The Railway Viaduct

by Edward Marston

  ‘I still say that it was you, Father,’ he accused.

  ‘Then you’d best bring a Holy Bible so that I can swear on it. That won’t mean much to you, godforsaken heathen that you are, but it means all the world to me.’ He put his face close to that of the other. ‘I did not tell a soul about your plan.’

  ‘But you did know about it.’

  ‘Of course – thanks to you. To get support, you told everybody you could. That’s how it must have leaked out. The person to blame is you and that jabbering mouth of yours. It never stops. Someone overheard you and reported it straight away.’

  ‘Is that what Mr Brassey told you?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Slattery. ‘He called me to his office and said that he’d received information that there was to be an attack on the French camp. He asked me if I knew who was behind it.’

  Shannon was disturbed. ‘Did you tell him?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘How do I know that?’

  ‘Because I give you my word. If I’d named you and the other ringleaders, you’d all have been on the first boat back home. If nothing else does, that should prove my loyalty to my nation.’

  There was an extended pause while Shannon pondered.

  ‘Thank you, Father,’ he mumbled at length.

  ‘I named no names,’ said Slattery. ‘Tell that to the others.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘And don’t invent any more hare-brained schemes like this.’

  ‘It wasn’t me that thought of it.’ Shannon lowered his voice. ‘What else did Mr Brassey say?’

  ‘Only that you were mad to turn on the French. It could’ve meant him losing the contract altogether. As it is, the delays have cost him a lot of money. Did you know that there are time penalties of five thousand pounds a month if work is behind schedule?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Well, there are. Mr Brassey showed me the contract.’

  ‘Did he give you the name of the traitor?’

  ‘No, but I still think he was called Pierce Shannon. You opened your mouth once too often.’

  ‘Everybody knew that something was afoot tonight,’ said Shannon, ‘but only those who were coming knew the fucking time and place. Somehow, Mr Brassey got hold of those details.’

  ‘God works in mysterious ways.’

  ‘This was nothing to do with God. We’ve got a spy in our ranks.’

  ‘Then you should thank him – he saved your jobs.’

  ‘And what if these bloody raids go on, Father? What if we get another explosion or some more damage in the tunnel? What if someone starts a real fire next time? What would happen to our fucking jobs then? Answer me that.’ Shannon was breathing heavily. ‘And while you’re at it,’ he continued, angrily, ‘you can answer another bloody question as well.’

  ‘If you could phrase it more sweetly, maybe I will.’

  ‘Since you didn’t betray us, who, in the bowels of Christ, did?’

  Victor Leeming had never spent such an uncomfortable night before. He was, by turns, appalled by what he saw, nauseated by what he smelt and disgusted that human beings could live in such a way. The Irish camp consisted of ragged tents, rickety wooden huts and ramshackle cottages built out of stone, timber, thatch and clods of earth. In such dwellings, there was no trace of mortar to hold things together. Gaps in the roof and walls would, in due course, let in wind, rain and snow. Vermin could enter freely. It was grim and cheerless. Leeming had seen farmyard animals with better accommodation.

  When he had been invited to go to the flimsy shack where Liam Kilfoyle slept, he did not realise that he would be sleeping on flagstones and sharing a room with five other people. Two of them were women, and Leeming was shocked when the men beside them each mounted their so-called wives and took their pleasure to the accompaniment of raucous female laughter. It was worlds away from the kind of tender union that Leeming and Estelle enjoyed. Simply being in the same room as the noisy, public, unrestrained rutting made him feel tainted. Kilfoyle, by contrast, was amused by it all. As he lay beside Leeming, he whispered a secret.

  ‘The fat one is called Bridget,’ he said, grinning inanely. ‘I have her sometimes when Fergal goes to sleep. You can fuck her as well, if you want to.’

  Leeming was sickened by the thought. ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘It’s quite safe. Fergal never wakes up.’

  ‘I’m too tired, Liam.’

  ‘Please yourself. I’ll have Bridget later on.’

  Leeming wondered how many more nights he would have to endure such horror. During his days in uniform, he had raided brothels in some of the most insalubrious areas of London but he had seen nothing to equal this. He could not understand how anyone could bear to live in such conditions. What he did admire about the navvies was their brute strength. After one day, his hands were badly blistered and he was aching all over, yet the others made light of the exhausting work. Navvies had incredible stamina. Leeming could not match it for long. To take his mind off his immediate discomfort, he tried to probe for information.

  ‘Liam?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What if we were wrong?’

  ‘Wrong about what?’

  ‘The French,’ said Leeming, quietly. ‘Suppose that it wasn’t them who set off that explosion?’

  ‘It had to be them, Victor.’

  ‘Yes, but suppose – only suppose, mind you – that it wasn’t? If it was someone from this camp, for instance, who’d be the most likely person to have done it?’

  ‘What a stupid question!’

  ‘Think it through,’ advised Leeming.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, it has to be someone who knows how to handle gunpowder, for a start. It’s very easy to blow yourself up with that stuff. Is there anyone here who’s had any experience of blasting rock before? I heard that the gunpowder was stolen from near here.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Who could have taken it?’

  ‘Some bleeding Frenchie.’

  ‘It’s a long way to come from their camp.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kilfoyle slowly, as if the idea had never occurred to him. ‘You’re fucking right, Victor.’

  ‘So who, in this camp, knows how to handle gunpowder?’

  ‘Not me, I can tell you that.’

  ‘Somebody must have had experience.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I just wondered who it might be, that’s all.’

  ‘He needs catching, whoever the bastard is.’

  ‘Have you any idea at all who it could be?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Think hard, Liam.’

  ‘Don’t ask me.’ He fell silent and cupped a hand to his ear so that he could hear more clearly. A loud snore came from the other side of the room. ‘That’s Fergal,’ he said with snigger. ‘Fast asleep. I’m off to shag his wife.’ He sat up. ‘Shall I tell Bridget you’ll be over to take your turn after me?’

  Leeming’s blushes went unseen in the dark.

  Caleb Andrews was late getting home that night. When he came off duty at Euston, he went for a drink in a public house frequented by railwaymen and tried to bolster his confidence by beating his fireman at several games of draughts. His winnings were all spent on beer. As he rolled home to Camden, therefore, he was in a cheerful mood. His supremacy on the draughts board had been restored and several pints of beer had given him a sense of well-being. He let himself into his house and found his daughter working by the light of an oil lamp.

  ‘Still up, Maddy?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, Father,’ she replied. ‘I just wanted to finish this.’

  He looked over her shoulder. ‘What is it – a portrait of me?’

  ‘No, it’s the Sankey Viaduct.’

  ‘Is it? Bless my soul!’

  Since his vision was impaired after so much alcohol, he needed to put his face very close to the paper in order to see the drawing. Even then he had difficulty picking out some of the pencil lines.<
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  ‘It’s good, Maddy.’

  ‘You’ve been drinking,’ she said. ‘I can smell it on your breath.’

  ‘I was celebrating.’

  ‘Celebrating what?’

  ‘I won ten games of draughts in a row.’

  ‘Are you ready for another game with me?’

  ‘No, no,’ he said, backing away. ‘I’ll not let you take advantage of your poor father when he can’t even see straight. But why are you drawing the Sankey Viaduct? You’ve never even seen it.’

  ‘Robert described it to me.’

  ‘I could have done that. I’ve been over it.’

  ‘Yes, Father, but you were driving an engine at the time. You’ve never seen the viaduct from below as Robert has. According to him, it was a painting rather like this that will help to solve the murder.’

  ‘I don’t see how.’

  Madeleine put her pencil aside and got up from her chair. She explained how Ambrose Hooper had witnessed the body being hurled over the viaduct, and how he had duly recorded the moment in his watercolour of the scene. She felt privileged that Colbeck had confided the information to her. What both she and the inspector knew was that the murder victim had been on his way to an assignation, but it was something she would not confide to her father. Caleb Andrews would have been alarmed to hear that she had been involved in a police investigation. More worrying from Madeleine’s point of view was that fact that he was likely to pass on the information over a drink with his railway colleagues. Discretion was unknown to him.

  ‘Why do you want to draw the Sankey Viaduct?’ he wondered.

  ‘I was just passing an idle hour.’

  ‘You’re never idle, Maddy. You take after me.’

  ‘Robert told me so much about it that I wanted to put it down on paper. It’s not something I’d ever expect to sell. I was just trying to do what Mr Hooper did and reconstruct the crime.’

  ‘The real crime was committed by the guard on that train,’ said Andrews with passion. ‘He should have kept his eyes open. If he’d seen that body being thrown from the train, he could have jumped on to the platform at the next stop and caught the killer before he could sneak away.’

  ‘But the guard didn’t see a thing, Father.’

  ‘That’s my point.’ Swaying uneasily, he put a hand on the back of a chair to steady himself. ‘I’m for bed, Maddy. What about you?’

  ‘I’ll be up soon.’

  ‘Next time you speak to Inspector Colbeck, tell him to consult me. I’ve got a theory about this crime – lots of them, in fact.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, fondly. ‘I’ve heard them all.’

  Madeleine kissed her father on the cheek then helped him to the staircase. Holding the banister, he went slowly up the steps. She returned immediately to a drawing that she had embarked on in the first instance because it kept Robert Colbeck in her mind. It was not meant to be an accurate picture of the viaduct. Madeleine had departed quite radically from the description that she had been given. She now added some features that were purely imaginary.

  Using her pencil with a light touch, she removed the brook and canal that ran beneath the viaduct by drowning them completely in the foaming waves of the English Channel. On one side of the viaduct, she drew a sketch of a railway station and wrote the name Dover above it. On the other, she pencilled in a tall, elegant man in a frock coat and top hat. England and France had been connected in art. The drawing was no longer her version of what had happened to Gaston Chabal. It was a viaduct between her and Robert Colbeck, built with affection and arching its way across the sea to carry her love to him. As she put more definition and character into the tiny portrait of the detective, she wondered how he was faring in France and hoped that they would soon be together again.

  Thomas Brassey did not only expect his employees to work long hours, he imposed the same strict regimen on himself. Accordingly, he arrived on site early that morning to discover that Robert Colbeck was there before him. The inspector was carrying a newspaper.

  ‘You’ve read the report, I daresay,’ noted Brassey.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I got my wife to translate it for me. I’m glad that they described Gaston as an outstanding civil engineer because that’s exactly what he was. My only concern is that the report of his murder will bring droves of people out here to bother me.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Colbeck. ‘Since the crime was committed in England, reporters would have no reason to visit you. The police, on the other hand, may want to learn more about the deceased so I am sure that they will pay you a call at some time.’

  ‘I hope that you’re on hand when they come, Inspector.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I need an interpreter.’

  ‘What about your wife?’

  ‘Maria doesn’t like to come to the site. And who can blame her?’ he said, looking around at the clamorous activity. ‘It is always so noisy, smelly and dirty here.’

  ‘Building a railway means making a mess, Mr Brassey.’

  The contractor laughed. ‘I’ve made more mess than anybody.’

  ‘All in a good cause.’

  ‘I like to think so.’

  Brassey unlocked the door of his office and the two of them went in. Various people began to call to get their orders for the day from the contractor. It was some time before Colbeck was alone again with him. Meanwhile, he had been studying the map of northern France that was on the wall.

  ‘Compared to us,’ he remarked, ‘they have so few railways.’

  ‘That will change in time, Inspector. Mind you, they’ve been spared the mad rush that we had. Everyone wanted to build a railway in England because they thought they would make a fortune.’

  ‘Some of them did, Mr Brassey.’

  ‘Only the lucky ones,’ said the other. ‘The crash was bound to come. When it did, thousands of investors were ruined, credit dried up and everything ground to a standstill. The Railway Mania was over.’

  ‘You survived somehow.’

  ‘We still had plenty of work on our books, in France as well as England. Many of our rivals went to the wall. It was the one good thing to come out of the disaster – we got rid of a lot of crooked promoters, incompetent engineers and contractors who gave us all a bad name. It stopped the rot, Inspector.’

  ‘Is that why you prefer to work in France?’

  ‘My partners and I will go wherever railways need to be built,’ said Brassey. ‘We’ve contracts in Canada, Italy and Denmark at this point in time.’

  ‘But this one is your major concern.’

  ‘At the moment.’

  ‘I can understand why,’ said Colbeck, glancing at the map. ‘If you can secure the contract for the extension of this line from Caen to Cherbourg, you’ll have work in France for years to come.’

  ‘That’s why nothing must jeopardise the project.’

  ‘We headed off one big threat last night.’

  ‘When will the next one come?’

  ‘I hope that it won’t Mr Brassey.’

  ‘But you can offer no guarantee.’

  ‘No, sir. I fear not. What I can tell you is this. Gaston Chabal was murdered in England for reasons that are connected to this railway. As you pointed out to me,’ Colbeck went on, ‘he was much more than an engineer. He obviously had a pivotal role to play here.’

  ‘He did, Inspector. He was a sort of talisman.’

  ‘In more ways than one, it seems.’

  ‘I knew nothing of Gaston’s private life when I took him on,’ said Brassey. ‘Even if I had been aware of his adulteries, I’d still have employed him. I’m a contractor, not a moral guardian.’

  ‘That’s clear from the vast number of navvies you employ.’

  ‘Quite so, Inspector Colbeck. All sorts of irregularities go on in their camps but it’s none of my business. As long as a man can do the job he’s paid for, he can have three wives and a dozen mistresses.’

  ‘I don’t think that Chabal went t
o that extreme.’ Colbeck moved away from the map to look through the window. ‘I fear that it will all have come as a great shock to Victor.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The moral laxity in the camp. He’s a married man who tries to lead a Christian life. Some of the antics here will shake him to the core. He won’t have seen anything like this before.’

  ‘It’s one of the reasons I encouraged Father Slattery to join us.’

  ‘He’s a courageous man, taking on such a task.’

  ‘And so is Sergeant Leeming,’ said Brassey, a chevron of concern between his eyebrows. ‘As a priest, Father Slattery is not in any physical danger. Your sergeant certainly is.’

  ‘Police work entails continuous danger, sir.’

  ‘I just wonder if you have him in the right place.’

  ‘The right place?’

  ‘Well, I agree that the people we are after may be somewhere among the Irish but we’ve hundreds and hundreds of those. The villains could be bricklayers or quarrymen or blacksmiths. Why do you think they are navvies?’

  ‘Instinct,’ replied Colbeck. ‘Instinct built up over the years. I feel that it was endorsed last night when that mob went in search of a fight. That was another attempt to disrupt this railway and to put you out of business. The villains used the same device as on the previous night, Mr Brassey.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘On the first occasion they used gunpowder. On the second, they used an equally deadly device – human gunpowder. Those Irish navvies were set to explode by the time they reached the French camp. No,’ he decided, ‘Victor is definitely where he needs to be. He won’t thank me for putting him there, but he’s in exactly the right place.’

  Working so hard left him little time for detection. Victor Leeming had to take on a convincing camouflage and that forced him to toil away for long hours with a shovel in his hands. There were breaks for food and times when he had to satisfy the call of nature. Otherwise, he was kept busy loading spoil into the wagons for hour after fatiguing hour. He talked to Liam Kilfoyle and to some of the others labouring alongside him but they told him nothing of any real use. It was only when the shift finally ended, and the men trooped off to the nearest tavern, that Leeming was able to continue his search. Since he had joined in the march on the French camp, he was accepted. It made it easier for him to talk to the navvies. With a drink in their hands, they were off guard.