The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs Read Online Free

mind to cry out, I was knocked senseless.



Chapter 3
     
    The Journey South

     
    Jackie!” a voice said, sounding distant and dreamlike. It occurred to me that the name was my own, or had been in some dim, earlier life. Soon after I recalled that I had eyes, and I opened them and squinted up into the worried face of Tubby Frobisher, who looked down at me, holding his blackthorn stick in his hand. My first thought was that Tubby had beaten me with it, but on second thought it seemed moderately unlikely. The train was moving along now, slowly picking up speed.
    “I knocked the bugger sideways,” Tubby said to me. “Broke his wrist for him, I warrant you. But he leapt out the carriage door straightaway and disappeared. A railway thief, no doubt. The man had his weapon raised to strike you again, by God, but I put an end to his filthy caper.”
    I managed to sit up now, but reeled back against the wall, shutting my eyes at the sudden spasm of pain in my skull. On the floor beside me lay a piece of rusty iron pipe wrapped in greasy newsprint that smelled unhappily of fried cod. There was a spray of blood on the newsprint—my blood, I realized. I scrabbled weakly in my coat pocket and discovered that my watch was missing, and of course my purse with it. To put it simply, I’d been bludgeoned and robbed. By now my assailant had no doubt gone to ground in Ashdown forest through one of the common gates.
    If I could have felt anything past the pain in my head, I would have felt like a fool, a richly deserving fool. It was no secret that railway thieves booked passage on the South Eastern Railway for no other purpose than to waylay nighttime travelers at carefully chosen spots along the track. East Sussex is full of forests and empty heath, you see. There’s no point in stopping the train to give chase, or to report the incident at the next station, because there’s damn-all that anyone can do to put things right. In that part of the country, railway thievery is perhaps the safest line of work there is, unless you’re unfortunate enough to run into Tubby Frobisher and be laid out by a blackthorn stick.
    Tubby helped me back to my seat, where my companions voiced a general concern. St. Ives probed the back of my head and announced that my skull wasn’t crushed. I’d been dealt a sort of sideways blow, to my great good fortune, he said, due to my falling away from the man even as he struck me. To my mind my fortune would have been considerably improved at that moment had I been spared the entire experience.
    “What’s this now?” St. Ives asked, looking at the newsprint-wrapped pipe, which Tubby had brought away with him.
    “The weapon,” I muttered stupidly, but then I saw that he didn’t mean the length of pipe, but rather the newspaper. He held it up gingerly and unfolded it—the Brighton Evening Argus , it turned out to be, from two days past. It was the story on the front page that interested him, and he read it in silence for a time and then laid the newspaper down and looked away. “Of course,” he muttered and shook his head tiredly.
    Hasbro picked the Argus up again and said, “Might I, sir?” St. Ives nodded but said nothing. The salient bits of the remarkable story went thus: A merchant ship, the India Princess , out of Brighton, had driven up into the shallows below Newhaven and had stuck fast near where the River Ouse empties into the Channel. She was hauled free when the tide had risen the following morning, with tolerably little damage done to the hull or cargo. Virtually the entire crew had drowned or disappeared, and that was the puzzler. The ship wasn’t wrecked. There had been no storm, no foul weather. As remarkable as it might be, they had apparently leapt or fallen over the side shortly after the ship had rounded Selsey Bill, several miles from shore, the lot of them shouting and carrying on like candidates for head nutter at Colney Hatch.
    The ship’s boy, the sole known survivor of the