Death on a Branch line

Chapter Ten

On the right side of the road were trees; on the left side a row of white, bent cottages which declined in the middle like a line of washing. Two old women stood before the houses, and looked like they belonged to them, for they too were old and bent. Then came high hedges in which many kinds of wildflower were entangled. These in turn gave way to fields of cut corn, and The Angel.

It was on the left side, a taller white-painted house than the others. A long trestle table had been placed before it, and three people sat there. It was like an exhibition of country life. At one end sat a man in late middle-age. His face was all colours: white and grey beard mingled with red and grey skin. His eyes were half-closed and he sipped ale from a pewter. In the centre sat a plump, brown woman surrounded by lemons. She was slicing them on a board with a great knife and squeezing them into a pail. A lad of about twelve years sat with his knees pressed up against the table end. At first I thought it was a small dog that was tied by a string to his chair, but on second glance it turned out to be a ferret or polecat. Behind the table, a bicycle — the machine belonging to the man who’d lately climbed down from the train — was propped against the front wall of the pub.

As we approached, the wife looked at the front of the inn and, giving a sort of gasp, said ‘wisteria’. She was trying to get a plant of that name to grow over the front of our terraced house at Thorpe-on-Ouse, outside York, but it would not take. This one had taken all right. Its black branches and purple flowers quite covered the windows on the upper left-hand side so that The Angel seemed to have a patched eye.

Touching my hat, I gave the three good evening, at which the man and the boy stirred a little, but only the woman went so far as to return the greeting.

‘Do you have rooms?’ I asked her, but my question was answered by the words painted in large black letters half under the wisteria: ‘The Angel Inn — Beers and Wines — Rooms for Travellers.’

‘Yes, dear,’ said the woman, shading her eyes against the low sun.

‘Do you have a room for two for tonight?’ put in the wife.

‘We do, love,’ said the woman — and yet she made no move.

‘Looks like most of the village has gone to Scarborough,’ I said.

‘Most has,’ she said.

Lydia was looking down at the ferret or polecat.

‘He’s very pretty,’ she said.

‘Don’t stroke ’im whatever yer do,’ said the lad.

Lydia stepped back.

I introduced myself to the woman — though not as a policeman. It would pay dividends, I had decided, to observe this village as an ordinary tripper.

One magpie sat on the roof of The Angel. It was black and white, like the inn, and looked made of leftovers from it.

Why did I think Lambert was innocent? Because he had fed the bird outside the police office. And I was in good company: the governor of Wandsworth gaol had thought the same.

The woman was at last rising, giving her name as ‘Mrs Handley’ and wiping her hands on her pinafore.

Lydia, still looking at the polecat, was saying to the boy:

‘He’d have my finger off, I suppose.’

‘He wouldn’t have your finger off,’ said the boy, evidently thinking hard. ‘It’d be left on…’

‘Would you like to follow me up?’ the woman was saying.

‘… Only it’d be danglin ’,’ the boy ran on.

The lad was also rising to his feet. Where his mother was tawny, he was a brighter brown. He seemed smallish for his age, but he had a great wave of black hair, which must have been oiled naturally, for he was not the sort of boy to be brilliantined. The kid reminded me of one of the over-thatched cottages. He wore a suit of rough purplish corduroy, and balanced what seemed like a very small cap on top of his great quantity of hair.

The sign above the front door read: ‘Mr P. Handley, licensed retailer of foreign wines, spirituous liquor, ales, porters and tobacco’. We stepped beneath it into the hot dimness of the inn’s tiny hallway. There was a door on either side. One said ‘Saloon’, the other ‘Public’.

‘Lovely wisteria,’ Lydia said, as we climbed the stairs.

The landlady smiled but it was the lad who answered.

‘Threatens to ’ave the ’ole front down, that does,’ he called up the staircase.

The lad, who’d seemed stand-offish at first, was now eager to be included in the conversation; he was certainly the brightest spark we’d struck so far in Adenwold. He carried my bag — he’d insisted on doing so, while his mother carried Lydia’s. The landlord himself had remained at the table outside with his ale.

The staircase walls were decorated with wallpaper — white with red roses — and this continued along the narrow landing and into the room we now entered, so that the whole of the interior of The Angel seemed to have a bad case of measles.

The room was small and buckled, with a single tab rug on a polished wooden floor. Beside the high bed stood a rickety washstand, a dresser, a cane chair and a small wardrobe. I whisked off my top-coat, and put my warrant card in the top left drawer of the dresser. There was one picture on the wall, showing two fish facing different directions, each marked ‘Pearch’ — the old-fashioned spelling. Between them were drawings of four hooks, and these were marked ‘Lob worm’, ‘Minnow’, ‘Brandling’ and ‘Marsh Worm’. The room was clean and light — this even though we were, so to say, inside the wisteria, for its purple flowers fluttered at the window.

Lydia complimented the woman on the prettiness of the room, and I gave the boy a penny for carting my bag up the stairs. I asked his name, and he answered, ‘Mervyn.’

‘Who’s the fellow on the bicycle?’ I enquired.

‘Him?’ he said. ‘He’s a bicyclist.’

I could see that he knew his answer to have been a little lacking, but before he could make any further remark his mother had bundled him out of the room. She turned about in the doorway, saying, ‘There’s a cold supper laid on in the saloon from just after nine. Yorkshire ham and salad — will that do you?’

‘Just the ticket,’ I said.

As she quit the room, the wife sat on the bed.

‘Why is there any need to call it a “Yorkshire” ham?’ she said when the door was closed. ‘That talk’s all for the benefit of trippers. Doesn’t she see that we are Yorkshire?’

It was a strange thing for the wife to say, for she herself was not Yorkshire. She’d been born in London, and had lived there until we’d married. She was now looking down at her dress, as if trying to make out her knees through the muslin.

‘Well, I’m torn about the landlady,’ I said. ‘She’s sort of half-friendly, isn’t she?’

‘It’s quite obvious that her husband never does a hand’s turn,’ said Lydia. ‘Why is it his name over the door, and not hers?’

It seemed to me that the wife always fell back on her hobby horse, the sex war, when in a bad mood.

‘I liked the lad, though,’ I said, and the wife made no reply to that.

‘Still hot, en’t it?’ I said, removing my collar and moving over to the washstand. ‘You could cut it with a bloody knife.’

I lifted up the jug of water that stood beneath the washstand and began giving myself a sluice down. The washstand was too small, and, although I wasn’t looking towards the wife, I knew that she was eyeing me and thinking: Why must he slosh about so?

‘What was she doing with the lemons?’ the wife asked, as I dried my face.

‘Making lemonade,’ I said.

The wife, who was no great hand in the kitchen, seemed irritated that I knew this. She was browned off again, and the little headway I’d gained with her on the train since Malton was now lost. The Angel Inn, although clean and bright, was not up to the mark, being too cottage-like and countrified. The wife liked wildflowers and she was a good walker, but Thorpe-on-Ouse (where we lived, and which was just three miles outside York) was village enough for her. For all her Liberal-Labour leanings, the wife aspired to society, and that was not to be had in a remote spot like this.

As I put on a clean shirt, she walked over to the window, which gave onto the kitchen garden of the inn. I stood behind Lydia, towelling my face, for it was not just then safe to touch her. The garden was pretty well-kept, but lonely-looking somehow. The raspberries, growing along twines stretched between canes, put me in mind of telegraph poles and wires. Cut cornfields lay beyond, and beyond them the dark green wall of the woods. There was something not right about the woods. Shadows of trees fell upon the trees at the edge of it — and yet where were the ones that made those shadows?

Just then there came a clattering noise from close-by, and Mrs Handley came out of the back door of the inn and walked across the garden into the outhouse. She returned after a moment carrying a ham. The Yorkshire Ham. The call of a nightjar came from the yellow cut field, and it stopped Mrs Handley in her tracks.

‘Is she crying?’ I said, looking over the wife’s shoulder.

Lydia sat down on the bed again.

‘I wouldn’t be in the least surprised,’ she said.

I heard the clatter of the door from directly below, signifying that Mrs Handley had re-entered the inn.

‘What are you thinking about, love?’ I asked the wife, as I fixed what I thought of as my holiday neckerchief in place. It was green to match the sporting cap, but I reserved that for the present on account of the wife’s mood.

‘Scarborough,’ she said.

I should’ve known not to ask.

‘… The Italian band on the pier,’ she ran on, ‘… a lemon tea at the Grand… the Chinese lanterns at dusk in the Esplanade Gardens.’

If we’d gone, I thought, she wouldn’t have been so keen on it all.

‘We will go to Scarborough,’ I said, transferring the bundle of papers from my kitbag to the inside pocket of my suit-coat, which lay on the bed. ‘I’ve another leave in August, and we’ll go then. Meantime, shall I tell you how we’ve come to fetch up here?’

I had been eyeing the place next to the wife on the bed, but I thought it better to tell the tale while standing.

I gave Lydia the story I’d had from Hugh Lambert, and told her of my plan of campaign. I didn’t say whether I believed the story to be true. When I’d finished, I stood waiting for her to say, ‘Well, it’s all too daft for words.’ Instead there came through the open window a beating of air. It was the fire-breathing of the iron

intruder: the 8.41 ‘down’.

‘I’m off to meet that in,’ I said, and I snatched up my suit-coat and new cap and quit the room. Let the wife digest the story at her leisure — it was a lot to take in.

Spilling out through the front door of The Angel, I saw that the long table now stood empty, and that Mervyn Handley’s ferret had been untied and removed. The train gave two screams as it approached through the trees, and I began running along the dusty downhill road, which brought the sweat pricking under my shirt. The floating sharpness of engine smoke mingled with the dizzying country-side scents of hay, cut corn, hedge flowers and meadow flowers — and all for my benefit alone, for there was no-one else about. It was unnatural for an evening to be so close. A man deserved a rest after six, but this bugger of a sun would never let up. Seemed set on proving a point, it did: I can keep this up for ever, you know!

I ran past the triangle of dying grass that marked what seemed to be the centre of Adenwold, and across the station yard, where I had to step aside to let a man in a long white dust-coat come through. He was hatless, and with silver hair, and the coat came out behind him like wings. Behind him, the train was just coming to a stand. Had he come down early from it? He’d have risked a broken ankle if so. I turned about and watched him tear across the station yard, and then away in the opposite direction to The Angel.

He might or might not have arrived by train. My priority was to observe those who certainly had done.

I gained the ‘down’ platform, and stood level with the tail light of the guard’s van, which blazed away needlessly in the golden evening. A man was walking away from a third-class carriage. He was a clerkly sort, sweating in tall collar, black shiny suit and a cheap, high-crowned brown bowler that clashed. He carried a portmanteau and a Gladstone bag. The lad porter was on the platform, watching the man. He’d made no move to assist him.

The clerkly sort kept turning about as he walked, as if to make sure that nobody else had climbed down from the train — which nobody else had. He stopped as I watched him and gave me a steady stare for a second or two before striking out for the barrow boards and Adenwold.

As he crossed the station yard, he passed a man approaching the simmering train: a parson in a light white suit. He carried a small suitcase.

Was this the Reverend Martin Ridley, the vicar who’d been in the woods at the time of the killing? He stepped onto the platform and came past me without a glance. The porter closed on him. They exchanged a word, and the porter took the suitcase. The vicar wore a white straw hat with a red ribbon around the crown that pulled at the brim, making it wavy and flower-like. His face was redder than a vicar’s ought to be. I did not care for his looks, but he was evidently deemed worth money by the porter, who now opened a door marked ‘First’ for him. The vicar climbed up, passed down a coin or two and the porter slammed the door.

So that was one less to worry about.

The engine gave a whistle, and I watched the train move away, the reflected sun burning in the blank carriage windows. When it had gone, the lad porter turned and faced me — giving me a stare that had in it a sort of steady defiance. Maybe he’d been given a rating by the station master after my complaint, but I doubted that.

I doubled back over the barrow boards just in time to see the lately alighted fellow in the bowler skirt the triangular green. From the station yard, I watched him take the dusty uphill road. He must be heading for The Angel. After all, it was that or a ten-mile tramp to the next village.

The man appeared to be having bother with the catch on his Gladstone bag, and kept pausing to secure it. A female form was advancing on him from the part of the road that was bounded by the hedges. It was the wife in her high-waisted holiday dress. As the two crossed, the clasp on the man’s bag gave way, and the goods inside spilled out onto the road. Four heavy-looking items in green cloth bags tumbled down, and a quantity of papers floated up and a little way away in the hot evening air. The wife closed on the man, and I was a little jealous of him for the speed with which she came to his aid. She almost knelt in the road to help collect up the papers. By the time I was level with them, everything was back in the bag.

‘You for The Angel?’ I asked, lifting my sporting cap.

‘I’m for the inn, anyhow,’ said the man.

His accent was London.

‘It’s called The Angel,’ I said.

The man removed his bowler to mop his brow. His hair was divided perfectly into two halves from neck to forehead as though he was just up from a swim.

‘It’s a lovely evening,’ said the wife.

‘Well, it is extremely oppressive,’ said the man, before remembering himself and adding, ‘but yes, it is lovely.’

There was something artificial about his speech, as though he wanted to be better than he was.

I said, ‘You’ve come up from…?’

‘Oh you know,’ he said, ‘London way… Norwood area,’ and then, in a kind of panic, he looked up at the sky, saying, ‘Not a cloud!’

He had us down as people who could be fobbed off with talk of the weather. He nodded to us, turned on his heel, and marched on, but after a second he stopped again, and called to me: ‘I say, you ain’t Franklin, by any chance, are you?’

‘Name’s Stringer,’ I called up to him, ‘Jim Stringer.’

He nodded and turned on his heel. He had not given out his own name. I ought not to have given him mine. Lydia stood next to me, and close enough for me to know that our late argument was at an end.

‘Why did you not say you were a policeman?’ she asked, when the man was out of earshot.

‘I don’t want him to bolt,’ I said.

‘You think he’s here to make mischief for this John Lambert?’

‘Well, he’s not here for a ramble in the woods, is he?’

‘I don’t suppose you’ve found out where this man Lambert is?’

‘He’s at the Hall.’

‘Which way is that?’

‘Don’t know just yet.’

‘Why not ask someone?’

I looked at my silver watch: quarter to nine.

‘I don’t know who to trust. You don’t know who might be in with the bad blokes.’

Lydia was grinning at me. I might almost have thought she’d taken a drink at The Angel, only she never touched a drop.

‘Fairly drowning in mysteries, aren’t we?’ she said.

‘What’s up?’ I said.

‘ Him,’ she said, taking hold of my sleeve, and pointing up the road after the clerk.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘what about him?’

‘The papers he’s just dropped,’ she said. ‘Half were quite blank, and half were written in German.’

‘ German? ’

‘Your face, Jim Stringer,’ she said, grinning.