Cut Throat by Christopher Bush

Author:Christopher Bush
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2017-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XII

WHARTON BEGINS AGAIN

At about half-past five in the morning, Wharton, asleep in a chair in the waiting-room, was roused by the sergeant on duty.

“You’re wanted, sir; down at the station!”

Wharton scrambled up and stretched himself.

“What’s up? Have they got him?”

“I don’t know, sir. The inspector wants you urgent.”

The only means of locomotion seemed to be the sergeant’s bicycle and he set off. The morning was breaking clear and the air was keen along the river and the tree-covered road. In the station a freight train was waiting, and in the recess in front of the booking-office door a group of men were standing, looking at something on the ground. Wharton cleared his throat and the group opened out to show what was on the dark sheet.

Sanders, if it were Sanders, lay on a tarpaulin. Even Wharton, who had seen death in horrible shapes, flinched for a moment and turned his head away. Another quick look and he drew the tarpaulin over again.

“Who knows anything about it?” he asked Groom.

The fireman and driver were both there. All the fireman knew was that as the train went under Barlcombe Bridge, he was looking out for the home signal; then, all at once, quicker than he could speak or act, he saw something which might have been man or animal, clean under the engine. He gasped to the driver and the train was pulled up; then they saw . . . that there! The driver corroborated to the extent of what he knew and was adding details of what had happened to the body, when Wharton cut him short.

“Was he lying on the line, or what was he doing?”

“That I don’t know, sir,” the fireman told him. “It looked to me as if he didn’t know we was coming. He sort of stumbled like.”

Wharton nodded. “We’re much obliged to you. Both of you will be wanted for the inquest. Got their names and addresses, inspector?”

The inspector had. The train moved off for Barnstaple before Wharton made another move.

“You’ll see to all this, inspector. I don’t want my hands tied. What about his pockets?”

They hunted them through. But for strictly personal articles everything seemed to have been destroyed—except a wad of paper, tied round with string and addressed to Rodman of the Evening Record. Wharton made no bones about untying it; then he put on his glasses and had a preliminary look.

They were in pencil, on pages torn from a notebook. By the time he’d gone over them once he could gather only vaguely what it all meant. Then, Groom and his men moving off with the body, he sat down in comfort, got his pipe going and tried another reading.

Out of the shrieks and ravings and incoherencies he now got some idea of what had been in the demented man’s mind. All the festering introspection of months had come to one hysterical head. Some of it he had heard a few hours before. There were curses on those who trafficked in souls

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