Murder At Deviation Junction

Chapter Twenty-six

'As I say, the boy and I are not constructed at all on the same lines,' Marriott began. 'For example, I do not take a constitutional, Detective Stringer ...'

(Perhaps the supper had put him in better humour. At any event, I had regained my title.)

'I do not take a constitutional,' he repeated, 'and never let it be said that I take a stroll. I walk, Detective Stringer, and I would walk with Theodore Falconer for quite hours - right over the tops and all about Whitby. Do you know Whitby at all, Detective Stringer? A very fine old seaport, beautiful ships ... Do you know about ships? The parish church at the top of the steps is quite exceptional, and Falconer and I would make a wide circuit from there on Sunday mornings in all weathers. I was in fact a member of his rambling club for a spell, and a very strange grouping they proved to be. They met in the woods, you know - an almost pagan confederacy.'

'I had met Falconer at the University,' he continued, again looking keenly at Small David, hoping to reopen the quarrel, but the Scotsman read on, so Marriott continued addressing me. 'We were not of equivalent rank, socially speaking, but fell in with each other while tramping on Christ Church Meadow. Almost every Sunday for two years, we'd tuck into our mackintoshes and have a blow. He'd enjoy that, and the rougher the weather, the better he liked it. We continued in the same way when I removed, with Richard, to the Middlesbrough district - to the village just south of Saltburn, which was Falconer's home territory. We rode into town in the Club car, and on Sundays we tramped. High up on the tops—he would never keep to the paths but would battle his way through the heather singing Methodist hymns and booming on about the wonders of nature.'

And he nearly smiled, adding, 'Quite the fresh air fiend was Falconer.'

Small David was looking up from the Sutherland Gazette.

'We've come to' t now!' he said in a strange, fluting tone.

'The virtues of fresh air are well attested,' Marriott went on, 'and the cramped, stifling rooms of the suburban house are to be deprecated . . .'

He spoke with agitation, fairly shaking now, and not from the cold. I knew that the truth was approached as Small David, leaning further forward on the edge of his truckle bed, said, 'Spit it oot, man, spit it oot!'

The lawyer seemed in a daze now, gazing at vacancy and shaking his head. In an under-breath that I had to crane forwards to hear, he spoke the words:

'But to open the window on a day of heavy snowfall -'

'There y'are, it's oot!' cried Small David, rolling backwards on his bed, as the lawyer continued to shake his head, speaking a Latin phrase whose meaning I did not take at the time, for I am not well up in the language:

'—that was the reductio ad absurdum.'

The Scotsman was falling back on his bed, cackling, saying over and over, 'It's oot, it's oot!'

What was out?

Bowman was looking directly at me, red face at boiling point.

'Don't you see? Falconer opened the window in the saloon, and caught his death as a result.'

The lawyer went on, in the same head-shaking, sorrowful way. 'It was against the rules of the Club.'

Richie, the son, was standing in the doorway now; he gave a cough.

The truth was coming to me by degrees.

'Falconer opened the window in the Club carriage -' I said, eyeing Marriott, 'and you murdered him for it?'

'Yon dunderheed's got there in the eend!' came the cry from the

Scotsman's bed, and it was followed by a long bar of silence. Then Marriott spoke up again.

'He drew down the window, Detective Stringer. I put it up again; he drew it down a second time; and I struck out - one blow of the cane, Detective Stringer. I did not mean to kill. The word on the indictment would have been "manslaughter".'

The Scotsman snorted.

'But others have gone the same way,' I said. 'He was not the only one killed.'

The boy Richie was in the doorway.

'The kitbags are packed and stowed on the cart, father,' he said. 'All ready for the morning . . . but we must leave your books behind.'

Small David was drawing the bed that the boy had sat on closer to the stove; he then did the same with his own. He opened the door of the stove, and began putting on logs. There seemed to be a deepening of the darkness beyond the window.

'You're pushing off tomorrow?' I said to the room in general.

'Aye,' said Small David at the stove, 'and so are ye.'

'Planning on taking me with you, are you?'

The Scotsman paused about his work.

'A little o' the way, aye.'

'Another big snow's coming, you know?' I said, and Small David rotated his wide body to face me.

'It'll nae matter either way to yersel',' he said.