Murder At Deviation Junction

Chapter Twenty

He wore a sporting cap like Bowman's, but it suited him better. He looked like a rambler, out of place in Fleet Street, or a rough sort of motorist suddenly deprived of his motor car. He was not quite bearded, but wore white sideburns that became a moustache, flowing over the top of his mouth like a snowdrift. He carried his head tilted backwards, as though taking exception to everything he saw.

I looked towards the editor's cubby-hole. Bowman was stepping out of it, papers in hand.

I indicated to him that he should join me at the window, and we glanced down at the man standing in the dirty snow. Bowman stepped back from the window and said, 'Christ, it's him.' He then returned to the window, and began wrestling with the catch, making to open it, at which the man in the street looked up. He turned in the street, somehow like a man trying to make up his mind about something.

'What are you doing?' I said. 'He'll see you.'

The man writing nearest to us was looking up:

'It's cold enough just as it is, old chap,' he said to Bowman - who now let the catch alone and stepped back again, saying, 'I only meant to call down to him and ask what he meant by skulking about in Wimbledon at all hours.'

The man in the street then turned smartly and began walking north with boots turned outwards, heading back towards Fleet Street.

'He's going back ...'

Bowman was moving towards his desk, just as though he meant to start writing again.

'Let's get on his rear,' I said.

'What's that?' said Bowman, with a strange look on his face.

'We must follow him,' I said.

Somebody in the office cried out, 'Copy!'

Bowman stared at me with his mouth open.

'He's only going to Wimbledon,' he said. 'He'll take up station outside my house again.'

'It makes no odds,' I said. I had my topcoat in my hand, and the office was waking up to the agitation in our voices; I was through the door and down the stone stairs in an instant. In Bouverie Street, I looked north towards Fleet Street. The man had made the junction, where he wheeled his wide body to the left. I followed him, as snowflakes fell in the darkening sky - and it was something dangerous now, like the first flaking of a ceiling.

I stood at the junction with Fleet Street. Bowman was coming up - a lonely man struggling to join the crowds. I shouted 'Run!' and he did his best, but I thought his hot head would explode.

I pointed left so that he would know the way, and set off directly. I was fifty yards behind the man, keeping him in sight without difficulty. Most people on Fleet Street wore plain black and were thin; but this man was a tweed-coated cube. He never once looked back, and did not seem in any hurry. He walked with the swinging step of the outdoorsman. Where was he heading? I tried to put up in my mind the Underground map. Was he heading for a station that could take him to Wimbledon? I hoped not, for I knew about his Wimbledon connection, and I did not want to go there. I did not like the place: high, thin red houses like guardsmen in a row - a fucking prison of a place. No, this one would surely be making somehow for the ironlands of Yorkshire.

I looked behind. Still Bowman came on, though with a few pavement collisions on the way. I struck the billboard again: 'Doctor Killed and Eaten by Natives of Nigeria'. The man ahead had not given it a glance, but kept his great head tilted upwards, as though to receive the refreshment of the snow.

Gaslit advertisements flashed as we came towards the Strand; a huge church stood in the road, blocking traffic. I did not remember it being there in my Waterloo days. My eyes flickered back towards the path ahead, and the man had gone.

Bowman came panting up beside me.

'Lost the bastard,' I said, but Bowman was shaking his head, gasping out a word I couldn't hear and pointing directly left, to one of the theatres. No, it was a new Underground station - Aldwych - that he was indicating. We walked into the booking hall followed by a blow of snow. All the signs in the place showed arrows, but which one to follow?

The man was in the lift looking out - one of half a dozen occupants. The attendant drew the steel mesh across, and down they all went.

My eyes moved right: there were two lifts and the second was ready to go. The attendant had the mesh dragged half across, but I stopped him and pushed my way in, dragging Bowman behind.

'Ticket,' said the liftman in a sour voice.

As we went down, I held up my warrant card - he might make of it what he liked. Bowman he ignored.

'Did this fellow ever get a good look at you?' I said.

'I don't believe so,' said Bowman. 'I had my comforter up and cap down every time I saw him - at first just on account of the weather, later on by design.'

The doors clashed open at the bottom, and I was out of that lift like a rat out of a drainpipe, with Bowman panting along behind. The sight of the man in tweed slowed us, though. He was only ten feet ahead in the passageway, walking slowly, checking the people behind him like the church in Fleet Street. He certainly seemed to have no notion that he might have been followed, for he'd never once turned about. He was gazing up at a swinging sign that hung before the point at which the passageway split into two. The sign was an electrically lit glass box, and it showed two hands, each with a pointing finger. One was marked 'North', the other 'South'. He slowed further, approaching it. He did not know London, and that was because he came from the ironlands of the Cleveland Hills. Or was it simply that he hadn't decided where to go?

He hadn't quite stopped by the time he made his decision. He chose the northern passageway, and we followed at a distance of twenty feet. You couldn't get to Wimbledon this way.

There were perhaps fifty people in between the man and Bowman and me as we all lined up on the platform. The adverts on the tunnel wall were for Lipton's tea, but, looking sidelong, I saw that the man was looking above them all, gazing at the tunnel roof.

The train came in, and we boarded the carriage behind the one into which the man stepped, but we could see him clearly through the windows at the carriage end, and the bright electric light seemed to bring him too close. I turned away from him, towards Bowman, who had removed his sporting cap and was wiping his head, dragging the few hairs on his head hard to the left.

'I'm in need of a dose of wine,' he said. 'Where do you think he's heading? The Cross?'

He meant King's Cross.

'Must be,' I said. 'He's going north.'

If we stuck with the man, we would end back in Yorkshire, and that was fine.

As we came crashing into Russell Square station, I tried to picture the place he might run to earth: one of the little iron-getting towns on the Cleveland cliffs - Loftus or some such. The carriage doors opened. A third of the passengers got off; a new third got on. The man remained, and it seemed to me that the new third avoided standing near him, just as the old third had. It was his great width, and that strange rig-out with the yellow stockings - a challenge to all-comers. The train started away again with a jerk, and it jerked a thought into my head: I knew the man.

I turned to Bowman, who was fixing his cap back on his head.

'It's Sanderson,' I said, as the black brickwork thundered away beyond the windows.

'Who?'

'The man we're following is Gilbert Sanderson,' I said. 'He was hanged last year for the murder of George Lee.'

Bowman gave me a narrow look.

I fished in my pocket for the Club photograph, pointed to Lee. 'This man was done in as I told you. It happened in the course of a robbery committed by Gilbert Sanderson. It's him,' I went on, tipping my head back to indicate the man in the next carriage. 'I've seen his woodcut.'

Bowman was shaking his head as the train seemed to gain speed before suddenly seizing up. It had stopped at the Underground station called King's Cross St Pancras. And here of course the man who was Sanderson, or the spitting image of Sanderson, turned and stepped off.

'Identical twin?' asked Bowman, as we again fell into line twenty paces and twenty people behind the man. 'Or is he a ghost?'

We stepped off the train behind the man, merging into the moving crowd. He was through the ticket gate. I held my warrant card up to the ticket checker, who said, 'What the hell's this?' as we went by, but he was grinning as he said it. In the passageway beyond the barrier, the man was slowing once again. His choice now was King's Cross or the passageway connecting with its rival, St Pancras.

'It's King's Cross for my money,' I said. 'He's heading for Yorkshire.'

But the man followed the St Pancras direction, his open coat swinging.

'That's rum,' I said. 'What the devil is he up to?'

I tried to think it out: the man had come to Bouverie Street half- intending to do something - and then had decided not to do it. Had he seen me at the window, and suspected I was a copper? Or then again, had he seen Bowman there, and decided, looking at his terrified expression, that he had succeeded in putting the frighteners on, and that his job was therefore done? But Bowman had told me that the man didn't know him; that he wouldn't necessarily be able to pick him out away from his known haunts.

And who had told the man of Bowman's haunts? Who had put the man-who-looked-like Sanderson on to Steve Bowman?

He walked along the passageway, up another flight of stairs and out into the great wide roaring of St Pancras Station. On the pillars and roof arches, the red colourings of the Midland Railway looked like Christmas decorations. The man paused again, and turned right around in the circulating area, taking sights, or just letting everyone have the benefit of his biscuit-coloured suit and bright yellow woollen socks.

'The glass of fashion, isn't he?' muttered Bowman.

It would have been a comical sight but for the brute power that obviously rested in the man. He walked towards the booking hall, and we followed. We stood away from him as he queued at the window marked 'Bedford and All Stations North Thereof.'

'He's not going to Kentish Town, then,' said Bowman. 'I rather hoped he would be.'

Kentish Town was the next stop on the line.

As the man moved towards one of the pigeonholes to make his ticket purchase, I looked at the tile map of the Midland territories that was fixed to the booking-office wall. You could go to York from St Pancras and other points immediately north of York. You could do it, but this wasn't the regular London station for Yorkshire. I pictured the man alighting at Derby, Trent, the Midland towns. But they were not in the case.

He was buying his ticket now, but we could not risk moving closer to hear the destination stated. He gave his request in the shortest amount of words possible, I could tell that much. Having done so he stood back, looking upwards again. It was as though his moustache was a false one, held on with gum and in danger of falling off unless he held his head in that particular grand and arrogant way.

The ticket was pushed out under the window, and the man paid over his gold: pound notes - at least two by the looks of it. This was a bad lookout. At Third Class rates, each of those pound notes represented about three hundred miles' distance, and I did not think my North Eastern warrant card would pass muster with a Midland ticket checker.

The man came out of the ticket hall, and swung away towards the waiting trains.

'We've struck a trail here all right,' I said.

'Why don't we just let him go?' said Bowman. 'He's given up hounding me, at any rate.'

'Then we'll be left with the mystery,' I said.

'Yes,' said Bowman, 'and left alive as well.'

As we stepped out of the booking hall, we saw the man take up position once again in the middle of the circulating area. He was gazing towards the trains this time, then glancing at his watch.

'If I were him, I'd go for a stiffener just now,' Bowman said at length, and the fellow was indeed within striking distance of the refreshment rooms, but he didn't so much as glance that way.

I looked to the left: the platform behind the ticket gate at that extreme - Platform One - was beginning to fill with people. A line of baggage trolleys waited there. A pageboy was towing a heavily loaded tea wagon across the circulating area towards it. The wagon flew a small flag that bore the word 'Sustenance'. As I watched, a red tank engine came wheezing into view on that line, drawing more carriages than it could easily manage.

'It's the bloody sleeper,' I said. 'The bugger's off to Scotland.'