Death on a Branch Line (25 page)

I eyed her for a while as she went back to reading. She was becoming properly interested in new explanations of the murder at the very moment we’d been stopped from investigating them. I fished in my pocket for my silver watch: six o’clock.

Hugh Lambert had twenty-six hours to live.

I looked out of the window. This would be a hot day, but not sunny. In the grey light, the mathematical garden looked just mathematical, and not at all beautiful, and the stone pond from this height appeared over-crowded with great, aimlessly floating goldfish. Each checkmated the other: they were all in a fix because someone had too much money. I looked up, towards the woods. Was John Lambert hiding there? Of course, I wanted him found. He had been black-mailing Britain, but somehow I couldn’t help thinking that Britain was Usher and the Chief more than it was me. By the very fact of knowing the danger the country faced, they became men who had more to lose
from
that danger. It was wrong-headed of me, I knew, but I felt that I would rather see
Hugh Lambert spared the noose than his brother found.

I’d thought that John Lambert was going to lay name to the killer. Instead, he’d proposed to trade the whole country for his brother’s life.

At eight o’clock the manservant came with coffee and bread rolls, and the poor bloke didn’t know where to look. The night before we’d been guests of the house; now we were its prisoners. After breakfast, we swapped over: the wife looked out of the window, and I looked again at the papers of Hugh Lambert. After a few false starts, owing to his bad handwriting, I struck:

It is perfectly possible to catch a rabbit by hand if you
approach it downwind, and it is perfectly possible to release it
subsequently. I have taught young Mervyn the trick of the first
but not the habit of the second. I know that he sells rabbits to
the carter, who takes them to the butchers of the other
Adenwolds, and I know he sells moleskins to the blacksmith
Ainsty, and that he once sold a job lot of them to Hamer, who
distributed them amongst the plumbers of Malton in return for
considerable profit. Moleskins are ideal for cleaning the joints
of freshly soldered pipes, unfortunately for the moles.

I have taught the boy to draw these creatures, in the hope of
curing his habit of snaring them, but his addiction to killing
rabbits rivals, I fear, that of father. Mervyn practically lives in
the woods, but I am aware that he makes a special point of
lurking there when father is out after rabbits, knowing very
well that the pleasure for father is all in the killing and not in
the acquisition of meat, and that Tom, father’s lumbering old
spaniel, misses half the corpses in any case.

‘Here’s something,’ I said, calling across to the wife.

She read it over and looked up, worried, just as a knock came at the door.

It was Usher. Cooper, still in his dust-coat, was behind him. We would be allowed to go, but we must consent to be chaperoned by Cooper until John Lambert was brought in. A full search was
evidently now under way. As we left the room, Usher practically bowed to the wife, taking credit for a decision that I suspected had been forced on him by the Chief, but she swept past him without a word, for he was back to being gallant.

The wife went on ahead, I walked in the middle, Cooper lagged behind silently; and that was how we crossed the lawn and approached the path through the woods. It hadn’t been settled that we’d go that way – it just fell out like that. The day was sticky and grey; the clouds rolled like smoke over the fire of the sun. As the light came and went, so did the shadows of the decorative trees.

As we entered the woods, the wife for some reason turned a new way, and we came by the railway line and the telegraph poles. The cut in the wires that we’d seen already lay in the other direction, and the present ones were intact as far as could be made out, but I knew there must be an interruption somewhere. As we walked on, parallel to the tracks, I took out my silver watch. Ten o’clock. In five minutes the ‘down’ train would come by, very likely having by-passed the station like the train of the evening before. There was no point in asking Cooper about any of this. He had a fine head of silver hair and black eyebrows, a combination that seemed to dictate silence. I also knew that he’d taken strong exception to the wife and me on the strength of the conversation he’d overheard between us outside the yellow room. My persuasion was that he thought us a pair of mischief-makers rather than traitors, but still his dislike was obvious.

The man was a sort of grey angel of death. He would keep me from discovering the truth about the shooting of Sir George, and so he would bring Hugh Lambert – an innocent man, as I was increasingly certain – to his doom.

But as it turned out, we shook Cooper off with no bother at all.

At just gone ten, he hailed us from behind.

‘Hold on there,’ he shouted. ‘I’m off behind a tree.’

He stepped away from the path a little and made water as I heard the first spots of rain on the leaves overhead; he’d seemed to
bring it on by pissing. As Cooper stepped away from the path I took off my cap, which was prickling my head. The wife leant against a tree up ahead, kicking the trunk with her boot-heel.

The rhythm of her kicking was gradually drowned out by that of the 10.05, which was upon us a moment later. It had not stopped at the station but unlike the train of the night before, was coming on at a moderate pace, as though picking its way through the trees.

‘Look out there!’ the wife suddenly yelled, and Cooper stepped out from behind his tree with his hands on his fly buttons.

‘There’s a man just leapt up onto that train,’ said the wife. ‘I believe it was John Lambert.’

She’d had the same view of the train as I’d had, and no such event had occurred, but Cooper was flying again, white coat-tails streaming behind him. He could just about keep up with the high coaches, but he measured his pace until he was level with the guard’s van, which offered hand-holds. The guard was leaning out and looking down at him as he ran, as though admiring an athletic prodigy. But Cooper was screaming at the guard to stand back so that he could make his leap, and just as the train was picking up its pace, he did so.

It was a good leap, and he gained the handholds without difficulty, but one of his legs swung out, and clattered into a stout-looking tree branch. The guard pulled him into the van a moment later, and the train retreated from view, leaving great peacefulness and freedom, and the sound of dripping rain.

I eyed the wife.

‘Well, you might have
thought
you saw something,’ I said. ‘It
might
have been an honest mistake.’

‘I don’t think you’d have any difficulty persuading Usher that a woman had made a mistake,’ she said.

The rain came on, making the sound of many small creeping animals.

‘What now?’ I said.

‘Mervyn?’ she said.

I nodded: ‘His place in the woods – the set-up.’

We found the clearing, and the boy was there, amid the river
sound, the fallen trees and the rusting foresters’ machinery. Raindrops came down at intervals, widely spaced, and the boy was placing what looked like small sticks on a fire. He stepped back from the flames as we came up. His shotgun lay on the ground, with the bill-hook hard by.

He wore breeches, and a coat that looked like moleskin. His head seemed small under the mass of his hair. Any man of middle years would have given worlds for hair like that. He said nothing as we approached.

‘Caught a fish, Mervyn?’ I enquired, for he’d given that as the reason for his fires.

‘I
en’t
,’ he said.

‘Then what are you burning?’

The wife hung back; Mervyn Handley looked at the fire, and I could see very well what he was about. He was trying to work himself up to a lie, but he could not do it.

‘Bones,’ he said.

The white sticks in the flames
were
bones.

‘Dead birds if you ask me,’ I said, looking into the flames, ‘and disappearing fast.’

I looked at Mervyn, and he gave a brief nod before looking away.

‘Pheasant?’ I said.

‘Moorhen,’ said Mervyn. ‘Moorhen and kestrel.’

‘Bagged ’em with that, did you?’ I said, with a glance at the shotgun.

‘I wouldn’t shoot a kestrel,’ he said. ‘
Couldn’t
.’

‘Too fast, I suppose,’ I said, ‘and they fly too high?’

‘Not that one,’ said Mervyn, nodding down at the flames, which had now all-but consumed the bones. ‘’Alf-dead to begin with, he were.’

‘What happened, Mervyn?’ put in the wife.

‘Kestrel attacked the moorhen … Never would’ve done it if he hadn’t been half-starved … Pair of ’em scrapped in air, then they come down together like a stone.’

The kestrel was ‘he’; the moorhen ‘it’.

‘As they fought, they’d forgotten to fly,’ said the wife.

‘That’s it,’ said Mervyn, looking at her.

‘And you kept the bones,’ I said.

‘Aye,’ said Mervyn.

‘… Until now, anyhow,’ I said, and he made no answer to that. ‘Why until now?’ I asked, after a beat of silence.

‘Wanted shot of ’em,’ he said, moving his hair away from his eyes.

There came another fast, scuffling sound from the woods, and Mervyn Handley crouched down and took up his shotgun. I found myself taking a step back. He was armed, I was not. And what sort of kid was this anyway? The scuffling sound came again, louder this time. A rabbit flew into the clearing, and it was running for its life even before Mervyn levelled the rifle, took aim and blasted. A great flash of flame came from the gun; the rabbit somersaulted twice in the air and lay still. But Handley made no move towards it. Instead, he continued to eye me directly and levelly, as if to say, ‘
Now
look.’

‘What do you know about the killing of Sir George, Mervyn?’ I asked him, as something scuttled in terror through the trees.

‘Nowt,’ he replied, and I was certain that I had finally driven him to a lie.

We walked back fast from the woods, without quite knowing why. The rain had stopped, and we came by the cricket pitch just as it was lit by a flash of sun. We gained the second green, and approached the hedge-tunnel, but we had to wait as the second charabanc of the week-end came into view. It contained the coppers from Scarborough. Most of them smoked, as did the motor, which was driven by a man who looked to be concentrating harder than he ought.

We walked on up the hedge-tunnel and past the station, which was silent and empty.

‘Who needs trains when a motor’s available?’ asked the wife, and I wondered whether it would ever come that there were
road
police to go alongside the railway force.

The Angel was fairly bustling, and as I stepped towards the bar – where Mr Handley was serving – I heard one fellow say, ‘Will’s been on cracking form in the nets,’ and realised that at least one cricket team was in, even though nobody had yet put on their whites. I also spied Woodcock and the signalman in the corner. Both wore rough suits, and twisted greasy neckers, and both might have been waiting to appear before the magistrates at any police court in the country. Of course, there was no question of me seeing Woodcock without him seeing
me
and he lifted up his glass in a sarcastic sort of way, saying, ‘Journalist!’

Of the Reverend Martin Ridley there was no sign, even though I had the idea that he was the keenest cricketer of the lot. He would no doubt be preparing for the game by drinking wine of a better vintage than was offered by The Angel.

The wife was craning to see all around the bar. She wanted to find Mrs Handley, I knew, and to talk to her about Mervyn.

‘Rain’s holding off, boys,’ said one of the cricketers, and his remark for some reason made me feel anxious. I put my hand in my inside pocket, and brought out the letters I’d taken from the Hall. I looked each one over quickly, before passing it on to the wife. They were written by Hugh Lambert, either to the man Paul, or to John Lambert. They’d been sent from London hotels or a house in Bayswater, London W. The dates were 1907 and 1908 – well in advance of the murder. They were about poems and parties; and some were about nature and country matters. As I was reading, I heard the wife say, ‘These are some of Hugh Lambert’s letters, Mrs Handley. Jim borrowed them from the Hall.’