The 19:40 to Carlisle

This is a short story. It is fiction.

Reeve had worked the ticket window at Thwaite Bank for nine years and had developed the particular kind of attention that comes from a job with long gaps in it. He knew which of the regulars would have the right money and which would search for it. He knew that the man who travelled to Preston on Mondays had stopped travelling to Preston in April and had not been seen since. He noticed things because there was very little else to do with the afternoon.

The woman started coming in September. Thursdays, about twenty past seven, a single to Carlisle, paid in cash, no railcard. She was somewhere in her sixties and she wore a good coat and she said thank you and she went through the barrier onto platform two.

The 19:40 to Carlisle left at 19:40. At about eight she came back through the barrier and went home.

The first time, he assumed she had changed her mind. The second time, three weeks later, he assumed she had missed it, although she had been on the platform for twenty minutes. By November he had stopped assuming and started counting.

Eleven Thursdays. Eleven tickets to Carlisle. No journeys.

It was not, he told himself, any of his business. Nobody is obliged to board a train. But the tickets were not cheap, and eleven of them was a considerable amount of money to spend on standing on a platform, and Reeve had the sort of mind that will not put a thing down once it has picked it up.

He worked through the possibilities in the quiet hours.

She was meeting someone off a train. But the 19:40 was a departure, and the only arrival near it came into platform one at 19:52, and she was always on two.

She was leaving something for someone. He walked platform two on a Friday morning and found nothing, and platform two had a bench, a shelter, a bin and a sign, and nowhere to leave anything that would still be there an hour later.

She was frightened of the journey and could not make herself get on. This was the theory he liked least and believed most, and it sat with him unpleasantly through most of December.

In January the barrier broke.

It was not much of a break. The gate on the automatic side stopped reading tickets and stood open, and there was a notice, and for eight days anyone could walk onto either platform without passing anything.

On the Thursday of that week, the woman did not come to the window.

Reeve saw her at twenty past seven, walking straight past the ticket office and through the open gate, and something in his chest went cold and then rearranged itself, because he understood in that moment that he had been asking the wrong question for four months. He had been asking where she was going. The answer was that she had never been going anywhere. She had been buying access.

He left the window and stood at the end of the concourse where he could see through to the platforms.

She was on platform two, at the far end, past the shelter, where the canopy stops and the platform runs out towards the signal. Standing at the rail, facing out across the cutting.

At 19:38 the lights of the 19:40 came up the line and the train drew in and stood, and the doors opened, and the few people who were travelling got on.

She did not look at it.

She was looking across the cutting at the embankment on the other side, where there is a row of terraced houses backing onto the railway, and in one of them, on the first floor, a light was on and the curtains were open.

At 19:40 the train left, and the platform was clear, and the sightline from the end of platform two to the back of those houses was open for perhaps ninety seconds before the next thing came through.

A figure came to the lit window. Small, a child, seven or eight. Stood there.

The woman at the end of the platform raised one hand and held it up.

The figure at the window raised one hand back.

Neither of them waved. They simply held their hands up, for a while, and then the curtain was drawn across from inside by somebody taller, and the light stayed on, and the woman put her hand down and walked back along the platform.

Reeve got back to the window before she reached the concourse.

The following Thursday the barrier was fixed, and she came to the window at twenty past seven and asked for a single to Carlisle, and Reeve, who had thought about very little else for a week, said that as it happened there was a platform ticket, thirty pence, if she was meeting someone.

She looked at him for slightly longer than the question required.

“I’m not meeting anyone,” she said.

“No,” said Reeve. “Thirty pence, though.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she opened her purse and counted out thirty pence and put it on the tray, and he pushed the small card through to her, and she took it and said thank you and went through the barrier.

She came every Thursday for another year and two months. Reeve never asked, and she never explained, and each week she paid thirty pence and stood at the end of platform two at twenty to eight with her hand up.

The puzzle is solvable from the information given, which is the only rule this kind of story has to keep. Reeve gets there four months late for the same reason the reader does: he assumes a ticket is for a journey.

For another story where the official explanation and the real one part company, The second key. For one about a record kept for reasons its keeper had stopped examining, The cartographer’s error.