Murder At Deviation Junction

Chapter Five

Behind the lad porter, I spied the steam jets of the day's first train.

'Bloke boarded the train for Middlesbrough,' continued the kid. 'I closed the door behind him myself. He was after photographing the Club Train.'

He and the bloke in the milk cart had the churns lined up on the platform ready for loading. As the engine came past the snow-crowned signal box, the kid was leaning on a churn, going over his tale as I made notes in my book with my indelible pencil. The lad held a long ladle in his hand. He'd lately dipped it into the churn, and he kept looking down at it rather than drinking from it.

'But as soon as you'd done so, you realised you'd made a bloomer over the time?'

'Aye,' he said. (He seemed very happy to admit the fact.) 'I worked out that he wouldn't get there in time to see the Club Train. It would have left Middlesbrough before he arrived.'

'Can you recall the date?'

He shrugged. 'Run-up to Christmas time.'

'Why was he so dead set on seeing the Club Train?'

'It's a swanky thing, en't it? Luxury carriage set aside for the toffs. All modern conveniences carried. Newspapers, hot drinks, ice refrigerator - that's for the champagne, you know.'

The train was beside us now, adding its steam to the whiteness of the air, but the lad didn't stir himself.

'Why don't you drink that milk?' I said.

'I like to watch it,' he said, still gazing down at the bowl of the ladle. 'I like to see the cream rising to the top.'

He pitched the milk on top of the platform, and made ready to load the train.

'That's what's going to happen to me,' he said, as the train guard jumped down from the brake van, ready to give a hand. 'I'll rise to the top.'

'I started under Crystal myself,' I said. 'I was his lad porter for a while at Grosmont.'

The milk train was in now. Thirty tons of engine stood alongside the kid - a B16 class 4-6-0, very nice motor, and he paid it no mind. Instead, he was thinking over my remark.

'And what are you now?' he asked, giving me a level look.

'Detective,' I said. 'Detective . . . sergeant,' and of course it was a lie. 'You'll be hearing from me again,' I said, re-pocketing my notebook.

I had in that moment determined to investigate the matter of Paul Peters, and not leave it to others. I was bored in my work and in need of distraction. I found myself thinking: if this is suicide, there will be nothing to plunge into, and I will be straight back to hunting up ticket frauds and petty hooligans. But as my thoughts ran on, I found that I was trying to picture whoever had done for the boy and made it look like suicide.

Why would a man come all the way to Stone Farm to make away with himself? Peters was a young fellow doing work that he enjoyed and with everything before him. He had not committed suicide. He had been killed - I was on the instant certain of it - and Stephen Bowman was mixed up in it somehow, or knew more than he let on. He was standing by the milk train now, having stepped across from the station building, camera once again over his shoulder. Why had he come to this station on this day? But no - he hadn't made the choice to come. We had all been turfed off the train against expectations. And as for the reason for his being on the line . . . well, he was staying at Whitby. But there was more to it than that.

Crystal, ready to depart for his bed, stood in the booking office doorway. I would show him what I was made of - him and Shillito both. I would search for the truth about Peters, and if I made enough headway before Christmas Eve, I might be DS by New Year.

I climbed into the one passenger carriage with Bowman. We were railway rovers, him and me both. Any man who wanted to make his way in the modern world had to be. We stowed our cameras on the luggage racks. Bowman, not looking at me, said, 'Your wife said you were detective grade. But you gave out to the boy that you were detective sergeant.'

I coloured up while removing my topcoat. He didn't miss much, for all the booze he put away. He must have a head like cast iron.

'I have the grade "detective sergeant" on the brain,' I said, 'what with forever thinking about this interview I have coming up.'

Bowman gave a short nod.

'Christmas Eve's the big day,' I said, 'at the headquarters in Middlesbrough.'

Bowman, taking his seat, said, 'I can hardly think for tiredness just now, but when I get back to London I'll fish out last year's diary. It's in the office somewhere, and I have a note in there of Peters's wanderings. Come down, and I'll stand you dinner. Make a day of it.'

'Up,' I said.

'What's that?'

'It's "up" to London as far as the railways are concerned.'

I wondered at his not knowing, being a railway journalist.

He nodded wearily, saying, 'But what if you're going across country: Stafford to Birmingham, for instance? What's that? It's neither up nor down.'

'The kid says that Peters carried two cameras. That right?'

Bowman nodded and yawned at the same time.

'He would generally take two on a job, yes.'

'Why?'

'In case one broke - even though the model he used, the Mentor Reflex, is about the sturdiest portable available. He was over-keen, you see.'

Bowman made do with one Mentor Reflex. The job did not justify the precaution of taking two - was not important enough. He had arranged his topcoat over his legs, making a blanket of it. As we pulled away from Stone Farm, he looked through the window at the snow-covered fields. It was all like so much spilt milk.

'Beautiful railway ride!' he said, in his sarcastic way.

A moment later, he was asleep, and the stop at the small town of Loftus - where more milk was taken up - didn't interrupt his slumbers. As we rolled on parallel with the high street, the sea came into view once more, and I looked down to the left, towards the ironstone mine that stood on the low cliff there. This was Flat Scar mine, one of the biggest, and it squatted at the seaward end of a great valley that had been cut by a tiny beck.

The wheelhouse of the mine was at the centre of a web of wires. Iron buckets were being sent out along these, running to and from the mine's own railway station. The mine was its own little black town, with its own gasworks and its own black beach behind the main building, on which rusty lumps of machinery and slag were dumped as required. A wooden jetty stuck out to sea, but this was disused now. No stone went north by boat.

From the mine station, ironstone was taken up a zigzag railway towards the furnaces at Rectory Works. I looked up to the right, and saw the Rectory (as the works was generally known) with its line of fiery towers - only they were not blast furnaces but kilns, and they did not make iron but burned the lumps of ironstone down so that there was more iron and less stone. It was then cheaper to carry to the blast furnaces of Ironopolis.

The iron cloud over the kilns was slowly changing from one shape to another^ moving like a person in agony.

As we rumbled on towards the Kilton Viaduct, which would carry us across the valley, I looked down at the mine, and up at the kilns. Here was a pretty situation: a train was setting off from the mine station. It was making ready to climb the zigzag. I stood up in the compartment to watch the exchange. The zigzag line, running east to west, would take the iron train between the hundred- and-fifty-foot-high brick legs of the Kilton Viaduct while we crossed over the top, heading from north to south.

A wind gauge fluttered beyond the compartment window - a strange-looking contraption. It was like a small windmill, and it operated a 'stop' signal in high winds. It was not safe for a train to be on the viaduct in those conditions, but we were rolling across it now, going at the precautionary slow speed over the great ravine. The walls on either side of the single track were low, and I looked over the one on the left to see the iron train still climbing. At any moment, it would be passing underneath. The falling snow, the rising iron cloud, the crisscrossing of the trains, the rise and fall of the tide and the slow approach of Christmas - all were part of the larger machine. The transition I'd taken a fancy to happened out of sight, with black smoke rising from below. The little ironstone engine had been on the left; now, having passed underneath the viaduct, it was rising to the right, taking its dozen wagons to the waiting kilns of the Rectory Works, where more fun lay in store - for the wagons would be picked up bodily by a mighty winch, and carried to the top of the kilns, there to be upended. I had seen that business carried on, and it was like watching a hungry giant feed itself. An account of it might have been interesting for readers of Bowman's magazine, and what could match it for photographic opportunities?

But he slept on.

He had no enthusiasm for his work. He was like me: fixed in a rut. I gazed at his fiery little face, which was suddenly blotted out as we shot into the Grinkle Tunnel. Three quarters of a mile of blackness . . . and we came out into the beginnings of day. Bowman had rolled forwards somewhat. He was the same sleeping man as before, only now shaking with the train.

He was not shamming.

He had wanted to know my line of questioning - that was why he'd stayed on at Stone Farm. But I must lose him in Whitby, for I intended to make straight for the siding where, the lad porter had told me, the Club Train had been kept; and was kept still. It no longer ran, and nor did Peters, who had been closely interested in it, and I thought those facts might very well be connected.

We were now gliding across the viaduct over Staithes. That village was packed tight in the mighty ravine below. During the short stop at the station, I watched fishermen walking between boats on the snowy beach, wondering whether to put out. 'All weather is a warning.' Where had I heard that? A man led a pony with a sack slung on either side across a white field. Kettleness station came next; then the viaduct of Sandsend, which was like the legs of a giant iron man walking, and the houses below looked as though they'd been pitched off the cliff by that same giant.

I was not tired, despite having been up all night, and I knew the reason: in the months and even years beforehand, I'd done too little. I had been biding my time in the York Railway Police office, avoiding the chilly stares of Shillito, listening enviously to the sounds of the engines and enginemen coming and going in the station beyond. An office in a station was a ridiculous thing: a ship forever docked.

We were now rolling across the snow-covered cliff-tops - and our train was the only moving thing on those tops as we made for the terminus, Whitby West Cliff. As we came in, I woke Bowman with a touch on the shoulder.

'Copy's come up short,' he said, quite distinctly, at the moment of waking, and then he looked at me for a moment as though he didn't know me. But he quickly apologised, and collected up his things.

Whitby West Cliff station was a little way out of the town, which was silenced by snow. Bowman walked beside me through the drifting whiteness, the camera slung over his shoulder. We stopped outside a bakery that was responsible for all the activity in one particular narrow street just above the harbour.

'Which is your hotel, old man?' I said.

'Oh,' he said. 'The Metropole.'

'I know it,' I said, and I pointed seawards. 'The alley past the chapel will see you directly to the door.'

'Right-o,' he said, but he made no move.

A low tugboat was rocking across the water from the west to the east harbour wall - nothing more to look at than a floating chimney. A church clock counted sadly to five.

'To think that it's twelve hours until I can take a drink,' said

Bowman. 'That's if I stick to my fixed rule .. . which I never do.'

'Well, I'm for the town station, and home,' I said.

He nodded and we shook hands.

'You'll keep me posted as to your investigation?'

I nodded. 'I'll be in touch,' I said.

But he still didn't move off, and it struck me that he'd been clinging to me like a barnacle right from the start. He now muttered something while looking down at the snowy pavement.

'What's that?' I said.

'Peters,' he said, looking up. 'It comes to me now . . . He'd had one of his two cameras stolen.'

'Where?'

'Middlesbrough - in the vicinity of the station, I think.'

'Did he report it?'

'Not sure.'

'When did this happen?'

'Couple of days before I saw him for the last time. I must look at my diary, as I say.'

And he nodded again and moved off in the direction of the sea.