All Honourable Men by Gavin Lyall

you’ve got an excuse, but O’Gilroy didn’t need telling. “There shouldbe a second carriage attached, but it’s gone off somewhere. Does it,” he asked Dahlmann, to hold him in place, “have a kitchen, too?”
    â€œNaturally. And also a boiler and generator –” he nodded at some dead table lamps which Ranklin hadn’t realised were electric “– and baggage space and a cabin for the staff. Your servant must move in there tomorrow.”
    â€œSplendid. And what’s the plan, then?” Snaipe could show that much curiosity.
    â€œTomorrow, perhaps later tonight – we must find a train to be attached to, or an engine – we go south to Basle, then to Friedrichshafen, to meet the ferry of Lady Kelso who comes from Romanshorn. Then, I do not know for sure yet. The telegraph . . .” He nodded at the outside world, where others must be taking decisions. Nods, brief and sharp, were part of Dahlmann’s vocabulary, gestures were not.
    O’Gilroy came back with a stone jar of pickled herring and half a coffee cake. “And there’s drinks of all sorts, sir. I can’t be reading the labels, but from the smell I can do yez a whisky.”
    â€œWhisky would be splendid,” Ranklin murmured, deciding against herring at one in the morning. “Oh, and we’re going to have to share a compartment tonight. I trust you don’t snore.”
    â€œLiving single, nobody’s ever told me, sir,” O’Gilroy said mournfully.
    O’Gilroy insisted on clearing up all the cups, glasses and so forth and washing them in the toilet hand-basin – which gave him the run of the whole carriage while Ranklin and Dahlmann chatted between long silences. The banker wasn’t probing and Snaipe wasn’t the inquisitive type, so not much got said. Ranklin and O’Gilroy went to bed about half past one.
    The walls of sleeping compartments can be deceptively thin – though these seemed more solid than usual – and they kept their voices down.
    â€œDahlmann’s in the one next to the room ye was in,” O’Gilroy reported, “and some railway feller between this and that, then the last one’s empty. There’s no papers in the diningroom ‘cept some railway maps in German, but there’s a small safe. Locked. Ye can’t say easy how big a safe is from the outside, but I wouldn’t be thinking it could hold that much gold. Ye said ’bout a foot square?”
    â€œThe India Office did.” They sat on the bottom bunk measuring small cubes in the air like modest anglers talking about the ones that got away.
    O’Gilroy shook his head. “Not that big.”
    â€œMaybe it’s in the detached carriage. Or it’ll come aboard later. Has the safe got a combination lock?”
    â€œIt has. How much did ye learn about them?”
    â€œLittle enough. But if I get a chance, I’ll try my luck.” But even if the gold were there, what could he do about it? He hadn’t got any lead to substitute: he reckoned he’d need at least a tenth of the total weight, which meant explaining away over thirty pounds of lead if his baggage got searched.
    Still, it would be progress of a sort to find the gold was actually on the train.
    * * *
    Some time in the night – call it three in morning since the middle of the night is always three in the morning – Ranklin heard somebody clump down the corridor and start banging around in the next compartment. He had just dozed off again when, at another three in the morning, an engine or train backed into them with a jolt, paused for an interval of shouting, and jerked them – temporarily – into motion.
    He lost count of the threes in the morning after that, but at the last one he realised they were rumbling along steadily if not fast. When he next woke they were stopped again, light was seeping past the blind and O’Gilroy was