Death on a Branch line

Chapter Nineteen

We tramped on through the woods.

We’d missed the best route back to the village, but I knew the general direction. Sometimes I walked ahead, sometimes the wife. Sometimes we walked parallel on separate narrow tracks through the trees. Every so often the wife would shoot a look of fury at me, and at my green sporting cap in particular.

As we walked on, I thought of the timetable clerks at the Company offices in York, who worked amid heaps of graphs and diagrams and maps and were considered the brightest sparks of the place, while the men in charge of them were the leading intellects of all. John Lambert was evidently one of the men in charge of the men in charge. He would have the brains to overturn a conviction for murder. If he spoke out against a hanging, people would listen. But who did he plan to speak out to?

Was Usher the man? Or was he out to silence Lambert?

I’d read in the railway papers of the mobilisation schemes, but the subject was always very cagily approached: ‘It is likely that plans are in hand…’; ‘It would be expected that at such a critical time…’

I glanced again towards the wife.

It was crazy to be rowing, for we’d struck a business of the very gravest sort. Everything, from the Moroccan crisis to the women’s question to the strikes and riots flaring all across the country — it was all wrapped up in the War Question. France had been the enemy for a while (there always had to be one), but the French had given way to the Germans, who fitted the part much better. You didn’t hear much about Anglo-German friendship any more. Instead, it was all war talk — and war talk and railway talk overlapped more and more. I’d heard of a scheme to connect the barracks at Aldershot with East Anglia without going through London. Get the regular army out fast — push ’em out through the Essex ports. But there was more to the planning than that. The whole question had to be looked at contrariwise as well: you’d need a programme for getting the troops into defensive positions in the event of invasion, and another for bringing back the dead or injured — a scheme for hospital trains. You knew the planning went on, and all you could do was trust that it was being done well.

But for all that, the row with the wife was just as strong in my thoughts. It was hardly our first one. We had small ones regularly about the late hours I was called on to work. It all boiled down to the demands the Chief placed upon me, which the wife did not understand. The Chief’s wife seemed to stand anything; he lived his whole life in a man’s world.

‘I’m sorry I packed you off,’ I called to her through the trees, after twenty minutes or so.

‘You did not pack me off,’ she called back, crashing through some ferns. ‘I chose to leave.’

‘Well, I’m sorry that I made you choose to leave then,’ I said. ‘I just think it was a bit of a distraction to start telling him that you couldn’t use a railway timetable.’

‘Credit me with some intelligence, please. I wanted to keep him talking,’ said the wife.

‘Funny way of going about it,’ I said, ‘… by talking yourself.’

‘I had the idea that I was on the verge of a discovery.’

‘What?’

‘Oh, get back in your box,’ she said. ‘And take that flipping cap off.’

‘I will not,’ I said. Indicating a path, I stopped and said to the wife, ‘After you.’

‘Stow it,’ she snapped back, but she led off in the direction I’d shown her.

The woods gave out and a cricket ground came into view. The pavilion put me in mind of a white wooden railway station. At one end of the ground stood three tall poplars, and they might have been giant wickets, only they stood some way beyond the boundary. The wicket was a strip of especially bright green light.

I followed the wife along the lane that bounded the pitch, which turned out to connect with the second village green of Adenwold. We walked past the silent churchyard, the shops and cottages, and began drifting along the hedge-tunnel, where the bees whirred as they worked the great green walls. The neglected ladder remained in place, looking very forlorn, for the hedge could grow and it could not.

I heard what might have been a motor-car in the far distance, and stopped to try and make out the sound, but the wife kept walking, drawing her straw hat against the left-hand hedge, and taking down her hair, which you would have thought a complicated business but which she accomplished with two impatient strokes of her right hand. When she took her hair down, that always meant she was going off into her own world.

As we trudged on past the station yard, the hour chimes from the church floated up, the bell toiling with great effort, as though climbing a steep hill to the maximum number: twelve o’clock. Hugh Lambert had forty-four hours left; his brother possibly fewer still. The train that might bring the Chief was due in twenty-seven minutes’ time. I called up to the wife: ‘I’m off to meet the train in. I’ll come up, presently.’

But she just walked on towards The Angel.

I crossed the station yard, and walked up onto the ‘up’, where a smell of white-wash, combined with the great heat of the day, made me feel faint. The whole of the platform seemed to tilt for a moment and the signal box lurched.

The signalman was up there, leaning on his balcony. Eddie by name. He appeared to be grinning down at the porter, Woodcock, who sat on the fancy bench smoking, and looking at a pot of white-wash set down by the platform edge. He’d started renewing the white edging, but had got only about a third of the way along. I took my top-coat off, and draped it over the fence that separated the ‘up’ platform from the station yard.

‘You had enough of this place, mate?’ said Woodcock. ‘Are you making off?’

I made no reply to that, but removed the Lambert papers from my coat pocket, and sat down by the fence to read them: The dog is everything to the boy, and accompanies him at all times. He uses it a good deal for rabbiting, of which he knew I disapproved, but Mervyn Handley has an innate diplomacy, which always prevented him from speaking about his pursuit of rabbits in my presence. I would often think that he would have been the perfect son for father to have. Aged eight, I fell off the cob, and had concussion of the brain; later, I perfected the art of going backwards on a pony. I doubt that Mervyn would have required a leading rein for year after year, as I did. The boy has taught himself shooting, but I’m sure that he ‘shoulders’ a gun (if that be the correct expression) in the right manner, and I’m sure that, given the chance, he would be the ‘hard man to hounds’ that Ponder and I were always supposed to become. He could never be categorised as a booby or a mollycoddle, even by a man so keen to employ those epithets as father. I do not mean to be patronising about the boy. There is more to him than pluck and a keen eye. He is intelligent, and who is to say that he does not have the brains to take a first at Cambridge as Ponder did? This, of course, will remain undetermined.

Approaching the bottom of the page, the writing became scrawl and I shuffled the pages once more, but I found that I couldn’t break in again: every new page seemed equally crabbed. I sat back, and closed my eyes.

When I opened them, the clock on the platform said 12.27 dead on, and I felt my face stiff with sunburn. I didn’t like the idea of having slept in Woodcock’s presence. He remained smoking on the bench just as before, but as I lifted my coat off the wicket fence, I checked through its pockets for warrant card, pocket book and watch, and found them all present.

‘Any news of the 12.27, mate?’ I called over to Woodcock. ‘It’s not running late, is it?’

‘Don’t know,’ he said, ‘and I’m not your mate.’

It had been a daft question. How could he know? The telegraph line was down.

‘You leaving without your missus?’ he said.

‘Meeting a pal,’ I said.

‘Another journalist?’ he said.

‘Yes, since you ask.’

He didn’t believe me.

Did John Lambert’s timetable work somehow connect him with these blokes at the station? I looked from Woodcock to the paint pot.

‘It’s almost too hot to work today,’ said Woodcock, ‘and I never thought I’d hear myself say that. Anyone who knows me would be amazed to hear me coming out with those words.’

I watched him blow smoke.

‘In a state of shock they would be,’ he said.

‘Where’s your governor?’ I enquired, and it seemed to me possible in that instant that Woodcock and the signalman had killed and eaten station master Hardy. But Woodcock looked along the platform towards the small sidings and the goods yard. As he did so, I heard the bark of a small engine from that direction.

The station master was on the warehouse platform, swivelling in the driving seat of a steam crane, the steam and smoke rising up from his rear — from the little motor that was located behind him like a bustle. He fitted so snugly into the seat of the crane that he looked like a steam-powered man. A good-sized crate was attached by canvas belts to the jib of the crane, and station master Hardy was loading it onto a flat-bedded wagon that had been drawn up by the warehouse. The wagon would be taken away on the next pick-up goods to come through Adenwold. That would be on Monday.

How many Lamberts would be dead by then?

I wondered again about station master Hardy’s miniature soldiers. Did he move them about at intervals like chess pieces, the movement on one side requiring movement on the other? How did a miniature soldier die? How was that event signified? If you were a boy, you just knocked the soldier over — and you usually didn’t stop at one.

The man Gifford… Perhaps I ought to have directed him towards Hardy, who might have an interest in scale models in general. Then again, did model soldiers come in the same scale as model trains? This was the connection that John Lambert was required to make: the connection between soldiers and railways. And who had charged him with the task? Surely the government: the War Office. In which case, who employed his seeming opponent Captain Usher? They couldn’t both be in the service of the state; couldn’t both be on the side of right.

The sound of the crane was by degrees drowned out by the beat of a louder engine, and I saw the 12.27 coming around the track-bend in the woods, two minutes late. As I crossed the barrow boards to the smaller platform, I watched the bundles of black smoke enter the woods by different gaps in the trees, like so many parcels being sorted.

The train stopped on the ‘up’, and a carriage door opened.

Well, the first man down was the Chief, and I felt a great sense of relief and duty-done at the sight of him. He was holding a kitbag, and looking at his watch. He hadn’t seen me yet, for I stood by the guard’s van, and he’d been riding in the carriage behind the engine.

He held his trilby hat, and I looked with enjoyment at his battered face, and thin strands of hair lashed by sweat to his great dinty head. At first he might charge me with having dragged him away from his Saturday dinner-time bottle of wine in the Station Hotel for no good reason. But I was sure he’d see the sense of the wire I sent once I’d explained all.

The Chief gave a glance along the platform, and would have spotted me at that moment had not a younger man stepped down from the train, blocking his line of vision. I’d barely had time to take in this new arrival when another man came, and then everything went wrong, for a dozen carriage doors opened and a dozen or more young blokes climbed down. They were all in the twenties or early thirties. Some wore hooped caps, and all carried long canvas bags, some with bat handles protruding. They were all bloody cricketers and they were all bloody suspects. I cursed the North Eastern Railway for bringing them.

To turn up in this way at a village with the shadow of an execution hanging over it did not seem right. They all stood on the platform, joshing and larking about, and the Chief was fighting his way through, coming towards me and looking none too pleased. Cricket wasn’t one of his games. As he closed on me, I pulled off my cap by way of a salute, and started in straightaway by asking whether he’d had the story of Hugh Lambert’s lay-over at York station, at which the Chief shook his head briskly, and spat.

The train was noisily taking its leave (nobody had boarded), and the platform was clearing as the cricketers streamed over the barrow boards towards the station yard and I began telling my tale to the Chief. He listened with head bent forward and eyes closed as though making a great effort to understand.

Or was he drunk?

That was not out of the question. Saturday was the Chief’s principal boozing day, and his breath came over a little sour.

The Chief was nodding occasionally, and looking over towards the station yard, where a charabanc had drawn up. It had many seats — looked like a sort of omnibus with the top deck sliced off. At the wheel sat that bad shilling of Adenwold, the fucking vicar, the Reverend Martin Ridley, who was climbing down now as the cricketers straggled across the yard towards him. He moved towards the first of the blokes and greeted him by miming the bowling of a very fast ball, which caused a good deal of dust to fly up in the station yard and the vicar’s hat to fall off.

As I carried on with my explanations, the Chief was agitatedly moving his hand over his head, shifting the strands of sweaty hair, so that they were one minute like so many tangled S’s, the next drawn straight as railway lines. Station master Hardy had abandoned his seat on the steam crane, and was watching us across the tracks from the booking office doorway; porter Woodcock also looked on from the ‘up’ platform, where he’d advanced a little way towards his pot of white-wash, but had still not laid a hand on the brush. I did not believe that either could hear my talk with the Chief.

The porter had made no move to cross the tracks to help the Chief with his bags, so my governor had evidently failed the test. Any one of the cricketers might have passed it, but none had looked in the least need of assistance.

The charabanc was now driving away from the station yard amid the sound of more explosions. The scale of it seemed out, for it did look a normal-sized car at first glance — and yet there were more than a dozen men in it.

The little station was left silent except for the high birdsong, and the ceaseless rattling of my own voice as I went on with my story.

The clock on the ‘up’ said 12.35. Station master Hardy remained at the doorway of the booking office looking, as he ever did, in fear of some catastrophe coming around the corner. Porter Woodcock had disappeared.

‘It’s a good job you were in the office when the message came,’ I said to the Chief.

He gave a grunt. ‘Now where’s the Hall?’ he enquired.

‘We’ll go there directly,’ I said.

‘Don’t get past yourself,’ said the Chief.

I turned about and eyed him.

He said, ‘It’ll only take one of us to see whether there’s anything in this.’

Well, it came to this: he hadn’t believed my story.

… Or did he want to keep the business for himself? In the past, when I’d struck something big, he’d given me a pretty free hand. But this was very big: one death certain, and another threatened. And the gentry were involved.

I’d had visions of walking up to the Hall with the Chief. We’d take the place over. He’d be my authority, but I’d be in the lead. We’d get John Lambert out of the clutches of Usher, force him to say what he knew — the thing that Usher wanted him to keep back — and then we’d lay hands on the true killer, which for preference would be Usher himself.

I was in a stew of sweat; I dragged my handkerchief over my brow, and could think of nothing better to say than, ‘It’s too hot.’

‘You want to get your coat on,’ said the Chief.

‘Well, it’s not as if I’m on duty, is it?’

The Chief made no reply but lit another cigar.

‘Have you come armed?’ I asked.

He eyed me over the flaring Vesta. ‘Are you trying to scare me, sonny?’

Our pint of the day before had been amiable enough, but I had perhaps bested the Chief over the matter of the bank’s man on the platform. I’d pointed out his error, and that might have rankled.

‘The Hall is that way,’ I said, indicating the direction of the second village green. ‘It’s signposted.’

I was buggered if I was going to tell him about The Angel, or offer to take his bag up there.

After the Chief had quit the platform, the station master called across the tracks to me:

‘Was he the one?’

‘Eh?’ I called back. ‘How do you mean?’

‘The one that was at Tamai?’

It was unlike Hardy to be coming forward. He seemed galvanised for the first time since my arrival. He ignored Woodcock, who sat on the bench, smoking.

‘How did you know?’ I asked Hardy, as I cut across the barrow boards.

‘Well,’ he said, as I gained the ‘up’, ‘he looked the part… about the right age…’

‘What do you mean by that?’ I said, challenging him — although to say anything to Hardy was to challenge him.

‘Oh,’ he said, and he took a step back into the booking office.

Somehow emboldened by the Chief’s rejection, I stepped into the booking office after him.

Trapped heat and dust made the place suffocating. The tall desk was still covered with a jumble of papers, but some of the books had now been stacked on the counter where stood the ABC telegraph machine. But that must be dead since the line was down. As before, the arrangement of soldiers had pride of place on the strong table, and it seemed that Hardy was minded to talk about it.

‘The push for Khartoum,’ Hardy said, indicating the soldiers on the table. ‘Thirteenth of March, 1884, east coast of the Sudan. I show the British square,’ he ran on, as he knelt down beside the table, quite heedless of his uniform. His head appeared over the brown-coloured board like a desert moon. As he spoke, he touched the tops of soldiers’ pith helmets with his fingertips, moving from one to another like a kind of blessing.

‘The square was formed against a massing of the Mahdi’s forces…’

‘The dervishes, as they were known?’ I said. ‘The fuzzie-wuzzies? They wanted to kick Egypt — and us — out of the Sudan?’

‘Correct,’ he said, ‘quite correct. In the square there were all sorts: York and Lancasters, Marines and other regiments besides, but I show the York and Lancasters only. You might have brought your friend in for a look,’ he said.

This was a turn-up: a bit of steeliness in his voice, as if I’d let him down.

‘He was in a hurry,’ I said, ‘- business up at the Hall.’

Hardy appeared to show no interest whatsoever in what might or might not be happening at the Hall, but carried on moving his fingers across the ranks of little soldiers. They wore khaki uniforms with white bands on the tunics and pith helmets and white puttees. Some wore moustaches, and these did not come standard but were various in shape and size.

I asked Hardy: ‘Did you paint them yourself?’

‘Sable brush,’ he said briskly.

‘It’s well done.’

This compliment seemed to check him for a second, but he made no acknowledgement of it.

‘We have three poses. First, standing,’ he said, indicating upright soldiers; ‘… then kneeling to repel,’ he went on, indicating others; ‘and finally kneeling to fire. It’s the Winchester rifle, of course,’ he added, standing back, as if for a better view of his own creation.

‘You haven’t modelled the Mahdi’s men,’ I said.

He blew out his cheeks.

‘Leave those chaps to the imagination,’ he said, ‘and they don’t bear thinking about too much. They slashed hands and arms first — then go for the head and body. Wouldn’t take prisoners, mind you, but then nor would we — not at Tamai. It was life or death.’

He advanced on the table again, and shifted a couple of the kneeling figures a few eighths of an inch.

‘The square was broken, you know,’ he said, looking up. ‘I don’t show it broken, but it was, and you saw the character of the British soldier: officers and men risking their lives for each other.’

All I could think to say was ‘Yes,’ for I’d been quite knocked by Hardy’s speech. He lived for this miniature display.

‘I should imagine that if you’d been in that lot,’ he said, indicating the display, ‘then everything that happened next in your life would be of quite minor importance.’

I thought of the Chief. Certainly he was not over-anxious.

‘… quite minor importance,’ repeated Hardy, who then took a deep breath and looked at me. ‘All my paints and all my brushes,’ he said, ‘… all stolen last week.’

‘Well, don’t look at me,’ came a voice from the doorway, and it was Woodcock the porter.

He leant against the door frame, smoking.

‘This is Mr Hardy’s little war,’ he said, addressing me. ‘Nice, en’t it?’

I kept silence.

‘His big war’s summat different,’ said Woodcock. ‘That’s against me. No — joking aside — he wants me stood down, don’t you, Mr Hardy? He’s got his monkey up with me, has Mr Hardy.’

‘Clear off, you,’ said Hardy.

‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ Woodcock said, ‘what with him always acting so friendly like, but he’s plotting against me. You want to be careful that board don’t get kicked over, Mr Hardy.’

‘And why might it?’ asked Hardy, looking down at the floorboards.

‘Somebody might just come in and give it a bit of a fucking boot,’ said Woodcock as he moved away from the doorway.