Death on a Branch line

Chapter Eighteen

We’d followed the finger-posts to the Hall, which had taken us, by a new route, to the gates at which we’d earlier discovered John Lambert. We’d walked through these and were now passing between the great globe-like trees, approaching the house with its dozen windows staring down at us.

I’d meant to wait for the arrival of the Chief before braving the Hall again. I’d been warned off the place both by Lambert and (in a roundabout way) by the man in field boots, and with every step I expected some alarm, shout, objection to be raised. Most particularly, I expected some gun to be fired. Over against that, I was a police officer about my duty.

As for the wife, she just seemed entranced by the house.

‘It’s middle Georgian,’ she said. ‘Very simple.’

Many green plants stood in tall urns across the white gravel of the carriage drive. These and the green door, the brown bricks and the great heat bearing down somehow put me in mind of the Roman Empire.

I said to the wife, ‘What’s the programme?’ and I thought: Now hold on, Jim, you can’t be asking her.

A man came walking fast round the side of the house, and he wore knee-length boots, but not field boots. He was a footman or groom or some such — had a horsy look about him.

‘Where’s the gardener’s cottage?’ I asked him, and he said, ‘Follow me round.’

We crunched over the dazzling white gravel to the left side of the house, and there stood a lot of stables and out-buildings of one sort or another, the lot of them looking Roman to me, like temples or villas. We walked through the maze of these for a while, passing dark farm machinery standing in open doorways, until the horsy bloke pointed to a very plain cottage standing amid burnt brown grass fifty yards off.

‘That’s you,’ he said.

‘I’m obliged to you,’ I said, and we set off in that direction.

The groom called out:

‘You’re with Captain Usher, are you?’

‘Don’t answer him,’ said the wife, in a low tone as we walked on. ‘He’s a servant, so you don’t have to.’

She wouldn’t as a rule have said that, but in her mind she was established as mistress of the house. The notion made her headstrong — not that she wasn’t already, and for the first time the notion composed in my mind: I wish I hadn’t brought her along.

The man in field boots was Captain Usher. That was no surprise. He had a martial air, he had the boots, and he had the firearm somewhere about him, I was sure. But he was nowhere to be seen as we closed on the gardener’s cottage, which was a small, plain building, newer than the rest and with its own territory — a garden within a garden — bounded by low hedges. Beyond the cottage, on a yellow hillside a quarter-mile off, I saw a harvester pulled by four bullocks, the whole arrangement tilted so far to one side that it threatened to topple over.

But the gardener’s cottage now came between us and that vision. The curtains were closed but the door was on the jar. As we crossed the garden, I cut in front of the wife — which was by way of reminding her that I was the certificated detective.

I tapped on the door, and John Lambert was just inside it.

He stood smoking a cigarette, in a living room that had been put to use as a study in the place that he preferred to the Hall. There were two desks, one either side of the dead, dusty fireplace, and these two desks seemed to signify great effort, like a double-headed train. Lines of bright light leaked through the closed curtains, and they showed up twirling clouds of dust. There were papers everywhere, covering all the means of ordinary living: papers on top of the sofa, on the carpet, all about the hearth and the hearth rug. They were scrawled with both letters and numbers, and some of them were maps, and some were maps of the sea; and where there weren’t papers there were railway timetables.

John Lambert looked disappointed to see us, but only moderately so.

‘You’re still living, then?’ I blurted, all my rehearsed speech going by the board.

‘I can’t deny it,’ he said, breathing smoke, ‘… in the face of all the evidence.’

He looked over-strained, as he had the day before — but no worse. His beard, growing in the shadow of his hollow cheeks, still looked as though it had not been intended. Instead, it was a mark of decline. His white suit was of a good cloth, but did not stand close scrutiny.

‘A man has arrived to see you,’ I said. ‘A Captain Usher.’

He nodded once, touched his spectacles and looked at me shrewdly.

He said, ‘How do you know?’ But he seemed only moderately curious on that point, and as to the reason for my interest in the matter.

‘He came by train,’ I said. ‘Not many people do, so it’s easy to keep cases on the arrivals.’

John Lambert nodded again.

‘Usher has been here once today already,’ he said. ‘And is about to return. I wouldn’t be here when he does if I were you.’

‘Is he the one you’re in fear of?’ the wife put in.

(I would allow her that one question.)

‘I’m not in fear of anyone,’ Lambert replied. And he kept silence for a moment, before adding: ‘That said, I do not much expect to see out the day.’

‘And you won’t say why?’ I enquired, in horror.

‘I will not. It is all a secret — a profound secret.’

‘And do you know the identity of your father’s murderer?’

He kept silence.

Why would a man about to die have any interest in keeping a secret?

‘You make… timetables,’ said the wife, from over near the sofa.

‘My wife will step outside now,’ I said.

Lydia — giving me not so much as a glance — was leaning over the sofa, fanning her brown face with her straw boater, which I knew was meant as a deliberate provocation.

‘Would you please move away from there?’ Lambert rather coolly requested.

Lydia stood back, saying, ‘You needn’t worry. I do not understand railway timetables.’

A beat of silence.

‘Actually you will find that many perfectly intelligent people do not,’ said the wife. ‘They are very badly designed. Your brother was not married, I believe,’ she ran on, ‘but is there a fiancee perhaps, or some special woman who will be thinking of him this week-end?’

I looked white at her. Here was a man who did not expect to outlive the day, and she was making tittle-tattle.

‘My wife will leave the room now,’ I repeated.

Lydia eyed me for a full five seconds before turning on her heel, and walking out, which left a strange silence between me and Lambert, during which he smoked out his cigarette.

‘Well, congratulations,’ he said, ‘you worked your will in the end.’

So saying, he turned and pitched the cigarette stub into the fireplace, where it joined dozens — if not hundreds — of its fellows.

‘Is it difficult to be married?’ he asked, turning back to face me.

‘She’s rather strong-minded,’ I replied.

Lambert looked as though he might have said a hundred things in answer to that, but settled on none. He glanced at his watch.

‘Will you join me in a friendly glass?’ he enquired. ‘Just before the return of friend Usher?’

He caught up a tumbler from the mantel-piece, and poured into it from a whisky bottle that stood by the sofa. But this glass was evidently his own, so another was needed, and as Lambert hunted about for it I let my eye run over his papers.

There seemed an eastern bias to it all. Two timetables of the Great Eastern; a town plan of the port of Harwich; sea charts for the Channel and the North Sea; a book on the railways of East Anglia. The written documents gave little away, but were just dense masses of handwriting. I made out a few phrases — ‘Principal entraining stations’, ‘provision of hospital trains’ — and one sentence I read in its entirety. It stood out almost luminous: ‘There must be kept, throughout the emergency, open lines for out-going, so that trains can be kept running, as it were in a circle.’

And that was when the picture composed.

As Lambert handed me the whisky, I was in a flat spin of excitement, and I drank it in a draught to steady myself. John Lambert did the same — and it wasn’t his first of the day, either. It was agony to understand something of the matter at hand, and yet to be checkmated by his silence.

He was now peering through the gap in the curtains at the window that overlooked the fields. He turned to me, and said, ‘Drink up, Usher’s coming. You can go out by the way you came in.’

‘Now hold on,’ I said. ‘We can face him down together.’

Lambert smiled and shook his head.

‘A small chance remains that he and I might reach an accommodation, but there’ll be no chance of it if we have company.’

And there was somehow nothing else for it. I would leave, and I would return directly with the Chief. If I was too late, then it was too bad.

Lambert walked towards the far door. He unbolted it, stepped into the back garden and, as I quit the room by the front door, I heard him say ‘Hello again’ in a fascinating, dead tone. There was some smooth answering murmur from Usher, and then Lambert said, ‘Look — let’s talk out here in the garden. It’s pleasant here, don’t you think?’

I stepped through the front door, and there stood the wife, kicking her heels.

‘This way,’ I said, indicating the most direct route towards the woods, and she stood still for a moment, just to show that she would not take any more orders from me.

I waited for her at the railing that bordered the woods. I had managed the angle so that we could not be seen from the rear of the gardener’s cottage, and the wife had followed my footsteps very precisely along the scorched grass, although keeping at twenty yards’ distance.

‘And are you any the wiser?’ she said, looking at the sporting cap, which I had fixed back on my head.

The railing stood between us.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Come out of the grounds.’

‘You left in a tearing hurry,’ she said.

‘Usher came up to the cottage by the back way. The two of them are talking in the garden now.’

‘I think you should have stood your ground. If you’re dead set on filling up our week-end with this business you should go about it properly.’

I made no reply.

‘You’re scared of that man Usher, why don’t you admit it?’ she said, climbing over the railing.

I put out my hand to help her.

‘Don’t you dare,’ she said, and struck out for the main woodland track.

Now it was my turn to follow her at a distance.

‘Do you want to know what all those papers of Lambert’s are about?’ I called after her.

No answer. She walked on with swishing skirts.

‘It’s the mobilisation of the British Army,’ I said.

The wife said nothing to that, but I knew by the change that had overcome her walk that she was impressed.