Oscar O’Neill was sipping his mid-morning coffee when he got a call from Detective Inspector Luke Stott. ‘I hope I’m not interrupting your clinic?’ he asked. ‘No, you’re fine,’ Oscar replied. ‘You’ve managed to hit a gap between patients.’ What Oscar neglected to mention was the length of the gap: about an hour in this case.
‘Did you know that Australian pilots could be colour blind?’ Stott continued.
‘Yes, I had heard that,’ Oscar replied.
‘I think the same is true of Russian train drivers as well,’ he added.
Before Oscar had time to ask why the DI was asking, Stott exclaimed, ‘I don’t believe it!’
‘No, I’m pretty sure that’s correct,’ Oscar replied defensively.
‘No, I don’t mean that I don’t believe you,’ Stott explained.
‘It’s just that it’s an incredible coincidence. Bruce Harrison is an Australian pilot who was over here for a transport conference. But he seems to have gone missing, along with a Russian who was also at the conference, Victor Tymoshenko. I don’t know if Victor is a train driver or not, but it seems a bit of a coincidence as one of the few things we know about Harrison is that he’s colour blind. I didn’t know that you could be a colour blind pilot, and surely you must be able to see signal colours to drive a train?’
‘I think it’s only in Australia that you can be a pilot,’ Oscar replied. ‘I believe in Russia they give the drivers special training, but I’m not sure that I’m going to be catching a train in Russia any time soon.’
‘The thing is, we don’t know if one or the other of them is a spy, or whether either or both of them are in danger. If you wanted to murder someone, could you use the fact that they’re colour blind, do you think?’ asked Stott.
Oscar thought about this for a few moments before replying. ‘Well, it would probably depend on how severe their colour blindness was. I suppose you could lure then to somewhere dangerous that was protected by a red light which they may not notice. I know that, in the past, train accidents have been caused by lights that have either been confused or not seen at all. But you would have thought that even in Russia they wouldn’t allow drivers who couldn’t see a red light.’
Oscar thought a bit more before continuing: ‘Recognising food can be a problem for some, so perhaps you could poison some meat or fruit.’
‘They were last seen driving towards the coast,’ Stott interjected.
‘Ah,’ Oscar replied. ‘I remember a case of a rescue boat being confiscated by health and safety officials after rescuing a child. It was painted in a colour that blended in with the sea, and I remember the judge saying that it was just as well there weren’t any deaf colour blind people swimming at the time. That’s a point: they weren’t deaf, by any chance, were they?’
‘You’re asking if a Russian, whom we know nothing about, is a deaf, colour blind train driver. I think that’s rather unlikely, don’t you?’ Stott asked, rhetorically.
Oscar had to agree that it was pretty unlikely. And, of course, it turned out not to be true, as Stott revealed to Oscar a few days later: ‘They were found together in a hotel in Brighton. Neither was a spy, though the pilot will need some diplomatic skills to explain this to his wife.’