Eye of the Needle - Ken Follett [62]
Faber looked up, past the ticket collector, and understood.
Waiting on the other side, dressed in a hat and raincoat, was the blond young tail from Leicester Square.
Parkin, dying in agony and humiliation, had deceived Faber at the last. The trap was here.
The man in the raincoat had not yet noticed Faber in the crowd. Faber turned and stepped back on to the train. Once inside, he pulled aside the blind and looked out. The tail was searching the faces in the crowd. He had not noticed the man who got back on the train.
Faber watched while the passengers filtered through the gate until the platform was empty. The blond man spoke urgently to the ticket collector, who shook his head. The man seemed to insist. After a moment he waved to someone out of sight. A police officer emerged from the shadows and spoke to the collector. The platform guard joined the group, followed by a man in a civilian suit who was presumably a more senior railway official.
The engine driver and his fireman left the locomotive and went over to the barrier. There was more waving of arms and shaking of heads.
Finally the railwaymen shrugged, turned away, or rolled their eyes upward, all telegraphing surrender. The blond and the police officer summoned other policemen, and they moved on to the platform.
They were obviously going to search the train.
All the railway officials, including the engine crew, had disappeared in the opposite direction, no doubt to seek out tea and sandwiches while the lunatic tried to search a jampacked train. Which gave Faber an idea.
He opened the door and jumped out of the wrong side of the train, the side opposite the platform. Concealed from the police by the cars, he ran along the tracks, stumbling on the ties and slipping on the gravel, toward the engine.
IT HAD TO BE bad news, of course. From the moment he realized Billy Parkin was not going to saunter off that train, Frederick Bloggs knew that Die Nadel had slipped through their fingers again. As the uniformed police moved onto the train in pairs, two men to search each car, Bloggs thought of several possible explanations of Parkin’s nonappearance; and all the explanations were depressing.
He turned up his coat collar and paced the drafty platform. He wanted very badly to catch Die Nadel; and not only for the sake of the invasion—although that was reason enough, of course—but for Percy Godliman, and for the five Home Guards, and for Christine, and for himself….
He looked at his watch: four o’clock. Soon it would be day. Bloggs had been up all night, and he had not eaten since breakfast yesterday, but until now he had kept going on adrenalin. The failure of the trap—he was quite sure it had failed—drained him of energy. Hunger and fatigue caught up with him. He had to make a conscious effort not to daydream about hot food and a warm bed.
“Sir!” A policeman was leaning out of a car and waving at him. “Sir!”
Bloggs walked toward him, then broke into a run. “What is it?”
“It might be your man Parkin.”
Bloggs climbed into the car. “What the hell do you mean, might be?”
“You’d better have a look.” The policeman opened the communicating door between the cars and shone his flashlight inside.
It was Parkin; Bloggs could tell by the ticket inspector’s uniform. He was curled up on the floor. Bloggs took the policeman’s light, knelt down beside Parkin, and turned him over.
He saw Parkin’s face, looked quickly away. “Oh, dear God.”
“I take it this is Parkin?” the policeman said.
Bloggs nodded. He got up, very slowly, without looking again at the body. “We’ll interview everybody in this car and the next,” he said. “Anyone who saw or heard anything unusual will be detained for further questioning. Not that it will do us any good; the murderer must have jumped off the train before it got here.”
Bloggs went back out on the platform. All the searchers had completed their tasks and were gathered