Death on a Branch Line

by Andrew Martin

  When Mrs Handley came to collect the plates, I asked whether Mr Gifford had pitched up.

  ‘Now, where he’s gone I don’t know,’ she said, with a distracted look.

  Well, I would not tell her what little I knew on that score. But I did let on that John Lambert had gone missing from the Hall. (It couldn’t hurt to mention it; the fact would soon be common knowledge with all those coppers in the district looking for him.)

  Then the wife said, ‘Where’s our bicyclist, Mrs Handley?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, I’m sure,’ she said.

  ‘Has he booked out?’ asked the wife.

  ‘He has not.’

  ‘When was he due to book out?’

  ‘No date’s been given. He’s paid for yesterday and he’s paid for today, and he can keep doing that as long as he likes as far as I’m concerned. His bicycle’s gone, though, you might have noticed.’

  ‘But it’s punctured,’ said the wife.

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Handley, ‘I saw him pushing it off into Clover Wood not one hour since.’

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  We stood outside the front of The Angel looking at the soft greyness of the sky, the great trees bright green against it. The rainbow was half there and half not, like the memory of a dream, and seeming to carry the message: this is not what you’d call the perfect summer’s day but it’s beautiful in its way, you know.

  Two chimes floated up from the village.

  ‘Hugh Lambert has eighteen hours left alive,’ I said.

  ‘And what about your investigation?’ asked the wife.

  ‘In the first place …’ I said.

  ‘I think time’s too short for “in the first place”,’ said the wife.

  ‘… You don’t think Hugh Lambert murdered his father,’ I said, ‘and nor do I.’

  ‘Mervyn’s the key to it, wouldn’t you say?’ asked the wife – and it wasn’t quite like her to be asking questions in this way. As a rule she didn’t give tuppence what I thought. Instead, she was giving me a chance to say what she herself couldn’t.

  Just then, the blurred voice of Mr Handley came from behind us.

  ‘Where is that boy?’ he said. ‘He’s late for his bloody dinner.’

  He held a pewter of ale in his hand, and because of this and the natural impairment of his speech, it was impossible to know how worried he might be. I turned to him and said, ‘We’ll keep our eyes skinned.’

  He turned and went back inside his pub. We watched him do it, and the wife said, ‘I do wonder about that bicyclist, you know.’

  He’d always been a special study of the wife’s, and this was down to the shocking business of seeing him stab his own tyre. All bicyclists were martyrs to rough roads: their machines were too flimsy and were forever getting crocked, and the bicyclists were forever moaning about it. To see the damage self-inflicted put the whole thing on its head.

  ‘Clover Wood is that way,’ I said, pointing directly over-opposite.

  This time, I found a track rather than crashing on through the undergrowth, and I led the wife along it. Wherever the path divided, we took the wider route, but these would become narrow after a while, and we’d end in a jam of trees and thorn bushes. We pressed on through narrow gaps until we did at last strike another good-sized track. It was lined with tall everlastings of a very dark green, and by rights ought to have led to a blank-faced tomb or cemetery. In fact it led to a perfectly round clearing: a Piccadilly Circus of the woods with a fallen log in its centre, two people sitting on the log and two bicycles on the ground hard by. I knew that one bicycle would be punctured, the other not. We were about fifty yards short of the couple, who were the bicyclist from The Angel and a young woman I’d never set eyes on before. Their voices carried along the track, and I motioned the wife into a gap between two of the everlastings. I stepped in after her, and watched the couple.

  The fellow’s arm was around the waist of the young woman. It rested there rather guiltily – that arm knew it was taking a liberty – and the conversation went stiffly.

  ‘It is a very happy chance that you came along, Dora,’ the fellow said.

  ‘But I don’t have a puncture repair outfit,’ said the woman.

  ‘Even so,’ said the bicyclist.

  (‘That’s very magnanimous of him,’ whispered the wife, as a silence fell between the two on the tree trunk.)

  ‘There’s practically everything but a puncture repair outfit in my saddle-bag,’ the young woman eventually said.

  ‘I’ll take it into the blacksmith’s again tomorrow,’ said the man. ‘I tried him yesterday but he wasn’t about.’

  ‘Do blacksmiths fix punctures?’ asked his companion. ‘After all, I’d have thought it was a rather delicate operation and they’re all fires and hammers.’

  ‘He might be able to fettle up a couple of tyre levers,’ the fellow said.

  ‘Why do you need a tyre lever?’

  ‘For levering off the tyre. It’s very hard to get the modern Dunlops over the wheel rim without one.’

  ‘Oh.’

  And they sat silent once again.

  (‘He’ll lose all feeling in that arm of his,’ I whispered to the wife.)

  ‘I don’t suppose that you find bicycles very interesting as a topic of conversation,’ the bicyclist said, after a further minute.

  ‘Well,’ said the young woman, ‘I’d rather ride them than talk about them.’

  ‘That goes for so many things, don’t you find?’ asked the bicyclist, who immediately coloured up. He was getting nowhere fast with his spooning.

  ‘You see, my original plan,’ he went on, ‘as I think you knew, was to make for Helmsley after spending just Friday night at The Angel. It was only the condition of the machine that made me hang on here.’

  ‘I come along this track most Sundays about this time,’ Dora said with a sort of sigh.

  You don’t want them sighing at this stage, I thought. But the fellow answered her sigh with a sigh of his own, followed by the remark: ‘Well, no fear of an interruption here.’

  And somehow that did the trick, for after an interval of staring forward in silence they both turned towards each other and began kissing, which they continued to do as the wife crept off the way we’d come with me following, and as the Adenwold church bells began striking three.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Come five o’clock, we were watching the cricket game.

  I stood on the boundary by the three poplars; the wife, being restless, was making a circuit of the ground. I was thinking about how, coming out of the woods, we’d struck two of the coppers in the search party. I’d asked them whether they’d come upon any scent of ‘their quarry’, and one of the two had said, ‘The quarry? That’s over yonder, en’t it?’ which had made me think John Lambert might yet escape them.

  We’d just given up a hunt of our own: for young Mervyn. Our best hope seemed to be to find him and hustle him into saying what he knew, but Mervyn was not at his set-up and had evidently not returned to The Angel, for we’d come across Mrs Handley who’d told us that she was also searching for him. She had not been over-anxious, though: the boy was allowed the run of the woods and fields, and would often tramp off to East or West Adenwold and stay out all day.

  The cricket game was being played against a great wall of grey sky that was darkening by the minute, and which made the players’ whites seem to glow. A woman I’d never seen before stood by the pavilion twirling a lacy parasol, and I thought: That’ll have to do duty as an umbrella before long. A second charabanc had brought the second team (the two motors were now drawn up alongside the pavilion), and she must have come in with them.

  The first innings had ended after a shockingly short period of time, and the Reverend Ridley was giving directions to his team, who – having batted and scored thirty-six – were now about to go out and field.

  The pep talk concluded, some of the players performed physical jerks as they strode out, for all the world as if
they were about to do something strenuous. There might have been raindrops already flying, or it might just have been the colour of the sky that made me think so.

  The players were now all arranged.

  A fast bowler ran up and, reaching the wicket, leapt and pedalled his legs as though cycling – seeming, as he rose, to make the shape of a sea-horse in the air. He landed running; the ball flew past the batsman, who turned and watched it rise into the hands of the wicket keeper, who, having caught it, chucked it to another fielder and gave the batsman the evil eye for a while.

  Then it all started again.

  The wife was now at my shoulder on the boundary.

  I asked her: ‘Did you hear what the vicar was saying?’

  ‘Something to someone about not sending a lot down on the leg side to Pepper. He said they’d be absolutely slaughtered if Pepper got a lot to leg. He’d only have to start glancing at their legs, and they’d all be finished.’

  ‘I expect Pepper’s the man in bat just now,’ I said. ‘What are the teams called, do you know?’

  ‘The Enemies and the Friends,’ the wife said, in a vague sort of way.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think you can have that right.’

  The wife, pointing at the umpire, asked, ‘Why is the referee wearing two hats? It’s not sunny and he’s wearing two sun hats.’

  ‘That’s exactly why he’s wearing two,’ I said.

  A third ball was bowled. The wicket keeper failed to stop it, and he looked down at his white boots as if he’d never seen them before while another fellow went into the woods to collect the ball.

  ‘The umpire might end up wearing any number of hats and woollens,’ I said. ‘The players give him whatever they don’t need.’

  Another ball was bowled, and the batsman stopped it dead. He did the same again twice more, and then there was a general collapse into chaos as everyone began walking long distances in different directions.

  ‘What’s going on now?’ said the wife, sounding quite alarmed.

  ‘End of the over,’ I said.

  At the end of the disturbance another bowler stood ready, but the wife was still interested in the umpire.

  ‘He’s the man in charge of the game?’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘How can he command any respect if he’s wearing two hats?’

  ‘I suppose he must rely on force of character.’

  I turned towards the wife, but she was walking away again along the boundary.

  ‘Hold still,’ I called, for another ball was about to be bowled.

  ‘Why?’ she called, turning about.

  ‘You shouldn’t move behind the bowler’s arm,’ I said. ‘It’s distracting.’

  ‘How can I distract him if I’m behind him and being perfectly quiet?’

  ‘It distracts the batsman.’

  ‘What rot,’ the wife said, and she set off again.

  Well, we were just lingering out the hot, grey afternoon, wasting the time. I could not influence the wife in the slightest degree, let alone prevent one death and solve the mystery of another. For want of anything better to do I counted the men on the fielding side, going clockwise from the vicar, who stood only a little way from my boundary position. Having counted them once, I did so again.

  I could make them only ten.

  I began pacing the boundary, as though I might discover another player by viewing the game from a different angle. I had not seen one of them make off during the game. Had they arrived at the ground as ten? But no, the vicar wouldn’t have stood for that.

  … It was just that I was that bloody tired. I started counting again as another ball was bowled, and the batsman smashed it for six into the woods. The fielder nearest to me put his hands on his hips and said, ‘Oh my eye.’

  One by one, most of the fielding players disappeared into the edge of the woods. The ball was lost. The two batsmen met in the middle of the pitch for a confab, and the wicket keeper took one of his gloves off and examined his hand, which was evidently just as fascinating as his boots. The wife came wandering up to me again.

  ‘What’s happened now?’

  ‘They’ve lost the ball.’

  She rolled her eyes.

  One of the fielders, on the border of the woods, was looking agitated and calling to the others, but it wasn’t until the two batsmen broke off their talk that I knew something was up. I half-ran, half-walked across the pitch, and when I came to the edge of the woods, I saw the players gathered around some object. I could not at first make it out, for they surrounded it, and it lay in long grass. I pushed my way through, and saw in the grass a dead dog. Half its head was perfect, and the other half was not there.

  ‘Shotgun,’ said one of the cricketers, eyeing me.

  The dog was a terrier – Mervyn’s, name of Alfred.

  Chapter Thirty

  When the players went back onto the pitch, I counted a full complement of eleven fielders.

  ‘I’m sure there was one less before the dog was found,’ I said to the wife, and at that instant the sky darkened yet further, and the rain started again. The players at first walked towards the pavilion, but as the rain came faster they began to run.

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything for it but to get out into the woods and look for Mervyn,’ I said as, five minutes later, we made our way under the rain back towards the second village green of Adenwold. ‘I’ll borrow an oilskin from the pub.’

  ‘We’ll be soaked through if we walk in this,’ she said. ‘Let’s sit in the church.’

  But it turned out that the Reverend Ridley kept the door locked; so we sat on the two bench seats in the porch, and talked over what had happened and what might happen. At twenty to six, we heard the bolts being released on the inside of the church door, and it swung open to reveal a face I could not at first place: it was Moffat, the amiable man who kept the baker’s shop. He had entered the church by another door. Some muttering between him and the wife revealed him to be a reader at the church or a helper of some sort, or there again perhaps standing in for the verger, who was in Scarborough. At any rate, he passed us hymn books, and showed us to a front pew. Evening Prayer was in the offing.

  The baker went away to ring the bell, and I thought of the other bell – the one that would be ringing in Durham gaol in fourteen hours’ time. The church had a medical smell – incense – and was filled with a kind of silvery rain-light. I wondered who would come to the service, since most of the village was in Scarborough. The answer was disclosed over the next five minutes: the baker’s daughter came, and two of the tiny old ladies we’d seen outside the almshouses. They sat at the back, smiling with their faraway eyes. The manservant from the Hall came, and with him the maid who’d assisted him at the party. It occurred to me that they might be married. The manservant smiled a little at me, embarrassed no doubt at having been my gaoler. As the clock was striking six, some of the cricketers came in: big men trying to look smaller as they eased along the pews.

  The Reverend Ridley made his entrance at just gone six. He wore a black cassock, and his red head and black body seemed to belong to two different people; the prayer book was tiny in his hand, but it soon became obvious that he hardly needed to look at it. He knew the ropes; he really was a vicar after all. It was a plain, short service: no music, just the vicar, the prayer book and Bible readings from the baker. He did them very well, and I thought: That’s what the fellow’s really about. He was a church-goer first and a baker second.

  When the vicar blessed us all, I had an idea we were approaching the end of proceedings, and it was at this point that I heard the scrape of the door opening.

  I turned about, half-expecting to see John Lambert, but it was Mervyn Handley who stood there. He held his shotgun by his side, like a staff. The baker immediately rose and went towards him saying, very calmly as it seemed to me, ‘You can’t bring that in here, Mervyn Handley.’

  The vicar had paused in his reading. He was eyeing the boy.

&nbs
p; ‘Where can I put it, then?’ I heard Mervyn ask in a sulky voice.

  ‘In the umbrella stand in the porch,’ said the baker.

  Well, it was the country-side after all. Every man jack was armed. A shotgun in an umbrella stand might be nothing out of the common here. Mervyn went out and came back in, but when he saw me, he coloured up and looked around, as if contemplating a breakaway.

  ‘What’s he doing in here?’ I whispered to the wife. ‘He’s Catholic.’

  ‘I’ve an idea,’ said the wife.

  The Reverend Ridley finished off the service, and the wife stood up fast and followed Mervyn through the door and into the porch, where he was removing his shotgun from the umbrella stand. The other churchgoers were giving him a wide berth.

  ‘Don’t you think it would be better if you gave us the gun?’ Lydia asked the boy.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t need to go to church to talk to God, you know,’ the wife ran on. ‘And you don’t need to go for forgiveness.’

  The boy kept silence.

  We were out into the churchyard now. The rain had stopped; it was only dripping off the trees. A flare of sunlight came through the clouds and the wife said to Mervyn: ‘If you really want to be forgiven, and you really do repent – well then, you already are forgiven.’

  ‘… Because I don’t much care for goin’ to church,’ said the boy.

  ‘Not many do,’ I said.

  Another silence.

  ‘It’s dead boring,’ I put in.

  ‘Oh, don’t listen to him,’ said the wife.

  ‘I en’t,’ said the boy, and he looked at Lydia as though on the point of further speech.

  ‘If you know anything about the murder that happened here, you must let on,’ I said. ‘Master Hugh has only fifteen hours left to live.’

  At which he turned on his heel.