The Amateur Detective

Elanor walked down the length of her car, discretely looking through the sliding doors of each cabin to ensure that no vagrants had snuck aboard. It was a pointless exercise really, because she had already checked twice before and felt it quite unlikely that a hobo would leap onto a speeding train on its way to Manchester, but the other option was to go to the luggage car with the other girls and gossip.

Tiffany was the worst of them. During their downtime, after everyone had been brought aboard and settled, but before the dessert trolley was taken from cabin to cabin, Tiffany would instigate a round of talk about the passengers of the day and which particular boy had taken her fancy. There were even times when she would trade cars with another girl to get a look at some of the other passengers. It was galling really, to treat these people - people just trying to go about their business - as though they were animals in a zoo, there for entertainment.

There were plenty of war veterans, of course. At this stage, to get sent home usually meant that a man was far too ill to fight. Elanor had seen men with missing arms, missing legs, and others with bandages wrapped all the way around their heads. It was ghastly really, and she tried her best not to bother them too much, or to look at them for too long. The other men that went by train ... well, Tiffany was of the opinion that any good-looking man must have something wrong with him if he wasn't off to war. Now this was obviously not true, because of course the crown needed all sorts to help at home with logistics and planning and things of that sort, but it did sometimes seem as though the country had disgorged all its eligible men in the last few years, leaving only the old and infirm behind.

Elanor was making her rounds for a fourth time when she noticed that the curtains had been drawn shut on one of the cabins. This happened from time to time, especially on a light load when a person might have the whole cabin to themselves and was desirous of a short nap. Elanor almost passed it, but then remembered that the cabin in question had been occupied by a man and woman. She paused briefly, mulling it over, then went back to have a peek.

Now according to Tiffany, people got up to funny business on the train all the time. According to her, it was practically impossible to walk down the narrow corridors without stumbling across a tangled mess of arms and legs. This was demonstrably not true, as most of the cabins didn't even have both men and women in them. While Elanor might have been able to conceive of people choosing to engage in lewdness on a train, say, a young couple just recently married before the man is to go off to war, it was entirely beyond her imagination to think that her train would be home to, well, buggery.

The curtains hadn't been closed neatly, and only offered notional privacy to begin with, and so the view offered to Elanor told a sort of story. The woman was leaning away from the man, but he was sidled up close to her, talking in a voice too low to be heard, an urgent expression upon his face. This went on for some time, the man making animated hand gestures, as though he needed his whole body to get his point across. Finally, the woman turned to him and snapped something at him, which sounded like but probably wasn't "stagnant". She produced a letter from her purse and brandished it at him, urging him to take it, but he stared straight ahead with a scowl on his face. She laid the letter between them. The couple - if that's what they were - stopped talking completely.

Elanor quickly moved away, feeling a burning shame for having eavesdropped, even if she'd only heard one word, and heard it wrong at that. Her first thought was to tell someone, Tiffany most likely, but she quickly checked that impulse. Instead, she tried to figure out from the clues what it was they were arguing about. The train was on its northern route, away from London, which meant that neither of them were off to the war. Besides that, the man didn't have a military bearing, which meant that he fell under the category of "suspicious men who should be at war, but are not". They were both young, if not as young as Elanor.

She mulled it over until the next stop, when the woman exited the car and the man did not. Elanor snuck a quick peek into the cabin on the pretense of bringing the dessert trolley, even though the girls weren't usually supposed to knock on cabins with the curtains drawn. The man looked a bit dazed, as if he'd had the wind knocked out of him, but the letter remained beside him, unopened.

He got off at the stop after his friend, or girlfriend, or mistress, or wife, or whoever she was, and Elanor completed her duties as quickly as possible so she would be able to go back to their cabin. Inside she found the letter, sitting there on the broad seat, exactly as the woman had left it. Elanor picked it up, muttering under her breath "The kinds of rubbish people leave ..." for the benefit of anyone who might be spying on her. She stowed it under her blouse, pressed against her skin, until a half-hour later when she had the time to lock herself in the lavatory and look it over.

The envelope smelled faintly of lilacs, and was made of higher quality paper than one could normally find in wartime. Elanor opened it gingerly, keeping one eye on the door, and when she finally unfurled the letter, it turned out to be five pages with writing on both sides in a thin, neat cursive. She began to read ...