Death on a Branch Line (11 page)

Just then there came through the open windows the roaring of a machine. It caused a slight stir in the room, but the drinkers stood the shock, as though the noise came as nothing out of the common to them. Walking over to one of the front windows I saw by the moonlight two men on a motor-bike that ought only to have carried one. The first man – the one on the seat – I did not recognise until I made out the identity of the one riding on the rear mudguard. He was the villainous-looking lad porter, and the one in the seat was the signalman. They both wore their North Eastern company uniforms, but with no shirt collars or caps. They climbed down from the motor-bike, and a moment later came clattering and dust-covered through the door that led into the bar. As the door swung to behind him, the lad porter called across to Hardy, who faced away from him. The pub fell silent as the porter said:

‘The auction poster in the booking office, Mr Hardy – out of date it was, you were quite right. I took it down as per your instructions. You won’t catch me shirking on the job, Mr Hardy.’

He had an older man’s grey, pitted face on a boy’s body, and without his cap, I saw that his head was shaved; he looked to me like an evil jockey.

He carried on with his stream of shouted sarcasm:

‘I’ve closed the warehouse – padlocked it good and proper as you asked, Mr Hardy. You’ll find no cause to complain of slackness there …’

But as he spoke, the man addressed turned and made for the door with head down. The porter, eyeballing him all the way, asked, ‘Where you off to, Mr Hardy? Early night is it?’

Hardy made no answer but pushed on grimly through the door, at which the lad porter said to the signalman, ‘Well, en’t that the frozen limit? It was a perfectly innocent enquiry!’

The signalman grinned and walked over to the bar, where Mrs Handley was nowhere to be seen. Instead, he called for two beers
from Mr Handley, and with no ‘please’ or ‘thank-you’ about it. His companion remained standing in front of the door, from where he kept up his speech:

‘He’s a hard nut to crack, is Mr Hardy. There’s just no bloody pleasing him, is there, Eddie old mate? Treat him with consideration, and he throws a paddy.’ He shook his head, saying, ‘Well, we’d best reach an accommodation somehow, or the results won’t be pretty … Are you staring at me, mister,’ he ran on, addressing me, ‘or is it just my imagination?’

I kept silence.

‘No,’ said the lad porter, ‘you must have been staring at me because, now that I come to think of it, I don’t have any imagination, do I, Eddie?’

He was appealing to the signalman, who seemed nothing more to him than a sounding board, a mobile audience.

‘Not to speak of, Mick,’ said the signalman, ‘– not
over
-imaginative.’

I was weighing the kid up. He had a boy’s body in size, but was jockey-like in that he looked as though he could take a pounding or give one. It was very noticeable that he stood directly before the door, blocking the exit.

‘Bit keen-eyed you are, mate,’ he said.

It was quite beyond believing, but in the silence of the pub, the two of us had fallen to a staring contest.

‘I’ll give you some fucking rough music,’ the lad porter said, after an interval.

I said, ‘I’d think on if I were you. You don’t know who you’re talking to.’

‘I saw you at the fucking station,’ he said. ‘Come in with your missus. She’s a bit of all right, your missus.’

‘I’ll crown you in a minute,’ I said.

‘Try it if you like. But I don’t see you have any cause.’

‘At the station,’ I said, ‘you didn’t attend to us …’

‘And
why
d’you suppose I didn’t?’

‘Because you were sitting at the top of the fucking signal pole, that’s why.’

‘I was changing the lamps, if that’s all right with you, mate.’

‘You looked set for the evening – smoking ’n all. Paraffin and naked flame don’t go together too well this weather.’

‘Well … what do
you
know about it?’

I eyed him directly, and the situation cracked.

‘Fancy a pint, mate?’ asked the porter, and he indicated to the signalman that he should stand me a glass.

The porter put out his little hard hand.

‘Mick Woodcock,’ he said.

He had a lot off, all right – especially for a kid of … well, it was hard to say but he might not have been more than eighteen.

‘Sorry about that, mate,’ he said, passing me the pint of Smith’s as Mr Handley looked on, and the agriculturals began talking again. ‘I’m liable to fly off over anything. You here on holiday, are you? I mean … don’t suppose you’re here on account of our murder, are you? You en’t a copper or a journalist or owt like that?’

‘On holiday,’ I said.

He was sharp, this kid.

‘The bloke that did it goes up Monday morning,’ he said.

There was a long interval of silence as we drank on.

Woodcock said, ‘That business at the station earlier on – I didn’t mean owt by it, you know. Fact is I like a high seat. Very viewsome it is, up at the top with the signals and you can take a pot at the odd rabbit. We have to keep ’em down, you know. I mean, they
will
get at the perishables in the warehouse. Of course, I’ll come down to give a hand with bags occasionally …’

‘Very good of you, I’m sure.’

‘But only if a good tip seems to be in prospect.’

‘He’ll only come down for the gentry,’ put in the signalman, ‘and not all of
them
.’

I was meant to be riled by this, so I gave it the go-by.

‘Very likely,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the pint, anyhow.’

And as I made towards the door, I heard the lad porter say, ‘Aye, on your way.’

I ought not to have let
that
go
, I thought, as I walked upstairs.

What would the Chief have done in my place? He’d have laid
the bloke out, and then he’d have gone all out to get him lagged – three months hard for assault whether the bloke had fought back or not. I reached our room, but when I tried the door it was locked.

Chapter Fourteen

I rapped on the door, and there came a noise from along the narrow corridor. I turned. The man from Norwood was there, holding a candle and eyeing me in his dressing gown.

‘Everything quite all right, old man?’ he said.

‘Ought to be,’ I said, thinking of the German papers that had spilled from his bag.

He looked more impressive somehow in his dressing gown, although it was shabby enough. I knocked again, and Lydia answered the door in a flurry, wearing her night-dress. I walked into the room, and saw that the window had been thrown wide open. The wife strode across to the bed and sat down upon it cross-legged like a Hindoo, which she would often do at night – something about being in her night-dress seemed to bring it on. She looked from me to the open window as the curtains stirred.

‘Why d’you lock the door?’ I said.

‘Now … what do you suppose about the bicyclist?’ she said.

‘Eh?’

‘I left the bar when I saw him through the window messing about at the back of the pub. I’ve been watching him from
our
window while you were hammering on the door doing your level best to give me away.’

‘Where is he?’

‘He
was
just down below.’

‘And what was he about?’

‘He was at his bike.’

‘It’s punctured,’ I said. ‘I overheard him say so in the bar.’

‘He held a pocket knife,’ said the wife. ‘He took it, and stabbed
it twice into the front tyre.’

‘That
would
give him a puncture.’

‘It might just,’ said the wife.

‘But he already had one.’

‘No, he did not. He stabbed the wheel to make what he said true. He
wanted
a puncture.’

‘It’s rum. How will he account for it, I wonder?’

‘Sharp stones,’ the wife immediately replied, as though she’d spent a good while thinking about it. ‘That man has done everything to convince us that he’s a cyclist, short of riding his flipping bike. Why does he
have
a bike if he doesn’t go anywhere? And why does the man Lambert have a railway timetable if
he
doesn’t go anywhere? It’s just as though everyone in this place is
checked
.’

She was now looking over at the dresser.

‘The second thing,’ she said. ‘… Your warrant card – you put it in the left-hand drawer, didn’t you?’

I nodded.

‘When I came in, both drawers were a little way out and your card had jumped to the right-hand one.’

I heard the roar of the motor-bike as it left the front of the pub – it couldn’t have been those two that had come into the room. They’d entered the bar directly after arriving. Mrs Handley and young Mervyn had seen me put the warrant card in the drawer, but my money was on the Norwood clerk. The noise of the motor-bike faded away, leaving nothing but the sound of massed grasshoppers. No breeze stirred the window curtain.

The wife said, ‘Who do you think’s been in, then?’

I sat down next to her on the counterpane, and we went over everything. I undressed by degrees as we spoke, and was down to my undershirt when I looked at the wife, and said:

‘You’re leaving by the first train in the morning, anyhow.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I am not. Apart from anything else, I’m set on seeing inside that house.’

She meant the Hall. She had a liking for grand houses. The Archbishop of York had his palace at Thorpe-on-Ouse, and the wife would find any excuse to go inside. She aspired to own a
grand house herself, although she’d never admit the fact. It was terrible in a way to think that she had all these ambitions kept down.

‘Tomorrow, I’m going to fetch the Chief,’ I said.

In my five years on the force, the wife had never set eyes on the Chief but I knew she was strong against him. He was the fellow who kept me out all hours, who put dangerous work my way.

Talk of the Chief brought me back to the subject of station master Hardy, and how it was the Chief’s regiment that he had in miniature in the booking office. I told her a little of what I knew about the Chief’s time fighting in Africa:

‘All they had to hand’, I said, ‘against the spears of a thousand charging dervishes was –’

‘A large quantity of guns.’

As the wife said this, she was stretching out on the bed.

She was always down on the army. In the first place, it was all men, and secondly it would be the army who’d put a stop for good-and-all to the women’s movement if it took matters that bit too far.

I was beside her now, and my hand was under her night-dress, making its regular explorations.

‘Do you suppose the blank papers in that man’s bag were written in invisible ink?’ she said.

‘But then why wouldn’t he put the German stuff in invisible ink as well? This is not the time to be seen carrying German papers about.’

The wife said, ‘I’ve often thought – if you can have invisible ink, then why can’t you have invisible anything else? Invisible
bicycles
.’

And, not waiting for an answer, she quickly stood up and took her night-dress off; then she walked over to the wardrobe, and fished my darbies out of my suit-coat pocket. She sometimes liked me to lock her hands into them for a while before our love-making. She liked to pretend to be in desperate straits, with no knickers on and her hands fast. I thought it a strange look-out for a reader of
The Freewoman
, but that was the wife all over. She was an unpredictable sort.

We fucked once, and then we did it again, differently arranged, in very short order. It might have been the danger of Adenwold that had stirred her up, and the danger of Morocco, the raging fires and the strikes and all the rest; or just the fact that somebody had been in our room without our say-so. As we turned in, I thought:
Well, she’s off in the morning, no question. The Chief will
come in and she will go
.

I put the oil lamp to its lowest setting and closed my eyes. But sleep wouldn’t come, and I fell to listening to the country sounds – the many desperate rustlings, scufflings and screechings. The chimes of midnight floated up from the village, and I walked over to the chair on which I’d left my suit-coat. I took out the papers and read again from the memories of Hugh Lambert:

And so we began to avoid each other more than ever. If father
was in the country, then I made it my business to be in
London, and vice versa. According to Ponder we were like the
opposing carriages of a funicular railway. ‘I will run up to
London,’ I would say, but I could never say it lightly. Father
told me often enough that this was one of my troubles: ‘Too
much London,’ and it’s true that upon returning from a spell
there, I would lie awake at night, still somehow hearing the
heavy roll of the traffic, as though the city were an infection
not lightly to be shaken off. Indeed, the …

I could not read the next few lines.

I shuffled the pages, and read:

She is a treasure, but he … His speech I find a kind of chloroform.
When he addresses me, I drift off, and every other sound
supersedes him: the babbling of a nightingale, the wind rattling
at the window panes of the inn. He is often in drink, of course,
but the defect in his speech has some deeper cause. On the
farm, I was never required to speak to him. He was always on
the other side of a field, working happily. And no wonder …
how beautiful that place was! A farm under sycamores, and
with a rookery in each corner. Does Mr Handley drink to bury
the pain of its loss? I do not know. The man is incomprehensible
to me, but it is all I can do when in his presence not to
apologise continually for father’s conduct
.