Death on a Branch line

Chapter Twenty-Four

The butler or manservant gave us a storm lantern, and we used it to light the way back to The Angel. It made the trees swing and rear up as we pushed on, the wife talking about Usher, and how he’d said the women’s cause could ‘bring the women up’, and other wrong things.

‘I don’t think John Lambert’s in any danger,’ she said. ‘Usher’s an ass. But still, you can see that Lambert needs to be taken in hand. He has a condition of some kind, a mental… a sort of hysteria, I’m sure brought on by what’s going to happen to his brother.’

Her success at the party had made her over-confident, it seemed.

‘We women have wills of iron but very frail bodies, you know,’ she ran on. ‘I suppose Captain Usher’s body is made of iron. I’d say his brain probably is.’

She broke off in her speech when our light showed a fox on the track before us.

I was drunk but not, as it turned out, in the worst way, for it had been good wine. I felt outside of myself somehow, and revolved my new discovery just as though it had no power to harm me. The paper in my pocket showed that the wire asking the Chief to come to Adenwold had not been transmitted until 12.30, whereas he had arrived by the 12.27 train. I had no idea what had gone wrong with Will Hamer, his rulley or his beasts, but there were any number of possibilities. The Chief had not come to the village on my account; he had arrived quite independently.

I began trying to explain this to the wife, but she was hardly listening, and did not take the point.

‘… It was only a coincidence that we coincided at the station,’ I said, and she asked, cheerfully enough:

‘How drunk are you, Jim?’

In our room, we kissed in a friendly way, for she knew she’d been the star of the evening, even if wrongly dressed and not invited to the meal. Then I turned out the lantern, and the slice of moon moved right up to the open window. I watched it from the pillow thinking: I am investigating my own Chief. Nothing could be worse for my prospects or more generally shocking, but I went directly to sleep nonetheless.

I awoke at the chime of three, however, and knew that I could not put off finding an answer.

I stood up, dressed and caught up the lantern we’d been given at the Hall. The wife changed position twice as I did so, but she slept on. Outside the front door of the inn, I lit the lantern, and set off back for the Hall.

The lantern showed swinging, grey-coloured pictures of Adenwold: closed doors, shuttered windows, high blank hedges. I took the early track through the woods, and followed it to the rear gate of the Hall, which now stood unattended. I moved fast across the grass, approaching the lines of cone-shaped trees.

The Chinese lanterns on the terrace were now only so much dangling litter, objects of no significance, long since burnt out. The table had been removed, but a line of empty bottles remained on the bottom step of one of the two staircases.

Light glowed from two of the house windows. I turned the lamp off and went up the steps into the mathematical garden. I was not sticking to the complicated paths: I went as the crow flies, and I could feel ornamental plants falling under my boots.

The light in the sky was ash-coloured, a sort of emergency light. There was just enough to see what was important. I had now reached the low windows of the rear of the house, and a voice in my head put the question: Where are you going? A sash window standing open gave the answer. I ducked down and I was in, coming bang up against a piano. I took out my matches, and relit the lantern. The room grew as the light flared — a long yellow room with multiple sofas, as if the contents of many ordinary drawing rooms had been taken into it.

It held no fewer than three wide, peaceful billiard tables. The lantern showed me a dark painting of a boy and a greyhound over the fireplace, and I pictured Sir George Lambert and his sons in this room, each playing his own game on his own table.

I moved now into the hallway, which offered the front door and the main stairs as ways of escape. But I could not have said whether I was aiming to find or avoid the occupants of the house. I began a circuit of the hall, and the first room that I came to contained a harpsichord and many photographs, both on the walls and on the mantel-pieces. They were all of men shooting or hunting, and one showed a cricket game. It ought to have been possible to work out which man was Sir George — his would be the face that cropped up the most often — but I had no time to examine the pictures.

My lantern was like a magic lantern, showing me dream-like pictures. The next room along was done out in a Chinese style with tall vases and delicate black cabinets holding pottery that was Oriental in looks but otherwise mysterious to me. The main object in the room was not in the least Chinese, however. It was an old soap crate, and it held more photographs — some framed, some not — and a stack of handwritten papers.

I picked up the first framed photograph. The young man pictured was Master Hugh. He was standing before a tree, and looking as though taken by surprise, but quite happy about it. He was grinning, perhaps on account of his hat, which was completely shapeless in a countrified way. I picked up the first of the papers that was to hand. It was a short note, and the address was Park Place, London S., which I took to be a good address.

‘My dear Hugh,’ it began. ‘This is up to the mark. It has the music of the place. You pretend not to know it, but if you heard a note wrong in the happy speech of the public bar in that pretty village of yours… this you would instantly detect. Have you tried Heinemann’s? If they bite, you would perhaps be five pounds to the richer, for one book of poetry equals one very good dinner in Mayfair, or one good lunch and a haircut.’

It was signed ‘Paul’.

I picked up another paper, which carried the heading ‘Station Hotel, York’ and was evidently from John Lambert: Greetings and thank you for the verses, which I find beautiful, although whether that means anything coming from a railway drudge, I doubt. You asked how my work is going here and you can damn well endure the answer. Many of my supposed talents go to waste in this business, but it might be regarded as useful. Are you bored by railway timetables? You might not be if you knew how they were put together. (How’s that, by the way, for the beginning of a chapter in The Wonder Book of Railways for Boys and Girls?)…

A voice came… a woman’s voice from the top of the stairs. She was calling out a name I couldn’t catch. Bundling some of the letters into my pocket, I reviewed my options. I could retreat into one of the rooms I had so far visited or sprint for the front door. I sprinted, as the voice called again from lower on the staircase. I was quickly at the door, where I set about trying to work the latch.

‘You there!’ called the voice just at the moment I got the trick of it.

I slid through the door, turned right and dashed across the front of the house, reaching the territory of the dark out-buildings. Some of their doors were open, disclosing a deeper darkness. The dung on the stone walkways combined with the stagnant black air and the smell of engine oil to make a drugged and drowsy atmosphere. I leant against the wall of a workshop, getting my breath and looking towards the gardener’s cottage, which stood fifty yards off.

A voice was at my ear.

‘Have they brought you in, sir?’

It was the footman or manservant, the one who’d been forcing the claret on me. He wore no tie; his clothes looked hastily put on.

‘Into what?’ I said, shocked.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘the search.’

‘I know that a… difficulty has arisen,’ I said, with fast-beating heart.

‘I mean to pray for him, sir,’ said the manservant. ‘I believe his soul’s in danger.’

I eyed the man. It was strange to hear somebody say they meant to pray when they were not in a church.

‘He’s not well in himself,’ the man ran on, ‘and Captain Usher wanted to keep an eye on him. But he burst out of his room about half after one in the morning and he hasn’t been seen since.’

‘Was he not under lock and key?’ I asked.

‘He is the owner of the house, sir,’ said the manservant.

‘It was Usher who gave chase?’

‘Captain Usher and Chief Inspector Weatherill.’

‘Were any shots heard?’ I asked, and I saw by the lantern light that the man had closed his eyes. Was this the prayer in the process of being delivered up? He opened his eyes after a few seconds, and carried on briskly, as though he had just sent a telegram.

‘How do you know that, sir?’ said the manservant. ‘I heard two shots at two o’clock, but I’d gone back to bed by then, and was half-asleep. I just looked at the clock, and I suppose I thought: Well, it’s two for two, like church bells striking. A few minutes later, I went over to the window again and light was coming across the lawn. It was Captain Usher and Chief Inspector Weatherill. I dashed down to see them, and they said they were looking for Mr Lambert, and I believe they’ve been about it ever since.’

‘Did they carry guns?’ I asked.

‘They both held shotguns.’

‘ Why, do you suppose?’

‘Well,’ said the manservant, ‘suicide is feared.’

I supposed he meant that Lambert, bent on suicide, might have been assumed to be armed and generally inclined to shoot.

I shook my head.

‘That won’t answer,’ I said.

‘I must go to the housemaid, sir,’ said the servant. ‘She’s very upset.’

And this man — a very dutiful fellow indeed — headed off in the direction of the house.

The Chief and Usher were giving out that John Lambert was missing. But I believed they’d done for him.

I held up my lantern and contemplated the gardener’s cottage.

As before, the door was on the jar. I pushed it, and entered, setting the lantern in the middle of the floor. Aside from a jumble of what looked like belts and webbing bags on one of the two desks, the room had been cleared and tidied: all the timetables and papers had been piled against the left-hand wall. A blanket was partly draped over the stack of documents. I moved towards it, and saw a last year’s Bradshaw. There were thin folded papers inside, acting as bookmarks. One marked a page for ‘London, Barking, Tilbury’ and certain railway stations and times on the ‘down’ line had been circled in ink pen. Here was the easterly drift again. I imagined that John Lambert read timetables in the same way that an art expert looks at a painting, forever spotting curious little details here and there.

I unfolded the paper that had marked the page. It was pale blue, and headed ‘Sartori’s Park View Hotel, Hyde Park Corner, London, S.W.’ The date was 9 October, 1908, and I recognised Hugh Lambert’s writing: My dear John Well, the Squire’s chucked me out again, so I’m lodged just around the corner in the above mentioned pensione — very modern with all hygienic desideratas. You entrained for York last week, I think. How do you find the place? I have spent more time there than you, and feel I ought to be able to supply a few pointers. I strongly recommend the peacocks of the Museum Gardens who look very proud but are not above taking rolled pellets of bread from your fingers. They can ‘fly’ to the top of the tree, but it looks to me suspiciously like a jump accompanied by flapping of wings. I dragged the Squire to the Museum Gardens once, and could only persuade him to show interest in the peacocks by telling him they were a species of pheasant, which gave him the opportunity to imagine killing them. Peacocks’ tails are beautiful: blue and green and iridescent, but the poor peahens come in drab browns. The case is the opposite with the peacocks and peahens here at Sartori’s…

I heard an approaching voice outdoors, at which my eyes flicked to the bottom of the letter, and the words: Your disgraceful brother, Hugh. I dropped the letter back into the Bradshaw, and moved to the front door, ignoring the lantern. I’d made the garden gate by the time I heard the clatter of boots on the flagstones that lay between the out-buildings and the cottage. Usher loomed into view a second later, a blue-eyed shadow. He carried a shotgun by a strap over his shoulder, and it looked about right — this was the fulfilment of the man.

He tilted the gun slightly, and pumped it once. A cartridge was ejected, twirled in air and clattered somewhere in the darkness about his boots. I knew that by this action he had also chambered a new cartridge, ready for firing. He said nothing, but levelled the barrel at me as the Chief appeared from around the same corner. He looked glad to be back in his tweeds and his dinty old trilby hat. He also carried a shotgun — the two of them had perhaps plundered the armoury of the Hall — and he too levelled it and took aim at me.

‘Thought you’d have a bit of a poke about, did you?’ he said.

With a jerk of his head, he indicated the cottage to Usher. It was permissible, I supposed, for a sergeant major to make a suggestion to a captain in the heat of an engagement.

I walked, under their guns, back into the cottage, and was directed to the main room where the timetables were stacked and my lantern glowed. I was driven by the gun muzzles towards the back of the room, where the two desks stood, and in so directing me I perceived that the gunmen had made rather a bloomer.

A beautiful bone-handled revolver lay in the tangle of martial-looking goods on the desk, and it looked very questing and forward-pointing and eager to be up and at. I watched the shadows of the two shotguns as I contemplated it, and I made my goodbyes to the world and the mysteries of Adenwold, as I picked it up and turned about.