Beware of the Trains Read Online Free PDF

cases they don’t kill at all. They don’t necessarily involve loss of consciousness or inability to act, either: there was that fourteen-year-old boy, you remember, who tripped and fell on an iron rod he was carrying; the rod went clean through his brain; but all that happened was that he pulled it out and went on home, and he didn’t die until more than a week later, after an interlude during which he hadn’t even felt particularly ill…
    “But Garstin-Walsh must have had a nasty turn when the man he’d left for dead burst in at his french windows. No wonder he was ‘fairly thoroughly unnerved.’ No wonder his shot went wild. But no wonder, also, that Brebner could hardly hold the shotgun with which he intended to revenge himself; no wonder he collapsed just after Garstin-Walsh fired at him…
    “Garstin-Walsh must have rejoiced. He’d murdered a man, and now, by the queerest combination of accidents, the thing had been made to seem a perfect case of self-defence. The only snag lay in that superfluous, that tell-tale bullet-hole in the study wall. In the excitement following Brebner’s collapse it wouldn’t be noticed—the more so if a piece of furniture were unobtrusively shifted so as to conceal it. But there was no chance during the night of removing the bullet and plugging the hole; and there was very little chance that Jourdain would miss it when he examined the study next morning. So Garstin-Walsh, having heard from his housekeeper of Jourdain’s presence,and intentions, and seeing no opportunity, with such a crowd of people in the house, of slipping into the study and dealing with the hole before meeting Jourdain, loaded his revolver with two live cartridges and a blank; and then—you having placed yourself conveniently in position near the french windows and the bullet-hole—staged his nervous breakdown.”
    There was a long silence. Then Humbleby said: “Yes, I’m sure you’re right. But it’s all conjecture, of course.”
    “Oh, quite,” said Fen cheerfully. “If my theory’s false, there won’t be any proof of it. And if it’s true, there won’t be any proof of it, either. So you can take your choice. The only possibility of checking it would be if the—”
    He was interrupted by the shrilling of the telephone. “That might be for me,” Humbleby told him. “I took the liberty of asking Jourdain to get in touch with me here if there was any news, so…”
    And in fact the call was for him. He listened long and spoke little. And presently, ringing off, he said:
    “Yes, it was Jourdain, He’s found those cartridge-cases.”
    “In a place where he’d looked previously?”
    “No. And none of them is a blank. Which means—”
    “Which means,” said Fen as he picked up the whisky decanter and refilled their glasses, “that on this side of eternity there’s at least one thing we shall never know.”

The Drowning of Edgar Foley
    In a room in Belchester Mortuary—a plain room with a faint smell of formalin, where dust-motes hung suspended in a single shaft of sunlight-the financier and the labourer lay on deal tables under greyish cotton sheets, side by side. The scene was of a sort to evoke facile moralising, all the more so since the labourer had left his wife moderately well off, whereas the financier had died penniless. But neither Gervase Fen—for whom, thanks to the repetitious insistence of the English poets, such moralising had long since lost its first freshness—nor Superintendent Best—who like most plain men felt that the democracy of death was too large and obvious and absolute a fact to require comment—was moved to remark, or even to reflect on, the commonplace irony of it, In any case, they were not, as yet, fully informed: at this stage the financier was not yet known to be a financier, was not yet docketed and filed as the undischarged bankrupt who had changed his identity, fled from London, and at last, in God knows what access of fear or despair, cut his