Murder At Deviation Junction

Chapter Four

Nine hours after the discovery, I looked out of the window of the station building, and the night air was suddenly clear, like a stopped clock. The train was long gone. The engine had detached from it, and taken a run at the drift that lay around the bend. It had just gone bang at the snow and had cut through it directly. The train had then carried on towards Whitby, taking the wife and Harry with it. They were in for a weary drag, but Lydia had made Harry a pillow with her wrap, and they would be in time to connect with the last York train. Duty required me to stay at Stone Farm, and Lydia had quite understood:

'No sense in shirking with your interview coming up.'

She was pushing the pace all right.

I'd then waded through the snow on the bank with two of the blokes from the snow gang, and they'd showed me the cabin where the main discovery had been made. It had been used as a shelter by the platelayers when the direction of the line had been slightly altered years before. The line now went the seaward side of the bank rather than the landward side. A short stretch of the old line remained as part of stationmaster Crystal's empire: Deviation Junction.

The cabin was soundly built, and there were three roof beams at a good height for hanging. Toppled over on the floor of the shelter was an old wooden chair. Had the man stepped on to it while fixing the rope, and then kicked it away? There was a mix-up of rusted tools, railway line catches and clips and baulks of timber on the floor. The body had lain amid this stuff, having fallen away from the noose when the rot set in. It was a queer kind of comfort to know that a man could not remain hanged for ever.

On my return to the station, a loco had run up light engine from Saltburn to take away the snow gang. Every man had stood on the footplate, most with beer bottles in hand.

It was now three-thirty a.m. I closed the doors that gave on to the platform, and poked the fire in the little room that made shift as the Stone Farm booking hall. Through the ticket window, I could see Crystal counting coppers in the ticket office, attending to the business he'd been kept from by the arrival of our train. The body was in there with him, stretched on a table top, and muffled in the blanket. Those bones were Crystal's property, and he growled like a dog if anyone came near. This didn't bother me overmuch: I'd sent two telegrams from the signal box - one to the Middlesbrough office of the railway police, one to the local force, whose nearest office was at Loftus, five miles down the line. And I'd kept my hands on the length of rope and the camera. Nothing would happen until morning, and I had no desire to be at close quarters with Paul Peters in the meantime.

That was the fellow's name. I'd had it from Steve Bowman, who'd also decided to stay at Stone Farm. After seeing the body, and chucking up on the platform, he'd seemed in a great state of nervous tension, wandering about in a daze. He'd said it was the shock of realising that he'd known the dead man; and it was certainly a strange turn-up - far too strange to be explained by coincidence, in my view.

Bowman had got sensible at about midnight, though - which was about when he'd been able to lay his hands on some strong waters. He'd then found his tongue, and told his story to Crystal and myself.

Peters was a photographer. He'd been sent north with Bowman this time last year to tour interesting spots on the North Eastern Railway and get articles from it. They'd put up at the Zetland Hotel in Saltburn for a week in order to look at the easterly parts of the Company's territory. It had been snowing heavily then as now. Peters had kept going off on his own, taking the train at all hours over the Middlesbrough—Whitby stretch. Night photography, weird railway scenes in the half-light or strange weather—it was the coming thing, and he was a demon at it. Peters was a young lad, barely seventeen, and Bowman had known he ought to accompany him. It had troubled his conscience at the time, and was doing so with compound interest just now.

'There'll be an investigation of some sort, I take it?' Bowman said, from the booking-hall bench. He would keep asking that.

'It'll go to the coroner,' I said, for the umpteenth time. 'But what I want to know is: why wasn't more of a fuss made when he went missing?'

Bowman kept silence, taking another go on a beer bottle. He'd been doing excellent justice to a crate of John Smith's - a consignment without a label - that Crystal had given over in exchange for the pair of us staying out of his way. I could see Crystal now through the ticket window. Having got the gist of Bowman's story - which seemed to have fairly bored him - he'd retreated to his desk and begun counting coppers.

'It wouldn't do for the magazine to give the impression it didn't know where its own men were,' Bowman said at length. 'Not that he was on the staff. He had an arrangement with the editor; that's all.'

Silence for a space.

'Peters was a free agent,' Bowman continued. 'Not married - parents dead, if I remember rightly.'

His camera was in its box at his feet. He stared at a poster of Whitby and sighed. Everything he said seemed to come with a sigh.

'Was he the sort likely to make away with himself?'

Bowman nudged his spectacles again.

'Well, he wasn't very amiable,' he said. 'Not much conversation. Taking photographs was everything to him.'

'But was he the sort to kill himself? The nervous sort, I mean?'

Bowman looked down at the floor, looked back up again.

'He didn't like it if you said, "Take a pot - go on, take a pot of that engine." That would annoy him.'

'But you wouldn't say he was at breaking strain?'

Bowman took a long go on his beer bottle.

'The boy took postcard views for Boots - that was how he really got his living. He'd go to any town and make it look interesting: cathedral or castle if the town ran to one, or failing that, a fine view of the bloody fish market. He was only a kid but he did pretty well by it.'

Bowman raised the bottle to his lips again. He was queer-looking all right: thin legs, little pot of a belly, head too small, nose too big. He might have been built from bits of several other men.

I said, 'You take your own pictures now, I see.'

He tipped his little head up towards me, pushed at his specs.

'The editor was minded to make economies, as he is in every matter except those touching on his own salary and expenses. He said, "You go roving about so much - it costs fortunes to have you always accompanied. Take your own pictures.'"

He leant forward towards the fire, staring into it as he warmed his hands.

'Not to boast, Jim, but I am The Railway Rover. Apart from anything else, I'm the only one who ever leaves the bloody office. As regards the pictures, I do just take a pot, you know, and it seems to work.'

He was reaching into the valise he'd carried off the Whitby train.

'I've a mind to stop writing altogether, and go all out on photography. It's a good deal quicker - at least, it is the way I do it. There's one of mine here, if you'll just hold on a second.'

He took out a journal, and I had my first sight of The Railway Rover. Bowman leafed through it for a while, before handing it over kept open at a certain page.

'What's your opinion?'

The article was entitled 'Some Drivers and Their Engines', words and pictures by S. J. Bowman. The photograph in question showed a smart o-8-o at some station or other.

'It seems a first-rate picture to me,' I said, 'but -'

'Be straight now,' said Bowman, giving a twisted little grin.

'Well - that telegraph pole does appear to come straight up out of the locomotive chimney.'

Bowman sighed, sitting back again.

'But that's down to the driver stopping directly in front of the telegraph pole.' 'He's stopped there for a signal, or for whatever reason,' I said. 'Aesthetics don't come into it.'

'Well, I was damned if I was going to ask him to move the engine,' said Bowman. 'Peters would do that, you know. He'd go up to the driver, and he'd say, "Could you just reverse out of this shadow that you're presently standing in?" and the chap'd say, "Reverse out of this what?" Couldn't believe it.'

He shook his head and looked away as I said, 'But if you'd moved .. .'

He was back at his bottle; back to gazing at vacancy.

I dragged my own bench closer to the fireplace, leafing through The Railway Rover as I did so. 'Notes by Rocket' came at the back. They were light items: 'In a trade supplement recently appearing in The Times newspaper, an article on "New Railway Locomotives of the Midland Railway" gives prominence to a picture of a z-6-o engine of the GWR. As any schoolboy knows, this is not an Atlantic, is not new and does not belong to the Midland. Otherwise, we can have no complaints whatever as to the accuracy of the representation.'

It was well-turned, I supposed; a little fancier than the common run of railway writing.

I went through the pages again, heading backwards this time.

'What time's this milk train due?' Bowman asked, after a while.

'Twenty to five,' I said.

We were to go on to Whitby by the first train of the day. It was the morning milk, but one passenger carriage was carried along behind the vans.

'Can't think why we've hung on here after all,' said Bowman.

Why had he stayed? He could've told me what he knew about Peters in good time to re-board the Whitby train. But I reserved that particular question - along with about a hundred others.

'Will you be investigating the matter yourself?' Bowman asked.

'Shouldn't think so,' I said, and I lifted my eyes from The Railway Rover to think of Detective Sergeant Shillito. That bastard would put the kybosh on any independent action on my part. Besides, this was a matter for the Northern Division of the railway force, whereas we in York belonged to the Southern Division.

Crystal was eyeing me once again through the ticket pigeonhole.

'What are you reading?' asked Bowman.

'An item called "The Railways in Spain".'

'They fall mainly on the plain,' said Bowman, leaning back on his bench. He kept silence for a minute, before muttering 'Fawcett' and shaking his head. The article was, I saw, by B. R. M. Fawcett.

I took it up again. The clock ticked.

'I'm surprised at your sticking with that, quite honestly,' said Bowman. 'I mean to say, do you not find the style rather antiquated?'

I read on, while Bowman watched me.

'"We must advert to—",' he said, after a space. 'That's Fawcett all over. I will not "advert".'

'He knows his stuff on the railways of Spain,' I said.

'Yes,' said Bowman. 'Well, he's better up on train matters than I am.'

'How do you mean?' I said, looking at him. 'That's the whole subject of the journal.'

Bowman shrugged.

'You have no interest in railways?' I asked him.

'I started penny-a-lining around Fleet Street after school - got afloat on railways, that's all. Railway topics were the easiest ones to get rid of.'

'Did you not play trains as a boy?'

'Must've done, I suppose. I really can't recall.'

He took another pull on the beer bottle.

'I'm done, I don't mind telling you,' he said. 'I was up all hours last night as well.'

'Up at Gateshead, weren't you?'

This had come out earlier on.

Bowman nodded.

'Function at the Railwaymen's Institute there,' he said, yawning. 'Presentation of a cabinet gramophone to a fellow who'd done fifty years of service. I thought it might make an item in "Queer and Quaint".'

'And will it?'

'If I'm desperate come press day,' he went on, walking over to the window that gave on to the station yard. 'When a function bores the daylights out of me I'll generally put "Several interesting speeches were made", and leave it at that.'

Bowman had spotted something through the window, for he fell away from his speech and craned closer to the glass. I joined him at the window. In the light of dawn there was a bike half-buried in a drift, and a young lad picking himself off the road. It was me six years ago: Crystal's lad porter, arriving for his day's work.

He lifted the bicycle and started pushing it through the snow, kicking the stuff up as he went.

He walked through the station door, the left side of his uniform covered with snow. I nodded at him, and he shot me a funny look - 'Morning, mister' - before blundering through into the ticket office and closing the door behind him.

I heard his cry of 'What the bloody hell's that, Mr Crystal?' and then Crystal came down on him like a ton of coal, vociferating away for a good half-minute, as Bowman finished off his beer bottle.

'Rather wearing, the company of a chap like that,' he said, leaning forward on his perch, and pushing his spectacles up his nose.

When he'd finished bawling at the kid, Crystal furnished some sort of explanation, and although I couldn't make out the whole scene through the ticket window, the lad must have been permitted a look under the blanket, for he exclaimed, in a voice loud enough to be clearly heard beyond the ticket office, 'Hold on, I know that bloke!'

This checked Bowman, who was setting about another beer bottle. He froze with the opener in his hand, all ears. I was on my feet straightaway, and into the ticket office. 'You don't ruddy know him,' Crystal was saying, as he put on his topcoat. (Having worked all night, he was about to be relieved by a spare man from Loftus up the way). He eyeballed me for a moment, then relented.

'Best talk to him if that's your fixed idea,' Crystal said to the lad, nodding in my direction.

I took out my notebook and indelible pencil, and asked the lad to say what he knew about Paul Peters.

'Bloke came through here about this time last year; stepped down off the one-thirty stopping train to Whitby. Only a young fellow, and he'd a camera slung over his shoulder - camera on legs, it was. No, wait, he had two, now that I think on - just like this here.'

The kid looked at the camera I wore; looked at me.

'I'd just finished me dinner,' he went on, 'and I was scraping snow and laying down sand as per instructions from Mr Crystal. Bloke came up to me. He said, "Would you mind putting some of the snow back down on the platform?" I said, "Come again, mister?" Bloke said, "Could you put some of it back, as it makes for a better picture?" I said, "It might be pretty, but it en't safe." He looked a bit put out, so I said, "Can you not take a picture of sum- mat else?" "Such as what?" he said, and I said, "We have a passing loop here, you know.'"

'Marshalling yard,' rapped Crystal.

Bowman was at the doorway, listening hard.

'Well, bloke re-slung his camera, and went off to have a look. About ten minutes after, he came back and said, "I think I'd better be off up to Middlesbrough. When's next train?" I said -'

'Hold on a moment,' I cut in. 'Had he taken a picture of the loop or marshalling yard or whatever it's known as?'

'I can't say,' said the lad porter, 'but I reckon he might well have. I mean - he was loony. Any road, like I was saying -'

But he'd forgotten what he was saying.

'You said the bloke was after going to Middlesbrough,' I prompted him.

'That's it. I said, "If it's views you're after, you'd be better off in Whitby." He said he didn't want "views" but railway interest, anything out of the common for a magazine, so I said, "If you take the next Middlesbrough service you'll get there in time to see sum- mat a bit that way." And he said, "What?" and I said, "Why, the Club Train.'"

'Club Train?' I said, and there came a fearful crashing from the station yard.

'Milk cart's here,' said Crystal. 'You,' he continued, pointing to the kid, 'stop yarning and get to work. I'm off home.'

And he pushed his way past Bowman, at which point the lad porter seemed to take in the journalist for the first time. 'You all right, mister?' he said. 'You don't half look seedy.'