I stopped sulking, and began to think. If he stopped a train, there would be a determined search for the culprit, and the police might put two and two together.

“You always do the right thing,” I said, “and then go plumb crazy when it works. Look here, if we went to Southampton by train, that’s the only train we could have taken. Right! We weren’t on it, so the cops go home to bed. If we’re cautious we can use the station.”

The line was open and bare of possible cover. There was little chance of avoiding any railwaymen who might choose to walk along it at the same time as ourselves, or of bluffing them into believing that we had a right to be where we were. Assuming that the police had been chatting with stationmaster and staff, anyone answering the descriptions of Sandorski and myself would be under lively suspicion. No, it was absolutely essential to reach the station unnoticed. If we could, and if we found a place to wait for a London train, we should be clear of pursuit at last.

I went up the line to explore, leaving Lex and the general under cover of the coal trucks. My excuse was that I knew more of my own railways than Sandorski; but in fact I felt that his mood was too inspired for him to be let loose. Left to himself, he might easily have walked into the station-master’s office and ordered a special train. I don’t say he wouldn’t have got it, but at this crisis of our fortunes I was all for a hole-in-the-ground policy.

Quarter of a mile up the line was a signal box blazing with light, and beyond that the white gleam of the station and the dots of red and emerald on the tracks. I trotted from sleeper to sleeper, ready to drop flat at any moment, until I was under the wall of the box. That was the end of the advance. I might perhaps have tried to stalk the station if I had had only myself to consider, but there was no hope of getting the lumbering, overcoated Lex past the box and all the lights and onto the bare platform without some official shouting at us.

Even so I was confident that on a dark night, with all industry and transport–outside the station, that is–tucked up in bed or represented only by sleepy watchmen, it would be easy enough to find another route and to remain invisible. The little gods of luck, however–whom I may have offended by ascribing too much of our success to good management–were determined to show me to whom the gratitude was really due.

I went back down the line and started to climb the fence into the waste ground between railway and docks. The fence was only of split paling, but I got my trousers caught on the points. While I was trying to extricate myself, a locomotive passed, clanking lightheartedly home. The driver shouted something, and the fireman heaved a lump of coal–more, I think, by way of a cheerfully disapproving gesture than with any intent of hitting the target; indeed he might have tried for a month of journeys to score a bull and failed. The lump caught me on the back of the neck. The seat of my pants and the paling were smartly separated. Until I picked myself up I thought it was the locomotive itself which had hit me.

After crossing the waste ground and another fence I came out onto a road. It passed over the railway by a bridge, on each side of which were the approaches to the up and down platforms, spacious, well-lit and empty but for a solitary taxi. There were two massive cops outside the entrance to the up booking-office; the solidity of their overcoats made them look like a sculptor’s functional decoration for the concrete buildings. While I watched them,

they moved off. To us it didn’t much matter whether they stayed or not. The railwaymen, mildly busy on the platforms, had certainly been warned to keep an eye open for fugitive murderers.

I leaned over the parapet of the bridge. The tracks and the roofs over the platforms were immediately below me. The roofs were accessible, easily accessible, and couldn’t be seen from ground level. Was there any hope of a route and a refuge at the end of it? I saw several fantastic answers, and one that might be practical. In a bay alongside the down platform was a big, empty restaurant-car. If we could reach it, we could wait as long as we liked behind it or under it. The back of the car was close up against the wall of the station buildings, and in deep shadow.

Before I committed Lex and Sandorski, I decided to reconnoiter the route. The road appeared to be empty. I climbed onto the parapet, and let myself silently down to the roof of the platform, which was only some six feet below. I had just started to crawl cautiously along the roof, when a voice from the parapet called:

” ‘Ere you! Wotcher doin’ of?”

I shall never know how he managed to interrupt me. I think he must have been riding a bicycle without a light, or else had been watching me for some time from the shadows, as fascinated as any curious dog.

What to do? Take him into my confidence? Bluff? Climb back to the road and knock him out? I remember that all these alternatives went through my head, but I cannot have had time to formulate even mental words. How is it possible to think, I wonder, without the use of at least a few key-words in the brain? And yet, in an emergency, it is.

“Only getting a spot of free travel, mate,” I said.

“Doin’ the railways company, eh?” he asked with an aggressive sense of duty.

“It ain’t the company any longer,” I replied indignantly. “It’s the state.”

He thought that over.

“Ah, so it is,” he said. “Well, good night!”

He removed his head, and vanished as silently as he had appeared.

After all this interference by the citizenry, my nerves were shattered. I crawled along that roof, trying hard to persuade myself that it was safer than any other place I had been in for the last six hours–which, oddly enough, and at a distance of twenty feet from the bridge, was true. When I came abreast of the rear end of the restaurant-car, I saw that there would be no difficulty in dropping on to its roof, so long as feet didn’t slip on its sloping edge. There was a risk, of course, that the lower half of anyone walking along the top of the car would be noticed from the platform, but it had to be taken.

I returned to the bridge, crossed the road and the fence beyond, and disappeared into the waste ground. Lex and Sandorski were waiting where I had left them in the darkness of the coal trucks. The general didn’t much care for my route when I explained it, and asked whether I thought that Lex was a bloody circus performer. Lex, however, had cheered up a little. He insisted that if all he had to do was drop, the law of gravity would take care of him. It certainly would. What worried us was where he would land and how much noise he would make.

We passed Lex over the fence, and made a wide circuit away from the railway so that our clumsy progress wouldn’t be heard by anyone on the line. That journey was a violent strain on patience. The darkness was absolute–probably because there were so many lights in the distance to catch our eyes–and the surface was abominable. Holes, bricks, strands of wire, rusty cans and drums, all camouflaged by tall dead weeds, tripped us while we supported the stumbling Lex. It seemed all of a mile before we came to the road.

I went first to show them where to cross the parapet of the bridge. A minute afterwards Lex sprawled over the edge into sight, with the general hanging onto his hands. I grabbed and landed him, and Sandorski followed. Once Lex had got his breath back, it seemed the right moment to stimulate him; so we had a stiff tot of rum all round.

Our crawl in single file along the roof was easy enough. We halted above the black whale-back of the restaurant car. I asked Lex if he thought that–with help–he could drop to it and keep his footing, and then quickly climb down to the couplings by the rungs at the rear of the car.