A Gun for Sale by Graham Greene Page A

Vauxhall. Another police car came past them through the Vauxhall tunnel. Mather raised his hand. They followed it back over the river. The flood-lit clock on the Shell-Mex building showed half-past one. The light was on in the clock tower at Westminster: Parliament was having an all-night sitting as the opposition fought their losing fight against mobilization.
    It was six o’clock in the morning when they drove back towards the Embankment. Saunders was asleep. He said, ‘That’s fine.’ He was dreaming that he had no impediment in his speech; he had an independent income; he was drinking champagne with a girl; everything was fine. Mather totted things up on his notebook; he said to Saunders, ‘He got on a train for sure. I’d bet you –’ Then he saw that Saunders was asleep and slipped a rug across his knees and began to consider again. They turned in at the gates of New Scotland Yard.
    Mather saw a light in the chief inspector’s room and went up.
    ‘Anything to report?’ Cusack asked.
    ‘Nothing. He must have caught a train, sir.’
    ‘We’ve got a little to go on at this end. Raven followed somebody to Euston. We are trying to find the driver of the first car. And another thing, he went to a doctor called Yogel to try and get his lip altered. Offered some more of those notes. Still handy too with that automatic. We’ve got him taped. As a kid he was sent to an industrial school. He’s been smart enough to keep out of our way since. I can’t think why he’s broken out like this. A smart fellow like that. He’s blazing a trail.’
    ‘Has he much money besides the notes?’
    ‘We don’t think so. Got an idea, Mather?’
    Colour was coming into the sky above the city. Cusack switched off his table-lamp and left the room grey. ‘I think I’ll go to bed.’
    ‘I suppose,’ Mather said, ‘that all the booking offices have the numbers of those notes?’
    ‘Every one.’
    ‘It looks to me,’ Mather said, ‘that if you had nothing but phoney notes and wanted to catch an express –’
    ‘How do we know it was an express?’
    ‘Yes, I don’t know why I said that, sir. Or perhaps – if it was a slow train with plenty of stops near London, surely someone would have reported by this time –’
    ‘You may be right.’
    ‘Well, if I wanted to catch an express, I’d wait till the last minute and pay on the train. I don’t suppose the ticket collectors carry the numbers.’
    ‘I think you’re right. Are you tired, Mather?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Well, I am. Would you stay here and ring up Euston and King’s Cross and St Pancras, all of them? Make a list of all the outgoing expresses after seven. Ask them to telephone up the line to all stations to check up on any man travelling without a ticket who paid on the train. We’ll soon find out where he stepped off. Good night, Mather.’
    ‘Good morning, sir.’ He liked to be accurate.
    3
    There was no dawn that day in Nottwich. Fog lay over the city like a night sky with no stars. The air in the streets was clear. You have only to imagine that it was night. The first tram crawled out of its shed and took the steel track down towards the market. An old piece of newspaper blew up against the door of the Royal Theatre and flattened out. In the streets on the outskirts of Nottwich nearest the pits an old man plodded by with a pole tapping at the windows. The stationer’s window in the High Street was full of Prayer Books and Bibles: a printed card remained among them, a relic of Armistice Day, like the old drab wreath of Haig poppies by the War Memorial: ‘Look up, and swear by the slain of the war that you’ll never forget.’ Along the line a signal lamp winked green in the dark day and the lit carriages drew slowly in past the cemetery, the glue factory, over the wide tidy cement-lined river. A bell began to ring from the Roman Catholic cathedral. A whistle blew.
    The packed train moved slowly into another morning: smuts were thick on all the faces,