Death on a Pale Horse - By Donald Thomas Page 0,103

read at this distance, I saw that this could not be today’s paper. At the top of that front page it was stamped in red “AFTERNOON EDITION.” It was still only half-past ten in the morning. Afternoon editions do not come on the news-stands until after midday.

I managed at length to make out some of the smaller numerals and to see that the edition bore a date well past. It was the original report of Captain Sellon’s murder. Why was someone now holding it open, as if for me to read? A sharp whistle-blast announced the departure of that other train, towards King’s Cross and the banking districts. With a quickening of the heart, I convinced myself that should the newspaper be lowered, I would be staring into the malevolent features of Colonel Rawdon Moran. Those same eyes must surely have followed me from our rooms—perhaps in a slowly moving cab—with the quiet expressionless stare of the patient trapper.

That was absurd, of course. It was vastly more probable that someone else from London’s millions had somewhere picked up a discarded out-of-date paper and was reading it. Yet I had begun to know the man since Epsom. I felt sure it must be he. He was not here by chance. I had ten—perhaps twenty—seconds before his carriage window glided out of view. But if I could see nothing else, I had a view of the back of his right hand as it held open that front page of the paper. In my mind, I tried to picture the hand that had held a gun at the Royal Britannia Rifle Range. I had kept in my memory the strong roughened fingers with a sprouting of red hairs on their backs.

There was time to focus on them. These were the same fingers, I could swear it. But they gripped the edge of the paper at just such a level that the upper corner of its page fell back upon them a little. Not enough to conceal them but, in this light and at a rapidly increasing distance, to suggest a reddish colour to those little tufts of hair that perhaps I was only imagining.

There was nothing more I could do—and he would have known it. That was what made me all the more certain. I could not see him but I would have bet my life that somehow, perhaps through a pinhole poked in the paper, he could see me register my astonishment before his train pulled into the darkness of the tunnel. Then I could only watch as that carriage slid completely out of sight.

Moran had surely kept me in his view, but any story I might tell to others would sound like the babbling of a delusional neurotic. He had contrived it all, if indeed it was he, so that I could not communicate with him or hold him to account. It was not twenty-four hours since I had heard that voice directed to me in the so-called Hall of Mirrors. Now I was being taught to understand that I should remain under scrutiny by his people in the London crowds, always at his beck and call. He had killed before—who knows how many times?—but always in such a way that he could not be touched by the law. From now on he would be constantly on the offensive, always driving me back. When my summons to execution came, I should be as powerless to evade him as I had been to confront him just now in our two “goldfish-bowls.”

If I stop and read again the last paragraph that I have written, its words seem to me like the protests of an hysteric. Short of a growing obsession with our adversary, there was nothing to prove that it had been Moran. Had I imagined or misread the headline? No. I knew instinctively that this had been our second encounter and presumably my third warning. I was being informed that my time was up. Holmes was under sentence in any case.

As the half-lit stations slipped by, I tried to think as Holmes would think. In London, it is far easier than in any jungle for a determined man to stalk his prey. My friend had recently begun to make use of those juvenile ragamuffins and mudlarks whom he called his “Baker Street Irregulars.” They could gather gossip, eavesdrop on conversations, and track a man who would never suspect a child among so many of them in the city streets. But then what