Death on a Branch Line

by Andrew Martin

  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 fiancée 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?’

  He caught up a tumbler from the mantel-piece, and poured into it from a whisky bottle that stood by the sofa. But this glass was evidently his own, so another was needed, and as Lambert hunted about for it I let my eye run over his papers.

  There seemed an eastern bias to it all. Two timetables of the Great Eastern; a town plan of the port of Harwich; sea charts for the Channel and the North Sea; a book on the railways of East Anglia. The written documents gave little away, but were just dense masses of handwriting. I made out a few phrases – ‘Principal entraining stations’, ‘provision of hospital trains’ – and one sentence I read in its entirety. It stood out almost luminous: ‘There must be kept, throughout the emergency, open lines for out-going, so that trains can be kept running, as it were in a circle.’

  And that was when the picture composed.

  As Lambert handed me the whisky, I was in a flat spin of excitement, and I drank it in a draught to steady myself. John Lambert did the same – and it wasn’t his first of the day, either. It was agony to understand something of the matter at hand, and yet to be checkmated by his silence.

  He was now peering through the gap in the curtains at the window that overlooked the fields. He turned to me, and said, ‘Drink up, Usher’s coming. You can go out by the way you came in.’

  ‘Now hold on,’ I said. ‘We can face him down together.’

  Lambert smiled and shook his head.

  ‘A small chance remains that he and I might reach an accommodation, but there’ll be no chance of it if we have company.’

  And there was somehow nothing else for it. I would leave, and I would return directly with the Chief. If I was too late, then it was too bad.

  Lambert walked towards the far door. He unbolted it, stepped into the back garden and, as I quit the room by the front door, I heard him say ‘Hello again’ in a fascinating, dead tone. There was some smooth answering murmur from Usher, and then Lambert said, ‘Look – let’s talk out here in the garden. It’s pleasant here, don’t you think?’

  I stepped through the front door, and there stood the wife, kicking her heels.

  ‘This way,’ I said, indicating the most direct route towards the woods, and she stood still for a moment, just to show that she would not take any more orders from me.

  I waited for her at the railing that bordered the woods. I had managed the angle so that we could not be seen from the rear of the gardener’s cottage, and the wife had followed my footsteps very precisely along the scorched grass, although keeping at twenty yards’ distance.

  ‘And are you any the wiser?’ she said, looking at the sporting cap, which I had fixed back on my head.

  The railing stood between us.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Come out of the grounds.’

  ‘You left in a tearing hurry,’ she said.

  ‘Usher came up to the cottage by the back way. The two of them are talking in the garden now.’

  ‘I think you should have stood your ground. If you’re dead set on filling up our week-end with this business you should go about it properly.’

  I made no reply.

  ‘You’re scared of that man Usher, why don’t you admit it?’ she said, climbing over the railing.

  I put out my hand to help her.

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ she said, and struck out for the main woodland track.

  Now it was my turn to follow her at a distance.

  ‘Do you want to know what all those papers of Lambert’s are about?’ I called after her.

  No answer. She walked on with swishing skirts.

  ‘It’s the mobilisation of the British Army,’ I said.

  The wife said nothing to that, but I knew by the change that had overcome her walk that she was impressed.

  Chapter Nineteen

  We tramped on through the woods.

  We’d missed the best route back to the village, but I knew the general direction. Sometimes I walked ahead, sometimes the wife. Sometimes we walked parallel on separate narrow tracks through the trees. Every so often the wife would shoot a look of fury at me, and at my green sporting cap in particular.

  As we walked on, I thought of the timetable clerks at the Company offices in York, who worked amid heaps of graphs and diagrams and maps and were considered the brightest sparks of the place, while the men in charge of them were the leading intellects of all. John Lambert was evidently one of the men in charge of the men in charge. He would have the brains to overturn a conviction for murder. If he spoke out against a hanging, people would listen. But who did he plan to speak out to?

  Was Usher the man? Or was he out to silence Lambert?

  I’d read in the railway papers of the mobilisation schemes, but the subject was always very cagily approached: ‘It is likely that plans are in hand …’; ‘It would be expected that at such a critical time …’

  I glanced again towards the wife.

  It was crazy to be rowing, for we’d struck a business of the very gravest sort. Everything, from the Moroccan crisis to the women’s question to the strikes and riots flaring all across the country – it was all wrapped up in the War Question. France had been the enemy for a while (there always had to be one), but the French had given way to the Germans, who fitted the part much better. You didn’t hear much about Anglo-German friendship any more. Instead, it was all war talk – and war talk and railway talk overlapped more and more. I’d heard of a scheme to connect the barracks at Aldershot with East Anglia without going through London. Get the regular army out fast – push ’em out through the Essex ports. But there was more to the planning than that. The whole question had to be looked at contrariwise as well: you’d need a programme for getting the troops into defensive positions in the event of invasion, and another for bringing back the dead or injured – a scheme for hospital trains. You knew the planning went on, and all you could do was trust that it was being done well.

  But for all that, the row with the wife was just as strong in my thoughts. It was hardly our first one. We had small ones regularly about the late hours I was called on to work. It all boiled down to the demands the Chief placed upon me, which the wife did not understand. The Chief’s wife seemed to stand anything; he lived his whole life in a man’s world.

  ‘I’m sorry I packed you off,’ I called to her through the trees, after twenty minutes or so.

  ‘You did not pack me off,’ she called back, crashing through some ferns. ‘I chose to leave.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry that I made you choose to leave then,’ I said. ‘I just think it was a bit of a distraction to start telling him that you couldn’t use a railway timetable.’

  ‘Credit me with some intelligence, please. I wanted to keep him talking,’ said the wife.

  ‘Funny w
ay of going about it,’ I said, ‘… by talking yourself.’

  ‘I had the idea that I was on the verge of a discovery.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, get back in your box,’ she said. ‘And take that flipping cap off.’

  ‘I will not,’ I said. Indicating a path, I stopped and said to the wife, ‘After you.’

  ‘Stow it,’ she snapped back, but she led off in the direction I’d shown her.

  The woods gave out and a cricket ground came into view. The pavilion put me in mind of a white wooden railway station. At one end of the ground stood three tall poplars, and they might have been giant wickets, only they stood some way beyond the boundary. The wicket was a strip of especially bright green light.

  I followed the wife along the lane that bounded the pitch, which turned out to connect with the second village green of Adenwold. We walked past the silent churchyard, the shops and cottages, and began drifting along the hedge-tunnel, where the bees whirred as they worked the great green walls. The neglected ladder remained in place, looking very forlorn, for the hedge could grow and it could not.

  I heard what might have been a motor-car in the far distance, and stopped to try and make out the sound, but the wife kept walking, drawing her straw hat against the left-hand hedge, and taking down her hair, which you would have thought a complicated business but which she accomplished with two impatient strokes of her right hand. When she took her hair down, that always meant she was going off into her own world.

  As we trudged on past the station yard, the hour chimes from the church floated up, the bell toiling with great effort, as though climbing a steep hill to the maximum number: twelve o’clock. Hugh Lambert had forty-four hours left; his brother possibly fewer still. The train that might bring the Chief was due in twenty-seven minutes’ time. I called up to the wife: ‘I’m off to meet the train in. I’ll come up, presently.’

  But she just walked on towards The Angel.

  I crossed the station yard, and walked up onto the ‘up’, where a smell of white-wash, combined with the great heat of the day, made me feel faint. The whole of the platform seemed to tilt for a moment and the signal box lurched.

  The signalman was up there, leaning on his balcony. Eddie by name. He appeared to be grinning down at the porter, Woodcock, who sat on the fancy bench smoking, and looking at a pot of white-wash set down by the platform edge. He’d started renewing the white edging, but had got only about a third of the way along. I took my top-coat off, and draped it over the fence that separated the ‘up’ platform from the station yard.

  ‘You had enough of this place, mate?’ said Woodcock. ‘Are you making off?’

  I made no reply to that, but removed the Lambert papers from my coat pocket, and sat down by the fence to read them:

  The dog is everything to the boy, and accompanies him at all times. He uses it a good deal for rabbiting, of which he knew I disapproved, but Mervyn Handley has an innate diplomacy, which always prevented him from speaking about his pursuit of rabbits in my presence. I would often think that he would have been the perfect son for father to have. Aged eight, I fell off the cob, and had concussion of the brain; later, I perfected the art of going backwards on a pony. I doubt that Mervyn would have required a leading rein for year after year, as I did. The boy has taught himself shooting, but I’m sure that he ‘shoulders’ a gun (if that be the correct expression) in the right manner, and I’m sure that, given the chance, he would be the ‘hard man to hounds’ that Ponder and I were always supposed to become. He could never be categorised as a booby or a mollycoddle, even by a man so keen to employ those epithets as father.

  I do not mean to be patronising about the boy. There is more to him than pluck and a keen eye. He is intelligent, and who is to say that he does not have the brains to take a first at Cambridge as Ponder did? This, of course, will remain undetermined.

  Approaching the bottom of the page, the writing became scrawl and I shuffled the pages once more, but I found that I couldn’t break in again: every new page seemed equally crabbed. I sat back, and closed my eyes.

  When I opened them, the clock on the platform said 12.27 dead on, and I felt my face stiff with sunburn. I didn’t like the idea of having slept in Woodcock’s presence. He remained smoking on the bench just as before, but as I lifted my coat off the wicket fence, I checked through its pockets for warrant card, pocket book and watch, and found them all present.

  ‘Any news of the 12.27, mate?’ I called over to Woodcock. ‘It’s not running late, is it?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ he said, ‘and I’m not your mate.’

  It had been a daft question. How could he know? The telegraph line was down.

  ‘You leaving without your missus?’ he said.

  ‘Meeting a pal,’ I said.

  ‘Another journalist?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, since you ask.’

  He didn’t believe me.

  Did John Lambert’s timetable work somehow connect him with these blokes at the station? I looked from Woodcock to the paint pot.

  ‘It’s almost too hot to work today,’ said Woodcock, ‘and I never thought I’d hear myself say that. Anyone who knows me would be amazed to hear me coming out with those words.’

  I watched him blow smoke.

  ‘In a state of shock they would be,’ he said.

  ‘Where’s your governor?’ I enquired, and it seemed to me possible in that instant that Woodcock and the signalman had killed and eaten station master Hardy. But Woodcock looked along the platform towards the small sidings and the goods yard. As he did so, I heard the bark of a small engine from that direction.

  The station master was on the warehouse platform, swivelling in the driving seat of a steam crane, the steam and smoke rising up from his rear – from the little motor that was located behind him like a bustle. He fitted so snugly into the seat of the crane that he looked like a steam-powered man. A good-sized crate was attached by canvas belts to the jib of the crane, and station master Hardy was loading it onto a flat-bedded wagon that had been drawn up by the warehouse. The wagon would be taken away on the next pick-up goods to come through Adenwold. That would be on Monday.

  How many Lamberts would be dead by then?

  I wondered again about station master Hardy’s miniature soldiers. Did he move them about at intervals like chess pieces, the movement on one side requiring movement on the other? How did a miniature soldier die? How was that event signified? If you were a boy, you just knocked the soldier over – and you usually didn’t stop at one.

  The man Gifford … Perhaps I ought to have directed him towards Hardy, who might have an interest in scale models in general. Then again, did model soldiers come in the same scale as model trains? This was the connection that John Lambert was required to make: the connection between soldiers and railways. And who had charged him with the task? Surely the government: the War Office. In which case, who employed his seeming opponent Captain Usher? They couldn’t both be in the service of the state; couldn’t both be on the side of right.

  The sound of the crane was by degrees drowned out by the beat of a louder engine, and I saw the 12.27 coming around the track-bend in the woods, two minutes late. As I crossed the barrow boards to the smaller platform, I watched the bundles of black smoke enter the woods by different gaps in the trees, like so many parcels being sorted.

  The train stopped on the ‘up’, and a carriage door opened.

  Well, the first man down was the Chief, and I felt a great sense of relief and duty-done at the sight of him. He was holding a kitbag, and looking at his watch. He hadn’t seen me yet, for I stood by the guard’s van, and he’d been riding in the carriage behind the engine.

  He held his trilby hat, and I looked with enjoyment at his battered face, and thin strands of hair lashed by sweat to his great dinty head. At first he might charge me with having dragged him away from his Saturday dinner-time bottle of wine in the Station Hotel for no good reason. But I was sure he’d see the se
nse of the wire I sent once I’d explained all.

  The Chief gave a glance along the platform, and would have spotted me at that moment had not a younger man stepped down from the train, blocking his line of vision. I’d barely had time to take in this new arrival when another man came, and then everything went wrong, for a dozen carriage doors opened and a dozen or more young blokes climbed down. They were all in the twenties or early thirties. Some wore hooped caps, and all carried long canvas bags, some with bat handles protruding. They were all bloody cricketers and they were all bloody suspects. I cursed the North Eastern Railway for bringing them.

  To turn up in this way at a village with the shadow of an execution hanging over it did not seem right. They all stood on the platform, joshing and larking about, and the Chief was fighting his way through, coming towards me and looking none too pleased. Cricket wasn’t one of his games. As he closed on me, I pulled off my cap by way of a salute, and started in straightaway by asking whether he’d had the story of Hugh Lambert’s lay-over at York station, at which the Chief shook his head briskly, and spat.

  The train was noisily taking its leave (nobody had boarded), and the platform was clearing as the cricketers streamed over the barrow boards towards the station yard and I began telling my tale to the Chief. He listened with head bent forward and eyes closed as though making a great effort to understand.

  Or was he drunk?

  That was not out of the question. Saturday was the Chief’s principal boozing day, and his breath came over a little sour.

  The Chief was nodding occasionally, and looking over towards the station yard, where a charabanc had drawn up. It had many seats – looked like a sort of omnibus with the top deck sliced off. At the wheel sat that bad shilling of Adenwold, the fucking vicar, the Reverend Martin Ridley, who was climbing down now as the cricketers straggled across the yard towards him. He moved towards the first of the blokes and greeted him by miming the bowling of a very fast ball, which caused a good deal of dust to fly up in the station yard and the vicar’s hat to fall off.