After Helmsdale we were rocking along in a valley by a fast black river - one-sided trees and tumbledown cottages, all snow- covered. It seemed a great impertinence for the engine, which was green, and its carriages, which were greener still, to intrude upon this white world, which was a kind of fairyland, not real, not Britain. I could not believe they had the Royal Mail here; or even newspapers. There were telegraph poles and wires, but they were all askew and snow-loaded.
We stopped at a place called Kildonan, and hastened down on to the platform. I needed a piss, and there was no WC on the train.
A man in railway uniform stood before the station house.
'Good day,' I said.
(That was a laugh, with the wet snow flying at us.)
'Could I use the jakes in the station house?' I continued.
'The whit?' he said, making the sound of a cane going swish through the air.
'The station lavatory,' I said.
'Aye, aye,' he said, and jerked his thumb at the open door behind him. It was half booking hall, half living room with a good fire going and three pot dogs on the mantelpiece. The lavatory was in a door leading off. I pissed and came out, lingering by the fire. I then turned, nodded at the man and climbed up into the train as he blew his whistle. The ministers had gone, and Bowman was standing up at his seat.
He was talking in low tones to the man we had been pursuing.
The stationmaster slammed the door behind me, and the train jerked into motion as the man we had been pursuing turned towards me, gun in hand. With perhaps the beginnings of a smile, he motioned me towards him, motioned me into my seat. He sat down opposite me, and Bowman sat down beside him.
Bowman would not meet my eye.
He was in on it.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-four
'In five minutes, ye'll alight the train,' said the man.
'Will I now?'
'Aye, ye wull,' he said, with a glance down at the revolver in his hand.
Juggins like us, Bowman had said. Juggins like me. The business of the photograph was never meant to come to any good, and I should never have taken it up. Shillito had been right. I knew hardly anything, but it was too much for this Scotsman. Was he Sanderson? Had Sanderson been Scottish? I asked him outright:
'Are you Gilbert Sanderson?'
'Sanderson's deed,' he said. Again, the half-smile came. He had the smooth kind of Scottish accent, making the most of the Rs.
Down below us to the left, the black water seemed to be in a panic as it rushed towards two mighty boulders. We and it were the only things moving in the valley. Looking up at the mountains, I thought for some reason of hymn-singing in church, the search for the Beyond. This was an almost heavenly, life-after-death place where everything was different. I would not see my wife and child again, and all that was left was curiosity.
'Where is this place?' I said, and it was Bowman who answered, looking down and away. It took me a while to make out what he'd said, which was: 'Strath of Kildonan'.
Well, it sounded like a place in a book.
I looked back at Bowman, but he could not meet my eye.
The train began to slow, and a station rolled into view, but there had been no bell, and there were no people.
'Oot,' said the Scotsman, and I stood up. We climbed down,
Bowman slamming the door behind us, and then immediately huddling up into his coat again. The train went on. This was not a station, but a halt. The place was not named. The platform was of wood, like a theatre stage, and there was no station building, but only the two pointing arrows for 'Inverness' or 'Thurso and Wick'. The Scotsman must have requested the stop miles since.
I could not keep my eyes open in the floating snow, but I knew that the clattering river was near by, that mountains rose all around; and that a high-wheeled dog cart stood waiting at twenty yards' distance.
'Tae yer left', said the Scotsman, and I could not make out the words.
I turned in the snow towards Bowman. The lenses of his spectacles might have been painted white. He looked like a red-faced blind man.
'He means you to go to your left,' Bowman said.
The snow-covered heather leant across the path so that, as I came up to the cart, my trouser legs were soaking. It wasn't weather for a forty-shilling lounge suit.
Two men waited in the cart. Their collars were up, and their hats pulled low, but I knew them. They had stepped from the photograph in my pocket and up into the vehicle. They were the barrister known to the Chief and called Marriott, and the youngest man of the five, the one who'd been missed in Filey over the summer. Had I run them to earth, or they me? The young man was speaking to the Scotsman in what seemed like a friendly way, but the barrister, who was in the driving seat, stared straight ahead at the miserable horse. I was placed on one bench; the young man, the Scotsman and Bowman sat facing me. The revolver lay in the Scotsman's hand. He did not wear gloves; the gun would freeze before that hand of his did. He was made for this weather, born to it.
'Ye've the photograph about ye?' he said, and I gave it over.
Marriott the lawyer cracked the whip, and we started to roll as the Scotsman said to the young man, 'Would you no say I was better to look on than yon Gilbert Sanderson, Richie?'
The young man said something I didn't catch.
'Aye, he's the same high foreheed as me,' said the Scotsman, 'I'll grant ye that.'
Again a remark from the young man that I did not hear, to which the Scotsman said, 'Nay, nay, he was bald - I'm towsy-haired compared to the leet Sanderson.'
He pulled off his cap to show his smooth brown skull; there was not a hair on it. He didn't crack a smile, but he was jesting with the younger man, who smiled a little uneasily. The Scot seemed to have a liking for that young man, who looked maybe a couple of years shy of my own age.
Of course, the Scotsman's identity of appearance with Sanderson had been the key to the whole scheme. He had stolen Sanderson's horse and lamed the beast in the garden; he had then entered the house to do the murder, made sure he was seen by a servant and made off on foot. Was the Whitby-Middlesbrough Travelling Club a band of robbers then? I could not believe it.
The young man, evidently called Richard, stood in need of a shave, and there was a deep red cut on his forehead. He had come a long way from garden parties at Filey. The road was rising up above the railway line now. We were passing a broken-down stone house, and a sign reading 'DANGER', warning travellers off the land at certain times when shooting would take place. I glanced up again at the mountains, but could not make out the tops. On the hills were four-pointed shelters, like crossed swords.
I looked across at Bowman. He had found the horse's blanket and wore it over his shoulders, so that he looked like an old woman. Had he made the plan to net me? Who was the true governor here? The Scotsman? Or the man in the driving seat - the silent lawyer?
A thought came: I had been the one to suggest giving chase when the Scotsman had walked away up Bouverie Street. How could Bowman have known I would do that? But it was not really a mystery. Bowman had been on the point of making the suggestion himself. He had played with the window of the magazine offices. There had been no reason to open it on such a day of cold; instead, it had been the signal to the Scotsman to set off.
I looked up at this fellow who had led me such a dance.
'What are you called?' I asked him.
'Haud yer tongue,' he said, head tilted back. He was still staring as Bowman muttered, 'He's called "Small David".'
'Why are you called Small David?' I asked the man.
'Dae ye have any objection to the name?'
'It is not accurate.'
We were coming to a fork in the road.
'You're about the largest man in this cart,' I said, and again the half-smile seemed to develop underneath that moustache.
A white cottage marked the junction; deer antlers hung on the end wall. The Scotsman did not give a glance, but continued staring at me.
'It's humour,' said someone; and I realised that the lawyer in the driving seat had at last spoken up. Having done so, he evidently thought he might as well continue.
'County Sutherland,' he said, half-turning around towards me. 'A country very different from the levels of the North Riding, Detective Stringer.'
He was as handsome as he had looked in the photograph, but strangely rigged out: half poor farmer in looks, half gentleman. Beneath his ulster he wore a good black suit, but with a dirty black guernsey under that. At his throat, he wore a black comforter and a green silk necker. And he had the wrong boots on for this place: town boots of thin leather. His face put me in mind of somebody. I looked quickly between him and the young man, Richie.
The lawyer was the father of Richie.
Beyond the white cottage, we turned on to a higher road. A white cloud was rising slowly behind the mountains ahead as the snow came down fast. The railway was out of sight below, but I knew it must be blocked by now.
A few seconds beyond the house, we had to pull into the hedgerow to let another cart by that contained another lot of muffled-up men. They looked respectable enough, but none of us raised our hat. The way was now becoming rougher; the stones rolled under our wheels, and underneath the snow.
After another few minutes of being shaken to bits in the cart I realised that the Scotsman, Small David, was staring at me again. I said, 'Why are you looking at me like that?' In reply he spat out something that sounded like: 'Why are ye?' 'What's the programme?' I asked the company after another long interval.
No reply from anyone.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-five
At first, I took the cottage we were approaching to be nothing but a wide stone wall. It was some way up a mountain, part of the grey blur beyond the snow.
'I know you're watching the chimney, Small David,' said Richie Marriott.
'Why's there nae smoke, laddie?'
'We're low on firewood and peats, Small David.'
'And ye're low on brains,' he said, but there was perhaps some affection there; these two were cronies, who conspired over the heating of the house.
'I can't manage that flue in the scullery, David, and that's all about it,' said the son.
Everyone jumped down; I followed. It was not so much a garden, more like an island in the sea of heather. Two rusty long-handled shovels leant against the low stone walls; a rain barrel stood at one corner, barely higher than the wall. You'd call it a one- storey house, only it was lower than that. As we approached it, the Scotsman nodded from me to Marriott, saying, 'He stays here the neet if ye insist, but then it's o'er the burran wi' him.'
The lawyer was walking the horse towards a broken-down barn a little further up the track that had brought us to the house. The house looked over a white, misty valley - threatened to roll down into it. Whether this was the same valley we'd run along in the train or another, I couldn't tell, for I could not see. I could just make out through the blizzard a steeper hill rising above the one on which we stood; black clouds flowed across the tops like a spillage of oil. The day was nearly done, and the world was closing down to this house and these men. The snow was a foot thick as I stepped out of the cart, and I knew that I was held prisoner by the weather as much as the revolver. I suddenly thought of my interview for promotion at Middlesbrough. I would not be there after all, and the fact was a very good demonstration of the strangeness of life.
Small David walked up to the door of the cottage, on which a note was pinned, reading: 'Shut this door after you. This means YOU', with the last word underlined.
He kicked it open with bullet-like force, and entered the house.
'What's "over the burran"?' I asked, following him in.
In the smoke-filled scullery we had now entered, he turned sharply about towards me:
'Ye spoke just now of Gilbert Sanderson,' he said. 'He's o'er the burran.'
'Steady now, David,' said Marriott, who stepped in behind the two of us, having settled the horse.
Small David was at the stove that squatted in the centre of the room, cursing to himself, and trying to fettle the fire. The lawyer held a pitcher of water; he stood at the stone sink - which was as big as a horse trough, and took up about a third of the room - washing his hands as thoroughly as circumstances permitted. Then he turned to me:
'I am currently negotiating to save your life, Detective Stringer.'
If nothing else, his beautiful lawyer's voice had survived whatever decline had brought him to this house.
'Negotiating?' I said. 'Who with?'
Bowman, now also alongside us, cut in, saying, 'With Rob Roy there, of course', while nodding towards Small David, who was still crouching at the stove. 'And I want you to know that I hope he succeeds.' He was addressing me in the haze of the cold kitchen, but not looking at me. He knew he had done a low thing. He had stopped short of friendliness ever since I'd known him; he'd always been cagey, and he'd been all wrong on the chase from St Pancras. If he'd been straight, he'd either have jibbed at the business or got keen on it; he'd done neither.
'I had no choice but to bring you here, you know,' he said, as though the whole disaster was somehow my fault. There was one small window in the scullery, and I craned to look through it. Seeing what I was about, Marriott said, 'Don't try a breakaway, Detective Stringer. Or Small David will be upon you in an instant.'
I remained at the window, but it was only a bluff: the glass was thick with ice and I could see nothing - and the sight of that blank- ness made me feel I could barely breathe.
I turned around, and saw that none of the company had removed his hat; yet all the hats scraped against the grimy roof beams that swooped low across the room, which was more like a cave than a room. Small David now opened a door leading to a sitting room of sorts, and it seemed that I was free to follow him in.
The stove was black and cold here too. The young man, Richie, was in the room already, lighting greasy, evil-smelling paraffin lamps at either end. It was a long, low place with several truckle beds pushed against the three stone walls away from the fire. Filthy tab rugs were placed anyhow on the floor; and stacks of papers, books and journals were placed around the fireplace, whether to be burnt or read, I could not say. Richie then began remaking the fire, and he proved a shocking bad hand at doing so. Instead of cleaning the grate, he poked at it with the tool, which constantly rang against the iron of the door, striking a high, unpleasant note. He had obviously lit it earlier on in the day, but it had gone out because the draught was not properly created. As he poked and prodded, I wondered whether he had ever lit fires before he came to this place. I doubted it of a man who was a barrister's son. He got a burn going eventually, but I could see that it might not last.
'The trick of keeping a slow burn,' I said, 'is to close the top flue a little more - the lever wants tipping another ten degrees.'
'And who're ye tae tell him?' Small David called out.
I had not seen him enter the room. He carried a bucket in place of the revolver. For all his size, I ought not to be held off by a man who wore yellow socks and carried a bucket, but my thoughts would keep going back to that revolver of his, evidently close at hand in one of his coat pockets.
'I'm trained up as a fireman,' I said.
'Fireman?' said Small David. 'Ye are a dirty polis.'
'I was first trained up as a railway fireman,' I repeated.
'But he was fired.,' said Bowman, who had also entered the room, and whose speech was now slurring.
'Sorry, Jim,' he added, as he sank down on one of the truckle beds. He'd got a bottle from somewhere, though I couldn't make out the contents.
The stove was warming up after a fashion - it would keep me at close quarters as surely as any manacle. I claimed for myself one of the beds, but Small David ordered me off - I guessed from what he said that it must have been his. He then quit the room, and a moment later, I thought I caugh
t sight of him walking past the one tiny frosted window that served the sitting room. Bowman sat silent on his bed, perhaps asleep, while Richie occupied another of the beds, reading a paper. He had never passed a word to me, and come to that, I had not seen him speak to his father or to Bowman. He only ever seemed to speak to Small David, who had evidently taken the place of his father in his affections. He seemed very young for his years, this fellow, but he must be in - or rather he must have been in - employment himself, otherwise he wouldn't have been in the habit of riding up to Whitby with the Travelling Club.
Murder At Deviation Junction Page 18