Winters' Tales

Identity Train.

As the from-Kent Express pulled lazily into Kings Cross station on a nippy, breezy, Autumn morning, Detective Inspector Toby Smart was already quite impressed by the criminal he was about to arrest upon their disembark.

Samwise Nixon had been on the Yard's radar for years. A cocky chap-forty or so, perhaps a little wider in the waist than he would have liked to admit, dark haired, round-faced, quite heavily bearded, and decidedly shifty. Smart had never met the guy, but reports spoke about something in his eyes which seemed to put everyone around him a little on edge.

But the most interesting fact, Smart had decided, as he watched all the passengers leave the train, and half of the Yard officers fan out to hold them up at the end of the platform while the rest boarded the train to search it, was that Samwise Nixon had been pronounced very firmly dead six months ago.

It had been a simple affair, as deaths go. Nixon had been shoved off of a moving train-another Express, going from London to Edinburgh on the coastal route-by a private detective working to track him down. The body had fallen off a cliff, and had been recovered, mangled, by police, a few weeks later.

But, Smart smirked to himself, as he leant casually up against the wall and watched his men do their work-as soon as a thief comes back from the dead to continue his usual thoroughfare, that, and only that, appeared to be a case in his league.

Smart wasn't being cocky when he's thought that. He really wasn't. Cocky wasn't something that applied to Toby Smart nowadays. In his youth, yes, but now age and experience taught him never to be cocky. His realisation that he was always being picked for the more puzzling cases came with a spoonful of flattery, he knew. After the whole drama with the Winter sisters six months prior, Smart knew his reputation had been blown up quite a deal.

As he regarded the scene unfolding in front of him, which mainly consisted of grumpy passengers arguing with irritable policemen, Smart noticed a small flash of blue in the corner of his vision. Turning his head slightly to acknowledge the newcomer, Smart recognised the young officer as the latest addition to the Force, a boy of barely eighteen with an awkwardly large, freckly face and a wild mop of frizzy ginger hair. Smart couldn't remember the boy's name, but he'd liked him from the start, mainly because he reminded Smart of a timid, slightly dumber version of himself. Not visually, though, obviously. Character-wise.

Now the final few passengers were trickling away from the platform, the young eighteen year old, twisting his cuffs of his slightly-too-large jacket in his hands, seemed like he was working up the courage to speak.

Smart turned his head properly so the boy could see that he had his senior's attention. Although to be honest, Smart thought to himself, he was only the boy's senior by about five or six years. But currently, as Smart was decked out in his ever-present wide-brimmed hat and large overcoat, the young officer trying to stammer out a sentence in front of the D.I. probably didn't realise how similar in age the two were.

"He's...not here, s-sir."

Smart raised an eyebrow in surprise, a movement masked by the brim of his hat.

"Not here?" he repeated, looking quizzically at the boy. "Nixon, you mean?"

"Yessir." The boy was nodding his head so frantically and fearfully Smart wondered whether it might fall off.

Smart once again scanned the platform, which was filled now only with rather confused policemen, all of whom were, in actuality, watching the exchange between himself, their boss, and the young officer, all with varying degrees of subtelty.

"Fascinating."

"Sir?" the boy quivered. "Aren't you-well, angry?"

Smart turned back to him and beamed, if only to try and shift the installment of fear in the young officer's conscience.