Death on a Branch Line (14 page)

‘I couldn’t imagine how anybody could behave more suspiciously,’ the wife ran on, ‘until about two minutes later when
that
man came down to breakfast, and started looking over his German papers while drinking coffee.’

And she pointed towards the vicarage, where we glimpsed through low graveyard trees the Norwood clerk, still waiting to be admitted. We’d come to a stop before one of the newer graves,
which stood outside the green enclosures and lay exposed to the bright sun. ‘In Memoriam,’ I read, ‘Sir George Arthur Horton Lambert, Baronet. 1855–1909. Deus Fortitudo Mea.’ That meant something like ‘God give me strength’. No, couldn’t be. It was a very simple inscription anyhow, but then I supposed there were many things you couldn’t very well put on a murdered man’s gravestone. ‘Died peacefully’ was out for starters; so was ‘Loved by all’. There were no flowers on the grave but just a single bush growing up from the grass mound.

‘He was reading his German papers over coffee at the front table,’ the wife repeated, looking across at the Norwood man, ‘and when I walked behind him, pretending to be interested in the wisteria, he folded them up. A moment later, he turned to me and said, “I say, you’re quite sure your husband ain’t Franklin? It makes no odds either way to me. Only, I know Franklin’s expected.”’

I looked surprise at the wife. She had made a very fair imitation of the man’s cockney accent.

‘I’ve already told him I’m not Franklin,’ I said.

‘Well then, he doesn’t believe you.’

‘Wait a bit,’ I said. ‘What if the man in the field boots is Franklin?’

The door of the vicarage remained unopened, but as we looked on, the red-faced parson appeared from around the side of the house, and shook the clerk’s hand. He then took him back around the side with him.

‘Come on,’ said the wife, and we closed on the house.

From the front gate, we could hear the vicar talking to the man from Norwood, but could not make out the words. The two were in the back garden.

‘We’ll walk round the side of the house, only we’ll do it slowly, listening out all the while,’ said the wife, pushing open the front gate.

‘What’ll we say if they see us?’

‘Hello,’ she said, ‘we thought it was part of the common.’

‘That won’t wash,’ I said.

‘Then we’ll ask about service times in the church.’

‘Push on, then,’ I said.

The wife opened the gate, and we both stepped into the garden. She let go of the gate, and it clanged shut. It was on a spring. The wife turned to me and gave a look of alarm with eyes extra-wide, which she did half in jest. I thought:
She was worried for a while
last night, but now she’s back to larking about
. The fact that we’d been told we were in danger seemed to have faded completely from her thoughts.

The vicar’s garden was well-kept and well-watered. The grass was bright green. The flowerbeds were as bright and various in colour as Turkey carpets, but what stood out was the red: red apples hanging from the trees, red roses – and the red ribbon in the hat of the red-faced vicar as he led the man from Norwood through the rear garden. He was escorting him towards the opened doors of a round wooden summerhouse, and the surprising thing was the tone of his speech. He had that glorious house and garden – his own little Yorkshire Eden – and yet he sounded glum; sounded like a right misery, in fact.

‘Servants, curate and verger gone away to Scarborough,’ he was saying, as the birds in his beautiful garden sang like mad. ‘… I had to see to my own breakfast, and not an egg to be found …’

The two entered the summerhouse, and were lost from earshot.

It was little more than a circle of French windows – mostly propped open – with a wooden roof on top. It stood at the very end of the garden, and just behind it were iron railings separating the back of the vicarage garden from the woods that were everywhere around Adenwold. To the left side of the summerhouse (as we looked) stood a row of sweet peas supported on canes, making a kind of wall. Lydia eyed me, and we had the same thought in the same instant. We dashed past the sweet peas and so, screened from the summerhouse, gained the rear railing. We climbed over, and were in the edge of the woods.

Here, we could loiter and watch through the glass without being on trespass, and without having to account for ourselves.

And that’s what we did.

Chapter Seventeen

The summerhouse was bare except for a couple of occasional tables, and deckchairs pointing in various directions to catch the sun at different times – it was a sort of temple for sun worship. As we looked on, a fox terrier walked into it from the vicarage garden, wagging its tail and happy as you like. The Norwood man made to stroke it, but the vicar roared ‘Out!’ and it bolted in terror. The parson then turned to his visitor: ‘Now, Gifford,’ he said (so that at last the man’s name was disclosed), ‘shall we get down to business?’

They moved over to one of the small tables, and Gifford removed from his case the objects in the cloth bags that he had spilled onto the road the night before. There were four, as when he’d had his spillage, and he placed them on the table before the parson, saying:

‘These are hot from the factory in Germany as you might say, sir. Direct from the boys in Nuremberg. They come with all the usual etceteras.’

The fixed agent meets the travelling agent – was that what I was seeing?

Gifford was now taking papers out of his case – no doubt the ones written in German, although I couldn’t see them in detail.

‘I’ve looked them over, but it’s all Hebrew to me,’ he said, passing them to the vicar.

I kept glancing across to look at the wife’s face. She’d removed her straw boater, and was so intent on the summerhouse that it was like being at the music hall with her, looking at her as she strained forward to see what would happen next, quite ignoring the man at
her side. The parson looked over the papers, and he could obviously read German. Nothing so surprising in that: he was an educated man. Meanwhile, he held the object that was inside one of the cloth bags. Why wouldn’t he remove the bloody thing?

‘You haven’t had a letter from Franklin, have you, sir?’ Gifford asked him. ‘The bloke that lives in Islington?’

‘I’ve had no letters at all,’ said the vicar, pulling the object from the cloth bag in his hand.

It was a red miniature locomotive that he held, and the sight came as a let-down to me. I’d pictured some species of weaponry, something devilish and German.

‘That’s jolly,’ said the vicar, contemplating the little engine. But he didn’t sound over-enthusiastic.

Gifford said, ‘It supersedes the …’

(I couldn’t catch the final word.)

The vicar put the engine into its cloth bag and took out another, from a second bag.

Gifford leant over and said, ‘Valve and valve gear that work properly, you’ll see, sir.’

He was an ordinary salesman, and the vicar nothing more to him than a likely – though not, as it appeared, a
very
likely – customer. Gifford had had an appointment to see the vicar, and had been anxious that a fellow called Franklin, apparently a business rival of his, had an appointment for about the same time, and he had thought that I was Franklin. He had not believed my denial and had then (finding the door unlocked) walked into my room and hunted through the drawers in the bureau in hopes of discovering my true identity. He’d have had a shock when he saw the warrant card and found out I was a copper. He’d have left that room at a lick.

We were wasting our time. It was the man in field boots that really mattered. Was the murder already done? Had he put John Lambert’s lights out immediately on discovering him? I did not think it would work like that. There would be some parley or negotiation to begin with, and I was thrown back on hoping this would somehow carry on until the Chief pitched up.

In the summerhouse, Gifford was recommending another of the engines to the vicar, who now seemed thoroughly bored.

‘Looks well, doesn’t it?’ Gifford said. ‘I’ve seen nothing to match it in the “O” gauge.’

It was not his part, as the seller, to be saying that. The vicar ought to be saying it. Instead he gave a glance towards the woods, and I met his eye for an instant. But he saw only a couple spooning under the trees – rather too close to his property perhaps, but harmless anyhow. He was a burly man with a rough-skinned red face. He had a summery look: neatly pressed white suit, and the shirt under his white collar was sky blue. The sun was not good for him: it burned his skin, but he took it full in the face all the same. He would drink a good deal of wine, and it would be fine wine. He had what I believe they call in the church ‘a good living’ and he did himself well. Or other people did well for him.

Lydia had already given up on the scene within the summerhouse, and turned her back on it; she was resting against the railing and eyeing me, as if to say, ‘Have you cottoned on yet? This is a false trail.’

The vicar was saying, ‘Taken all in all, I think I’ll let these go.’

Gifford’s long journey north had been for naught, and I admired the way he gulped down his disappointment.

‘Will you not take just the little one, sir? The red single-driver? Have it on approval for a month, sir. Return it by post if not completely delighted.’

But under the heavy gaze of the vicar, he was already packing his bag.

‘Want to go back round the front?’ the wife said. ‘Catch him coming out?’

‘Why?’

And she shrugged while picking at a dandelion.

We did it anyway, avoiding the garden this time, but cutting along towards the graveyard by means of a narrow snicket that led between two of the cottages.

‘Lovely country,’ Gifford was observing at the front of the vicarage, as he said goodbye to his host. His words were almost
drowned out by birdsong, but he hadn’t given up on the niceties, for all his disappointment. His behaviour towards the vicar reminded me of mine towards the man in the field boots.

‘Lovely garden too, sir,’ said Gifford.

‘It might be moderately agreeable, I suppose,’ said the vicar, ‘if the head gardener gave it half a chance. He will insist on planting out far too high a percentage of late-flowering … But you don’t want to hear my troubles, Gifford!’

And he clasped the salesman’s hand, saying, ‘Pleasant journey back, now!’

Gifford stepped into the lane that stood between the vicarage and the graveyard, and gave a start of surprise when he saw the two of us lounging there, no doubt recalling in that instant his secret visit to our room.

‘You’re the pair from The Angel, ain’t you?’

I could see the sweat leaking out from over his stand collar.

‘We’ve just taken a stroll around the back,’ I said. ‘… Saw you chatting to the parson, and couldn’t help over-hearing a bit.’

‘Not a lot
to
bloody well hear,’ said Gifford in a glum tone.

‘Came out badly, did it?’

‘Don’t it always?’ replied Gifford, and he removed his brown bowler to mop his brow. He had not made his sale, and he was stifled besides. His centre parting looked like a guide-line for a saw. His moustache was also arranged in two halves. The man was a martyr to his fine-toothed comb.

‘I travel in model locomotives,’ he said. ‘You might think that’s a pretty good joke?’

And he looked at us expectantly.

‘But I ain’t seen the funny side in years – not in years.’

We had entered the graveyard, and come to a stop by Sir George’s grave.

Gifford was saying, ‘Steam-powered, electrical and spring-motor mechanism – well, that’s clockwork, if you must know. But it’s all a bloody mug’s game, pardon my French, lady. He’s one of the biggest collectors in the whole country,’ Gifford continued, indicating the vicarage. ‘“Well worth a visit to Reverend Ridley,” I
was told. “Makes a purchase every time. Never misses.”’ He shook his head. ‘Calls himself a vicar … Christian thing would’ve been to buy the little red loco. Brass boiler, steel frames. Double action piston valve cylinders with reversing motion worked from cab. All wheels to scale throughout.’

Gifford stepped back from the grave, and his boot-heel went into some fresh sheep dung.

‘Who let a bloody cow in here?’ he said, and I hadn’t the heart to put him right. ‘Bloody cattle!’ he said, looking down. ‘They do make a litter. I’ll be bloody glad to be leaving this ’ole, I can tell you.’

I looked towards the vicarage, where the Reverend Ridley was standing at one of the ground-floor windows, watching us with folded arms.

‘Have you two heard of his layout, by the way?’ Gifford continued in a lower voice, as though he felt the vicar might be able to hear him. ‘Famous, it is – been photographed in all the railway papers. It’s in his dining room I believe, though the pill wasn’t about to show me it, and I hadn’t the nerve to ask. King’s Cross and environs in one and a quarter inch to the foot. Shown in the rush hour, the Cross is. Hundreds of little lead people charging about all over the shop – well, they’re not
charging
; they’re completely fixed, but that’s the effect. Thing is, being a parson, he’s rotten with money and ain’t got anything else to do.’

‘Except save the souls of the villagers,’ said the wife, who was one of the religious sort of feminists, and set a lot of store by the behaviour of vicars.

‘Do leave off, lady,’ said Gifford.

‘You have a line in German models?’ I said.

Gifford pulled at his collar.

‘The best models today are German,’ he said. ‘You’ll generally find with your German models the smoke-box door will be made open-able. Little touches like that. It’s in the finishing too, of course. The enamelling and lining is always of the first order. But try telling him that!’

It struck me that the vicar might be looking on because he’d seen
us stop by Sir George’s grave. Did he think we were discussing the murder?

‘That’s the fellow was murdered,’ I said to Gifford, indicating the grave.

‘I know,’ he said, which surprised me. ‘It’s a queer spot this is, just the place for a murder. Gives me the jim-jams, I don’t mind telling you.’