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

“Reverting to a point where you might be able to help us. It is fairly clear that the attack took place between Ingatestone and Chelmsford and that the assassin left the train at Chelmsford. Did you take any note of the people who got off?”

“I was in the rear, carriage at the time, but yes, I did look out. I was anxious about the possibility of the train being held up and I was glad to see that no one was waiting to get on.”

“It’s the people who got off that I’m interested in.”

“Well, there were a fair number of them. All men. The usual home-going crowd, I thought.”

“Nothing more?”

“I’m sorry. No.”

“If members of the public kept their eyes open and their wits about them,” said Mayburgh, “we might make some progress.”

This not being a question, Hugo did not feel called on to answer it, and five minutes later he had been bundled out of the room. As he closed the door, Mayburgh said to Inspector Barley, “What did you make of that? Was he holding out on us?”

“I made nothing of it, because there was nothing to make.”

“He’s old Bracknell’s son. He’s just joined the firm. And you know what they’re like. Do anything they can to obstruct the police.”

“I don’t think,” said Barley primly, “that we can pin anything onto this young man if he only came back to England a fortnight ago.”

“I suppose that’s right,” said Mayburgh.

It was evident that he was in some awe of his learned junior.

Hugo, meanwhile, had reported the outcome of this unsatisfactory interview to Mr. Piggin.

“The man’s a hog,” he said. “If he’d been even remotely civil, I might have given him one useful piece of information. I’m fairly certain I recognised the man who was killed.”

“Did you indeed?” said Mr. Piggin. “That could be of major importance.” He sounded faintly aggrieved. His own sources of information were wide and various. It piqued him that a newcomer should know something that he did not.

“I spent six very enjoyable months at Perugia University and got to know a lot of the students and the younger professors. We used to meet for drinks in the evening and — well, you know how people talk. This particular man — an economics don called Carlo Frossinone — told me — I think he was three parts drunk at the time because the next day he denied that he had ever said it — that he had been approached by the capo of the local mafia to do a job for them and that he’d refused and was now in their black books. He sounded rather proud of this, as though it was a distinction.”

Mr. Piggin, who had been listening carefully, had now extracted, from a locked drawer, his private address book. He was thumbing through the section under the letter A.

“Arbuthnot,” he said. “That’s the man. Colonel Arbuthnot. I’ll give him a ring. I’m sure he’ll be very interested in what you’ve told me. It may take a day or two to get hold of him. He’s much abroad.”

On the surface, the next few days were uneventful, but there was a disturbing undercurrent to them. The opposition, spearheaded by a claque of members with constituencies in Essex, raised a number of questions in Parliament. The Home Secretary sidestepped them with practised agility, but was not as easy as he managed to appear; and his uneasiness was passed down, in a series of minutes, to the assistant commissioner, and through him to Chief Superintendent Brace, and, finally, to Superintendent Oliphant, who arrived at Cable Street with an ultimatum in his pocket.

“Bring me up to date,” he said. “Particularly with regard to this last episode.”

“We’ve got a certain way,” said Mayburgh cautiously. “We’ve circulated a photograph of the victim, which produced a number of identifications, none of them reliable, I’m afraid.”

“Had the man no papers on him?”

“Yes. He had an Italian passport. We telexed the details to Interpol, who say that the details in it were false and the whole passport a clever piece of forgery.”

“And that’s all?” said Oliphant.

“All except an enormous amount of routine work,” said Mayburgh rather bitterly. He indicated the six fat folders on a side table, rocks in a torrent of other documents. “The real trouble is that the carriages concerned were of the open type, with thirty-two seats and a gangway down the middle. At the start of a commuter rush, all the seats would be occupied and a number of people standing in the gangway. As people got off, the standers would take over the seats and be replaced by other passengers coming in from even more crowded carriages. Our enquiry produced forty-one people who thought they might have been in the carriage concerned. All of them had to be questioned and their answers recorded.”