Murder At Deviation Junction

Chapter Thirty-two

I stepped down at York feeling light as a feather from want of sleep. I was one of only four to climb down there. It was six o'clock, and the station was coming to life in a series of crashes, and in the barking of the exhaust on the first passenger train of the day for Hull, which was pulling away from Platform Thirteen. I stood on Platform Four. A cold wind was sweeping along under the roof, and I could not contemplate removing my hands from my coat pocket.

I walked towards the door of the police office. It ought to be open by now. The Chief was often the first man in, filling the place with the sour smell of his cigar smoke as he read the night's telegrams and the first of the post. But it was locked, and a notice was pasted to the door glass: 'Monday 20 December. Closed. Police training day. Passengers seeking urgent assistance please find Stationmaster's Office by the booking hall.'

I had forgotten this was a training day.

In fact, training days were a species of holiday and generally ended in the bar of the Railway Institute. There were sometimes physical jerks directed by the Chief, sometimes lectures on dry subjects such as 'effecting arrest' or 'railway trespass'. The Chief was required to lay them on, but he didn't really hold with them, and wouldn't mind if you missed one, providing the cause was anything other than bone idleness.

I looked at the notice again. It annoyed me that anything as normal as a training day should be allowed to go on after all that I'd been through. Still, at least I couldn't be stood down on a training day.

I walked on. It was too early to go back to Thorpe-on-Ouse. I'd only wake the wife and Harry, and the boy needed his sleep. I picked up a Yorkshire Post at the bookstall and the fat man who ran it said, 'First one away today, mate.'

On the front page, I read 'Leap from an Omnibus' and 'Hull Soldier's Bad Behaviour'. Nothing had happened, but the paper had to come out all the same.

I walked out of the station, and saw that the snow had gone, leaving only the ancient city of York and a little rain. I went into town, and breakfasted at the Working Men's Cafe by the river at King's Staith. It was the cheapest breakfast going: fried egg, two rashers, tea or coffee and bread and butter all in for a bob. All of yesterday's Yorkshire papers were lying about on the tables, and it turned out that nothing had happened yesterday either, except that the snow had been expected to stop, which it obviously had done. It would apparently be returning, however.

I came out of the cafe and watched the river blokes take a load of coal off a barge until they began to shoot me queer looks, at which I went off into the middle of town.

Should I make a report on my investigation? Bowman wanted me to drop it. He felt he was owed this, having rescued me from the house at Fairy Hillocks. But I would at the least be required to give an account of where I'd been if I wanted to keep my job.

I pushed on. The shop blinds were rolling up, like the weary opening of a person's eyes on a day of cold. The narrow streets were full of the delivery drays, and the shouts of the early morning men. In St Helen's Square, a great consignment of Christmas trees rested against the front of the Mansion House.

I would be willing to put the thing on ice, but for Small David. There were more murders left in him, and that was a certainty. He had to be run in.

I looked up. I had found my way to Brown's, the toyshop that lay just off St Helen's Square. I walked through the door and the ceiling seemed to be sagging, but it was only the hundreds of paper chains stretched across. I turned and saw a great multi-coloured house. It had been built from Empire Bricks. All around it were boxes of same, and some of the smaller ones contained only half a dozen bricks, but I didn't care to look at the price ticket even on these. Beyond the books were dolls - and they were all lying down, so that their part of the shop looked like a mortuary. Then came the narrow spiral staircase that led up to more toys. This was the feature of Brown's: it was helter-skelter-like, almost a toy itself, and it was now all wrapped in green tinsel. I climbed it, feeling an ass at having to turn so many times in order to go up such a little way.

The second floor of Brown's seemed at first one great parade ground of miniature soldiers. A man moved along fast by the far wall - he looked almost guilty at being full-sized. I walked on and the soldiers gave way to trains. The clockwork engines were in the North Eastern style - well, they were painted green at any rate. Small, leaden railway officials stood among them. The engines had keys in their sides, and some were much smaller than the key that operated them, and looked ridiculous as a result. I put my hand on the smallest engine that was not dwarfed by its key, and looked at the price: seven and six. Many a York citizen kept house for a week on that. I took out my pocket book and fished out one ten- bob note. I knew it was the last, but I still had some silver in my pocket and that might make another ten bob.

I paid for the engine, and then walked to Britton's in Gillygate. I stood under the sign looking in the window for a while. The sign read: 'Britton: Coats, Skirts, Furs', and it worried me that the gloves in the window were only draped about to offset the articles mentioned on the sign, and were not really of any account in themselves. But only the gloves had prices in shillings rather than pounds. Besides, the wife had especially mentioned that she wanted a new pair. I went inside and asked the assistant about one particular pair, and they were ten bob exactly. I pulled all the loose change out of various pockets, and it turned out I had enough, although I coloured up in the process of bringing it to hand.

'I'm sure the lady will enjoy them, sir,' said the assistant, and I thought there was something a bit off in that 'sir'. A gentleman ought not to buy his wife a present out of loose change.

For some reason, when the gloves were all wrapped up and ready to be taken away, I asked the assistant, 'What are they made of, by the way?'

'Deerskin, sir.'

Well, I couldn't take them. It was seeing that herd in the Highlands that had done it; and then dreaming about them. I had to take a calfskin pair, which cost another bob again.

I walked back to the station, picked the Humber off the bicycle stand and rode to the edge of York, and then past the six wide fields to Thorpe-on-Ouse. As I walked along the garden path, I heard the wife typing in the parlour, and so left the gloves in their parcel in the saddlebag while pocketing the clockwork engine. I opened the front door and the wife's greeting rang out. She was happy. She'd got the job, I was certain of it. The two telegrams I'd sent were on the mantelpiece, together with some Christmas cards, and a letter in an envelope addressed to the wife - there was nothing from John Ellerton at the Sowerby Bridge shed.

We kissed, and the wife, looking at my sodden suit, said, 'It's rained just in time for Christmas' - adding, 'Mrs Gregory- Gresham has written to confirm the appointment.'

'Very good,' I said. 'How's Harry?'

'Much better. He's gone back to school.'

It was all very good, but again I felt strongly my own unimportance. I produced the little engine from my pocket.

'He'll adore that,' said the wife. 'He'll think he's got the moon.'

He would have a few other things besides, but not much: a top, a ball, a bag of chocolates. We walked through to the kitchen now, where a pot of tea was on the go. A seed cake stood on the table in brown paper.

'That looks an expensive item,' I said.

'The Archbishop's man brought it,' said the wife.

The Archbishop of York had his palace at Thorpe-on-Ouse. At Christmas, one of his servants went around the village houses in a coach delivering cakes and sweetmeats cooked in the Palace kitchens. Given that we didn't have any money to speak of, this felt a little too much like receiving charity.

'You don't mind taking it?' I asked the wife.

'I like the Archbishop,' she said.

'Why? You wouldn't have charity from any other sort of gentry.'

'The Archbishop is different.'

'How come?'

'Because he's religious ... well, sort of.'

She grinned at me. I liked that; she looked smaller when she grinned.

'Did you trace out any murderers in Scotland?'

'Several,' I said.

'But did you find who'd killed the men in the picture?'

'Yes.'

'Then you will have your promotion ...'

'There are complications,' I said.

'Such as?'

'None of the guilty men has yet been taken into custody, for one.'

'Where are they then?'

I shrugged.

'They're all over the shop.'

She looked at me narrowly.

'But you made progress?'

'Yes. Do you want the detail of it?'

'No,' she said, walking over to the larder and pulling back the thin curtain that hung there.

'I've been quite housewifely over the past two days,' she said.

There were some new items in the larder: in pride of place were about a dozen plums and four tins of pineapple rings. The wife explained that the plums were all for Harry. A vegetarian diet was recommended for a weak chest. Everything that cost money was recommended for it

'As for the pineapple,' said the wife, 'I thought we'd have it on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day and the day after Boxing Day. What do you think of that as a plan?'

'I would like them with custard,' I said.

She ignored that (for she couldn't make custard, and refused ever to learn), saying instead, 'I'm dead set on making jam roly-poly.'

I pictured her about it. She would start enthusiastic, and then turn silent. It was best to be out of doors when the wife cooked. She was looking at me.

'You're all in, our Jim. You'll have to go to bed.'

'I don't think I'll get off,' I said. 'I've too much on my mind.'

She was still smiling. She had no inkling that I might be out of a job by the end of tomorrow.

'I'll bring you up a bottle of beer if you like.'

'I'll tell you what - I haven't had a fuck for a little while,' I said.

'I should think not,' said the wife. 'You've been in Scotland for a little while.'

She stepped back and leant against the cold kitchen wall, saying, 'What were the women like up there?'

'I didn't really see any women.'

'That is a very good answer,' she said, grinning again.

I followed her upstairs. On the bed, I got the wife's dress up. She wasn't going to take it off because she had to take some letters across the road to the post office for the two o'clock collection ... but it did come off eventually, and we were in the middle of a rather hot tangle, with the church clock striking two, when I asked:

'Now, are your boots upstairs or downstairs? The elastic-sided ones, I mean?'

'Why on earth do you ask?' said the wife, stopping what she was about.

'Well

'They're by the stove, I think. I was hoping you'd have a go at them with Melton's cream.' 'Oh.'

'I was going to wait until Christmas Eve,' I said, '. . . only I thought of Uncle Roy, who would sort of make Christmas come early. About a week before, he'd come over from Stafford with a couple of pounds' weight of sugar balls, you know, and it struck me that—'

'Sugar what?' said the wife.

'Sugar balls,' I said.

'But what have they got to do with boots?'

A sudden reversal occurred at that moment, so that she was looking down at me as she asked:

'What have they got to do with anything?'

I couldn't come out with it.

'Nothing,' I said. 'Nothing at all - let's just carry on.'

And we did; and afterwards, when she was getting dressed, the wife said, 'I'm going to see Lillian this afternoon. I'm going to ask if you can wear Peter's suit for the interview. He's about your size.'

'Not the suit he digs graves in?' I said.

The wife was backing towards me with her hair pulled up. As I fastened the hooks of her dress, she said, 'Peter Backhouse has three suits. One for digging graves, one for attending the important funerals and one for getting drunk in the Fortune of War. The point is that the mourning suit is of quite good broadcloth, and I think you should wear it on Friday.'

If she wanted me to wear it, I would wear it. It wouldn't matter what I thought or what Peter Backhouse thought. Lillian Backhouse would go along with the wife's scheme; she would do anything for Lydia and vice versa. They were both New Women, and that sort came with an uncommon amount of push. The wife was now 'doing up' the bedroom, and the sound of rain beyond the window was fainter, so that I couldn't tell whether it was falling from the sky, or just trickling away in the gutters.

Finding a comfortable position for sleep, I said, 'You can't really have jam roly-poly without custard, you know.'

'Custard needs lemons and we haven't got any.'

'Why not?'

'Because I didn't choose to buy any.'

'I don't see what you have against custard.'

'Have you never tasted a jam roly-poly so good that it didn't need to be drowned in pints of the flipping stuff?'

'No.'

'Well then, I feel very sorry for you, I really do.'

But she really did not.

'If the rain stops,' the wife said as she was quitting the bedroom, 'we'll go for a walk with Harry after school. We're to give him a turn in the fresh air whenever possible.'

Lydia woke me at four, by which time the rain had stopped.

Harry was not a bit exhausted by his first day at school in a long while, and once he'd had his cup of beef tea, a bit of bread and cheese and one of the plums (which was more than he'd eaten in weeks), he was keen to walk along the river a little way for a look at the swing bridge that brought the London expresses over Naburn locks and into York.

It was a beautiful blue evening, if cold. We walked along the river towards the little village of Naburn, which was a strange business. The way took you through dripping trees, across a couple of silent fields ... and then you struck the huge iron bridge with signals riding above and flashing lights. As we stood alongside it, an unruly goods came over - mixed cargo, going on for ever. It was as if a whole factory had been dismantled and entrained.

'What do you reckon to that?' I asked Harry.

'It's eeenormous,' he said.

He was sitting on my shoulders and kicking my chest - which hurt. We were about to turn around and go home, when the high signals shifted.

'Eh up,' I said, 'another one's coming.'

It was a big engine that brought the carriages - the biggest of the lot. I could scarcely credit it, but it was a V Class Atlantic that was coming riding over the locks of the Ouse.

'Now you don't normally expect to see that on a London run,' I shouted up to Harry, as the thing came crashing over. 'It's called the Gateshead Infant!'

'Why, our dad?'

'It's called "Gateshead" because it was shopped out of Gateshead, and "Infant" ... well, because it's big.'

'Are you trying to confuse the boy?' said the wife.

'What do you think, Harry?' I shouted up, when the last of the carriages and the brake van had finally gone over.

No answer.

'Better than an aeroplane any day, wouldn't you say?' I craned around to see his face, and I could tell he was thinking it over. The question, like many another just then, was rather in the balance.