Agnes Pollard

Agnes Pollard is 44 and for nineteen years has worked in the signal boxsignal box A small railway building where an operator works the levers and panel that control signals and points on a stretch of line. closest to Mill Crossing. She was born in a stone village in the countryside, the daughter of a postman and a teacher, and joined the railway during the war, when men were scarce and levers plentiful. She stayed when the men came back. She says that in nineteen years no train has been late through any fault of hers, and she keeps that tally the way other people keep photographs.

She lives alone in a brick cottage beside a dirt road, twenty minutes' walk from the signal boxsignal box A small railway building where an operator works the levers and panel that control signals and points on a stretch of line., with a narrow kitchen, an iron stove, a kettle that whistles loudly and a garden of dahlias that she prunes on her days off. She was married, is no longer, and does not talk about it. In the kitchen the cups hang on hooks in the same order, and the dish towel is folded in three before it goes on the stove rail.

She has fair, rosy skin, green eyes tired from sleeping by day and wavy brown hair tied in a scarf printed with tiny flowers. She wears a navy-blue wool cardigan over a gray dress and the railway armband on her sleeve, and almost always has in her hand an enamel tea mug, white with a blue rim, that she brings from home. She is methodical and polite, speaks of the signal boxsignal box A small railway building where an operator works the levers and panel that control signals and points on a stretch of line. as of a kitchen she tidies herself and takes offense when anyone hints at carelessness.

About the night of the robbery, her account is the panel's: at 3 a.m. the lamp showed green for Mill Crossing, as on every night, and she never put that signal to red. She explains that eleven trains pass the signal boxsignal box A small railway building where an operator works the levers and panel that control signals and points on a stretch of line. at night, counting freight, and that the mail is the most punctual of all, so much so that people set their clocks by it. She recalls that the Crossing is two kilometers away, behind the bend of the woods, and that from the box she sees only the lamp. With the countryside dark and the line deserted, no one can say for certain what each person saw that night.

Agnes knows that the signalwoman nearest a tampered signal is the first one suspected. When the detective asks if she put the signal to red for the thieves, she recalls her nineteen years without a late train and invites him to look for her fingerprints on every lever. It may be the wounded pride of a professional with no mark in the logbook. It may be someone who talks about the panel so as not to talk about something else. The detective will have to decide which.