Death on a Branch Line

by Andrew Martin

  ‘They’re the old ladies in the almshouses.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘the elderly parties. We saw them. Why haven’t they gone?’

  ‘Well, they’re too old. They have those houses at a peppercorn rent. They’re supposed to be infirm. They can hardly go off … enjoying themselves.’

  And here she did give a quick smile. She was continuing to eye me carefully, however.

  ‘Who runs the Scarborough outing?’ asked the wife.

  ‘Christmas Club,’ said Mrs Handley. ‘You see, the Christmas Club here has nothing really to do with Christmas. You put in your money, and you have three days in Scarborough.’

  ‘Don’t you get a turkey at Christmas?’ I said.

  ‘You get a chicken,’ Mrs Handley said after a while. ‘But people like the Scarborough jaunt. It’s a village tradition.’

  ‘I suppose nobody from the Hall’s gone, have they?’ I asked Mrs Handley.

  ‘Most of the servants have, I believe.’

  ‘But not the man who cuts the grass?’

  ‘That’s Ross’s boy,’ she said, and she nodded to one of the two agriculturals, explaining that they were brothers from West Adenwold, to which they would be returning on foot very shortly, together with the grass-cutter, who was son to one of them. I decided to put them out of consideration, along with the two old maids in the almshouses.

  ‘I believe there’s a new squire in place of the murdered man,’ I said. ‘But that it’s not John Lambert.’

  Mrs Handley folded her arms, and smiled at me as if to say, ‘Well now, you’re quite the dark horse, aren’t you?’

  ‘That’s Robert Chandler,’ she said, slowly, as though feeling her way. ‘He’s Major Lambert’s late wife’s brother. He’s the new tenant.’

  ‘Why doesn’t John Lambert have the place?’

  ‘Oh, he owns it. It’s come to him – only he doesn’t want to live there.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Bad memories, I expect.’

  ‘Does he ever come in here?’ asked the wife.

  ‘No fear,’ said Mrs Handley.

  ‘What does he do for a living?’ I asked.

  Mrs Handley shrugged.

  ‘I can’t say. I hardly know him. He’s in London a good deal of the time, and in York most of the rest. They say he keeps heaps of books in the gardener’s cottage, a little way off from the main house.’

  ‘Sir George Lambert,’ I said, ‘– what was he like?’

  Did Mrs Handley colour up at the question?

  ‘He was a sportsman,’ she said presently, ‘always bucking about on his horse. He had the hunt, which came through on Wednesdays and Saturdays like a great whirlwind; he had his shoots, and he had his cricket games …’

  ‘This inn is his, isn’t it?’ I said, with the wife eyeing me.

  ‘’Course it is,’ said Mrs Handley, as if to say, ‘Don’t you know how a village works?’

  ‘What about his wife?’ asked Lydia, no doubt thinking this would be a subject more to Mrs Handley’s taste.

  ‘Dead long since,’ said Mrs Handley.

  Well, I had read something of the account of her death in Hugh Lambert’s papers – the business of the fire seeming always too cold.

  ‘And so there was no-one to come between him and the boys,’ Mrs Handley was saying. ‘He was very hard on the two boys – on Hugh especially.’

  Mrs Handley had fallen to gazing at Mr Hardy the station master, but I was sure there was nothing in this. He was just a convenient object to look at. Mrs Handley’s earlier sadness had returned, and I could see that it was not on account of the murdered father, but on account of the son who was about to swing for the crime.

  ‘Would Hugh come in here?’ asked the wife, who, having finally entered licensed premises herself, had evidently become fascinated by the question of who else might or might not do so.

  ‘Master Hugh?’ said Mrs Handley, and she gave a cautious sort of nod. ‘He’d take a glass, and he’d sit in the public. The public, mark you, not the saloon. He was one of the two young masters, and yet he’d sit in the public bar.’ She smiled, saying, ‘Always wore the same suit – dark blue worsted. Lovely cloth, and yet the trouser bottoms clarted with muck, and all up his black boots. He told me one day: “I always wear a city suit in the country and a country suit in the city.”’

  As she spoke, she was preparing a supper for us – two plates of cold ham and salad. She handed them over the bar, saying, ‘What do you reckon to that saying of his? Was I supposed to laugh?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what – he’d look at me until I did laugh.’

  And she was almost laughing now.

  ‘He meant you to laugh,’ I said.

  ‘’Course he did. He was always coming out with things like that.’

  ‘Contradictory,’ I said.

  ‘And he was just ever such … fun.’

  ‘Unlike John.’

  ‘John’s clever,’ she said. ‘Clever people aren’t usually much fun, are they?’

  And it was clear from this that she didn’t include me in that category.

  I looked over at the clerk-type from Norwood – I was pretty sure he couldn’t hear our conversation, nor was he straining to do so. I somehow didn’t feel I ought to ask Mrs Handley about him and the bicyclist, whereas it was all right to ask about the locals. That was the sort of thing an ordinary tripper might do.

  The wife said, ‘Mervyn told us that Master Hugh had given him a dormouse.’

  Mrs Handley’s smile disappeared for an instant, but it came back as she said:

  ‘… Came up here, parked himself down on the bench outside, just next to where Mervyn was sitting. He turns to little Mervyn and he says, “I’ve rather a bad head cold today,” and lifts his handkerchief out of his pocket. Well, the face he pulled when he saw that dormouse curled up in the middle of this most beautiful red silk handkerchief …’

  ‘Master Hugh didn’t know it was there?’ I asked.

  ‘He knew very well it was there. He was play-acting for the boy, don’t you see? It was all for Mervyn’s benefit. Well, it fairly slayed me, that did. I laughed fit to bust.’

  ‘Was the dormouse dead?’

  Mrs Handley stopped laughing, and looked at me in amazement.

  ‘Of course it wasn’t dead. Where would have been the fun if it had been dead? It was a dormouse. It was asleep.’

  Well, this was all apiece with the feeding of the sparrow outside the police office.

  ‘He doesn’t sound much like a murderer,’ said the wife.

  ‘Driven to it by the father, I expect,’ said Mrs Handley, in a very business-like way. ‘There’d been aggravation between them for years, and Lambert kept a house full of guns … There’ll be an end to the business on Monday morning, anyhow.’

  She gazed at vacancy for a moment, before adding:

  ‘He’s to be hung on Monday – eight o’clock.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  And she eyed me again, perhaps struggling to withhold the question: ‘And how do you know?’

  The wife was staring towards the window, picking at her food. Mrs Handley moved off to serve one of the agriculturals, and as she did so the man from Norwood also left the bar. The wife said, ‘I’m going up.’

  ‘Hold on,’ I said, lifting my pint, ‘I’ll just finish up.’

  But she just said, ‘Don’t be long’, and was gone.

  I told myself she’d been emboldened to leave my side by the meek-seeming behaviour of our chief suspects: the man from Norwood and the bicyclist. But that might not have been it at all.

  Station master Hardy, I noticed, was looking at me along the bar. The moment I returned his gaze he looked away, but not before I could get in the word ‘Evenin”.

  ‘The soldiers you have at the station,’ I said, moving towards him. ‘What lot are they?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that’s the York and Lancasters.’
r />   It was the Chief’s regiment.

  ‘Are they set out just anyhow, or is it a model of some particular scrap?’

  ‘Battle of Tamai,’ he said, for the first time eyeing me directly. ‘Thirteenth of March, 1884.’

  Hardy’s tunic was askew, but perhaps it had to be arranged peculiarly to fit round his big belly. He was not drunk, but on the way.

  ‘I know a fellow was in that very show,’ I said, for the Chief had fought at Tamai.

  ‘You do?’ said Hardy, and he was different now – sharper. ‘Who’s that, then?’

  I couldn’t answer directly without giving away that I was a copper, so I said, ‘… Sergeant major, he was.’

  Hardy was now holding my gaze for once. He was almost smiling as he said, ‘Tough as bulldogs, the non-commissioned blokes.’

  ‘This particular fellow once marched for fifty miles in hundred-degree heat,’ I said, at which station master Hardy eyed me for a while, perhaps idling the thought of that long march.

  ‘I’d like to shake that man by the hand,’ he said presently, and he nodded rapidly to himself for a while, each nod signifying a further retreat from the conversation.

  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?’