‘What!’

‘You see what I mean? The coroner said “What!” too. The railway chap said that they were talking about “robbing the Caley” and since no one could rob a football team it must have been a hotel. It seems that all the hotels in Scotland that are not called Waverley are called Caledonian. Popularly known as “Caley”. They weren’t serious about it, he said.’

‘And that was all he saw of the see-er-off?’

‘Yes, that was all.’

‘He mightn’t have been a see-er-off at all. He might have been just a friend who came across him on the train. Saw his name on the sleeper list, or noticed him in passing.’

‘Yes; except that you’d expect a friend to turn up again in the morning.’

‘Not necessarily. Especially if he was far down the train. And the removal of the body would have been so discreet that I doubt if any passengers knew that someone had died. The station was clear of passengers long before the ambulance arrived. I know, because the ambulance fuss was taking place when I had nearly finished breakfast.’

‘Yes. The sleeping-car chap said he took it for granted that the other man was a see-er-off because he was standing in hat and coat. Mostly, he says, when people go coffee-housing along the train they take their hats off. It’s the first thing they do, he says: throw their hat on a rack. When they get to their compartment, I mean.’

‘Talking of names on the sleeper list, how was the berth booked?’

‘By phone; but he picked up the ticket himself. At least, it was picked up by a thin dark man. Booked a week in advance.’

‘All right. Go on about Yughourt.’

‘About who?’

‘About the sleeping-car attendant.’

‘Oh. Well. He said that when he came down the train collecting tickets, about twenty minutes out from Euston, Martin had gone to the lavatory, but his sleeper ticket and the outward half of his ticket to Scoone were lying ready on the little shelf below the mirror. He took them and marked them off in his book, and as he was passing the lavatory he knocked at the door and said: “Are you in B Seven, sir?” Martin said yes. The attendant said: “I’ve taken your tickets, thank you, sir. Will you be wanting tea in the morning?” And Martin said: “No, thank you; good-night.”’

‘So he had a return ticket.’

‘Yes. The return half was in his wallet.’

‘Well, it’s all straightforward enough, it seems. Even the lack of anyone to make inquiries about him, or to claim his body, may be due to the fact that he was off on a trip and people didn’t expect to hear from him.’

‘That and the lack of publicity. I don’t suppose his people even bothered to put an announcement in an English paper; they would just announce it in their own local affair, where people knew him.’

‘What did the P.M. say?’

‘Oh, the usual. Light meal about an hour before death, large quantity of whisky in stomach and a fair amount in the blood. Quite enough to make him tight.’

‘No suggestion that he was a soak?’

‘Oh, no. No degeneration of any kind. Head and shoulder injuries at some earlier period, but otherwise good healthy specimen. Not to say tough.’

‘So he had some earlier injury?’

‘Yes, but a long time ago. I mean, nothing to do with this. He had at some time had a fractured skull and a broken collar-bone. Would it be very bad-mannered or very indiscreet of me to ask why all this interest in a simple case?’

‘So help me, sergeant, if I knew I would tell you. I think I must be getting childish.’

‘It’s more likely that you’re just bored,’ Williams said sympathetically. ‘Me, I was brought up in the country and I was never a one for watching the grass grow. An over-rated place, the country. Everything’s too far away. Once that burn of yours starts flowing you’ll forget about Mr Martin. It’s pouring stair-rods here so you probably won’t have long to wait for rain now.’

It did not, in fact, rain that night in the Turlie valley, but something else happened. The cold bright stillness gave place to a light wind. The wind was soft and warm, the air hung damp and heavy between gusts, the earth was moist and slippery, and down from the high tops came the snow water, filling the river bed from bank to bank. And up the brown racing water came the fish, flashing silver in the light as they leaped over the broken ledges of rock and up the narrow sluicing current between the boulders. Pat took his precious invention from his fly case (where it had a special compartment of its own) and presented it to Grant with the formal benevolence of a headmaster handing over a certificate. ‘You’ll take care of it, won’t you?’ he said. ‘It took me a long time to make.’ The thing was, as his mother had said, a fearsome object. Grant thought that it was rather like something for a woman’s hat; but he was aware that he was being singled out among men as the sole recipient worthy of such an honour and he accepted it with due gratification. He put it safely away in his own case and hoped that Pat would not supervise his efforts to the extent of making him use it. But each time he chose a new fly in the days that followed, he caught sight of the fearsome object and was warmed by his small cousin’s approval of him.

He spent his days by the Turlie; happy and relaxed above the brown swirling water. The water was clear as beer and its foam froth-white; it filled his ears with music and his days with delight. The damp soft air smurred his tweed with fine dew and the hazel twigs dripped down the back of his neck.

For nearly a week he thought fish, talked fish, and ate fish.

And then, one evening, on his pet pool below the swing bridge, he was startled out of his complacence.

He saw a man’s face in the water.

There was time for his heart to come up into his mouth before he realised that the face was not under the surface of the water but at the back of his eyes. It was the dead white face with the reckless eyebrows.

He swore, and sent his Jock Scott singing viciously to the far side of the pool. He was finished with B Seven. He had grown interested in B Seven under a complete misunderstanding of the situation. He had thought that B Seven too had been hounded by demons. He had built up for himself an entirely fallacious picture of B Seven. That toper’s Paradise in B Seven’s compartment boiled down to an overturned whisky bottle. He was no longer interested in B Seven: a very ordinary young man, bursting with rude health to the point of toughness, who had had one over the eight on a night journey and ended his life in the highly undignified manner of falling backwards and then crawling about on his hands and knees until he stopped breathing.

‘But he wrote those line about Paradise,’ a voice in him said.

‘He didn’t,’ he said to the voice. ‘There’s not the slightest evidence that he did any such thing.’

‘There’s his face. No ordinary face. It was the face that you first succumbed to. Long before you began to think of his Paradise at all.’

‘I have not succumbed,’ he said. ‘In my job you take an automatic interest in people.’

‘Yes? You mean, if the occupant of that whisky-sodden compartment had been a fat commercial traveller with a moustache like a badly kept hedge and a face like a boiled pudding, you would still have been interested?’

‘I might.’

‘You lying dishonest bastard. You were B Seven’s champion the minute you saw his face and noticed the way that Yughourt was mauling him about. You snatched him from Yughourt’s grip and straightened his jacket like a mother pulling a shawl over her baby.’

‘Shut up.’

‘You wanted to know about him not because you thought there was anything odd about his death but because, quite simply, you wanted to know about him. He was young and dead, and he had been reckless and alive. You wanted to know what he had been like when he was reckless and alive.’