Death on a Branch line

Chapter Thirty

When the players went back onto the pitch, I counted a full complement of eleven fielders.

‘I’m sure there was one less before the dog was found,’ I said to the wife, and at that instant the sky darkened yet further, and the rain started again. The players at first walked towards the pavilion, but as the rain came faster they began to run.

‘I don’t think there’s anything for it but to get out into the woods and look for Mervyn,’ I said as, five minutes later, we made our way under the rain back towards the second village green of Adenwold. ‘I’ll borrow an oilskin from the pub.’

‘We’ll be soaked through if we walk in this,’ she said. ‘Let’s sit in the church.’

But it turned out that the Reverend Ridley kept the door locked; so we sat on the two bench seats in the porch, and talked over what had happened and what might happen. At twenty to six, we heard the bolts being released on the inside of the church door, and it swung open to reveal a face I could not at first place: it was Moffat, the amiable man who kept the baker’s shop. He had entered the church by another door. Some muttering between him and the wife revealed him to be a reader at the church or a helper of some sort, or there again perhaps standing in for the verger, who was in Scarborough. At any rate, he passed us hymn books, and showed us to a front pew. Evening Prayer was in the offing.

The baker went away to ring the bell, and I thought of the other bell — the one that would be ringing in Durham gaol in fourteen hours’ time. The church had a medical smell — incense — and was filled with a kind of silvery rain-light. I wondered who would come to the service, since most of the village was in Scarborough. The answer was disclosed over the next five minutes: the baker’s daughter came, and two of the tiny old ladies we’d seen outside the almshouses. They sat at the back, smiling with their faraway eyes. The manservant from the Hall came, and with him the maid who’d assisted him at the party. It occurred to me that they might be married. The manservant smiled a little at me, embarrassed no doubt at having been my gaoler. As the clock was striking six, some of the cricketers came in: big men trying to look smaller as they eased along the pews.

The Reverend Ridley made his entrance at just gone six. He wore a black cassock, and his red head and black body seemed to belong to two different people; the prayer book was tiny in his hand, but it soon became obvious that he hardly needed to look at it. He knew the ropes; he really was a vicar after all. It was a plain, short service: no music, just the vicar, the prayer book and Bible readings from the baker. He did them very well, and I thought: That’s what the fellow’s really about. He was a church-goer first and a baker second.

When the vicar blessed us all, I had an idea we were approaching the end of proceedings, and it was at this point that I heard the scrape of the door opening.

I turned about, half-expecting to see John Lambert, but it was Mervyn Handley who stood there. He held his shotgun by his side, like a staff. The baker immediately rose and went towards him saying, very calmly as it seemed to me, ‘You can’t bring that in here, Mervyn Handley.’

The vicar had paused in his reading. He was eyeing the boy.

‘Where can I put it, then?’ I heard Mervyn ask in a sulky voice.

‘In the umbrella stand in the porch,’ said the baker.

Well, it was the country-side after all. Every man jack was armed. A shotgun in an umbrella stand might be nothing out of the common here. Mervyn went out and came back in, but when he saw me, he coloured up and looked around, as if contemplating a breakaway.

‘What’s he doing in here?’ I whispered to the wife. ‘He’s Catholic.’

‘I’ve an idea,’ said the wife.

The Reverend Ridley finished off the service, and the wife stood up fast and followed Mervyn through the door and into the porch, where he was removing his shotgun from the umbrella stand. The other churchgoers were giving him a wide berth.

‘Don’t you think it would be better if you gave us the gun?’ Lydia asked the boy.

‘No,’ he said.

‘You don’t need to go to church to talk to God, you know,’ the wife ran on. ‘And you don’t need to go for forgiveness.’

The boy kept silence.

We were out into the churchyard now. The rain had stopped; it was only dripping off the trees. A flare of sunlight came through the clouds and the wife said to Mervyn: ‘If you really want to be forgiven, and you really do repent — well then, you already are forgiven.’

‘… Because I don’t much care for goin’ to church,’ said the boy.

‘Not many do,’ I said.

Another silence.

‘It’s dead boring,’ I put in.

‘Oh, don’t listen to him,’ said the wife.

‘I en’t,’ said the boy, and he looked at Lydia as though on the point of further speech.

‘If you know anything about the murder that happened here, you must let on,’ I said. ‘Master Hugh has only fifteen hours left to live.’

At which he turned on his heel.

‘Where are you off now?’ I called after him.

‘Look for me dog,’ he said.

‘No, Mervyn!’ called Lydia, hurrying after him.

I looked across to the vicarage. A woman stood at the garden gate. The Reverend Ridley approached her. She was pretty, in a white dress, and she twirled what was either a parasol or a dainty umbrella. It was the woman who’d been watching the cricket. Ridley wore his cricketing clothes with his cassock slung over his arm. He went quickly up to the woman, and kissed her on the mouth, which put paid to the twirling of the parasol. He then took her quickly indoors.

I turned about to see Lydia standing at the gate of the churchyard and speaking again to Mervyn. Beyond them on the road was the carter, Will Hamer. I hurried up to him, hearing Lydia say to Mervyn, ‘You’re to come back with us to The Angel.’

‘Did you bring that woman here?’ I asked Hamer.

‘Well now,’ he said, ‘I’m not supposed to let on.’

‘What’s her name?’

He grinned down at me with a look of great happiness.

‘Is it Emma?’ I said. ‘Was she the governess at the Hall?’

‘ You know what o’clock it is, don’t you?’ he said, and the grin gave way to laughter.

The vicar and the woman — Emma, as it seemed — were crossing the churchyard, closing on Will Hamer’s rulley. The vicar carried a bag. ‘May I speak to you about the murder of Sir George Lambert?’ I asked, as he approached.

‘Certainly not,’ he said, in a mild enough tone as he and the woman climbed up onto the bench beside Hamer.

‘I’m a policeman,’ I said, as Hamer turned his wagon, and only then did I remember to fish for my warrant card, but Hamer’s ‘men’ (the donkey and the old horse) had a turn of speed in them after all, and they’d disappeared into the hedge-tunnel by the time I’d got it out.

We took the boy to his mother, who only seemed about as relieved as if some fairly insignificant missing object had been turned up. We then took tea of bread, cheese and rhubarb tart with the Handleys in the saloon bar (which was otherwise deserted) and as we ate I watched the boy. He said nothing concerning either John Lambert or Hugh Lambert, even though John was the main subject of the conversation: Mrs Handley put the boy’s disappearance down to his being upset over the forthcoming execution, and I let that go. She was right in essence, anyhow.

Mervyn was back to his old helpful ways, giving a hand to his mother as she laid out the table, but he was agitated over something, and I didn’t think it was his missing dog. Evidently it — like him — was habituated to long rambles in the woods, but could be relied on to turn up in time for its grub, which was made up of the day’s leftovers and was generally served up to it at about eight, before it settled down for its kip. I would not for the present tell Mervyn its fate. That would only put him further into his shell.

The clock in the bar said a quarter after seven when we finished the tea. Draining off the dregs of my teacup, I said, ‘I’m off back into the woods,’ and nobody appeared to find this very surprising, since that was where the hunt for John Lambert was being largely conducted.

‘I’ll sit here and keep Mrs Handley company,’ said Lydia, by which she meant that she would sit with the boy as well, in case he should speak up. I had no doubt that she’d seek the aid of his mother in persuading him to talk.

The latest downpour had stopped for the present, and a kind of airless, wet-wood smell came floating through the open windows; but I was sure we hadn’t seen the end of the rain, so I turned to Mr Handley, who had been supping John Smith’s ale while the rest of us drank tea, and asked whether he had an oilskin about the place. He made some reply that was much longer than yes or no, and at the end of it, he stood up and quit the room.

‘He has an old ulster,’ said Mrs Handley, turning towards me, and it was the first time she had translated, so to say, on behalf of her husband. She knew very well the difficulty everybody had in understanding him, and I wondered whether it made her ashamed of him. She never seemed to make conversation with her husband, and yet she was an intelligent woman. She would want to talk, and that was no doubt where Master Hugh had come in.

Mr Handley came back with the coat. It had dried leaves in the bottom of its deep pockets, and smelt of old wood fires. I wondered whether it was a left-over of his farming days. He would be much better suited to farming than running a pub; he wouldn’t have to talk as much, and there wouldn’t be John Smith’s ale always to hand. Mr Handley showed me a special pocket in the ulster, and the gist of what he said was that any object placed in there would be kept perfectly dry no matter what. As if to prove this he brought out from behind the bar a packet of Woodbines and a box of Vestas, and he stowed them in the pocket, indicating that I might smoke as many as I liked, gratis. As he leant over me I smelt the ale on his breath, which brought to mind a question.

I asked whether Hardy, the station master, had been as drunk as he’d seemed that afternoon, and Mr Handley replied (as I eventually worked out): ‘He was goin’ some, aye.’

I asked, ‘Is that out-of-the-usual for him?’ but couldn’t make out the answer.

I entered the woods once again by the path directly across from The Angel. It hardly mattered where I went in since I didn’t know what I was looking for, but only that everything bad in Adenwold started and finished in the woods. There was grey daylight over the fields but it was dusk in the woods, and I was soon lost. The air was stirless and damp; there was not a breath to breathe, and I was far too hot in the ulster. It put me in a bath of sweat.

I came after a while to a straight track bordered by evergreens, but this one didn’t lead to the Piccadilly Circus of the woods. I kept imagining that I’d struck the railway line, which would give me my bearings, but it refused to appear however much I crossed and recrossed in the ferns, nettles and brambles.

As I heard the chimes for eight o’clock, I was in a district of giant trees, where the largest of the lot had toppled over onto some of its fellows and was held up leaning, like a drunk. There then came a while sitting on a low branch, smoking one of Mr Handley’s Woodbines, thinking hard about the Reverend Ridley and listening for human sounds. But I heard only the birds ascending to and descending from the treetops, from which drops of a light rain swirled down spiral-wise.

It was getting on for nine before I gave it up, and began looking for a way out, which brought me, half-dazed, to the first village green, and the silent cottages and stores. Crossing the station yard in my clammy coat, I walked onto the ‘up’ platform.

Here I made out the figure of the station master moving in the station house behind lace curtains, and I heard the clatter of pots. Hardy was a bachelor of course, and it appeared that he had no servant, and was making his own tea. I walked along to the waiting room, where the great black horsehair bench faced the dead fireplace. A picture on the wall showed ‘The Ruins of Rievaulx Abbey’, and a horseless cart sat in the middle of these ruins, as though to pile on the misery. The walls were bare and white, and I pictured in my mind’s eye Hugh Lambert in his cell. I stepped out of the waiting room, and looked at the platform clock: 9.20. Well, very likely the condemned man had done it — and it suddenly struck me that young Mervyn might be seeking forgiveness not for himself but for Master Hugh. By going to church he might be trying to put a word in for his friend, keep him from the fires of hell.

Another possibility was that Mervyn himself had shot Sir George Lambert, and this neither I nor the wife had felt able to put into words.

I was ambling up the narrow road that led back to The Angel when I heard voices coming around the corner. It was the Chief and Captain Usher. Now this might be ticklish. We’d seen off Cooper so easily that I’d put him from my mind completely. Yet here were his governors.

The Chief wore a waterproof; Usher carried a tightly rolled umbrella. As we closed, I tried to return the Chief’s gaze without looking at his nose, which was still not right. They both looked wearied out.

I gave them good evening.

‘Not so good for Cooper,’ said Usher.

‘He chased a fellow onto the train,’ I said. ‘… Thought it was John Lambert.’

A beat of silence.

‘I don’t suppose it was,’ I ran on.

‘That’s not really any of your business, is it, Stringer?’ said Usher.

He was being cagey as usual, but there was no doubt that John Lambert was still at liberty.

‘Might I ask about friend Cooper, then?’ I said. ‘I saw him clatter his leg.’

‘Nasty bruise, that’s all,’ said the Chief. ‘I dare say you’ve been searching for Lambert yourself, in spite of instructions.’

Instructions, not orders. The Chief was on my side over this, but it was necessary for him to disguise the fact.

‘I’ve just been dangling about, really,’ I said. ‘I watched a bit of the cricket game this afternoon.’

‘And what happened there?’ said the Chief, folding his arms.

‘First side in got fifty-two — no, more like thirty-six. They weren’t up to much, anyhow. The second lot were on about three, maybe four, when the ball was lost. Then rain stopped play.’

‘I wish I’d been there to see it myself,’ said the Chief.

Usher was looking at his watch.

‘We ought to be pressing on, Chief Inspector,’ he said.

‘Could I ask one last question, sir?’ I asked Usher, and we eyed each other levelly. ‘Is it known for an absolute fact that Hugh Lambert is… that way?’

‘We’ve no hard evidence… thank God,’ said Usher.

I nodded to the pair of them, and carried on up to The Angel as the chimes came for nine-thirty.