Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 105, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 640 & 641, March 1995

Again an empty carriage. In the next, there was one man slouched in his seat and blocking the door in the centre of the carriage that Hugo had been planning to use. As the train jerked to a stop, the man rolled over and lay across the two seats, staring up at the roof with a puzzled look on his face, and Hugo saw the narrow wound in the back of his neck with the dark blood oozing out of it.

It was instinct that led his hand to the handle of the door. Must have help. Must have air. Get the door open. He stumbled onto the platform and stood holding on desperately to the handle.

The guard shouted, “Stand away,” an order which Hugo was unable and unwilling to obey. A louder shout brought out the station master, peremptory and indignant at the sight of a young man, apparently drunk, holding himself up by the door handle.

By this time the guard had come up. Hugo used his free hand to wave towards the interior of the carriage.

After that, things happened slowly.

First the arrival of a local constable. Then a more senior policeman. Then the business of evacuating the few remaining passengers and shunting the train onto a lay-by. Then the arrival of photographers and a police surgeon and a string of questions which Hugo answered as best he could while trying to control his rebellious stomach. Finally the body was moved and Hugo, his identity established and checked, was at last allowed to take possession of the taxi he had secured and to depart and endeavour to placate his aunt.

He was able in the circumstances to excuse himself from carrying out his projected weekend visit; but he further disrupted his aunt’s domestic arrangements by asking to be called at six-thirty. He reached his office at nine o’clock. Fearne and Bracknell — old-fashioned in this as in everything else — worked on Saturday mornings and he arrived, as planned, before either of the partners put in an appearance and made his way straight to the sanctum of their managing clerk. It was Mr. Piggin’s advice and support that he wanted.

“So you are the young man,” said Mr. Piggin, “described, but tactfully unnamed, whose exploits I have been reading about in the morning papers.”

“That’s me, Piggy,” said Hugo. “And I’ll tell you something mighty strange. Nobody I encountered seemed in the least surprised at what I told them. Disturbed, excited, even shocked, but not surprised. The official people at Witham were clearly keeping something back, and my aunt, when she’d heard my story, simply closed her mind to it and discussed a problem she was having with the committee of the Women’s Institute. But she knew something. I’m sure of it.”

Mr. Piggin seemed to be faintly amused. He said, “If you had opened a newspaper three or four months ago you’d have read little or nothing about indiscretions in Whitehall or massacres in Kurdistan. The front page of the paper and other pages as well would have been full of the activities of the creature they christened the Knifeman.”

“Are you telling me that yesterday was not the first—”

“It was the sixth known occasion on which he has struck. You have not seen one of today’s papers? No. Well, I can assure you that he has regained his position on the front page. Was there nothing in the papers where you were?”

“The Italian press don’t pay much attention to crime in other countries. They’ve got plenty of their own. Though now that you mention it, I do recall a brief comment about a serial murderer. When did it all start?”

Mr. Piggin had been turning over the pages of his working diaries. He said, “The first one was sixteen months ago, on Tuesday, November tenth. The next, near the beginning of last year, on Friday, February nineteenth. Then on June fifteenth, August thirteenth — which was also a Friday — and on Monday, October eleventh.”

“How did they know that these were all the same man?”

“It could not, of course, be known,” said Mr. Piggin precisely, “but the evidence that it was so was almost conclusive. His procedure in every case was the same. He waited until he was alone with one other man in the carriage, walked up to him as though he was making for the door, and struck him on the head with a loaded stick or life preserver. As his victim crumpled up he produced his second weapon. This the pathologists, in every case, thought to be a long, slender surgical-type lancet. He drove this upward, through the back of his victim’s neck, into his brain, killing him instantly.”

Although Mr. Piggin was speaking flatly, as though he was explaining a legal problem, his words recalled the horror of the moment and Hugo found himself shuddering. He said, “The man who does this — he must be mad — but he must also be wholly ordinary in appearance, so as not to excite any suspicion of his intentions.”

“Wholly so. And this agrees with the only description we have of him.”

“You mean — he was seen—”