Murder At Deviation Junction

Chapter Twelve

I slept for a while, and when I woke up, a man was sitting over opposite in the compartment. He was reading the Middlesbrough Gazette. There was the blather about the calendar on the front page of the paper - 'Beautiful illustrations, showing the locality in all seasons' - and something else told the readers it was a red letter day, for the words 'Complimentary Calendar' were written in each of the top two corners of the front page. The two Cs were intertwined in an artistic way.

I stood up and reached for my topcoat, which lay on the luggage rack, and removed from the pocket the photographs of the Travelling Club. The youngest man held the Whitby Morning Post, a newspaper published in the next sizeable place south of Middlesbrough (leaving aside the middling-sized town of Saltburn). He held the paper folded, but I could see one of the two top corners. The artistic Cs were there as well.

The Whitby Morning Post had served Baytown (where I'd grown up, and which lay only eight or so miles south of Whitby), and I recalled that it too had published a complimentary calendar annually. It was at about the time when dad's shop (he was a butcher) began to take in the Christmas fowl - an exciting sign that Christmas was coming, along with the annual visit of my Uncle Roy, dad's brother, who always came over from the Midlands a couple of weeks before Christmas. Uncle Roy was a worried-looking bachelor, and it was as though he thought he'd better get his Christmas visit in early, before anything terrible might cause the cancellation of it. He would always bring me sugar balls.

Was the Whitby Morning Post connected to The Middlesbrough Gazette? I did not think so, but they used the same design for the advertising of their calendar.

Whitby West Cliff station appeared out of the darkness; I must change here for the Town station in order to make the connection for York. Sometimes the carriages were shunted down through the streets from West Cliff to Town station, which lay in the middle of Whitby. Whether that was about to happen this time, I did not know, but I climbed down, and made a walk of it in any event.

Whitby was cold and old: the streets were filled with grimy snow, and the harbour was packed with empty boats, as though everyone had given up on the outdoor world for the present.

The office of the Whitby Morning Post perched on the harbour wall, and as soon as I hit the waterside, I saw the lights blazing inside. I was in luck, but barely, for there was only one man left in the office at that late hour. Freezing though it was, he worked with the door propped open; seemed to keep open house. I walked straight in and pulled off my cap.

'Evening,' I said.

There were three model boats on the low window ledge that overlooked the harbour, and the office was ship-like: low, and with a great deal of well-varnished wood. And it was as if the ship had listed slightly, for all the desks seemed a little out of kilter. The man - a journalist, as I supposed - sat on a revolving chair with his feet up on a desk. He was actually reading the Whitby Morning Post, just as though he was an ordinary citizen who'd had no hand in its making.

He nodded back, and put down the paper.

'You looking for work?' he said, eyeing the camera that hung from my shoulder.

I showed him my warrant card, and said, 'I'm looking into certain events of late last year. To make a long story short, it'd be quite handy to know when you came out with your Complimentary Calendar for 1908.'

'Early,' said the man immediately, 'so as to beat the competition.'

He did not rise, but pointed towards a table that ran along one wall, where lay a great mountain of past Morning Posts. The whole purpose of the office was to add to that pile.

'See for yourself,' said the man; and he went back to reading his own paper.

The papers were all slightly damp, from being kept so close to the sea, as I supposed. The one at the top of the first pile was dated 12 March of the present year. I pulled it and the ones below aside and kept going until I reached December 1908. I proceeded slowly through these until I came to the edition in which the usual top- corner advertisement for Bermaline Bread gave way to the intertwined Cs of 'Complimentary Calendar inside today'.

It was dated 3 December. This was the same edition held by the young man in the photograph taken by Peters; Falconer was shown in that photograph, and yet the last sighting of Falconer was supposed to have occurred on 2 December. I brought to mind the dates I knew. I turned to the journalist, saying, 'I'm obliged to you, mate.'

He barely grunted in response, being still lost in the doings of Whitby and district as described by the Whitby Morning Post. It said a lot for both town and paper, I decided, as I set off for the station and my York connection. But then again, I was in good spirits anyway, for I felt that I'd had a pretty good day of it.