Death on a Branch line js-5

by Andrew Martin

  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.’

  ‘Do you not find it peaceful and quiet?’ asked the wife.

  ‘The quieter a place is,’ he said, ‘the noisier it is. You hear every little thing. Here now, I meant to have a word with you,’ he continued, addressing me particularly. ‘You’re a copper, aren’t you? Railway police.’

  ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘How do you know?’

  He stopped dead; all the life went out of him. But he rallied after a few seconds, saying, ‘I don’t rightly know. Just something about you, I suppose. Something about your looks.’

  ‘And a railway policeman looks different from the ordinary sort, I suppose?’ the wife cut in.

  He’d been in our room all right.

  ‘What did you want a word about, anyway?’ I asked. ‘Something touching on the murder?’

  ‘I believe so,’ he said, thoughtfully, but before he could answer, there came a cry from the vicarage.

  The Reverend Ridley was standing in the doorway and hailing Gifford.

  ‘God help us, he’s changed his mind!’ said Gifford. ‘He’s seen the sense of going for the single-driver.’

  The vicar called again.

  ‘I’ve half a mind not to go to him,’ said Gifford.

  ‘I wouldn’t if I were you,’ I said.

  ‘Are you nuts?’ said Gifford, and he was off, bag in hand, calling ‘Just coming, sir!’ to the Reverend Ridley.

  ‘What did you want to tell me?’ I shouted after him.

  ‘Speak to you at the inn,’ he called back. ‘One o’clock suit?’

  ‘Well, that’s that as regards him,’ said the wife, looking on as he was taken into the vicarage.

  ‘How do you mean exactly?’ I asked her.

  ‘He’s not a spy.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t believe he is.’

  ‘We ought to see John Lambert again,’ she said. ‘Really have it out with him once and for all.’

  I reminded her that there was the complication of the man in field boots.

  ‘Oh, I don’t care about him,’ she said.

  Chapter Eighteen

  We’d followed the finger-posts to the Hall, which had taken us, by a new route, to the gates at which we’d earlier discovered John Lambert. We’d walked through these and were now passing between the great globe-like trees, approaching the house with its dozen windows staring down at us.

  I’d meant to wait for the arrival of the Chief before braving the Hall again. I’d been warned off the place both by Lambert and (in a roundabout way) by the man in field boots, and with every step I expected some alarm, shout, objection to be raised. Most particularly, I expected some gun to be fired. Over against that, I was a police officer about my duty.

  As for the wife, she just seemed entranced by the house.

  ‘It’s middle Georgian,’ she said. ‘Very simple.’

  Many green plants stood in tall urns across the white gravel of the carriage drive. These and the green door, the brown bricks and the great heat bearing down somehow put me in mind of the Roman Empire.

  I said to the wife, ‘What’s the programme?’ and I thought: Now hold on, Jim, you can’t be asking her.

  A man came walking fast round the side of the house, and he wore knee-length boots, but not field boots. He was a footman or groom or some such — had a horsy look about him.

  ‘Where’s the gardener’s cottage?’ I asked him, and he said, ‘Follow me round.’

  We crunched over the dazzling white gravel to the left side of the house, and there stood a lot of stables and out-buildings of one sort or another, the lot of them looking Roman to me, like temples or villas. We walked through the maze of these for a while, passing dark farm machinery standing in open doorways, until the horsy bloke pointed to a very plain cottage standing amid burnt brown grass fifty yards off.

  ‘That’s you,’ he said.

  ‘I’m obliged to you,’ I said, and we set off in that direction.

  The groom called out:

  ‘You’re with Captain Usher, are you?’

  ‘Don’t answer him,’ said the wife, in a low tone as we walked on. ‘He’s a servant, so you don’t have to.’

  She wouldn’t as a rule have said that, but in her mind she was established as mistress of the house. The notion made her headstrong — not that she wasn’t already, and for the first time the notion composed in my mind: I wish I hadn’t brought her along.

  The man in field boots was Captain Usher. That was no surprise. He had a martial air, he had the boots, and he had the firearm somewhere about him, I was sure. But he was nowhere to be seen as we closed on the gardener’s cottage, which was a small, plain building, newer than the rest and with its own territory — a garden within a garden — bounded by low hedges. Beyond the cottage, on a yellow hillside a quarter-mile off, I saw a harvester pulled by four bullocks, the whole arrangement tilted so far to one side that it threatened to topple over.

  But the gardener’s cottage now came between us and that vision. The curtains were closed but the door was on the jar. As we crossed the garden, I cut in front of the wife — which was by way of reminding her that I was the certificated detective.

  I tapped on the door, and John Lambert was just inside it.

  He stood smoking a cigarette, in a living room that had been put to use as a study in the place that he preferred to the Hall. There were two desks, one either side of the dead, dusty fireplace, and these two desks seemed to signify great effort, like a double-headed train. Lines of bright light leaked through the closed curtains, and they showed up twirling clouds of dust. There were papers everywhere, covering all the means of ordinary living: papers on top of the sofa, on the carpet, all about the hearth and the hearth rug. They were scrawled with both letters and numbers, and some of them were maps, and some were maps of the sea; and where there weren’t papers there were railway timetables.

  John Lambert looked disappointed to see us, but only moderately so.

  ‘You’re still living, then?’ I blurted, all my rehearsed speech going by the board.

  ‘I can’t deny it,’ he said, breathing smoke, ‘… in the face of all the evidence.’

  He looked over-strained, as he had the day before — but no worse. His beard, growing in the shadow of his hollow cheeks, still looked as though it had not been intended. Instead, it was a mark of decline. His white suit was of a good cloth, but did not stand close scrutiny.

  ‘A man has arrived to see you,’ I said. ‘A Captain Usher.’

  He nodded once, touched his spectacles and looked at me shrewdly.

  He said, ‘How do you know?’ But he seemed only moderately curious on that point, and as to the reason for my interest in the matter.

  ‘He came by train,’ I said. ‘Not many people do, so it’s easy to keep cases on the arrivals.’

  John Lambert nodded again.

  ‘Usher has been here once today already,’ he said. ‘And is about to return. I wouldn’t be here when he does if I were you.’

  ‘Is he the one you’re in fear of?’ the wife put in.

  (I would allow her that one question.)


  ‘I’m not in fear of anyone,’ Lambert replied. And he kept silence for a moment, before adding: ‘That said, I do not much expect to see out the day.’

  ‘And you won’t say why?’ I enquired, in horror.

  ‘I will not. It is all a secret — a profound secret.’

  ‘And do you know the identity of your father’s murderer?’

  He kept silence.

  Why would a man about to die have any interest in keeping a secret?

  ‘You make… timetables,’ said the wife, from over near the sofa.

  ‘My wife will step outside now,’ I said.

  Lydia — giving me not so much as a glance — was leaning over the sofa, fanning her brown face with her straw boater, which I knew was meant as a deliberate provocation.

  ‘Would you please move away from there?’ Lambert rather coolly requested.

  Lydia stood back, saying, ‘You needn’t worry. I do not understand railway timetables.’

  A beat of silence.

  ‘Actually you will find that many perfectly intelligent people do not,’ said the wife. ‘They are very badly designed. Your brother was not married, I believe,’ she ran on, ‘but is there a fiancee perhaps, or some special woman who will be thinking of him this week-end?’

  I looked white at her. Here was a man who did not expect to outlive the day, and she was making tittle-tattle.

  ‘My wife will leave the room now,’ I repeated.

  Lydia eyed me for a full five seconds before turning on her heel, and walking out, which left a strange silence between me and Lambert, during which he smoked out his cigarette.

  ‘Well, congratulations,’ he said, ‘you worked your will in the end.’

  So saying, he turned and pitched the cigarette stub into the fireplace, where it joined dozens — if not hundreds — of its fellows.

  ‘Is it difficult to be married?’ he asked, turning back to face me.

  ‘She’s rather strong-minded,’ I replied.

  Lambert looked as though he might have said a hundred things in answer to that, but settled on none. He glanced at his watch.

  ‘Will you join me in a friendly glass?’ he enquired. ‘Just before the return of friend Usher?’