The investigators gathered in the cluttered, book-lined office of Professor Julius Arthur Smith, a heavy-set, whiskered Englishman of 59 whose booming laugh and fondness for pungent tobacco were as legendary as his scholarly reputation. Smith had recently turned his considerable intellect from European languages and archaeology toward the parapsychological, and he wasted little time drawing the group's attention to an intriguing newspaper articles. A man named Henry Stanley had seemingly vanished in a puff of smoke from his locked Stoke Newington apartment!
The assembled investigators were a varied and colorful lot. Dr. Edmund Ashcombe, a sharp-tongued 36-year-old professor of Roman and Byzantine history at the University of London, made no secret of his skepticism, insisting there was always a rational explanation for apparent supernatural phenomena. Dr. Hermann Schneider, a 51-year-old Swiss linguist and author of modest fame, had known Smith since his own doctoral studies at the University of Vienna, and brought a more open mind to the proceedings. The dashing Christopher Smith, a young explorer of Italian heritage who had grown up around the Professor's household, rounded out the group alongside Maddie Wicks, a vivacious 24-year-old socialite who had charmed her way into Smith's employ and surprised everyone, including herself, by developing a genuine talent for occult research. Professor Smith tasked the four of them with investigating the Stanley disappearance, framing it as potential evidence for his upcoming January lecture on hauntings.
The group's first stop was the Stoke Newington Police Station, where Maddie took the lead with characteristic flair. She flattered the muscular desk officer with compliments about his physique, leaving him flustered and cooperative, and was soon introduced to Sergeant Archibald Mason, the officer handling the Stanley case. Mason was dismissive, convinced that Stanley had simply staged his own disappearance and would turn up eventually, and he handed over the man's address without much resistance. As the party departed, they could just make out the desk officer muttering to himself, clearly charmed, that she had noticed he had been working out.
The address led them to a boarding house where the landlady, Mrs. Atkins, had wasted no time capitalizing on the notoriety of the event, having chalked a sign outside advertising the "Death Room" for sixpence a visit. Hermann paid for the group, and Mrs. Atkins led them upstairs with theatrical relish, describing how Stanley had arrived home that evening in high spirits after a train set had been delivered to his room earlier in the day. She had heard a tremendous rumble that shook the very house, and when she rushed upstairs with her key, she found the door locked from the inside, the windows bolted shut, the room thick with cold, stinking smoke, and Stanley entirely gone. She was adamant she had been watching the hallway the entire time and would have seen him leave.
Inside the room, the investigators found walls of books and shelves of models, every one of them devoted to trains. Christopher examined the room carefully and discovered dark, sooty streaks running diagonally across the ceiling from the northwest corner to the southeast, and parallel black smudges on the carpet running in precisely the same direction. Hermann, drawing on his knowledge of locomotives, noted that the smudges on the carpet were spaced exactly as far apart as full-sized railroad tracks, and that the soot coating every horizontal surface was entirely consistent with the residue from a coal-burning steam engine. There was no evidence whatsoever of spontaneous combustion — no singed upholstery, no burned fabric — only the unmistakable signature of a train. Hermann borrowed a tape measure from Mrs. Atkins to record the gauge of the tracks, while the party learned from the landlady that the police had already seized the train set, citing a possible electrical fault.
Using library resources, Maddie located a listing for Mehmet Makryat's antique shop in Islington, and the group made their way there to find it shuttered and dark. A neighboring shopkeeper named Cynthia, who sold imported scarves and lace, told them that Makryat had not been seen since the previous day, when the police had come to speak with him. She described him as a grumpy, solitary man who kept to himself and dealt primarily in Middle Eastern and Ottoman goods. Maddie purchased a blue scarf from Cynthia for a shilling, keeping the conversation warm and the information flowing.
Unwilling to leave without a closer look, the investigators moved around to the back of the shop. The attempt to break in through a small rear window went badly from the start — Hermann smashed the glass but cut his arm in the process, and Edmund fared no better trying to clear the remaining shards. Maddie, shaking her head at the two academics, patched Hermann up (Edmund, always independent, looked after himself) before nimbly climbing through the opening herself and unlocking the back door from the inside. Inside, Hermann went straight to the sales ledger and found what he was looking for: the final transaction recorded in the book was the sale of a "Wrightson Special Commission" train set to one Henry Stanley of Stoke Newington, for the sum of one pound. The rest of the shop's inventory was entirely Middle Eastern in character — brasswork, ceramics, imported rugs — making the train set a conspicuous anomaly.
Upstairs in Makryat's living quarters, Edmund and Maddie found the wardrobe nearly bare, with only a single shirt remaining. There were cans of food from the Middle East but no personal books, no diary, and no indication of where he had gone. It was clear that Makryat had packed up and left in a hurry, with no intention of returning. The party exited quietly, leaving the shop as they had found it.
At the Islington Library, Maddie followed up on something mentioned in the newspaper description of Stanley's disappearance and unearthed another link to Makryat. Three men had been found stabbed through the heart in a room at the Chelsea Arms Hotel, each carrying identical papers identifying him as Mehmet Makryat, Turkish antique dealer. The article noted that each man bore a superficial resemblance to the others and that their passports showed years of independent worldwide travel under the same name. The investigators concluded, with some disappointment, that the three victims were likely look-alikes operating under duplicate travel documents rather than supernatural duplicates — though the question of why three men had been travelling the world under the same identity, and who had killed them all, remained very much open.
While searching the library's notice board, Hermann spotted an advertisement for the London Train Spotters Association's Christmas dinner, to be held the following evening. More importantly, he recalled that Henry Stanley had been a member of the association. Hermann made his way across the city to Camberwell, where the association's president, Arthur Butters, lived, and presented himself as a Swiss rail enthusiast. Butters was immediately delighted, and the two men bonded over the engineering marvel of the Simplon Tunnel before Hermann secured four tickets to the dinner at ten shillings each. Meanwhile, Maddie returned to the Stoke Newington Police Station to follow up on the seized train set, only to find Sergeant Mason was out; she left the office telephone number and hoped he would be in touch.
The investigators reconvened at Professor Smith's office in the late afternoon to share their findings. Hermann laid out his theory with quiet conviction: the Wrightson Special Commission train set, delivered to Stanley's room that very day, had somehow manifested as a full-sized ghost train, filling the room with coal smoke and leaving its tracks burned into the ceiling and carpet before carrying Stanley away through the locked room and bolted windows. Smith listened with great interest, noting that the locked-room nature of the mystery was particularly compelling. The group agreed that the Makryat murders, while strange, appeared to be a separate and more earthly affair, though the connection between the antique dealer and the mysterious train set was not something they were prepared to dismiss.
With the evening ahead of them, Professor Smith arranged dinner at the Oriental Club, and the investigators settled in to plan their next move. The Train Spotters Christmas dinner the following night promised to be their best opportunity yet to learn more about the Wrightson Special Commission train set and Henry Stanley's connections within the enthusiast community. Hermann made a mental note to bring along some old Swiss rail ticket stubs to help him blend in, while the others quietly prepared themselves for an evening of conversation about locomotives. The ghost train, wherever it had gone, was still out there — and so, presumably, was Henry Stanley.