Death on a Branch line js-5

by Andrew Martin

  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 fl
y 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.’

  The wife passed a couple of the letters across to Mrs Handley, who looked them over for a while. Then she handed the bundle back to Lydia, lifted the bar flap and moved towards the front door of the pub, saying, ‘I’ve something to show you.’

  She came back a minute later, pushing her way through the cricketers, and holding a paper — another letter by the looks of it. She passed it first to Lydia, who read it over quickly before handing it to me. Well, after all the Mayfair hotels the address did come as a shock, for this dated from the time after his arrest for murder: ‘His Majesty’s Prison Wandsworth, Heathfield Road, London S.’ The letter was addressed to Mrs Handley. It began with thanks for a letter of hers, and ‘all the news of The Angel’. Hugh Lambert then fell to talking about the prison: There is a warder here called Parkhurst, which causes me to wonder whether there is a warder in Parkhurst Prison called Wandsworth. The man seems doubly displaced because he also bears a remarkably close resemblance to Dawlish, the chaplain at my old college. But he is much nicer than Dawlish. As you can already tell, this place is doing peculiar things to my mind, but I am otherwise perfectly content. Everything is wonderfully concentrated, and you have the whole world here in its distilled essence. The sparrows in the yard do duty for the Adenwold country-side; a cigarette after supper (or ‘tea’) is an evening in the bar of the Ritz, and as for ‘prisoners’ association’ — well, that’s a chapter from a Dickens novel. Please send my best regards to your husband, and tell Mervyn to look for a robin’s nest in the old plum tree in the graveyard. There are two holes in the trunk at the start of the branches. When I saw it last, the north-facing one was occupied by the family of robins; the other (west facing) was occupied by a family of flycatchers, and the robin parents fed the flycatchers and vice versa, which I found charming. Enclosed are two sketches for Mervyn. The first is a robin and a flycatcher side by side, the second (as I do hope you can tell) is of a mole. I don’t know why. Perhaps, in my present situation, I should turn mole. Do tell Mervyn, by the way, that if a mole were the size of a man he would create a tunnel his own width and thirty-seven miles long after a typical night’s work.

  I handed the letter back to Mrs Handley, and she was on the edge of tears.

  ‘The drawings are at the framers in Malton,’ she said. ‘I’m going to put them up in place of the fish pictures.’

  (You’d have thought wall space came at a premium in The Angel, whereas in fact the fish pictures were the only ones in the place.)

  ‘We saw Mervyn in the woods just now,’ I said. ‘He was burning bird bones: a kestrel and a moorhen.’

  The wife was frowning at me, but I’d checked Mrs Handley’s tears at any rate.

  ‘The kestrel attacked the moorhen, and they came down together,’ she said. ‘It happened out at the back here. Our Mervyn came racing in to tell me while I was talking to Master Hugh. We all went out to see, and Hugh looked down at these two birds and he said something like “That’s father and I”. Mervyn heard it quite distinctly, and when the police were first here asking all their questions I was daft enough to let on. Well, they had Mervyn in — took me and him by train to York, and asked us that many questions. The boy was in tears from the moment we left to the moment we came back — I’ve never seen him in such a state.’

  ‘He told us he’d never travelled by train,’ I said.

  ‘He never has since,’ said Mrs Handley. ‘Put him off for life, that trip did.’

  ‘That’s why you never went to Scarborough,’ said the wife, and Mrs Handley said, ‘Yes. It was a consideration.’

  ‘Was his statement put in?’ I said. ‘Was he called as a witness?’

  Mrs Handley shook her head. ‘It never came to that,’ she said.

  I noticed there was a small glass of wine on the bar in front of her. I had never seen her drink before.

  ‘Mrs Handley,’ I asked her, ‘do you really think that Master Hugh is a murderer?’

  She just drained her glass, and said, ‘Do you want some dinner?’

  We went over to a table and ate some cheese and cold meats whi
le crowded in by the cricketers. At one point, they were so arranged that I saw a clear channel through them, and station master Hardy was at the end of it, sitting at a table in the ‘public’. He looked red-faced, perhaps on account of his suit, which looked very constricting. Every so often, one of the strapping cricketers would go over and place an empty pint glass on his table, and each time I glimpsed Hardy there were more and more glasses containing sticky dregs under his nose. It wasn’t so much that the cricketers were not mannerly, or that they were drunk, it was just that they didn’t seem to notice him at all.

  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.