Death on a Branch line js-5

by Andrew Martin

  The ‘down’ platform over-opposite contained nothing but a single bench, with more cornfields beyond.

  The bicyclist, wheeling his machine, advanced upon us and gave not so much as a nod as he passed on his way. Was he off to silence John Lambert? His machine made the whirring sound of a dragonfly. I was wondering whether I ought to pursue and question him when a sudden bark of laughter came from the woods ahead of us.

  At first, I thought this came from the signal box, which was half in the woods, and raised one storey off the ground on stone arches. (This, I supposed, so as to give the signalman a clear view of the trains arriving and departing through the trees.) The signalman stood at the top of the wooden staircase that led to the high door of the box. He did not look like one of the usual solid sorts employed in signalling: he was thin with a straggly beard, no cap and a uniform worn anyhow.

  But when the laughter came again, I knew it had not come from his lips, but from those of another lounger on a level with him but on the other side of the tracks. This scrawny youth I took to be the lad porter at Adenwold. He sat like a crow on the little iron platform built onto the top of the pole that held the signals controlling the station. He was on a level with the treetops, yet slightly in advance of the trees, giving him a view of the whole station and the village hard by. And he was smoking.

  He called across to his partner the signalman: ‘Reckon this pair are thinking, “Crikey, where’ve we pitched up?”’

  ‘Reckon so,’ the signalman called back.

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked the wife, screening her eyes and looking up towards the signal gantry.

  ‘He ought to be down here giving a hand with our bags,’ I said, ‘not cackling in the bloody trees.’

  There was a movement from the direction of the booking office, and I saw a fat man turning in the doorway. I made towards him, passing the open doorway of the waiting room where stood one giant black bench with horsehair bursting through holes in the seat cover.

  The complications of light (too much of it outside, too little of it inside) meant I could make out little more than a silhouette in the booking office, but I knew the man for the station master by the glint of brass buttons on his tunic.

  ‘Your porter’s not up to much,’ I called across to him, but there was no answer, only a sort of rumble and whistle from within the dark room. I set down my bag and walked over.

  ‘I say, mate,’ I began, ‘I’ve never seen the like of…’

  The words died on my lips as I looked inside the booking office.

  It was a sort of wood-smelling hovel. There was a counter with an ABC telegraph machine on it. But there was so much clutter on the floor in front of the counter that I supposed most passengers had their tickets served out through the doorway. There was a wide cabinet fixed to the wall, and a clock beside it. A tall sloping desk held many papers and tattered books, but a good many more books lay on the floor: Wagon Book, Transfer Order Book, Delivery Book, Goods Not Reserved Book — all of these were on the dusty floorboards, and it was all wrong. It was like seeing a Bible on the floor of a church.

  The fat man stood guiltily in amongst this wreckage, as well he might do. One visit from a company auditor and he’d be stood down on the spot. He was no smarter in appearance than his two juniors in the trees, but in manner he was the opposite. The sweat rolled off him, and he looked scared. He was standing beside a small table, and here was the queerest thing of all, for on the table top (which was covered over with a green cloth) were perhaps sixty or seventy tiny leaden soldiers set out in a battle scene. I looked at the man, and his eyes flickered towards me, then away. We were both struck dumb, save for the fact that a kind of regular, desperate whistle escaped from the man’s throat as he laboured to breathe in the heat.

  I said, ‘Your lad porter, Mister…’ at which he gave a start and a small cry of ‘Oh yes?’

  He looked at me with great anxiety, practically trembling.

  ‘You ought to know that he’s sitting at the top of the signal pole and cheeking the passengers,’ I said.

  ‘Leave off, Jim,’ came the voice of the wife from the platform. ‘Could you just ask the gentleman where we might get a bed for the night?’

  ‘I sent the boy up to oil the lamps,’ said the station master. ‘He’s… he’s still up there, is he?’

  He had a high-pitched voice, and was better spoken than I had expected.

  ‘He’s nattering away to the signalman, who’s also fifteen foot up,’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ said the station master, ‘they like to keep a look-out, you know.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Well… trains.’

  ‘So they can ignore them when they come in?’

  ‘We’ve just one more through this evening,’ said the station master, and you’d have thought from his tone that every one that came by was a torture to him. He looked strained all to pieces — to the point where I felt it wrong to keep on at him about the slackness at his station.

  ‘Do you know if there’s an inn with beds roundabout?’ I asked him in a kindlier tone.

  ‘Oh,’ said the fat official, and he began wiping his forehead with the fluttery fingers of his right hand. ‘The Angel,’ he said. ‘They’ll do you pretty well there.’

  ‘Is it the only inn?’

  ‘It is.’

  I looked again at the books on the floor, and saw again the anxiety in the man’s face as I did so. I felt I ought to account for the clutter in some way.

  ‘Having a bit of a clearout, are you?’

  ‘Oh,’ the station master said again, and it came out as a sort of surprised hoot, ‘… no.’

  The wife was at the door now: ‘If you don’t mind — where is The Angel exactly?’

  ‘Just up the way there,’ said the SM, giving us a look that so plainly said ‘Please go away now’ that we both turned, collected our bags and did so.

  We walked out of the station under the eyes of the lad porter and the signalman. They were both still on their perches but now kept silence as they watched, and it struck me for the first time that I might have put the wife in the way of danger.

  I held open for her the wicket gate that separated the station proper from the station yard, and there was a notice pinned to it: ‘Adenwold Christmas Club Summer Outing. Friday 21 July to Monday 24 July. To Scarborough, Premier Watering Hole of the North amp; Queen of Spas. Tickets from Mrs Taylor at the Post Office.’

  The wife was reading it over my shoulder.

  ‘Some folks are all luck,’ she said.

  The station yard was a dusty white triangle. Beyond it was another triangle, this one green, or at any rate yellowish, for the grass was all burnt by the sun. There were several shops around this green. One was a brick block of a building with a sign reading: ‘A. AINSTY: SHOEING AND GENERAL SMITHS (MOTORS REPAIRED)’. The double doors at the front were closed, an iron bar fixed across. A great heap of old horseshoes was stacked against one side wall, together with a bench seat from what might have been a carriage or motor-car propped on trestles.

  A little way along from the smithy was a flimsy clapperboard shop, which was also closed and blank-looking. On the signboard was painted a word that had faded almost to nothing, and that I could not read. It was followed by the word ‘Provisions’, and then came another unreadable one for good measure. Before the shop stood a sort of wide step-ladder meant for displaying goods, but it was quite bare. There was also a cottage under a thatch that was laughably thick — put me in mind of a sheep that needed shearing. A tiny tin sign dangled from the front of it, reading ‘Post Office’, and it was hardly bigger than a post card. Fixed into the side wall was a posting-box, and I wouldn’t have fancied dropping a letter in there. It looked as if it hadn’t been emptied in years.

  Scarborough seemed to have claimed the whole village. I thought of the way a school yard is cleared for a fight, and I thought again of the bicyclist. It was Friday evening. Could he be said to have arrived during the week-en
d? What exactly did the word ‘week-end’ mean?

  Three dusty roads led away from the square. One went more or less the way the station master had indicated.

  As we approached this one, I asked the wife:

  ‘When does a week-end begin?’

  ‘That’s just what I’m wondering,’ she said.

  Chapter Ten

  On the right side of the road were trees; on the left side a row of white, bent cottages which declined in the middle like a line of washing. Two old women stood before the houses, and looked like they belonged to them, for they too were old and bent. Then came high hedges in which many kinds of wildflower were entangled. These in turn gave way to fields of cut corn, and The Angel.

  It was on the left side, a taller white-painted house than the others. A long trestle table had been placed before it, and three people sat there. It was like an exhibition of country life. At one end sat a man in late middle-age. His face was all colours: white and grey beard mingled with red and grey skin. His eyes were half-closed and he sipped ale from a pewter. In the centre sat a plump, brown woman surrounded by lemons. She was slicing them on a board with a great knife and squeezing them into a pail. A lad of about twelve years sat with his knees pressed up against the table end. At first I thought it was a small dog that was tied by a string to his chair, but on second glance it turned out to be a ferret or polecat. Behind the table, a bicycle — the machine belonging to the man who’d lately climbed down from the train — was propped against the front wall of the pub.

  As we approached, the wife looked at the front of the inn and, giving a sort of gasp, said ‘wisteria’. She was trying to get a plant of that name to grow over the front of our terraced house at Thorpe-on-Ouse, outside York, but it would not take. This one had taken all right. Its black branches and purple flowers quite covered the windows on the upper left-hand side so that The Angel seemed to have a patched eye.

  Touching my hat, I gave the three good evening, at which the man and the boy stirred a little, but only the woman went so far as to return the greeting.

  ‘Do you have rooms?’ I asked her, but my question was answered by the words painted in large black letters half under the wisteria: ‘The Angel Inn — Beers and Wines — Rooms for Travellers.’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said the woman, shading her eyes against the low sun.

  ‘Do you have a room for two for tonight?’ put in the wife.

  ‘We do, love,’ said the woman — and yet she made no move.

  ‘Looks like most of the village has gone to Scarborough,’ I said.

  ‘Most has,’ she said.

  Lydia was looking down at the ferret or polecat.

  ‘He’s very pretty,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t stroke ’im whatever yer do,’ said the lad.

  Lydia stepped back.

  I introduced myself to the woman — though not as a policeman. It would pay dividends, I had decided, to observe this village as an ordinary tripper.

  One magpie sat on the roof of The Angel. It was black and white, like the inn, and looked made of leftovers from it.

  Why did I think Lambert was innocent? Because he had fed the bird outside the police office. And I was in good company: the governor of Wandsworth gaol had thought the same.

  The woman was at last rising, giving her name as ‘Mrs Handley’ and wiping her hands on her pinafore.

  Lydia, still looking at the polecat, was saying to the boy:

  ‘He’d have my finger off, I suppose.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have your finger off,’ said the boy, evidently thinking hard. ‘It’d be left on…’

  ‘Would you like to follow me up?’ the woman was saying.

  ‘… Only it’d be danglin ’,’ the boy ran on.

  The lad was also rising to his feet. Where his mother was tawny, he was a brighter brown. He seemed smallish for his age, but he had a great wave of black hair, which must have been oiled naturally, for he was not the sort of boy to be brilliantined. The kid reminded me of one of the over-thatched cottages. He wore a suit of rough purplish corduroy, and balanced what seemed like a very small cap on top of his great quantity of hair.

  The sign above the front door read: ‘Mr P. Handley, licensed retailer of foreign wines, spirituous liquor, ales, porters and tobacco’. We stepped beneath it into the hot dimness of the inn’s tiny hallway. There was a door on either side. One said ‘Saloon’, the other ‘Public’.

  ‘Lovely wisteria,’ Lydia said, as we climbed the stairs.

  The landlady smiled but it was the lad who answered.

  ‘Threatens to ’ave the ’ole front down, that does,’ he called up the staircase.

  The lad, who’d seemed stand-offish at first, was now eager to be included in the conversation; he was certainly the brightest spark we’d struck so far in Adenwold. He carried my bag — he’d insisted on doing so, while his mother carried Lydia’s. The landlord himself had remained at the table outside with his ale.

  The staircase walls were decorated with wallpaper — white with red roses — and this continued along the narrow landing and into the room we now entered, so that the whole of the interior of The Angel seemed to have a bad case of measles.

  The room was small and buckled, with a single tab rug on a polished wooden floor. Beside the high bed stood a rickety washstand, a dresser, a cane chair and a small wardrobe. I whisked off my top-coat, and put my warrant card in the top left drawer of the dresser. There was one picture on the wall, showing two fish facing different directions, each marked ‘Pearch’ — the old-fashioned spelling. Between them were drawings of four hooks, and these were marked ‘Lob worm’, ‘Minnow’, ‘Brandling’ and ‘Marsh Worm’. The room was clean and light — this even though we were, so to say, inside the wisteria, for its purple flowers fluttered at the window.

  Lydia complimented the woman on the prettiness of the room, and I gave the boy a penny for carting my bag up the stairs. I asked his name, and he answered, ‘Mervyn.’

  ‘Who’s the fellow on the bicycle?’ I enquired.

  ‘Him?’ he said. ‘He’s a bicyclist.’

  I could see that he knew his answer to have been a little lacking, but before he could make any further remark his mother had bundled him out of the room. She turned about in the doorway, saying, ‘There’s a cold supper laid on in the saloon from just after nine. Yorkshire ham and salad — will that do you?’

  ‘Just the ticket,’ I said.

  As she quit the room, the wife sat on the bed.

  ‘Why is there any need to call it a “Yorkshire” ham?’ she said when the door was closed. ‘That talk’s all for the benefit of trippers. Doesn’t she see that we are Yorkshire?’

  It was a strange thing for the wife to say, for she herself was not Yorkshire. She’d been born in London, and had lived there until we’d married. She was now looking down at her dress, as if trying to make out her knees through the muslin.

  ‘Well, I’m torn about the landlady,’ I said. ‘She’s sort of half-friendly, isn’t she?’

  ‘It’s quite obvious that her husband never does a hand’s turn,’ said Lydia. ‘Why is it his name over the door, and not hers?’

  It seemed to me that the wife always fell back on her hobby horse, the sex war, when in a bad mood.

  ‘I liked the lad, though,’ I said, and the wife made no reply to that.

  ‘Still hot, en’t it?’ I said, removing my collar and moving over to the washstand. ‘You could cut it with a bloody knife.’

  I lifted up the jug of water that stood beneath the washstand and began giving myself a sluice down. The washstand was too small, and, although I wasn’t looking towards the wife, I knew that she was eyeing me and thinking: Why must he slosh about so?

  ‘What was she doing with the lemons?’ the wife asked, as I dried my face.

  ‘Making lemonade,’ I said.

  The wife, who was no great hand in the kitchen, seemed irritated that I knew this. She was browned off again, and the little headwa
y I’d gained with her on the train since Malton was now lost. The Angel Inn, although clean and bright, was not up to the mark, being too cottage-like and countrified. The wife liked wildflowers and she was a good walker, but Thorpe-on-Ouse (where we lived, and which was just three miles outside York) was village enough for her. For all her Liberal-Labour leanings, the wife aspired to society, and that was not to be had in a remote spot like this.

  As I put on a clean shirt, she walked over to the window, which gave onto the kitchen garden of the inn. I stood behind Lydia, towelling my face, for it was not just then safe to touch her. The garden was pretty well-kept, but lonely-looking somehow. The raspberries, growing along twines stretched between canes, put me in mind of telegraph poles and wires. Cut cornfields lay beyond, and beyond them the dark green wall of the woods. There was something not right about the woods. Shadows of trees fell upon the trees at the edge of it — and yet where were the ones that made those shadows?

  Just then there came a clattering noise from close-by, and Mrs Handley came out of the back door of the inn and walked across the garden into the outhouse. She returned after a moment carrying a ham. The Yorkshire Ham. The call of a nightjar came from the yellow cut field, and it stopped Mrs Handley in her tracks.

  ‘Is she crying?’ I said, looking over the wife’s shoulder.

  Lydia sat down on the bed again.

  ‘I wouldn’t be in the least surprised,’ she said.

  I heard the clatter of the door from directly below, signifying that Mrs Handley had re-entered the inn.

  ‘What are you thinking about, love?’ I asked the wife, as I fixed what I thought of as my holiday neckerchief in place. It was green to match the sporting cap, but I reserved that for the present on account of the wife’s mood.

  ‘Scarborough,’ she said.

  I should’ve known not to ask.

  ‘… The Italian band on the pier,’ she ran on, ‘… a lemon tea at the Grand… the Chinese lanterns at dusk in the Esplanade Gardens.’

  If we’d gone, I thought, she wouldn’t have been so keen on it all.