Death on a Branch line

Chapter Fourteen

I rapped on the door, and there came a noise from along the narrow corridor. I turned. The man from Norwood was there, holding a candle and eyeing me in his dressing gown.

‘Everything quite all right, old man?’ he said.

‘Ought to be,’ I said, thinking of the German papers that had spilled from his bag.

He looked more impressive somehow in his dressing gown, although it was shabby enough. I knocked again, and Lydia answered the door in a flurry, wearing her night-dress. I walked into the room, and saw that the window had been thrown wide open. The wife strode across to the bed and sat down upon it cross-legged like a Hindoo, which she would often do at night — something about being in her night-dress seemed to bring it on. She looked from me to the open window as the curtains stirred.

‘Why d’you lock the door?’ I said.

‘Now… what do you suppose about the bicyclist?’ she said.

‘Eh?’

‘I left the bar when I saw him through the window messing about at the back of the pub. I’ve been watching him from our window while you were hammering on the door doing your level best to give me away.’

‘Where is he?’

‘He was just down below.’

‘And what was he about?’

‘He was at his bike.’

‘It’s punctured,’ I said. ‘I overheard him say so in the bar.’

‘He held a pocket knife,’ said the wife. ‘He took it, and stabbed it twice into the front tyre.’

‘That would give him a puncture.’

‘It might just,’ said the wife.

‘But he already had one.’

‘No, he did not. He stabbed the wheel to make what he said true. He wanted a puncture.’

‘It’s rum. How will he account for it, I wonder?’

‘Sharp stones,’ the wife immediately replied, as though she’d spent a good while thinking about it. ‘That man has done everything to convince us that he’s a cyclist, short of riding his flipping bike. Why does he have a bike if he doesn’t go anywhere? And why does the man Lambert have a railway timetable if he doesn’t go anywhere? It’s just as though everyone in this place is checked.’

She was now looking over at the dresser.

‘The second thing,’ she said. ‘… Your warrant card — you put it in the left-hand drawer, didn’t you?’

I nodded.

‘When I came in, both drawers were a little way out and your card had jumped to the right-hand one.’

I heard the roar of the motor-bike as it left the front of the pub — it couldn’t have been those two that had come into the room. They’d entered the bar directly after arriving. Mrs Handley and young Mervyn had seen me put the warrant card in the drawer, but my money was on the Norwood clerk. The noise of the motor-bike faded away, leaving nothing but the sound of massed grasshoppers. No breeze stirred the window curtain.

The wife said, ‘Who do you think’s been in, then?’

I sat down next to her on the counterpane, and we went over everything. I undressed by degrees as we spoke, and was down to my undershirt when I looked at the wife, and said:

‘You’re leaving by the first train in the morning, anyhow.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I am not. Apart from anything else, I’m set on seeing inside that house.’

She meant the Hall. She had a liking for grand houses. The Archbishop of York had his palace at Thorpe-on-Ouse, and the wife would find any excuse to go inside. She aspired to own a grand house herself, although she’d never admit the fact. It was terrible in a way to think that she had all these ambitions kept down.

‘Tomorrow, I’m going to fetch the Chief,’ I said.

In my five years on the force, the wife had never set eyes on the Chief but I knew she was strong against him. He was the fellow who kept me out all hours, who put dangerous work my way.

Talk of the Chief brought me back to the subject of station master Hardy, and how it was the Chief’s regiment that he had in miniature in the booking office. I told her a little of what I knew about the Chief’s time fighting in Africa:

‘All they had to hand’, I said, ‘against the spears of a thousand charging dervishes was — ’

‘A large quantity of guns.’

As the wife said this, she was stretching out on the bed.

She was always down on the army. In the first place, it was all men, and secondly it would be the army who’d put a stop for good-and-all to the women’s movement if it took matters that bit too far.

I was beside her now, and my hand was under her night-dress, making its regular explorations.

‘Do you suppose the blank papers in that man’s bag were written in invisible ink?’ she said.

‘But then why wouldn’t he put the German stuff in invisible ink as well? This is not the time to be seen carrying German papers about.’

The wife said, ‘I’ve often thought — if you can have invisible ink, then why can’t you have invisible anything else? Invisible bicycles.’

And, not waiting for an answer, she quickly stood up and took her night-dress off; then she walked over to the wardrobe, and fished my darbies out of my suit-coat pocket. She sometimes liked me to lock her hands into them for a while before our love-making. She liked to pretend to be in desperate straits, with no knickers on and her hands fast. I thought it a strange look-out for a reader of The Freewoman, but that was the wife all over. She was an unpredictable sort.

We fucked once, and then we did it again, differently arranged, in very short order. It might have been the danger of Adenwold that had stirred her up, and the danger of Morocco, the raging fires and the strikes and all the rest; or just the fact that somebody had been in our room without our say-so. As we turned in, I thought: Well, she’s off in the morning, no question. The Chief will come in and she will go.

I put the oil lamp to its lowest setting and closed my eyes. But sleep wouldn’t come, and I fell to listening to the country sounds — the many desperate rustlings, scufflings and screechings. The chimes of midnight floated up from the village, and I walked over to the chair on which I’d left my suit-coat. I took out the papers and read again from the memories of Hugh Lambert: And so we began to avoid each other more than ever. If father was in the country, then I made it my business to be in London, and vice versa. According to Ponder we were like the opposing carriages of a funicular railway. ‘I will run up to London,’ I would say, but I could never say it lightly. Father told me often enough that this was one of my troubles: ‘Too much London,’ and it’s true that upon returning from a spell there, I would lie awake at night, still somehow hearing the heavy roll of the traffic, as though the city were an infection not lightly to be shaken off. Indeed, the…

I could not read the next few lines. I shuffled the pages, and read: She is a treasure, but he… His speech I find a kind of chloroform. When he addresses me, I drift off, and every other sound supersedes him: the babbling of a nightingale, the wind rattling at the window panes of the inn. He is often in drink, of course, but the defect in his speech has some deeper cause. On the farm, I was never required to speak to him. He was always on the other side of a field, working happily. And no wonder… how beautiful that place was! A farm under sycamores, and with a rookery in each corner. Does Mr Handley drink to bury the pain of its loss? I do not know. The man is incomprehensible to me, but it is all I can do when in his presence not to apologise continually for father’s conduct.

I put aside the papers.

Sir George had removed the Handleys from one of the estate farms, and given them The Angel instead. I had already had this from the boy Mervyn. Was the inn fair compensation for the farm? Would the loss of the farm make a motive for murder?

What did John Lambert know about it all? And what did he aim to do about it?

I walked towards the window with a fast-beating heart, and pushed aside the curtain. But there was only the violet night, and the building heat.