The Baghdad Railway Club(67)

‘Over the next week, other inspectors on the staff found a similar thing happening to them. The tickets would be properly clipped, some excesses asked for, some not. I reckoned that if this chap wasn’t taking all the excesses, then he wasn’t in it for the money – and the reason he took some cash now and again was to keep up the front, keep up his credibility. In other words it was more important for him to check tickets than it was to make money out of it, and that put me on the track of thinking he might be a man who’d once been turned down for the job of ticket inspector . . .’

‘A ticket inspector manqué,’ said Harriet Bailey – and I had one of her smiles all to myself, even if I didn’t quite take her meaning.

‘Ticket inspectors are employed by the traffic department,’ I said. ‘So I went there and looked over all the records of men shortlisted for ticket-collecting positions but not taken on, or stood down from them. There were plenty. More of the first than the second of course, but dozens all told. The men who’d resigned or been sacked had to hand over their ticket clippers, and the records showed that they always did. There was not a single pair of clippers unaccounted for, and there never had been. But I was curious about the resignations, of which there were quite a few. It was a steady sort of job, and decently paid. Why would a man chuck it up? I was told the main reason was that they didn’t care for the rostering patterns. Every man had to start early or finish late because that’s when most of the fare-dodgers operate – first thing or last thing in the day. It broke in on me then that our phantom ticket-checker did all his work in the morning, so might he not be using the clippers of a man who worked afternoons and evenings?’

Thoughtful nods from around the table. I seemed to have Bob Ferry quite mesmerised. Not Major Findlay, however. It would take more than a tale of petty crime on the line to distract him from Miss Bailey. I could hear no noise from the square just then.

‘I asked for the names and addresses of all ticket inspectors of the York district who worked late. I then picked out the ones who lived with other men – those who lived in digs in other words. There were three that fitted the bill, and I struck lucky with the first: a fellow called Hughes. He lived in a big lodging house in the middle of York – a place not too particular about its tenants. Every night Hughes knocked off late from work, downed a few more pints of ale than were good for him and in the small hours of the morning he put his coat in the hallway, leaving the clippers in the pocket. He put the coat on again when he set off for work at one o’clock the next afternoon.

‘Now there were some ruffians in that house, but it was a quiet chap who caught my eye when I went round the landings knocking on the doors. He was medium build with dark hair, and I could see he was a railway nut because he had The Railway Magazine and The Railway Gazette on his table top.’

This caused quite a stir. Shepherd – a Railway Magazine man himself, of course – was laughing, and one of the R.E. chaps was quite indignant: ‘I’ll have you know that I subscribe to both. Does that make me a railway nut?’

‘Technically, it does,’ said Harriet Bailey, and she gave me another of her lovely smiles, thus increasing the anxiety written on the face of Findlay.

‘The quiet fellow’s name was Randall – Bartholomew Randall. We had him in for questioning, and he came clean. We asked him what he’d done with the money he’d taken for excess fares, and he took us to the collection box for the Railway Mission that stands on platform five of York station. It was all in there. He’d been putting cash in there for weeks in fact, and only a few days earlier, I’d been talking to Father Cunningham who runs the Railway Mission, and he’d said he’d detected what he called “a real access of the Christmas spirit in the city of York” – this on account of the donations in the box. In November, the donations had amounted to four shillings and thruppence or so, along with the usual admixture of foreign coins and amusement-machine tokens. Up to the third week of December fifty-seven pounds ten had been found in the box. But even though he hadn’t kept the money, Randall was charged with theft as well as personating a company officer and travelling on a train without a ticket, since he himself had not had a ticket. Of course, the peculiar feature of the whole case was the motive: he’d gone about inspecting tickets just for the love of doing it.’

‘A crime of passion,’ said Harriet Bailey.

‘What became of the fellow?’ someone else asked, which I’d hoped they would not, since Bartholomew Randall had hanged himself in the lodging house the day before he was due to appear in the police court, confirming too late the doubts I’d had about proceeding against him, and never put strongly enough to the prosecuting solicitor.