Death on a Branch line

Chapter Twenty-Eight

We stood outside the front of The Angel looking at the soft greyness of the sky, the great trees bright green against it. The rainbow was half there and half not, like the memory of a dream, and seeming to carry the message: this is not what you’d call the perfect summer’s day but it’s beautiful in its way, you know.

Two chimes floated up from the village.

‘Hugh Lambert has eighteen hours left alive,’ I said.

‘And what about your investigation?’ asked the wife.

‘In the first place…’ I said.

‘I think time’s too short for “in the first place”,’ said the wife.

‘… You don’t think Hugh Lambert murdered his father,’ I said, ‘and nor do I.’

‘Mervyn’s the key to it, wouldn’t you say?’ asked the wife — and it wasn’t quite like her to be asking questions in this way. As a rule she didn’t give tuppence what I thought. Instead, she was giving me a chance to say what she herself couldn’t.

Just then, the blurred voice of Mr Handley came from behind us.

‘Where is that boy?’ he said. ‘He’s late for his bloody dinner.’

He held a pewter of ale in his hand, and because of this and the natural impairment of his speech, it was impossible to know how worried he might be. I turned to him and said, ‘We’ll keep our eyes skinned.’

He turned and went back inside his pub. We watched him do it, and the wife said, ‘I do wonder about that bicyclist, you know.’

He’d always been a special study of the wife’s, and this was down to the shocking business of seeing him stab his own tyre. All bicyclists were martyrs to rough roads: their machines were too flimsy and were forever getting crocked, and the bicyclists were forever moaning about it. To see the damage self-inflicted put the whole thing on its head.

‘Clover Wood is that way,’ I said, pointing directly over-opposite.

This time, I found a track rather than crashing on through the undergrowth, and I led the wife along it. Wherever the path divided, we took the wider route, but these would become narrow after a while, and we’d end in a jam of trees and thorn bushes. We pressed on through narrow gaps until we did at last strike another good-sized track. It was lined with tall everlastings of a very dark green, and by rights ought to have led to a blank-faced tomb or cemetery. In fact it led to a perfectly round clearing: a Piccadilly Circus of the woods with a fallen log in its centre, two people sitting on the log and two bicycles on the ground hard by. I knew that one bicycle would be punctured, the other not. We were about fifty yards short of the couple, who were the bicyclist from The Angel and a young woman I’d never set eyes on before. Their voices carried along the track, and I motioned the wife into a gap between two of the everlastings. I stepped in after her, and watched the couple.

The fellow’s arm was around the waist of the young woman. It rested there rather guiltily — that arm knew it was taking a liberty — and the conversation went stiffly.

‘It is a very happy chance that you came along, Dora,’ the fellow said.

‘But I don’t have a puncture repair outfit,’ said the woman.

‘Even so,’ said the bicyclist.

(‘That’s very magnanimous of him,’ whispered the wife, as a silence fell between the two on the tree trunk.)

‘There’s practically everything but a puncture repair outfit in my saddle-bag,’ the young woman eventually said.

‘I’ll take it into the blacksmith’s again tomorrow,’ said the man. ‘I tried him yesterday but he wasn’t about.’

‘Do blacksmiths fix punctures?’ asked his companion. ‘After all, I’d have thought it was a rather delicate operation and they’re all fires and hammers.’

‘He might be able to fettle up a couple of tyre levers,’ the fellow said.

‘Why do you need a tyre lever?’

‘For levering off the tyre. It’s very hard to get the modern Dunlops over the wheel rim without one.’

‘Oh.’

And they sat silent once again.

(‘He’ll lose all feeling in that arm of his,’ I whispered to the wife.)

‘I don’t suppose that you find bicycles very interesting as a topic of conversation,’ the bicyclist said, after a further minute.

‘Well,’ said the young woman, ‘I’d rather ride them than talk about them.’

‘That goes for so many things, don’t you find?’ asked the bicyclist, who immediately coloured up. He was getting nowhere fast with his spooning.

‘You see, my original plan,’ he went on, ‘as I think you knew, was to make for Helmsley after spending just Friday night at The Angel. It was only the condition of the machine that made me hang on here.’

‘I come along this track most Sundays about this time,’ Dora said with a sort of sigh.

You don’t want them sighing at this stage, I thought. But the fellow answered her sigh with a sigh of his own, followed by the remark: ‘Well, no fear of an interruption here.’

And somehow that did the trick, for after an interval of staring forward in silence they both turned towards each other and began kissing, which they continued to do as the wife crept off the way we’d come with me following, and as the Adenwold church bells began striking three.