Read Chapter 8: The Night Shift

The night box at Merrow Junction smelled of stale tea and coal dust, same as every other signal box Arthur had ever worked. He poured himself a cup from the Thermos Old Tom had left him and settled into the worn leather chair, the leather creaking under his weight like a man complaining about his age.

The clock on the wall read 11:47.

Thirteen minutes until the Night Mail came through.

Arthur’s fingers found the small screwdriver in his jacket pocket, turning it over absently. It had become a habit now, a nervous tic. He’d told himself it was for reassurance, but the truth was it reminded him how naked he was out here. Four men with guns and a sheaf of forged paper against him. The screwdriver wouldn’t do much against a bullet, but it was something. A man had to have something.

He pulled his hand out, set the screwdriver on the shelf beside the block instruments, and tried to focus on the levers in front of him. Green for clear. Red for stop. They were old friends, these levers, companions he’d trusted for twenty-three years. But Thursday night, he’d be pulling one of them for a very different reason than he’d ever done before.

The bell in the box rang twice—the distant block signal announcing the mail’s approach from the next section.

Arthur stood, moved to the window, and watched the headlamp appear far down the line, burning a hole in the darkness. The train grew from a point of light into a shape, steel and steam and purpose. It passed through his section at speed, the wheels hammering a rhythm against the rails that vibrated up through the floorboards and into his bones. He counted the carriages—twelve, thirteen, fourteen, the mail vans in the middle, their windows shuttered and locks gleaming even in the dark.

He didn’t signal it to stop. Of course he didn’t. Thursday was the night. Tonight was just another shift, another train, another routine run that would end in King’s Cross sorting office with letters and parcels and the odd registered packet settling into their racks for the morning.

The tail lamp shrank into the darkness, and the line fell silent again.

Arthur let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

It was the same train Thursday would stop. The exact same route, the same carriages, the same crew in all likelihood. He’d just watched the thing he was going to help rob sail past him at sixty miles an hour, and for one mad moment he’d wanted to reach out and grab it, pull it back, tell the driver to keep going and never stop.

The box door rattled open behind him.

“Still awake, then?” Old Tom shuffled in, a flask in one hand and a newspaper under his arm. He was seventy if he was a day, a fixture in this box since before the war, his face a map of railways that no longer existed and lines that had been ripped up before Arthur had even started.

“Just watching the mail through,” Arthur said.

“Aye, she’s a beauty.” Old Tom settled into the corner chair with the same groan of complaint Arthur’s had made. “Never miss her if I can help it. See her every night, and a man gets attached to things that run on time.”

Arthur smiled thinly. “That he does.”

Old Tom unfolded his newspaper, but Arthur caught the way the old man’s eyes strayed to him from behind the pages. There was something on his mind. Arthur had worked with him long enough to know the signs. Old Tom didn’t come up to the box unless he had a story to tell or a complaint to air, and his current silence had the feel of a kettled-up tale.

“You hear anything more about Eddie Marsh?” Old Tom asked, his voice casual in the way men used when they wanted to ask about something without really asking.

Arthur’s pulse did a half-step. He kept his face still. “Not since the newsboards mentioned him. Why?”

Old Tom folded the paper down to his lap. “I was thinking the other day. I saw him. In that stretch down past Merrow Downs, on the embankment. Week before he went missing.”

Arthur felt the words land in his stomach like a stone in still water. “The embankment past Merrow Downs? That’s a long way out.”

“That’s what I thought. He’d no reason to be there. Said he was doing a site survey, but that stretch is all through-line, no points, no sidings, nothing to survey. I told him as much, and he got all shifty.” Old Tom rubbed a finger along the rim of his flask. “I didn’t think much of it at the time. He was a strange one, Eddie. Kept to himself, no family that ever came to visit. But when I heard he’d gone missing, I put two and two together.”

“And what did you get?” Arthur asked, trying to keep his voice light.

Old Tom looked at him with clear grey eyes that had seen too much not to know when a man was hiding something. “I got that Eddie Marsh was involved in something he shouldn’t have been. And that whatever it was, it caught up with him out there.”

Arthur’s hand found the screwdriver on the shelf. He closed his fingers around it, the metal cold and comforting.

“You think something happened to him out there?” Arthur asked.

“I think a man doesn’t walk to the middle of nowhere in the dark and vanish unless he’s meeting someone. And a man who meets someone in the middle of nowhere in the dark usually doesn’t want to be seen.” Old Tom took a long drink from his flask. “That’s all I’m saying.”

The clock ticked. The wind rattled the windows. Arthur’s heart was hammering so loud he was sure the old man could hear it.

“How well did you know Eddie?” Arthur asked.

Old Tom shrugged. “Well enough to know he was the sort of man who liked to make a bit extra. Not enough to be honest about. The sort who gambled a little, drank a little too much, and owed a little more than he could pay.”

The words hit Arthur like a fist to the chest. That was Eddie Marsh. And that, Arthur realized with sickening clarity, was also him. A man with debts, a man who’d been approached for one last job, a man who’d been told everything would be fine if he just did his part.

“You ever talk to him about where he was going that night?” Arthur asked.

“I never saw him again,” Old Tom said. “But I heard a whisper later, from a lad who works the goods yard at Eastleigh. Said he thought he saw Eddie on a train down to Southampton, a week before he disappeared. But that don’t make sense neither, because the lad said Eddie wasn’t on the train. He was under it.”

Arthur’s grip on the screwdriver tightened.

“Under it?”

“Hanging on to the frame,” Old Tom said. “Riding the undercarriage like a vagrant. The lad thought he was imagining it, but he knew Eddie’s face, and he said it was him, clear as day. A signalman riding underneath a goods train like that? A man would have to be desperate to do something like that. Or on the run.”

The room seemed to close in around Arthur. Merrow Downs. The embankment past the tunnel, where Victor had told him they’d stop the mail. It was the same stretch. The exact same stretch. Old Tom had seen Eddie Marsh there, and Eddie Marsh had disappeared without a trace.

And Victor had told Arthur that Eddie tried to double-cross him.

But what if that was a lie?

What if Eddie had gone to Merrow Downs for the same reason Arthur was going Thursday? What if Eddie had been the signalman—the one Victor had used to stop the train—and once the job was done, Victor had sent him on a one-way trip, and the man who’d replaced him was standing in the same signal box, about to make the same mistake?

Arthur realized he was staring at the levers. Green. Red. Green. Red. The whole system was built on the two of them. Stop. Go. Life. Death. And he’d been given a third option none of them had counted on.

“You look a bit pale, Arthur,” Old Tom said. “You feeling all right?”

Arthur forced a smile. “Just tired. Long week.”

Old Tom studied him a moment longer, then nodded slowly and returned to his newspaper.

Arthur checked his watch. Two in the morning. Five hours left on his shift. Thursday night, he’d be back here in the dark, waiting for the same train. And this time, he’d pull the red lever and stop it dead.

But Eddie Marsh had been here first.

And Eddie Marsh was gone.

Arthur put the screwdriver back in his pocket and thought of the diamonds—the confidential order he’d seen at Clapham Junction, the forged manifest Victor had shown him. It was the only weapon he had. And if Eddie had known something too, then Arthur had to wonder exactly what it was that had gotten the man killed.

He spent the rest of the night staring at the levers and imagining the surface of the moon.