‘I tried to. They weren’t interested. There was no mystery, you see. They knew who the man was, and how he died, and that was all that concerned them.’
‘It might have interested them that he was writing verse in English.’
‘Oh, no. There is no evidence that he wrote anything, or that the paper belonged to him at all. He may have picked it up somewhere.’
‘The whole thing’s crazy,’ Cullen said, angry and bewildered.
‘It’s fantastic. But at the heart of all the whirling absurdity there is a small core of stillness.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes. There is one small clear space on which one can stand while taking one’s bearings.’
‘What is that?’
‘Your friend Bill Kenrick is missing. And out of a crowd of strange faces, I pick Bill Kenrick as a man I saw dead in a sleeping-compartment at Scoone on the morning of the 4th of March.’
Cullen thought this over. ‘Yes,’ he said drearily, ‘I suppose that makes sense. I suppose it must be Bill. I suppose I knew all the time that something—something awful had happened. He would never have left me without word. He would have written or telephoned or something to say why he hadn’t turned up on time. But what was he doing on a train to Scotland? What was he doing on a train anyhow?’