Murder At Deviation Junction

Chapter Thirty-four

I walked into the main office and Shillito was waiting there, holding a leathern notecase under his arm. There was a mark on his forehead that I'd made. He watched me come out of the Chief's door, and motioned me towards my own desk. Wright was looking on from his corner - the best ringside seat.

Shillito sat at his own desk, which was directly opposite mine, and he began to eye me. Was he going to ask for my notebook? As he continued to stare, Wright sharpened a pencil without looking at it. His eyes were on me. A great train was leaving from Platform Four, and the noise made my heartbeat begin to gallop.

Just then, the Chief came out of his own room and quit the office without a look back. It was all no good; I was for it.

Now Shillito was speaking.

'As a body of men we must stand together, would you not agree, Detective Stringer?'

'I would, sir.' (I found I didn't object to calling him 'sir' as long as I fixed my eyes on that mark that I'd made.)

'We're up against it on all fronts,' he said.

I nodded. The train had gone, leaving only the steady, slow scrape of Wright's pencil-sharpening blade.

'We do not have the privileges of the ordinary public detectives,' Shillito ran on, 'and the travellers are frequently against us.'

I nodded again.

'They chaff us, will not give up their tickets when asked.'

I was tired of nodding.

'And do you know what the other classes of railwaymen call us?'

'The pantomime police.' 'Just so.'

(He hadn't reckoned on me knowing that.)

'We must stand together, then.'

'I have already agreed to that.'

I was pushing it with Shillito, but I seemed to have decided that it was all up for me in any case.

'Very well then, try this: we must not deal each other blows'

Whatever reply I made to that, he wasn't listening, but was standing up, removing some papers from the notecase.

'You want to get your promotion - there it is.'

He dashed the papers down on my desk.

'Now I'm overdue at home,' he said, and he strode out of the office without another word.

There were half a dozen pages, torn from a magazine, a railway journal - not The Railway Rover or the Railway Magazine or anything I'd heard of, but some little journal out of the common. I caught them up, and looked across at Wright, who was still scraping away at the pencil.

'What the hell's going off?' I said.

'You did yourself a good turn when you clouted him,' said Wright.

He put down the pencil, sat back and folded his arms.

'It's Christmas,' he said. 'Do you want an orange?'

There was no sign of any orange, so this might have been a sort of bluff. I thanked him and said that if he was after doing me a good turn, he might record in the log book that I'd gone out on the search for Davitt, the fare evader. I then quit the office and walked under a sky that threatened more snow, to the Punch Bowl in Stonegate, which was known for its twopenny pints of ale. It was a secret-looking pub with many small, half-underground rooms that got smaller the further back you went from the street, so that it was like drinking in a coal mine. In the very furthest snug from the street, I began to read the bundle of papers that Shillito had given me. It was a very strange return for having hit him; in fact, the papers were strange all ends up.