The station was awash with light when Jack got there. One of the patrol cars shot out of the exit, blue light flashing, though its siren was switched off. Jack parked quickly, went in the back door, and headed straight for the washroom where he splashed cold water on his face until he felt as if he could face people again.
"You look as if you've got flu," Bobby Thomson said when he leaned over the desk. "Your eyes are all red."
"Must be an allergy," Jack replied, forcing a grin. "Pollen or something." Policemen didn't cry, and if they ever did, other policemen were the last folk to understand. "What's happening now?"
"I was about to call you. You must be a mind-reader or something."
"What?" Bobby Thomson's words immediately brought back a picture of Lorna Breck's earnest and gentle face.
"You coming in tonight. There's been another one"
"What a snatch?"
"No. Some nutter's been smeared by the mail train. Looks like a suicide. There's an ambulance heading round to the station, but the word is it's a hamburger job."
"Bobby," Jack said, with mock severity. "A bit of decorum." The sergeant grinned. He'd seen it all in thirty years.
The station was two minutes away, and it was quicker to walk than drive. As he turned out of the rear entrance of the station, Jack could see the electric wink of the emergency cars. He crossed the road, walked quickly to the old tunnel entrance and headed up the ramp.
Bobby Thomson had been right. It was indeed a hamburger job. Jack hoped that there was enough left of the body on the line to make identification possible, though it did not look as if it would be easy.
The ambulance teams were down on the tracks. One policeman was retching drily over the bannister of the exit-slope. He turned round and Jack recognised young Gordon Pirie who'd thrown up down at the Castle when they'd found Annie Eastwood's corpse and had to be given a day off duty. He wasn't having a pleasant introduction to policing.
"Two witnesses," the rookie's partner said. "Sandra Mitchell and Walter Dickson. They said the man jumped in front of the train. They're still in the Horse Bar. Somebody's coming to take them round to the station for statements. Driver didn't see a thing. They're sending down a replacement to take the engine away when we're finished. Looks like it'll need a good hose down."
Jack strode to the edge of the platform. Somebody had rigged a light and the white beam picked out everything in detail. The broken, slumped figure did not look like a man. The coat was spread out on either side, with a wide rip from hem to shoulder, and it glistened wetly under the lights. What Jack assumed to be a leg was pointed in the wrong direction, slanted over the man's chest, one shoeless foot resting on his shoulder. The face was a ruin of white bone and dark blood.
"Bet his name's O'Day," Jack said. One of the men on the track turned up from the body.
"Don't think so sir. We've got his wallet. Says he's a Derek Elliot. He's that bloke who runs the estate agents, according to his cards."
Instantly Jack recalled what Andy Toye had said. The words on the wall could have been an anagram. Andy had that kind of lateral-thinking mind. He'd suggested he should be looking for people whose names began with the two missing letters, although the professor had been quick to point out it was only an idea.
"Elliot," Jack said through clenched teeth.
If Andy Toye was right, the next man had to be O'Day.
The policemen on the track, helped by the ambulance team, managed get the mess of the body into a bag, and hauled it onto the platform just as Ralph Slater came running breathlessly up the subway ramp.
"Sorry, chief. Just got the call." he said, gasping. He was toting his black scene-of-crimes equipment case.
"I think we got the sixth one?"
"Huh?"
"From the Herkik case," Jack said softly, keeping it between them. "Looks like he took a dive in front of the Mallaig express."
"Did a human Garfield?" Ralph asked. Jack grimaced.
"Got that one from John McColl," Ralph said, grinning. "He's got a way with words. Despite himself, Jack felt a smile struggle through at the visual image the phrase conjured up.
"I'll speak to the driver. You confirm the I.D. and get prints." he turned away then came back to Ralph. "That might help," he said, pointing down at the dirty concrete close to the station wall. The young policeman was just levering himself upright when he turned and saw where Jack was pointing. Immediately he doubled over the safety barrier, sides convulsing in spastic heaves.
"He'll turn himself inside out," Ralph said. He walked forward and picked up the hand which still lay palm up.
"Remarkable," Ralph called over. "His watch is still going."
The young policeman moaned sickly.
Tom Middleton had nothing helpful to say. His face had lost all its colour and he'd the look of a man who's woken up to find a corpse and a bloodstained knife lying beside him. Anybody would have thought he'd made the train jump the tracks and had gone, hauling on the steam whistle, chasing after the man to grind him under the wheels. He kept shaking his head as if denying what had happened. One of the ambulancemen gave him something to drink and the engine driver spilled most of it on the way to his mouth.
"I saw him before he hit but I didn't know what it was," the man said. "It was only something black. Honest, I couldn't have stopped it. Damned thing takes three hundred yards at only thirty."
"Did he jump?" on the policeman was asking.
"Must have. Never saw anybody else. The whole train's in a mess. I thought he might have still been stuck there, but he must have gone under."
The driver kept shaking his head in disbelief while the policeman took notes, then he seemed to come round a little and he grabbed the other man by the sleeve of his tunic.
"I've only got three weeks to go before I retire. I never had an accident in forty year, not one. I got certificates to prove it."
"Yes sir," the policeman said patiently, easing his arm away, but Tom grabbed it and pulled it close, unaware of what he was doing.
"So why did the bastard pick my train?"
"I can't honestly say," the constable said civilly. He didn't take offence, at least not while his superiors were watching.
Jack pulled his coat tight against the cold and went down the subway, crossed the road and into to the Horse Bar where a young woman constable sat with her arm round a younger girl who was snuffling into a crumpled tissue. Beside her, a boy of eighteen or so with short cut hair slicked back with gel, was staring into the far distance just above the table.
He sat down and introduced himself. The boy nodded dumbly. The girl sobbed steadily, and for a second he was reminded of Lorna Breck, only an hour before. "Give us some coffees across here," he called out to the barman who was leaning against the gantry, boredly cleaning a glass.
"We're shut," the skinny fellow called back. His hair was as black as Jack's, but it hung down in lank strings over his forehead.
Jack got up and walked to the bar. He put both hands on the surface and leaned across, towering over the man.
"I've got no time for any lip, and I'm in no mood for backchat," he said, staring down into the barman's eyes. "Get some coffees. Now. And make it snappy." The man nodded. Jack went back to the seated group. The small man man shrugged and hit the button on the coffee maker.
The boy was quite lucid when he spoke, but his voice had the shaky hesitation which is quite normal in people who are in shock.
"I thought he was drunk," he said. "He came along the platform, mumbling away. He looked as if he was on drugs. All starey-eyed and that. He came right up to us and I pushed him away. He was scaring Sandra."
"You pushed him?"
"Yes. But not hard. He was saying something."
"Like what?"
"He kept swearing. Saying 'bastard'."
"At you?"
"I don't think so. I think he was talking to himself. Then he said he didn't want to do it."
"That was exactly it?" Jack asked. The boy nodded.
" 'Bastard was in me,' that's what he said an' all. Said he was dirty now."
Jack took a note of that. It didn't make much sense, but it seemed important.
"Than what?"
"Then he shoved past us. The train was just coming into the station. He didn't even stop, he ran out and jumped right in front of it. Jeez-o, you should have seen it. He went right up in the air and a bit of him came off. His hand. I saw it. Then he went down and the wheels went right over him. Sandra here just fainted. I had to carry her down."
The barman brought the coffee across and set them down with a surly clatter. Jack spooned sugar into the four cups and shoved two of them across to the girl and the woman constable who nodded her head and gave him a grateful smile. Walter picked up and started to sip.
"What's that wee dog called in Charley Brown?" he asked vaguely.
"Snoopy," the policewoman said.
"That was it. He was wearing a Snoopy watch, with the wee bird walking round the edges. It was still going. Even when his hand was off, it was still going."
Big tears welled up in the boy's eyes and the girl started to cry again, great racking sobs that looked as if they would take a while to subside. The woman pulled her close, letting her lean against her uniform and patted her shoulder comfortingly.
The mangled and eviscerated body was finally carried own to the ambulance. The ticket collector asked Ralph what he should do about the mess on the lines.
"Put some sand down," was the only advice he could offer.
Back at the station mortuary, Ralph had the grizzly job of taking prints from the fingers of the dead man, including the five on the hand, now a pale grey, still in its sleeve. By the time Jack came back, it was getting on to two in the morning, and by then Ralph could confirm that yes, the suicide had laid prints all over Marta Herkik's table.
"So now we have to find O'Day," Jack said. Send a team of people round to this guy's place. Usual statements from relatives and search the house for anything that will give us another connection."
"Do you know what's going on?"
"I'm getting close," Jack admitted.
"Want to let me in on it?"
Jack looked down at Ralph, who, at six feet was a few inches shorter, though in his old tweed jacket and thick herringbone coat he looked almost as broad.
"I do, but I can't. You'd never believe me."
Ralph gave him a searching look. "I suppose it's got something to do with the Breck girl? Is she starting to talk sense?"
"She might be, but whether it really makes sense is anybody's guess."
Jack walked off and went to his office where he stood staring at a map of the town. After a while, he picked up the internal phone and dialled Bobby Thomson's number. There were sixteen men on night duty, plus the ones who were still out on the beat, and Jack realised, that wasn't enough. He'd get operations to call them with instructions, and in the morning he'd fax a request to headquarters in for extra men. The policemen trooped in to the operations room and after a scuffling of chairs, sat attentively.
"I've a feeling it might strike tonight," he said. He did have a feeling that it would, though he had an even nastier feeling, worse, a near-certainly, that it had already struck, after listening to Lorna Breck's anguished voice on the telephone.
"I need extra work on specific areas tonight," he told the group. "Forget about padlock rattling on River Street and the rest of the shops. If there's anybody breaking in to places, then it's their lucky night. We'll catch them another time."
He approached the large-scale map, showing the streets and vennels and alleys of the old centre of town.
"Concentrate on these areas," he said, ringing them one by one.
"Latta Court and the nearby blocks. The Town Hall. Castlebank Church. The Distillery." each of the spots was punctuated by a quick, almost savage circling motion of his hand. "Places where people come and go at night. Anywhere high. This bastard climbs."
He turned round to face the men. They all gazed back.
"He doesn't like to leave traces, so he climbs up things. That's where we'll catch him. I don't want you guys racing around with the lights and sirens on. We'll have to do this softly-softly."
When he'd finished, the men stood up and shuffled out and onto the streets.
Jack sat for another half an hour, trying to puzzle out, from the description Lorna Breck had given him, where the next killings would be, or had been. It would have been much better, despite her lilting highland accent which softened out her words, if she'd been a local girl. Then she'd know.
At the moment, nobody knew.
Jack cleared his desk and went home to bed, almost too tired to think.