Death on a Branch Line

by Andrew Martin

  I dare say we ought to’ve woken Mr and Mrs Handley rather than making off at just gone four-thirty in the morning with their son in tow and the rain streaming down. But whereas the difficulty before had been to make Mervyn Handley speak, the difficulty now was stopping him.

  ‘It were all over the telegram not sent,’ he kept saying, as we walked past the row of low, bent cottages that stood black against the greyness of the dawn.

  ‘And it was the porter, Woodcock, who Sir George asked to send it?’ I asked again, although I thought I had this clear.

  ‘It were up to ’im, aye,’ said Mervyn. ‘It were ’is job, only he’d booked off for t’ day, an’ ’e wouldn’t do it.’

  ‘And he cheeked Sir George?’

  ‘I should just think ’e did, aye. Give ’im a right mouthful.’

  ‘But this is all hearsay?’ I said, as we passed in front of the cottages. ‘You what?’ said Mervyn.

  A thin line of smoke went up contrary to the rain from one of the chimneys.

  ‘You know of this,’ I said, ‘but you never saw it.’

  ‘I saw what come next,’ said the boy. ‘Not likely to forget it, either.’

  ‘Let’s be right now,’ I shouted over the rain. ‘Sir George threatened to write –’

  The boy nodded eagerly, saying, ‘Letter of complaint, like.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Railway brass at York.’

  ‘Did he mean to complain about Woodcock or Hardy?’

  ‘Why, both,’ said Mervyn.

  ‘Hardy,’ I said, ‘… had he got across Sir George before?’

  ‘No,’ said Mervyn. ‘You en’t listening. Woodcock ’ad. Woodcock would always give trouble, and Hardy wouldn’t do owt agin ’im.’

  ‘Because he was scared of him.’

  ‘Scared? I’ll say ’e was.’

  ‘And Hardy was more scared of this Woodcock than he was of Sir George,’ put in the wife.

  We were now crossing the station yard. The trees thrashed under the rain, and the station looked like nothing more than a camp in the woods. It had been important to have the boy’s story clear by the time we reached it, and this had meant he should come along with us, but I did not want a child put in the way of what might happen next.

  ‘Look, you mustn’t come up,’ I said.

  So he remained in the yard under the slanting rain, with the wife standing beside him, and not quite knowing – from the looks of things – whether to take his hand.

  I walked on until I gained the platform boards of the ‘up’. The tracks and signals, and the rattling sign reading ‘Waiting Room’, seemed nothing but a bluff. One light burned low in the roaring greyness – it spilled through the booking office doorway. I walked up to it, and Hardy was there in full station master’s uniform, watching the spread of tiny tin soldiers and scratching his head. As I looked on, he leant forward and swiftly changed the position of some of the men. In 1884, the British square had broken, and the station master was setting that to rights again. He made his move, and stood back. Our eyes met.

  ‘You murdered Sir George Lambert,’ I said.

  He looked at me with curiosity – in a daze at having been dragged from Africa back to Adenwold.

  ‘You murdered Sir George Lambert,’ I said again, holding up my warrant card this time. ‘You went to see him at the Hall over the matter of a telegram. I don’t know what the telegram was about. It hardly matters. He’d wanted it sent, and your porter, Woodcock, wouldn’t do it. Sir George called you up to the Hall. He was drinking, getting ready to go out shooting rabbits, and he was in a rage, having been arguing with his son. You thought you’d be well in with him since he’d taken so strongly against the previous bloke in your job, but he’d had bother with Woodcock before, and he wanted you to stand him down. He was giving you a hot time of it. You made out you’d do it but you knew you hadn’t the nerve. Then I’d say this happened … You took a shotgun from the Hall. There was no shortage of them there. You went into the woods and called to Sir George when you saw him alone. You fired on him. You were wearing gloves at the time. You then came on Hugh Lambert, lying drunk in the woods, and you left the shotgun by his side.’

  Hardy continued to study the soldiers.

  ‘They walked through a fire of light, these men,’ he said, looking up from the leaden figures. ‘… I read that in a book about them.’

  I saw the alphabetic dial of the ABC machine behind him. That was the contraption by which Sir George had wanted his message sent – most of the small stations on the North Eastern had them. They were simple to operate and required very little training, unlike the Morse system of telegraphy. There had been no telephone in the Hall until lately. Sir George had been dependent on the station for sending messages.

  But now the wires were down, and in nearly three hours’ time Master Hugh would be executed for Hardy’s crime unless a message was sent.

  ‘… A fire of light,’ Hardy said again. Then, rapidly, ‘Who do you have your story from?’

  ‘The boy,’ I said. ‘Mervyn Handley. He was in the woods – he practically lives in the bloody woods – and he saw you fire. You know very well that he did. You saw him yourself.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said the station master, with an intake of breath, ‘I don’t say it isn’t right.’

  ‘He was scared of speaking out. He was no doubt threatened.’

  ‘Not by me,’ said Hardy. ‘I’m not the type to threaten.’

  ‘You’re more the type to be threatened,’ I said.

  ‘I have my own boy,’ said Hardy.

  ‘You have a son?’

  ‘Here,’ said Hardy, and his fat finger shook as he pointed at one of the figures on the board: the drummer boy. ‘He was the hardest to paint, you know.’

  ‘Why?’ I said, although I was thinking of the cut wires. Was it possible that the Chief and Usher had restored them?

  ‘Oh,’ said Hardy. ‘Well … because he’s the smallest.’

  No, I thought, the Chief and Usher would not have restored the connection, with John Lambert still at large and threatening to communicate with foreign agents.

  I eyed Hardy.

  ‘Did you hear us talking in the woods to Mervyn this morning? Did you shoot his dog?’

  He shook his head, which set his cheeks wobbling.

  ‘Why do you have these soldiers?’

  ‘To set an example,’ he said. ‘Help me play a brave man’s part.’

  He sighed.

  ‘To bring me up to –’

  ‘A confession?’ I put in. ‘Well, you’ve left it rather late, but will you own to it now? The boy will stand to what he saw in court, you know.’

  (Would he really? I hadn’t put the question to Mervyn, and he evidently went in terror of police and courts.)

  ‘I’d have been on the stones, you see,’ said Hardy. ‘Sir George said I was helpless to manage, and that I ought to go.’

  Hardy moved as he spoke – wobbled a little way to the left – giving me a view of the clock on the wall. Five to five.

  ‘A man like that can get what he wants, and he meant to have me dismissed no matter what.’ Hardy breathed a shuddering breath: ‘And I couldn’t stand Woodcock down – there was never any question of it. He’d made himself a devil to me as things were.’

  ‘And he came to know you’d done it?’

  ‘Oh, he knew,’ said Hardy.

  ‘You told him yourself, I shouldn’t wonder – thinking to put the frighteners on him, make out that he’d get the same treatment … Only you were under his thumb from then on.’

  I advanced a little way into the booking office.

  Hardy was at the wall cabinet.

  ‘I’ll come along with you,’ he said, ‘but let me find my greatcoat.’

  He opened the door, turned and there was a rifle in his hand.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, facing me, as though surprised to find himself holding the thing. ‘This is the same as the lads have.’ He indicated the board
with a nod of his head. ‘It’s a Martini-Henry.’

  The gun looked ridiculous compared to the inch-long ones on the display – just as if Hardy’s gun was over-sized rather than the others being under. But he levelled it at me, and his fat hands weren’t shaking as he did so, either. I listened to the rain, which seemed to come down with hysterical heaving breaths – a whole summer’s worth falling all at once. Why had I not brought Mervyn’s shotgun out of The Angel? An evil voice came from the doorway behind me.

  ‘In a fix now, en’t you, copper?’

  Woodcock. He’d come down from his crib in the signal box. I ought to’ve known he’d be somewhere about. I’d seen him in the pub earlier and there’d been no train to take him away. Still under the gun, I half-turned to him. He was making some motion with his hand in the region of his fly-hole.

  ‘What’s your game?’ I asked, at which Hardy gasped out, ‘No talking now.’

  ‘What’s my game?’ repeated Woodcock. ‘I’m scratching me fucking love apples – any objection?’

  There was a beat of silence.

  ‘I swear there’s fucking fleas in that bench,’ Woodcock said.

  He’d perhaps been kipping in the waiting room then, not the signal box.

  ‘Didn’t think you were a journalist,’ he said. ‘They’re quite clever.’

  I said, ‘Lambert hangs at eight.’

  ‘Here,’ said Woodcock, ‘do you know why the trains ran through? Why were the wires cut?’

  I made no answer.

  ‘In the end,’ said Woodcock, ‘I just thought I’d see how it fell out. I’m in the clear anyhow.’

  ‘The boy knows you were in on it,’ I said, ‘… covering up a murder. That’s why you shot his dog – warn him off. How do you know he won’t speak against you?’

  I indicated Hardy.

  Silence in the booking office.

  ‘Now look here …’ I began again, but Woodcock cut me off, saying, ‘Shut it, I’m thinking.’

  Another beat of silence, and then Woodcock looked at me as if to say: I’ve made my decision.

  He took his hands out of his pockets, and began moving forward, coming past me, advancing on Hardy.

  ‘Give that over, you soft bugger,’ he said.

  Hardy stared at him for a moment, then handed him the rifle just as though he’d been mesmerised. There was now a good deal of shuffling of boots on the wooden floor as Woodcock took Hardy’s position before the clock, and Hardy – wheezing away – skirted the military display and eased out into the rain, with Woodcock calling after him: ‘That’s right, clear off, you double-gutted bastard.’

  Woodcock put the shooter on me.

  ‘It is loaded, you know,’ he said. ‘Old Father Hardy kept it ready at all times. Know why? He meant to blow his own lamp out, only he couldn’t screw himself up to it, so he was in a bind: too scared to live and too scared to die. The wonder is that he ever pulled the bloody trigger in the first place. Do you know what I think?’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck what you think.’

  ‘I reckon he was canned.’

  Woodcock turned and, still keeping the shooter on me, opened the cupboard from which it came. I had a clearer view of it this time, and saw small tools, paint pots, coils of wire, company manuals of various kinds and a shelf given over to bottles of spirits.

  ‘An innocent man’ll be dead not three hours from now,’ I said.

  ‘Innocent,’ said Woodcock. ‘Now that’s putting it a bit strong. Wasn’t friend Lambert a bit of a …’

  ‘What?’

  He hesitated.

  ‘… Down in London, like. It is a crime, you know.’

  Still keeping the gun levelled at me, he reached into the cupboard, and brought down one of the spirit bottles. He pitched it across to me.

  ‘After you,’ he said.

  I unscrewed the cap, and took a belt. It might have been whisky, might have been rum; I don’t touch spirits as a rule.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Woodcock, ‘two railway blokes who like a bit of a drink. If we can’t come to an understanding I don’t know what … Just put the bottle on the table, if that’s quite all right.’

  I did so. There was no sound for a moment but the ticking of the clock, and the seething of the rain.

  ‘You want Lambert to be spared the noose, so you need to get a wire off sharpish – only the lines are down so you’re a bit stumped. I want you to leave me out of account when you come to write up this whole bloody business.’

  ‘You mean you’ll help me send a wire in return for immunity?’

  ‘You’ve got the drop on it just nicely.’

  ‘What about Hardy? He’s the guilty man, and you’ve sent him on his way.’

  ‘Where’s he going to go, you fucking bonehead?’

  I looked again at the clock. The hands seemed to be making leaps. Ten after five.

  ‘Straight now,’ said Woodcock. ‘Do we have an agreement?’

  ‘If you put that shooter down,’ I said.

  But Woodcock continued to eye me. He seemed to be weighing the matter.

  ‘I reckon you’re the type that keeps a promise,’ he said, ‘– a good little company man.’

  He reached into the cupboard and pitched across one of the books, grinning and saying, ‘Here, cop hold.’

  The title of the book was North Eastern Railway: Rules and Regulations for Traffic Department Staff.

  ‘Swear on that,’ said Woodcock, before turning away from me, and pointing the long gun at the ABC machine. He was aiming not at the two dials, but at the edge of the wooden base of the thing. He fired once, and I thought my eardrums had split; then he yanked at the lever under the handle, and took aim again at the other side of the base, saying, ‘You might want to stop your ears, mate.’

  He shot again, and the wood of the counter and the wood of the base of the machine had split, but the ABC machine was now free. Woodcock had shot away the two screws that moored it to the counter.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  We were crashing through the woods in the grey dawn, with the rain spilling down at irregular intervals from above, as if the tree canopies held so many broken pipes.

  I carried the ABC machine – which was an armful in itself – and a storm lantern taken from the booking office. Woodcock held the battery for the ABC and two long loops of wire. We’d left Hardy’s rifle in the station, although I’d pocketed the cartridges.

  It seemed that I really did have an agreement with Woodcock, and that he meant to stick to it. Who’d got the best of this deal? Woodcock was fairly cute, and I was pretty sure he had. For one thing, I ought by rights to have made the stipulation that he would turn King’s Evidence against Hardy. But I was not trained up in telegraphy; I knew that I would not be able to set up the ABC so that it worked in its new position. Accordingly, I had no bargaining power to speak of.

  As we’d come out of the station, I’d not seen the wife in the yard (or Mervyn or Hardy), but I assumed that Lydia had taken the boy back to The Angel, and that Hardy had made off. He would be run in eventually, though, even if his woodcut had to appear in the Police Gazette every week for the next year. Woodcock was a little way ahead of me. Every time he pushed a branch aside, it sprang back and gave me a fresh soaking.

  ‘Why wouldn’t you send a wire for Sir George?’ I asked him.

  ‘Couldn’t be arsed,’ he called back. ‘My work stops when I book off – if not before.’

  We were sweeping fast through knee-high gorse and bracken, keeping our heads low to avoid the black branches.

  ‘Who are you going to send to?’ called Woodcock.

  ‘Well, it won’t reach long distance, will it?’

  ‘Signal’s piss weak,’ called Woodcock. ‘Only goes along the branch.’

  ‘I’ll send the message to Pilmoor,’ I said. ‘That’s on the main line, and they’ll have a good connection for London. The chap there can send it on.’

  I pictured Pilmoor station – two skimpy w
ooden platforms shaken to buggery every time an express flew by. In theory my message could be sent there within five minutes of a connection being established, and it would only take that long again for Pilmoor to transmit to London. The question was whether they could send it direct to the Home Office … or would they have to go through some London exchange? We came to a wide clearing, which turned out to be a wide pond – all stagnant and clogged with weeds; not the one I’d struck before. It looked grey in the dawn-light, and was surrounded by tall everlastings, like a gathering of giants.

  ‘Where’s this?’ I said.

  ‘It’s left from here,’ said Woodcock, and we skirted the water by a path littered with fallen trees, from which other trees were sprouting like signals on gantries. Sometimes we went over, sometimes under.

  ‘I know the bloke at Pilmoor,’ said Woodcock, ‘– telegraph clerk, I mean.’

  ‘They do run to one, do they? What’s he like?’

  ‘He’s a cunt.’

  Presently, we came to the edge of the woods, and there we stood before a scene of disaster: the empty stretch of railway line, the fallen cable and the hissing rain. We moved beyond the breakage, heading westerly, as I supposed. Two poles beyond the collapse, Woodcock pointed to the ABC and said, ‘Plant it here.’

  I set the machine down by the track ballast.

  ‘You off up?’ he said, indicating the pole. ‘Or am I?’

  As he spoke, he was attaching the long wires to the back of the ABC. I hadn’t quite thought it through, but of course our wires would have to be tied onto the overhead cable.

  ‘You do it,’ I said, and he was up the pole like a bloody monkey on a stick with the wires in his teeth.

  I leant over the storm lantern to protect the wick from the rain, and took out a box of matches. I struck the first, and it was blown out – not by the falling rain but by the warm wind the rain made. The same thing happened to the second, but I got the lamp lit at the third go. I then moved it close to the ABC, and looked at the two dials. One was the communicator, and the other was the indicator – sometimes called the receiver. The two dials were like overcrowded clock faces. On each were set out the numbers from 0 to 9, the letters of the alphabet and all the punctuation marks and other symbols. It was only the English language, but it looked brain-wracking enough just then. I drew out my pocket watch and lowered it towards the glimmering lantern: ten to six.