Death on a Branch line

Chapter Twenty-One

Flying along the margins of the cornfield, I kept a look-out for the telegraph poles that ought to be somewhere ahead. They would indicate the territory of the railway line.

I rounded a bend and came upon the silent poles, and their confederates, the silent tracks. I slowed somewhat as I went past the downed stretch of cable. It struck me that railway policemen ought to be issued with portable telegraph instruments. With these, and a length of cable looped over the right wire, it was possible to send your own messages.

Running now along the railway sleepers, I looked up. The poles carried six wires: telegraph and telephone either way — that accounted for four. The other two would be the wires linking the signal boxes of the branch, for the sending of the signalmen’s bell codes. To send a message, you’d have to know which was which; you’d need the portable doings, and you’d need to go beyond the point of the cut. Then you’d be within reach of the normal world, and sanity.

I kicked up my boot-heels and I flew on. The station, waiting on the far side of a tree-made arch, seemed to swing and shake as I pounded down the track.

I found it quite deserted, like a ship becalmed. But Will Hamer and his horse and donkey stood dreaming in the station yard, with the rulley hitched up behind.

I ran at the fellow, gulping at air and unable at first to speak.

Instead, Hamer spoke.

‘It’s you again,’ he said, smiling.

‘There’s a man badly injured in the woods,’ I said. ‘I’ve just come from him. He’s near the bridge over the ditch.’

‘I know that spot,’ said Hamer, who was now not quite smiling but still looking amiable, ‘On the edge of Clover Wood.’

So there were separately named woods within the woods.

‘He may have fallen out of a tree,’ I said.

‘Aye,’ Will Hamer said, ‘I expect so.’

‘Will you fetch a doctor?’

‘Aye,’ Hamer said again, making no move, ‘I will do.’

‘Where is a doctor?’

‘Well now, East Adenwold,’ Hamer said. ‘Doctor Lawson — deliver to him regular like. Very good man for an emergency if you can catch him in.’

‘You’d better look sharp,’ I said. ‘I reckon the fellow’s dying. Might you un-harness the donkey? I mean, wouldn’t the horse be quicker on its own?’

Hamer looked at his horse for a while. Presently, he said, ‘Wouldn’t move at all on his own, wouldn’t that bloke. Pair of ’em might go a bit faster, though, and don’t think I en’t tried a few tricks. I’ve had ’em this way and that: him to the left, him to the left. You name it, I’ve tried it.’

I stood silent. Was there any other way of getting help to Gifford apart from employing this blockhead?

‘… Mangel wurzels I’ve tried,’ he was saying. ‘Short rein, long rein…’

He turned and fixed on me a sort of questioning smile.

‘You look down-hearted, mister,’ he said.

‘There’s blood coming out of the bloke’s mouth,’ I said, ‘and that’s always a bad look-out.’

‘Might be his… tooth fallen out?’

‘Will you go off just now?’ I said. ‘I’ll go back to guard the bloke, and I’ll see you at the place.’

I indicated the rulley.

‘You’ll get that along the edge of the field — there’s a track of sorts.’

‘Oh, no bother,’ he said, and he fell to smiling at me.

I felt in want of a whistle to blow and a green flag to wave.

‘Come on, men!’ Hamer shouted at last, and the horse and donkey first awoke, and then moved.

I took off my jacket, and watched them cross the station yard, but as before they rolled to a stop after twenty yards.

‘While I think on…’ Hamer called out, and I thought: Christ, he wants to be paid. But that wasn’t it. He was passing a paper to me.

‘Your wire was delivered,’ he said, ‘earlier on, like.’

It was an acknowledgement of sending, written on a chit stamped: ‘The Booking Office, West Adenwold Station.’

‘Obliged to you,’ I said, ‘but I knew it had gone off, because the fellow I sent for arrived.’

‘What fellow?’ said Hamer, and instead of answering, I gave his horse’s arse a good slap, which set the three on their way again. I watched them out of sight, then raced back through the station and around the woods.

I came to the bridge just as two rabbits went flying across it. I looked about. Birdsong twisted through the drowsy air. I walked a little way along the margin of the wood. I looked about once again. The sun beat down on the brambles and the cow parsley.

Neither Gifford, nor his bag, nor the little red locomotive, were anywhere to be seen.

I stood still for a space, thinking of everything and nothing. Finally I sat down by the bridge, exhausted.

This place Adenwold, I thought… It’ll be the bloody finish of me. I made no further attempt to scout about. There was no sound but the steady, heavy drone of insects. I looked at my silver watch: five to two. I felt honour-bound to wait for the doctor. It was important that somebody kept up sensible behaviour. When the chimes of two o’clock floated over from the village, I moved under the big oak for shade, and took the papers of Hugh Lambert from my pocket.

‘Mr Richardson, the station master at Adenwold during our childhood,’ I read… and that pulled me up short, for starters. It was hard to imagine the station without Hardy: he seemed such a fixture of Adenwold, his own strangeness matching that of the village. I read on:

… Mr Richardson would bring Ponder on in his railway interests, and father would undoubtedly have written to the Company demanding his removal had the man been anything less than a model official. His top hat was lustrous, and the staff were most punctilious under his eye, as even father admitted. Richardson personally sent telegrams by the dozen for father, using the station machine, and always with a smile and always without charging. But he would talk trains with the boy! And how could father state that the railways were neither sporting nor aristocratic? That they had paid grandfather too little for right of way over his land, a fact serving to remind father that the estate was small, the family not as well-off as commonly imagined, and he only a Baronet? Father expressed himself delighted at Richardson’s retirement, but the new man wore a bowler instead of a topper and did not keep the place so well. How many times did father cancel Ponder’s subscription to the Railway Magazine? And how often did he wearily reinstate it during a fit of guilt? It wasn’t so much my brother’s reading and collection of the Railway Magazines that antagonised father, as the sending-off for the special binders with the railway crests. (I should say that Ponder, an incredibly untidy person for all his orderly mind, liked the idea of binders more than the act of binding.) The writing-in of letters by Ponder was still more to be deprecated, and the publication of articles under his own name doubly so. I remember Ponder showing the first of his letters to appear in cold print. It appeared under the heading: ‘A correspondent asks for information concerning the vacuum brake now installed’. He pointed to the word ‘correspondent’ and then to himself, and he grinned. He then promptly won a carriage clock for one of his railway essays. I asked him whether it had been an essay on carriages but nothing so modest: ‘How to Improve the Summer Services’ was his theme. Not some of them, but all. And Ponder ought to know, for he’d spent almost the whole summer lying on the croquet lawn and reading timetables, relayed to him in batches free of charge, I believe, by Mr Richardson. Ponder would seek out the innovations: a new restaurant car between St Pancras and Leeds; a train from York to Hull booked one minute later than the previous month. It was the drag of interrelatedness that fascinated him, the way that one train couldn’t be moved until another had been. He was quite lost to it all; and he was lost to father, too. Ponder did not retreat so much as fade from the battleground, with the result that father and I concentrated our fire on each other, and in this connection too the railway figured, for it was the railway that took me to London, and my other life.

Trying to make out the words had brought on a headache. I put down the paper. What was this other life? I had half an idea.

I looked up to see Will Hamer’s wagon rumbling over the sun-hardened mud. Another man was sitting up with him: Lawson, the doctor from East Adenwold.

He turned out to be a very crabby little man in a salt and pepper suit, who wouldn’t take no for an answer. I felt like offering to lie down myself on the canvas stretcher he was waving about, just to save him a wasted journey. Hamer smiled through the whole palaver. It took more than an unexplained disappearance to jolt him out of his groove.

‘Do you think the man had been drinking?’ Lawson demanded.

‘More likely shot,’ I said. ‘There was something very like a bul let wound on the side of his head.’

‘Have you been drinking?’ asked Lawson.

He seemed to have a very limited imagination: everything started and finished with alcohol. I stood shaking my head as Will Hamer turned the rulley about and drove the doctor back down the track. I ought to have given him a couple of bob for his trouble, I decided, as I set off back to The Angel. He’d proved himself not such a dope after all, for he’d delivered my wire without any hitch, and he’d fetched the doctor.

At The Angel, the bar was quite deserted. I climbed the stairs and the wife was sitting cross-legged reading her paper, The Freewoman, which she immediately tossed to one side. I knew right away that I was properly forgiven, and that there was some important business at hand; or business she thought important, at any rate. It didn’t matter what it was, though. Gifford had very likely been shot at because of what he knew, and I would not put the wife in the way of a bullet. I had to get her out of Adenwold.

There was a pleasant scent of soap in the room, and I saw that the wife had placed cut lavender inside a glass on the dresser. She was looking at me bright-eyed. She started saying, ‘You’ll never guess…’

But I cut in on her, telling her that I’d found Gifford in the woods; that I’d fetched a doctor; that Gifford had disappeared meantime. I did not mention the possibility of a shooting. She kept silence for a moment when I’d finished, before saying:

‘Well, whatever he was about, it’s connected to the man at the Hall, and to his brother. The centre of everything is the Hall, and we’re invited there this evening.’

She would not be going; she would be on the ‘down’ train at 8.35 p.m. But I asked, ‘Invited? Who by?’

‘Why, the tenant of course. Who else would presume to do it? Mr Robert Chandler — he came by the front of the inn just now.’

‘How? On foot?’

‘In a very smart little trap.’

‘We can’t be invited to a place like the Hall. We’re not their type.’

‘It is a little irregular,’ said the wife. ‘But it’s not a dinner invitation. It’s for rather late on — nineish — and Mr Chandler said we were not to dress.’

‘Just as well,’ I said, ‘since we’ve nothing to dress in.’ And, seeing my way to a grievance, I added: ‘He fancied you, I suppose?’

The wife went quite blank at that. She never admitted that any man fancied her. It was as though her womanly spell might be broken if she once did so.

‘He was with his wife,’ she said at length, ‘and she seemed just as keen. They were very friendly. You see, I was sitting outside at the long table and Mr Chandler drove up and said something about it being a lovely day. Then he asked me, “What brings you to Adenwold?”’

‘The train,’ I put in. ‘The train brought you to Adenwold.’

The wife ignored this, saying:

‘I told him that you’d brought me here but that I’d been hoping to go to Scarborough, not that this wasn’t a very pretty spot, and he said, “I know, but Scarborough’s my favourite summer place.”’

‘Why didn’t he go on the outing, then?’

‘I don’t see him in one of your horrible rattling excursion trains,’ said the wife.

Everything bad about the railways was my personal responsibility. ‘I then said that I’d been particularly looking forward to the Chinese lanterns strung all along the garden walks, and he said, “Well, we’ve Chinese lanterns at the Hall, why don’t you come up and see?”’

‘Did you tell him I was a policeman?’

‘I did not.’

‘Did he mention the Chief?’

‘No.’

‘And will Usher be there?’ I asked. ‘And John Lambert, who’s under threat of death because of what he knows about his father’s murder? Where do they come in? Are they invited to this little jolly?’

‘I don’t know,’ replied the wife, ‘but that’s what makes it all so exciting.’

It was one of the things that made it exciting to the wife.

Presently, she went back to The Freewoman, and I looked at Hugh Lambert’s papers again, but I kept striking bits of bad handwriting, or bits I’d already read.

The wife said she’d like a look, so I passed the bundle over. ‘I never went well on a horse,’ she read out loud. ‘Ponder did, but he simply refused…’

‘Who’s Ponder?’ asked the wife.

‘The brother, John,’ I said, ‘on account of his studious ways, I suppose.’

‘… Ponder did, but he simply refused,’ she repeated. ‘However, he would ride out with father and I if father had been especially bold with the brandy, which would make him liable to violence. He saved me from countless thrashings, just by riding in-between us, playing the part of a mounted policeman…’

And she read on from there in silence.

‘What we have here,’ she said, when she eventually put the bundle aside, ‘is impressions.’

‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘It’s literature, worst luck, written only for his own satisfaction.’

‘But then why do you suppose he gave it you?’

‘Well, it’s all in there, I suppose, in a roundabout way.’

‘What do you make of him?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t understand him at all.’

‘Do you know why, Jim Stringer?’ she said, and after giving me a strange look for a while, she went back to looking over the sheets of paper.

‘Who’d want the verdict to stand?’ I asked her a little while later (my silver watch gave ten to four). ‘… Or, to put it another way, who’d have wanted Sir George dead in the first place?’

‘The pheasants of Adenwold, I should think,’ said the wife, still reading Hugh Lambert’s papers.