Джон Бакен – The Thirty-Nine Steps. Selected Stories / 39 ступеней. Избранные новеллы (страница 3)

Another search informed me that there was a train that left at 7.10, which would bring me to any place in Galloway in the late afternoon. That was great, but a more important question was how I could get to the station because I was pretty sure that Scudder's friends would be watching outside. This troubled me for a bit, but then I had an idea. On that I went to bed and slept for two hours.

I got up at four and opened my bedroom shutters. It was a fine summer morning. I was determined to go on with my plan.

I put on a well-used suit, a pair of strong boots, and a flannel shirt. I stuffed my pockets with a cap, some handkerchiefs, and a tooth-brush. I had taken a good sum in gold from the bank two days before, in case Scudder needed money, and now I put it in a belt which I had brought back from Africa. That was all I wanted.

Then came the next step. Paddock usually arrived at 7.30 and let himself in with a key. But before that, about twenty minutes to seven, the milkman came with a great clatter of cans. I had seen that milkman sometimes. He was a young man about my own height, and he wore a white overall. On him I staked all my chances.

I went into the darkened smoking-room where I put a pipe in my pocket and filled my pouch from the tobacco jar on the table by the fireplace. As I put my fingers into the tobacco, they touched something hard, and I took out Scudder's little black pocket-book… That seemed to me a good sign.

'Goodbye, old chap,' I said to the body. 'I am going to do my best for you. Wish me luck.'

Then I stayed in the hall waiting for the milkman. That was the worst part of the business. Six-thirty passed, then six-forty, and yet there was no sign of him. The milkman had chosen this day of all days to be late.

At a quarter to seven I heard the clatter of the cans outside. I opened the front door, and there was my man. He was surprised to see me so early.

'Come in here for a moment,' I said. 'I want a word with you.' I let him into the room.

'I want you to do me a favor. Give me your cap and overall for ten minutes, and here's a sovereign[23] for you.'

His eyes opened at the sight of the gold, and he smiled. 'What's the game?' he asked.

'A bet,' I said. 'I haven't got time to explain, but to win it I've got to be a milkman for the next ten minutes. All you've got to do is to stay here till I come back. You'll be a bit late, but nobody will complain.'

'Right!' he said cheerfully.

I put on his blue hat and his white overall, picked up the cans, closed my door, and went downstairs. The porter there did not recognize me.

At first I thought there was nobody in the street. Then I saw a policeman a hundred yards away and some man walking past on the other side. On impulse, I looked up at the opposite house, and there at a first-floor window was a face. As the man passed it, he also looked up, which was like a signal.

I crossed the street, imitating the milkman. Then I turned into the first side street. There was no one in the little street, so I left the milk-cans, the cap and overall behind a board fence. I had only just put on my own cap when a postman came round the corner. I said good morning to him, and he answered me. At that moment the clock of a church struck seven.

There was not a second to waste, so I ran. The clock at the station showed five minutes past seven. I had no time to take a ticket, nor to choose my destination. A porter told me the platform, and there I saw the train already leaving. I managed to jump into the last carriage.

Three minutes later, the guard[24] wrote out a ticket to Newton-Stewart for me – a place name which had suddenly come back to my memory – and took me to a third-class compartment, occupied by a sailor and a fat woman with a child.

There I started my new life and couldn't even believe that a week ago I had been so bored.

3

It was fine May weather, and I had a quiet time traveling north that day. I didn't dare go to the restaurant car, but I got lunch at Leeds[25] and shared it with the fat woman. Also I got the morning's papers with some paragraphs about Balkan affairs. When I had done with them, I took out Scudder's little black pocket-book and studied it. It was filled with writings. Most of them were figures, but now and then there was a name. For example, I found the words 'Hofgaard', 'Luneville', and 'Avocado' pretty often, and especially the word 'Pavia'.

I was sure that Scudder never did anything without a reason, and I was sure that there was a cipher in all this. That is a subject which has always interested me, and I did a bit of it myself once as intelligence officer[26] during the war in Africa[27]. I used to be pretty good at reading ciphers. This one looked like the sets of figures corresponding to the letters of the alphabet. But any man can find the clue to that cipher after an hour or two's work, and I didn't think Scudder would've been using anything so easy. So I focused on the words because you can make a pretty good numerical cipher if you have a key word.

I tried for hours, but none of the words answered. Then I fell asleep and woke just in time to get out and then catch the slow Galloway train. There was a man on the platform whose looks I didn't like, but he never glanced at me. No wonder[28]: with my tanned face and my old suit I looked like one of the many farmers who were traveling in the third-class carriages.

At about five o'clock the carriage was finally empty, and I was left alone. I got out at the next station, a little place set right in the heart of a bog. Soon I found myself on a white road that went over the brown moor. It was a fine spring evening. The air had the queer smell of bogs, but it had the strangest effect on me. I felt light-hearted like a boy on a spring holiday, and not a man of thirty-seven, wanted by the police. I decided that I was still far ahead of any pursuit. There was no plan in my head, only just to go on and on in this hill country.

I was getting very hungry when I came to a shepherd's cottage beside a waterfall. A woman, who was standing by the door, greeted me. When I asked for a place to spend the night, she said I was welcome to the 'bed in the loft', and very soon she set before me a meal of ham and eggs.

In the evening her husband came back from the hills. They asked me no questions, but I could see they thought I was a kind of cattle dealer. So I spoke a lot about cattle, of which they knew very little, and I learned from them a lot about the local Galloway markets.

I woke up at five the next morning, had breakfast at six, and then was on my way again. My kind hosts didn't take any payment. My plan was to get to the next railway station and to go some way back. I thought that that was the safest way because the police would think that I was always going farther from London.

The station, when I reached it, was ideal for my purpose. The moor was around it, making it quite isolated. There was no road to it from anywhere. I waited in the heather till I saw the smoke of a train on the horizon. Then I came up to the tiny booking-office and took a ticket for Dumfries.

The only passengers in the carriage were an old shepherd and his dog. The man was asleep, and beside him was that morning's newspaper. I took it, hoping it would tell me something.

There were two columns about the Portland Place Murder, as it was called. My man Paddock had called the police, and the milkman had been arrested. Later the milkman had been let go, I read, and the true criminal had got away from London by one of the northern lines. There was a short note about me as the owner of the flat. I guessed the police had put that in, trying to tell me that I was not a suspect.

There was nothing else in the paper, nothing about foreign politics or Karolides, or the things that had interested Scudder. I put the paper back and saw that we were coming to the station at which I had got out yesterday. On the platform three men were talking to the station-master. I supposed that they were the local police, who had been called by Scotland Yard. Sitting in the shadow, I watched them carefully. One of them had a book and took notes. All four men looked at the moor and the white road.

As we moved away from that station, the shepherd woke up. He looked at me, kicked his dog, and asked where he was. I told him. Clearly he was very drunk.

'That's what happens when you're a teetotaler,' he said.

I showed my surprise.

'Ay, but I'm a strong teetotaler,' he said. 'I haven't touched a drop of whisky for a long time.'

'What did it then?' I asked.

'A drink they call brandy. Being a teetotaler, I kept off the whisky, but I was drinking this brandy,' he explained and fell asleep again.

My plan had been to get out at some station, but the train suddenly gave me a better chance because it came to a standstill at the end of a culvert. I looked out and saw that every carriage window was closed and there was no one in the landscape. So I opened the door and jumped into the bushes that grew along the line.

It would've been all right, but that shepherd's dog started to bark. I crawled through the bushes for a hundred yards or so. Then from there I looked back and saw the guard and several passengers standing at the open carriage door and staring in my direction. My departure was not unnoticed. When after a quarter of a mile's crawl I looked back again, the train had started and was disappearing into the distance.