‘Well?’

‘Is that your friend?’ Grant said, pointing to the man on the bottom step.

‘Yes, that’s Bill. How did you know? Have you met him somewhere, then?’

‘I–I’m inclined to think that I have. But of course, on that photograph, I could hardly swear to it.’

‘I don’t want you to do any swearing. Just give me a general weather report. Just tell me roughly when and where you saw him and I’ll track him down, don’t you be in any doubt about it. Do you know where you met him? I mean, do you remember?’

‘Oh, yes. I remember. I saw him in a compartment—a sleeping-berth compartment—of the London mail when it was running into Scoone early in the morning of the 4th of March. That was the train I came north on.’

‘You mean Bill came here? To Scotland? What for?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Didn’t he tell you? Did you talk to him?’

‘No. I couldn’t.’

‘Why not?’

Grant put out his hand and pushed his companion gently backwards so that he sat down in the chair that was behind him.

‘I couldn’t because he was no longer alive.’

There was a short silence.

‘I’m truly sorry, Cullen. I wish I could pretend to you that it might not be Bill, but short of going into a witness-box on oath I am prepared to back my belief that it is.’

After another little silence Cullen said: ‘Why was he dead? What happened to him?’

‘He had had a fair load of whisky and he fell backwards against the solid porcelain wash-basin. It fractured his skull.’

‘Who said all this?’

‘That was the finding of the coroner’s court. In London.’

‘In London? Why in London?’

‘Because he had died, according to the post-mortem, very shortly after leaving Euston. And by English law, a sudden death is investigated by a coroner and a jury.’

‘But all that’s just—just supposition,’ Cullen said, beginning to come alive and be angry. ‘If he was alone, how can anyone tell what happened to him?’

‘Because the English police are the most painstaking creatures as well as the most suspicious.’

‘Police? There were police in on this thing?’

‘Oh, assuredly. The police do the investigating and report in public to the coroner and his jury. In this case there had been the most exhaustive examination and tests. They knew in the end almost to a mouthful how much neat whisky he had drunk, and at what intervals before his—his death.’

‘And that about his falling backwards—how could they know that?’

‘They went prowling with microscopes. The oil and broken hair were still evident on the edge of the basin. And the skull injury was consistent with a backwards fall against just such an object.’

Cullen calmed down at this, but he looked disorientated.

‘How do you know all this?’ he asked, vaguely; and then with growing suspicion: ‘How did you come to see him anyway?’

‘When I was on my way out I came across the sleeping-car attendant trying to rouse him. The man thought he was just sleeping it off, because the whisky bottle had rolled all over the floor and the compartment smelt as if he had been making a night of it.’

This did not satisfy Tad Cullen. ‘You mean that was the only time you saw him? Just for a moment, lying—lying dead there, and you could recognise him from a snapshot—a not very good snapshot—weeks later?’

‘Yes. I was impressed by his face. Faces are my business; and in a way my hobby. I was interested in the way the slant of the eyebrows gave the face a reckless expression, even—even as it was, without any real expression whatever. And the interest was intensified in a way that was quite accidental.’

‘What was that?’ Cullen was not giving an inch.

‘When I was having breakfast, in the Station Hotel at Scoone, I found that I had picked up by accident a newspaper that had been tumbled off the berth when the attendant was trying to waken him, and in the Stop Press—the blank space, you know—someone had been pencilling some lines of verse. “The beasts that talk, the streams that stand, the stones that walk, the singing sand—” then two blank lines, and then: “that guard the way to Paradise.”’

‘That was what you advertised about,’ Cullen said, his face growing momentarily blacker. ‘What was it to you that you went to the trouble of advertising about it?’

‘I wanted to know where the lines came from if they were lines from some book. If they were lines in the process of being made into a poem, then I wanted to know what the subject was.’

‘Why? What should you care?’

‘I had no choice in the matter. The thing ran round and round in my head. Do you know anyone called Charles Martin?’

‘No, I don’t. And don’t change the subject.’

‘I’m not changing the subject, oddly enough. Do me the kindness to think of it seriously for a moment. Have you ever, at any time, heard of or known a Charles Martin?’

‘I’ve told you, no! I don’t have to think. And of course you’re changing the subject! What has Charles Martin got to do with this?’

‘According to the police, the man who was found dead in Compartment B Seven was a French mechanic called Charles Martin.’

After a moment Cullen said: ‘Look, Mr Grant, maybe I’m not very bright, but you’re not making sense. What you’re saying is that you saw Bill Kenrick lying dead in a compartment of a train, but he wasn’t Bill Kenrick at all; he was a man called Martin.’

‘No, what I’m saying is that the police believe him to be a man called Martin.’

‘Well, I take it they have good grounds for their belief.’

‘Excellent grounds. He had letters, and identity papers. Even better, his people have identified him.’

‘They did! Then what have you been stringing me along for! There isn’t any suggestion that that man was Bill! If the police are satisfied that the man was a Frenchman called Martin, why in thunder should you decide that he wasn’t Martin at all but Bill Kenrick!’

‘Because I’m the only person in the world who has seen both the man in B Seven and that snapshot.’ Grant nodded at the photograph where it lay on the dressing-table.

This gave Cullen pause. Then he said: ‘But that’s a poor photograph. It can’t convey much to someone who has never seen Bill.’

‘It may be a poor photograph in the sense that it is a mere snapshot, but it is a very good likeness indeed.’

‘Yes,’ Cullen said slowly, ‘it is.’

‘Consider three things; three facts. One: Charles Martin’s people had not seen him for years, and then they saw only a dead face; if you are told that your son has died, and no one suggests that there is any doubt as to identity, you see the face you expected to see. Two: the man known as Charles Martin was found dead on a train on the same day as Bill Kenrick was due to join you in Paris. Three: in his compartment there was a pencilled jingle about talking beasts and singing sands, a subject that on your own showing had interested Bill Kenrick.’

‘Did you tell the police about the paper?’

‘I tried to. They weren’t interested. There was no mystery, you see. They knew who the man was, and how he died, and that was all that concerned them.’

‘It might have interested them that he was writing verse in English.’

‘Oh, no. There is no evidence that he wrote anything, or that the paper belonged to him at all. He may have picked it up somewhere.’

‘The whole thing’s crazy,’ Cullen said, angry and bewildered.

‘It’s fantastic. But at the heart of all the whirling absurdity there is a small core of stillness.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes. There is one small clear space on which one can stand while taking one’s bearings.’

‘What is that?’

‘Your friend Bill Kenrick is missing. And out of a crowd of strange faces, I pick Bill Kenrick as a man I saw dead in a sleeping-compartment at Scoone on the morning of the 4th of March.’