she giggled.

 

“I’m doing that,” she said. “It’s a trick.”

 

She slipped off her shoulder strap to show black lace.

 

“And it’s accurate,” she added. “Sorry, I mustn’t tease. You’re so easy to get a rise out of. I don’t get to play with anyone in the know very often.”

 

She tapped the side of her head and made spooky conjuring gestures.

 

Under her brittle flirtatiousness, she ran a few degrees high, trying to shake off a case of the scareds. That, in turn, worried him. Annette Amboise might come on like the Other Woman in a West End farce, but in the Diogenes Club’s trade—not to mention actual war—she was a battle-proved veteran. All he’d ever done was switch some wires. If she knew enough to be frightened, he ought to be terrified.

 

“Aren’t the arches magnificent?” she said. “They’ll be knocked down in a year or two. By idiots and philistines.”

 

“You’re seeing the future?”

 

“I’m reading the papers, darling. But I do see the future sometimes. The possible future.”

 

“What about...?”

 

She puffed and opened a fist as if blowing a dandelion clock. “Boom? Not this week, I think. Not if we have anything to do with it. Of course, that’d bring down the arches too.”

 

She touched the stone with a gloved hand, and shrugged.

 

“Nada, my love,” she said. “Of course, that’s Magic Fingers’ specialty, not mine. Laying on of hands. The Touch That Means So Much.”

 

Annette took him by the arm and steered him into the station. A porter followed, shoving a trolley laden with a brassbound trunk, matching pink suitcases, a vanity case and a hatbox. Richard had one item of luggage: a gladstone bag he’d found in a cupboard.

 

“There’s our leader,” said Annette, pointing.

 

Harry Cutley sat at a pie stall, drinking tea. His own personal cloud hung overhead. Richard wondered whether Edwin would show up to see them off, then thought he probably wouldn’t.

 

Annette stopped and held Richard back.

 

“Darling, promise me you’ll be kind to Harry,” she said, pouting, adjusting his tie as if he were a present done up with a bow.

 

Richard shrugged. “I didn’t have other plans.”

 

“You don’t need plans to be unkind. You’re like me, a feeler. Try to be a thinker too. Heaven knows, I won’t be. You and Harry aren’t a match, but a mix. Don’t be so quick to write him off. Now, let’s go and be nice.”

 

Harry looked up and saw them coming. He waved his folded newspaper.

 

“Where’s Myles?” he asked.

 

Neither Richard nor Annette knew. Harry tutted, “Probably puffing ‘tea’ in some jive dive.”

 

“Tea would be lovely, thanks,” said Annette.

 

Harry looked at the mug in his hand.

 

“Not this muck,” he said sourly. The woman behind the counter heard but didn’t care.

 

“Supper on the train, then?” said Annette. “Sample that famous Scotch Streak luxury?”

 

“Just make sure to keep the chits,” cautioned Harry.

 

“Don’t be such a grumpy goose,” said Annette, leaning close and kissing the lecturer, who didn’t flinch. “This will be a great adventure.”

 

“Like last time?”

 

“Well, let’s hope not that great an adventure.”

 

Harry pulled back the sleeve of his tweed jacket and showed a line of red weals leading into his cuff.

 

“Puma Cults,” commented Annette. “Miaow.”

 

Richard gathered Harry and Annette had both come off the Edgley Vale case with scars. The Most Valued Member had put that successfully to bed. An “away win” for the Diogenes Club. No points for the Forces of Evil. Harry even smiled for a fraction of a second as Annette purred and stretched satirically.

 

At once, Richard understood the difference between his Talent and Annette’s. He received, she sent. He picked up what others were feeling; she could make them feel what she felt. A useful knack, if she was in an “up” moment. Otherwise, she was a canary in a mineshaft.

 

Suddenly, Myles was there.

 

“Hey, cats,” he said, raising an eyebrow as that set Annette off on more miaows. “Ready to locomote?”

 

“If we must,” said Harry.

 

Magic Fingers dressed like a cartoon burglar—black jeans, tight jersey, beret, capacious carpetbag. All he needed was a mask.

 

Passengers travelling First Class on the Scotch Streak had their own waiting room, adjacent to the platform where the train was readied. On presenting tickets, the party were admitted by a small, cherubic, bald, uniformed Scotsman.

 

“Good evening, lady and gentlemen,” he said, like a headwaiter. “I’m Arnold, the conductor. If there is any way I can be of service, please summon me at once.”

 

“Arnold, the conductor,” said Harry, fixing the name in his mind.

 

Annette made arrangements to have her extensive luggage, and their three underweight bags, stowed on the train.

 

No extranormal energies poured off Arnold, just polite deference. Considering his age and Richard’s style, that was unusual. In the conductor’s view, purchase of a First Class Sleeping Compartment ensured admission to the ranks of the elect. The passenger was always right, no matter what gaudy finery he wore or what gunk was slathered on his hair. Richard realised Arnold was the see-no-evil fellow Edwin had mentioned. The man who was not haunted. The conductor might be immune to ghosts, the way some people didn’t catch colds. Or he could be a very, very good dissembler.

 

The waiting room wanted a thorough clean, but a residue of former glory remained. While Second and Third Class passengers made do with benches on the platform, First Class oiks could plump posteriors on divans upholstered in the Streak’s “weeping bruise” purple. Complimentary tea was served from a hissing urn—which made Cutley mutter about wasting threepence (and collecting a chit) at the pie stall. Framed photographs hung like family portraits, commemorating the naming ceremony (there was that Lady Lucinda Catriona disliked), the inaugural runs of 1928 and 1934 (Lord Kilpartinger in an engineer’s hat) and broken speed records. Nothing about Inverdeith Bridge, of course.

 

Other passengers arrived. Two young men might as well have had “Secret Courier” stitched to their hankie pockets. They had adult-approved US Navy crew cuts and wore well-fit civilian suits that didn’t yet bend with their bodies. Matching leather briefcases must contain the vital envelopes. Annette cast a critical eye over the talent; one nudged the other, who cracked a toothy smile that dimpled in his cornfed American cheek.

 

“So, where’s the spy?” whispered Annette.

 

“We’re the spies,” said Richard. “Remember? Mata Hari.”

 

Three sailors in whites looked like refugees from a road company of On the Town; one very drunk, his mates alert for the Shore Patrol. They’d be through for Portnacreirann too, though it would be a surprise if they really were travelling First Class. An allied uniform counted with Arnold. Mrs. Sweet, an elderly lady in a checked ulster, was particular about her gun cases. She issued Arnold with lengthy instructions for their storage. A clergyman swept in, and Richard’s first thought was that he was a disguised Chicago gangster. His ravaged cheeks and slicked-down widow’s peak irresistibly suggested a rod in his armpit and brass knucks up his sleeve. However, he radiated saintly benevolence. Richard ought to know not to judge by appearances.

 

A fuss erupted at the door. Arnold and a guard were overwhelmed by a large, middle-aged woman. She wore a floral print dress and a hat rimmed with wax grapes and dry, dead roses.

 

“I’ve got me ticket somewhere, ducks,” she said. “Give us a mo. Here we are. Me ticket, and me card.”

 

The woman had a Bow Bells accent and one of those voices that could crack crystal. Something about her alerted Richard. Annette and Myles had the same reaction. Psychic alarm bells.

 

“What is it?” asked Harry, noticing his group’s ears all pricked up at once.

 

“Calm,” said Annette.

 

Richard realised his heart was racing. He breathed deliberately and it slowed. Myles let out a whistle.

 

“Me card,” repeated the woman. “Elsa Nickles, Missus, Psychic Medium. I’m here to ‘elp the spirits. The ones tevvered to this plane. The ones who cannot find the rest they need. The ones trapped on your Ghost Train.”

 

Arnold was less interested in the woman’s card than her ticket, which turned out to be Third Class. Not a sleeping compartment, but a seat in the carriage next to the baggage car. A trained contortionist with no feeling at all in her back or lower limbs might stretch out and snooze.

 

The conductor told her this waiting room was First Class only. She wasn’t offended.

 

“I don’t want to go in, ducks. Just wants a butchers. The vibrations are strong in the room. No wonder your train’s got so many presences.”

 

The “Psychic Medium” craned over Arnold’s head and scanned the room, more obviously than Richard had done. She frankly stared at everyone in turn.

 

“Evenin’, vicar,” she said to the saturnine clergyman, who smiled, showing rotten teeth. “Should have those fixed,” she advised. “Pull ‘em all on the National Health and get porcelain choppers, like me.”

 

She grinned widely, showing a black hollow rim around her plates.

 

The vicar wasn’t offended, though he looked even more terrifying when assembling a smile.

 

Mrs. Nickles didn’t give Harry, Richard or the US Navy a second glance, but fluttered around Annette—’cor, wish I had the figure for that frock, girl”—and was taken with Magic Fingers.

 

“You’ve got the Gift, laddie. I can always tell. You see beyond the Visible Sphere.”

 

Myles didn’t contradict her.

 

“I sense a troubled soul ‘ere, or soon to be ‘ere,” she announced. “Never mind, I can make it well. It’s all we can do, ducks: make things well.”

 

Mrs. Sweet hid behind her Times and rigidly ignored everything.

 

Harry muttered, unnoticed by Mrs. Nickles.

 

The woman was a complication, not accounted for in Harry’s “boring procedures.” Richard sensed the Most Valued Member wonder idly if Mrs. Nickles might step under rather than onto the train.

 

The first time he’d “eavesdropped” on a musing like that, he’d picked up a clear vision from the Latin master; the Third Form mowed down by a machine gun barrage. He’d been horrified and torn: keep quiet and share in the guilt, speak out and be reckoned a maniac. Even if he prevented slaughter, no one would ever know. For two days, he’d wrestled the problem, close to losing bowel control whenever he saw the master round the quad with an apparently distracted smile and mass murder in mind. Then, Richard picked up a similar stray thought, as the Captain of the Second Eleven contemplated the violent bludgeoning of a persistent catch-dropper. With nervy relief, he realised everyone plotted atrocities on a daily basis. So far, he hadn’t come across anyone who really meant it. Indeed, imagined violence seemed to take an edge off the homicidal urge—folks who didn’t think about murder were more likely to commit one.

 

“Ahh, bless,” said Mrs. Nickles, standing aside so someone with a proper ticket could be let into the room.

 

A solemn child, very sleepy, had been entrusted by a guardian into the care of the Scotch Streak. She wore a blue, hooded coat and must be eight or nine. Richard, who had little experience with infants, hoped the girl wouldn’t be too near on the long trip. Children were like time bombs, set to go off.

 

“What’s your name?” asked Annette, bending over.

 

The girl said something inaudible and hid deeper in her hood.

 

“Don’t know? That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

 

Mrs. Nickles and Annette were both smitten. Richard intuited neither woman had living children. If Mrs. Nickles really was a medium, that was no surprise. Kids were attention sponges and sucked it all up—a lot of Talents faded when there was a pram in the house.

 

Annette found a large label, stiff brown paper, fastened around the girl’s neck.

 

‘“Property of Lieut-Cdr. Alexander Coates, RN,’“ she read. “Is this your Daddy?”

 

The little girl shook her head. Only her freckled nose could be seen. In the hooded coat, she looked more like a dwarf than a child.

 

“Are you a parcel, then?”

 

The hooded head nodded. Annette smiled.

 

“But you aren’t for the baggage car?”

 

Another shake.

 

Arnold announced that the train was ready for boarding.

 

The Americans jammed around the door as the British passengers formed an orderly queue. Annette took the little girl’s hand.

 

The Coates Parcel looked up, and Richard saw the child’s face. She had striking eyes—huge, emerald-green, ageless. The rest of her face hadn’t fully grown around her eyes yet. A bar of freckles crossed her nose like Apache war paint. Two red braids snaked out of her hood and hung on her chest like bell-pulls.

 

“My name is Vanessa,” she said, directly to him. “What’s yours?”

 

The child was strange. He couldn’t read her at all.

 

“This is Richard,” said Annette. “Don’t mind the way he looks. I’m sure you’ll be chums.”

 

Vanessa stuck out her little paw, which Richard found himself shaking.

 

“Good evening, Richard,” she said. “I can say that in French. Bon soir, Rishar. “And German. Guten Aben, Richard.”

 

“Good evening to you, Vanessa.”

 

She curtseyed, then hugged his waist, pressing her head against his middle. It was disconcerting—he was hugged like a pony, a pillow or a tree rather than a person.

 

“You’ve got a fan, man,” said Magic Fingers. “Congrats.”

 

Vanessa held onto him, for comfort. He still didn’t know what to make of her.

 

Annette rescued him, detaching the girl.

 

“Try not to pick up waifs and strays, lad,” said Harry.

 

Richard watched Annette lead Vanessa out of the waiting room. As the little girl held up her ticket to be clipped by Arnold, she looked back.

 

Those eyes!

 

* * * *

 

V

 

Richard was last to get his ticket clipped. Everyone found their proper carriages. Mrs. Nickles strode down the platform to Third Class, trailed by sailors.

 

He took in 3473-S. At a first impression, the engine was a powerful, massive presence. A huge contraption of working iron. Then, he saw it was weathered, once-proud purple marred and blotched, brass trim blackened and pitted. The great funnel belched mushroom clouds. He smelled coal, fire, grease, oil. Pressure built up in the boiler and heat radiated. A gush of steam was expelled, wet-blasting the platform.

 

“Bad beast, man,” said Myles, fingertips to metal.

 

As Annette said, his talent was to read inanimate, or supposedly inanimate, objects. He was qualified to evaluate the locomotive.

 

“Got a jones in it, like a circus cat that’s tasted blood, digs it, wants more.”

 

“That’s a comfort.”

 

Myles clapped his shoulder, magic fingers lingering a moment. Briefly, Richard felt a chill. Myles took his hand away, carefully.

 

“Don’t fret, man. I’ve known Number Seventy-three buses go kill-crazy. Most machines are just two steps from the jungle. No wonder witches don’t dig iron. Come on, Rich. ‘All aboard for the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe....’“

 

Arnold blew his whistle, a shrill night-bird screech. It was answered by a dinosaurian bellow from the locomotive. The steam-whoop rattled teeth and scattered a flock of pigeons roosting in the Euston arches.

 

“The train now standing at Platform Fourteen,” said an announcer over the tannoy, sounding like a BBC newsreader fresh from an elocution lesson, “is the Scotch Streak, for Edinburgh, and Portnacreirann. It is due to depart at seven o’clock precisely.”

 

Richard and Myles stepped up, into their carriage. The wide, plush-carpeted corridor afforded access to a row of sleeping compartments.

 

“You’re next to me, Richard,” said Annette, who had been installing Vanessa nearby. “How cosy.”

 

He looked at Magic Fingers, who shrugged in sympathy—with a twinge of envy—and went to find his place.

 

Richard checked out his compartment. It was like a constricted hotel room, with built-in single bed, fixed desk (with complimentary stationery and inkwell) and chair, a cocktail cabinet with bottles cradled in metal clasps, wardrobe-sized en-suite “bathroom” with a sink (yes, marble) and toilet (no gold seat). A second bed could be pulled down from an upper shelf, but was presently stowed. From murder mysteries set on trains, he knew the upper berth was mostly used for hiding bodies. Richard’s gladstone bag rested at the foot of the bed like a faithful dog. His towel and toiletries were stowed in the bathroom.

 

At first look, everything in First Class was first class; then the starched white sheets showed a little fray, and that grayish, too-often-washed tinge; the blue-veined sink had orange, rusty splotches in the basin and a broken plug-chain; cigarette burns pocked the cistern. “Kindly refrain from using the water closet while the train is standing in the station,” said a framed card positioned above the toilet. In an elegant hand, someone had added “Trespassers will be shot.”

 

Richard thought he saw something in the mirror above the sink, and had to fight an instinct to turn. He knew there would be nothing there. He looked deeper into the mirror, peering past his pushed-out face, ignoring a fresh-ish blotch on his forehead, searching for patches where the silvering was thin. He exhaled, misting the mirror. Runelike letters, written in reverse, stood out briefly. He deciphered “danger,” “warning” and “fell spirit,” then a heart, several Xs and a sigil with two “A”s hooked together.

 

“Made you look,” said Annette, from the corridor. She giggled.

 

He couldn’t help grinning. She was hatless now, languidly arranged against the door frame, dress riding up a few inches to show a black stocking-top, shoulders back to display her fall of silky hair. She drew her “AA” in the air with her cigarette end, and puffed a perfect smoke ring.

 

She drew him along the corridor. They joined Harry and Myles in the next carriage. The ballroom in Lord Kilpartinger’s day, it was now designated the First Class Lounge.

 

Magic Fingers found a piano, and extemporised on “The Runaway Train,” which Annette found hilarious. She curled up in a scuttlelike leather seat.

 

At the far end of the carriage sat the vicar—probably working on a sermon, though his expression suggested he was writing death threats to be posted through the letterboxes of nervous elderly ladies.

 

Arnold passed through the carriage, and informed them the bar would be open as soon as they were under way.

 

“Hooray,” said Annette. “Mine’s a gimlet.”

 

She screwed a fresh cigarette into her holder.

 

Arnold smiled indulgently and didn’t tell Myles not to tinkle the ivories. They were First Class and could swing from the chandeliers—which were missing a few bulbs, but still glinted glamorously—if they wanted.

 

“Impressions?” asked Harry, who had a fresh folder open and a ballpoint pen in his hand.

 

“All clear here,” said Annette. “We’ll live past Peterborough.”

 

“This box has had its guts battered,” said Magic Fingers, stuttering through a phrase, forcing the notes out, “but we’re making friends, and I think he’ll tell me the stories. ‘The runaway train came over the hill, and sheble-e-ew ...”‘

 

Harry looked at him and prompted, “Jeperson? Anything to add?”

 

Richard thought about the little girl’s ageless eyes.

 

“No, Harry. Nothing.”

 

Harry bit the top of his pen. The plastic cap was already chewed.

 

“I hope this isn’t a wasted journey,” said the Most Valued Member. “Just smoke-and-mirror stories.”

 

“It won’t be that,” said Annette. “I can tell.”

 

The whistle gave out another long shriek, a Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan yell from the throat of a castrated giant.

 

“... and she ble-ew-ew-ew-ew ...”

 

Without even a lurch, as smooth as slipping into a stream, the Scotch Streak moved out of the station. The train rapidly picking up speed. Richard sensed pistons working, big wheels turning, couplings stretching, the irresistible pull...

 

He had a thrill of anticipation. All boys loved trains. Every great mystery, romance or adventure must have a train in it.

 

“... the engineer said the train must halt, he said it was all the fireman’s —!”

 

Myles’ piano playing was shut off by a crash. The lid had snapped shut like a bear trap.

 

The jazzman swore and pulled back his hands. His knuckles were scraped. He flapped them about.

 

“Pain city, man,” he yelped.

 

“First blood,” said Annette.

 

“The beast’s impatient,” said Myles. “Antsy, itchy-pantsy. Out to get us, out to show who’s top hand. Means to kill.”

 

Harry examined the piano, lifting and dropping the lid. A catch should have held it open.

 

“Catch was caught, Haroldo,” said Magic Fingers, preempting the accusing question. “No doubt about it.”

 

Harry said the lid could easily have been jarred loose by the train in motion. Which was true. He did not make an entry in his folder.

 

Annette thought it was an attack.

 

“It knows we’re here,” she said. “It knows who we are.”

 

They were on their way. Outside the window, dark shapes rushed by, lights in the distance. The train flashed through a suburban station, affording a glimpse of envious, pale-faced crowds. They were only waiting for a diesel to haul them home to “villas” in Hitchin or Haslemere and an evening with the wireless, but all must wish they were aboard the brightly lit, fast-running, steam-puffing Streak. Bound for Scotland—mystery, romance and adventure!

 

Richard found he was shaking.

 

* * * *

 

ACT TWO: ON THE SCOTCH STREAK

 

I

 

Over the train-rattle, Annette Amboise heard herself scream.

 

She was in the corridor. The lights were out. One of her heels was broken, and her ankle turned.

 

The train was being searched, papers demanded, faces slapped, children made to cry, bags opened, possessions strewn. She’d soon be caught and questioned. Then, hours of agony culminating in shameful release. She’d hold off as long as she could. But, in the end, she’d break.

 

She knew she’d talk.

 

Fingers slithered around her neck. A barbed thumb pressed into the soft flesh under her jaw.

 

Her scream shut off. She couldn’t swallow her own spit. Air couldn’t reach her lungs.

 

The grip lifted her off her feet. Her back pressed against a window that felt like an ice-sheet. She was wrung out, couldn’t even kick.

 

She smelled foul breath, but saw only dark.

 

The train passed a searchlight. Bleaching light filled the corridor. Uniform highlights flashed: twin lightning-strike insignia, broken cross armband, jewel-eyed skull-badge, polished cap-peak like the bill of a carrion bird. No face under the cap, not even eyes. A featureless bone-white curve.

 

The boche had her!

 

She tried to forget things carried in her head. Names, code phrases, responses, locations, times, number-strings. But everything she knew glowed red, ready for the plucking.

 

Her captor held up his free hand, showing her a black, wet Luger. The barrel, cold as a scalpel, pressed to her cheek.

 

The light passed.

 

The pistol was pushed into her face. The gun sight tore her skin. Her cheek burst open like a peach. The barrel wormed between her teeth. Bitter metal filled her mouth.

 

The grip around her throat relaxed, a contemptuous signal.

 

She drew in breath and began to talk.

 

* * * *

 

“Annie,” said Harry Cutley, open hand cupped by her stinging cheek, “come back.”

 

She had been slapped.

 

She was talking, giving up old names, old codes. “Dr. Lachasse, Mady Holm, Moulin Vielle, La Vache, H-360 ...”

 

She choked on her words.

 

Harry was bent over her. She was on a divan in the lounge carriage. Myles and Richard crowded around. Arnold the conductor attended, white towel over his arm, bearing cocktails. Hers, she remembered, was a gimlet.

 

“Where were you?” asked Harry. “The war?”

 

She admitted it. Harry had been holding her down, as if she were throwing a fit. Suddenly self-conscious, he let her go and stood away. Annette sat up and tugged at her dress, fitting it properly. Nothing was torn, which was a mercy. She wondered about her face.

 

Her heart thumped. She could still feel the icy hand, taste oily gunmetal. When she blinked, SS scratches danced in the dark.

 

“Can we get you anything?” asked Harry. “Water? Tea?”

 

“I believe that’s mine,” she said, reaching out for her cocktail. She tossed it back at a single draught. Her head cleared at once. She replaced the empty glass on Arnold’s tray. “Another would be greatly appreciated.”

 

Arnold nodded. Everyone else had to take their drinks from the tray before he could see to her request. They sorted it out—a screwdriver for Myles, whisky and water for Harry, a virgin mary for Richard. Arnold, passing no comment on her funny turn, withdrew to mix a fresh gimlet.

 

“Case of the horrors?” diagnosed Myles.

 

She held her forehead. “In spades.”

 

“A bad dream,” said Harry, disappointed. His pen hovered over a blank sheet in his folder. “Hardly a manifestation.”

 

“To dream, wouldn’t she have to be asleep?” put in Richard. “She went into it standing up.”

 

“A fugue, then. A fit.”

 

Harry erred on the side of rational explanation. Normally, Annette admired that. Harry kept an investigation in balance, stopped her—and the rest of the spooks—from running off with themselves. Usually, ghosts were only smugglers in glow-in-the-dark skeleton masks. Flying saucers were weather balloons. Reanimated mummies were rag week medical students swathed in mouldy bandages. Now, his thinking was just blinkered. There were angry spirits on the Scotch Streak. And, for all she knew, little green Martians and leg-dragging Ancient Egyptians.

 

“Have you had fits before?” asked Richard.

 

“No, Richard,” she said patiently. “I have not.”

 

“But you do get, ah, ‘visions’?”

 

“Not like this,” she said. “This was a new experience. Not a nice one. Trust me. It reached out and hit me.”

 

“‘It’?” said Harry, frowning. “Please try to be more scientific, Annie! You must specify. What ‘it’? Why an ‘it’ and not a ‘them’?”

 

Her heartbeat was normal now. She knew what Harry—irritating man!—meant. She tried to be helpful.

 

“Just because it’s an ‘it’ doesn’t mean there’s no ‘them’? An army is an ‘it,’ but has many soldiers, a ‘them.’“

 

Harry angry, at something Richard called him.

 

“What came for me wasn’t one of my usuals,” she continued. “I see what might happen. And not in ‘visions,’ as Richard put it. I don’t hear ‘voices’ either. I just know what’s coming, or might be coming. As if I’d skipped ahead a few pages and skim-read what happens next.”

 

Harry, Richard and Myles backing away from her. No, they were still close—they wouldn’t back away for a few minutes.

 

“I see round corners. Into the future. This was from somewhere else.”

 

“The past?” prompted Richard. “A ghost?”

 

“The past? Yes. A ghost? Not in the traditional sense. More like an incarnation, an embodiment. Not a personality. My idea of the Worst Thing. It reached into me, found out what my Worst Thing was, and played on it. But there was still the train. I was on the train. It lives here. The Worst Thing. The Worst Thing Ever. The Worst Thing in the World.”

 

“Dramatic, Annie, but not terribly helpful.”

 

Harry put the top back on his biro.

 

“Listen to her,” said Richard, slipping an arm around her shoulder—a mature gesture for such a youth. “She’s not hysterical. She’s not imagining. She is giving you a report. Write down what she’s said.”

 

Harry was not inclined to pay attention to the Jeperson boy.

 

“I can’t,” he said. “It’s static. It’ll cloud the issue. We need observable phenomena. Incidents that can be measured. Traced back to a source. I’ll get the instruments.”

 

“We have instruments,” said Richard. “Better attuned than your doodads, Daddy-O. We have Annette and Magic Fingers.”

 

He didn’t include himself, but should have.

 

A burst of indignant fury belched from Harry as Richard called him “Daddy-O.” She flinched at the psychic outpouring, but less than she would if she hadn’t known it was coming.

 

The lad was pushing with Harry. He couldn’t help himself.

 

Myles laid a hand on her forehead, nodded.

 

“Something’s been at her,” he said. She didn’t like the sound of that. “Left claw marks.”

 

“Will everybody please stop talking as if this were my autopsy,” she said. “I have been attacked, affronted, shaken. But I am not a fragile flower you need to protect. I can take care of myself.”

 

Like she did in the war.

 

The curve under the SS cap came back to her. If questioned, she would have talked. Everyone did, eventually. It had never come to it, because of her trick, her way of putting her feet right, of avoiding situations. Others— the names that had come back to her—had been less fortunate. As far as she knew, they were dead or damaged beyond repair. Most had been caught—talking made no difference in the end, and they were still killed.

 

Ever since, she had been putting her feet right. Walking near peril, not into it. Here, she was on a train—a row of linked boxes on wheels. There might be no right steps here. There might only be danger. Her gift was often knowing where not to be. Here, knowing where not to be did not mean she could avoid being there.

 

She trusted her instincts. Now, they were shouting Pull the communication cord! She could afford the fine for misusing the emergency stop signal. One swift tug, and brakes would be thrown. The Scotch Streak would scream to a halt. She could jump onto the tracks, head off over the fields.

 

Harry, Richard and Myles backed away from her. Just as she’d known they would. She ticked off the moment, grateful there wasn’t anything more to it.

 

She was pulling the communication cord.

 

She suppressed the instincts. The red cord—a chain, actually—still hung, above a window, unbothered in its recess. She would ignore it.

 

Would she pull the cord in the future or was she imagining what it would be like? No way to tell. She saw herself in the dock, being lectured, then paying five one-pound notes to a clerk of the court—but the clerk had no face. That usually meant she was imagining. If this was going to happen, she would see a face, and recognise it later.

 

Then, her brain buzzed. She couldn’t mistake this for wandering imagination. Before the war, a child psychiatrist labelled Annette’s puzzling malaise as “acute déjà vu.” Catriona Kaye modified the diagnosis and coined the term “jamais vu.” Annette did not have “I have been here before” memories of the present, but “I will be here soon” memories of the future.

 

An open exterior door, nighttime countryside rushing past. Someone falling from the train, breaking against a gravel verge. And someone coming for her, from behind.

 

If that was a few pages ahead, she’d rather fold the corner at the end of this chapter, put the book on her bedside table and never open it again. But that wasn’t how the world worked.

 

Arnold came with her second gimlet. This one she sipped.

 

“Perfect,” she told the conductor, suppressing shivers.

 

* * * *

 

II

 

Annette’s recovery impressed Richard. Two gimlets and a nip to her compartment to fix her face, and she was set. Her strings were notches too tight, but so were everyone else’s. She flirted, presumably on instinct, flitting among her colleagues, seeming to offer equal time. Only Richard noticed he was getting marginally more serious attention than Harry Cutley or Danny Myles. She already knew them but needed to puzzle out the new boy, fix him in her mind the way Harry fixed names, by rolling him around, pinching and fluffing, testing reactions. Which, as ever, were warm and, he thought, horribly obvious.

 

Harry sourly made shorthand notes in his folder.

 

The frightening vicar gently enquired as to the lady’s condition. Annette said she was fine, and he retreated, satisfied. Richard still wondered if the man was faking his aura. His killer’s hands seemed made to be gloved in someone else’s blood.

 

Standing nearby, Annette was carefully not looking at the communication cord. Of course. Anyone who travelled by train knew that imp of the perverse which popped up at the sight of a “penalty for improper use—£5” notice—-pull the chain, see what happens, go on, you know you want to. On the Scotch Streak, the imp was a bullying, nagging elemental.

 

Annette felt Richard’s lapel between thumb and forefinger.

 

“Real,” she said. “Sometimes I can’t tell anymore.”

 

He didn’t know where to put his hands.

 

“Put the boy down, Annie,” said Harry. “Come fill in this incident form. Since you’re convinced you were assaulted, we must have a first-person account before memories fade.”

 

She shuddered and joined Harry. He gave her a sheet of paper and a pencil, which she proceeded to use as if sitting an exam, producing neat, concise notations in the spaces provided.

 

Danny Myles sat at the piano, fingers tapping the closed lid. His bruises were rising. He smiled, did a little two-finger Gene Rrupa solo on the polished wood.

 

“Me next, you think?” Richard asked.

 

Myles lifted his shoulders.

 

“Watch your back, Jack.”

 

The carriage windows were ebony mirrors. If Richard got close to the glass and strained, he could make out the rushing countryside. A late supper would soon be served in the dining carriage. The train didn’t stop until Edinburgh, at half-past one; then, after a twenty-minute layover, it would continue to Portnacreirann, arriving with the dawn.

 

The overnight express felt more like an ocean liner than a train. Safe harbour was left behind and they were alone on the vast, deep sea.

 

Though they had compartments, none of them would sleep.

 

Richard took out his father’s watch, checked it against the clock above the connecting door. He had ten past nine, the train clock had ten to. He’d wound the watch at Euston, setting the time against the big station clock.

 

Myles saw what he was doing, rolled his sleeve back and felt a glassless watch—a holdover from his blind days. “Stopped, man,” he said. “Dead on the vine. Seven seven and seven seconds. That’s a panic and a half.”

 

“I won’t have one of those things,” said Annette, looking up from her form. “Little ticking tyrants.”

 

“Prof?” Myles prompted Harry.

 

Harry pulled a travel clock out of a baggy pocket and held it next to his wrist-watch.

 

“Eight thirty-two. Ten oh six.”

 

“Want to take a stab at which is the real deal?” asked Magic Fingers.

 

They all looked at the train clock, ticking towards suppertime.

 

“What I thought,” said the jazzman.

 

Harry Cutley riffled through his folder and dug out more forms. He handed them out. Myles got on with it, turning out a polished paragraph. Richard simply wrote down “watch fast.”

 

“Perhaps now you’ll stay away from mechanical instruments and rely on people,” said Annette. “You know clocks run irregularly in haunted places, so why do you trust thermometers, barometers, wire recorders and cameras?”

 

“People run irregularly too,” said Harry reasonably. “Even—no, especially—Talents.”

 

Richard was piqued. His watch was no ordinary timepiece. His father had inherited it from his grandfather, who had sat with Mycroft Holmes on the first Ruling Cabal. Geoffrey Jeperson had carried the watch all through the war. The Major, thinking his business done in a refugee camp, had been checking the time when he and a large-eyed, hollow-bellied child noticed one another. The watch brought them together. The boy who would become Richard Jeperson reached for the bauble, taking it reverentially when the Major, on instinct, trusted it to him. He had solemnly felt its weight, listened to its quiet tick, admired its Victorian intricacy through a panel in the face. Inside gears and wheels were tiny fragments of unknown crystal, which sparkled green or blue in certain light. The roman numerals were lost in tiny engravings of bearded satyrs and chubby nymphs.

 

Those first ticks were where Richard’s memory began. Before now, the watch had never betrayed him.

 

If Jeperson’s watch wasn’t to be trusted, what else in the life furnished for him by the Diogenes Club was left? The watch wound with a tiny key, which was fixed to the chain—it could also stop the mechanism, and Richard did so. If the watch could not run true, it should not run at all. He felt as if a pet had died, and he’d never had pets. He unhooked the chain and wondered if he’d ever wear it again. He slipped watch and chain into a pocket and handed back the incident form.

 

Arnold, who obviously had no trouble with his watch—a railway watch, as much a part of the Scotch Streak as the wheels or the windows— announced that supper was served. According to the train clock, it was nine o’clock precisely.

 

Harry reset his watch and clock against the train time. He made a note in his folder.

 

“I foresee you’ll be at that all night,” said Annette. “Without using a flicker of Talent. It’s Sod’s Law.”

 

Harry smiled without humour, not giving her an argument.

 

It hit Richard that something had gone on between Harry Cutley and Annette Amboise, not just an investigation into a Puma Cult. Harry took teasing from her he wouldn’t from anyone else. He sulked like a boy when she paid attention elsewhere. She’d told Richard not to underestimate the Most Valued Member.

 

Now, in a way that annoyed him, he was jealous.

 

“Should we sample the Scotch Streak fare?” said Annette. “In Kilpartinger’s day, the cuisine was on a par with the finest continental restaurants.”

 

“I doubt British Rail have kept up,” said Harry. “It’ll be beef and two veg, pie and chips or prehistoric bacon sarnies.”

 

“Yum,” said Magic Fingers. “My favourite.”

 

“Come on, boys. Be brave. We can face angry spirits, fire demons, Druid curses and homicidal lunatics. A British Rail sandwich should hold no horrors for us. Besides, I’ve seen the menu. I rather fancy the quail’s eggs.”

 

Annette led them to the dining carriage. Wood-panel and frosted-glass partitions made booths. Tables were laid for two or four.

 

As he passed under the lounge clock, Richard looked up. For a definite moment, he saw a face behind the glass, studded with bleeding numbers, clock-hands nailed to a flattened nose, cheeks distended, eyes wide, clockmaker’s name tattooed on stretched lips.

 

“That’s where you’ve got to,” he mused, recognising Douglas Gilclyde. “Lord Killpassengers himself.”

 

The face was gone. Richard thought he should mention the apparition, then realised he’d only have to fill in another form and opted to keep stumm. There’d be plenty more where that came from.

 

* * * *

 

III

 

They were all laughing at him, the bastards!

 

Harold Cutley tasted ash, bile and British Rail pork pie. He wanted to tell the bastards to shut up. The only noise he produced was a huffing bark that made the bastards laugh all the more.

 

“Gone down the wrong tube,” said the insufferable Jeperson Boy.

 

The French tart slapped him on the back, not to clear the blockage— taking an excuse to give him a nasty thump.

 

“Get Prof a form to fill in,” snarked the beatnik. “See how he likes it.”

 

Cutley stood and staggered away from the table. He honked and breathed again. He could talk if so inclined. As it happened, he bloody well wasn’t.

 

He’d known they’d all gang up on him!

 

That was how it always was. At Brichester, no one understood his work and he was written off as “the Looney.” Muriel hadn’t helped, betraying him with all of them. Even Head of Physics, Cox-Foxe. Even bloody students! He was with the Diogenes Club toffs on the sufferance of Ed Winthrop, who habitually overruled and sidelined and superseded. Ed had saddled Harry with this shower so he couldn’t get anywhere, would never have any findings to call his own.

 

No one was coming after him. He shot a glance back at the booth, where Annette was canoodling with the teddy boy. The bitch, the bastard! Magic Fingers was tapping the table, probably hopped up on “sneaky pete.” If there were results to be had, he’d have to find them on his own.

 

He would show them. He would have to.

 

The conductor—what was his name? why hadn’t he fixed it?—was in his way, blocking the narrow aisle. Cutley got past the man, shrinking to avoid touching him, and strode towards the dark at the end of the carriage.

 

“Well, really,” said the frumpy bat who was the only other diner, the old girl with the guns. She’d spilled claret on her gammon and pineapple and was going to blame Harold Cutley. “I must say. I never did.”

 

Cutley thought of something devastating to snap back at the pinch-faced trout, but words got mixed up between his brain and his pie-and-bile-snarled tongue and came out as spittle and grunts.

 

The woman ignored him and forked a thin slice of reddened meat into her mouth.

 

He looked back. The carriage had stretched. The rest of his so-called group were dozens of booths away, in a pool of light, smiling and fondling, relieved he was gone, already forgetting he’d ever been there. The bastarding bastards! They had the only bright light. The rest of the carriage was dim.

 

Now there were other diners, in black and white and silent. One or two to every fifth or sixth booth. Shadows on frosted-glass partitions. Starched collars and blurry faces. Some were missing eyes or mouths; some had too many.

 

Muriel was here somewhere, having her usual high old time while someone else brought home the bacon.

 

Bitch!

 

“May I see your ticket?”

 

It was the conductor. Or was it another official? This one looked the same, but the tone of voice was not so unctuous. He sounded deeper, stronger, potentially brutal. More like a prison warder than a servant.

 

What was the name again? Albert? Alfred? Angus? Ronald? Donald?

 

Arnold—like Matthew Arnold, Thomas Arnold, Arnie, Arnoldo, Arnold. That was it. Arnold.

 

“What is it, Arnold?” he snapped.

 

“Your ticket,” he insisted. His collar insignia, like a police constable’s, was a metal badge. LSIR. That was wrong, out of date. “You must have your ticket with you at all times and be prepared to surrender it for inspection.”

 

“You clipped mine at Euston,” said Cutley, patting his pockets.

 

Cutley searched himself. He found his bus ticket from Essex Road to Euston, a cinema stub (Is 9d, Naked as Nature Intended, the Essoldo), a slip pinned inside his jacket since it was last dry-cleaned three years ago, a sheaf of shorthand notes for a lecture he’d never given, an invitation to Cox-Foxe’s thirty-years-service sit-down dinner, a page torn out of the Book of Common Prayer with theorems pencilled in the margin, a linked chain of magician’s handkerchiefs some bastard must have planted on him as a funny, a Hanged Man tarot card that had been slipped to him as a warning by that blasted Puma Cult, his primary school report card (“Fair Only”), an expired ration book, a French postcard Muriel had once sent him, his divorce papers, a signed photograph of Sabrina, a Turkish bank-note, a card with spare buttons sewn onto it, a leaf torn out of a desk calendar for next week, and a first edition of Thomas Love Peacock’s Headlong Hall he had once taken out of Brichester University Library and not got round to returning but which he could’ve sworn he’d left behind in the house Muriel had somehow wound up keeping when she walked out on him. But no ticket.

 

“Would this be yours?” said Arnold, holding up a strip of card.

 

Cutley was more annoyed. This was ridiculous.

 

“If you had it all the time, why didn’t you say so, man?”

 

“We have to be sure of these things.”

 

Cutley noticed that the conductor wasn’t “sirring” him anymore. Before he could take the proffered ticket, he had to return his various discoveries to his pockets. Even if he piled up the things he could afford to throw away, it was a devil of a job to fit everything back into his jacket, which was baggier and heavier by the minute.

 

Arnold watched, still holding out the ticket.

 

Beyond the conductor, the dining car was nearly empty again. Jeperson, Annette and Magic Fingers were in the far distance, merrily tucking into knickerbocker glory or some other elaborate, sickly-sweet pud. None of that on his old ration book, he remembered with a bitter twinge.

 

He was sorted out. Except he had put the Peacock with the used bus and cinema tickets. He slid the book into his side-pocket, tearing a seam with a loud rip. He had a paper of buttons but no needle and thread. Muriel always had a needle, ready threaded, pinned about her in case of emergencies. She wasn’t in the dining carriage now—probably off in some fellow’s compartment, on her knees, gagging for it, the cow, the harlot!

 

“Why are you still here?” he asked Arnold, snatching his ticket.

 

“To make sure,” said the conductor. “This isn’t your place. This is for First Class Passengers only.”

 

Bloody typical! These jumped-up little Hitlers put on a blue serge uniform that looked a bit like a policeman’s and thought they could order everyone else about, put them all in their proper and bloody places. One look at Harry Cutley was enough to tell them he didn’t belong with silver cutlery and long-stemmed roses at every table. All the knickerbocker glory a fat girl could eat conveyed with the compliments of the chef to the table in crawling, grovelling deference! Only, just this once, Harry Cutley did belong. Baggy, torn, patched jacket and all, Cutley was in First Class. He had a First Class ticket, not bought with his own money, but his all the same. With angry pride, he brandished it at the conductor’s nose.

 

“What does this say, my good man?”

 

“I beg your pardon,” responded Arnold, with a tone Cutley didn’t like at all. “What does what say?”

 

“This ticket, you bastard. What does this ticket say?”

 

“Third Class,” said the conductor. “Which is where you should be, if you don’t mind my saying. This is not the place for you. You would not be comfortable here. You would be conscious of your, ah, shortcomings.”

 

Cutley looked at his ticket. It must be some sort of funny.

 

“This isn’t mine,” he said.

 

“You said it was. You recognised it. You would not want to make a scene in the First Class Dining Carriage.”

 

“First Class! I don’t call a stale pork pie first-class dining!”

 

“The fare in Third Class might be more suited to your palate. More your taste. Rolls are available. Hard-tack biscuits. Powdered eggs, snoek, spam. Now, move along, there’s a good fellow.”

 

Arnold, seeming bigger, stood between him and the booth where the others were downing champagne cocktails. Cutley tried to get their attention, but Arnold swayed and swelled to block him from their sight. Cutley tried to barge past. The conductor laid hands on him.

 

“I must ask you to go back to your place.”

 

“Bastard,” spat Cutley into the man’s bland face.

 

Arnold had a two-handed grip on Cutley’s lapels. So where did the fist that sank into Cutley’s stomach come from?

 

Cutley reeled, hearing another long rip as a lapel tore in the conductor’s hand. His gut clenched around pain. He knew when he was beaten. He slunk off, towards the connecting door. Beyond was Second Class, not his place either. He was supposed to be at the back of the train, with the baggage and the mail, probably with live chickens and families of untouchables who sat on suitcases tied with string, lost in the crowd, one of the masses, trodden under by bastards and bitches. In his place.

 

There were things back there which he could use. He knew where they were. He had overheard, at Euston. He remembered the long cases.

 

Guns!

 

He limped out of the dining carriage, into the dark.

 

* * * *

 

IV

 

“What’s up with Harry?” Richard asked.

 

“Gyppy tummy?” suggested Magic Fingers.

 

“I should go after him,” said Annette, folding her napkin. “We shouldn’t be separated.”

 

Richard touched her arm. His instincts tingled. So, he knew at once, did hers.

 

Harry had stumbled past Arnold, who was briefly showed bewildered, and charged out of the carriage.

 

“You stay here,” said Richard. “I’ll go.”

 

He stood. Annette was supposed to admire his manly resolve. She radiated a certain mumsy pride as if he were a schoolboy striding to the crease to face the demon bowler of the Upper Sixth. Not quite what he intended.

 

Harry Cutley had been seized in the middle of a mouthful of pie. Not necessarily a phenomenon worth an incident form. Something in his eyes as he veered off, trying to stanch coughing, suggested he wasn’t seeing what Richard was. The man had been touched. Attacked, even.

 

“Your friend, sir,” said Arnold, with concern. “He seems taken poorly.”

 

“What did he say?”

 

“Nothing repeatable, sir.”

 

“I’ll see to him, thank you, Arnold.”

 

“Very good, sir.”

 

Every time he spoke with Arnold, Richard had to quash an impulse to tip him. At the end of the journey, was it the done thing to palm a ten-bob note and pass it over with a handshake?

 

He walked the length of the carriage, rolling with the movement of the train. He had become accustomed to the Scotch Streak. He had to concentrate to hear the rattle of wheels, the chuff-chuff of the engine, the small clinkings of cutlery and crockery. Almost comforting. Catriona Kaye said the most dangerous haunted houses always feel like home.

 

Hairy had barged past Mrs. Sweet. Richard thought of talking with her, but she glared as he walked towards her. He was a duck’s-arse-quiffed affront to everything she believed. Real killers wore respectable suits from Burton’s and had faces like trustworthy babies. That was how they got close. Richard had a pang of worry that Mrs. Sweet might have an extra gun about her—a hold-out derringer in her stocking-top or a pepperpot in her reticule—in case a wounded grouse flapped close enough to need its head dissolving with a single, deadly-accurate shot. This train gave people funny ideas. She might easily pot him on the off chance.

 

He got by Mrs. Sweet unshot, looked over his shoulder at Annette and Myles, and stepped through the connecting door into the Second Class carriage. He checked the lavatory and didn’t find Harry—though he caught sight of a cracked mirror and started, shocked at a glimpse of an antlered, fox-faced quarry with a target marked on his forehead in dribbling blood. How others see us.

 

The carriage was empty. The corridor was unlit. Second Class did not have sleeping berths, but there were regular compartments, suitable comfortably for six, which could take ten in a pinch. The dark made it easier to see out of the windows. This stretch of track ran though ancient forest. Branches twisted close, leaves reaching for the passing express.

 

Richard made his way down the carriage, checking each compartment. None of the privacy blinds were down. One seat supported a huddle of old clothes that might have been a sleeping Second Class passenger—though it was early to turn in for the night. On a second look, no one was there. He knew better than be caught out that way, and looked again. Whatever had been huddled was gone back to its hole. He trusted it would stay there.

 

It couldn’t be the throat-cut spectre of ‘Buzzy’ Maltrincham. The vicious Viscount wouldn’t have been caught dead in Second Class. 3473 had many more ghosts than him. Would Lord Kilpartinger show up again? Disgraced old Donald McRidley—assuming he was dead. The Headless Fireman? The passengers of ‘31? The waterlogged witches of Loch Gaer?

 

It got darker as he proceeded. Turning back, he saw the glass of the connecting door was now opaque—had someone drawn a blind?—and the dining carriage cut off from view.

 

“Harry?” he called out, feeling foolish.

 

Something pattered, near the toilet cubicle. Fast and light. Not clumsy Harry Cutley. It might be a large cat. They had railway cats, didn’t they? There was one in Old Mother Possum’s. But usually on stations, not on trains.

 

Another of Catriona Kaye’s sayings was that sometimes observers brought their own ghosts and the haunted place merely fleshed them out. Was there a puma person still after Harry? Hadn’t Annette been bothered by something from the war? Her ‘it,’ her Worst Thing? Some entities fished out your worst nightmare—your worst memory, your darkest secret—and threw it at you. But nothing dug for your happiest moments, your fondest wishes, your most thrilling dreams and wrapped them up as a present. What had Magic Fingers called it, Sod’s Law?

 

Richard remembered his father’s advice about how to see off a tiger if you were unarmed. Knock sharply on its snout, as if rapping on a front door. Just the once. Serve notice you are not to be bothered. The big cat would bolt like a doused kitten, leaving rending, clawing and devouring for another day. Pumas are just weedy imitation tigers, so the Major Jeperson treatment should send one chasing its tail. Of course, his father never claimed to have used his tiger-defying technique in the wild. It was wisdom passed down in the family—untested, but comforting.

 

“Harry?”

 

Now, Richard felt like an idiot. Plainly, lightfeet wasn’t Harry Cutley.

 

He walked back, past the compartments—that huddle was still absent, thank you very much—towards the toilet and the connecting door. He moved with casual ease, controlling an urge to scream and run. The puma was Harry’s Worst Thing. Not Richard Jeperson’s.

 

The area between cubicle and door was untenanted. He thought. He held the door handle, torn. He couldn’t return to Annette and Myles with no news of Harry, but didn’t want to venture farther into the train without reporting back, even if he raised a fuss. Harry, technically, was in charge. He should have left instructions—not that Richard would have felt obliged to follow them. If it had been Edwin Winthrop, maybe. Catriona Kaye, certainly—though she never instructed. She provided useful information and a delicate nudge towards the wisest course.

 

The nagging imp came again—he was just a kid, he wasn’t ready for this, he wasn’t sure what this was. None of that nonsense, he told himself, sternly, trying to sound like Edwin or his father. You’re a Diogenes Club man. Inner Sanctum material. Most Valued Member potential. Bred to it, sensitive, a Talent.

 

Click. He’d tell Annette Harry had gone far afield, then co-opt Arnold and make a thorough search. This was a train; it was impossible to go missing {Lord Kilpartinger did), and Harry was simply puking his pie, not held by the Headless Fireman and clawed by a Phantom Puma.

 

He opened the connecting door.

 

And wasn’t in the dining carriage, but the First Class Sleeping Compartments. Discreet overhead lights flickered.

 

At the end of the corridor, by an open compartment door, stood a small figure in blue pyjamas decorated with space rockets, satellites, moons and stars. Her label was tied loosely around her neck. Her unbound red hair fell to her waist, almost covering her face. Her single exposed eye fixed on him.

 

What was the girl’s name? He was as bad as Harry.

 

“Vanessa?” it came to him. “Why are you up?”

 

Setting aside the Mystery of the Vanishing Carriage, he went to the child, and knelt, sweeping hair away from her face. She wasn’t crying, but something was wrong. He recognised emptiness in her, an absence he knew well—for he had it himself. He made a smile-face, and she didn’t cringe. At least she didn’t see him as a werebeast whose head would fit the space over the mantelpiece. She also didn’t laugh, no matter how he twisted his mouth and rolled his eyes.

 

“What’s wrong?”

 

“Dreams,” she said, hugging him around the neck, surprisingly heavy, lips close to his ear, “bad dreams.”

 

* * * *

 

V

 

“... and then, chicklet, there were two.”

 

Magic Fingers wished the Scotch Streak’s famous facilities stretched to an espresso machine. He could use a java jolt to electrify the old grey sponge, get his extra senses acting extra-sensible. Like most night birds, he ran on coffee.

 

Annie pursed her lips at him and looked at the doorway through which Hard Luck Harry and now the Kid had disappeared.

 

“You said we shouldn’t split the band, and you were on the button,” he told her. “We should have drawn the wagons in a circle.”

 

“You’re not helping,” she said.

 

Was he picking up jitters from her? When Annie was discombobulated, everyone in the house came down with the sweats. It was a downside of her Talent.

 

“Chill, tomato, chill,” he said. “Put some ice on it.”

 

She nodded, knowing what he meant, and tried hard. There was a switch in her brain, which turned off the receptors in her fright centre. Otherwise she’d never have made it through the war.

 

Danny Myles had been blind during the war, evacuated from the East End to the wilds of Wales. He had learned his way around the sound-smell-touch-tastescape of Streatham in his first twelve years, but found the different environment—all cold wind-blasts, tongue-twisting language and lava bread—of Bedgellert a disorienting nightmare. He had run away from Mr. and Mrs. Jones the farmers on his own, and felt his way back across two countries, turning up in his street to find it wasn’t there anymore and Mum was with Auntie Brid in Brixton. Lots of cockney kids ran away from yokels they were packed off to during the Blitz—some from exploitation or abuse far beyond lava bread every evening and tuneless chapel most of the weekend—but they weren’t usually blind. It was a nine days’ wonder. Mum wasn’t sure whether to send him back to the Joneses, with a label round his neck like that chick who took a shine to the Kid, or keep him in London, sheltering in the Underground during the raids.

 

Born without sight, it was hard for Danny to get his head round the idea of blindness or realise his extra senses were out of the ordinary. Then, the switch in his brain was thrown. No miracle operation, no bump on the bonce, no faith healer—it was just like a door suddenly swinging open. There was a blackout, so there wasn’t even much to see—until the sun came up. He didn’t stop whooping for a week. At first, the bright new world in his eyes blotted out the patterns of sound and touch he had made do with, but when things settled, his ears were sharper than ever. Soon, he could channel music through anything with eighty-eight keys, really earning his “Magic Fingers” handle. Then Edwin Winthrop came into the scene and the Diogenes Club took an interest, labelling him a Talent.

 

He’d been doing these gigs for years. In ‘53, he’d unmasked the Phantom of the Festival of Britain. Then, he’d busted the Insane Gang. Defused the last of Goebbels’ Psychic Propaganda Bombs. Rid London Zoo of the Ghost Gorilla and his Ape Armada. It was a sideline. Also, he knew, an addiction. Some jazzmen popped pills, mainlined horse, bombed out on booze, chased skirts—he went after spooks. Not just any old sheet-wearers, but haints that could turn about and bite. Heart-eaters. Like 3473-S. This was a bad one, worse than the Phantom, worse than the Ghost Gorilla. He knew it. Annie and the Kid knew it too, but they hadn’t his extra senses. They didn’t know enough to be properly wary. Hell, not wary—terrified.

 

“You’re doing it again,” Annie chided him.

 

He realised he’d been drumming his fingers. “Stella By Starlight.” A song about a ghost. He stopped.

 

His hands hurt. That snap from the piano lid was coolly calculated to show him who was boss. The sides of his thumbs were numb. His knuckles were purple and blobby. He spread his fingers on the tablecloth.

 

“Like, ouch, man,” he said.

 

Annie giggled.

 

“It hurts, y’know. How’d you like it if your face fell off?”

 

She was shocked for a moment.

 

“Not a lot,” she said.

 

“These hands are my fortune, ought to be wrapped in cotton wool every night. If I could spring for payments, I’d insure them for lotsa lettuce. This ... this train went for them, like a bird goes for the eyes. Dig?”

 

“The Worst Thing in the World.”

 

“On the button, Mama.”

 

“Less of the ‘Mama.’ I’m not that much older than you.”

 

The Kid ought to be back by now. But he was a no-show. And Harry Cutley was far out there, drowning.

 

Magic Fingers cast his peepers over the dining car. There’d been an elderly frail strapping on the feed-bag down the way. She’d skedaddled, though he didn’t recall her getting up. Arnold—the conductor-waiter-majordomo-high priest—was gonesville also. He and Annie were alone.

 

Man, the rattle and shake of the train were fraying his nerves with bring-down city jazz! It was syncopation without representation! All bum notes and missed melodies.

 

At first, movement had been smooth, like skimming over a glassy lake. Now, the waters were choppy. Knives and forks hopped on the tables. Windows thrummed in their frames. The cloth slid by fractions of an inch and had to be held down, lest it drag plates over the edge and into the aisle.

 

He felt it in his teeth, in his water, in his guts, in the back of his throat.

 

Speed, reckless speed. This beast could come off the rails at any time.

 

The windows were deep dark, as if the outsides were painted—or blackout curtains hung over them. Even if he got close to the cold glass, all he saw was a fish-eye-distorted, darked-up reflection.

 

They weren’t in a tunnel. They could have been on a trestle stretched through a void, steaming on full-ahead, rails silently coming to pieces behind them. Alone in the night.

 

He raised his hand and fingertipped the glass, getting five distinct icy shocks. He’d been leery of using his touching, but now was the time.

 

“Anything?” asked Annie.

 

He provisionally shook his head, but felt into the glass. It was thick, like crystal, and veined. He felt the judder of pane in frame, and caught the train’s music, a bebop with high notes, warning whistles and a thump of dangerous bass. 3473 had a heartbeat, a pulse.

 

A shock sparked into his fingers, pain outlining his hand bones.

 

He was stuck to the window, palm flat against the glass, fingers splayed. Waves of hurt pulsed into him, jarring his wrist, his arm ... up to the elbow, up to the shoulder.

 

Annie sat, mouth open, not moving. Frozen.

 

No, he felt her gloved fingers on his wrist, pulling. He scented her perfume, close. The brush of her hair, the warmth of her, near him.

 

But he saw she sat still, across the table.

 

It was if his eyes had taken a photograph and kept showing it to him, while his extra senses kept up with what was really happening. He moved his head: the picture in front of him didn’t change.

 

Annie was speaking to him, but he couldn’t make it out. Was she talking French? Or Welsh? He had the vile taste of lava bread in his mouth. He heard the train rattle, the music of 3473, louder and louder.

 

The picture changed. For another still image.

 

Annie was trying to help, one knee up on the table, both hands round his wrist, face twisted in concentration as she pulled.

 

But he couldn’t feel her hands anymore, couldn’t smell her.

 

In his eyes, she was with him. But every other sense told him she’d left off.

 

His vision showed him still images, like slides in a church hall. It was as if he were in a cinema where the projector selected and held random frames every few seconds while the soundtrack ran normally.

 

A scream joined train noise.

 

Annie was in the aisle, arms by her sides, hands little fists, mouth open. Dark flurries in the air around her. Birds or bats, moving too fast to be captured by a single exposure.

 

The scream shut off, but Annie was still posed in her yell. Something broke.

 

In the next image, she was strewn among place settings a few booths down, limbs twisted, dress awry. The frosted glass partition was cracked across.

 

The window let go of him. His hand felt skinless, wet.

 

Someone, not Annie, was talking, burbling words, scat-singing. No tune he could follow.

 

He waited for the next picture, to find out who was there. Instead the frame held, fixed and unmoving no matter how he shook his head. He stood and painfully caught his hip on the table edge. He felt his way into the aisle, still seeing from his sat-by-the-window position. He tried to work out where he was in the picture before him, reaching out for chair backs to make his way hand-over-hand to Annie, or to where Annie was in his frozen vision.

 

A heavy thump, and a hissing along with the gabble.

 

He stood still in the aisle, bobbing with the movement of the train, like the hipsters who didn’t dance but nodded heads to the bop, shoulders and hands in movement, carried by jazz. He guesstimated he was three booths away from his original viewpoint.

 

Then the lights flared and faded.

 

The picture turned to sepia, as if there were an even flame behind the paper, and the brown darkened to blackness.

 

He shut and opened his sightless eyes.

 

His hands were on chair backs, and he had a better sense of things than when treacherous eyes were letting him down. He heard as acutely as before. The gabbling was a distraction. Just noise, sourceless. There was no body to it—nothing displacing air, raising or lowering temperature, smelling of cologne or ciggies. There was one breathing person in the carriage—Annette Amboise, asleep or unconscious. Otherwise, he was alone, inside the beast.

 

This was different; blindness, with the memory of sight. It was as if there had been white chalk marks around everything, just erased but held in his mind as guidelines.

 

It wasn’t like seeing, but he knew what was where.

 

Tables, chairs, roses in sconces, windows, connecting doors, the aisle. Under him was carpet. Under that was the floor of the carriage. Under that hungry wheels and old, old rails.

 

Now there were shapes in the dark. Sat at the tables. White clouds like human-sized eggs or beans, bent in the middle, limbless, faceless.

 

He heard the clatter of cutlery, grunts and smacks of swinish eating. In the next carriage, the piano was assaulted. Someone wearing mittens plunked through “Green Grow the Rushes-Oh,” accompanied by a drunken chorus. This wasn’t now. This was before the war.

 

This was the Scotch Streak of Lord Killpassengers.

 

How far off was the In-for-Death Bridge?

 

He couldn’t smell anything. It was worse than being struck blind. He knew he could cope without eyes. He’d made it from Wales to London, once. He had the magic fingers.

 

Someone called him, from a long way away.

 

All he could taste was dry, unbuttered lava bread. Butter wasn’t to be had in London, what with rationing—his Mum used some sort of grease that had to be mixed up in a bowl. In Wales, with farms all about, there was all the butter in the world and no questions asked, but Mr. and Mrs. Jones didn’t believe in it. Like they didn’t believe in hot water. Or sheets—thin blankets of horsehair that scratched like a net of tiny hooks would do. Or music, except the wheezing chapel organ. When Danny drummed his fingers, he’d get a slap across the hand to cure him of the habit. He was not to get up from the table, even if he needed to take the ten steps across the garden to the privy, until he’d cleared his plate and thanked the Good Lord for His Bounty. Most nights, he’d sit, fighting his bladder and his tongue, struggling to swallow, trying not to have acute taste buds, ignoring the hurt in his mouth until the lump was solid in his stomach. “There’s lovely,” Mrs. Jones would say. “Bless the bread and bless the child.”

 

In the dining carriage, there was lava bread on every table.

 

The communicating door opened. The racket rose by decibels, pouring in from the canvas-link between carriages where the din was loudest. A cold draught dashed into his face. Someone entered the dining car, someone who shifted a lot of air. The newcomer moved carefully, like a fat man who knows he’s drunk but has to impress the Lord Mayor. A grey-white shape appeared in the dark and floated towards Danny, scraps of chalk-mark and neon squiggles like those sighted people have inside their eyelids coalescing into a huge belly constrained by vertically striped overalls, an outsize trainman’s hat, a pitted moon face. Danny saw the wide man as if he were spotlit on a shadowed stage, or cut out of a photograph and pasted on a black background.

 

He recognised the face.

 

A huge paw, grimy with engine dirt, stack out.

 

“Gilclyde,” boomed the voice, filling his skull. “Lord Kilpartinger.”

 

Not knowing what else to do, Magic Fingers offered his hand to be shaken. Lord Killpassengers enveloped it with his banana-fingered ape-paws and squeezed with nerve-crushing, bone-crushing force.

 

Agony blotted out all else—he was in the dark again, feeling the vise-grip but not seeing His Lordship dressed up as Casey Jones. Burning pain smothered his hand.

 

It was a bad break. At the end of his wrist hung a limp, tangled dustrag.

 

Then he felt nothing—no pain. No sound. No smell. No taste. No feeling.

 

For the first time in his life, he was completely cut off.

 

* * * *

 

VI

 

Even beyond the usual assumption that quiet English children were aliens, there was something about Vanessa.

 

She made Richard feel the way grownups, even those inside the Diogenes Club, felt around him when he was a boy, the way a lot of people still felt when he was in the room. At first, they were on their guard because he dressed like the sort of youth the Daily Mail reckoned would smash your face in—though, in his experience, teds were as sweet or sour as anyone else, and the worst beatings he’d personally taken came from impeccably uniformed school prefects. Once past that, people just got spooked—because he felt things, saw things, knew things.

 

Now he knew about Vanessa.

 

He was almost afraid of her. And this from someone who accepted the impossible without question.

 

Sherlock Holmes, brother of the Club’s founder, said “when you have eliminated the impossible, what remains, no matter how unlikely, must be the truth.” Less frequently quoted was Mycroft’s addendum, “and when you can not eliminate the impossible, refer the matter to the Diogenes Club.” It was recorded in the Club’s archives, though not in the writings of John Watson, that the Great Detective several times found himself stumped, and fielded the case to his contemporary Carnacki the Ghost-Finder.

 

It was barely possible that a gigantic conjuring trick could rearrange, or seem to rearrange, the carriages while the train was steaming through the darkened countryside. The archives weren’t short of locked-room mysteries and like conundra. For some reason, especially from the 1920s and early 1930s. The Scotch Streak dated from then, so it could have been built to allow baffling disappearances. However, an uncanny explanation required less of a stretch of belief. Richard couldn’t see a point to the carriage substitution, and pointlessness was a frequent symptom of the supernatural. Haunted houses often had “treacherous” doors, opening to different rooms at different times. It should have been expected, by know-it-all Harry Cutley for instance, that a haunted train would have something along these lines. However, the switcheroo wasn’t on the train’s list of previously recorded phenomena.

 

Where was everybody? Harry was downwind, last seen heading towards Second and Third Class. Annette and Myles were in the misplaced dining car. Arnold the Conductor, omnipresent earlier, was nowhere to be seen.

 

Were the other passengers where they should be? Though it was easy to get distracted by fireworks, this investigation was supposed to be about protecting the American couriers.

 

Three compartments had blinds drawn and Do Not Disturb signs hung. One was Annette’s, and she wasn’t there. Another was Vanessa’s, and she was with him.

 

That was a puzzle. Besides the couriers, Mrs. Sweet and the sinister vicar (one of whom must be a spy) should be here. They couldn’t all be crammed into one compartment playing whist with nuclear missiles. In theory, the British Government had other agents to deal with that sort of mess, kitted out with exploding cufflinks and licenses to kill. In a pinch, Richard could muddle in. The Club had been dabbling in “ordinary” espionage since the Great Game of Victoria’s reign. Edwin had served as an Intelligence Officer in the RFC during the First World War (“No, I didn’t shoot down the Bloody Red Baron; what I shot was a lot of photographs from the back of a two-seater—if it matters, each exposure got more Huns killed than all the so-called flying aces put together”) before taking over Carnacki’s ghost-finding practice.

 

“Have you seen any Americans?” he asked the child.

 

She solemnly shook her head and stuck out her lower lip. She wanted more attention paid to her.

 

He looked again at her label.

 

“Who is Lieutenant-Commander Coates?”

 

She gave a “don’t know” shrug.

 

“Not your Dad, you said. Where are your parents?”

 

Another shrug.

 

“Lot of that about,” he said, feeling it deeply. “Where do you live, usually?”

 

A small sound, inaudible—as if the girl weren’t use to speech, like a well-bred, upper-middle-class Kaspar Hauser in spaceman pyjamas.

 

“Come again, love?”

 

“Can’t remember,” she said.

 

Richard had a chill, born of kinship. But he was also wary. This was too close to where he came from. If the train could come up with Worst Things to get under Annette’s or Harry’s skin, it could sidle up close to him and bite too.

 

“Vanessa What?”

 

Another “can’t remember.”

 

“It must be Vanessa Something. Not Coates, but Something.”

 

She shook her head, braids whipping.

 

“Just Vanessa, then. It’ll have to do. Nothing wrong with ‘Vanessa.’ Not a saint’s name, so far. Not forged in antiquity and refined through passage from language to language like mine. Richard, from the Germanic for ‘Rule-Hard,’ also ‘Ricardo,’ ‘Rickard,’ ‘Dick,’ ‘Dickie,’ ‘Dickon,’ ‘Rich,’ ‘Richie,’ ‘Clever Dick,’ ‘Dick-Be-Quick,’ ‘Crookback Dick.’Your name—like ‘Pamela,’ ‘Wendy’ and ‘Una’—was invented within recorded history. By Jonathan Swift, as it happens. Do you know who he was?”

 

“He wrote Gulliver’s Travels.”

 

So she remembered some things.

 

“Yes. He coined the name ‘Vanessa’ as a contraction—like ‘Dick’ for ‘Richard’—for an Irish girl called ‘Esther Vanhomrigh.”‘

 

“Who was she?”

 

“Ah, she was a fan of Dean Swift, you know, like girls today might be fans of Tommy Steele.”

 

“Don’t like Tommy Steele.”

 

“Elvis Presley?”

 

Vanessa was keener on Elvis.

 

“Miss Vanhomrigh was Swift’s biggest fan, so he invented a name for her. He preferred another woman called Esther, Esther Johnson, whom he called ‘Stella.’ I expect he made up the names so as not to get them mixed up. Stella and Vanessa didn’t like each other.”

 

“Did they fight?”

 

“In a way. They competed for Swift’s attention.”

 

“Did Vanessa win?”

 

“Not really, love. Both died before they could settle who got him, and he wasn’t entirely in the business of being got.”

 

Best not to mention the author might have married Stella.

 

How had they got into this? He hadn’t set out to be a lecturer, but he was recounting things he didn’t think he remembered to this inquisitive, reticent child. Talking to her calmed him.

 

“Are we being got?” she asked.

 

“I’m afraid we might be.”

 

“Please don’t let me be got.”

 

“Not if I can help it.”

 

“Promise?”

 

“Promise.”

 

Vanessa smiled up at him. Richard worried he had just given his word in the middle of a great unknown. He might not be in a position to keep his promise.

 

But he knew it was important.

 

Vanessa must not be got.

 

They were by the compartment with the Do Not Disturb sign. He saw a “through to Portnacreirann” notation. The blind wasn’t pulled all the way down, and a spill of light wavered on the compartment floor. In that, Richard saw a pale hand dangling from the lower berth, thin chain fixed to the handle of a briefcase on the floor. It was one of the couriers.

 

At least they were safe.

 

Vanessa put her eye up to the gap and looked in, for a long while.

 

“Come away,” he said. “Let the nice Americans sleep.”

 

She turned and looked up at him. “Are you sure they’re nice?”

 

“No, but they’re important. And it’s best to leave them alone. There are other people I want to find first.”

 

“Your friends? The pretty lady. The scowly man. The blind person.”

 

“Danny’s not blind. Well, not now. How did you know he’d been blind?”

 

She shrugged.

 

“Just sensitive, I suppose,” he prompted. “And, yes, them. I left them in the restaurant but I, ah, seem to have mislaid the carriage. It used to be there”—pointing at the connecting door—”but now it isn’t.”

 

“Silly,” she said. “A restaurant can’t get lost.”

 

“You’ve got a lot to learn.”

 

“No I haven’t,” she declared, sticking up her freckled nose. “I’ve learned quite enough already.”

 

Richard was slightly irked by her tone. He might have said Vanessa’s education could hardly be considered complete since she’d omitted to learn her own full name. But that would be cruel. He understood too well how these situations came about.

 

“The supper carriage is through that door,” she said. “I peeked, earlier.”

 

She led him by the hand, back towards the connecting door.

 

“We should be careful,” he said.

 

“Silly silly,” she said. “Come on, Mr. Richard, don’t be scared....”

 

When anyone—even a little girl—told him not to be scared, his natural instinct was to wonder what there was not to be scared of, then whether the person giving the advice was as well up on the potential scariness or otherwise of the situation or entity in question as they might be.

 

The subdued lamps in the train corridor had dimmed to the point when everything seemed moonlit. The glass in the connecting door was black— he had a nasty thought that the carriages could have shifted about again, and there might be cold night air and a nasty fall to the tracks beyond.

 

He let Vanessa’s hand go, and looked—trying to show more confidence than he felt—towards the door. He was over twice the girl’s age, and should take the lead; then again, twice a single figure wasn’t that much. He didn’t really know how old he was, let alone how old he should act.

 

He hesitated. She gave him a little push.

 

The train noise was louder near the door, the floor shakier.

 

Richard told himself he was opening the door. Then he found he actually was.

 

Beyond was ...

 

* * * *

 

VII

 

Something had given her an almighty thump. And had got to Danny Myles.

 

Annette came to on a table. Forks were driven through her shoulder-straps, pinning her to Formica. She couldn’t sit without ruining her Coco Chanel. Obviously, this was the work of a fiend from Hell. Or a jealous wife.

 

The table rattled. Was the Scotch Streak shaking to pieces?

 

A length of something spiny, like overboiled stringy asparagus with teeth, stretched across her mouth. She clamped down, tasted bitter sap, and spat it away. It was the long-stemmed rose from the place setting.

 

She carefully detached the forks, trying to inflict no more damage to her dress, and sat up. Wet, sticky blood pooled on the tablecloth. Then she noticed a paring knife sticking out of her right thigh. Her stocking was torn. She gripped the handle, surprised not to feel anything but slight stiffness. Upon pulling out the knife, a gush of jagged pain came. She ignored it, and improvised a battlefield dressing—another useful trade learned in the war—with a napkin and cocktail sticks.

 

Sliding off the table, she looked up and down the dining carriage.

 

Danny Myles was backed into a space between the last booth and the door to the galley, hugging his knees, face hidden. He trembled, but she couldn’t tell if it was with silent sobbing or the movement of the train.

 

She saw no one else, which didn’t mean no one else was there.

 

Someone had forked and knifed her. The skewering had been too deliberate, too mocking, to be the result of a directionless phenomenon like the common or garden poltergeist. Something with a personality had attacked her. Something that thought itself a comedian. The worst kind of spook, in her opinion. Or maybe she’d been pinned by a mean person who wasn’t here anymore. Never neglect human agency. People could be wretched enough on their own, without calling in ghosts.

 

There were ghosts here, though.

 

“Danny,” she said.

 

He didn’t hear her. That tinkled a warning—Danny heard everything, even when you didn’t want him to. He could probably smell or taste what was whispered in the next building in a room with taps running.

 

“Danny,” she said, louder.

 

She went to him, feeling stabbed again with every step.

 

He wasn’t dead, she saw, but in shock, crawled back into his shell. He looked up and around, seeing nothing.

 

Danny “Magic Fingers” Myles held up useless hands.

 

“Busted,” he said. “Gone.”

 

She knelt by him and examined his hands. No bones were broken. She found no wound of any kind. But they were dead, like sand-filled gloves.

 

“Salauds boches,” she swore. Nazi bastards!

 

She knew what the Worst Thing was for Danny Myles.

 

His head jerked and he flinched, as if he were being flapped at by a cloud of bats. He knew someone was near, but not that it was her. All his senses were gone. He was locked in his skull.

 

She took his arms and stood him up. He didn’t fight her. She tried to reach him—not by talking or even touching, but with her inside self. She projected past the bony shields around his mind, to reassure, to promise help ...

 

She didn’t know if the damage was permanent—but she quashed the thought, screwing it into a tiny speck. He mustn’t get that, mustn’t catch despair from her, to compound his own.

 

It’s Annie....

 

Because it was her way, she tried kissing him, but just smeared her lipstick. She held him tight, her forehead against his.

 

He wriggled, escaping from her. The napkin bandage came loose, and her leg gave out. For support, she grabbed a tall trolley with shelves of dessert. It rolled down the aisle, dragging her. She bumped her head against the silvered frame. Cream and jam smeared the side of her face, matting in her hair. The trolley got away, and she was left, tottering, reaching out for something fixed ...

 

Danny walked like a puppet, jerked past the galley, pulled towards the end of the carriage. Annette had seen people like that before, in shock or under the influence.

 

“Danny!” she called out, frustrated. Nothing reached him.

 

She repaired her bandage. How much blood had she lost? Her foot was a mass of needles and pins. She wasn’t sure her knee was working properly. Her fingers weren’t managing too well knotting the napkin.

 

Danny was at the end of the carriage. The door slid open, not through his agency—the train had tilted to slam it aside. He vanished into shadow beyond, and fell down. She saw his trouser cuffs and shoes slither into darkness as he pulled himself—or was pulled—out of the dining car.

 

This had gone far enough.

 

She reached out, slipped her hand into the alcove, and took a firm hold on the communication cord.

 

She had felt this coming. Now, here it was.

 

‘“Penalty for improper use—five pounds,’“ she read aloud. “Cheap at half the price.”

 

She pulled, with her whole body. There was no resistance. She sprawled on the carpet. The red-painted metal chain was loose. Lengths rattled out of the alcove, yards falling in coils around her.

 

No whistle, no grinding of breaks, no sudden halt.

 

Nothing. The cord hadn’t been fixed to anything. It was a con, like pictures of lifebelts painted on the side of a ship.

 

The Scotch Streak streaked on.

 

If anything, the din was more terrific. Cold wind blew, riffling Annette’s sticky hair.

 

Between the carriages, one of the exterior doors was open.

 

Another earlier flash-forward came back to her. An open door. Someone falling. Breaking.

 

“Danny,” she yelled.

 

She scrabbled, tripping over the bloody useless chain, got to her feet, one heel snapped. That had been in her Worst Thing vision. Slipping free of her pumps, she ran towards the end of the carriage, as light flared in the passage beyond. She saw the open door, had an impression of hedgerows flashing by, greenery turned grey in the scatter of light from the train. Danny Myles hung in the doorway, wrists against the frame, body flapping like a flag.

 

She grabbed for him. Her fingers brushed his jersey.

 

Then he was gone. She leaned out of the train, wind hammering her eyes, and saw him collide with a gravel incline. He bounced several times, then tangled with a fencepost, wrapping around it like a discarded scarecrow.

 

The train curved the wrong way, and she couldn’t see him. Magic Fingers was left behind.

 

Tears forced from her, she wrenched herself back into the train, pulling closed the door. It was as if she had taken several sudden punches in the gut, the prelude to questioning, to loosen up the prisoner.

 

She found herself sitting down, crying her heart out. For a long time.

 

“Why is your friend bawling?” asked a small voice.

 

Smearing tears out of her eyes with her wrist, Annette looked up.

 

Richard was back—from the wrong direction, she realised—with Vanessa. The little girl held out a handkerchief with an embroidered “V.” Annette took it, wiped her eyes, and found she needed to blow her nose. Vanessa didn’t mind.

 

“Danny’s gone,” she told Richard. “It got him.”

 

She looked up at her colleague, the boy Edwin Winthrop had confidence in, the youth she’d entertained fantasies about. Recruited at an early age, educated and trained and brought up to become a Most Valued Member. Richard Jeperson was supposed to take care of things like this. Harry Cutley led this group, but insiders tipped Richard as the man to take over, to defy the worst the dark had to offer.

 

She saw Richard had no idea what to do next. She saw only a black barrier in the future. And she swooned.

 

* * * *

 

ACT THREE: INVERDEITH

 

I

 

He had nothing.

 

Annette was out cold. Harry was missing in action. Danny was finished. He was no use to them; they were no help to him.

 

Richard was at the sharp end, with no more to give.

 

Vanessa tugged his sleeve, insistent. She needed him, needed comfort, needed saving.

 

Nearby, in one of these shifting carriages, the nato couriers slept. And others—Arnold the Conductor, the scary vicar, Mrs. Sweet, that cockney medium, more passengers, the driver and fireman sealed off from the rest of the train in the cabin of the locomotive. Even if they didn’t know it, they all counted on him. With the Go-Codes up for grabs, the whole world was on the table and the big dice rattled for the last throw.

 

The Diogenes Club expected him to do his duty.

 

He had the girl fetch chilled water in a jug from the galley, and sprinkled it on Annette’s brow. The woman murmured, but stayed under. He looked at Vanessa, who shrugged and made a pouring motion. Richard resisted the notion—it seemed disrespectful to treat a grownup lady like a comedy sidekick. Vanessa urged him, smiling as any child would at the idea of an adult getting a slosh in the face. With some delicacy, Richard tipped the jug, dripping fat bullets of water onto Annette’s forehead. Her eyes fluttered and he tipped further. Ice cubes bounced. Annette sat up, drenched and sputtering.

 

“Welcome back.”

 

She looked at him as if she were about to faint again, but didn’t. He shook her shoulders, to keep her attention.

 

“Yes, I understand,” she said. “Now don’t overdo it. And get me a napkin.”

 

Like the perfect waiter—and where was Arnold?—he had one to hand. She dabbed her face dry and ran fingers through her short hair. She’d like to spend fifteen minutes on her makeup, but was willing to sacrifice for the Cause.

 

“You’re lovely as you are,” he said.

 

She shrugged it off, secretly pleased. She let him help her to her feet and slid into one of the booths. Vanessa monkeyed up and sat opposite. The child began to play, tracing scratch-lines on the tablecloth with a long-tined fork.

 

“I tried the communication cord,” she said. “No joy.”

 

He got up, found the loose loop of cord, examined it, sought out the next alcove, pulled experimentally. No effect whatsoever.

 

“Told you so,” she said.

 

“Independent confirmation. Harry Cutley would approve. It counts as a finding if we fill in the forms properly.”

 

Richard sat next to the little girl and looked at Annette, reaching out to catch a drip she had missed.

 

“Harry’s gone?” she asked.

 

Richard thought about it. He calmed, reaching into his centre, and tried to feel out, along the length of the train.

 

“Not like Danny’s gone,” he concluded. “Harry’s on board.”

 

“What’s he doing when he goes quiet like that?” Vanessa asked, interested. “Saying his prayers?”

 

“Being sensitive,” said Annette.

 

“Is that like being polite, minding his Ps and Qs?”

 

Richard broke off and paid attention to the people immediately around him.

 

“Something missing,” he said. “Something’s been taken.”

 

“Time, for a start,” said Annette. “How long have we been aboard?”

 

Richard reached for his watch pocket, then remembered he’d retired the timepiece. There was a clock above the connecting door. The one in the ballroom carriage seemed to keep the right time when all others failed. The face of this clock was black—not painted over, but opaque glass. It still ticked.

 

“I won’t carry a watch,” said Annette, “but I’ve an excellent sense of time. And I’ve lost it. How long was I unconscious?”

 

“Ages,” said Vanessa. “We thought you’d died.”

 

“A few seconds,” said Richard.

 

“See,” said Annette. “No sense of time at all.”

 

Richard looked at the nearest window. It was black glass, like the clock—a mirror in which he looked shockingly worn-out. Even when the overhead lights flickered, which they did more and more, he couldn’t see out. He didn’t know if they were rushing through England, Scotland or some other dark country. He felt the rattle-rhythm of the train—that, he knew, came from rolling over slight joins between lengths of rail, every ten or twenty feet. The Scotch Streak was still on tracks.

 

“Have we passed Edinburgh?” said Annette.

 

Edinburgh! That was a way out, a way off the Ghost Train!

 

From the station, he could phone Edwin, have the Club use its pull to cancel the rest of the journey, get everyone else out safely. Danny’s death was justification for calling off the whole jaunt, shutting down the line. The couriers could be sent across Scotland in a taxi. It would take longer, but they’d be surer to arrive intact. If anyone wanted to start World War Three, they’d have to wait until after lunch.

 

Then, he could think of something else to do with his life.

 

What life?

 

“I have a picture of the station in my mind,” said Annette, concentrating. “Passengers get off; coal is taken on. They try and do it quietly, so as not to wake the sleepers, but you can’t pour tons of anything quietly. I’m can’t tell if I’m seeing ahead or remembering. My Talent seems to be on the blink at the moment. ‘Normal transmission will be resumed as soon as possible.’ There’s a black wall...”

 

“We’ve already stopped once,” said Vanessa, in a small, scared voice. “In Scotland.”

 

This was news. Richard couldn’t imagine not noticing.

 

“Quite right, miss,” said Arnold the Conductor, coming back from where the First Class Carriages should be. “I’ve clipped the ticket of the Edinburgh-to-Portnacreirann passenger. Just the one. Not what it used to be. Ah, someone’s made a bit of a mess here. Don’t worry. We’ll get it cleaned up in a jiffy. Madam, might I bring you more water? This jug seems to be empty.”

 

Richard, suddenly cool inside, saw Arnold was either mad or with the other side. Not the other side as in the Soviets (though that was possible) but the other side as in beyond the veil, the Great Old Whatevers. Maybe he’d been normal when he first boarded the Scotch Streak, who knows how many nights ago—now he was one of Them, aligned with Annette’s It. The conductor wore an old-fashioned uniform, a crimson cutaway jacket and high-waisted fiyless matador trousers. His tiepin was the crest of the long-gone London, Scotland and Isles Railway Company. His cap was oversize, a child’s idea of railwayman’s headgear.

 

He resisted an impulse to take Arnold by his antique lapels, smash him through a partition, throw a proper teddy boy scare into him, get the razor against his jugular, demand straight answers.

 

“Thank you,” he told the conductor. “A refill would be appreciated.”

 

Arnold took the jug and walked off. Annette, greatly upset, was about to speak, but Richard made a gesture and she bit her lip instead. She was up to speed. It wasn’t just the train and the spooks. It was the people aboard, some of them at least.

 

“What is it?” said Vanessa, picking up on the wordless communication between grownups. “A secret? Tell me at once. You’re not to have secrets. I say so.”

 

Annette laughed indulgently at the girl’s directness. The corners of her eyes crinkled in a way she hated and tried to avoid, but which Richard saw was utterly adorable. She was far more beautiful as herself than the makeup mask she showed the world.

 

“No secrets from you, little thing,” she said, pinching Vanessa’s nose.

 

The little girl looked affronted by the impudence and stuck her fork into Annette’s throat.

 

“Don’t call me ‘little thing,’“ she said, in a grown man’s voice. “You French cow!”

 

* * * *

 

II

 

Richard scythed a white china dinner plate edge-first into the little girl’s face. The plate broke, gashing Vanessa’s eyebrow—it would leave a scar. Blood fountained out of the child-shaped thing.

 

She gave out a deep, roaring howl and held her face, kicking the underside of the table, twisting and writhing as if on fire.

 

Richard looked across the table at Annette.

 

She held her hand to her throat, fork stuck out between her fingers, blood dribbling down her arm. Her eyes were wide.

 

“Didn’t see ... that coming,” she said, and slumped.

 

The light went out in her eyes.

 

Vanessa’s hooked little fingers scrabbled at Richard’s face, and he fell out of his seat. The child hopped onto his chest, pummeling, scratching and kicking. He slithered backwards, working his shoulders and feet, trying to throw the miniature dervish off him. Her blood poured into his face.

 

He caught hold of one of her braids and pulled.

 

A little girl yell came out of her, a “Mummy, he’s hurting meee” scream. Was that the real Vanessa? Something else was in there with her, whoever she was, whatever it was.

 

The girl was possessed.

 

It had been hiding, deep in the blanks of her mind, but had peeped out once or twice. Richard hadn’t paid enough attention.

 

And now another of the group was gone.

 

Annette Amboise. He’d only known her a few days, but they’d become close. It was as if they knew they would be close, had seen a future now cruelly revoked, had been rushing past this long night, speeding to get to a next leg of their journey, which they would take together.

 

All that was left of that was this monster.

 

As Vanessa shrieked, Richard hurled her off. He got to his feet, unsteady. He looked to Annette, hoping she was unconscious but knowing better. Slack-mouthed, like a fish, she toppled sideways, towards the window, slapping cheek to cheek with her equally dead reflection.

 

Arnold was back—not from the direction he had left. He carried a full jug.

 

“The lady won’t be needing this now,” he said.

 

The conductor ignored the frothing child-thing, who was crawling down the aisle, back seemingly triple-jointed, tongue extending six pink-and-blue inches, braids stood on end as if pulled by wires. It was like a giant Gecko wearing a little girl suit, loose in some places and too tight in others. As its limbs moved, the suit almost tore.

 

One eye was blotted shut with blood. The other fixed on Richard.

 

The girl hissed.

 

Then the Gecko became bipedal. The spine curved upwards, straining like a drawn bow. Forelegs lifted and became floppy arms, hands limp like paddles. The belly came unstuck from the aisle carpet. Snake-hips kinking, it hopped upright. It stood with feet apart and shoulders down, as if balancing an invisible tail.

 

“Vanessa,” said Richard, “can you hear me? It’s Richard.”

 

Hot, obscene anger burst from whatever it was. He flinched. Annette might have been able to reach the girl inside, help her. That was her Talent. His left him open to emotional attack.

 

He stood his ground.

 

The label around the Gecko’s neck was soggy with blood, words washed away, black shapes emerging.

 

He reached out and tore the label away. It left an angry weal around Vanessa’s neck.

 

“Mine,” she said, in her own voice. “Give it me back, you bastarrrd,” in the thing’s masculine, somehow Scots voice. “Mine,” both voices together, blasting from her chest and mouth.

 

He rubbed his thumb over the bloody card. Scrapes came away. The label was actually an envelope, with a celluloid inner sleeve sealing strips of paper. He clawed with a nail, and saw number-strings.

 

The couriers were decoys, after all.

 

“Give me those,” said the Gecko.

 

Richard knew what he held. Not numbers, but a numerical key. Put in a slot, they could bring about Armageddon.

 

“Is that what you want?” he asked, talking to the thing.

 

The smile became cunning, wide. The unblotted eye winked.

 

“Give me back my numbers,” it said, mimicking the girl’s voice.

 

He could tell now when it was trying to fool him. Could tell how much she was Vanessa and how much the Gecko.

 

“Conductor,” she said. “That man’s got my ticket. Make him give it back to me.”

 

“Sir,” said Arnold. “This is a serious matter. May I see that ticket?”

 

Richard clutched the celluloid in his fist. He wouldn’t let Arnold take the Go-Codes. He was with the Gecko.

 

Vanessa’s eye closed and she crumpled. He had a stab of concern for the girl. If she fell badly, hit her head ...

 

Arnold’s gaze had a new firmness.

 

“Sir,” he said, holding up his ticket clippers. “The ticket.”

 

By jumping from the girl to the conductor, the Gecko had got closer to him. But it wore a shape he was less concerned about damaging.

 

He stuck the Go-Codes into his top pocket, and launched a right cross at Arnold, connecting solidly with his chin, staggering him back a few steps. He’d perfectly hit the knock-out button, but the thing in Arnold didn’t pay attention. It lashed out, clipper-jaws open, aiming for an ear or a lip, intent on squeezing out a chunk of face.

 

Richard ducked, and the clippers closed on his sleeve, slicing through scarlet velvet, meeting in the fold. He hit Arnold a few more times, hearing school boxing instructors tell him he shouldn’t get angry. In his bouts, he always lost on points or was disqualified, even if he pummelled his opponent insensible. What he did in a fight wasn’t elegant or sporting, or remotely allowable under the Queensberry rules. He had learned something in the blanked portion of his childhood.

 

From a crouch, he launched an uppercut, smashing Arnold’s face, feeling cartilage go in the conductor’s nose. The clippers hung from Richard’s underarm. They opened and fell to the juddering floor, leaving neat holes in his sleeve.

 

Not above booting a man while he was down, he put all his frustration into a hefty kick, reinforced toe sinking into Arnold’s side, forcing out a Gecko groan. The conductor emptied.

 

Then an arm was around Richard’s neck. He was dragged to the floor.

 

Annette’s elbow nut-crackered around his throat, and her dead face flopped next to his, one eye rolling.

 

He felt a wave of disgust, not at physical contact with a corpse, but at the abuse of Annette’s body. He couldn’t fight her as he had Arnold, or even as he had Vanessa (he’d broken a plate on a child’s face!) because of what had hung between them until moments ago.

 

The thing working Annette took the fork out of her throat and held it to Richard’s eye.

 

“The codes,” it said, voice rattling through her ruptured windpipe. “Now.”

 

He pressed his hand over his top pocket. He blinked furiously as the fork got close. One jab, and there would be metal in his brain.

 

This trip was nearly over.

 

* * * *

 

III

 

The Gecko inside Annette held Richard in a death grip, fork tines hugely out of focus against his eye. Beyond the blur, he saw Arnold watching with his habitual air of quizzical deference. Anything between the passengers was their own business.

 

Someone shouldered Arnold aside and levelled two double-barrelled shotguns at Richard and Annette.

 

It was Harry Cutley. Hard-Luck Harry to the Rescue!

 

“Ah-hah,” declared Harry, a melodrama husband finding his wife in a clinch with her lover, “ah-bleedin’-hah! I knew Dickie-Boy was a wrong ‘un from the first. Hold him steady, Annie and I’ll save you!”

 

It wasn’t easy to aim two shotguns at the same time, what with the swaying of the train. Harry couldn’t keep them level.

 

“Annette’s not home,” Richard said. “Look at her eyes.”

 

Harry ignored him.

 

He must have broken into the baggage car and requisitioned Mrs. Sweet’s guns. His pockets were lumpy with cartridges. He had a lifetime of resentments to work off, in addition to being under the influence of the Scotch Streak. Harry still couldn’t hold the guns properly, but was close enough to Richard that aiming wouldn’t make much difference.

 

At least, the fork went away.

 

The Gecko relaxed a little, holding Richard up as a shield and a target.

 

Harry saw Vanessa, half her face bruised and bloody.

 

“I see you can’t be trusted on your own,” he said. “There’s a reason I’m Most Valued Member, Clever Dick. I observe at a glance, take in all the clues, puzzle out what has happened, make a snap decision and act on it, promptly and severely.”

 

He managed with an effort to get one gun half-cocked, but his left-hand gun twisted up and thumped his face. He flinched as if someone else had attacked him, and pointed the gun he had a better grip on.

 

Richard shrugged off Annette’s dead fingers and stood.

 

The gun barrel rose with him.

 

“Look at Annette, Harry,” he said. “It got her. It got Danny. It had Vanessa. It’s tried to have me. It is trying to get you. You can hear it, can’t you? It’s talking to you now.”

 

Richard stood aside, to let Harry see Annette.

 

The Gecko couldn’t get the corpse to stand properly. Her bloodied neck was a congealed ruin. Her bloodless face was slack, empty—only her eye mobile, twitching with alien intellect.

 

“Annie,” said Harry, shocked, grieving.

 

“You see,” said Richard, stepping forward. “We’ve got to fight it.”

 

Both guns swung. The barrels jabbed against Richard’s chest.

 

“Stay where you are, young feller-me-lad,” said Harry, fury sparking again. “I know you’re behind this. You may have Ed Winthrop fooled, but not Harry Cutley, oh no. Too clever by half, that’s your bloody trouble. Went to a public school, didn’t you?”

 

“Several,” Richard admitted.

 

“Yes, I can tell. They’re all like you, bright boys with no depth, no backbone. Had it too easy, all your lives. Silver spoons up your bums from Day One. Never had to work, never had to think. Reckon you can put one over on us all. Smarm out the posh accent and walk away from it.”

 

Harry was off on his own. With the guns steady, he got all the cocks back.

 

Annette had pulled herself upright, assisted by Arnold. She puppet-walked towards them.

 

“Look behind you,” whispered Richard, like a kid at a pantomime.

 

Harry showed a toothy grin. “Won’t fool me with that one, boy.”

 

Annette’s hands were out, thumbs barbed, nearing Harry’s neck. When she gripped, his hands would clench—and four barrels worth of whatever Mrs. Sweet liked to load would discharge through Richard’s torso.

 

“Just this once, do me a favour, Harry, and listen,” said Richard.

 

The barrels jammed deeper. Richard shut up—he couldn’t do anything about his educated accent, which set off Harry’s class hatred.

 

Annette’s hands landed, not around Harry’s neck, but on his shoulders. He shivered, in instinctive pleasure. He was enjoying himself. He had everyone where he wanted them. He angled his head and rubbed his cheek, like a cat’s, on Annette’s dead hand.

 

The Gecko used Annette’s face to make a smile and kissed Harry’s ear.

 

It was a miracle the guns didn’t go off.

 

“See, just this once, bright boy, you lose.”

 

The light in Annette’s eyes went out and she was a corpseweight against Harry’s back. Harry was bothered, his eyes flickering.

 

“Don’t do that,” he said.

 

While Harry was distracted, Richard took hold of the barrels and tried to shift them. No dice. Harry shook his head as if trying to see off a buzzing wasp.

 

Annette fell away, collapsing on the floor.

 

Harry stepped backwards, his upper body jerking as if the wasps were now pestering in force. The guns slipped away from Richard’s chest. He took the opportunity to get out of the way. Harry tripped over Annette’s legs and went arse over teakettle.

 

One of the guns finally went off, blasting a plate-sized hole in the ceiling.

 

Night air rushed through. Up there somewhere were stars.

 

Harry, without even knowing what he was doing, resisted the Gecko. So it couldn’t take anyone—only unformed minds, long-time Streak freaks, or the newly dead. It could whisper, influence, mislead, work on weaknesses, but couldn’t just move in and take over.

 

Richard sensed the thing’s formless anger.

 

Then Vanessa, standing quietly a dozen feet away, was tagged and was “it” again. She ran, hopping past Annette, leapfrogging Harry, and soared at Richard, in defiance of gravity, a living missile.

 

Vanessa’s head collided with Richard’s stomach, and he was knocked over.

 

She snatched the celluloid from his pocket, and—with a girlish whoop of nasty triumph—was out of the carriage.

 

He heard her laugh dwindle as she got farther away.

 

Harry stood, brushing a blood-smear on his jacket. He’d dropped one of the guns, but had the other under his arm. He flapped his wrang-out hand, still jarred from the discharge. The thumb, broken or dislocated, kinked stiffly.

 

Another person lumbered into the dining carriage, bulky in shawls, thick-ankled. Richard thought for a moment it was Mrs. Sweet come to complain about the ill treatment of her precious guns, but it was the old dear last seen at Euston. “Elsa Nickles, Missus, Psychic Medium.”

 

Mrs. Nickles eased past Arnold, who didn’t tell her she was out of her class. She looked at the bloody ruins, the dead woman, the mad people.

 

“I knew no good would come of this,” she said. “Them spirits is angered, furious. You can’t be doin’ anythin’ wiv ‘em when they’re stirred up. Might just as well poke an umbrella into a nest of snakes. Or stick your dickybird in a mincer.”

 

Mentally, Richard told Harry not to shoot the woman.

 

He could tell the Most Valued Member was thinking of it. Firing guns was addictive. The first time, you were afraid, worried about the noise, the danger, the mess. Then, you wanted to do it again. You wanted to do it better.

 

Didn’t matter if your finger was on the trigger of a .22 bird-blaster or the launch button of an intercontinental ballistic missile, the principle was the same. Didn’t even matter what you were aiming at. Pull ... point and press! Ka-pow!

 

“Listen to her, Harry,” he said.

 

Harry didn’t know what Richard meant. Why should he pay attention to some unscientific loon? In Harry Cutley’s parapsychology, cranks like Elsa Nickles were the enemy, dragging the field into disreputability, filler for the Sunday papers.

 

“Listen to her accent,” Richard insisted.

 

“Oi don’t know what ‘e means,” said Mrs. Nickles, indignant.

 

Class solidarity in Harry. If Richard’s manner got his back up, Elsie’s plain talk—even when spouting nonsense—should soothe him. Of course, she was from London and he was a northerner. He might hate her just for being southern, in which case Richard would give up and let the world hang itself.

 

Harry put the gun down and held up his wonky thumb.

 

“Cor, that’s shockin’,” said Mrs. Nickles. “Let me ‘ave a butchers. Been a school nurse for twenty years an’ never seen a kiddie do that to hisself.”

 

Harry let the woman examine his hand. She thought for a moment, then took a firm grip on the twisted digit and tugged it into place. Harry yelped, swore, but then flexed his thumb and blurted gratitude.

 

“That’s better,” said Mrs. Nickles.

 

The pain had cleared Harry’s mind, Richard hoped.

 

“We’ve met the thing behind the haunting,” he told the Most Valued Member. “It was hiding in the little girl. It tried to possess you, but you fought it off. Do you remember?”

 

Harry nodded grimly.

 

“Continue with the report, Jeperson,” he said.

 

“It’s some sort of discarnate entity....”

 

“A wicked spirit,” said Mrs. Nickles. “A frightful fiend.”

 

“Not a ghost. Not the remnant of a human personality. Something bigger, nastier, more primal. But clever. It plucks things from inside you. It understands who we are, how we can be got at. It’s simple, though. It does violence. That’s its business. Feeds off pain, I think. Call it ‘the Gecko.’ When it’s in people, they move in a lizardy way. Maybe it nestles in that reptile part of the brain, pulls nerve-strings from there. Or maybe it knows we don’t like creepy-crawlies and puts on a horror show.”

 

‘“The Gecko,’“ said Harry, trying out the name. “I’ll make a note of that. You found it, Jeperson. You’re entitled to name it.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

“Now we know what we’re up against, we should be better able to cage it. I’ll write up the findings and, after a decent interval, we can come back with a larger, more specialist group. We can get your Gecko off the Ghost Train into a spirit box. In captivity, it can be properly studied.”

 

Richard knew a spirit box wasn’t necessarily of wood or metal. If “sealed” properly, a little girl could be a spirit box.

 

Looking at Annette, who’d rolled under a table, Richard said, “If it’s all the same, Harry, I’d rather kill it than catch it.”

 

“We can still learn, Jeperson. How to deal with the next Gecko.”

 

“Let’s cope with this one first.”

 

Richard’s attention was called by the train’s rattle. Something had changed.

 

A whistle-blast sounded. Had there been another ellipsis in time?

 

“Are we there yet?” asked Harry. “Portnacreirann?”

 

“Oh no, sir,” said Arnold, who still didn’t acknowledge anything unusual. “We’re slowing to cross Inverdeith Bridge.”

 

Richard felt the pace of the rattle.

 

“We’re not slowing,” he said. “We’re speeding up.”

 

* * * *

 

IV

 

“It was on a night like this, in 1931,” said Mrs. Nickles. “Inverdeith Bridge fell...”

 

Richard understood why the Gecko had killed Annette. She’d have seen what was coming next.

 

“We’re in no position to make a report and act later,” he told Harry. “The Gecko’s going to kill us now. It has what it wants.”

 

Harry and Mrs. Nickles both looked puzzled.

 

Richard had a familiar sensation, of knowing more than others, of the power that came with intuition. It was warm, seductive, pleasant—he had the urge to flirt with revelation, to hint that he was privy to mysteries beyond normal comprehension, to crow over his elders. No, that was a temptation—had it been left there to dangle by the Gecko, or some other “wicked spirit”? Or was it nestled in the reptile remnant of his own brain, a character trait he should keep in check?

 

“The Go-Codes,” he said. “It has the number-strings.”

 

Mrs. Nickles nodded, as if she understood—Richard knew she was faking, just to stay in the game. Harry was white, genuinely understanding.

 

“It was lunacy to send the damned things by train,” said Harry. “Ed advised against it, but the Club was overruled. By the Americans. Bloody Yanks.”

 

“Bloody us too, though,” said Richard. “This might have happened eventually, but it happened tonight because we were aboard. We pushed the Gecko. Which is what it wants. Us extraordinary people. We notice things, but things notice us too. We give it more fuel. If regular folks are lumps of coal, we’re gallons of jet fuel. Annette, Danny, you, me.”

 

“Not me,” said Harry.

 

Richard shrugged. “Maybe not.”

 

“But her?”

 

Harry looked at Elsa Nickles.

 

Richard did too, for the first time really. Psychic Medium. A Talent. But she had something else. Knowledge.

 

“Why are you on the Streak, Mrs. Nickles?” he asked.

 

“I told you. To ‘elp the good spirits and chase off the wicked.”

 

“Fair enough. But there are many haunted places. Ruins you don’t have to buy a ticket for. Why the Scotch Streak?”

 

She didn’t want to explain. Harry helped her sit down in a booth. Arnold was eager to fetch her something.

 

“Gin and tonic, luv,” she said.

 

The conductor busied himself. Richard hoped the Gecko hadn’t left something in Arnold, to spy on them.

 

The whole carriage shook, from the speed. Crockery, cutlery, roses, anything not held down, bounced, slid, shifted. Air streamed through the hole in the roof, blasting tablecloths into screwed-up shrouds.

 

Arnold returned, dignified as a silent movie comedian before a pratfall, drink balanced on a tray balanced on his hand. Mrs. Nickles drained the g and t.

 

“Hits the spot,” she said.

 

“Why ... this ... train?” Richard asked.

 

“Because they’re ‘ere, still. Both of ‘em. They’re not what you call ‘the Gecko,’ but they made it grow. What they did, what they didn’t do, what they felt. That, and all the passengers who drownded. And all who come after, who were took by the train, bled their spirits into it. That’s your blessed Gecko, all them spirits mixed up together and shook. It weren’t born in ‘ell. It were made. On the night when the bridge fell. Somethin’ in the loch woke up, latched onto ‘em.”

 

“Them? Who do you mean?”

 

“Nick and Don,” she said, a tear dribbling. “Me ‘usband and ... well, not me ‘usband.”

 

“Nick... Nickles?”

 

“Nickles is what you call me pseudernym, ducks. It’s Elsa Bowler, really. I was married to Nick Bowler.”

 

“The Headless Fireman,” said Harry, snapping his fingers.

 

Mrs. Nickles grimaced as about to collapse in sobs. The reminder of her husband’s suicide was hardly tactful.

 

“Don would be the driver, Donald McRidley?” he prompted.

 

Arnold almost crossed himself at that disgraced name. The conductor fit into this story somewhere. He looked at Mrs. Nickles as if he were a human being with real feelings, rather than an emotionless, efficient messenger of the railway Gods.

 

“Donald,” spat Mrs. Nickles. “Yes, blast ‘is ‘ide. The Shaggin’ Scot, they used to call him. The girls in the canteen. We were all on the railways, on the LSIR. I was there when they named the Scotch Streak, serving drinks. I was assistant manager of the Staff Canteen in ‘31. Up the end of the line, in Portnacreirann. Don and Nick weren’t usually on shift together, but someone was off sick. They were both speedin’ towards me that night. I think it came out, while they were togewer in the cabin. About me. The bridge was comin’ down, no matter what. But somethin’ was goin’ on in between Don and Nick. Afterwards, Don scarpered and Nick ... well, Nick did what he did, poor lamb. So we’ll never know. Don was a right basket. Don’t know how I got in with him, though I was a stupid tart in them days and no mistake. Don weren’t the only bloke who wasn’t me ‘usband. Even after all the mess. If you want to call anyone the Gecko’s Mum, it’s me.”

 

“The driver and the fireman were arguing? Over you?”

 

Mrs. Nickles nodded. Her false teeth jounced, distorting her mouth. Richard’s fillings shook. Harry’s face rippled. It was as if the Streak were breaking the sound barrier.

 

The train was going too fast!

 

“What about the uncoupling?”

 

“That! No human hand did that. It was your Gecko, come out of the loch and the fires in the ‘earts of Don and Nick, reachin’ out, like a baby after a first suck of milk. It killed all them passengers, let the carriages loose to go down with the bridge. That was a big meal for it, best it’s ever had, gave it strength to live through its first hours. I’ve lost three kiddies, in hospital. That happened in them days. All the bloody time. One was Don’s, I reckon. That little mite’s in the Gecko too. It sucked in all the bad feelin’, all the spirits, and it’s still suckin’.”

 

Richard understood.

 

But he saw where Mrs. Nickles was lying. “No human hand.” Maybe the Gecko was partly poltergeist. Using the shake, rattle and rock of the train to nudge inanimate objects. The piano lid snapping at Danny was classic polter-pestering. But for the big things, the fork-stabbings and grabbing the Go-Codes, it needed human hands, a host, a body or bodies.

 

“It was both of them,” he said. “It took them both. It made them do it, made them uncouple the train.”

 

He saw it, vividly. Two men, in vintage LSIR uniform, crawling past the coal-tender, leaving the cabin unmanned, gripping like lizards, inhumanly tenacious. Four hands on the coupling, tugging the stiff lever that ought not be thrown while the train was in motion, disabling the inhibitor devices that should prevent this very act. Hands bleeding and nails torn, the hosts’ pain receptors shut off by the new-made, already cunning, already murderous Gecko.

 

The coupling unlatched. A gap growing. Between engine and carriages. The awful noise of the bridge giving way. The train screaming as it plunged. Carriages coming apart among clanging girders and rails. Bursts of instantly extinguished flame. Sparks falling to black waters. Breaking waves on the loch shores.

 

An outpouring of shock and agony. Gecko food.

 

“Jeperson,” said Harry, snapping his fingers in front of his nose.

 

“I know what it did,” he told the Most Valued Member. “What it wants to do. How it plans to do it. Another Inverdeith disaster, all of our deaths, and it can get off the train. Free of the iron of the Scotch Streak, it’ll be strong enough to possess living, grownup bodies. It can piggyback, get to the base, play “pass the parcel” between hosts, handing the Go-Codes on to itself. It can sit at a modified typewriter keyboard and use the numbers. It’s a hophead, needing bigger and bigger fixes. The deaths of dozens don’t cut it any more, so it needs to shoot up World War Three!”

 

Harry swore.

 

“We’ve got to stop the little girl,” said Richard. “Pass me that shotgun.”

 

* * * *

 

V

 

At the connecting door, ready to barge after the Gecko, Richard caught himself.

 

“Fooled me once, shame on you, fooled me twice, shame on me.”

 

He turned and walked deliberately to the other end of the dining carriage, past Harry, Mrs. Nickles and Arnold.

 

“That’s the wrong way, Jeperson.”

 

“Is it?”

 

“I came from that way. Back there is, ah, Second and Third Class. And the baggage car.”

 

Harry held up the other shotgun, left-handed.

 

“Things change. Haven’t you noticed?”

 

Harry wasn’t stupid or inexperienced. “Dislocation phenomena? Escher space?”

 

“Topsy-turvy,” Richard said.

 

“How do you know the configuration won’t switch back? The Gecko could keep us off balance, charging back and forth, always the wrong way? At Wroxley Parsonage in ‘52, there was a corridor like that, a man-trap. The MVM before me lost two of his group in it.”

 

Jeperson was given pause.

 

He looked up through the hole in the ceiling, at telephone wires, clouds, the sky. He could tell which way the train was travelling but lost that certainty if he stepped too far away from the hole. The windows were no help. They might have been painted over or gooed on. A rifle-stock blow rattled but did not break the glass.

 

“There’s a spirit ‘ere ‘oo wants to speak,” said Mrs. Nickles.

 

Harry was impatient. “There are too many spirits here.”

 

“This is a new one, mate. I’m gettin’... ah ... fingers?”

 

“Magic Fingers?” said Harry, suddenly taking the woman seriously. “Danny Myles? What’s happened to him?”

 

“Lost, Harry,” said Richard. This was news to the Most Valued Member.

 

“Damn.”

 

“‘E says, don’t think, feel... Does that make sense?”

 

To Richard, it did. He shut his eyes, and in the dark inside his head sensed Danny, or something left behind by Danny. He stopped trying to work out which way the train was speeding, just let his body become aware of the movement, the rattle, the shifting. He had little thrills, like tugging hooks or pointing arrows.

 

“Spin me round,” he said.

 

“Like the party game?” asked Mrs. Nickles.

 

He nodded. Big hands took him and spun him. He went up on the points of his shoes, remembering two weeks of ballet training, and revolved like a human top.

 

He came to a stop without falling.

 

He knew which way to charge and did so, opening his eyes on the way. He didn’t even know which end of the carriage he was exiting from. He opened the communication door and plunged on, as if Mrs. Sweet’s gun were a divining rod.

 

The others followed.

 

* * * *

 

VI

 

Richard knew Danny was tied here, along with many others. Magic Fingers was fresh enough to have some independence, but soon he’d be sucked in and become another head of a collective pain-eating hydra. The Scotch Streak was home to a Bad Thing. Haunting a house, or a lonely road or public toilet or whatever, seldom meant more than floating sheets or clammy invisible touches. The worst haunters, the Bad Things, were monsters with ambition. They wanted to be free of the anchors that kept them earthbound, not to ascend to a higher sphere or rest in peace or go into the light ... but to wreak harm. Plague-and-Great-Fire-of-London harm. Japanese Radioactive Dinosaur Movie harm. End of all Things harm.

 

He was in a carriage he hadn’t seen before but didn’t doubt he was on the track of the Gecko.

 

There were no windows, not even black glass. Hunting trophies on shields—antlers and heads of antlered animals—stuck out of panelled walls, protruding as if bone were growing like wood, making the aisle as difficult to penetrate as a thick thorn forest. There were rhino horns and elephant tusks, even what looked like a sabre-tooth tiger head with still-angry eyes. Low-slung leather armchairs were spaced at intervals, between foot-high side-tables where dust-filled brandy snifter glasses were abandoned next to ashtrays with fat cigar grooves. Potent, manly musk stung Richard’s nostrils.

 

“What’s this?” he asked Arnold, appalled.

 

“The Club Car, sir. Reserved for friends of the Director, Lord Kilpartinger. It’s not usually part of the rolling stock.”

 

In one chair slumped a whiskered skeleton wearing a bullet-bandolier, Sam Browne belt and puttees. It gripped a rifle barrel with both hands, a loose toe-bone stuck in the trigger-guard, gun-mouth jammed between blasted-wide skull jaws, the cranium exploded away.

 

“Any idea who that was?” Richard.

 

“He’s in Catriona’s pamphlet,” put in Harry. “‘Basher’ Moran, 1935. Some aged, leftover Victorian Colonel. Big-game hunter and gambling fiend. Stalked anything and everything, put holes in it and dragged hide, head or horns home to stick on the wall. Mixed up in extensive crookery, according to Catriona, wriggled out of a hanging more than once. He’s here because he won his final bet. One of his jolly old pals wagered he couldn’t find anything in the world he hadn’t shot before. He proved his friend wrong, there and then.”

 

An upturned pith helmet several feet away contained bone and dumdum fragments.

 

“Case closed.”

 

“Too true. They made a film about Moran and the train, Terror by Night.”

 

Richard advanced carefully, between trophies, tapping too-persistent horns out of the way with the gun-barrel.

 

“Could do with a machete,” he commented. “Careful of barbs.”

 

The train took a series of snake-curve turns, swinging alarmingly from side to side. A narwhal horn dimpled Richard’s velvet shoulder.

 

Richard heard Harry ouch as he speared himself on an antler point.

 

“Just a scratch,” he reported. “Doesn’t hurt as much as my bloody hand.”

 

“Shouldn’t ought to be allowed,” said Mrs. Nickles. “Shootin’ poor animals as never did no one no harm.”

 

“I rather agree with you,” said Richard. “Hunting should be saved for man-killers.”

 

Gingerly, they got through the club car without further casualties.

 

The next carriage was the dining car, again. Harry wanted to give up, but Richard pressed on.

 

“Table settings here are the other way round,” he said. “It’s not the same.”

 

“There ain’t no bleedin’ great ‘ole in the roof neither,” observed Mrs. Nickles.

 

“That too.”

 

“We shall be pleased to serve a light breakfast after Inverdeith,” announced Arnold. “For those who wish to arrive at Portnacreirann refreshed and invigorated.”

 

“Kippers later,” said Richard. “After the world-saving.”

 

Beyond this dining car was First Class. Richard led them past the sleeping compartments. Annette’s door hung open: her nightgown was laid out on the counterpane, like a cast-off silk snakeskin. That was a thump to the heart.

 

The decoy couriers snored away. No need to bother them.

 

Another expedition was coming down the corridor towards them. Were they so turned around in time they were running into themselves? Or had evil duplicate ghost-finders emerged from the wrong-way-round dimension where knives and forks were right-to-left? No, there was a mirror at the end of the corridor. Score one for eliminating the impossible.

 

“Where’s the connecting door?” Richard asked the conductor.

 

“There’s no need for one, sir,” said Arnold. “Beyond is only the coal-tender, and the locomotive. Passengers may not pass beyond this point.”

 

The Gecko had managed, though.

 

One of the doors flapped, swinging open, banging back. Cold air streamed in, like water through a salmon’s gills.

 

Richard pushed the door and leaned out of the carriage, keeping a firm grip on the frame.

 

Below, a gravel verge sped by. To the east, the scarlet rim of dawn outlined a black horizon. Up ahead, 3473-S rolled over the rails, pistons pumping, everything oiled and watered and fired.

 

An iron girder came up, horribly fast. Richard ducked back in.

 

“We’re on the bridge,” he said.

 

Before anyone could object, if they were going to, he threw himself out of the door.

 

* * * *

 

VII

 

Clinging to the side of the carriage, it occurred to Richard that someone else might have volunteered to crawl—essentially one-handed, since shotguns don’t have useful shoulder-slinging straps like field rifles—along the side of a speeding steam train.

 

Harry had seniority and responsibility, but his injured hand disqualified him. Mrs. Nickles was too hefty, overage and a woman besides. And the conductor was not entirely of their party. The Gecko had fit into him much too snugly. There was more mystery to Arnold—a streak of sneakiness, of evasion, of tragedy. Richard had noticed a spark in his mild eyes as Mrs. Nickles was talking about the good old days of the LSIR, about the Shagging Scot and the Headless Fireman and the In-for-Death Run of ‘31.

 

So, the train-crawling was down to him.

 

Once he’d swung out on the door, he eased himself around so he was hanging outside the train, blasted by the air-rush, deafened by the roar. About eight feet of carriage was left before the coupling. That was a mystery—a compartment not accessible to the passengers. No, it wasn’t a mystery—it was a toilet and washroom for the driver and the fireman, reachable by a wide, safe running board along the side of the coal-tender, with guard-rails and handholds he would just now have greatly appreciated on this carriage.

 

Above him, however, were loops of red chain—the communication cord. Richard grabbed a loop and held tight. The whistle shrilled over the din of the train. Cold chain bit into his palm. He should have put gloves on.

 

He dangled one-handed, trusting the chain to take his weight, back against the carriage, and saw glints on the dark waters of Loch Gaer several hundred feet below. Down there were the angry spirits of Jock McGaer’s “graysome” diners, the drowned Inverdeith witches and the cut-loose passengers of ‘31—they must all be wrapped up in the Gecko too. Not to mention the “stoon o’ fire spat out frae hell” of 1601. This had all started with that.

 

The flimsy-seeming bridge, he reminded himself, was the sturdy structure put up to replace the one that fell down. Girders flashed past, faster and faster. He used the stock of the gun to push himself along, and the barrel caught on a girder. The gun was wrenched out of his hand, twisted into a U-shape, and dropped into the loch. Mrs. Sweet had made a special point of telling Arnold to look after her artillery. A stiff complaint would be made to British Rail in the next day or two, providing there was a next day or two.

 

With both hands free, it was easier to travel from loop to loop. He’d think about how to deal with the Gecko without a weapon when he got to it. A sound rap on the nose didn’t seem likely to do the trick.

 

The door clanged shut behind him. Harry and Mrs. Nickles hung out of the open window, fixed expressions of encouragement plastered on anxious faces.

 

He fought the harsh wind, cruel gravity, hot spits of steam and cinder, and his own clumsiness. Something shaped like a little girl had done this earlier, he knew. The Gecko could probably stick to the side of the train, like a real lizard.

 

Eight feet. A hard eight feet. The skirts of his frock coat lashed his thighs. He had no feeling in his hands, but blood dripped from weals across his palms. He reached out for the next loop, the last, and his fist closed on nothing, then locked. He had to force his hand open and look up, hooking nerveless, perhaps boneless fingers over the loop. He saw his grip, but couldn’t feel it. He didn’t want to let go of the hold he was sure of. But if he didn’t, he was stuck. He reached out his leg, which didn’t quite stretch enough to hook over the guardrail. His boot sole scraped tarnished brass. His cuff was sodden with his own blood. With a prayer to higher powers, he let go the sure hold, put all his weight on the unsure one, and swung towards the platform.

 

He made it and found his feet on a veranda-like platform at the end of the carriage. He shook with fear and weakness and relief. Feeling came back, unwelcome, to his bloodied hand.

 

Between the carriage and the locomotive was the big, heavy coupling. Black iron thickened with soot and grease.

 

On the coupling squatted the Gecko. Only the braids and oily pyjamas even suggested this was still Vanessa. It was goblin filth on a poison toadstool, a gremlin dismantling an aero-engine in flight, the imp in Fuseli’s Nightmare hovering over a sleeping maiden.

 

With stubby-fingered, black hands, it picked at the coupling.

 

The Gecko looked up, eyes round, nostrils like slits. It hissed at Richard.

 

Blasts of steam came, surrounding them both with scalding fog. The whistle shrieked again.

 

In the coal tender, nearly empty this close to the destination, rolled two bodies, the driver and the engineer. They were sooty, with red torn-out throats. No one was at the open throttle.

 

Richard shook hot water off his face, which began to sting. He’d be red as a cooked lobster.

 

He grabbed the Gecko by the shoulders. He held folds of Vanessa’s pyjama top and pulled.

 

It gnawed his wrists.

 

Things hadn’t all gone the monster’s way. In 1931, it had unhooked the coupling at this point on the bridge. Now, it was using one little girl’s hands rather than two experienced men’s. The Gecko could give its hosts strengths, ignore their injuries, distort their faces ... but it couldn’t increase a handspan, or make tiny fingers work big catches.

 

The Gecko tried to take Richard and he shrugged it off.

 

They were more than halfway across the bridge.

 

“No room here,” he told it. “No room anywhere for you. Why not quit?”

 

Vanessa slumped in his grip, hands relaxing on the coupling. Richard picked her up, pressed her face to his chest.

 

“Can’t breathe,” she said, in her own voice.

 

This was too easy.

 

In the coal-tender, two bodies sat up and began to crawl towards Richard and Vanessa. The Gecko had found experienced railwaymen’s hands. This was where having a shotgun would have been useful—he doubted he could shoot Vanessa, even if he had smashed a plate in her face, but he’d have no compunction about blasting a couple of already-dead fellows.

 

The Gecko had no trouble working both corpses at the same time, which meant there was probably still some of it in the child. It had been hatched in the driver’s cabin of 3473, and was at its strongest here.

 

The fireman threw a lump of coal, which broke against the carriage behind Richard’s head. The driver clambered off the tender, down to the coupling platform. There was a lever there, its restraints undone.

 

The bridge might not come down, but at this speed and gradient the uncoupled carriages would concertina, come off the rails, break through the girders, fall into the loch.

 

There was a lot of dawnlight in the sky now.

 

Holding Vanessa close, he felt something in the hankie pocket of her pyjamas. He shifted her weight to his left shoulder, freeing his right hand to pluck out the Go-Codes.

 

He held the celluloid up in the rush of air, then let it go, snatched away, up and over the lake, sailing towards Inverdeith. One of the most closely guarded military secrets in the world was tossed into the wind.

 

“You should have committed the Go-Codes to memory,” he told the monster.

 

The Gecko’s corpse puppets opened throats and yelled, like the whistle. Then, the whistle itself sounded. The Gecko wasn’t only in the driver and the fireman. It clothed itself in the iron of the locomotive, the brass trim and scabby purple paint. Its fury burned in the furnace. Its frustration built up a seam-splitting head of steam. Its hunger ate up the rails.

 

Richard thought he’d saved the world, but not himself.

 

“What’s keeping you here?” he asked.

 

Dead hands reached the uncoupling lever. Richard slid his cutthroat razor out of his sleeve and flicked it open. He drew the edge swiftly, six or seven times, across greasy, blackened meat, cutting muscle strings.

 

The corpse’s hands hung useless, fingers flopping against the lever like sausages. The corpse was suddenly untenanted, and crumpled, falling over the coupling, arms dangling.

 

The Scotch Streak was safely across Inverdeith Bridge.

 

* * * *

 

VIII

 

The fireman lay dead, empty of the Gecko.

 

It was just in the train now. The Scotch Streak’s lamps glowed a wicked red.

 

World War Three was off, unless the Gecko could somehow let the Soviets know nato’s trousers were down. But everyone on the train could still be killed.

 

At this speed, slamming into the buffers at Portnacreirann would mean a horrific pileup. Or the Scotch Streak might plough through the station, and steam down Portnacreirann High Street and over a cliff. Like Colonel Moran, the Gecko was intent on spiteful suicide. It could carry them all with it, in fire and broken metal.

 

Richard knew Diogenes Club procedure. Solve the problem, no matter the cost. His father had told him from the first this was a life of service, of sacrifice. Every Member, every Talent, gave up something. Danny and Annette weren’t the first to lose their lives.

 

It might be a fair trade.

 

“Are we nearly there?” Vanessa asked, laying her head on his shoulder. “I’m very sleepy.”

 

He felt the weight of the child in his arms. He had to carry the fight through. For her. He only had a half-life, snatched from a void. He should have been dead many times over. There was a reason he’d survived his childhood. Maybe it was Vanessa. She had to be saved, not sacrificed.

 

“There’s one thing left to do,” he told her. “Have you ever wanted to drive a choo-choo train?”

 

She laughed at him. “Only babies say ‘choo-choo’!”

 

“Chuff-chuff, then.”

 

Vanessa’s giggle gave him the boost he needed, though he was still terrified. While facing demon-possessed zombies and nuclear holocaust, he’d misplaced his fear. Now he was in charge of a runaway train, funk seeped back into his stomach. He found he was trembling.

 

He set the girl down safely and stepped over the dead driver, climbed the ladder to the coal-tender, passed the dead fireman and got to the cabin. The furnace door clanked open. Levers and wheels swayed or rolled with the train’s movement.

 

It occurred to him that he didn’t know how to stop a train.

 

“Can I sound the whistle?” asked Vanessa. She had followed, monkeying over the coal-tender, unfazed by dead folk. She found the whistle-pull, easily.

 

Richard absentmindedly said she could and looked about for switches with useful labels like “pull to slow down” or “emergency brakes.” He heard the Gecko’s chuckle in the roll of coal in the furnace. It knew exactly the pickle he was in.

 

Vanessa blew the whistle, three long bursts, three short bursts, three long bursts. What every schoolchild knew in Morse code. S.O.S. Save Our Souls. Help! Mayday. M’aidez! Richard wasn’t sure she even understood it was a distress signal, it was likely only Morse she knew.

 

The sun was almost up. The sky was the colour of blood.

 

Ahead, the rails curved across open space, towards Portnacreirann Station.

 

“I can see the sea,” shouted Vanessa, from her perch.

 

Richard muttered that they might be making rather too close acquaintance with the sea—rather, Loch Linnhe—in a minute or two.

 

“Here comes someone,” said Vanessa.

 

More trouble, no doubt! He looked back and couldn’t see anything.

 

He was reluctant to leave the cabin, though he admitted he was useless at the throttle, but surrendered to an impulse. He was sensitive: he should trust his feelings while he had them. He made his way back past the tender.

 

The door to the staff toilet was open, and Arnold stood with a fire-axe. He had smashed through the mirror. Mrs. Nickles was behind him. And Harry Cutley. Richard kicked himself for not thinking of that, but hadn’t known there was a door beyond the mirrored partition.

 

Arnold raised the axe, and Richard knew the Gecko had its hook in him, had been reeling him in like trout. Mrs. Nickles shouted something. They hadn’t come in response to the SOS.

 

Now, in addition to the runaway train, he had an axe-wielding madman to deal with.

 

Richard dashed back to the cabin. Arnold leaped across the coupling, treading on his dead colleague, and followed.

 

The conductor was the full Gecko now. Richard had a razor against an axe.

 

He pulled the first lever that came to hand. Instinct paid off. A burst of steam pushed Arnold back, knocking him to his knees. Richard kicked at the axe-head and wrenched the weapon out of the conductor’s hands. He took hold of the man’s throat and held up his fist, enjoying the look of inhuman panic—the Gecko in terror!—in Arnold’s eyes, then clipped him smartly, bang on the button. This time, fortune was with him. The Gecko’s light went out. Arnold slumped in Richard’s grip, blood creeping from his nose.

 

Mrs. Nickles had followed Arnold. She clung to the handrail.

 

“It’s Donald,” she shouted. “Donald McRidley. I didn’t recognise the blighter without ‘is ‘air. ‘E were a ruddy woman about his blessed beautiful ‘air when ‘e were the Shaggin’ Scot, an’ now ‘e’s a bald-bonced old git.”

 

Arnold’s—Donald’s!—eyes fluttered open.

 

So, he wasn’t a navvy. Or not anymore. He was back on his train. Unable to get away, Richard supposed. No wonder.

 

“Driver,” he shouted. “Bring in the Streak!”

 

“Passengers aren’t allowed in this part of the train, sir,” he mumbled. “It’s against regulations. The company can’t be held responsible for accidents.”

 

Richard saw the red glint, the Gecko creeping back. He slapped McRidley, hard. The eyes were clear for a moment.

 

“Time to stop the train,” he told the man. “Do your duty, at last. Redeem your name.”

 

“Do it for Else, ducks,” said Mrs. Nickles, cooing in McRidley’s ear. “Do it for poor Nick. For the LSI-bloody-R.”

 

McRidley broke free of the pair of them.

 

As if sleepwalking in a hurry, mind somewhere else, he pulled levers, rolled wheels, tapped gauges.

 

The station was dead ahead, sunlight flashing on its glass roof.

 

Wheels screamed on rails. Vanessa tooted the whistle, happily.

 

Harry was with them now, arm in a makeshift sling, hair awry. Every boy wanted to be in the cabin of a steam train.

 

They all had to hang onto something as McRidley braced himself.

 

Sparks showered the platform, startling an early-morning porter. The buffers loomed.

 

They did not crash. But there was a heavy jolt.

 

* * * *

 

IX

 

Donald McRidley, Arnold the Conductor, was dead. When the train stopped, so did he—like grandfather and the clock in the song.

 

3473-S was decoupled now and shunted into a siding. The Gecko was still nestled in there, but its conduit to the train, to the passengers, was cut. Richard thought it might have been the communication cord, which had to be unhooked—but the monster had also been tied to the lifeline of the once-disgraced, now-redeemed driver.

 

“‘E were a handsome devil,” commented Mrs. Nickles, putting her teeth back in. “Loved ‘is train more than any girl, though.”

 

Harry was on the telephone to Edwin Winthrop. He said the entity was in captivity, but Richard knew the Gecko was dying. As the fire went out in 3473’s belly, the monster gasped its last. A bad beast, Danny had called it. The iron shell would just be a trophy. They should hang the cowcatcher in the Diogenes Club.

 

The decoy couriers were gone, off to the nato base. Mrs. Sweet was marching down to the baggage car, where a surprise awaited. The terrifying vicar looked even more ghastly in the light of day. Richard had brushed past the man several times, mind open for any ill omen, to convince himself the Gecko wasn’t sneaking off in this vessel to work its evil anew.

 

Police and ambulances were on their way. Edwin would have words in ears, to account for Danny, Annette and the crewmen, not to mention general damage. Richard found Annette rolled under a table, and carried her to her compartment, where he laid her out on her bed, over her nightgown, eyes closed.

 

A straight-backed American civilian, with teeth like Burt Lancaster and a chin-dent like Kirk Douglas, scouted along the platform.

 

“Buddy, have you seen a parcel?” he said. “For Coates?”

 

Richard tried to answer, but no words came.

 

The American looked further, walking past Vanessa.

 

* * * *

 

PORTNACREIRANN

 

The train finally came, as Richard finished telling the story.

 

They had been up all night. Cold Saturday dawn had broken.

 

Now, they sat in a carriage, not a compartment. Fred settled in, but Richard was restless.

 

“I used to love trains,” he said. “Even after my Ghost Train ride. It was a nice way to travel. You had time and ease, to read or talk or look out the window. Now, it’s all strikes and delays. This might as well be a motor coach. She hates trains, you know. Mrs. Thatcher. To her, anyone who travels on public transport is a failure, beneath contempt. She’s going to bleed the railways. It’ll be horrid. Like so much else.”

 

Fred still had questions.

 

“So, guv, who is Vanessa?”

 

Richard shrugged. “Vanessa is Vanessa, Fred. Like me, she’s no real memory of who she was, if she was anyone. In my case, there was a war, a decade of chaos. It was easy to get misplaced, left out of the records. With her ... well, it shouldn’t have been possible. Someone dropped her off at Euston with a label round her neck. A woman, she thought, but not her mother. Surely, she couldn’t be a stray, she must belong to someone?”

 

“What about that Coates bloke? The Yank at Portnacreirann.”

 

“That wasn’t ‘Lieutenant Commander Alexander Coates, R.N.’ That was a Colonel Christopher Conner, S.A.C. ‘Coates’ wasn’t an alias or a code—just a name on a label. Winthrop made enquiries. The only ‘Alexander Coates’ even remotely in the navy was a fourteen-year-old sea-scout. We looked into the system of couriering the Go-Codes. The Americans had only given us the cover story even when they’d wanted help, so we threw a bit of a sulk. They eventually admitted—and this is how strange defence policy is—that they had, as they said, ‘contracted out.’ Hired a private firm to make delivery, not telling them what was being carried. The firm turned out to be a phone in an empty room with six weeks’ rent in arrears. Maybe some semicrook was hauling kids out of orphanages and bundling them up to Scotland under official cover, then selling them on or disposing of them. We’ll never know and, in the end, it was beside the point.”

 

“You adopted Vanessa?”

 

“No. No one adopted her, unless you count the Diogenes Club.”

 

“Does she have a surname?”

 

“Not really. Where it’s absolutely necessary, it’s ‘Kaye.’ Catriona took an interest, as she did in me. Without her, we’d be complete freaks.”

 

Fred kept quiet on that one.

 

“What about the Gecko? Harry Cutley?”

 

“The Gecko died, if it could be said to have lived. When 3473-S turned into cold scrap iron, it was gone. Puff. Harry poked around with his instruments before giving up. For a year or two, another old steamer pulled the Scotch Streak. Then it went diesel. Harry dropped out in 1967. Went to Nepal. And I became the Most Valued Member. There’s a ceremony. Very arcane. Like the Masons. You know most of what’s happened since.”

 

Fred thought it through.

 

He did know most of the stories, but not all. Despite ten years’ involvement with the Diogenes Club, with Richard and Vanessa, there were mysteries. They could both still surprise him. Once, in a close, tense, unexpected moment, before Fred met Zarana, he and Vanessa had kissed, deeply and urgently. She said, “You do know I’m a man,” and, for dizzying seconds, he had believed her. Then she giggled, they were back in danger, and anything further between them cut off.

 

After a decade, he still didn’t know if Richard and Vanessa had ever been a couple. Everyone else assumed, but he didn’t. Now, knowing about the Ghost Train, he saw how complex their entanglement was: a kinship of siblings, raised under the aegis of a unique institution, but also guardianship, as Richard brought Vanessa into the circle the way his adoptive father had brought him. The only thing he really knew now that had been mystifying before was how Vanessa had got her eyebrow scar. Richard had given it to her.

 

Lately, Vanessa had been absent a great deal. So had Fred, of course— with Zarana, or at the Yard. But Vanessa had been on missions, cases, sealed-knot and under-the-rose business. A change was coming in the Club—when Richard took a seat on the Cabal, as seemed inevitable, was Vanessa in line to become Most Valued Member? There was a woman Prime Minister, so no reason why a woman couldn’t hold that title. If she wanted it—which, Fred realised, he didn’t know she did.

 

For three months, there’d been no word. While Richard and Fred were tracking cornflakes cultists, she was somewhere else, unavailable. Fred could tell Richard was concerned, though confident in the woman. She’d survived a lot since throwing off the Gecko. Now, this summons.

 

... to Portnacreirann.

 

“It’s not over, is it?” said Fred. “It can’t be coincidence that it’s the same place.”

 

Richard gave a noncommittal pfui.

 

“We’re at Inverdeith,” he said. “And that’s a Portnacreirann train on the other side of the platform.”

 

They were off one train before it had completely stopped and on another already moving out.

 

And then Inverdeith Bridge. Sun glinted on the surface of Loch Gaer.

 

“This is where the Gecko was born,” said Richard. “Between Nick Bowler and Donald McRidley and 3473-S. And that ‘stoon o’ fire spat out frae hell,’ if I’m any judge—which I am. The stoon was an egg, waiting for the right circumstances to hatch. All the other bloody business around the loch was influenced by the unborn thing. Maybe it was an alien, not a demon. The stoon was what we’d now call a meteorite, after all. From outer space. Witch drownings and human haggis kept the embryo on a drip-feed for centuries, but it awaited a vehicle—literally. The shell-shards might still be down there. Maybe it was a clutch of eggs.”

 

Fred looked at untroubled waters. This local train proceeded slowly over the bridge. He saw rust on the girders where paint had flaked away, missing rivets, spray-can “Independent Scotland” graffiti, scratched swearwords.

 

“In-for-Death,” he said.

 

“Think calm thoughts, Frederick. And we’ll be safe.”

 

This was where it had happened. With that thought, Fred had a chill. He didn’t only mean that this was where the Gecko had been born and defeated, but this was where Richard and Vanessa had started. When Richard got on the Ghost Train, he’d been a kid himself. When he got off...

 

Past the bridge, with Portnacreirann in sight and passengers taking luggage down from overhead racks, Fred’s insides went tight. They had been delayed. What if they were too late? What was so urgent anyway? He had learned to be ready for anything. But what kind of anything was there at Portnacreirann?

 

“Did you bring your elephant gun, guv?”

 

Richard snorted at that.

 

They got off the train, carrying their bags.

 

They walked along the platform and into the station. It was busier than Culler’s Halt, but emptied quickly.

 

A centrepiece of the station was an old steam engine, restored and polished, with a plaque and a little fence around it.

 

Richard froze. It was 3473-S, the locomotive that had pulled the Scotch Streak, the Ghost Train, the favoured physical form of the Gecko. Now, it was just a relic. No danger at all. A youth in naval dress uniform admired it. He turned and saw them.

 

“Mr. Jeperson, Mr. Regent,” he said. “Glad you made it in time. Cutting it close, but we’ll get you to the base by breaking petty road safety laws. Come on.”

 

The officer trotted out of the station. Fred and Richard followed, without further thought for 3473-S.

 

A jeep and driver waited on the forecourt. The officer helped them up. Fred had a pang at being treated as if he were elderly when he was only just used to thinking of himself as “early middle aged.” It happened more and more lately.

 

“I’m Jim,” said the boy in uniform. “Al’s cousin. We’re a navy family. Put down for ships at birth like some brats are for schools. In the sea-scouts as soon as we’re teething. I hope your lady knows what she’s getting into.”

 

Fred and Richard looked at each other, not saying anything.

 

“We all think she’s rather super, you know. For her age.”

 

“We admire her qualities, too,” said Richard.

 

Fred had a brief fantasy of tossing Jim out of the jeep to watch him bounce on the road.

 

They travelled at speed down a winding lane. Three cyclists with beards and cagoules pedalling the other way wound up tangled in the verge, shaking fists as Jim blithely shouted out “sorry” at them. “Naval emergency,” he explained, though they couldn’t hear.

 

Whatever trouble Vanessa was in, Fred was ready to fight.

 

The jeep roared through a checkpoint. The ratings on duty barely lifted the barrier in time. Jim waved a pass at them, redundantly.

 

They were on the base.

 

It had been a fishing village once, Fred saw—the rows of stone cottages were old and distinctive. Prefab services buildings fit in around the original community. The submarine-launched “independent deterrent” was a Royal Navy show now. nato—i.e., the Yanks—preferred intercontinental ballistic missiles they could lob at the Soviets from their own backyards in Kansas, or bombs dropped from the planes that could be scrambled from the protestor-fringed base at Greenham Common. There would still be Go-Codes, though.

 

The base was on alert. Sailors with guns rushed about. There were rumours of trouble in the South Atlantic. Naval budget cuts had withdrawn forces from the region so suddenly that a South American country, say Argentina, could easily get the wrong idea. It might be time to send a gunboat to remind potential invaders that the Falklands remained British. If there were any gunboats left.

 

The jeep did a tight turn to a halt, scattering gravel in front of a small building. Once the village church, it was now the base chapel.

 

“Just in time,” said Jim, jumping down.

 

He opened the big door tactfully, so as not to disturb a service inside, and signalled for Fred and Richard to yomp in after him.

 

Fred remembered Richard leading him into a deconsecrated church at dead of midnight to stop a then-cabinet minister intent on slitting the throat of a virgin choirboy in a ritual supposed to revive the British moulded plastics industry. The Minister was resigned through ill-health and packed off to the House of Lords to do no further harm. The choirboy was now in the pop charts dressed as a pirate, singing as if his throat really had been cut. This wasn’t like that, but a ritual was in progress.

 

No one in the congregation gave the newcomers a glance. Jim led Fred and Richard to places in a pew on the bride’s side of the church. They found themselves sat next to Catriona Kaye, and her nurse. All the others from her day—Edwin, Sir Giles—were gone. Barbara Corri was here too, in a cloud of ylang-ylang with her hair done like Lady Diana Spencer’s. Even Inspector Price of the Yard, sporting a smart new mac. Fred looked around, knowing the other shoe would drop. Yes, Zarana, in some incredible dress, was at the front, clicking away with a spy camera lifted from Fred’s stash of surveillance equipment.

 

“We got telegrams,” whispered Professor Corri, fingers around Richard’s arm.

 

Vanessa stood at the altar, red hair pinned up under the veil, in a white dress with a train. Beside her stood a navy officer Fred had never seen before. He couldn’t focus on the groom’s face for the glare of his uniform. He even had the dress sword on his belt and plumed helmet under his arm.

 

“How did this happen?” Fred asked, no one in particular.

 

“A loose end, long neglected,” whispered Catriona. “Not that it explains anything....”

 

She dabbed a hankie to the corner of her eye.

 

Fred looked at Richard. The man was crying, and Fred had absolutely no idea what he was feeling.

 

Fred looked at the altar, at the naval chaplain.

 

“...do you, Alexander Selkirk Coates, take this woman, Vanessa, ah, No Surname Given, to be your lawfully wedded wife ...”

 

Fred looked up at the vaulted ceiling, gobsmacked.