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While all this was going on the policemen at the other end of our table were conducting interviews with passengers: I knew that sooner or later they were going to want to interview me. I was dreading the moment. I had too much to say to them without making any admissions or speaking any untruths. They were a typically unlikely and unprepossessing bunch of country coppers: one of them had big ears like wingnuts, almost like a character in a children’s comic; another was broad and squat, almost square, and was busy writing everything down, though it looked rather as though he was unaccustomed to handling a pen; and the third, clearly the most senior officer, had a bald head and a bottle-brush moustache, and he kept scratching at his rather scraggy neck and rubbing a hand across his brow, as though trying to soothe his troubled mind. Passengers were ushered before this trio by a formidable woman in a shop coat called Mrs Sweeton who seemed to have appointed herself as official usher. ‘Thank you, Mrs Sweeton,’ the senior policeman would regularly pronounce. ‘Next, Mrs Sweeton.’ I rather fancied that they knew each other very well. The passengers gave their statements and then were ushered away again. ‘Thank you, Mrs Sweeton. Thank you, Mrs Sweeton.’
Morley was clearly keeping a keen and close eye on all this, and as I sat back down at the table he shushed me and indicated to me with his hand that I should sit and be quiet, attend to the conversations, and take notes. Another man was being ushered before the police – but this was no passenger.
The crowd in the bar parted as he was escorted to the table by two gentlemen dressed in LMS uniforms, like captains of the guard – thick black blazers, emblazoned caps and shiny brass buttons. I had seen the man they were escorting at the scene of the crash, frantically rushing first to the front of the train and then back to the rear. He was tall and good-looking, with high cheekbones, and though smartly turned out in his own LMS uniform he looked terribly afraid and uncertain.
‘He’s dishy,’ said Miriam to me, as he sat down at the table: he was the sort of young man, I thought, who might easily attract the wrong sort of woman.
A total hush fell over the thronging crowd.
It was George Wilson, the Appleby signalman.
CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_964a3847-377b-5ce3-97c0-7073e4bfd528)
THE LOCOMOTIVE ACCIDENT EXAMINATION GUIDE (#ulink_964a3847-377b-5ce3-97c0-7073e4bfd528)
THOUGH WE WERE SITTING NEARBY, close enough to hear, it wasn’t possible to pick up every word of the police interview over the hubbub of the bar – after a few preliminary questions the crowd had returned to their own rumours and conversations – and it wasn’t until the senior policeman raised his voice that the conversation with the signalman became entirely clear.
‘So, can you think of any reason for the engine derailment?’
‘Axle defect, bearing failure, boiler defect, bolt failure, brake failure, broken rail, debris, defective this or that, drive shaft failure, driver error, fireman error, excessive loading, excessive speed, lack of signal detection, landslip, signal layout defect. Series implexa causaram.’ This was not, suffice it to say, the signalman’s answer. It was Morley, interrupting.
‘I beg your pardon?’ said the policeman, looking across for the first time at the three of us perched at the end of the table. ‘I don’t think you’re a part of this conversation, sir, are you?’
‘And signalman error,’ said Morley, to the signalman. ‘If you don’t mind my saying so. Let’s not assume. It’s a checklist, from The Locomotive Accident Examination Guide, I think, first published by Hoyten and Cole in—’
The policeman looked despairingly at his two companions.
‘I do mind you saying so, sir, actually. And I’d be grateful if you’d keep your thoughts to yourself for the moment. If you were involved in the crash you’ll have an opportunity to give a statement, along with everyone else.’
‘Father,’ said Miriam, with a voice of restraint. ‘Irritabis crabrones.’
‘It’s only what the company’s accident expert will say, when he arrives,’ said Morley. ‘I thought it might save you some time.’
‘He’s only trying to help,’ said Miriam. ‘Sorry, Officer.’
‘Si cum hac exceptione detur sapientia, ut illam inclusam teneam nec enuntiem, reiciam.’
‘What’s he saying?’ asked the policeman.
‘If wisdom were offered me on condition that I should keep it bottled up, I would not accept it,’ said Miriam. ‘Roughly.’
‘Well, he’s going to need to bottle it up for the moment, if you don’t mind. We’re more than qualified to be able to get to the bottom of things, thank you. We’re just trying to establish what might have happened—’
‘I know what happened,’ said the signalman.
‘What?’ asked Morley.
‘Please!’ said the policeman. ‘I’m conducting an interview here.’
‘Apologies, Officer,’ said Morley.
‘What happened, then?’ the policeman asked the signalman.
‘I was about to say,’ said the signalman. ‘I’ve already explained to Eric—’
‘The stationmaster?’
Eric, standing smartly by the table, quietly nodded, his LMS cap lending the nod an air of locomotive authority.
‘Well?’ said the policeman.
‘It was children on the line. I didn’t have any choice.’
‘Children?’ said the policeman.
‘Gypsy children. It’s those ones that come for the fair, and then never went away,’ said the signalman.
‘The Appleby Fair,’ said Morley to me.
I wrote it down.
‘The Appleby Fair,’ said the policeman.
‘That’s right,’ said the signalman. ‘They come up here and then they hang around and you can’t get rid of the buggers and they let their bloody children run wild, and if it wasn’t for them—’
‘You know, I have always wanted to visit the Appleby Fair,’ said Morley to me.
‘You’re not missing anything,’ said the signalman to Morley. ‘And if it wasn’t for those bloody kids none of this would have happened. I didn’t have any choice. I had to divert the train into the dairy siding.’
‘The dairy siding?’ asked Morley.
‘The Express Dairy Creamery. The milk goes down to London.’
‘I see,’ said the policeman. He sat back in his chair and sighed.
There was an awkward silence. The police looked relieved. The stationmaster, his companion and the signalman looked devastated: this was their crash, after all. Morley, unfortunately, was determined to make it his.
‘An interesting case, is it not?’ said Morley.
‘If you wouldn’t mind leaving the police work to us, sir,’ said the policeman.
‘Philosophically interesting, I mean, Officer.’
‘Sorry, sir, you are?’ asked the policeman.
‘Swanton Morley,’ announced Morley, in his brisk, no-nonsense fashion.
‘The People’s Professor?’ said the policeman.
‘I am sometimes referred to as such, yes,’ said Morley.
The policeman’s manner changed entirely. ‘Very nice to meet you, Mr Morley.’ He leaned across the table and vigorously shook Morley’s hand. ‘My father was a great one for your books, sir.’
‘I’m delighted to hear it.’
‘He loved your books on wildlife,’ continued the policeman.
‘Very good,’ said Morley.
‘And the ones on hobbies and home improvements.’
‘Excellent.’
‘He was less keen on the philosophical ones.’
‘Ah, well—’
‘And I’ve never read any myself. We gave them all away when my father passed on.’
‘Well, never mind,’ said Morley. ‘What we have here, funnily enough, is a classic philosophical problem.’
‘Is it indeed?’
‘It is. A classic moral dilemma.’
‘You’d better write that down,’ the senior policeman instructed his burly colleague.
‘Really, Sergeant?’ asked the burly one.
‘Write it down,’ repeated the policeman. ‘It might be significant.’ He stared at Morley as if beholding a work of art. ‘The People’s Professor, well, well. Lads, you’ve read the People’s Professor?’ The two other policemen shook their heads.
‘Ah well,’ said Morley to me. ‘Non quivis suavia comedit edulia.’
‘What did he say?’ the policeman asked Miriam.
‘Not sure,’ she said.
‘Marvellous,’ said the policeman.
‘Notebook to hand?’ Morley asked me. This usually meant that he had seen some opportunity and was about to deliver an impromptu lecture, which he wished to be recorded for posterity. An opportunity this clearly was. I did not alas have a notebook to hand. These are merely my recollections.
‘Might I elaborate?’ he asked the policeman.
‘By all means, Mr Morley.’
Morley turned to address the signalman, who was looking defeated and ashamed. ‘I’m so sorry you should have been faced with such a dilemma, young man. Mr Wilson, is it not, if I heard correctly?’
‘That’s right, sir. George Wilson.’
‘Well, Mr Wilson, I’m afraid you have been confronted with one of the fundamental questions in ethics.’
‘Has he?’ said the policeman.
‘Indeed he has. We might call it the “Changing the Points Problem”.’ (For a full elaboration of the problem, see Morley’s article, ‘The “Changing the Points Problem”’ in the Journal of Philosophy, vol.113, summer 1938: another article that caused more trouble than it was worth.) ‘Faced with the likelihood of causing harm to an individual or individuals, should one or should one not change the points?’
‘Course you should,’ said the wingnut-eared policeman.
‘Indeed. It seems like the obvious answer. Though alas in this case, as so often, there are complicating factors.’
‘Which are?’ asked the senior policeman.
‘Well, in this instance of course there is the complicating factor of causing harm to another individual or group of individuals.’
‘The people on the train,’ explained Miriam, who always liked to get in a word or two during Morley’s musings. She was not someone, under any circumstances, ever to be outdone or outshone. Her father in full flow was always a challenge to her.
‘Precisely,’ said Morley. ‘In which case, in the case of competing wrongs, as it were, our friend here can only have done wrong. The real question is therefore how wrong was the wrong?’
‘What?’ said George Wilson, the signalman, raising his voice. ‘What are you saying? I didn’t do wrong. I did what any signalman would have done. Eric, you tell him.’
Eric the stationmaster remained silent; he might just as well have been blacking the grate in the waiting room.
The crowd in the bar began to quieten.
‘Yes, yes of course you did,’ said Morley calmly. ‘You did what any of us might have done. If you had chosen not to change the points, all the children on the line might well have died. How many were there?’
‘Four or five.’
‘Which would have been a terrible tragedy. But how many people were on the train?’
‘We’re waiting for the full head count,’ said the senior policeman. He looked towards Eric the stationmaster.
‘We think it’ll probably be about five hundred,’ he said, from under his LMS cap.
‘So five hundred lives might possibly have been lost because of our friend’s decision,’ continued Morley.
‘But they weren’t!’ protested the signalman.
‘Thank goodness, no, though as it is …’ Morley looked sympathetically at me. ‘The loss of one child is of course a terrible tragedy.’
‘And many more injured,’ said the senior policeman. ‘The fireman seriously.’
‘Yes. But you can perhaps see that theoretically at least, from the purely utilitarian point of view, it might have been better for our friend here to have chosen not to change the points, possibly killing only four or five children rather than five hundred men, women and children.’
‘Father!’ said Miriam. ‘That is really a quite monstrous suggestion.’
‘But logically sound,’ said Morley.
‘You’re saying it was a lose-lose situation?’ asked the senior policeman.
